Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(New York Jewish Week) - "I've always wanted to write about the Holocaust," the playwright Moisés Kaufman, son of a Romanian Holocaust survivor, told me this week. "But it's the one thing in history that has been most written about. What is there new to say?" One answer came in an article on the front page of the New York Times, dated Sept. 19, 2017, about a remarkable album of photographs donated anonymously to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. More than 100 carefully mounted snapshots...
(New York Jewish Week) - My son is in town from California for Passover, and on Tuesday night he treated the rest of the family to a Mets game. Before the first pitch, the Mets had a moment of silence for the pitcher Carl Erskine, who died that day at age 97. Erskine was a star of the storied Brooklyn Dodgers teams of the late 1940s and '50s, when they won the National League pennant five times and the 1955 World Series. Erskine was also the last surviving Dodger to have been profiled in Roger...
(JTA) — Comedian Richard Lewis, who parlayed his neurotic Jewish personality and self-deprecating humor into a 50-year career as a standup and actor, died Wednesday. He was 76. Lewis had been in ill health for a number of years and last April announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease two years earlier. Although he considered himself retired as a standup, he appeared again as a regular in the current season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” playing a version of himself in the HBO show created by and starring his childhood friend...
(JTA) — Pearl Berg, thought to be the oldest Jewish person in the world and the third oldest American, died Feb. 1 in Los Angeles. She was 114. A philanthropist active in her local Hadassah chapter, Berg was married for 58 years to Mark Berg, a businessman and investor. He died in 1989. “She maybe had a sip of Sabbath wine but she didn’t drink, she didn’t smoke, she ate sensibly, she had good emotional balance and she clearly had remarkable genes,” Berg’s youngest son, Robert Berg, told the Los Angeles Times. Berg was born Oct. 1, 1909, in In...
(JTA) - Music critic Jeremy Eichler's study of how classical composers made music after the Holocaust was named the book of the year by the Jewish Book Council, which will present the National Jewish Book Awards at an in-person ceremony in March. "Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance" was named the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year and won both the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial History Award and the Holocaust Award in Memory of Ernest W....
(JTA) - When I spoke with novelist Elizabeth Graver in August about her novel "Kantika" - inspired by her own Turkish Jewish family - I asked her how she managed to breathe life into a tired genre like the Jewish family saga. "I want the characters to be flawed and complex, and for the turns that they take to come out of their intersections with both history and their own very particular circumstances," she told me. The flawed and the complex; the historic and the particular. These are the...
(JTA) — Attend or watch footage of a campus pro-Palestinian demonstration these days and you are likely to see someone carrying a sign reading “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Almost immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, George Washington University Students for Justice in Palestine put out a statement praising the terrorists, declaring “Decolonization is NOT a metaphor.” As a political slogan, it may not pack the same punch as “Free Palestine” or “From the river to the sea.” But to activists on both sides of the Israeli-Pa...
(JTA) - The Jewish Theological Seminary community is in mourning after three revered scholars long associated with the Conservative movement flagship died within days of each other. Rabbi Israel Francus, who died Nov. 15 at age 96, and Rabbi Avraham Holtz, who died the same day at age 89, were both professors emeritus at the seminary - Francus as a longtime professor of Talmudic exegesis and Holtz in Hebrew literature. Samuel Klagsbrun, who died Nov. 11 at age 91, was a psychiatrist and medical...
(JTA) -After the deadly attack by Hamas, the Jewish world has joined to share in the grief of the mourners and lament the lives cut brutally short. Below are just a fraction of the men and women who were killed on and since Oct. 7 - some are soldiers, most are civilians, and all helped make up the rich tapestry of the Jewish state. Omer Balva, 22, graduate of a Jewish day school in Maryland Omer Balva was on vacation in Maryland, where he was born and lived until graduating from high school, on...
(JTA) — Hours after Saturday’s deadly surprise attack on Israel by Hamas, the Israeli protest group Achim le’Neshek (Brothers and Sisters in Arms) was helping arrange transportation for army reservists being called to the front. “Brothers and Sisters in Arms call on everyone who is required to stand up for the defense of Israel without hesitation and immediately,” the group tweeted early Saturday. “Right now the most important thing is the safety of the country’s citizens.” It was an abrupt turnabout by a group of military veterans and re...
(JTA) — For those following the judicial reform crisis in Israel, this week’s Torah portion is almost too on the nose. For months now, Israel has been convulsed by protests in response to a plan by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “reform” Israel’s Supreme Court by stripping it of much of its powers of oversight and shifting the balance of power heavily in favor of the legislature. Defenders of the reform call it a corrective measure meant to rein in a high court that too often flouts the will of the democratically elected Knesset. Critics...
(JTA) — I was just out of college when I got a freelance assignment from a small entertainment magazine to interview a rising comic named Pee-wee Herman. Of course that wasn’t his real name, but the man-child persona — one part Howdy Doody, one part third-grade nerd, who spoke as if he just took a hit off a helium balloon — was created by a comic and actor named Paul Reubens. The publicist warned me that Reubens would be only talking to me as Pee-wee, but the voice at the other end of the cal...
(JTA) - Alan Arkin knew he was going to be an actor from the age of five. "Every film I saw, every play, every piece of music fed an unquenchable need to turn myself into something other than what I was," he wrote in his 2011 memoir, "An Improvised Life." What he was was the son of Ukrainian and German Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, where he was born in 1934. But over the course of a long and unusually peripatetic career, he managed to turn himself into a conflicted Russian submarine officer ("The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,"...
