When I was ordained in March 1981 with s'mikha from HaRav HaGaon Harav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik zt"l and Rav Nahum Lamm shlit"a at Yeshiva University's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), I undertook to be a Rav b'Yisrael, a rabbi and teacher in the greater Jewish community. I have been a Rav for 30 years and have practiced in pulpit and community rabbonus for more than 18 of those years. It is because I love the Jewish People, and particularly because I am devoted to the Judaic education of young people -- of all ages, of all backgrounds -- that I write this considered commentary on my profound disappointment over what I have seen and experienced first-hand at the Irvine-based community day school called "TVT" or Tarbut v'Torah.
Irvine is not New York or Los Angeles, and – given its Jewish demographics – it is proper, even for an Orthodox Rav, to modify expectations in light of the reality of the community and what it realistically can accept in terms of Jewish education, what it reasonably can sustain. I write from that recognition and perspective.
I have been in Tarbut / TVT. I know many of its students. I deeply care for them.
I am deeply pained that, for exactly the same money – or even significantly less – that has been invested in the school, Tarbut / TVT could be a fine community Jewish Day School. Instead, it does not meet its mission as a community Jewish Day School. One readily can discern the focus that donors devoted on the campus grounds and the externals of the facility, but a more experienced and trained eye discerns sadly the lesser focus devoted on the quality of the Judaic component of the academic program. (It is beyond the scope of this commentary to opine on the school's secular program or its administration. Neither approbation nor disdain should be inferred from this commentary regarding either of those two subjects.) This severe weakness is commonly perceived, and it is commonly acknowledged among Jewish educators outside the community. It is discussed quietly among rabbis of all Jewish denominations in Orange County, several of whom lament privately that the Morashah Day School extends only through sixth grade. However, it is regarded as rabbinic-career political suicide to say it aloud, with attribution, within the Jewish community of Orange County. I thank G-d for imbuing me with the courage to write this.
It is not difficult to know what a formal Jewish education can offer its students. Throughout Southern California, there are noble efforts to that effect. Institutions under Orthodox auspices are not the only ones. There are noble efforts under Conservative and Reform auspices, too. In Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, Bruce Powell has created a burgeoning model of a community Jewish Day School. Tragically, however, Tarbut's / TVT's Jewish studies program is dramatically weaker than one finds at many fine Jewish schools run in the United States under Reform or other denominational auspices.
The students at Tarbut / TVT deserve better. I know many of them personally. Many are bright -- and they would love to learn more. They are quite capable of being taught text knowledge. Certainly, at a tuition of some $15,000 per head, they deserve it. TVT / Tarbut should be a school where capable students learn Jewish knowledge, book knowledge, side-by-side with secular curricula. But it is not. I know this from very personal knowledge: from what I personally have seen, what I have tried to share of myself, and -- primarily -- from what parents themselves privately and confidentially have brought to my attention throughout my three years in Orange County. I have spoken privately with select students and with select faculty through three years here. There is great fear to speak openly about the lacunae. "Rabbi Fischer," I am asked, "Please do something about this. Please say something. Please write something. Please tell what is happening -- or, more accurately, what is not happening -- here. But, please, promise me that you will not quote me. My friends will attack me. My children will lose their friends. Please do not quote me."
There is no need to fear. I will not quote and will not attribute. I speak only as a Rabbi of 30 years -- as a Congregational Rav and as a professional Jewish educator. I speak only in my own name, and I bear full personal responsibility for every word I write here. For a period now extending through several years, Tarbut V'Torah (TVT) consistently has failed its parents and students, failing to transmit a substantive Judaic knowledge foundation to the vast majority of its students. The academic lacunae are palpable, and the failure to transmit substantive Judaic information and to inculcate meaningful Jewish learning is manifest. Given the expansive and lush grounds on which the Tarbut V'Torah campus is situated and the $15,000 annual tuition charge for each student, this poignant institutional failure to achieve the results charted at leaner, more modestly funded Jewish Day Schools operated throughout America under Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox auspices respectively cannot be attributed to a lack of material wherewithal, thus amplifying the concern.
At Tarbut / TVT, the students are not taught to navigate a Chumash. They do not learn Chumash text as part of their curriculum between grades 1-12. They cannot read a Rashi commentary. Over 90% never even have heard the most basic terms that children at any other Jewish Day School would have learned. The kids should be looking and learning inside real texts – Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah.
The level of Hebrew reading at Tarbut / TVT concerns me. I have met any number of parents who have brought their 12-year-old sons and 11-year-old daughters into my office, to start them on the paths of their respective bar- and bat mitzvahs. I would take out four Siddurim -- one for the student, one for the Mom, one for the Dad, and one for me. Typically, I also would invite our Youth Director to participate in the session, handing him a Siddur, too. I would ask the student kindly to read something in the Siddur so I could gauge the level of intensity needed for the forthcoming curriculum of bar/bat mitzvah study. The experience typically would be profoundly disheartening.
This educational shortfall is universally recognized among Jewish educators and rabbis in the region, but there is an understanding within the community that discretion is appropriate. One Youth Director after another who has worked with me has seen first-hand and experienced the Tarbut / TVT failure. Each has expressed amazement. The Youth Director would sit in my office with me, as we -- and the parents -- would gauge the prospective bar/bat mitzvah student’s Hebrew reading to assess the need and plan out a learning program. Because I always would have the Mom and Dad in the room with us, too, as the child would read Hebrew from the Siddur, the parents also would be startled.
As in public schools, where many parents consign pedagogical authority to the employed teachers without always investigating what is being taught and how, many of the parents of TVT students understandably do not investigate what their children are learning at Tarbut V'Torah, often because they understandably do not know how to check or what standard to expect. They are not professionally trained Jewish educators, and they understandably do not have a skills set in that area. Yet even they know that something is severely wrong when their intelligent child, after six years at some $15,000-a-year, sits in the Rabbi's office at age 12 or age 11 and barely is able to read a line of Hebrew smoothly, much less to identify basic Judaic concepts or terms.
If the parents lack the skills set, how then do they know there is a problem? Consider that I do not read Chinese. But if my son, after attending a Chinese-language class for six years at $15,000 a year, were asked to read from a Chinese book, and he were to articulate only a handful of syllabic sounds in a sixty-second minute, and then were to stop after just a few more syllables over three or four more minutes, I would be quite unsettled. And if he then were to turn to me, seeing my dismay, and say “Don’t be angry at me, Dad. I really am trying, but I can’t read this so well. It is a foreign language with a different set of alphabetical characters.” Well, after six years -- and knowing how well my child is able to acquire other knowledge skills -- that would tell me something very sobering about my $90,000 investment.
That is the core of the problem at TVT / Tarbut v'Torah. For those less professionally trained and experienced in the area of Jewish pedagogy, the difficulty to recognize the scope and depth of the problem is amplified and obfuscated by two factors:
(1) A small number of TVT / Tarbut students independently are intensely home-schooled by their parents, after school and on weekends, because those parents are among the proportionately few in South Orange County who enjoy the Judaic background and skills-sets sufficient to perceive that their respective children otherwise are not being taught a meaningfully substantive Judaic knowledge base. Then, after being home-schooled, those proportionately few children are presented to the broader community as “proof” that TVT / Tarbut is doing a fine job.
(2) The second obfuscation is more subtle. The Rabbi and the temple Youth Director -- whether Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox -- is assigned, within the separate institutional framework of the temple that provides services for its members, to train the 12-year-old boy or 11-year-old girl, over the course of the following 8-12 months leading up to bar/bat mitzvah, to essentially quasi-memorize the bar/bat mitzvah service. Thus, on “Bar/Bat Mitzvah Day,” those present at temple hear a young lady or fellow chant and otherwise lead aspects of the service with the perceived erudition that implicitly comes with years of training, learning, and study.
But the actuality differs. Professional and experienced pedagogues in secular schools have encountered this same educational phenomenon when first meeting a child entering the first grade. The child is tested in entry-level reading skills and is given a page, or several pages, to read. The child reads beautifully. The parent beams proudly, but the teacher methodically reaches for a second book of similar grade-level, but written by a different author, illustrated with different pictures. Inexplicably to the parent -- but all-too-common to the trained pedagogue -- the same child cannot read from that comparable book. The trained pedagogue instantly discerns that the child was taught "sight reading," not phonics. Thus, the child essentially has quasi-memorized that first book, page by page. But the child remains helpless when exposed to other illustrations, another page lay-out. The child has not yet been taught to read. Many pedagogues maintain that there nevertheless is some value in teaching "sight reading" if it encourages a foundational love for books and love for reading among nursery children and kindergarteners. However, by eighth grade, it is recognized that "sight reading" is not sufficient.
The same phenomenon underlies the Bar/Bat Mitzvah phenomenon. The Tarbut / TVT student leads the service at the temple. Perhaps she reads from the Torah. Perhaps he reads a Haftorah. Perhaps she leads a portion of the prayer service. Yet, if the same boy were to be asked -- only moments later -- to read also from the Haftorah that appears on the page that precedes or follows his Bar Mitzvah Haftorah, the result well could surprise. Likewise, the boy or girl is taught essentially to quasi-memorize portions of the prayer service that he or she leads. But if he or she were to be asked moments later, quietly and confidentially, to read in the same Siddur from prayers that appear a few pages before or after what he or she has been taught essentially to memorize, the results well could surprise. Thus, for the audience -- the assembled congregation -- an appearance of erudition redounds to the school's reputation. Would that it were so!
Ultimately, then, the need in Orange County is not exclusively for a Brooklyn/Los Angeles-quality yeshiva day school. Naturally, as an Orthodox Rav, it is my goal and dream to see a Jewish Day School of such caliber established some day in Irvine so that my Orthodox rabbinical colleagues and I do not have to endure the enormous logistical challenges and difficulties of having our children educated two hours away at YULA in Los Angeles. But as a Rabbi who recognizes the variegation of the Jewish demographic locally and understands with the experience of a career spanning a quarter century what is at stake and what realistically can be achieved for the Jewish community that I love and whom I am dedicated to serve -- an Irvine-based South Orange County Jewish community of more than 100,000 Jews who are not predominantly Orthodox but who deserve excellence for the tuition dollars being invested in their most precious resources, their children -- it is deeply, deeply painful to watch profoundly bright and capable young children in our community being denied exposure to substantive Judaic knowledge.
As a Rabbi, it devolves on me to observe aloud that wonderful, bright young people are processed year-after-year through Tarbut's / TVT’s revolving doors at a tuition rate that certainly implies a substantive education, yet that demands from and offers them so much less than one typically would find provided to graduates of a Jewish Day School run under Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox auspices.
I know the children because my focus as a Rabbi always has included attending with utmost concern to elementary students, teens, and college students. I know, first-hand in the confidentiality of my relationships with families of Tarbut / TVT students, how deeply so many of those parents are pained. There are parents who literally have broken down, crying in my office. I know, from that same base of direct and confidential personal knowledge, how relieved those parents are when the year-long quasi-memorization process ends, with their sons and daughters emerging from the Bar/Bat Mitzvah having publicly presented the appearance of having a Judaic education. I know the scope of what rabbis in Los Angeles -- who may speak more candidly on the subject because they are outside the penumbra of political fall-out and personal exposure when speaking -- think of TVT / Tarbut. (The school's reputation outside Orange County and its environs is one that I have not encountered in my quarter century in the Rabbinate.) From a career in the rabbinate, I know what other Jewish community and denominational schools can and do teach their charges.
