Moment Magazine Winter 2022

WINTER ISSUE 2022

THE

STATE OF

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN

AMERICA

BESHERT:

12 STORIES OF LOVE & CONNECTION

POLITICAL COMPROMISE: A JEWISH VIRTUE?

MAN RAY, DATES, SHMITA AND MORE!

Your next destination awaits Today, this splendid Relais & Chateaux historic property, embodies French art de vivre with rare finesse. Just 90 minutes from Paris by car, we invite guests to view the Champagne region through a kaleidoscope of unique features: its terroir, its vineyards and so much more. Chef Philippe Mille of Le Parc, the property’s 2-star Michelin restaurant and Le Jardin, its Michelin BIB Gourmand, has created a circle of 64 producers, farmers, fish farmers and gatherers who supply him with the best ingredients, all within 70 kilometers of the estate. Boasting three cellars and 63,000 bottles, Head Sommelier Martin Jean has set up a superior aging cellar and has embraced the new energy that is shaking up the region, selecting 250 independent wine growers to join the ranks of his cellar.

Voted among the 40 most beautiful hotels and palaces in France at Conde Nast Traveler’s 2021 Readers Choice Awards, Domaine les Crayeres is located on Saint-Nicaise Hill, a listed UNESCO heritage site and surrounded by seven hectares of breath-taking landscaped nature.

To plan your visit to Domaine les Crayeres email contact@lescrayeres.com or call +33 (0)3 26 24 90 00

From Jewish culture and history, to the Holocaust and Israel, to politics and pop culture, explore MomentLive! programs at momentmag.com/zoominars

Max Brooks

Isabel Wilkerson

Judy Gold

Calvin Trillin

Joan Nathan

Michael Oren

Emily Haber

Eric K. Ward

Evan Osnos

Deborah Lipstadt

Simon Schama

Dana Bash

author

author

journalist

author

author

historian

comedian

ambassador

historian

columnist

activist

journalist

INNOVATE. INSPIRE. LEARN. EXPERIENCE. REFLECT.

moment visit us

MOMENTMAG.COM

follow us

Moment Magazine is known for its award-winning journalism, first-rate cultural and literary criticism and signature “Big Questions”—all from an independent Jewish perspective. Founded by Leonard Fein and Elie Wiesel in 1975, it has been led by Nadine Epstein since 2004. Moment is published under the auspices of the nonprofit Center for Creative Change and is home to projects such as the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest and the MomentBooks imprint. To learn more about Moment and its work, visit momentmag.com.

FACEBOOK @momentmag TWITTER @momentmagazine INSTAGRAM @moment_mag

Nadine Epstein

MOMENT INSTITUTE FELLOWS

Ira N. Forman, Nathan Guttman

Sarah Breger MANAGING EDITOR Ellen Wexler EDITOR

OPINION & BOOKS EDITOR

Amy E. Schwartz

Diane M. Bolz SPECIAL LITERARY CONTRIBUTOR Robert Siegel

PINTEREST @momentmag

ARTS & ARTICLES EDITOR

YOUTUBE @momentmag

Dan Freedman, Terry E. Grant, Diane Heiman, George E. Johnson, Eileen Lavine, Wesley G. Pippert, Francie Weinman Schwartz, Laurence Wolff RABBI HAROLD S. WHITE FELLOW Sophie Wiener ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Noach Phillips POETRY EDITOR Jody Bolz ISRAEL EDITOR Eetta Prince-Gibson EUROPE EDITOR Liam Hoare FILM CRITIC Dina Gold CRITIC-AT-LARGE Carlin Romano DESIGN Marissa Vonesh DESIGN FELLOW Erjon Ajazi ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Tanya George DIRECTOR OF MARKETING Ellen Meltzer DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY AFFAIRS Debbie Sann DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS Pat Lewis

LINKEDIN /company/moment-magazine

ask us Is everything Moment publishes on the web?

No. Some articles in the print or digital editions are accessible only to subscribers. If you are not a subscriber and would like access, you can purchase a digital subscription online at momentmag.com/subscribe or by calling 800214-5558. Moment can also be purchased on select newsstands.

How do I donate to support your work?

We could not produce this beautiful magazine and run the projects we do without loyal friends and supporters. Go to momentmag.com/donate or call 202-363-6422.

Whom do I contact to advertise in the magazine, newsletter or website?

Email Ellen Meltzer at emeltzer@momentmag. com or call 202-363-6422.

How do I submit a letter to the editor or pitch?

Email editor@momentmag.com. We will be in touch if your submission fits our editorial needs.

Does Moment have an online gift shop?

Recent past issues, books, tote bags and assorted gifts can be purchased at momentmag.com/shop

read with us MOMENT MINUTE Tuesdays & Thursdays Moment’s editors share their thoughts on important stories and issues.

Sign up at momentmag.com/minute JEWISH POLITICS & POWER Alternating Mondays Reporting and political analysis from a Jewish perspective.

Sign up at momentmag.com/jpp ANTISEMITISM MONITOR Weekly updates & monthly analysis Tracking and analysis of antisemitic incidents worldwide.

Sign up at momentmag.com/asm

2

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & CEO

WINTER ISSUE 2022

SENIOR EDITORS

ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR/EVENTS

Johnna Miller Raskin DIGITAL PROJECTS Ross Bishton CONSUMER MARKETING Nicole Bowman SPECIAL PROJECTS DIRECTOR Suzanne Borden SPECIAL PROJECTS ASSISTANT Brianna Burdetsky COPY EDITOR Sue Driesen TRAVEL COORDINATOR Aviva Meyer ACCOUNTANT Jackie Leffyear BOOKKEEPER Debra McWhirter WEBSITE AllStar Tech Solutions INTERN

Bella Druckman

CONTRIBUTORS Marshall

Breger, Geraldine Brooks, Max Brooks, Susan Coll, Marilyn Cooper, Marc Fisher, Glenn Frankel, Konstanty Gebert, Ari Goldman, Gershom Gorenberg, Dara Horn, Pam Janis, Clifford May, Ruby Namdar, Joan Nathan, Fania Oz-Salzberger, Mark I. Pinsky, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Sarah Posner, Naomi Ragen, Dan Raviv, Suzanne F. Singer (z”l), Abraham D. Sofaer

MOMENT MAGAZINE ADVISORY BOARD

Michael Berenbaum, Albert Foer, Esther Safran Foer, Kathryn Gandal, Michael Gelman, Carol Brown Goldberg, Lloyd Goldman, Terry E. Grant, Phyllis Greenberger, Sharon Karmazin, Connie Krupin, Peter Lefkin, Andrew Mack, Judea Pearl, Josh Rolnick, Jean Bloch Rosensaft, Menachem Rosensaft, Elizabeth Scheuer, Joan Scheuer, Leonard Schuchman, Walter P. Stern, Diane Troderman, Robert Wiener, Esther Wojcicki, Gwen Zuares DANIEL PEARL INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM INITIATIVE ADVISORY BOARD

Michael Abramowitz, Wolf Blitzer, Nadine Epstein, Linda Feldmann, Martin Fletcher, Glenn Frankel, Robert S. Greenberger, Phyllis Greenberger, Scott Greenberger, Mary Hadar, Amy Kaslow, Bill Kovach, Charles Lewis, Sidney Offit, Clarence Page, Steven Roberts, Amy E. Schwartz, Robert Siegel, Paul Steiger, Lynn Sweet Project Director Sarah Breger

Articles and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the view of the Advisory Board or any member thereof or any particular board member, adviser, editor or staff member.

Advertising in Moment does not necessarily imply editorial endorsement.

Volume 47, Number 1 Moment Magazine (ISSN 0099-0280) is published bi-monthly with a double issue (May/June and July/August) by the Center for Creative Change, a nonprofit corporation, 4115 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Suite LL10, Washington, DC 20016. Full subscription price is $59.70 per year in the United States and Canada, $153.67 elsewhere. Back issues may be available; please email editor@momentmag. com. Copyright ©2022, by Moment Magazine.

Printed in the U.S.A. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Moment Magazine, P.O. Box 397, Lincolnshire, IL 60069

subscribe to us Order print or digital at momentmag.com/subscribe or call 800-214-5558 Canada and foreign subscriptions: 818-487-2006 Bulk subscriptions: 202-363-6422

winter issue 2022 16

22

42

22 features

departments

30

4

I N V E S T I G AT I O N

The State of Holocaust Education in America Fifty years ago, Holocaust education was introduced in public schools as a way to encourage moral development. In an era of polarization, is this message at risk of being forgotten?

by Dan Freedman

42

From the Editor-in-Chief

Elie Wiesel and two girls he never met

by Nadine Epstein

6 10

The Conversation

Beshert: Stories of Connection in a Universe of Love

Opinions

Black Jews could help reset Black-Jewish relations

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin Israel’s criminal rabbis escape justice

by Naomi Ragen

Moment Debate

Would a ban on abortion curtail the religious freedom of Jews?

Shlomo Brody vs. Danya Ruttenberg interviews by Amy E. Schwartz

16

Ask the Rabbis

Is political compromise a Jewish virtue?

20

52 Talk of the Table: A satisfying and sweet date

Moment(s)

AIPAC launches a PAC. What does this mean?

by Nathan Guttman

Visual Moment

28

Jewish Word

52

Talk of the Table

54

Literary Moment

Shmita? Give me a break!

by Noach Phillips

Are pro-Trump Jews moving on? with Steven F. Windmueller interview by Amy E. Schwartz

14

22

“The Last Jew in Vinnitsa”

by Sandy Solomon

A satisfying and sweet date

by Susan Barocas

Anita Diamant’s pursuit of menstrual justice interview by Amy E. Schwartz In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution and the Rise of Nazism review by Robert Siegel Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom review by Vivian Gornick Breaking & Entering: New and Selected Poems review by Marcela Sulak

63

Caption Contest

64

Spice Box

Cartoon by Ben Schwartz

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

3

© MAN RAY 2015 TRUST / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/ADAGP, PARIS 2021; RAUF ALVI; MARISSA VONESH

Twelve stories from writers including Julie Gray, Eileen Lavine, Beth Levine, Faye Moskowitz and Rob Dobrusin from Moment’s popular “Beshert” series. edited by Pam Janis

Poem

Photographer Man Ray in Paris

by Diane M. Bolz

What kind of Jewish state is Israel?

by Marshall Breger MEMOIR

21

from the editor-in-chief

ELIE WIESEL AND TWO GIRLS HE NEVER MET

CAROL GUZY

S

hortly before Elie Wiesel, one of Moment’s two cofounders, died in 2016, I had an appointment to visit him in New York. I had watched age and illness creep up on him, and was looking forward to spending time together. I was at the Jersey Shore visiting my father, and was about to walk to the station to catch the train into the city. My dad, sitting in his wheelchair at the dinette table, asked, “Where are you going?” I explained that I was on my way to see Elie Wiesel.

No sooner had I said this name than whoops of excitement came from the kitchen, where my father’s caregiver, from Haiti, was braiding the hair of her twin nieces, Rashawn and Nellwyn. “You know Elie Wiesel?” asked Rashawn, wide-eyed.

“We just learned about him in school!”

“We read Night,” Nellwyn chimed in, adding, “We studied the Holocaust,” in case I didn’t understand the connection. The girls were about 12 and attended public middle school in a neighboring town. They were beside themselves. “How do you know him?” they asked.

My dad smiled, and I explained. And then I thought of how Elie often wrote back to people who wrote to him, and how significant it was that Rashawn and Nellwyn, the daughters of Haitian immigrants, knew who he was and had studied the Holocaust. “Why don’t you write him a note and I’ll give it to him?” I suggested.

4

WINTER ISSUE 2022

More whoops! Rashawn scribbled a note and I stuck it in my bag as I dashed out to make the train.

Later, as my train emerged from the tunnel under the Hudson River, an email appeared on my phone. My meeting with Elie had been canceled because he was not well. I carried the twins’ note around with me for months, but I never saw Elie again.

Even after he died, I kept it in my purse for at least a year, unable to part with it, an unfinished communication between a survivor and two young girls that would have meant something to all three of them.

Fast forward to May 2021, a few months after my father died. I was in New Jersey and went for a stroll on the Asbury Park boardwalk with a man who had been part of the push to bring Holocaust education to New Jersey public schools. As we walked, he recounted his mother’s escape from Germany in the 1930s and how studying the Holocaust had become a staple in the state’s classrooms. Talking to him made me realize how it had come to pass that two first-generation American pre-teens idolized Elie Wiesel—and how little many people, myself included, really know about the movement to educate American public school children about the Holocaust.

I quickly determined that Moment needed to dive into Holocaust education in the nation’s public schools and asked senior editor Dan Freedman to take on this gargantuan task. Unlike most stories I have read about Holocaust education, Dan’s story is not framed in terms that suggest failure: It is not frontloaded with statistics detailing Americans’ ignorance about Auschwitz or the number of Jews killed. Nor does it lead with the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world, who abuse and misuse Holocaustrelated historical analogies. We do give these facts space, not to sensationalize or alarm, but, as is our practice, to deepen understanding and create the conditions for informed vigilance. Our story encompasses far more, from Holocaust education’s wide though still imperfect reach, to the dangers posed to it by political polarization, and to the profound themes it introduces to students who often remember it forever. Which brings me full circle to Rashawn and Nellwyn today: These two smart young women are unlikely

BY NADINE EPSTEIN to ever forget Elie’s harrowing story and the evil that was Nazi Germany. To me, they are proof that Holocaust education works.

“

I KEPT THE NOTE FOR AT LEAST A YEAR, AN UNFINISHED COMMUNICATION BETWEEN A SURVIVOR AND TWO YOUNG GIRLS. Our winter issue is full of other topics that will expand your mind and open your heart, including “Beshert: Stories of Connection in a Universe of Love,” based on our popular online “Beshert” series (momentmag. com/beshert) featuring tales of twists of fate; a refreshingly nuanced debate over the importance of weighing Jewish views in the battle over abortion; and an “Ask the Rabbis” section that explores a foundational question: Is political compromise a Jewish virtue? Among other things, we also take a look at the biblical commandment of shmita and how it is observed today and marvel at the innovative Paris photography of artist Man Ray (originally Emmanuel “Manny” Radnitzky). “Literary Moment” includes Robert Siegel’s review of Michael Brenner’s new book, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism, and a revelatory interview with Anita Diamant about her book Period. End of Sentence. A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice. In “The Conversation,” you’ll find an array of thoughtful letters in response to last issue’s provocative “Big Question”: What should the role of American Jews be with respect to Israel today?

One more thing: Producing a Moment issue that meets our standards is a very demanding and collaborative process. By necessity, the final stages of production take place in person in our office. Just as we moved into our deadline period for the winter issue, our home city of Washington, DC was hit with more than a 3,000 percent surge in COVID cases due to the Omicron

variant. Given the choice between endangering staff and getting the issue out late, I chose the latter. I know you would have made the same decision. I want to thank Moment’s staff and volunteers for their beyond-the-call-of-duty dedication. And to all of you, thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts with us. Stay well and safe!

START THE WITH A GIFT TO

in memoriam: two moment women The Moment of old is mostly associated with men: founding editor Leonard (Leibel) Fein, cofounder Elie Wiesel and editor Hershel Shanks, all gone now. But at least two women played major editorial roles from the magazine’s founding in 1975 to 2004, and their names are far less known. Carol Kur served as Moment’s managing editor, then executive editor between 1975 and 1987.

A stalwart of progressive Judaism, she reflected on the Jewish debates of the time in columns and articles such as her 1978 profile of Avital Sharansky, then a young wife fighting to get her husband Anatoly (later Natan) Sharansky out of a Soviet gulag—and out of the Soviet Union. Carol died in late 2020, although I only learned of her death recently. We never met but we corresponded. More recently, on New Year’s Day, my friend and former colleague Suzanne “Sue” Singer died at her home in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem. Sue was an authority in the field of biblical archaeology and was executive editor of Hershel Shanks’ Biblical Archaeology Review.

When Hershel purchased Moment from Leibel in 1987, he appointed Sue executive editor of Moment. That was the same year her son Alex was killed on his 25th birthday while serving in the IDF in Lebanon. Throughout her tenure, Sue helped shape the editorial voice of Moment and wrote incisive articles, reviews and columns, sharing her deep commitment to Israel and Jewish life. Sue continued to contribute columns to Moment after I took over the magazine in 2004. Both Carol and Sue will be greatly missed.­(To read my statement on Sue’s passing and a selection of her writing, visit momentmag.com/ suzanne-singer.)

—Nadine Epstein

“The great journalists at Moment Magazine are doing amazing work and producing stories you won’t find anywhere else.”

–WOLF BLITZER—

Independent journalism–one of the most powerful weapons for preserving democracy—is at the heart of Moment’s mission. Your tax-deductible gift allows us to continue to provide the trusted, balanced and in-depth stories our community needs and deserves.

SUPPORT US BY:

• Making a tax-deductible contribution online at momentmag.com/donate • Sending a check to Moment at 4115 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Suite LL10, Washington, DC 20016.

• Giving a gift of stocks, bonds or mutual funds through Fidelity Charitable or another vehicle.

• Remembering Moment in your will or estate plan.

Contact your financial adviser or Debbie Sann at dsann@momentmag.com or 202.363.6422.

Moment is a non-profit!

All gifts are fully tax-deductible.

CELEBRATING 47 YEARS OF INDEPENDENT JOURN ALISM WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

5

the conversation THE BIG QUESTION

“

I AM SO AMBIVALENT HERE. I’VE HAD TO SPLIT MY LOVE OF ISRAEL FROM MY CONTEMPT FOR HER GOVERNMENT. IT HURTS.

TO JOIN THE CONVERSATION: • RESPOND • TWEET

AT MOMENTMAG.COM

@MOMENTMAGAZINE

• COMMENT

ON FACEBOOK

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR TO EDITOR@MOMENTMAG.COM

• SEND

Please include your hometown, state, email and phone number.

Moment reserves the right to edit letters for clarity and space.

6

WINTER ISSUE 2022

AMERICAN JEWS’ ROLE IN ISRAEL Susie Linfield was by far my favorite contributor to the issue’s Big Question (“What Should the Role of American Jews Be With Respect to Israel Today?”

November/December 2021). She had original and important observations to make. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Alina Jacobs, who had much more concern with Palestinians than with Jews—American or Israeli. And then there was Peter Beinart. How did such an intelligent man, a man whose writing I used to hunger to read, become so, well, silly? His yearning for justice is understandable, but might we have some practical suggestions on how two peoples who’ve been at war for 150 years will suddenly morph into Belgium?

Lawrence Jurrist Hollywood, FL A LIVELY GREAT READ Some of the opinions in response to this “Big Question” prompted me to enthusiastically embrace this issue of Moment. Others made me want to toss the issue in the trash! Hence, a lively, provocative and balanced presentation that made for a great read. The topic is particularly important in these chaotic times because of its far-reaching effects.

Thanks for taking it on.

Michael Alan Finn Washington, DC A DIFFICULT QUESTION Thank you for this important “Big Question.” This is a difficult question for me as someone who is in the process of converting to Judaism. (I’ve approached a Reconstructionist rabbi to guide my conversion, so I know I won’t have the right of aliyah anyway.)

I disagree with a lot of decisions made by the State of Israel, but I do feel good that Jewish friends would have a place to go if things got really bad here in the United States. One thing I wish

American Jews would do is listen more to the Israeli Jews and Arabs working toward peaceful relations rather than trying to impose their opinions on a nation with a very different reality.

Yossi Casteel Houston, TX LOST AND CONFUSED We Jews have always found laughter and strength in the belief of “two Jews, three opinions.” For those who study Talmud, we often hear that “the question is more important than the answer.” In struggling to apply these worn-out adages to everybody’s words of wisdom in this article, I’m totally lost, confused and worried. I’m only left with my own questions. It’s very safe to play out all these opinions on a page, but could all these influential Jews be gathered into a room to see each other’s humanity, even with all their different opinions? Could they hear each other out and then attempt to respectfully organize together for intelligent interaction and somehow move the Jewish world forward? Would they feel connected to one another? If the answer is no, then what does it mean to be “a people” or “a family”?

Gary Wexler Valley Village, CA HOLDING OUT HOPE I am an ordinary American citizen and a Zionist of sorts. My love and support of the United States of America and of Israel remain undaunted and hopeful.

Politically, I consider myself a moderate thinker. Usually, I can appreciate both sides of the same topic. I have been a loyal and supportive member of Hadassah for more than 60 years.

Israel deserves to be respected in the community of nations. In spite of what is politically happening in our country presently, I wouldn’t give up hope that things will improve, maybe not in my lifetime—I am 88 years old— but certainly in my grandchildren’s or

great-grandchildren’s (ages nine and ten). American Jews and the country of Israel—Jews and Arabs—can do it.

Vida Gaffin Burlington, NJ AMBIVALENT ZIONISM I am so ambivalent here. I’ve had to split my love of Israel from my contempt for her government. It hurts. I cannot reconcile my vision of Israel as a place where Jews can go to be safe as Jews with what is becoming a theocracy, where extremists decide who is a Jew and whether an American convert is legitimately Jewish—even if she was converted by an Orthodox rabbi. I can’t accept that Palestinians are treated badly and ghettoized the way we were in the Middle Ages; I cannot accept that Jewish women who wish to worship at the Wall are corralled into a pen.

Israel could be so wonderful if she were true to her promise. But I’m here, not there. I have a dim notion of what it means to be scared for your life of terror attacks. I don’t like Likud sucking up to Republicans and Republicans sucking up to Likud to make them seem more acceptable to American Jews. My role is to love Israel and to tell the truth as I see it. It’s an opinion and I can only humbly offer it.

Karen Silver via momentmag.com

THE KHAN OF AJJUR AN EVOCATIVE TALE This was a most captivating and moving article (“The Ghosts of the Khan of Ajjur,” November/December 2021).

Moreover, I have a personal connection to it. I worked with Itzhak Taragan for many years at Israel Radio (Kol Israel). And in 1967, before the Six-Day War, we trained in the area, in the abandoned houses in Ajjur, as part of our house-to-house combat exercises when I was in the 50th battalion of the paratrooper brigade. Ever since, I have tried to pass by the place, but the “Khan” I don’t recall. Perhaps I

No charitable gift has a greater impact on the lives of Israelis.

There are many ways to support Israel and its people, but none is more transformative than a gift to Magen David Adom, Israel’s paramedic and Red Cross service. Your gift to MDA isn’t just changing lives — it’s literally saving them — providing critical care and hospital transport for everyone from victims of heart attacks to casualties of rocket attacks.

Save a life through a gift to Magen David Adom today. Support MDA by visiting AFMDA.org/give or calling 866.632.2763.

afmda.org

SUBSCRIBE

NOW

LIMITED TIME OFFER!

• 6 print issues a year + unlimited digital access!

at the discounted rate of $19.95 and we will send you Nine Lives: Favorite Profiles of Famous People from the Annals of Moment Magazine as a special gift.

NAME

ADDRESS

*Only available for U.S. addresses

CIT Y

STATE / ZIPCODE

4115 WISCONSIN AVE NW, SUITE LL10 WASHINGTON, DC 20016

*REQUIRED

CHECK ENCLOSED ( to Moment)

Nine Lives features profiles of Jon Stewart, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Walter Mosley, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sergey Brin, Brian Epstein, Tony Kushner & Oliver Sacks. Foreword by Sidney Offit. Afterword by Gloria Steinem.

To subscribe, visit momentmag.com/subscribe and use the promo code 9LIVES Or fill out & mail this form to Moment at

EMAIL ADDRESS for digital access, newsletters and ebook

PHONE NUMBER

• PLUS our special gift book with free shipping in the U.S.