(JTA) — When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we thought it might be cool to hire a klezmer band. This was during the first wave of the klezmer revival, when groups like The Klezmatics and The Klezmer Conservatory Band were rediscovering the genre of Jewish wedding music popular for centuries in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe. Of course we also wanted to dance to rock ‘n’ roll and needed musicians who could handle Sinatra for our parents’ benefit, so we went with a more typical wedding band. Modernity won out over tradition. Or did...
(JTA) - Ben Stiller offered his own High Holiday alternative to Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song" as his fellow Jewish comedian accepted the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. During an awards ceremony that took place on March 19 and aired on CNN, Stiller asked from the stage at Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts how Sandler's novelty song, first heard on "Saturday Night Live" in 1994, became a seasonal standard. "It's really just a list of rhyming celebrity names, and yet...
(JTA) — When Benjamin Netanyahu put his controversial calls for judicial reform on pause three weeks ago, many thought the protesters in Israel and abroad might declare victory and take a break. And yet a week ago Saturday some 200,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv, and pro-democracy protests continued among Diaspora Jews and Israeli expats, including those who gather each Sunday in New York’s Washington Square Park. On its face, the weeks of protest have been about proposed legislation that critics said would sap power from the Israeli Sup...
(JTA) — Holocaust documentaries tend to sit along a scale from horrific to heartwarming. For every “Night Will Fall,” the rediscovered British film showing gruesome scenes from newly liberated Nazi concentration camps, there is a family-friendly film about a survivor, like “The Number on Great-Grandpa’s Arm.” Some critics distrust Holocaust documentaries that have “happy” endings, or that focus on the second chance given to survivors, as if they betray the fate of the many more millions of Jews who died rather than survived. Raye Farr, the form...
(JTA) — There are 49 days between the second night of Passover and the holiday of Shavuot, but who’s counting? Jews the world over, in fact, and in languages familiar and obscure. The daily counting of the Omer is an old ritual being given new life this season by the Jewish Language Project at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. On each day of the seven-week period, the research group will post a version of the counting in a different vernacular Jewish language, from Ladino and Yiddish to less familiar languages like Jud...
(JTA) — Earlier this month the New York Times convened what it called a “focus group of Jewish Americans.” I was struck briefly by that phrase — Jewish Americans — in part because the Times, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, tends to prefer “American Jews.” It’s seemingly a distinction without a difference, although I know others might disagree. There is an argument that “American Jew” smacks of disloyalty, describing a Jew who happens to be American. “Jewish American,” according to this thinking, flips the script: an American who happens to...
(JTA) — Abraham Zarem was 28 when he joined the Manhattan Project, the vast U.S. government effort to develop the atom bomb. Engineers like him gathered in secret laboratories in New Mexico, California, New York City and elsewhere to provide the practical know-how the theorists lacked. “‘They were geniuses, but didn’t know how to build a f—king thing,’” Zarem recalled, according to his longtime rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, David Wolpe. Zaum, who went on to a distinguished career in technology, business development and leadership ma...
(JTA) - Songwriter Burt Bacharach, who with his longtime lyricist Hal David turned out a string of hits in the 1960s and '70s - including "Alfie" and "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" - died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94. Bacharach and David, both Jewish New Yorkers, also wrote a host of songs that made Dionne Warwick a megastar, such as "Walk on By," "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" and "I Say a Little Prayer." The duo came to fame while working in the Brill Building -...
(New York Jewish Week) — Three state lawmakers are asking if Yeshiva University misrepresented itself as a secular institution in order to qualify for more than $230 million in public funds. Their letter demanding a full accounting from the Modern Orthodox flagship is the latest twist in the university’s attempts to block an LGBT student club from getting official campus recognition. In fighting court orders to accept the club, Y.U. has been insisting that, despite a charter that describes it as a secular institution, it has a distinct religiou...
(New York Jewish Week) - In 2017, Deborah Veach went back to Germany, looking for the site of the displaced persons camp where she and her parents had been housed after World War II. They were in suspension, between the lives her parents led in Belarus before they were shattered by the Nazis, and the unknown fate awaiting them as refugees without a country. To her dismay, and despite the fact that Foehrenwald was one of the largest Jewish DP centers in the American-controlled zone of Germany,...
(JTA) — Jewish eras can be defined by events (the fall of the Second Temple, the Inquisition, the founding of Israel) and by ideas (the rabbinic era, emancipation, post-denominationalism). It’s too early to tell what ideas will define this era, although a look back at the big debates of 2022 suggests Jews in North America will be discussing a few issues for a long time: the resurgence of antisemitism, the boundaries of free speech, the red/blue culture wars. Below are eight of some of the key debates of the past year as (mostly) reflected in...
(JTA) — It’s been over 20 years since my predecessor as editor of the New York Jewish Week, Gary Rosenblatt, first exposed the predations of Rabbi Baruch Lanner. His powerful investigation led Lanner’s bosses at the Orthodox Union to issue a report describing the sexual, physical and emotional abuse carried out by Lanner against dozens of teenagers in his charge. It’s been exactly 20 years since Lanner was convicted of sexually assaulting students at a Jewish high school in New Jersey. It’s been 14 years since Lanner, then 58, was released afte...
