NA'AMAT WOMAN, SPRING 2015

Spring 2015

MAGAZINE OF NA’AMAT USA

Spring 2015 Vol. 30 No. 2

Editor Judith A. Sokoloff Art Director Marilyn Rose Editorial Committee Harriet Green Sylvia Lewis Elizabeth Raider Edythe Rosenfield Lynn Wax Marcia J. Weiss NA’AMAT USA Officers PRESIDENT Elizabeth Raider VICE PRESIDENTS Jan Gurvitch Ivy Liebross Gail Simpson Marcia J. Weiss TREASURER/FINANCIAL SECRETARY Debbie Kohn

features

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On the Road With NA’AMAT............................................................................. 4 At the Na’amat International Solidarity Conference in Israel, members from eight countries discovered that we are one big family. By Judith A. Sokoloff

French Jews: Is it time to come home? .......................................................... 12 A look at what makes Jews leave France and how they fare in Israel. By Michele Chabin

Linda Stein.................................................................................................... 18 The making of an artist-activist, feminist Jew. By Amy Stone

departments President’s Message By Elizabeth Raider............................. 3 Take Action! Sexual Assault on Campus

By Marcia J. Weiss............................................................. 26 Book Reviews............................................................. 28 Around the Country..................................................... 30

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RECORDING SECRETARY Debby Firestone CHAIR/NATIONAL FUNDS Harriet Green Na’amat Woman (ISSN 0888-191X) is published quarterly (fall, winter, spring, summer) on the Internet, with winter and summer issues also in print, by Na’amat USA. Postmaster: Send address changes to NA’AMAT USA National Office, 21515 Vanowen St., Suite 102, Canoga Park, CA 91303.

For change of address, contact naamat@naamat.org, phone 818-431-2200 or write to national office in California.

Editorial and advertising, contact Judith@naamat.org, phone 212-563-5222 or write to Na’amat Woman, 505 Eighth Ave., #12A04, New York, NY 10018.

Signed articles represent the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of Na’amat USA or its editor.

Websites: www.naamat.org and www.naamatwoman.com

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NA’AMAT USA AREA OFFICES

Our front and back covers: Participants in the Na’amat International Solidarity Conference celebrate their commitment to Israel near the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Mission Statement The mission of Na’amat USA is to enhance the status of women and children in Israel and the United States as part of a worldwide progressive Jewish women’s organization. Its purpose is to help Na’amat Israel provide educational and social services, including day care, vocational training, legal aid for women, absorption of new immigrants,

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community centers, and centers for the prevention and treatment of domestic violence. Na’amat USA advocates on issues relating to women’s rights, the welfare of children, education and the United States-Israel relationship. Na’amat USA also helps strengthen Jewish and Zionist life in communities throughout the United States. Na’amat USA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Eastern Area 505 Eighth Ave., Suite 12A04 New York, NY 10018 212-563-4962 eastern.area@naamat.org Southeast Area 4400 N. Federal Hwy., Suite 50 Boca Raton, FL 33431 561-368-8898 raenazucker@gmail.com Midwest Area 10024 N. Skokie Blvd., Suite 226 Skokie, IL 60077 847-329-7172 naamatmdw@aol.com Western Area 16161 Ventura Blvd., #101 Encino, CA 91436 818-981-1298 wanaamat@sbcglobal.net

Dear Haverot,

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n February, 33 members of Na’amat USA participated in the Na’amat International Solidarity Conference in Israel along with delegations from six other countries and representatives from Israel. This was an extraordinary trip, with an unprecedented opportunity to meet with so many of our counterparts from Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Belgium, Argentina and Uruguay.

We were busy from early morning until late at night, traveling throughout Israel to meet with Na’amat leaders and government officials; to visit Na’amat day care centers, a youth village, a center for

president’s memory.

For comprehensive coverage of the trip that will fill you with pride to be part of Na’amat, read editor Judith Sokoloff ’s feature article “On the Road With Na’amat” in this issue.

During the last few months, Na’amat USA has been launching “Spotlight,” a series of interviews with some of the remarkable Na’amat Israel women who have helped make Na’amat’s aspirations a reality. Our national public relacontinued on page 29

Israel Malovani

The Na’amat USA delegation gathered for a photo at the festive final dinner at the Na’amat International Solidarity Conference.

the treatment of domestic violence and the women’s health center in Karmiel; and to participate in dedications of new projects and in sessions with many of the volunteers and staff of Na’amat Israel.

Na’amat USA played a prominent role in the conference.

Members of our executive board presented greetings and shared personal thoughts at functions throughout the country. I was honored to be asked to represent all the Na’amat presidents at the opening ceremony at Israel President Reuven Rivlin’s official residence in Jerusalem. In Beersheva, Jane Blitz of California gave a very moving account of her “supermom,” Alice Howard, z"l, at the groundbreaking ceremony of a new day care center being built in our former

On the Road With Na’amat At the Na’amat International Solidarity Conference in Israel,

members from eight countries discovered that We Are One Big Family.

By JUDITH A. SOKOLOFF our many vital facilities at meetings and conferences. Then there’s Na’amat the reality. And it’s hard to avoid the ageold cliché: There is nothing more moving, no better way to comprehend the totality and significance of our women’s movement than to actually observe the day care centers, high schools and women’s centers that we build and nourish; to talk to the families who benefit from our support; to meet the directors and workers of our facilities in the various regions of Israel. It’s clear: Na’amat changes people’s lives for the better, often dramatically. If conference participants were cheerleaders for Na’amat at the start of our journey, they were dancing and jumping even higher by the end.

So let me take you on the road with Na’amat, a trip with numerous high points. For that, we can thank Galia Wolloch, Na’amat Israel president,

who joined us during several events, and Shirli Shavit, director of the International Department, whose careful planning made every moment meaningful, inspirational and exciting and who accompanied us throughout the journey.

“The conference is a dream come true for Na’amat,” Shirli declared.

Our first memorable experience was a reception at Israel President Reuven Rivlin’s official residence on February 10. He warmly welcomed and thanked Na’amat members, remarking: “In Israel’s Declaration of Independence, our leaders committed themselves to the complete social and political equality for all citizens of Israel, without distinction of religion, race or gender. And when we promise something, we then must be committed to working hard to deliver.

You, the women of Na’amat, have always supported the State of Israel and dedicated so much to the welfare of the citizens of Israel. You were always proud Zionists, even in times when people were afraid to show public support for Israel.

Moreover, your support helped, and still

Students from Kanot Youth Village, who performed at the President’s House, were excited to see the winter 2014-15 issue of Na’amat Woman magazine in which their school was featured.

From left: Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, first lady Nechama Rivlin, Na’amat USA president Liz Raider and her husband Dave Raider sing “Hatikvah” at the gala reception at the President’s House.

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Photos by Israel Malovani, Mishel Amzal, Alex Huber, and Judith Sokoloff.

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ake 120 wildly enthusiastic members of Na’amat speaking five languages and representing eight countries on a Na’amat International Solidarity Conference. Put them on three buses and take them to Na’amat schools, day care centers, community centers and youth villages for five days, early morning until late night. These women from the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Belgium and Israel were warmly welcomed by their sisters in Beersheva, Jerusalem, Karmiel, Lod, Hadera, Rosh Ha’ayin and Tel Aviv, proving — as it was trumpeted over and over — that we are one big family.

There’s the Na’amat that is an abstraction — we read about its work in this magazine, newspapers, brochures and various online platforms. We see photos and videos, and we hear about

In Beersheva, Na’amat held a groundbreaking ceremony for a new day care center named in memory of Alice Howard, former president of Na’amat USA. From left: Jane Blitz, Howard’s daughter; Heftzi Zohar, deputy mayor of Beersheva; and Hagit Pe’er, head of Na’amat in Beersheva.

In a mock army induction at Sde Boker, Na’amat members donned army jackets, put on dog tags and learned about mortars, missiles and tanks from young soldiers.

Delegates broke out in song and dance at the Beersheva Women’s Center.

At the grave site of Paula and David Ben-Gurion in Sde Boker, from left: Amir Greenberg, Na’amat construction engineer; Denise Sadeh Cohen, president of Na’amat Belgium; Dora Duenyas, vice president of Na’amat Uruguay; Liza Rivkin, director of the Na’amat Early Childhood Network; Sari Shilon, Na’amat ombudsman; Marta Haber, president of Na’amat Argentina; Masha Lubelsky, Na’amat representative to WZO Executive; Hagit Pe’er, head of Na’amat in Beersheva; Sarah Beutel, president of Na’amat Canada, Ceres Maltz Bin, president of Na’amat Brazil; Liz Raider, president of Na’amat USA; Esther Bleier, president of Na’amat Mexico; Orly Bitty, Na’amat attorney; Shirli Shavit, head of the Na’amat International Department; Liora Lenger, head of Na’amat in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

The Glickman Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Domestic Violence has a day care facility in its women’s shelter for children too young to attend local schools.

Delegates talked to a caregiver holding a toddler.

helps us, to ensure that we live up to our promises and that we keep alive the symbiotic connection between Israel’s Jewish and democratic identities.”

Greetings from the president were expected, but when Nechama Rivlin, his wife, got up to speak, the audience was happily surprised. She talked about how moved she was by her visit to a shelter for battered women earlier that week and by the unforgettable stories told by the residents. Speaking about the advances and responsibilities of women, she commented: “Women are the change that we want to see in the world, and we are not alone in this journey. … “Many partners have helped us create a better future for our children — for the young, for the old — whether Muslims, Christians or Jews. Many members of our community are looking for ways to improve our world, knowing that it is our shared responsibility — with the understanding that our own welfare depends on that of our neighbor. I want to thank you, dear women, volunteers, for shedding light on issues that need attention and never allowing us to forget our obligation to repair the world and give a hand to those who need it. It is our obligation as women, and I am grateful for the sense of commitment we, Jewish women from all over the world, share.”

Liz Raider, Na’amat USA president, thanked the president and first lady for the opportunity to meet and 6

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Delegates and Na’amat staff posed for a photo on the grounds of the Glickman Center.

Fifth and sixth from left are Orit Earon and Ruti Ozeri, directors of the center; far right is Liora Lenger, head of Na’amat in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

hear from them. “Our countries may be separated by oceans,” she said, “but our goals, our work and hearts, are as one, in providing continued support for the expansion of the programs and services of Na’amat in Israel. Together, we all strive to ensure that the promise of a brighter future for all Israeli citizens is a reality.”

Masha Lubelsky, former president of Na’amat Israel, former Knesset member and Na’amat representative to the World Zionist Organization Executive, remarked: “We pledge today to continue our Zionist work, because we know that Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel lives!”

Entertainment was provided by a talented five-member singing group from Na’amat’s Kanot Youth Village.