AMEX

CARD NUMBER

VISA

MC

EXP. DATE

DS

THIS DEAL IS ONLY AVAIL ABLE FOR U.S. ADDRESSES

SIGNATURE CUT HERE TO MAIL IN

“conquered” it in one of the exercises?

Keep writing evocative articles.

Arie Gus Haifa, Israel

ASK THE RABBIS VACCINATIONS ARE MITZVAHS As a psychiatrist and medical ethicist, I found the rabbis’ discussion of vaccination refusal helpful and illuminating (“How Do You Deal With People in Your Community Who Don’t Want to Get Vaccinated?”

November/December 2021). Most of the comments rightly emphasized the need to understand a person’s reasons for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and to refrain from shaming or shunning those who refuse this lifesaving intervention.

Two of the esteemed rabbis cited Deuteronomy 30:19 (“...therefore choose 8

WINTER ISSUE 2022

life”) as the central command of the Torah, and as a biblical rationale for getting vaccinated. I was surprised, however, that the principles of pikuach nefesh (preserving life) and shmirat haguf (protecting the body) did not receive more discussion. Vaccination against COVID not only preserves one’s own life during this deadly pandemic, it also helps preserve the lives of others by reducing transmission of the virus. And as Maimonides taught us, “Bodily health and well-being are part of the path to God, for it is impossible to understand or have any knowledge of the Creator when one is sick.

Therefore one must avoid anything that may harm the body, and one must cultivate healthful habits” (Hilchos De’os 4:1).

In sum, for an ethically responsible Jew, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is far more than a “personal choice.” It is really a mitzvah—one aimed at preserving

life and protecting one’s physical health, the better to remain on the right path.

Ronald W. Pies Lexington, MA A COMMUNITY OBLIGATION I disagree with Rabbi Gershon Winkler on this question. A person who does not get vaccinated may well cause another immunocompromised person to get the virus and die. As Jews, we have an obligation to our community.

George Steinberg-Caudill via Facebook SICK AND TIRED I totally agree with Rabbi Haim Ovadia’s response that vaccines should be mandatory. I am sick and tired of the anti-vax people who are totally ignorant of the history of medical science running the conversation.

Ruiz Herrera via momentmag.com

Bennett Center for Judaic Studies THE COMPLEXITY OF ‘TALMUDIC’ A FEMINIST TAKE I completely agree with Adam Kirsch that Talmud study is “anything but a waste of time” (“The Hairsplitting Complexity of ‘Talmudic,’” November/ December 2021). Especially for women and progressive Jews, the former excluded from the text by misogynist halachic rulings and the latter by the barrier of not understanding Aramaic.

But now, in the 21st century, those are empty excuses. Anyone can study Talmud online, where nobody knows a student’s gender. There are many places where women can study Talmud in the traditional fashion, in person with a study partner; there are even yeshivot for women.

Both women and progressive Jews especially should study Talmud.

Women, because it’s a matter of power.

If women don’t know how halacha was formulated and established, then they can’t challenge it or change it. For progressive Jews, it’s learning that not all Talmudic arguments end with one winner whose ruling, often the strictest, defines halacha. Very often they end with teiku, which means that both views have merit and a person/community can follow either one.

Maggie Anton Los Angeles, CA

LECTURES AND EVENTS: Spring 2022 A Virtual Semester of Free Learning Joan and Henry Katz Lecture in Judaic Studies

“Too Long, Too Foreign. . . Too Jewish?: The Rise of Jewish Name Changing, 1917-1945” Kirsten Fermaglich, PhD, Assoc. Prof. of History and Jewish Studies, Michigan State University A Rosenberg By Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (2018).

Thursday, February 17 at 7:30 p.m.

Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Lecture in Judaic Studies

“The Ancient ‘Gender Gap’: The Bible, Archeology, and Israelite Women”

Carol L. Meyers, PhD, Mary Grace Wilson Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, Duke University Biblical scholar and field archeologist; author, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context.

Monday, March 7 at 7:30 p.m.

Registration is required at fairfield.edu/bennettprograms. For questions, contact the Bennett Center at bennettcenter@fairfield.edu or (203) 254-4000, ext. 2066

MOMENT DEBATE IS THE FILIBUSTER GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY?

A TALE OF TWO BRISKETS THE BEST MEAT YOU CAN EAT As a lover of brisket in all its forms, I enjoyed this piece very much (“A Tale of Two Briskets,” November/ December 2021). I make braised brisket in a tomato and onion sauce with beer (except for Passover) and I also have a smoker that makes Texas-style brisket. Several times, the Reform temple in town has asked for smoked brisket for 80 to 100 people instead of the braised. The stronger smoke flavor overtakes the less savory braised, but both are some of the best meat you can eat when done right.

Jerry Newman Sebastopol, CA

In the previous issue, Moment asked if the filibuster is good for democracy. Richard Arenberg, co-author of Defending the Filibuster: Soul of the Senate, said yes; Sarah A. Binder, co-author of Politics or Principle?: Filibustering in the U.S. Senate, said no. We asked Moment’s Twitter followers to weigh in.

The No’s won.

Share your opinions by sending an email to editor@momentmag.com or engaging with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social media platforms.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

9

perspectives OPINION MARSHALL BREGER

A JEWISH STATE, BUT WHAT KIND? It’s more complicated than rabbis, courts or legal rulings.

WIKIPEDIA

I

n December, Arab Knesset member Mansour Abbas noted that Israel was born as a Jewish state and will remain one, so the pressing question of the status of Arab citizens there “is not about the state’s identity.” But if the past is any guide, agreeing that Israel is a Jewish state will do little to settle what kind of Jewishness the state should represent.

The question goes back to the state’s earliest days. In 1947, the ultra-Orthodox group Agudath Israel agreed in negotiations with David Ben-Gurion to accept the new state if it used the Orthodox definition of Judaism for public functions and personal status issues (such as marriage). Orthodox political power has kept this deal in effect.

But while the Orthodox community views the matter as decided, sociological changes on the ground—such as Sephardic and Russian immigration and the growth of a hedonistic, diverse urban culture in Tel Aviv—have kept the question open.

The perennial debate over “Who is a Jew?” reflects that underlying struggle: Who gets a voice in defining Jewishness?

In 1962, the Orthodox answer—you are considered a Jew if your mother is Jewish, even if you convert to another religion— came up against the notion of political citizenship in the modern state. Brother Daniel was a Polish Jew who converted to Christianity during World War II; he later became a priest and sought to move to Israel as a cleric to minister to the Christian community there. Instead of seeking a clerical visa, he tried to immigrate under the Israeli “law of return,” which states that all Jews, with very narrow exceptions, have the right to move to Israel and become citizens.

The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that when Brother Daniel became a priest, he perforce chose not to participate in the community of fate (in Hebrew, brit goral) that is the Jewish people, and therefore could not make use of the state’s law of return. The 10

WINTER ISSUE 2022

court thus rejected the Orthodox definition of citizenship, finding, in Judge Zvi Berenson’s words, that the law should be given a “secular-national and not a religious connotation.”

The court took the secular-national approach further in the 1968 case in which an Israel Defense Forces officer, Benjamin Shalit, married a Scottish Christian woman, brought her to Israel and sought to register his children as Jewish by nationality, not religion. The court accepted this position, with Judge Yoel Sussman finding that affiliation “to a given religion or a given nation derives principally from the subjective feeling of the person concerned.”

The Knesset, however, in effect overruled the court’s decision. It immediately amended the Law of Return in 1970 to grant automatic citizenship rights to anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent. At the same time, it explicitly defined a “Jew” as someone “who was born of a Jewish mother or has converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.”

This enshrined the Orthodox definition of “who is a Jew” in secular law.

The law further defined anyone who has converted to Judaism as a Jew, and therefore able to take advantage of the law of return, but it did not specify what type of conversion would count. Orthodox law as codified by the Israeli rabbinate does not recognize the validity of Conservative or Reform conversions. However, in March 2021, the Israeli Supreme Court recognized conversions performed in Israel by the Reform and Conservative movements, issuing a technical opinion that used the Population Registration Act to find that the state should acknowledge as Jews all those converted by “recognized Jewish communities.”

Astonished, perhaps, by its own courage, the court then promptly retreated to statutory hairsplitting by affirming the Interior Ministry’s rejection of the application of

Brother Daniel, born Oswald Rufeisen.

Yosef Kibitya, a Ugandan member of the Abayudaya tribe, to settle in Israel under the law of return. The Abayudaya have long believed themselves to be Jewish and for some years have been undergoing formal conversion by the Conservative movement, but at the time of Kibitya’s conversion they were not yet a “recognized Jewish community.” (He had been converted a year too early.) The rejection will likely again be appealed on other grounds.

All this tells us that the politics of religion in Israel are far from settled. Sometimes the court accepts a secular-political approach and sometimes it retreats to a traditional religious approach. The Knesset, sensitive to votes, has generally hewed to the religious approach, not only on conversion but on laws related to marriage, divorce, kashrut and transportation. But popular sentiment has supported workarounds, such as the use of cultural funds to subsidize non-Orthodox synagogues.

The failure of the Orthodox definition of Jewishness to “settle in the nation” opens space for other forms of self-definition, such as the 2018 Basic Law that declared Israel “the Nation State of the Jewish People,” upending efforts by liberals to define Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.” But no one law will end the negotiation over the meaning of Jewishness in the Jewish state. Only time will tell.

Marshall Breger is a law professor at Catholic University.

OPINION INTERVIEW STEVEN F. WINDMUELLER

ARE PRO-TRUMP JEWS MOVING ON? The relationship, already complex, could worsen by 2024.

A

s 2022 ushers in a new political cycle, the relationship between former president Donald Trump and his supporters in the Jewish community—a minority, but a passionate and often influential one—seems set to enter a new and more complicated phase.

The latest twist came in December, when interviews emerged in which the former president rained abuse on his erstwhile ally, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Raging on the record to Israeli journalist Barak Ravid that Netanyahu had betrayed him by phoning to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden, Trump went on to tell Ravid that it was Netanyahu, not Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, who had been the true obstacle to Israel-Palestine peace efforts.

Now that Trump himself has opened up “daylight,” as the expression goes, between himself and Netanyahu, will pro-Israel Jews move on? Or will they stick with Trump and all that goes with him? Steven F. Windmueller, editor of the new essay collection The Impact of the Presidency of Donald Trump on American Jewry and Israel, sees hints that Jewish Republicans, in particular, may be moving toward “a Republican agenda that sees Trump as sacred leader but not necessarily as torchbearer.”

A longtime observer of Jewish communal life, Windmueller, an emeritus professor at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, sees Trump as a driver of changes in the Jewish community, but even more as a symptom of them. The increased polarization that marked the Trump years, he says, flows partly from Jewish institutions’ reluctance to address disagreements directly. Other worsening trends reflected in the essays—which cover Trump’s reception by liberals, conservatives, Orthodox Jews, millennials and the Jewish press—include rising antisemitism,

erosion of faith in democratic institutions, a tilt toward tribal rather than universalist thinking, and “truth decay,” the insidious effects of Trump’s continual assaults on reality. “We had Trump for four years,” he says, “but the Trump effect will linger in the Jewish community for a long time.”

Will Trump’s break with Netanyahu matter? For the evangelicals, it will be a blip. The pro-Israel energy of that community is larger and broader than personalities. But within Jewish circles, my sense is that it could be a longer-term problem for the Trump folks. It creates uneasiness.

It could be difficult for him to regain their confidence and support.

Not everyone in the Jewish community feels that kind of unease. I think Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America would continue to argue in favor of a second Trump term. The essay he and Elizabeth A. Berney contributed to the book argues, in essence, “Look what he delivered!” Like the evangelicals, they’re used to Trump acting out.

On the other hand, an essay in the book

by Matthew Brooks and Shari Hillman of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) concludes that while some Trump policies brought “astonishment and appreciation,” other behaviors produced “deep disappointment and dismay.” They predict that, given the polarization of reactions, it will be 50 or even 100 years before we can render a “just verdict” on the Trump presidency.

Will Trump be that coalition’s candidate in 2024? I think that crowd may be withholding their vote to see how things play out. Will other Republicans come with less baggage but carrying the core messages that interest the coalition? Many of these folks were not Trumpers from the outset; in 2016 there were Jewish Republicans supporting Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Nikki

Haley. They only came around at the very end. So that group may watch from the sidelines for awhile. If Trump captures the nomination, I’d guess that in fairly significant numbers they’d return to him.

What moments were key turning points in the Trump-Jewish relationship? Charlottesville was profoundly important in Trump’s relationship with Jews. While the question of what he said there has become polarized in itself—the Klein-Berney essay in the book pushes back hard on this—it started a conversation. And what followed, in Pittsburgh and in other incidents, in a sense traumatized the American Jewish community. The Pew study of 2020 confirms the high degree of concern American Jews have about antisemitism, levels that did not exist in the previous 2013 study.

January 6 was another reframing moment. It challenged the whole notion of democracy and the rule of law, and faith in institutions, and that really triggered Jews—Republicans as well as Democrats.

What other factors will linger from the “Trump effect”? What interests me is the long-term political future of the very influential cohort of Republican Jews who walked away from the Republican Party because of Trump. Many of them supported Biden in 2020, others sat it out, or voted libertarian to demonstrate their disgust and anger at the American political scene. What happens next? And the longer-term question should be put before Jewish Democrats too. What happens if the progressives grow their strength in the party and become more challenging, especially on matters of Israel and of where Jews fit in? Where will those voters go?

INTERVIEW BY AMY E. SCHWARTZ WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

11

OPINION LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN

DINNERS AND DIALOGUES ARE NOT ENOUGH Can Black Jews help us reset the table and truly come together?

I

’ve been obsessed with Black-Jewish relations for half a century.

As a young adult, I was emotionally and ideologically invested in the storied civil rights alliance of the 1950s and 1960s (which was not quite as perfect as we thought at the time).

The following decades saw rising hostility between Blacks and Jews, as incendiary events—from the Ocean Hill-Brownsville, New York teachers’ strike to the Crown Heights riots—exposed the shift away from shared struggle and toward each community’s politics of self-interest. Distressed by the dissolution of bonds that had seemed to me organic and unbreakable, I became convinced that the way to repair the rift was to engage in intergroup dialogue.

In the 1980s, two such enterprises animated my hopes. First, I became part of a large coed dialogue group composed halfand-half of Jews and African Americans prominent in New York City affairs—opinion makers, politicians, journalists, clergy members, bigwigs in business and the arts.

Then a Black woman from that cadre joined me in organizing a small, intimate group made up of three Black women and three Jewish women.

The big group met intermittently but unraveled after two years when it became clear that the Black members mostly wanted to mobilize the Jews for joint action to mitigate systemic racism, while the Jews mostly wanted Blacks to acknowledge antisemitism in their ranks. Meanwhile, our six-woman dialogue group had dinner at one another’s homes on a regular basis for ten years, during which we engaged in soul-searing, bone-deep conversations about our feelings and experiences that opened my eyes to Black reality and forever altered my relationship to “the other.”

In the mid-1990s, I was invited to participate in a foundation-funded dialogue group of Black and Jewish writers, thinkers and

12

WINTER ISSUE 2022

scholars convened by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Our mandate was to analyze the needs, commonalities and differences of our two constituencies and produce a joint plan of action. Sadly, after a promising start, the project was disbanded with no explanation.

Relations between Black and Jewish Americans nose-dived in the 2000s as clashes over Palestinian rights, police and prison reform, the Women’s March and Louis Farrakhan ginned up each side’s vilification of the other.

This rancorous antipathy was deeply demoralizing for those of us raised to believe that Blacks and Jews are natural allies based on our historic, though vastly different, roles as American out-groups and our shared faith in the liberatory promise of the Exodus. However, in the last few years, I’ve been buoyed by new forms of constructive engagement on racial issues, spearheaded by people who themselves are both Black and Jewish.

In Moment’s Fall 2020 issue, editor Sarah Breger summarized the activities and objectives of Jews of color—be they Black, Sephardi, Mizrachi, Asian, Latinx, Indigenous or from Arab countries. Since reading the piece, I’ve discovered many visionary initiatives created and run by Jews of color whose mission-driven vigor seems indefatigable. For instance, Be’chol Lashon (raising awareness of “the racial, ethnic and cultural diversity of Jewish identity and experience”); Jews of Color Initiative (grantmaking, research, community education); Black Jewish Liberation Collective (political and cultural organizing, including “Kwanzakkah” observances that meld Hanukkah and Kwanzaa into “one awesome night of song, prayer, and community”); Jewtina y Co. (celebrating Latin-Jewish traditions); and LUNAR (an online community of Asian American Jews).

In June 2020, a group called Not Free to

Desist made news when it published a gloriously chutzpadik open letter demanding that mainstream (white, Ashkenazi) Jewish federations, funders and organizations commit to seven obligations giving top priority to racial justice, antiracist activism and the greater inclusion of Jews of color in leadership. More than 1,500 organizations and individuals endorsed the letter.

Just as happened in earlier decades, some of their demands hit a communal nerve.

To wit: The first item is “explicit endorsement” of the statement that Black Lives Matter “is inherently true and should be accepted without caveat or qualification.”

Though many white Jews have felt alienated by aspects of the BLM movement, or discomfited by the affiliations of some of its leaders, Leo Ferguson, organizer of the Jews of Color caucus at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, says, “If Black Jews are us, then Black Lives Matter is a Jewish fight for liberation and justice.” It’s the goal that counts, and the goal is a just world.

Ultimately, activist Jews of color are fighting for recognition of their dignity, authenticity and legitimacy as Jews among Jews. But because they forged their identities in the crucible of both Black and Jewish experience, and likely were seared by both racism and antisemitism, their sensitivities, priorities and loyalties are doubled. The entire community should thank them for literally embodying complexity and tirelessly testing our commitment to the Jewish values we claim to hold dear. The question is, will the larger Jewish community be better able to hear the truth about Black experience when it comes from voices within our own ranks? And will this generation accomplish the bridge-building that ours could not?

Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s 12th book, Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy, will be published in September.

OPINION NAOMI RAGEN

BLINDED BY A BLACK HAT A 35-year-old murder case reveals weaknesses in Israel’s justice system.

I

against Berland, who fled the country and spent the next four years on a frenzied odyssey through the United States, Italy, Switzerland, Morocco (from which he was expelled by King Mohammed VI himself), Egypt, and finally South Africa and Zimbabwe, where a wealthy follower provided a private plane and luxury accommodations.

Eventually, a devout follower convinced him to hire lawyers and return to Israel.

He did. Duly convicted of sexual assault and indecent behavior, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and paroled after only three. That was in 2017. In 2020, he faced new charges of fraud and extortion for milking millions of shekels from desperately ill people with promises of miracle cures—which were actually just overthe-counter medications and candy. A plea deal arranged another slap-on-the-wrist 18-month sentence.

Meanwhile, however, fate intervened: Investigative reporter Shany Haziza of Israel’s Kan broadcasting authority came across the Nissim Shitrit case. She aired her findings on Israeli television in 2019 in the documentary Rav Hanistar (“The Hidden Rabbi”). The report, which shocked the nation, alleged that under orders from Berland, Nissim was kidnapped by two of Berland’s followers, Benjamin Ze’evi (son of a late government minister) and Baruch Sharvit. Taking Nissim to the thick forests outside of Beit Shemesh, the two allegedly met up with others from Shuvu Banim, who joined in mercilessly beating the teenager to death and burying him in the area. The documentary went on to allege that four years later, Berland ordered his followers to commit a second murder, also for “immodest behavior”—of haredi teacher Avi Edri, whose brutalized, lifeless body was found in the forests of Ramot.

Haziza’s documentary embarrassed Israeli police into dusting off these files. In

Nissim Shitrit, who disappeared in 1986.

December, both Ze’evi and Sharvit were indicted for Nissim’s murder. Berland, who had been serving his fraud sentence, was rearrested, but no additional charges have yet been brought. He was given early release in mid-December for medical reasons. In the Edri case, the person who allegedly drove the victim to the murder site is currently the elected mayor of a haredi township, and his name cannot be published because of a court order. He was taken into custody, only to be released on the grounds that he was a minor at the time and that the statute of limitations on kidnapping had now expired. He is now back in city hall conducting business as usual.

Like the child-abusing cult of Elior Chen, on which I based my novel Devil in Jerusalem, and the cult of Lev Tahor, here is one more frightening example of the horrifying results of Hasidic-like cults and the failure of the Israeli police and the justice system to provide adequate intervention and punishment. Israel would do well to examine why in this case, and many others involving rabbinical misconduct, authorities are often reluctant to get involved, perhaps hampered by their own religious beliefs, leaving black-clad psychopaths with long beards free to destroy more innocent lives.

Naomi Ragen is a novelist and playwright living in Zichron Yaakov, Israel.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

13

SCREENSHOT: KAN 11

remember the Shitrit family. Very devout new immigrants from Morocco, they lived in the building next to mine in Sanhedria Murchevet, the dusty Northern Jerusalem neighborhood designated for religious olim, or immigrants, by the Jewish Agency in the 1970s. On January 23, 1986, their son Nissim, a 16-year-old yeshiva student, disappeared without a trace. Now, 35 years later, that tragic mystery seems on its way to being solved, bringing with it a new reminder of the dangers posed by mindless worship of a charismatic rebbe, as well as the inadequacy of the response of Israeli police and the justice system in coping with criminals posing as holy men.

Four months before he disappeared, Nissim had made a police complaint against men connected to a self-styled “modesty patrol”—associated with a yeshiva—who had put him in the hospital for the “crime” of going out with girls. He named the yeshiva as Rabbi Eliezer Berland’s Shuvu Banim, a place with a reputation for catering to newly religious men with long rap sheets. Nissim also named some of his attackers, all men connected to Shuvu Banim. Inexplicably, after he disappeared, police never investigated Berland, his yeshiva or the named disciples. Instead, they dropped the case, leaving the devastated family in limbo for decades.

Perhaps this had something to do with Berland having all the right credentials— he’d been a study partner of the renowned Rav Chaim Kanievsky, a top authority for many in the haredi world. Berland was certainly idolized by his followers—that is, until 2012, when one of them shimmied up the side of Berland’s building, peered through his window and, to his profound shock, witnessed Berland involved in a sexual act with a young married woman from the community. Soon after, two women filed complaints of rape and sexual assault

moment debate

NO

Would a ban on abortion curtail Jews’ religious freedom? No. Abortion in general, at least abortion at will, is not mandated

by Jewish religious law. There are notable exceptions: If the mother’s life is in danger, then she might be required to have an abortion. Some argue that it’s in the best interest of the Jewish community that abortions stay legal and safe, in order to give women the freedom to have abortions in cases where it is mandated or permitted by halacha. For this reason the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel have historically submitted briefs in Supreme Court cases with the pro-choice camp so that abortion will remain safe, legal and, at least in their community, rare.

They are prioritizing their specific interests over their general values. There may be a certain advantage to that approach, but I don’t think it’s a question of religious liberty, just a question of what role the government should play.

“

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, the Jewish community must introduce nuance into the debate.

SHLOMO BRODY for a fetus: It’s not a full-fledged human being, but in general it should be protected.

One should violate Shabbat in order to save the life of a fetus. But Jewish law does not share the Catholic view that full human life begins at conception. And this allows for some flexibility to permit abortions in certain limited circumstances.

Are there circumstances where Jewish law permits or even requires abortion?

There’s a widespread consensus that women may and sometimes must have an abortion when their life or health is in danger. In other limited cases, opinions are mixed. The clearest indication that we don’t attribute full human status to a fetus is that feticide is not treated like homicide in the Bible. A murderer can be subject to the death penalty. A person who kills a fetus is not, and Exodus 21 seems to punish such an action via tort law. It’s bad, but far from the equivalent of killing someone.

