No, I always said. It sounded like a ploy for tourist dollars. And besides, I wasn’t even sure I could prove my connection.

My parents were born in Mexico and fled north to California in the U.S. in 1914 and 1930, respectively, during the Mexican Revolution. Like many Mexican Protestants, they suspected they had originally descended from Spain’s banished Jews—a vast Sephardic diaspora that extended from China to India to the American West that began with the Edict of Expulsion, the 1492 charter that told hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the Spanish Kingdom to convert, leave, or be killed.

No one spoke of this history, really. I first learned of it at the age of 9, after I read all of the Old Testament and told my mother I wanted to be Jewish. We were, once, she told me—or rather, our ancestors were. But now we were Protestant. It was years before I patched it all together and connected my family’s story with the Inquisition’s legacy. Eventually I began writing about my family and the hidden Jews of Mexico, as families like mine are sometimes known—a group who often practiced Catholicism, but never quite belonged.

The citizenship offer was announced in 2015, and set to expire after three years. As the window began to close, my son, then 28, said, “We should do this.”

“What?” I said. “Why?”

“It’s EU citizenship.”

I thought about this. I had visited Spain but had never really considered a move there. At the same time, since 2016 we had been living in a United States where, every morning, we’d been greeted with a new atrocity committed by our own government against immigrants and the children of immigrants, including those from Mexico, part of a population recently portrayed as murderers and rapists. The atmosphere was threatening to get worse. Spain and the European Union looked progressive, in comparison. My son, a software engineer, was already a citizen of the world, having traveled all over, working with colleagues from Silicon Valley to Poland, and backpacking through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and all over South America. “It will be fun,” he promised. “We will do it together.”

So I agreed to apply.

It seemed, at first, like a manageable process. Get a few documents together, brush up on my Spanish, and study for a citizenship test—the same things required of people seeking citizenship in the United States, plus proving my Jewish background. The amount of paperwork turned out to be massive. Everything had to be translated into Spanish by a translator certified by the Spanish Government. Everything had to not only be notarized, but recognized by the equivalent of notaries in Europe.

We needed our birth certificates and our driver’s licenses. We needed the state of Washington to attest that we had clean criminal records for the last two years—no easy feat, I was to learn, as numerous copies of my fingerprints were rejected for review by the FBI, time and again, because they were considered illegible. I needed copies of my marriage certificate from Colorado. I needed to learn grown-up Spanish, as opposed to my vestigial childhood Spanish, and pass a rigorous, three-part test. Everything cost money. Everything took time.

I also had to establish my direct descent from specific individuals who left Spain under duress during the Inquisition—proof that needed to be documented with papers recognized by both the Jewish Council of Spain, a group of rabbis who represent the present-day Jewish communities in Spain, and the Spanish government. I would need to list names of people in my family—father to son or daughter, mother to son or daughter, a direct, unbroken line—all the way back to someone who had fled Spain. Many people who escaped the Inquisition took on new identities to board ships to the Americas, and kept those new identities in the New World. How, I wondered, did they expect us to have legal proof of descent after hundreds of years of clandestine existence?

Most of what I know of my family’s distant past I’ve learned since 1992, the 500th anniversary of the Inquisition. For the milestone, I wrote a piece for the literary journal the Raven Chronicles, where I had the opportunity to interview an elder in Seattle who I hoped would be able to tell me more about the Sephardic community there. When I arrived at my interviewee’s home, the dining room table was covered in old photos. Isaac Maimon, a retired greengrocer, told me about his years teaching Ladino, a Jewish dialect of Spanish, at his synagogue. His father had been the first Sephardic rabbi in Seattle. Mr. Maimon had immigrated with his family from Turkey as a 13-year-old at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and grown up in a vibrant community of Jews from Turkey, Greece and the Isle of Rhodes. He had strong feelings about Spain; he might forgive the country for what it did to its Jewish citizens, he said, but he would never forget. As we spoke, his wife was kneading and rolling dough in the kitchen, which had a Dutch door into the room where we talked. This allowed her to join us as she baked, and kept Mr. Maimon, an Orthodox Jew, from being alone with a woman who was not a relative.

Before I left, I told him that there was speculation in my family that we, too, were descended from Spanish Jews. Immediately, he began to grill me on family customs. Did we light candles on Friday night, a telltale remnant of Shabbat observances past? Did we play cards, a way to study Torah without having the actual texts? Did we have any documents or objects—a menorah or mezuzah—that might hint at Sephardic ancestry? To acknowledge the 500-year anniversary, Sephardim all over the world, he told me, were sharing antiques or relics that linked them to their Spanish past. Some people even had keys to the homes their ancestors left behind in Spain, as though this would all blow over and they could return in their own lifetimes.

Everyone, it seemed, except the Jews of northern Mexico and New Mexico, who said, “thank you very much, but we are happy the way we are”—in other words, hidden. Catholicism is still strong in Mexico, and even after 500 years people feel that they could hurt their business prospects, or endanger themselves, by openly declaring their Judaism. It has become more than a habit or an affectation. After so much time, a way to stay alive is a way of life.

Unlike some families, ours did not have any old artifacts. My mother’s family had moved constantly while she was growing up. My father’s family walked north with what they could carry. All we had were stories and strings of names.

We were going to have to dig to confirm a Jewish past. At first, an acquaintance of mine who specialized in Mexican Jewish genealogies told me that we could submit a simple report from a genealogist, summarizing the evidence of our ancestry. She referred us to a woman in Spain who did such work; she merely noted a couple of the surnames on my family tree, that there were Alcalás and Gutierrezes in Spain who had also suffered under the Inquisition—gruesomely, I might add—and that it was reasonable to believe we were their descendants. But by the time we received the “report,” the Spanish Government was no longer accepting such documents as valid proof. The connection had to be spelled out generation by generation, name by name.

Over the years various relatives had passed along family trees of sorts, but I felt inadequate to trace the connections between people who all shared the same few names, over and over. An ancestor at the top of the chart had been married four times. We turned next to an American genealogist who specialized in the history of Northern Mexico. He mined the records of the Mormon Church, who collect genealogies for religious reasons, but make them available to everyone.

He also found a privately published book that told the stories of Spanish settlers of Monterrey and Saltillo, Mexico, and provided photos of church records from the Cathedral in Saltillo that provided proof of our descent from one of four particular individuals—people recruited to Mexico by the famous Luis de Carvajál, a governor of the Spanish province of Nuevo León, who was himself later sentenced to death by the Inquisition in Mexico. These four were mysteriously able to board ships without the mandatory background checks attesting that they were of good Catholic backgrounds. It was the first time I had heard the names of the specific people in my family who left Spain for what was, to them, a New World. Even now, I can barely look at their names without feeling a bit shaky.

The citizenship process, for us, culminated in a trip to Málaga, Spain, moments before the pandemic broke out in Europe. There, we visited a notario (a kind of legal officer with more power than notaries in the U.S.) to witness our signatures on piles of official papers, after which he affixed his own signature and seal. Only then could our application, along with those of more than 132,000 other descendants of Spanish Jews, make its way to the Spanish government.

Just over a year later, we are now waiting to hear back. If everything is approved, we will visit the local Spanish Consular in the Seattle area to receive our passports and our citizenship. I have mixed emotions about this subject; because I can afford the time and money to pursue Spanish citizenship, I feel that I am claiming privilege when what I want to claim is justice. I know my feelings will continue to evolve as world events unfold. I also identify as a descendant of Opata Indians from the Sonoran Desert. I have taken an active role in recovering that culture in recent years, another case of land stolen and people who deliberately hid their identity in order to survive. No story takes precedence over any other, of loss and recovery, of conqueror and conquered, or of exile and return.

