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The image of advocacy
The photo almost looks like it was born for a captions competition, doesn’t it?
A thought-bubble from the young Haredi’s head might read, “Now where did I put that rock?” or the woman might be thinking, “Jeez, living in photoshop is so radical!”
As you might have gathered, my first reaction when looking at this poster at a Yom Ha’atzmaut event, was incredulity and not a little frustration.
First off, I have a problem with the whole quest for authenticity that publicizers are on, such that “reality” is now some kind of ideological real estate (geddit?) that can be bought.
But more substantially, I found the image offensive. As if the very real issues of women and Haredim in Israel is the exact polar opposite of that which is presented in the media. As if there really is no such thing as a clash between the Western woman and the Haredi community. As if orthodox young girls dressed far more modestly than the blond in the picture were not being harrassed as the poster was being printed.
But then I looked again. Was the image really suggesting that all is perfect in Israel, or was it just suggesting things are a bit more complicated than the Bet Shemesh images? I know that there is a Haredi community near Sheinkin, a trendy area of Tel Aviv. Is there no possibility that one might catch sight of a woman like this with a Haredi in the background? Besides, the Haredi guy in the photo has his back to her – he may not even have seen her. That’s something that can happen all over Israel.
Looking even closer, I’m guessing the photo was taken in Tzfat. The woman has a shawl draped over her shoulders for modesty’s sake, and I’m not sure if she’s looking happy about that. Those folded arms could suggest frustration. In short, at a second glance it isn’t clear whether this is a celebratory image at all. We have a woman having to cover herself up, and a Haredi man with his back to her, perhaps trying to ignore her presence. It’s an image that is far more ambivalent than my initial glance assumed. (Thanks to Guy Gelbart, who put up the poster at his Israel Fest event in Tucson, for pointing this out!)
That evening I came across another fantastic shot by Alex Livak. Another authentic juxtaposition of a Haredi man leaning almost longingly against a billboard of a distinctly non-Haredi chap.
Well if Livak can capture an image like this, another image that somewhat gives the lie to the “Iran” comparisons after the Bet Shemesh furore, why can’t the guys at the Yom Ha’atzmaut event do the same?
I think the difference is the words.
For some reason, the words printed on the image have a hasbaratic insistence, to which I am now thoroughly allergic – irrespective of their message. I automatically assumed that a call to “see the real Israel” was a demand to jump from one polar opposite (media critique) to another polar opposite (all is perfect in Israel). Yet the phrase “See the real Israel” doesn’t have to be interpreted as such a nuance-less invitation.
Is this just my own idiosyncratic allergy? Did you share my initial reading of the poster’s intention?
I wonder whether – if the words had been placed on a separate poster, next to the image standing on its own – this might have had a more liberating effect?
What I would have said at J Street
I was invited to be on a panel about Israel education at this year’s J Street conference. Sadly I couldn’t be there, but here is what I had been planning to say…
My wonderful daughter had her Bat Mitzvah recently. She sang beautifully from the Torah, built an amazing model of her “Personal Tabernacle” inspired by the portion, and took part in a lovely service she had helped to shape.
I am overjoyed that my daughter’s experience of Judaism has been of a wise and deep tradition, fantastic stories, warm Friday nights, and inclusivity for both genders.
It wasn’t until we went with her to an exhibition on Jewish Feminist art at Ein Harod Museum that we came across a different aspect of Judaism. We walked around an exhibition created by furious female artists. Laws of niddah, modesty, and exclusion were beautifully screamed at, ridiculed, and mourned through video, photography, installation, sculpture and embroidery. From the wedding dress decorated with the hair shorn from the bride, to the photo of the disembodied hand holding a JNF box thrust through the curtain of the women’s section, there was some strong and strikingly painful work there.
Yet although my daughter must be the most Jewishly knowledgeable of all her friends, I needed to explain every single reference to her. She had had literally no idea of how aspects of Jewish tradition can be cruel to or disdainful of women.
This is because we had never taught her about them, and she’d never come across them until this exhibition. We knew instinctively that if we had exposed her to the anti-feminist narrative of Judaism at an early age she would have emerged knowledgeable about yet emotionally distant from Judaism. We didn’t want that for our kid.
I’m left reflecting on these ideological choices when addressing the topic of our panel: “How do we talk to our children about Israel?” Because you see the thing is that my wife and I have absolutely no regrets at constructing “rose-tinted spectacles” for our child’s experience of Judaism. Our choice to induct our daughter into Judaism was not related to the moral rights or wrongs of the entirety of the tradition. We wanted for Judaism to be a part of who she is.
