Hadassah Magazine Jul/Aug 2022 by HadassahMag

A FEMINIST’S ‘SHANDA’ | ACING PICKLEBALL | JULIA HAART’S ‘UNORTHODOX’ LIFE

JULY/ AUGUST 2022

GOING FOR THE

GOLD IN ISRAEL MACCABIAH 2022

TOGETHER, WE CAN HELP

ISRAEL’S

BUILDERS. NOW AND FOR THE NEXT 74 YEARS. Over more than 74 years, ordinary men and women devoted their lives to help build a new Jewish state. Many of these pioneers are now aging, frail, impoverished and alone. They need our help. With more than 7,000 volunteers and 120+ branches throughout Israel, Yad Sarah is dedicated to helping to provide for Israel’s less fortunate — especially those who have sacrificed so much, who have dedicated their lives to build a nation. We provide home and health care support services that enable people in Israel to remain independent at home and in their own communities despite illness or frailty. Return the favor of service to Israel's Builders by supporting Yad Sarah today.

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JULY/AUGUST 2022 | VOL. 103 NO. 6

DEPARTMENTS 12 COMMENTARY The Jewish approach to abortion is pro-woman

13 ESSAYS Relishing pickleball

26 HEALTH A pandemic of eating disorders

34 TRAVEL A Jewish tour of Providence and Newport

IN EVERY ISSUE 4 President’s Column 6 The Editor’s Turn 8 Letters to the Editor 10 Cut & Post 28 Hadassah Medicine 32 Hadassah News 43 Crossword Puzzle (CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM) FROM ‘COOKING ALLA GIUDIA’ BY BENEDETTA JASMINE GUETTA (ARTISAN BOOKS)/ COPYRIGHT © 2022. PHOTOGRAPH BY RAY KACHATORIAN; COURTESY OF ZOYA CHERKASSKY; ISTOCK

55 About Hebrew 56 Question & Answer On the Cover

Maccabi USA’s 2022 delegation includes (clockwise from top) judoka Sara Golden; Ivy League basketball player of the year Abby Meyers; tennis ace Alexis Blokhina; and Maccabiah gold-medal-winning runner Leah Rosenfeld. Photos: Courtesy of the International Judo Federation; Courtesy of Abby Meyers/Princeton Athletics; Associated Press; Courtesy of Leah Rosenfeld/Carlos Chavez Photography

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14 GOING FOR THE GOLD IN ISRAEL By Hilary Danailova The 21st Maccabiah Games, happening in July in Jerusalem, bring “the Jewish community together across geographic, denominational, political and socioeconomic differences,” said Marshall Einhorn, CEO of Maccabi USA, Maccabi World Union’s American affiliate. Among the competitors in the “Jewish Olympics” are some of America’s most talented Jewish female athletes, five of whom are profiled in this issue.

36 FOOD

20 RATHER THAN LIVE IN DISGRACE,

38 ARTS

‘I DECIDED TO KILL MYSELF’

By Letty Cottin Pogrebin “My unwanted pregnancies were far and away the most shameful secrets of my youth,” writes feminist icon Letty Cottin Pogrebin in this exclusive excerpt from her new memoir, Shanda. “I didn’t confide in anyone in my family, not my married sister, Betty, who was 14 years older than I, or my married aunts or female cousins, most of whom had multiple children and presumably knew a thing or two about sex. I couldn’t tell them because, in my eyes, they were moral exemplars and I was a scarlet woman.”

The Italian Jewish kitchen Orthodox Jews onscreen

44 BOOKS

• Family drama at the ‘Golden Hotel’ in the Catskills

• Leonard Cohen in the Sinai

24 AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE By Renee Ghert-Zand When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Kyiv-born Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky responded the best way she knew how. She picked up watercolors, markers, pencils and crayons— “whatever was on my desk,” she said—and began to create, letting her imagination take her to disturbing places. JULY/AUGUST 2022

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PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Normal and Exceptional Marking a watershed moment in Jewish history | By Rhoda Smolow

he first zionist congress took place August 29-31, 1897, in Basel, Switzerland. Three days after he gaveled the proceedings to a close, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary: “At Basel, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. If not in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.” David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence on May 14, 1948. Herzl’s forecast was off by just nine months. The Congress was a watershed in Jewish history. Herzl essentially stamped an end date on the Jewish exile, and the Zionist movement became the virtual construction site of Jewish sovereignty. August 2022 marks the 125th anniversary of that first Congress, and the World Zionist Organization, in partnership with the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, has planned a series of events in Basel as well as in Israel and around the world to mark the occasion. On Sunday and Monday, August 28 and 29, conferences and meetings will be held in the Basel Congress Hall, attended by leaders from Zionist organizations from many lands. Hadassah will certainly be there. As a pillar of the Zionist movement and stakeholder in Israel’s founding and growth since 1912, this will be a great moment of celebration. To say the 50 years between Basel and Israel’s founding were tumultuous would be an understatement: building, planning and migration, to be sure, but also two world wars and

the Holocaust. Zionism is and always has been a manifestation of Jewish optimism. For nearly 2,000 years, our ancestors prayed for the return to our homeland but had no organized movement to achieve that goal. After 1897, the problem of Jewish national homelessness became inseparable from the knowledge that we were doing something about it on a global scale.

SHOULD ISRAEL ENDEAVOR TO BE A STATE LIKE ANY OTHER STATE OR A LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS? Since its founding, Israel has flourished against tremendous odds. It has offered a home to every threatened Jewish community in the world and welcomed immigrants from affluent, democratic societies as well.

e can’t ignore the many challenges that continue to confront the Jewish people today, from rising antisemitism to the continued struggle for Israeli-Palestinian peace and broader Israeli security, to the existential climate threat we share with the rest of the world. But in keeping with Zionist optimism, I can’t help but focus on the most recent signs of Israel’s progress, normalization and exceptionalism. I see in Israel a multicultural nation struggling to become more

JULY/AUGUST 2022

integrated. For decades, Hadassah leaders have asserted that even if we don’t know when lasting peace will come to the Middle East, we know what it will look like: The corridors, waiting rooms and operating theaters of our medical center, where Jewish and Arab patients, family and medical staff mix freely and feel their common humanity. Setbacks aside, I see the rest of Israel looking more and more like Hadassah. In the wider region, we have seen dramatic progress. After decades of peace with Egypt and Jordan, in 2020, Israel signed peace accords and initiated diplomatic relations with Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Other Arab and Muslim nations may soon follow. Even amid these positive developments, I am still astounded by recent media reports about the fast-growing Jewish community in Dubai, which now has several religious congregations, a mikveh and five kosher restaurants. Though Israel has long had a sterling reputation in medicine—thanks in no small measure to Hadassah— the pandemic has illuminated the nation’s profile on an issue of universal import. Israel’s record on Covid treatment, research, outreach and rollout of the vaccine has captured worldwide attention. Ben-Gurion once summed up Israel’s contrasting aspirations with a question: Should it endeavor to be a state like any other state or a light unto the nations? In this celebratory season, the answer is clear: It is and will be both.

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The Round Building renovation has made significant headway! Thanks to your commitment, the iconic Round Building at Hadassah Ein Kerem continues on its path to care for more patients and save more lives. Thanks to donors like you, our vision is becoming a reality. Here’s a round-up of the most significant work to date: ° State-of-the-art dialysis unit with its own nursing stations — completed ° Pandemic-ready isolation units equipped with ventilators — completed ° Internal medicine, Ophthalmology, Hematology-Oncology — in progress ° Safe rooms construction — in progress ° New exterior facade — in progress ° Two additional top floors for greater capacity — under construction Your generous support enables us to maintain our position as a world leader in medical research, treatments and patient care. JOIN US IN OUR 360-DEGREE VISION OF HEALING THE WORLD TODAY. IT’S ABOUT COMPASSION. IT’S ABOUT HEALING. IT’S ABOUT LIFE.

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THE EDITOR’S TURN

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Women at Play

A refreshing respite amid troubling times | By Lisa Hostein

t’s not every day that you find action shots of athletes on the cover of your Hadassah Magazine. You’d be forgiven for confusing it with Sports Illustrated! But what better way to usher in summer than with a tribute to some of the female standouts participating in this year’s Maccabiah Games? The quadrennial sporting event, known as the “Jewish Olympics,” is one of the largest sporting events in the world, and this year, Team USA is represented by more than 1,300 delegates, with athletes competing in 34 sports. And women are making history in this year’s games, as Hilary Danailova reports in “Going for the Gold in Israel” (page 14). Even if you’re not a sports fan, the Maccabiah Games, which bring together Jews of all ages from around the world, are a source of pride and inspiration. I remember being in the stadium for the opening ceremonies during my first trip to Israel when I was 16 years old. It was breathtaking to be surrounded by so many Jews from so many different countries— and instrumental in developing my understanding of what Jewish peoplehood actually looks like. The games provide a refreshing respite from the grim news roiling the world. But we can’t not tackle some of the tough issues as well. As reproductive rights for women continue to be threatened, Orthodox legal scholar Rabbanit Adena Berkowitz provides insight into “Jewish Tradition’s Nuanced Approach to Abortion” (page 12) and feminist icon Letty Cottin Pogrebin, in an exclusive excerpt from JULY/AUGUST 2022

her soon-to-be published memoir, Shanda, reveals the shame she felt when she got pregnant—twice— during college (page 20). With white supremacist ideology creeping its way into mainstream politics and its adherents engaged in mass shootings, Debra Nussbaum Cohen interviews Amy Spitalnick (page 56), who is fighting to hold extremists accountable. Meanwhile, for Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky, the ongoing war in Ukraine is personal, and her paintings reflect the pain her birth country is experiencing (page 24). A team of trauma specialists from the Hadassah Medical Organization who got a firsthand glimpse of that pain during a stint in Poland to address Ukrainian refugee needs share their insights into caring for trauma patients both at home and abroad (page 28). In our arts coverage, Josefin Dolsten takes a dive into film and television’s fascination with ultra-Orthodox Jews (page 38) and Alan M. Tigay shares the success story of one of Ladino’s leading performers (page 40). If you’re looking for more ways to escape, we share a newcomer’s tales from the pickleball court (page 13); a travel writer’s journey through Rhode Island (page 34)—my home state!— and some Italian Jewish food delights (page 36). And as always, don’t miss our collection of book reviews, including one of Last Summer at the Golden Hotel, our August One Book, One Hadassah selection and a great beach read. Wishing everyone a safe and peaceful summer!

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

THERE’S MORE TO US ONLINE Do you receive Hadassah Magazine’s monthly email newsletter delivered to your inbox? If not, then sign up at hadassahmagazine.org. Our newsletters regularly feature digital-exclusive content, including cookbook reviews, seasonal recipes and an expanded arts section. If you missed any of our compelling Hadassah Magazine Discussions or One Book, One Hadassah author interviews, then you’ll be thrilled to know that recordings of most programs are available online. Visit hadassah.org/ get-involved/virtual-programming to start your binge watching today.

QUESTIONING ‘HER CHOICE’ While I believe that a woman whose health is at risk or who has been raped, or who is carrying a baby that is not viable, deserves the right to consider termination of her pregnancy, I find it extremely disturbing that Hadassah Magazine, in the feature article “Israel’s Take on Abortion” in the May/June issue, included a picture and story about college student Avigail Bailey. In the photo of Bailey, she appears smiling above a caption that proudly states that her abortion was “Her Choice.” Just because she and her boyfriend didn’t want the pregnancy, there she was beaming at the fact that she destroyed a life. How many women struggle with infertility who will see that image of Bailey and feel sad that it was acceptable for her to end her pregnancy? I am disappointed that Hadassah Magazine found Bailey’s story to be a great example of Israel’s abortion policy. Beth Pascal Hillsborough, Calif. JULY/AUGUST 2022

WHEN I WAS A REFUGEE Reading “Welcoming the Stranger, Literally” by Rahel Musleah in the May/June issue brought back memories of my own arrival as a refugee from Bucharest, Romania, in 1983 and how HIAS and Jewish Family Service supported me and made my new life in a new country a success. The United States welcomed me with open arms and has been my home ever since. Some of my fondest memories are of HIAS making my transition to independence possible. Recollections of Tova Friedman, a Holocaust survivor who was a director of the JFS in Elizabeth, N.J., to which I had been assigned, are especially dear to me. I was very pleased to read about the help and support that HIAS, JFS and now the Welcome Circles continue to offer to refugees from all walks of life. It warms my Jewish kishkes. Paula Zevin Somerset, N.J.

MUSEUM-QUALITY HANUKKIYAH I found the “Zionist Home Goods” arts article on Israeliana in the May/June issue to be especially interesting. When my husband and I were married in December 1964 in Rahway, N.J., our rabbi gave us a

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IN PRAISE AND DISPLEASURE Thank you so much for putting Miriam Anzovin on the May/June 2022 cover of Hadassah Magazine. Her TikToks are so informative and entertaining. I love that the magazine focused on a trending millennial. Please keep up this type of coverage in the future! Susan Avery New York, N.Y.

I am writing to express my displeasure with the recent Q&A with Miriam Anzovin. I regard Anzovin as a woman, but no lady. The interview sullies the reputation of Hadassah women and the organization when it refers to Anzovin’s “salty language and irreverence” and for the fact that she is not a “scholar.” Because I enjoy reading Hadassah Magazine and support the work of Hadassah, I will not stop my subscription nor withhold my support, but I ask that you choose people to interview more carefully. Dr. Howard Rottenberg Atlanta, Ga.

lovely hanukkiyah as a wedding gift. We use it still. So, imagine my surprise, nearly 58 years later, to see a photo of an identical hanukkiyah on page 42, in a photo by Laura Lachman with the credit indicating that the hanukkiyah is in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. I never dreamed my favorite hanukkiyah is a museum-quality object! Cari Greene League City, Texas

A Cold Case Investigation by Rosemary Sullivan comes in at No. 5. I have been living in the Netherlands for more than 46 years, so I am aware that the book’s Dutch publisher, Ambo Athos, has now apologized for publishing it, has removed the title from stores in the country and has even stated that the book is not entirely based on facts. Janice Knoppers Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ANOTHER ‘BETRAYAL’ OF ANNE FRANK

Several years ago, when my husband and I moved from our longtime home in Long Island, N.Y., to a retirement community near our son in Westchester County, N.Y., I had

In the “Top Ten Jewish Best Sellers, Nonfiction” list in the May/June issue, The Betrayal of Anne Frank:

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WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! We value your interest in Hadassah Magazine and welcome hearing from you. Please email letters to the editor to letters@ hadassah.org. To read more letters, visit us online at hadassahmagazine.org. to downsize. My accumulation of stuff included lots of past issues of Hadassah Magazine. Now that we have moved, when I finish reading an issue, I ex-out my name and place it on a table in the main lobby of our building. The magazine is quickly gone, and Hadassah Magazine continues to circulate. Here’s to longevity! Aileen Novick Rye, N.Y.

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Re-enactment Buffs Cross Swords in Israel July 4 carries a special meaning near the Kinneret, where each year dozens of women, men and even teenagers re-enact one of the most famous battles ever fought in the area. On a beastly hot July 4 in 1187, Crusaders rushing to rescue Tiberias from the Muslim forces of Saladin ran out of water. Sweating in chain mail suits, the Christian soldiers became dehydrated and succumbed to Saladin near an extinct volcano known as the Horns of Hattin. In 2007, that war story sparked the imagination of Jerusalem archaeologist and tour guide Genadiy Nizhnik-Kolomiychuk, 46, who made aliyah from Lviv, Ukraine, in 2000.

PHOTO BY MONIKA FITZ/COURTESY OF KITEPRIDE

Something, and Someone, of Value Combining a passion for social justice with sustainably upcycling discarded sail fabric is the business concept behind KitePride, a Tel Aviv operation that employs former sex workers to produce fashionable and functional bags from recycled ocean sports’ fabrics. KitePride, founded by Tabea and Matthias Oppliger, is an offshoot of GlowbalAct—a nonprofit that the couple created in 2011 to fight sex trafficking initially in Switzerland before expanding globally. Tabea Oppliger and her team at KitePride oversee the company’s production of colorful, one-of-a-kind bags made from donated surfing kites, parachutes and wet suits that would otherwise go in a landfill. The daughter of Swiss parents, 44-year-old Oppliger grew up in Papua New Guinea before moving to Switzerland as a teenager. She describes herself as a Christian Zionist who relocated with her husband and three children to Tel Aviv in 2014. “I can’t explain why,” Oppliger replied when asked what motivated

Knowing nothing initially about the worldwide phenomenon of military re-enactments, Nizhnik-Kolomiychuk nevertheless founded the group Regnum Hierosolymitanum, Latin for Kingdom of Jerusalem, and staged the first re-enactment that same year. Today, participants in the annual choreographed event include more than two dozen Israelis and several dozen tourists, among them

Scenes from the 2021 Horns of Hattin re-enactment include (from opposite page, far right) fighting on horseback; women in period dress; and event founder Genadiy Nizhnik-Kolomiychuk on the battlefield wearing a red tunic over chain mail.

her move to the Jewish state. “We just felt we needed to do our work in Israel.” Looking back on her first years in Israel, she recalls how she met trafficked women in the street near her office in Tel Aviv’s red-light

district, close to the Central Bus Station. “I saw women in so much pain—not only sore backs and legs from standing in high heels all day but fighting numbness because they didn’t want to feel their bodies,” she said. Oppliger, a trained massage therapist, began offering the women healing massages before they entered their places of work, which was done with the brothel owners’ permission during quiet afternoon hours. With an estimated 14,000 men and women in Israel trapped in prostitution, Oppliger notes that it takes courage to leave and find employment. “They want to get rid of labels and find a future with an independent life,” she said. “KitePride gives them a safe environment tailored to their needs.” Currently, KitePride employs 13 people, Oppliger said, noting that since its founding in 2018, the business has provided almost 30,000 hours of safe employment for staff. KitePride’s colorful handmade totes, pouches, backpacks and laptop sleeves are sold online and in a small South Tel Aviv store. Oppliger sees KitePride as a metaphor for people and material: “We take something discarded and turn it into something of value.” —Helen Hill

Tabea Oppliger modeling a KitePride bag

many from the former Soviet Union who due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine are not able to attend this year. “The war in Ukraine has had a negative effect

But it is the July re-enactment, which attracts dozens of spectators and receives financial support from the Jezreel Valley and Lower Galilee regional councils, that he would like to see become a major tourist attraction. “I can talk about the knights,” Nizhnik-Kolomiychuk said, “what they wore, what they ate, how they felt when they fell off a horse.” —Esther Hecht

New Center Preserves Israel’s Blood Supply How does a small country sitting on an active earthquake fault line and under constant threat from hostile neighbors protect its blood supply? Since the late 1980s, Israel’s national blood services center has been housed in Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv, in a facility neither large enough to meet the demands of a growing population nor secure enough to meet the country’s needs in times of war. Indeed, during several rocket attacks, including the May 2021 conflict with Hamas in Gaza, the center had to cease processing blood and move the country’s blood reserves into a bomb shelter. All that will change by the end of 2022, when the Marcus

The six-story center includes three underground, highly secure floors.

