November/December 2019 by Moment Magazine

Marc Fisher on Stephen Miller | Roz Chast on Jewish Humor Robert Siegel on David Ben-Gurion | Carlin Romano on Primo Levi Eetta Prince-Gibson on Gender Segregation in Israel + Middle East turmoil, mushrooms and more

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FROM THE EDITOR

More women’s voices lead to stronger journalism by Nadine Epstein

6 THE CONVERSATION 9 FROM MOMENTMAG.COM From “Chai Brow:” Two must-see 2019 movies by Andrew Lapin From “Beshert:” A shiva leads to a lifetime love by Faye Moskowitz

OPINIONS

Poland’s Jewish museum is in danger by Konstanty Gebert A Mizrachi millennial loses sleeps over Iran by Tabby Refael Is impeachment good for Israel? by Marshall Breger Who’s to blame for the Israeli Arab murder rate? by Shmuel Rosner

Robert Malley on the deeper crises in the Middle East interviewed by Amy E. Schwartz

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MY PEOPLE IN CARTOONS Incessant questioning, a sense of the absurd, plus a touch of anxiety are the fixings for Jewish humor. by Roz Chast, with cartoons by Chast, Bob Mankoff, Ed Steed, Mort Gerberg and Zachary Kanin

M O M E N T F E AT U R E

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MOMENT PROFILE

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MOMENT PROJECT

2020 JEWISH POLITICAL VOICES

The 34-year-old adviser to Donald Trump is fiercely loyal, quick and ruthless. Has the president finally found his Roy Cohn?

What do 30 politically engaged Jews from ten battleground states have to say about the presidential campaign, now and in months ahead?

by Marc Fisher

by Amy Saltzman, Suzanne Borden, JPVP team

MOMENT FICTION

HOMECOMING, 1945

Israel’s publicly funded universities now offer gender-segregated programs to help the ultraOrthodox earn degrees. But at what price?

Two strangers arrive at the train station in a small Hungarian town and unload some heavy nailed boxes, unsettling the local inhabitants.

by Eetta Prince-Gibson

by Gábor T. Szántó

MOMENT EVENT

TZEDEK, TZEDEK TIRDOF Moment honored Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Lloyd Goldman at its 2019 New York awards dinner. Highlights from the evening, including remarks and photographs.

F RO M THE EDITOR | NADIN E EPSTE I N

Women’s Voices Make Journalism Stronger

CAROL GUZY

A few weeks ago, I heard from a concerned reader. He thought that Moment was becoming too women-oriented for his taste, that we were publishing too many stories about women. I don’t agree. Here at Moment, we are proud to cover women’s struggles and triumphs in an effort to make up for the gender imbalance that has always existed in magazine journalism. That doesn’t make us women-oriented. It does, however, help us portray the Jewish world more accurately. That the majority of our editors are women, and that they have the power to frame the issues of our day, makes our journalism stronger. Of course, there is no single women’s take on any issue. Even among our small cadre of editors, we have differences of religion, politics and background—but we manage to come to a consensus on most issues. In our broader world of contributors, there is even more variety. Our work reflects the thoughtful team that puts it together. On a recent trip to Israel, I learned about gender segregation in publicly funded colleges and universities in Israel, a growing trend that has received little coverage there and almost none here. As a woman— and as someone who once attended an Israeli university—I was concerned about the potential impact of these relatively small programs. While there’s no question that Israelis have a right to attend single-

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019

sex private institutions of higher education, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was fair for public institutions to offer separate secular degree programs for the ultra-Orthodox. On one hand, this discriminates against female professors and administrators, and feeds a culture of extremism that leads to widespread discrimination against women in Israel. On the other, it may help some ultra-Orthodox students earn a university degree so that they can get higher-paying jobs, which benefits Israel’s economy. Moment’s Israel editor Eetta Prince-Gibson guides us through this debate. On a subject closer to home, we are launching our Jewish Political Voices Project, opening a window onto the political and cultural conflicts that are tearing the nation—and the American Jewish community—apart. We are following 30 politically engaged American Jewish voters through the 2020 presidential election, and in this issue, we introduce you to ten of them. These interviews serve as a reminder that Jews—whether they identify as Democrats, Republicans or independents—are distinct individuals with their own stories and opinions on Israel, Iran, growing anti-Semitism, immigration, health care, climate change, the economy, guns and impeachment. We’ve already been surprised by the fresh insights our interviewers have gleaned, and over the next year, we look forward to sharing our findings with you in print and online. And I invite you to tell us your thoughts at momentmag.com/jpvp, but ask that you be respectful of others’ points of view. Also, lest you forget that ours is not a

placid time, we publish Washington Post editor Marc Fisher’s insightful profile of President Donald Trump’s speechwriter and adviser Stephen Miller, plus columns on the turmoil in the Middle East and the potential effect of the impeachment process on Israel. For the part of your brain longing to think about anything but present-day problems, there’s fiction by the Hungarian writer Gábor T. Szántó, a review of Tom Segev’s recent biography of David Ben-Gurion by Moment special literary contributor Robert Siegel, and an essay from our new critic-at-large Carlin Romano on Primo Levi. For a little levity, I recommend Roz Chast’s musings on Jewish humor and a selection of delightful Jewish-themed cartoons in “Visual Moment,” excerpted from Have I Got a Cartoon For You, edited by Bob Mankoff, former New Yorker cartoon editor and founder of Moment’s very own cartoon contest. (Chast wrote the foreword to the book.) Then there’s the story of the term “bark mitzvah” (yes, it’s been trademarked) in “Jewish Word.” To attain an even deeper state of relaxation, read about Jews and mushrooms in “Talk of the Table.” After you finish this issue, head to our website, newly redesigned, at momentmag.com and check out our online series “Beshert,” “Chai Brow” and our growing collection of “Five Books to Be an Educated Jew.” You can also sign up for updates from our Anti-Semitism Monitor and our newsletters, Moment Minute and DC Dispatch. It’s hard to believe that it’s 5780 and nearly 2020, a big birthday year for Moment. More on that coming soon!

IN MEMORIAM — KEN BIALKIN Moment’s longtime board member Ken Bialkin passed away at age 89 in August. A New York attorney and philanthropist, he served as the leader of many major Jewish organizations, including as president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, chairman of the American Jewish Historical Society, president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, national chairman of the AntiDefamation League, chairman of the America-Israel Friendship League and vice chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was also a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He will be missed.

/OCTOBER

SEPTEMBER

ISSUE 2019

UPCOMING EVENTS & DEADLINES T FORGIVE?

WHAT CAN WE NO

Sunday, November 10, 2019 INAUGURAL LECTURE “Tipping The Scales of Human Nature Towards Tolerance and Kindness,” by Nadine Epstein, hosted by the Anne Jaffe Fund for Tolerance and Holocaust Education

Sunday, November 24, 2019 MOMENT’S DC GALA & AWARDS DINNER Awards recipients are Nina Totenberg, Evan Osnos, Aviva Kempner and Phyllis Greenberger. Robert Siegel is emcee and presenters include Thomas Friedman and Judy Woodruff

National Press Club 529 14th St NW Washington, DC 6 p.m. For tables and tickets visit momentmag.com/gala2019 Monday, March 30, 2020 DANIEL PEARL INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM INITIATIVE PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE

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Elie Wiesel: An Extraordinary Life & Legacy, edited by Nadine Epstein

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WHAT AMERICA

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Have I Got a Cartoon For You! The Moment Magazine Book of Jewish Cartoons, by Bob Mankoff Theodore Bikel’s The City of Light, by Aimee Ginsburg Bikel

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

THE CONVERSATION

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER ISSUE 2019

WHAT CAN WE NOT FORGIVE?

WHAT AMERICA CAN LEARN FROM GERMANY

ALICE HOFFMAN + ISRAELI DANCE + SABBATH STEWS + WILD THINGS

FIVE BOOKS TO BE AN EDUCATED JEW

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8/16/19 9:34 PM

“ CO N C EN TRATION CA M P ” I S I TSE LF A EU P HEMI SM, S OMEHOW MO RE UTTERABLE T H AN “ DEATH CAMP ” OR E VEN “ FO R CEDL AB O R C A MP.” WE CA NN OT A PP ROPRIAT E A E UPHEMI SM AND CL AI M EXC LUS IVE RI G HTS.

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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019

FIVE MUST-READ BOOKS A BOOK CLUB ADVENTURE Our congregation’s book club meets every other month for food and lively discussions. Recently, it had been getting harder to select a book. Just in time, I discovered your article (“Five Books to Be an Educated Jew,” Summer 2019 and September/ October 2019) containing recommendations from a broad spectrum of interesting Jews. We passed it around while we were drinking coffee, eating and discussing the current book. Being Jews, we had 45 opinions on which book to choose next, but we settled on Dropped from Heaven: Stories by Sophie Judah, about four generations of Indian Jews. We chose that because we wanted to know more about the experiences of Jews in India. Then we went home assuming it would be simple to find. Wrong! It’s out of print. There were a few copies on Amazon for hundreds of dollars each. No Kindle version. Two booksellers listed it on their websites, then emailed to cancel our orders saying they didn’t have it. Our library had one copy. To be ethical, I contacted the publisher for permission to scan it and distribute it. The publisher said the rights were controlled by a literary agent in Israel and gave me an address but no phone number or email address. Just imagine how long it would take to get mail back and forth to Israel, and that assumes the agent hasn’t subsequently moved. So, having done our best to acquire it legally, we figured it would be ethical to scan it and email it to our book club, and now people are looking forward to our upcoming discussion. We have another few books on deck for subsequent meetings. I’m going to keep this issue, as it will be good for choosing gifts as well as finding future reads for our group. Just be prepared for an adventure trying to find some of them. Audrey Newell Ann Arbor, MI GAGA FOR ISRAELI DANCE A GREAT ART FORM I applaud Moment for its excellent exploration of Israeli culture (“Gaga for Israeli Dance,” September/October 2019). I’m delighted to see Israeli contemporary dance recognized for what it is: one of the great art

forms to emerge from Israeli society. What was particularly fascinating was the way the story connected the history of Israeli dance from its roots in nation-building to the politically aware forms of contemporary dance that have challenged audiences around the world. This article opened my eyes and helped me appreciate the genius of Israeli choreographers on a deeper level. Eileen Dzik Ann Arbor, MI LEARNING FROM GERMANY REPARATIONS ARE JUST Slavery reparations now (“What America Can Learn From Germany,” September/ October 2019)! Can we stop playing games already? It is not about slave owners or the slaves from the time being alive. It is about the wealth of this country that was built on the backs of slaves. Why is it right for the ancestors of the wrongdoers to help themselves to the wealth and run ahead, especially of those whose ancestors were forced to give so much? Julia Harden, via Facebook REPARATIONS ARE CRAZY Reparations are a crazy idea. No one living to pay it to. Let’s just stop fighting over the past; we can’t change that. There will always be racism, in all people, regardless of skin color. The Democratic Party needs to stop misusing the term. They call everyone they don’t agree with racists. Most people are not racists. Donna Haigood, via Facebook ISRAEL’S ETHIOPIAN CITIZENS FROM JOY TO PREJUDICE Thank you for the article by Naomi Ragen (“How Israel Is Failing Its Ethiopian Citizens,” September/October 2019). It is sad to see that color prejudice is embedded in society wherever black people live. Saving the Ethiopian Jews was a great and joyous event. Now this is marred by the ugly reactions of Jews who themselves have experienced prejudice. What is wrong? We don’t like it when we are discriminated against. How do you live with doing the same to others? Truly, this is despicable. Anita Lieb, via momentmag.com

BERNIE SANDERS A GRUMPY DEFECTOR As a 76-year-old grumpy old Jew who was born and raised in Brooklyn, supported Bernie Sanders (“Grumpy Jewish Grandpa 2020,” September/October 2019) from his first Senate race until the 2016 presidential primary, and would love to see a socialist president, I can no longer support Sanders for president for the following reasons: 1) he is too old (as is Joe Biden), and 2) the United States is not ready for a socialist president and socialism is a distraction that Il Duce Trump will demagogue to win reelection. Ted Hochstadt, via momentmag.com CLIMATE CHANGE JUDAISM & THE NATURAL WORLD I have just had time to get through the letters column in this month's Moment, which arrived this afternoon. I realized that there is a thirst among your readers for an understanding of the Jewish relationship to the environment (“Is There a Jewish Responsibility to Fight Climate Change?” Summer 2019), and for a textual basis for approaching our 21st-century understanding of the natural world. I suggest a feature on this topic. One starting point would be an article by Rabbi David Seidenberg or a review of his recent book Kabbalah and Ecology. Jewish texts are ripe with many views of the natural world, and when we talk in our synagogues about the environment, we should have some grounding in them. Andrew Oram Arlington, MA CONCENTRATION CAMPS NO ONE OWNS A EUPHEMISM The term “concentration camp” (“Reflections on Language—and Thought,” September/ October 2019) is itself a euphemism, somehow more utterable than “death camp” or “extermination camp” or even “forced-labor camp,” or conveniently more inclusive of all the types of torture inflicted by the Nazis during World War II in, yes, concentration camps. We (Jews, the Allies, any group) cannot appropriate a euphemism and then claim exclusive rights, as if the term is itself sacred. We must not insist that the word cannot correctly be applied to other imprisonment situations, such as Japanese internment camps in the United States, re-education centers in China or the detention camps at the U.S.Mexico border. Any such place in which peo-

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ASK THE RABBIS GOD FORGIVES MURDERERS TOO If murder is unforgivable, then Moses and King David are unforgiven (“Are There Things That Can’t Be Forgiven?” September/October 2019). David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” mass murderer, is in life imprisonment (last I heard) and has been forgiven by God for his murders. If he can be forgiven, then can’t we all be? Of course, as in his case, it requires repentance. In the New Testament, Jesus equates hatred in the heart with murder. That includes just about all of us. As they say, to err is human, to forgive divine. It takes a spiritual transformation to receive that “divine forgiveness.” Davida Brown, via momentmag.com TALK OF THE TABLE A FEW CORRECTIONS My sister and I are always grateful for writers to remember our dad, Irving Naxon, and his invention of the Crock-Pot (“The CrockPot & the Sabbath Stew,” September/ October 2019). I’ve been interviewed occasionally over the years by writers ranging from CBS Sunday Morning to the Canadian Jewish News. So I was surprised to see the current edition of Moment with an article referring to my dad that had inaccuracies. • Dad changed his name from Nachumsohn to Naxon because it was less German, not less Jewish. Naxon had been the brand he created for his appliance manufacturing business. • Rival manufacturing was a Kansas City company, not a Chicago one. • The photo of the patent is for a turkey roaster, not the Crock-Pot. The correct patent information for the Crock-Pot is at the U.S. Patent Office and pre-digital. Lenore Naxon San Francisco, CA Editor’s note: We regret the errors and have corrected the story at momentmag.com/talkof-the-table-the-crock-pot-the-sabbath-stew

FROM MOMENTMAG .COM

The Best Jewish Movies of 2019 This is an excerpt from Chai Brow, Moment’s new weekly arts column exploring contemporary film, TV and podcasts through a Jewish lens. To read more from Chai Brow, visit momentmag.com/chai-brow I want to tell you about my two favorite Jewish movies of the year. The only problem is, I’m not sure if they even qualify as “Jewish movies.” So why do I describe them as such? Why, when watching them, did I find myself reflecting on my own Jewish identity? Because, with all due respect to the new documentary about Fiddler on the Roof, which I hear is lovely, I’m excited to embrace a more-expansive definition of Jewish culture in the modern day. The global Jewish community is a big tent, and the world of Jewish film should reflect that, which means exploring beyond the shtetl and the Upper East Side. So let’s part the waters and go on a journey to some unexpected places.

Va c a t i o n b y D a n Redefining Give Me Liberty: In this indie-film marvel about a Russian-American who works as the driver of a medical transport van in Milwaukee, our hero Vic (Chris Galust) just wants to get through his day helping his usual clients with disabilities. But the other displaced post-Soviet Jews in his low-income apartment building rope him into driving them to a friend’s funeral, along with all his clients. Chaos follows, as Vic’s van becomes a de facto melting pot for different social and ethnic groups, all just trying to get somewhere on time, and all failing miserably. It’s the Old World colliding with the new, which means a protest against police shootings of black men and an accordion performance of “Let My People Go.” Writer-director Kirill Mikhanovsky’s poignant exploration of how forgotten communities can band together in the worst of circumstances is a message of Jewish resilience if ever there was one.

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Synonyms: The winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival is the latest from Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid (The Kindergarten Teacher). Lapid’s dark comedy centers on Israeli ex-military officer Yoav (Tom Mercier), who moves to Paris and tries to erase his national identity and “become French.” He’s stranded—literally naked in the opening scene—the first sign that trying to build a new selfhood from scratch isn’t going to be easy. (The second sign? He can only find work at the Israeli consulate, yet refuses to speak Hebrew.) In the absurd vignettes that follow, Yoav reckons with a host of wild characters, including a French pornographer who wants to fetishize his Israeli background and a chestthumping colleague who aggressively hums “Hatikvah” on the Paris Metro. Synonyms finds its raw, provocative sense of humor in the messy freedom of abandoning one’s heritage. —Andrew Lapin

MONDAYS Five things you need to know from the nation’s capital. A newsletter by Nathan Guttman. Sign up at momentmag.com/ dispatch Moment Minute TUESDAYS & THURSDAYS A newsletter written by our editors, who reflect on our latest stories— and delve into the archives. Sign up at momentmag.com/newsletter Beshert THURSDAYS Is your love beshert—“meant to be”? A feature on Jewish love stories, written by you. Read more—or submit your love story—at momentmag.com/beshert Chai Brow FRIDAYS An arts column exploring contemporary film, TV and podcasts through a Jewish lens. Read more at momentmag.com/ chai-brow Anti-Semitism Monitor We track and contextualize anti-Semitic incidents around the world. Read more, and sign up for updates, at momentmag. com/anti-semitism-monitor-2019

From a Shiva to My Lifetime Love This is an excerpt from Beshert, a new Moment feature dedicated to telling Jewish love stories. To read more from Beshert—or submit a story of your own—visit momentmag.com/beshert 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. We stopped at a deli and made a great show of tossing coins on the table’s center so no one would go hungry for lack of money. 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. 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. The triple mirror of my mother’s vanity was shrouded, some say so the spirit of the dead won’t encounter itself as it leaves the body. The next day we began the seven days of

mourning. I readied myself, wearing 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? Jack, and each day he brought me a little present to amuse and distract me from the seven days of confinement. I only remember one of those gifts, a cunning cigarette-rolling machine. Jack chatted up my mother’s grieving sisters and brothers, even my bewildered father and my two brothers, ages six and twelve. 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. This year, 2019, we celebrated 71 years together. —Faye Moskowitz

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O P I NION | KON STAN T Y G EBERT

History Held Hostage Poland’s government is jeopardizing the future of its Jewish Museum.

Until the doors of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened six-and-a-half years ago, many observers, myself included, were diffident toward this new institution. Many were worried that the museum’s innovative concept—telling a story with props, rather than, in the traditional way, showcasing objects—would lead to a Disneylandization of a serious subject. Others shared concerns that the museum, giving in to a swelling trend in Polish public opinion, would whitewash the many contentious, and at times horrible, episodes of Polish Jewish history. And all wondered if professor Dariusz Stola, the museum’s director, would be up to the task. Neither Jewish nor a specialist in Jewish history—his field is 20thcentury Polish political history—Stola seemed dangerously unprepared for the demands of the office and the political minefield he was walking into. No other aspect of Polish history, not even the years of postwar Communist Poland, raises as many hackles as the centuries of PolishJewish coexistence and conflict that ended in the horror of the Shoah. Yet today, the museum elicits a consensus of approval among most visitors, both Polish and Jewish (itself a major miracle). It has also become obvious that the success of the institution, recognized in 2016 as European Museum of the Year, is largely the handiwork of its director. Stola has not only directed the museum competently and creatively; his knowledge of Jewish history is also impressive and his ability to dance between political mines breathtaking. He has, for instance, unequivocally criticized Poland’s infamous “Holocaust law” of 2018, which penalized ascribing blame to Poles for crimes of the Shoah (the penal article was eventually revoked, but the issue still rankles). So when his term in office ended in February 2019, observers were certain that he should, and would, be reappointed for another term, as he had requested. Only one person appears to have disagreed: Poland’s powerful minister of culture and deputy prime minister, Professor Piotr Gliński. 12

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The museum is a unique public-private partnership among three parties. The city of Warsaw provided gratis the plot of land, in the heart of the former ghetto, on which the museum was built; the government paid for the construction; and a Jewish NGO, the Jewish Historical Institute Association, assumed financial and substantive responsibility for the exhibition itself. According to museum bylaws, all three need to agree on any major decisions—and the appointment of the director is certainly one of them. The association and the city, run by the liberal opposition, enthusiastically endorsed Stola. The nationalist ruling party, PiS, had other plans. Minister Gliński announced in February that he would not reappoint the director. He never clearly explained his reasons; the one he sometimes invokes—that Stola allegedly refused to host a conference at the museum on the role of Jews in the political philosophy of former president Lech Kaczy´nski—is false. Stola repeatedly stated that he would be glad to host the conference, but since the museum is an academic institution, the organizers needed to find an academic partner. They never did. There was no reason for Stola to object to the conference: The late President Kaczyński was one of the initiators of the POLIN project and a staunch supporter of the museum. But the allegation, though disproved, is explosive among ruling party supporters. The president— who was the twin brother of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, the party’s current leader—died in an air crash in Smolensk that the party believes was a concealed Russian assassination, and any slight, real or imaginary, to his memory is seen as lèse-majesté. The real reason for Stola’s non-reappointment seems to be his refusal to cave to the party’s ever-more-strident line in what it calls “historical policy”—that is, its insistence on denying any wrongs Poles and Poland might have committed against other nations and against the Jews in particular. The director’s special sin was a temporary exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the anti-Semitic campaign of March 1968. The

government took the position that, since Poland was then ruled by Communists and ultimately from Moscow, “it did not exist”— in the words of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki—and therefore has no responsibility for the 1968 events. The exhibition, which became Poland’s most popular historical exhibition ever, did not overtly address the issue of responsibility. But the last item was a billboard with quotes, unattributed but recognizable, by contemporary Polish figures, paired with very similar anti-Semitic statements made 50 years earlier. Regardless of who was responsible then, it implied, the hatred continues now. When Gli´n ski refused to reappoint Stola, a stalemate ensued. The parties eventually agreed to an open contest, with a 15-member jury appointed equally by all three entities. Academics nationally and internationally rallied behind Stola, who reapplied—and in May obtained 12 of the 15 votes. This means that his countercandidate, who had no relevant experience, convinced only three of the five ministerial appointees to the jury. It seemed that the case was closed—but Gliński, almost half a year later, still has not signed Stola’s appointment contract. Under the law, only he has the power to do so, and no law imposes a deadline on his decision. Thus the museum, run by an interim director, is paralyzed. No major decisions can be made, and donors are pulling away, fearing a government takeover of this independent institution. There is no political reason for the government to relent—reappointing Stola would cost the ruling party far-right votes. But the museum cannot function in limbo indefinitely. The minister has thus found an effective way of blackmailing the other two partners: If they do not give in to his demands, the institution will ultimately go under. Welcome to the world of practical historical policy, Polish style. Konstanty Gerbert is an international reporter and columnist with the leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

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Theater Magic By Yonah Kirschner His husband was going to be away for the weekend, so Brian Rubin-Sowers was searching for something to do with his 3-year-old and 6-month-old daughters. Having a theater background, Rubin-Sowers decided to check out an immersive theatrical experience for young children and their parents at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), a New York City LGBTQ synagogue. What he discovered that weekend, he says, was simply “magical.” CBST first piloted Aggadah Adventures in June 2018 during Pride weekend with a Noah-themed experience titled “Under the Rainbow.” This year, supported by The Covenant Foundation, CBST created and held two new Adventures: Purim-themed “Behind the Mask” and Passover-themed “Down the Nile.” Both, held three times, filled to capacity with more than 100 participants. Families with young children are more than 20 percent of CBST’s 600 member households. Over the past ten years, CBST’s “tot Shabbat” has grown into the robust Limmud B’Shabbat education program for children ages 6 to 18 and the bimonthly AlefBet Shabbat service for babies and toddlers. But, the synagogue leadership felt that there was still a gap in CBST’s early childhood programming. Rabbi Yael Rapport, Assistant Rabbi at CBST and Project Director for Aggadah Adventures, wanted an immersive program that families could experience together. When Jonathan Shmidt Chapman, executive director of Theatre for Young Audiences/USA and Project Director for Aggadah Adventures, asked her what it might be like for families to walk into Noah’s ark in a Theatre for the Very Young (TVY) Jewish expe1

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rience, Rabbi Rapport knew they were onto something. Drawing on TVY techniques, including immersive storytelling, multisensory elements, 360-degree learning environments, and small participant size to maximize interaction between artist-educators and participants, Aggadah Adventures has emerged as an exciting program to connect families with young children to Jewish stories, holidays, learning, and wisdom. Chapman directs and adapts the stories, and writes the original music for each Adventure along with composer Ty Citerman. “The key words for us were family engagement,” Rabbi Rapport explains. “But we also wanted to create deep roots within a child’s experience and memory about Jewish story, ritual, and community, and it didn’t make sense to do that without the grownups who came with the kids.” Participants walk into a completely immersive environment. In the Noah’s Ark Adventure,

Jennifer Johnson’s twin sons, one of whom is autistic, attended all three Aggadah Adventures. “I’ve never seen something so engaging and creative,” she says. “There’s nothing like it in any Jewish early childhood setting. It’s professional caliber. You’re expecting a little children’s theater, and then you think, ‘Wow, what did I just walk into?’” The program has also emerged as a prime space for participants to build community, which is all the more important for LGBTQ families, who can often feel very isolated as a minority within a minority in Jewish spaces, Rabbi Rapport explained. One family, who are longtime members of CBST, distinctly remembers when societal barriers kept LGBTQ individuals and families from child-rearing. Now, Rabbi Rapport says, this same family is witness to the evolution of what an LGBTQ synagogue can grow to look like. “It was really moving to hear from that

the room was transformed to make families feel as if they were actually on the ark, complete with water sounds, fish swimming by illuminated portholes, and even a misty ocean breeze. “The kids can have a very individual experience” because of the small artist-educator to child ratio, said Beth Slepian, who has attended all three Aggadah Adventures with her 2-yearold son. “You feel like you’re a part of this story.”

family,” Rabbi Rapport said. “They have children now and they have seen this program. And it’s nothing short of miraculous.”