It thus is a matter of grave public concern, compelling a Rabbi to speak out, even as it is a matter of political suicide in South Orange County to discuss this subject publicly with candor. But I am a Rabbi, and that is my calling. It is my soul's yearning. It is incumbent on me to share these concerns publicly. We need only view the greater American society's economic fall-out, in the face of the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae setbacks that were perceived by many who knew that the system was in grave danger but who chose not to speak because their personal political considerations for advancement and personal fundraising opportunities diverted them. And, then, one day Bear Stearns collapsed, and then Indy Mac, and then Lehman Brothers. Yet, with deference to the significant economic and financial institutional concerns of an American polity in which I share, I feel obliged even more to share the present concern. The need for a dramatic overhaul and re-conception of Tarbut V'Torah (TVT), its mission, and its educational aspirations for students and parents who deserve better is most compelling because, at bottom, we are talking about the right of Jewish young people to receive the substantive education they deserve and for which their parents believe they are paying. They are good young people. They are capable of learning great things. And, if they miss these opportunities to grow in Jewish text knowledge -- the study of Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah, Talmud, and so much more -- during their childhood and teen years, they may never get that opportunity later, once "life happens."
And what will they have left to pass down to their children?
This statement of public concern concludes with one more area of attention. A Jewish community day school that offers its students the opportunity to participate in formal daily prayer services lays a foundation for them to have an option to grow spiritually in yet another way, and also to learn the skill of navigating through a prayer book. Those who daven daily are not perfect. But if tefilah -- Jewish prayer (davening) -- is taught with sensitivity and formal training, it sometimes can assist a school's administration and faculty in an effort to guide young people from evolving in their teens towards the coarseness sometimes found in segments of external society. Coarseness is the hallmark of teen evolution in certain circles of society, but the Jewish Day School model aims for something more noble and uplifting. Dirty words, filthy language, coarse sexual references and humor are not compatible with a successful Jewish Day School model. TVT / Tarbut should offer its students the opportunity to pray every day -- a formal Shacharit option each and every school morning, with all boys age 13 or over donning tefillin and with Sephardic boys wearing a tallit in the tradition of their parents. Such prayer need not be mandatory, but it should be a formal curricular offering in much the same way that so many other community Jewish Day Schools offer. Similarly, Tarbut / TVT should offer a formally scheduled Mincha prayer opportunity, even if only optional, every afternoon.
If there is no one else to lead such a daily Shacharit service, I publicly volunteer to lead it. Just as I remain available -- as I have for three years -- to teach Torah text as a formal faculty member. I extend that offer because it is easy to offer analysis and observation when one is not prepared personally to accept a challenge and take up a gauntlet. But the faculty member need not be I. Nor need the prayer leader be I. But it is time. And if not now, when?
Monday, August 1, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Measure for Measure: Bin Laden Gets His Last 15 Minutes
The American Administration should release the Bin Laden photo(s). Not because the photos will prove he was killed. Photos on the internet prove nothing -- just ask Elvis. Not because of "spiking a football." But because those who celebrated Bin Laden's evasion of G-d's Justice and American determination should be reminded, in the thousand words that a picture provides, that there is no evading G-d's justice and that Bin Laden and his fellow shark food aspirants were writing America's epitaph way too prematurely. Bin Laden thought America was weak, soft, lazy, and certainly never could pursue a determined manhunt for a decade. Those who reveled with him in that belief, those who spiked their own footballs at America after every terrorist outrage, deserve to see photographic imagery revealing the stark reminder of reality: There is no evading justice. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini all died young. Justice caught up with each.
America does not relent. Even the most incompetent and weak-kneed American Presidential Administration since that of Jimmy Carter -- and possibly the weakest and most incompetent in all American history (with apologies to Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan) -- saw this one through. They had no choice. The American People would not let Obama relent. We would not let him close Gitmo. We would not let him put terrorist leaders on civilian trial in Lower Manhattan. We accepted enhanced interrogation and rendition, refusing to let Holder lay a hand on any of those who protected our country during the Bush-Cheney years. Much as we forced Obama finally to go down to Louisiana and to clean up the mess in the Gulf of Mexico, after the President and his inexperienced and unqualified staff fumbled and bumbled by refusing repeated offers of boom and of assistance from oil-cleaning vessels, so we forced him to clean up after Al Qaeda -- like it or not.
As the final judgment took place, G-d saw Osama finished exactly as he merited, measure for measure. He had murdered 3,000 Americans who perfunctorily had left for work on the morning of 9-11 as they respectively had done every other morning -- a quick cup of coffee, a brief glimpse of a newspaper, perhaps forgetting to say "good-bye" or to hug or kiss a loved one on the hurried way out the door. None saw what lay in store that day, and thousands who survived them live a decade later with the pain that they never said "good-bye." Garth Brooks captured that feeling -- the feeling of never having said "good-bye" to a loved one before he died -- years before 9-11 in his incredible song "If Tomorrow Never Comes." I personally have lived 44 years with that pain, having been too young and immature to exchange "good-byes" with my Father as he lay in a hospital bed dying of leukemia. That pain has wracked me nearly half a century, and it never will end -- never having gotten to say "good-bye." But at least I have been able to visit my father's burial site, and I have said "good-bye" there.
For the families who lost 3,000 souls on 9-11 at Osama's inducement, there were few chances to say"good-bye." The survivors forever will live with that amplified pain, even as the victims never saw it coming. And, for so many of those victims, their final remains never were found by the subsequent crews. Many who died at the Twin Towers never will be found. They are part and parcel of Ground Zero. Their survivors cannot go to their gravesites. There is no coming to terms or ultimate closure.
And so it was fitting, in the ultimate measure for measure, that Bin Laden died a decade later in a sudden hail of frenzy, never having seen it coming. It was a day that had begun like all others with the three wives and the 23 kids. And then, from nowhere, with no advance warning, it all came to thud of a halt. A hail of fire, a blown-off piece of skull, and tomorrow never came. Only A flash of fire and a last image: that of Uncle Sam's SEALs discharging their weapons at his head. And, even as those who survived him never got to say "good-bye," they and their fellow mourners have nowhere to go to pay their respects. His body is gone, remains disappeared. There is no gravesite, no marker. As Moses the Zionist cheerfully sang in Exodus 15:3-5,10: "G-d is a master of war. . . . Pharaoh's chariots and warriors He threw in the sea, and the most select of his officers sank in the sea. Deep waters covered them; they descended in the depths like stone. . . [T]he sea enshrouded them; they sank like lead in water."
And so Osama, too, promptly sank in the ocean like lead, subsumed by the mighty waters and the deepest of depths. There is nowhere to go to say "good-bye, Bin Laden." By now, part of him still may lie on the ocean floor, part in some whale, part in some shark. Perhaps, by now, a bit even in some local aquarium's population.
Gone at once. Never saw it coming. Nowhere to be found. Measure for measure.
That, too, is G-d's justice, as realized by the armed forces of a nation determined not to relent, not to let its weak and inadequate national leadership back off. And that is the testimonial power of that photo -- for every terrorist and terrorist-wanna-be who ever spiked a football towards America. There is no evading justice, and this United States of America will not relent.
America does not relent. Even the most incompetent and weak-kneed American Presidential Administration since that of Jimmy Carter -- and possibly the weakest and most incompetent in all American history (with apologies to Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan) -- saw this one through. They had no choice. The American People would not let Obama relent. We would not let him close Gitmo. We would not let him put terrorist leaders on civilian trial in Lower Manhattan. We accepted enhanced interrogation and rendition, refusing to let Holder lay a hand on any of those who protected our country during the Bush-Cheney years. Much as we forced Obama finally to go down to Louisiana and to clean up the mess in the Gulf of Mexico, after the President and his inexperienced and unqualified staff fumbled and bumbled by refusing repeated offers of boom and of assistance from oil-cleaning vessels, so we forced him to clean up after Al Qaeda -- like it or not.
As the final judgment took place, G-d saw Osama finished exactly as he merited, measure for measure. He had murdered 3,000 Americans who perfunctorily had left for work on the morning of 9-11 as they respectively had done every other morning -- a quick cup of coffee, a brief glimpse of a newspaper, perhaps forgetting to say "good-bye" or to hug or kiss a loved one on the hurried way out the door. None saw what lay in store that day, and thousands who survived them live a decade later with the pain that they never said "good-bye." Garth Brooks captured that feeling -- the feeling of never having said "good-bye" to a loved one before he died -- years before 9-11 in his incredible song "If Tomorrow Never Comes." I personally have lived 44 years with that pain, having been too young and immature to exchange "good-byes" with my Father as he lay in a hospital bed dying of leukemia. That pain has wracked me nearly half a century, and it never will end -- never having gotten to say "good-bye." But at least I have been able to visit my father's burial site, and I have said "good-bye" there.
For the families who lost 3,000 souls on 9-11 at Osama's inducement, there were few chances to say"good-bye." The survivors forever will live with that amplified pain, even as the victims never saw it coming. And, for so many of those victims, their final remains never were found by the subsequent crews. Many who died at the Twin Towers never will be found. They are part and parcel of Ground Zero. Their survivors cannot go to their gravesites. There is no coming to terms or ultimate closure.
And so it was fitting, in the ultimate measure for measure, that Bin Laden died a decade later in a sudden hail of frenzy, never having seen it coming. It was a day that had begun like all others with the three wives and the 23 kids. And then, from nowhere, with no advance warning, it all came to thud of a halt. A hail of fire, a blown-off piece of skull, and tomorrow never came. Only A flash of fire and a last image: that of Uncle Sam's SEALs discharging their weapons at his head. And, even as those who survived him never got to say "good-bye," they and their fellow mourners have nowhere to go to pay their respects. His body is gone, remains disappeared. There is no gravesite, no marker. As Moses the Zionist cheerfully sang in Exodus 15:3-5,10: "G-d is a master of war. . . . Pharaoh's chariots and warriors He threw in the sea, and the most select of his officers sank in the sea. Deep waters covered them; they descended in the depths like stone. . . [T]he sea enshrouded them; they sank like lead in water."
And so Osama, too, promptly sank in the ocean like lead, subsumed by the mighty waters and the deepest of depths. There is nowhere to go to say "good-bye, Bin Laden." By now, part of him still may lie on the ocean floor, part in some whale, part in some shark. Perhaps, by now, a bit even in some local aquarium's population.
Gone at once. Never saw it coming. Nowhere to be found. Measure for measure.
That, too, is G-d's justice, as realized by the armed forces of a nation determined not to relent, not to let its weak and inadequate national leadership back off. And that is the testimonial power of that photo -- for every terrorist and terrorist-wanna-be who ever spiked a football towards America. There is no evading justice, and this United States of America will not relent.
Fabulous Jews and Schmendricks at El Al Airlines: On Caroline Low, Elyezer Shkedy, and a Teenage Boy Alone at Heathrow Airport over Shabbat
So my son followed up this morning in Britain. I have a great story to write about the world of Orthodox Jews and hachnasat orchim. But this post is about the schmendricks at El Al, too. And the follow up customer service department letter from Caroline Low on behalf of Elyezer Shkedy.