What would happen to those cases in a post-Roe v. Wade environment? If Roe v.

Wade gets fully overturned, which I doubt will happen, presumably abortion then goes back to the states. Many will preserve very liberal abortion laws. Others will be more restrictive, but I predict they will still permit abortions when the mother’s life is in danger, and probably make exceptions for rape or incest or other cases where Jewish law mandates or permits abortion.

A stricter ban, such as a personhood amendment granting the fetus full human rights from conception, would be different and unwise. The Jewish community would need to work against that because it would create ambiguities about the nature of a fetus that could indeed harm our ability to get an abortion when necessary. Maybe I’m naïve, but I think it’s highly unlikely that the court or the legislatures would do that.

America has a deep-rooted tradition of respecting religious practices. I hope and anticipate that whether in the Supreme Court or state legislatures, those with wellgrounded arguments that their religion permits some abortions would have access to exemptions.

Does Jewish law support a pro-choice position, then? If by pro-choice we mean the woman has full autonomy over her body and can decide at will not to keep a pregnancy, I do not think Jewish law supports that. Jewish law recognizes a special status

Are Americans debating abortion within a Christian framework? It’s unfortunate that the “religious perspective” as portrayed in public discourse is the Catholic or Southern Baptist view that life begins at conception, which is not the traditional

14

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Jewish view. But abortion also shouldn’t be framed as a religion-and-state issue. Many (not all!) on the pro-life side are inspired by religion but believe their views on abortion are also rooted in reason or philosophy. It would be best if we turned the conversation more toward what’s the best way to decide among competing visions of life and liberty in a diverse and pluralist society. In general, in democratic societies, that’s done through the legislatures.

What would a Jewish framing of the abortion debate look like? As with much political discourse, the abortion debate is polarized. Judaism offers a more nuanced perspective. Polling has regularly shown Americans are much more conflicted on this issue than the extreme positions that are portrayed. They may think abortion is sometimes reasonable, without saying it should be taken lightly or allowed in all circumstances. They may recognize a fetus is not a full-fledged human being but is still clearly something we care about. At the same time, Jewish law does not believe life begins at conception and does not see feticide, even late in pregnancy, as equivalent to homicide. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, the Jewish community must try to introduce some of this nuance into the debate.

From a Jewish perspective, it would also be wise for the states that limit abortion to increase access to contraception.

Although the issue of contraception is complex in Jewish thought, it’s very different from abortion. We’d much prefer people use contraception rather than abortion as birth control.

Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody is the co-dean of the Tikvah Online Academy. His book, A Guide to the Complex: Contemporary Halakhic Debates, won a National Jewish Book Award.

Would a ban on abortion curtail Jews’ religious freedom?

YES

Would a ban on abortion curtail Jews’ religious freedom? Yes. Abortion bans are predicated on assumptions about when life begins that have specific Christian theological assumptions baked into them. Not the assumptions of every Christian denomination—many of them are extremely supportive of abortion rights. However, claims about when life begins are theological claims, and that impacts Jews, Muslims, secular people and many others who may understand this biological process differently. The Texas law SB 8, which the Supreme Court recently declined to block, says you can sue people who aid and abet an abortion, which is a liability for rabbis who, following Jewish law, might advise someone to get an abortion.

Are there circumstances where Jewish law permits or even requires abortion?

In the simplest, most clear-cut case, Judaism mandates abortion in order to save the life of the pregnant person. That’s completely uncontroversial. The Mishnah says that if someone is having difficulty in labor and you have to decide whose life to save, if the fetus’s head hasn’t emerged, it is permitted to go in and cut the fetus in pieces.

Maimonides defined this as a negative commandment—to not take pity on the “pursuer,” one who might take a life—and extended the permissibility of abortions in such cases to those using medication.

Many reasons to have an abortion are deemed halachically valid. The Talmud states that for the first 40 days after conception, the fetus is considered “mere water,” maya b’alma, which, as we count pregnancy today, is approximately 7-8 weeks of gestation—which is when about two-thirds of abortions take place. After that, the fetus is considered “a limb of its mother” until birth.

Exodus 21:22-23 establishes that the fetus

“

Claims about when life begins are theological claims, and that impacts Jews and many others who understand it differently.

DANYA RUTTENBERG doesn’t have the status of a person, since a man who causes a miscarriage by striking a pregnant woman is punished with civil damages paid to the woman’s husband. More recently, in 1740, Yehudah Ibn Ayyash, head of the religious court in Algiers, is asked for a ruling or teshuva on the practice of women in the city who perform medication abortions, making the decisions themselves. He concludes it’s acceptable. Jacob Emden, writing around the same time, permits an abortion for a married woman who had an affair, and says abortion can be permitted even of a legitimate fetus if there is “great need” or to save the woman from “an associated evil that could cause her great pain.” In 1913, another well-known authority, Mordechai Winkler, equates protecting mental health with protecting physical health as a reason for abortion. Ben Zion Chai Uziel says an abortion may be acceptable “even for a slim reason, such as to prevent disgrace.” This has been mainstream halacha for a long time.

Does Jewish law support a pro-choice position, then? A better term for it might be abortion justice. We are commanded to pursue justice and create a just society, so working to make sure abortion is accessible to everybody is critical. Our tradition believes in creating a world where every child who is born is supported and cared for. In a broader sense, economic justice and racial justice are Jewish values, and access to abortion is intertwined with them.

It allows people to have dignity and the possibility of changing their own lives.

What would happen to those cases in a post-Roe v. Wade environment? Some suggest a religious exemption for Jews. But it’s not that simple. A religious accommodation might help a tiny percentage of Jews who know how to fill out the paperwork

and have the privilege and the access and the connections to say, “I’m Jewish enough to get an abortion.” But even then, I’ve been hearing stories of people in Texas with ectopic pregnancies being advised by doctors to drive 10 or 12 hours to neighboring states to get an abortion, because doctors in Texas are so terrified of performing abortions and getting busted. Technically, the Texas law has a provision that if your life is in danger, as it is from an ectopic pregnancy, you can have an abortion. But people are nervous about losing their medical licenses, so unless you’re bleeding out in the ER, they won’t do it. If you begin banning abortions, this is the world we’ll have. People will die.

We have a profound Jewish obligation to prevent that—for everybody.

Are Americans debating abortion within a Christian framework? It’s deeply Christian, in ways I think people haven’t fully absorbed. People, even some Jews, have become so used to certain kinds of language and rhetoric that we don’t even necessarily see the influence of evangelical Christian concepts. It’s like the old joke about one fish asking, “How’s the water?” and the other fish saying, “What’s water?”

What would a Jewish framing of the abortion debate look like? Are we preventing unnecessary suffering? Are we centering people’s agency and dignity? Are we each created in the divine image and provided with the agency and dignity to make our own call on how to navigate the body we are issued? Or does somebody else get to decide for us?

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women and author of seven books, including several about gender, sexuality and Judaism.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

15

ask the rabbis

Is political compromise a Jewish virtue?

ILLUSTRATION COMPOSITE MADE FROM DRAWKIT

independent Absolutely. That’s how Abraham resolves his dispute with Lot over grazing lands: “If you head left, I’ll head right.

If you head right, I’ll go left” (Genesis 13:9). Four hundred years later, Moses introduces the politics of tribal land apportionment via the male heads of each family, which works fine for everyone but five orphaned brotherless sisters of the tribe of Menashe—Mah’lah, No’ah, Tirzah, Milkah and Hag’lah (Numbers 26:33). Rather than dismiss the sisters’ 16

WINTER ISSUE 2022

complaints, Moses works out a compromise: They get the land that would have been assigned to their father, in return for keeping it within their tribe (Numbers 27:1-8 and 36:6-10). Centuries later, the prophet Ezekiel asks: What to do about non-Jewish settlers pouring into the Promised Land, where every inch has already been split among our tribes?

Comes the Word of God: “‘And you shall divide up this land amongst all of you… and also to the strangers [the non-Jews] who sojourn amongst you and who have borne children amongst you, and they

shall be to you like native citizens amid the Children of Israel…within whichever [Jewish] tribal land that the stranger is living…you should give to him his portion” (Ezekiel 47:22).

Rabbi Gershon Winkler Walking Stick Foundation Monument, CO

humanist Politics is group decision-making, which by definition includes individuals

with conflicting priorities, interests and worldviews. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It can even contribute to values clarification. A community considering whether to spend fixed resources on filling potholes or on fixing sidewalks is really weighing conflicting needs of drivers and pedestrians. In such debates, Judaism offers values like shalom bayit, the promotion of domestic harmony. It can help us reach fair compromises that allow us to collectively move forward.

But there are limits. Some values are beyond compromise. These include accommodations that violate the higher Jewish (and Humanistic) virtues of human dignity and equal justice for all. On these grounds, Jews who honor human rights must recognize that compromise is no Jewish virtue. America’s history offers one of the greatest reasons to oppose concessions that damage human rights.

We need look no further than the idolized U.S. Constitution, the product of compromises that created a profoundly unrepresentative upper legislative body, a bizarrely undemocratic presidential “electoral college” and the unspeakably inhuman “three-fifths compromise.”

Today’s Americans continue to pay the price of loving compromise more than human dignity.

Rabbi Jeffrey L. Falick Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Metro Detroit Birmingham Hills, MI

renewal Perhaps so, but I would say, not enough of a virtue. Of course, Jews famously value argument, especially arguments “for the sake of heaven”—those which produce something of lasting good, even if only a respect for multiple viewpoints. What arguments, then, are “not for the sake of heaven?” These have to do with power, self-interest and authority—arguments that, according to Pirkei Avot, “will not be established in the end.” The cryptic language here is usually understood as a condemnation. But perhaps one way to

read the statement is that arguments over power—i.e., political arguments—do not and should not result in a permanent favoring of one faction over another.

During 2,000 years without a state of our own, Jewish tradition had little practice in making the kind of political compromises that arise in questions of governance. Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University suggests that in exile, schisms within the Jewish community were so common because they caused little serious harm, given the absence of a real power structure that disunity could threaten. Hence the familiar joke about the Jew marooned on the desert island who builds two synagogues, then tells his rescuers that one of them is “the shul I wouldn’t set foot in.”

We have much work to do in our Jewish communities, here as well as in Israel, to find ways of containing and defusing more substantive political disputes, to recognize that even arguments “not for the sake of heaven” are necessary and normal and must take place within the bounds of the political process.

Rabbi Gilah Langner Kol Ami Arlington, VA

recontructionist The answer, in good middle-ground style, is yes and no. Compromise is virtuous when it achieves the best possible outcomes for real people in the real world, despite falling short of the ideal. It’s odious when core values or constituencies get sacrificed along the way, as happens far too often. Both are true, in Judaism as in politics.

Maimonides sanctifies the “golden mean,” often the path of compromise.

Indeed, in the “sausage-making” that produces policy, certain compromises are inevitable. This reality of democracy requires Rashi’s caveat: In the verse “Justice, justice you shall pursue” (Deut. 16:20), he says, “justice” is doubled, since both our means and our ends should be just.

The policy arguments between the

COMPROMISE IS VIRTUOUS WHEN IT ACHIEVES THE BEST POSSIBLE OUTCOMES FOR REAL PEOPLE IN THE REAL WORLD, DESPITE FALLING SHORT OF THE IDEAL.

schools of Hillel and Shammai, though vehement, were “for the sake of heaven” (Avot 5:17). Both sides stood for solid if differing values; both were committed to truth. Korach and his band, by contrast, spouted populist rhetoric while trampling truth. Enriching and empowering only themselves, they undermined the collective enterprise.

Today’s political choices are similar.

Compromise on how much to spend or regulate? Necessary; kosher. Compromise over truth: whether vaccines save lives, climate change threatens lives, or racism is real? Political sausage; treif.

Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation Bethesda, MD

reform If you look at a Jewish home and notice a slanted mezuzah on the doorpost, you see the virtue of compromise in action.

When two medieval Torah scholars, Rashi and Rabbenu Tam, who were grandfather and grandson to each other, disagreed on how to hang a mezuzah—vertically or horizontally—a third scholar suggested this compromise. Today most Ashkenazi Jews hang the mezuzah at an angle.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

17

THERE ARE TIMES WHEN COMPROMISE OR APPEASEMENT IS A DESECRATION OF GOD’S NAME, AND OTHER CASES WHERE A REFUSAL TO COMPROMISE BRINGS DISASTER.

Compromise, in Jewish law called peshara, requires all parties to give, get and make accommodations so that everyone leaves with some level of satisfaction. Compromise requires creativity and allows for more original resolutions to emerge. Good compromise requires nuance and willingness to let go in the service of moving closer to greater healing, justice and peace.

Compromise is hard. Jewish law recognizes this very human element. This is where our tradition offers insight into the many challenges we see today in the political sphere. Those sitting around the tables of political debate have to be willing and ready to compromise. They have to be open to hearing, accepting and even embracing elements of truth that come from diverse voices and perspectives. When they do, peace and justice will emerge.

Rabbi Dr. Laura Novak Winer Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Fresno, CA

conservative Politics is about the exercise of power.

Throughout history, Jews have lacked 18

WINTER ISSUE 2022

power and have had differences of opinion over the best strategy for dealing with those in authority over them. The Talmud describes how, in the Roman siege of Jerusalem, the Jewish Zealots were opposed to any compromise (Gittin 56a).

The Zealots were known for their uncompromising stance toward polytheistic Rome and were despised by fellow Jews who wanted to find ways to work with or around the Romans. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of Jerusalem in order to secure the yeshiva at Yavneh, resorting to this tactic because the Jewish Zealots in the city resisted all attempts to deal with the Romans. Strictly speaking, Rabban Yochanan’s action was not a compromise, since a compromise requires that each side have some measure of power to give or withhold, and the Jews in Jerusalem seemingly had neither. And yet, one can argue that Rabban Yochanan retained some element of spiritual power and sought to relocate it, while the Zealots insisted that raw material power was all that counted. They were prepared to go down fighting in order to preserve their absolute truth. Judaism survived and was reinvented because of Rabban Yochanan.

Rabbi Amy S. Wallk Temple Beth El Springfield, MA

sustainable pace, until incremental improvements add up to the utopian goal of a good life and full dignity for everyone.

In the covenant, God—and the human partners—renounce coercion. They counsel, negotiate and act together—that is, they compromise. The compromise may leave people only partly satisfied, but no group is so alienated that it turns against the system.

Over the course of history, the covenantal halacha often prescribed not the ideal behavior but the best possible policy that kept people working together.

This slow method cumulatively reached great heights of social improvement. By contrast, revolutionary movements refused to accept compromises and turned to violence and coercion to realize utopian goals, often crushing one side and setting back the entire society. In Jewish history, polarization often led to tragedies—such as the revolt against Rome, which led to civil war between Zealots and peacemakers and ended in destruction and exile.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life/Hadar New York, NY

orthodox modern orthodox Political (also economic and social) compromise is prized in Jewish tradition. The Talmud states that a mediated settlement— that is, one in which both sides feel they have gotten some of their just due—is a better outcome than a strict judgment that hands a victory to one side (Sanhedrin 6b).

Without compromise, the overruled side may feel alienated and left out. This undermines the will to live together that enables a stable, functioning, productive society (just as the breakdown of bipartisanship and mutual respect between liberals and conservatives in America today threatens the viability of our democracy).

Covenant is a partnership between God and humanity, and between the generations, to improve the world at a gradual,

Virtues can be virtuous without being particularly Jewish. The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot states, “Go out and see, what is the proper path for a person to choose.”

In other words, the Maharal says, don’t expect to find the answer in ancient hoary tomes. Sometimes you’ve just got to go out there and see what works. It’s usually clear when compromise will work better than obstinacy. I wouldn’t necessarily call that a Jewish virtue, other than the virtue of using your noodle.

That said, there are lots of cases in the tradition where people should have compromised and didn’t or made compromises when they shouldn’t have. Some famous examples: The Tisha B’Av liturgy tells the story of Josiah, a righteous king of Israel who met a tragic end because he was approached by a neighboring

king, at war with another kingdom, who asked permission to pass through peaceably. Josiah decided to stand on principle: No sword could pass through the land.

That led to a war and his own destruction. Conversely, you have the story of the Jews of Shushan, whose troubles with Haman, according to the Talmud, began because the Jews agreed to join Ahasuerus at the dinner celebrating his victory over them, a dinner where the sacred vessels from the Temple were used.

It was a slap in the face for Jewish honor—but politically expedient to accept an invitation from the king. So there are times when compromise or appeasement is a desecration of God’s name, and other cases where a refusal to compromise brings disaster. There’s no formula, other than blunt honesty as to whether the decision to compromise reflects the honor of heaven rather than a personal agenda.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein Cross-Currents Los Angeles, CA

sephardic Jewish virtue is a broad category, and two Jews would have three opinions about what deserves to be included. To balance those opposing opinions we will need arbitration, and if that doesn’t bring compromise, the opposing parties will split into subdivisions, until the subdivisions disagree further...

I personally believe that compromise in any field, not just political, is a Jewish virtue, though any proof I provide could be contested. Many classic sources suggest that compromise is the ideal path when there is a dispute. Abraham reached a compromise with Abimelech and offered one to his nephew Lot. But Jacob wrested the right of the firstborn from Esau, and though Jacob tried to apologize later, they never reached agreement. Esau left Canaan to avoid a dispute, and the brothers became bitter enemies. Later in Jewish history, the Israelites pleaded with Rehoboam, son of King Solomon, to ease their burden. He refused, and the result was an unbridge-

able divide between the southern and northern kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

When we insist on doing things our way against others’ will, we may win, but the others will be left with a sense of bitterness and animosity which could easily be later aroused. When we compromise, we may make more people happy, and that, I believe, is a Jewish virtue.

Rabbi Haim Ovadia Torah VeAhava Potomac, MD

chabad Political compromise, unlike religious compromise, is usually a wonderful thing.

While compromising halachic standards—even to address pressing needs— has almost always led to adoption of the more lax standard, and must therefore be avoided whenever possible, personal or political compromise, especially for the sake of peace, has always been lauded by the Torah and even by G-d.

The Hebrew word for compromise, peshara, shares the same root as posher, to cool down. Too many unfortunate events stem from heated moments or the resulting lack of dialogue. The Torah urges the cooling down of negative and destructive passions, and Maimonides’ exhortation to walk the golden path of the center is especially relevant these days.

Lately, conviviality is in short supply, particularly in the political arena.

Whether in public policy, business, marriage or relationships generally, calming down and taking a respectful look at the other side is virtuous, even if you continue to disagree.

The country, the world and all of us would significantly benefit from seeing our leaders talk to instead of at each other, as was prevalent only a few decades ago. Don’t compromise who you are, but let who you are be one who is open to appropriate dialogue and compromise.

It ultimately brings you greater strength.

Rabbi Levi Shemtov Executive Vice President, American Friends of Lubavitch Washington, DC

GOOD COMPROMISE REQUIRES NUANCE & WILLINGNESS TO LET GO IN THE SERVICE OF MOVING CLOSER TO GREATER HEALING, JUSTICE AND PEACE.

moment(s) AIPAC LAUNCHES A PAC. WHY IT MATTERS.

LORIE SHAULL VIA FLICKR

T

he American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), America’s largest and most powerful pro-Israel lobby, announced in December its decision to create two PACs (political action committees) that will raise money for congressional candidates. Citing “hyper-partisanship, high congressional turnover, and the exponential growth in the cost of campaigns,” the lobby decided to launch both a regular PAC (which can donate up to $5,000 per candidate each election cycle) and a super PAC (unlimited in funding, but not allowed to coordinate directly with the candidate) to support pro-Israel political candidates.

Which raises a few questions: Wasn’t AIPAC already a PAC? No, that’s just a common misconception due to the lobby’s name. AIPAC, up to now, did not explicitly endorse candidates or raise funds for them.

The other question is: Should you care? Since its founding in 1951, AI20

WINTER ISSUE 2022

PAC has walked a fine line: It lobbied for pro-Israel causes in Congress and made sure its supporters were aware of each member’s voting record on issues the lobby cares about, but also took pains to distance itself from direct fundraising for candidates.

Now, the lobby, through its new PACs, will come out as a full-fledged political player, making no secret of its support for certain candidates and the financial benefits that these candidates’ campaigns can expect from the lobby’s supporters.

It is a sign, as AIPAC noted, of the changing times in DC politics and in the pro-Israel arena, where direct money is a necessary tool. Subtle winks and nods are no longer a match for checks carrying the group’s name.

The move will also make it easier for AIPAC to correct course and bolster its claim of bipartisanship, which has been called into question after some very public spats between the lobby and progressive Democrats.

Raising funds directly for both Dem-

BY NATHAN GUTTMAN

ocratic and Republican candidates will help the lobby highlight its contributions to centrist Democrats, demonstrating that its support is truly bipartisan—and that it excludes those on the margins of both parties who oppose pro-Israel legislation. In other words, the next time someone claims AIPAC leans Republican because of its attacks on members of “the Squad,” the lobby will be able to come back and respond: “We’re not against the Democrats! Look at all the money we just gave Democratic candidates.”

As expected, AIPAC’s move drew immediate fire from its critics, mainly from J Street, the left-leaning pro-Israel lobby.

J Street chose an interesting strategy: It did not criticize AIPAC for entering the field of direct political fundraising (which J Street has been doing for years), but rather presented a challenge: “J Street calls on AIPAC and all pro-Israel PACs not to endorse any lawmaker who voted against Congressional certification of 2020 election results on January 6 or otherwise supported the ‘Big Lie’ which

POEM SANDY SOLOMON

falsely claims that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election.”

The Jewish Democratic Council immediately agreed (but that’s easy, since they only support Democrats), as did the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), which also only provides funding for Democratic candidates. But DMFI responded to J Street with a challenge of its own: “We are still waiting for @jstreetdotorg to join us in refusing to back candidates who voted against replenishing the life-saving #IronDome missile defense system.”

“

IF A POLITICIAN IS ON AIPAC’S SIDE REGARDING ISRAEL, THEY WILL RECEIVE ITS BLESSING. As for AIPAC, it is not at all clear that the lobby can commit to not backing candidates who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. That list of 147 Republicans includes staunch supporters of Israel such as Senators Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, as well as Representatives Lee Zeldin and Brian Mast. Clearly, AIPAC has no plans of shunning these lawmakers or others on the very long list of Republicans who backed Trump’s attempt to overturn the election results.

And none of the lobby’s supporters really expects them to.

AIPAC’s fundamental approach to partisan politics is issue-based. If a politician is on its side regarding Israel, they will receive the lobby’s blessing, regardless of their stance on other issues.

An excerpt from Moment’s bi-weekly column, Moment’s Politics & from Jewish Politics andJewish Power, with reporting Power newsletter is published politics reporter, Nathan Guttman.Read every other week.

Sign up at more at momentmag.com and sign up for the newsmomentmag.com/jpp

How can we teach history—or learn from it—if we can’t agree on facts? “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa” revisits the harrowing photo of that name and asks what “other perspectives” could bear upon its content. To consider such evidence, to look at it squarely and refuse to turn away, is a first step toward knowledge— whether the event it documents occurred far off or close to home.

—Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor

“the last jew in vinnitsa” Said to be on the back of a photo found in a German soldier’s album,

these words have attached themselves to the image itself.

The man who kneels at the edge of a pit heaped with bodies, the man who kneels at the edge of a pit heaped with bodies—the man who kneels at the edge of a pit heaped with bodies—is looking up at the crowd of German soldiers watching him.

They stand like lynch-mob casuals around their day’s achievement. Bespectacled, a German soldier, behind the man, leans slightly to extend a gun, trigger ready.