I believe we need to take the same choices with our young children with regards Israel. Prior to and irrespective of our attitudes to Israeli policies and politics, we need to make an ideological choice. Is Israel important to a Jew, or not?
My belief is that the only reason there are so many Jews at J-Street conference, and at work for J-Street throughout the country, is because they believe Israel is important to them as Jews.
We are all busy people, we all have limited free time on our hands, and – let’s face it – quantitatively strategically and even morally there are far more important and horrific things going on throughout the world for us to get worked up about. We get worked up about Israel because it is important to us. Just as much as we wish no wrong to be done to Palestinians, and just as much as we wish no wrong to be done to Israelis, we also wish that Israel behave justly because Israel is part of us.
But as you yourselves at J Street can attest, growing up with a deep connection to Israel does not have to lead one to love everything about Israel. The fact that my kid was not just surprised but also horrified by much of what she learned at the Jewish Feminist exhibition shows that one can be brought up to identify with a tradition, a people, a place, and still continue to develop a moral stance that might be at odds with elements of that tradition.
Bringing up our children to “love Israel” should not mean we are brainwashing them or serving evil reactionary interests. Sometimes I fear that too much superficial education has given love and commitment a bad name. A knee-jerk rejection of “teaching to love Israel” is – I would suggest – mainly a response to the extent to which such a concept has been shorn of its depth. Love is crucial, but it’s not simple.
We need our children to be knowledgeable and wise enough to be able to question what they have received, and at the same time we need them connected enough to care.
What would an education look like that seeks to establish a commitment that is strong and passionate but not blind or paralyzed? How might we cultivate the roots of critical loyalty in our young?
We at Makom would advocate for two approaches. We would take care to give pre-teens what we might call the “philosophical training” for them to embrace complexity, and we would give them a framework of “spiraling questions”.
Embracing Complexity
Rather than simplifying issues for a little kid to grasp, we should encourage them to grapple with the complexities of simple situations. For example, at the age of five, issues of “Hugging and Wrestling with Israel” are tough! But questions such as “has your best friend ever done something you thought was the wrong thing to do?” fit right in to their lives. Follow up questions can go further: Did you tell your friend they had done wrong? Did you tell them in private or in public? Are you still friends despite the wrong-doing?
Rather offering a simplistic explanation of Israel’s Separation Barrier, we might ask where there are fences in our children’s lives? (House? School?) What are the advantages and disadvantages of fences? Do good fences make good neighbors or deepen divides? Who decides where to put a fence, and why? (Our “Car Pool Conversations” about Israel are freely downloadable )
These are the kinds of conversations that can help our kids develop a familiarity with complex moral issues, and build a suitable vocabulary to begin to address them when they arise. In this way our children learn that complexity and “messiness” (Israeli characteristics if ever there were!) can be fascinating and not frightening.
Spiraling questions
At Makom we would suggest that the moral and political issues of Israel emerge from four key values expressed in the Hatikvah anthem: To Be A Free (Jewish) People In Our Land.
What does it mean and what does it take to survive (To Be)? What does it mean and what does it take to be free? What does it mean and what does it take to be connected to the Jewish People? And what does it mean and what does it take to be In Our Land? These four questions underlie every headline we ever read about Israel, and they are four questions that we can ask and explore at every age.
As little kids our questions about being Jewish and connected to other Jews will yield different answers from those we may reach today. Likewise the expansion of our understanding of freedom – its limitations and responsibilities – will grow with the years. But the more we empower our children to engage with these four “pillars of Zionism”, the more we enable them to connect to, critique, and affirm Israel at every stage of their lives.
All the above opinions have been developed and inspired by my work with Makom, and consultations with Dr Jen Glaser who first introduced me to the teachings of Vygotsky.
Planning the Global Jewish Forum on Haredim
How can you find the deep conversation when there are so many burning facts flying around?
- Fact: the Haredi population in Israel is doubling every decade.
- Fact: Over 20% of school children in Israel are at Haredi institutions, which teach neither English nor Math, let alone Citizenship.
- Fact: Over 60,000 young Haredi men are granted automatic exemption from army service every year, under 50% of all Haredi adults work, and those that do so work fewer hours than anyone else in the country.
- Fact: Over 90 “Mehadrin” bus lines throughout the country require women to sit at the back of the bus.