My son arrived in London on Thursday. Had things gone smoothly, he would have arrived in Tel Aviv on Friday morning. Alas, flights were canceled to and from Lod Airport that day for important reasons. We all properly accept that. Here is where Jewish policy comes in:
El Al explained to the stranded travelers on Thursday that they would be stranded in London until Saturday night. The flight for Saturday night would start so close after Shabbat that all the shomrei Shabbat stranded in London ultimately needed to remain at the local hotel over Shabbat because there otherwise would have been no time for them to get back to the airport in time for the flight after havdalah. I guess we all properly can accept that, too. Flight schedules are based on many factors. Next:
Yet the schmendricks at El Al agreed to pay for only one night at the hotel – Thursday night. They refused to pay for Friday night. They also insulted several travelers repeatedly for asking El Al also to cover the second night, Friday night, for which they essentially were requiring the shomrei Shabbat to remain at the hotel. This nastiness went back and forth for much of the day, until El Al upper management finally relented to other, older-in-age passengers who also pressed them, and El Al finally agreed a day later to pay for Friday night, too, leaving bad feelings all around. (It is my business experience that, if an airline compels you to wait overnight for its next flight to materialize, they pay for your hotel for as long as they delay you. And they do it with a smile and a soft polite apology to the passengers whom they are delaying.)
In the end, a wonderful Shabbat-observant lady in London, with whom my son and I were connected by the wonderful rav of New York’s Lincoln Square Synagogue, kindly and generously paid fgor and dispatched a taxi cab that delivered complete Shabbat meals for my son, including not only wine and home-baked challah but also meat and desserts of chocolate mousse. (In addition, other among my many wonderful rabbinical colleagues among the RCA and shul members of Young Israel of Orange County also put us in touch with many other London-area shomer Shabbat contacts. In all, in less than half a day, we received more than 25 invitations for my son to spend Shabbat at homes throughout Greater London. Harry Potter should be so blessed!)
This incident tells a great story about Orthodox Jews throughout the world and about hachnasat orchim. El Al is not part of that great story. It seems you can't teach class.
I did, however, give it a try. After all, El Al is the best at security. So one would figure that the term "El Al Customer Service" does not have to be an oxymoron. So I wrote El Al. After a month of "investigating," one Caroline Low wrote me on behalf of the President, Elyezer Shkedy, essentially praising the hachnasat orchim of the lady in London and, in so many words, wishing us better luck next time with El Al!
That's got to be the ultimate Form Letter for incompetent Customer Service departments and nincompoop clerks around the world: "Dear Mr. Jones. Thank you for writing about the poor service you received from our company. We have conducted a one-month investigation and are glad to learn, pretty much from re-reading your letter a month after we first read it, that someone else helped you out while our half-trained employee was yelling at and insulting you. On behalf of our Department President, Corporate President, and the lady who does my nails we all wish you better luck next time. Ciao!"
Remember the names: Caroline Low. Elyezer Shkedy. The next time you buy an airline ticket to Israel, choosing a different airline to receive your $1,500-$2,000 purchase, drop them a note: "Although I am Jewish and a deep Zionist, and always go out of my way to patronize Israeli companies, I have chosen to fly an airline other than El Al because of Caroline Low and Elyezer Shkedy. Better luck next time!"
My son arrived in London on Thursday. Had things gone smoothly, he would have arrived in Tel Aviv on Friday morning. Alas, flights were canceled to and from Lod Airport that day for important reasons. We all properly accept that. Here is where Jewish policy comes in:
El Al explained to the stranded travelers on Thursday that they would be stranded in London until Saturday night. The flight for Saturday night would start so close after Shabbat that all the shomrei Shabbat stranded in London ultimately needed to remain at the local hotel over Shabbat because there otherwise would have been no time for them to get back to the airport in time for the flight after havdalah. I guess we all properly can accept that, too. Flight schedules are based on many factors. Next:
Yet the schmendricks at El Al agreed to pay for only one night at the hotel – Thursday night. They refused to pay for Friday night. They also insulted several travelers repeatedly for asking El Al also to cover the second night, Friday night, for which they essentially were requiring the shomrei Shabbat to remain at the hotel. This nastiness went back and forth for much of the day, until El Al upper management finally relented to other, older-in-age passengers who also pressed them, and El Al finally agreed a day later to pay for Friday night, too, leaving bad feelings all around. (It is my business experience that, if an airline compels you to wait overnight for its next flight to materialize, they pay for your hotel for as long as they delay you. And they do it with a smile and a soft polite apology to the passengers whom they are delaying.)
In the end, a wonderful Shabbat-observant lady in London, with whom my son and I were connected by the wonderful rav of New York’s Lincoln Square Synagogue, kindly and generously paid fgor and dispatched a taxi cab that delivered complete Shabbat meals for my son, including not only wine and home-baked challah but also meat and desserts of chocolate mousse. (In addition, other among my many wonderful rabbinical colleagues among the RCA and shul members of Young Israel of Orange County also put us in touch with many other London-area shomer Shabbat contacts. In all, in less than half a day, we received more than 25 invitations for my son to spend Shabbat at homes throughout Greater London. Harry Potter should be so blessed!)
This incident tells a great story about Orthodox Jews throughout the world and about hachnasat orchim. El Al is not part of that great story. It seems you can't teach class.
I did, however, give it a try. After all, El Al is the best at security. So one would figure that the term "El Al Customer Service" does not have to be an oxymoron. So I wrote El Al. After a month of "investigating," one Caroline Low wrote me on behalf of the President, Elyezer Shkedy, essentially praising the hachnasat orchim of the lady in London and, in so many words, wishing us better luck next time with El Al!
That's got to be the ultimate Form Letter for incompetent Customer Service departments and nincompoop clerks around the world: "Dear Mr. Jones. Thank you for writing about the poor service you received from our company. We have conducted a one-month investigation and are glad to learn, pretty much from re-reading your letter a month after we first read it, that someone else helped you out while our half-trained employee was yelling at and insulting you. On behalf of our Department President, Corporate President, and the lady who does my nails we all wish you better luck next time. Ciao!"
Remember the names: Caroline Low. Elyezer Shkedy. The next time you buy an airline ticket to Israel, choosing a different airline to receive your $1,500-$2,000 purchase, drop them a note: "Although I am Jewish and a deep Zionist, and always go out of my way to patronize Israeli companies, I have chosen to fly an airline other than El Al because of Caroline Low and Elyezer Shkedy. Better luck next time!"
Israel Independence Day 5771 - Yom HaAtzma'ut 2011
As American Jews, we are proud and engaged citizens of the United States. We are loyal to America, pay taxes to her, support and often have fought in her armed forces, often giving our lives for her. See, e.g., the website of the Jewish War Veterans of America at www.jwv.org . Many Jews have served America as public office holders, government administration professionals, and military professionals. We celebrate America’s holidays as our own, because they are own: Thanksgiving as a day to thank G-d for bringing us to these shores of a New World, far away from the continents of blood libels, Crusades, and Inquisitions. Columbus Day with thanks that he took that wrong turn and found this place. Veterans Day with gratitude for all who have fought under our flag for freedom. Presidents’ Day to celebrate a tradition of American political leadership that consistently has affirmed our place in America. Memorial Day to remember our fallen soldiers who fought so that America could be safe for liberty. Independence Day for marking the historic break from tyranny and the pursuit of liberty. Thus, our commitment to the country of America is primary and all-engrossing.
At the same time, we also are part of an eternal people, the Jewish People, with our eyes and hearts always turned to Tzion – to Zion – to the heart of Jerusalem where G-d set His eternal dwelling place on the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. For two thousand years of bitter Jewish Exile, through dispersion and persecution, we never abandoned our bond with and yearning for Zion. In our daily prayers, we faced and still face towards the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. Three times daily, we prayed and still pray for G-d’s return to Jerusalem. After meals that we eat with bread, we recited and still recite our prayer that He rebuild Jerusalem speedily in our days. For two thousand years, we sat and still sit on floors, weeping bitter tears by candlelight as we remembered Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av Night and Day, mourning and fasting for a return to the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem and for restoration of the Jewish People to the land that G-d promised Abraham, Isaac, and Israel (Jacob). The Holy Land, then, is part of our core heritage as Jewish People, and we cannot be separated from the Land of Israel and our connection to our forebears who lived and died there. Indeed, many proud American Jews, like Jews all over the world, arranged through the centuries, and still arrange, to be laid to rest in Israel after a full and rich life.
When the State of Israel was reestablished in 1948, that event marked an historically awesome and momentous event in Jewish faith. After nearly two thousand years of never ever giving up the claim and the hope, we saw its fulfillment begun: a Jewish Commonwealth reborn in the land we spiritually never had left. By 1967, when three Arab armies based in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan forced Israel to fight for her survival in a fearsome and ultimately miraculous defensive war that resulted with Israel’s liberation of East Jerusalem and the reunification of the City of Jerusalem as the temporal capital of the State of Israel and as the Eternal Spiritual Capital of the Jewish People, our lives as Jews everywhere were changed forever.
Israel’s independence, then, is part of our essence as Jews. Militarily, our loyalties are to America. Politically, to America. Economically, to America. Spiritually, even as Catholics throughout the world turn to the Vatican and as Moslems make their haj to Mecca, our eyes and hearts turn to Jerusalem and to Israel. We celebrate her independence as our own. We send money to support her institutions. We lobby our elected officials to take steps to offset those who would endanger her. We visit her, again and again. We send our children to learn there, whether at a yeshiva seminary for a year after high school, or for a Birthright trip, or an Aish program in spiritual discovery, or any of scores of other programs. We learn the ancient Hebrew language with modern inflections, pray almost exclusively in Hebrew, and we visit the holy sites in Bethlehem (where Rachel is buried), Shechem (Nablus, where Joseph lies), and of course Hebron (the resting place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah). Some of us plan our retirements to include significant time in Israel. So many of us, by now, have family living in Israel – cousins, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandchildren, and others – who not only speak pure Hebrew but with Israeli accents.
Israel Independence Day, then, is in good measure our celebration, too. We are invested in Israel – spiritually, emotionally, historically through our ancestors, materially. We take pride in Israel’s strides and advances, concern ourselves with her evolution, and plan our lives with the knowledge and understanding that we live in the most miraculous of times, an era that our grandparents and theirs barely could have imagined – an age and a time when many millions of Jews have returned to live in a Jewish country in Israel, with borders open to Jews everywhere so that we never again need be a people with nowhere to flee from persecution. Ours is the miracle era with the city of Jerusalem reunited and now with many hundreds of thousands more pouring into and rebuilding the cities of Judea and Samaria in the heart of our patrimony where Judaism all began. Regardless of whether a particular American Jew personally ever will set foot in Israel, much less live there, the day of Israel’s independence – Yom HaAtzma’ut – is a day for each and every American Jew to celebrate heartily and gratefully, within our hearts, among our families, as part of our communities, and as an eternal Jewish people whose spark never will cease and to whose eternal existence the modern State of Israel bears existential witness.
At the same time, we also are part of an eternal people, the Jewish People, with our eyes and hearts always turned to Tzion – to Zion – to the heart of Jerusalem where G-d set His eternal dwelling place on the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. For two thousand years of bitter Jewish Exile, through dispersion and persecution, we never abandoned our bond with and yearning for Zion. In our daily prayers, we faced and still face towards the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. Three times daily, we prayed and still pray for G-d’s return to Jerusalem. After meals that we eat with bread, we recited and still recite our prayer that He rebuild Jerusalem speedily in our days. For two thousand years, we sat and still sit on floors, weeping bitter tears by candlelight as we remembered Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av Night and Day, mourning and fasting for a return to the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem and for restoration of the Jewish People to the land that G-d promised Abraham, Isaac, and Israel (Jacob). The Holy Land, then, is part of our core heritage as Jewish People, and we cannot be separated from the Land of Israel and our connection to our forebears who lived and died there. Indeed, many proud American Jews, like Jews all over the world, arranged through the centuries, and still arrange, to be laid to rest in Israel after a full and rich life.
