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Before election, Israel approved $2.3 million plan to improve its image among Reform and Conservative Jews: Report

(JTA) — Concerned that progressive values widely held by American Jews were fueling growing skepticism about the Jewish state, the Israeli government launched an unprecedented plan to counter the trend, according to internal documents obtained by the Israeli watchdog newsroom Shomrim.

The documents reveal a $2.3 million partnership between Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and the Reform and Conservative movements in the United States focused on pro-Israel advocacy among young and liberal American Jews. 

Shomrim’s Uri Blau reported that the fate of the plan is uncertain following Israel’s recent election, which saw major gains for the far right, including a politician who has called Reform Judaism a “fake religion.” 

With negotiations among political factions underway, the final shape of the country’s next government has not yet been determined, but the various scenarios on the table have made many American Jews uneasy because of the racism and homophobia espoused by some of those who were elected. Reform leaders have said Israel’s democracy is in peril. 

A government that includes ultranationalists “will almost certainly lead to challenging moments in U.S.-Israel relations and will be painful for Jews worldwide who will not see the Israel they love and believe in reflected in these leaders, nor in the policies they pursue,” the Union for Reform Judaism said in a statement about the election.

Israeli’s outgoing minister of diaspora affairs, Nachman Shai, told Shomrim that while past Israeli governments have been reluctant to engage with the Reform and Conservative movements, he made it a priority of his office. He said the tensions between the two sides have to do with values. 

“That’s why it was very important for the current government to emphasize values shared by both us and them, such as diversity and minority representation,” Shai said. “We want to demonstrate that we nevertheless share common values.”

The leaked documents from Shai’s ministry show that he and other Israeli officials are paying attention to evidence that American Jews have grown more critical of Israel over time

Whoever authored the analysis in the documents blames the embrace of progressive values among U.S. Jews for rising anti-Israel currents in the community. The situation is the result of “the internalization of the progressive discourse framework among a growing number of Jews,” the documents say, according to Shomrim.

The analysis also says that American Jewish identity, unity and communal character are under threat amid changing attitudes toward Israel.

The budget for the plan is reportedly earmarked toward bringing American youth to Israel for trainings and educational trips, holding community events in the United States and other related advocacy.

The documents obtained by Shomrim make no mention of the issues that many American liberal Jews say bother them about Israel, including religious pluralism and the occupation.

“The terms ‘Palestinians,’ settlements,’ ‘Western Wall, ‘equality,’’ and ‘intermarriage,’ and a long list of topics that are at the root of the conflict with American Jewry are not in there,” Blau reported. 

Leaders of the Reform and Conservative movements were interviewed by Shomrim before the election but declined to speak on the topic further after the Nov. 1 vote, which has positioned Benjamin Netanyahu to return to power with the support of the Religious Zionists political bloc.

On Tuesday, the Zionist arm of the worldwide Masorti-Conservative movement, MERCAZ Olami, released a statement suggesting that a coalition including far-right extremists could threaten the ties that the government initiative was meant to strengthen.

“It is impossible to ignore the fact that the coalition which appears to be in the making, will include politicians whose positions regarding basic elements of democracy and diversity (such as Jewish pluralism, LGBTQ and vulnerable minorities) significantly differ from the values which have guided Zionism since its inception,” read the group’s statement, which was endorsed by nearly a dozen groups associated with the Conservative movement. 

It went on, “The bridges between Israel and world Jewry could be severely damaged if a step back will be taken on sensitive issues like the Egalitarian Kotel, conversion, and who is a Jew.”


The post Before election, Israel approved $2.3 million plan to improve its image among Reform and Conservative Jews: Report appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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It was once Sweden’s only news broadcast — what did it say about Israel?

The team behind Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 bares it all with the title of their documentary. It is, in fact, three and a half hours of footage about the conflict from the Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Television AB (SVT), stitched together in mostly chronological order.

SVT was founded in 1956 and held a monopoly on news broadcasts in Sweden until the early 90s, when the commercial channel TV4 was launched. The intention behind SVT programs was to present impartial news produced solely by Swedes.

In the two years since the beginning of the current war, there’s been a renewed interest in understanding the history of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. For those well-versed in the region’s history, they likely won’t learn anything new here. For those who don’t know much, it’s a good crash course — if one considers three and a half hours to be succinct.

Sveriges Television AB reporter Vanna Beckman and Ghassan Kanafani. Courtesy of Icarus Films

The film, directed by Göran Hugo Olsson, documents many major developments that happened in Israel during those three decades, including big waves of American immigration in the 60s, economic growth, and, of course, the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars. Although the early footage focuses on Israel’s impressive agricultural projects and the modernization of the country’s major cities, as the years go on, the increasing focus is on the plight of Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps and the Gaza Strip, as well as political unrest within Israel.