As journalist Greer Fay Cashman wrote in The Jerusalem Post (February 13): “The Na’amat women had come to express solidarity with Israel and with each other and when they rose to sing ‘Hatikvah,’ it was almost deafening. It is quite common for the national anthem to be played or sung at the President’s House to signify the end of any given event, but rarely is it sung with such enthusiasm and commitment.”

South to Beersheva

On the bus south to Beersheva the next day, Shirli stressed that new day care centers are a priority for Na’amat.

“People can’t afford private day care, some of which charge twice the

Na’amat fees. And we have waiting lists with hundreds of children.” So it was with great happiness that participants joined in the groundbreaking ceremony for a new day care center in the growing city of Beersheva, dedicated to the memory of Alice Howard, past president of Na’amat USA. Jane Blitz, Alice’s daughter, spoke movingly about her “supermom” who instilled in her children and grandchildren her love of Judaism and Israel. Lisa Rivkin, head of the organization’s Early Childhood Network, spoke about the challenge of building much needed preschools in the north and south of Israel. Afterwards, the buses split up to take us to three day care centers in the area, all projects of Na’amat USA. Later, back at Na’amat’s community and women’s center in Beersheva, we were briefed by Hagit Pe’er, chairperson of Na’amat in the Negev region.

She oversees 14 day care centers, two of which target at-risk children as well as a women’s rights center that provides legal counseling and other services to more than 1,300 women and their families each year. “Women here have a lot of problems and Na’amat provides them with critical assistance,” she said.

Among them are virtual workshops for women’s empowerment — 15 lectures that women can view online. There are also on-site workshops dealing with parenting, empowerment, work-life balance, neurolinguistic programming

In Karmiel, Na’amat members placed a wreath and lit candles at a memorial for Argentines killed in antiSemitic attacks in 1992 and 1994 in Buenos Aires.

Gil Gat day care center in Lod, a project of Na’amat Belgium, provides loving care for high-risk children.

Na’amat Canada members celebrate the progress of the day care center they are building in Karmiel.

and a group for women on maternity leave. Hagit said that Bedouin women come to some of the workshops, but she would like to go into their community where they face much violence, poverty and lack of education.

The lightly populated Negev is mostly desert. Camel crossing signs are not unusual. Three-quarters of its 630,000 residents are Jews; the rest are mostly Bedouin Arabs. Poverty is a bigger problem in the Negev than in the rest of Israel. The region also faces special security issues due to its

proximity to Gaza. During last year’s conflict with Gaza, known as Operation Protective Edge, the area came under heavy rocket fire with numerous casualties.

Concerned about the safety of the children, Hagit was forced to close 13 day care centers. The one center that stayed open, she told us, was at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva, the region’s only major hospital. With babies and toddlers cared for, doctors and nurses could do their jobs without worrying about the safety of their children. Na’amat is working on adding safe rooms to day

Students at Ayanot Youth Village talked about their lives — before and after coming to the boarding high school.

Flaming torches and the sounds of drums, shofars and trumpets greeted members at the entrance of the Na’amat Karmiel Community Center.

care facilities. “If there is no safe room in the center, you have only 40 seconds to run with all the children to a shelter,” Hagit pointed out.

Soon, 90,000 soldiers will be moved off bases further north in Israel to an area near Beersheva, she said. This means 5,000 additional families with children will need day care. Hagit is grateful that when the Alice Howard day care center is completed this year, “70 new children will join our Na’amat family.”

We learned about the hardship

of life in the region during Operation Protective Edge from three brave souls who worked tirelessly during the war: the coordinator of emergency care at Soroka hospital, a helicopter engineer who volunteered in the special rescue forces and a female combat helicopter pilot, who has made the 10-year requisite commitment to serve. The pilot gave us a harrowing description of her rescue missions to save injured soldiers inside Gaza. It was stressed how much the hospital needs additional fully protected day care classrooms.

A multicourse meal at the center included a wide variety of scrumptious desserts made by Na’amat volunteers in Dimona. Ceres Maltz Bin, president

The delegates wave to the photographer in front of the Na’aamt Community and Health Centers in Karmiel.

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of Na’amat Brazil, exclaimed, “I am so happy to be part of Na’amat, of the joy and the exchange of experiences!” An Israeli folk singer regaled us with his lively repertoire. Then, suddenly, dancing broke out with Israeli flags in hand — a great way to top off the evening.

We headed back to bustling, growing Tel Aviv. The city, like every place we saw in Israel, was dotted with heavy construction equipment as new buildings seemed to rise before our eyes.

“The national bird of Israel,” says Dave Raider (architect and husband of Na’amat president Liz Raider), “is the crane,” repeating a popular joke.

A Day With Na’amat in Tel Aviv

By 9:00 a.m. the next day, starting off in Tel Aviv, we were gathered at Na’amat’s Glickman Shelter for the Prevention and Treatment of Domestic Violence, built by Canadian members. The impressive facility has two parts: a unit for counseling and group therapy plus a shelter for battered women. Directors Orit Earon and Ruti Ozeri spoke to us, as well as Ronit Lev Ari, the facility’s first director. We learned that Glickman is the only shelter in Tel Aviv, and one of 14 in Israel. The center services Jews, Christians, Muslims, Bedouins, Druze, tourists and illegal immigrants along with their children.

Touring the attractive, airy building, we noticed that each family had its own bedroom and bathroom (though two single women may share a room).

We saw residents preparing food and

setting a lovely table, and children, too young to attend a local school, were being lovingly cared for in the nursery.

The center has a good relationship with the neighborhood and many local volunteers work there.

Next, we were on the road to Na’amat headquarters on Arlozorov Street in Tel Aviv. On the way — we never wasted a second — Liora Lenger, chairperson of Na’amat Tel Aviv-Jaffa, presented an overview of her region.

Some 1,800 children attend 19 day care centers. About 700 children were shut out last year due to lack of space. Two of the centers are multipurpose, where the preschoolers can go “pajama to pajama” from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Na’amat also provides afterschool programs for 600 kindergarten children from local schools. Add legal advice bureaus and two community centers, where women’s empowerment workshops play an important role. There is also a network for businesswomen, workshops on Arab-Jewish coexistence and technological high schools for teenagers who could not succeed in the regular school system. “We have the whole package,” Liora pointed out.

She told us about an event held on the International Day for the PrevenOn a tour of Jerusalem, delegates made a stop on Mt. Scopus to enjoy the spectacular view of the city.

tion of Violence this past November. A group of young Na’amat women set up a huge black box at Tel Aviv University.

They invited people to go inside and put on earphones to hear firsthand accounts of sexual harassment and violence against women and then write and post their thoughts outside. “It was very moving,” she recalled. She emphasized the importance of Na’amat’s work to raise awareness about women’s issues, adding, “Everything we do is empowerment!”

Liora continued: “We are privileged that we have you all to remind us what an important Zionist job we do. Working for equality is part of this Zionist work. Thank you!”

At headquarters, we were updated by the organization’s department heads.

Galia began: “How moving it is to know we have sisters all over the world who really care for us, who love us, who find it important that Na’amat Israel is on the map, doing what we do best: taking care of women and families. Together — all of us — are one big family!”

Professor Shosh Arad, president of the Ruppin Academic Center and head of the Na’amat science research grants committee, talked about the professional scholarships Na’amat awards every year to women in higher education, particularly about the ones awarded to women in Ph.D. programs in science, agriculture, health, nutrition, the environment and, starting recently, in nano-

technology. She explained her own work at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the field of microalgae. Shosh then introduced Michal Shevach, who received a Na’amat research grant in biotechnology. We were fascinated with the detailed description of her work regenerating cardiac tissue. Her passion was clear.

Avi Nissankoren, attorney and chairman of the Histadrut Federation of Labor, spoke about the relationship of Na’amat and the Histadrut, “which together worked to establish the State of Israel and have shared the values of equality and solidarity and continue to bridge the social gap and the gap between men and women.” He emphasized that much work has to be done to decrease gender discrimination, increase the role of women in government and other leadership roles, and advance employment among the haredim (ultra-religious Jews) and the Arab populations. He added, “We must raise the minimum wage,” and he hopes that Na’amat and the Histadrut together “will lead social change.”

Edith Titunovich, attorney and director of the Na’amat Legal Bureaus and Women’s Rights Centers, talked about some of the cases her department has tackled lately. In a country with no civil divorce (only religious), Na’amat lawyers were able to successfully mediate difficult divorce situations.

She explained that Na’amat has

Still full of energy, delegates danced to a klezmer band until the last moment of the conference.

worked for 10 years to change the laws that deal with dividing pensions in divorce cases. The law, which came into effect a week before our conference, now brings family law (which allows for a pension to be divided) and pension law (which allowed nothing for a spouse not registered in her husband’s pension) into accord.

Na’amat’s first priority is to help women from lower socio-economic strata, Edith said, “but we are also an important address for women who can pay.” She added that Na’amat takes on the challenges of family law – and the impact of the male-preferential rules of halacha (traditional Jewish law), helping unmarried couples who need documents for their children, with rights of single parents and gay parents. “We are the ER no matter where or what or who.” Edith stressed that Na’amat lawyers are highly qualified and unbiased.

“We run the marathon and we are the octopus,” she said metaphorically. “We extend our reach all over.”

Edith also emphasized the importance of “bringing men into the discussion of equal rights if we want to achieve equality.” And we have to work to get men equal rights, she said, pointing to a case where Na’amat helped a male physician get parental leave when his third child was born (his wife is also a doctor). “We need to get out of the box,” she urged, “to think differently 10

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and bring a different point of view to society. We need to change the workplace for the benefit of all, to make it more family-friendly. This will bring more prosperity and equality.”

Galia Etzion, attorney and director of the Counseling and Legislation Department, talked about the importance of getting more women on the party lists for elections, where there has been “some success.” Women vote in fewer numbers than men, she pointed out, and “we are telling them, if you don’t vote, no one will care about you. Women are not goldfish, we are silent no more.”

With the Israeli elections just a month away at the time, we were surrounded by a media and electioneering frenzy.

“Our work is day in and day out. We use Facebook a lot — a low cost way of reaching the young,” she said. “We see change, little by little,” noting that Israel’s military just appointed its first female senior combat-battalion commander.

After the reports and the introduction of many Na’amat workers, the presidents of the seven visiting countries gave presentations about their activities.

Liz Raider, president of Na’amat USA, talked about the successful move of the national office from New York to California, the increased use of social media, “which is making a difference” in fundraising and membership, and the plans for the organization’s

Presidents Liz Raider and Galia Wolloch celebrate their birthdays at the closing dinner in Tel Aviv.

90th anniversary starting in the fall.

Canadian president Sarah Beutel reported on the various fundraising, cultural, educational and community service events involving Na’amat members in eight cities. They have raised the profile of the organization and are proud of a new club in Toronto for 20 and 30 year olds. They are also celebrating 90 years — with plans to inspire a new generation of leaders and improve communication and marketing strategies.