When the State of Israel was reestablished in 1948, that event marked an historically awesome and momentous event in Jewish faith. After nearly two thousand years of never ever giving up the claim and the hope, we saw its fulfillment begun: a Jewish Commonwealth reborn in the land we spiritually never had left. By 1967, when three Arab armies based in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan forced Israel to fight for her survival in a fearsome and ultimately miraculous defensive war that resulted with Israel’s liberation of East Jerusalem and the reunification of the City of Jerusalem as the temporal capital of the State of Israel and as the Eternal Spiritual Capital of the Jewish People, our lives as Jews everywhere were changed forever.
Israel’s independence, then, is part of our essence as Jews. Militarily, our loyalties are to America. Politically, to America. Economically, to America. Spiritually, even as Catholics throughout the world turn to the Vatican and as Moslems make their haj to Mecca, our eyes and hearts turn to Jerusalem and to Israel. We celebrate her independence as our own. We send money to support her institutions. We lobby our elected officials to take steps to offset those who would endanger her. We visit her, again and again. We send our children to learn there, whether at a yeshiva seminary for a year after high school, or for a Birthright trip, or an Aish program in spiritual discovery, or any of scores of other programs. We learn the ancient Hebrew language with modern inflections, pray almost exclusively in Hebrew, and we visit the holy sites in Bethlehem (where Rachel is buried), Shechem (Nablus, where Joseph lies), and of course Hebron (the resting place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah). Some of us plan our retirements to include significant time in Israel. So many of us, by now, have family living in Israel – cousins, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandchildren, and others – who not only speak pure Hebrew but with Israeli accents.
Israel Independence Day, then, is in good measure our celebration, too. We are invested in Israel – spiritually, emotionally, historically through our ancestors, materially. We take pride in Israel’s strides and advances, concern ourselves with her evolution, and plan our lives with the knowledge and understanding that we live in the most miraculous of times, an era that our grandparents and theirs barely could have imagined – an age and a time when many millions of Jews have returned to live in a Jewish country in Israel, with borders open to Jews everywhere so that we never again need be a people with nowhere to flee from persecution. Ours is the miracle era with the city of Jerusalem reunited and now with many hundreds of thousands more pouring into and rebuilding the cities of Judea and Samaria in the heart of our patrimony where Judaism all began. Regardless of whether a particular American Jew personally ever will set foot in Israel, much less live there, the day of Israel’s independence – Yom HaAtzma’ut – is a day for each and every American Jew to celebrate heartily and gratefully, within our hearts, among our families, as part of our communities, and as an eternal Jewish people whose spark never will cease and to whose eternal existence the modern State of Israel bears existential witness.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
On the Increased Urgency for a New Jewish Educational Vision to Guide the Pedagogic Model of Tarbut v'Torah (TVT) in Irvine, Orange County, California
When I was ordained in March 1981 with s'mikha from HaRav HaGaon Harav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik zt"l and Rav Nahum Lamm shlit"a at Yeshiva University's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), I undertook to be a Rav b'Yisrael, a rabbi and teacher in the greater Jewish community. I have been a Rav for 27 years and have practiced in pulpit and community rabbonus for more than 15 of those years. It is because I love the Jewish People, and particularly because I am devoted to the Judaic education of young people -- of all ages, of all backgrounds -- that I write this considered commentary on my profound disappointment over what I have seen and experienced first-hand at the Irvine-based community day school called "TVT" or Tarbut v'Torah.
Irvine is not New York or Los Angeles, and – given its Jewish demographics – it is proper, even for an Orthodox Rav, to modify expectations in light of the reality of the community and what it realistically can accept in terms of Jewish education, what it reasonably can sustain. I write from that recognition and perspective.
I have been in Tarbut / TVT. I know many of its students. I deeply care for them.
I am deeply pained that, for exactly the same money – or even significantly less – that has been invested in the school, Tarbut / TVT could be a fine community Jewish Day School. Instead, it does not meet its mission as a community Jewish Day School. One readily can discern the focus that donors devoted on the campus grounds and the externals of the facility, but a more experienced and trained eye discerns sadly the lesser focus devoted on the quality of the Judaic component of the academic program. (It is beyond the scope of this commentary to opine on the school's secular program or its administration. Neither approbation nor disdain should be inferred from this commentary regarding either of those two subjects.) This severe weakness is commonly perceived, and it is commonly acknowledged among Jewish educators outside the community. It is discussed quietly among rabbis of all Jewish denominations in Orange County, several of whom lament privately that the Morashah Day School extends only through sixth grade. However, it is regarded as rabbinic-career political suicide to say it aloud, with attribution, within the Jewish community of Orange County. I thank G-d for imbuing me with the courage to write this.
It is not difficult to know what a formal Jewish education can offer its students. Throughout Southern California, there are noble efforts to that effect. Institutions under Orthodox auspices are not the only ones. There are noble efforts under Conservative and Reform auspices, too. In Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, Bruce Powell has created a burgeoning model of a community Jewish Day School. Tragically, however, Tarbut's / TVT's Jewish studies program is dramatically weaker than one finds at many fine Jewish schools run in the United States under Reform or other denominational auspices.
The students at Tarbut / TVT deserve better. I know many of them personally. Many are bright -- and they would love to learn more. They are quite capable of being taught text knowledge. Certainly, at a tuition of some $15,000 per head, they deserve it. TVT / Tarbut should be a school where capable students learn Jewish knowledge, book knowledge, side-by-side with secular curricula. But it is not. I know this from very personal knowledge: from what I personally have seen, what I have tried to share of myself, and -- primarily -- from what parents themselves privately and confidentially have brought to my attention throughout my three years in Orange County. I have spoken privately with select students and with select faculty through three years here. There is great fear to speak openly about the lacunae. "Rabbi Fischer," I am asked, "Please do something about this. Please say something. Please write something. Please tell what is happening -- or, more accurately, what is not happening -- here. But, please, promise me that you will not quote me. My friends will attack me. My children will lose their friends. Please do not quote me."
There is no need to fear. I will not quote and will not attribute. I speak only as a Rabbi of 27 years -- as a Congregational Rav and as a professional Jewish educator. I speak only in my own name, and I bear full personal responsibility for every word I write here. For a period now extending through several years, Tarbut V'Torah (TVT) consistently has failed its parents and students, failing to transmit a substantive Judaic knowledge foundation to the vast majority of its students. The academic lacunae are palpable, and the failure to transmit substantive Judaic information and to inculcate meaningful Jewish learning is manifest. Given the expansive and lush grounds on which the Tarbut V'Torah campus is situated and the $15,000 annual tuition charge for each student, this poignant institutional failure to achieve the results charted at leaner, more modestly funded Jewish Day Schools operated throughout America under Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox auspices respectively cannot be attributed to a lack of material wherewithal, thus amplifying the concern.
At Tarbut / TVT, the students are not taught to navigate a Chumash. They do not learn Chumash text as part of their curriculum between grades 1-12. They cannot read a Rashi commentary. Over 90% never even have heard the most basic terms that children at any other Jewish Day School would have learned. The kids should be looking and learning inside real texts – Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah.
The level of Hebrew reading at Tarbut / TVT concerns me. I have met any number of parents who have brought their 12-year-old sons and 11-year-old daughters into my office, to start them on the paths of their respective bar- and bat mitzvahs. I would take out four Siddurim -- one for the student, one for the Mom, one for the Dad, and one for me. Typically, I also would invite our Youth Director to participate in the session, handing him a Siddur, too. I would ask the student kindly to read something in the Siddur so I could gauge the level of intensity needed for the forthcoming curriculum of bar/bat mitzvah study. The experience typically would be profoundly disheartening.
This educational shortfall is universally recognized among Jewish educators and rabbis in the region, but there is an understanding within the community that discretion is appropriate. One Youth Director after another who has worked with me has seen first-hand and experienced the Tarbut / TVT failure. Each has expressed amazement. The Youth Director would sit in my office with me, as we -- and the parents -- would gauge the prospective bar/bat mitzvah student’s Hebrew reading to assess the need and plan out a learning program. Because I always would have the Mom and Dad in the room with us, too, as the child would read Hebrew from the Siddur, the parents also would be startled.
As in public schools, where many parents consign pedagogical authority to the employed teachers without always investigating what is being taught and how, many of the parents of TVT students understandably do not investigate what their children are learning at Tarbut V'Torah, often because they understandably do not know how to check or what standard to expect. They are not professionally trained Jewish educators, and they understandably do not have a skills set in that area. Yet even they know that something is severely wrong when their intelligent child, after six years at some $15,000-a-year, sits in the Rabbi's office at age 12 or age 11 and barely is able to read a line of Hebrew smoothly, much less to identify basic Judaic concepts or terms.
If the parents lack the skills set, how then do they know there is a problem? Consider that I do not read Chinese. But if my son, after attending a Chinese-language class for six years at $15,000 a year, were asked to read from a Chinese book, and he were to articulate only a handful of syllabic sounds in a sixty-second minute, and then were to stop after just a few more syllables over three or four more minutes, I would be quite unsettled. And if he then were to turn to me, seeing my dismay, and say “Don’t be angry at me, Dad. I really am trying, but I can’t read this so well. It is a foreign language with a different set of alphabetical characters.” Well, after six years -- and knowing how well my child is able to acquire other knowledge skills -- that would tell me something very sobering about my $90,000 investment.
That is the core of the problem at TVT / Tarbut v'Torah. For those less professionally trained and experienced in the area of Jewish pedagogy, the difficulty to recognize the scope and depth of the problem is amplified and obfuscated by two factors:
(1) A small number of TVT / Tarbut students independently are intensely home-schooled by their parents, after school and on weekends, because those parents are among the proportionately few in South Orange County who enjoy the Judaic background and skills-sets sufficient to perceive that their respective children otherwise are not being taught a meaningfully substantive Judaic knowledge base. Then, after being home-schooled, those proportionately few children are presented to the broader community as “proof” that TVT / Tarbut is doing a fine job.
(2) The second obfuscation is more subtle. The Rabbi and the temple Youth Director -- whether Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox -- is assigned, within the separate institutional framework of the temple that provides services for its members, to train the 12-year-old boy or 11-year-old girl, over the course of the following 8-12 months leading up to bar/bat mitzvah, to essentially quasi-memorize the bar/bat mitzvah service. Thus, on “Bar/Bat Mitzvah Day,” those present at temple hear a young lady or fellow chant and otherwise lead aspects of the service with the perceived erudition that implicitly comes with years of training, learning, and study.
But the actuality differs. Professional and experienced pedagogues in secular schools have encountered this same educational phenomenon when first meeting a child entering the first grade. The child is tested in entry-level reading skills and is given a page, or several pages, to read. The child reads beautifully. The parent beams proudly, but the teacher methodically reaches for a second book of similar grade-level, but written by a different author, illustrated with different pictures. Inexplicably to the parent -- but all-too-common to the trained pedagogue -- the same child cannot read from that comparable book. The trained pedagogue instantly discerns that the child was taught "sight reading," not phonics. Thus, the child essentially has quasi-memorized that first book, page by page. But the child remains helpless when exposed to other illustrations, another page lay-out. The child has not yet been taught to read. Many pedagogues maintain that there nevertheless is some value in teaching "sight reading" if it encourages a foundational love for books and love for reading among nursery children and kindergarteners. However, by eighth grade, it is recognized that "sight reading" is not sufficient.