National Blood Services Center in Ramla, also near Tel Aviv, becomes fully operational as the world’s first subterranean, highly secure blood center. The new six-story building was designed and built to conform to threat-level standards dictated by Israel’s National Security Council, with three of the floors located underground and intended to withstand missile, chemical and biological attacks as well as earthquakes. “Everything apart from atomic threat,” noted Dr. Eilat Shinar, director of the National Blood JULY/AUGUST 2022

Services Division of Magen David Adom, which runs the center. Dr. Shinar is chairwoman of the Advisory Committee for the Israeli Ministry of Health on Blood Usage in Emergencies and was a senior physician for 13 years at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem’s Department of Hematology. “Israel must be self-sufficient and have the ability to face the demands for blood from the country’s 32 hospitals and the IDF,” she stated. The new blood center features 163,000 square feet of secured blood bank laboratories and

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80 anti-blast doors. The first underground floor houses the labs and an area for a transportation fleet. The second underground floor contains the Cord Blood Inventory, an R&D molecular lab and a chemical and biological warfare air-filtration system that enables staff to continue processing blood in the event of a chemical or biological attack. At the heart of the third level, 50 feet underground, lies the Blood Storage Vault, a 3,229-square foot safe room shielded against the most severe missile threats. This is where Israel’s strategic inventory of 25,000 blood components will be safeguarded. Most importantly, the new facility will be able to securely produce 500,000 blood units annually, almost doubling current capacity. In case of an attack, “we’ll be able to carry on working and not have to run to the shelter,” said Dr. Shinar. “For us, that’s huge.” —Judy Lash Balint

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF REGNUM HIEROSOLYMITANUM. ELENA KON (OPPOSITE PAGE); ILYA VOLGUST

weather. As arrows fly and swords clash, those wearing helmets and shields form the front line; the rest hide behind a wall of shields. The final battle involves fighters on horseback and infantry combat. Throughout the year, Nizhnik-Kolomiychuk’s group offers lectures and smaller re-enactments of 12th century life as well as life in Judea in the first and second centuries CE.

COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE MAGEN DAVID ADOM

on the Horns of Hattin re-enactment,” said Nizhnik-Kolomiychuk. “Every year, many participants would come from Russia and Ukraine. They would walk together, help each other, act together. One of the aims of the project is to bring closer together people from various countries who share this activity. We were proud of that.” The three-day event includes a two-day, 16-mile march through difficult terrain in hot

COMMENTARY

Jewish Tradition’s Nuanced Approach to Abortion Neither pro-life nor pro-choice, but pro-woman By Rabbanit Adena Berkowitz

ROY SCOTT/IKON IMAGES

t my daughter’s postponed Barnard College graduation ceremony in May, actress Cynthia Nixon, one of the featured speakers, reacted to the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. She told the audience that legal access to abortion is of “paramount importance to everyone with a uterus being able to control” their bodies and their lives and that “abortion is normal.” Her statements were a stark reminder to me of how traditional Jewish views, not only about abortion but also about our relationship to our bodies, diverge from American ideas about the rights to privacy and bodily autonomy. Halachic sources do not recognize a right to privacy or ownership of our body as understood by both American jurisprudence and contemporary culture. The Torah states that we were created “in the image of God,” and therefore our bodies are “on loan” from God. As custodians of our bodies, tradition teaches us to treat them with reverence—neither to harm, permanently mar nor destroy them. Thus, when it comes to medical decision-making and autonomy, including seeking an abortion, Jewish texts historically have taken us on a different path than “My Body, My Choice.” The assertion of absolute bodily autonomy is one example that leaves little room for Jewish tradition’s nuanced view of termination of pregnancy, which gives primacy to the woman’s physical and mental health while also addressing the sanctity—

and loss—of potential life. Jewish debate around abortion has been going on for centuries. From ancient to contemporary times, there are differing rabbinic views, for example, on the status of the fetus. In the Talmud, a fetus is described as the thigh of the mother, i.e., a part of the pregnant woman and not a separate person (Chullin 58a). Indeed, in the first 40 days after conception, it is described as mere fluid (Yevamot 69b). The 11th-century biblical and Talmudic commentator Rashi, commenting on the discussion in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 72b), writes that a fetus in utero is “lav nefesh hu,” not a living being, and as Mishnah Ohalot 7:6 teaches us, may be forfeited when the mother’s life is at risk, as long as no part of the child has emerged into the world. Yet throughout rabbinic literature, we find recognition that although a fetus is not a person in a legal sense, it nevertheless represents potential life. For example, Talmudic dispensation is given to violate Shabbat to save a fetus—in order to help it stay alive so it can observe many more Shabbats in the future. Thus, the rabbis saw the potential life as important enough to break a core halachic precept, which in most cases is allowed only for pikuach nefesh, the saving of a life. Similarly, Maimonides, the revered medieval Jewish philosopher, taught that the life of a woman should take precedence when a conflict arises between her life and her fetus. But unlike Rashi, Maimonides saw the JULY/AUGUST 2022

fetus, in the case where it endangers its mother, as akin to a pursuer, i.e, a person. This suggests that a fetus should be treated with a certain reverence that would permit its termination only in dire circumstances. When religious leaders—such as Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, a Jerusalem rabbinic authority who died in 2006—have sanctioned abortions in cases of severe fetal abnormalities, the focus is on the interests of the woman rather than the fetus’s anticipated quality of life. Here, her life and mental well-being are at stake, and this concern for the pregnant woman certainly is extended to cases of rape and incest. (The 18th-century rabbi, Jacob Emden of Germany, was the first to include mental health risks among the considerations that would allow termination of a pregnancy.) Jewish tradition makes a muchneeded contribution to the discussion of abortion. Its approach can perhaps be summed up as neither pro-life nor pro-choice, but pro-woman, combined with a sensitivity to the gravitas of the loss of potential life. This nuanced approach should serve as a model for how American law and the American public can address this complex issue. Rabbanit Adena Berkowitz, a practicing therapist and founder of the Hadassah Attorneys’ Council, is scholar in residence at Kol HaNeshamah NYC and author of The Jewish Journey Haggadah.

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ESSAY

How I Learned to Relish Playing Pickleball A game where staying out of the kitchen is hard work By Deborah Riemer They were chatty. They exuded Ted Lasso’s Midwestern “nice.” They were a welcoming bunch of men and women. They played with finesse and didn’t break a sweat. For my part, I was friendly, but not chatty. I was focused. I was optimistic I could nail this game. I played to win. I bought a sweatband. I think it was the sweatband that gave me away. “You’re not making a highlight reel of grand slams,” Max, one of the higher-ranked players, told me. “Shift yourself into third gear, play slow and steady, and let your opponent make the mistakes. Oh, and remember, once you dink, get out of the kitchen.” And there you have it. My Achilles’ heel.

n pickleball, the kitchen is the colloquial term for the non-volley zone, or NVZ. It’s a 7-foot area on both sides of the net that players can enter only after the ball bounces there, usually on a dink, or soft shot. Its purpose, I guess, is to keep the short-court game from being one of grand slams and smashes at the net. The thing is, I love hanging out in the kitchen. Maybe it’s my Eastern European grandparents’ genes, but that’s where I am most comfortable. So a game that mandates largely staying out of the kitchen is a challenge. But the more I played pickleball, the more I saw the similarities between the game and my own upbringing.

JULY/AUGUST 2022

Deborah Riemer

Growing up in a three-generational Jewish family, my parents’ kitchen was filled with laughter. No one fled this sacred space unless it was their turn to do the dishes. It was a place where everyone was welcome, where we could keep up a friendly banter and occasionally land a drop shot that surprised, delighted or stunned those around us—like when I told my parents that I had fallen in love with an Israeli and would be moving to Israel, where I lived from 1977 to 1991. Turns out, the sport of pickleball has a lot in common with the wonderfully warm and sometimes chaotic kitchen of my youth. It’s multigenerational, full of laughter, inclusive and always surprising. It is quick to learn but hard to master, despite my years of playing matkot on the beaches of Netanya. And while I’ll always be a grand slam kind of gal, I’m learning to kick back, keep my feet out of the kitchen and play for the love of the game. Oh, and if someone yells “falafel,” don’t look for the nearest food truck. Just watch the ball fall short of the net and savor the point. Deborah Riemer, a former broadcast journalist in Israel, currently works and plays in Vermont.

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COURTESY OF DEBORAH RIEMER

nlike many of my friends, I had an unremarkable Covid experience. I didn’t hunker down to write a new children’s book. I didn’t take a virtual vacation anywhere. And while I tried Duolingo to learn Spanish, the only phrases that stuck were “café con leche” (which I already knew) and “me gustan mucho las manzanas,” which means something like, “I like apples very much.” But it seemed like a good idea to take up something new, something outside where I could distance myself from people. When I saw that the local Vermont Green Mountain Academy for Lifelong Learning was offering an outdoor clinic for pickleball, I was intrigued. Pickleball sounded, well, a bit silly—like something immigrant Jewish kids played on the Lower East Side of New York after pulling a half-sour out of a barrel. Boy, was I wrong! There is a tribe mentality to pickleball, but it wasn’t initially my tribe—though my first three lessons on the court were promising. I was a tennis player. I know my way around rackets and balls. The court is smaller and I’m older, so that sounded like a win-win. “The play is all about friendly competition,” chirped Annie, the ponytail-coiffed instructor running the clinic. But in the throes of cultivating this new community of people, it hit me: I was not like them. Call it my Ted Lasso moment without the British accents. They were congenial.

GOING FOR THE

GOLD IN ISRAEL Female athletes make history at this year’s ‘Jewish Olympics’ By Hilary Danailova

REUTERS/ALAMY

rowing up in southern California, Chelsey Goldberg played roller hockey alongside her twin brother, Chad. When it got too hot to skate outside, they switched to ice hockey. When the Goldbergs’ talent became obvious, coaches encouraged the twins to pursue ice hockey seriously. Then came 2014, when Chad headed to Israel to compete in men’s hockey at the Maccabiah Games, Israel’s quadrennial sports event dubbed the “Jewish Olympics.” For the first time, Chelsey couldn’t join him: There was no women’s ice hockey competition. “I actually asked them if I could just play on the boys’ team,” recalled Goldberg, now 29 and a professional hockey player. “I wanted the opportunity to play for my country and take a trip to my holy land. But they said no. So from that point on, I was like, ‘I’m going to get a girls’ team over there.’ ” Eight years later, Goldberg’s determination is paying off: Women’s ice hockey is debuting at the 21st Maccabiah Games this July. Goldberg

joins an American squad facing off against teams from Canada and Israel. They are among a record 2,000 female athletes from around the world and part of a United States delegation of over 1,300—the largest American representation ever at any international sporting event, including the Olympics. Postponed from 2021 due to Covid, the two-week event kicks off July 12, with festive opening ceremonies two days later at Jerusalem’s Teddy Stadium. More than 10,000 athletes from 60-plus countries are competing in Haifa, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Netanya—but not on Shabbat, allowing observant Jews to participate and watch live. The Maccabiah Games “elevate the role of sports in bringing the Jewish community together across geographic, denominational, political and socioeconomic differences,” said Marshall Einhorn, CEO of Maccabi USA, Maccabi World Union’s American affiliate. “Our athletes are being exposed to Jewish cultures and Jewish languages from around the world.” JULY/AUGUST 2022

Opening Day Delegations arrive for the opening ceremony of the last Maccabiah Games, in July 2017.

Indeed, athletes come from as far away as Uruguay and Ukraine (even this year, despite the war) to compete, tour and celebrate Jewish athleticism and shared identity in the State of Israel. The Maccabiah Games are the signature event of the Israel-based Maccabi World Union, the world’s largest and longest-running Jewish sports organization, comprising 450 clubs in 60 countries. Maccabiah athletes range in age from 14 to 85 and compete in juniors, open, masters (over 35) and paralympic categories. They are swimmers and fencers, lawn bowlers and field hockey

Judaism and Athleticism Chelsey Goldberg successfully lobbied and recruited for a women’s ice hockey event at the games.

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players, and they include some of America’s most talented Jewish female athletes. In addition to Goldberg, standout women in the American delegation include Abby Meyers, the 2022 Ivy League Player of the Year in women’s basketball; Leah Rosenfeld, a two-time gold medalist runner in previous Maccabiah Games; Alexis Blokhina, a teenage tennis ace who heads to Israel right after her second appearance at Wimbledon; and Sara Golden, a top-ranked judoka.

Game On Yosef Yekutieli, founder of the Maccabiah Games, lit the torch at the 8th staging of the competition in July 1969.

the 1977 games, launching what has become one of Israel’s most successful sports. (The first-ever Israeli Olympic medal was a 1992 silver in judo won by Yael Arad.) Kanokogi singlehandedly made women’s judo an internationally recognized sport, mortgaging her home to sponsor the first world women’s judo championships in 1980, and threatening a lawsuit to persuade Olympic officials to add women’s judo to the 1988 summer games in Seoul, where she served as the first coach for the American team. This summer, 20-year-old Golden becomes a part of Kanokogi’s legacy. So does Goldberg, whose spirit echoes that of the fiery Brooklynite. Here, we look at some of the American women with the potential to write new chapters of Maccabiah history during this summer’s games. JULY/AUGUST 2022

CHELSEY GOLDBERG

helsey goldberg wants the kind of professional athletic career that her equally talented male counterparts have long taken for granted. That includes not only a well-paid day job on ice but also participation in the Maccabiah Games, where men’s ice hockey is a marquee sport. Judaism and athleticism have been pillars of Goldberg’s identity since her childhood skating alongside her brother and attending Temple Adat Elohim in Thousand Oaks, Calif., a Reform synagogue near their hometown of Agoura Hills, where the pair celebrated their b’nai mitzvah. After playing at Northeastern University, where she earned a bachelor’s and then a master’s in sports leadership—and where she was involved in the school’s Hillel—she spent several seasons with the Boston Blades in the Canadian Women’s League before it disbanded in 2019. Since then, Goldberg has been affiliated with the Professional

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COURTESY OF CHELSEY GOLDBERG (BOTTOM); ISRAEL PRESS AND PHOTO AGENCY (I.P.P.A.)/DAN HADANI COLLECTION, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF ISRAEL/CC BY 4.0

hile female athletes are still a minority at the games, Maccabiah features a rich history of pioneering women. Brooklyn-born judoka Rena “Rusty” Glickman—later known as Rusty Kanokogi, her married name— fought to include women’s judo in

Women’s Hockey Players’ Association, a nascent federation of American and Canadian sportswomen working to build a sustainable league “and make enough money to live,” she said. She has also spent the last eight years—ever since Maccabiah refused to let her play on the men’s team— lobbying for a women’s event at the games and recruiting an American team. “I put out the word on social media and reached out to past team-

mates,” Goldberg recalled. But even harder than finding players for her own team, she said, “was not having enough interest from enough players from different countries.” After a decade away, she recently moved back to California, where, in between training and organizing the new league, Goldberg works as a sales rep for the Verbero hockey apparel line and as a coach and mentor to young female athletes.

COURTESY OF MACCABI USA

MACCABIAH HISTORY The Maccabiah Games were the brainchild of Yosef Yekutieli, a Zionist immigrant to British Mandate Palestine from Belarus. Inspired by the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Yekutieli lobbied for a similar event in Eretz Yisrael. The nascent Maccabi organization— named for Judah Maccabee, the Jewish warrior whose revolt against Greek oppressors in the second century BCE is commemorated during Hanukkah—held its first competition in Tel Aviv in 1932. The games’ initial interval was set at three years, but there was no competition between 1935 and 1950 as both Europe and the Basketball star Tal Brody (left) fledgling Jewish nation were embroiled in the and swimmer Mark Spitz at the destruction and turmoil surrounding World 1965 games War II. The 1950 Maccabiah Games were the first in the new State of Israel and united Israel’s athletic community in preparation for the 1952 Olympics, a kind of global coming-out for Jewish athletes. Over the years, notable American participants in the Maccabiah Games have included swimmers Mark Spitz and Lenny Krayzelburg; gymnasts Kerri Strug and Aly Raisman; and shoe designer and philanthropist Stuart Weitzman, a three-time participant in table tennis. Judit Polgar of Hungary, considered the greatest women’s chess player of all time, and Olympic gymnast Neta Rivkin of Israel, are also alums (chess and bridge are Maccabiah sports). Regional Maccabi organizations hold competitions in off years, including Latin America’s Pan American Maccabi Games and the European Maccabi Games. This coming January, Germany will host the first Maccabi Winter Games since World War II. A century after Yekutieli promoted his vision, the Maccabiah Games reflect an increasingly confident and inclusive Jewish sports universe. “There had never been a Shabbat-observant Jew drafted in Major League Baseball until this past year, when there were two,” observed Marshall Einhorn, Maccabi USA’s CEO. “Jews have a proud history in sports that require ruggedness as well as those that require more finesse. The beauty of Maccabiah is that it brings Jewish athletes together across these sports in those two amazing weeks.” —Hilary Danailova JULY/AUGUST 2022

While she has become accustomed to being one of the few Jews in athletic spaces, Jewishness “has always been an honor and a staple of my identity,” she affirmed. That’s why her first trip to Israel, along with the opportunity to compete in the games, is such a milestone. Coming after her 2020 induction into the Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, Goldberg said, “it’s amazing to be finally going to Maccabiah—and to be a part of this first team.”