The 11 groups of Na’amat Brazil, reported president Ceres Maltz Bin, have been focusing on cultural and educational programs, many in partnership with other Jewish organizations and synagogues. They run educational seminars and arrange trips outside the country. Their outreach includes the attractive Na’amat Pioneiras website updated continually (check it out: naamat. org/br). They are proud of the several groups of young women that they have recently started.

Mexico Na’amat is 80 years old, president Esther Bleier informed us.

Centered in Mexico City, members provide grants for scholarships and help low-income families with food needs. continued on page 24

The Na’amat World Movement Declaration of Solidarity and Support for Israel (written in English, Hebrew, Spanish and French) was presented to Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin. From left: first lady Nechama Rivlin; Masha Lubelsky, Na’amat representative to the World Zionist Organization Executive; Shirli Shavit, director of the Na’amat International Department; and Mr. Rivlin.

Current Na’amat presidents signed multiple copies of the Na’amat Declaration of Solidarity at the closing dinner. From left: Esther Bleier (Mexico), past Israeli presidents Tamar Eshel and Masha Lubelsky; Galia Wolloch (Israel), past Israeli president Talia Livni, Liz Raider (USA), Sarah Beutel (Canada), Denise Sadeh Cohen (Belgium), past Israeli president Ofra Friedman, Dora Duenyas (Uruguay), Ceres Maltz Bin (Brazil) and Marta Haber (Argentina).

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French Jews: Is it time to come home?

A look at why Jews leave France and how they fare in Israel

by MICHELE CHABIN

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rowing up in Paris, Andre Rothschild didn’t know much about Israel, so it came as a shock when, during the winter of 2008-2009, fellow students at the Sorbonne launched verbal attacks against him over Israel’s conduct during Operation Cast Lead, the anti-terror Gaza war Israel was fighting against Hamas at the time.

“I didn’t grow up in a Zionist family. We didn’t go to Israel on vacations,” Rothschild, now 23 and a student at the Hebrew University, said on a chilly winter day in Jerusalem. “My only experience up until then was a youth trip to Israel when I was 17.”

His limited Jewish experience didn’t prevent the many pro-Palestinian, antiIsraeli students on campus from accusing Rothschild’s “people” of war crimes.

“I was expected to be the ‘spokesman’ for the IDF [Israel Defenses Forces] and Israel solely because I have a Jewish-sounding name,” Rothschild said of the barrage of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic criticism he was forced to contend with in and outside the classroom. “That’s when I first considered making aliyah.”

After moving to Israel on his own four years ago, he served two years in

the IDF before enrolling in the Hebrew University.

Rothschild said anti-Semitism was just one of the reasons he decided to move to Israel. “I want to live as a Jew in a Jewish country. I believe in the Jewish national dream. Israel is a great place for young people because the society is so much more open to risk-taking.”

Even so, he believes that Jews “shouldn’t move to Israel for negative reasons. They should come only if they truly want to live here.”

Immigrants make aliyah for a variety of reasons, but the mounting number of anti-Semitic incidents, coupled with the economic slowdown in Europe, was certainly a catalyst for many, perhaps most, of the European olim (immigrants) who have moved to Israel during the past decade, immigration officials say.

According to the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the Jewish Agency, of the 26,500 Jews who immigrated to Israel in 2014 — 32 percent more than in 2013 — about 8,640 came from Western Europe. Of these, nearly 7,000 were from France. That’s more than double the 3,400 French Jews who made aliyah in 2013. They were the vast majority of the 4,600 Western Europeans who made aliyah in 2013.

The January 2015 attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris in which four French Jews were murdered two days after the attack on Charlie Hebdo was the latest in a long and growing string of attacks against Western European Jews and their institutions over the past decade.

Given the fact that France’s Jewish population, estimated at between 500,000 and 700,000, is the largest in Europe (and the world’s third largest after Israel and the United States), it comes as no surprise that the majority of incidents and attacks have taken place there.

In truth, incidents such as spraypainted swastikas on Jewish gravestones are not, in themselves, spurring aliyah.

What has increased aliyah are the gruesome hate crimes against European Jews perpetrated solely because they were Jewish. In France, statistics reveal 527 anti-Semitic acts (violence, threats, vandalism) in the first seven months of 2014, compared with 276 in the same period the previous year. The vast majority of attacks, both verbal and physical, are being carried out by French Muslim Arabs whose families emigrated from North Africa.

The number and intensity of attacks skyrocketed during last summer’s Israel-Hamas war, which the Arab and

The Israeli government has come under fire both in Europe and in Israel for insisting that the best place for French Jews, Photos by Debbie Hill

and all Jews for that matter, is the State of Israel.

Above and opposite page: French bakeries are popping up in many cities as the growing French community makes its culinary mark on Israel.

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I would not describe this as a situation where French Jews are in constant fear. The Jewish community has received a great deal of support from the French government.

This is not the 1930s.

Muslim world, including France’s large Muslim minority, called a massacre.

Some 5 million Muslims — roughly 10 times the number of Jews — live in France, the majority of them with roots in North Africa. The families of most of France’s Jews also emigrated from the former French North Africa — Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria.

“There is a new anti-Semitism in France,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told The Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg just before the attacks on the Jewish supermarket and the offices of Charlie Hebdo. “We have the old antiSemitism, and I’m obviously not downplaying it, that comes from the extreme right, but this new anti-Semitism comes from the difficult neighborhoods, from immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, who have turned anger about Gaza into something very dangerous. Israel and Palestine are just a pretext. There is something far more profound taking place now.”

Valls said it is “legitimate to criticize the politics of Israel. This criticism exists in Israel itself. But this is not what we are talking about in France.

This is radical criticism of the very existence of Israel, which is anti-Semitic.

There is an incontestable link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Behind anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

The prime minister noted that the Jews of France “are profoundly attached to France but they need reassurance that they are welcome here, that they are secure here.”

In the wake of the supermarket attack the French government deployed thousands of soldiers to protect synagogues, Jewish schools and Jewish institutions. Thousands more soldiers are guarding mosques and Muslim institutions deemed “sensitive” because they are vulnerable to revenge attacks 14

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by French nationalists and others. In February, two soldiers who were protecting a Jewish community center in Nice were injured in broad daylight by a knife-wielding assailant.

Avi Mayer, spokesman for the Jewish Agency for Israel, which facilitates immigration, agreed that French Jews “live with a very profound sense of insecurity” heightened by the kosher supermarket attack.

“Until the recent period,” French Jews “were making aliyah for a variety of reasons, including economic,” observed Mayer. At this point they are making aliyah largely due to a sense of insecurity in France. Many feel they have nothing to go back to. That, combined with the improved integration efforts by the Israel government and the Jewish Agency, has helped combat reverse aliyah back to France and other countries.”

Elaborating on the French Jews’ special relationship with Israel, Mayer said: “What’s interesting about the French Jewish community is that they maintain a very strong connection to Israel and have done so long before the recent problems. That’s mostly a result of the fact that the community is largely comprised of Jews of North Africa.

When North African Jewry departed in the 50s and 60s, about half went to France, half to Israel. So French Jews travel to Israel rather frequently. They go for holidays and vacations. Some have second homes here. They send their children to Israel on various programs. Israel is not a foreign country to them, so I think their integration into Israeli society may be smoother than it is for some other immigrant groups.”

Mayer said the Jewish Agency and the Ministry of Immigration have stepped up their efforts to ensure that all French and other European Jews who want to immigrate can do so in

the most expeditious way. Following the supermarket attack, the agency’s French-language call center received “hundreds” of calls from French Jews seeking information on aliyah.

The agency has increased the number of aliyah fairs in France while the Ministry of Immigration has stepped up its services, from university scholarships to assistance to business owners and other new immigrants trying to gain a foothold in Israel.

But the Israeli government has also come under fire both in Europe and in Israel for insisting that the best place for French Jews, and all Jews for that matter, is the State of Israel.

During the Jerusalem-based funeral for the supermarket victims, Israel Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu told mourners, “Jews have a right to live in many countries and have full security, but I believe that they know in their heart, there is one country which is their historic home, a state that will always accept them with open arms.”

Professor Richard Cohen, an expert in French Jewry at the Hebrew University, said that although French Jews are alarmed by the increase in anti-Semitism, Israel shouldn’t expect the largescale immigration of French Jews, “especially those with deep roots in France.

“I can’t imagine a major upheaval in French Jewish society,” Cohen said, referring to emigration. “I would be hard-pressed to say there is a general malaise in French Jewish society as a whole. Perhaps it is felt more in cities like Marseilles, Toulouse and certain less prosperous areas of Paris.”

Cohen pointed out that France began to receive large numbers of North African Jews and Muslims at the end of the Algerian War in 1962, and that many of these immigrants and their children live in close proximity to each other in

working-class French neighborhoods in and around France’s biggest cities.

“There is friction,” he said. Anti-Semitic incidents usually take place “where there is a significant number of traditional or Orthodox Jews and lower-class Muslims.”

While not denying the seriousness of the attacks, Cohen warned against fear-mongering. “I would not describe this as a situation where Jews are in constant fear. The Jewish community has received a great deal of support from the French government. This is not the 1930s and the attacks are being carried out by splinter groups that are condemned by French society.”

Others point the long and proud 2,000-year-old history of France’s Jewish community, where they have been full citizens since 1791. The country has a vibrant network of synagogues, schools, community centers, cultural institutions along with service and students organizations.

In response to Netanyahu’s call for French Jews to move to Israel, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director of the European Jewish Association, told the Israeli newspaper Maariv’s website NRG (nrg.co.il): “The Israeli government must stop this Pavlovian response every time there is an attack against Jews in Europe. I regret that after every anti-Semitic attack in Europe, the Israeli government dispenses the same

statements about the importance of aliyah rather than take every diplomatic and informational means at its disposal to increase the safety of Jewish life in Europe. Every such Israeli campaign severely weakens and damages the Jewish communities that have the right to live securely wherever they are.”

He continued: “The reality is that a large majority of European Jews do not plan to immigrate to Israel. The Israeli government must recognize this reality and also remember the strategic importance of the Jewish communities as supporters of Israel in the countries in which they live.”

Lea Taieb, a 22-year-old business student who spoke by phone from Paris, said she began to consider leaving France — although to where she cannot say — following the attack on the kosher supermarket. “It’s a question I’ve been asking myself, and I’ve been trying to pursue a career that will enable me to relocate easily.”

Taieb, who recently completed a marketing internship in Tel Aviv, said the experience “showed me the limits of working in a country in a foreign language, which was English.” Even more frustrating was that she doesn’t speak Hebrew well.

The dilemma, she said, is feeling torn between wanting to remain in France and knowing she may not have a

future there. “I’ve always lived in France and always felt I belonged to France.”