As my son and I wait to hear if we will be granted citizenship, it is easy for me to ignore the larger questions. We have a new administration, and the existential threat hanging over our heads has abated. My relationship with Judaism has evolved over the decades, and this seems to be one more step in the process. As I talk to others with dual citizenship or multiple ethnic, cultural, or religious identities, I see that they are comfortable in this in-between place, called nepantla in Uto-Aztecan. I am by nature oriented to place as a way of being, but I have come to understand that I should never take it as a given. As my ancestors fled for their lives or were driven off their land, I should be prepared to pull up roots and relocate if I have to. At the same time, I should also be prepared to defend my place, and that of others, in the world.

The question before me remains: After an absence of 530 years, will Spain feel like home? Or just another diaspora?

The post My Jewish Ancestors Fled Spain. Will Returning Feel Like Home—Or Just Another Diaspora? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kubrick was, according to Frederic Raphael, who co-wrote the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), “known to have said that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents.” Jewish by birth through both his mother, Sadie Gertrude Perveler, and his father, Jacob (also known as Jack or Jacques) Kubrick, the director was given by his parents a very typical first name for Jews born in that era. In addition, he steadfastly stuck to using that name in an industry where fellow Jews—at least the actors with whom he worked—had frequently changed them.

Born in 1928, Kubrick grew up in the heavily Jewish West Bronx, surrounded by Jewish neighbors and immigrants. The Bronx was, at that time, home to 250,000 Jews, from which Kubrick drew his early circle of childhood friends. His maternal grandmother spoke Yiddish; Kubrick adored Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987), set in Rockaway Beach in Queens, identifying with the little boy, Joe, the film’s protagonist. The language of that film, and the tastes and smells it conjured up, were those of Kubrick’s childhood in the 1930s and 1940s.

However, as an assimilated American-Jewish family, the Kubricks were not religious. They practiced little, if any, Judaism. Jacob had changed his own Hebrew name to the more cosmopolitan Jack/Jacques. When asked once by an interviewer, “Did you have a religious upbringing?” Kubrick replied, “No, not at all.” His education was completely secular. He received no formal Jewish instruction and, as far as is known, never attended a synagogue or Hebrew School or was bar-mitzvahed. None of these things interested him.

Some collaborators have characterized Kubrick as a self-hating Jew. Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay for Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), accused the director of being “a guy who is a Jew, and he’s a man who hates Jews. He has said to me that the Jews are responsible for their own persecutions because they have separated themselves from the rest of humanity.” In his memoir of working with Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, Frederic Raphael claimed Kubrick said that Hitler had been “right about almost everything.”

Yet Kubrick’s Jewish identity was much more complex than these labels—and unproven assertions—suggest. Kubrick was more than just Jewish by birth; he was a Jew by culture and feeling. He was acutely aware of his Central and Eastern European Jewish origins—his ancestors emigrated from Poland, Austria, and Romania to the United States around 1900. This cultural inheritance deeply influenced Kubrick. He loved the Jewish literature of the region: Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Jacob Schulz, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig. His father, who was a well-read man, owned an extensive personal library, which he encouraged his son to read, supplying an informal Jewish education during Kubrick’s childhood.

Kubrick’s lifelong interests manifested a Jewish sensibility. He was passionate about photography, chess, drumming, boxing, jazz, and filmmaking, all extraordinarily Jewish professions and pastimes in the 20th century. He married two Jewish women in succession (albeit in civil ceremonies), both daughters of first-generation European immigrants, Toba Metz and Ruth Sobotka.

Kubrick also can be described as a gastronomic Jew. He loved lox, bagels, salt beef, and pastrami. His long-time assistant, Tony Frewin, recalled, “I think of Stanley going to sleep at night dreaming of Carnegie Deli.” Kubrick objected that the nearest deli was miles away from his home north of London.

Unfortunately, he also experienced anti-Jewish prejudice. In an interview with Tachles, his third wife, Christiane Harlan, recalls how, “Early on, as a photojournalist for the magazine Look, he was confronted with anti-Semitism.” When traveling in the U.S. Southern states, he was barred from restaurants and hotels. Even in Vermont, he once was denied a table. Kubrick never, as far as we know, responded. He did not comment on it publicly or in any letter I have seen.

He also experienced it later when working in Hollywood, on Spartacus. “Get that little Jewboy from the Bronx off my crane,” grumbled veteran cinematographer Russell Metty. How Kubrick reacted in these instances is unknown, but it led him to further embrace his relationship with Tony Curtis, another Jewish Bronx native. No doubt, these experiences hardened him and lay in part behind his reason to relocate to England in the early 1960s to make Lolita (1962), where he lived until his death in 1999. But he never felt truly comfortable in certain social circles there, either. He was often invited to social events and refused to go.

Maybe this was because, as his brother-in-law and producer, Jan Harlan, said, “he knew he looked Jewish and his big beard emphasized this.” In the opinion of Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay for 2001, the director’s full and untrimmed facial hair gave him the “aura of a Talmudic scholar” and the look of a “slightly cynical rabbi” that he retained for the rest of his life.

As a parent, his daughter Anya described him as “a very nice, good, rather Jewish father—probably overprotective.” The Kubricks always had a Christmas tree, and Kubrick also loved bacon. Although they did nothing Jewish, his eldest daughter, Katharina, said, “He did not deny his Jewishness, not at all. But given that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust and researched it for years, I leave it to you to decide how he felt about his religion.”

Indeed, Kubrick read many books about the Holocaust throughout his career, and not only in preparation for his never-to-be-made Aryan Papers. This included Raul Hilberg and Primo Levi, whom he recommended to various collaborators, including Michael Herr and Brian Aldiss. He just could never complete the film he dreamed of making. When asked if he would adapt Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, he said, “I don’t see how I could make it? … I’m Jewish….”

In the final analysis, Kubrick had no faith. In an interview with Playboy in 1968, he stated, “I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions.” His driver and handyman, Emilio D’Alessandro, recalled, “Stanley wasn’t particularly interested in religion, nor did he really understand religious fanaticism.” Yet, Jan Harlan says, he was “always taking a big bow to the great Unknowable.” Maybe this explains why the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, was performed at his funeral in 1999.

Nonetheless, if you watch Kubrick’s films often and closely enough, the Jewish moments will gradually rise to the surface. Private Sidney, played by Jewish actor Paul Mazursky in Kubrick’s first feature film Fear and Desire (1953), very much resembles the stereotypical Jewish soldier of so many World War II combat films. Davey Gordon, the boxing hero in Killer’s Kiss (1955), very much fits into that period of Jewish boxing movies. The Jewish loan shark played by Jay Adler in The Killing (1956) has a Jewish sensibility encapsulated by the Yiddish saying, “Man plans, God laughs.”

Kubrick’s two films with Kirk Douglas, Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960), project the new 1950s creation of the macho-mensch character type. Douglas and his co-star Tony Curtis were both Jewish but had taken on non-Jewish names, seemingly playing non-Jewish characters. Kubrick’s two films with the British Jewish actor Peter Sellers—Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964)—were both imbued with a ’60s Jewish shtick of the type at which Lenny Bruce excelled. A poster of Lenny Bruce can be glimpsed in The Killing (as can a young Rodney Dangerfield, a Jewish comedian). Lolita also stars Jewish actress Shelley Winters, and there’s even a Jewish navigator in Dr. Strangelove. Both films have an underlying Holocaust theme.

Kubrick then made 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, a film rich with allusions to the Hebrew Bible, liturgy, and especially Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah. His next two films also featured Jewish actors—Steven Berkoff and Aubrey Morris in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Berkoff again in the period film Barry Lyndon (1975), as well as Marissa Berenson and Ryan O’Neal, both of whom had Jewish ancestry. While the former film deals with the nature of free choice, a key Jewish tenet, the latter explores the interloper in WASP society, something that Jews confronted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a host of countries. As a shabby-genteel Irishman, Barry Lyndon was clearly an interloper in 18th-century elite Anglo society. In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford’s status as a party-crashing “outsider” is similarly based on social class, being out of his depth among the superrich elite in 1990s New York City. The protagonists of both Spartacus and A Clockwork Orange also fit into this interpretation of the outsider/anti-hero who disrupts the dominant social order.