In the kneeling man’s lap bunches his coat, a pile of ordinary warmth he maybe thought he’d need. I can imagine him, the fact of him, before this day. I don’t have to imagine this photo—

I’ll give them their own opinions, not their own facts, the Senator said. And yet, a pliant official, telling Texan teachers about new law, advises, If you assign a book about the Holocaust, also assign “one that has opposing…other perspectives.”

But what “perspective” beside this view across the pit where a second soldier stood to click his shutter a moment before the killing shot? Did that soldier bring his exposed film to a shop and later spread his snaps across a tabletop to scrawl his slanted notes on their backs? Perhaps. No one now can say, but the photo of that name still frames the fact: a thin man, hair rumpled, collar buttoned, hands clenched, who, kneeling on the edge, briefly watched the German soldiers standing around his almost slaughtered town.

Sandy Solomon is writer in residence in creative writing at Vanderbilt University.

Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines, most recently The New Yorker. Her book, Pears, Lake, Sun, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

21

visual moment Man Ray in Paris Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, the artist spent the 1920s and 1930s in the French capital creating iconic photographs of the city’s international avant-garde

BY DIANE M. BOLZ

© MAN RAY 2015 TRUST / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/ADAGP, PARIS 2021

W

alking through the exhibition of artist Man Ray’s photographs at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is like stepping into a time machine. One is instantly transported back to the exhilarating, cosmopolitan Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, with its bohemian atmosphere and compelling cast of artists, writers and performers. A sense of teeming creativity emanates from the gallery walls, hung with Ray’s portraits of such cultural and artistic luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Salvador Dali, Igor Stravinsky and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

In the years between the two world wars, Paris, a symbol of artistic freedom and modernity, became a mecca for the international avant-garde. Amidst this assembly, a close-knit community of American expatriates formed, prompted in part by the end of World War I, the favorable exchange rate between the dollar and the franc, and the end of the deadly 1918-1919 flu epidemic.

Among this group was the artist and photographer Man Ray, a founding father of the antiestablishment, satirical Dada movement and follower of the modernist sensibility of photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Emmanuel “Manny” Radnitzky, who adopted the pseudonym Man Ray around 1912, was born in South Philadelphia and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. At Brooklyn’s Boys’ High School he learned drafting and other art techniques, and during frequent visits to local museums, he studied works by the Old Masters.

Turning down a scholarship to pursue architecture, he decided instead to concentrate on painting. Although he had owned a simple Brownie camera for years, his career as a self-taught photographer didn’t really start 22

WINTER ISSUE 2022

until 1915, when he began making reproductions of his own artwork while living in New York City. Soon he was photographing works for other artists, as well as for organizations such as the Société Anonyme, which he cofounded with artists Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Drier in 1920 to promote modern art in the United States.

A sale of his paintings to Ohio art collector Ferdinand Howald earned Ray the funds for a much-coveted trip to Paris. Arriving in the French capital in July 1921, he soon came into contact with American writer Gertrude Stein and American expat Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company, the renowned Parisian bookstore. Both women became champions of his work.

Beach commissioned him to do a photographic portrait of Irish writer James Joyce for publicity related to his landmark novel Ulysses, which she published in February 1922. “Shakespeare and Company sent the writer to me to have press photos made,” Ray wrote in his autobiography, Self-Portrait. “I went to work on Joyce because his fine Irish face, although marred by thick glasses—he was between two operations on his eyes—interested me…he seemed to consider the sitting a terrible nuisance.”

Although Ray worked in a variety of media, including film, sculpture and painting, photography was the means he favored during his time in Paris. He made his first photographic portraits there around November 1921 and soon set out on a mission to record the city’s bohemian art scene. The remarkable series of portraits he produced documented the international avant-garde gathered in the city and established him as one of the leading photographers of his era.

“Man Ray: The Paris Years,” on view in Richmond through February 21, 2022, was planned to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the artist’s arrival in the French capital. Organized by Michael Taylor, VMFA’s chief curator and deputy director for art and education, this revelatory exhibition is supported by extensive archival research. Featuring more than 100 photographs, the show focuses not only on the artist’s achievement as a photographer and portraitist, but also on the friendships and exchange of ideas that took place between

Man Ray created “Self-Portrait with Camera” in 1930 using the innovative process of solarization, which produced the halo-like effect that outlines his profile. Ray is seen adjusting the focal range of his camera, whose lens points outward, as if the viewer were his next subject.

© MAN RAY 2015 TRUST / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/ADAGP, PARIS 2021

the artist and his subjects. An emphasis on storytelling lies at the heart of the exhibition. By relating the stories of Ray’s respective sitters and highlighting the innovative techniques he used to create their portraits, the show gives the subjects of his photographs a voice that brings them to life.

Ray connected with a number of his subjects at the renowned Saturday evening salons that Gertrude Stein held at the Montparnasse apartment she shared with her partner, Alice B. Toklas.

The salons provided the opportunity for members of the expatriate American community to meet with their European counterparts and engage in dialogue. Stein’s impressive collection of modern paintings, by such artists as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, provided an apt backdrop for the group’s discussions. Ray became Stein’s official photographer in the 1920s and through her met future clients and patrons.

The bohemian art world of Paris soon beat a path to Man Ray’s studio. “As a photographer, I was in demand,” the artist explained to John Bainbridge, a writer at The New Yorker. “I was like a doctor. Everybody needed me.” Bookstore owner Sylvia Beach noted that Ray and his pupil Berenice Abbott were the official portraitists of “the crowd” and that the walls of her store 24

WINTER ISSUE 2022

were covered with their photographs. To “be done” by Ray and Abbott, she said, meant that you rated as somebody.

Ray’s photography produced a substantial income and also contributed to his rapid rise to fame in the French capital.

During his early days there, the artist was commissioned to make portraits of such notable figures as French artist Marie Laurencin and American poet William Carlos Williams, mainly for promotion related to upcoming publications, events or exhibitions. In addition to the fees Ray received for these portraits, he was also paid when the images appeared in magazines such as Vanity Fair. He ventured as well into fashion photography in collaboration with designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Thanks to revenue from these endeavors, he was able to rent a luxurious two-floor apartment in Montparnasse, where he lived from 1922 to 1935.

French poet, playwright and filmmaker Jean Cocteau was Ray’s greatest advocate during those early years. Ray met Cocteau in 1921 through a mutual friend, painter Francis Picabia, and subsequently made several portraits of the poet. Cocteau, who had extensive connections within the Parisian avant-garde, introduced Ray to actors, ballet dancers and composers, thus further expanding the photographer’s clientele.

“

MOST OF ALL, RAY WANTED TO CAPTURE THE SPIRIT OF HIS SUBJECTS… HE STROVE TO IMBUE HIS PORTRAITS WITH A SENSE OF DRAMA AND MYSTERY.

From left: “Lee Miller,” 1929. Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, a young fashion model from New York City, came to Paris in 1929 intent on pursuing a career on the other side of the camera. Introducing herself to Man Ray at a nightclub near his studio, she announced, “I’m Lee Miller and I’m your new student.” She began work as his assistant and they soon became lovers. Miller would later forge a successful career as a photographer. “Ernest Hemingway,” 1928. This image was taken at a party in Man Ray’s Montparnasse apartment during which Hemingway incurred a minor head injury as the result of an accident. Ray placed a felt hat over the bandage and shot this portrait of the bemused writer. “Kiki de Montparnasse,” ca. 1924.

This photo captures the glamour of the legendary French actress, artists’ model and nightclub performer Alice Prin, better known by her stage name, Kiki de Montparnasse. Ray met Prin in late 1921; their often tumultuous relationship lasted nearly a decade.

Ray often said that his portraits were inspired by Old Master paintings, especially those of Hans Holbein the Younger, Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer. “I…admired the respect with which they treated the proportions of human features,” he wrote in an article published in Modern Photography magazine in November 1957. From Rembrandt and Holbein he learned how to emphasize the physical presence and distinguishing facial features of his sitters through the use of strong lighting effects and minimal, unadorned backgrounds—techniques that became hallmarks of his photography.

Most of all, Ray wanted to capture the spirit of his subjects.

He believed that his photography transcended the camera’s mechanical ability to record countenances and strove to imbue his portraits with a sense of drama and mystery. He achieved this in part by his creative use of light and shadow, composition and angle of pose, as well as by employing innovative techniques such as photomontage and solarization (exposure of developing film to a flash of light that creates a halo-like effect in the final product).

“Being both inventive and methodical is key to Ray’s talent as a photographer,” says critic Arthur Lubow, author of Man

Ray: The Artist and His Shadows. “He was a first-rate portraitist, creating flattering images by shooting from a distance, then cropping and enlarging the image, which softened flaws yet captured facial proportions accurately. But overall, I’d say, it was his wit—his unconventional approach to conventional subjects—that distinguishes him.” In addition, the fact that so many of Ray’s subjects were friends or colleagues provided him with the emotional and psychological insight he sought to convey in his portraits. In fact, Ray had serious love affairs with several of his female subjects, including his photography assistant Lee Miller and the legendary model and nightclub performer Alice Prin, better known by her stage name, Kiki de Montparnasse. In 1946, Ray would marry dancer and model Juliet Browner.

The extraordinary roster of creative individuals who posed for Ray included American and British expatriate artists and writers, his friends and colleagues in the Dada and Surrealist groups, arts patrons and members of the European aristocracy.

Among those subjects was artist Jules Pascin. Born Julius Mordecai Pincas in Vidin, Bulgaria, the artist changed his name to the more French-sounding Pascin shortly after moving to Paris WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

25

© MAN RAY 2015 TRUST / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/ADAGP, PARIS 2021

Above: “Berenice Abbott,” 1921. The American sculptor sat for this portrait, one of the earliest Ray took in Paris and one of his most daring, in 1921. Ray posed Abbott sitting on a trunk against a plain background that fills almost the entire top half of the photograph. Abbott worked as Ray’s darkroom assistant and went on to become famous as a photographer in her own right. Right: “Ruby Richards with Diamonds,” ca. 1938. Ray employed double exposure—overlaying two negatives to create a single image—to produce this dual portrait, in profile and facing the viewer. Originally from the West Indies, the dancer replaced the renowned performer Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère.

in 1905. Pascin was associated with the School of Paris, a group of foreign-born painters and sculptors, including Marc Chagall and Jacques Lipchitz, who challenged the antisemitism that was growing in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s by highlighting the important contributions they were making to French culture. Ray, himself, did not talk about his Jewish origins and if asked, says biographer Lubow, would deflect the question.

Another subject was the Romanian-born poet and playwright Samuel “Sami” Rosenstock, better known as Tristan 26

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Tzara, one of the founders and promoters of the international Dada movement during and after World War I. Tzara met Ray at the end of 1921 when they both lived at the Grand Hôtel des Écoles in Montparnasse. They became close friends, and Tzara witnessed Ray’s experiments with his first camera-less photograms, or “rayographs.” Ray had discovered the process when he accidentally exposed ordinary objects on a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which registered their reverse imprints and shadows when he exposed the paper to light.

“Man Ray used photography to challenge artistic traditions and break boundaries, including fixed gender roles and racial barriers,” says curator Michael Taylor. “His portraits went beyond recording the mere outward appearance of the person depicted and aimed instead to capture the essence of his sitters as creative individuals, as well as the collective nature and character of Les Années folles (the crazy years) of Paris between the two world wars.”

Man Ray’s stay in Paris came to an end in 1940 with the

German occupation. He went back to the United States, to New York and Los Angeles, where he continued his work as a painter and photographer, ultimately returning to Paris in 1951. He died there in 1976. But his creative energy and commitment to groundbreaking innovation live on in the portraits he created during his first two decades in the French capital—portraits that remain an invaluable record of the cultural landscape of Paris in the early years of the 20th century.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

27

jewish word Shmita: A Sabbath for the Land—and Ourselves

BY NOACH PHILLIPS

ADAPTED IMAGE FROM YUNUS TUA

F

lapping proudly in fallow fields, large green and yellow banners in rural Israel proclaim: Kan Shomrim Shmita (“Here We Keep Shmita”). The banners are issued by an organization called Keren Hashviis, which financially supports Israeli farmers who strictly observe one of the Bible’s less practical commandments: to let all agricultural land in Israel lie uncultivated for one out of every seven years.

Shmita, which literally means “release,” is also called shabbat haaretz (“Sabbath of the land”) and is currently being observed during year 5782 on the Hebrew calendar.

Just as the weekly Sabbath is a day of rest for Jews, so is shmita supposed to be a year of rest for Jewish farmland. In addition to its agricultural dimensions, during shmita, 28

WINTER ISSUE 2022

according to the Bible, debts are to be forgiven and Hebrew slaves freed.

The origins of and reasoning behind shmita are unclear. Today we know that letting soil rest allows it to regenerate and improves its fertility, but the degree to which this was understood in the ancient Near East is unknown. And while occasional debt forgiveness was practiced by monarchs in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Aharon Ariel Lavi, a rabbi and author of Seven: Shmita Inspired Economic and Social Ideas, says the regular practice of shmita appears to have been a Hebraic innovation. The Torah represents shmita as an essential piece of the covenant permitting Jews to dwell in the Promised Land, and numerous prophets, including Jeremiah, portrayed the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian

exile as a consequence of transgressing these laws.

While shmita may be a respite for the land, historical and biblical sources recount that despite divine assurances of increased abundance leading up to shmita, these years could be times of starvation and vulnerability. Both the First Book of Maccabees and Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus write that observing shmita compromised the ancient Israelites’ ability to withstand siege during the Hasmonean revolt against the Seleucid Empire in 167-160 BCE. Josephus also recounts that Alexander the Great and Gaius Caesar both granted the Jews exemptions from their yearly tributes for the seventh year. But the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the subsequent exile of the Jews from Israel hastened the demise of shmita practice. Around 200 CE, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, who redacted the Mishnah (the foundation of the Talmud), argued that the arduous sacrifices entailed by observing shmita were not biblically mandated for the few Jewish farmers who remained in Palestine. More and more, shmita became a hypothetical topic of discussion among Jewish scholars and commentators, rather than an actual practice.

Widespread interest in shmita—as well as debate over how to observe it—revived in the 1880s during the first major wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine. (Perhaps coincidentally, it was in 1880 that Harvard began granting its academics a “sabbatical,” or a year off, once every seven years, an adaptation of shmita that quickly spread to many other academic institutions.) Early Zionist pioneers who established agricultural settlements prioritized survival over shmita. One popular workaround was the heter mekhira (“leniency of sale”), which allowed Jewish farmers to sell their land to non-Jews for the sabbatical year, thus letting Jews continue to farm and sell produce as workers on the land, not owners of it. (This accommodation’s provenance stretches back to a still unsettled dispute between two 4th-century sages over whether selling land to gentiles exempts it from tithes.)

One reluctant proponent of the heter mekhira method was Abraham Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, who agreed it was necessary due to the settlements’ precarious circumstances. “Have I not repeated several times that it is a temporary measure that is only [suitable] because of great need and great necessity?” wrote Kook in a letter to a detractor.

“Heaven forbid that we should abandon such a great and overarching mitzvah— the sanctity of the Shmita—without a tremendous need that touches our very soul.” Kook later published an influential book on shmita called Shabbat of the Land before the 1909-1910 sabbatical year.

Today in Israel, produce in an average Israeli grocery store during the shmita year is usually grown under heter mekhira. Even secular farmers use this method, in order to keep their kosher certifications. Other farmers prefer another option, the otzar beit din, in which the land is transferred to a rabbinical court to manage during the shmita year. But these methods don’t work for everybody: Some believe they circumvent the spirit of the biblical law, as they keep Israeli agricultural land in production. Shmita observance presents “a conflict between religious values, national values and economic values,” says Lavi.

This tension has led to other alternatives, such as importing food from Europe or neighbors such as Gaza or Jordan. A more expensive and consequently less common course of action is to grow food in a greenhouse sealed off from the land.

“It’s like a spaceship, a bubble where you can plant, you can sow, you can do whatever you want,” says Lavi.

These workarounds mean shmita is invisible to most Israelis, since the availability, quality and price of most produce is unaffected, says Lavi. “It just looks like every other year, which is sad because we lose this very special mitzvah and all the values and content that it brings. On the other hand, we have 9 million people. We need to feed them somehow. It’s really not realistic to abandon all the lands in Israel.”

Then there is the Keren Hashviis approach, with its green and yellow banners.

The number of farmers participating in the Keren Hashviis program grew from 1,836 in 2000 to more than 3,000 in 2014, and the acreage rose from 45,000 acres to 90,000—still a small fraction of the 1.1 million acres under cultivation in Israel, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These farmers rely on subsidies from the government and donations from private individuals in order to observe shmita.

“

HISTORICAL AND BIBLICAL SOURCES RECOUNT THAT DESPITE DIVINE ASSURANCES OF INCREASED ABUNDANCE LEADING UP TO SHMITA, THESE YEARS COULD BE TIMES OF STARVATION AND VULNERABILITY. Although shmita does not technically apply to land outside of Israel, diasporic interest in the biblical concept started to grow in the 1990s when Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leader of the Jewish Renewal movement, suggested using the sabbatical year to reflect on the impact of work and the economy on ourselves, our relationships and the environment.

In 2007, Hazon, an organization devoted to promoting sustainability through Jewish eco-agrarian lifestyles and education, launched the Shmita Project, which partners with Jewish groups to develop plans of ecological sustainability, resilience and climate action. Hannah Henza, who currently oversees the Shmita Project, views the interest in shmita as an outgrowth of the American Jewish search for meaning and identity. “When we look at some of

the most pressing issues of our time— financial and socioeconomic inequality, hunger, land degradation, climate change—there is an invitation to look back on our history, on our ancestry, on our tradition, and say, ‘What wisdom is there that might inform a conversation for us facing these issues right now?’” she says. “One of the pieces that comes out really quite clearly is the concept of shmita.”

The project’s partners include agricultural ones, such as the Jewish Farmer Network, which encourages members to select shmita plots to keep fallow as a spiritual nod to the commandment. “As farmers, so much of our work is having a plan for the land,” says Shani Mink, a farmer and director of the network.

“The work of shmita is finding out how to lean into that and be present with the stillness and the lack of control.” (Fans of regenerative agriculture will notice resonance with the “first principle” of permaculture: to observe the land for a full year before placing any permanent features on it.)

For American Jews who have no land to let lie fallow, there are other ways to practice shmita. M², the Institute for Experiential Jewish Education, gave its staff the entire month of September off. Focusing on the practice of forgiving debt, the Jewish Education Loan Fund is creating a shmita-specific loan forgiveness program. Shmita has also informed Jewish calls to alleviate student and medical debt on a national scale. Kol Tzedek, a synagogue in West Philadelphia, is working to eliminate $250,000 in unpaid bills for low-income Philadelphians. In fact, possible applications of shmita are endless, and can help raise awareness about and combat food waste, overconsumption, greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation and more. “Shmita is one of the things from the history of Jewish ideas that make sense,” says Aharon Lavi. “It’s a connection to nature. It’s a connection to each other. It’s a connection to culture, to ritual, to something that makes sense of this reality. It takes a cycle of seven years and gives it a name.”

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

29

THE STATE OF

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN AMERICA

30

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Fifty years ago, Holocaust education was introduced in public schools as a way to encourage moral development.

In an era of unrelenting political polarization, is this message at risk of being forgotten?

BY DAN FREEDMAN

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

31

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION //

A

COURTESY MICHAEL ABRAMSON

S THE RED ARMY approached the Majdanek death camp outside Lublin, Poland, from the east, Nazi SS guards took prisoners not capable of marching westward and gunned them down. They fell lifeless into a narrow trench—all except one. Gizella Gross, her right hip and leg shattered by a previous beating, slid into the trench with no gunshot wounds. The guards raked the still bodies with gunfire, but once again, the bullets missed Gizella.

She searched for air pockets between the corpses on top of her, and once the Germans departed, she emerged—one of the few living inmates at Majdanek when the Soviets arrived in 1944. Just barely alive at age 17, she weighed 60 pounds.

A little over 35 years later, Gizella

Abramson, married with two children, was one of a group of Holocaust survivors who met with then-North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt.

She was in constant pain. Walking was difficult. Her upper left arm still bore SS-branded lightning bolts. False teeth had replaced the ones the SS knocked out. Hunt listened as she and the others told their stories and urged him to create a commission to foster Holocaust education as a way to counter antisemitism and nurture inclusion, democracy and racial justice.

Out of several such discussions, the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust, the nation’s first such statelevel group, emerged in 1981. Its goal: bringing the phrase “Never Again” to life through teacher training and workshops,

Clockwise from top: Gizella Abramson (center) with students in 1995. Michael Abramson, her son, leading a Holocaust educator workshop in 2018. Gizella Abramson as a young woman.

32

WINTER ISSUE 2022

books, films, traveling exhibits and plays. Like other survivors throughout the country, Abramson spent decades visiting public schools and sharing her experiences with students. Her harrowing story had the same effect on students as it had had on Hunt: It made them want to take action, to become what those in the Holocaust education field now term an “upstander”—a person willing to stand up in the face of bullying and persecution.

Abramson died in 2011, but today her son, Michael, carries on her work in North Carolina’s public schools. He celebrated in November 2021 when the North Carolina legislature approved an annual budget that included the “Gizella Abramson Holocaust Education Act,” which mandates teaching of the Holocaust in the state’s public schools.

“It is my responsibility as a child of a Holocaust survivor to be involved in Holocaust education,” he says. He and his small ad-hoc crew of deputies—all volunteers from different backgrounds— work to bring Holocaust education into public schools by supporting teachers and coordinating speakers and traveling exhibits. But his role goes beyond supporting teaching about the genocide itself. It extends to helping students connect what they learn about history to what is going on in the world.

Today, he sees himself as a first responder of sorts when antisemitic incidents occur—anything from utterances of “Hitler was right” to swastikas painted on school lockers. He doesn’t just talk with teachers and students. He spends a fair amount of time working the phones, trying to get school principals to take student outbursts such as “Too bad Hitler didn’t kill all of you” seriously.

“The trend is going in the wrong direction,” he says, in regard to increasing incidents of hate in schools. He is absolutely certain that Holocaust education can help prevent such scenarios by shedding light on where hatred can lead. “I try to explain to the principals that the Holocaust is not just a Jewish event,” he says. “It’s a world event.”

Abramson’s message that Holocaust education in public schools is about more

///

than just history is a critical one. Yet in an era of rising political polarization, it is a message that is at risk of being forgotten.

“

The teachers saw the topic as a vehicle for leading students through what the renowned American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg had outlined as stages of ‘moral development.’

Top: New Jersey social studies teachers Richard Flaim (left) and Harry Furman (right) with Polish resistance fighter and diplomat Jan Karski (center). Below: Roselle Chartock, then a teacher at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Similar educational ideas were popping up elsewhere in the country, notably in the small rural community of Vineland in southern New Jersey. There, social studies teachers were developing their

own ideas about how to teach the Holocaust. The teachers saw the topic as a vehicle for leading students through what the renowned American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg had outlined WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

33

COURTSY HARRY FURMAN / ROSELLE CHARTOCK

IN 1972 IN GREAT BARRINGTON, Massachusetts, 28-year-old teacher Roselle Kline Chartock listened as the social studies department chair, Jack Spencer, lamented that textbooks used in public schools never included more than a line about the Nazis’ systematic slaughter of six million Jews.

Chartock was brand new at Monument Mountain Regional High School. She was bursting with 1960s-inspired idealism and anxious to help students “understand they have to make the world a better place.”

Learning about the Holocaust, she thought, would give students a sense of empathy for others’ suffering and help them understand the dangers of staying silent in the face of evil. But she soon realized that despite her Jewish upbringing, most of what she knew about the Holocaust came from reading Leon Uris’ bestselling 1958 novel Exodus.