The same phenomenon underlies the Bar/Bat Mitzvah phenomenon. The Tarbut / TVT student leads the service at the temple. Perhaps she reads from the Torah. Perhaps he reads a Haftorah. Perhaps she leads a portion of the prayer service. Yet, if the same boy were to be asked -- only moments later -- to read also from the Haftorah that appears on the page that precedes or follows his Bar Mitzvah Haftorah, the result well could surprise. Likewise, the boy or girl is taught essentially to quasi-memorize portions of the prayer service that he or she leads. But if he or she were to be asked moments later, quietly and confidentially, to read in the same Siddur from prayers that appear a few pages before or after what he or she has been taught essentially to memorize, the results well could surprise. Thus, for the audience -- the assembled congregation -- an appearance of erudition redounds to the school's reputation. Would that it were so!
Ultimately, then, the need in Orange County is not exclusively for a Brooklyn/Los Angeles-quality yeshiva day school. Naturally, as an Orthodox Rav, it is my goal and dream to see a Jewish Day School of such caliber established some day in Irvine so that my Orthodox rabbinical colleagues and I do not have to endure the enormous logistical challenges and difficulties of having our children educated two hours away at YULA in Los Angeles. But as a Rabbi who recognizes the variegation of the Jewish demographic locally and understands with the experience of a career spanning a quarter century what is at stake and what realistically can be achieved for the Jewish community that I love and whom I am dedicated to serve -- an Irvine-based South Orange County Jewish community of more than 100,000 Jews who are not predominantly Orthodox but who deserve excellence for the tuition dollars being invested in their most precious resources, their children -- it is deeply, deeply painful to watch profoundly bright and capable young children in our community being denied exposure to substantive Judaic knowledge.
As a Rabbi, it devolves on me to observe aloud that wonderful, bright young people are processed year-after-year through Tarbut's / TVT’s revolving doors at a tuition rate that certainly implies a substantive education, yet that demands from and offers them so much less than one typically would find provided to graduates of a Jewish Day School run under Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox auspices.
I know the children because my focus as a Rabbi always has included attending with utmost concern to elementary students, teens, and college students. I know, first-hand in the confidentiality of my relationships with families of Tarbut / TVT students, how deeply so many of those parents are pained. There are parents who literally have broken down, crying in my office. I know, from that same base of direct and confidential personal knowledge, how relieved those parents are when the year-long quasi-memorization process ends, with their sons and daughters emerging from the Bar/Bat Mitzvah having publicly presented the appearance of having a Judaic education. I know the scope of what rabbis in Los Angeles -- who may speak more candidly on the subject because they are outside the penumbra of political fall-out and personal exposure when speaking -- think of TVT / Tarbut. (The school's reputation outside Orange County and its environs is one that I have not encountered in my quarter century in the Rabbinate.) From a career in the rabbinate, I know what other Jewish community and denominational schools can and do teach their charges.
It thus is a matter of grave public concern, compelling a Rabbi to speak out, even as it is a matter of political suicide in South Orange County to discuss this subject publicly with candor. But I am a Rabbi, and that is my calling. It is my soul's yearning. It is incumbent on me to share these concerns publicly. We need only view the greater American society's economic fall-out, in the face of the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae setbacks that were perceived by many who knew that the system was in grave danger but who chose not to speak because their personal political considerations for advancement and personal fundraising opportunities diverted them. And, then, one day Bear Stearns collapsed, and then Indy Mac, and then Lehman Brothers. Yet, with deference to the significant economic and financial institutional concerns of an American polity in which I share, I feel obliged even more to share the present concern. The need for a dramatic overhaul and re-conception of Tarbut V'Torah (TVT), its mission, and its educational aspirations for students and parents who deserve better is most compelling because, at bottom, we are talking about the right of Jewish young people to receive the substantive education they deserve and for which their parents believe they are paying. They are good young people. They are capable of learning great things. And, if they miss these opportunities to grow in Jewish text knowledge -- the study of Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah, Talmud, and so much more -- during their childhood and teen years, they may never get that opportunity later, once "life happens."
And what will they have left to pass down to their children?
This statement of public concern concludes with one more area of attention. A Jewish community day school that offers its students the opportunity to participate in formal daily prayer services lays a foundation for them to have an option to grow spiritually in yet another way, and also to learn the skill of navigating through a prayer book. Those who daven daily are not perfect. But if tefilah -- Jewish prayer (davening) -- is taught with sensitivity and formal training, it sometimes can assist a school's administration and faculty in an effort to guide young people from evolving in their teens towards the coarseness sometimes found in segments of external society. Coarseness is the hallmark of teen evolution in certain circles of society, but the Jewish Day School model aims for something more noble and uplifting. Dirty words, filthy language, coarse sexual references and humor are not compatible with a successful Jewish Day School model. TVT / Tarbut should offer its students the opportunity to pray every day -- a formal Shacharit option each and every school morning, with all boys age 13 or over donning tefillin and with Sephardic boys wearing a tallit in the tradition of their parents. Such prayer need not be mandatory, but it should be a formal curricular offering in much the same way that so many other community Jewish Day Schools offer. Similarly, Tarbut / TVT should offer a formally scheduled Mincha prayer opportunity, even if only optional, every afternoon.
If there is no one else to lead such a daily Shacharit service, I publicly volunteer to lead it. Just as I remain available -- as I have for three years -- to teach Torah text as a formal faculty member. I extend that offer because it is easy to offer analysis and observation when one is not prepared personally to accept a challenge and take up a gauntlet. But the faculty member need not be I. Nor need the prayer leader be I. But it is time. And if not now, when?
Irvine is not New York or Los Angeles, and – given its Jewish demographics – it is proper, even for an Orthodox Rav, to modify expectations in light of the reality of the community and what it realistically can accept in terms of Jewish education, what it reasonably can sustain. I write from that recognition and perspective.
I have been in Tarbut / TVT. I know many of its students. I deeply care for them.
I am deeply pained that, for exactly the same money – or even significantly less – that has been invested in the school, Tarbut / TVT could be a fine community Jewish Day School. Instead, it does not meet its mission as a community Jewish Day School. One readily can discern the focus that donors devoted on the campus grounds and the externals of the facility, but a more experienced and trained eye discerns sadly the lesser focus devoted on the quality of the Judaic component of the academic program. (It is beyond the scope of this commentary to opine on the school's secular program or its administration. Neither approbation nor disdain should be inferred from this commentary regarding either of those two subjects.) This severe weakness is commonly perceived, and it is commonly acknowledged among Jewish educators outside the community. It is discussed quietly among rabbis of all Jewish denominations in Orange County, several of whom lament privately that the Morashah Day School extends only through sixth grade. However, it is regarded as rabbinic-career political suicide to say it aloud, with attribution, within the Jewish community of Orange County. I thank G-d for imbuing me with the courage to write this.
It is not difficult to know what a formal Jewish education can offer its students. Throughout Southern California, there are noble efforts to that effect. Institutions under Orthodox auspices are not the only ones. There are noble efforts under Conservative and Reform auspices, too. In Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, Bruce Powell has created a burgeoning model of a community Jewish Day School. Tragically, however, Tarbut's / TVT's Jewish studies program is dramatically weaker than one finds at many fine Jewish schools run in the United States under Reform or other denominational auspices.
The students at Tarbut / TVT deserve better. I know many of them personally. Many are bright -- and they would love to learn more. They are quite capable of being taught text knowledge. Certainly, at a tuition of some $15,000 per head, they deserve it. TVT / Tarbut should be a school where capable students learn Jewish knowledge, book knowledge, side-by-side with secular curricula. But it is not. I know this from very personal knowledge: from what I personally have seen, what I have tried to share of myself, and -- primarily -- from what parents themselves privately and confidentially have brought to my attention throughout my three years in Orange County. I have spoken privately with select students and with select faculty through three years here. There is great fear to speak openly about the lacunae. "Rabbi Fischer," I am asked, "Please do something about this. Please say something. Please write something. Please tell what is happening -- or, more accurately, what is not happening -- here. But, please, promise me that you will not quote me. My friends will attack me. My children will lose their friends. Please do not quote me."
There is no need to fear. I will not quote and will not attribute. I speak only as a Rabbi of 27 years -- as a Congregational Rav and as a professional Jewish educator. I speak only in my own name, and I bear full personal responsibility for every word I write here. For a period now extending through several years, Tarbut V'Torah (TVT) consistently has failed its parents and students, failing to transmit a substantive Judaic knowledge foundation to the vast majority of its students. The academic lacunae are palpable, and the failure to transmit substantive Judaic information and to inculcate meaningful Jewish learning is manifest. Given the expansive and lush grounds on which the Tarbut V'Torah campus is situated and the $15,000 annual tuition charge for each student, this poignant institutional failure to achieve the results charted at leaner, more modestly funded Jewish Day Schools operated throughout America under Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox auspices respectively cannot be attributed to a lack of material wherewithal, thus amplifying the concern.
At Tarbut / TVT, the students are not taught to navigate a Chumash. They do not learn Chumash text as part of their curriculum between grades 1-12. They cannot read a Rashi commentary. Over 90% never even have heard the most basic terms that children at any other Jewish Day School would have learned. The kids should be looking and learning inside real texts – Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah.
The level of Hebrew reading at Tarbut / TVT concerns me. I have met any number of parents who have brought their 12-year-old sons and 11-year-old daughters into my office, to start them on the paths of their respective bar- and bat mitzvahs. I would take out four Siddurim -- one for the student, one for the Mom, one for the Dad, and one for me. Typically, I also would invite our Youth Director to participate in the session, handing him a Siddur, too. I would ask the student kindly to read something in the Siddur so I could gauge the level of intensity needed for the forthcoming curriculum of bar/bat mitzvah study. The experience typically would be profoundly disheartening.
This educational shortfall is universally recognized among Jewish educators and rabbis in the region, but there is an understanding within the community that discretion is appropriate. One Youth Director after another who has worked with me has seen first-hand and experienced the Tarbut / TVT failure. Each has expressed amazement. The Youth Director would sit in my office with me, as we -- and the parents -- would gauge the prospective bar/bat mitzvah student’s Hebrew reading to assess the need and plan out a learning program. Because I always would have the Mom and Dad in the room with us, too, as the child would read Hebrew from the Siddur, the parents also would be startled.
As in public schools, where many parents consign pedagogical authority to the employed teachers without always investigating what is being taught and how, many of the parents of TVT students understandably do not investigate what their children are learning at Tarbut V'Torah, often because they understandably do not know how to check or what standard to expect. They are not professionally trained Jewish educators, and they understandably do not have a skills set in that area. Yet even they know that something is severely wrong when their intelligent child, after six years at some $15,000-a-year, sits in the Rabbi's office at age 12 or age 11 and barely is able to read a line of Hebrew smoothly, much less to identify basic Judaic concepts or terms.
If the parents lack the skills set, how then do they know there is a problem? Consider that I do not read Chinese. But if my son, after attending a Chinese-language class for six years at $15,000 a year, were asked to read from a Chinese book, and he were to articulate only a handful of syllabic sounds in a sixty-second minute, and then were to stop after just a few more syllables over three or four more minutes, I would be quite unsettled. And if he then were to turn to me, seeing my dismay, and say “Don’t be angry at me, Dad. I really am trying, but I can’t read this so well. It is a foreign language with a different set of alphabetical characters.” Well, after six years -- and knowing how well my child is able to acquire other knowledge skills -- that would tell me something very sobering about my $90,000 investment.