While there was seemingly no one or nothing Jewish about The Shining (1980), adapted from Stephen King’s bestselling horror thriller, the story draws heavily upon Genesis 22, in which a father, the Jewish patriarch Abraham, seeks to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at the bidding of a higher power.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) perhaps comes closest of all Kubrick’s work to referencing the horrors of the Holocaust, in its depiction of how ordinary men can become hardened killers. In this Vietnam War drama, young boys are degraded and dehumanized in boot camp so they can kill with hard hearts in Vietnam.

And all of this was capped off by Eyes Wide Shut, an adaptation of Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, a story that was Jewish to its very core but seemingly scrubbed clean of any trace—except for casting Sydney Pollack in a key role as Victor Ziegler, a rich, unsavory, and morally suspect Jewish businessman. Pollack, like Kubrick, was a Jewish director and his physiognomy added what might be described as a stereotypical Jewish “look.”

As alluded to above, the ritual of unmasking and expulsion which Dr. Bill undergoes is something that Jews metaphorically feared and actually underwent in European society.

Kubrick and his films were complicated and defied simple readings. We can read them as Jewish, but this is just one element to be added to the mix of interpretations that already exist and no doubt will keep coming in the future.

The post How Jewish Was Stanley Kubrick? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Very few readers today will have heard of Menasseh ben Israel; but in the 17th century he was arguably the most famous Jew in the world, in no small part for trying to move Jews and Christians past centuries of mistrust and hatred.

Menasseh was one of the most accomplished and cosmopolitan rabbis of his time, and a pivotal intellectual figure in early modern Jewish history. He was among the three rabbis of the “Portuguese Nation” in Amsterdam, a community founded at the beginning of the 17th century that would quickly earn great renown (and envy) worldwide for its mercantile and scholarly vitality. Menasseh played an essential role in that community’s reputation because his books and other writings—in Hebrew, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and English—reached a broad and very appreciative audience, among both Jews and gentiles.

Menasseh, a true Renaissance man, did more than anybody in the 17th century to advance the Jewish cause, whether in learning or in politics, and to educate Christians about Jewish religion, literature, and history. He was a scholar, philosopher, diplomat, educator (he was the philosopher Spinoza’s elementary school teacher), editor, translator, printer, and bookseller; no activity seems to have been outside his considerable talents. His network of friends and admirers stretched across the continent. He was, for many, the go-to person for all things Judaic.

And yet, Menasseh felt that, somehow, he did not receive the respect he deserved from his own local community.

He was right.

Menasseh was born Manoel Diaz Soeiro in Lisbon in 1604. His father had suffered horribly there under the Inquisition’s torturers, and there was reason to believe that he would be arrested again; even though his family was converso and ostensibly Catholic, the authorities suspected them of secret Judaizing. As soon as they could, the family fled Iberia, first to Madeira, then to La Rochelle, in southwestern France, and finally, around 1610, to Amsterdam. The Portuguese authorities’ suspicions of Judaizing were well grounded—when the family reached Holland, the men were all circumcised and took the name “ben Israel,” son of Israel.

Unlike almost everywhere else in 17th-century Europe, Jews in the Dutch Republic were allowed to live where they wanted and practice their religion openly. There was no ghetto, and while there were some restrictions on Jewish activities—they were excluded from most guilds—they could socialize and do business as they wished. It was a remarkable display of toleration in a generally intolerant era. Over the course of the century, Amsterdam and other Dutch towns became a haven for Jews fleeing persecution in Iberia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Menasseh’s family joined the Beth Jacob congregation, the oldest in Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community, founded just a few years before their arrival in the city. Manoel, now Menasseh, was a precocious student and had a particularly fine command of both Portuguese and Hebrew. By the age of 18, he was appointed rabbi (hakham) of the Neve Shalom congregation. Many non-Jews came to the synagogue to hear his sermons, which were reportedly both rhetorically splendid and intellectually stimulating. He was also praised for his knowledge of Scripture.

Other rabbis of the community, however, had doubts about his skills as a Talmudist. And he took it as a great insult when, in 1639, with the merger of the three congregations, he was appointed third in rank among the rabbis. His relations with the congregation’s lay leadership were rocky, and he chafed under what he believed were undignified limitations put upon him—such as not being allowed to preach as often as he would have liked, and being required to teach in the elementary school. The highlight of his career occurred in 1642, when he was chosen to deliver the welcoming address on the occasion of a visit to the synagogue on the Houtgracht by Stadholder Frederik Hendrik (the highest political and military officer in the Dutch provinces) and Queen Henrietta Maria of England (wife of Charles I). It was one of the few times that Menasseh was actually given a position of honor.

With the narrow scope of his rabbinical duties, as well as his meager compensation, Menasseh had no choice but to direct his energies into other projects. He ran one of the community’s yeshivot, sponsored by the brothers Abraham and Isaac Pereira (Spinoza, as a young adult but before his excommunication in 1656, may have been one of its attendees), and was a beloved teacher. But his work there demanded much of his time.

Menasseh, like the other rabbis, also engaged in business. With his brother and brother-in-law, he imported goods from the West Indies and Brazil. But he felt that having to supplement his salary as a rabbi in this and other ways was demeaning. “At present, in complete disregard of my personal dignity, I am engaged in trade … What else is there for me to do?”

Menasseh’s real love was his printing press. He was the first printer of Hebrew books in Amsterdam, and he quickly gained an international reputation for the quality of his work. He published Pentateuchs, Hebrew Bibles, prayer books, and editions of the Mishnah, as well as numerous treatises and literary works in Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Latin. He even collaborated on various projects with gentile scholars and artists, including, it seems, Rembrandt. Because of Menasseh ben Israel, Amsterdam was, for a time, the center of the Jewish publishing world in Europe.

Menasseh also acquired great fame for his own writings, especially among Christians, to whom some of them were directly addressed. He was seen among non-Jews as the foremost Jewish spokesman of his time. Gentiles sought him out as a teacher and consultant. “[He is] a learned and pious man”, wrote Gerard Joannes Vossius, the celebrated Dutch scholar and theologian whose son studied Hebrew and Jewish literature with Menasseh. “If only he were a Christian.”

Menasseh, more than anyone else, assumed responsibility for explaining the doctrines and beliefs of Judaism to the gentile world. He never shied away from controversy, and he was willing to be the Jewish representative in exactly the kinds of polemical debates that many Christians sought (to convince the Jews of the error of their ways and lead them toward salvation) and most Jews feared. For many of the Portuguese Jews in Holland, Menasseh’s international celebrity was a source of pride. These wealthy Sephardic merchants and professionals appreciated the renown he brought to the community.

His extracurricular activities, however, caused the rabbis and lay leaders of the Amsterdam Portuguese no small amount of concern. They were constantly warning congregants that, since they were still technically refugee-guests in the Netherlands, it would be best to keep a low profile. They were especially cautious about crossing the line that the Dutch had explicitly drawn regarding theological debates between Jews and Christians. Menasseh’s cosmopolitanism and many relationships outside the community may explain the troubles he had with the other rabbis and with the members of the ma’amad, or governing board. (He was even issued an excommunication (herem) on one occasion for a disturbance he had been making over the way one of his relatives had been treated by the board.)

Throughout his life, Menasseh was guided by the Messianic hope for divine redemption and the idea that this would not happen until the people of Israel were completely scattered across the globe. Only then could they be reunited and restored to their kingdom by God’s anointed one. This conviction was behind what Menasseh hoped would be the crowning achievement of his life: arranging for the readmission of the Jews to England, from which they had been banished since 1290.