That summer, with a small grant from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Chartock prepared a series of readings, including poetry, survivor recollections, philosophical reflections and even song lyrics, as the basis for discussions in her freshman world history class. She organized the readings into sections that included “What Happened,” “Victims and Victimizers,” “Aftermath” and “Could it Happen Again?” Photocopied and stapled, the series was, she now reflects, unpolished.

But it became the basis of a curriculum she coedited with Spencer about the Holocaust. Their course included references to additional atrocities—such as the mass killing of Armenians during and after World War I, the murder and displacement of Native Americans, and slavery and the slave trade—and would later become a book, The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial, published by the AntiDefamation League (ADL), then part of B’nai B’rith, and Bantam Books.

Chartock was in tune with her times.

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION //

JIMMY CARTER LIBRARY

President Jimmy Carter shakes hands with Holocaust survivor Vladka Meed, who had been a member of the Jewish resistance in Poland, during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden in September 1979 at which Elie Wiesel presented the report of the U.S. Holocaust Commission, of which he was chair.

as stages of “moral development.” In Kohlberg’s conception, young children do the right thing out of fear of punishment or to gain rewards; later, as they mature, they are motivated by social approval, then respect for rules and laws, and ultimately by allegiance to universal ethical principles. The ADL and the state teachers union put the New Jersey teachers in touch with Chartock, and a delegation was sent to Great Barrington.

Only one member of the group was Jewish: Harry Furman, a high school teacher from Vineland, was a child of Holocaust survivors. His father had survived Auschwitz, and his mother had been transported at age 14 from Poland to a Nazi labor camp in Czechoslovakia. Both had lost almost all their family members, including his father’s first wife and children. Furman’s parents were among a group of several hundred survivors who ended up settling in Vineland and becoming chicken farmers.

Yet Furman, now a 71-year-old lawyer, remembers that despite the critical mass of survivors living in the area, the 34

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Holocaust was rarely discussed openly during his childhood. Many survivors, like his parents and neighbors, wanted to leave the past behind and focus on rebuilding their lives, keeping the story of what had happened to them in Europe to themselves. Still, “despite the attempts of my parents to bring a sense of normalcy to my sister’s and my life in America,” he says, “the reality of a deep, pervasive, but silent history was there.”

Seeking to fill that silence, Furman developed his own embryonic curriculum titled “The Conscience of Man.” The course, which he tried out on his social studies students in 1976, inspired what would eventually become New Jersey’s Holocaust curriculum. Furman used Kohlberg’s stages of moral development to show how, in the words of a colleague, “this historic tragedy embodied a vast range of moral and ethical issues, as well as public and private choices, and had the potential to both educate students about a seminal historic event in the 20th century and to motivate students to reflect on their own values.”

That colleague, Richard Flaim, also grew up in Vineland. He wasn’t Jewish, but he had been exposed to the Holocaust as a teenager in the 1950s when he went to the doors of local chicken farmers to collect money for the newspapers he delivered. When he knocked, they peeked at him from behind closed window shades. When they came to the door, he saw the tattooed numbers on their arms.

He asked his father about these unusual encounters. “His response was, ‘These customers are Jewish refugees, many of whom were in concentration camps during the war. Many of them lost all or numerous members of their families. So, if they appear suspicious and cautious, you have to be understanding.’” Years later Flaim and Furman found out that their fathers, fellow farmers, knew each other, and that Flaim’s father had once asked about the numbers on the senior Furman’s arm. “There’s part of me that believes it’s no surprise that Vineland, a little community in the middle of nowhere, would be a center of Holocaust education,” says Furman.

In 1978, with a small grant from the New Jersey Department of Education, Flaim, Furman and fellow teacher Ken Tubertini collaborated with teachers in the northern New Jersey town of Teaneck to develop a curriculum titled “The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience.” The materials consisted of an anthology for students and a curriculum guide for teachers that, like the Great Barrington curriculum, addressed other instances of genocide and group discrimination, including the killing of Armenians, the internment of JapaneseAmericans during World War II, and the ongoing discrimination against Blacks in the United States. Central to the curriculum was understanding how Hitler and the Nazis, who blamed Jews for all the ills of Western civilization, had channeled long-simmering prejudices against Jews in Europe, and turned them into a state ideology that led to the “final solution” of eradicating Jews altogether.

The Holocaust was used as a case study to expose students to what happens when people fail to stand up to what they know

///

is wrong, and to educate them about the dangers of prejudice, intolerance, stereotyping and hate. The aim was to foster students’ empathy and tolerance and to teach them to question assumptions and recognize hatred.

Their curriculum, which was also published by the ADL, was tested statewide in 1980 and was incorporated into social studies lesson plans throughout the state.

Two years later, the initiative got a major boost when Governor Thomas Kean, a Republican, created an Advisory Council on Holocaust Education and the state provided the fledgling project with a budget.

One of the Teaneck teachers, Edwin Reynolds, recalls that these nascent efforts in Holocaust curriculum building were not merely an exercise in idealism.

They were propelled by an undercurrent of Holocaust denial and misinformation. As early as 1973, pamphlets such as American Nazi sympathizer Austin App’s “The Six Million Swindle” were claiming that no Jews had been gassed in concentration camps. Reynolds remembers a meeting in which a fellow educator held aloft a book on Holocaust denial and asked what was most shocking about it. After rebuffing a series of reasoned responses, the discussion leader pointed to the copyright page, which stated the book was in its seventh printing. “That reality hit home,” says Reynolds.

Chartock, Spencer, Furman, Flaim and Reynolds were among the pioneers in what would become a national effort to promote awareness of the Holocaust and other atrocities through public school education. Over the decades, study of the Holocaust blossomed in school districts large and small, first on the East Coast, and then spreading to the Midwest and West Coast. While the methods varied, they were united by the hope that exploring why and how this tragedy occurred would create informed citizens capable of acting in the interests of the oppressed both domestically and abroad, and in the process, nurture values of pluralism and religious and ethnic tolerance. Looking back, Furman clearly sees the importance of what he and other educators were doing. While the process

of developing a curriculum and learning how to teach it was frustrating at the time, he says, “the bottom line is that this was worth doing.”

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF World War II, awareness of the Nazis’ near success in annihilating the Jews was buttressed by shocking newsreel footage of concentration camp victims.

Later, memoirs and testimonies began to emerge. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, published in English in 1952, became a sensation and was staged as a Broadway play in 1955. In 1960, the first English edition of Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night was published and the novel Exodus was turned into a blockbuster movie starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. In 1961, Americans were also riveted by Israel’s trial of high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which resulted in his 1962 execution.

Nevertheless, although remembrances were held at synagogues, Jewish schools and community centers, memories of the horrors the Nazis had perpetrated were largely fading from the public consciousness. With a few high-profile exceptions, such as Wiesel and Italian writer Primo Levi, most survivors had not yet begun to speak out. That began to change in the late 1960s, some say around the time of the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. “The Holocaust survivor generation realized that after spending their early postwar lives seeking to move beyond the painful past, they had a legacy they wished to pass on before they were gone,” says Gavriel Rosenfeld, a professor of history and the director of Judaic studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut, who specializes in the Holocaust and memory studies.

The year 1978 was pivotal. That was the year that the term “Holocaust” came into widespread use after the four-part TV miniseries titled Holocaust aired on NBC. It depicted the Nazi genocide of European Jewry through the stories of two fictional families in Berlin: one Jewish, one not. An estimated 120 million viewers

watched the series, which introduced the genocide and the word “Holocaust” to a wide swath of Americans. That same year, President Jimmy Carter made remembering the Holocaust a federal policy when he responded to calls from Jewish community leaders and agreed to establish the nation’s first Commission on the Holocaust. Carter asked Elie Wiesel to chair the 34-person working group charged with recommending “an appropriate memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust.” (Wiesel had cofounded Moment Magazine in 1975.)

“

These nascent efforts in Holocaust curriculum building were not merely an exercise in idealism. They were propelled by an already strong undercurrent of Holocaust denial and misinformation.

This set off a furious debate within the Jewish community over the message of the memorial, and how closely it should focus on the Jewish Holocaust experience. After a year, a consensus was forged, and in 1979 the president accepted the commission’s recommendation to create a museum as a “living memorial” on the Mall in Washington, DC to bear witness to citizens’ responsibility in a democracy to remember and to prevent the past from being repeated. (Now named the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it was erected with private funds on land allocated by the federal government, and opened in 1993.) As part of its mission of “Never Again,” the new memorial was to have education as a critical component. The commission envisioned that the museum would foster WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

35

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION //

Holocaust education “in every school system in the country.”

This was an ambitious undertaking.

There were already some private efforts to teach about the Holocaust elsewhere in the country through regional and local museums, memorials and university departments, but public schools were largely uncharted territory. Despite the federal imprimatur, states were left to set up their own internal structures.

Some, like North Carolina, established Holocaust councils or commissions to support teaching public school children. Others went further and passed laws mandating the teaching of the Holocaust in all public schools. In 1985, California became the first state to pass such legislation.

“Even in the mid-1980s, we were concerned that we were losing witnesses and survivors,” says the measure’s author, Richard Katz, then a Democratic

member of the California State Assembly.

“And the question was always, who would tell the story to the next generation?”

Katz made sure the measure extended the study of genocide to include the Armenian genocide, a move that helped it win the support of the state’s significant Armenian-American community. Illinois followed in 1989, 11 years after the 1978 planned neo-Nazi march in Skokie, a municipality adjacent to Chicago with a large number of Holocaust survivors.

New Jersey, further strengthening its already well-developed Holocaust education program, passed a law mandating it in 1994, as did Florida and New York, all three states with large Jewish populations.

The 1990s were critical years in the development of Holocaust education.

“Reflecting and teaching about the Holocaust became a mission statement for what humane Western democracies wanted to be in the future,” says historian

Emily Haber, Germany’s ambassador to the United States. “It defined responsibility for all of us.” (Germany, for obvious reasons, took its own complex path to Holocaust education.) In what has been called the “Americanization” of the Holocaust, the United States took the lead in making understanding the lessons of the Holocaust a touchstone of Western identity. This new post-Cold War moral authority was one of the factors that resulted in the U.S.-led intervention to end genocidal “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia by brokering a peace treaty to end the Balkan War. In 1993, in his speech at the dedication ceremony for the new U.S. Holocaust memorial museum, Elie Wiesel raised an alarm about the mass killings there, sending a signal to the world that the lessons of the Holocaust have a universal dimension.

This was a message that many Americans could agree on, says Gavriel Rosenfeld.

Currently, in the United States, 22 states mandate Holocaust education, five have permissive statutes (legislation that is not a requirement), 17 support a Holocaust education commission or task force, one has legislation pending, and 15 have no legislation regarding Holocaust education. States or school districts may include Holocaust studies in their curriculum without a state policy in place; however, this map does not reflect those individual curriculum decisions.

Data Source: Echoes & Reflections (updated by Moment) 36

WINTER ISSUE 2022

///

Top: From left, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), late Holocaust survivor Esther Peterseil and Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) and Don Bacon (R-NE) pose for a photograph before the U.S. House of Representatives vote on the Never Again Education Act in January 2020. The bipartisan act, introduced by Stefanik and Maloney, provides teachers throughout the United States with needed resources and training to teach children about the Holocaust. Below: Holocaust survivors, students and lawmakers gather around Arizona Governor Doug Ducey in August 2021 as he signs House Bill 2241 requiring the State Board of Education to teach students about the Holocaust and other genocides.

In general, most Holocaust education advocates prefer mandates because they can provide increased teacher training and resources, and require greater accountability. But mandates are not guarantees of success, says Melissa Mott, project director of Echoes & Reflections, a group that provides Holocaust resource materials to schools. While Mott says mandates for Holocaust education “can be a conversation starter,” she and others in the field agree that the lack of them is not necessarily an indication of failure:

“The ecosystem for good education is just as important as legislation,” she says.

That means giving teachers the resources and training they need to succeed, as well as finding teachers who are committed to the subject. Teacher training is key, agrees Karen Shawn, a professor at Yeshiva University who specializes in Holocaust education teacher training and edits PRISM, an interdisciplinary journal for Holocaust educators. Asking teachers to teach the Holocaust without sufficient training is like asking a teacher to teach WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

37

PHI NGUYEN / DOUG DUCEY TWITTER

But that consensus began to fall apart as levels of political vitriol and divisiveness ratcheted up at the turn of the 21st century.

This divisiveness was further increased in the run-up to the 2016 election of Donald Trump and during his presidency. The marked growth in antisemitism, along with Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi rhetoric and violence, brought a new urgency to expanding the reach of Holocaust education in the nation’s public schools.

State legislatures soon began churning out Holocaust education mandates.

Michigan passed one in 2016, followed

by Connecticut, Rhode Island, Kentucky and Texas in 2018. Oregon passed a mandate in 2019; Colorado, Delaware and New Hampshire in 2020; and Arizona, Arkansas, Massachusetts and Wisconsin in 2021. That same year, North Carolina pushed through a mandate as well, 40 years after Hunt established the nation’s first statewide Holocaust council. So did Maine, although its law doesn’t go into effect until 2023. In all, 27 states have passed some kind of law regarding Holocaust education. While those laws vary, approximately 35.5 million K-12 students out of a national total of around 49 million live in these states, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But that doesn’t mean that the remaining public school students are not learning about the Holocaust.

Seven states, including Tennessee and Georgia, have commissions or task forces without mandates. Fifteen states don’t have laws, commissions or task forces.

Most are in the West—the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho—but not all. Vermont is one of them. “Without a mandate or commission, it is impossible to gauge what Vermont students are being taught and how,” says Debora Steinerman, president of the Vermont Holocaust Memorial, a nonprofit advocating for Holocaust education. The group and its supporters are working to make Holocaust education a requirement, Steinerman says, but it is not easy.

Vermont schools and teachers “greatly prize their independence in curriculum,” and tend to resist state mandates.

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION //

physics without the necessary instruction, she says. “I couldn’t do it.”

Some states, such as New Jersey, New York and California, have developed their own curricula. New Jersey’s is tailored to the needs of schoolchildren of different ages. The K-4 curriculum, “Caring Makes a Difference,” is intended to “inculcate a spirit of respect” and draws lessons from popular children’s cartoon characters. “To Honor All Children,” for grades 5-8, gradually introduces historical information about life in the ghettos and camps and includes poems, fiction and nonfiction memoir excerpts, including two mainstays of Holocaust education nationwide, Elie Wiesel’s Night and Anne

38

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. By high school, New Jersey students are exposed to the full story. “The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Humanity” is a high school lesson plan that includes viewing historical footage, and it comes with advice to high school teachers about how to navigate the most difficult parts of Holocaust history.

As it did from the start, New Jersey’s curriculum weaves Holocaust-specific history with moral lessons. Other state curricula do the same, as do curricula provided by major organizations that supply resources for educators in states that do not have their own. The most long-standing of these is Facing History and Ourselves,

which was founded in the 1970s by two teachers in Brookline, Massachusetts who received a federal grant to develop the first national Holocaust curriculum for eighth graders. Now a much larger endeavor, with a $20 million annual budget for education and programming, Facing History offers a curriculum that is known for its strong humanitarian focus, featuring units such as “Democratic & Civic Engagement,” “Race in U.S. History” and “Bullying and Ostracism,” and surveying a range of atrocities perpetrated in different cultures.

Resources provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the nation’s central clearinghouse for Holocaust education materials,

///

also reflect on the role of citizens in a democracy. The museum’s curriculum is broken down into nine subject areas, including “The Holocaust in America” and “Antisemitism and Racism,” and includes almost 40 lesson plans geared to one, two and four days of instruction.

With its $127.7 million budget ($69.9 million from the federal government), the USHMM spends close to $100 million on program services, including teacher-training fellowships and individual help for any teacher who contacts the museum through its website.

A third major player is Echoes & Reflections, established in 2005, which also approaches Holocaust education

with a wide lens. It aims to reshape “the way that teachers and students understand, process, and navigate the world through the events of the Holocaust, and makes it clear that the Holocaust is more than a historical event; it’s part of the larger human story.” Echoes & Reflections is a collaboration among three powerhouses—the ADL, with its long history of battling antisemitism and promoting Holocaust education; the USC Shoah Foundation, founded

by Steven Spielberg in 1994 as a repository of Holocaust-survivor recollections; and Yad Vashem, Israel’s main institution devoted to Holocaust memory. (Echoes & Reflections declined to release its budget,

“

Some fear that with broadbased curricula, students could lose the sense of the Holocaust as a uniquely horrific event, rather than just one in a parade of horrors or injustices.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

39

LOU COLLECTION / ALAMY

Left: Volunteer Robert Behr speaks to a group of students during their visit to the USHMM. Behr, who was born in Berlin and whose father and stepfather were both veterans of World War I, ended up with his parents in Theresienstadt, where he transported bodies for burial and worked on a road crew. The family survived deportation to Auschwitz and were liberated by the Soviet Army on May 5, 1945. Behr died in 2018.

but the ADL, USC Shoah Foundation and Yad Vashem together spend close to $20 million a year on education.)

The universal approach is vital, says Michael Berenbaum, who headed the effort to create the USHMM and helps develop Holocaust curricula and museums worldwide. The history of antisemitism and the Holocaust is diminished if it’s too narrowly focused and non-Jews can’t relate to it, says Berenbaum, now a professor of Jewish studies at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles.“You can’t ask the world to remember the Holocaust and then expect people not to remember it on their own terms,” he says. But there are others who fear that with broad-based curricula, students are losing the sense of the Holocaust as a uniquely horrific event, rather than just one in a parade of horrors or injustices. “Holocaust education isn’t working,” columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote last year in the Boston Globe, arguing that a universalist approach sacrifices greater understanding of antisemitism’s long history. “Students are not taught to recognize the singular and protean nature of Jew-hatred, or to understand how the persecution of Jews is invariably a sign of deep-rooted sickness in any society,” Jacoby wrote.

The debate between particularism versus universalism that runs deep in the Jewish community feeds into this. “The problem with Holocaust education is that we think the way to teach people that the Holocaust was bad is to make them believe Jews are just like everybody else,” novelist, essayist and Yiddish scholar Dara Horn recently said on a webinar sponsored by the Tikvah Fund. “But Jews spent 3,000 years trying not to be like everybody else. To teach the Holocaust properly, we need to focus on teaching what was lost.”

Recently, Holocaust education has become a talking point in the national culture wars raging over how best— or whether—to teach about systemic racism. Holocaust education is particularly vulnerable at times when political polarization intensifies, says Fairfield University’s Rosenfeld. “Any kind of

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION //

historical education is going to become a hot potato and is going to become fodder for controversy between the left and the right, and I don’t think Holocaust education is exempt from that larger dynamic, because everyone weaponizes history to serve their partisan goals.”

“

So many Americans misuse Holocaust history that there is even a term—Godwin’s Law—for the inevitability of any given online argument deteriorating into references to Nazis.

Last October, an incident in Southlake, Texas set Holocaust educators on edge.

In an attempt to follow a new Texas law requiring teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues, a top administrator suggested the inclusion of books that cover “opposing” views of the Holocaust. (The school superintendent later apologized, saying, “We recognize there are not two views on the Holocaust.”) More recently, in an attempt to enact a similar bill in Indiana in January, one state senator said teachers should be “impartial” when teaching about Nazism. “Marxism, fascism, Nazism, I’m not discrediting any of those ‘isms’ out there…I believe that we’ve gone too far when we take a position on those ‘isms,’” he said. (He, too, later apologized).

Last year, Florida’s long-respected Holocaust education program got caught in the crossfire when Governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s education 40

WINTER ISSUE 2022

commissioner, Richard Corcoran, attempted to revise the state’s Holocausteducation standards as part of a larger effort to purge “liberal assumptions” from school curricula. In response to calls from the religious right, DeSantis invited the Christian Zionist group Proclaiming Justice to the Nations (PJTN), whose mission is “to educate Christians about their Biblical responsibility to stand with our Jewish brethren and Israel,” to help with revisions. Their suggestions, including lessons on Judaism and the Zionist movement, drew the ire of Florida’s Task Force on Holocaust Education. A pitched battle ensued in which the ADL and other organizations accused DeSantis and PJTN of narrowly focusing on the Holocaust without any effort to connect it to “universal lessons” applicable today.

In a letter to Corcoran in June 2021, ADL’s Florida director, Yael Hershfield, said the revision violated the original 1994 mandate’s language to foster “an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping.” In the end, neither side scored a victory. The head of PJTN said the group’s proposals had been gutted, but opponents were disappointed the new standards did not fully embrace the mandate’s original language about linking lessons on the Holocaust to racism, prejudice and intolerance.

Polarization has also complicated efforts to establish mandates at the state level. A state’s political leanings are not necessarily an indicator of whether a mandate will pass. For instance, Republican-leaning Kentucky passed a mandate in 2018, largely because for 13 years, Fred Whittaker, a Catholic school science and religion teacher, brought his students to lobby the state legislature.

But arguments over what should be taught in classrooms now occur even in states where there is no pushback against the concept of mandates or against Holocaust education generally. Last year in Louisiana, a Republican-proposed mandate fell apart over the sponsors’ desire to teach about the Holocaust in a framework that equated present-day liberals with Nazis, and conservative Americans with Jews. Liberal Democrats

“are the predators; we are the prey,” one advocate testified. “We need to teach [Holocaust] history to our future citizens so we don’t end up like the Jews.”

In Arizona, a state where a mandate once seemed unattainable, a group of Holocaust survivors and children of survivors pushed one through in 2021. Led by Sheryl Bronkesh, a daughter of survivors and president of the Phoenix Holocaust Association, the group persevered through years of legislative near-misses to win a mandate with the help of State Representative Alma Hernandez, a Democrat, who is Jewish. In this case, Holocaust education also got political support from conservatives, who saw it as a lesson in staying on guard against an oppressive state. “To me, Holocaust education should be nonpolitical; it’s a no-brainer,” says Bronkesh. “Do I agree with them [Republicans] on taxes?” she says, “Probably not. But I’m laser focused on Holocaust education.”

AFTER FIVE DECADES, HOLOCAUST education is well established in the American public school system and supported by a large number of institutions in addition to the federal government.

Still, it’s not always clear whether it is having the desired effect of increasing public tolerance for minorities, let alone for pluralism and diversity. There are those who even argue that it is counterproductive, that a little education can be easily twisted into dangerous Holocaust analogies. One of the most visible recent distorters has been Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has shocked much of the nation with her comparisons of COVID-19 mask mandates to the Nazis’ requirement that Jews wear the infamous yellow Stars of David.

Despite apologies and even a visit to the USHMM, she has continued to make remarks that educators say betray a lack of awareness of the enormity of Nazi crimes.

Greene is hardly alone among political leaders invoking Holocaust references in sometimes trivializing ways. In fact, so many Americans allude carelessly

///

Above: Holocaust survivor Halina Litman Yasharoff Peabody, a volunteer at the USHMM, works with students participating in the museum’s Art & Memory program. The students, who are from DC’s School Without Walls, are painting pictures based on survivors’ memories. Peabody, who was born in Kraków, Poland, survived the war by living as a Catholic.

reported “knowing a lot or a moderate amount” compared to 58 percent of students with no Holocaust education.

For those who see Holocaust education as a vehicle for teaching values rather than for simply conveying historical information, the picture is even brighter. The ADL survey found that students with Holocaust education have more pluralistic attitudes and are more open to differing viewpoints. They were also significantly more likely to challenge incorrect or biased information, confront intolerant behavior in others, and stand up to negative stereotyping. When presented with a bullying scenario, students with Holocaust education reported being more likely to offer help and were 50 percent less likely to do nothing.