Yonah Kirschner is a Program Officer at The Covenant Foundation. This piece ran in Sight Line, a journal of The Covenant Foundation. covenantfn.org/sightline NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

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How a New York Synagogue Put Family Engagement Center Stage

O P I NION | TABBY REFA EL

The Politics of a Mizrachi Millennial Grateful to be in America, and worried about Iran.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019

There was a great deal to talk about with Lieu. Pregnant and tired, I waddled into his office and listened as our group discussed centrifuges and horrifying human rights abuses. When the time was right, I pointed to my protruding bump and told Lieu that the U.S. Capitol Building where we sat was hallowed ground for my family and me, because it was there that the United States had passed the Refugee Act of 1980. “Before I was even born,” I said, “a compassionate, forward-thinking country passed legislation that eventually allowed a persecuted Jewish girl to escape Iran and grow up as an American. That was the defining moment for my family. And now we will have a new family, and I need to know that I can teach this child—this first-generation American—that the men and women who serve in that same building once again stood on the side of clarity and forward-thinking protection. Please, please reject the Iran deal.” I believe the American Jewish community is now witnessing the rise of a new generation of Mizrachi voices—those of us who hail from the Middle East and North Africa, or whose parents or grandparents escaped Arab and Muslim countries that treated Jews as second-class citizens. In the second half of the 20th century, nearly 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab or Muslim lands. Many of us younger Mizrachim prioritize different policy issues from the average Ashkenazi, let alone millennial, Jew in America. For example: In January 2017, while most of my Ashkenazi female friends donned pink hats at women’s marches nationwide, I was calling the offices of representatives on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and expressing concern that the looming threat of Iranian-backed attacks against Saudi Arabia would inevitably drag the United States (and a seemingly trigger-happy new president) into war with Iran. Should I have attended the Women’s March? Perhaps, but I was losing sleep over the possibility of Iranian terrorist cells being activated in the United States. Also,

the march was held on a Saturday, and I adhere to the laws of Shabbat that forbid driving and using a phone. In general, the Mizrachi community skews more traditional, maybe because of our experiences living under unapologetic anti-Semites. For many young Mizrachi-American Jews, foreign policy issues are far more complex given that our bodies are in the West, but our hearts (and our family trauma) are still painfully rooted in the East. Today, many (though not all) young Mizrachi-Jewish Americans might entreat their elected officials to take a harder line with murderous dictators from Tehran to Damascus, and to protect the Kurds from hideous annihilation. But back home, whether in Beverly Hills or the boroughs of New York, we follow the Trump administration’s policies regarding immigrants and refugees with the alarmed empathy of people who know the incomparable blessing of having been redeemed by this country. That explains why in 2017 I was advocating again, this time on behalf of innocent Iranians who were desperately trying to escape Iran but were facing unparalleled hardships in overcoming Trump’s travel ban. In September 2019, the administration slashed the annual refugee cap to 18,000, which means that the United States is no longer the world’s greatest protector of refugees. In 1989, the year my mother received that glorious stamp on her Iranian passport that read “Admitted as a Refugee,” that number was closer to 100,000. To me, that’s heartbreaking. As for Ted Lieu, he courageously voted against the Iran deal back in 2015, but he has also been an outspoken critic of President Trump’s immigration policy. As an eternally grateful refugee, I might have to schedule another visit to his office in the coming months. We have a lot to pore over. Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker, and civic action advocate, as well as a weekly columnist for LA Jewish Journal.

TABBY REFAEL

In August 2015, I was part of a bipartisan group of young Iranian-American Jews from Los Angeles who met with Representative Ted Lieu in Washington, DC. It might sound surprising, but this group of Jewish millennials was attempting to convince the congressman to take a stand against President Barack Obama. My background isn’t one that comes to mind when people talk about American Jewish millennials. At age seven, I escaped from Iran with my family and gratefully abandoned my mandatory hijab— the Islamic head covering that all females, regardless of religion, are forced to wear there. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which officially turned the country into a sharia-abiding Shiite theocracy, tens of thousands of Iranian Jews were granted refugee asylum in the United States. My family and I arrived in 1989. I grew up in an extremely close-knit, traditional community with a deeply defined Jewish identity, as did many of my peers. I’ll never forget that conversation with Lieu. At the time, he and some other Democratic representatives were still on the fence about Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal. As Jews who had escaped Iran, our group felt a moral imperative to ensure that Lieu and other elected officials understood Iran’s genocidal threat. We wanted him to vote against the deal, even at the risk of breaking away from party and presidential lines. Persian Jews comprise about one-fifth of the population in Beverly Hills, which is in Lieu’s district, but when I asked the congressman whether his constituents had reached out to him regarding the JCPOA, he confirmed that his office had been flooded with passionate voicemails and emails—from presumably Ashkenazi residents who demanded that he vote for the Iran deal. And there we had it: two distinct groups of Jews—Iranians and Ashkenazim—both well-meaning, with seemingly opposite views on how America should deal with the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism.

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The Elephant in the Impeachment Inquiry Will the process damage the American-Israeli relationship?

With Syria in turmoil, the Kurds in flight and its own government in prolonged limbo, the last thing Israel probably wants to worry about right now is an American impeachment process. For that matter, the possible effects of impeachment on Israel aren’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind for American political junkies, either. We all know the old saw about the Jewish newspaper that publishes an article on “The Elephant and the Jewish Question.” And yet, at the risk of seeming similarly obsessed, it is worth asking what effect the possibility of impeachment will have on the already increasingly complicated U.S.-Israel relationship. It’s a difficult question, particularly now. In the past few years, the connection between the United States and Israel has been focused to an unusual degree on the personal bond between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump. Impeachment aside, we don’t yet know Netanyahu’s political fate, and even if Netanyahu secures the prime ministership once again, the necessary dealmaking might clip his wings in significant ways. His pending indictments might also affect his power and influence—even if he stares down those who would demand that he resign, if, that is, he is in fact indicted. It is telling that after the last Israeli election, Trump spoke of the bonds between the United States and Israel without mentioning Bibi. Can it be that our president does not like associating with losers? At its core, the U.S.-Israel relationship is not dependent on individuals but on the broad sympathy the United States public still holds for the Jewish state. So even without Trump or Bibi, the relationship will remain solid. At the same time, the region around them is in turmoil. Even before the abandonment of the Kurds, the American failure to respond forcibly (militarily or otherwise) to Iran’s recent adventures in the Gulf caused sleepless nights in the oil kingdoms. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the president’s sudden decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the Syrian border, 16

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allowing Turkey to invade northern Syria to attack our allies the Kurds, scrambling the players and alliances and strengthening the hand of the Russians. That move sent shock waves through American allies in the Middle East, who saw it as a warning sign to those who rely overmuch on American promises to defend them. That reaction holds true even in Israel. Writing in the center-right Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, diplomatic correspondent Shimon Shiffer declared that Trump’s decision on the Syrian withdrawal and his “abandoning of the Kurdish allies, who believed that the U.S. would stand with them… must set all our red lights flashing.” Impeachment adds yet more variables. I see two potential scenarios. 1) There is an impeachment process leading to a House vote. If this happens, the president will lean even more heavily on his base—particularly evangelicals—to attempt to block the outcome. He may act to underscore his commitment to Israel in the strongest possible terms. (This holds true even if American Jews overwhelmingly support impeachment—as is likely, since they’re mostly Democrats. Trump’s solicitude for Israel is driven by his relations with evangelicals, not Jews.) He would likely accede to any Israeli initiatives to increase Israeli control over the West Bank. Prospects will dim for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on terms other than abject surrender by the Palestinians (which also won’t happen). 2) There is a trial and conviction in the Senate. I consider this event highly unlikely, as it would require the president’s Republican support in the Senate to crumble. But if, by some unexpected chain of events, Trump is removed from office, in my view the evangelicals and the Christian Zionists will ironically have less, not more, influence on events in the Middle East. A President Mike Pence, notwithstanding his religiosity and strong evangelical credentials, will find himself with much less room to maneuver—at least before the 2020 election. If Israel takes any actions that reprise Bibi’s

right-wing antics, and Democrats mount serious opposition to it, Pence’s political incentives to push back will be weak. He will already have the evangelical vote, so he won’t need to court it with strong proIsrael actions; and the Democrats, not reliant on evangelicals’ support, will not be constrained by any need to please them. If impeachment proceeds, I also doubt the much delayed and still murky Trump peace plan will see the light of day. Israel does not really want it, and rolling it out now will give Trump little or no benefit from the evangelical right. Meanwhile, whatever the outcome, a long impeachment process could inadvertently exacerbate existing Middle East tensions. Some of our allies already seem uncertain whether the United States under an embattled Trump has the staying power to control events there. Although attention is focused elsewhere, the United Arab Emirates has pulled its ground troops from the Yemen conflict, and there are signs that it is seeking rapprochement with Iran. Saudi Arabia may be doing so as well. We are also likely to see, in the words of Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum, “the end of the much heralded but overhyped development of quiet ties between Israel and the Gulf states.” If the Gulf states are going to mute their opposition to Iran, this quietly building alliance will not stand. As for Iran, if Israel fears that the United States is withdrawing from the Middle East, it might feel it needs to be less fettered in responding to any Iranian adventurism in Lebanon or Syria or Iraq. And the Iranians, if they perceive the American military threat receding, might easily miscalculate. It might be alarmist to imagine that the ripples from impeachment in Washington could heighten the danger of armed conflict between Israel and Iran. But uncertainty and instability bring hazards for everyone, Israel included. Marshall Breger is a law professor at Catholic University.

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Murder Rate Rises Among Israel’s Arabs Why is this happening, who’s to blame and what can be done?

Only one political faction could look with satisfaction at the indecisive results of the second 2019 Israel election. A reunited United Arab List surged to become the third-largest party in Israel’s parliament. Amid the confusion and impotence of other parties, the Arab List was relatively focused. Its agenda includes at least one urgent priority that has nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinians, Israel’s foreign affairs or security policy— all problems that Arab politicians tend to highlight without much chance of changing. For once, it was a problem on which there is room for political cooperation: criminal violence in Israel. The facts are indisputable: The rate of criminal violence, including homicide, among Arab Israelis is much higher than among Jewish Israelis. Arab Israelis are a fifth of Israel’s population, but close to half of all murder cases involve Arabs. Between January and October 2019, more than 70 Arab Israelis were killed. And the murder rate in the Arab-Israeli community is not just high, it’s on the rise. September 2019 was the deadliest month ever recorded, with 13 killings. At the beginning of October, Arab Israelis demanded action. They took to the streets in protest, raising public awareness, arranging meetings with top political and police leadership, calling for government attention. A consensus emerged: Something needs to be done. The question is: What, exactly? The responses diverge sharply—as do views of the problem’s cause. Here is one suggestion, from Arab Member of Knesset Yousef Jabarin: “[The] murder of 70 Arab civilians since the start of 2019 and more than 1,300 since 2000 is not fate. It is the result of a conspiracy by the government of Israel and criminal organizations, the racist policy of the police and the helplessness of law enforcement.” At the other extreme is the view of the (Jewish) minister of public security, Gilad Erdan. “Arab society is a very, very violent

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society. It has to do with the fact that in their culture, disputes, rather than ending with a lawsuit, are settled by a knife or a gun,” he said recently. “These are the cultural codes. I will not let the Arabs evade this discussion.” Of course, very few serious observers believe it is only one of the two—Arab culture or government mismanagement. (Erdan later clarified that he accepts it is the responsibility of the government to take action.) Arab Israeli communities suffer from higher rates of fighting among criminal factions, sometimes with injuries to bystanders; of vendetta or revenge killings; and of women killed over “family honor,” that is, unsanctioned sexual behavior. Also, the police catch perpetrators at a much lower rate among Arab Israelis. Why? Either because the police don’t care (Arab version) or because Arabs do not cooperate with police and give cover to criminals as a community (police version). Blame games of this kind are common. But in this case the blame game goes to the heart of Israel’s identity and morality, and thus is much more delicate and volatile. The problem has a history. For many years, hundreds of Arab Israelis served in Israel’s police, mostly in Arab communities. But with the eruption of a direct IsraeliPalestinian conflict (the First Intifada of the mid-1980s was the initial catalyst, but the second, in 2000, was the real turning point), pressure grew on Arab Israelis to see Israel’s police as an antagonistic force rather than an ally, and Arab cooperation with police investigations declined. So did the pool of Arab policemen, which meant Jewish policemen would have to do the job; this in turn worsened mutual suspicion. The result is paradoxical: Arab leaders demand police intervention to curb violence and at the same time suggest the police cannot be trusted. For some Arab leaders, blaming the government is a way of saying not just that it is inefficient but that Israel, the Jewish

state, discriminates against its non-Jewish minority. Some even hint that it is quite convenient for Israel when Arabs kill each other. Many Jewish Israelis object to this as absurd: Arabs, they say, engage in violence among themselves, then use this violence to delegitimize Israel’s standing as a country of equal rights and civil decency. Conversely, some Jewish leaders who point a finger at Arab society are not just calling for better education but implying Arab society is deeply flawed. It is a way for them to justify harsh words, or even harsh policies, aimed at curbing Arab success and influence. Some Arab Israelis note that this too is absurd: Rather than using its power to solve a problem, they say, Israel’s response is to blame the victims of violence—Arab citizens who deserve as much protection from harm as anyone else. The combination of professional dilemmas (How many police officers are needed? What can be done in the educational sphere? What new resources can be applied?) and identity-related sensitivities (Is Israel discriminatory or racist? Is Arab culture flawed?), is a recipe for further trouble. As a practical matter, Arab Israelis who are truly bothered by violence in their community have no choice but to trust the police and cooperate with them. Similarly, if Israel’s government sincerely wants to curb violence among Arab Israelis, it has no choice but to work with Arab leaders and invest resources. Of course, the growing violence does indeed trouble both Arabs and the government. But that’s still not enough. It has to trouble them to the extent that both agree to forget about their grievance-driven narratives, to bury the urge to employ cultural punditry, and to focus on a professional response to violence. Shmuel Rosner is the political editor of the LA Jewish Journal and a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute.

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O P I NION INTERVIEW | ROBERT M AL L E Y

Will the Middle East Erupt? Beneath the surface of the current turmoil lie deeper crises.

You’ve written that “the conditions for an all-out war in the Middle East are riper than at any time in recent memory.” Why? Everything in the Middle East is related to everything else, so it’s difficult, if not impossible, to contain a crisis in one place. Borders are porous, ideologies transcend boundaries, weapons flow. If Iran feels besieged economically—as it now does—it could take action in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or Gaza. If Israel felt threatened, it could act in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq or the Gulf. What makes this more dangerous is that the region is also very polarized. Right now there are three main rifts: Shiite Iran vs. Sunni Saudi Arabia and its allies; Israel vs. Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah and Hamas; and the Sunni vs. Sunni conflict with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab 20

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Emirates (UAE) on one side and Qatar and Turkey on the other. The combination means the tinder is very dry. Any action anywhere could lead to conflagration everywhere. How much of this instability flows from current American policy, and how much has been gradually building up? Obama didn’t leave a legacy of great stability in the Middle East. Things were getting worse, but slowly; there wasn’t this fear of immediate conflagration. But the American withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, its economic pressure campaign on Iran, and Iran feeling under siege and needing to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies, whether by

The combination means the tinder is very dry. Any action anywhere could lead to conflagration everywhere. attacking tankers or the Saudi Arabian oil fields—all these have obviously made things worse. Having Trump in the White House has also emboldened anti-Iranian actors, such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, who may feel they have an opportunity to take definitive action against Iran because the president’s attitude toward Iran is closer to theirs. They were always frustrated with Obama. But they also see Trump may not be there much longer, and thus may feel some urgency to take action. Have there been near misses? The presumed Iranian attack on Aramco a couple of months ago could have had a very serious

outcome. If the United States had retaliated, Iran might have struck our allies somewhere else, sparking a bigger counter-response. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. On the other hand, once the United States decided not to retaliate—by all accounts, with Trump going against the advice of most of his national security team—Saudi Arabia and other countries have plainly started to wonder if they can count on the United States to come to their rescue in a crisis. They may hedge their bets by coming to some accommodation with Iran. What’s the effect on Israel? Right now, Iran’s presence in the region, its development of precision-guided missiles, its technology transfer of that development to its allies, and the fact that it was apparently able to strike the oil field—all that raises the alarm level in Israel. At the same time, Israelis see that nobody has reacted to Iran’s attack, and that other countries are reaching out to Iran. If you’re sitting in Israel, that’s not a good dynamic. Faced with proof of Iran’s greater ability and lesser fear of retaliation, Israel needs to decide whether to take action or wait. It’s an added element of peril and uncertainty. A lot will depend on whether Netanyahu is replaced and by whom. Netanyahu has been relatively cautious when it comes to waging war, though we know that at one point he was close to attacking Iran. Does the withdrawal from Syria change anything? It was inevitable that at some point the United States was going to withdraw from Syria. But the way it was done, without preparation, is more likely to lead to a domino effect. The attempts by both the Obama administration and now the Trump administration to say that the U.S. role in Syria was contained, that we weren’t trying to topple the regime, ended up being in vain. Everything is interconnected; we can’t “just” intervene against ISIS. We can’t be in Syria and run no risk of affecting Iraq or Turkey. So a decision that on its face could have seemed pretty minor—moving a few Americans away from the area where they were protecting the Kurds—had massive outside repercussions and brought Russia in. We are captive in the region whether we want to be in it or not.

FREE VECTOR MAPS

When a Middle East crisis erupts, it can be hard to think long term. But Robert Malley sees larger, longer-running dangers in the region, which today is a place of crisscrossing trip wires and alliances where a miscalculation by any actor—for instance, Iran expanding its nuclear program past the United States’s or Israel’s “unidentified tolerance levels,” or a Houthi rebel from Yemen killing an American soldier—could touch off a retaliatory spiral. Malley is something of a crisis connoisseur. Now the president of the International Crisis Group, an NGO founded in 1995 to study global flash points and propose ways to defuse them, he worked on the IsraeliPalestinian issue for President Bill Clinton. He served as a senior Middle East adviser to President Barack Obama with a variety of crisis-ridden Middle East portfolios, including the counter-ISIS campaign. Things have gone downhill since then for reasons beyond the blowups and policy swerves associated with President Donald Trump, Malley says. In today’s Middle East, he wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, the classic Tip O’Neill maxim, “All politics is local,” is turned on its head to “All politics—especially local politics—is international.” Malley speaks with Moment about the effect of the current volatility on America’s allies, including Israel, and how to reduce the chances of a crisis nobody wants.—Amy E. Schwartz

MOMENT

D E B AT E

DO UNIVERSITIES OVERPROTECT THEIR

HA RVE Y SILVERGLATE: YES Harvey Silverglate is a lawyer and cofounder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Do universities overprotect their students from challenging ideas? Yes, they do, and it’s been going on for a while. I’m a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer, but I have been involved in representing students and occasionally professors in trouble since 1967. Starting in the 1980s I noticed that students were being protected rather than challenged. For example, [restrictive] speech codes, something that had been unheard of earlier on liberal arts campuses, suddenly were invoked: Students were admonished not to say certain things that would embarrass or insult other students. Many universities adopted codes punishing speech that purportedly harassed students or was discriminatory. Language now was no longer an accurate expression of what one was thinking; it was more an expression of what the administrators thought students should think. The advent of speech codes to me was the telltale sign that something very fundamental was changing. The university seemed to be taking on the role not of challenging students to think about life and the universe but of protecting them from the realities of life and the universe. There are many functions of free speech, including hateful, threatening speech. I believe hateful speech is protected, but it has another crucial function: The only way to find out what a person is really thinking, and how dangerous a person is or can be, is to let that person tell you out of his or her own mouth. And if that person is functioning under a speech code or restriction, you won’t know. What are the most serious threats to free speech on campus? One is the presence of deans and administrators who spend their time trying to protect students from insults and harassment. They want college essentially to be a continuation of kindergarten. They don’t want you to be upset. College is supposed to upset you, but they say college should be a safe space. That’s a term that makes my blood run cold. I don’t make an exception for rac22

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ist insults. I consider the extreme reluctance of colleges to let people talk frankly about race probably one of the most damaging results of lack of free speech. Most students—not just white kids, but Asians, African Americans, everyone—have been exposed to views in their own communities that are in some way belittling of other races. It’s just a natural result of living in a multiracial society. And one of the principal goals of education is to confront those racist ideas, so by the time students get out of college they are more accepting of human differences. And if these students can’t speak honestly about their feelings concerning

Not only does the university not have the right, or the power, to educate students in what it thinks is civil or not civil; doing so is contrary to the goal of a liberal arts education. race, racism is never going to be challenged, much less wiped out. So these deans trying to protect students are doing exactly the opposite. They’re sending students out into the world unprepared. Do universities have a role to play in teaching civility? Not only does the university not have the right, or the power, to educate students in what it thinks is civil or not civil; doing so is contrary to the goal of a liberal arts education. Universities shouldn’t be educating students in personal philosophy or morality. By the time students get to college they are old enough to decide these life issues for themselves. When I got report cards in elementary school, there was a box for “Works and plays well with others.” But when you’re in college, there should not be such a metric. Students cannot have a successful liberal arts education if they are discouraged from expressing themselves fully and frankly and

occasionally insulting or disturbing their classmates. Education without disturbance is not really education. If administrators express disapproval of an idea, are they suppressing student speech? It is not the role of a college administrator even to suggest—never mind mandate—limits to student speech, or to say, “You may be free to say this, but it’s really not a good idea.” I think it’s a form of censorship. For an authority figure to say “I don’t think you should say those things” is an indirect command, really, to the student, because the professor has more power. Professors have to be careful that they observe the line between teaching and indoctrinating. It’s very important for students to be encouraged to stand up for their right to free speech. It is much easier at public colleges and universities, because the First Amendment applies to all government institutions. It’s harder on a private campus, but the concept of academic freedom does apply—it’s a more diffuse, less clearly defined term than constitutional free speech, so it’s a somewhat harder battle, but it can be fought. I’m a cofounder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and we take those cases and point out to courts that the college has made a promise, by calling itself a liberal arts college, that students will be allowed to express their views. When they punish what a student says, it’s a breach of that contract. Are there any ideas that have no place in a university? Nope. None. If you start to draw lines, eventually that line is going to be pushed further and further into abject censorship. The purpose of a liberal arts education is that for four years, you are not constrained— you can’t punch anyone in the face, but you can unleash your views on them. How should universities handle anti-Semitism? I have always thought that it was a very bad idea, not only on college campuses but outside, to penalize the expression of antiSemitic views. I have always wanted to know who hates me and who doesn’t. If there’s a rule that bars the expression of anti-Semitic thought, I won’t know. That’s a very good example of the functionality of free speech.

MOMENT

STUDENTS FROM CHALLENGING IDEAS?

D E B AT E

ROB E RT C. POST: NO Robert C. Post is a law professor and the former dean of Yale Law School.

Do universities overprotect their students from challenging ideas? I’m not sure I like the way the question is framed. Universities are responsible for educating their students, and they should give students the degree of protection necessary to further their education. It is hard to generalize about universities; some may properly protect their students, others may overprotect them. Generally, universities should make sure that speakers can speak and that all students can listen and respond. The amount of protection called for is a matter of context. Sometimes you have to meet students where they live; sometimes you have to lead them out from where they live. I don’t think any abstract metric is relevant, or that the question is illuminated by talking about free speech rights or the lack of them. It is not a matter of rights at all; it is fundamentally a matter of education. Take the case of controversial speakers who come to campus. How should universities handle these cases, which come up all the time? First one must ask why any given speaker is coming to campus. Presumably, it is to contribute to the education of the university’s students. If a student group has the budget to invite whoever interests them, then presumably the educational interest is in having students learn to manage such invitations. Suppose a speaker is controversial to others on campus. Then a tradeoff must be effected between the education of the students who invited the speaker and the speaker’s potentially dysfunctional impact on others. Part of the mission of higher education is to help teenagers become adults who can function in a democracy. Students need to develop the intellectual equipment to handle ideas with which they disagree. If a speaker has no intellectual views worthy of respect, and the degree of intellectual or even physical harm to third parties is high, a university is facing one kind of situation. But if a speaker is offering comments that deserve intellectual respect—even if the comments may be upsetting to many other students—then the balance may be struck differently.

What are the most serious threats to free speech on campus? I would deny the basic premise of the question—that the disputes and protests we constantly hear about on college campuses concern threats to First Amendment rights. That’s not correct. What’s at stake in universities is the provision of education, not the exercise of rights. There is a lot of protected expression in universities, but this protection does not typically derive from the First Amendment, but rather, from academic freedom. Protection of academic freedom is explicitly organized around the education of students and the promotion of research. Those seem to me the relevant

If administrators express disapproval of an idea, are they suppressing student speech? No. People who make that argument are confusing the university with the government. If the government expresses the view that something should not be said, it may effectively be imposing a sanction on the speech, and that may be a First Amendment problem. But universities express their ideas all the time. To equate them with government in that sense is a fundamental mistake. Universities have their own distinctive mission; they can speak in ways that support it.

questions for universities, not what are ordinarily called First Amendment rights.

Are there any ideas that have no place in a university? There are infinite numbers of ideas that have no place in a university. Universities are places where knowledge is researched and expanded, so ideas are judged on competence. If I’m in the astronomy department and I say that the moon is made of green cheese, I won’t get tenure, and that’s perfectly appropriate. Within political discourse, we tend to accept the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas. Everyone cites Oliver Wendell Holmes to the effect that “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” But this maxim is totally antithetical to what a university does. Universities don’t judge ideas by their popularity with consumers. Universities are in fact supposed to be insulated from the pressures of public opinion.

Do universities have a role to play in teaching civility? Of course. That’s what restrictive university speech codes are intended to do—foster civility. There are good and bad speech codes, but the overall purpose of any such code must be to facilitate students’ education. A good speech code punishes speech that interferes with that education and permits speech that advances it. The university context is special, because students have a status that allows the university to regulate them qua students—which is very different from the relationship between a citizen and the state. This is true even at public universities. When I taught at Berkeley, my students might be able to stand up and say whatever they liked in a park, but they could not do that in my classroom.

How should universities handle antiSemitism? It depends what you think constitutes anti-Semitism. Personal attacks should not be tolerated. But denying the Holocaust, for instance, is an offense against competence. It is incompetent history. If it were convincing history, it would not matter that the idea offends Jews. When I was teaching at Berkeley in the 1990s, the British Holocaust denier David Irving came to speak. He’d been invited by a student group with Middle Eastern funding. Many people thought we should cancel the invitation. I advised against it. Irving was someone whose views could not survive the test of academic exchange. My advice was not that the speech be canceled—after all, students ought to learn to handle issues like this— but that no one should attend Irving’s lecture, because he was not worthy of academic respect.

The university context is special, because students have a status that allows the university to regulate them qua students—which is very different from the relationship between a citizen and the state.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

JEWISH WORD | BARK MITZVAH

Muzzle Tov!