When Makom was faced with the challenge of creating and running a 5-hour symposium on “Haredim and the Jewish Collective” for the Global Jewish Forum of the Jewish Agency, we wanted to avoid throwing oil on the already blazing fire.
We also wanted to bring all the participants into a deeper more honest and informed understanding of the situation. For example, all the above facts are most certainly the presenting edge of the issue, but they risk offering a snap-shot as a trend, a two-dimensional picture as the deep reality. How might we help everyone reach, as Yonatan Ariel puts it, “a higher level of confusion”?
Add to that a mostly non-Haredi audience carrying a little bit of natural prejudice, a smidgen of hurt pride, and a genuine concern that Israel may not end up looking anything like a Western paradise, and we knew to expect a loaded atmosphere for the latest Global Jewish Forum.
We are not experts about Haredim, but we knew something about our approach to Israel education, and we chose to stick with the five principles we knew.
1. Elephants in the Room.
Israel is too important to the Jewish People, and Jewish adults are too intelligent and invested for us to avoid the burning and even painful issues. Careful honesty is more important than breezy avoidance.
2. Local perspectives.
Every community has its own assumptions, its own associations, and its own concerns that must be acknowledged and worked with. Some values are more culturally-specific and less universal than we are aware.
3. Multi-vocality.
We needed to bring many different voices into the room. Not a case of them and us, but a case of them and them and also them and us and us and us. We are a deep complicated People with many shades of opinions and stances, and that is what makes us fascinating.
4. A Jewish conversation.
When studying Israel with Jews, Israel’s issues, challenges, and achievements must be addressed through the lens of Jewish civilization. Hence we took care to frame the day’s forum in the 200-year perspective of the challenges that modernity presented to the Jewish world, and made sure the accompanying source pack referred not just to Israeli sociology but also to Jewish history.
5. Bettering not battering.
We do not advocate for prettifying or cover-ups. Critique is a crucial part of learning. But we do insist on an intention of repair rather than just moaning.
Elephants in the Room
The elephants in the room tend to be different from the subject everyone is talking about. Everyone has been talking about the violence in Bet Shemesh and the extreme responses to women sitting in “Mehadrin” buses. Yet scratching at the surface of these deeply troubling events revealed an easy truth: These headline-grabbing events are not particularly complex. What can one do with a violent person or someone who brazenly breaks the law? Arrest them!
The more complex question lies below: What if all violent Haredim (acknowledged by all to be a minority) were arrested? What if every single Haredi who spat at a child, set fire to a garbage can, screamed in a woman’s face, was removed from society? Would this solve the issue of the remaining 800,000 or so Haredim in Israeli society? Would this overnight fill the army to bursting with Haredi recruits? Would this miraculously give Haredi men qualifications and the desire to take a job? And these jobs – are they just waiting to be filled?
In short, the elephants in the room tend to be hidden by the headlines. Other questions must be brought forward and addressed: Do we want Haredi integration into Israeli society, or do we prefer them separate? What do we mean by “integration” – which side should make compromises to enable such integration? Do Haredim seek integration? Do we wish to achieve this aim through a radical or gradual process? These were the kind of issues we decided to try to tackle in the Global Jewish Forum.
Local Perspectives
The dominant Israeli perception of the Haredi “problem” is primarily economic. It is about “sharing the burden”. Something along the lines of: They can dress how they want, so long as they serve in the army, work for their keep, and educate their children for sustainability. Hence reassurance for an Israeli would be to hear that more and more Haredim are entering the workplace, are serving in the army, are teaching their children for the 21st Century.
Yet the dominant Diaspora perspective of the Haredi “problem” is altogether different. It is primarily about the exclusion of women: “Women within the Haredi community are practically enslaved in the home, and Haredi men will not be happy until every woman in Israel is covered up and out of sight.” For an American to be reassured, they would like to hear that the rights of 50% of the Jewish People are being protected and upheld.
This is why Israeli reassurances about “progress” are often met with such ambivalence in the Diaspora. “What does Haredi men working in hi-tech have to do with women’s place in society? It would seem that the way to integrate Haredi men into the army and workplace is to exclude women from it! In what way is this progress?” Likewise the Diasporan suggestion of trumpeting women’s rights would only cause the Haredim to close ranks and avoid integration – no solution at all for the Israeli.
These two opposing prisms through which we look at the same issue (or indeed the same prism through which we look from opposing sides) needed to be made explicit. They were addressed very clearly and in two different ways by the two women in the interviews video.