Most Holocaust education teachers believe that the subject makes a difference in their students’ lives. “I think once you’ve gone through extensive Holocaust education, it changes the way you look at people and it changes the way you look within yourself,” says Susan Myers, a former Texas teacher and director of the Houston Holocaust Museum who now heads the Association of Holocaust Organizations. Victoria Kessler, a veteran teacher at Somerville High School in New Jersey, measures the success of Holocaust education from the emails she

receives from former students: the ICU nurse connecting with a patient whose parents were Holocaust survivors, the students who recommend books and films they see for inclusion in the course curriculum, the college student who says “you would have been proud of me” for standing up to a Holocaust denier on campus.

After learning about the Holocaust, her students often tell her: “I have a better idea of the person I want to be, and how to get there.”

Rather than being discouraged by the debates raging throughout the country, many Holocaust educators view the controversies as teachable moments, proof that nearly 80 years after the Allies threw open the gates of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other Nazi camps, learning about the Holocaust is more relevant than ever. “I think this kind of education is what every citizen needs,” says Karen Murphy, director of international strategy for Facing History and Ourselves. “All citizens need a civics education that has history and ethics as part of it, that asks them to think—and think about their thinking.”

That need is particularly acute at a time when “the truth is up for grabs,” she says.

“There are rough waves and headwinds, but I’m not giving up hope.” M Additional reporting by Nadine Epstein.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

41

UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

to Holocaust history that there is even a term—Godwin’s Law—for the inevitability of any given online argument deteriorating into references to Nazis. Says Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum: “I would hope that good history drives bad history out of the marketplace. But there is no guarantee.”

It’s an open question how much students are actually learning today, says former USHMM director Walter Reich.

“Just because you can teach something doesn’t mean people will learn it,” says Reich, a psychiatrist who teaches at George Washington University in Washington, DC. “And just because people learn it does not mean they’ll change their behavior.” History can be hard to teach, adds Fairfield University’s Rosenfeld, especially to high school students, who, when required to sit through lessons, often retain nothing beyond the foggiest references. Rosenfeld is also concerned that with the Holocaust so ubiquitous in popular culture, recent generations may be suffering from Holocaust fatigue. “At a certain point, it’s inevitable there’s going to be a little bit of backlash—just exhaustion with something that’s been going on for a generation already.”

Can the effectiveness of Holocaust education in public schools be measured?

There is conflicting data. A 2020 survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference, for short) found that 63 percent of millennials and Gen Z did not know that six million Jews had been murdered; 36 percent thought that “two million or fewer Jews” were killed; and 48 percent could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto.

A 2020 ADL survey of 1,500 college students described more positive results.

Eight out of 10 students reported having received at least some Holocaust education during high school. (The majority received one month or less.) Overall, students with Holocaust education demonstrated greater knowledge about the Holocaust than their peers who did not receive Holocaust education; 78 percent of students with Holocaust education

42

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Beshert Stories of Connection in a Universe of Love nce?

e Coincid

Luck?

Kism

et?

STORIES BY: Rob Dobrusin Barbara Draimin Nadine Epstein Rachel Feldman Julie Gray Brandi Larsen Eileen Lavine Beth Levine Sophie Mindes Faye Moskowitz Janet Nussbaum Marion Silver

EDITED BY: Pam Janis

T

here are many terms for encounters that were meant to be, but none quite as evocative as the Yiddish word beshert. Traditionally, one’s beshert is one’s soulmate, the person an individual is destined to end up with, but the term has come to encompass all sorts of fated relationships. In 2019, Moment created a weekly feature titled “Beshert” to capture some of these cosmic meetings. Here are a few of our favorites—short tales of meaningful connection, understanding, healing, love and sometimes romance. “Beshert” is an ongoing column; to learn how to share your story, visit momentmag.com/beshert.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

43

My Bourgeois Friend Jack

By Faye Moskowitz i was at a labor zionist meeting the night my mother died.

We danced an ecstatic hora, whirling and stomping until the walls shook in empathy. Teenagers, we were starving from stomping, so we stopped at a deli and made a great show of tossing coins into the table’s center, the kupah (communal pot) that guaranteed no one would go hungry for lack of money.

As I walked home, the February snow in Michigan crunched under my boots; tiny cloud breaths like cigarette puffs preceded me. Every window in my house blazed as if for a party.

Everything for which I had escaped to my meeting vanished: the camaraderie and the warm hands around my shoulders.

I knew my mother was very sick, but death was a stranger to me. Slowly I made my way up the carpeted stairs to her room.

She lay on her bed, hair bound in a white cloth, a faint smile on her lips and a bubble of saliva overlooked when the women washed her. Winter billowed the curtains at her open window, and a brother would sit at her side through the night.

The triple mirror of my mother’s vanity was shrouded; some say so the spirit of the dead would not encounter itself as it leaves the body.

The next day we began the formal shiva, seven days of mourning. I readied myself, donning a plaid school dress,

and I waited for my Zionist friends to arrive with awkward condolences. But not a single one of them came.

Several weeks earlier, I had been introduced to a young man outside “the movement.” He came to call in a belted storm coat, a copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology under his arm. His name was Jack.

My Zionist friends laughed when I called him “so bourgeois,” our favorite epithet for anyone not committed to life on a kibbutz.

So guess who came to sit with me every day of the mourning?

My bourgeois friend Jack came, and each day he brought me a little present to amuse and distract me from the seven days of confinement. I remember only one of those gifts, a cunning cigarette rolling machine with tissue-thin wrappers, loose tobacco and a final product: a fat cigarette.

Jack chatted up my mother’s grieving sisters and brothers, even my bewildered father and my two brothers, aged six and twelve, now half-orphans. My mother had been 40 when she died.

I never went to live on a kibbutz. Instead, I married my Jack six months later when the official mourning period ended. That was in 1948. When Jack died on June 3, 2020 at the age of 93, we had been married for 72 years.

Faye Moskowitz is a writer and professor emerita at George Washington University.

Strangers on a Train

By Brandi Larsen my father was an appliance repairman. if something could

be fixed, he’d do it, often for free.

Marisa and I had met in the bereavement group where I mourned Dad. We became instant friends, her kindness more powerful than the cancer threatening her life. Headed to her funeral three years later, I drowned in waves of loneliness and grief as I sat in the café car of the train.

I wasn’t thrilled when an older woman asked to sit across from me as she slid into the booth seat, already unwrapping her bagel and plunking down her bulging purse. She looked as not-put-together as I felt. I plugged in my headphones and slunk behind my screen.

Hours passed. The bagel was eaten, replaced with tea, then sandwiches.

I don’t remember who spoke first, but we eventually moved from silent strangers to women sharing a meal and, as we discovered, both grieving.

“I’m sorry about your losses,” she said. “I was my father’s caregiver, too.”

I asked the question grievers long to hear: “Tell me about him.”

She smiled, looked out the window through the countryside and back in time. She shared how her dad had saved for decades to afford a retirement condo in a town in South Florida.

44

WINTER ISSUE 2022

“That’s where I’m from!” I replied. “Where?”

She named a building I recognized. “Dad did a lot of appliance repair there,” I said.

She paused. Looked at me for a long moment, squinted.

“Was he a big guy? Handsome, with a Jewfro?”

Shocked, I pulled up Dad’s picture on my phone.

“I remember him!”

She described the work shirt he wore with his name embroidered in red script over his heart. How he told her dad he didn’t need a new dishwasher and fixed the old one for free.

“Why do you remember a repairman from 20 years ago?”

She clutched her tissue and explained how caring for her father was the hardest time in her life. My dad had recognized that she needed to escape and asked for a soda from the fridge.

He told her to finish her errands, that he’d be there when she got back, and he sat down at the kitchen table, kibbitzing with her father. That one break kept her from breaking.

This stranger on a train held onto my father’s kindness for decades and, at the moment when I needed it most, she gave it back to me.

Brandi Larsen is a writer, speaker and publishing coach and the board president of Literary Cleveland.

37 Days of FaceTime

By Barbara Draimin for years before we met, ellen and i had both assumed that

a miracle relationship was out of our grasp. At 76, I had given up because I thought that my age would deter potential partners. At 65, Ellen was still persisting through the trials of computer dating.

On April 10 of last year, Ellen asked our mutual friend Robin for my number. They’d been discussing Ellen’s lack of luck online.

Robin offered to put Ellen in touch with me since in the past, I’d met some interesting women online. Ellen told her, “I don’t want to talk to her about dating, I want to ask her out.”

We FaceTimed that night. It was a totally sweet virtual encounter—lots of laughing and a comfort level I have rarely experienced.

Then we FaceTimed for 37 days, 260 miles apart—me in Warwick, New York, and Ellen in Silver Spring, Maryland—long enough for me to get my second COVID-19 shot, plus two weeks for it to take full effect.

Who knew chemistry could happen on FaceTime? We met each other’s families on Zoom. We had virtual cocktail hours to meet each other’s friends. My dear friend Joanne opened her introductory Zoom with Ellen by asking, “What exactly are your intentions?”

Ellen wrote to Joanne the next day, assuring her that she intended to love me with “fierceness and bold abandon” and to meet any challenges with courage and compassion.

Joanne wrote back saying how intense this relationship was for me and that I don’t usually “bet the store.” True. It was intense because I had been much more guarded in previous relationships.

I went slower, revealed less and waited for the other person to declare their feelings first. In this case, I jumped out front and went for it. I did bet the store. Part of it is age and the other part is four separate cancers that have taught me how to dance in the rain.

Two weeks after we met on FaceTime, we reserved an Airbnb in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, our halfway point. We finally met in person there on May 18.

We spent a loving week at the Airbnb getting to know one another. Many past lessons and lots of personal work lined up as we grew together in tenderness and harmony. We had much in common. My grandparents emigrated from Latvia and Germany; hers were from Poland and Germany. We’d both had 30-year partnerships that ended a decade ago. We both love children. Ellen has two adult children; I could not have children but started an agency for children whose parents are critically ill. I will spend the winter in Puerto Vallarta, and Ellen will visit for a month. This summer, we’ll spend some weeks at each other’s homes.

We happened fast. I think the pandemic has helped many of us realign our priorities and distinguish the special from the ordinary.

It has also given many of us new quantities of gratitude.

Our love is deep and powerful. Our combined 14 decades of experiences inform our belief that we are beshert.

Barbara Draimin is a retired social worker.

From top: Faye and Jack Moskowitz, 1948. Brandi Larsen and her father, 1979. Barbara Draimin (left) and Ellen Hedvah Weiser, 2021.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

45

He Had Me at Lunch

The Number in His Wallet

By Rachel Feldman

By Eileen Lavine

it was just a typical day in a local vermont tv news-

it was early september

room:

People were crashing their cars because every year they forget how to drive in the snow, and some wayward cows in the road had created more traffic delays.

Enter: Handsome Stranger.

His name was Andrick. With blue eyes, a massive smile and a hockey player’s build, he caught my eye on his first day at the station.

Toiling in TV news, I thought all traces of romance had disappeared, thanks to the Grim Reaper-self that emerges when you work in an “if it bleeds, it leads” field. But I thought to myself: “I’m going to marry that guy…maybe he’s Jewish?”

He wasn’t. Cue heart quandary.

A week later, he brought his dog to work. Cue heartbeat skip; I’m a devoted dog person.

“We got him three years ago,” he said.

Cue heart crashing to the floor.

“We.” There was someone else.

As I was already pretty miserable reporting on other people’s tsuris, I did what any sensible person would do: sold all my stuff, quit my career of six years and moved to Israel to teach English.

Two months later, after a day spent wrangling fourth graders the way one wrangles wayward cows, I got a Facebook message from Unavailable Handsome Andrick.

“Feel free to write me off as a creep,” it began, “but I broke up with [the other girl], and always thought you and I had a connection. Would you want to talk on Skype?”

The next day I was Skyping with this gorgeous, definitely not Jewish guy.

“What did you have for lunch today?” I asked. Smooth question, moron, I thought. But living in a land without cheeseburgers had made me miss American food in ways that bordered on inappropriate.

“There’s a great deli nearby,” he said. I knew the place. Every Jew in Vermont knew the place. It was the only spot to get a decent knish north of Massachusetts. “I got a pastrami on rye and a cream soda. It’s the best cream soda ever. Do you know about Dr. Brown’s?”

The man had just eaten the lunch of Jewish champions.

There went my heart quandary; he embodied the simplest and best parts of being Jewish. With that one lunch, I realized he was the perfect Jew for me.

We talked on Skype for seven more months. When I came home, he met me at the airport with pastrami on rye. It was the most “Jewish” love I’d ever felt. It was beshert.

Six years later, after our at-home wedding, where I told this story in my vows, we went to a campsite, grilled cheeseburgers and drank Dr. Brown’s.

wich

Rachel Feldman is a communications and public relations specialist.

Eileen Lavine has been a senior editor at Moment since 2008.

46

WINTER ISSUE 2022

1956. i was living in a greenVillage basement apartment when I got a phone call from one Dick Lavine from Webster, Massachusetts.

I knew Webster as an ugly mill town where an aunt had moved and her daughter Rita had found a husband, ending up in an apartment next door to Jennie and Phil Lavine. Rita told Jennie one day that she had a cousin in New York whom their son Dick should call if he were ever in the city.

Dick put the paper with my phone number in his wallet and forgot about it until he moved to New York that summer. He had just graduated from Georgetown Law School and started his first job with the Federal Trade Commission in their New York office. He had gone to law school in the evenings, working as a typist at the Labor Department days and playing clarinet and sax in local bands at night after class. One weekend, a Webster friend who was visiting Dick in New York said, “Why don’t you call Rita Franklin’s cousin?” That’s when Dick pulled out the tattered piece of paper and called me.

I was a little disenchanted with the idea of someone from Webster but felt a bit more positive when he said he was a lawyer. I was going to an Adlai Stevenson election event with the Village Independent Democrats, who were fighting Tammany Hall, so I turned him down that night but we made a date for the following Saturday.

We went to an Italian restaurant on Mulberry Street that first evening, then the dates multiplied all throughout September and October. It soon became obvious we were falling in love. I was enchanted by Dick’s warm sense of humor, his curiosity about everything—especially Italian food!—and his instant connection with my mother, who was delighted when in late November Dick proposed (my two sisters were long married with children). In December, Dick and I took the train to Webster, where Rita had planned a luncheon for family and friends. We had a short engagement and on Sunday, January 13, 1957—a little over four months from when we first met—we were married in my sister’s New Rochelle home.

Yes, it was a whirlwind courtship. But I was 32 and had sown my wild oats—after working on a newspaper in New Bedford, Massachusetts and living in Paris for a year, I was editing a welfare and health weekly newspaper and living in my own apartment, 85 blocks south of my mother’s. I was ready!

We were beshert from the start and throughout our nearly 58 wonderful years together.

From left: Dick and Eileen Lavine at their wedding, January 13, 1957. Rachel Feldman and Andrick Deppmeyer at their wedding, June 30, 2018.

Roadside Assistance

By Rob Dobrusin 8 a.m. on a sunday summer morning. I was driving on a rural section of Interstate 75 in northern Michigan on my way to Mackinac Island to officiate at a wedding. I had left home at 5 a.m. for the four-and-ahalf-hour trip, allowing extra time so I wouldn’t feel rushed to make the 12:30 p.m. ferry. The extra time was especially important as this was my first long drive since recovering from a rather significant surgery six weeks before.

The drive started out perfectly. I was singing along with the radio, thinking about the d’var Torah (the sermon) I had written for the wedding, when I suddenly heard a noise. It concerned me but I put it out of my mind. However, a few minutes later, the car started bumping fiercely, so I pulled over to take a look. It wasn’t a flat tire. It was a blowout.

So there I was. Under the best of circumstances, I’m not a good tire changer. But with strict orders from my surgeon not to lift anything heavy, there was no way in the world I could do it.

I reached for my cell phone. No service.

Worst-case scenarios came to mind: missing the ferry, it happened shortly after

leaving the couple standing alone at the chuppah with no way to let people know why the rabbi didn’t show.

I have never felt so helpless as I did then, standing on the side of the desolate road almost in tears.

A moment later, I looked up and saw that out of the morning fog, a car had pulled over. It seemed odd that I hadn’t heard it coming.

The driver, a man who appeared to be in his 60s, got out and asked if he could help. I explained my situation and he said, “Okay.”

He took out my spare and silently changed the tire in five minutes.

I offered to pay him. He refused. I asked him for his name and address so I could thank him properly. He would not tell me his name, simply saying, “I’m glad I could help.”

He drove off into the fog as quickly as he had arrived.

I made it to the wedding with time to spare.

I have thought about him often.

Coincidence? Beshert? Or perhaps an intercession from those who look down on us. Quite frankly, that is the explanation I prefer.

Rob Dobrusin is Rabbi Emeritus of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he served as rabbi for 30 years.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

47

Friends First. Fast Forward, 2020

By Sophie Mindes

he is kind, thoughtful and laughs easily. my parents love

him—he asks for the recipe after eating my dad’s chicken and is there for IT support if my mom accidentally deletes a voicemail.

He leaves messages for me on Post-its on my fridge after each visit.

I am anxious, short-tempered and moody. I show him I’ll miss him by asking him several times if he’s remembered to pack his allergy meds.

He is Indian, and I am Chinese with a Jewish father. We argue over whose home has the best cuisine and have agreed that it’s a tie: his mom’s goat curry, my mom’s mapo tofu, my dad’s sweet potato latkes.

We had been close friends for nine years, since high school, and the pandemic brought us closer. In August 2020, we were both in a bad place emotionally after months of quarantine. He was in Maryland, taking care of his grandpa and mom, who were immunocompromised, and I was in New York, recently laid off.

We texted and talked so often that it felt like he was there next to me, sitting in my hot Brooklyn apartment with three fans blowing. I should have realized much sooner that I loved him.

Still, it took me three hours to say yes after he asked me out last September. We sat drinking coffee on the balcony of my brother’s apartment and he waited patiently, easing each of my concerns as I listed every possible thing that could go wrong. He likes to show me his scars from the dozens of mosquitos that bit his ankles while I argued with myself.

After that, things moved fast. I went back to New York and he came to visit a week later. It was there, in the apartment not-so-affectionately dubbed the Roach Motel, that we said “I love you” and in our heads quietly planned a future together.

We sat on the fire escape and ate cheesesteaks in silence while looking at a view of mismatched brownstones and patches of grass. We slow danced to a song that doesn’t really have the type of rhythm you can slow dance to. We cooked cilantro rice and sausages and watched a reality TV show about a barbecue competition and thought to ourselves, I have never been this happy.

Sophie Mindes is a nonprofit grant writer living in Brooklyn.

Reunited 60 Years Later

By Janet Nussbaum growing up in the bronx, new york in the early

1940s, my best friend—from the time I was five until moves and marriages separated us—was Bernice Goldfeder. Fast forward to the 2000s.

I had left New York and relocated to Washington, DC in 2002. I made a happy life for myself there with a few wonderful new friends and the blessing of my daughter and two delicious granddaughters close by in Northern Virginia. I tutored reading at a local school and enjoyed the wonders of retirement, going to theaters, concerts, ballets, museums and more.

But something was missing. I had occasional intangible feelings of loneliness and displacement. My parents were gone. My only sister had recently died, and there was no way to stay in touch with old friends lost decades before.

I truly didn’t realize the impact of all this until I experienced beshert.

One Monday in the summer of 2019, I took my to-do list and stopped at a local shop to pick up two gifts. After selecting them, I was handed over to another salesperson to check out. We chatted a bit, which is my habit, and she asked me where I’d gone to school. When I told her, “the Bronx,” she asked, “Was it Taft High School?” That was where her mother had gone. At that point, I closed my eyes and asked her mother’s maiden name. The rest is now history.

Her mother is my dear friend Bernice’s older sister. The salesperson called her mother and I was on the phone with her a 48

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Something was missing.

I had occasional intangible feelings of loneliness and displacement. I truly didn’t realize the impact of all this until I experienced beshert. moment later. She lives in Northern Virginia, about 30 minutes from my home! Later that day, Bernice called from her home in Bethesda, Maryland, also just 30 minutes from me. We were amazed to discover that the day I moved to DC, they were both already living here, but it took almost 20 years to find that out.

The three of us had not seen or spoken to each other in 62 years.

That wasn’t the only beshert. It turned out that the daughter usually never worked on Mondays. She was there that day subbing for a colleague.

Soon after our joyous reunion, our families met at Bernice’s house for Rosh Hashanah. She and I have been catching up ever since.

Janet Nussbaum worked in the insurance industry in both Manhattan and Long Island, eventually becoming an agency partner before she retired at 65 and moved to Washington, DC.

From top left: Penny and Peter Bar-Noy, 1986. Friends reunited, Bernice Goldfeder (left) and Janet Nussbaum, date unknown. Vivek Sen and Sophie Mindes, 2021.

My Mother’s Love Song

By Marion Silver

my mother, paula, or perel in yiddish, was born in cologne,

Germany in 1923. Her childhood ended at age nine when her father died. My grandmother couldn’t take care of her and her older sister, Margot, and placed them in a kinderheim, a Jewish orphanage.

There, the sisters were placed in a program that prepared youth for kibbutz life in Palestine.

Kristallnacht accelerated this training. My mom left Germany for Palestine in March 1939 at age 16 and ended up at Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov, near the Sea of Galilee. My Aunt Margot and her fiancé were on a boat headed to Palestine when the war broke out. Their boat was turned back. We believe she either was killed in a concentration camp or died of typhus. My grandmother, meanwhile, had procured a “domestic passport” (meaning she had to work as a maid) to England. She arrived there two days before the war started.

At the kibbutz, my mom was given the name Penina because it sounded more Hebrew than Perel. A few days later, another boatload of teenagers arrived. Among them was a handsome 17-year-old from Berlin, Peter Neuman. He was renamed Shimshon.

He and my mother fell in love and enjoyed a wonderful romance.

He dubbed her Penny, her name ever since. He wanted to marry her, but she wasn’t ready to get married. After two years, they went their separate ways. She lived in Tel Aviv for seven years before joining my grandmother in England. He joined the British Army and later the Israeli Army, where he fought in the War of Independence.

What my mother didn’t know was that in the 1950s, Peter Neuman became the famous and beloved Israeli singer known as Shimshon Bar-Noy. Some called him “the Israeli Frank Sinatra.”

My mother didn’t know this because she stayed in England. She’d

meant to return to Israel but then met and married my father, Harry Silver. They immigrated to Canada, where I and my sister Helen were born. My dad died suddenly in 1969, leaving my mother a widow at age 46.

She was lonely for six years. Then, her best friend, Thea, contacted an Israeli friend in New York, thinking maybe he’d know a single man for Mom. He did know someone: a divorced man from Israel living in New York whose name was Peter. Thea dialed Peter’s phone number even as my mother protested. She told me later that she had “a sixth sense” while Thea was on the phone. After she hung up, my mother told her to call him back and ask if he was ever on Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov. When he replied yes, Thea told him, “Well, my friend here is your first great love!” He replied, “You don’t mean…Penina?”

Mom and Peter (Shimshon) Neuman (Bar-Noy) married a few months later.

He had moved to the United States with his then-wife and two daughters to try to establish his singing career there. Mom and Peter lived 12 gloriously happy years in New York, always amazed that fate had brought them together once again.

Peter Neuman, the love of her youth—Shimshon Bar-Noy, the love of her life—was her beshert.

Marion Silver earned her BA and teacher’s certificate from Montreal’s McGill University, then taught French as a second language to grade schoolers in Ottawa. She also coproduced and cohosted a Jewish cable TV program, Shalom Ottawa, for ten years.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

49

Wait, No Drama?