Accompanied by his son Samuel, Menasseh crossed the English Channel to make his petition for readmission in 1655. In his presentation to the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, he appealed to both theological and (perhaps more importantly) economic considerations. He wanted to bring to Cromwell’s attention the financial benefits that usually accrue to a country with a thriving Jewish community. After noting that “merchandising is, as it were, the proper profession of the nation of the Jews,” Menasseh went on to remind Cromwell that “there riseth an infallible Profit, commodity, and gain to all those Princes in whose Lands they dwell above all other strange Nations whatsoever.”

Cromwell was quite taken with the Dutch rabbi and gave him a sympathetic hearing. Public opinion, however, was by no means so well-disposed toward readmission. Some argued that strong and humiliating restrictions should be imposed on the Jews; they would certainly not be granted many of the privileges or rights that they had been enjoying for decades in Holland.

After several sessions, the conference convened by Cromwell to consider the issue was deadlocked, and in the summer of 1657 it adjourned before anything was formally resolved.

Menasseh was greatly disappointed by this turn of events, particularly since he had devoted several years of his life (two of them in England) to this project. Cromwell’s tacit permission for Jewish settlement would not begin evolving into formal readmission for another decade or so, but Menasseh did not live to see it.

He was devastated by the sudden death of his son Samuel in London that September, and as Menasseh bore Samuel’s body back to across the Channel for burial two months later, he was a broken man. He died several weeks later.

The post The Amsterdam Rabbi Who Became the Most Famous Jew in the World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Enjoying the benefits of whiteness, they arrived just in time for the physical expansion of the United States across the continent, referred to by patriotic orators as “Manifest Destiny.” Americans who moved west desired consumer goods to make life comfortable. Jews, as peddlers or settled merchants, followed these farmers, miners, loggers, and other pioneers, selling them clothing, shoes, household goods, and other personal and domestic items.

Many Jewish Americans thrived; Rosenwald’s success was monumental. As the genius behind the expansion of Sears, he became the 57th-wealthiest person in U.S. history, according to one recent estimate. Still, he identified with his fellows, consistently remarking how, as a Jew, he owed so much to America, which had played such an important part in making his luck possible.

Rosenwald gave away his riches as a new American, grateful to his country, but also as a Jew: The inheritor of a tradition that emphasized individuals’ responsibilities to their communities. Despite his own vast wealth, Rosenwald believed that an America without great gaps between rich and poor, and without sharp divides based on religion and race, would be a better place to live—safer for Jews, and for others. His charitable works reflected his conviction.

Rosenwald did not like the words “philanthropy” or “charity”—his approach to giving was informed, instead, by the world of consumer commerce. As a businessman, he believed he had a responsibility to provide goods to people who wanted them, and that consumption was a unifying force. A nation that consumes together, he would say, could find ways to stay and live together. Rosenwald’s idea of the civic good held that no one should be so poor, so disinherited, and so alienated as not to be able to afford or want cutlery, dishes, wallpapers, new dresses, and beyond.

The Pee Dee Rosenwald School, in Marion County, South Carolina, c. 1935. Photo courtesy of South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

Of course, a constantly expanding population of American consumers—spanning otherwise profound divides of class, geography, and race—had helped make his fortune. Rosenwald, known to his friends as JR, grew up comfortably, but only that. His father, a German-Jewish immigrant, started out in America selling small goods house to house, a pack on his back, but eventually became the owner of a modestly successful men’s clothing store in Springfield, Illinois. JR, who was born in 1862 and grew up behind the cash register of his father’s store, aspired as a young man to make his mark in the world of business. He was struggling as a manufacturer and salesman of men’s summer suits when he got an opportunity to invest in Sears, Roebuck—a relatively new, but already successful, mail order operation specializing in the sale of watches. Buying in seemed like a good idea, but JR did not have the cash. He turned to relatives to loan him the money.

It was a fortuitous move. Rosenwald, who had a keen read on consumers, went on to oversee a colossal transformation at Sears, turning it into one of the nation’s largest retailers and becoming a very rich man in the process. He figured out how to sell to all Americans—rural, urban, and suburban; poor and well-off; immigrant and native-born—delivering a dazzling array of stuff they wanted (or learned to want through Sears’s wish book, the fabulously popular catalog). A shopper could buy almost anything from Sears, except for firearms and patent medicine: clothing, kitchen equipment, sheets and towels, blankets, mirrors, tools, musical instruments, even a house to live in with all its furnishings. These and so many other goods would come right to the customer’s doorstep, no matter where they lived.

Even before Rosenwald made his fortune, he had a vision of someday giving it away. As a young man, he dreamed of earning $15,000 a year—and, he said, he knew what he would do with the money. His family could live nicely on one-third, and he would plow another third back into the business. He thought he would give away the last third. When the time came, Rosenwald did so, with a vigor and zest that came to define his public life. He gave famously to causes that helped African Americans, but also to Jewish projects, in America and abroad. He worked to expand medical care and improve medical education, public health and hospitals. His gifts enhanced the city of Chicago. He created the Museum of Science and Industry and the University of Chicago. He made possible Jane Addams’ operation at Hull House and Grace and Edith Abbott’s Immigrant Protective League, organizations that worked directly with the city’s poorest residents.

Rosenwald had a philosophy of giving. He never made donations to endowments because he fervently believed each generation had to tackle the needs of its own age, and that those who gave should not saddle future institutions with mandates conceived in the past. He refused to allow his name to be affixed to buildings or walls, and did not want it formally and permanently attached to projects that would persist beyond his lifetime. When in 1917 he organized his foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, he set it up to expire 25 years after his death and charged it with spending down the principal. Let his children, he argued, who would be wealthy indeed, create and support the organizations and institutions that they wanted to advance—not the ones he might have foisted on them.

Rosenwald did not shy away from publicly proclaiming his gifts and their scale. Ever the civic activist, he believed that announcing how much he planned to give might inspire others—particularly others with means—to act likewise. He may have been the first giver in American history to implement the match. Rosenwald would announce, with bravado, that he planned to give whatever amount to whichever undertaking, but only if others collectively raised an equal amount. He operated on the logic that supporting the public made a giver a better person—and thus, by insisting on the match, he was helping his fellow citizens.

One famous gift demonstrates how Rosenwald put his principles to work: his massive project of building elementary schools for African American children in Southern states. He embarked on the effort in 1917; by the time of his death in 1932, he had funded almost 6,000 schools. They came to be known as Rosenwald Schools, though he had never wished that to be the case. He had wanted the institutions to be known by the names of the communities they served.

Other aspects of the school project more closely reflected his dictates. There was a match: Rosenwald would build only if states provided funds as well, and included the new schools for black children in the public system, supervising them just as they did the white schools. Rosenwald’s offer functioned as a way to entice the white Southern power structure to take responsibility for the education of black children, which he saw as a step towards equalizing resources. Similarly, Rosenwald asked African American residents to help by providing sweat equity, literally by building the schools. They could help by providing lumber from their sawmills or bricks from their kilns. They could provide housing for the teachers who would come to staff the schools.

Rosenwald repeated this pattern time and time again, to the ultimate benefit of millions across the nation. The catalog of his good works, all fueled by a belief in the power of consumption, augments his portrait as a grateful American of immigrant parentage who believed that wealth brought obligations; that being a good American involved making the country a better place; and that he, a very lucky individual, had a responsibility to empower and inspire others.

The post The Jewish Immigrant Philanthropist Who Didn’t Like the Word “Charity” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The earliest picture is from 1904, when the already 42-year-old congregation (then called Congregation B’nai B’rith) was located in its more humble second home, at 9th and Hope streets. Like all such archival collections, this one is fascinating in that it shows how the fashions worn by a century’s worth of budding 16-year-olds continually change. But what I believe is more noteworthy is what doesn’t change in these photographs—year after year, the faces of certain individuals keep reappearing alongside the confirmands.