The film opens with the statement that archival material “doesn’t tell us what really happened — but says a lot about how it was told,” so the broader implications of the footage are left up to the viewer’s interpretation. Some may see a welcome, growing awareness of Palestinian suffering. Others may see overly harsh criticisms of Israeli policies that disregard the country’s security issues. With no elaboration or editorializing, it doesn’t feel like the film is helping clarify or challenge the audience’s preconceived notions about the conflict.

And although the footage is Swedish, it’s unclear what, if anything, that lends to the conversation. There is barely anything in the film about Swedish attitudes towards Israel, though we get a peek into diverging viewpoints during a 1964 debate between diplomat Gunnar Häglöff and political scientist Herbert Tingsten about the issue of Palestinian refugees. In a 1968 broadcast, two Swedish journalists question Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Abba Eban about the Israeli government destroying Arab homes. There are also interviews with Swedish soldiers from the United Nations who were stationed at a former railway station on the border between Gaza and Egypt in 1975. They have little to say about the conflict, however, and are more interested in discussing how they can build a sauna, a luxury from home they can’t live without.

Conscripts for obligatory Israeli military service in 1967. Courtesy of Icarus Films

How the Swedish government or its citizens have felt about Israel over the years remains strangely obscured. Whatever impact this footage may have had on Swedish-Israel relations and how these broadcasts were received is never discussed. It’s especially unfortunate that the films offers no way to compare the countries’ past relationship to current diplomatic tensions around Israel’s treatment of activist Greta Thunberg

With the humanitarian crisis in Gaza growing more dire and the future of Israel’s democracy becoming an increasingly pressing issue, one wonders what can be gained from the rehashing of history on view in Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV. The documentary primarily underscores a point most people already understand by now: The situation in Israel and Palestine is complicated. It’s violent. It feels neverending. Most people probably don’t need to watch a three and a half hour documentary to tell them that.

‘Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989’ opens at Film Forum NYC on October 10th.

The post It was once Sweden’s only news broadcast — what did it say about Israel? appeared first on The Forward.

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It was one of klezmer’s greatest days — will there ever be another?

18 years ago, America’s finest and most influential klezmer musicians gathered on the steps of the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for a photograph.

The picture was organized by Yale Strom, a violinist and klezmer musician who, having watched ‘A Great Day in Harlem,’ a documentary about Art Kane’s celebrated 1958 shot of America’s best-known jazz musicians, sought to do something similar by assembling those responsible for America’s klezmer revival. Strom called the photo, which was taken by Leo Sorel, ‘A Great Day On Eldridge Street’.

Whereas most of the musicians in Kane’s photograph knew each other, and indeed were friendly, a good few of Strom’s klezmer musicians had never met. “It certainly brought together a lot of people who had never been together at the same place at the same time,” recalled Hankus Netsky, a founding member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and a central figure in the klezmer revival.

For Strom, this remains the photograph’s abiding achievement. “I accomplished something no one had ever done,” he told me. “And most likely never will.”

Several of the 106 musicians photographed that day have since passed away, including Theodore Bikel, one of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival; Elaine Hoffman Watts, the first female graduate of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music; and renowned Yiddish poet and songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. But American klezmer has continued to grow in popularity, thanks to the contributions of Don Byron, John Zorn, Jake Shulman-Ment, and Pete Rushefsky, among numerous other performers.

‘A Great Day on Eldridge Street’ was partly a celebration of American klezmer’s New York roots, and of the Lower East Side’s historic Eastern European Jewish immigrant community, but since 2007, the klezmer revival, which began in the late 1970s, has taken on an increasingly international character. “There’s a lot more access to international workshops now, and klezmer’s presence in the global music scene is only increasing from year-to-year,” Netsky said.

“The music is larger and more varied,” Strom added. “More sounds, more venues, more academic study, and more global cross-pollination.”

And though the 2007 photo cannot be recreated, it is past time for a sequel, Netsky said — one that honors “the incredible dedication and virtuosity of the younger generation.”

The post It was one of klezmer’s greatest days — will there ever be another? appeared first on The Forward.

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Has the Jewish joke become an endangered species — Òu sont les blagues d’antan?

Is the Jewish joke on the verge of becoming extinct?  The Last Jewish Joke, written by the veteran Parisian sociologist Michel Wieviorka, and newly translated into English by Cory Stockwell, argues that in recent years, Jews began to seem less heimish for at least three reasons: The Holocaust receded from memory; Israel’s government became guilty of actions decried internationally as war crimes; and right-wing antisemites who were always present became more boldly vocal.

Reminiscing about when he heard certain jokes, the author compiles his own consoling self-portrait in an autumnal mood. Wieviorka will be 80 next year, and his prose has a tendency to poignantly deem things as the “last” or at their “end.”