ALEXIS BLOKHINA

t 17, tennis phenomenon Alexis Blokhina is a bridge between countries: Her mother is from Russia; her father is from Ukraine, where he played on its national soccer team; and her uncle, who lives in Israel, is waiting to cheer her on at this summer’s games. “Tennis has opened up firsts for everything,” said Blokhina. Now ranked No. 2 in the United States and No. 25 in the world in junior women’s tennis, Blokhina first picked up a racket at age 5 while her family lived briefly in Japan. They later returned to her native California, where Blokhina’s parents had met as high school exchange students. By age 9, Blokhina, also an accomplished swimmer, chose to focus on tennis, so the family relocated to Plantation, Fla., to train at a high-level tennis academy. (Blokhina has recently been training at the United States Tennis Association in Orlando.) This fall, she starts at Stanford University, where she was recruited to play. The self-confident teen loves tennis’s spontaneity. “You have to be

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Leah Rosenfeld

Blokhina knows she represents more than just American tennis. Her success is a realization of her family’s American dream. “My brother and I have both capitalized on the opportunities that have been given to us,” she said, “and the sacrifices our parents have made.”

LEAH ROSENFELD

A Alexis Blokhina

s a longtime camper at Camp Young Judaea in New Hampshire, Leah Rosenfeld participated in its annual Maccabiah-style competition. Now 33 and a professional running coach in Flagstaff, Ariz., Rosenfeld is returning to Israel for her third Maccabiah Games. “Honestly, I just want to keep living that camp experience,” she laughed. She grew up in Ridgefield, Conn., helping runners at the charity road races organized by her parents— weekend warriors who themselves met at a race and owned several shoe stores. “I remember taking people’s

JULY/AUGUST 2022

numbers at the finish lines, putting pins on the bibs and eventually running myself,” Rosenfeld said. She “was hooked” after her first Maccabiah Games as a high school junior in 2005. “It was a very powerful experience to see that many Jewish people from all over the world and have that athletic connection,” she recalled. Though Rosenfeld grew up attending Temple Shearith Israel in Ridgefield (now Congregation Shir Shalom of Westchester and Fairfield Counties), she said that in school and professional circles, she’s “almost always been the only Jewish person.” After earning a journalism degree from Penn State, where she ran cross country and track, Rosenfeld moved to Arizona for graduate school in educational leadership. She currently coaches runners of all ages online and is a NordicTrack trainer for the iFIT workout app. As a competitive long-distance runner, Rosenfeld has numerous firstplace finishes to her credit, including at the Maccabiah Games, where she took gold in the 400-meter relay in

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COURTESY OF LEAH ROSENFELD (TOP); COURTESY OF ALEXIS BLOKHINA

ready for anything,” she said. “Being out there alone on the court and just relying on myself, it really keeps me motivated.” By age 13, then-unseeded Blokhina became the youngest ever to win her division at the prestigious USTA Florida “Bobby Curtis” Junior State Singles Championships. This year, she won the singles title at the FILA Easter Bowl, a premier junior tennis showcase. She was also the singles champion and a doubles finalist in her age category at the Indian Wells Masters in California. Wimbledon may be her most prestigious tournament to date, but the Maccabiah Games represent a special opportunity for Blokhina to connect with her paternal Jewish heritage and finally visit Israel. “Whenever I would have to choose in front of people, I would always say, ‘I’m Jewish.’ I was really proud, always, to be Jewish,” she said.

2005 and in the 3,000-meter event in 2013. She also won the half marathon at the 2019 European Maccabi Games in Budapest. “The pressure is on, because each time I’ve gone I’ve won something,” said Rosenfeld, who is competing in this year’s half marathon alongside teammate Melissa Perlman, whom she coaches. In the near future, Rosenfeld hopes to qualify to run the marathon for the 2024 Olympics. Meanwhile, Rosenfeld is looking forward to repeating some favorite experiences in Israel: swimming in the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv, training alongside other Jewish athletes and feasting on shakshuka and hummus. Israel “feels like nowhere else in the world that I have been,” she reflected—except, maybe, her beloved summer camp. “Like camp, you’re immersed in something completely different from your daily routine, learning and being athletic with other people. The fact that it’s in Israel just makes it more meaningful.”

ABBY MEYERS

COURTESY OF ABBY MEYERS/PRINCETON ATHLETICS

eing recently named ivy League Player of the Year in women’s basketball “is one of the greatest highlights of my career,” said Abby Meyers, 22, who graduated from Princeton in the spring with a degree in international affairs. Another highlight comes this summer, as Meyers helps the Maccabi USA women’s basketball team defend its 2017 gold medal in Israel. The Maccabiah Games are a new challenge for Meyers, but she’s joining a team with several familiar faces: Among her basketball cohorts are Princeton teammate Maddie Plank and three other Ivy Leaguers she

Abby Meyers

has previously competed against. Beyond medals, the 6-foot-tall shooting guard from Potomac, Md.— who grew up observing holidays at the Washington Hebrew Congregation—said the games are “very much about embracing your Jewishness and understanding the culture behind it in the birthplace of Judaism.” The daughter of two doctors, Meyers was raised in a high-energy family alongside twin sister Olivia, who also graduated from Princeton, and older sister Emily. “We were crazy, wild maniacs, so they needed to put us into activities to tire us out,” recalled Meyers. “Whenever I was bored, I’d go outside to the driveway and just shoot against myself. Every time I’d make a shot, I’d be like, maybe I can make one more.” Meyers, her high school team’s all-time leading scorer, was recruited JULY/AUGUST 2022

to Princeton and led the university’s Tigers to the Ivy League regular season and tournament titles. Having lost one year of competition due to the Covid-19 hiatus in college sports, Meyers will transfer her final year of collegiate eligibility to the University of Maryland, pursuing a master’s in business this fall. “My grandma will finally be able to come and watch games; she’s never seen me play in college,” she said. Having interned with Nike, Meyers

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MACCABIAH 2022 For extensive coverage of Team USA’s participation in the 21st Maccabiah Games, including livestreaming of games, video features and articles, check out Maccabi USA’s website, maccabiusa.com, and its social media on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

usa delegation by the

udoka sara golden’s participation in the Maccabiah Games caps a year in which she took judo gold at the Junior World Championships in Italy. That followed her winning gold in 2020 at the Pan American Championships in Mexico and the Pan American Cup in Peru.

But Golden, 20, who is top ranked in her weight category and just moved up to senior level, was not always so worldly. As an adolescent from Crystal Lake, Ill., she felt self-conscious during a monthlong judo event in Japan. Locals stared at her and touched her light-colored hair. “My mom sat me down and said: ‘You can keep feeling awkward, or you can smile and wave,’ ” she

Sara Golden JULY/AUGUST 2022

recalled. “So the next day, I smiled and waved. It was culture shock. But I represent America, and I have to put my best foot forward.” Nowadays, Golden said she enjoys that being a judoka “makes me different”—and she cites the sport’s Japanese culture as key to its appeal. “Judo is really complex, and there’s a lot of respect and discipline involved.” Golden was introduced to judo at age 6 by her father, an experienced martial artist who noticed her interest in her older brother’s wrestling matches and began to train her. Focused on judo, she graduated early from high school and enrolled in Purdue University’s online undergraduate program, where she is studying nutrition and training; the Olympics is her eventual goal. The Maccabiah Games is more than just another tournament for Golden. Judo is especially popular in Israel, and over the years, the young American has been encouraged by members of the Israeli national team. She’s excited to finally visit the country that looms so large for her sport. “This time, it isn’t just about judo,” she reflected. “It’s an opportunity to embrace and learn about my own Jewish culture.” Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.

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COURTESY OF THE INTERNATIONAL JUDO FEDERATION

SARA GOLDEN

SOURCE: MACCABI USA; NUMBERS AS OF JUNE 1

is eyeing an eventual career in sports marketing, but hopes to play professionally first. The Maccabiah Games will be another rite of passage. “Being a Jewish athlete is actually a pretty rare thing,” Meyers observed. “It’ll be special to go to Israel, play basketball and represent the U.S.—and disprove that stereotype of small, curly-haired Jewish athletes.”

Letty Cottin Pogrebin was a cheerleader throughout her time at Brandeis.

Rather Than Live in Disgrace, ‘I Decided To Kill Myself’

COURTESY OF LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN (LEFT); KENNETH C. ZIRKEL

Abortion in the pre-Roe v. Wade era | By Letty Cottin Pogrebin

seemed to have missed the memo on contraception, an ignorance partly attributable to my deceased mom not being there to explain ovulation and partly to the fact that I trusted street myths like, “You can get pregnant from sperm on a toilet seat, but you can’t get pregnant if you do it standing up.” Had Mom lived, I probably would not have confided in her, anyway; talking about sex would have embarrassed us both. Like many Jewish mothers of her generation, her medical specialty was constipation and her all-purpose cure was a warm water enema. Everything else in the physical realm fell beyond her purview. All of which explains

why I was dumb enough to have sex without a condom and get pregnant in 1958, the fall of my senior year at Brandeis University. At that point, all I knew about abortion was that it was illegal and it cost hundreds of dollars, money I did not have. So, despite being paralyzed with fear and shame and anticipating his deep disapproval, I told my father, a proudly pragmatic but emotionally unavailable lawyer, that I was pregnant and I wanted an abortion. He didn’t try to talk me out of it. He didn’t ask me who the boy was. He didn’t lecture or scold me. (Neither did he comfort me.) He just told me he would take care of it. I have no idea how—maybe there was a Jewish JULY/AUGUST 2022

mafia in Queens, N.Y., where I grew up—but he found a gynecologist not far from his apartment in Jamaica who performed the procedure in the dead of night. It cost $350 ($3,500 in today’s money), and I paid him back every cent from my hourly wage (working for Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, then the rabbi at Brandeis Hillel). For the remaining 25 years of my father’s life, neither of us ever mentioned that episode again. It would have shamed us both. In 1991, I went public with my illegal abortion in a column published in The New York Times Magazine. I intended to rebut those who, without regard for our bodies, health, feelings or circumstances,

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On the March The author led many pro-choice rallies through the years. ‘It took the feminist movement and a Supreme Court decision to give us the right to control our own bodies.’

far and away the most shameful secrets of my youth. I didn’t confide in anyone in my family, not my married sister, Betty, who was 14 years older than I, or my married aunts or female cousins, most of whom had multiple children and presumably knew a thing or two about sex. I couldn’t tell them because, in my eyes, they were moral exemplars and I was a scarlet woman. The idea that any of my upstanding female relatives might excuse my transgression, much less know where to find an abortion doctor, was beyond my imagination. Much later on, I discovered from Betty that the three women closest to

Dr. Robert Spencer JULY/AUGUST 2022

me in the world—my adored sister, mother and grandmother—had all had abortions. The revelation was not just shocking; it was heart-rending, infuriating and life-changing. It taught me that when it comes to abortion (or any issue important to women), shame and secrecy are self-defeating. Not confiding in intimate family members and friends to protect my Nice Jewish Girl image cheated me of the benefits of their love, wisdom, experience and counsel.

ut at that time, rather than face their judgment, I decided I would kill myself. With no access to a weapon or a lethal drug and being too squeamish to slash my wrists, I narrowed my options to leaping off the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge or jumping in front of a subway train. My roommate, Selma Shapiro, noticing my distress, kept hounding me to tell her what was wrong. Finally, I blurted out the truth. She let me cry on her shoulder then walked me downstairs to the quarters of our dorm counselor, Lisel Judge, whose day job was coaching the Brandeis women’s fencing team, but who also served as an unshakable, unflappable

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COURTESY OF LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN (TOP); FROM ‘DEAR DR. SPENCER,’ A FILM BY DANIELLE RENFREW AND BETH SELTZER/IMAGE COURTESY OF ICARUS FILMS (ICARUSFILMS.COM/IF-DEAR)

insist that women carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, like a brood mare, then give the baby up for adoption. What I did not admit in that column, or anything else I’ve written in the last half century, was that in the spring of my senior year, six months after the first abortion, I was pregnant again. Going back to my father, or the gynecologist in Jamaica, was out of the question. I was supposed to have my life under control. I was supposed to be a smart girl. Graduation was a few weeks away. I had a full-blown panic attack. How could I make the same mistake twice? In my world, Nice Jewish Girl was not a cliché, it was an edict. A Nice Jewish Girl was expected to pick up her college diploma with an engagement ring on her finger and an intact hymen. A pregnant Nice Jewish Girl was an oxymoron, the mother, so to speak, of all shandas. I’d heard stories about girls being spirited out of town before they could “show” and kept out of sight until after they delivered, their parents having invented an elaborate story to cover for their daughters’ half-year absences. (“Arlene is taking a semester abroad.” “Laurel won a scholarship to a school out West.”) After giving birth in secret, and a discreetly arranged adoption, the daughter returned home, her reputation unsullied, her appearance unchanged, and none were the wiser. The alternative to that scenario, giving birth and keeping the child, was unthinkable. While the boy in question was rarely identified by name, the girl was disgraced, her child called a “mamzer” (incorrectly translated as “bastard,” which, in those days, wasn’t just a swear word but the term used for a baby “born out of wedlock”). My unwanted pregnancies were

58 Years Later The author met her husband, Bert Pogrebin, five years after she had her second abortion. After confessing to him her ‘shameful secret,’ he responded, “None of that matters.”

car accident or get stopped for any reason on the New Jersey or Pennsylvania turnpikes, she said I was to tell the trooper I was a patient of Dr. Spencer’s, and he, the officer, would let me go with a warning or arrange for my car to be towed and alert the clinic that someone needed to come to pick me up. That sounded bizarre, but the nurse was so matter of fact, I just took down her instructions. Fortunately, Selma drove me to Ashland without encountering law enforcement. But for years afterward, I heard parallel accounts from other women who’d been Dr. Spencer’s patients, several of whom claimed to know why his name worked as a Get Out of Jail Free card. Apocryphal or not, the story was that the good doctor had once saved the life of a trooper’s daughter who was near death after a botched kitchen table procedure and, since that time, the officer’s colleagues up and down the highways in both states had been protecting Dr. Spencer and his patients. (And, when necessary, sending their own wives and daughters to his clinic.) By the time he died, Dr. Spencer had performed more than 100,000 safe abortions in his spotless clinic. In June 1963, five years after my second abortion, I met the man who JULY/AUGUST 2022

would become my husband and within three months of our first date we were engaged. Nothing required me to fess up; I knew Selma would never tell. But given how abortion was reviled back then, I felt it morally unconscionable to begin our life together without confessing my shameful secret. I announced to my fiancé that I had to tell him something that might make him change his mind about me. At that point, the thought of losing him unleashed torrents of sobs so convulsive, I could barely continue. He waited, heard me out, then took me in his arms. “None of that matters,” he said. “All that matters is us and our future.” We were married three months later. That was 58 years and three wanted children ago. I will be forever grateful to Selma, a lifelong friend; to Lisel, my dorm counselor, who died in 2017 at the age of 101; and, above all, to the nonjudgmental Dr. Spencer, who, risking his career and worse, safely terminated my inadvertent pregnancy. It was his commitment to women’s autonomy, not to the state or someone else’s religious beliefs, that allowed me to graduate with my class, move on with my life and wait until I was ready to settle down with a loving mate and establish a stable

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COURTESY OF LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN

confidante to female students. Lisel comforted me without making a big deal about it. She said I wasn’t a bad person, I just needed to get measured for a diaphragm. The next morning, she plugged into an underground network of abortion whisperers and directed me not to a seedy back-alley abortionist with dirt under his fingernails but to a licensed physician, the saintly, soon-to-be legendary Dr. Robert Spencer. I called for an appointment, trembling with anxiety. Dr. Spencer’s plainspoken nurse told me what to expect of the procedure and what to pack for my overnight stay at the doctor’s clinic in Ashland, Pa., where I would be observed post-op. Oh, and one more thing: Should I have a

home in which our children could be welcomed, cherished and nurtured to adulthood. Dr. Spencer’s clinic was pristine. He and his nurse attended to me with the utmost sensitivity and respect. Yet, I have never gotten over the indignity of the clandestine, the terror and loneliness, the shame. Had abortion been legal then, I could have been spared all that. Were sexually active young women not branded as trollops who disgraced their families and brought shame on The Jewish People, I would not have come so close to killing myself. I kept that chapter of my life hidden from those closest to me because abortion was scandalous and ruinous, not to mention dangerous. Thousands of women lost their lives to bungled illegal procedures, self-induced abortions (knitting needles, lye, throwing themselves down a flight of stairs) or suicide. Because their parents, husbands and friends were too ashamed to admit how and why those women died, and too timid to advocate for reform, it took the feminist movement and a Supreme Court decision to give us the right to control our own bodies. Post-Roe v. Wade, my daughters and granddaughters grew up in a different world, one in which (most) women were free to determine their own futures, unshackled to state intervention in their reproductive lives. Clearly, that world is coming to an end. And that constitutional right— constantly challenged, amended and eroded—is vanishing.

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Letty Cottin Pogrebin is a writer, activist and founding editor of Ms. magazine. This article is an adapted excerpt from the forthcoming Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy © 2022 Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Published by Post Hill Press. Used with Permission.

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Zoya Cherkassky

‘Before and After’ An artist responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine

By Renee Ghert-Zand

hen russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky responded the best way she knew how. She picked up watercolors, markers, pencils and crayons—“whatever was on my

desk,” she said—and began to create, letting her imagination take her to disturbing places. It was her way of processing the horrific images of the war on the news, she explained. On social media, she watched in real time as Kyiv, the

city where she was born, and other areas of her native country were bombarded by Russian forces. “I can’t avoid thinking about what is going on there,” said Cherkassky, who made aliyah with her family in 1991 at the age of 14. After footage emerged on February 27 of an unidentified Ukrainian man trying to block the passage of a Russian tank with just his bare hands and body weight, the 45-yearold artist painted a pig-tailed girl in a white blouse and red-and-black checked skirt looking out from an apartment window at a war scene on the snow-covered street below: A man with outstretched hands stands on the street before a tank while the buildings lining the street are in flames. This piece was inspired by one that Cherkassky drew in 2016. Titled Mama, it also portrays a little girl perched at a window, but she is looking at her mother who is happily waving at her from the snowy courtyard. Mama is one of the drawings in Cherkassky’s “Soviet Childhood” series, which depicts the artist’s early years growing up in Ukraine. Her

‘Train to the South’ shows a group on their way to a vacation. JULY/AUGUST 2022

The ‘after’ artwork portrays worried refugees fleeing Ukraine.