By Beth Levine

30. but if that was the plan, I wasn’t terribly good on the follow-through. I ran from anyone remotely appropriate and agonized about anyone who wasn’t. It amounted to a lot of exhausting drama, which I can sum up thusly: I wanna, you don’t wanna, oh, so now you wanna, because now I don’t wanna. Lather, rinse, repeat. I had no learning curve whatsoever. So, gee, what a surprise, I hit 30 with no chuppah in sight, and I said the hell with it.

What a relief that was! I stopped looking for my life to begin and started to actually live it. I quit my job in order to write and spent the summer on Fire Island. But then mutual friends introduced me to Bill, of the big chocolate eyes. He was a writer too. He was funny, kind, smart and…recently separated from his wife.

AHA! I said. I can learn from the past! I will not get involved with this guy—it’s got disaster written all over it. Sure, he wannas now, but it won’t last. I’ll be Rebound Girl and when he gets his sea legs back, he won’t wanna. I’ll be back in drama soup all over again. No! I won’t do it!

So I didn’t encourage him…much. But…not only was he funny, he got my humor. I was used to guys staring at me uncomfortably while my jokes lay dying on the floor. They didn’t get it, they didn’t get me, and I was usually left with egg on my face. But Bill laughed. No, he wasn’t Jewish, but he seemed Jewish. He was so haimish, like home, comfy. As my father later rationalized, “He has a Jewish soul.” Or something.

He just got it. Whatever it was, he got it. And I got him.

We flirted at a party. It’s just flirting, I thought. Flirting can’t hurt anyone. Then he asked me to lunch. It’s just lunch, I said.

Lunch is such a nothing. Then he asked me to dinner and kissed me in the cab on the way home, and I said, who am I kidding?

We skidded sideways into a relationship but I was so unused to the calm, I thought it signaled something was wrong. A lack of passion? Until the day I realized this is what real love looks like. This is what it feels like when one of you doesn’t have one foot out the door. In fact, there are four feet in the house because you are both home.

He once asked me, “Does it bother you that I spend so much time inside my head?” And hand to G-d, my answer was, “I’m sorry, what did you say? I wasn’t listening.” Now if that isn’t beshert…

He wanna-ed, and I wanna-ed, and we’ve been wanna-ing together now for more than 30 years. Sometimes we listen to each other; sometimes we’re lost in our heads. Does it matter?

I don’t know. What was the question? i had decided i needed to be married by age

Beth Levine is an award-winning health and humor writer.

From top: Gidon Lev and Julie Gray in New York City. Bill Squier and Beth Levine. Ruth and Seymour Epstein on their wedding day.

50

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Open Book Finds Editor

By Julie Gray the truth is, we are an odd couple, gidon and i. he is from

the Czech Republic, I am from California; I like cats, he not so much; I like Asian-fusion food, he loves potatoes and gravy; he likes romantic books, I mostly read nonfiction; he’s into football, I never got sports; I am 55 and he is 84. But we have a lot in common, too, like our mutual love of camping, bingeing on Netflix, making soups in the winter, swimming together in the summer and reading books quietly in the evening. We also like to sing duets together, and our repertoire includes everything from “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” to a rousing rendition of “Shalom Aleichem.”

We met in a café in Israel in 2017, to discuss a book Gidon was writing about his life. I am an editor by trade and he had been referred to me. I simply could not resist his sparkling blue eyes, playful manner and mischievous smile. We started hanging out, doing errands and seeing movies, and a few months later, decided to just be sensible and move in together. I think we surprised a lot of people, who wondered what on earth we had in common, what with our differences about cats and potatoes.

The book is progressing and has become more than either of us ever imagined, as we add more experiences and reflections to the pages. Gidon spent four years in the Terezin concentration camp but he refuses, in word and in deed, to be defined by that terrible time. His life has been a series of adventures—some of them a bit crazy and misguided, others very rewarding—that included two marriages and six children. For a man who does not consider himself to be educated, Gidon knows more than a little bit about the art of living and aging well. Don’t get me wrong, he’s not all sunshine and roses (and neither am I). But we are both old enough to appreciate each other, for the brief time that we have together, and to let life’s cranky moments roll on by.

I have no doubt in my mind that at this specific moment in my life and in Gidon’s, we are meant to be together. Can I get a shehecheyanu?

Julie Gray is an editor and writer living in Tel Aviv. She is the director of the Tel Aviv Writer’s Salon and is working on a book, together with her beshert, called The True Adventures of Gidon Lev.

The Dime of His Life

By Nadine Epstein he was incredibly picky. a photo album from the

1940s shows him dashingly handsome, in and out of New York City, in and out of baggy suits, Navy uniforms and bathing shorts, with girlfriends, pre-kiss, post-kiss. One annotation reads something like: “She had thoughts otherwise but he was in no mood for marriage.” In his 30s, with two degrees and military service behind him, he was still in search of the perfect Jewish wife. This physicist, with a remarkably unique mind, drove his Kaiser to Manhattan from New Jersey on weekends to find her.

And so one night, he stood outside a dance at Temple Rodef Shalom. A child of the Depression, he waited for a woman worth the dime entrance fee.

Enter my mother. Movie-star beautiful, radiant, inexplicably intuitive, a natural leader and elegantly dressed. This former elocution teacher with her own two degrees had been president of every organization she ever joined. She had picked herself up from rural Pennsylvania to Manhattan to find the world and could have married anyone.

He proffered his dime, followed her in and asked her to dance. He was a great dancer and so was she. In his pocket was a crystal he had grown in his lab and she bumped against it as they twirled. She was intrigued. Throughout their courtship, he serenaded her with his inexhaustible repertoire of romantic songs in his lovely tenor voice. A fan of musical theater, she fell for the singing, choosing to ignore his stubbornness and the

difficulties this brilliant man had in getting along with people.

Perhaps she thought she could change him. Certainly, she was afraid of becoming an old maid (she was 29) like her aunt.

The modest wedding took place at the House of Living Judaism of Temple Emanuel on Fifth Avenue. A stunning bride, a rare look of joy on my father’s face.

A move to suburbia, and a year later, I was born. He finished his PhD, worked as a research scientist and built a house. She juggled pregnancies with presidencies, raised four children and became executive director of the JCC. These two balls of energy weren’t soulmates but achieved a state of coexistence that was all they could ask of marriage. She tried to help him get along with people as best she could. He thought she wasn’t intellectual enough. But there was a spark when they danced, and just enough respect and shared values for a long, fulfilling life together of travel, adventure, milestones and grandchildren. They didn’t necessarily want to be in the same room at the same time but liked shouting to each other across the house. “Seymour!” “Ruth!”

That’s what he missed when she died in 2012. Life went on but at nearly 100 he still wished she was in the other room. He was sure she was worth the dime—and his time.

Nadine Epstein is a writer based in Washington, DC, where she is the editor-in-chief of Moment Magazine. Her father, Seymour Epstein, died in 2021, a few weeks short of 100. M WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

51

talk of the table

The Satisfying Sweetness of Dates

BY SUSAN BAROCAS

W

hen I need a sweet, satisfying nibble, I often pick up a date.

These wonderful little packages of luscious and nutritious fruit are boundlessly versatile.

They pair with stews, sweets, meat and dairy. They transform into appetizers, entrées or desserts. They can be added to breads and puddings, infused into smoothies, made into honey or syrup, or used to liven up anything as a substitute for sugar.

Dates have a rich flavor, and an even richer history: Evidence found in Lower Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, confirms that dates are one of the world’s oldest cultivated fruits, domesticated over 6,000 years ago. The word “date” is derived from the Greek daktulos (“finger”), describing the way the oval-shaped dates dangle from their trees in hanging bunches. The Hebrew word for date is tamar, from the root meaning “to be lofty,” and for millennia slender date palm trees up to 75 feet tall have provided shade and nourishment from North 52

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Africa and the Middle East into India.

According to the Greek historian Strabo, the ancient Persians sang of 360 uses for the date palm. Wine made from tapping the palms quenched travelers’ thirst at ancient desert oases. Twigs and fibers were woven into baskets, sieves, mats and ropes, while tree trunks provided beams and other materials for building. The dates themselves were a daily staple, eaten plain or pressed into cakes along with figs. And because they were long-lasting, nourishing and easy to carry, they were favored by nomads, traders and explorers.

Dates also play a particularly important role in Jewish tradition. In the story of the biblical exodus, dates are one of the “seven species,” the fruits and grains the Israelites discover growing in the Promised Land.

And when the Torah says the land is “flowing with milk and honey,” it is actually referring to date honey, not bee honey—which was rarer to find and dangerous to collect.

This honey, called dvash temarim, is made by boiling dates for many hours, and it is mentioned in the Torah no fewer than 55 times.

Eventually dates made their way to Europe, growing especially well in Spain’s arid climate. In the 1700s, Spanish missionaries were the first to bring dates to the New World. But it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the commercial date industry began in the United States, when an intrepid explorer from the U.S. Department of Agriculture brought date cuttings from Iraq back to California. Today, Southern California produces nearly 90 percent of all dates grown in the United States.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran are typically the top producers worldwide, with the United States (and Israel) falling much lower on the list.

With grandparents from Turkey, I grew up munching on dates for their sweetness, unaware of their health benefits. Dates are considered a superfood, packing in critical vitamins and nutrients, as well as helping to regulate the digestive system, blood sugar and cholesterol levels. When it comes to nutritional value, all dates are equal—which is surprising, considering there are more than 200 varieties, differing in color, shape and taste. Most common in the United States are medjool dates, good for snacking and stuffing, and deglet noor dates, good for pitting and chopping.

Dates can be eaten in three stages of ripeness. In the first stage, they are pale yellow and crisp like an apple. U.S. shoppers will usually find these fresh dates only in specialty Middle Eastern markets. In the second stage, dates are light brown, soft and exceptionally sweet—and also difficult to find in the United States.

American markets usually sell dates only in their third stage: These dried dates have wrinkly, dark brown skin and last for 18 to 24 months unrefrigerated.

Date honey, dvash, popular in the Middle East for thousands of years, used to be hard to find in the United States—I would stock up during trips to Israel—but because of the swell of interest in Israeli food over the past decade or so, it can now easily be found in many shops and markets. Today, dvash is most commonly marketed as silan.

Also known as date molasses or date syrup, silan has a texture similar to molasses, but it’s easier to drizzle. It has less sugar than honey

and a deeper, more complex taste. Mixing equal parts with tahini produces a topping for toast that is overwhelmingly popular in Israel—and gaining on PB&J in the United States. Silan can be drizzled over ice cream or pancakes, stirred into sauces and salad dressings, or used to sweeten tea and soothe sore throats. Mixed with olive oil, salt and pepper, it becomes a tasty glaze for roasted veggies, fish and fowl.

Dates are a staple of Sephardic, North African and Middle Eastern cuisines. Many Moroccan and Persian stews and tagines with chicken, beef and lamb feature dates, while dafina, the Moroccan long-cooked Shabbat stew, is served with dates as an ingredient or garnish. Certain recipes for Persian rice, a feature of some Shabbat dinners, call for dates and pistachios, along with other dried fruits. And when it comes to sweets, there are seemingly endless uses. Stella Hanan Cohen, a descendant of Sephardic Jews from Rhodes and author of Stella’s Sephardic Table, loves to make Rhodian Jewish shortbread “stuffed with succulent dates and chopped almonds, fragrant with cloves, cinnamon and orange blossom water,” she says. “We call them menenas, much like the cookies in the East Mediterranean known as ma’moul.”

Served on their own, dates are traditionally stuffed with almond paste, almonds or walnuts. The Persian cake ranginak uses walnut-stuffed dates covered with a sweet roux and a layer of chopped pistachios. I often serve dates stuffed with creamy goat

“

WHEN THE TORAH SAYS THE LAND IS ‘FLOWING WITH MILK AND HONEY,’ IT IS ACTUALLY REFERRING TO DATE HONEY. Dates continue to hold an important place in Jewish tradition—particularly when it comes to the holidays. They are one of the foods celebrated during Tu B’Shevat, and a key component of the Sephardic Rosh Hashanah seder. Traditionally, they symbolize the hope that our enemies will not harm us—or these days, the hope of finding love in the new year.

Dates and date syrup are also a leading ingredient in Passover charoset: Iraqi charoset, for example, is simply chopped nuts stirred into silan. Some Turkish charosets feature dates and oranges ground together raw or cooked into a paste. Each Passover, I make several charosets, but for more than 20 years, the crowd favorite has been my Moroccan charoset balls. Every family has its own way to prepare this special treat. Mine is mostly dates ground in the food processor together with dried figs, apricots and walnuts or almonds, then formed into small balls that I roll in finely chopped almond meal.

One of my favorite memories connected to those date-laden charoset balls is preparing them (along with other Sephardic foods) as the guest chef for White House seders with President Obama in the last few years of his term. When I make them now, I think about that special honor for this granddaughter of immigrants. I think about the date-and-orange charoset of my Sephardic ancestors in the Ottoman Empire, and about the pressed date-fig cakes of my biblical ancestors.

Just as dates have sustained people for thousands of years, I am sustained by the connection to this rich heritage.

Recipe by Susan Barocas Date-walnut bread came to the United States from the British Commonwealth and became popular in the first decades of the 20th century. Serve slices of this sweet bread as is or toasted, spread with butter or cream cheese. Up the taste with a drizzle of silan and sprinkling of chopped nuts. The recipe is dairy-free and can be made gluten-free by using one-to-one gluten-free flour.

ingredients

1 1 1 1/4 1 1/2 1/2 1 1/4 1 1

cup chopped dates, lightly packed, or 10-12 medjool dates cup very hot water teaspoon baking soda teaspoon sea salt cups all-purpose flour cup date sugar (or granulated cane sugar if needed) tablespoon vegetable oil cup silan (date syrup) large egg, beaten cup coarsely chopped walnuts or pecans plus more for garnishing (optional)

instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Lightly grease or spray with oil a standard loaf pan.

2. Measure the dates after they are chopped. If working with whole dates, pit them if needed. Cut in half lengthwise, then cut each half into three or four pieces. Pour the boiling water over the dates, baking soda and salt in a large heat-proof cup or bowl. Set aside to soften and cool while preparing the rest of the ingredients.

3. In a mixing bowl, blend the flour and sugar. Add in the remaining ingredients along with the date mixture and stir until well blended, being sure to incorporate all of the flour.

4. Pour into the prepared loaf pan, level the top and bake for about 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes before taking out and letting cool on a wire rack.

WALLPAPER FLARE / SAKHAWATIT / PIRO4D

From top: Fresh dates, dried dates.

cheese or whipped feta with a sprinkling of chopped nuts or sesame seeds, pomegranate seeds and a drizzle of silan.

TRIPLE DATE BREAD

literary moment

QA

SHARONA JACCOBS

&

Anita Diamant and the Pursuit of Menstrual Justice

A whole generation has gone through the Jewish life cycle with Anita Diamant.

The guides she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s—The New Jewish Wedding, The New Jewish Baby Book, Choosing a Jewish Life, Saying Kaddish— enjoy such lasting popularity that Diamant is now revising several of them to reflect the societal changes she has also played a role in bringing about. Her novel The Red Tent, a retelling of the story of Dinah from Genesis, quickly attained the status of feminist midrash. Along with half a dozen more novels, journalism and an essay collection, she’s been an activist, founding the Boston area’s progressive mikvah Mayyim Hayyim (Living Water).

Her new book Period. End of Sentence. A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice looks at women’s lives and life cycles from yet another angle.

It describes the growing movement to eliminate obstacles posed by menstruation, a cause that speaks both to the enduring issues raised in The Red Tent and to the cutting edge of Gen Z activism. Diamant speaks with Moment book review editor Amy E. Schwartz.

54

WINTER ISSUE 2022

There’s a scene at the beginning of your new book in which the 2018 documentary of the same name wins an Oscar on international TV. Watching at home, you write, “I jumped off my couch and cheered, certain that a million other people were doing the same.” How is the book related to the movie? The movie inspired the book. After seeing the Oscar ceremony, I watched the movie on YouTube the next day. It tells the story of a small village in India and a group of high school students in California who raise money to donate a machine to the village so they can make menstrual pads. You learn about how little is known about menstruation, how stigmatized menstruation is and how transformative it is for these young girls to talk to people about it. And for the village women to make menstrual pads for themselves and for sale, so they have a microbusiness, is very empowering.

The movie’s makers asked if I’d write a companion book. I spent my lockeddown COVID year doing research and was overwhelmed with how many issues come together in dealing with menstruation. There are intersecting issues of equity, medicine and of course poverty, which exacerbates the problems of everyone who menstruates and can’t afford the products or the healthcare they need.

One thing I learned, and that I find hopeful, is how much activism there is around menstrual shame and menstrual pain. I’ve been inspired by the number of people who are dedicating themselves to changing this on every possible level: donating things, getting laws changed to require that there be products in schools and public spaces, and also raising questions about education, health education, sex education and the role of men. It’s a lot. The activism starts with trying to provide products, but it doesn’t end with products.

You say in the book that menstrual justice is a perfect introduction to activism for young women and girls, to give them a sense of agency. Yes. Everybody who’s menstruated knows the

panicky feeling of being out in public and not having what you need, especially as an adolescent. If they’re 12 or 13, it strikes them that this is patently unfair and that it doesn’t have to be this way. So they start collecting and donating products. They get featured in the newspaper. And it teaches them that they can change things.

My great hope is that this generation, which is very creative and outrageous, will take from this experience the sense that they can have a big impact on the world and become active in other ways as well.

Many synagogues, particularly sisterhoods, have taken up the menstrual justice cause and organized collections. What more should be done?

There are large and small ways to help. A lot of people are working to get rid of sales tax on menstrual products in their states.

Every state decides what it puts sales tax on, and necessities are exempted. Are menstrual products necessities? That question opens the door to a conversation about who counts in the most basic of ways.

In Massachusetts, a very liberal state, there’s a bill languishing in the legislature that, if it passes, will require all municipal buildings, schools, shelters and prisons to have menstrual products available for everybody. And I’m thrilled that more and more synagogues are putting products out in their bathrooms all the time, not just when there’s a wedding or a bar mitzvah. We need to normalize that.

How can men become part of this conversation? There’s a chapter in the book called Men-struation, which starts with a question somebody posted online, “What’s the most ridiculous thing a man has ever said to you about your period?”

Some of the answers are very funny, and some are cruel. But mostly, the chapter is full of men behaving beautifully, examples of dads doing right by their daughters when they get their first period, or teenage boys helping when they see one of their classmates with a stain on her pants.

There’s the cab driver in South Africa who, when he noticed bloody tissues on

One thing I have learned, and that I find hopeful, is how much activism there is around menstrual shame and menstrual pain. I’ve been inspired by the number of people who are dedicating themselves to changing this on every possible level. the floor in the back of his cab, bought pads and put them for free on the dashboard. It’s really important that we hear these stories. There have been cultures where the entire community—men, women, people of all genders and ages— acknowledged and even celebrated the beginning of a girl’s menstruation because it was seen as proof that life and the community would continue.

When I started writing this book, I’d take a deep breath when someone asked me what I was working on. I’d say, “Well, I don’t know if you want to hear this.” I stopped doing that pretty quickly. I learned to say, “I’m writing about menstruation.”

Then I’d ask people, “Do you carry toilet paper around with you?” And everybody said, “Oh, I guess not. I guess I don’t need to. And I guess if you need menstrual products, you should have them.”

Menstruation has been a recurring theme in your work, from The Red Tent to the mikvah to menstrual justice. It may seem that way, but it was all so unplanned. For me, The Red Tent was not so much about menstruation. The title refers to the tent where I imagined women would go to menstruate, to give birth and to recover. But I thought of it as more about community than menstruation, a place where women could be themselves and talk to one another. But the blood is part of it, and it’s considered normal.

And as I imagined it, the tent was not off in the distance. The men and boys knew what was going on, and it was an accepted part of life. There’s no documentary evidence that our ancestors actually did that, although there have been pre-modern menstrual places all over the world and

there still are some, and some of them are horrific, and some are quite beautiful.

When I got involved with the mikvah, the impetus wasn’t menstruation, either, but conversion. I had been working on a book on conversion called Choosing a Jewish Life, and the one mikvah in the Boston area that was open for conversions was not a welcoming, warm place.

It struck me that we, as liberal Jews, could do better. So that’s where that came from.

Menstruation was not really my bridge to it. But all my work focuses on women’s lives and women’s agency.

Do we need new rituals connected to menstruation? Should there be a celebration honoring menopause?

Menopause is a sort of slow roll out. You start menstruating at a specific time, but it takes a long time before you’re really finished. People have celebrated it in different ways, and some ceremonies feel manufactured rather than authentic.

Going to the mikvah feels good because it’s an old tradition you’re using for a new purpose.

But we don’t have any models for this.

In fact, in Judaism, we have no models for marking the life cycle of the female body: beginning menstruation, deciding to have a baby, ending nursing, deciding to stop having children, infertility, all of the life cycle of the body with the uterus.

We have, what, 100 blessings you’re supposed to say every day? There are a lot of blessings missing. There’s no reason not to add them. The more blessings, the better.

This is an excerpt of a MomentLive! interview. To watch the full interview, visit momentmag.com/zoominars WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

55

BOOK REVIEW ROBERT SIEGEL

THE RIPPLES BEFORE THE STORM

In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution and the Rise of Nazism

By Michael Brenner Princeton, 392 pp., $35.00

BAVARIAN STATE LIBRARY

M

unich in the years following World War I was a nasty, bloody microcosm of the political catastrophes in Europe that preceded and followed Germany’s defeat in that war. Political instability and recriminations over the war’s outcome led to violence, revolution and counterrevolution. Even before the war’s end, one of Germany’s imperial neighbors, Czarist Russia, had already collapsed and in 1917 had given way to Bolshevik rule. In 1919, Communists took power in Hungary, which had entered the war as Austria’s co-imperial power. That same year in Munich, capital of the German state of Bavaria, several governments rose and fell in quick succession. Two of them were so-called “council governments,” imitations of the Bolshevik model (“soviet” being Russian for “council”).

It was a time of collapse for the old order and of apparent opportunity for 56

WINTER ISSUE 2022

movements promising something better.

The leaders of Munich’s series of revolutionary governments were very often Jewish, like their counterparts in Russia and Hungary. Their moment in power was brief; conservative governments ousted and succeeded them, and victory in Munich’s political struggles ultimately went to the Nazis. By 1923, Hitler (an Austrian transplant) was popular enough to launch a failed coup in the city, the so-called Beer Hall putsch. His followers regarded Munich as the cradle of Nazism, and in 1935, after coming to power in Berlin, they officially designated Munich “the Capital City of the Movement.”

Munich during all this was home to a small, diverse Jewish population— according to the 1910 census, 11,000 strong in a city of almost 600,000. The city had both a Reform and Orthodox synagogue. Historian Michael Brenner’s book In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution and the Rise of Nazism explores the great variety of roles played by Munich’s Jews in those years, putting to rest any simple characterization of preWorld War II German Jewry. The Jews of Munich were neither predominantly radical, nor conservatively complacent, nor oblivious to the rise of antisemitism in their city.

One of the most interesting characters in Brenner’s story is Kurt Eisner, a Jewish newspaper editor, activist, socialist and pacifist who in November 1918 led workers on a protest march through Munich and declared the Free State of Bavaria. Until that day, kings of the Wittelsbach dynasty had sat on the Bavarian throne for seven centuries, even after the kingdom had joined the Prussian-led German Empire. (The terms of entry included Bavaria keeping its own monarchy—soldiers of the Bavarian Army swore allegiance to the Bavarian king, not the Prussian Kaiser.)