We should also point out that most Jews in the West might assume that the integration of Haredim into Israeli society is desirable, while many Israelis – Haredim and non-Haredim – do not share this basic assumption and even aspire to more separation.
Multi-vocality
We needed participants to hear from Haredim. But how? Most Haredim who are in any way representative of their communities will have been educated in the Israeli Haredi education system and so do not speak English. Simultaneous translation systems are technically possible, but are, in our experience, always more distancing than engaging.
How many Haredim should we bring in? We envisaged two or three Haredim defending themselves against the accusations of over a hundred liberal American Jews… not particularly constructive… A panel of speakers? But we would insist on having some women on the panel, and what if that were to rule out the participation of the Haredi men? Besides, panel discussions are so rarely enriching.
In the end we chose a different genre. We interviewed six different people, edited them down into about 5 minutes each, and added subtitles in English. Men, women, Haredim, non-Haredim, in favour of integration and against, advocating for radical and gradual change. The Forum would watch the 30 minute video, and then discuss what they had seen in their small groups.
Which led us to our next issue: who would be in the groups? Surely multi-vocality on this topic would require many different voices in the small group discussions as well as from the screen? Yet there are no Haredim in the Jewish Agency Board of Governors, or in positions of power in Jewish Federations. In order to have Haredim at the tables, we would need to go out of our way to invite them.
The Jewish Agency works with Haredim – through its Youth Futures project, and Partnership Together network. Thanks to a huge amount of effort on the part of these units, including the provision of transport, glatt kosher meals, and much liaison, we knew we would be able to ensure the participation of Haredim at each discussion table.
But, we were asked by one of their representatives, would there be an option for men and women to sit separately? Would there, for example, be a table set aside for women only?
We tried hard to imagine this. A conversation about Haredim and Israeli society without the men hearing the women or the women hearing the men? We couldn’t do it. We refused. But we could, we reasoned, accept the idea of men and women sitting at the same table, but with men sitting on one side of the table and women on the other side. Then all are part of the same conversation, no one is excluded, but the seating is still separate.
This idea lasted until we raised it with the facilitators of the table discussions. They quite rightly pointed out that were we to introduce this seating arrangement at the start of the day, to over 250 people deeply concerned about a “Haredi take-over”, the Forum would break down then and there. Only a long serious and reasoned conversation would lead everyone to accept this suggestion, and we didn’t have time for that.
The final arrangement was simply for each facilitator to discretely ensure that each Haredi table member be sandwiched by someone of the same gender. We survived. Haredim were active and crucial participants in the small-group discussions throughout the conference. Did the seating arrangements rule out the participation of some whose voices might have sounded different? Perhaps.
Bettering not Battering
One might say that there are two schools of thought on the Haredi issue: The Neri Horowitz approach, and the Dan Ben David approach. Both are serious researchers. Yet we began to realize they almost represent a Hillel–Shammai divide of old.
Dan Ben David sees doom ahead. He will point out, for example, that 45% of Israel’s children are educated in the Haredi and the Arab sector. This is a third-world education at best. Israel will not be able to maintain a first-world army when such a large proportion of its citizens have received a third-world education. In marrying together security, existential fears, and Haredim, Dr Ben David is absolutely right. But perhaps a little bleak, shall we say.
Contrast this with the Hillel of Neri Horowitz, adviser to Admors and to Ministers. He is a walking encyclopedia on Haredi issues, and celebrates the huge steps made by the government and the Haredi community towards integration. He prefers to advocate for a policy of “internal aliya” – an investment in the absorption of Haredim into Israeli society requiring similar educational, social, and economic strategies to those of welcoming a wave of immigration. He doesn’t deny the challenges, but chooses to trust a process rather than force a confrontation. He also is absolutely right, while possibly a little optimistic.
We invited Neri to address our conference. We chose a little bit too much light rather than a little bit too much darkness.
But more than this, some of the Haredim we chose to “showcase” in our film were people working towards peaceful and practical solutions. The jewel in the crown was Rabbi Yehuda Meshi Zahav. This is a man who has shifted from being the leader of an extreme (and often violent) Haredi sect, to being the founder director of ZAKA. ZAKA is an internationally acclaimed volunteer organization that focuses on “respecting the dead, and saving life.” It’s a Jewish Red Cross. They treat everyone, and welcome everyone: They even sent a team of Haredi volunteers around the country to teach resuscitation to Arab women.