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ingled out by the ha’aretz Israeli newspaper as “one of the pillars of contemporary Israeli art,” Cherkassky, who lives in Ramat Gan and has a studio in Tel Aviv, is a prolific artist. Her brightly colored and often ironic paintings, drawings and sculptures focus on personal stories and social issues, and they have been displayed in galleries and museums throughout Israel and the United States. Other series have explored the experience of immigrants from former Soviet countries (“Pravda”); Jewish iconography and anti-Jewish stereotypes (“Collectio Judaica”); and the plight of contemporary sex workers (“Women Who Work”). The Museum of Sex in New York City acquired an untitled drawing from “Women Who Work” for its ongoing exhibit, “Artifact: (xxx),” while the city’s Jewish Museum has in its permanent collection a screen print from Cherkassky’s Haggadah from “Collectio Judaica.” Selections from “Soviet Childhood” were exhib-

ited in galleries in New York City and Los Angeles, and at a 2018 solo show at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Cherkassky, who has visited Ukraine frequently as an adult, selected 10 drawings from “Soviet Childhood” as “before” images. For each, she created a parallel, untitled “after” scene expressing what she imagined the same subject would look like during the Russian siege. Cherkassky used the same vivid colors in each set—bright pinks, reds, yellows and greens— but where the “before” pieces are cheerful, detailed and inviting, even humorous, the “after” ones present a striking contrast. They are somber and either roughly drawn or painted, expressing the foreboding and pain she feels about the invasion. “They are destroying my childhood,” she said of the Russian troops. In one pairing, Train to the South (2015) depicts a train compartment with two women and three children dressed in summer clothing and enjoying a snack on their way to a vacation. In the “after” version, the same space is crammed with refugees evacuating to the east in winter coats, their faces despondent and etched with worry. She Forgot to Wear Her Skirt (2016) shows three older women JULY/AUGUST 2022

‘Mama’ The original 2016 version is a happy tableau (left); the parallel image from 2022 depicts a war scene.

seated together in front of their apartment building. The piece’s title reflects a snide remark the trio makes about a young woman who passed by wearing a micro-mini skirt and fishnet stockings. In the “after” image, the building has been bombed and the same young woman kneels in grief before the graves of the elderly women, buried in haste in the front yard. “War,” the artist explained, “changes the relationships between people.” Cherkassky has posted what she is calling her “Before and After” pieces on her Facebook and Instagram accounts. Meanwhile, she has sold a number of prints and pieces from the series through galleries and art fairs, donating the money to support efforts to help Ukrainian refugees. She has also received requests to exhibit the series, but she is holding off for now. “I don’t want to do an exhibition of these until the war is over,” she said. “For right now, creating them was therapeutic for me.” Renee Ghert-Zand is a Jerusalem-based freelance writer and journalist covering Israel and the Jewish world.

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ALL IMAGES COURTEST OF ZOYA CHERKASSKY

drawings and paintings synthesize a variety of styles, including pop art, manga/comic book illustration and Soviet realism, to present a sentimental but complex image of life in the former Soviet Union.

HEALTH

An Eating Disorder Pandemic These illnesses are on the rise across all age groups By Sarah Yahr Tucker

ISTOCK

hen the covid-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, Rachel and her husband decided that they and their two daughters would isolate completely. The 37-year-old resident of Northern California marks this point as the moment her binge eating disorder resurfaced. “I became food obsessed again,” said Rachel, who had struggled with the disorder for decades though she was only officially diagnosed a few years ago. She obsessively baked cinnamon buns and cookies, part of “a desperate need to make our little world feel like every day was special,” recalled Rachel, who asked that her real name not be used. She also began consuming large amounts of food that she didn’t entirely enjoy in order to cope with her anxiety—a hallmark of binge eating. The pandemic had brought back the intense focus on food that had begun for her at age 16, a cycle of losing and gaining weight, restricting calories and binging. After being diagnosed as an adult, group therapy had helped her manage the behavior. But the stress of the pandemic was undoing her progress. According to clinicians and treatment centers, the incidence of eating disorders—anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating and other forms

of mental illness around food—has risen dramatically in the United States during the pandemic. Between March 2020 and December 2021, the National Eating Disorders Association reported a 107 percent increase in the volume of calls to its helpline. And while figures for 2022 aren’t yet available, anecdotal evidence indicates that the numbers remain at their pandemic high. Among the deadliest of the mental health illnesses, eating disorders have been recognized by medical professionals for decades. Nevertheless, myths and misconceptions continue to surround them. The most prevalent is that they are only a problem among teens and 20-somethings. Yet eating disorders, found in all races and genders, afflict all age groups. The disorders can be triggered by stress around family or social dynamics and by underlying mental health issues. There are also genetic markers that increase the risk of developing an eating disorder. Rachel’s experience, too, is far from unique. According to medical professionals, these issues can reoccur or develop for the first time in adulthood. With most studies focused on teens and younger women, there is comparatively little current research on how eating disorders impact those middle-aged and older. According to a 2012 study in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, 13 percent of American women 50 or older experience symptoms of an eating disorder and 60 percent report that their concerns about weight negatively affect their lives. A 2017 review of eating disorder studies in Current Opinion in Psychiatry concluded that eating disorders in adults frequently go undetected by primary care doctors. Images of those suffering from JULY/AUGUST 2022

these disorders tend to focus on underweight white teens, yet anorexia is the least prevalent of the eating disorders listed by the American Psychiatric Association, though it has the highest mortality rate. Research indicates that rates of women who are anorexic, which can include restricting calories as well as excessive exercising, plateau around age 26; that bulimia rates don’t peak until around age 47; and that rates of binge eating disorder hit their highest level in people in their 70s. Meanwhile, the most common eating disorder is “other specified feeding and eating disorder” (OSFED), a classification for those with symptoms of one or more disorders and who do not strictly meet diagnostic criteria. This diagnosis covers, for example, a person who purges without the binging of bulimia, or restricts calories and has other symptoms of anorexia without being significantly underweight. Temimah Zucker, a New York City therapist who specializes in eating disorders, pointed out that people with these illnesses are often not physically compromised or underweight. She noted that a combination of factors can trigger an eating disorder, a “recipe” that might come

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together at any point in life. These include underlying conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety or depression, or big changes such as children leaving home or parents beginning to age. As an Orthodox Jew, Zucker is frequently in demand by observant clients with eating disorders. Several reports have indicated that rates of these disorders are both on the rise and underreported among Orthodox Jews, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. Holidays, Zucker explained, can be challenging for those in treatment due to the emphasis on large family meals. Even Shabbat can seem like a “weekly Thanksgiving,” Zucker noted, with many decisions around food to navigate that can be overwhelming and lead to obsessive thinking. A woman might think, “I had a piece of cake with Kiddush in the morning at my synagogue or shul,” Zucker said, explaining one possible scenario, and she has to decide if “that was my snack or my breakfast.” Fast days such as Tisha B’Av, observed during the summer, or Yom Kippur can be “very stressful” for those with disordered eating, noted Dina Cohen, a New Jersey nutrition therapist and certified eating disorders registered dietitian and supervisor. She recommends that her clients take concerns seriously and consult with their rabbis about whether to fast. “I’ve seen people relapse from fasting,” she said. “It’s getting back into that mindset of ‘Oh right, that’s what restriction feels like. Why did I ever stop doing it?’ You might see people who are at a normal weight and have no medical problems, and they’ll still be told not to fast, because it can be a real psychological trigger.” Cohen described the pandemic

as a “perfect storm” of stress and uncertainty, heightening underlying vulnerabilities. But even under normal circumstances, she said, for those in recovery, the struggle to resist diet culture—a term for the pervasive belief that thinness and body shape are more important than physical, emotional and psychological health—is like driving against the flow of traffic on a highway. Success, she added, takes a lot of support.

roviding support and finding ways to prevent stressful situations from causing disordered eating is something Debbie Saroufim has learned through experience. Saroufim, 42, from Los Angeles, had struggled with the illness since early childhood and was diagnosed with OSFED at age 14, working with a therapist and dietitian to overcome it. “There were good foods and bad foods,” Saroufim recalled, “and there were good bodies and there were bad bodies. And if you had a less desirable body, it was made very apparent very early on that you should do anything within your power to fix that.” Today, Saroufim is a personal coach, helping women explore body image and how it relates to food and exercise. She encourages clients of all ages to confront fat-phobic beliefs in order to strive for a forgiving relationship with their body. The tools that she teaches, Saroufim said, provide “a means of checking in. Oftentimes we don’t even know we’re stressed until the eating disorder voice in our head gets louder.” Saroufim also noted that re-emerging from Covid isolation brings a certain amount of pressure to her clients. “Everybody’s terrified that they’re fatter,” she said. “Or, if they’re thinner, they worry about how to keep it. It really is a situation where

JULY/AUGUST 2022

nobody’s allowed to win. But what happens if we just decide we don’t want to play?” As Covid-related protocols in the United States have eased, Zucker has noticed her existing patients benefiting from the return to normal activities. Still, she said, the number of patients reaching out for help has remained high. It is possible that the numbers will continue to rise, Zucker speculated, as some people may have been waiting for restrictions to lift before seeking help. For Rachel, being able to send her daughters back to school and regain some time for herself has helped ease her anxiety, and consequently, her binge eating has largely stopped. “Everyone just got through 2020 and 2021 the best ways they could,” she said, noting that she is still considering reaching out to a therapist. “But being a woman, inhabiting a woman’s body, adds a layer of complication.” Sarah Yahr Tucker is a freelance writer and journalist based in Los Angeles.

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WHERE TO GO FOR HELP National Eating Disorders Association (nationaleatingdisorders.org) is among the largest organizations in the United States dedicated to providing education and referrals around eating disorders. The Renfrew Center (renfrewcenter.com) is a pioneer in the treatment of eating disorders, with centers throughout the country and a program for treating adults in their 30s through 60s. Relief (reliefhelp.org) provides mental health referrals for the Jewish community and has a division focused on eating disorders.

HADASSAH MEDICINE

Living With Trauma Hadassah’s lifesaving protocols are globally recognized By Wendy Elliman

SHUTTERSTOCK (TOP); COURTESY OF HMO

efore this year, israel and Poland inhabited different medical realities. “Poland hasn’t known war or terror, or experienced mass casualty, in a long time,” said Dr. Miklosh Bala, head of the trauma unit at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem. “They have no expertise in what Israelis face daily.” Then, on February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. Refugees streamed into Poland, and the risk of an errant missile or two slamming into a Polish civilian center near the country’s border with Ukraine became alarmingly real. Just 11 days after the Russian invasion, Dr. Bala and his team flew to Poland with a Hadassah emergency medical delegation, the first of several Hadassah Medical Organization missions to the country. Part of the group went to treat refugees at a field hospital and refugee center in Przemysl, about 10 miles from the Polish-Ukrainian border. Dr. Bala, senior surgeon Dr. Asaf Kedar and Hadassah’s trauma nurse coordinator, Julie Benbenishty, went to the

Medical University of Lublin. The city’s largest hospital, it had been appointed by the Polish government as a disaster center for the region. “The hospital has excellent facilities and medical team, but no preparation for mass disaster or serious trauma events, and no systems

in place for situations that challenge capacity,” said Dr. Bala. “We had a specific task: Teach local specialists the basics of disaster and mass casualty management.” Among the training and topics discussed were an introduction to disaster management, logistics around hospital preparedness and possible scenarios for mass casualty events. “We produced a training simulation and helped set up a real-time trauma guidance network with nearby hospitals.” While fears of a mass casualty event near Poland’s border with Ukraine have so far proven unfounded, Lublin’s hospital staff “was eager to learn, and we were proud to share,” Dr. Bala noted. Born in the city of Grodno, now part of Belarus, Dr. Bala has shared his expertise around the globe, but it was in Israel where he first got his on-the-ground training. He made aliyah with a medical degree earned in Moscow and came to Hadassah as a resident in 2000, just as the second intifada began. Back then, Hadassah had Jerusalem’s only Level 1 trauma center, located at Ein Kerem. The

Constant Learning Dr. Rami Mosheiff (above), head of the orthopedic trauma department at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, says his team is always innovating and crafting ‘more effective treatment techniques and protocols.’ JULY/AUGUST 2022

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anything else, including cancer. Israel’s lifesaving trauma protocols developed during the second intifada—from the number and specialties on the trauma team to the chain of decision-making—are globally recognized and shared at international conferences and in up to 20 academic papers a year. “It’s no overstatement to say we’ve changed the way trauma centers function,” said Dr. Bala. “Surgeons treating Boston marathon bombing victims in 2013, for example, used our triage methods and groundbreaking surgical procedures.” Among them was computer-guided technology, developed by Hadassah orthopedists for removing bullet fragments and repairing complex fractures.

ma unit head at Hadassah Ein Kerem, training a Hadassah team in trauma protocols (above) and, in Poland, presenting disaster management strategies at the Medical University of Lublin

first Level 1 trauma center in Israel, it had opened eight years earlier with support from Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Today, the country has 21 trauma centers, six of them Level 1. Between 2000 and 2004, Hadassah treated half of the 8,341 people in Israel injured in the intifada. Adi Hooja, then 11, was one of those trauma patients. She was severely wounded in April 2001, when a terrorist bomb packed with metal bolts blew up in the Jerusalem pedestrian mall where she had been getting an ice cream with friends. Dozens of metal shards perforated her leg. As the young girl lay near death in Hadassah’s trauma unit, the doctors made a difficult decision: They would not amputate. Multiple surgeries and long, intensive rehabilitation followed. Dr. Bala, now chair of the Israeli National Trauma Society, was a junior doctor on Hooja’s case. Today, the 32-year-old Hooja is married with children and walks steadily and gracefully. In normal times—as normal as it gets in Israel—only 5 percent of HMO’s annual 2,500 trauma patients are victims of war or terror. “Trauma is physical injury that occurs

suddenly—from road, work or sports accidents, falls and domestic or social violence, as well as from war and terror,” said Dr. Rami Mosheiff, head of Hadassah Ein Kerem’s orthopedic trauma department. Like Dr. Bala, he started working in trauma during the second intifada. Typically involving complex and critical injuries that threaten life or limb, trauma care, or traumatology, is a multidisciplinary, multidimensional and constantly changing field. Trauma specialists must act fast and knowledgeably in the so-called “golden hour,” the 60 minutes after injury when the right treatment reduces risk of death by a factor of three. “Trauma care was once known as ‘the neglected disease of modern society,’ ” Dr. Mosheiff said. It was not identified as a separate discipline until the 1970s, he noted, though trauma injuries kill more people under the age of 40 worldwide than JULY/AUGUST 2022

ritical to hadassah’s success in the trauma field are organization and teamwork, explained Dr. Bala. Organization is reflected in the defined chain of command, with the final call for a patient made only by a highly experienced trauma physician. Teamwork puts orthopedists, interventional radiologists, critical care staff, general surgeons and nurses on the trauma team. The treatment of a family injured in a car accident in early May shows the system in operation. The father, who asked to remain anonymous, had lost control of his car outside Jerusalem as he drove his four children home from a wedding. The paramedics who arrived at the scene alerted Hadassah Ein Kerem’s trauma unit about the extent of the injuries as the ambulances raced to the medical center. Off-duty trauma staff hurried to the hospital to bolster its three on-duty physicians and two nurses, so that a full team of specialists awaited each patient. The

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COURTESY OF HMO

Sharing Knowledge Dr. Miklosh Bala, trau-

COURTESY OF HMO

HADASSAH MEDICINE

children—aged 5, 8, 11 and 15—and their 46-year-old father were wheeled directly from the ambulances to the six-bed trauma unit, adjacent to Hadassah’s Judy and Sidney Swartz Center for Emergency Medicine. Each bed had a respirator, defibrillator and monitors as well as blood supply, antibiotics, pads, tubes, bandages and more. And each bed had enough space for multiple specialists to work simultaneously. “Well within the golden hour, we’d assayed, X-rayed, scanned and assessed each patient, and started the treatment plan for each,” said Dr. Bala. “We treated all injuries successfully.” Trauma care is a developing specialty, and today’s patients are

A patient arrives at the trauma unit at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem.

more likely to be individuals or small groups, like the father and his children hurt in the car accident, rather than dozens or more victims of a catastrophe or attack. “The mass

casualty situations of the intifada are now rare,” said Dr. Bala. A stark exception occurred on May 16, 2021, when three rows of bleachers collapsed in a Hasidic synagogue

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in northern Jerusalem on erev Shavuot. Two people died and 184 sustained severe crush injuries, head and abdominal trauma and broken bones. “We performed life-saving surgery—orthopedic, neurological and abdominal—all that night and the following day,” said Dr. Bala. Between Ein Kerem’s trauma unit and the regional trauma center at Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus, some 150 people were treated, with the remainder going to other Jerusalem area hospitals. Falls, especially among the elderly and, lately, severe injuries from electric scooter accidents, account for many of the trauma unit’s current patients. “With each new type of injury, we innovate, learn and craft more effective treatment techniques and protocols,” said Dr. Mosheiff. Acts of terror that require trauma care are different these days, too. The second intifada’s blast injuries have given way to the crush injuries of car rammings and penetrating knife wounds. Dr. Bala recalled successfully treating a 20-year-old soldier, stabbed in the neck in Jerusalem’s Old City during the “knife intifada,” a wave of increased violence in 2015 and 2016.

HADASSAH ON CALL Go behind the scenes at Hadassah Medical Organization with the Hadassah On Call: New Frontiers in Medicine podcast, hosted by Benyamin Cohen. This summer, episodes will highlight joint and knee care and diabetes research at Hadassah. Catch up on recent episodes, including an interview with Dr. Yoram Weiss, newly appointed director-general of HMO, who shares insights into emerging technologies and the future of medical care. Sign up for new episode alerts at hadassah.org/hadassahoncall.

The soldier was taken to Hadassah Mount Scopus, and Dr. Bala and a vascular surgeon were rushed there by police car, with its lights flashing and siren blaring to get through the traffic, Dr. Bala said. What has remained constant about trauma care are the miracle stories shared by specialists and surgeons. Dr. Mosheiff described an 11-year-old Bedouin goat herder who stumbled onto a mine in the Jordan Valley many years ago and was transferred to Hadassah Ein Kerem from a local hospital. “It had looked like we’d have to amputate both legs,” he said. “But, aiming to save not only his life but also his mobility, we decided to use one leg as a reservoir, drawing on its bone, vessels, ligaments and nerves to save the other. And the leg healed. Today, as an adult, he walks comfortably with a prosthesis.” For his part, Dr. Bala pointed to a 27-year-old woman who was in a driving accident a little over a month ago and brought to Hadassah Ein Kerem. “The paramedics judged her more shocked than hurt,” he said. “This was a rare occasion when they got it badly wrong.” Hadassah protocols require that all accident victims are first taken to the trauma unit, and it was there that trauma specialists discovered that she had sustained a life-threatening liver injury. “We treated her angiographically. Today’s technologies and better understanding of trauma physiology have made much trauma care far less invasive. Sometimes it’s better to keep your hands in your pocket than open the abdomen. Her recovery is slow, but she’s doing well.” This young woman is one of 12 trauma patients currently hospitalized at HMO, all of whom are followed throughout their stay by the trauma unit team. JULY/AUGUST 2022

Traumatology, agree Drs. Bala and Mosheiff, is not for everyone. Its hours are disruptive, with surgeons and specialists called in for emergencies around the clock, and it requires vast physical and emotional stamina as well as theoretical and practical knowledge. Yet neither of the two specialists has ever doubted that the field was for them. “I wanted this from the day I decided to be a surgeon,” said Dr. Bala, noting the satisfaction he gets from both directly aiding the severely injured and sharing his skills and knowledge with others. “It’s the best way I know to help people.” Wendy Elliman is a British-born science writer who has lived in Israel for more than four decades.