NOAH PHILLIPS

he first known bark mitzvah took place in 1958 in Beverly Hills, California. More than 100 guests attended, and Monty Hall of Let’s Make a Deal served as emcee. The invitations requested “the honor of your presence at the bark mitzvah and 13th Birthday” celebration for the Duke of Windsor—a black cocker spaniel whom his humans dubbed “Windy”—followed by a “Dogtail” party. “Guests brought classic bar mitzvah gifts like fountain pens, and also dog biscuits,” recalls Janet Salter, the former newspaper cartoonist and philanthropist who hosted the festivities along with her late husband, Beverly Hills Mayor Max Salter. Windy remained on his best behavior, as did the other canine attendees—but the human guests, not so much. “They were laughing so hard they could hardly stand it,” says Salter, now 94. The occasion was nonetheless a huge success, and the Salters went on to host several more bark mitzvahs over the years. Some 25 years later, New Jersey pet entertainer Lee Day began performing bark mitzvah ceremonies for families that wanted to celebrate their dogs. She eventually trademarked the term “bark mitzvah,” described in the filing as “entertainment in the nature of live performances at parties given for pets.” The ceremony’s profile rose in the early 1990s when Day presided over the bark mitzvah of Joan Rivers’ beloved yorkie, Spike, on The Joan Rivers Show. “I’m giving them a little Jewish prayer, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Day said in a 2016 radio interview. “I’m giving them a little party and we’re dancing and having fun, and the animals are getting attention.” Since then, the popularity of bark mitzvahs has only grown. Search “bark mitzvah” on YouTube and you’ll find all kinds of celebrations, from over-the-top par24

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ties to low-key backyard gatherings. Synagogues have also gotten in on the act. Every year, the Houston Congregation for Reform Judaism’s Rabbi Steve Gross conducts a short service for more than 250 dogs that includes readings, songs and blessings, along with a certificate declaring that each participant became a “bark mitzvah.” The festival features a DJ, food trucks and dog-related vendors. “While our dogs certainly don’t practice Judaism, they are members of Jewish families and live in Jewish homes,” says congregant Melinda Neumann, who helps organize the affair. “The bark mitzvah offers us a chance to extend our joy of Judaism to our dogs in a fun and friendly environment.” The number of people planning bark mitzvahs has generated a market for related products—from “It’s my bark mitzvah!” dog bandanas to bark mitzvah-themed squeaky toys. In 2012, video journalist Janet Weinstein reported for the Associated Press that bark mitzvahs are “a booming multimillion-dollar industry.” Weinstein’s video on the craze was featured on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, complete with a clip of a dog in a yarmulke being lifted into the air, as human guests danced the hora. Unsurprisingly, some Jews disapprove of the trend. The bar or bat mitzvah ceremony “is something that young Jewish adults prepare for, for years,” Rabbi Daniel Satlow, then of Congregation Beth El in Fairfield, Connecticut, says in the AP video. “To imagine that a dog could do anything like this is degrading.” Cantor Rhoda J. Harrison of Congregation M’kor Shalom in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a pet owner herself, has mixed feelings. “I have no problem with an owner celebrating 13 years that they’ve had a dog and maybe drawing on traditions that are Jewish,” she says. But she takes issue with dressing dogs in ritual objects, such as miniature prayer shawls and yarmulkes. “It misses the point about what those rituals are about.”

Although most people don’t know it, Judaism, like many other religions, does have a holiday for animals—Rosh Hashanah la’Behemot (the New Year for Domesticated Animals)—which falls on the first day of the Jewish month of Elul, several weeks before Rosh Hashanah. “It’s so important to dwell upon the awesome totality of creation, including every animal that God fashioned leading up to the forming of Adam and Eve,” says Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, president and dean of Valley Beit Midrash in Phoenix, Arizona. “Rosh Hashanah la’Behemot is a truly unique and special opportunity to consider our compassionate relationship to God through the animals that help sustain our ecosystem and enrich our lives.” And that is exactly how Rabbi Ariel Edery, of Beth Shalom in Raleigh, North Carolina, has come to interpret the bark mitzvah ceremony at his congregation. Like many other rabbis, he originally dismissed the idea, but after some reflection, he changed his mind. The Book of Genesis, he notes, teaches us about our place in this world and our relationship to animals. Edery believes that the unique bond people have with their dogs ought to be celebrated, and while the name “bark mitzvah” may sound silly, having one can be meaningful. So one Shabbat morning every year, his congregants gather for a short outdoor service and share the special connections they have with their pups. “A bark mitzvah is celebrating life,” Edery says. “It’s reminding us of our role in this world.” But sometimes a bark mitzvah is just plain fun. Filmmaker Carly Glenn’s award-winning 2015 short mockumentary Bark Mitzvah is about a family who throws an extravagant 13th-year celebration for their beloved pooch, who sports a “taleash” and “yamapaw,” while human guests dine from the “All You Can Eat Bonefet.” Responding to bark mitzvahs’ critics, Glenn says, “Lighten up. It’s a fun celebration. It’s not sacrilegious if you’re bringing people together.” Janet Salter never anticipated what would develop from Windy’s 1958 bark mitzvah, but she’s proud of what she started. When asked if she knew she was the one who coined the term “bark mitzvah,” she gleefully replies, “Yes, of course I do! I’m on Wikipedia for it.” —Suzanne Borden

VISUAL MOMENT | ROZ CHAST

My People in Cartoons

Here are a few things about My People: we are fatalists, i.e., we tend to expect the worst. If you know anything about our history, you can see why we believe this. And when the worst does not happen, we don’t celebrate

our good fortune, because we know that it’s just a matter of time before the flowerpot on the 16th floor falls off the windowsill and onto our head and kills us. My parents actually knew someone who was killed by a falling flowerpot. On the bright side, the widow sued the flowerpot owner, won and bought a fancy apartment. If the dangers didn’t come from windowsills, they’d come from within: gangrene; diphtheria; whooping cough; lockjaw; rabies; appendicitis; sudden blindness or deafness; mysterious “conditions;” the disease that starts with a C… If there is a gene for anxiety, we have it bigtime. We ask a lot of questions, many of which are annoying. You can be an atheist or an agnostic and still be a Jew. We like to argue, because we are generally right. We do not feel shy about asking a waiter for another table because there’s a draft, and also this chicken is raw. There’s no such thing as chicken sushi, so please take it back. Fighting with our fists is not our strong

suit. If, or should I say when, we are confronted by a galoot, words are our weapons of choice. Maybe not at the time…but later, in a cartoon. The self-deprecating joke is our true specialty, i.e., you can’t insult me by calling me an unattractive, self-centered, no-talent nitwit, because A) I already know that, and B) I can hurt my feelings far, far better than you can. After all, I’ve had a lifetime of practice. Anxiety (how can a person not be anxious?!?), depression (ditto), aggression (passive or otherwise), the incessant need to question everything, a sense of the absurd, being interested in a wide range of subjects without knowing too much about any of them, knowing in your heart of hearts that you have always been and always will be an outsider, that you will never fit in no matter what you do or how “successful” you are, a combination of misanthropy and compassion for your fellow humans, and at least some ability to draw and write—this is what makes a cartoonist. —Roz Chast

“No, you were right—this is much better than how it was before.”

Excerpted from Have I Got a Cartoon for You!: The Moment Magazine Book of Jewish Cartoons, edited by and with an introduction by former New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff with a foreword by Roz Chast. Available at online retailers, bookstores and at momentmag.com/shop. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

“The Kitmans in 12-B. Tell them Elijah is here for the Seder.”

“Any other hobbies besides suffering?”

Page 25 from top: Roz Chast Roz Chast Ed Steed Page 26 from top: Mort Gerberg Bob Mankoff Zachary Kanin

“I’m Jewish and Don is Catholic, but we’re raising the kids as wolves.” 26

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ASK THE R ABBIS | HIGH HOLIDAYS

ASK THE RABBIS | CORRUPTION

SHOULD DIRTY MONEY BE RETURNED? HUMANIST

JANDOS ROTHSTEIN

The ethics of using “dirty money” has been a topic of conversation in Jewish circles for millennia.

Our tradition’s guidance about what we call “dirty money” generally refers to funds acquired by theft. Maimonides, for example, warns against accepting charity from known thieves. This should be obvious. It’s not an ethical stretch to ask that when we discover contributions from stolen funds, they should be returned, preferably to law enforcement. Today, however, “dirty money” isn’t always about theft. No one has accused Harvey Weinstein of financial crimes, but charities that retain his gifts should realize that this creates the appearance of bestowing a kind of hechsher (“kosher stamp”) on the man himself. In this case, recipients have two choices: return the money or—when permitted—redirect it to those who fight sexual harassment.

One word of caution is warranted. As a Humanist I’m aware of contributions rejected due to fears that funds from “nonbelievers” are “dirty,” too. When the Stiefel Freethought Foundation gave $250,000 to the American Cancer Society, the organization returned the gift. Several other groups have rejected needed funds awarded by the Humanistic giving group Foundation Beyond Belief. Neither funder requires recipients to support Humanism. It is crucial to consider the sources of contribution, but we should also be prudent in defining “dirty money.” Jeffrey L. Falick Birmingham Temple Congregation for Humanistic Judaism Farmington Hills, MI NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

SHOULD DIRTY MONEY BE RETURNED?

INDEPENDENT

Biblically speaking, it should not be benefited from, as we see in the stories of Achan (Joshua 7) and Saul (First Samuel 15). In both instances, the spoils of war were taken when it was forbidden to do so. Achan and his kin perished; Saul lost the crown. But the remaining question is: What if we received the money innocently, and only later discovered it was dirty? In such an instance, I would redirect the funds to benefit those by whose victimization it was amassed. And if the money had been swindled, then yes, return it, as we read in the midrash: “He said to me, ‘Rabbi, it happened that I sold to a star-worshipper four kurs of dates... and because it was dark, I measured out a half bushel less than what he paid for. I then took the money and bought a pouch of oil for myself and put it in the same place where I had sold those dates. But the pouch burst and the oil spilled and vanished.’ I said to him, ‘My son—it is written in the Torah, ‘You shall not swindle your fellow’ [Leviticus 19:13]. Your fellow is like your own brother [Jewish or not].’” (Tana D’Bei Eliyahu 15). Rabbi Gershon Winkler Jewish Chaplain, Patton State Hospital Patton, CA

RENEWAL

A mishnah pertaining to the holiday of Sukkot asks whether a person can fulfill one of the holiday’s key mitzvot—shaking the lulav, or palm branch—using a stolen lulav. While the mishnah essentially says no, the ancient rabbis of the Talmud add nuance: One can do so, some say, just not on the first day of the holiday. Like them, we can see both sides: On the one hand, how can we do good with something which was taken through unjust means? On the other hand, isn’t it possible to fulfill one mitzvah while breaking another? Engaging in one transgression does not mean that all of one’s actions are transgressions. In fact, elsewhere in the Talmud, it says in the name of Rav: “A person should always engage in Torah and mitzvot even if it’s for the wrong reasons, because doing something for the wrong reasons may lead to doing it for the right reasons.” (Babylonian Talmud, Nazir 23b.) If this is so, perhaps “dirty money,” if used for good, may lead to the transgressor’s repentance. If the “dirty money” was stolen, and it can’t be returned to its 28

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rightful place, isn’t using it for tzedakah better than stuffing the thief’s pockets? Rabbi Elyssa Joy Austerklein Beth El Congregation Akron, OH

RECONSTRUCTIONIST

Money attained through illegal activity must definitely be returned, according to Jewish law. Money given by someone who acquired it legally but is associated with past unethical and immoral activity is more complicated. If the gift is a part of a genuine process of teshuvah (repentance), then the mitzvah of tzedakah is to be encouraged. The complication, however, is that very large gifts can themselves be used by the giver as a way to wield power and cover wrongdoing. That is neither tzedakah nor teshuvah and should not be accepted. Some acts of wrongdoing are so heinous and harmful that any tzedakah from the wrongdoer should go toward the victims of the immoral activity rather than to institutions that might glorify the giver’s family name. At the root of this question, however, is another moral sin that distorts the dynamics of giving and creates strong incentives to keep even questionable donations— extreme economic inequality in our society. Very low tax rates on the wealthiest Americans mean less public money to fund social services, education and arts organizations, which are then more dependent on super-large donors. That is not a healthy environment for tzedakah generally. The Torah addresses extreme economic inequality when it discusses the sabbatical and jubilee year, and prophets address it (Isaiah 5:8). So should we. In doing so, we embrace the mitzvah of public and communal responsibility for each other, as well as the mitzvah of generous tzedakah at all levels. Rabbi Caryn Broitman Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center Vineyard Haven, MA

REFORM

The ethics of using “dirty money” has been a topic of conversation in Jewish circles for millennia. The Talmud considers funds generated from harlotry to be unusable for the purchase of gifts to the Temple, unless those funds have been converted in some way, such as corn turned to flour, or olives turned to olive oil. Yet, on the other hand, there are rabbinic sources that suggest we cannot prevent a

person from doing a mitzvah. Maimonides implies that to refuse a gift from a criminal would cause us to add to that criminal’s sin, since they would be unable to fulfill their obligation to give tzedakah. However, accepting such gifts does not require public recognition of the donor, for that would give honor to a person who is not worthy of it. With these ethical considerations in mind, it would be reasonable to contemplate how we might put funds from such sources to constructive use. I wonder how the recipients of those funds might convert them into new forms of resources that could benefit victims, be invested in causes or directed toward initiatives that would serve more sacred purposes. Rabbi Dr. Laura Novak Winer Fresno, CA

CONSERVATIVE

When considering this question, I turn to the work of my teacher Rabbi Elliot Dorff, who in June 2009 wrote a paper for the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards entitled “Donations from Ill-Gotten Gain.” Dorff’s short answer to this question is no, the money need not be returned. He explores many of the ethical issues that surface when considering this question. What is dirty or ill-gotten money? We would all agree that stolen money is dirty. But is money dirty if it is legally earned but morally tainted or socially unacceptable? For example, would we accept donations from a company that sells tobacco? Or from a man who imports clothing that is made in the sweatshops of China? How is it decided what money is morally tainted or socially unacceptable? Charitable organizations must be able to trust that the donations they receive are earned legally and honestly. It would be an onerous burden to expect nonprofits to investigate how the money being donated is earned. However, if the donation were to come from a known thief (ganav mefursam), the organization accepting the gift would need to investigate the source of the money being offered. Rabbi Amy Wallk Katz Temple Beth El Springfield, MA

MODERN ORTHODOX

The Torah states that the wages of prostitution should not be brought into the Temple in fulfillment of any vow (Deuteronomy 23:19).

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This is a direct precedent for returning dirty money and not using it for sacred purposes. As a generalization, let me specify: Where accepting the money would be perceived as legitimating the bad behavior of the donor, then the money should be refused or returned. Nevertheless, I feel that the poor—and the good causes—need the money more than we need the feeling of righteousness that we have returned the money. So let me put limits on this refusal policy. The money need not be returned, 1) when the dirty money’s source was marginal to the philanthropist’s overall wealth and actual giving; 2) when the recipient organization, innocent of the dirty money aspect, spent the money and cannot recall it without hardship; 3) when the behavior itself is offensive but does not reach the level of being morally repugnant. I close with a reminder that the Rockefeller Foundation—founded out of profits generated by abusive monopolistic business practices—within a generation had evolved into one of the great humanitarian and socially responsible philanthropies of the world. Rabbi Yitzhak Greenberg Riverdale, NY

ORTHODOX

One important yardstick for ill-gotten gains is: Will the receipt of such money commit you to furthering the criminal or immoral act? Halacha disallows benefiting from stolen goods because by purchasing them, even legally, you encourage theft. So taking donations from people whose business ethics are seriously compromised shows social approval for a behavior that will continue. Ironically, Jeffrey Epstein-type behavior does not require social approval; it’s part of a warped personality and a predilection to a particular kind of evil that requires no further encouragement. A particular Hasidic rebbe in Europe was known to have three different policies toward contributions. Those that came from average people, he would use for his salary and personal expenses. For institutions considered holy—the synagogue, study halls, etc.— he would accept donations only from glatt kosher sources, free of any taint of impropriety. And when he received donations in cash from people he knew to be seriously compromised, he would use the bills to light his cigars. So an enterprise you consider to be of greater spiritual value requires greater oversight as to the message you send out about it. There is a source on this in the Talmud which I love, about a component of the

incense used in the Temple. The Gemara says that mei raglayim (generally translated as urine) would do a better job, but you can’t use mei raglayim in a holy place. One medieval commentator says no, mei raglayim is not urine—it’s just a yellow substance that reminded people of urine. So in dealing with the holy, you try to distinguish it as much as possible from the ugly and the unseemly. In other words, if you name a school building after someone who did multiple terms in prison, it might not be technically forbidden, but what message are you sending about the enterprise? Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein Cross-Currents Los Angeles, CA

SEPHARDIC

Money obtained illegally or immorally cannot be laundered by giving portions of it to charitable causes, as noble as they may be. By accepting such a donation, we assist the criminal and, in a way, become accomplices. I would like to believe that most people accept this simple logic, but I assume some would argue that, although we should reject a donation offered by a known or convicted criminal, one need not return a donation made before that information was exposed. In this view, since the receiver was unaware of the non-kosher origin of the donation, he is not an accomplice. I would ask the proponents of this approach what they would do if they were the victims. Wouldn’t they want the money returned to them? Others suggest making a distinction based on the donation’s destination: A museum or playhouse should return the money, perhaps, but a hospital or soup kitchen should not because it is saving lives.

I would argue that in no case should the money be used as the giver intended, but rather, as much as possible, to amend the damage caused by the criminal. For example, money obtained from narcotics should be given to rehabilitation clinics. Rabbi Haim Ovadia Potomac, MD

CHABAD

Legally, it’s clear: Stolen money, like objects, must be returned. Further, as community leaders and institutions, it behooves us to send clear signals that dishonesty and unsavory business practices can never become “kosherized” by financial contributions, however generous, to even the most noble and worthy charitable causes. On a deeper level, the discussion about “dirty money” highlights an important spiritual idea. We each engage a portion of this physical world during our lifetime. The choices we make along the way, whether they are G-dly or unG-dly, affect more than just our own personal spirituality. They also affect the spirituality of the physical places and things with which we engage. Money is “spiritually neutral” until we come along and make choices. If we earn the money honestly and use it in a G-dly manner, we have spiritually transformed and elevated it. The same is true of our food and our homes, and of our cars, computers and technology. When we use our “slice of the world” for good and holy purposes, we are spiritually sanctifying a piece of that lowly world and, in Kabbalistic terms, creating a “dwelling place for the divine.” Rabbi Yosef Landa Chabad of Greater St. Louis St. Louis, MO

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he pressure was building, and Donald Trump didn’t like it one bit. It was the spring of 2017, and the stillnew president was growing ever angrier as waves of investigations washed over him. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump blurted out in frustration. Where was the whip-smart adviser who would be consummately loyal, utterly crafty, and at least as willing as Trump to do whatever it took to win? In policy, politics and even in personality, Trump has his Roy Cohn: Stephen Miller. The president’s 34-year-old speechwriter and senior policy adviser— a position held by the likes of Ted Sorensen and Peggy Noonan—wields influence that extends well beyond his job titles. Miller is the primary

who gets to immigrate legally. And as President Trump’s speechwriter, he is the author of many of the president’s most memorable—and most inflammatory—phrases: “I alone can fix it,” from Trump’s Republican Convention acceptance speech; “This American carnage stops right here, and stops right now” from the inaugural address, and a series of statements in recent weeks declaring the House’s impeachment inquiry to be a product of “the deep state.” Three years into the Trump presidency, Miller is this administration’s ultimate survivor—the rare unrelated high-level, high-profile Trump adviser who has managed to sublimate his lifelong love of the limelight to serve a president who grows suspicious of aides when they get credit for

' IT S STEPHEN

MILLER TIME Has President Donald Trump found his Roy Cohn?

By Marc Fisher 30

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architect of Trump’s signature policies on immigration, including the executive order that banned people from seven Muslim countries and the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy toward illegal immigration. He shaped the sprawling initiatives aimed at deporting undocumented people, lowering the number of refugees to near zero, and redefining

the administration’s work. Like Cohn in his day, Miller has mastered the art of working mainly behind the scenes, yet emerging at strategic moments to take flak for Trump and serve as a vital and sometimes vicious rhetorical attack dog. During the 2016 campaign, Miller often served as the warm-up act at Trump rallies—his job was to deliver red meat, and he developed a routine

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conservative phenomenon and later at work on Capitol Hill and at the White House, Miller has been, like Trump, a contrarian and a sometime prankster. Unlike many of those who have served in Trump’s inner circle, Miller is also ideologically driven—a quality that Trump, who changed his party affiliation six times before running for president as a Republican, has long viewed with suspicion. But stylistically, Miller and his boss are similar—the bombast, the provocation, the passion to project strength. Yet they are quite different as well. Where the president casually tosses playful (if cruel) insults, Miller scowls and snaps. When Fox News’s Chris Wallace in July played Miller a series of Trump’s most controversial remarks about Muslims and white supremacists and asked why Americans shouldn’t consider the comments racist, Miller replied that “The term ‘racist’ has become a label that is too often deployed by the left, Democrats in this country, simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear.” While Trump is excruciatingly sensitive to slights and insults, Miller relishes being seen as a dark, Machiavellian figure—much as Cohn did. Miller, who did not respond to requests for an interview for this article, has repeatedly denied that he’s merely out to provoke. He has said that he aims, rather, at “constructive controversy, with the purpose of enlightenment.” Miller’s value to the president is almost unsurpassed in a White House where few people escape without a taste of Trump’s public needling or insults. “We have this running joke,” White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway said early in the administration: “If we were going to get key man’s insurance”—a policy businesses buy to protect their most vital employee—“on anyone, Stephen would top the list.” David Horowitz, the conservative activ-

ist and former leftist, has been Miller’s mentor since he was in high school. “Here’s a guy who’s loyal, brilliant, a great speechwriter and incredibly knowledgeable,” Horowitz says. “He’s the perfect complement to Trump and unlike the [Anthony] Scaramuccis of the world, the president can trust him.” Both those who delight in the president’s norm-busting ways and those who are appalled by his ability to erode democratic traditions have latched onto Miller’s rhetoric as one of the most powerful and shocking weapons of Trumpism. In February 2017, after a federal judge struck down the initial version of the travel ban, Miller went on CBS’s Face the Nation to warn that “our opponents, the media and the whole world, will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” (“Great job!” the president tweeted in response.) Among the appalled is Miller’s maternal uncle, David Glosser, a neuropsychologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. “What my odious nephew says about immigrants is word for word what was said about Jews coming into this country,” says Glosser. “He’s got to know where that stuff leads. He has to know those guys in Charlottesville would happily drag their feet over his lame body.”

ike Trump, Miller comes from a family that arrived during America’s biggest wave of immigration, around the turn of the 20th century. The Glossers, Stephen’s family on his mother’s side, come from a place called Antopol, a shtetl in current-day Belarus where violent anti-Jewish pogroms sparked an exodus to America. The Glossers, like the Millers, Stephen’s forerunners on his father’s side, who also arrived from the Pale of Settlement, flourished in the new land. The Millers and Glossers

Miller Timeline Circa 1997 Reads Wayne LaPierre book Born 1985

2007 Receives BA from Duke in political science

Circa 2001 Appears on conservative radio shows 32

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2016 Joins the Trump campaign in January

2007–2008 Works for Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann

2009 Starts working for Senator Jeff Sessions

MICHELLE BACHMANN AND JEFF SESSIONS BY GAGE SKIDMORE CREATIVE COMMONS

that worked crowds into a frenzy of anticipation for the main event. Since Trump took office, Miller’s role has shifted more into the background, but he still appears regularly on TV as a fervent defender of the president, especially when the administration is under fire, and not just on immigration matters. In the first days after the House launched its impeachment inquiry into Trump, the president relied on Miller to go on TV and push back as Trump would himself—with heated, take-no-prisoners rhetoric, adhering to the first rule Roy Cohn taught a very young Trump in Manhattan in the 1970s: “If you’re hit, hit back a hundred times harder.” So there was Miller on Fox News, calling Trump the “real whistleblower” and blasting the intelligence official who revealed Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine’s president as “a saboteur trying to undermine a democratically elected government.” In the new documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?, which portrays Cohn as the original, essential sculptor of the public character Americans have come to know as Donald Trump, Cohn speaks in a decades-old interview: “I very early in my life broke with tradition and left my Jewish upper class-oriented life in New York and became a contradiction of everything I was supposed to stand for. I am myself an oddball in a lot of ways.” Miller so far has shied away from that kind of self-analysis, but many of those who have watched him develop into a flame-throwing advocate for a loud, nationalistic populism have reached similar conclusions about him: Like Cohn, Miller provides Trump with a savvy counselor who encourages his most pugilistic, provocative and populist instincts. And like Cohn, Miller goes for the jugular; he is quick, loyal, ruthless. Like Cohn and like Trump himself, Miller has spent much of his life as an outsider, rejected and often disrespected by those around him. As a high school and college

2017 Cowrites Trump’s inaugural address

became retailers and lawyers and doctors. They bought real estate, joined their local synagogues and became leaders of their communities’ efforts to help the next generations of immigrants. David Glosser, whose sister, Miriam, is Stephen’s mother, is keeper of the family lore. He knows that back in the old country, his great-grandfather Wolf-Lieb Glotzer lived in a one-room house with a dirt-floor kitchen, that his grandfather Sam lost an eye in the violence of a pogrom, and that his great-grandmother Bessie arrived in the United States speaking only Yiddish. He knows the story of how the Glossers came to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where they peddled dry goods to farmers and eventually transformed their business into Glosser Brothers, once the region’s leading department store, an operation that employed thousands and was listed on the American Stock Exchange. And Glosser knows the history of his family’s pro-immigration and civil rights activism, including the fact that in his great-grandfather’s will, the very first bequest, ahead of any provision for his family, was to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. “We were hard-core Roosevelt Dem ocrats,” Glosser says, “living in a place where Jews couldn’t get jobs in the steel mills or the banks. You couldn’t join the swim club, so our family decided to build a swimming pool that anybody could join. Our family made no-interest loans to newcomers. At one point, my father was president of the synagogue and on the board of Catholic Charities.” That tradition in the family, juxtaposed against Miller’s fiery rhetoric on immigration, has led some of Miller’s relatives to declare him an “immigration hypocrite,” a denier of his own family’s heritage. David Glosser knows his nephew is aware of his family’s immigrant history and political tradition. “He’s not an uneducated guy,” he says. Stephen knows that if the United States had built a wall in the early 20th century “against poor desperate immigrants of a different religion, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.” Stephen’s parents, Miriam and Michael, originally followed in their families’ liberal footsteps: As late as 1989, both of them made donations to Democrat Bill Bradley’s Senate campaign in New Jersey, as well as to other Democrats, according to campaign finance records collected on opensecrets.org. But Miriam, who worked with