But a brief discussion of her family’s roots reveals the depths of French anti-Semitism. Her Polish-born grandparents, who moved to France “because they thought it would be safe,” were deported during the Holocaust. “They wrongly trusted the French authorities,” Taieb said.

Her father, who is Sephardic, moved from Algeria to France. “I’m the product of the Jewish diaspora and it’s complicated,” she observed. “Recently, I’ve come to realize my future may not be in France. Maybe I won’t want my children born in an environment where being Jewish could be dangerous. Last year in the university I experienced anti-Semitism and realized it’s deeply ingrained in French society. People used to hide it, but now there’s no shame in being an anti-Semite. It’s become an identity. I feel rejected by my own country and, at the same time, closer to the Jewish community, despite the fact that I’m not religious. In Tel Aviv, I felt more French. In France, I feel more Jewish.”

Taieb’s parents are divorced, and her father is making aliyah in the near future. Her mother is considering ali-

Jamilla Arlette lives in Paris but is thinking about moving to Israel. She already owns an apartment in Netanya, a coastal city where many French Jews live.

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I want to live as a Jew in a Jewish country. I believe in the Jewish national dream. Israel is a great place for young people because the society is so much more open to risk-taking.

One can buy real French crepes in this popular Netanya shop.

yah once Taieb’s 13-year-old sister gets a bit older. Her brother is studying in England and may stay there. “I also have Jewish friends studying in Canada and they plan to stay,” she said. “My father is nearly 65 and almost retired. For me to make aliyah would be far more difficult.”

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n Jerusalem’s southern neighborhoods, French is often the language heard on the bus or in the playground. There are so many immigrants and vacationers from France that French bakeries have recently opened and many businesses — especially real estate agencies and fashionable retail shops — boast about their Frenchspeaking staffers.

Many of the immigrants are retired and living on pensions, a fact that makes aliyah possible. Immigrants who are still working have three options: open a busi-

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ness in Israel, work for an Israeli company or business or commute to France.

Nethaniel Hadida, 25, works in the Ness Patisseries, a friend’s new café on Emek Refaim Street, the bustling main street of southern Jerusalem. Having moved from Paris to Jerusalem four years ago, his Hebrew is very good, although many of his customers speak French.

The father of two young children, Hadida was visiting Israel when he decided to make aliyah. “I realized I couldn’t live anywhere else,” he said as he prepared coffee for a customer. “There are many good places to live around the world, but only Israel feels like home.”

For Hadida, home is the place where being Jewish is an asset, not a liability. “We had everything in France: kosher food, Jewish schools, but we didn’t feel safe. In Israel we don’t have to go to a kosher restaurant to feel Jew-

ish. My children can go outside and play without fear. I don’t have to keep my kippah in my pocket. Do I wish everything in Israel wasn’t so bureaucratic? Yes, but I prefer bureaucracy to anti-Semitism.”

Loren Blum, 43, also from Paris, moved to Israel 24 years ago. A little more than a decade ago he was severely injured in a Palestinian terror attack that left 10 people dead.

Seated in Ness Patisserie with his baby daughter, Blum said, “It never occurred to me to leave, even after the attack,” which left him with shrapnel lodged in his head and partially disabled. He is unable to work full time.

“Israel is my home and, over time, my parents and sister and brothers made aliyah, too,” Blum said. “I would advise all Jews to make aliyah, even despite the terror in Israel. Right now I think it’s safer to live in Israel than to live in France.”

In Netanya, a coastal Israeli city whose large population of French immigrants has influenced the cuisine, how people dress and the overall atmosphere, 41-year-old Pascal Gabison said he misses French culture but is far happier in a place where he can openly express his Judaism.

Seated behind the desk of his real estate agency, Gabison, who moved to Netanya from Paris with his wife and children 11 years ago, said he has no regrets over leaving France. “I love the Land of Israel. I’ve been to many places in the world. This is the smallest country but the best place to live, because we can live by the Torah.”

Speaking as an Orthodox Jew, he observed: “Here men aren’t afraid to walk outside wearing a kippah. This is our country.”

Gabison’s business is located near

the beach in a large square filled with outdoor cafés and other businesses displaying signs in French and Russian. Talking about business, he said there has been an upswing in the number of Western Europeans expressing interest in purchasing a second home in Netanya. “Having a home here gives them peace of mind. They feel they have a place to escape, God forbid.”

Sunbathing with friends on the beautiful Netanya beach — on a 70-degree day in January — Jamilla Arlette, 72, explained she lives in Paris but is “checking out” aliyah. An accountant, she already owns a two-bedroom apartment in Netanya. “My brother lives in Netanya but I won’t move here until my children do. My daughter plans to move here this summer.”

As much as she and her family are rooted in France, she said, “all the Jewish people I know in France want to leave and most, though not all, want to come here. If they owned a home and had no problems finding work, I think many of them would come in a heart beat.”

For many, though, moving to Israel is just half the battle. Integrating into a new culture, especially when one is over the age of 30, isn’t easy, according to many immigrants.

Eva Achour, a middle-aged Polishborn psychologist, lived in France for 20 years before making aliyah. Walking her dog near Netanya’s beach, she noted that acclimating to life in Israel has been a challenge.

“I love Israel but not necessarily Israelis,” said Achour, who moved here several years ago to be closer to her grown children. “Their mentality is so different.

People come from all over the world, each with their own mentality and way of doing things. It’s not a melting pot. If there is to be one nation, there needs to be one overarching culture and system.

You won’t find that in Israel.”

Michael Amar, a French-born Israeli who immigrated to Israel a decade ago, summed up the challenges many newcomers face. Co-director of Lev Hai, an organization that assists new and longtime immigrants in their lengthy absorption process, Amar said French immigrants “don’t necessarily

Pascal Gabison, who owns a real estate agency, moved to Netanya 11 years ago. He loves Israel.

know Hebrew, there’s not a lot of work available and they don’t understand the culture here.”

Amar pointed out other difficulties: The high price of Israeli homes is often beyond French immigrants’ reach, and tuition in Israeli public schools isn’t entirely free. Contrary to stereotypes, he added, not all French Jews are wealthy.

Amar said Lev Hai receives many calls from immigrants “who have been ripped off by store owners and homerepair people who hear a French accent or see a nice home and take advantage of them. In many cases, they have no family here and are on their own.”

He estimates that as many as 500 immigrants return to France every year, just as hundreds of American, Russian and other olim return to their countries of origin. Despite the difficulties, Amar predicted that “many” French olim will move to Israel due to Islamic extremists. “Many are calling us from France for help.”

Thousands of Israelis, most of them immigrants from France, attended the Jerusalem funeral for the four Jewish men murdered at the kosher supermarket in Paris.

Benjamin Lastmann was among the mourners. Standing in the cemetery with some friends who had traveled with him from Tel Aviv to show their respects, Lastmann, 24, said he moved to Israel in 2009 because his parents made aliyah.

“I recognized that this is the place I want to stay. Yes, it’s been difficult to adapt to a new country, a new mentality, but I’m not sorry I came. When you live in Paris you have 40 synagogues that are potential terrorist targets. Here in Israel I feel like we’re participating in a

Acclimating to Israeli life has been a challenge for psychologist Eva Achour.

project to build a country.”

Meir Nadaf, 28, also from Paris, agreed. “I used to live in the neighborhood where the supermarket attack occurred, and although I was shocked by the attack I wasn’t completely surprised.”

The Tel Avivian said he sees “no future” for the Jews of France “because I don’t think the security situation will improve.”

Difficult though it might be for his friends and family to uproot themselves from their homes, businesses and communities, Nadaf is convinced they can make it work, given a lot of time and patience.

“This is home,” he said. “It’s time to come home.”

Michele Chabin is a journalist living in Jerusalem. She covers the Middle East for The New York Jewish Week and other publications. She wrote “Ellis Island Journey” in our fall 2014 issue.

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Linda Stein The making of an artist-activist, feminist Jew

by AMY STONE

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inda Stein comes across as one fearless artist-activist, but says, “All my work in the last 30 years is about protection.” Quite simply, her mission is to defy bullying in all its forms and stand up to a compendium of evils: sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, ableism.

With her spiky red hair and athletic build, she doesn’t look like someone who grew up scared. But throughout her childhood, she had a recurring dream of “running, always running, But the bad guys never got me.”

Quick cut to 9/11. Stein and her as-

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even in the absence of heads or arms.

Five years later, the minimalist torsos evolved into something more clearly political. The message was gender bending — muscular black leather torsos that cross sexual boundaries and wearable armor using acrylicized paper. Protection was now bound up with what Stein calls “the fluidity of gender.”

She says, “We don’t have to stick to the binaries of what makes a man and what makes a woman.” Indeed, her work celebrates the fluidity of gender and tears down all types of gender stereotypes that people accept unquestion-

Photos courtesy of Linda Stein except where indicated.

Stein joins protective female figures (right to left) Kannon, Buddhist goddess of mercy; pop icon Princess Mononoke; Wonder Woman; and Stein’s Knight of Protection sculpture.

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sistants are running, holding hands as they flee her Lower Manhattan studio, in sight of the towering inferno of the World Trade Center.

It took a year before she felt psychologically able to return to sculpture.

Before 9/11, her work, which involved using machete blades and other found objects, had been abstract. Now, female forms were emerging — giant vertical shapes with waists, hips and breasts. In 2002, they became her Knights of Protection — elegant mounted torsos of wood, metal, stone and leather. Modern Aphrodites, they are powerful figures,

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ingly as natural. She speaks of “gender constructions and gender constrictions,” and that her work is about finding the courage to break these molds and inspire that bravery in others.

The androgynous black torsos are highly erotic, made of skin-tight leather. With their breasts, flaring hips and mighty build, they defy male/female stereotypes. They could be elegant Renaissance figures or headless motorcycle gangs. Adding identity to the black leather torsos are scavenged materials: elaborate metal latches, a brass NYPD pin, heavy chains, buckles, zippers and the visual pun of CO2 cartridges for making not war but seltzer. Art historian Christina M. Penn-Goetsch has suggested that the zippers are like scars. With titles like “Tough Love 683,” “Defender 696” and “In Charge 694,” their sex is in the eye of the beholder.

Stein’s other more lighthearted Fluidity of Gender sculptures, the acrylicized paper forms, are made, in part, from Wonder Woman comics updated to include her own feminist messages.

It’s easier to ask questions like “What defines bravery? What makes a hero?” from inside a cartoon message balloon.

Wonder Woman, wearing knee-high red boots and American flag swimsuit, asks: “What are masculine/feminine expectations and limitations?”

Wonder Woman is joined on Stein’s armor by anime pop icon Princess

“WHAT ARE MASCULINE/FEMININE EXPECTATIONS AND LIMITATIONS?”