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HADASSAH NEWS

Hadassah in Harmony Bold designs, mellifluous chords and Israeli sports Stories compiled by Marlene Post

By Deborah Fineblum

ith fashion that’s fun, flattering and functional, especially for women over 50, the Alembika formula has made the designer clothing company the go-to for thousands of Israeli women, including many who wear larger sizes. Now, the company is trying to gain the same status with their American sisters, starting with Hadassah members. Alembika recently teamed up with Hadassah Florida and its 45,000plus members to raise funds to dedicate a pediatric

Hadassah Florida member Su Su Smith at an Alembika trunk show in Deerfield Beach

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A dress from Alembika’s current collection

contributed three nights at Jerusalem’s Inbal Hotel. In addition, as a thank-you gift, Alembika sent outfits to members whose photos and interviews, taken during the trunk shows, were featured on the company’s blog (blog.alembika.com). Alembika’s blog is the central meeting place for a growing digital community. “The woman behind the clothes is the real story,” said Edelist. “After 50, everything begins to fall into place. The kids are grown, and we finally have the time, the maturity and the wisdom to become a mentor and to grow in new ways.” Which is why the blog includes a Zoom Café with guest panelists—for example, a jewelry crafting workshop with artist Debra Rappaport, a senior fashion influencer—as well as its newest feature, The Well, where guest columnists contribute health and mindfulness posts. According to Jill Davis, Hadassah Florida’s philanthropy chair, Alembika’s “philosophy of women growing old not gracefully but gorgeously, and making their mark on the world, fits in with everything Hadassah stands for.” That self-affirming philosophy is shared by founding designer Hagar Alembik, who continues to champion her peers’ enjoyment of life. “By the time a woman is 40 or 50, she’s a real woman, not a kid, and she loves to surround herself with beautiful things,” said the 67-year-old Alembik. “This is

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COURTESY OF ALEMBIKA

Doing Good Is Always in Fashion

bay in the Round Building at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem. In the process, those members got to sample Alembika dresses, skirts, pants and tops in everything from funky florals and bold stripes to gorgeous tie-dyes and exotic African prints. Many of the dresses and separates are loose and flowy with the ability to move with the wearer. The partnership began when Yael Edelist, president of Roni Rabl, the United States distributor for Alembika clothing, learned about Hadassah’s work from a friend. “I knew we had a lot in common—Alembika is also always doing tikkun olam, it’s a big part of the agenda,” she said. Indeed, since Alembika’s launch in 2005, the clothing line has donated a portion of each season’s overstock to charity, from refugee centers to battered women’s shelters to a Chabad-run thrift shop in an immigrant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Before long, Edelist was connected with Lori Heiken, co-managing director of Hadassah Florida, and the two began brainstorming. In April, 400 tickets were sold to attend one of five Alembika trunk shows held in dress shops throughout South Florida, with Hadassah members acting as models. Ten percent of clothing sales from those shows will fund the pediatric bay. Meanwhile, all ticket holders were entered into a virtual drawing for a trip to Israel, for which Alembika donated two airplane tickets and the Boca Express Travel agency

Deborah Fineblum is an award-winning journalist and book author currently based in Pardes Hanna, Israel.

An Italian Violin’s Circuitous Journey to Israel

any years ago, iris jourdan of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., bequeathed a portion of her estate to Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Just days before her death last November at age 87, Jourdan confided a specific wish to attorney Lisa Smith, of Hadassah’s Planned Giving and Estates Department, during Smith’s last visit with the octogenarian. A Zionist and longtime Hadassah member, Jourdan wanted her beloved antique spruce and maple violin to be gifted to an Israeli musician. So the valuable violin, made in Italy more than a century ago, began its next journey, carried first by Smith from Upstate New York to New York City, then to Israel in February by Viviane Kovacs, Hadassah’s philanthropy coordinator. That same month,

ZIONISM…DID YOU KNOW? Israel is hosting the 21st Maccabiah Games, the world’s largest Jewish athletic competition, from July 12 to 26. What do you know about Israel’s competitive sports?

Ksenia Kozodoi with her new violin

it was delivered to the Bonnie Lipton Center for the Performing Arts at the Meir Shfeyah Youth Aliyah Village by Hadassah CEO Naomi Adler. The selection of Meir Shfeyah was easy. The village has a famed mandolin orchestra, which will celebrate its centennial next year. Among the many talented Meir Shfeyah graduates who played in the orchestra in their teens is Ukrainian-born Ksenia Kozodoi, now a violinist in the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. When Kozodoi, 32, was presented with the violin at a ceremony in February, she took it out of its case and held it in wonder. “This is my dream come true,” she said while examining the instrument and explaining that she had long wanted to own an Italian violin, which is known for its unique, expansive sound. “I can’t thank Iris Jourdan and Hadassah enough.” In March, Kozodoi recorded a welcome message in Ukrainian for a group of teenagers who had just arrived at Meir Shfeyah after escaping the violence in their war-torn homeland. In her message, she acknowledged the challenge of arriving in a new country; she, too, had left her hometown of Krivoy Rog as a teenager when she enrolled in the Na’ale high school program in 10th grade and ultimately ended up at Meir Shfeyah. She promised the new arrivals that they would soon grow to love the village as much as she did. JULY/AUGUST 2022

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The first Maccabiah Games opened on __________ and featured 390 athletes from 18 countries. With its Mediterranean and Red Sea coastlines, Israel counts several exceptional spots for watersports. In fact, windsurfer __________ (his first name fittingly means “wave” in Hebrew) was the first Israeli to win an Olympic gold medal, at the 2004 summer games in Athens. A Hadassah Neurim Youth Aliyah Village graduate, Tachlowini Gabriyesos aka Louis, finished in 16th place in the marathon at the __________ . Speaking of marathons, ultraOrthodox runner and mother of five “Speedy Beatie” __________ wrote the International Olympic Committee to request that the body reschedule her race, which was to be held on Shabbat during the Tokyo summer games. The committee complied. Now retired, __________ is Israel’s highest-ranked tennis player ever, reaching world number 11 status in January 2011. In November 2022, Israel will host its first full-course __________ event in Tiberias. The winner of the long-distance triathlon will earn the title of Middle East Champion.

NOW YOU KNOW… MORE ABOUT ISRAEL’S COMPETITIVE SPORTS

ANSWERS: March 28, 1932; Gal Fridman; 2020 Tokyo Olympics; Deutsch; Shahar Pe’er; Ironman

true for Israeli women and just as true for American ones. They often read the same books, go to the same movies and have many of the same attitudes about life. In fact, they’re more alike than either of them realizes.” “We’re glad we’re working with an Israeli company, to help the children there,” said Davis, “because healing sick kids in Israel is where Hadassah’s heart has been since the beginning.” At the same time, she said, “accepting our bodies as beautiful as we age, no matter what, is a women’s empowerment mission we also share. It’s a win-win for everybody.”

TRAVEL

Rhode Island, Historic and Cutting Edge Delightful and unexpected contrasts in the Ocean State By Hilary Danailova

SHUTTERSTOCK

n a warm afternoon in late April, my daughter, Zelda, frolicked on the lawn of the Breakers, a fabled Vanderbilt estate in Newport, R.I. Nearby, couples picnicked amid daffodils, accompanied by the cry of seagulls and the gentle lapping of water against a rocky shore. It didn’t take much imagination to picture Bertha Russell and Ward McAllister, society characters in the HBO show The Gilded Age, next to us on that lawn. We had just toured the Breakers’ interior, and its lavish staircase and ornate ceilings looked familiar: Parts of the show were filmed there. Just as Russell’s daughter, Gladys, came out into society during season 1, this summer marks a comingout of sorts for Newport, whose attractions were largely shuttered since the pandemic began two years ago. These include Touro Synagogue, America’s oldest Jewish house of worship, as well as the fin-de-siècle mansions built as summer “cottages” for Gilded Age robber barons. Newport’s urban counterpart, Providence—Rhode Island’s largest city—had less of a pandemic slumber. The capital has long been a workaday New England city whose 19th-century smokestacks and brick warehouses belie a modern identity shaped by more than a half-dozen universities. America’s smallest state, with around 18,000 Jewish residents, Rhode Island boasts delightful and

unexpected contrasts. Along the Providence River on College Hill, rows of prim manses preserve the city’s colonial-era cityscape. Mere blocks away, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the top art schools in the United States, is a venue for cuttingedge multimedia art as well as masterworks from around the globe.

hode island is home to leafy maple forests, quiet towns and sandy beaches. While resort towns like Watch Hill and Newport connote affluence, there is a notable lack of flashiness—even along Bellevue Avenue, Newport’s mansion row. That Touro Synagogue occupies a prime downtown location in Newport—and not in, say, Boston—is no accident. Rhode Island’s first Jews were Sephardim who sought refuge in a state founded in 1636 on the principle of religious freedom by Roger Williams, an iconoclastic preacher who had fled the scolding Puritanism of neighboring Massachusetts. Those Sephardim were originally from Spain and Portugal, and had settled in Amsterdam to escape the Inquisition. They then left for Dutch-controlled colonies in Brazil, where they joined an early merchant class. When the Iberian Inquisition caught up with them in the New World colonies, they boarded ships for New York and Newport, a burgeoning deep-water port. (It would be nearly two centuries before

JULY/AUGUST 2022

a significant Jewish community coalesced in Providence, which had 18 mostly Ashkenazi synagogues at its 20th-century Jewish zenith.) In colonial Rhode Island, the Jews built a synagogue high on a hill in the center of Newport, where they were championed by none other than President George Washington, who affirmed America’s promise of religious liberty in a famous 1790 letter to the congregation. To visit Touro Synagogue is to feel how urban this downtown was in its colonial heyday. Designed by Peter Harrison, one of the era’s most celebrated architects, the building was dedicated in 1763. A decade later, it escaped wartime destruction by serving as a British garrison during the American Revolution. Newport’s Jews largely dispersed after the war; many settled in Manhattan, where their Sephardi brethren had established America’s first Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel, in 1654. The New York community tended the Newport building and its ritual objects during the decades when Touro lay fallow. In the late 19th century, a wave of Eastern European Jews settled in Providence and Newport, and worship was revived at Touro. The resident Congregation Jeshuat Israel has since that time held traditional Orthodox services—though its 180 Ashkenazi members are mostly non-Orthodox—and maintained the building as well as a Hebrew school. But the two historic congregations have been locked in an ugly, 13-year dispute over sovereignty of the synagogue and its ritual objects, including

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Rhode Island founder Roger Williams perched high atop a park in Providence (far left); exterior and sanctuary of Touro Synagogue in Newport

a set of colonial-era silver Torah finials crafted by noted silversmith Myer Myers. The Newport congregation at one point wanted to sell the finials, valued at $7 million, to raise endowment funds. The conflict reached its apogee in 2017, when a Boston appeals court affirmed Shearith Israel

as the building’s owner; the United States Supreme Court later declined to consider the case. With tensions ongoing over ritual and guardianship, the Manhattan congregation is now seeking to evict Jeshuat Israel and retake control of Touro. The rise and fall of families, fiefdoms and fortunes: Few places tell this American story better than Newport. I thought about this as we munched takeout pizza on the Breakers lawn, an

WHAT TO SEE By car is the only way to see the Ocean State, whose diminutive size makes for leisurely itineraries. The major cities, Providence and Newport, are barely 45 minutes apart. Providence’s downtown is home to Brown University’s world-class galleries, eateries and bookstores, alongside rows of clapboard colonial houses from before the American Revolution and smokestacks from the industrial era. The waterfront Riverwalk is an enjoyable place to stroll, eat and enjoy views. In Federal Hill, classic Italian joints cluster along Atwell Avenue, alongside newer Thai, Lebanese and other ethnic restaurants. (Check out Rhode Island’s offering of kosher cafes, bakeries and markets at bethsholom-ri.org/kosher-food.html.) Providence’s major art destination is the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Its modern and contemporary collections are notable for Jewish artists, many of whom have Rhode Island connections. These include illustrator Steve Mendelson, a RISD grad, and RISD professor and painter Deborah Zlotsky, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. There are also historic figures like the fin-de-siècle American feminist and painter Florine Stettheimer; German Israeli

The Breakers

Bauhaus ceramicist Margarete Heymann; and Hungarian-born American industrial designer and ceramicist Eva Striker Zeisel. Newport occupies the southern portion of Aquidneck Island, surrounded by Narragansett Bay, various inlets and picturesque bridges. The best ways to appreciate Newport’s waterfront are hiking the coastal Cliff Walk or navigating Ocean Drive, which winds past the mansions and along the rocky shoreline. Touro Synagogue—named for Abraham Touro, a New England Jewish philanthropist whose 1822 bequest preserved the synagogue—is America’s oldest synagogue building and a National Historic Site. Congregation Jeshuat Israel maintains the visitor center, which offers an informative prelude to your guided tour of the building, including its 17th-century Dutch Torah. While the visitor center is fully accessible, the synagogue requires advance notice for its wheelchair ramps. JULY/AUGUST 2022

impossibly gauche gesture the Vanderbilts hardly could have envisioned. But who knows? Eventually, the old-money crowd accepted the nouveau riche. Roger Williams’ rebellion ended up setting the tone for American religious freedom. As historic as it is, Rhode Island has always been on the cutting edge. Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.

Newport’s 10 public mansions are wellpreserved jewels of American history as well as shrines to various European architectural styles: Italianate, classical and Gothic Revival, French Country. The Vanderbilts acquired many of their period furnishings and important artworks through the noted German-British Jewish Wertheimer art dealer family, who were themselves frequent subjects of painter John Singer Sargent’s portraits. The Breakers—the best known and most crowded of the summer cottages—has a sunlit cafe with indoor and outdoor seating. Kids love Green Animals, an estate with a topiary garden 15 minutes’ drive north on the Portsmouth waterfront. The Breakers and Marble House are among the few mansions that offer downloadable audio guides, including a version for children. Likewise, both are largely accessible for visitors with disabilities. (The Breakers still runs its original Otis elevator, for which the company makes custom parts.) Hadassah’s Rhode Island chapter counts over 800 members and Associates throughout the state. Popular programs include a book club that, since the pandemic, meets regularly on Zoom, and “Books on the Beach”—author luncheons held in Newport.

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DISCOVER NEWPORT (TOP ROW, MIDDLE AND RIGHT); SHUTTERSTOCK

Religious Liberty Iconoclast preacher and

FOOD

Jewish Cooking in an Italian Accent How immigrants influenced Italy’s fabled foodways By Adeena Sussman

RAY KACHATORIAN (TOP)

talian jewish cooking is so much more than crispy artichokes. Although that delicious treat— fresh carciofi steamed, smashed and then fried in olive oil until crisp— graces the cover of Benedetta Jasmine Guetta’s alluring new cookbook, Cooking alla Giudia: A Celebration of the Jewish Food of Italy, its pages reveal an eye-opening variety of dishes with a Jewish inflection. It’s a collection of seasonal and easy-to-make fare from a Jewish community with a fascinating 2,000-plus year history. Guetta’s recipes are an edible tour of Italy, with every region represented, and they show how Jews adapted local dishes to suit their needs. There is Roman spaghetti carbonara studded with zucchini instead of bacon; a pasta, bean and sausage soup from Venice that swaps in beef sausage for pork; and chicken hand pies similar to borekas that made their way to Emilia-Romagna in the Middle Ages. The book is also a work of preservation, documenting the peregrinations of an ancient Jewish community and its accompanying foodways and stories that are becoming harder to access in the face of intermarriage and as memory keepers are dying. “I had anxiety that these people and these recipes were endangered species on the way to disappearing,” Guetta told me over the phone from Los Angeles, where she now lives.

he daughter of a libyan Jewish father and Piedmontese (northern Italian) mother, Guetta, 33, was raised in a kosherstyle home in Milan. “We were Jewish, but quiet about it, like most Europeans,” Guetta said. In 2009, while in college in Milan, Guetta began teaching cooking classes for young urban Jews with a friend. She founded her blog, Labna (named after the yogurt popular in Israel and around the Middle East), to house the recipes she taught, and the site rapidly gained a wide following (to date, 100 of Labna’s 900 recipes have been translated into English). Guetta was surprised to learn that the most popular recipes on her site were those with a Jewish story attached, whether the readers were Jewish or not. “People are curious about Jews in Italy,” she said, “and their curiosity, in turn, piqued mine.” Before writing Cooking alla Giudia, Guetta embarked on a year-

JULY/AUGUST 2022

Benedetta Jasmine Guetta

long journey—cooking with Jewish nonnas, traveling and scouring the Web for recipes and stories that would deepen her knowledge of her country’s culinary history. She discovered, for instance, that the ear-shaped orecchiette pasta typical of Apulia was likely brought to Italy in the 1500s by Jews from Provence, who made them on Purim as another form of oznei Haman (Haman’s ears, the Israeli term for hamantaschen). “Jews have had an influence on Italian cooking as long as they have been there,” said Guetta. In fact, Jews have lived in Italy since the first century, when thousands were brought from Jerusalem as enslaved people during the Jewish-Roman Wars. With the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Italy became a series of nation-states, each of which treated Jews with varying levels of tolerance. Excluded from professional guilds, Jews worked in permitted fields like moneylending and food vending, seeking acceptance and safety in different regions at different times. In certain parts of Italy—Sicily, for instance—Jews were deeply involved in trade throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East and introduced ingredients like eggplant to the Italian diet (see Guetta’s delicious caponata recipe). Following the Inquisition-era expulsion of Jews from Spain, Sicily’s Jews migrated northward since that region belonged to the Kingdom of Aragon. Around the same time, waves of

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Caponata alla Giudia

fry until golden, turning often. Remove the eggplant with a slotted spoon and spread out on a paper towel-lined plate to drain. Cook the remaining eggplant cubes in the same manner, adding more oil if needed.