As the warmup act at Trump rallies, Miller’s job was to deliver red meat, and he developed a routine that worked crowds into a frenzy. troubled teenagers after she got a degree in social work from Columbia University, and Michael, a Stanford-trained attorney who practiced corporate and real estate law in California, pivoted toward a more conservative politics as Stephen and his older sister, Alexis, and younger brother, Jacob, grew up. (Both siblings are now lawyers at big firms.) Michael and Miriam, who did

not respond to requests for comment, run a rental housing business in the Los Angeles area that controls about 2,500 apartments, mostly under the brand name California Villages. The couple “felt overtaxed and overregulated by crazy California liberals,” Glosser says. Like the president’s father, Fred Trump, Michael Miller has a larger-than-life presence. He relishes political discussion; in Glosser’s view, he is “very arrogantly self-confident and uniquely able to ignore facts that contradict his opinions.” During Stephen’s teenage years, the Millers began donating to Republican candidates and conservative causes, with thousands of dollars contributed to Republicans such as then-Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and presidential candidate John McCain, as well as large gifts to the Republican National Committee. The Millers were also involved in Jewish organizations, including the Republican Jewish Coalition, and Michael served on the boards of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. It’s not clear that the Millers passed NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

their politics on to their children; instead, it appears, it was Stephen who helped move his parents to the right. Neither of the elder Millers was ever “a rhetorical bombthrower,” says Glosser. “My sister knows the family history. I’ve never heard a racist word from either of Stephen’s parents.” Two of Stephen’s schoolmates from Santa Monica say that it was his advocacy that nudged his parents rightward. And Glosser says he saw Miriam, his only sibling, move more definitively to the right after Stephen joined the president’s campaign at the start of 2016. At some point in the last couple of years, bashing Miller became something of a trend, reaching its nadir when his third-grade teacher, Nikki Fiske, told The Hollywood Reporter that eight-year-old Stephen “would pour glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it. He was a strange dude.” In response to that revelation, the Santa Monica school district Miller in high school. placed Fiske on “home assignment” for a few days, saying she had violated rules who are paid to do it for us?” Miller delivabout “release of student information.” ered the line in an angry roar and looked The last time Glosser talked politics with satisfied as his classmates reacted in horror. his nephew, Stephen was a recent college Then, when two adults escorted him from graduate who was adamant that gun control the stage, he laughed. was a bad idea. Glosser put him to a test of Kids at Santa Monica High knew to ascending danger: Would Stephen be okay expect the outrageous from Stephen. He with his uncle owning a 12-gauge shotgun? had crafted an identity as a political provoSure. An Uzi? Yes. A Howitzer? That too. cateur—a rare right-winger in a very liberal “When I escalated to an Atomic Annie, which place who delighted in outraging his classcould fire an atomic bomb, his father rescued mates. In his earlier school years, Stephen him from the conversation,” Glosser recalls. had been known more for his obsesIn recent years, Glosser says, relatives sion with all things Star Trek than for any have steered clear of bringing up politics political passion. But according to Chris with Stephen. “It can be a little uncom- Moritz, a close friend of Miller’s from midfortable,” he says. Other topics are off lim- dle school through high school and head its as well. “A couple of Thanksgivings ago, of the high school’s Political Forum Club, somebody asked him if he was dating any- Miller shifted in seventh grade from being a one and he said, vociferously, ‘There’s to be Democrat like his parents to a sharply conno discussion of my personal life.’” servative middle schooler. “I like to think I had a big influence t Santa Monica High School, over that,” Moritz said in a film made by Miller’s big moment came in 2002, his classmates during their senior year. during his junior year, when he Moritz introduced Stephen to books by delivered a controversial speech at a student libertarian economists Milton Friedman government election rally. “I’m the only and Thomas Sowell. candidate up here who really stands out,” The janitors remark was just Stephen he said. “I will say and I will do things that being Stephen, Moritz has said: “He was no one else in their right mind would say or just joking...Most people are so uptight, and do.” And then he asked, “Am I the only one they don’t realize the humor in some of the who is sick and tired of being told to pick things he says.” up my trash when we have plenty of janitors Miller later claimed that the speech was

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“satire.” Although many students did not take the speech as a joke, Miller was widely known as a class funnyman. He joked about his hair loss and about dumb pop songs, but also about how best to torture Saddam Hussein. Miller has looked back at his teen self and said he sees a nonconformist reacting to an almost monolithically liberal school and city. “When we think of nonconformity, we tend to imagine kids in the 1960s rebelling against the system,” Miller told the Los Angeles Times in 2017. “This was my system. My establishment was a dogmatic educational system that often uniformly expressed a single point of view.” Or, as he put it in an interview in The Atlantic last year: “I’ve always been a nonconformist...And in today’s culture, the nonconformists are conservatives.” Miller traces his political awakening not to Moritz but to a book by the National Rifle Association’s longtime leader, Wayne LaPierre. In middle school, he took part in a magazine subscription drive; to win a prize, he needed one more subscription, so he bought himself Guns & Ammo magazine, where he read a piece by then-NRA spokesman and Hollywood actor Charlton Heston. Miller later recalled the column as “the first conservative writing I’d ever read.” That story led him to LaPierre’s Guns, Crime and Freedom, a New York Times bestseller that argued that “the Warsaw ghetto stands in history as a shining example of the dangers of gun control.” The book inspired Miller to read more about libertarianism and the idea that America’s success was the result of a near-absolute commitment to individual freedoms. Miller became a strong defender of the Second Amendment; according to The New York Times he even introduced himself to fellow freshmen at Duke by saying, “My name is Stephen Miller, I am from Los Angeles and I like guns.” Miller’s new political ideology quickly put him at odds with most of his high school classmates, especially on matters of diversity and race. He adopted the idea that the best path to a cure for “the disease of racism” was to “stress the one culture that we all hold in common—the American culture.” Writing for a local newspaper soon after he finished high school, Miller said that “if we are to entirely extract this venom of prejudice from the United States,

I proclaim Americanism to be the key.” The emphasis on multiculturalism that he’d experienced in school was entirely the wrong approach, he wrote, because it kept people apart rather than uniting them in a focus on “why our ancestors came here.” His belief that the United States is threatened by immigrants solidified early on. In his high school yearbook, he included on his senior page a quotation from Theodore Roosevelt: “There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are American and nothing else.” Miller’s parents, according to friends and relatives, took pride in his growing notoriety. “Michael was proud as a peacock,” Glosser says. But throughout his teen years, Miller’s classmates and teachers wrestled with the fact that they were often appalled and annoyed by things he said, even as they realized that their reaction was precisely what Stephen aimed to provoke. He was without doubt a talented speaker, they say, but he seemed to lack empathy for those around him. “We certainly tried to teach him what’s right and what’s wrong,” says Rabbi Jeff Marx of the Santa Monica Synagogue, a Reform congregation the Millers belonged to when Stephen was in high school. The Millers were “absolutely committed Jews, supportive of the congregation, good values,” says Marx, who taught Stephen in confirmation class and recalls him as “never shy about speaking up” and often taking “the opposite tack. What stood out for me about Stephen was that he stood out. He relished that role.” The Millers’ previous rabbi, Neil Comess-Daniels, then and now the leader of Congregation Beth Shir Shalom, a Reform temple where Stephen celebrated his bar mitzvah, does not recall Stephen as a child, but has said in sermons and interviews that Miller’s work is “completely antithetical to the values of Judaism. We’re supposed to see the world through these glasses of moving from slavery to freedom, and somehow I think Mr. Miller took those glasses off.” What some saw as acting out, others viewed as principled opposition to the status quo. A teacher who had Stephen as a student in middle school says, “Stephen’s narrative is very much the principled thinker who was appalled at the liberal pieties of the People’s Republic of Santa Monica. That’s true, but it’s not the full story. The full story starts with attention-getting. His father was a huge personality, really dominated the

Miller’s new political ideology quickly put him at odds with most of his high school classmates, especially on matters of diversity and race. room, and this was Stephen’s way of gaining a place for himself in that room.” Miller was a rabble rouser, but he also did his homework. When he launched a campaign to get Santa Monica High to require recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, the school’s principal credited Miller with forcing a change that, while unpopular with some teachers and students, was actually required by California law.

t was the pledge controversy that first brought Miller to national prominence. He wrote to his favorite radio talk-show host, Larry Elder, then a conservative fixture on KABC-AM in Los Angeles, about the school’s violation. Elder had him on the air once, twice and eventually more than 70 times. On the show, Stephen slammed his school for being an “indoctrination machine,” accused a teacher of dragging an American flag on the floor, and railed against the multiculturalism that the school celebrated. Listening to Elder’s show at home on the day Miller came on to talk about the pledge was David Horowitz, the former Marxist radical who had migrated across the ideological spectrum to organize a nationwide campaign against the left’s dominance on college campuses. Horowitz, himself a firebrand speaker and self-styled provocateur, invited Stephen to his house to talk about the scourge of “political correctness.” “We talked and we saw eye to eye,” Horowitz says. “I thought, this is some ballsy kid. He could get into any elite college, but he’s willing to jeopardize that to defend his principles. He invited me to speak at Santa Monica High and he kept at

it for eight months before he could get permission for me to come.” Horowitz views Miller as a freedom fighter: “Comes 9/11, a patriotic moment, and schools are saying the Pledge of Allegiance, but at Santa Monica High, they trample the flag. Stephen Miller stays true to the values he was brought up with. He was like Gary Cooper in High Noon—he stood alone.” Horowitz became Stephen’s mentor, advising him how to make a mark in high school, college and beyond. After heading east to attend Duke in 2003, Miller created the campus chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, Horowitz’s network aimed at exposing left-wing influence on college campuses. Horowitz continued to egg him on, encouraging him to press for equal time for conservatives at campus events and to expose what he saw as efforts by liberal professors to indoctrinate students. He and Miller both saw so-called identity politics as a threat to American unity and both viewed themselves as “the real liberals—for individual freedom, against identity politics, which is racist,” Horowitz says. “The reason Stephen was attracted to me is because, although my parents were card-carrying members of the Communist Party and his were just Adlai Stevenson Democrats, we both feel betrayed by the left.” Miller again invited Horowitz to speak, and in 2007, the two created “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” events on campuses around the country, taking out ads in college newspapers warning against jihadist extremists and the threat of terrorism. Many college papers refused to run the ad, saying it was Islamophobic and inflammatory. At Duke, the other main sponsor of the campaign against “political correctness” was a graduate student, Richard Spencer, who would go on to become a prominent white nationalist, calling for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of the United States. Spencer has said that Miller first came to his attention through his columns in Duke’s student paper. In 2006, when nationwide controversy erupted over allegations that three white members of the lacrosse team had raped a black stripper at an off-campus party, Miller was a rare voice defending the players from a rush to judgment. His willingness to stand by them despite campuswide assumptions that they had to be guilty won him a nearly constant presence on CNN and Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. When the players were exonerated, Miller pronounced it as proof that the criticism NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

and abuse he’d been getting ever since high school were unfounded and unfair. In 2007, Miller and Spencer, who met as activists in the Duke Conservative Union, organized a debate on immigration policy in which Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE, a nationalist online forum that argues that “the racial and cultural identity of America is legitimate and defensible,” faced off against Peter Laufer, a journalist who had just published a book, Wetback Nation, that called for opening the U.S.-Mexican border entirely, allowing a free flow of people between the countries. Miller and Spencer “were partners, not ships passing in the night,” Laufer recalls. “Stephen and Richard were gracious hosts, but they were ideologues interested in promoting their point of view through the device of this debate.” Miller now strenuously denies ever working closely with Spencer. “I condemn his views. I have no relationship with him. He was not my friend,” Miller told The Washington Post. Spencer, who did not respond to requests for comment, has described himself as Miller’s “mentor.” “Clearly, I was influencing him,” Spencer said earlier this year on his talk show on YouTube. “I was a little bit older in this organization. I was the one pushing for the immigration debate.” Spencer distinguishes his own views from Miller’s but praises him for taking on issues that most mainstream politicians shy away from: “Stephen is not me,” he told Vanity Fair. “He is not coming from my identitarian perspective, but he is willing to go there. He’s willing to take on those issues, which shows a lot of bravery.” After college, Horowitz helped Miller find a place in American conservative politics on the Hill. “His ambition was to be a senator,” he says. “He came to me for help finding a job in Washington. I regret this, but I got him a job with [congresswoman] Michelle Bachmann, and she turned out to be a nutcase.” Horowitz says he helped Miller get his job with then-Senator Jeff Sessions too. And that job led him to Trump.

ardworking and driven, Miller rose to become Sessions’ communications director, where he played a vital role in Sessions’s successful 2013 effort to kill the bipartisan immigration reform bill that came close to creating a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. His views on immi36

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Miller has scoffed at suggestions that his rhetoric stems from anti-Semitism or encourages anti-Semitic extremists. gration formed the core of his politics, and while he knew policy in detail, he deployed simple, reductive language to deliver his arguments, both in Congress for Sessions and on the campaign trail, where he helped Tea Party Republican insurgent Dave Brat unseat GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor, whom he considered soft on immigration, in a 2014 primary in Virginia. In January 2016, Miller joined Trump’s campaign as a senior policy adviser and immediately put his well-honed public speaking skills to work at rallies, endearing himself to the candidate and his supporters. “Don’t ever, ever let anyone tell you that you’re not a good person because you want to secure the border,” Miller roared, playing to the crowd’s sense that Democrats looked down on them, viewing them as nothing but bigots. In the White House, Miller has continued to focus on immigration. This year, he moved to slash the number of refugees who would be allowed into the United States, reducing by more than 70 percent the tally of 85,000 refugees admitted in President Barack Obama’s final year in office. In fact, immigration is so central to Miller’s identity that it’s one of the first things his friends talk about when they describe the bond between Miller and his girlfriend, Katie Waldman, now Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary. Previously a spokesperson for thenSecretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and subsequently for Republican Arizona Senator Martha McSally, Waldman has described asylum-seekers as “a violent mob” and has a picture of the border as her Twitter cover photo. In his own speeches, Miller portrays immigrants as a danger to Americans; he

rarely mentions his own family’s immigration story, but he has sometimes noted his own “immigrant ancestors” and especially his great-great-grandfather, who “came here from overseas to start his American dream.” And he has mentioned his religion, especially in response to New York Congresswoman Alexandria OcasioCortez’s comparison of detention facilities along the U.S.-Mexican border to concentration camps. “I’m a Jew,” Miller said on Fox News in July. “As a Jew, as an American Jew, I am profoundly outraged by the comments from Ocasio-Cortez…. It is a sinful comment. It minimizes the deaths of six million of my Jewish brothers and sisters.” Miller has scoffed at suggestions that his rhetoric stems from anti-Semitism (much of his language resembles that of the “America First” trope, which tracks back to Charles Lindbergh’s nativist campaign of a century ago) or encourages anti-Semitic extremists. Although he has sometimes reveled in depictions of himself as an evil force—Haaretz called him the “most-hated Jew in America” and Slate dubbed him “the mastermind of Trump’s most horrible policies”—he has occasionally shifted his tone to a style that Trump calls “presidential.” In this year’s State of the Union address, Miller gave Trump language that spoke of carnage and fear, but also gave a nod toward more traditional themes, embodied in introductions of victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, a World War II concentration camp survivor and a Holocaust rescuer. Those images of empathy and humanity bumped up against more typical Miller-Trump rhetoric about “caravans on the march” and an impending “tremendous onslaught” of dangerous immigrants. The more lurid language dominates behind the scenes, according to people who have worked alongside Miller. In his book Team of Vipers, former White House communications aide Cliff Sims quotes one of Miller’s more incendiary lines, and the White House press secretary hasn’t denied the quote’s accuracy. “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil,” Miller reportedly said; within days, the line was quoted in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Politico, Slate and on and on. It was inflammatory, tough, provocative— the kind of thing Roy Cohn might have said, the kind of line Trump would love. It was quintessential Stephen Miller. M

POEM | FAYE MOSKOWITZ A LITTLE GIRL’S 1930s DIRGE “Turn off your lights! Turn them off! Heh heh heh,” the radio coughs. The Olga Coal Company presents “The Hermit’s Cave” With the Mummers In The Little Theater of the Air. Hugging myself on the stair, In the licorice dark, I wonder where my parents are. “We have lost our place,” Mummy says. “Thank God My sister is willing to share.” Lost our place? That means books When a finger Slips off a word. I saw a mummer once At the Jackson County Fair. Bandages flying everywhere. Such a boo boo! His mummy must have Wrapped him head to toe While he cried, “Ow ow ow!” “Heh heh heh,” the Hermit Whispers. I know my numbers. My Aunty is eight And we are three. Two hands plus one finger over. “Mummy, Mummy,” I call, Crossing my arms to warm me. “Why do my cousins think The radio is fun?”

My daddy says, “This is a hard time.” The radio winks a little Red eye and answers, “Now I’m done. Brother, can you spare a dime?” Our old Zayde says, “Don’t forget You are Jews in a Goyische city.” Mummy says on the telephone, “We know who we are; We don’t want your pity.” Now my eyes can see. My cousins are black Coal piles in their chairs. “Heh heh heh,” The Hermit laughs, And I get chills. When my mummy Looks into a pram, she says, “What an ugly baby! Why tell the Angel of Death About a pretty baby?” When someone calls me pretty, I’m afraid the Angel of Death Will get me.

Daddy bought me popcorn, Yellow seeds changing To snowy white flowers. I eat the flowers one by one From a little white sack, Salt and butter on my fingers. Daddy calls it a “snack.” Thunder booms and lightning Lights up Aunty’s rooms. Mummy does not like storms. She may be in bed to hide. If she sat beside me On the stairs, I would say “Mummy, it’s okay.” If I could find my way To Aunty’s kitchen For a knife, I could poke A hole through the roof To God and the stars, But I have lost my way, Too afraid for wishes And too scared to pray.

Daddy took me back To the Jackson County Fair. I looked for the mummer Crying “Ow ow ow,” But he wasn’t there.

Renowned fiction writer and essayist Faye Moskowitz is Moment’s longtime poetry editor. Her works include the short story collection Whoever Finds This: I Love You and the memoirs And the Bridge Is Love, A Leak in the Heart and Peace in the House. She was also the editor of Her Face in the Mirror: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters. Sadly for Moment, Faye will be retiring as poetry editor with this issue.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

What American Jewish Voters Are Thinking With this issue, Moment launches its 2020 Jewish Political Voices Project. Between now and the presidential election, we will be taking a deep dive into the political views of the American Jewish community and bringing you along. The Jewish Political Voices Project will explore the political and cultural forces splitting apart both the nation and American Jews. It offers an alternative to polls, which, as we saw during the 2016 presidential election, are not always a reliable predictor of voter behavior. Instead, by getting to know three politically engaged voters in each of ten battleground states, we will learn what voters are thinking and how their attitudes change over time. And, as this project reminds us, Jews—be they Democrats, Republicans or independents—are by no means a homogeneous group of voters: We are individuals with distinct stories and many takes on Israel, anti-Semitism, immigration, climate change, the economy, health care, guns, Iran and impeachment. The political attitudes and preferences of the American Jewish community have a significant impact on American electoral politics. Jews make up only 2 percent of the U.S. population, but voter turnout is considerable: About 85 percent of adult Jews voted in recent presidential elections, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, compared to the national average of 55-63 percent. Our featured voters live in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. In 2016, candidate Donald Trump won all of these states but two—Nevada and Virginia—although Republican support eroded during the 2018 midterms. Since winning margins were small, Jewish voters in these swing states have a real potential to shift the outcome. For instance, in 2016, Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes in Michigan, a state where an estimated 71,500 adults identify as Jewish, out of a total Jewish

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019

population of 116,200, according to new data compiled by the American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute. In Florida, where an estimated 510,800 residents of voting age identify as Jewish, out of a total Jewish population of 736,300, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by just under 113,000 votes. We found our “voices” by reaching out to Jewish communities across the country. They are students, lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, public servants and others who range in age from 21 to 92. About two-thirds consider themselves Democrats, while the other third are Republicans, approximately reflecting the voting patterns of the Jewish electorate. However, their attitudes and preferences vary widely—and many of them could be considered independent voters. On the following pages, you’ll meet ten of the thirty voters we are interviewing. You can hear from the rest by visiting the Jewish Political Voices Project at momentmag.com/jpvp. Look for more of their stories in subsequent issues of the magazine. Through the fast-moving news cycles, debates, primaries, caucuses and general election, our team will also provide updates, stories, fresh analysis and real-time insights to guide you through this historic and unprecedented campaign.

MOMENT INSTITUTE

POLITICAL 2020 JEWISH VOICES PROJECT MOMENTMAG.COM/JPVP

Director: Amy Saltzman Deputy director: Suzanne Borden

2020

MOMENT INSTITUTE

Interview team: Suzanne Borden,POLITICAL JEWISH Dan Freedman, LillyVOICES Gelman, PROJECT Nathan Guttman, Sandra Perlmutter, Amy MOMENTMAG.COM/JPVP Saltzman, Francie Schwartz, Stuart Schwartz, Sherry Schweitzer, Charles Wolfson

MOMENT INSTITUTE

To find out what our vo ters are saying abou t recent presidential debates, visi t momentmag .com/jpvp

In these pages we are providing the unfiltered opinions of voters interviewed for this project. Those views are based on their understanding and perception of facts and information from a range of sources. In some cases, that information may be misleading or incorrect. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

39 39

PENNSYLVANIA

Lou Weiss

Age: 63 Location: Pittsburgh, PA Party: Republican Occupation: Retired; previously ran family carpet business Jewish denomination: Conservative, but also belongs to Reform, Orthodox and Chabad congregations Current 2020 choice: Bill Weld in Republican primary; Amy Klobuchar in general election 2016 choice: Marco Rubio in the primary; wrote in his wife in general election News sources: The Wall Street Journal editorial page, The New York Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Drudge Report Bret Baier on Fox News, Dennis Prager’s radio show, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Family: Married with four adult daughters; one is New York Times columnist Bari Weiss

Weiss grew up a Reform Jew in a “McGovern liberal family” in Pittsburgh. His conservative political views took hold in a college freshman political science class. Today, he belongs to four synagogues. He was president of Congregation Or L’Simcha, the synagogue that merged in 2010 with the Tree of Life congregation. He occasionally writes op-eds for The Wall Street Journal.

Does religion affect your political views? My Judaism informs my conservatism. And it’s true of my own family too. My whole family is liberal, but they’re conservative in how they live their lives. My dad, who just died last December, was very hardworking, very industrious, saved his money, didn’t do crazy things. I think that kind of conservatism is the way out of poverty for a lot of people. Are there any make-or-break issues for you? My litmus test issue is Israel. If someone is bad on Israel, meaning that they oppose what the citizens of Israel want, as expressed through their democratically elected leaders, I cannot support them. Trump is great on Israel and understands that it’s an important ally. But I cringe at the thought of voting for him. What other issues are important to you? Free markets: I tend to support policies that 40

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promote “free people and free markets,” standing up for what they believed in, but which is the motto of the Wall Street Journal busing turned out to be a disaster. All white editorial page. Immigration: I'm in favor of people fled to the suburbs and it didn’t make doubling the size of the country through outcomes better for black students. This is immigration. When you fly over this coun- one of the reasons I’m a huge proponent of try, there’s a lot of empty space. If we had school choice. 700 million people instead of 330 million, I What traits are you looking for in a candithink it would be good for the country. I’m date? Trump is despicable. I just don’t even a capitalist, and more people typically cre- know where to start. I like someone who has a ate more wealth. But we need to control our sense of humor and is self-deprecating. Trump borders, so I’m both prodoesn’t know what the word selfimmigration and pro-wall. deprecating means. In terms Identity politics: When you of characteristics I’d like to see, insist on seeing every issue Trump has none of them. through the lens of race, Are there any Democrats gender, class or sexual prefPennsylvania you would vote for? My erence, it ignores that there Total Jewish population prayer is that Mike Bloomberg are universal values beyond 311,500 enters the race as a Democrat. those things. To me, this Percent of total population He is rational and he can selfworldview is an intellectual 2.4% fund. In a minute, I’d vote for and moral dead end and the Jewish voter party him. If Amy Klobuchar were opposite of freedom. identification the nominee, I would consider Democrat: 55.8% Is there political conflict in voting for her because she’s Republican: 18.4% your family? My shins are moderate and is also rational. Independent: 23% bruised from being kicked Other: 2.8%* ShouldTrump be impeached? so often under the table dur2016 presidential results No—63 million Americans ing family dinners. I've been Clinton: 48% view the whole Democratic trying unsuccessfully now Trump: 49% effort to get Trump as an for 47 years to get my family 2018 midterm results attempt to nullify their votes. to see it my way. My parents Governor Beat him at the ballot box. were in favor of school bus- Incumbent Democrat: 58% Republican: 41% ing. I was still in high school * All Jewish voter population data Senate and people were boycotting is from the American Jewish Incumbent Democrat: 56% our family’s business because Population Project at Brandeis Republican: 43% my parents stood up in pubUniversity’s Steinhardt Social House Research Institute. lic meetings to support it. I give them so much credit for Democrat: 9, Republican: 9

ARIZONA

Alma Hernandez Age: 26 Location: Tucson, AZ Party: Democrat Occupation: State Representative Jewish denomination: Reform Current 2020 choice: Joe Biden 2016 choice: Hillary Clinton News sources: NPR, CNN, MSNBC, BBC News, local newspaper Family: Single

Hernandez is the first Jewish Mexican-American woman elected to the Arizona State House. Her brother is also a state representative in South Tucson, and her sister is on the school board. She grew up in a nonobservant intermarried family. She connected to Judaism as a teenager, has held leadership positions in several Jewish organizations and recently became a bat mitzvah. How does your Judaism affect your political views? I am very proud of my Jewish roots and I have tried to include that in every aspect of my life, including politics and policy. The whole notion of tikkun olam—that people are treated fairly and equally, and that we live in a society where we can all thrive—is very important to me.

Why do you support Joe Biden? I want to win this election, and I feel that the only way to win right now would be with Joe Biden. I know people say he’s old and he’s a part of the establishment. But I feel that is what’s going to win in this election. I’m trying to be as realistic and pragmatic about this as possible.

Has the Ukraine affair changed your Is Israel an important issue for you? As a mind about Biden? In regards to his son, it progressive it sometimes causes hasn’t, as I strongly believe some divisions in my circle. I’ve that Biden didn’t take part been working on pro-Israel in any wrongdoing on that issues since high school, so I take issue. I think it’s now being some of it personally. We’re told used by Trump as a distracthat we have to be either proArizona tion from all of the serious Israel or pro-Palestinian, but I Total Jewish population problems he is now facing. 135,200 don’t see it that way and won’t be shamed into choosing a side. Percent of total population Are there disagreements in your family about 1.9% What policy issues do you whom to support? We Jewish voter party care about most? Health care, are a very split family. My identification public education and especially Democrat: 41.1% father is a staunch Elizabeth criminal justice. I unfortunately Republican: 22.7% Warren supporter. He was introduced to the crimiIndependent: 33.9% wants Warren to win more nal justice system when I was Other: 2.3% than anything in the world. attacked at age 14 by a police 2016 presidential results My mother is a really big officer on my school campus. Clinton: 45% Biden supporter for a lot of Trump: 50% I was arrested, taken to juvie the same reasons as I am. I and kicked out of high school 2018 midterm results think my brother is leaning Governor for something I didn’t do. I toward Pete Buttigieg. My Democrat: 42% went from being an honor stuIncumbent Republican: 56% sister seems to be waiting to dent one day to being a crimdecide, like a lot of people, Senate inal the next. I had to work so but she doesn’t seem to be Democrat: 50% hard against the system that on the Biden train. Republican: 48% had failed me, which is the reaHouse Would you support son why I’ve been so involved in Democrat: 5, Republican: 4 any Democrat against that issue.

Trump? I will support whoever wins the nomination. We don’t want to see what happened in the last election. I was a delegate for Hillary, and I voted for her at the Democratic National Convention. But it was frustrating to see those who call themselves Democrats and were Bernie supporters not supporting Hillary in the way they should have. After the primary election, it’s a matter of supporting the candidate who wins, moving forward, and doing what we can to help them win the general election. Do you support the move to impeach Trump? I firmly believe that we need to hold all elected officials to the same standard, and if there is enough evidence that would qualify him for impeachment, I am for it. No one should be above the law. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

IOWA

Josh Mandelbaum

Age: 40 Location: Des Moines, IA Party: Democrat Occupation: Environmental lawyer and member of Des Moines City Council Jewish denomination: Reform Current 2020 choice: Undecided, but likes Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker 2016 choice: Hillary Clinton News sources: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, The Daily podcast, Twitter, candidates’ social media and emails Family: Married with two young children

Mandelbaum comes from a long line of Iowans and attends Temple B’nai Jeshurun, the congregation his great-great-grandfather helped found in 1873. He works for the nonprofit Environmental Law Policy Center on clean energy and clean water issues. He has volunteered for political campaigns for more than 20 years and currently serves on the greater Des Moines Jewish Federation Board. ing the world, certainly informs the way I interact in politics.