The initial response to our choice of featuring ZAKA and its director, was to shrug: “That’s easy,” we were told, “but how representative is Meshi Zahav of the Haredi mind-set?” The assumption was that ZAKA is something of a freak of nature, an exception that proves the rule. To give prominence to such an organization would be just as misleading as to present Neturei Karta as evidence of most Jews’ anti-Zionism, or a mild-mannered Persian proving that Iran’s nuclear plans are peaceful.
But on the other hand, ZAKA is a picture of the possible, and it is a success story. Is the utopian vision of integrated tikkun olam that Meshi Zahav propounds more likely to succeed than the strategy of homogenous Haredi cities enacted by the Mayor of Betar Illit (who also features in our video)? No one really knows. But we knew that in the careful educational dance between clear-eyed critique and a call to action we needed to weight the scales away from despair and in the direction of hope.
As Yonatan Ariel, Executive Director of Makom, emphasized at the end of the Forum: We must give weight to the power of human agency. Nothing is fixed. After the Holocaust 80% of Yeshiva students had been wiped out by the Nazis and over 90% of all Rabbis murdered. Thanks to the huge efforts of the Haredi community and the Jewish State, the world of Yeshiva has been revived. If such an extraordinary recovery is possible not through miracles but through human agency, so too may we fix the unhealthy by-products of such a recovery through our own choices and actions.
The full program can be seen here
Israel as part of the Whole
I don’t normally like Israeli songs that are written and performed in English.
I’m a great fan of Tamar Eisenman’s artistry, and of Asaf Avidan’s surreality, but what can I tell you – I’m an old-school Zionist. I’m big on our developing and Israeli-Jewish culture in Hebrew. You don’t need to – even I call me old-fashioned. I kind of think that if we can’t even create our own renewal of Jewish culture here in the Holy Land, then really what are we doing here?
But just now a great song came out by an Israeli woman who writes and performs in English. This one made it past my usual barriers. It’s one of those rare Israeli songs that while escaping the particularity of Hebrew, doesn’t feel the need to escape Israel and her issues.
The chorus is a powerful mix of rocked-up folk with a Cranberries-crack, and evokes the powerful image of the Carmel Forest up in smoke:
My country’s burning
Smoke is rising
You can see it rise from miles away
Driving by the flames
I pray
For rain
I pray for sanctuary
The singer songwriter comes from my neck of the woods, and we could indeed see the smoke rising from miles away. It was an awful sight.
Along with the tears shed for the destruction and the deaths of so many brave people, there was a lingering frustration following the Carmel fire. An excruciating video went around, showing Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovitch in the Knesset warning in 2009 that in pushing Israel’s firefighters towards privatization by drying up their public funding, the Finance Ministry was almost asking for a disaster to occur. It occurred.
It wasn’t until listening to the song by Ella Vs Mountain that I saw the connection between the Carmel Fire and the Israel’s summer protests for Social Justice. If ever we had required non-partisan confirmation that the State was not doing its job properly, the devastation of such a a beloved part of the country mostly due to poor preparation and chronic underfunding gave it to us. Maybe this was the fire that Ella recognizes burning under the protest movement.
But the video clip of the song does more than talk Israel. It cuts together images of popular protests throughout the world, so that the fire falls back into symbolism and the protests that gripped Israel become part of a global wave. Though the youtube cuts mostly show images from Israel (there are even a few rioting Haredim in there) they are also taken from the US, Europe, China, and throughout the Middle East. On the youtube page they even give links for all the clips they used.
The message of the video is clear: the local is global. Israelis in the streets were marching with the world, as part of the world, in order to address an issue for the world. It’s a bold – and mostly true – statement.
It’s a no-brainer to suggest that the general aims (and some methods) of the Occupy movement share a great deal with the Social Justice tent encampments of Israel, although I reckon Occupy could learn something from the Israelis about inclusivity. One can also see how the call for a more representative application of state power shares much with the protests in the Arab world. Though in Israel the protests were met with far less violence (and far less success?).
The video led me to think about what is going on in Tunisia, pretty much the only place in the Arab world where protesters were not beaten or shot at. The New York Times now points to a more complex issue that the Tunisians are dealing with: The tensions between religion and democracy.
Ring a bell?
A TV director chose to air a film that upset religious Muslims, and he’s since been beaten up and taken to court for libeling religion and possibly harming “public order or good morals”.
“Certain Islamist factions want to turn identity into their Trojan horse,” Mr. Messaoudi said. “They use the pretext of protecting their identity as a way to crush what we have achieved as a Tunisian society. They want to crush the pillars of civil society.”