From 1922 to 1983, the photographs include Rabbi Edgar Magnin. From 1983 to 2004, they include Rabbi Harvey Fields. From 1988 to the present, they include Rabbi Steve Leder. And, of particular interest to me are the photos from 1950 to 2002, which include Rabbi Alfred Wolf, my father.

These four men held the position of senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple over the past 94 years. Together, they devoted a total of 181 years to this institution.

To a large extent, the senior rabbi establishes the gestalt of any congregation. When there is frequent turnover in this position, the gestalt keeps changing and never really takes root. Thanks to these four men, whose tenures substantially overlapped, Wilshire Boulevard Temple has enjoyed a consistent identity that nevertheless has evolved, shaped by the distinct personas of each of its leaders.

And I was privileged to know them all.

I was born in 1950, less than a year after Dad joined the Temple. The larger-than-life Rabbi Magnin was my godfather.

Edgar Magnin was a legendary speaker whose booming voice could easily reach the last row of the 1,800-seat sanctuary. Even more remarkable, anyone who sat in that distant row invariably felt as if Rabbi Magnin were speaking directly to him or her. His reputation was national and enduring: For years, he had his own weekly radio show and syndicated column, he delivered the invocation at Richard Nixon’s first inaugural, and he remained active at the Temple nearly until his death in 1984 at the age of 94.

But for me, Rabbi Magnin was also something of a time machine. This was someone who evacuated his home at the age of 16 … because of the San Francisco earthquake! He built one of the first homes in Beverly Hills, helped found Hillcrest Country Club, and oversaw the construction of the Temple’s Pantheon-like sanctuary, which opened in 1929. He counted Louis Mayer, William Randolph Hearst, Irving Thalberg, and the Warner brothers among his friends. But he was also happy to have lunch with my family at Hamburger Hamlet following my son’s naming ceremony. The man who befriended moguls also befriended me.

My father joined Rabbi Magnin at Wilshire in 1949. The following year, Dad launched the Temple’s camping program, which led to Camp Hess Kramer and Gindling Hilltop in Malibu. Dad’s commitment to camping was rooted in his teenage years when, as a Jewish youth leader in Germany, he regularly defied the Nazis by taking kids into neighboring forests where they could savor practicing their religion free of fear.

Dad’s experience living in Germany, from which he escaped in 1935, also led him to be a leader in intercultural affairs, becoming the first chairman of the Southern California Interreligious Council as well as chairman of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations. He was determined that the hatred and demagoguery he had witnessed in his homeland never take root in his beloved L.A. Most memorably, during Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Los Angeles in 1987, Dad addressed the pontiff on behalf of the entire Jewish community at an extraordinary interfaith gathering.

In photo after photo on the confirmation wall, we can see these two vital religious leaders as they proudly passed their heritage to new generations. The photo from 1966 depicts the largest class, with 202 students. There’s Dad, there’s Rabbi Magnin, there’s Rabbi Maxwell Dubin, who served the Temple for 50 years. And there, in the middle, hair shiny with Brylcreem, is me. Moving down the wall there is a photo featuring my son, Aaron—who was part of the 1997 class, the smallest in the Temple’s history with 12 students. Since then, the confirmation classes have been growing again. The Temple now has a Jewish elementary school with 280 students at its Westside campus, the construction of which was spearheaded by Rabbi Fields. And, a new day school at the Wilshire campus is growing steadily, populated by children of the Jewish families that are increasingly moving to neighborhoods such as Hancock Park, Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Eagle Rock, and Echo Park.

Indeed, if the Temple restoration project had merely resulted in a beautiful place to house the congregation for annual High Holiday services, then that gleaming dome would be little more than an empty shell. Instead, it is Rabbi Leder’s vision for it to be a bull’s-eye of Jewish life right in the center of our city.

And so, as with that wall filled with confirmation photographs, there is continual change to be seen. But, just as in those pictures, the essence of this old/new congregation remains the same, and it propels us forward.

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I’d flown in from the East Coast that morning, then headed, a few hours later, to Ohr HaTorah, Rabbi Finley’s Westside synagogue. Which was not, it turned out, where services were being held. I don’t actually live in L.A. I don’t have family here, or many friends. I’m not a member of this shul. I’d traveled 3,000 miles for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year, and wound up arriving 30 minutes late. For the sin of not double-checking the address before getting on the freeway, and for the sin of underestimating how long it would take to blow-dry my hair.

My regular synagogue is on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The Shul of New York, led by Rabbi Burt, holds services at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, a huge Gothic Revival synagogue built in 1849 and never fully renovated. The pointed arches and crumbling mortar outside, the cavernous vaulted chapel within—always cool, smelling of clay—are so soulful, so redolent of worshippers past, just entering the sanctuary makes you feel holy.

Rabbi Burt is a true spiritual leader with a peripatetic congregation that has followed him throughout New York City for decades. In his early 70s, he still does yoga. He spends a month in India each year. Services are mostly music, led by the sexy Cantor Adam on acoustic guitar, a man young enough to be a new parent. Seth, also a new parent, plays ukulele. The Villalobos brothers—three violinists from Mexico, one more dashing and dark-eyed from the next—aren’t even Jewish. There’s dancing in the aisles, clapping in the seats. You attend the Shul of New York to give in to the good feeling, to go with the flow, catch a good wave on its peak and ride it in. It’s very, how shall I say? L.A.

This year on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I was facing divorce. Many of my old traditions felt limiting, constraining. The High Holy Days prayer book at the Shul of New York looked, well, thin, light on sins. I needed something deeper for Yom Kippur, more challenging, more transformational.

I’d first heard about Ohr HaTorah over the summer, at parents’ day at the camp in Santa Monica where I sent my son. My husband and I had been separated for more than a year by then. After a decade of his refusing to move to L.A., as I wanted, I decided that as a single person, I could take my son and go for a couple months myself. I’d spent too many years in my marriage acquiescing, accommodating a spouse who I felt didn’t bend in return. I was determined to summer in L.A., and I didn’t need permission.

Actually, I did need permission, or at least agreement, which my future-ex was quick to grant. He’s grown weekly more flexible, more aware of my needs, more broadly supportive, since we’ve been apart. He is, in fact, the ideal ex-husband. Not that he could fathom why anyone would want to move across the country, uproot, give up years of social capital. “Who does that?” was his general critique.

I’ve done that all my life. I fled the gray, low-sky suburbs of Detroit after high school to attend college in Texas. I lived in Paris before New York. I’ve long been eager to uproot myself again.

At parents’ day, I started talking to a woman named Nita, the grandmother of another camper. We were sitting on the metal bleachers by the outdoor pool, watching our kids splash around under the bright, white, L.A. light. Nita also hailed from the Detroit suburbs. She’d also written books about relationships. She declared herself my new best friend, took my phone number for play dates, and invited me to Ohr HaTorah.

Like my New York rabbi, Rabbi Finley is a true leader, but of a different sort. In addition to rabbinical training, he earned a Ph.D. in religion and social ethics from USC. He has side jobs as a professor and counselor. He wakes up each morning and reviews his behavior from the day before. Then he reads the op-ed page of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and wrestles with their opposing views.

He prepares for his Saturday morning services—which run for three hours, and are always packed—with the rigor of a college professor. Services begin with an hour-long disquisition on moral issues, such as the need to analyze the facts rather than give in to an effluence of emotion, or the notion that free speech does not give you the moral right to criticize your spouse. The synagogue experience is intellectual. Challenging. Intense. It’s a little, how shall I say? New York.