Warren and I like Cory Booker. We met Booker and my son, who is five, loves him. But whoever the Democrats nominate, even if it’s not my first or second or third choice, I’m going to be supporting that person in the general election.

Are there any make-or-break issues for you when it comes to supporting a candidate? A president can only do a handful of big things because it’s hard to get legislation through Congress. I think cli- Are there disagreements about politics mate change is of such great magnitude in your family? My dad and brothers are that we need to act on it immediately. I more conservative than I am. I don’t even want to know that whoever I’m caucusing know how my dad voted in 2016. I’ve got for gets the seriousness of clia brother who is a big, big mate change and has it as their Trump supporter. He’s top two or three issues. All the actually frustrated with me Democratic candidates genover some of the gun vioerally say the right things on lence prevention stuff that climate, but there’s a real quesI’ve advocated for on a local tion about whether it would be level. So politics does create Iowa a top priority. some tension.

What traits are you looking for in a candidate? I want someone who can grapple with a lot of information, ask questions, think critically and communicate effectively. They can be informed by an ideology and a vision, but I want a certain amount of pragmatism. I want to understand how they’re going to solve problems and get things done. They need to be in politics to serve and make the world a better place. The opposite is true of President Trump. Not only is he entirely transactional, but the focus tends to be on how he can personally benefit. Does religion affect your political views? In a very broad, value-based sense, yes. The concept of tikkun olam, repair42

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Is Israel an important issue for you? It’s certainly something that I track, monitor and care about. It’s important religiously, but what has happened to the greater Jewish community over the years is also important—having a state, and having a refuge. Who will you be supporting in the Iowa caucuses? I have not figured out yet who I’m caucusing for. I don’t like dealing in the hypothetical. I am impressed by the caliber of the field, especially having had a chance to see a number of these folks up close. I am impressed by Elizabeth

Total Jewish population 11,600

Percent of total population <1% Jewish voter party identification Democrat: 47.5% Republican: 17.4% Independent: 32.9% Other: 2.2% 2016 presidential results Clinton: 42% Trump: 52% 2018 midterm results Governor Democrat: 48% Incumbent Republican: 50% Senate n/a House Democrat: 3, Republican: 1

Why is the 2020 election so important to you? I think Trump is an existential threat to the way our country works. I know it’s a cliché to say that this is the most important election cycle of our lifetime, but it does feel that way to me. In the past, I never worried about our democratic norms and whether our institutions would survive. But now I feel there’s a risk that our institutions are eroding, and that makes this election more important than in the past.

WISCONSIN

Ruth Kantrowitz

Age: 42 Location: Mequon, WI Party: Republican Occupation: Owns and runs seven group homes for the elderly and people with disabilities Jewish denomination: Belongs to a Reform synagogue, but doesn’t want to define her denomination Current 2020 choice: Donald Trump 2016 choice: Donald Trump News sources: Fox News, Breitbart, Facebook, a friend who follows alternative news outlets, conservative friends Family: Married with two school-age children and one foster child

Kantrowitz , an Israeli immigrant, moved to the U.S. in 1989 at age 13 when her family won the green card lottery. She calls herself a “very liberal conservative” who supports both abortion and gun rights. Kantrowitz carried twins for a New York gay couple. She voted twice for President Barack Obama, but says his presidency pushed her to become a Republican because of “handouts” and “immigrants living off tax dollars.” What traits matter most to you in a candidate? I prefer candidates who are frank. I have no problem with them being offensive. What’s unacceptable to me is saying one thing and doing another. How does Israel affect your political views? Trump’s support for Israel is a determining factor for me, probably above all other things. I automatically rule out anyone with anti-Israel sentiments.

Wisconsin Total Jewish population 46,400 Percent of total population <1% Jewish voter party identification Democrat: 47.3% Republican: 18.9% Independent: 31.5% Other: 2.3%

Do you have political conflicts with family or friends? I have lost plenty of friends over my political views. Most people I know seem to be more Democraticleaning. My friends who are conservative feel the need to have secret Facebook pages where they can speak their minds freely.

Why do you support Aside from Israel, what other Trump? The main reaissues do you care about? son is he says what he’s Welfare: I want to see more welgoing to do and he does fare reform and fewer handouts; 2016 presidential results it. I like his tough policies. forcing people to recognize their Clinton: 47% His rudeness in many own independence, their own Trump: 48% ways is so Israeli. He tells strength and to know that they 2018 midterm results it like it is. You don’t have can earn for themselves rather Governor to like it, and he’s not than being dependent on the govDemocrat: 50% ernment. Military: A strong mili- Incumbent Republican: 48% going to care that you don’t like it. But he’ll just tary force and worldwide security. Senate keep doing what he thinks Incumbent Democrat: 55% Abortion: I’m not just pro-choice, is right. And I appreciate Republican: 45% I’m very much pro-abortion. I that in any person, espeHouse feel tax dollars should go to aborcially a president. I think Democrat: 3, Republican: 5 tion as much as needed, because he’s tough as nails. that’s better than putting it into prisons and foster care and whatnot. Is there anything you wish Trump would As an immigrant yourself, what’s do differently? I do wish he would do a lot your view of the current immigra- more expelling of people who are harmful tion debate? I was a legal immigrant. to this country than he has. And I wish he We didn’t sneak in relatives whose appli- would handle the border crisis differently. cations to come here were denied. They I’m not exactly sure why those people are in stayed living in fairly poor conditions in cages. Send them back. Israel. There is a law and there needs to be respect for the law.

hunt. I think the “evidence” is no different from what any other politician has done and will do. I believe Trump hides less of what he does versus other politicians. His crude and unpolished manners make him at least honest. I also think the good he’s done for this country outweighs anything he’s told another country to look into. Do you expect any surprises in the election? I’ll be surprised if Trump doesn’t win a second term. I think his supporters are just quieter because they don’t want to be harassed, but I think he has an incredibly strong support base.

What do you think about the impeachment inquiry? I feel they are on a witch

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

NEVADA

Felipe Goodman

Age: 52 Location: Las Vegas, NV Party: Democrat Occupation: Rabbi Jewish denomination: Conservative Current 2020 choice: Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden 2016 choice: Hillary Clinton News sources: The New York Times, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post Family: Married with three children over 18

Goodman is a Mexican immigrant. He was an assistant rabbi in Mexico City before joining Temple Beth Sholom in 1998. Named one of America’s most inspiring rabbis by The Forward in 2013, he participated in a series of White House meetings with President Barack Obama on relationships with the Jewish community and on Israel’s security. One reason he became a U.S. citizen 12 years ago was so he could vote. What are the top three issues that concern you most? My top three issues are the composition of the Supreme Court, support for the State of Israel and, believe it or not, a woman’s right to choose. I have a fourth: guns. We have a duty as Jews to preserve human life, and we’re not doing it. Why are abortion rights so important to you? It’s clear to me that the life of the mother comes first. I want to be on the side of caution. Jewish law says that when the life of the mother is in danger, we need to terminate the pregnancy. Therefore, I do

not want reproductive rights to be touched. Do you have any make-orbreak issues? I could never vote for a candidate who doesn’t outright support the State of Israel or won’t uphold the relationship between Israel and the United States the way it is today. I also could never vote for somebody who doesn’t support reproductive rights and some sort of different approach to guns.

think like him or her. I need a leader who children can look up to. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or a Democrat.

Nevada Total Jewish population 76,200 Percent of total population 2.5% Jewish voter party identification Democrat: 44.2% Republican: 20.3% Independent: 32.8% Other: 2.8%

Why do you support Pete Buttigieg? I admire his military experience, and I think he has really interesting ideas. I would like this country to be in the center again and I see him in the center of the spectrum, even though for some people his being gay puts him completely out of the realm of reality. To me, he is the ideal candidate, but I don’t think that’s going to happen, so I go back and forth between him and Biden. I have to be realistic about who can beat Trump.

As an immigrant yourself, how do you feel about the current immigration situation? I’m very upset. 2016 presidential results Clinton: 48% Immigrants are being treated Trump: 46% like pariahs. I understand that 2018 midterm results not everybody who wants asyGovernor lum can get it, and people Democrat: 49% should come here legally. But Republican: 45% there are so many ways to solve Senate this crisis. I’m so frustrated Would you vote for any Democrat: 50% because when George W. Bush Incumbent Republican: 45% Democrat? I don’t think was in office, he tried to solve I could vote for Elizabeth House it and Democrats didn’t let Democrat: 3, Republican: 1 Warren or Bernie Sanders. him. Then Obama tried and They’re radicals, and I the Republicans didn’t let him. don’t like radicals on either These immigrants are like a political football. side. I also don’t like how Sanders relates What traits matter to you most in a to the State of Israel, and I don’t really presidential candidate? I want some- like Warren. I don’t know why, but I don’t body who does not demean the position trust her. of president of the United States and who can uphold the position with dignity. I want someone who can be the president of all Americans, not only the ones who 44

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Who would you vote for if one of them is nominated? If there’s an independent candidate, I may vote for them. I would do that for sure before I voted for Trump.

MICHIGAN

Sander Eizen

Age: 21 Location: Ann Arbor, MI Party: Republican Occupation: Senior at the University of Michigan, majoring in political science; minoring in computer science Jewish denomination: Modern Orthodox Current 2020 choice: Andrew Yang 2016 choice: Wrote in Marco Rubio News sources: National Review, Twitter, Bipartisan Policy Center, Students for Carbon Dividends Family: Single. Father is a retired firefighter and mother is director of training for a geriatric consulting firm

Eizen grew up in a Modern Orthodox household in Oak Park, Michigan. He attended Jewish day school starting in nursery school and went to an Orthodox Zionist sleepaway camp. At the University of Michigan, he attends events at Hillel and the Jewish Resource Center, and lives in a house with eight students who come from Modern Orthodox or “Conservadox” backgrounds. extended family are all Democrats. When they visited recently, my 11-year-old cousin started going off on how he loves Bernie Sanders. I’m just like, yo, we’re going to have a conversation about economics today. I’m sure my aunt loved that. But we’re very civil about it. We agree on so much more than we disagree on. It’s just a matter of how we want to get to a better place for everybody. What issues do you care about most? Probably Israel, climate change and the rule of law.

Did growing up in a religious Zionist environment affect your political views? I think it profoundly forced me to think more historically about Israeli politics and shaped my centrist/center-right views on Israel. But I don’t think religion has a big influence on my political views overall. I like making arguments from a nonreligious standpoint, because if you’re talking to somebody who isn’t religious, and you start using religion as your reasoning for your stance, then you’ve already lost them. Is there political conflict in your family? Not really. More than ever I agree with my dad politically. He’s kind of transformed from a union Democrat to an “everybody sucks” libertarian. But the rest of my

in a candidate? Honesty and integrity. If you don't have core values and beliefs, or you flip-flop on those things, then I don’t know why you’re running for president. Well, I do know—it’s for your ego. But if you’re the leader of the free world, you should have some moral grounding. I don’t like Trump because he doesn’t check off any of those boxes. Do you support impeachment? Not at the moment. Impeachment is both the apex of our democracy and a dangerous path to go down and should be saved for the gravest of circumstances. It remains to be seen if this is one of those moments.

Are any policy positions make-or-break for you? I want a climate policy that Michigan puts a price on carbon emisTotal Jewish population sions in the way that can116,200 didates like Pete Buttigieg, Percent of total population Andrew Yang and John 1.2% Delaney are talking about. Jewish voter party Instead of using that tax revidentification enue to fund government Democrat: 47% Republican: 17.1% programs, the money would Independent: 32.9% be rebated to the American Other: 3% people in quarterly dividend 2016 presidential results checks. It puts clean energy Clinton: 47% on the same playing field Trump: 48% as dirty energy. Positions 2018 midterm results like free college for all and Governor Medicare for all don’t make Democrat: 53% sense to me. Free college for Republican: 44% all devalues college educaSenate tion and isn’t fair to people Incumbent Democrat: 52% who have already paid off Republican: 46% their debt. House What kind of personal traits matter most to you

Democrat: 7, Republican: 7, Independent: 1

Would you vote for any of the Democratic candidates? I would 100 percent vote for Andrew Yang. He actively seeks conversations with people who disagree with him, and I think that’s a very compelling way to lead—by unification versus division. Pete Buttigieg is interesting to me. Not necessarily because I agree with him, but because I think he’s absolutely brilliant. I would vote for Amy Klobuchar because she’s very moderate and is one of the most bipartisan senators right now. Do you anticipate any surprises? Andrew Yang is very popular among young people, and young people drive debates in a strong way. You’ll definitely be seeing more of him.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

NORTH CAROLINA

Kathy Manning

Age: 62 Location: Greensboro, NC Party: Democrat Occupation: Attorney Jewish denomination: Conservative Current 2020 choice: Joe Biden 2016 choice: Hillary Clinton News sources: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Politico, CNN, MSNBC, three or four podcasts, candidate websites Family: Married with three children

Manning, an immigration lawyer, was the first woman to chair the Jewish Federations of North America. She led a local campaign for Operation Exodus, the national effort to raise money to resettle Soviet Jews after the Soviet Union changed its immigration policy and allowed Jews to leave. In 2018, she ran for Congress, losing to the Republican incumbent, Ted Budd, with 45.5 percent of the vote. separation of powers and is accountable to the American people. After that, health care is a huge issue for me. The system is overly complicated and costly, and probably less effective than in many other Western countries. Next, I would say gun safety and women’s health. Climate change is obviously critically important—and even more so because we have an administration that’s rolling back protections and causing even more damage.

How does Judaism affect your political views? All my political views are affected by my values, and my values come from my religion. Many of the things that have me so upset about what’s going on in our country right now are things that are contrary to my values. Separating children from their parents when they’re trying to immigrate to this country and putting children in cages goes completely against who we are as Jews. We have been refugees; we have been exiles. And we are taught to welcome the stranger. What issue do you care about most? The priority is getting a president in office who is willing to abide by the law, respects the 46

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to have a positive impact on the country and the American people. And I’m looking for somebody who can win.

Who do you think most aligns with those traits? Right now, I’m leaning toward Joe Biden. He’s moderate and practical, and I think he can win in a general election. I also have great respect and admiration for him, for his many years of service and the personal tragedies that he’s overcome that make him the Is Israel an important compassionate person he is. issue for you? Yes, it’s critThe recent revelations involvical that Jews are not only ing Ukraine demonstrate able to live peacefully in that Trump is doing his best their ancestral homeland, to eliminate Biden, who he but that there is one counclearly considers his toughest North Carolina try in the world that is willopponent. I just watched Biden Total Jewish population ing to stand up for Jews and on a CNN town hall, and he 112,500 accept them when they’re seemed to be focused, relaxed Percent of total population in trouble. This is parand in control despite all that 1.1% ticularly important duris going on around him. So I Jewish voter party ing this period of rising wouldn’t count Biden out yet. identification anti-Semitism. What traits matter to you most in a candidate? I’m looking for somebody who is aspirational but who also has a practical bent, because I want somebody who can lead in a way that allows us to get things done. I want somebody who has relevant experience, somebody who is running for the right reason: that they really want

Democrat: 45.4% Republican: 20.4% Independent: 32.2% Other: 2%

2016 presidential results Clinton: 47% Trump: 51% 2018 midterm results Governor n/a Senate n/a House Democrat: 3, Republican: 10

Who else do you like among the Democrats? I am absolutely not a Bernie Sanders supporter. I like Elizabeth Warren; I think she’s incredibly smart, energetic, thoughtful. I think she’s a great communicator. And I think she’s doing it for all the right reasons. My concern is that her position on the corruption in our government may be a bit extreme and will scare off people who are in the middle.

FLORIDA

Lynne Toporov

Age: 76 Location: Sarasota, FL Party: Republican Occupation: Retired, former assistant to the news director at KYW Radio in Philadelphia Jewish denomination: Unaffiliated Current 2020 choice: Donald Trump 2016 choice: Donald Trump News sources: Fox News, conservative radio station AM 930 WLSS Family: Married with three children, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren

Toporov grew up in an agnostic Philadelphia family surrounded by Democrats. Her grandfather was a Communist. She was confirmed but does not consider herself religious and does not currently belong to a synagogue. She always voted for Democrats, including President Barack Obama, until about four years ago when she started listening to conservative talk radio and found she connected to what she heard. What issues do you care about most? feel Trump did anything wrong speakImmigration: I care about the borders and ing to that president of Ukraine. I mean, that all these people have been coming, he’s allowed to speak to anybody, and why hundreds of thousands of people coming in they’re coming down on him the way they like crazy. And nothing is being done except have for speaking to him, this doesn't make now the president is starting to get a han- any sense to me. I am appalled by what Joe dle on things by putting up the wall. Guns: Biden did and his son with all that money. I wish no one had guns. I really mean that. I just don’t understand how he could have I can understand back in the day, when this done something like this. That’s how I feel. country started, that you needed weapons Biden has really made me upset. to defend yourself. But this is a Are there disagreewhole different time now. ments among your Are there any make-or-break f a m i ly a n d f r i e n d s issues for you? I’m fearful the about politics? I used Democrats have gone so far to to look forward to getthe left that they’re definitely ting together with our becoming socialist. That’s a bigfamily on Sundays and Florida gie for me. I would never ever we’d talk about differTotal Jewish population vote for anybody who has gone 736,300 ent things and politics socialistic. Percent of total population would come up. Some What personal traits matter to you most when picking a candidate? I value honesty and integrity and cannot stand what’s going on in this country right now. It just makes me ill the way President Trump is picked on. I’ve never heard of any president being treated with such disrespect in my entire life, and I’m 76 years old. I can’t stand to watch shows like Jimmy Kimmel or any of those other shows because all they do is put our government down. I just turn them off. What do you think about House Democrats investigating President Trump? I don’t

3.5% Jewish voter party identification Democrat: 48.1% Republican: 20% Independent: 29.2% Other: 2.7% 2016 presidential results Clinton: 48% Trump: 49% 2018 midterm results Governor Incumbent Democrat: 49% Republican: 50% Senate Democrat: 49.9% Republican: 50.1% House Democrat: 13, Republican: 14

were Republicans, some were Democrats, but you would have a nice conversation about all kinds of subjects. You can’t do that today. I have tried. I have also tried to talk to my friends about political issues. I can’t. They have come down on me like you wouldn’t believe. I can’t even go to some of their houses now because of it. I am just appalled by what’s happened.

Do you plan to vote for Trump in 2020? Yes,

I feel he’s accomplished a hell of a lot in the short time he’s been in office compared to some other presidents. I voted for Obama twice, believe it or not. Compared to Trump, I don’t think Obama did one heck of a thing. Is there anything you’d like to see Trump do differently if he’s re-elected? I don't like that he constantly talks about how wonderful he is. That rubs me the wrong way. I’d like him to be a bit more presidential. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

OHIO

Nina Stanley

Age: 68 Location: Cincinnati, OH Party: Democrat Occupation: Retired nurse Jewish denomination: Unaffiliated Current 2020 choice: Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg 2016 choice: Hillary Clinton News sources: CNN, MSNBC, internet, “reads everything” Family: Divorced with one daughter, one grandson

Nina Stanley’s “very liberal” leanings haven’t budged since May 4, 1970, when bullets fired by the Ohio National Guard struck down four fellow students at Kent State University during the Vietnam War protest. “I was shot at. A friend pushed me down. I had never heard gunfire in my life and had no idea they were using live ammunition. When I got up, I said something like, ‘I didn’t know blanks could do that to you.’” Which two or three issues do you care about most? All issues pale in comparison to getting Trump out of office. But I believe dealing with climate change is the most important, followed by reproductive rights and health care.

Which other candidates do you like? I will vote for any Democrat. I don’t care for Bernie, but I would vote for him. I could vote for Elizabeth Warren. I think she’s smart, even though I don’t agree with her about everything. I’m a lifelong Democrat but I would gladly have Republicans such as John Kasich or Mitt Romney in the White House rather than this guy. When Kasich was governor of Ohio, I didn’t agree with his policies, but he’s a normal person.

Do your feelings about Israel affect your political views? Israel isn’t among my top five issues. I’m very against the Netanyahu government. He’s ruining the country. My brother lives in Israel, and he’s religiously conservative, very concerned about safety. I’ve been to Israel many times. But I can’t support a country where they love Trump like that. Ohio

Total Jewish population

What traits matter most to you in a candidate? The number one thing is whoever I support has to be honest. I don’t think the country can survive a second term of Trump. A lot of the time I say, I’m glad I’m old! The country as we know it will not survive. My daughter is friends with a Jewish man from Mexico and his Israeli wife. They have two children who are dark, and kids taunt them in school. Things are happening. 48

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Why is Biden one of your 161,400 top choices? Right now, Percent of total population Mayor Pete is my top choice, 1.4% but I also support Biden. Jewish voter party Trump and the Republicans identification have been muddying Biden Democrat: 48.1% up like crazy, but I think he’s Republican: 18.4% an honest, good person. He Independent: 30.7% Other: 2.8% may not be the most liberal or progressive, but he can 2016 presidential results Clinton: 44% win. You can put Biden in Trump: 52% Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, 2018 midterm results and he can relate to those Governor people. I talk to a lot of Democrat: 47% Jewish ladies who are not Republican: 50% as liberal as me. They didn’t Senate vote for Trump, but they say Incumbent Democrat: 53% they would vote for Biden. I Republican: 47% know their husbands voted House for Trump, but they won’t Democrat: 4, Republican: 12 admit to it.

Are there conflicts in your family about politics? My brother and I have disagreements, but we don’t talk about that. We speak often, and I love him; he’s my brother. If he wasn’t living in Israel, he would vote for Trump. He was a liberal Columbia University grad. The change in him is unbelievable. Do you support impeaching Trump? I’m okay with the impeachment inquiry. Whatever they want to do. That phone call was illegal; he is guilty, and they should file charges on that one phone call. Do you anticipate any surprises in the campaign? If things go the way it looks, maybe the Republicans will have a different candidate for president. But who knows?

VIRGINIA

Alan Zimmerman

Age: 61 Location: Charlottesville, VA Party: Democrat Occupation: Financial journalist Jewish denomination: Conservative Current 2020 choices: Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar 2016 choice: Hillary Clinton News sources: The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, CNN, MSNBC, occasionally Fox News, Talking Points Memo, the blog Blue Virginia, the conservative website Bearing Drift Family: Married with three children in their 20s

Zimmerman was president of Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville during the Unite the Right march in August 2017. Zimmerman remembers standing on the steps, watching armed neo-Nazis shouting “Heil Hitler.” He was “not surprised that there is anti-Semitism in America—I’m not naïve—but that it could be displayed so brazenly and even proudly in the streets of an American city was frankly shocking.” How would you describe your politics? For most of my life, I considered myself a Democrat. But in the last two years I’ve felt that the party system isn’t working for me. I decided I will now vote based on positions and values, not party. But I suspect, given our current political climate, that 98 percent of the time I’ll vote for Democrats.

on an anti-Israel platform and be a viable candidate. But I also think we should recognize that its approach to a lot of Palestinian issues is wrong. I don’t think it’s anti-Israel to be critical of Israel. Is politics a source of tension among friends and family? At some point in the last two or three years, I completely lost interest in engaging in political discussions with people who don’t agree with me. The conversations lead nowhere and left me thinking less of the person. My way of dealing with it is to avoid those subjects altogether.

Does religion affect your political views? Absolutely. I think certain core Jewish values are indisputable, like welcoming the stranger. To me, that means we should be opening our arms to refugees. The question shouldn’t be how do we keep refugees out, but how do we accommodate them? Virginia What issue is most important to you? My top issue by far is health care because it’s personal to me. My youngest son is a type 1 diabetic and on the autism spectrum. The main reason I’m still working is for the health insurance. Our main concern is our son finding reasonable health care after his 26th birthday. Because of the autism, it’s unlikely he’ll find a job that offers insurance. And since he is diabetic, if protections for pre-existing conditions go away, he’ll have some real problems. How do you feel about Israel? Israel is very important to me. I don’t think anyone could run

Total Jewish population 166,200 Percent of total population 1.9% Jewish voter party identification Democrat: 48.6% Republican: 17.7% Independent: 31.1% Other: 2.6% 2016 presidential results Clinton: 50% Trump: 45% 2018 midterm results Governor n/a Senate Incumbent Democrat: 57% Republican: 41% House Democrat: 7, Republican: 4

What do you think about the Democratic field? I think it’s good overall, but I don’t like Bernie Sanders. As for Joe Biden, I think his time has passed. It’s not about his chronological age; he’s just from another era. I think as a nation and as a progressive movement, we need to be looking ahead. That said, if he is the nominee, I will enthusiastically support him. Elizabeth Warren appeals to me most, followed by Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. How do you feel about Donald Trump’s presidency? I’m very concerned about white supremacy and anti-Semitism. The Unite

the Right rally marched past our synagogue in 2017. I think Trump has given a license to elements in society that are anti-Semitic and racist, and we need to find a way to address it. The president needs to provide some moral leadership, especially in difficult times. Do you support impeachment? There is little doubt in my mind that he deserves it, not just for this Ukrainian stuff, but also for what came out in the Mueller report. So in that sense, I support it. I’m undecided about whether it is a good political strategy; time will tell, though I tend to think it will be a net negative for Trump and the Republicans. Sometimes, though, you just have to do what’s right and let the chips fall where they may. The Jewish Political Voices Project welcomes you to share your opinions by respectfully commenting at momentmag.com/jpvp NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

By EeTta Prince-Gibson

Thenew MECHITZA S

NOAH PHILLIPS

ince the founding of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University in 1955, all kinds of students—male and female, Orthodox and secular, Israeli and Palestinian— have studied side by side. Today, however, the publicly funded research university, the country’s second largest, has reserved a set of buildings on the edge of campus for gender-segregated classes. There, ultraOrthodox men—most dressed in white shirts and black pants with tzitzit hanging over their belts and their heads covered by fedora-like black hats or large kippot—sit in classrooms, paying careful attention to the lecturer, who is always a man. But what may look like an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva is in fact a class leading to an undergraduate degree in a subject such as management or economics. In Hebrew slang, these classes are called sterili (“sterile”)—without women as either classmates or teachers—and are considered “safe” for ultra-Orthodox men whose rabbis forbid them from studying with or learning from women. As a result, ultra-Orthodox women study separately—for degrees in education or a similar field—in another building. Unlike their male counterparts, they can be taught by both females and males. Bar-Ilan, located outside of Tel Aviv in Ramat Gan, is one of approximately a dozen publicly funded colleges and universities that have over the past few years introduced gender-segregated classes