“WOULD YOU WEAR A BATHING SUIT TO FIGHT THE BAD GUYS?”

Wonder Woman is a primary protector on Stein’s “bully-proof” vests.

Monoxnoke, Japanese warrior girl and fearless protector of the environment; and Kannon, the sometimes androgynous Buddhist goddess of mercy and compassion. Wonder Woman is the primary protector on Stein’s “bully-proof” vests displayed in her Tribeca studio.

Explaining the appeal of Wonder Woman, Stein says, “I love her because she’s strong, she’s mobile, she avenges wrongs without killing.”

Stein says she works intuitively.

Then once a creative direction materializes, she digs deep. She’s embraced the original Wonder Woman superhero created by William Moulton Marston, the eccentric Harvard-educated psychologist and inventor of the prototype polygraph (lie detector). His 1941 World War II superhero is the lone female in the superhero pantheon. The Amazonian warrior come to Earth to right wrongs, she is protected by her indestructible Bracelets of Submission, Lasso of Truth (a spinoff of Marston’s polygraph) and weaponized tiara. Never killing, she fights for peace, love, justice and sexual equality. Stein rejects the

Linda Stein lays hands on her body-swapping armor “Heroic Compassion 665,” with its Wonder Woman images. (2010)

post-Marston “bullet-breasted sex object in swimsuit.” As one of Stein’s updated Wonder Woman cartoon bubbles reads, “Would you wear a bathing suit to fight the bad guys?”

The heavy metal chains on Stein’s black leather torsos may riff on Marston’s proclivity for placing Wonder Woman in chains. Certainly Wonder Woman’s muscular thighs and skimpy garb provide perfect material for Stein’s mission to use art to break down society’s masculine/feminine divisions.

In navigating the great divide, Stein herself has evolved. Growing up in a working class family in the Bronx, she tried to fit into traditional female expectations, stuffing nylons into the bra of her hand-me-down swimsuit to emulate her pin-up girl older sister. At the same time, she describes herself as having been “very, very athletic,” exhilarated playing hard against the most athletic boys, those who she knew could SPRING 2015

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Stein adds feminist concerns to the cartoon bubbles of Wonder Woman images.

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HAWT was incorporated as a nonprofit six years later. Board members include Gloria Steinem and Elizabeth A. Sackler, whose foundation gave the Brooklyn Museum its Center for Feminist Art, home of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party.”

Not mere self-promotion, Stein says

adult, Stein managed to find her victim and apologize to her. Apology accepted.

She says, “If only I had been like one of my gender-fluid sculptural Knights of Protection for Carole.”

Participants in HAWT events are invited to put on what Stein calls “bodyswapping armor” and try a new avatar Amy Stone

beat her. The price she paid was bullying in the form of ostracism by other girls. But, she recalls, “If a boy was a weaker athlete than me, it was my job to see that he won anyway. … I grew up at a time when boys were supposed to be (or at least appear to be) better, stronger, smarter than girls. If a girl wanted to be popular, she learned very quickly that it was her responsibility to play out this masculinist scenario.”

Stein accepted that “the male ego took precedence” over hers — and she was proud at the time to have learned her gender lesson well.

Stein went on to become the first member of her family to go to college.

She got her B.A. degree from Queens College, City University of New York, and her M.A. degree in art and education from Pratt Institute.

Explaining how she has managed to escape the heterosexual binary, she says, “I was straight for much of my growing up days until I was 40.” But, “I couldn’t fulfill my potential as much with a man as with a woman.” In 2007, the same year that The Fluidity of Gender coalesced, she married Helen Hardacre, Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society at Harvard.

Stein says it took courage to come out to her mother, who, as it turned out, needed less protection from the truth than Stein had anticipated.

Professionally, everything Stein does is part of her outreach project Have Art Will Travel! Inc. For Gender Justice (HAWT). Started in 1972,

Stein, in bully-proof vest, poses with her tapestry of Holocaust hero Vitka Kempner, a leader of the partisan fighters in the Vilna ghetto. The work combines Kempner images and memorabilia with fabric, zippers and Wonder Woman images.

that HAWT’s purpose is to inspire people to live fearlessly. She sees antibullying as the lens for viewing the evils we live with to then confront them.

Bringing the message to museums and colleges, The Fluidity of Gender torsos and armor have been on the road with Have Art Will Travel since 2010 and will continue into 2017.

Stein wants to move participants through what she calls the 4 Bs: from Bully, Bullied, Bystander to Brave Upstander, ready to stand up against bullies and to develop the courage to risk failure and unpopularity. Her experience has shown, she says, that “using art to inspire participants to explore their own roles and behavior can help them become Upstanders in their everyday lives.”

She’s come clean on her own bullying. In junior high, she was president of the I Hate Carole Club, mean girls picking on a hapless classmate. As an

to get in touch with their inner courage, to swap bodies and shift genders. With Velcro straps and “armordillo” articulated legs, The Fluidity of Gender armor is meant to be worn. Interactive events, an extensive catalog, panels, discussions and videos are part of the traveling exhibit, all for the purpose of inspiring change.

While the written messages can sound a bit clichéd, visitors to the exhibit are responding at schools and museums across the country, especially once they find themselves inside knight’s armor. In Joplin, Missouri, a woman farmer thanked Stein, saying, “You’re the first feminist I’ve ever heard speak here.”

In Johnstown, New York, a male theater major tried on the androgynous armor. Later he wrote Stein, “I have come to the idea that gender is just a thing that they say you are and you can

be what you want to be. … I feel much stronger now walking around campus as a young gay male because of the empowerment you provided me.”

A graduate student in art education and women’s studies at Penn State University brought her husband and two sons, 9 and 12, to the Fluidity of Gender show. Trying on black leather armor with breasts, her husband felt naked.

Her own reaction in Wonder Woman armor: “Man, if I could wear this armor every day, I would feel so tough and protected.”

Knight of Tomorrow 542 is one of Stein’s Knights of Protection series begun after 9/11.

Hannah Senesh is one of the 10 fierce females inspiring Stein’s Holocaust Heroes tapestries.

Assessing the impact of Have Art Will Travel, Stein says, “If I reach a few people at each place, it’s thrilling.”

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ow, she’s finally digging into her Judaism. Stein describes her family as Jewish but not religious. In her youth, she dressed up for the Jewish holidays, and she felt pride in her Judaism as a result of the Six-Day War. Now, Stein says, she is obsessed with the Holocaust.

She is currently at work on Holocaust box sculptures — a series of “Spoon and Shell” tableaux using found objects. The spoons and shells are metaphors for protection and nourishment and a reminder of the impossible choices that many women faced during the Holocaust. The inspiration comes from the story of Leah, a Birkenau inmate who had the inner strength to resist a Polish prisoner’s offer of a spoon, a lifesaving item, in exchange for her body.

The box sculptures and series of 10 tapestries will form Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females. An essential part of Stein’s message: Women have not been

sufficiently recognized for their bravery during the Holocaust. She sees the project as a way to empower exhibit-goers to resist scapegoating and discrimination in their own lives and to stand up for victims.

Stein recounts a related dream from her childhood: “The Nazis were rounding up the Jews again. They got me and took me to a room and told me I was going to be, along with the others, electrocuted. ‘You can electrocute me,’ I said, ‘but I want you to know that I have, as I had in the last Holocaust, electrical insurance!’ ” The fierce females in Stein’s tapestries have no insurance. Most are operating on sheer nerve, standing up to the Nazi murder machine to protect others rather than themselves.

Emerging from thousands of hours of research, Stein’s choices include 10 women who represent different aspects of bravery during the Holocaust. Some are familiar icons — for example, Anne Frank and Hannah Senesh. Others not quite so well known are Ruth Gruber, SPRING 2015

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the American journalist, photographer and humanitarian who documented the life of survivors in post-liberation Europe; Zivia Lubetkin, one of the leaders of the Jewish underground in the Warsaw Ghetto; and Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft, who saved hundreds of Jewish women from the gas chambers in Auschwitz, where she worked in the “infirmary.”

Among the less familiar is Noor Inayat Khan, born in a Moscow monastery to an American mother and an Indian Sufi priest father.

Trained in London as a Special Operations Executive agent, she was the

Knight of New Thoughts 667 empowers the wearer with Wonder Woman images and updated cartoon messages.

One reads: YOU’RE A STRONG BOY … IT’S FUN TO DEFEAT YOU!

last surviving radio operator sent from Britain to aid the French resistance.

Vitka Kempner, less well known than her famous husband, was a leader of the United Partisan Organization’s armed resistance in the Vilna ghetto. She fought alongside founder Abba Kovner, whom she later married.

Fearless in combat, she was the first woman to play a role in blowing up a Nazi train.

Also less familiar is Nancy Wake, one gutsy dame. Born in New Zealand, she wa s a British agent who worked with the French Resistance. In preparation for D-Day, she was parachuted into France to collect night parachute drops

of weapons and ammunition for the advancing Allied Armies. At the same time, she set up communication networks and harassed the Germans, who code-named the elusive agent “the white mouse.” She lived to 98, enjoying six gins a day until a heart attack late in life forced her to cut back.

As an artist and activist, Stein remains determined to stay true to her choice of Holocaust heroes. When criticism surfaces over some of these fierce females not being strictly Holocaust figures, she digs in to explain her work. The tapestries are up for discussion but not for censorship.

The tapestries in somber tones, measuring five feet by five feet, incorporate found objects and materials, such as leather, metal, canvas, paint and fabric. Possibly as a nod to her father, who worked in the garment industry, old fabrics are worked into each tapestry.

Zippers, first embedded in Fluidity of Gender, are part of the unzipping of these heroes’ stories. Buckles and purse straps are also familiar from Stein’s earlier work.

Within the tapestries, Stein’s fierce Holocaust females coexist with pop icons. Wonder Woman is joined

by Princess Mononoke and Kannon.

Tapping into multi-generational cul-

The Accidental Upstander

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ike everyone else in the subway car, I am ignoring the four teenage girls fighting with each other. In New York, you don’t mess with something that could trigger racism, classism or worse.

One girl has another in a stranglehold. The strangled girl breaks loose, screaming, “I’m going to kill you.”

They go back to pummeling each other.

A third girl: “We’re in a subway. Act civilized.”

More fighting.

No agonizing over whether to get involved. I just stand up, walk over to them and say, “She’s right. You’re in a

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subway. Act civilized.”

One girl: “What right does that lady have to talk to me?”

Another girl: “She’s right.”

They stop fighting.

Who knows what happened once they got off the subway.

But, unexpectedly, Linda Stein’s message of standing up to bullying has transformed me from Bystander to Brave Upstander — standing up against bullies.

That felt good. I’m up for more. Wish me luck.