That is the core of the problem at TVT / Tarbut v'Torah. For those less professionally trained and experienced in the area of Jewish pedagogy, the difficulty to recognize the scope and depth of the problem is amplified and obfuscated by two factors:
(1) A small number of TVT / Tarbut students independently are intensely home-schooled by their parents, after school and on weekends, because those parents are among the proportionately few in South Orange County who enjoy the Judaic background and skills-sets sufficient to perceive that their respective children otherwise are not being taught a meaningfully substantive Judaic knowledge base. Then, after being home-schooled, those proportionately few children are presented to the broader community as “proof” that TVT / Tarbut is doing a fine job.
(2) The second obfuscation is more subtle. The Rabbi and the temple Youth Director -- whether Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox -- is assigned, within the separate institutional framework of the temple that provides services for its members, to train the 12-year-old boy or 11-year-old girl, over the course of the following 8-12 months leading up to bar/bat mitzvah, to essentially quasi-memorize the bar/bat mitzvah service. Thus, on “Bar/Bat Mitzvah Day,” those present at temple hear a young lady or fellow chant and otherwise lead aspects of the service with the perceived erudition that implicitly comes with years of training, learning, and study.
But the actuality differs. Professional and experienced pedagogues in secular schools have encountered this same educational phenomenon when first meeting a child entering the first grade. The child is tested in entry-level reading skills and is given a page, or several pages, to read. The child reads beautifully. The parent beams proudly, but the teacher methodically reaches for a second book of similar grade-level, but written by a different author, illustrated with different pictures. Inexplicably to the parent -- but all-too-common to the trained pedagogue -- the same child cannot read from that comparable book. The trained pedagogue instantly discerns that the child was taught "sight reading," not phonics. Thus, the child essentially has quasi-memorized that first book, page by page. But the child remains helpless when exposed to other illustrations, another page lay-out. The child has not yet been taught to read. Many pedagogues maintain that there nevertheless is some value in teaching "sight reading" if it encourages a foundational love for books and love for reading among nursery children and kindergarteners. However, by eighth grade, it is recognized that "sight reading" is not sufficient.
The same phenomenon underlies the Bar/Bat Mitzvah phenomenon. The Tarbut / TVT student leads the service at the temple. Perhaps she reads from the Torah. Perhaps he reads a Haftorah. Perhaps she leads a portion of the prayer service. Yet, if the same boy were to be asked -- only moments later -- to read also from the Haftorah that appears on the page that precedes or follows his Bar Mitzvah Haftorah, the result well could surprise. Likewise, the boy or girl is taught essentially to quasi-memorize portions of the prayer service that he or she leads. But if he or she were to be asked moments later, quietly and confidentially, to read in the same Siddur from prayers that appear a few pages before or after what he or she has been taught essentially to memorize, the results well could surprise. Thus, for the audience -- the assembled congregation -- an appearance of erudition redounds to the school's reputation. Would that it were so!
Ultimately, then, the need in Orange County is not exclusively for a Brooklyn/Los Angeles-quality yeshiva day school. Naturally, as an Orthodox Rav, it is my goal and dream to see a Jewish Day School of such caliber established some day in Irvine so that my Orthodox rabbinical colleagues and I do not have to endure the enormous logistical challenges and difficulties of having our children educated two hours away at YULA in Los Angeles. But as a Rabbi who recognizes the variegation of the Jewish demographic locally and understands with the experience of a career spanning a quarter century what is at stake and what realistically can be achieved for the Jewish community that I love and whom I am dedicated to serve -- an Irvine-based South Orange County Jewish community of more than 100,000 Jews who are not predominantly Orthodox but who deserve excellence for the tuition dollars being invested in their most precious resources, their children -- it is deeply, deeply painful to watch profoundly bright and capable young children in our community being denied exposure to substantive Judaic knowledge.
As a Rabbi, it devolves on me to observe aloud that wonderful, bright young people are processed year-after-year through Tarbut's / TVT’s revolving doors at a tuition rate that certainly implies a substantive education, yet that demands from and offers them so much less than one typically would find provided to graduates of a Jewish Day School run under Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox auspices.
I know the children because my focus as a Rabbi always has included attending with utmost concern to elementary students, teens, and college students. I know, first-hand in the confidentiality of my relationships with families of Tarbut / TVT students, how deeply so many of those parents are pained. There are parents who literally have broken down, crying in my office. I know, from that same base of direct and confidential personal knowledge, how relieved those parents are when the year-long quasi-memorization process ends, with their sons and daughters emerging from the Bar/Bat Mitzvah having publicly presented the appearance of having a Judaic education. I know the scope of what rabbis in Los Angeles -- who may speak more candidly on the subject because they are outside the penumbra of political fall-out and personal exposure when speaking -- think of TVT / Tarbut. (The school's reputation outside Orange County and its environs is one that I have not encountered in my quarter century in the Rabbinate.) From a career in the rabbinate, I know what other Jewish community and denominational schools can and do teach their charges.
It thus is a matter of grave public concern, compelling a Rabbi to speak out, even as it is a matter of political suicide in South Orange County to discuss this subject publicly with candor. But I am a Rabbi, and that is my calling. It is my soul's yearning. It is incumbent on me to share these concerns publicly. We need only view the greater American society's economic fall-out, in the face of the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae setbacks that were perceived by many who knew that the system was in grave danger but who chose not to speak because their personal political considerations for advancement and personal fundraising opportunities diverted them. And, then, one day Bear Stearns collapsed, and then Indy Mac, and then Lehman Brothers. Yet, with deference to the significant economic and financial institutional concerns of an American polity in which I share, I feel obliged even more to share the present concern. The need for a dramatic overhaul and re-conception of Tarbut V'Torah (TVT), its mission, and its educational aspirations for students and parents who deserve better is most compelling because, at bottom, we are talking about the right of Jewish young people to receive the substantive education they deserve and for which their parents believe they are paying. They are good young people. They are capable of learning great things. And, if they miss these opportunities to grow in Jewish text knowledge -- the study of Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah, Talmud, and so much more -- during their childhood and teen years, they may never get that opportunity later, once "life happens."
And what will they have left to pass down to their children?
This statement of public concern concludes with one more area of attention. A Jewish community day school that offers its students the opportunity to participate in formal daily prayer services lays a foundation for them to have an option to grow spiritually in yet another way, and also to learn the skill of navigating through a prayer book. Those who daven daily are not perfect. But if tefilah -- Jewish prayer (davening) -- is taught with sensitivity and formal training, it sometimes can assist a school's administration and faculty in an effort to guide young people from evolving in their teens towards the coarseness sometimes found in segments of external society. Coarseness is the hallmark of teen evolution in certain circles of society, but the Jewish Day School model aims for something more noble and uplifting. Dirty words, filthy language, coarse sexual references and humor are not compatible with a successful Jewish Day School model. TVT / Tarbut should offer its students the opportunity to pray every day -- a formal Shacharit option each and every school morning, with all boys age 13 or over donning tefillin and with Sephardic boys wearing a tallit in the tradition of their parents. Such prayer need not be mandatory, but it should be a formal curricular offering in much the same way that so many other community Jewish Day Schools offer. Similarly, Tarbut / TVT should offer a formally scheduled Mincha prayer opportunity, even if only optional, every afternoon.
If there is no one else to lead such a daily Shacharit service, I publicly volunteer to lead it. Just as I remain available -- as I have for three years -- to teach Torah text as a formal faculty member. I extend that offer because it is easy to offer analysis and observation when one is not prepared personally to accept a challenge and take up a gauntlet. But the faculty member need not be I. Nor need the prayer leader be I. But it is time. And if not now, when?
Monday, January 10, 2011
Always the Jews -- Not: There Is No Specifically Jewish Angle to the Giffords Shooting
I respectfully recoil from asserting a Jewish angle in every story (although JTA effectively finds it). Although everything in HKBH”s world may unfold with a purpose to help the Jewish People to perfect our souls, not everything arises from someone thinking about “The Jews.” Edward VIII did not abdicate the throne after ten months because he was infatuated with the chance to marry a woman who had divorced a Jew. (Wallace Simpson had divorced Ernest Aldrich Simpson. His father, Ernest Louis Simpson, had changed his surname from Solomon. Always the Jews.)
This guy was a nut. He merits the privilege, by dint of his own hard efforts, of being deemed by all of us a 100% nut. He may have had an interface with an extremist hate group because they hate Latinos or African Americans or even people from the planet where Loughner perhaps thinks he comes from.
It does not help us or abet the truth to find a Jewish angle in this if there honestly is none. Giffords is a Jew because a Reform rabbi married her to an astronaut named Kelly?
This maniac, Loughner, loved Mein Kampf? Well, he also loved Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan. http://www.businessinsider.com/jared-lee-loughner-2011-1 My mind can be changed, but I am not persuaded that this is about Jews. Nor is it about American politics. It is about a nut.
It is not about the Tea Party any more than John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan because of Democrat rhetoric that demonized Reagan in the day. Hinckley wanted to impress a fictional character protrayed by Jodi Foster in the movie “Taxi Driver.” Our present maniac, Loughner, wanted to change the currency or English grammar. Really. It is like the guy who killed Allard K. Lowenstein – he had been very close to Lowenstein but became a paranoid-schizophrenic. Much as some people needed to find a Jewish angle, or blame the Republicans for prosecuting the Vietnam War in the face of Lowenstein’s principled objections, the bottom line behind Lowenstein's murder was that that his assassin was a nut. Charles Manson’s extended family did not slaughter Sharon Tate because she was married to a Jewish filmmaker.
Representative Giffords’s mother, Gloria Fraser, was a Christian Scientist. In 2001, at age 31, Giffords began identifying with the paternal side of her ethnicity. The interesting thing, though, is that her Jewish paternal-line grandfather, Akiba Hornstein, had changed the family surname to “Giffords” in order to hide their Jewish identity. Now, with Hornstein’s presumably non-Jewish granddaughter tragically shot by a nut, some in the American Jewish media race to turn her tragedy into an act of anti-Semitism. The Hornsteins can run, it seems, but they can’t hide.
Although Loughner may indeed have been motivated by anti-Jewish animus, I am skeptical. Give the crazy man his due – he is just plain insane.
This guy was a nut. He merits the privilege, by dint of his own hard efforts, of being deemed by all of us a 100% nut. He may have had an interface with an extremist hate group because they hate Latinos or African Americans or even people from the planet where Loughner perhaps thinks he comes from.
It does not help us or abet the truth to find a Jewish angle in this if there honestly is none. Giffords is a Jew because a Reform rabbi married her to an astronaut named Kelly?
This maniac, Loughner, loved Mein Kampf? Well, he also loved Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan. http://www.businessinsider.com/jared-lee-loughner-2011-1 My mind can be changed, but I am not persuaded that this is about Jews. Nor is it about American politics. It is about a nut.
It is not about the Tea Party any more than John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan because of Democrat rhetoric that demonized Reagan in the day. Hinckley wanted to impress a fictional character protrayed by Jodi Foster in the movie “Taxi Driver.” Our present maniac, Loughner, wanted to change the currency or English grammar. Really. It is like the guy who killed Allard K. Lowenstein – he had been very close to Lowenstein but became a paranoid-schizophrenic. Much as some people needed to find a Jewish angle, or blame the Republicans for prosecuting the Vietnam War in the face of Lowenstein’s principled objections, the bottom line behind Lowenstein's murder was that that his assassin was a nut. Charles Manson’s extended family did not slaughter Sharon Tate because she was married to a Jewish filmmaker.