Gender Segregation Comes to Israel’s Publicly Funded Universities

in an effort to draw the ultra-Orthodox into higher education. These programs, once found only at private religious institutions of higher learning, are now encouraged and funded by Israel’s Ministry of Education. In 2011, before these programs started, 6,000 ultra-Orthodox students were enrolled in degree programs, according to the Ministry. By the 2017–2018 academic year, that number had risen to more than 13,000, and Israel hopes to increase that number to 19,000 by 2021–2022. While some schools, such as Bar-Ilan, have sectioned off parts of their campuses and created genderspecific courses of study, others such as the Jerusalem College of Technology, Achva College and Ruppin College have instituted separate days for study, exams and library use. A divider called a mechitza, traditionally used to separate men from women during worship, can now be found in some classrooms. Indeed, last year, at the Jerusalem campus of the Kiryat Ono Academic College (a private institution that receives supplemental public funding), former President of Israel’s Supreme Court Aharon Barak, considered by many to be Israel’s foremost defender of civil rights, addressed a packed audience in which men and women were separated by a mechitza. Barak spoke

from the men’s side, out of sight of most of the female students. Moishe, 32, a student at Kiryat Ono’s Jerusalem campus, says, “I attended an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva, and I have never been in a large room where men and women sit together. The rabbis would never allow me to study with women. It would be too much for me. I might think thoughts that I, as an ultra-Orthodox man, should not think.” Moishe is thankful that the school’s segregated program is making it possible for him to become a lawyer so he can earn a good living, but he’s afraid to give his full name. “Even this program isn’t accepted by all of the rabbis in our community, so I must be discreet,” he says. The Ministry of Education heralds these programs as a way to integrate the ultra-Orthodox, also known as Haredim, into higher education. “In order to bring the ultra-Orthodox into academia, we must make adaptations to their religious beliefs and cultural mores,” says Yaffa Zilbershats, head of the Ministry’s Council for Higher Education’s Plan ning and Budgeting Committee. “Truly liberal and democratic societies must find a balance between competing values for the public good, such as multicultural adaptations and equality for all...even if there is some damage to principles of equality towards women.” The programs, unsurprisingly, have raised serious concerns in a country where, despite legislation mandating equality between the sexes, academia has not yet proved to be a reliable path to career success for women. “Gender segregation is an assault on the deepest tenets of academia and a democratic society,” says Yofi Tirosh—head of the law school at Sapir College in Sderot and a faculty member at Tel Aviv University—who has been a leading voice in arguing against it. She believes that the state has no business funding gender segregation anywhere and certainly not in academia. “A university must be based on liberty and equality. How can we teach professions such as law, education and social work when 52

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the teaching institution is violating the most basic humanistic values?” Strict ultra-Orthodox rabbis enforce gender segregation based on the belief that undue interaction with women, even wives, distracts men from Torah study. Both laws and customs forbid physical contact and even conversation for pleasure between people of the opposite sex who are not married or closely related. Men are also prohibited from staring at women’s bodies or clothes. “According to the ultra-Orthodox, being a woman is an essential quality—that is, a woman is first and foremost, and at all times, thought of as a woman, whether or not this is relevant to the issue at hand,” says Tirosh. “This essentialism can never be considered neutral, because it keeps women in their place. And it can be used to justify other differences—in salary, in position or advancement, for example.” That women cannot teach men but men can teach women has serious ramifications for women in the job market. “When hiring new faculty, the primary consideration should be academic excellence, along with a commitment to diversity and equality and to hiring women,” says a male BarIlan professor (who did not want his name used), adding that gender segregation has put him in an “untenable” position. “We know that women are at a disadvantage in academia. Fewer women are hired, fewer women are given tenure and fewer women advance to senior positions.” The new programs, he says, put women at even more of a disadvantage. Gender segregation at universities also contributes to its normalization throughout Israeli society, says Tirosh. “The creation of women-free spaces has a dangerous potential for being legitimized and spreading, especially in a country that is currently struggling with ultra-Orthodox demands for the exclusion of women in public halls, at municipal events, in public spaces like libraries, medical clinics and cemeteries, on streets and buses, and even at formal government events.” These kinds of demands in settings other than universities have become more frequent since Israel’s ultra-Orthodox became

power brokers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s successive governing coalitions. In May, a municipal official in Ramat Gan refused to allow a 17-year-old girl to sing at an Independence Day event after religious men in the audience objected. Despite state laws against it, some bus companies continue to run “strictly kosher” lines—buses on which women are expected to sit at the back. There has also been a growing number of incidents in which women and teenage girls have been prevented from boarding buses because they were wearing shorts. And the use of the mechitza has increased: In mid-July, Rafi Peretz, the interim minister of education, addressed a professional conference on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in teenagers that was open to the general public in which men and women sat separately during plenary sessions, divided by a mechitza, while other sessions were designated male or female only. In August, Israel’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit issued an opinion that stated that even though gender discrimination is formally illegal in Israel, publicly funded gender-segregated events are acceptable “in certain circumstances.” The list of those special circumstances is long and broad, including if the separation is “desired by the target audience” and if “conditions for men and women are equal.” This, many feminists warn, could pave the way for more gender segregation in public spaces.

he story of how David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, agreed to exempt religious men from army service and work so they could devote themselves to full-time Torah study is widely known. Concern that a large number of religious Jews had been killed in the Holocaust and most centers of Jewish learning destroyed, combined with his need for their political support, led Ben-Gurion to provide religious Jews with government stipends and welfare benefits. At the time, the ultra-Orthodox population was tiny; today it is 12 percent of Israel’s population. And given their high birthrate, the number of ultra-Orthodox is expected to rise to 16 percent by 2030,

according to the “Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel.” The economic consequences of this demographic change are staggering. Since only half of Israeli ultra-Orthodox men participate in the workforce, close to half of ultra-Orthodox families live below the poverty line, according to a 2016 report from Israel’s National Insurance Institute. By 2030, the annual cost to the Israeli economy to maintain this status quo will be approximately $11.25 billion, not including loss of tax revenue. Politicians and social scientists have been warning about an impending social and economic crisis, and state and civil society institutions have begun to search for ways to integrate the Haredim into the workforce. It’s not an easy task. The Haredi educational system, carefully guarded by rabbis and leaders against state intervention, does not provide its students with the skills needed for more lucrative occupations or for admission to college or universities. As a result, most Haredim are relegated to poorly paying jobs in gender-segregated workplaces. Women, who are considered exempt from Torah study, are often the only employed adults in the family, working as teachers in ultra-Orthodox schools, at call centers and in low-wage coding jobs. Some organizations have established vocational programs for the ultraOrthodox, especially in the fields of mechanics and tech support, but the charge to bring the ultra-Orthodox into academia has been led by the Ministry of Education’s Council for Higher Education, which is responsible for the accreditation and regulation of all of Israel’s institutions of higher learning, including its 12 private colleges. More importantly, it funds and oversees the budgets of 9 universities, 29 colleges, and 21 teachers’ colleges. Zilbershats, head of the Council for Higher Education’s Planning and Budgeting Committee, oversees the approximately $3.4 billion yearly budget provided by the Ministry of Finance. The first woman in the history of the State of Israel to serve in this position,

“ In order to bring the ultraOrthodox into academia, we must make adaptations to their religious beliefs and cultural mores.” she was appointed in 2015 by theneducation minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the right-wing religious Jewish Home Party, and has turned out to be a champion of gender segregation. Under Zilbershats, the Council has offered generous funding to universities and colleges that would take up the challenge of bringing ultra-Orthodox into academia. At first, the programs were to be limited in scope—offered only at the bachelor’s level to graduates of Haredi schools, which do not prepare their students for matriculation exams—and held in close proximity to the main campuses so that both male and female religious students could use university facilities such as libraries, labs and cafeterias. Two of the country’s most prestigious universities met the guidelines while offering only minimal adaptations. Hebrew University started a one-year gendersegregated preparatory program, for both men and women, to teach the basic math, English and study skills needed for undergraduate classes. After that, students are fully integrated into regular programs. So far, several hundred ultra-Orthodox students have participated in the program, and most have made the transition, says Orna Kupferman, a professor who was vice-rector of the school when the program was established. Like Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University provides a program for ultra-Orthodox students, which includes additional support in basic academic skills. According to the university, approximately 100 ultra-Orthodox

students currently participate while also attending mixed-gender classes. Other schools, however, have expanded gender segregation beyond transitional programs, establishing separate areas, separate days of study, separate days for exams and separate facilities. Some, such as the Hadassah College in Jerusalem, have instituted “modesty regulations” for women’s dress and behavior in the ultra-Orthodox programs. Rochele, an ultra-Orthodox graduate student in education at Hadassah, who asked not to be identified by her full name, says all female students were required to sign a document promising to dress modestly, cover their heads completely if they marry, and behave appropriately and modestly at all times. If she violates these terms, she says, she could be expelled. “The Council cannot enforce the limitations that it set up,” says Kupferman. The deeper problem, she adds, is that there is no such thing as “moderate” gender segregation. “Gender segregation is a monster that will never be satiated, and will always demand more.” In fact, the Council has announced that it is expanding the program. In the fall semester, graduates of accredited ultra-Orthodox schools were permitted to attend gendersegregated classes (previously, only those who attended unaccredited programs were eligible). In addition, universities are now allowed to offer segregated master’s programs as well as undergraduate ones. Given the challenges of forming a new governing coalition in the wake of September’s elections, there is no NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

“ Gender segregation is an assault on the deepest tenets of academia and a democratic society. A University must be based on equality.” sign that these policies or the political atmosphere that shaped them will change. Education Minister Peretz has been outspoken about his preference for gender segregation. Opponents to the policy hope they will have more luck in the courts. Tirosh is spearheading the group of academics that has petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to put an end to the gender-segregated programs. The court has heard arguments several times over the years, but the case is still pending.

nother argument against the new gender-segregated programs is that they don’t achieve their intended goal of an educated Haredi workforce. In May, a stinging report from Israel’s state comptroller revealed that nearly half of ultra-Orthodox men and one-third of women who are enrolled in the gender-segregated courses drop out before completing their bachelor’s degrees. And the dropout rate, nearly twice the rate of non-Haredi students, is not the only concern. Netta Barak-Corren, a law professor at Hebrew University, disputes the underlying assumption that gender segregation can solve the problem of ultra-Orthodox integration. In an independent survey, she found that only 44 percent of the ultra-Orthodox interested in higher education regarded gender segregation in the classroom as a major consideration; gender segregation in campus facilities is important to only 23 percent, and only 16 percent said that the gender of the lecturer matters to them at all. 54

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Journalist Tali Farkash, an ultraOrthodox feminist, agrees. “Most of the ultra-Orthodox students are already defying their rabbis and their communities,” she says. “Gender segregation isn’t going to bring more of them in.” In fact, she says, many ultra-Orthodox would prefer to study in the regular, mixed-gender programs, which are on a generally higher level. While they could ostensibly choose to enroll in such programs, the very existence of gender-segregated programs makes studying in a mixed program seem less religious. “Reality creates perception,” says Farkash, “especially in this atmosphere of increasing extremism within the ultra-Orthodox community.” The real problem, she says, is that leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis want their communities to remain apart from the rest of Israeli society. Some of the strongest advocates, however, are other ultra-Orthodox feminists. One of those is Adina Bar-Shalom, who founded the Haredi College of Jerusalem for ultra-Orthodox men and women, for which she was awarded a 2014 Israel Prize, Israel’s highest civilian honor. (The college closed because of lack of funds and enrollment in 2016.) “Society must be willing to allow the ultra-Orthodox public to study on its own terms,” and not to do so is “intolerant” and “not democratic,” she insists. A Bar-Ilan University student named Zahava, who does not want her full name used since not everyone in her community approves of her studies, agrees. “I am sick and tired of non-ultraOrthodox feminists telling me that they

are going to save me from myself, that I am suffering from some sort of ‘false consciousness’ and that they will give me the opportunity to be a ‘full woman,’” she says. “That is paternalism and arrogance, and secular coercion. If Israel is a multicultural society, why can’t other women accept that my voice is different and that mine is a genuine, feminist voice?” Tova Hartman, dean of humanities at the Kiryat Ono Academic College and a founder of Shira Hadashah, a halachically observant congregation with egalitarian values in Jerusalem, also sees virtues in gender segregation. “Feminism has taught me about invisibility and to be sensitive to those who have not had the same privileges as I have,” she says. Hartman believes that ultra-Orthodox women and their needs have been invisible in Israeli society. “They have not been able to enter the halls of academia on their own terms,” she says. “The separation is what enables them to get a degree and fulfill their intellectual and academic goals. How can anyone view this as a violation of human rights?” The question of gender segregation in publicly funded universities, then, may boil down to competing views of multiculturalism that could lead to drastically different futures for Israel. Hartman insists that Israel’s multiculturalism include the ultra-Orthodox. “Isn’t there a value in providing a higher education to someone who doesn’t look like me and doesn’t think like me?” she asks. “The secularists accuse the ultraOrthodox of living in a shtetl, but if the secular do not meet the ultra-Orthodox, then they, too, are living in a shtetl. We must learn to live together.” But when living together means learning apart, whose rights are paramount? “The challenge of rearticulating the identity of the State of Israel includes the challenge of determining what women’s place will be,” says Tirosh. As she sees it, women are merely pawns in a larger battle. “The ultra-Orthodox establishment knows very well that whoever defines the role of women in Israel will eventually control our political, economic and ideological lives.” M

MOMENT FICTION

1945 HOMECOMING,

moke rises slowly from the locomotive’s chimney, hissing from the valves and swirling in clouds over the face of the train. The locomotive heaves once more, then stops. With a cap pushed high on his head, the scruffy, perspiring conductor hops down from the carriage’s steps into the fresh air, hoping to find relief from the sweltering heat inside the train, but he hardly can tell the difference between inside and out. It’s over ninety degrees, high noon on a muggy July day, seven hours after the slow train left the capital at dawn. Only one figure is waiting on the platform. No one else can be seen, no one is coming, and no one is traveling here these days. He’s only here because of his duty to fulfill a task. He expects clients recommended to him by the village notary. The conductor can almost taste the pint of frothy beer that teases his mind. But according to the bill of transport, the freight

BY GÁBOR T. SZÁNTÓ has to be unloaded, and he’s not free to go until then. The shipper must arrange the unloading. He’s a conductor, not a porter! But he’ll stew for an hour if he doesn’t help, and on top of everything else, the two passengers who shipped the freight will think he has a grudge against them and that’s why he won’t lend a hand. They can think what they want! They’re all the same. Suckers. All the more so, considering what’s happened. But they aren’t budging from inside until someone unrolls the red carpet. Maybe they’re praying in there where it’s one hundred degrees and counting. In black suits and hats. Who on earth understands them? It seems odd that what happened to them doesn’t seem to be quite enough. They’re coming back, back to where it happened. What an undeniably stubborn race, he concludes, and so pigheaded, too. The conductor strolls towards the stationmaster’s office to borrow a handcart, imagining he’ll be free that much faster if he orga-

nizes the unloading in advance and doesn’t let them mess about. How they’d fussed as they loaded in Budapest—as if every last thing they were packing was glass. He’d asked if they were transporting crystal, because fragile goods require special shipping and handling, and an additional fee. “Nothing fragile,” they’d said, “but handle with care.” If they want to scrimp and save, let it be, the conductor thought. If something happens to the cargo, then they’ll be responsible for the damage. That’s how they are, always insisting on saving money. That’s why they play tricks rather than take risks. Ten heavy, nailed boxes, plus a lighter one, had been loaded into the boxcar. They’d refused to have any other goods or packages transported in the same car and they’d paid the full fee. Photographs from 1945, the 2017 film, directed by Ferenc Tȯrök, that was based on this story.

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The conductor had acknowledged their special demands with a shrug. It was none of his business. The transport certificate had been filled out and signed accurately, they’d paid in advance and from that point on they could transport anything they wanted the way they wanted. He’d labored on the railway for more than thirty years, seen everything, and endured plenty of demands and objections from bosses and crazy passengers, but he did have an opinion about these people here. About a year ago, he’d seen how they were herded into each boxcar, eighty or ninety at a time. He’d seen hands thrusting out through the windows’ barbed wire and heard shouts and pleas for water. He’d posted 56

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letters tossed out before the border, for good money, and he had even been compelled to feel sorry for these poor people who, in their despair, were trying to figure out where they were heading. He’d experienced a few sleepless nights after that. But given all that had happened, he now found it repugnant that, according to the newspapers, they were trading with Germans—with Germans of all people. They come and go through half of Europe with boxes sealed by the German Reich, proving once again that they’ll overcome any challenge and have no scruples when it comes to making a profit. He had no doubt that this shipment must promise great rewards, considering all their special precautions.

These folks have learned nothing, he concluded. Although he’d love to depart for the village to drink that cold beer, he pulls the handcart over to the boxcar and then goes back to the stationmaster’s office. A gray-bearded older man appears in the door of the passenger carriage wearing a black hat, a black suit and a white shirt. As he disembarks, a younger man of similar appearance follows. This one doesn’t have a beard, but his face is dashed with thick black whiskers. He’s in mourning; that’s why he doesn’t shave. They both seem run-down and tired. They’re about to summon the conductor, when they register the man on the plat-

form striding toward them. The old peasant is wearing boots, baggy felt trousers, a worn sun-washed shirt, a vest and a hat. “Good afternoon,” he says. “And to you.” “Coming from Pest?” They nod. “I’m your driver.” “Did you manage to prepare everything?” asks the older man. “Just the way you asked in the telegram. The notary appointed me and my brother-in-law.” “What do you mean, he appointed you?” “Well, it’s harvest. Most people are working their land.”

“Everyone has land here?” “Most.” “No one wanted the job?” “No. But we need the cash. So my brother-in-law and I said yes—if that’s okay with you?” “What’s your name?” “Suba, sir.” He tips his hat. “Mihály Suba.” “Hermann Sámuel.” The older man holds out his hand, the younger only nods. “Then let’s get started, Mr. Suba.” The driver calls his brother-in-law from the other side of the stationmaster’s office. He’s waiting in the shade, next to their horse. The conductor reappears from the stationmaster’s office and points toward the end of the ramp. “It’ll be easier with the handcart. You only have to make a little detour, but it’s easier than unloading the boxes by hand. There’s a gate over there.” “Thank you.” They nod. “The documents should be signed that we’re done.” “We’d rather wait until you unload.” The old man squints. “Who cares?” the conductor says, offended. He regrets being helpful, but there’s nothing to be done: the transportation is incomplete until the boxes are unloaded. I’ll wait, he thinks. I’ll wait, if that’s what they want! The driver comes back with his brotherin-law, who tips the brim of his hat, muttering a greeting. The conductor points to the handcart again, as if it wasn’t obvious that it would make the job easier. They go to the boxcar, the conductor breaks the seal, and they pull the door open. The boxes are intact. Mihály Suba climbs into the boxcar, pushes the cargo to the rolling door, jumps down, and, along with his brother-in-law, lifts the boxes one-by-one onto the handcart. One box tips during the rapid unloading. Hermann Sámuel and the younger man react together, their faces alarmed, but Mihály Suba regains his balance and the box falls into place atop the others. “Gently, please!” the old man says. “There’s no need to hurry!” He clings to the younger man’s arm. While they’re unloading, a messenger departs from the stationmaster’s office. He pedals his bicycle along a long row of poplars, silent and still, leading to the top of the village. His assignment is to inform the notary, Ist-

Ten heavy, nailed boxes, plus a lighter one, had been loaded into the boxcar. ván Szentes, that they’ve arrived, together with their cargo, and that all they’ve revealed is that the boxes contain cosmetics. “So they are coming,” the notary says. He sighs and loosens his tie. He steps to the window, opens it as if he were choking, but only the heat rolls into the damp-smelling office. He angrily pushes the window closed. “Go and tell my son to be patient. I’ll look in on him. We’ll wait to see what they’re stirring up. Tell me, is anyone from the village among them?” “No,” the scrawny boy says. “How many are they, anyway?” “Two.” “Only two now, but the rest will come later. What are their names?” “There’s only one name on the transport bill. Hermann Sámuel.” “He’s not even from here. He had nothing to do with…,” he bites off the sentence. He doesn’t understand. Pollák was the pharmacist. Is it possible he’d made a last bequest? Or sold his business well before? He couldn’t have. He’d have had to report it for the notary’s approval and pay the tax. And since there’s no valid contract, there cannot be a new owner. István Szentes thinks about his son Árpád, who was an assistant in the pharmacy a few years ago. Then he was promoted to store manager, and later formally took ownership after Imre Pollák and his family left the village in the summer of 1944—the notary always puts it just so, if asked, but he’s almost never asked. It would have been hard to find arguments against Pollák, who had always been so nice to Árpád. And he had no qualms about the others—none at all. If the others are returning to claim Pollák’s share, it means that Pollák cannot come in person. “Go tell my son to calm down. I need to stay at the office for now. They could be heading here.” The messenger nods, jumps on his bicycle, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

and speeds along the main street to the pharmacy. He jumps off, rattles the door, but it’s locked. He knocks, scratches at the window. No reply. He doesn’t understand. Árpád never closes at noon and never ever takes a lunch break. “Árpád! Árpád Szentes!” No answer. It’s dark inside, but the “closed” sign is absent. He knocks at the window of the house opposite, and asks if they’ve seen the young pharmacist. “He was here in the morning; he opened on time,” an old woman answers. “We haven’t seen him since then.” The boy rides back to the notary’s office with the news. “He’s not there?” “Not a trace, sir.” István Szentes can’t believe it. You can say plenty of bad things about Árpád, but he’s responsible and precise. It’s inconceivable that he’s not there. He knows very well that they’re arriving today. The notary boards his buggy. He likes driving and no one else in the village has a buggy that handles so exceedingly well. It’s nimble, even with a single nag harnessed to it. If he hadn’t hidden the beast when the Russians marched through the village, they surely would have confiscated it, but he’d tucked the horse out of sight. “Go about your business!” he says to the messenger, turning from the courtyard to the main street. István Szentes drives fast, fans the animal with his whip, foaming with rage. Where could Árpád possibly be today, of all days, when he should be standing at his post? What could have happened on this cursed day that led him to simply abandon the shop? István had gone over his duties with him after receiving the letter in which they announced their impending arrival and asked for assistance. He could have refused, saying the notary office isn’t a cargo company, and they would have to arrange the transport alone. Even then the boy seemed scared. He’s a mama’s boy, completely dependent. He doesn’t understand politics, money or horses. And women even less. If this wasn’t disgraceful enough, he was exempted from serving in the army, too. Growing up, books were all that interested him. Novels and poems. He was a bookworm, but he ran the shop fair and square. His heart was in the business, even if his mind wasn’t. Goddamn! He cracks the whip. He’s think58

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ing of that forsaken store as if it was over. But it’s not over and it won’t ever be over. They’re trying in vain, and we’re going to be lucky for once! He jumps from the buggy in front of the pharmacy and knocks. “Are you here, son? Árpád, answer if you’re here!” he says to the glass door, above which hangs the new company sign of his own design. He hears some noise from inside. “Goddamn, son! Open the door now!” István Szentes knows that his son is sitting motionless on the other side. Ridiculous. “Árpád! I swear, son, I’ll break this door down if you don’t open up,” he says. “Árpád! Act like a man. Just this once. Take on what you’ve done!” Árpád Szentes despises his father now. “What you’ve done” rings in his ears for a long time. His father was the one who encouraged him to take on the business, to lend his name to the enterprise, and carry on the business as if it were his own. At the end of the day he did have a paper saying the pharmacy belonged to him. And it’s true, he could manage effectively: he knew his way around the store, it enabled a modest living, and his father stopped pestering him for being a loser. Árpád slowly rotates the key in the lock and, cracking the door open, he stands tall. “You can go, father. I’ll take care of my own things,” Árpád says firmly. If the strangers knocked, he was prepared to grab his linen jacket and straw hat from the coatrack, let them into the shop and say, “Dear Sirs, I’ve saved the pharmacy for you. I did what I promised. And now excuse me!” With that he would doff his hat and bow a little, tilting his head forward and to the side, and then he’d scurry away. His father reads the thoughts lining his face. He jerks the door open and steps into the shop, blocking the exit. Father and son stare at each other fixedly. “You’ll take care of a big fat nothing. You don’t think that we’ll just give up what we’re owed.” “What are we owed, father?” “A contract’s a contract. A paper says the store’s yours, right?” “But what kind of paper was it? Father, you know.” “A paper’s a paper. They can sue us if they’d like.” “I won’t go to court.” “What will you do then?”

“Who cares?” the conductor says, offended. He regrets being helpful, but there’s nothing to be done: the transportation is incomplete until the boxes are unloaded. “I’ll walk out and leave it all behind.” “Goddamn! You’re not leaving anything! Be a man for once in your life!” Both of them suddenly are thinking about a girl from the neighboring village, Eszter Hórusz, whom Árpád courted over a year ago, and whom he still loves, even if she’s engaged to another boy. Árpád keeps sending her letters, and poems, too—this especially annoys his father—but they go unanswered. Since then Árpád hasn’t been his usual self. As long as he works mechanically, he can distract himself, but in the evenings he’s broken and buries himself in books. Father and son glare at each other. The son turns away cautiously and arranges the supplies on the counter, while his father lowers himself into the chair next to the small table where older customers often rest in the pharmacy. They wait together.

he unloading nears its conclusion at the railway station. Only once all 11 boxes are loaded onto the cart is Hermann Sámuel willing to sign the documents, and the conductor can go about his business. He has a good four and a half hours before the train departs again. He’ll go to the pub, he imagines, and meditate over a few beers. He borrows the stationmaster’s bicycle and rides under the fiery sun toward the village. He already can picture the sparkling mug of beer with beads of sweat growing on the glass. As the conductor steps into the dimmed

bar, plops down at the table closest to the damp, cool counter, and lifts a foamy beer to his lips, the driver and his brother-in-law climb on the buggy, after offering places to the two strangers. “It’s at least a half-hour walk from here to your village,” they say, but the gray-bearded old man just shoos them away. “There’s room next to the boxes. Try sitting there,” they say. They urge the men, but there’s no reply, just a pressing wave indicating they should leave. The sun shines at its zenith when Mihály Suba clucks his tongue and flicks his whip. You can say a lot of bad things about them, thinks Suba, but you can’t say they don’t respect their dead. After being away for more than a year, their first order of business was the cemetery—and this gesture of respect means a lot to Suba. But the dead are dead, he thinks, and nobody helps the living with their challenges. The cart moves slowly and they stride behind it, next to one another in their hats and black suits, unruffled by 100 degrees of July heat. At the end of the poplar row they turn for the village road, which merges into its main street, just as the conductor finishes his first pint. “They brought eleven,” he says in a moderate voice. “Eleven?” the bartender asks. “Not much for goods, a lot for luggage.” “Well, that’s how many they have. They had to be handled gently, like crystal.” Seven other villagers occupy the pub, five of them feeling the pits of their stomachs sinking. They’ve an urge to dash home and warn their families about the trouble. Because if they’ve come back, then more might be coming. If the others are coming, there’ll be even more, and sooner or later they’ll reclaim what they know or suspect is with someone else—whatever was handed over for safekeeping, whatever disappeared. But only one of them stands up: a farmer, now a disabled pensioner, whose right hand was removed by a faulty machine in the summer of 1943. He didn’t take anything from the homes abandoned last year, but like other people with big families, he requested a

house. Considering his health, the state of his own crumbling home, five children, and a son who died a hero on the Eastern front, he was granted a house and moved in. The farmer pays wordlessly, his face tense, and departs for home. There’s no justice on earth, he thinks, ashamed he’ll have to move away if the original owner returns. He has no issue with them, except the envy he always felt because of their prosperity, their easy lot, and the future they secured for their children. He never did anything to claim their possessions, but since fate willed that their houses remained empty, he felt little remorse for moving into a house with clean, whitewashed walls. The villagers who remain in the pub know why he chooses to leave, and they’re also startled by a vague fear. It’d be good to know who has come and who else might join—purely from a practical standpoint. “The older man’s called Hermann Sámuel, but there’s also a younger man with him,” says the conductor. What a relief. The name’s unfamiliar. At a loss, they stare at one another.