— Amy Stone Na’amat Woman’s fearless correspondent Amy Stone in Stein’s body-swapping armor.

tural connections, Stein has added Storm of Marvel Comics X-Men; Lisbeth Salander of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo renown; and Lady Gaga, who’s endowed an anti-bullying foundation at Harvard. Stein sees combining pop culture heroes with Holocaust heroes as a way of making the historical women more relevant and starting a conversation. She says, “A lot of people will say that Lisbeth Salander is too violent. That’s a discussion I invite.”

Printing plates from the days of hot metal typesetting nest into each tapestry. The enigmatic reverse letters that are part of the bygone printing process become part of the layers of the heroes’ identity. The heavy metal also links to Stein’s own past as a calligrapher whose clients included Tiffany, Cartier and the International Monetary Fund.

In these dark tapestries, the heroes’ pale faces stand out, black-andwhite photos transferred to canvas.

A participant tries on Stein’s androgynous armor during a Fluidity of Gender event, part of Have Art Will Travel at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina.

With no central focus, the tapestries display pictures of the fierce females in their youth and, for those who survived the Holocaust, into their old age. We see Hannah Senesh in military uniform before her parachute jump into enemy territory. What a surprise to see the entrancing figure of the adolescent Senesh holding out the long skirt of a white satin dress like a bird’s wings or an unfurled parachute.

As part of her own education, Stein is putting together a catalog for the project with essays by a distinguished and diverse range of writers.

Collector Raymond Learsy has already acquired the Anne Frank tapestry from the preliminary exhibit of Holocaust Heroes at Flomenhaft, the Manhattan gallery that represents Stein.

Learsy and his wife, Melva Bucksbaum, serve on the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art and regularly appear on the ARTnews list of the world’s top 200 collectors. With Holocaust tragedy in his own past, Learsy says that Stein’s tapestry “captures in a very sensitive way a very grim but historic moment.”

Like all her HAWT projects, Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females will include panelists, videos and interactive events and will be available to museums and schools.

Stein wants to get people thinking about the opportunities in their daily lives to stand up for victims of bullying.

She says: “We have to protect all kinds of people — people from different races, sexes, classes.” She sees everyday bullying taken to the extreme as persecution on the grand scale of the Holocaust. She explains, “What I want more than anything is to begin a discussion.”

Stein, artist-activist, is certainly not timid in taking on the evils that even Super Woman couldn’t extinguish. But what happens if a bad guy slips into Stein’s protective armor? Is he transformed or does evil get shielded? In all likelihood, this is a challenge Stein is ready to take on.

Amy Stone is a founder of Lilith magazine and blogs for Lilith at www.lilith.org. She lives in New York City.

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On the Road

continued from page 10 Their members, ages 30 through 90s, raise money selling holiday cards designed by renowned artists, running a thrift store and other activities. Under Mexican law, the organization must use a certain amount of its funds within the country (note that all our Latin members have restrictions on money being sent outside the country). “Volunteering advances the soul,” Esther commented. “Helping the needy vaccinates us against indifference.”

The Belgium Na’amat group meets weekly at a synagogue in Brussels, said president Denise Sadeh Cohen. Guest speakers cover political, historical and religious topics as well as health and medicine. Members have spearheaded the restoration of a day care center in Ashdod, which was damaged during the recent Gaza war, and have helped build other installations.

The women of Na’amat Argentina are very concerned with promoting “social justice and non-violence toward women,” president Marta Haber told participants. Weekly meetings include a wide array of activities from lectures on health and psychology, music and art to raffles and games. They recently published a popular kosher cookbook.

“Let’s unite in a supportive embrace to give us courage and solidarity,” she urged. “Let’s exchange ideas and information to get better results as we are proud to belong to Na’amat.”

Dora Duenyas, vice president of Na’amat Uruguay, talked about their chapters in Montevideo: the vatikot (longtime members) group, started in 1950, and the dor hemschech (next generation) group, founded in 2000. They celebrate holidays and remembrance days together and hold cultural events.

They have a network of volunteers and donate to public hospitals, schools and to needy seniors, and mothers and children.

Celebrating Our Youth Villages

Tired? We were. But that did not stop us from boarding the buses and heading off to Ayanot Youth Village (south of Tel Aviv between Rishon LeZion and Rehovot) for the evening. And what a treat!

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By then it was too dark to see much of the grounds, but we toured some of the class and dorm rooms and had a chance to talk to several of the 240 students. Most come to Ayanot due to serious emotional, behavioral, learning and family problems. In one of the buildings, we saw a barbershop and art studio — just a couple of the places where students learn skills and express their creativity.

Fantastic papier-mâché work covered the tables in the studio — whimsical, multicolored sculptures of animals and people.

Many of us wanted to buy the students’ work, but they were not for sale.

Breaking into small groups, we sat in classrooms with a teacher and several students. In my group, Itamar, the head of the film department, explained that Ayanot “is not just a boarding school, it is a whole experience.” This writer thinks that is why Na’amat seems to have returned to the label “Youth Village,” replacing “Beba Idelson Agricultural High School.”

Itamar described Ayanot as a “magical place with peacocks and ponies.

It’s a peaceful — all the greenery has a calming effect. This is where we make a home for the kids.” He continued: “We raise the bar for education and confidence so when the students graduate, they can say ‘I’m ready to go out to own my life.’ There is a structure for 24 hours a day and the students have to be willing to abide by it. Students have to commit to the place; they must get into the process and be part of it.”

Itamar spoke about the special trip that 12 of his students took to Germany where they studied filmmaking with 12 German students (one Ayanot student began studying German when he came home). He noted that he had to be “like a parent as well as a teacher.”

Then we heard from the students, all friendly and personable. Nora told us about her problem with ADHD. She was lost in the large classes in her local school. “I came to Ayanot in the fall and I love the place,” she smiled. Amit has been at the school for two years. “I had much difficulty before,” he said. “Here they support what I do.” He is enrolled in the culinary program, which specializes in baking.

Another student in the culinary program said her local school was too

difficult and she couldn’t continue. She likes working with the animals and is a talented singer. One day a week, the students work in either agriculture, animal care, the kitchen or landscaping.

Before coming to Ayanot, Ofer, age 17, showed up in his previous school about one day a month. When someone remarked about how well he speaks, he told us he practiced speaking English at a young age watching movies and listening to music. (Actually, they all did pretty well.) He is enjoying the culinary program.

Another student explained he had problems at home but wants to “grow up like a normal person — get up early, study, work.” He loves to ride the horses at Ayanot. A 17-year-old boy from Turkestan, also with family problems, said it took him “half a year to like it here.” He had trouble learning and slept a lot. He’s now very interested in chemistry.

Students served us a family-style dinner with three meat dishes and lots of vegetables and salads — it was delicious. Several joined us at the large round tables. “Bon appetite” said Nora cheerily as she passed by. And we all got a gift of the attractively packaged, herb oil-infused soap made by students.

You think the night was over? No way! Next stop: the beautiful state-of the-art auditorium, built with funds from Na’amat USA. We were welcomed by Hezi Yosef, director of Kanot Youth Village, Na’amat’s other youth village (located near Gedera, south of Tel Aviv). The audience enjoyed dancing and singing performances of pop, rock and show tunes by the talented Kanot students. (See “Kanot Revisited” in our winter 2014-15 issue.) Creative lighting made the colorful, often-changing costumes even more spectacular, and film students documented the performance.

All very professional.

During the performance, I observed a man and his two young boys sitting in front of me. He beamed and clapped throughout. Afterward, I asked him if he was a parent of one of the performers. He said he was a math teacher at Kanot. I told him I was with a Na’amat group. He said: “Do you know what a mitzvah is?” (Of course!) YOU are a mitzvah. Na’amat is a mitzvah.

You don’t know what these kids are like

when they come here. Every day when I go to Kanot, first I am a friend, then a parent, then a shrink, and THEN I am a teacher.”

It was quite late when we returned to Tel Aviv, tired but elated.

North to Karmiel

On Sunday morning, after a two-day break for Shabbat, we once again boarded the buses. One bus went to Afikim day care center in Rosh Ha’ayin, a project of Na’amat Mexico, and Elyachin day care center near Hadera, a project of Na’amat Brazil; another went to Gil Kat day care center in Lod, a project of Na’amat Belgium; the third traveled to Hadera Technological High School, a project of Na’amat Canada.

The American and Belgian visitors walked through the three classrooms with 70 children at Gil Kat, which services mostly high-risk children, ages 3 months to 3 years old, many Ethiopian.

The kids seemed to observe us as carefully as we observed them. The day care director pointed out that high-risk children don’t cry often, as they are used to not having their needs met. The kids were engaged in drawing, painting and making collages, exercises with specific goals, like learning the parts of their bodies. Photos of the children with their families lovingly decorate a section of the wall, which help the children learn about different types of families.

Visitors saw extensive interaction between childcare workers and children.

We heard many “tov meods” (very good) and the kids deserved them. The wonderful aroma of garlicky soup permeated the hallways as it was getting close to lunchtime. I followed the scent trail into the kitchen where a hearty lunch was being prepared. The school, unfortunately, is lacking sufficient safe rooms and the children on the second floor have only an inside wall for protection.

We then began a two-hour trip north to Karmiel. There were a few nappers on the bus, but most joined in a sharing session. Members from many U.S. cities and Brussels went up to the microphone, describing their clubs and their fundraising events.

Before you knew it, we were going up the hill to Karmiel, gazing at the multitude of red-roofed, beige-colored

houses, at the lovely parks and the six Galilee mountains that surround the city. Karmiel (Vineyards of the Gods) lies on the main road from Akko to Safed, 25 miles from the Lebanese border. This growing city of 52,000 is beautiful, with streetscapes that are pedestrian-oriented and clean. Some facts: This government-planned city was established in 1964 with some 20,000 people — half new immigrants and half native Israelis. The city includes Bedouin encampments. The largest folk festival in the world brings 300,000 people to Karmiel each summer. It was the first city in Israel to sell pork (the majority of the population is secular).

Argentines are part of the international mix, and our first stop was the city memorial for the people killed in the 1992 attack on the Israel Embassy in Argentina and the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center.

In a moving ceremony, we all lit candles and sang “The Whole World Is a Narrow Bridge” (don’t be afraid).

Then it was off to the under-construction Sue and Stan Goldfarb Day Care Center being built by Na’amat Canada.We trudged through the red mud (it’s still stuck to my shoes), admiring the unfinished concrete walls. Outside, Canadian members whipped out their country’s flag, sang, cheered and posed for photographs.

At a reception at the city’s municipal building we enjoyed a tasty lunch; were greeted and thanked by the various Na’amat chairs and city officials; were treated to a musical performance by a violinist, pianist and vocalist; and viewed a welcoming video by Mayor Adi Eldar, who had another obligation that day.