Eisner led a faction that had broken from the center-left Social Democratic Party over the question of German war guilt.

His Independent Social Democrats held Germany responsible for starting the war. In 1918, he had publicly supported a strike by Bavarian munitions workers

(while the country’s soldiers were still at war). Following his declaration of the new Free State, Eisner became Bavaria’s prime minister, a stunning milestone for a Jew—and a post in which he demonstrated a similarly stunning lack of political acumen.

As a socialist, Eisner filled the German right wing with fears of expropriations, nationalizations and government based on the soviet model—though these were all policies that he rejected. He disappointed the left wing by ruling out just such revolutionary extremism in favor of reformist policies that included women’s suffrage and the eight-hour workday. He infuriated nationalists by insisting on Germany’s responsibility for starting the war. This was no mere political talking point; German war guilt had been a rationale for punitive reparations in the Treaty of Versailles.

He was not a Bavarian by birth, but rather a Prussian Jew, a designation that in the eyes of many Bavarians made him doubly suspect. Bavarians resented northerners who ruled the imperial roost from Berlin, a city they deemed less cultured, artistic and congenial than Munich, their own capital. But it was Eisner’s Jewishness that proved a catalyst for events that ultimately played a part in the rise of Hitler.

Eisner was born into the largely assimilated Jewish middle class of Berlin. Early on he eschewed religious practice, but, as Brenner writes, “he bore no feelings of hatred for his Jewish background, which had not always been especially important to him but was also not something he denied.” He identified himself as a Jew on public documents, campaigned against antisemitism and counted as his most important intellectual mentor

Following his declaration of the new Free State, Kurt Eisner became Bavaria’s prime minister, a stunning milestone for a Jew.

LITERARY MOMENT

Hermann Cohen, the most renowned German Jewish philosopher and public intellectual of his day.

Not four months after his ascension to leadership, a politically hobbled Eisner was walking to the opening of the Bavarian parliament when he was assassinated by a right-wing university student named Count Anton von Arco auf Valley.

In death, Eisner appeared to have gained some of the affection that had eluded him in office. He was mourned at a public funeral by thousands of people who had both supported and opposed him. It would be another 15 years of polarization, thuggish politics, the two Communist governments of 1919, right-wing rule and intensified antisemitism before the Nazis took over Germany.

But Eisner’s Jewishness tapped into deep currents of Bavarian antisemitism.

Anti-Jewish attitudes at the time ranged from accusations of involvement in international Bolshevik and banking conspiracies to suspicions of war profiteering and avoidance of military service. Worst of all was the allegation of Jewish culpability in the “stab in the back myth,” the widely popular notion among Germans that traitors, Jews prominent among them, had caused the defeat of Imperial Germany in the Great War. As Brenner describes it, opposition to Eisner’s government expressed every variety of antisemitic trope: To many outsiders peering in, this Social Democrat residing in the petty bourgeois suburb of Großhadern was a Prussian Rothschild and Bavarian Trotsky all rolled into one. The Bavarian citizen who had grown up in Berlin was branded by his opponents as a Galician or, as if this was not sufficient, an Eastern Galician.

The established journalist was characterized as a destitute bohemian.

The “Eastern Galician” part was telling.

About a quarter of Munich’s Jewish population at the end of World War I consisted of Ostjuden, East European Jews who had fled the murderous pogroms in Poland.

Labeling him this way rendered Eisner a foreigner, alien not just to Bavarian traditions but to German ones. He was widely,

Kurt Eisner, who organized the Socialist Revolution that overthrew the monarchy in Bavaria, in 1918. Eisner was assassinated in Munich by a German nationalist in February 1919 only months after taking office.

and wrongly, rumored to have changed his name from Salomon Kosmanowsky so as to obscure his Galician roots. Even the papal nuncio in Munich, Eugenio Pacelli, described him unquestioningly in a dispatch to the Vatican as “a Galician Jew.” Pacelli went on to become Pope Pius XII. Brenner documents how a wave of resentment of Eisner in his short time as prime minister, fanned by right-wing

parties and their servile newspapers, helped suspicion and hatred of the Jews to go public and become the stuff of common political conversation. His own research in the Munich archives, he writes, turned up “a bundle of two thick files of antisemitic hate letters against Eisner” sent to him by hostile citizens when he was in office.

Despite the prominence of antisemitic WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

57

political discourse, and the public focus on the Jewishness of Eisner and his more radical successors, German Jewish voters in the 1910s and 1920s were in fact not especially identified with the radical left; most actually voted for centrist political parties. “In addition to the antisemites,” Brenner writes, it was members of the Munich Jewish community who objected most strenuously to the involvement of prominent Jews in the revolution. They remembered well the saying from the Russian Revolution a year earlier about Leon Trotsky (whose real name was Bronstein): “the Trotskys make the revolution, and the Bronsteins pay the price.”

Brenner’s contribution to this story is to depict and insist on the breadth and variety of Munich’s Jews: conservative Jewish businessmen, literary revolutionists, socialists, Jews yearning for Zion and Jews nostalgic for the Wittelsbach monarchy, prosperous families with deep roots in Bavaria, desperately poor families fleeing Poland, and even the occasional German nationalist. All dealt in their own ways with the ominous trends surrounding them; no strategy fended off the ultimate catastrophe.

If we stretch the definition of a Jew to one that the Nazis adopted, at the extreme end stands the influential Munich newspaper and magazine editor Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, Jewish self-hatred personified. Cossman had converted to Catholicism in his thirties and championed the “stab in the back” myth and the expulsion of the Ostjuden from Bavaria. In the summer of 1942 Cossmann died in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, his Jewishness ultimately inescapable.

One could look still farther afield to Eisner’s assassin, who was treated at his trial like a sympathetic kid driven to murder by the stress of the times. ArcoValley, as he was called, was said to have acted out of frustration at being excluded from an extreme-nationalist society due to his mother’s family’s long-renounced Jewish ancestry. At his murder trial, it was said by the prosecutor, “If the whole 58

WINTER ISSUE 2022

German youth were imbued with such a glowing enthusiasm we could face the future with confidence.” Though he was convicted, his death sentence was commuted, and after five years in prison Arco-Valley was freed and soon pardoned. His treatment presaged that of Adolf Hitler five years later, who was jailed and tried after the Beer Hall putsch of November 1923 but was treated with fawning deference by the people charged with prosecuting and incarcerating him.

In a Washington Post op-ed on January 9, 2021, just after the riotous assault on the U.S. Capitol, Brenner wrote of the echoes and lessons of the Beer Hall putsch, an armed assault on the Bavarian state government that was put down by force. The putsch was perceived at the time as a failure, but it actually elevated Hitler in public esteem and provided his movement with martyrs. The Bavarian judicial system, “blind in its right eye,” contributed to the ascent of Nazism by failing to prosecute the perpetrators ardently. Brenner also noted in the op-ed, and describes vividly in his book, the misguided notion among conservative politicians (in this case, the people who governed after the fall of Eisner’s coalition and the council governments) that they could use and contain the upstart Hitler for their own purposes.

The users typically ended up being used.

There are frightening parallels, to be sure. But while both the Capitol insurrection and the Beer Hall putsch were inspired by charismatic leaders who exerted extraordinary power over their followers, Hitler’s mob was motivated by a hatred more profound than what we have heard from most of the Washington insurrectionists who have spoken in court. Kurt Eisner’s story provides one more measure of that hatred, years after his death. In 1933, the Nazis inflicted what they considered one last degradation on the first Jew to lead a German state. His bones were disinterred and reburied where according to Nazi race laws they belonged: in a Jewish cemetery.

Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary contributor.

LITERARY MOMENT

BOOK REVIEW VIVIAN GORNICK

THE PALPABLE JOY OF JOURNALISM

Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom

By Carl Bernstein Henry Holt & Co., 352 pp., $29.99

T

and sent them running: some to the pool, some to police headquarters, some to the nearby hospitals. He then puts his rewrite men on alert to receive the phoned-in stories that will soon be coming, and copy boys are sent to the library to retrieve clips on the history of the playground in which the pool is housed, similar electrical accidents in the past and neighbors’ reactions to the accident. Everything done on the run. The adrenaline in the newsroom is running so high it could power a tank.

All in all, 75 minutes elapse between the police dispatcher’s first call and the last paragraph of the story reaching the composing room. Pulling it all together, Bernstein writes of “the horror of the event, the city editor’s calm, the gathering of facts, the making sense of them, the speed of the paper’s reflexes, the truth emerged from confusion and coalesced into a coherent story. It was a lesson in the workings of the Star and the values of the newspaper trade.” His admiration is riddled through with love.

The years that Bernstein worked and climbed at the Star contained many dramatically historic events: the Kennedy presidency in its entirety, the civil rights movement at its most vital, the terrifying days of the Cuban missile crisis; and on top of it all, the Russians send a cosmonaut into space and bring him back! During all of this, Bernstein, perpetually begging for assignments, gets sent to zoning hearings, school board meetings, business associations— and goes to them all happily. Everything holds the potential for a story, a real story, his story. And wherever he goes, he makes contacts and takes notes. Especially, he takes notes. And he keeps them. I think

Reporter Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post in 1973.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

59

RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY

he time is summer, 1960; the place, Washington, DC; the protagonist, 16-year-old Carl Bernstein on his way to buy a suit for a job interview as a copy boy at the Evening Star, the city’s major afternoon paper at that time. The interview itself will turn out less than satisfactory. He is passed from one editor to another, no one is sure he’ll do—he’s too young, he’s too short, he’s too freckle-faced, they’ll call him. But even at age 16, Carl Bernstein is nothing if not persistently proactive. He calls the Star every day until he gets the job.

The reason Carl was so determined to get this job, he tells the reader in his new memoir, is that during the interview he had passed through the newsroom—people running every which way, typewriters going like machine guns, men at their desks shouting “Copy!”—and felt galvanized. “In my whole life I had never heard such glorious chaos or seen such purposeful commotion as I now beheld in that

newsroom. By the time I had walked from one end to the other I knew that I wanted to become a newspaperman.”

Carl Bernstein has been one of the bestknown journalists in America since 1972, when he and Bob Woodward broke the Watergate scandal that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency. Chasing History, his newest memoir, is a nearly 400-page account of the apprenticeship he underwent at the Evening Star between 1960 and 1964. The book details his hunger to rise to the top of his chosen profession by becoming an ace reporter. It delivers a record of such single-minded pursuit of a goal that at times our protagonist’s rise can feel reminiscent of Budd Schulberg’s classic tale of the ur-hustler, Sammy Glick, in What Makes Sammy Run? However, Bernstein’s hustle stops short—way short—of Sammy’s ruthlessness. The young Carl is dogged but seems neither underhanded nor predatory; all in all, he is so good-natured that it’s a pleasure to spend time in his company.

Nonetheless, from the moment he gets the copy boy job he is aiming to be sent out on a story. Toward this end he nags, cajoles, manipulates. There is nothing and no one who can’t do him some good—not an editor, reporter or rewrite man, even the printers in the composing room. But whether they help him or not, from all of them he learns something more about the newspaper business. Perhaps “learn” is not really the right word. Perhaps the right word resides somewhere in the realm of “swallows whole” or “soaks-up-like-a-sponge.”

A striking element of Chasing History is the generosity with which Bernstein profiles almost everyone with whom he worked, showing how each one contributed to “getting the story out.” This group at the Evening Star, in particular, he thinks, provides a wholly admirable example of how things unfold when a newspaper is working as it should. Among the many examples he offers, here’s a simple but effective one: A police call comes in. Something terrible has happened in the city. At a public swimming pool, electric lights went on accidentally in the water and two children were electrocuted. Within minutes if not seconds the city editor, a master at his trade, has organized his reporters and photographers

JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS

Subscribe Now! From fiction to philosophy, and from ancient history to the latest show (or Supreme Court decision), the JRB brings you great writers who review the Jewish world with deep knowledge and ready wit.

Subscribe today!

Glikl bas Leyb from Winter 2020

Visit www.jewishreviewofbooks.com or call 1-877-753-0337.

Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover.

that there must be a room in Bernstein’s home entirely set aside for his notes. How else could he have written a book so filled with descriptions of “what happened”? The detail he has retained of people, events, circumstances, as well as the local and political ambience of the time, is a marvel.

Bernstein was born in DC, and even though his parents moved him to the Maryland suburbs when he was 11, he has always thought of the capital as his hometown. From the first pages of Chasing History he is eager to let the reader know how familiar he is with the city. Arriving at the store where he has been sent to get his interview suit tailored, he writes: “Louie Goldstein’s ‘haberdashery,’ as its owner referred to his store when I walked inside, was conspicuous from the sidewalk because of its big electric sign—unusual downtown, where almost everything shut down by six o’clock in the evening, except for a few restaurants and bars, and the peep show movies and burlesque house on Ninth Street.”

His ability to make of Washington a collection of neighborhoods that a working-class boy like himself would know like the back of his hand is an enrichment of his memoir, as is the judicious way in which he refers constantly to his left-wing family, his boyhood friends, his grade school memories, all representative of the thousands of ordinary lives that are being lived in the capital, right alongside the glamour and power we associate with the city.

Chasing History is not particularly artful, nor is it reflective. Its virtue lies elsewhere.

Narrated by the Carl Bernstein who did indeed become an ace reporter and is still in love with the newsroom, this little history of what it was like to live and work in the world of on-the-ground journalism as it was practiced some 60 years ago—a world of tactile intensity as opposed to the bloodlessness of online reality—is alive with the joy that clearly filled its author’s mind and heart while he was writing it. That joy is not only palpable; it’s contagious.

Vivian Gornick is an essayist and critic. Her most recent book is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader.

60

WINTER ISSUE 2022

LITERARY MOMENT

BOOK REVIEW MARCELA SULAK

A POET’S APPETITE FOR GRIEF AND DESIRE

Breaking & Entering: New and Selected Poems

By Barbara Goldberg The Word Works, 184 pp., $26 There must be an appetite for grief.

How else to explain this gnawing on memory until its bones are clean?

—“What is Served”

If he raised his glance to really look at me he’d see how near and far are merely metaphor of present, past and future. Ah, but his realm is space and all its variations, while mine is time.

The two realms intersect, of course: for instance, when he went far, I ached for his return.

Now that he’s here I feel a greater distance.

Aside from the Quattrocento series, most of the new poems seem to be set in Israel, fitting for a woman who is the first member of her Jewish family to be born in safety, in America, after fleeing the Holocaust “by way of Czechoslovakia, France, Spain, Portugal, to a Greek ship that took them from Lisbon to New York, and then to Brazil to await their permanent visas,” as she noted in a 2015 interview in the publishing blog Accents. She added that she was the only sibling born in the United States and that the family’s language was German.

Many of the selections from Goldberg’s earlier books mine the aftermath of this harrowing history; others focus on pivotal characters in medieval European history, such as the 1986 Berta Broadfoot and Pepin Short: A Merovingian Romance.

The new poems open in the birthplace of the author’s late partner, the noted Israeli

Barbara Goldberg

poet Moshe Dor, whose work Goldberg has translated into English in Scorched by the Sun (2012). Goldberg has devoted most of her life to translation, editing and publishing; that work culminated recently in an extraordinary volume, Transformation (2019), a selection of single poems translated from a wide range of Israeli writers along with personal essays about her lifelong relationship with translation.

Together, she and Dor co-translated one volume and edited four anthologies of contemporary Israeli poetry, including After the First Rain: Israeli Poems on War and Peace (1998) and the award-winning The Stones Remember (1991).

The new poems are quite different in language and style from most of the selected work, but they act as a gloss on nearly everything Goldberg has written.

“Furlough” is especially apt in describing how our parents imprint us with the love of fear and transmit generational trauma through their most loving and playful acts: I love to see those tall, lean, muscular men with their clean-shaven heads and digital watches toss their kids in the air. And I love to see them drop, not weightless, but light as grenades. This is how children learn that fear can be fun. And fathers, that this too is hand to hand combat. To cradle or kill—what story do we tell ourselves to justify. That a dunam of earth is worth dying for? That a child opening his mouth with an O of pleasure overturns everything? We grow like onions, our heads buried in dirt. And we die like onions, face down in a pot of boiling water. Gravity causes all to fall down, and love, to hold things up.

WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

61

WIKIIPEDIA

Barbara Goldberg’s poetry has always displayed an insatiable appetite for grief and desire. Breaking and Entering presents a satisfying sampling of Goldberg’s previous five collections over the past 35 years. Her work’s memory center is, in many ways, her family’s survival of the Holocaust and what surviving this horror has done to their desires, their loves and those of the generations after. They love and hurt one another, they marry, divorce, cheat and forgive or hungrily lick their wounds.

One imagines that Goldberg’s own life relationship with a partner who longed for his homeland when he was with her, and longed for his partner when he was at home, may provide material as well.

The “New Poems’’ that introduce the selected works feel up-to-the-minute as well as foundational. The fascinating

“Writings from the Quattrocento” series seems to have been penned around 1985, though published only now. This series—imagined entries from the diary of Tommasa di Benedetto Malefici, wife of Paolo Uccello, the Renaissance painter and sculptor known for the theory of perspective—introduces some of the most salient themes of Goldberg’s life’s work.

The poems describe a couple’s sincere love for one another and the trials that strain its capacity to endure when they are unable to produce a living child.

While the husband throws himself into his work (“I know he wracks his brain—/ how can the appearance of near/and far be rendered on a flat plane?”), it is the wife who seems to have mastered the true theory of perspective. This perspective explains, perhaps, why history remains circular, and why we want only what we cannot fully possess:

A perfect gift for B’nai Mitzvot and confirmation class students Chosen as a “best book of 2021”

by Tablet Magazine, School Library Journal and others

AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD.

“RBG’s Brave and Brilliant Women would make a great bat mitzvah or bar mitzvah gift. It’s a handsome volume with well-written pieces on women whose stories will motivate today’s Jewish youth to greatness. The book will edify Jewish girls and boys alike.”

—Sydney Taylor Shmooze Blog

Purchase signed copies at momentmag.com/shop Purchase signed copies at momentmag.com/shop

WIKIPEDIA

One might say that each of Goldberg’s poems is a microcosm of her entire work.

The children, we can’t help but feel, might one day have poems to write or read about wars their fathers or their lovers will have fought in. The digital watches tracking circular time, the Os of the mouths and the onions, the water bubbles in boiling water all emphasize the limited circulation of human love. And we know that what has been will happen again. A few poems later, “Penelope’s Song” concludes a section of poems about military outposts and Memorial Day. Penelope and the furloughed fathers are positioned in such a way that they are looking across the same sea, in one another’s direction, separated by 3,300 years of circular history of wars, loves and longing.

Goldberg’s insights about the nature of desire, its various and surprising objects, are remarkably astute, and they work as a breath that activates harmonious 62

WINTER ISSUE 2022

notes throughout the work. In fact, one might say that each of Goldberg’s poems is a microcosm of her entire work. I keep returning to the last section of the poem “Weight,” from The Royal Baker’s Daughter (2008): The pallbearers took turns carrying the casket. To the south lay the sea, and north, the castle and beyond the stone was the maiden Margot whose yeast cakes were always studded with raisins. How heavy death is if you don’t take turns.

Here, practical concerns such as distribution of a corpse’s weight open and close the poem, and in between is a fairy tale setting of sea and castle, complete with a maiden baking sensual cakes. In the short span of this Bruegelesque snippet of a poem, we are distracted from the deaths

that we carry in us, and from our own.

Indeed, we must all take turns.

As with other first-generation American poets, Goldberg’s poetry often returns to early 20th-century Europe through parable, fairy tale and multilingualism. Goldberg’s interest in fairy tales as allegories and repositories of hidden truths also makes her a sister to the English novelist Angela Carter.

Goldberg herself has described her work as containing elements of magical realism, which might best be described as narratives that contain two complete worldviews whose frames of reference have collapsed into one another. This collapse of boundaries between two intact worlds might also aptly describe the immigrant experience, or the experience of a child of two Holocaust survivors, or a couple whose homelands are separated by a deep sea.

Marcela Sulak is a poet, essayist and translator who directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Israel’s BarIlan University.

moment cartoon ILLUSTRATED BY BEN SCHWARTZ

SUBMIT A CAPTION FOR THIS CARTOON BY FEBRUARY 15 AT MOMENTMAG.COM/CARTOON

“She had these candles and a big bowl of stuffing, and said, ‘Your choice.’”

—Jim Gorman, Thousand Oaks, CA “I’ve got to prove to her parents that I’m Jewish.”

—Michael Lomazow, Riverside, CA “Yes, actually, it IS a pain in the ass.”

—Rich Wolf, Westminster, MD (NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021)

VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE CAPTION AT MOMENTMAG.COM/CARTOON

“Haven’t our people suffered enough?”

—Adrian Storisteanu, Toronto, ON, Canada (SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021)

CHUCKLE AT THE WINNING CAPTION! WINTER ISSUE 2022 | MOMENT

63

spice box FEATURED BOX

From the bar mitzvah of Homo Judaicus Submitted by Howard Lazar, Teaneck, NJ

What sort of mushrooms, exactly?

Submitted by Immanuel Spira, Chapel Hill, NC

Recipe on backside Submitted by Rabbi Stephen S. Pearce, San Francisco, CA

A late 19th century-early 20th century silver spice container from Yemen. Gift of Elsie and Simon Winer in honor of their grandsons, Adam, Michael and Eugene Winer.

THE JEWISH MUSEUM

64

WINTER ISSUE 2022

Send your unmarked original newspaper clippings, curiosities and photographs to: Spice Box, 4115 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Suite LL10, Washington, DC 20016 or email editor@momentmag.com

Books make wonderful wInter companions

NINE LIVES: FAVORITE PROFILES OF FAMOUS PEOPLE

THEODORE BIKEL’S THE CITY OF LIGHT

Includes Jon Stewart, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Walter Mosley, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Oliver Sacks and others.

Foreword: Sidney Offit Afterword: Gloria Steinem

The story of Bikel’s Vienna childhood and what happened to the Jews when the Nazis took power.

By Aimee Ginsburg Bikel Illustrations: Noah Phillips

ELIE WIESEL: AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND LEGACY

LEONARD FEIN: VISION AND PASSION

36 reflections from people who knew Wiesel, plus a visual history of his life. Editor: Nadine Epstein Foreword: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Afterword: Ted Koppel

Moment founding editor’s writings about American Jews, Israel, racism and more. Editors: Liat Deener-Chodirker, Nadine Epstein, Ann F. Lewis, Eileen Lavine Foreword: Nadine Epstein

CAN ROBOTS BE JEWISH? AND OTHER PRESSING QUESTIONS OF MODERN LIFE

HAVE I GOT A CARTOON FOR YOU: THE MOMENT MAGAZINE BOOK OF JEWISH CARTOONS

Moment’s “Ask the Rabbis” rabbis share their opinions.

Editor: Amy E. Schwartz Foreword: Rabbi Yitz Greenberg Afterword: Rabbi Shira Stutman

Cartoonist and former New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff presents his collection of favorite Jewish cartoons.

Foreword: Roz Chast

RBG’S BRAVE AND BRILLIANT WOMEN: 33 JEWISH WOMEN TO INSPIRE EVERYONE

SPIRITUAL BATHING: THE ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO SPIRITUAL WATER RITUALS

Intergenerational short biographies about trail-blazing women. By Nadine Epstein Introduction: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Illustrations: Bee Johnson

Water-based traditions from around the world with detailed instructions to create restorative spiritual baths. By Nadine Epstein and Rosita Arvigo

These books and others are available through MomentBooks at momentmag.com/shop

REDISCOVER THE CHARM OF PARIS Weekly direct flights from 13 U.S. cities Book today at AIRFRANCE.US