Representative Giffords’s mother, Gloria Fraser, was a Christian Scientist. In 2001, at age 31, Giffords began identifying with the paternal side of her ethnicity. The interesting thing, though, is that her Jewish paternal-line grandfather, Akiba Hornstein, had changed the family surname to “Giffords” in order to hide their Jewish identity. Now, with Hornstein’s presumably non-Jewish granddaughter tragically shot by a nut, some in the American Jewish media race to turn her tragedy into an act of anti-Semitism. The Hornsteins can run, it seems, but they can’t hide.
Although Loughner may indeed have been motivated by anti-Jewish animus, I am skeptical. Give the crazy man his due – he is just plain insane.
Monday, December 27, 2010
The End of the Rabbi As Mr. Nice Guy
Note something very subtle here. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's article is very courageous -- but, uh, is he the rabbi of a congregati
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Seattle Takes Down Those Despicable Anti-Israel Bus Ads: In Fairness, Credit Goes to Pamela Geller and David Horowitz
For the record, it should be noted that Seattle made the bus-ads decision today only after Pamela Geller’s “American Freedom Defense Initiative” bought 25 bus ads (twice as many as the anti-Israel ones) with an equally confrontational message showing bloody victims from Hamas terror bus-bombings with the header: “Hamas Terror: Your Tax Dollars at Work,” and then David Horowitz entered to buy yet another several-thousand-dollars-worth of confrontational bus ads titled: “Palestinian War Crimes: Your Tax Dollars at Work.”
Today, Pam Geller’s advertising representative first got a phone call that the Kings Metro system had decided to refuse her ads, then received a letter from Sharon Shinbo, in Seattle Metro’s Sales and Customer Services department, advising her that the Geller ads were being denied under rules pertaining to running ads that are “so objectionable under contemporary community standards as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will result in harm to, disruption of, or interference with the transportation system” and that are “so insulting, degrading or offensive as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will incite or produce imminent lawless action in the form of retaliation, vandalism or other breach of public safety, peace and order.” Therefore: “The content of the advertisements and the unprecedented response that the County has received to another recently proposed ad of a similar nature show that the American Freedom Defense Initiative ads do not meet the standards set forth in these sections, including among other things, that they pose an unacceptable risk of harm, disruption and interference with the transportation system and other breaches of the public safety, peace and order.”
It is my humble opinion that the efforts of the Jewish community of Seattle were virtually nugatory in obtaining the satisfactory result that all the ads are being rejected. Nonetheless, Seattle residents may anticipate that the community leaders will race to the mails to rustle up a last surge of tax-deductible donations from the locals before the tax-year ends next week.
Truth is an important weapon. It is important for us to know and to acknowledge that the real turning point came when Geller and Horowitz each used their respective organizations to buy a large number of equally confrontational ads. Those ad-buys guaranteed that the real goal would be obtained: not that Geller’s and Horowitz’s ads would run, but instead that no ads on the subject would run.
Geller and Horowitz deserve the thanks that few will give them, while the local Jewish groups will take the credit next week.
That’s how these liberals work. Free Speech for everyone. Free Speech for everyone. Bash Israel on the city buses. We can’t stop the ads even if we disapprove of the views because we protect all people’s right to speech.
Until the target is not Israel or Dead White Protestant Males. Then they suddenly find the Supreme Court language from Chaplinsky (1942) and Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). They know that Jews will not vandalize the twelve buses with anti-Israel ads. And they know what they are going to face if there are 30 buses with anti-Palestinian ads depicting . . . blown-up buses.
Today, Pam Geller’s advertising representative first got a phone call that the Kings Metro system had decided to refuse her ads, then received a letter from Sharon Shinbo, in Seattle Metro’s Sales and Customer Services department, advising her that the Geller ads were being denied under rules pertaining to running ads that are “so objectionable under contemporary community standards as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will result in harm to, disruption of, or interference with the transportation system” and that are “so insulting, degrading or offensive as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will incite or produce imminent lawless action in the form of retaliation, vandalism or other breach of public safety, peace and order.” Therefore: “The content of the advertisements and the unprecedented response that the County has received to another recently proposed ad of a similar nature show that the American Freedom Defense Initiative ads do not meet the standards set forth in these sections, including among other things, that they pose an unacceptable risk of harm, disruption and interference with the transportation system and other breaches of the public safety, peace and order.”
It is my humble opinion that the efforts of the Jewish community of Seattle were virtually nugatory in obtaining the satisfactory result that all the ads are being rejected. Nonetheless, Seattle residents may anticipate that the community leaders will race to the mails to rustle up a last surge of tax-deductible donations from the locals before the tax-year ends next week.
Truth is an important weapon. It is important for us to know and to acknowledge that the real turning point came when Geller and Horowitz each used their respective organizations to buy a large number of equally confrontational ads. Those ad-buys guaranteed that the real goal would be obtained: not that Geller’s and Horowitz’s ads would run, but instead that no ads on the subject would run.
Geller and Horowitz deserve the thanks that few will give them, while the local Jewish groups will take the credit next week.
That’s how these liberals work. Free Speech for everyone. Free Speech for everyone. Bash Israel on the city buses. We can’t stop the ads even if we disapprove of the views because we protect all people’s right to speech.
Until the target is not Israel or Dead White Protestant Males. Then they suddenly find the Supreme Court language from Chaplinsky (1942) and Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). They know that Jews will not vandalize the twelve buses with anti-Israel ads. And they know what they are going to face if there are 30 buses with anti-Palestinian ads depicting . . . blown-up buses.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Olive Tree Initiative and the Jews: Travels and Travails:
How the Jewish Federation of Orange County, the UCI Hillel, and the Hillel Foundation of Orange County Softened the Pro-Israel Partisanship of Several UCI Jewish Students in 2008
The University of California at Irvine (UCI) published a book of approximately 112 pages in Spring 2009 as part of its “Expressions/ Impressions” series. It is volume 6 in the series and is subtitled “Special Edition: Olive Tree Initiative (OTI).” It contains personal memoirs, averaging 2-3 pages per author, by virtually every participant on the first OTI trip. The volume is instructive, beginning with information published at the end:
On pages 110-111, OTI formally lists with gratitude the institutions and individuals whom they acknowledge as their “partners”: the institutions and individuals that “Olive Tree Initiative would not have been possible without.” These include, inter alia, Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, Hillel Foundation of Orange County, Shalom Elcott, Jay Feldmann [sic], and Jordan Fruchtman. On Page 12, Daniel Wehrenfennig, the then-doctoral student who put together the program, writes: “The Jewish community through the Rose Project of the Jewish Federation in Orange County offered crucial financial support at just the right moment, as well as important contacts in the region.”
The faculty leaders’ theme of the trip was to convince students that they can be citizen peace builders and play a role in bringing peace by learning to refrain from taking sides and instead to listen and learn and communicate. Certainly, it is very important, and a central role of the liberal arts university, to educate students to listen respectfully to and learn from those with conflicting viewpoints. But there is no virtue, after listening and learning and understanding, in refraining from partisanship. It helps that the side is just. Sometimes it is righteous to take a side. The OTI trip did not soften the understandable partisanship of the trip’s Moslem Arab students, but its exceptional ideological tilt attenuated Jewish attitudes for Israel.
Other than a solid memoir by Isaac Yerushalmi, one of the OTI participants, virtually every other Jewish person’s memoir reflects a softening of position – not necessarily to pro-Palestinian, not necessarily to neutral in all cases, but to a greater sense that there needs to be a Palestine alongside Israel, augmented by a deep belief that the masses of Palestinians really sincerely want a peaceful coexistence with Israel, but are obstructed in their dream solely by their political leaders. Contrasted alongside the Jewish students’ softening, among the Palestinian and other Arab students there is an overarching sense that some may have evolved positively in viewing their fellow Jewish UCI students as humans, but that they also were traumatized by seeing in-person, and without meaningful context, the “suffering in Palestine,” the Israeli military checkpoints, the refugee camps. Although some of the Moslem students speak warmly of a Friday night Shabbat dinner the OTI group had on the terrace of a Canadian-Jewish family who recently had made aliyah to East Jerusalem, the Palestinians came out strongly, even strengthened, for Palestine. Two or three speak of their shock in viewing what they honestly saw as apartheid – military checkpoints at the security wall, the people in Qalqilya walled in except for a few hours each day, spiffy new superhighways for Jews to drive from one Judea-Samaria community to the next but barred to Palestinians who instead must use separate roads. Different color licensed plates. The students seem utterly unaware of context:
“I have heard people talk about Palestinian apartheid, and I dismissed this as an overstated comparison. . . . But it wasn’t until I visited the West Bank that I became keenly aware that this was an area inhabited by two groups who were nevertheless separated. I witnessed an elevated Israeli-built superhighway intended for settlers overlapping a narrow road mandated for Palestinian usage. . . . There is no point in building two roads over each other unless it is desired to prohibit at least one group of people from going to certain places.” (P. 54)
Daniel Wehrenfennig, the former UCI doctoral student who now directs OTI, was the central crafter of the itinerary. His own personal bias is that Judea and Samaria are “occupied Palestine.” He formally decided not to bring the students to Sderot or the Golan Heights. (P. 11) So, on a trip that relied heavily on perceptions at the hot spots, the students never saw the shell-shock impact of the unilateral Gaza disengagement, the resultant nightmare sustained in Sderot by those who took risks for peace. And they never saw the facts on the ground in the north, the hands-on actual stakes for Israel in holding the promontories of Golan. But they were brought to several Palestinian “refugee camps.” Those locations were deemed safe. One student came away from OTI’s visit to Bethlehem’s Kanistat al-Mahid (Christians call it “Church of the Nativity”) with an understanding that the site “is a focal point of Palestinian resistance. The nativity church is arguably one of the most abused and neglected holy Christian sites. In it you will find Israeli bullets that have damaged statues of saints only a few meters away from the birth spot of Jesus Christ.” (P. 56)
They met a Holocaust survivor at Yad Vashem who impacted them, but one of the Palestinian students writes in her memoir that, through the Yad Vashem experience, she now better understands why Israel essentially is xenophobic towards Palestinians:
“I understand that after two thousand years of persecution and then the Holocaust, the panic they felt and the sense of urgency to get out of Europe may explain that sometimes you don’t care whose land you’re in and whose farms you’re stepping on. You just want to get out and try and seize any opportunity to a life of security, free of fear and torture. . . .BUT . . . I hope future generations are less overwhelmed with anxiety, fear, and distrust of others, as I feel many Jews are. I hear Jews say Hamas, Iran or the Arabs want to wipe out the Jews, throw them into the sea, etc., etc. . . . These claims from Iran and Hamas are at their heart media stunts which in turn play into Israeli politicians’ rhetoric and instill even more fear and xenophobia in the people.” (Pages 38-39)
An Israeli soldier, Yuval, who had served in Lebanon in 2006 spoke apologetically to the group, saying “. . . I would always ask myself what I was doing, why we have wars, etc.” The UCI student continues: “He spoke of Lebanon’s beauty, the mountains, the sea, the nature. . . . This encounter, although unique, left me uneasy. The truth is, as he spoke of Lebanon’s beauty, I felt violated. As if my country is some protected jewel of mine and Yuval had snuck into my room and held that jewel, enjoyed its beauty, and then threw it on the floor and stepped on it. And although the jewel is still here and mine, it is tainted. He had come into Lebanon uninvited, admired its beauty yet contributed to its destruction.” (P. 42) Consistent with the OTI strategy of presenting Israeli speakers primarily left of the mainstream, the group also met with Yonatan Adiri, a former advisor to Shimon Peres. “He both praised and criticized Israel’s democracy,” (P. 46) complaining primarily about compromises that have to be made to form and maintain multi-party coalition governments in Israel. It is ironic that, in advocating compromise with Palestinian Arabs who are not motivated by Israel’s best interests, he lambasted compromise with Israeli Jews, his own people.