Flaming torches, shofar blowing and drumming greeted the surprised visitors on the steps of the spacious, welldesigned Na’amat Community Center in Karmiel that evening. The Middle Eastern beat inspired spontaneous belly dancing by a few talented members. We were treated royally all evening.

Inside, Galit Hoffman, director of the Women’s Health Center in the building, gave us an overview of the Galilee region and center’s activities.

She emphasized the importance of bringing young families to the Galilee and that services are needed to support

them. Currently, 2,800 units are being built in a new neighborhood for about 7,000 new residents. Of course, the city needs more day care. Na’amat provides important services for Karmiel, the surrounding Misgav region and the nearby Arab villages where it runs two technological high schools “We are very proud of our community center” where there’s so much “positive energy and providing of knowledge,” Galit said, enumerating many activities: classes for painting, nutrition, dieting, aerobics, creative writing, healthful bread baking, belly dancing, tai chi, kung fu and needlework. Delegates participated in Israeli dance and tai chi classes.

The center holds art exhibitions, provides legal counseling, and recently held a demonstration in front of the local police station against sexual harassment in the police force. There are activities for working women at night and for retirees during the day (like a recent trip to Yad Vashem). The health center, built by Na’amat Pittsburgh and the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, hosts lectures by medical experts from the hospital in Safed and other cities and provides support for women with health problems. It also sponsors programs of the Israel Cancer Association.

Na’amat Karmiel holds workshops on health issues for representatives from local factories, who pass on knowledge to other workers. The “Women Together” group meets once a month, bringing Druze, Christian and Jewish women together to celebrate holidays and share information about health, food and personal empowerment. A group of Spanish-speaking women, new and longtime immigrants, meets every two weeks to discuss topics that concern the body and soul. “To Become a Women” brings together at-risk Ethiopian teenagers to talk about their bodies, exercise, nutrition, safe sex and personal empowerment. A group of Russian women study flower arranging and dancing. “Be our friend on Facebook,” we are urged.

A magnificent Middle Eastern buffet dinner awaited us after our briefing. If you think we ate well on this trip, you’re right. Delicious food continued on page 26 SPRING 2015

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Take Action!

Sexual Assault on Campus: Legislative Responses

by MARCIA J. WEISS

THE ISSUE: Campus sexual assault is an ongoing problem that has been significantly underreported. Startling statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that about one in five undergraduate college women are the victims of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault. Or, in the words of the Campus Violence White Paper: Approximately 20-25 percent of college women are projected to be victims of an attempted or completed rape during their college years. Less than 5 percent report their assaults to campus or local police authorities, according to the Department of Justice.

Why are student victims reluctant to report these alleged assaults?

There are a number of reasons.

Institutional barriers encourage students to remain quiet or face procedural obstacles that may leave them feeling victimized again. Peer pressure often causes a victim to decide not to report an assault, especially if the accused is a member of a popular or influential group on campus. Victims often fear having to face their aggressor on campus or in class. Self-blame and shame leave

On the Road

continued from page 25 was offered at every stop.

And, of course, not to waste a minute on the return to Tel Aviv, Liora discussed the upcoming elections, Israel’s economic, housing and security issues as well as Arab-Jewish relations.

Jerusalem and More

Our last day took us to Jerusalem, where we met at Bet HaHavera Women’s Center. On the wall in the main room hangs the patchwork quilt that Na’amat USA Eastern Area and Brooklyn members had created for Na’amat Israel in the 1960s. Here we learned about our 10 day care cen26

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some unwilling to come forward, and students often do not know the reporting procedure. Many women don’t know what constitutes rape and don’t understand the concept of “consent.” A 2007 study by the Department of Justice showed that 37 percent of victims said they didn’t report the rape to law enforcement because it was unclear that rape is a crime or that harm was intended.

The 2007 study revealed that some women were afraid of going public because of the terrible ordeal they would have to go through and because of the low rate of conviction. In many cases that have been reported, the men responsible were reprimanded with only a mild rebuke, a mere slap on the wrist or nothing at all. Because the colleges are incapable of protecting victims, it has been suggested that more training for lawmakers is necessary to make the justice system work better.

Only the courts can provide serious punishment for rapists.

CURRENT LAW: Laws now in place include Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program receiving

ters in the city proper, 24 in all in the larger area around Jerusalem. Ilana Daniel chairperson of Na’amat in Jerusalem, briefed us on the variety of activities offered at Bet HaHavera.

The newest program is a group for women on maternity leave, including their infants, in which they get advice on everything from legal issues to how to massage a baby. Again, we ate a great meal, with paper goods and tablecloths decorated with the signature Na’amat colors of purple and white. As Dora from Uruguay summed up, “We are one big organization with one big heart!”

Back in Tel Aviv, with a short time to dress up a bit, we then walked over to the Dan Hotel for our gala final dinner.

Avraham Duvdevani, chairman of the

federal financial assistance. Title IX states that sexual violence is viewed under the law as an extreme form of hostile environment/ sexual harassment and must be addressed. Prompt and appropriate investigations of sexual violence — including rape, sexual assault, sexual battery and sexual coercion — on or off campus must be reported to employees having authority to take action to redress sexual violence.

In May 2014, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released a list of institutions under investigation over the handling of sexual violence and harassment complaints. This list is regularly updated and made available to the public on request by contacting the OCR. Concerned with compliance, campuses are installing Title IX coordinators and are instituting required courses on campus safety for all freshmen. Faculty and staff are also being educated on their obligations for dealing with reports of alleged sexual violence.

The other law, passed in 1990, is the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (named for

World Zionist Organization Executive, greeted us, as did Galia and Shirli. It was a pleasure to see some of the past presidents of Na’amat Israel: Tamar Eshel (looking great at 95), Masha Lubelsky, Ofra Friedman and Talia Livni. With two cakes, we celebrated the birthdays of both Galia Wolloch and Liz Raider.

The pinnacle of the evening was the signing of the “Declaration of Solidarity and Support for the State of Israel and Na’amat,” which was autographed by the Na’amat presidents of eight countries (see page 11). Then we danced to a spirited klezmer band.

What have I left out? Lots. Mostly the non-Na’amat part. Briefly: Braving a sandstorm, we visited Sde Boker in the Negev. At the gravesite of David and Paula Ben-Gurion, we placed

Jeanne Clery, a Lehigh University freshman raped and murdered in her residence hall in 1986). It overlaps to a large extent with Title IX but also deals with criminal offenses such as homicide, hate crimes and stalking. Institutions must also disclose crime statistics for Clery reporting.

The Obama administration has already mandated the Education Department to publicly identify those colleges under investigation for sexual assault and their findings in the 2013 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, an amendment to the Clery Act. Besides mandating more transparent sexual assault reporting, it calls for expanded victim rights and prevention programs. In 2014, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault was created. Unfortunately, these efforts are insufficient to address the ongoing problems existing on campuses today.

ONE POSSIBLE SOLUTION: In July 2014 a bipartisan* group of eight United States senators

led by Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) sponsored a bill entitled the Campus Accountability and Safety Act (CASA), responding to the national problem of sexual assault on campus, the mishandling of investigations by school authorities and the lax oversight of federal laws. The proposed legislation would center on transparency and accountability for institutions — including establishing stiff penalties for non-compliance with the new standards for training, data and best practices. According to a national campus assault survey of 440 colleges and universities, 41 percent had not instituted a sexual assault investigation in the last five years.

The bill would require the designation of a confidential advisor to coordinate support services and provide guidance for victims. Special training would be provided for all personnel handling sexual assault cases.

CASA would require all colleges to conduct an annual survey of students, who would

a wreath and recalled the remarkable contributions of the first prime minster of the State of Israel. Masha Lubelsky nostalgically noted, “We miss you, Ben-Gurion.”

As we sat in an amphitheater, infantrymen performed a military ceremony in our honor, and a female army officer spoke about her expertise: training soldiers to use mortars. We experienced a bit of army life when we were presented with dog tags with our names and donned army shirts. Walking around, we checked out military equipment on display including mortar shells, missiles and army tanks as astute young IDF soldiers explained how everything works. I sat in a tank watching a video screen used for precision targeting.

With professional tour guide Zvi,

respond anonymously, on their experience with sexual violence.

These “climate surveys” would be published online for prospective students to see. The goal is to gauge the actual prevalence of sexual assault and other troubling behavior on a particular campus, an approach endorsed by the White House.

CASA would require colleges to adjudicate sexual assault cases using the same process for all students to prevent special treatment for groups such as college athletes. It also calls for colleges and local law enforcement agencies to delineate responsibilities and share information.

Colleges have expressed concerns about the bill and the Education Department’s ability to administer a survey for all types of campuses.

Emphasizing the significance of the proposed legislation, Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said: “Campus assault is staggeringly prevalent and stunningly underreported. This measure addresses a demand for

who had more facts up his sleeve than the Encyclopedia Judaica (did you know that Lake Michigan is five times bigger than Israel?), we traveled to Jerusalem. We observed the widening of the often-crowded road that connects Tel Aviv to the capital and the building of the new train line covering the same distance. Approaching the capital, we noticed the new light rail system and modern Jerusalem-stone buildings rising as we bused up to Mt. Scopus. There we enjoyed a spectacular panoramic view of the city and sang “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav.” In the Old City, we toured the Jewish Quarter (which now is mostly new), marveling at the reconstructed Hurva synagogue (destroyed and rebuilt twice since the early 1700s). Forming a huge circle, we

justice I heard over and over from survivors who felt victimized twice — first by their assailant and again by administrators who failed to respond adequately.”

Senator McCaskill noted: ‘This bill represents a rare thing in Washington — a truly collaborative, bipartisan effort — and that bodes well for our shared fight… . To curb these crimes, students need to be protected and empowered.”

TAKE ACTION! CASA (S.2692) remains in committee at this time.

Urge your legislator to support CASA, a response to a serious and ongoing problem on college campuses. *In addition to Senators McCaskill and Gillibrand, other sponsors of the bill include Dean Heller (R-NV), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL).

Marcia J. Weiss, J.D., is Na’amat USA vice president of program and education.

joyfully danced in the plaza near the Western Wall.

On our two free days over Shabbat, participants scattered to various parts of Israel to visit their many sons, daughters, grandkids, cousins, aunts, uncles and friends. So many connections!

Best of all, we felt like an integral part of the spirited, committed Na’amat World Movement. With our many new friends, we danced the hora until the last possible moment.

Haverot/sisters: Hasta luego, adeus, au revoir, shalom v’ l’hitraot, goodbye and see you again. Kol hakovod/a job well done, to all!

Judith A. Sokoloff is the longtime editor of Na’amat Woman.

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BOOK REVIEWS Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 320 pages, $25

I

always make a point to read the first page of the books I am given.

Rarely do I continue, only because there are just so many. (I say this as a person in love with books, who lives with loads of books, buys them, borrows them and even occasionally writes them.)