In describing a Tunisian issue, he uses almost exactly the kind of words one hears in Israel today with regards the fundamental religious encroachment on public life.
The article refers to Turkey by way of comparison, but so much of what it describes could as easily be applied to Israel. Check this out:
secular elites long considered themselves a majority and were treated as such by the state. In both, those elites now recognize themselves as minorities and are often mobilized more by the threat than the reality of religious intolerance.
Hello?
Not only that, but it seems that in Tunisia at least, the founding democratic government is keen to avoid making any bold decisions. Compromises will be made, rulings will be postponed, just as they have been in Israel for decades.
The spokesperson from the ruling party’s political bureau admitted that
the line between freedom of expression and religious sensitivity would not be drawn soon. “The struggle is philosophical,” he said, “and it will go on and on and on.”
And in a strange way I’m left hopeful. In a bizarrely Zionist way I’m proud that here in Israel we’re no longer dealing with the esoteric.
The tensions between religion and state are now no longer just a Jewish meshuggas – they’re international (dare we say “universal”) issues that we’re trying to tackle.
Likewise the Social Justice protests were nothing if not local – after all, no one bailed out failing banks in Israel. But we shared a shout, we called a call in common with the rest of the world.
In that way I guess it makes sense for Ella to sing her song of protest in English and not in Hebrew. Sometimes Israel isn’t a separate case – it’s part of the whole.
Trust and Suspicion
It seems like the overarching story will run and run.
As the UK’s Jewish Chronicle uncovers incident after incident of Jewish individuals and organisations ‘fraternizing with the enemy’, the mutterings in opposition to its stance grow louder and louder. You can almost see the two sides drawing their swords, shaping up for battle, determined to prove at all costs the objective truth of their position.
I don’t think this is going to end well.
Perhaps, fundamentally, the issue is about the extent to which we view the world with suspicion or trust. To Full Post
Social Engineering
Israel is a society which solves its problems piecemeal, blinkered to the broader implications of our actions.
We continually appease sectors of our overly partisan population by lighting small fires which we naively believe will harmlessly smolder on a low flame. We then forget about these fires and only wake up to them when they are raging, out of control, and then we raise our eyes to the skies and ask “how could this happen?” To Full Post
The noise of decency or humiliation
It’s strange how the most trivial thing brought me closest to violence.
I’m sitting on the train. The carriage is quiet. Four kids get on and sit across the aisle from me. They’re about 15 or 16. Well-equipped with their various mobile devices, they all loudly and boisterously turn to their respective video games. None of them have earphones.
One guy in particular is playing his beeping video game with the volume on full.
After putting in my noise-cancelling earphones and unsuccessfully trying to ignore him, I give in. I ask him, fairly nicely, to turn down the volume.
At first he doesn’t respond.
Then after I repeat my request he tells me to wait until he finishes the game. He is a little irritated that I distracted him. Blood rising to my cheeks I ask him again, less nicely.
His giggling mates guffaw as the kid tells me that I ought to be more patient.
I want to kill him. To Full Post
Jewish Peoplehood and Human Beings
‘Jewish Peoplehood’ – the notion of collective Jewish belonging – has been criticized as an abstract term with little practical grounding. In order to overcome this challenge, various resources including curricula and seminars have been developed to teach students what Jewish Peoplehood means.
The problem with this approach lies in the assumption that students will simply get it if educators teach them the value of and the textual basis for the ties that bind the Jewish people. However, engendering an organic ‘group connection’ is not a didactic exercise but rather a highly internalized understanding built out of layered relationships and experiences. To Full Post
Are unethical restaurants kosher?
Rabbi Gideon Sylvester directs the Rabbis for Human Rights Beit Midrash at the Hillel House of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and serves as the British United Synagogue’s Rabbi in Israel.
Is belly dancing kosher? How about New Year’s Eve parties?
For years, the Israeli rabbinate has waged wars against such activities, revoking the kashrut licenses of hotels and restaurants that offered them. This enrages those who feel that kashrut authorities should limit themselves to certifying food; others admire the holistic approach, which indicates that both the food and the ambience strictly conform to Jewish tradition.
Talking about Why Israel
American Jewish organizations have, over the last decades, struck a Faustian bargain regarding Israel. In return for the façade of unity and to avoid controversy, we have organizationally either stayed silent about Israel or addressed it in only the most idyllic strokes.
As a result of this lack of investment, the American Jewish-Israel relationship has fallen on tough times, and Americans have lost the “why” of the State of Israel. To Full Post
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