We have to be careful of our unquestioned beliefs—the intellectualism of New York versus the purported shallowness of L.A., the love in a marriage versus the hatred in divorce. Sometimes, in our personal lives, we may even have mistaken who’s oppressing whom.

On Yom Kippur eve, I finally arrived at the theater in the hilly subdivision with fan palms towering overhead. The rabbi was talking about Yom Kippur as a kind of spiritual emancipation. He told a story of a college girl he’d counseled whose roommate was keeping her up nights with repetitive tales of her parents’ foibles, her boyfriend’s deceits. The girl seeking counsel didn’t want to ask the roommate to stop talking because she thought it would be “mean.” Instead, she was listening all night, then arriving late to class, making mistakes, hating college.

Your inner pharaoh could be the dark side of your own niceness, Rabbi Finley proposed, refusing to set boundaries for fear of hurting someone else. All this niceness is also a way of not questioning a deep-seated assumption that other people’s needs are more important than your own. I’d done this, too, I felt. For the sin of letting one’s spouse make all the decisions, and for the sin of then complaining about it for 10 years straight.

After the service, congregants milled about the lobby hugging old friends, hoisting little girls on their shoulders, placing hands under elbows of aging relatives. The lobby rang with laughter, shouts of greeting, the warmth of good will and closeness.

I stood there looking around at all these people surrounded by loved ones, suddenly self-conscious about being alone in a city where I didn’t live, at a religious organization to which I didn’t belong, surrounded by hundreds of people I didn’t know. I could have been around those I’ve known for years back in New York, or with my own family. Yes, I want to reboot my life, but who flies across the country to spend the most important community event alone because she likes the weather? For the sin of going to great lengths to feel alienated, and for the sin of squandering frequent flier miles to feel unmoored?

On Saturday morning, I returned to services early. The hall was sparsely packed. I saw my new-best-friend Nita. She’d reserved a row for her friends, draping prayer shawls and pocketbooks over the seats. “Sit here, sit here,” she said, patting the seat next to her.

In New York, I always sit alone. I’ve never had a partner or even close friend moved by regular religious observance. Out in L.A., I sat enmeshed in community. If we ever do move here, I’d have to give up my default position of alienation, I thought. I’d have to become comfortable with belonging.

There’s a custom in Judaism of honoring special congregants with an aliyah, a chance to lead the congregation in chanting the blessings before and after the reading of the Torah. Rabbi Finley called up all of us who were celebrating the High Holy Days at Ohr HaTorah for the first time.

“Go up, go up!” Nita said, poking me in the arm. I mounted the stage, my L.A.-style white cotton shawl draped over my shoulders, and sang with a few dozen others before the congregation. I never sing anywhere; even my five-year-old son asks me to stop singing the barely melodic theme song of Fireman Sam.

Singing on stage gave me a spark, a little thrill. This is the other reason one flies across the country for Yom Kippur when there are perfectly good synagogues in New York. It’s why one might talk to strangers on airplanes, move cities, switch careers, leave a moribund marriage. When you start over again, you get to try things you’ve never done before. You face the challenge of crossing six freeway lanes to your exit in a new city, or understanding why, with so many numbers to choose from, city planners named almost every freeway after a combination of 0 and 1.

When you’re new again, you break out of the carapace of your prior existence. You see afresh who you might become. I may be too infatuated with the thrill of serendipity—there is a dark side to the constant churning as well. But there’s something humanistic about relying on the kindness of strangers, who do, in fact, always reach out. It’s a reminder that we live in a web of humanity, that we are not ever really alone.

The post Why I Traveled 3,000 Miles to Get to Temple appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But I had forgotten to write down one important detail: the address of my hostel.

I knew it was close to the headquarters of PresenTense, the organization that had brought me to Israel for a fellowship program that helps budding entrepreneurs develop businesses.

“Ehmm, around … 14 Hillel Street,” I stuttered. “The Little Jerusalem Hostel?”

The other tourists in the sherut van snickered. My driver was not amused. Apparently, there are two Hillel Streets in Jerusalem. I told him I wasn’t sure which one. He grunted and threw up his hands. As we sped down the highway, I gripped my disabled, non-roaming iPhone, willing Google Maps to beam me answers sans Wi-Fi. No luck. I half-listened to one of the bombastic, middle-aged American tourists babble about how the last time he was in Israel, there were no highways—just an expanse of desert roads. “It was before you were born,” he grinned at me.

But Israel had changed for me, too. The last time I came, in 2009, I was on a free Birthright Israel trip. It was like a Middle Eastern Disneyland—a terrific experience, but glossy and contrived, a packaged boondoggle for American Jews to become emotionally invested in the promised land.

Back then, I had become emotionally invested—but only to a point. Growing up in a secular home, I never felt completely comfortable in the American Jewish community. My father, the son of Holocaust survivors, was taught to conceal and downplay his Judaism as a kid. My mother, the granddaughter of a rabbi, felt constrained by religious rules and traditions. So they raised me more Jew-ish than Jewish.

When I was 8, my mother allowed me to decide whether or not I’d attend Hebrew school and have a Bat Mitzvah. I signed up because I didn’t want to feel like a leper at family functions. Our extended family was religious—and I envied how they connected through their Judaism. It seemed to enrich their relationships, like some inside joke I couldn’t understand.

I’ve blocked out most of my Hebrew School memories. My peers teased me, and the teachers sounded like Ben Stein. Jewish day camp, too, is a blur of Hebrew songs I couldn’t pick up, mean girls, and traumatic athletic competitions. The other kids seemed to make friends effortlessly—each one linked to the other through traditions and ancestry. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t fit in.

That tension continued in college: When I was with other Jews, I was never quite Jewish enough. I didn’t get the jokes, wasn’t familiar with all of the traditions. But outside of the community, I was the token Jew. I cringed at jokes about bagels and curly hair, made at my expense. In which world, I wondered, did I belong?

Far from answering that question, Birthright muddled it. I left unsure if my magical trip contained any strains of authenticity. But it stoked my curiosity. I began to wonder if I could find a place in the Jewish homeland without the aid of Birthright. A place that so many of my ancestors—similarly displaced from their communities and disconnected from their roots—had found there.

Already, this second trip was completely different. For one thing, I was pretty much on my own. After I finally figured out which Hillel Street I was looking for, the shuttle driver dropped me on a desolate block. Since I arrived on Shabbat, almost every store was shuttered. I dragged my bags up the city’s hilly, cobblestoned streets, stooping under the weight of my swollen backpack. I was famished, sweaty, and lost in the promised land. Why on earth had I come to this city?

Oh right. My startup.

Earlier this year, I began developing Tribelle, a venture I hoped would jumpstart the businesses of struggling Israeli female entrepreneurs. My time in Israel and a journalism internship in Doha, Qatar during college had introduced me to women who, against all religious and cultural odds, were launching businesses to support their families. I was fascinated and inspired by their stories—especially because female entrepreneurship runs in my family (my grandma, aunt, and great-grandma all launched businesses). I became intrigued by the transformative potential of female entrepreneurship in the Middle East. As in other societies, and in many impoverished communities, women often run a range of small businesses that are essential to families’ economic security, including craft and jewelry businesses.

Of course, there are female entrepreneurs who are struggling around the world. So why did I choose Israel as my launch pad? I suppose I felt, in a way, like these women were the closest to my family—they were women who, in other circumstances, could’ve been my entrepreneurial grandmother or aunt. It was hard, at first, to articulate to my friends and family—people who still saw me as a fringe member of the community. But it felt natural to me to start my efforts there.

Through Tribelle, I connect Israeli women struggling to grow their jewelry businesses with American markets and reinvest a portion of jewelry sales profits back into Israeli organizations that incubate women’s businesses or teach business skills—particularly focusing on women from low-income or disadvantaged backgrounds.