Serves 4

3 eggplants Kosher salt 1 1/2 onions 2 celery ribs 5 cherry tomatoes 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil 2 garlic cloves, smashed 1 cup chopped ripe tomatoes or canned diced tomatoes, with their liquid 2 tablespoons mixed black and green olives, pitted 1 tablespoon capers 1/2 cup white wine vinegar 1 tablespoon sugar Sunflower or peanut oil for deep-frying Freshly ground black pepper 5 basil leaves

1. Cut the eggplants into 3/4-inch cubes. Transfer them to a colander, salt generously, weigh them down with a plate and let drain for 30 minutes in the kitchen sink.

2. Cut the half onion into very

thin slices. Cut the whole onion into chunks roughly the same size as the eggplant cubes. Cut the celery into chunks and cut the cherry tomatoes in half.

7. Once the fried eggplant has

3. Pour the olive oil into a large

nonstick skillet set over medium heat, add the sliced onion and garlic and cook for about 3 minutes, until the garlic is slightly browned. Add the celery, tomatoes (both cherry and chopped), olives, capers and the chopped onion to the skillet and cook for 10 minutes, until the vegetables begin to soften. Add the vinegar and sugar and cook for another 10 minutes. Remove from the heat.

4. Remove the plate covering the eggplant and squeeze the eggplant in the colander to remove any remaining liquid.

from the heat and let the caponata cool to room temperature before serving.

Hraimi

cubes to the pan as will fit in a single layer without crowding and

cup extra-virgin olive oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 5 tablespoons tomato paste 1/2 to 1 teaspoon pure chili powder 2 garlic cloves, crushed 1 1/2 cups water 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt 4 thick yellowfin, ahi or albacore tuna steaks, or cod or grouper, about 4 ounces each

State of Israel. They brought with them dishes like Hraimi, spicy Libyan fish (see recipe) that comes together quickly with ingredients you probably already have in your pantry. Pair the fish with Guetta’s caponata and Concia di Zucchini, fried zucchini (available at JULY/AUGUST 2022

1. Pour the olive oil into a large

nonstick sauté pan or skillet set over low heat, add the onion and cook until it is translucent, about 10 minutes.

2. Add the tomato paste, chili

powder and crushed garlic to the pan, then pour in the water, add the salt and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Put the fish in the skillet and cook for 15 minutes, or until the sauce thickens.

3. Add the ground caraway to

the sauce and cook for a few more minutes, then add the lemon juice and take the pan off the heat. Let the Hraimi cool to room temperature.

4. Serve, providing plenty of

1/2

peanut oil into a large saucepan and warm over medium heat until a deep-fry thermometer reads 350°. You can test the oil by dropping a small piece of food, such as a slice of apple, into it: If it sizzles nicely but doesn’t bubble up too wildly, the oil is ready.

German and French Jews immigrated to Piedmont and Lombardy, bringing with them Ashkenazi traditions. In more recent history, 6,000 Libyan Jews—including Guetta’s father—immigrated to Italy in the 1950s, following the founding of the

8. Stir in the basil leaves, remove

Serves 4

5. Pour 1 inch of sunflower or

6. Add only as many eggplant

drained, add it to the skillet of vegetables. Season with 1/2 teaspoon salt and pepper to taste, adding a bit of water if the vegetables look dry, and cook the caponata over medium heat, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes.

1/2 teaspoon ground caraway seeds Juice of 1/2 lemon

bread to “clean up” all the sauce once the fish is eaten.

hadassahmagazine.org), for a perfect summer Shabbat dinner. Adeena Sussman is the author of Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors from My Israeli Kitchen and co-author of Gazoz: The Art of Making Magical, Seasonal Sparkling Drinks. She lives in Tel Aviv.

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ARTS

Are We in a Golden Age of Haredi Television? Portrayals of Ultra-Orthodox Jews ignite interest and debate By Josefin Dolsten

COURTESY OF YES TV

s she rose to prominence in the world of fashion, Julia Haart was hesitant to talk about her past. Friends, business partners and even lovers didn’t know her real story—that in 2013, at the age of 42, she left her life as a dutiful wife who wore long skirts and a wig, adhering to the strict rules of modesty in the observant Jewish community in Monsey, N.Y., where she lived. That quiet and reticent side of Haart, which she reveals in her new memoir, Brazen: My Unorthodox Journey from Long Sleeves to Lingerie, may be unfamiliar to viewers of her popular Netflix reality series, My Unorthodox Life. In the show, the former CEO of modeling agency Elite World Group and creative director for the lingerie brand La Perla, doesn’t shy away from exposing the drama in her work and family life. She also calls her low-cut shirts and miniskirts “emblems of freedom” and loudly criticizes her former community as extremist and oppressive to women. Haart says that her reality show serves as an inspiration to those who feel stuck in their lives. She says she has received messages from thousands of women, including some from observant Jewish backgrounds, who watched the show and thanked her for telling her story. Her memoir delves deeper into that story—from her struggles leaving her religious community to her meteoric rise in the business world—and addresses in

detail topics such as her mental health, longtime love of fashion and sex life. “The real purpose of telling my story is helping others. I’ve got to amplify that voice,” she said in an interview. “It’s an uncomfortable position to be in, but if I don’t have the guts to do it, who will?” Haart will return to Netflix for a second season of My Unorthodox Life, though the streaming service hasn’t yet announced a release date. The show’s renewal as well as the publication of her memoir speak to an ongoing fascination with portrayals of Orthodox Jews—especially ultra-Orthodox and formerly ultra-Orthodox—in wider American society. At the same time, the fact that many of the Orthodox-focused shows and movies revolve around a leaving-the-community narrative opens up questions and criticism about whose voices are being amplified and if those experiences present an accurate picture of observant Jewish life. Content about Orthodox Jews “is suddenly very much in vogue,” said Eric Goldman, an adjunct professor of cinema at Yeshiva University, noting the significant uptick in the number of shows and movies over the past decade or so that is creating a genre of sorts. The many streaming services now available are feeding that interest. In addition to My Unorthodox Life, among the other offerings on Netflix are the 2020 Emmy-winning film Unorthodox, starring Israeli actress JULY/AUGUST 2022

Characters from ‘Shtisel’: (from left) Ruchami, Shulem and Akiva

Shira Haas and based on the memoir by Deborah Feldman that describes her escape from her Satmar community in Brooklyn, and One of Us, a 2017 documentary set in Brooklyn that explores the heartache experienced by three young Jews as they attempt to leave their Hasidic families. Both films have been criticized by Orthodox advocates for their negative portrayals of haredi society. Writing in The Forward about Unorthodox, writer and blogger Frieda Vizel, who is herself a former Hasid, calls the show “a misleading fairy tale” that made Hasidic women look like “foreign Disney-witches in odd costumes” and just “sinks us a bit deeper into our biases.”

hen there is shtisel, the beloved Israeli-made hit that gives viewers an intimate look into the loves, lives and losses of the haredi Shtisel family in Jerusalem. It premiered on Netflix in 2018, and the show’s three seasons made stars of Haas, who plays Ruchami, granddaughter of patriarch Shulem Shtisel, and Michael Aloni, who plays Shulem’s son Akiva. (The show will likely not be renewed for a fourth season, but fans may be reassured by reports that an American remake is in the works.) Beyond Netflix, the Jewish streaming service Chaiflicks now offers The

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Julia Haart

New Black, a 2017 Israeli hit comedy series about the misadventures of four 20-something yeshiva students. Amazon also has in its collection several titles that center on Orthodox and haredi Jews in Israel, including the 2012 film Fill the Void, about a Hasidic woman asked to marry her widowed brother-in-law, by Rama Burshtein-Shai, a filmmaker from that community. And there are more Orthodox-related shows in the works. HBO Max recently announced it is developing a series based on the life of Black rapperturned-Hasidic Jew Nissim Black. This proliferation is a significant change from the 1990s, when there was little interest in either North

HADASSAH MAGAZINE DISCUSSION: LIVE WITH JULIA HAART Join us on Thursday, July 14, at 7 p.m. ET for an interview with Julia Haart, star of the Netflix reality series My Unorthodox Life and author of the new memoir Brazen: My Unorthodox Journey from Long Sleeves to Lingerie. In her book, Haart opens up about her struggle to survive in the ultra-Orthodox world and the “escape” she made from it in order to expand opportunities not just for her, but for her children. To register, go to hadassahmagazine.org.

America or Israel in exploring Orthodox characters onscreen, according to Goldman. But that shifted in the 21st century, with directors in both countries taking an interest in the religious Jewish world. “As a result, these last 15 years there have been just so many different films that have come out about that world,” he said, adding that these shows and movies are seen as “different, mysterious.” The films, such as Fill the Void or Unorthodox, allow viewers to be like a “peeping Tom,” indulging a voyeuristic urge to look into an insular world. They appeal even to non-Jewish viewers eager to learn more about this unfamiliar sector of Judaism. The description of a 33,000-strong Facebook fan group for Shtisel— “Shtisel”-Let’s Talk About It— confirms that interest: “Most, but not all, of our members are Jewish.” Indeed, it was Shtisel, which first premiered in Israel in 2013, that solidified audience interest in the genre. “Shtisel is actually responsible for, in some ways, normalizing and making attractive not necessarily the lifestyle that is portrayed, but the experience of watching that lifestyle,” said Esther Kustanowitz, a Jewish journalist and television columnist. The show, she added, is also unique “in that it doesn’t position Orthodoxy as something to be rebelling against.” JULY/AUGUST 2022

That a majority of the shows focus on rebellion, rather than normalization, has caused backlash. Haart frequently criticizes her former community in her reality series, calling it out for forcing women to follow specific modes of dress, marry at a young age—both she and one of her daughters were married at 19—and have many children. In her memoir, she describes her community as a place where she “had no outlet. No right to work in the field I loved—fashion.” She is also shown trying to convince her youngest son, who is still Orthodox, to chat and talk with girls after he decided at a religious summer camp to refrain from such co-ed communications. These and other interactions on the show prompted furious debates on Facebook and Jewish news media about the treatment of women in the observant Jewish world and the accuracy of Haart’s descriptions. They also triggered accusations that Hollywood largely presents a one-sided, negative image of haredi Jews. Indeed, after the premiere of My Unorthodox Life, Orthodox and haredi women created a social media campaign highlighting positive stories from observant women around the hashtag #MyOrthodoxLife, asking others, as one poster wrote, to “stop watching Netflix and meet some real Orthodox women!”

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COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE (LEFT); COURTESY OF ALLISON JOSEPHS

Activist Allison Josephs protests the depiction of an Orthodox Jew on NBC

ARTS

arlier this year, orthodox activist Allison Josephs, founder of the media organization Jew in the City, created a Hollywood bureau to combat what she says is the proliferation of false or negative portrayals of her religious community. The bureau is currently working on launching an academic study to track Jewish representation in media and is reaching out to television networks and writers to improve Orthodox representation. “Nearly every story is a repetition

of what we’ve heard before,” Josephs said, describing films like Unorthodox and Haart’s reality show. “A person in this controlled environment and a loveless community and wanting to escape. And then we’re cheering for the heroine—it’s usually a woman—when she finally gets the guts to stop being Jewish. That’s the endgame.” Josephs, who calls herself “centrist Orthodox,” is one of a number of activists who last year got NBC to pull from its website and streaming

platform an episode of its medical drama Nurses that portrayed a Hasidic patient in what Josephs called on her website an inaccurate and offensive manner. In the episode, the patient refuses a bone graft because it might come from a non-Jewish donor, or from a woman, even though Jewish law does not forbid such a transplant. “In an age of considering the impact of negative minority depictions, we have to consider what these constant negative Jewish depictions

A LADINO POP-ROCK SINGER-SONGWRITER FOLLOWS THE THREAD

The language that developed among the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 was a thread in the stories her grandfather told her about Monastir, nestled between three mountain ranges in Ottoman Macedonia. Jews had lived there peacefully for 400 years, but many emigrated during the Balkan Wars. The city was later renamed Bitola. During World War II, 98 percent of the city’s remaining Jews were murdered in Treblinka, and Bitola today, with no Jewish community, is part of North Macedonia.

She soon realized that Ladino, not opera, was her true passion and started learning the language, becoming one of the few contemporary artists who both sings traditional Ladino songs and writes new ones. The heritage thread tugged at her again after she released her third album, 2012’s Gracia, a feminist pop-rock tribute to Doña Gracia Nasi, a 16th-century heroine and benefactor of the Sephardi Diaspora. An article about Aroeste and the album appeared in a magazine in Macedonia and readers contacted her on Facebook, wanting to know more. Aroeste was invited in 2017 to perform in Bulgaria, North Macedonia’s neighbor to the east, and reached out to her Facebook friends about visiting Bitola. “They planned everything to get me to Bitola,” she said. “And after two years of contact, I suddenly realized that none of them was Jewish, just people who felt robbed of their neighbors, as if there were a hole in their [communal] identity.” The following year, Aroeste arranged a Jewish Macedonian heritage tour and returned with 20 Americans. Bitola city authorities organized a cultural festival, with assistance from Israel’s Foreign Ministry, that included a performance by Aroeste at the city’s main museum. The singer described looking at a photograph from the festivities as “the aha! moment that changed my life.” “It captured Macedonians, Israelis and Americans dancing and singing together,” she

BY ALAN M. TIGAY Sarah Aroeste is one of the leading performers of Ladino songs today, but growing up in a mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardi family in Princeton, N.J., she didn’t even speak the language. “One reason I was attracted to it was that it was so mysterious, a part of my tradition I had no access to,” said the 46-yearold singer-songwriter, who recently released a landmark album of Ladino music, her seventh, titled Monastir, after the city her maternal grandfather fled in 1913 for America.

ALEKSANDAR GEORGIEV

True Passion

Sarah Aroeste performs traditional Ladino music and writes new songs in the language.

he thread from her family’s stories first tugged at her in 1997. Aroeste, who grew up singing and studying classical opera, decided to spend a summer at the Israel Vocal Arts Institute in Tel Aviv, training with Nico Castel, a renowned tenor and coach with New York City’s Metropolitan Opera and a leading Ladino singer. He included Ladino songs in his coaching. Once back in the United States, Aroeste began adding Ladino numbers to her repertoire. After one performance, an audience member told her that the Ladino part was her favorite, she recalled: “Clearly, I was singing those songs in a different way, reaching deeper into my soul.”

do,” Josephs said. “Antisemitic attacks are way up. If we pretend that there’s no connection, we are being foolish, we are being dishonest.” Josephs has also publicly criticized Haart, saying she exaggerates the

said. “I needed to harness the energy in that photo.” The result was Monastir, honoring the city’s Jewish heritage. The album is a magnificent portrait, consisting of traditional and new songs—in Ladino, Macedonian and Hebrew— bringing to life a community’s sounds, smells, textures, pastimes and passions. When the Ottoman Empire offered refuge to the Jews expelled from Spain, Sultan Bayezid II remarked, “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!” Five centuries later, Aroeste found the welcome mat still out.

said. “It removes the burden of representing all of Jews, all of Judaism, from the shoulders of one particular piece of art.” The need for greater representation resonates with Josephs. “I’m a woman with an Ivy League degree,” she said. “I dress fashionably. I travel all over the world. I’m both strictly Orthodox and also very engaged and educated.” Yet, she added, “I’ve never seen anyone like me onscreen before, and that’s upsetting to me. I’m not saying we have to be the hero in every movie or TV show, but we do have to be shown as human.” Josefin Dolsten is a New York-based writer, reporting on the intersection of religion, gender and politics.

A Perfect Pairing Sarah Aroeste’s next project, now in the works, is more than just an album. Called Savor, it’s a unique experience bringing together songs and food. The album itself will include 10 tracks, each musical number focused on a food—among them stuffed grape leaves, burekas, stuffed dates, eggplant—emblematic of Sephardi life. The larger project will encompass videos of chefs preparing classic dishes as well as food and music seminars and an expanded book that delves deeper into the nexus of Sephardi history, music and cuisine. See saraharoeste.com for details. Alan M. Tigay is editor emeritus of Hadassah Magazine. JULY/AUGUST 2022

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COURTESY OF NETFLIX

Shira Hass in ‘Unorthodox’

limitations that were placed upon her in Monsey. The reality star, who describes herself as “a proud Jew,” dismisses such claims. Haart says that her story isn’t meant to stoke antisemitism. “The parts of my story that are painful have everything to do with extremism and fundamentalism and nothing to do with the particular religion,” because, she said, “this kind of extremism is found in every religion.” Kustanowitz, who grew up in a Modern Orthodox community, feels that having so many portrayals of Jews in the media is largely a positive, even if they elicit criticism. “The more representation we have of Jews, in particular onscreen, in all denominational areas, the better,” she

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Confined, with “up” 14. Brand that some may carrying animalsboats good Cleveland 30. "Quién ___?" ___ generis 44. Jewish ace subject for carrying animals 49. Fear, to François 76. Sicilian spouter sniff at? 3. H.S. 75. Confined, with "up" 31. Eliot Ness, for one sraeli Olympian foil sport Smashnova’s 3. H.S. subject 50. Fencing blade 77. Passes away 17. “Smooth Operator” 4. "Encore!" 76. Sicilian spouter 36. er 46. Clairvoyance, e.g. 4. “Encore!” 79. “___ Maria” singerQuaint lodgings 51. ___ Alon, director of 5. American actor ___ 77. Passes away 37. Wrath Smashnova's firstMan name 48. Mad Don 5. American actor ___ nursing and health 80. Bathtub liquid? 19. Terrain of mixed Perlman, known for playing a 42. 79.at "___ Maria" Mysterious to most 52. Caesar Yves’s eve Perlman, known for Bad day for professionals 81. Affirmative action woodland and beast and multiple comic 80. Bathtub liquid? 54. Washed out and pale playing a beast and Hadassah Medical 82. ___ Ensler of 43. pasture Unwelcome dermal Noah's Ham book characters 56. What French Jews multiple comic book development 81. Organization “Vagina Monologues” Affirmative action 23. Turn ___ to (ignore) Singer Lana Del ___ 6. Respiration, medically might eat on Shavuot? characters 53. ___ Wipes fame 25. Largest U.S. union 45. Oscar-nominee Gabourey 82. ___ Ensler of "Vagina The "Jewish Olympics," 7. Like some crooks' eyes Monologues" fame 47. Buddy ch will kickoff in Israel on 8. Grammar best seller JULY/AUGUST "Woe 2022 I 43 I hadassahmagazine.org 14 49. Fear, to François ___"

BOOKS

One ‘Last Summer’ in the Catskills? Growing up in the mountains’ golden era FICTION

COURTESY OF BERKLEY

Last Summer at the Golden Hotel By Elyssa Friedland (Berkley) Filled with mishaps and mysteries, Last Summer at the Golden Hotel is a Catskills caper wrapped in many expressions of love—romantic, marital, filial and platonic. While the title hints at the arc of the story, the

surprises keep coming at a steady beat. The Golden Hotel was founded in 1960 by a pair of best friends, Benny Goldman and Amos Weingold, who grew up together on New York City’s Lower East Side. Their children also grow up together, spending summers on the hotel grounds as Catskills royalty. When the novel opens in the summer of 2019, three generations of the families are gathering for an emergency meeting at their vacation palace to make tough decisions about the future. Memories of the golden era of the Catskills are as clear as the mountain air: The Golden, as it is affectionately JULY/AUGUST 2022

known, was a Jewish paradise, with top musical and comedy stars playing the social hall, lively bridge games around the pool and all-you-can eat meals served by wise-cracking waiters. The 1960s and 70s were a time of great optimism for the families running the Golden and for their guests, who repeatedly booked their stays seasons in advance. Now, the lobby is growing threadbare, the aging waiters are tottering under the weight of trays piled high with borscht, pickled herring and desserts, and most of the regular guests have either died or vacation elsewhere. Still, the bartender who has been working for decades knows everyone’s drink and keeps the vacation-goers’ secrets. “So what if the Sullivan County health department gave our kitchen a C last year?” one family member asks herself. “We were once in the Guinness Book of World Records for smoking the largest sturgeon in history!” Amid this decline, younger family members brainstorm serving vegan cuisine and using bee pollen soap to add a cool, hipster vibe. The story unfolds through multiple points of view, a device that allows the reader to peek into the emotional lives and perspectives of each generation. The Catskills era has become something of a beloved modern literary genre, with an abundance of novels (Hotel Neversink and Paradise, New York) and memoirs (Growing Up at Grossinger’s). Television and films continue to lean into the era’s appeal (see season two of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and the modern classic Dirty Dancing, with a sequel reportedly starring Jennifer Grey in the works). Author Feldman’s previous novel, The Floating Feldmans, is centered

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around another multigenerational Jewish story—an extended family trip on a cruise ship. Last Summer at the Golden Hotel is yet another proof of her ability to mine any theme and genre and write with humor and heart about families coming together for hard-won reconciliation and celebration. —Sandee Brawarsky Sandee Brawarsky is an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.