“Only two of them?” the bartender asks. “Only two.” The conductor wipes the foam from his mustache. “Maybe they’re from a neighboring village. But what are they up to here?” someone wonders aloud. “Did they say anything? Why they came?” “Yes, did they tell you anything?” “They don’t say a thing, those people.” The conductor gives them a significant look, aware that he has become a central figure. “Unless the cargo’s a clue.” He daubs the sweat along his forehead. “Well, what’re they transporting?” “Perfumery goods—in gross.” “Perfumery goods?” “In gross?” “Yep, perfumery goods. You know what I mean: powder, cologne, hand cream, and the like. Whatnot for ladies.” “Then the notary and his family can expect a very hot day.” The bartender cleans off the counter, smiling with malice and not a flicker of sympathy on his face. No one replies. They’re all small fry here, apart from the bartender; more disabled veterans are among them, besides the one-armed thresher who went home. If they have opinions, they keep them to themselves. These are difficult things. Maybe it’s better not to speak about them. One thing they do sense: they won’t get into any serious trouble for some personal bits and bobs—so long as Árpád Szentes owns the pharmacy that once belonged to Pollák. While they weigh the possibilities, the strange procession inexorably approaches. The driver and his assistant sit on the cart’s bench, with the cargo in back. The two male escorts follow the cart on foot, appearing like two ghosts in the eyes of the frightened women observing from the windows of the houses lining the street. If you could somehow pan through the village now, all you’d hear would be stillness, perfect silence. No one is working in the fields in the interval after lunch. The farmers rest quietly in the shade of the oaks beside the plots of wheat, as if even speech was exhausting work in the oppressive heat. The procession slowly approaches the pub. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

Those inside swarm to the window and door to follow the spectacle. “Like birds of death,” whispers one of the guests, gulping and repeatedly licking his chapped lips. “These ones just can’t stay out of trouble,” the conductor says, trying to satisfy the attention directed toward him—as if, by simply having traveled on the same train as the newcomers, he would know more about their journey here, and hence could predict the events to come. Understandably, he wants to satisfy their expectations, but as soon as he utters what he thinks, he furtively looks around to see whether he has stirred any disagreement. “They came back. So what? They came back.” The barkeep shrugs. He has nothing to be afraid of. He didn’t take anything from them. In fact, he bought his license and his business place for good money from one of them whose great-grandfather received his pub license in the middle of the last century. The majority of those present keep silent. This isn’t so simple, they think with a tint of uncomfortable embarrassment, considering the furniture, carpets, linen and clothes that they bought at rock-bottom prices at the auction in the market square last summer. It dawns on them how it might feel if the previous owners, returning to the village, were to meet their possessions face-to-face. They’re ashamed, and this feeling angers them even as they proclaim their innocence. The cart’s closer now. The horse’s shoes flatly and monotonously clop and stir dust along the road. The driver and his brotherin-law would prefer to vanish from the cart. They feel the eyes—how could they not— the searing gaze from the pub’s door; after all, they’d be watching the same way themselves, were they not sitting on the cart. Mihály Suba drives his horse, his head lowered, looking neither right nor left. Those in the door of the pub watch mutely, petrified like statues. Only when the cart reaches the next corner do they start to stir. They step forward curiously to see what’s going on at the pharmacy nearby. They all feel that this will determine the events to come, the things to be done.

nside the pharmacy, behind the closed shutters, the notary and his son avoid each other’s eyes, stealing only furtive glances. It seems that these few minutes, with only the two of them in the darkened shop, 60

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have seen a change in their relationship. Even if he did open the shop, Árpád Szentes knows that, although his father is a powerful man, he’s not infallible and has his own doubts. The son already knows that if he wants to grow up then he has to leave the village and leave behind everything he was given readymade, to free himself from everything that now suffocates him. First, he has to go to the next village, knock at the Hórusz house and tell Eszter: “Here I am. I cannot do otherwise. Will you come with me?” And at this point it’s all the same what she replies, because by simply being able to do what he planned, what he dreamt, and then act out the role in reality projected from the film in his imagination, he has achieved what one must and can achieve in life. Because if he can meet Eszter, he’d at once be capable of meeting anyone else, even if Eszter should say no. Árpád Szentes starts to laugh at this string of thoughts. He feels a relief he has never before experienced. The relief of one who has just wriggled out of a labyrinth he never realized he was in. He now knows that everything is possible on earth. What he tells his father next, when he gestures to the goods set out for the shop’s opening, is possible, too: “Do what you want, Father. I’m leaving. I love and respect the two of you, but I have to live my own life. About the shop: the books are in the cabinet, the whole accounting. All I withdrew was my salary. The money’s marked in the account.” He lifts his linen jacket and straw hat from the peg and steps into the bright midday sun. The trembling heat has settled heavily and thickly over the village, and yet he walks confidently, stepping lightly as if free from an enormous burden. István Szentes is taken aback. He’d like to call to his son, and at the same time he wouldn’t. He stands in the doorway not quite knowing what to do. Besides his anger and incomprehension, he’s oddly proud of his son, who behaved like a man for the first time in his life. He does suspect that feelings towards Eszter Hórusz are behind it all, just as he suspects that his son will fail and come back sooner or later, but he, too, left everything behind for a girl and slammed his parents’ door. But whether it’s fatherly worry emanating from his own painful experience or his disappointment with his own fiasco, or the hidden, unmentioned, jealous envy of the possibility that his son might succeed where he himself failed,

all of this is so completely entangled within his soul that it’s impossible to make sense of it and realize the depths of his own feelings. He closes the door, confused. His son’s right: he has to stay here. He must. He was the one who wanted it this way, and be it as it may, he has to take responsibility. Árpád Szentes sets out for the train station and soon encounters the cart. He greets those in the driving seat and tips his hat at the two strangers. They nod back, and that’s enough for him. He wanted to meet them and greet them as if he were repaying a debt. He’d imagined this for a while inside, behind the counter. Árpád Szentes feels happy for a moment. What could be bigger than imagining, dreaming, and doing by our own free will something we planned in our own minds?

he people grouped in front of the pub don’t know what to make of the strange behavior and departure of the Szentes boy, and they’re confused by the appearance of the father. They just stare, watching events unfold. Meanwhile, the cart reaches the pharmacy. Mihály Suba pulls on the reins; the horse stops. The shop’s about seventy meters from the pub; every important gesture will be visible, and if any loud words are exchanged, they’ll be overheard. They’re all tense, attentive, waiting silently and breathlessly for the moment when the newcomers step into the shop. But the cart hardly stops. It just lumbers on. The people standing in front of the pub are utterly bewildered, but so is Mihály Suba. He nearly bursts from the tension. He doesn’t understand what’s going on and he’s afraid. He’s afraid of the notary, afraid of the villagers seventy meters away, and even more afraid of those two right behind him. They still must have a lot of power if they dare to return on their own just like that, back to the places they were forced to leave in such disgrace, and they will seize in no time what was once theirs. Mihály Suba himself farms land that just a few years ago had a different owner. How could he not be worried? A year ago he thought it extreme that they were expelled from their houses and taken who knows where, even if he found it just to distribute their property among people like himself. It’s not right that they have everything and those whose greatgrandfathers tilled the land suffer in penury. Afraid and confused, he doesn’t under-

And now they’re leaving? They didn’t even bother to glance at the pharmacy. Perhaps they hadn’t come for the shop. stand anything, and the two strangers urge him to move on. “Where are we going then?” he asks in surprise. “Do you know where the house of worship was?” the younger one asks. “Yours?” “Yes, ours.” “Of course. It still exists.” “And how about the Yeshiva?” “Where they studied?” “Yes, yes.” “I know of it.” “Well then, let’s go.” The driver still doesn’t get it, but at least he was told the next destination. He snaps his whip and the cart lurches forward. István Szentes watches the scene and listens from behind the windows of the pharmacy. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. What on earth do these folks want? To march through the entire village? To haughtily display that they have returned loaded with goods to reoccupy what’s theirs? He didn’t know them to be like this in the past. They were quiet and humble; they liked to do their business peacefully because they knew all too well that they were not highly regarded. But who knows, after all that allegedly happened, what they might feel or what they might want to do? And now they’re leaving? They didn’t even bother to glance at the pharmacy. Perhaps they hadn’t come for the shop. István Szentes stands against the counter, and under his summer jacket his shirt’s wet with cold sweat. His legs are trembling and he has to sit. He pours a glass of water from the jug on the table. Having prepared for a confrontation, he suppressed his nervousness, his doubts,

but now all the tension caused by the arrival of the newcomers, and the waiting, the tension that he finally didn’t have to turn against them, turns against himself. His heart is tight, he’s short of breath, his limbs weaken, and he feels hatred for them because they provoked everything by showing up, by returning, by existing at all. The horse and cart turns into a narrow side street. Mihály Suba points to one of the houses that opens on the street and doesn’t have any windows. “That’s where they prayed. They studied in the other building.” They step to the fence, study the house of worship that has a trapdoor on its roof open to the sky and that was covered with reeds by its late owner to commemorate their temporary shelter during their wandering in the desert. Now someone had propped open the trapdoor, perhaps to allow the musty building, in disuse for more than a year, to air out and dry. They wave the driver to get moving. “Now where?” he asks uncertainly. “To the cemetery,” the whiskered one answers. Mihály Suba nods, cracks the whip, and the cart jerks ahead. The younger one with the hat turns questioningly to the older one. He nods and the other one starts humming quietly. The melody can only be heard by the old one. Anyone else would consider it, at best, a plaintive chanting, a mutter that can hardly be called a song. The drivers don’t turn around. They feel that the scene happening behind them is none of their business and since the two strangers aren’t speaking their language, they feel left out. The singing fades at times, barely audible. and sometimes you can only conclude he’s speaking from the movement of his lips, murmuring incessantly what he must do. The cemetery isn’t far. It’s the first plot at the end of the village beyond the houses to the east on an undulating strip of land, divided by a low stone fence from the dirt road. A vast space opens from the cemetery, bordered only by the sky. The best plot of land around. Mihály Suba never understood why their cemetery had to be put right here. The rest of the village’s dead don’t rest here. That’s odd, too, he thinks. They stop in front of the rusty gate and push in the drooping arms. “Take down the boxes and carry them next to the building.”

They gesture at the stone building used to wash the dead. Mihály Suba automatically obeys, although he doesn’t understand anything. He’s not asking, and he’s not curious anymore. He just wants to be done with the job and get rid of them as soon as possible. They work silently. The eleven boxes come down from the back of the cart. “Do you have shovels?” “You asked for them, so we brought them.” “Dig a grave then. It should be two meters long, one meter wide and two meters deep. Let’s say there.” The bearded man points at the untouched clearing in front of the first row of gravestones. Mihály Suba raises his head suddenly. He looks them in the eyes for the first time since they left the station. What do these people want? Who do they want to bury? He heard in his childhood that they take the blood of Christian children to flavor their Easter matzah bread but there’s no children here, it’s not Easter, and these people look least of all like somebody who’d drink anyone’s blood. He never understood the story, he was just afraid. It’s well known that they don’t drink blood. Blood is the spirit to them. “A grave?” he asks in doubt. “Yes.” Suba and his brother-in-law look at one another. His brother-in-law doesn’t speak, not a single word. Suba can’t count on him. He only thinks of the amount of work required to dig such a large hole in the parching heat. If he had a choice, he wouldn’t be doing such work. They remove the shovels from the cart and step to the indicated spot. “Good here?” Mihály Suba asks, suppressing his emotions. He remembers that on the front some were made to dig their own graves and then were shot in them. At least these people don’t have guns. “That’ll be good.” The strangers nod. Suba and his brother-in-law start digging. They don’t take their shirts off, only their vests, although the sun stings their backs. The others leave their jackets and hats on, but they’re only opening the boxes. While they’re excavating, a ragtag crowd turns up at the house closest to the cemetery’s street. The villagers are coming, led by the notary, about a dozen of them, but they halt at a respectful distance. They’re surprised to see that the strangers came to the cemetery. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

Mihály Suba raises his head suddenly. He looks them in the eyes for the first time since they left the station. What do these people want? Who do they want to bury? Mihály Suba stands waist-high in the hole he’s digging in turns with his brother-in-law when the strangers open the last box. They work silently, in coordination—as if this isn’t the first time. They unfold striped prayer shawls on the crisp dry grass near the boxes. A penknife clicks open in the hands of the younger man. Mihály Suba raises his head suddenly, and he can make out that he’s squatting by each talis, cutting into the material. The locals have lined up on the other side of the cemetery’s low stone fence. As if sensing they’re being observed, the two strangers glance up. The notary greets them. “Good afternoon.” They don’t reply, only nod, then look at each other and continue working. They pull the boxes one after another next to the outspread, sheet-size prayer shawls and start to unpack the load. They neatly set out palm-size, brick-shaped soaps in a row, their colors ranging from nuances of pink to gray. On the bars of soap can be read the letters RIF. The inscription is the official abbreviation for Reichstelle für Industrielle Fätte und Wachmittel,1 but in their minds the meaning of the three letters could not be clearer: Reines Israelitisches Fett.2 Due to their quick work, a box is emptied in minutes, and they then fold up and tie the four corners of the talisses like bundles. By now their faces are red and sweat streams down their foreheads and the napes of their necks. Only the top of Mihály Suba’s head is visible from the pit when they unpack the contents of the last box. Ten bundles side-by-side. “Have we got them all?” the old man asks, wiping his forehead.

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“Yes,” the younger one says, looking around to make sure. “One thousand four hundred seventeen pieces altogether. I counted them.” They stand up, step to the edge of the grave, and help Mihály Suba scramble out. They take the bundles to the pit, and this time the unshaven one descends. He takes a handkerchief of Jerusalem earth from the pocket of his jacket, sprinkles it on the earth, and only then do they start handing down the tied-up talisses. “Careful,” the old man says, worried. After the ten bundles are handed down and the man arranges them, they help him out of the grave. Puzzled, he looks at the older man as if he should say something that would relieve him, but he doesn’t say anything. The older man bends towards the mound of earth, grabs a handful and throws it into the grave. The younger one does likewise. The scene is followed silently from behind the fence. Mihály Suba can’t bear it much longer. He asks, almost with a groan, “Just tell me, why exactly this many?” “This is how many there were from the surrounding villages.” The one with the gray beard looks at him, attempting to restrain his feelings, but his eyes fade as he looks at the other man, as if for a second the hope for understanding and sympathy would bubble up in him, but he breaks up his tears with the back of his hand and clears his throat. “Cover the grave!” Suba and his brother-in-law work quickly, heaping and then smoothing the earth. They load the tools onto the cart. The younger stranger steps forward, takes his wallet from the inner pocket of his jacket and pays. He goes back to the grave and stands silently by the older one for a while and then touches his shoulders. “Mir muzn geyn, tate.” 3 The old one turns without a word and leaves. The notary breaks away from the group standing outside the cemetery gate and walks up to him. “As our village’s representative, please let me express my sympathy. We’ll take care that the memories of the victims remain alive with dignity.” 1. The Reich Office of Industrial Grease and Detergents (German) 2. Pure Israelite Fat (German) 3. We have to go, Papa. (Yiddish)

Wondering for a moment whether to accept the hand extended to him, Hermann Sámuel hesitates, then resigns himself, nods and shakes hands. “We cannot take care of the whole cemetery, of course, but we will do our best, especially if we receive some assistance,” the notary says. The brim of the young man’s hat and his whiskers conceal the muscles twitching in his face. The old man squints and yanks his hand out of the notary’s. He was disoriented before, but the tone is familiar. His eyes run across the faces of the men standing behind the notary and he says, “Thanks. I’ll take care of it.” The two men with the black hats pass in front of the gauntlet of villagers lining the cemetery street, they then turn right and pass once more by the prayer house and the Yeshiva, then turn left onto the main street, and finally bear right again along the row of poplars, all the way to the station. They never look back but feel the searing gaze of the villagers on their backs. AUTHOR’S NOTE During World War II, British propaganda spread the story that the Nazis cooked the remains of people killed in the death camps into soap. Historical research has provided no evidence for this hypothesis, but in spite of this, soap was buried symbolically as human remains in many places after 1945. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Budapest-born novelist and screenwriter Gábor T. Szántó is the editor-in-chief of the Hungarian Jewish monthly Szombat. His writings include volumes of short stories and the novels Édeshármas (Threesome) and Kafka macskái (Kafka's Cats). His short story 1945 Hazatérés (Homecoming, 1945) served as the basis of the film 1945 by director Ferenc Török (Katapult Film, 2017). The film won audience awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and at numerous Jewish film festivals in the United States. ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

TLR Bass lived and worked in Budapest for more than 20 years. He recently relocated to the UK.

Special Moment Event: The 2019 New York Awards Dinner

Moment Honors Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Lloyd Goldman

Elizabeth Scheuer, Lloyd Goldman, Justice Ginsburg and Nadine Epstein at the dinner.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the recipient of the inaugural Moment Magazine Human Rights Award, and Moment board member Lloyd Goldman, a leader in the fields of real estate development and philanthropy, received the Moment Magazine Community Leadership Award on Wednesday, September 18, at an special dinner at The Yale Club in New York City. The evening began with a performance by Denyce Graves, whom USA Today has called “an operatic superstar of the 21st century,” and who appeared courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera. In addition to “The House I Live In” and “Summertime,” Graves performed selections from “Half Minute Songs,” written by 20th-century American singer and pianist Carrie Jacobs-Bond, which contain “little pearls of wisdom,” according to Graves. Some crowd favorites were “I’d rather say you’re welcome once than thank you a thousand times,” and “Ain’t it gay that what they say can’t hurt you, unless it’s true.” During an on-stage conversation between Justice Ginsburg and NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg, Jus-

tice Ginsburg pushed back against critics who suggested she should have retired during President Barack Obama’s second term. In response to that suggestion, the Justice said she always asks the question: “Who do you think he could have nominated and gotten through the Republican Senate that you would prefer on the Court?” Lloyd Goldman was introduced by Rivka Carmi, the former president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In his remarks, Goldman noted that philanthropic causes help bring disparate groups within the Jewish community together. “I know it can be hard to discuss some social issues. But when we can support an organization that crosses so many categories that we each like to support and get a synergy between them, it is momentous.” In presenting Moment’s Human Rights Award to Justice Ginsburg, Elizabeth Scheuer, chair of Moment’s board, said, “In recent years, you have come to be known as the ‘Notorious RBG,’ a nickname coined by an NYU law student playing on the rapper Notorious B.I.G., to honor your dissent

“I am a judge, born, raised and proud of being a Jew. The demand for justice, for peace and for enlightenment runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition. I hope, in all the years I have the good fortune to continue serving on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, I will have the strength and courage to remain steadfast in the service of that demand.”—Excerpted from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s remarks

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Honorees and guests included Lloyd and Victoria Goldman, Rivka Carmi, Ruth Westheimer, Nina Totenberg and David Reines.

in the 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder case. You have also been portrayed as a children’s literary heroine, the star of a coloring book, a tattoo and even a Halloween costume—both for children and adults! In presenting you with this award tonight, we wrap ourselves in a tiny measure of your brilliance and notoriety. It is our honor and privilege to celebrate you for your enduring commitment to gender equali-

ty, to protecting the rights of minorities and to upholding the democracy that Denyce Graves sang about: that part of America that strives to protect the rights of all its citizens.” During her acceptance speech, Justice Ginsburg spoke of two feminists who were her childhood role models: poet and activist Emma Lazarus and Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold: “Two Jewish women, both raised in

the USA, whose humanity and bravery inspired me in my growing-up years.” In presenting the award, Moment editor-inchief Nadine Epstein said, “Justice Ginsburg’s strength, her perseverance, her commitment to women’s rights, and her willingness to defy long-held traditions have been inspirations for me. She embodies one of the central tenets of Judaism: ‘Justice, justice you shall pursue.’”

Regina Spektor listening to Justice Ginsburg’s speech.

Denyce Graves sang for Moment’s honorees.

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“Listening to the wise and funny and profound and witty RBG and being surrounded by such philanthropic and active people was just what my heart needed. Going to try and take some of that wisdom and hang out with it for a long time.”—from an Instagram post by singer-songwriter Regina Spektor

“I am proud to be honored along with Justice Ginsburg and grateful for the opportunity to thank her in person for her great work, for kicking doors open for women like my daughter and niece, and for championing important social issues.”—Lloyd Goldman, recipient of the 2019 Moment Magazine Community Leadership Award “Together with his sisters, Dorian and Katja, Lloyd has stewarded the foundation their father established to “make a measurable difference of lasting value on important issues affecting the fundamental quality of human lives” into a philanthropic powerhouse, impacting thousands and thousands of lives in the U.S. and in Israel.”—Rivka Carmi, former president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Award recipient Lloyd Goldman with Rivka Carmi and Nadine Epstein.

The Tzedek Collar Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore the “The Tzedek Collar,” a gift commissioned for her by Moment Magazine, on the first Monday in October, the opening day of the new U.S. Supreme Court term. “This collar is an affirmation of the foundational values on which the Supreme Court rests,” said Moment editor-in-chief Nadine Epstein. “We are delighted that the Justice chose to wear it on such an important day.” Designed by Michigan artist Marcy Epstein, the collar honors the justice’s decades of work as a champion of human rights, particularly for women. “Justice Ginsburg embodies a principal tenet of Judaism: Tzedek, tzedek tirdof—Justice, justice you shall pursue,” said Nadine Epstein. “We cannot think of a more appropriate way to thank her for her perseverance and willingness to defy long-held traditions to expand rights to so many.” The collar is a classically styled European jabot based on a late-19th-century Belgian lace design. Blue Ethiopian drop opals are intended to suggest the wearer’s composure and passion. Geometric beading along the neckline adds a Judaic design element, while the Hebrew

letters tsade, dalet and kuf, which form the word tzedek, are woven in silk. The artist teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her multimedia work includes designing Judaica, tiles and tapestries.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

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Explore how your unique voice can transform people’s lives while fostering your own creativity. Your musical talents can flourish as a cantor through an unprecedented breadth of opportunities to lead worship, compose and perform myriad styles of traditional and contemporary music, inspire learning, and offer pastoral care. Your first year in Israel will immerse you in the Hebrew language, Israeli culture, and the rich and complex varieties of Jewish music, worship, ritual, and spirituality that have evolved across the centuries and continents. During your next four years in New York, you will delve into liturgy and liturgical music, Bible, midrash, philosophy, musicology, history, and more, as you strengthen your musicianship, instrumental skills, conducting, composition, and arranging. Our internationally recognized faculty, spiritual guidance, mentored congregational internships, clinical pastoral education, recitals, and entrepreneurial and social action projects will nurture your individual growth. You may augment your Master’s in Sacred Music and Rabbinical Ordination with Master’s degrees in educational leadership and in Jewish learning, Jewish Nonprofit Management, Rabbinical Ordination, and the Ph.D.

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We prepare leaders at any point in their career to disrupt the educational status quo and build flourishing, future Jewish learning communities. Our programs produce creative, sophisticated and resourceful educational leaders with highly sought-after careers. Our alumni spearhead innovative, transformational and sustainable Jewish learning experiences of tomorrow. Whether you’re still exploring your options, or already have an established resume, we will help find your true voice as a leader and change maker within a vibrant, modern Jewish community. Find the program that best meets your career stage and goals: Master of Educational Leadership and concurrent Master of Arts in Jewish Learning Are you launching your career as a Jewish educational leader? Our Master of Educational Leadership (M.Ed.L.) is designed for creative, dynamic, passionate educators who are eager to lead change, curate Jewish learning experiences, and transform the world through education. Engage in innovative professional work while pursuing graduate studies to advance your career and become a NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

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A different way to school! The Zschool is a transformative gathering place for creative leaders. We offer a Master’s in Jewish Nonprofit Management (24 months) and a Master’s in Organizational Leadership (14 months). Both degrees can be completed with a limited summer residency, allowing you to work or complete another graduate school 68

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Join a unique community of graduate students from diverse faiths and international backgrounds in a rabbinical seminary environment alive with intellectual inquiry. The world’s leading scholars will guide your individualized doctoral programs in Hebrew Bible and History of Biblical Interpretation, Jewish and Christian Studies in the GrecoRoman Period, Rabbinic Literature, and Jewish Thought. We also offer a joint doctoral program in Modern Jewish History and Culture with the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati. You will enjoy unlimited access to our Cincinnati campus’s extraordinary resources, including the Klau Library network (the second-largest Jewish library in the world), Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Archaeology Center, and Skirball Museum, and at our Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem. You can begin your journey through our two-year M.A. in Jewish Studies in Cincinnati as a foundation for doctoral studies, which will give you a mastery of Hebrew lan-

guages of all periods, skills to teach seminal Hebrew texts within their historical contexts, and treatment of all areas of Jewish studies as they relate to core academic disciplines, including history, literature, law, philosophy, and religion. The M.A. in Jewish Studies is also an excellent way to enrich your knowledge as a lay or professional leader or non-Jewish clergy. Our Summer-In-Israel Program for Ph.D. and M.A. students offers an archaeological dig into ancient Israel, coursework, and the opportunity to experience Israel as a modern state. If you are a rabbi ordained at HUC-JIR (or another accredited Jewish seminary), the Doctor of Hebrew Letters Program offers you the opportunity for independent study and coursework (non-residency) that will revitalize your ongoing work as a learned leader for the Jewish people. Our New York campus offers the Interfaith Doctor of Ministry Program in Pastoral Counseling, designed for ordained clergy of all faiths. National Office of Admissions and Recruitment (800) 899-0944 GradSchool@huc.edu SPERTUS INSTITUTE

The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership offers dynamic learning opportunities, rooted in Jewish wisdom and culture and open to all. Based on the belief that a learning Jewish community is a vibrant Jewish community, these opportunities are designed to enable personal growth, train future leaders and engage individuals in exploration of Jewish life. Graduate programs, professional workshops and mentorships are offered in the Chicago area, in select locations across North America and through distance learning. The Spertus Institute’s leadership programs for Jewish professionals can be offered on-site in your community, tailored by our world-class faculty and staff to meet

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your community’s specific needs. Spertus public programs—including films, speakers, seminars, concerts and exhibits—are offered at the Institute’s Michigan Avenue facility, in the Chicago suburbs and online. spertus.edu BOSTON UNIVERSITY

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ELIE WIESEL CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES

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Whether you are interested in Moses or Maimonides, mysticism or philosophy, history or literature, the Holocaust or Israel, Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies is for you. One of the country’s great universities invites you to pursue your interests in Jewish studies along with everything else the University has to offer: small classes, study abroad, internships and scholarships. Visit us when you are on campus. Our house is always open. for more information, contact: Boston University Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies 147 Bay State Road, Boston MA 02215 bu.edu/jewishstudies 617-353-8096

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Talk of the Table

hen a student of the famous Talmudic sage Rabbi Gamliel doubted the majesty of the World-to-Come, Rabbi Gamliel pointed to mushrooms and their spontaneous growth as evidence of the future abundance of the land of Israel. In fact, in ancient Israel, mushrooms, particularly the genus Boletus, were bountiful after heavy rainfalls and a favorite ingredient in ancient Israeli cooking. Since then, mushrooms—true to their nature— have popped up throughout the Jewish world in the most surprising of places. In Jewish law, for example, their unique biology has been the object of many halachic discussions. Neither vegetable nor fruit, mushrooms gather nutrients from decaying organic matter, rather than through photosynthesis. As a result, Talmudic sages decided that mushrooms do not require the blessing for vegetables, borei pri ha-adamah (“who creates the fruit of the earth”), but rather the blessing shehakol nih’ye bidvaro (“who created all things with His word”) used for food that does not fit into any other category. And because they are not planted, mushrooms were deemed exempt from tithes. Avrohom Bornsztain, a leading 19th-