That’s a bigger group than you might think. The Israel narrative we hear in the States often emphasizes a booming Startup Nation—a Holy Silicon Valley. But in reality, the milk and honey of tech only flows to a few. If you venture past the startup hubs of Tel Aviv, you’ll find a very different country, one where many people can be called working poor and struggle to support their families. Around 20 percent of Israelis live in poverty.

But here’s the thing: I learned all of this from reading and from interviewing Israeli economic development experts. I had no clue if the organizations I’d discovered—and the female entrepreneurs—would endorse my idea once I was on the ground.

I wondered if they would share their stories with me—some American girl they’d never met. And I wondered if they would accept me into the community—a status that eluded me back in the States. If they did, what would that acceptance look like?

So I was anxious. And if I couldn’t even manage to find my hostel, how I was going to start this business?

Miraculously, with a little spotty Wi-Fi and a couple of helpful hotel concierges, I found the hostel. I spent my first evening in Jerusalem chewing a stale piece of pita on the hostel rooftop, listening to Hebrew mixed with French, and gazing over the city.

Then I slept restlessly in my windowless room.

The next day, I began to get some of my more existential questions answered. Like, will people laugh in my face when I tell them what I’m trying to do? In America, there’s a tacit understanding among members of the Jewish community: Sometimes you help someone else simply because they, too, are a Member of the Tribe (the playful phrase being a reference to the 12 tribes of Israel, and the inspiration for the name “Tribelle”).

But in Israel, nearly everyone’s Jewish. So that between-us-Jews bond, paradoxically, doesn’t exist in the same way.

An American-Israeli friend advised me on how to conduct business meetings before I made the trip: “Don’t show fear.”

I tried to conceal it. No one laughed in my face. But they did grill me. How old are you again? Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?

I must’ve passed the tests, because they began to share their stories.

A woman in her 60s told me her pregnant daughter and her husband had moved back in with her recently; the daughter’s pregnancy was debilitating, and she couldn’t work. Her other son relied on her for financial support, too, as did her mentally ill sister. Since traditional offices wouldn’t hire her (she thought because of her age), she decided to start her own business—and hoped she could grow it enough to employ other friends who were struggling economically.

We’d been talking for 10 minutes at a Jerusalem coffee shop before she began crying. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, squeezing a handful of her woven bracelets. “I’m just … it’s a lot of stress.”

Another woman brought her baby and her husband to our meeting. They told me the market for quality jewelry in Israel had dried up because of the country’s economic slowdown, but it was difficult for non-English-speaking locals to market themselves abroad. Another woman told me she crafted her jewelry at night between 1 and 6 a.m.—the only hours her children were asleep.

I spent my last evening at one woman’s home in Beit Shemesh, about 30 miles west of Jerusalem. Nestled into the hills, the city is swaddled in views so charming I wished I had brought my painting tools. She presented trays of cookies and sweetbreads upon my arrival, reminding me that Israelis may be tougher than American Jews—but Jewish mothers are the same everywhere. She told me about what it was like to grow up in Morocco and move to Israel as a kid. About what it was like to find a place in a new type of Jewish community.

Of course, like the U.S., Israel is a country of many immigrants. But it’s also a place where you are, by law, accepted as a citizen if you’re Jewish.

Still, I left Israel with a very different understanding of what it means to be part of a community—a citizen of a larger, global group. For 25 years, I’d always thought that I deserved a spot because of my ethnic heritage. But community membership isn’t about deserving. It’s about carving out a place for yourself—creating your own niche and benefits.

In Israel, I’d found a spot and a purpose in the Jewish world. I felt, finally, like a real Member of the Tribe. And that made the question at the beginning of my trip—“Where are you going?”—a little less scary. I’ve got a rough address, and I’m confident I’ll get there eventually. After all, I’ve got an entire community behind me. But for now, the work to find it is just beginning.

The post Lost and Found in Jerusalem appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No, he didn’t suddenly convert. Garcetti never hid that he contained multitudes. His father, Gil Garcetti, is Mexican-American with Spanish, American Indian, and Italian ancestry. His mother, Sukey Roth, is the granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants.

In this town, that makes Garcetti a pretty common blend of many ethno-religious flavors—an L.A. Smoothie. But by Jewish law, which is matrilineal, Garcetti is a full-on Jew. To those of us who tracked Garcetti’s career, none of this is new. But to that ever-shrinking demographic known as the L.A. city voter, it seems to have come as a surprise. “Most people didn’t know that during the election,” Councilman Paul Koretz told a reporter on election night. “I tried to get that word out.”

Part of the fault is in our own preconceptions. The most obvious way we assess a candidate’s identity is by his or her name and face. Yaroslavsky and Villaraigosa and Wesson are easy—Jew, Latino, black. But Jews are also a religion and a culture, and the big trend in Jewish life is just how much the old phrase “Funny, you don’t look Jewish” reflects the new reality of Ethiopian Jews, “Jewtino” conversos, and Chinese-born adoptees, not to mention Persian and Middle Eastern Jews. The garden-variety white Ashkenazic Jew is becoming as hard to find as a great Westside deli.

How many times this year did I have to remind people that Jan Perry, the black 9th District councilwoman who also ran for mayor, is also Jewish? When we sat together on a panel at the Autry National Museum in May, I inelegantly described Perry as “not a typical Jew.” She took offense. “Maybe not to you,” she said. Point taken.

But the other reason people assumed Garcetti isn’t Jewish is that as a candidate he spoke little about that side of his heritage.

“I always felt myself to be Jewish and Latino very comfortably,” Garcetti told Jewish Journal columnist Bill Boyarsky in a rare candidate profile that delved into his religious identity. “Weekends were both filled with bowls of menudo and lots of bagels.”

Garcetti told Boyarsky that growing up he celebrated Passover and Chanukah, and attended Jewish camp. In college he connected more seriously to his Judaism. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University from 1993 to 1996, Garcetti befriended the charismatic rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who would go on to write the book Kosher Sex, minister to Michael Jackson, and star in his own reality show, Shalom in the Home.

While “Rabbi Shmuley” veers politically right—he ran unsuccessfully for a Republican Congress seat in New Jersey last year—the two remain close. It was Boteach who wrote a column in the Jewish Journal on Garcetti’s behalf just prior to the election, calling him “pleasant, humble, wise, sincere, and serious.”

Garcetti’s religious affiliations, like his political ones, are liberal. He is a member of IKAR, a mid-City congregation with a famously liberal rabbi, Sharon Brous. He attends High Holy Days and occasional Shabbat services—what we in the trade call a twice-a-year Jew. Garcetti’s wife, Amy Wakeland, is not Jewish.

By these measures, Garcetti is like a great many modern American Jews—the offspring of an interfaith couple, intermarried, liberal, and more culturally than religiously Jewish.

Contrast that with two of Garcetti’s opponents in the mayoral race, Perry and Wendy Greuel. Perry, a convert, identifies strongly with her religion. Greuel, Garcetti’s opponent in the runoff, is married to a Jewish man, Dean Schramm. She makes it clear that they are raising their child as a Jew, and people are genuinely surprised —maybe it’s the name— to hear she is not in fact Jewish.

It’s not fair to say Perry and Greuel played the Jewish card harder, if that’s what you do with a Jewish card. It just seemed to come more naturally for them both.

After the election, a small dispute arose among journalists over whether Garcetti was, in fact, the first Jewish mayor of L.A. It turns out that from November 21 to December 5, 1878 a businessman named Bernard Cohn was appointed interim mayor by the city council, the equivalent of a mayor pro tempore, a position Garcetti and other Jews have held. But it’s certain that Garcetti is the first elected Jewish mayor in L.A. history.