English language readers may need to be reminded that, when Wieviorka alludes to family situations in which he first heard Jewish jokes, it is in the context of his distinguished family of overachievers. His sister Annette is an eminent historian of the Holocaust. Another sister, Sylvie, is a psychiatrist and academic, and a brother, Olivier, is a historian specializing in World War II and the French Resistance. The entire mishpocheh is inspired and motivated by the memory of their paternal grandparents, Polish Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz. Indeed, Annette Wieviorka recently published a “family autobiography,” which asked subtle, eloquent, and nuanced questions about her antecedents.

In a comparable emotional aura of reverence, Wieviorka characterizes Jewish comedy of the past as “never malicious” (though apparently insult comics like Jack E. Leonard, Don Rickles, and Joan Rivers never got the memo).

The notion that joking Jews had to be sympathetic victims to elicit empathy from non-Jewish audiences may be true of some raconteurs, but is also belied by historical examples of potty-mouthed rapscallions like Belle Barth, B. S. Pully (born Murray Lerman) and Joe E. Ross (born Joseph Roszawikz), who startled nightclub audiences of their day with profanity.

Later Jewish shock jocks of the Howard Stern variety likewise chose to surprise, rather than charm, the public as a way to win notoriety. And Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, far from relying on vulnerable Jews as victims, presented characters screaming putdowns to elicit hilarity.

French sociologist Michel Wieviorka, seen here in 2016, is the author of ‘The Last Jewish Joke.’ Photo by Getty Images

To bolster his arguments, Wieviorka refers to the counterexample of Popeck (born Judka Herpstu), a demure, wry entertainer of Polish and Romanian Jewish origin, who at 90 still appears at French theaters with gentle monologues akin to those of the Danish Jewish wit Victor Borge. Popeck presents himself onstage as a grumpy Eastern-European immigrant speaking Yiddish-accented French.

Wieviorka values such exemplars of rapidly vanishing tradition; as a social scientist, he is convinced that because communal settings such as the Borscht Belt no longer exist, the comics who once flourished on hotel stages in the Catskills have disappeared from memory.

To be sure, American standups like Myron Cohen, Jan Murray, and Carl Ballantine, once familiar from TV variety shows, are rarely mentioned now, though  others like Eddie Cantor are periodically rediscovered by a new public, as Cantor was when he showed up as a character in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. But in his autobiographical deep dive, Wieviorka, who writes here more as a memoirist than a history of comedy, is naturally more concerned with things that he personally saw or heard, rather than any objective history of Jewish comedians through the ages.

Wieviorka also somewhat curiously refers to the “Yiddish-inflected” comedy of Groucho Marx. Apart from the word “schnorrer” which appears in “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” a song written by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar, it is difficult to think of many other explicit Yiddishisms in Groucho’s verbal elan.

Wieviorka’s anecdotes tend to be hefty and hearty, like a family repast of kreplach that remains in the visceral memory for days after being consumed. Some of the quaintly old fashioned tales he refers to recall the precedent of Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, a dissection of pleasantries that reflects a sturdy Yekke approach to light-heartedness. Of course, in this optic of Jewish humor, there is no room for concise one-liners from the likes of Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen). For Wieviorka, as with Freud, brevity was so far from being the soul of wit that it might almost seem non-Jewish.

Another of Wieviorka’s claims appears to conflict with Jewish tradition itself, such as when he states that funny Jews laugh at themselves, never at others, negating the othering of mocked and disdained people in Chelm, a legendary village in Yiddish folklore inhabited by fools who believe themselves to be wise.

To support some of his claims, the author discusses the 1970s French film The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, a box office success, now somewhat frantic and dated-looking, starring the popular Gallic comedian, Louis de Funès disguised as a rabbi. More to the point, Wieviorka justly reveres the French Jewish comedian Pierre Dac for his still-fascinating wartime broadcasts from London for the Free French forces. Dac’s sense of humor simultaneously expressing Yiddishkeit and also undermining the enemy’s Fascist ideology is a subject that might have intrigued Freud himself.

To bolster the essentially serious messages of his book, Wieviorka mentions the writers Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart as well as the painter Marc Chagall, names rarely seen in books about humor.

Wieviorka’s elegiac, end-of-an-era tone might be cheered up by a glance at the Netflix streaming schedule or a visit to a comedy club. Of course Jewish humor is thriving, as Wieviorka himself admits; Le Monde headlined a relevant story about the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, “Israeli comedians are boosting morale in wartime.”

So, for all its methodical, highly intellectual analysis, The Last Jewish Joke might be best appreciated as a moving Kaddish for the demise of anecdotes that were once considered the height of drollery. It is very much a product of brainy French Jewish creativity, which itself deserves to be cherished and celebrated.

 

The post Has the Jewish joke become an endangered species — Òu sont les blagues d’antan? appeared first on The Forward.

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