The Latecomer By Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon Books) How can one write a book about secrets without giving any of them away? That is the conundrum presented by best-selling author Jean Hanff Korelitz’s complex new novel, The Latecomer, which opens with a tragic car accident. Salo Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish college student in New York, is the driver in a crash that kills two fellow Cornell students and leaves one seriously injured. He meets his future wife, Johanna Hirsch, at one of the funerals for the victims, and she makes it

her mission to heal his psychological wounds. The crash forever changes Salo, yet neither he nor Johanna share the story—the source of his emotional distance—with their four children. The three oldest children—triplets Harrison, Lewyn and Sally, born through in vitro fertilization—are meant to be Johanna’s gift to Salo, to heal him. They are reared with every advantage that wealth and Johanna’s devotion can offer, but Salo remains an absentee father and husband. He saves his passion and interest for his contemporary art collection, stored in a warehouse for his viewing alone. Tolstoy famously noted that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and this is one very unhappy family, with the children and Johanna struggling to understand why. At some point, each of the triplets wonders at their disconnect from each other, why they seem to be “in full flight from one another as far back as their ancestral petri dish,”

PUZZLED ABOUT HOW TO KEEP THE CATSKILLS VIBE GOING? Be the first to get our new Catskills-themed jigsaw puzzle with a donation to the Hadassah Magazine Circle, at hadassahmagazine.org/ make-a-gift.

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ONE BOOK, ONE HADASSAH Join us on Monday, August 15, at 7 p.m. ET, as Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein interviews author Elyssa Friedland about Last Summer at the Golden Hotel. Secrets, scandals and rivalries are revealed as two families—long-time co-owners of a storied Catskills vacation spot—gather for an extended summertime reunion in order to decide the fate of their beloved but declining resort. Filled with heart, humor, romance and plenty of Borscht Belt schmaltz, the charming multigenerational caper asks how we can value legacies and preserve traditions in the face of change. This event is free and open to all. To register go to hadassahmagazine/books. as Korelitz writes. Or perhaps their unhappiness is caused by progressive excesses in the American private education system. All of them despise their elite Brooklyn school, despite its policy of no tests, no grades and praise for every student. The book is divided into three sections: The first focuses on Salo and Johanna; the second on the triplets; and the final section on Phoebe, the titular latecomer and fourth child, born just before the triplets leave for college. She is born via surrogate from a frozen fourth embryo that had remained after the IVF treatments that produced the triplets, but that fact is kept secret from Phoebe. This daughter might be Johanna’s final attempt at a “gift” for Salo, to bring him back to the family, or a way to punish him when she uncovers one of the secrets behind his many absences from the family. Korelitz’s last novel, the best seller The Plot, revolved around one big secret. The Latecomer, however,

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BOOKS

is suffused with many of them, around birth, betrayal, sexuality and family. One small example: Sally and Lewyn both attend Cornell, yet do not acknowledge among their classmates that they are siblings, an omission that leads to its own tragic denouement. In addition to infertility and American education, the novel touches on several social issues: family trauma, wealth and privilege, faith and racism. But perhaps Korelitz’s broadest theme is an examination of what makes a family—genes, birth or cohabitation? Or is it love? Do the Oppenheimers actually love each other? This is a long book—450 pages spanning 45 years—and it is somewhat slow-going at first. But when Phoebe appears, the pace picks up. On the verge of adulthood, she’s the catalyst for the uncovering of secrets, the repudiation of lies and, at last, some family healing. —Elizabeth Edelglass Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer, poet and book reviewer living in Connecticut.

Very Cold People By Sarah Manguso (Hogarth) There is plenty of heat in Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso’s quietly devastating coming-of-age tale. The debut novel, set in the 1980s, is about a Jewish girl—her mother is Jewish, her father is Italian—in a fictional Boston suburb. The heat comes from the accruing

rage that the girl, Ruth, feels toward her small, snowy town of Waitsfield, whose residents constantly conjure up images of Boston Brahmins (as in, “The Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God”). The heat also comes from the protagonist’s many layers of shame: the shame of shouldering impostor syndrome as a poor Jew in a wealthy town that venerates dead WASPs and the shame of feeling unloved by her narcissistic parents. There is even the shame that she is made to feel because she is a girl—and then a young woman—in an environment where the dangers of living as such seemingly lurk in every crevice, around every corner. “The background of my life was white and angry, with violent weather,” Ruth thinks to herself. Early on, Ruth and her childhood friends experience unwanted pregnancies, the physical and emotional abuse of relatives and teachers, and the frequent disdain of authority figures who ignore the young women’s talents. “All the girls in town thought they were unusual, that they were the only ones, the only weird, unlucky little ones,” writes Manguso. “Some of them died of that bad luck, that terminal uniqueness.” Manguso, an award-winning poet and memoirist, deftly crafts images that shimmer off the page. “The auditorium was like the inside of a slaughtered animal, all oxblood paint and maroon velveteen,” she writes, describing a school venue. The scorched red of the earth, a crimson door or a swatch of fabric: Manguso’s stirring prose asks for empathy and reflection, even as it leaves the reader with the sense that blood is shed by every girl who JULY/AUGUST 2022

has survived—or succumbed to— Waitsfield. —Robert Nagler Miller Robert Nagler Miller writes frequently about the arts, literature and Jewish themes from his home in Chicago.

Human Blues By Elisa Albert (Simon & Schuster) Ambition, the price of success and the pressures on women to reproduce are the themes of Human Blues, Elisa Albert’s darkly funny, tongue-incheek third novel. In her previous books, she developed strong Jewish female characters who buck the norms and follow their own paths, and Aviva Rosner, the protagonist of Human Blues, is no different. Singer-songwriter Aviva is getting ready to release her fourth album even as she struggles with infertility. She desperately wants a baby with her husband, Sam, but doesn’t trust assisted reproductive technology, which she calls “industrial fertility.” This wariness is unapologetically laid bare in her folk-punk album, which she titles Womb Service. The album is a hit and Aviva enjoys the fame—until listeners’ responses to the album’s message become grating and intrusive. Her obsession and inspiration is real-life Jewish singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, who passed away in 2011, and Aviva often ruminates on Winehouse’s life to make sense of her own. Told over the course of nine menstrual cycles, the book is centered

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A Powerful Love Story With a Purpose on the female body—society’s sexualization and objectification of women as well as the cultural obsession with reproduction and motherhood. Aviva jadedly observes people on social media announcing pregnancies and oversharing fertility struggles, even as she fights her bitterness about her inability to conceive and stubbornly refuses to use modern technology to help. She says to herself, “I’m anti-selling motherhood, I guess. I’m anti-buying motherhood. I’m anti-capitalist motherhood. I’m anti-technocratic motherhood.” She also grapples with guilt from her mother, who makes sure to expound on the blessings of children (even as she herself is neither warm nor mothering to her own children), and ambivalence over her own needs and desires—the arrival of a baby would impact her ability to go on tour. Aviva is harsh and provocative. She unabashedly lies about being pregnant for her own gain, and even as she declares her wariness of antibiotics and fertility medications, eagerly ingests weed, edibles and psychedelics. Her refusal to play nice or be anything less than complex makes her an unsympathetic but nevertheless compelling character. In the end, just like in real life, there are no easy answers to the decisions she must make. The book revolves around Aviva’s physical body and fertility, but Albert quietly shines in laying bare topics crucial to many women—societal expectations, the push-pull between ambition and parenthood and the question of what it means to truly want to be a mother. —Jaime Herndon

"THE CHOICE is about the choices Jews make and the rules we break for reasons of consideration, conscience, logic, and love. Buy this book for the endearing romance at its core and get a feminist brief for women's inclusion in sacred space and communal life, plus twenty brilliant Talmud lessons. A surfeit of riches." —Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of twelve books including Debora, Golda, and Me, and Shanda

Anton has written a transformative novel that takes characters inspired by Chaim Potok and ages them into young adults in Brooklyn in the 1950s. www.thechoicenovel.com

In print and ebook

ISBN 978-0-9763050-3-3

Jaime Herndon is a writer and avid reader. Her work can be found on Book Riot, Undark, Kveller, Motherly and other places. JULY/AUGUST 2022

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BOOKS

NONFICTION

Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai By Matti Friedman (Spiegel & Grau) Shortly after the Yom Kippur War broke out on October 6, 1973, 39-yearold Leonard Cohen left his wife and infant son on the tiny Greek island of Hydra and finagled a flight to Tel Aviv, intending to pick oranges on a kibbutz. Recognized at a seaside cafe in Tel Aviv by a group of Israeli pop musicians, the already legendary Canadian singer-songwriter instead agreed to join them on a road trip to the southern front in Sinai, where Egyptian commandos had recently

overrun a series of supposedly impregnable bunkers called the Bar Lev Line. Matti Friedman’s impeccably researched and exquisitely written account of Cohen’s unlikely foray into the front lines of a nightmarish war answers the never quite explicated question—just what in the hell did the reluctant scion of a prominent Montreal rabbinical family think he was doing on an Israeli warfront? Relying on first-hand accounts by Israeli soldiers and musicians who encountered him during his desert wanderings as well as the contents of Cohen’s cryptic, previously unpublished notebook-cum-diary, Friedman makes the case that this “poet of cigarettes and sex and quiet desperation, who’d dismissed the Jewish community that raised him as a vessel of empty ritual” sought to turn a page on an unsatisfactory life

and career by putting himself at the service of his tribal “brothers” during a moment of near apocalyptic crisis. This act, Friedman demonstrates, was nonpareil. Jewish entertainers like Danny Kaye and Enrico Macias turned up after the war to express solidarity with their imperiled brethren. But Cohen was the only foreign celebrity to show up during wartime, grab a sleeping bag and an army-issued guitar and entertain tiny groups of soldiers who, for the most part, were too dismayed by their recent battlefield experiences to respond to most attempts at entertainment. Indeed, Cohen, who would later obscure his wartime sojourn, discovered that his melancholic tunes of lust and longing were precisely the balm needed for forlorn soldiers. Published six years after Cohen’s death in 2016, Who by Fire offers Cohen aficionados a welcome opportunity to get lost in their own longings. —Sheldon Teitelbaum Sheldon Teitelbaum is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor and is co-editor of the sci-fi anthologies Zion’s Fiction and More Zion’s Fiction.

ISAAC SHOKAL/COURTESY OF SPIEGEL & GRAU

The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America By Javier Sinay. Translated by Robert Croll (Restless Books)

For the Troops Legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (center) performs with Israeli singers Ilana Rovina (left) and Matti Caspi in the Sinai in 1973. JULY/AUGUST 2022

In June of 2009, Argentinian journalist Javier Sinay received an email from his father that pointed him to a surprising article written in 1947 by Javier’s great-grandfather, Mijl Hacohen Sinay. Mijl Sinay was also a journalist. In addition to reporting for a variety of news sources, he started Argentina’s first Yiddish newspaper, Der Viderkol, in 1898. That 1947 article,

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“The First Fatal Victims in Moisés Ville”—a gory multipage report on the murder of 22 people in the town in the early 20th century—sets Javier Sinay on a path to investigate the murders, which were long forgotten by Argentinian Jews. In writing about his investigation, Sinay also brings to life the history of Moisés Ville, the first Jewish agricultural community in the country, and possibly all of South America. Moisés Ville was established in the province of Santa Fe in 1889, when a group of Jews seeking refuge from Czarist pogroms in what is today Ukraine set sail for Argentina. They had hoped to become farmers but experienced difficulties from the beginning, from broken promises of support to fraudulent land deals. Hearing of their struggles, Baron Maurice de Hirsch stepped in. Following the untimely death of his children, the German financier and philanthropist had “decided his fortune would be put toward Jewish people who were suffering,” Sinay writes, and he formed the Jewish Colonization Association to help Russian and Eastern European Jews immigrate to agricultural colonies in North and South America. The JCA set up and funded infrastructure in Moisés Ville and brought in more immigrants to settle the town and surrounding area. Dubbed the Jerusalem of South America, Moisés Ville became the urban center of a Yiddish-speaking oasis of Jewish settlements on the plains of Argentina. (Today, the town

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“A must-read for all historical fiction lovers.” —Kristin Harmel

CHARITABLE SOLICITATION DISCLOSURE STATEMENTS HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. 22_173_Hadassah_GermanWife_2.indd 1 8th Floor – New York, NY 10005 – Telephone: (212) 355-7900 5/31/22 2:24 PM 40 Wall Street, Contributions will be used for the support of Hadassah’s charitable projects and programs in the U.S. and/ or Israel including: medical relief, education and research; education and advocacy programs on issues of concern to women and that of the family; and support of programs for Jewish youth. Financial and other information about Hadassah may be obtained, without cost, by writing the Finance Department at Hadassah’s principal place of business at the address indicated above, or by calling the phone number indicated Javier Sinay above. In addition, residents of the following states may obtain financial and/or licensing information from their states, as indicated. DC: The Certificate of Registration Number of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. is #40003848, which is valid for the period 9/1/2021-8/31/2023. Registration is less than 10 percent Jewish.) But does not imply endorsement of the solicitation by the District of Columbia, or by any officer or employee further difficulties hounded the new of the District. FL: A COPY OF THE OFFICIAL REGISTRATION AND FINANCIAL INFORMATION FOR HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. (#SC-1298) AND arrivals, including violence from the HADASSAH MEDICAL RELIEF ASSOCIATION, INC. (#SC-4603) MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE local gaucho population. DIVISION OF CONSUMER SERVICES BY CALLING TOLL-FREE 1-800-HELP-FLA, OR ONLINE AT www.FloridaConsumerHelp.com. KS: The official registration and annual financial report of Hadassah, Sinay’s research into the murders The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. is filed with the Kansas Secretary of State. Kansas is in many ways reminiscent of Registration #237-478-3. MD: A copy of the current financial statement of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Don Quixote tilting at windmills, Organization of America, Inc. is available by writing 40 Wall Street, 8th Floor, New York, New York 10005, Att: Finance Dept., or by calling (212) 355-7900. Documents and information submitted under the Maryor in this case, history. There are land Charitable Solicitations Act are also available for the cost of postage and copies, from the Maryland few surviving documents from that Secretary of State, State House, Annapolis, MD 21401. MI: Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. MICS #13005/Hadassah Medical Relief Association, Inc. MICS # 11986/The Hadassah period. Some were lost over time; Foundation, Inc. MICS #22965. 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VA: A financial statement of the organization is available from the Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, P.O. Box 1163, Richmond, VA 23218, Phone #1 (800) 552-9963, upon request. lived in Moisés Ville, a discovery that WA: Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc., Hadassah Medical Relief Association, leads the proudly secular author to Inc. and The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. are registered with the Washington Secretary of State. Financial his first Kabbalat Shabbat service at disclosure information is available from the Secretary of State. The toll-free phone number for Washington residents is 800-332-GIVE (800-332-4483), OR 360-725-0378. The website is www.sos.wa.gov/charities. the Baron Hirsch Synagogue that still WV: West Virginia residents may obtain a summary of the registration and financial documents of Hadassah, stands in the town. The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. from the Secretary of State, State Capitol, Charleston, WV 25305. ALL OTHER STATES: A copy of Hadassah’s latest Financial Report is available by writing Ultimately, The Murders of Moisés to the Hadassah Finance Dept., 40 Wall Street, 8th Floor, New York, New York 10005. REGISTRATION Ville offers more conjectures than DOES NOT CONSTITUTE OR IMPLY ENDORSEMENT, APPROVAL, SANCTION OR RECOMMENDATION BY ANY STATE. Charitable deductions are allowed to the extent provided by law. Hadassah shall answers. We do not know for certain have full dominion, control and discretion over all gifts (and shall be under no legal obligation to transfer how many murders there actually any portion of a gift to or for the use or benefit of any other entity or organization). All decisions regarding the use of funds for any purpose, or the transfer of funds to or for the benefit of any other entity or organiwere, and it does not appear that zation, shall be subject to the approval of the Board or other governing body of Hadassah. The Hadassah they were motivated by antisemitism. Foundation, Inc. is a supporting organization of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. and Hadassah Medical Relief Association, Inc. January 2021 Rather, Sinay writes, they were perpeJULY/AUGUST 2022

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VERONICA MARTINEZ

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trated by locals upset at outsiders encroaching on their land, or they were the result of robberies or misunderstandings. The book presents a picture of a significant moment in Jewish time— the resettlement of a group of Jews daring to dream the impossible—and that is good and valuable. But that the picture is so fuzzy and out of focus is, no pun intended, a negative. —Curt Schleier

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Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life By Delia Ephron (Little, Brown and Company)

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Delia Ephron’s latest book is the story of great love that struck twice. That love, however, is punctuated by loss, serious illness, healing and resilience. Zigzagging emotionally, Ephron is candid, tender and funny. Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life opens with the death of Ephron’s beloved husband Jerry Kass from cancer, only a few years after the death of her adored sister, Nora Ephron. With her husband gone, Delia Ephron writes that she was “dislocated, living in an unknown land.” Some months later, when she tried to have Kass’s personal landline disconnected, her internet crashed and she became caught in a phone company abyss for more than a week. As is her way of processing

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Guide to Jewish Literature Order these books directly through the Hadassah Magazine website! Just go to Hadassahmagazine.org and click on Guide to Jewish Literature.