Cohn represented what the UCLA historian David Myers called the first phase of Jewish political life in Los Angeles, when, during the city’s pioneer days, Jews faced little prejudice. After 1900, the city’s influx of East Coast and Midwestern WASPs brought with them a dour anti-Semitism that nudged Jews away from the power structure, even as the Jewish population increased from 136 in 1881 to 315,000 in 1951. This second phase was spent in the political wilderness.

The 1953 election of Rosalind Wiener Wyman, a Jewish woman, to the city council heralded the third phase—complete acceptance. The coalition of African-American and Jewish communities that combined to elect Tom Bradley as mayor in 1973 created a liberal Jewish Westside power base that spawned politicians like Zev Yaroslavsky, Howard Berman, Henry Waxman, Joel Wachs, and one of Bradley’s young aides—Wendy Greuel.

Even as L.A.’s Jewish community grew to 600,000, though, Jews never held the highest offices. The last election changed that in a big, sweeping way, bringing into office a Jewish city controller, Ron Galperin; a Jewish city attorney, Michael Feuer; and a Jewish mayor, Garcetti.

Jews have finally reached the top job at a time when the idea of a pure ethnic voting bloc seems as timely as Tammany Hall. It’s not that Jews don’t vote—they do, disproportionately to their numbers. (Past Los Angeles Times exit polls have shown that Jews, who make up just 6 percent of the city population, constitute about 16 percent of the vote.) But if in the past that vote automatically defaulted to the Jewish candidate, that’s no longer the case. The Jewish vote tends to go to the candidate who best articulates and can best deliver on a socially progressive, fiscally prudent, pro- (or at least not anti-) Israel agenda.

Ethnicity alone doesn’t buy you votes or campaign donations—but familiarity and loyalty help loads. That’s why it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the first Jewish mayor of L.A. might have been a man who was a native of Boyle Heights, who counted a Jewish teacher as his first mentor, and who spent more time in Israel than most Jews: Antonio Villaraigosa. Love him or hate him, the man knew his way around a shul.

The election of Garcetti doesn’t even come with that swell of (often self-congratulatory) Jewish pride that accompanied, say, hearing that Sandy Koufax refused to play on Yom Kippur or that the flash drive was invented in Tel Aviv or that—best of all—Scarlett Johansson is a Member of the Tribe.

Maybe that’s because, in a city that has seen so many Jewish pols and powerbrokers, one more isn’t kvell-worthy. Or perhaps it’s because we want to see how he does before we embrace him.

After all, that early interim Jewish mayor, Bernard Cohn, was a dubious character. He pulled a fast deal on Pío Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, which resulted in Pico spending his final years destitute. Cohn was married to Hulda Myer and had three children with her. But after Cohn died, a Catholic woman came forward and proved she was also his wife and had seven children and a house in Los Angeles Plaza with him.

“Claim them and blame them,” Stephen Sass, the historian of Jewish Los Angeles, once told me was his motto when it came to Jewish politicians who fell short of expectations. But if Garcetti does a great job, you can be sure the Jewish community will be bursting with pride.

Whether you take the position that Garcetti’s being Jewish doesn’t matter, or that it only does if he makes his People proud, there’s a deeper question underlying all of this: What, in a post-modern, post-ethnic age, does it mean to be a Jew?

Does it mean that your faith calls you to behave a certain way, to stand for certain things? Does it mean there are certain values and principles that you are charged to uphold? Is there a Jewish vision of social justice or of environmental and communal stewardship? What does it mean not just to choose to be labeled as a Jew, but to choose to act as one? This, of course, is a question that faces every Jew in the modern age, and it now faces Eric Garcetti, who, on July 1, 2013, became the first Jewish mayor of Los Angeles.

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Every Passover I learn new words. This week I attended my second Seder, the Jewish ceremony consisting of rituals and dinner among friends and family. Each time I enjoy a holiday with my fiancée’s family, I expect to learn a new word or two. First, during my college years in New York City, came kvetch and kvell; next came mitzvah. The latest, acquired at her family’s home in suburban Philadelphia, means, roughly, “it would have been enough.”

It’s not that Elizabeth’s family is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition. They celebrate Hanukah and hold Bar Mitzvahs but do not observe the Sabbath. Some members of the family–nuclear and extended–identify more with the Jewish faith than others do. The lexicon arises because they are integrating me into their family, and I am new to it all. When trying to accommodate someone to a new environment, go for detail: lob your guest some new vocabulary, of course, add some family history and some extra tidbits about your second cousin’s poodle. Do not forget that hilarious story about the time Uncle Ronny forgot daylight savings time and arrived an hour late to his own wedding!

During my first Seder, I worried I stood out too much among my new girlfriend’s family, with my French goy background and ignorance of this holiday. I was raised atheist–my family has a tradition of eating rabbit, of all things, on Easter. And I did not have many Jewish friends growing up in Paris, London, Tokyo and New York. I’ve only ever attended two Bar Mitzvahs, and I think I learned the expression “mazel tov” from a Mel Brooks movie.

As far as Seders are concerned, I knew Elijah was involved, but I never knew who exactly he was. I worried about understanding all the Haggadah’s references. I tried to memorize the names of the various elements that make up the ritual meal–there’s your pharosis, moran and happy cumin, I remembered (falsely). I have to admit I was impressed with myself.

I know better now. This year, I have embraced my ignorance, so I am no longer nervous. The obliging Goldberg-Black-Simins family–a complex assortment of divorces and step-children–all pitch in to help me understand what’s happening. As we sit down to begin the ritual, I observe the extended family take their places. The leader of the service helps each participant find the spot at the table that makes the most sense. I expertly open the Haggadah from the back.

I am learning slowly and adapting rapidly. I imbibe in new culture and kosher wine. I have a bottle of Pinot on the side, adding my French twist to the proceedings.

We read that if God had helped us out of slavery but not given us land, the Torah and a temple, “it would have been enough.” Dayenu.

The scripture poses the question, “Who knows one?” This introduces a tale that we must recite in turn, each participant adding a new theme until we arrive at 13 lines. The song lists various symbols and vignettes of Jewish tradition. Guess who lands on 13? I’m told to recite everything in one breath. I’m not sure if this pulmonary feat is another nod to the Jewish people’s desert plight or a family variation.

The Goldberg-Black-Siminses have been hard at work preparing the feast, cleaning the house, and setting the table in pink spring themes. We are sitting at the dining room table, where I have eaten only two or three times over the years. The traditional Seder plate in the center contains just one helping of each key ingredient; traditionally, everyone serves themselves from this platter, but to make things easier, my future mother-in-law has decided to serve each person individual plates with the traditional egg, herbs and so on. Traffic piles up in the kitchen as everyone seeks extra helpings of the exquisite matzoh ball soup. Sucking up to my future in-laws has never been so easy.

The highlight of this Seder is the individual quirks. One participant reads the scripture in its original Hebrew. Another has highlighted specific parts she wants to read. The youngest has been eyeing her grandfather all night in case he sneaks off to hide the afikoman, the half-piece of matzoh she must find to claim a prize. The importance of the Leader shows in how he orchestrates–my two Seder experiences were completely different because of the unique experiences and meanings the different Leaders brought to the table.

Finally it is time for almond cookies and chocolate chip meringues, another supplemental–and somewhat salacious–tradition. These may be the best yet. I have come to realize, as we bite into the pièces de résistance, that the main reason these people go to such lengths to prepare a Seder is not to celebrate freedom from Egyptian despots, but to celebrate being a family.

By the end of the night I am full, tipsy and happy. I have survived the pressures of an event with my beloved’s extended family and had an enjoyable evening. But I have also been transported–touched by tradition that first appeared alien, but that even a goy can intuitively understand.
Dayenu.

Tom Faure’s work has appeared in The Journal News of White Plains, NY, the Chattanooga Times-Free Press in Tennessee, and Asbury Park’s Splash of Red literary magazine. He lives in Astoria, NY.

*Photo courtesy of revenante.

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