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century posek (Jewish legal arbiter), even considered mushrooms blessed. When God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and cursed the earth’s land, obliging them to toil for food, Bornsztain says mushrooms, which require no human labor, were exempt from the curse. Although mushrooms are kosher (as long as one checks for bugs), the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides warned against eating them in his Mishneh Torah because of the poisonous nature of certain varieties. Some Eastern European Jewish communities considered mushrooms treif well into the 20th century because of Maimonides’s warning, according to Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, a Jewish studies scholar who is chief curator of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Nevertheless, mushrooms (shveml in Yiddish) were especially important in Ashkenazi cooking because “they were among the few flavoring agents available to the poor in eastern Europe and could be picked free from the fields and dried for future use,” writes Gil Marks in his Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. Ashkenazi Jews sautéed mushrooms with

onions, pickled them, stuffed them and added them to soups, stews, kasha dishes and fillings. Mushrooms gave “a meaty taste to food because of their umami [savoriness],” says cookbook author Jayne Cohen. They would “stretch the meat, and when there was no meat, mushrooms could fill that void.” Mushrooms were also part of Sephardi cuisine, says Cohen. “Sephardi Jews have mezes [appetizers] of pickled mushrooms and use mushrooms in frittatas and pilafs.” Cooking with mushrooms, along with mushroom gathering, was customary among Jews in Slavic countries, says Maxim Shrayer, a Russian-American author and professor at Boston College. Both an everyday leisure activity and a way to supplement the food supply in Soviet culture, mushroom picking was seen by Jews as a way to “Russianize,” he says. When Russian Jews immigrated to the United States, they brought this tradition with them. Shrayer argues that the use of mushrooms became more predominant in EasternEuropean Jewish cuisine through this Soviet Jewish tradition, but Cohen disagrees. Once Jews began “borrowing from the cuisines

HARSHAL S. HIRVE

Jews and ’Shrooms

of the countries that they were inhabiting, they started using ingredients in many of the same ways,” she says. Cohen maintains that foods “associated with Ashkenazi cuisine that use mushrooms,” such as mushrooms with barley, kasha and farfalle, or knishes with mushrooms, mushroom gravies and sour cream with mushrooms, “did not start in the 20th century after the Soviet occupation.” Today’s chefs have easy access to a variety of exotic mushrooms, such as porcini, morels and chanterelles. “Mushrooms are considered a gourmet ingredient,” says Cohen, that “really elevates the level of a dish.” At the same time, commercial manufacturing has complicated mushrooms’ kosher status. Canned or precooked mushrooms require certification to verify they haven’t been contaminated by any non-kosher products processed in the same facility. And lest we forget, certain mushrooms have an alternative use. The late Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement, famously experimented with psilocybin, a psychedelic found in 200 varieties of mushrooms. “I think to

understand the depth of a religion, one needs to have firsthand experience,” he writes in 2005 in Higher Wisdom: Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics. “It can be done with sensory deprivation. It can be done a number of ways,” he writes. “But I think the psychedelic path is sometimes the easiest way.” Of course, 20th-century Jews were likely not the first to make this discovery. Cohen men-

THE DARKER SIDE

In medieval times, anti-Semitic rhetoric compared Jews to mushrooms, referring to all fungi as “Jew Meat,” writes natural food expert Richard Mabey in his book Food for Free. Some say that this derogatory label stemmed from the mushroom’s slimy and often poisonous reputation. Many people also attribute the name of the “Jew’s ear” mushroom (Auricularia auricula-judae in Latin for “Judas’s ear”) to anti-Semitic sentiments associ-

tions how, in the Babylonian Talmud, “a rabbi recounts that he became so intoxicated by the fragrance of a mushroom dish that his health would have been in grave danger had he not been given some of the dish to eat.” Had he tasted a psychedelic mushroom? We can’t know for sure. What we do know, says Cohen, is that ancient Jews “were definitely enjoying their mushrooms.” —Lilly Gelman

ated with Judas, who Christian texts say betrayed Jesus. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, however, the name “Jew’s ear” evolved as a fallacious iteration of “Judas’s ear.” Mushrooms also featured in Nazi propaganda. In 1938, Julius Streicher published Der Giftpilz (“The Poisonous Mushroom”), which teaches German children to distinguish between Jews and gentiles by differentiating between toxic and edible mushrooms.

Wild Mushroom Potato Kugel Adapted from Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lover’s Treasury of Classics and Improvisations, by Jayne Cohen Pareve Yield: 8 to 10 servings INGREDIENTS

1 ounce dried wild mushrooms, preferably porcini or cèpes; shiitake don’t work well here (½ to ¾ cup) ¼ cup olive oil, plus additional for greasing pan 3 cups thinly sliced onion (¾ pound) Salt and ground black pepper 2 teaspoons chopped garlic 6 large or 8 medium russet (baking) potatoes, peeled* 4 large eggs, beaten *Rinsing then squeezing the grated potatoes dry eliminates that watery, muddy taste that mars some kugels. DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. 2. Soak mushrooms in 2 cups hot water for 30 minutes, or until soft. Drain through strainer lined with paper towels; reserve liquid. Wash mushrooms under cold water and chop coarsely. 3. Heat oil in 10-inch heavy skillet over medium heat. Add onions and sauté until crisp and light brown, about 15 minutes. Transfer to bowl and season with salt and pepper. Combine chopped mushrooms, garlic and reserved mushroom soaking liquid in the same skillet. Boil mixture over high heat, stirring until liquid evaporates. Add salt and pepper to taste and remove the skillet from heat.

4. Grate potatoes. Transfer to a colander, rinse well. Drain, using your hands to squeeze out as much liquid as possible. In a large bowl, combine potatoes, eggs, fried onion and plenty of salt and pepper. 5. Grease a 13-by-9-inch, or similar heavy baking pan (not glass), and place in oven until oil is sizzling hot. 6. Pour half the potato mixture into pan, spread mushrooms over it, cover with remaining potato mixture and smooth top. 7. Bake uncovered for about 50 minutes until top is golden and crisp. Let kugel cool until set. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

BOOK REVIEW | ROBERT SIEGEL

The Passions of a Prime Minister, Revealed A STATE AT ANY COST: THE LIFE OF DAVID BEN-GURION By Tom Segev Translated from Hebrew by Haim Watzman Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019, 816 pp, $40

The big question posed by Tom Segev’s biography of Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, is this: What quality did people see in Ben-Gurion that made him indispensable, when so many other qualities made him plainly impossible? His personal relationships with other leading Zionists ranged from complicated to hostile. He described Chaim Weizmann, whom he displaced as leader of the movement, as “loathsome carrion” (an epithet drawn from the Book of Isaiah). He likened his rival, the Revisionist Zionist leader Zev Jabotinsky, to Adolf Hitler (Jabotinsky said the same about him). He accused his successor as prime minister, Levi Eshkol, of lies, corruption and idiocy. His relationship with Golda Meir was summed up by Yitzhak Navon, Ben-Gurion’s secretary and later president of Israel, this way: When he seeks her favor, she thinks he is insincere; when he doesn’t, he’s ignoring her, and there’s no end to it. Love, admiration, hatred and jealousy merge one into the other, and the wretched romance of this couple has no remedy.

The romance in Meir’s case was only figurative, but Ben-Gurion’s actual marriage was equally wretched. To his wife, Paula, he could be indifferent, insensitive and frequently unfaithful. He wanted more children. She

confided that he had no idea how many abortions she had had to avoid having more. When his cautious positions under the British Mandate on abetting illegal immigration and launching retaliatory strikes on Arabs threatened to aggrandize his less cautious rivals, Ben-Gurion flipped and became the advocate of what he had opposed. And his greatest successes, seeing Israel through its war for independence and settling Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and North Africa, came only after colossal bungling of both missions. Regarding the former, Segev describes how tensions between Ben-Gurion and his generals ran so high that they led to a “generals’ revolt.” As for settling the immigrants, his government’s poor job of housing the North Africans imbued them with a resentment of the Labor establishment that would ultimately fuel Menachem Begin’s Likud Party in its rise to power. When Ben-Gurion’s subordinates failed publicly, rather than stand up for them and assume responsibility, he let them take the consequences. When he failed to get his way, he frequently threatened to quit the leadership. One of his many resignation threats came just two weeks before the attack by Arab armies in 1948. What overrode all of these faults, in Segev’s rich telling of Ben-Gurion’s life, was his single-mindedness. The aim of Zionism was to create a Jewish state; all else, it seems, was tactical detail. He saw the project as one of conquest, not gentlemanly diplomacy. He suffered from no illusions that the land was empty; he sought to achieve a state with maximum land and minimum Arabs, and he saw a population transfer as a valid way to achieve that. For all the public antipathy between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, they emerge from Segev’s book as rivals more divided over tactics than principles (they once met privately and enjoyed one another’s company). This is not the pragmatic center-left BenGurion that many of us grew up on. Ben-Gurion was also flexible—when nec-

essary. He could accept partition, when that position was unpopular in his own party, if it hastened creation of the state. He pursued such highly controversial policies as championing Israel’s friendship with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s West Germany (in fact, he said later he would have preferred a military alliance) and building Israel’s secret nuclear facility at Dimona because both pursuits strengthened the state. He saw the nuclear strategy, Segev writes, “as sort of atonement for the sin the Jewish people had committed over two millennia, ‘the sin of weakness.’” But strength was not an end in itself—the state was. Although he evidently shared the Zionists’ remorse over being helpless to assist Jews in the Holocaust, he said in 1938, one month after Kristallnacht, “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second, because we face not only the reckoning of these children but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.” He was also capable of extraordinary change. In retirement, on the eve of the SixDay War in 1967, Ben-Gurion opposed Israeli plans for preemptive strikes and seizure of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Such a war, he reasoned, would bring too many Arabs under Israeli authority at a time when Israel’s economy could not absorb enough new Jewish immigrants to maintain a strong Jewish majority. He attached little importance to achieving Israeli control of Jerusalem, a city he associated with “blacks,” his dismissive term for the ultra-Orthodox. But, like so many of his countrymen, once these territories were taken, he became intoxicated with Israel’s new position of dominance and eager for annexation. How was Israel supposed to reconcile its desire for land with its treatment of the residents of that land? Where were Israel’s borders to be drawn? For that matter, what role would religion play in a state led by secular Jews? Neither Ben-Gurion nor the movement he led provided clear answers, only tactical responses that served for the moment. Segev calls it Ben-Gurion’s “principal weakness” that “he led a movement that never agreed on its fundamental principles.” Segev is one of Israel’s most prominent “new historians,” the group of scholars who, starting in the 1980s, took the writing of Israeli Continues on page 78

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019

BOOK REVIEW | SHULAMIT REINHARZ

A Writer Who Opened Doors AND THE BRIDE CLOSED THE DOOR By Ronit Matalon Translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen New Vessel Press 2019, 128 pp, $15.95

How tragic that we recently lost one of Israel’s great writers—Ronit Matalon—who died at the young age of 58. And how poignant that the day before succumbing to cancer, she learned that she had won the Brenner Prize in Israeli Literature for her last book, the novella And the Bride Closed the Door, published in Hebrew in 2016. Since we will have no more books by Matalon, we should be grateful that New Vessel Press has just brought out Jessica Cohen’s stunning translation of Matalon’s final work, an outrageously funny, perplexing and perhaps universal story. Four hours before her wedding, Margie, the invisible protagonist of And the Bride, locks herself in her room and refuses to speak to anyone. Matalon may have identified with this fictional bride who said “no”—to her wedding and to everything else. Perhaps, in writing the story, Matalon was trying to say “no” to death. Although she was a prolific journalist and writer of fiction, praised extravagantly in the Israeli press, recognized with numerous prizes and widely translated (although only belatedly into English), Matalon’s writing has not been well known in the United States except among scholars of Israeli literature. I admit that she was new to me when the translation of And the Bride reached my inbox. I had not yet read her seven other books (including one for children), from Strangers at Home (1992) to

Uncover Her Face (2005). I had not known of Matalon’s work as a journalist, reporting from the West Bank and Gaza for Haaretz, nor that several of her books were made into films. In addition to numerous published interviews, Matalon’s autobiographical The Sound of Our Steps: A Novel (2015), translated by Dalya Bilu, enables the reader to understand her particular emotional and economic roots. In Matalon’s works, one gets to hear the voice of a Mizrachi, or Middle Eastern, Israeli woman. This shouldn’t be a novelty, but it is. The short lists of Israel’s greatest novelists typically focus on Amos Oz, Meir Shalev, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua. The American audience knows these writers but may not realize that what they have in common—other than being Israeli men, with all that that implies—is their yiches, or elite lineage. Amos Oz was born Amos Klausner— an Ashkenazi Jew in Jerusalem—and his story resonates broadly with European Ashkenazi immigrants to Israel. Meir Shalev was born in the iconic Nahalal moshav, founded by members of the highly influential Second Aliyah. The son of Jerusalem poet Yitzhak Shalev, Meir did his military service in the elite Golani Brigade and fought in the SixDay War. (Shalev had what I’d call a surfeit of yiches.) Grossman, an Ashkenazi Israeli, is very well known not only for his novels but for the tragedy of losing his son, Uri, when a missile struck his tank in the final days of the war in Lebanon. And Yehoshua, a Sephardi man of letters, has explained that although he began writing in his 20s, he didn’t explore Sephardi culture until he published Mr. Mani at the age of 54, because “when you are a minority writer—and the Sephardis are considered a minority—people expect you to write in a kind of folkloric way.” As a Mizrachi woman whose parents came from Egypt, Matalon does not represent a gender or ethnic category teeming with yiches. This is one reason that The Sound of Our Steps is an important book for

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Continues on page 78 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

ESSAY | CARLIN ROMANO

Primo Levi’s Work Outshines His Murky Death As the July 31 centenary of Primo Levi’s birth approached this past summer, Italy paid homage. For the chemist turned writer who, along with Elie Wiesel, cofounder of this magazine, remains widely acknowledged as one of the foremost literary witnesses to Auschwitz’s horror, the outpouring of appreciation marked unmistakable confirmation that Levi would not, like so many important writers after their death, slip from public importance. Two of the nation’s leading newspapers—Rome’s La Repubblica and Turin’s La Stampa—bundled books by or about Levi with their Sunday editions. On the centenary itself, all three of Italy’s top newspapers published multiple essays about him, with La Stampa scooping everyone by running a lovely, previously unpublished piece by Levi entitled, “I Write Because I Am a Chemist.” RAI Cultura, the country’s national broadcaster, aired a documentary about Levi the same day. In the United States, the New York Public Library organized an eight-hour reading in multiple languages of If This Is a Man, also translated into English as Survival in Auschwitz. In Lisbon, preparations began for the exposition “The Worlds of Primo Levi: A Strenuous Clarity,” organized and curated by the Centro internazionale di studi Primo Levi in Turin, a show that will later come to the United States. If one could discern a unifying theme in many of the remembrances, it might be Paolo de Stefano’s recognition, in “The Sentinel Primo Levi,” of “the three-dimensionality of a writer who for years has been loved especially as a witness.” One Italian critic after another commented on the often-ignored diversity of Levi’s work, supporting the writer’s own plea at one time that he did not want to be viewed as merely a “Holocaust writer,” but solely as a scrittore, a writer, with no adjective limiting that sanctified status. Perhaps the most notable aspect of the tributes was their redirection of attention from the last enormous wave of journalism about Levi—after his death at 67 on April 11, 1987. On that morning, only minutes after answering the doorbell of his thirdfloor apartment and thanking the concierge for his mail, Levi plunged down the stairwell of the Turin apartment building, Corso Re Umberto 75, where he’d lived all his life. 76

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His death stunned the literary world. Had Levi committed suicide in a manner that utterly contradicted everything intimates said later they had thought they knew about him—his scientific precision, his dexterity with chemicals, his kindness, his will to survive, his opposition to suicide? Would such a man not leave a note? Or had he suffered some neurological event that caused him to fall? In the years since his death, scholars, biographers and those who knew him remain split on the issue. Several biographers came to believe it was a suicide, while many who knew him (including this critic) continue to reject that conclusion. In fairness, attention to the issue can’t be ridiculed

The idea of Levi—exact, analytic, undemonstrative except for his controlled laugh—suddenly hurling his body into space seems as likely as Marcel Proust secretly lifting weights. as mere literary sensationalism, even if neither side saw the centenary as an appropriate time to raise it again. Given the nature of Levi’s principles, separating the suicide question from his work requires finesse. If even Levi, the voice of cool, rational coping with the trauma of Auschwitz, could take his own life, maybe the possibility of psychologically surviving the Holocaust didn’t really exist. As his literary reputation rose around the world, Levi stood as the stoic Holocaust survivor who analyzed his experience in Auschwitz as a scientist—dispassionately, precisely, without letting sentimentality get in the way of the facts. Speaking with Philip Roth, he likened If This Is a Man to a factory “weekly report,” the clear, accessible genre he practiced after the war as a chemical engineer managing a paint factory. But his later works expanded far beyond that genre. The Periodic Table, in which every chemical element triggered a story from his past, made him famous. The Monkey’s Wrench, an exuberant novel about a ram-

bunctious construction worker, confirmed his creative touch; and The Tranquil Star, a collection of his inventive short tales and “science fables,” revealed him as far more than the documentarian of Auschwitz. Over the years, many other writers and intellectuals who survived Auschwitz— the Austrian philosopher Jean Améry, the German-language poet Paul Celan, the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski and others—committed suicide. But Levi always rejected that “solution.” In 1979, he wrote of Auschwitz, “My time there did not destroy me physically or morally, as was the case with other people. I did not lose my family, my country, or my home.” Later, in The Drowned and the Saved, his last collection of essays on Holocaust themes, Levi drove home the point: “Auschwitz left its mark on me, but it did not remove my desire to live. On the contrary, that experience increased my desire, it gave my life a purpose, to bear witness, so that such a thing should never occur again.” Those of his admirers who believe he committed suicide concluded that Levi’s resolve had finally failed him. Wiesel famously remarked, “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz 40 years later.” Leon Wieseltier, then literary editor of The New Republic, wrote, “He spoke for the bet that there is no blow from which the soul may not recover. When he smashed his body, he smashed his bet.” Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg observed that despite Levi’s claims in his writings, he “must have had terrible memories” that “led him toward his death.” Eventually, more casual observers came to treat the matter as a proven fact rather than one possibility. As recently as 2015, the chronology at the beginning of editor Ann Goldstein’s three-volume edition of The Complete Works of Primo Levi, published by Liveright, stated flatly, “April 11: Levi dies, a suicide, in his apartment building in Turin.” The strongest argument from the other side came in a 1999 Boston Review article titled “Primo Levi’s Last Moments,” by Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta. Gambetta weighed a range of possibilities: premeditated suicide because of Holocaust demons; premeditated suicide for other reasons; spur-of-the moment suicide for any combination of reasons; a fainting spell; a bad reaction to medicine.

Gambetta argued that if Levi had planned his suicide, he “would have known better ways than jumping into a narrow stairwell with the risk of remaining paralyzed.” He rejected the idea that Levi—sober, restrained, fastidious and intensely concerned with the dignity of himself and others—would have imposed such a horrific scene on his family and neighbors. Gambetta conceded that Levi, at the end of his life, suffered from chemical depression unconnected to the Holocaust and took antidepressants; that he’d undergone a prostate operation just 20 days before his death; that both his senile, nonagenarian mother and his mother-in-law were slowly dying. Nonetheless, Gambetta favored the judgment of a cardiologist friend of Levi’s that his antidepressants might have triggered a dizzy spell that caused him to fall over the stairwell’s low banister. Some Levi scholars found Gambetta’s arguments convincing. “I never thought it was suicide,” commented Risa Sodi, author of A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz. Another, Lina Insana, who teaches Italian studies and Holocaust literature at the University of Pittsburgh, said, “I never believed it was a premeditated suicide.” The Nobel Laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, a lifelong friend of Levi’s, also reportedly rejected the idea of suicide. I first met Levi after reviewing The Periodic Table (1984); I visited him at his apartment and well remember that low

stairwell banister. I agreed with the skeptics. The idea of Levi—exact, analytic, usually undemonstrative except for his wry smile and controlled laugh—suddenly hurling his body into space seems as likely as Marcel Proust secretly lifting weights, or Umberto Eco faking his familiarity with Latin. Now, more than 30 years later, the silence of the Primo Levi centenary commentators about this once volatile issue recalls a lesson worth remembering—a lesson Levi delivered in The Drowned and the Saved. There he wrote that suicide “allows for a nebula of explanations.” He deemed it “an act of man and not of the animal. It is a deliberate act, a non-instinctive, unnatural choice.” He also reminded us that it is human nature to want to simplify, even when simplification is not “justified.” In the most famous anecdote in all his writing, Levi recounts in If This Is a Man how, parched with thirst, he tried to grab an icicle through his cell window only to have a Nazi guard snatch it away. When Levi asked “Warum?” (“Why?”), the guard replied, “Hier ist kein warum” (“Here there is no why”). Regarding Levi’s death, here there is no how, no what, no answer—beyond his inimitable, immortal, incisive body of work. Carlin Romano, Moment critic-at-large, teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of America the Philosophical.

A COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL, the first to be written and published in English by an American Jewish woman, that transforms what we know about the history of early Jewish America. www.uapress.ua.edu

Available on Amazon.com

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 / MOMENT

David Ben-Gurion continued from page 74

history out of the realm of hagiography and into that of cold facts, sometimes unflattering ones. When this book was published in Hebrew last year, it raised Israeli eyebrows on several counts. One revelation: As independence approached, the stalwart Ben-Gurion turns out to have offered the British a partition map that approximated the Green Line as it was ultimately established, as well as a strict limit on Jewish immigration. He even urged Britain to extend the Mandate and remain a colonial power for another five or ten years, offering to defer independence—so great was his fear of Israeli military weakness. Segev’s documentation of Ben-Gurion’s four extramarital affairs, in particular the account of one longtime mistress who doubted her lover’s capacity for intimacy and his understanding of female sexuality, earned him criticism for crossing the line from biography to tell-all tabloid fodder. However, one benefit of his granular examination of BenGurion’s private life, based on his voluminous

diaries and letters as well as the observations of his contemporaries, is as a tonic to cure the delusion that a great leader is one in possession of a robust self-confidence. Privately, Ben-Gurion took note of his frequent bouts of anxiety, physical weakness, insomnia, fear, anger and loneliness. For his entire adult life, he felt a wound of rejection for having been passed over for membership in an early unit of Zionist armed guards (“He thought too much and talked too much,” one member of the group explained). He was a voracious reader and bibliophile, but the scholarly Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Yigal Yadin attributed that to Ben-Gurion’s “very strong sense of inferiority toward people with college educations.” His only taste of university was studying Turkish law when Palestine was still an Ottoman province and the path to a Jewish state appeared to run through Istanbul. Once the world war began, his higher education was over (and soon, so was the Ottoman Empire).

Ben-Gurion’s anxiety recalls Abraham Lincoln’s melancholy, which many today diagnose as depression. Both men achieved superhuman tasks of leadership; both knew the agonies of the human condition firsthand. This portrait of Ben-Gurion is not a work of hero worship, nor does it sell a great man short. “He was one of those world leaders,” Segev writes, “who believed they could change the course of their people’s history. His ideological resolve was unbending, his imagination unbounded. Both told him that everything was possible, and nearly every price seemed reasonable.” Ben-Gurion’s legacy to his country may include a stack of important unresolved questions that continue to bedevil seekers of a Middle East peace, but they pale beside his greatest achievement, the very establishment of that country against all the odds.

a prisoner of its own rhetoric on security and sacrifices” and that the country was in danger of losing its democratic identity. Although And the Bride Closed the Door is ostensibly a Neil Simon-style comedy (in the mode of the 1970s Plaza Suite), several of Matalon’s political concerns are packed into it. The novella makes fun of contemporary upper-middle-class Israeli society, which seems to require a special purchase for every occasion, combined with an obsessive need to diet and a professional service provider to manage every conceivable problem or need. Thus, as the paralyzed wedding day wears on, the family finds a psychology practice specifically designed to push recalcitrant brides into their marriages—a not-so-subtle reference to Israel’s unforgiving pro-marriage, pro-natal culture. Matalon’s family descriptions, which form the bulk of the story, make clear that Jewish in-laws, expensive caterers and gay relatives are more interesting than the stubborn bride. Scenes in which an Arab worker is called to extract the bride through her window are simultaneously hilarious and extremely painful to read. Predictably, neighbors rush in to misinterpret Arab assistance as terrorism. Matalon’s appealing language is notable for extravagant, outrageously funny similes and metaphors. There are generous slapstick elements, as when the grandmother mishears, misunderstands and “mistakes,” and pathos

galore because her family doesn’t know if they should threaten, cajole or guilt-trip Margie to come out. Or should they just get a locksmith and break down her door? Should they call in the Marines, so to speak—that is, the IDF? But best of all, Matalon pays attention to bodies—body parts, especially hair; blood pressure readings; body excretions, especially sweat and tears with their unfortunate impact on mascara, not to mention drools, stomach rumblings and related object spills; and clothing, especially dresses that are too tight and hats that are wrong. She writes about rapping fingers, stomping feet, quivering nostrils, heavy damp eyelids, sneezing fits, runny noses and spitting. Matalon manages to squeeze into this very brief story several of Israeli society’s easily recognized blemishes: conspicuous consumption run amok, out-of-control weddings (this one includes 500 guests), marital and in-law relations and more. How does it all end? There is a hint that the bride will come out and the couple will go through changes, though society probably will not. It is also possible that the family’s ethnicity is revealed at the end when the grandmother begins to sing. But Matalon resolves very little; the story is cut off precipitously, as was her life.

Former NPR senior host Robert Siegel is a special literary contributor to Moment.

Ronit Matalon continued from page 75

American Jews to read. This forceful autobiographical work describes the life of an upper-class Egyptian family who descended into poverty after immigrating to Israel in the 1950s. Ronit’s mostly absent father was a social activist, a Communist and a verbrente pro-Mizrachi advocate with a huge chip on his shoulder. Her mother, embodying the downtrodden victim of downward mobility, is called “the mother” in The Sound of Our Steps. “The mother” was a kitchen worker and cleaner for the municipality of Petach Tikva, which kept her on her feet at least 12 difficult hours a day. Her life was filled not with self-pity, however, but with rage and fear. Ronit came into this world only because “the Nona,” her grandmother, begged “the mother” not to abort that pregnancy, as she had done frequently with other pregnancies. It should come as no surprise that as a youngster, Ronit moved in with her grandmother. She grew to be a strong woman, of striking physical beauty, with political opinions shaped by her parents’ lives and beliefs, to which she added her own. Matalon identified and commiserated with fellow Mizrachis, carrying on her father’s views, but she also embraced the Palestinian cause. Her statement in Le Monde that Israel was an apartheid regime and her accusation that “the fundamental characteristic of the Israeli society is denial” were deemed politically incorrect. She also believed that Israel “is 78

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Shulamit Reinharz is professor of sociology emerita at Brandeis University and founder of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

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A Moment favorite since 1980

SPICE BOX! Only we can move mountains!

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submitted by Steven Feldman Washington, DC

Do you mean ge-volt? submitted by Michael Brooks Ann Arbor, MI

For the ninth night submitted by Paul Bernstein Plymouth, MN

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