DINEH: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL Ida Maze, translated by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

Dineh is an autobiographical novel by Ida Maze, translated from the Yiddish by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub. Dineh is a pastorale laced with beauty and sorrow and a bildungsroman told from the point of view of a young girl. Living in what is now Belarus, Maze’s eponymous heroine is fueled by her hunger for learning, connection to family and community, and love of the natural world.

Available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book. Purchase at shop.yiddishbookcenter.org.

LEAVING THE BRONX: A NOVEL

THE GLASS PLATES OF LUBLIN: FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS OF A LOST JEWISH WORLD

Edited by Aaron Lansky, Piotr Nazaruk, and Lisa Newman The Glass Plates of Lublin features hundreds of stunning photographs made from the 2,700 glass photographic plates unearthed from a trash pile in a tenement house in a former Jewish section of Lublin, Poland. From the dirty and sometimes broken tiles emerge the faces of Jews and Poles, children and the elderly, young couples flirting, workers, athletes, dignitaries in tails, and anonymous people who posed for a camera long ago, before the war, and never dreamed that their portraits would be of interest to anyone. Available for purchase at shop.yiddishbookcenter.org.

Zee Abrams

Become a teacher, get married, have children— these were the expectations for Jewish girls in the 1950s. If you wanted something more, there were problems. Based on memories of the Bronx neighborhoods of Pelham Parkway and Parkchester, the feel of the time and place are recaptured. “Wonderfully vivid” – Richard Lederer, best-selling author and columnist.

Available on Amazon.

ON 174TH STREET: THE WORLD OF WILLIE MITTLEMAN

CREDITS

Mel Weiser

Days are bad in the Great Depression of the 1930s. But for little Willie Mittleman and the Mittleman clan in their Bronx, NY neighborhood, life is still good, proving that laughter and love will always be the lifesaving forces to rescue us from adversity and pain. A big-hearted gem. Funny, touching and insightful. For readers of all ages. Available on Amazon.

YOUR SOUL MATE AWAITS! A MATCHMAKER REVEALS HOW TO FIND LOVE AND HAPPINESS IN 3 SIMPLE STEPS

Judith Gottesman, MSW, with Maria De La O

The owner of Soul Mates Unlimited™, Judith Gottesman, MSW, is a Jewish matchmaker and dating coach. In Your Soul Mate Awaits! A Matchmaker Reveals How to Find Love and Happiness in 3 Simple Steps, Judith takes on much more than just dating, to illuminate today’s relationship questions. Judith understands how frustration, selfdoubt and uncertainty plague those looking for a soul mate connection. Whether readers are looking to date for the first time, for the first time in a long time, or just need a new approach, Judith reveals the tricks of the trade to find a romantic partner. Buy her books at www.SoulMatesUnlimited.com.

PRAIRIE SONATA Sandy Rabin

Named one of the Best Books of 2021 by Kirkus Reviews. “A compelling work…poignant and eloquent.” For ages 13 to 110. The story of Mira Adler and what she learns about life and love from her Yiddish and violin teacher, Chaver B, an intriguing and paradoxical immigrant from Prague who harbors a painful secret.

Winner of the Independent Press Award. Great for book clubs. www.PrairieSonata.com.

THE DEADLY SCROLLS Ellen Frankel

Meet Maya Rimon, Israeli intelligence agent, on the trail of the lost Second Temple Treasures and the murderer who stole the treasure map. Based on an authentic Dead Sea Scroll, this mystery thriller is powered by religious zealotry, greed, and scholarly puzzles. A Jewish Da Vinci Code! Hardcover, 400 pages. $27; Kindle edition, $9.99. Available from all online bookstores.

ACCORDING TO THEIR DEEDS – A FRUM ROMANCE Melvyn Westreich

In this humorous foray into the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, Ayelet Weinberg defends the charedi doctrine of strictly separating women and men, while Steve Lincoln believes in the feminism of modern Orthodoxy. They are thrown together in the grief counseling program at the Detroit Jewish Center. Unexpected things happen … they always do … and their ‘oil and water’ relationship slowly transforms. Soft cover, 351 pages, Amazon.

DARK FIRE

THE ASSIGNMENT

Elisa Robyn

Available on Amazon.

Inspired by a real-life incident. When a favorite teacher gives an assignment requiring students to pretend they’re Nazis and debate the Final Solution, two brave teens speak up and refuse to participate. The situation explodes, forcing the school and larger community to confront antisemitism and bigotry. What does it take for tolerance, justice, and love to prevail? Find out in this riveting, fast-paced, multi-award-winning novel. Available in hardcover, e-book, paperback, and audio wherever books are sold. Free curriculum guide through Penguin Random House. Liza will speak to Hadassah chapters, synagogues, schools, and other groups. Visit lizawiemer.com for more information.

BENEATH A BLANKET OF SNOW Arlene Lomazoff-Marron

Meredith Perkins enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, courtesy of her husband’s hard work and diligence—until his crime turned her world upside down. Friends deserted her while protecting their own secrets, until their lives also crumbled. Four women thought they knew everything about each other—but they were wrong. When a pristine covering of snow melts, well-hidden secrets are revealed. “A stunning debut” (KKEC Reads).

Available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback and e-book formats.

HIP SET

Elaine Serling

A musical story celebrating and honoring the special relationship between grandparents and a grandchild. This new re-designed hardcover edition features fresh lyrics, a toe-tapping memorable melody and colorful illustrations that mirror moments of joy this special bond brings. Use the digital download code printed inside the book to download the song. Reading, listening and singing together, will create memories that will last a lifetime!

Available from www.elaineserling.com. 800-457-2157; $19.95 + $3 shipping.

An award-winning and riveting historical novel of four generations of an immigrant family. When matriarch Ida escapes a pogrom in Ukraine determined to save her family, she cannot foresee the struggles of her descendants. Through war, mental illness, secrets and betrayal, each generation’s actions impact the lives of the next, as love and loyalty is tested by secrets and betrayal. You will recognize these family members and grieve and rejoice with them. Readers cannot put the book down. Gift it. Pick it for your book club and author will Zoom with you for a lively conversation. Available in paperback, audio, and e-book on Amazon. com, or wherever you buy books on author website www.florencereisskraut.com

Michael Fertik “Fast paced with an original, exotic setting, Hip Set is an unstoppable read from first page to last,” Faye Kellerman, best-selling author. A noir thriller set in modern-day Tel Aviv, Hip Set begins with what appears to the police to be a simple murder but swiftly takes our heroes through the hidden lives of Sudanese refugees and the violent underground economy of Russian gangsters, in search of an ancient mystery, lying untouched in the desert for millennia, that has been troubling scholars since it first appeared in the Old Testament itself.

Available on Amazon.

BUBBIE’S BABY: 15TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Florence Reiss Kraut

THE BIBLE ACCORDING TO EVE: THE WOMEN OF THE TORAH

BETWEEN THESE WALLS

Michael Newman Art curator Daniel Singer, adopted son of Colonel Samuel Singer, receives a mysterious package from Germany. He can’t help but think that there’s something important within the envelope. But what? Daniel’s quest to learn about the package’s contents leads him on a voyage of discovery about his roots, an encounter with the Mossad, Israel’s secret spy agency. As he searches, he unlocks the secrets of three families—one American and two German—following them from the dying days of WWI, to the rise of Adolf Hitler, WWII, the Holocaust, the birth of the State of Israel and three Middle East wars. Available on Amazon.

Hadassah Alderson

“How does the Hebrew Bible fit into the lives of Jewish Women today?” has become a central question to Modern Jewish life. Combining the seemingly antithetical interests of the Biblical text and feminist thinking, well-known, little-known, and the author’s own Midrashic stories about the laws are told to make the Bible relevant to modern readers. Early reviews emphasize this book’s literary content and comprehensiveness. Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

To advertise here, please call Randi O’Connor at (212) 451-6221, or email roconnor@hadassah.org. Space is limited. CREDITS

Elisa Robyn has topped herself with her latest book, Dark Fire. The main character, Tamra discovers her connection to the biblical Tamar and the women of the dark. She heads on a mystical journey to recover a stolen book of magic that holds astrological secrets. She is joined by a sexy partly vampire, a magical closet, and pet octopus. Her passions take her into a whirlwind of magic and magical beings—with a touch of erotic and exquisite mystery all culminating with Tamra’s discovery of the ancient guides and teachers who help her heal the lineage wounds in the descendants of Tamar.

HOW TO MAKE A LIFE

Liza Wiemer

BOOKS

emotions, she wrote about the experience, and that essay, published in The New York Times, turned out to be a “birdcall,” she writes in the book, prompting several notes from men who want to meet her. She declines them all. When Peter Rutter contacted her more than a year later, he, too, had read the piece and reminded her that they had gone out a few times in college after being introduced by her sister. Ephron didn’t remember him but nevertheless responds to his email as she is struck by many confluences in their lives—he had recently lost his wife—and by the warmth of his note. And he loved her last book, which is certainly “the way to a writer’s heart,” she acknowledges in Left on Tenth. Ephron, a Jewish screenwriter of romantic comedies who co-wrote the film You’ve Got Mail with sister Nora, shares the story of how Rutter and she started dating and how her life began to feel as though she’d fallen into one of her own scripts. He is a psychiatrist who loves hiking and the outdoors; she’s passionate

A N S W E R S Crossword Puzzle on page 43

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about walking to a cafe near her home in New York City’s Greenwich Village; both adore conversation. Their romance in their 70s feels like young love “happening at the speed of light,” writes Ephron. Their emails, many reprinted in the book, are a pleasure to read. But soon she is diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, the same disease that struck down her sister. Friends and doctors remind her that she is not Nora Ephron and that new approaches are possible. And while her sister kept her illness a secret, Delia Ephron keeps friends and especially her new husband—they marry in the hospital—closely involved. She makes a point of not understanding medical terms, but also makes stages of her treatment clear to the reader, terror and all. Above all, this is a memoir of hope. Ephron is so likeable, and Rutter is heroic. Summing up her story, she writes, it is “a lot of very good fortune wrapped around very bad fortune.” —Sandee Brawarsky

R A O N N A B P O A N C F E A L A G C E I S O I R D E I D A B I R E A A D V E

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TOP TEN JEWISH BEST SELLERS FICTION 1. The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon Books) 2. The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner (Atria Books) 3. Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Daniel Silva (Harper) 4. Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley (MCD) 5. Three Sisters by Heather Morris (St. Martin’s Press) NONFICTION 1. Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up by Selma Blair (Knopf) 2. Out of the Corner: A Memoir by Jennifer Grey (Ballantine Books) 3. All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business by Mel Brooks (Ballantine Books) 4. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday) 5. Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America by Michael Benson (Citadel)

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Linking wine, childbirth and the weather | By Joseph Lowin

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eaders with good short-term memory may recall that in last month’s column, our Hebrew root went from “dancing” to “flour sifting.” But Jews also have tradition, otherwise known as long-term memory. There, we find another root for dancing, ‫ל‬-‫ו‬-‫( ח‬het, vav, lamed), to leap, to dance. This root’s meaning meanders from dancing to trembling, from birth pangs to the Creator of the world, and on to the wine industry. When the root lands in modern times, it “becomes” an instrument that gets things to start. Jewish long-term memory takes our root back to the moment when the Israelite slaves could finally feel free, as Moses’ sister, Miriam, leads the women ‫( ְּב ֻת ִפּים ִּוב ְמחֹֹלת‬be-tuppim u-vimholot), “with dancing and drums.” Dancing becomes trembling in Psalms, with ‫( לִ ִּבי יָ ִחיל‬libbi yahil), “my heart will tremble” and ‫( חּולִּ י ָא ֶרץ‬hulli arets), “Tremble thou earth.” The Psalmist enlarges the semantic field of our root, saying to God, ‫( וַ ְּתחֹולֵ ל‬va-teholel), “You have created [the earth].” Furthermore, the Creator’s voice ‫( יְ חֹולֵ ל ַאּיָ ל ת‬yeholel ayyalot), “will cause hinds to tremble.” Medieval linguist David Kimchi gives a more naturalistic meaning to our root, when he translates the same phrase as, God’s voice “causes hinds to give birth.” Speaking of childbirth, the prophet Isaiah refers to the past when he reminds us that foremother Sarah ‫( ְּתחֹולֶ לְ כֶ ם‬teholelkhem), “gave birth to you all.” Using a simile for a striking image of severe pain, Isaiah says, ‫( ּכַ ּיֹולֵ ָדה יְ ִחילּון‬ka-yoleda yehilun), “They will be in pain like a woman giving birth.” The Book of Proverbs takes the metaphor further, and brings our root to climatology, informing us that the north wind ‫( ְּתחֹולֵ ל ּגָ ֶׁשם‬teholel gashem), “brings forth the rain.” Talmudic discourse, however lofty, is rooted in the real world, for example, in connection with the wine industry. One rabbinic discussion relates that it was an accepted custom for a wine producer to mix pure wine with water. A wine retailer, however, was forbidden to add pure wine to an overly diluted stock of wine to ‫( ְמ ַחיילֵ יה‬mehailei), “sweeten it,” in order to sell it at full price. Observant Jews today have borrowed from the Mishna (Megilla 2:4) the verb ‫( לָ חֺל‬lahol), to occur, happen or fall, to discuss the laws of a holiday that ‫( ָחל ְבּ ַשׁ ָבּת‬hal be-shabbat), falls on a Sabbath, or when a biblical law does not ‫( ָחל‬hal), fall, on Diaspora Jews. Then there is the ‫( ְמח לֵ ל‬meholel), electric generator, that sets things in motion. A very useful noun today, ‫ְמח לֶ לֶ ת‬ (meholel) can also refer to a dancer, such as a ballerina, or the generator or originator of an idea. A generator not only can set things in motion, but when used cannily, it can also cause a Hebrew column to stop abruptly. Joseph Lowin’s new book on Hebrew roots, Hebrew Matters, was published in April. His columns for Hadassah Magazine are collected in the books HebrewSpeak and HebrewTalk. JULY/AUGUST 2022

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Amy Spitalnick Tackling the dire threat of white supremacy By Debra Nussbaum Cohen

s executive director of the nonprofit integrity first for america, amy spitalnick works to expose neo-Nazis and white supremacists and ensure that they are held accountable for their actions. In a widely publicized case, the organization assembled a legal team that last year won a $26 million judgment in a federal lawsuit against two dozen defendants involved in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., which left one dead and dozens injured. Spitalnick notes that the same philosophy that drove white supremacist attackers in Charlottesville—the Great Replacement theory—is gaining wider traction. The conspiracy theory posits that people of color will soon replace whites as a majority in America because of policies, including on immigration, promoted by influential Jews. In one recent example, the 18-year-old gunman who opened fire at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, N.Y., in May invoked the theory repeatedly in an online screed prior to the attack, which left 10 dead and three others injured. Before joining Integrity First for America in 2019, Spitalnick, a graduate of Tufts University who spent her junior year at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, served as communications director and senior policy advisor for the Office of the New York State Attorney General. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

COURTESY OF INTEGRITY FIRST FOR AMERICA

What are your biggest worries when it comes to fighting white supremacy? There is a total failure among most people, including many of our leaders, to recognize just how dire the threat of white supremacy is and to understand how interconnected it is with broader dynamics. It’s crucial that we connect the dots to policies like what we’re seeing in Florida, where the “anti-woke” bill [passed in March and officially called the Individual Freedom bill] ties the hands of educators to talk about white supremacy and racism. What can Americans do to address this failure? You can’t simply prosecute or sue your way out of this. It requires media and digital literacy—teaching parents, educators, school counselors and others how to spot, identify and confront extremism at home and in schools. Anti-racist education is crucial. States and localities can lead, but it requires national and global action given the scope of the problem.

We have a tech ecosystem that has washed its hands of any responsibility for what it helped create. Discord, for example, is a chat platform used by many video gamers. Discord chats were central to planning for the Unite the Right rally. The Buffalo shooter used the same site five years later. There’s no excuse for Discord’s inaction given how central it was to the Charlottesville violence. And the platform is backed by venture capital. [Discord has raised nearly $1 billion from 31 investment firms and banks.] Elected officials and other leaders have validated extremism by promoting versions of the Great Replacement theory. What was a perplexing chant [“Jews will not replace us!”] heard in Charlottesville has now become a normalized conspiracy theory in our politics. What can the Jewish community do? Jewish organizations need to recognize the importance of building relationships with others who are targeted by this very same hate. We JULY/AUGUST 2022

are stronger together than alone. We must be clear to our leaders, to our communities, about how serious this threat is and not equivocate. Especially for Jews, it’s important to understand how racist, xenophobic and antisemitic this is. You can’t take on antisemitism without taking on the white supremacy animated by it. What motivates you? Jewish values drive much of what I do personally and professionally. I was raised in a Conservative synagogue in New York. I went to Jewish overnight camps and was president of my United Synagogue Youth chapter and of my Hillel at Tufts University. I’m the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Both maternal grandparents survived the war while their families were not as fortunate. The bravery of Jews and non-Jews alike helped them. Debra Nussbaum Cohen, author of Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant, is a journalist living in New York City.

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