So it was with some skepticism that I began Florence Gordon, a novel about a crotchety feminist Upper West Side woman in her 70s. She’s sure of herself, impossibly difficult and intelligent the way many people I know are. She can really think and put together ideas in an original way. There’s something about life she understands and even more that she doesn’t.

An emotionally distanced person who limits her intimacies by the hour, she’s not someone who’d be a good mother, a good friend. But she’s sharp and smart, and the memoir she wants to write is sure to be insightful. Beautiful, even.

Here’s how the book begins: “Florence Gordon was trying to write a memoir, but she had two strikes against her: She was old and she was an intellectual. And who on earth, she sometimes wondered, would want to read a book about an old intellectual? Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist…[and] reviewers would inevitably dismiss it as ‘strident’ and ‘shrill.’”

I read that paragraph and thought to myself, well maybe I don’t want to read a memoir by an old intellectual who lives in my neighborhood, but I want to read Florence Gordon. Maybe this review can explain why.

Florence is not a likeable character. She is anti-emotion and anti-psychology (she’s analytical — not one for ruminations, reflections, wondering), and yet, she has written a large emotional book and endless articles about

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women’s rights and the possibilities they have for living. She has been an important figure in the feminist movement. Through her books, Florence has helped scores of women live better by explaining that they can. But she’s hard on her family, hard on her friends, hard on everyone around her and she knows it. She walks out of her own surprise 75th birthday party to go home and work.“I’ll be here in spirit,” she says, thanking the well-wishers at a restaurant soon after she walks in.

Her ex-husband is an unfortunate stereotype, maybe the only false move in this original, witty, compelling and unexpected novel. He’s an unhappy jerk in wrinkled clothes, has no apparent charm and is unemployed. He’s angry, certain of his own unrecognized brilliance, self-involved and unpleasant. Oddly, Florence is unpleasant in a Good Way. The reader likes her because of what she does, even though it’s clear that being around her would not be a nice experience. She’s one of those people whose life is her work.

The reader can imagine what all the characters think of one another — and not only that, author Brian Morton tells us.

Florence’s son, Daniel, is somewhat estranged from her, though dutiful. He was raised an Upper West Side Jew, son of intellectual parents. He lives in Seattle (as far from Florence as possible?) where he’s married to an academic named Janine. Daniel is a social worker policeman (that’s what he calls himself –- he’s a policeman but he helps people).

His family is in New York temporarily because Janine has a Columbia fellowship. Daughter Emily, an Oberlin dropout, an apolitical literature type (her favorite novel is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. So’s mine). The book becomes a story, in an indirect way, about Florence

and her only granddaughter: how Emily comes to understand the largeness of Florence’s life, even though Florence doesn’t always get Emily’s name right (really). And Florence opens herself up just a little to the idea that a family member can be something besides an adversary.

Besides the engrossing dramas involving Florence, Emily and Daniel, there’s Janine. Maybe she’s in love with her boss. She probably has a momentary affair with him at a conference, but that story is vaguely told. She’s infatuated with a man who is everything Daniel isn’t: warm, psychologically oriented, accessible, outgoing. After so many years, should she leave her husband?

Daniel, because he is Florence’s son, is a distant man. Still, Janine loves him. They’d been married for years. Besides Emily, they have a son, Mark, who is more or less out of communication with his parents, with his grandmother, with this novel. But he’s there in the fragmented way that everyone is.

The novel, too, is fragmented — written in short bursts, episodic nuggets. Some chapters consist of just a few paragraphs that tell whole stories in circumspect ways.

It’s a book where telling the reader what happens isn’t easy. Not much happens. Life happens. People fall in love and then they don’t. Grandmother and granddaughter finally connect. This is one of the book’s through lines, both tenuous and moving. Emily comes to understand what life is and that how it’s measured is different from Middlemarch.

As for Florence, she suffers from physical disasters and a few minor personal affronts but gains a personal victory (famous New York Times reviewer loves her latest book). Florence remains, even in the very end, Florence.

We readers are glad for that.

— Esther Cohen Esther Cohen writes, teaches and sends a poem a day to her subscribers at www. esthercohen.com.

President

continued from page 3

The Girl from Human Street Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

By Roger Cohen New York: Alfred A. Knopf 304 pages, $27.95

I

n The Girl From Human Street, Roger Cohen — a New York Times foreign affairs columnist — explores his family’s historical and emotional past. The author relies on his memories, interviews and extensive historical research spanning many generations and continents to examine “a Jewish odyssey of the 20th century, and the tremendous pressure of wandering, adapting, pretending, silencing and forgetting.” The result is a haunting and enlightening yet somewhat disjointed book.

The girl from Human Street refers to Cohen’s mother, June, and it was on Human Street in Johannesburg that she lived. Her family were Lithuanian immigrants who created a new and prosperous life as merchants in a Jewish enclave in South Africa. Uprooted to England, from “sunlit shores to rainy lands,” June suffers from repeated bouts of depression and bipolar mood swings that hospitalization, shock treatment and medication cannot contain.

The reader is privy to Cohen’s own pain as he struggles to come to terms with the mental illness and secrecy surrounding it that plagues his family. After his mother’s death, Cohen discovers her suicide notes, his father’s chronology of events and a family tree on which black dots delineate the names of other such sufferers. These artifacts shed light on his mother’s unexplained absences from his early childhood.

Cohen recalls his father, a doctor who was warm and caring early in his childhood, becoming chilly, absent and unreachable. It is these wounds that clearly drive the book and perhaps Cohen’s need as a journalist to shed light on all aspects of his family history.

While Cohen’s mother occupies the title of the memoir, her personal history is only a small part of the story. In the course of the lengthy book, the author tells the stories of his maternal and paternal grandparents but often detours to tell stories of other Jews who perished in Lithuania, those who narrowly escaped, some who lived through apartheid in South Africa, many who experienced anti-Semitism in England and Zionists who chose to immigrate to Israel.

The sense of otherness that repeatedly defines many of the people whose stories Cohen tells is best summed up by the observation of Jonathan Katz whom he interviews. Katz is the son of a Nobel Prize winner who immigrated to Australia by way of Russia and Germany and then settled in England. When the younger Katz was sent to a London junior school with a “clear Christian Profile,” his Leipzig-born father told him to expect to hear comments about Jews, but emphasized that he must distinguish between “conventional British anti-Semitism and people who want to kill you.”

Cohen quotes the younger Katz, commenting about low-level anti-Semitisim: “One takes this sh-t because there is so much sh-ttier sh-t around. And it’s what has produced, in reaction, a lot of Jewish culture. It’s the manure.”

While The Girl from Human Street may have started out as Roger Cohen’s attempt to make sense of his own personal history, it is his frequent meditations and asides on the historical and political events simultaneously playing out on the world stage that are the most interesting. The reader is left to wonder whether Cohen’s multiple narratives would have been better served as a collection of independent essays.

—Marilyn Rose Marilyn Rose is an artist and writer living in New Jersey. Her website is www.marilynroseart.com

tions firm, Artisans, has been conducting these interviews via Skype and conference calls.

The current interview with Nadera Tannous is featured in the premiere issue of our new national newsletter “What’s Up With Na’amat?” Director of the Na’amat Technological School in Nazereth, Tannous took on the challenge of providing educational opportunities for Israeli Arab teenage girls who were not able to succeed in the regular school system.

“What’s Up With Na’amat?” is filled with news about Na’amat in Israel, the United States and our sister countries. It is being e-mailed to area and council offices for distribution and to all members and others in our database. Please share “What’s Up” so we can broaden our outreach in your communities and inspire others to get involved in our work. We are all ambassadors of Na’amat USA! The national board of Na’amat USA is now focusing on our 90th anniversary, which begins the fall of 2015 and culminates in the summer of 2016. We are planning a variety of events to include all Na’amat USA members and potential members.

Watch for details in the next few months to celebrate this milestone together.

As part of the celebration, our national office has been redesigning a number of certificates and information brochures, including the attractive new “Facts in Brief.” We plan to have all Na’amat USA materials updated during the coming year along with special 90th anniversary cards and certificates.

I want to thank our clubs, councils and areas across the country for your dedication, hard work and continued support of Na’amat USA during this past year’s transitions.

You have proven once again that we are a resilient organization that collectively moves forward and meets new challenges.

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AROUND THE COUNTRY  Palm Beach Council holds scholarship luncheon at the elegant Benvenuto’s in Boynton Beach, Florida. Among the large crowd are, from left, standing: Joyce Schildkraut and Judy Sufrin; seated: Claire Kaplan and Rita Sherman.

 Members of Eilat chapter (San Fernando Valley Council) enjoyed the play “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.” From left, Joyce Edelson, Gloria Kaplan, Cipy Baron, Susan Lutske, Hilary Botchin, Dina Mead, Roz Porton, Rachael Isaac, Lea Templer, Gitta Walbaum and Ivy Liebross.

 Cleveland Council members had a great time at March Mahj Madness, its biggest Mah-jongg tournament to date. The event committee, from left: Dorie Sopher, Rhoda Shapiro, Charlene Ratner, Raycine Spector, Ellen Saltz, Myrna Groger and Marcia Gisser.

 The Eastern Area billiard party in New York City was a great way to bring young women and men together to have fun and learn about Na’amat USA.

 Cincinnati Na’amat leaders make plans for a women’s Passover seder with two rabbis and work on other events for the spring. From left: Rabbinic intern Allie Cohen, Rabbi Miriam Terlinchamp, Bernice Bingman, Heroldine Ukelson, Laurie Dubin, Sandy Kaltman, Sandy Stern and Janet Weisberger.

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NA’AMAT WOMAN

SPRING 2015

Share Your Enthusiasm!

Give the Gift of Membership in Na’amat USA. Share the joy of making a real difference in the lives of Israeli women and children by giving an annual membership to a friend, relative, neighbor or colleague.

This is a great gift for those who are concerned about Israel. It’s a wonderful way to say thank you to those who attend Na’amat USA events as guests but have not yet joined. And it’s a great way to reach out to those you care about and share your connection with Na’amat. Let them know what we really do for Israel, for our community and for each other.

When you gift a membership, recipients will receive our beautiful and informative Na’amat Woman magazine and e-blasts.

Gift one membership for $36 or two for $54.

Yes, I want to share my enthusiasm!

Name Address

Name Address

Phone

Phone

Cell phone

Cell phone

E-mail

E-mail

Gifted by:

Name Address VISA Check enclosed in the amount of

MasterCard

AmEx

Discover

Credit Card # Expiration date

Security code

Please fill out form and send to the national office: Na’amat USA, 21515 Vanowen St., Suite 102, Canoga Park, CA 91303. Phone: (818) 431-2200.

WINTER 2014/2015

NA’AMAT WOMAN

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