The students were afforded a presentation by an Israeli professor, Muli Peleg, a long-time far-Left “Peace Now” organizer and advisor to Yossi Beilin, formerly one of the Knesset’s most far-Left members and a key shaper of the now-discredited Oslo Accords. Peleg left an impression on many of them, with his basic narrative that Israeli and Palestinian leaders never will make peace, but that peace only will come via the “bottom-up process” – i.e., bypassing the established leadership and institutions, and instead starting with people like the students at UCI who then spread the word, build the momentum, mobilize NGOs, and create a movement from the bottom, working its way up until the leaders at the top have no choice but to make compromises for peace. “One of the speakers on our trip, Muli Peleg, a professor in Tel Aviv, believes that one of the main obstacles is convincing Israelis that Palestinians want peace . . . .” (P. 61) There seems no perception that Israel had disengaged unilaterally from South Lebanon and from Gaza, twice taking risks for peace, being punished brutally for having taken those risks. Southern Lebanon has been controlled by the Hezbollah and Gaza by Hamas ever since.
Most of the students come away with a sense that there is no discernible solution to intractable differences in the region, so there needs to be a two-state solution. Their model is the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, co-owned by an Israeli Jew and an Israeli Arab, where Israelis eat and Arabs eat. An Arab woman had come into this center for Jewish-Arab coexistence a few years ago, blew herself up, and thereby murdered 21 people and severely wounded 51 others. The Haifa community came together to restore the restaurant. That restaurant becomes the metaphor of the two-state. The OTI students learned from a Captain in the Israeli Defense Forces that 95% of the two populations want peace. “Unfortunately, it is the other five percent who are not willing to compromise.” (P. 26) It is noteworthy that, when UCI Olive Tree Initiative emphasizes that its program balances Palestinian Arab views and speakers with Israeli views and speakers, in order to provide UCI students a fair and balanced understanding, the selected Israeli presenters are disproportionately left of the mainstream of Israeli society, thus skewing the UCI students’ perceptions. The UCI OTI group did go to Ariel, a city of nearly 20,000 and capital of the Jewish communities in Samaria, where they heard Ron Nachman, the mayor. However, that session does not resonate in the students’ memoirs. Thus, the IDF captain and Prof. Peleg are misperceived as representing mainstream Israeli perspective as a normative counterweight to Palestinian Arab propagandists.
The UCI Hillel Shaliach, Tzvi Raviv, participated. His only memorable thought was his last sentence: “I believe the future of Israel as a Jewish-democratic state is tied with the creation of an independent prosperous Palestinian state.” (P. 44) That was the Zionist professional who served the Jewish students at UCI Hillel for the two or three years he was on shlichut, and who participated on this trip after helping with the creation of OTI in tandem with UCI Hillel and its director. Shannon Shibata, the tour guide, portrays herself as someone who came to the region as pro-Palestinian but changed to neutral, after getting to hear all sides’ narratives, and she echoes the OTI theme, repeatedly encouraging the students to go back as neutrals committed to peace. It is not clear how much Shibata is paid by OTI.
In summary, the publication confirms that the OTI program is not anti-Jewish or anti-Israel, but surely is deeply repugnant to an identifying Jewish community’s ideals for what a normative and healthy Jewish community should be supporting. There would not be Jews today if Judaism’s forebears had been neutrals. When the world was polytheistic, Jews were not neutral on the question of monotheism. When the ancient world worked seven days, Jews were not neutral on the question of a day’s Sabbath. Jews do not send children to Jewish day schools or Hebrew schools for Bar/Bat Mitzvah study to be neutral. Mainstream normative Jews are fair and honest, and also are not neutral. By contrast, while portraying neutrality, the Israeli portion of the two-week OTI trip is top-heavy with apologists from a distinctly Left orientation that minimizes context and Jewish rights to Judea and Samaria. One swallow does not a summer make, nor does Mayor Ron Nachman of Ariel counterbalance a program inexorably tilted, even if unintentionally, towards moral relativism. One student, a non-Jewish/ non-Arab/ non-Moslem lady, came away with this lesson from her OTI travels: “Both Jews and Palestinians have suffered. I cried for both fathers of suicide victims and for the Palestinians who face humiliating discrimination on a daily basis.” (P. 72) In the words of another OTI student upon her return from the trip, and back at her UCI classes:
“Recently we had an assignment on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Our group had to show the Israeli perspective. One person said, I’m so glad I’m in the Israel group because I’m so pro-Israel. That made me upset because I couldn’t figure out why he would be so one-sided. It doesn’t help that he is Asian, not Jewish, so I don’t know where he’s coming from with this. So even on a small level, [now that I have been on OTI]I can help people better understand [neutrality].” (P.93)
Clearly, the problem transcends OTI, which is an important focus, and the greater problem is that the Orange County Hillel is in the hands of people who are focused on raising money but who, among their critical decision makers, include inter alia individuals who have no vision of Jewish authenticity nor the capacity or depth of Jewish knowledge for having such vision. They run an annual Poker Game, which many of the Hillel directors deem the annual highlight of the UCI Hillel calendar year. Soon after the wrenching Moslem Student Union (MSU) annual Hate Israel Week, they do a reactive week of pro-Israel programming whose substance completely dilutes Israel and her character, so that students learn very little about Israel while watching various non-Jewish dance groups perform and while patronizing booths that mostly are substantively superficial, offering very little about Israel. (That week’s main value is that members of the local Jewish community come down to campus and mingle.) The UCI Hillel has moved away from meaningful weekly Shabbat programming to an occasional once-monthly TGIF dinner. Sukkot and Chanukah have passed by. Meanwhile, it is clear that the Federation is in terrible hands. They do a very good job for the community at the annual Lag B’Omer Israel Fest, and some of their agencies do good work, completely separate from affiliation. Thus, the staff of Federation does little by way of Family Services; rather, Jewish Family Services does its excellent work with its own people, even as that agency has been compelled by the economy to merge into the Federation tent. Perhaps most importantly for the job security of Federation professionals in a community whose lay leaders seem mostly to value superficial displays of wealth and substantively void edifices, they raise some good amounts of cash in a city where, as one rabbi of ten years’ pulpit experience explained, “The Jews here are committed a mile wide and one inch deep.”
So we have a Hillel Foundation of Orange County and a UCI Hillel that is rudderless, without a vision or the people in the critical roles capable of having a vision, and a Federation being guided by those with a vision inimical to ours supported by patrons who are pleased that their Jewish Community Center is 125,000 square feet with a gymnasium, health and fitness center, two basketball courts, pool and aquatics center, and a Holocaust memorial garden. And it was designated a “Facility of Merit” by Athletic Business Magazine, too. With that kind of wealth, it is easy to see how the community would not notice, below the radar, that the Federation has submitted the community’s name and reputation, and has devoted Jewish charitable funds, towards so deeply flawed and damaging a project as the UCI Olive Tree Initiative.
The University of California at Irvine (UCI) published a book of approximately 112 pages in Spring 2009 as part of its “Expressions/ Impressions” series. It is volume 6 in the series and is subtitled “Special Edition: Olive Tree Initiative (OTI).” It contains personal memoirs, averaging 2-3 pages per author, by virtually every participant on the first OTI trip. The volume is instructive, beginning with information published at the end:
On pages 110-111, OTI formally lists with gratitude the institutions and individuals whom they acknowledge as their “partners”: the institutions and individuals that “Olive Tree Initiative would not have been possible without.” These include, inter alia, Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, Hillel Foundation of Orange County, Shalom Elcott, Jay Feldmann [sic], and Jordan Fruchtman. On Page 12, Daniel Wehrenfennig, the then-doctoral student who put together the program, writes: “The Jewish community through the Rose Project of the Jewish Federation in Orange County offered crucial financial support at just the right moment, as well as important contacts in the region.”
The faculty leaders’ theme of the trip was to convince students that they can be citizen peace builders and play a role in bringing peace by learning to refrain from taking sides and instead to listen and learn and communicate. Certainly, it is very important, and a central role of the liberal arts university, to educate students to listen respectfully to and learn from those with conflicting viewpoints. But there is no virtue, after listening and learning and understanding, in refraining from partisanship. It helps that the side is just. Sometimes it is righteous to take a side. The OTI trip did not soften the understandable partisanship of the trip’s Moslem Arab students, but its exceptional ideological tilt attenuated Jewish attitudes for Israel.
Other than a solid memoir by Isaac Yerushalmi, one of the OTI participants, virtually every other Jewish person’s memoir reflects a softening of position – not necessarily to pro-Palestinian, not necessarily to neutral in all cases, but to a greater sense that there needs to be a Palestine alongside Israel, augmented by a deep belief that the masses of Palestinians really sincerely want a peaceful coexistence with Israel, but are obstructed in their dream solely by their political leaders. Contrasted alongside the Jewish students’ softening, among the Palestinian and other Arab students there is an overarching sense that some may have evolved positively in viewing their fellow Jewish UCI students as humans, but that they also were traumatized by seeing in-person, and without meaningful context, the “suffering in Palestine,” the Israeli military checkpoints, the refugee camps. Although some of the Moslem students speak warmly of a Friday night Shabbat dinner the OTI group had on the terrace of a Canadian-Jewish family who recently had made aliyah to East Jerusalem, the Palestinians came out strongly, even strengthened, for Palestine. Two or three speak of their shock in viewing what they honestly saw as apartheid – military checkpoints at the security wall, the people in Qalqilya walled in except for a few hours each day, spiffy new superhighways for Jews to drive from one Judea-Samaria community to the next but barred to Palestinians who instead must use separate roads. Different color licensed plates. The students seem utterly unaware of context:
“I have heard people talk about Palestinian apartheid, and I dismissed this as an overstated comparison. . . . But it wasn’t until I visited the West Bank that I became keenly aware that this was an area inhabited by two groups who were nevertheless separated. I witnessed an elevated Israeli-built superhighway intended for settlers overlapping a narrow road mandated for Palestinian usage. . . . There is no point in building two roads over each other unless it is desired to prohibit at least one group of people from going to certain places.” (P. 54)
Daniel Wehrenfennig, the former UCI doctoral student who now directs OTI, was the central crafter of the itinerary. His own personal bias is that Judea and Samaria are “occupied Palestine.” He formally decided not to bring the students to Sderot or the Golan Heights. (P. 11) So, on a trip that relied heavily on perceptions at the hot spots, the students never saw the shell-shock impact of the unilateral Gaza disengagement, the resultant nightmare sustained in Sderot by those who took risks for peace. And they never saw the facts on the ground in the north, the hands-on actual stakes for Israel in holding the promontories of Golan. But they were brought to several Palestinian “refugee camps.” Those locations were deemed safe. One student came away from OTI’s visit to Bethlehem’s Kanistat al-Mahid (Christians call it “Church of the Nativity”) with an understanding that the site “is a focal point of Palestinian resistance. The nativity church is arguably one of the most abused and neglected holy Christian sites. In it you will find Israeli bullets that have damaged statues of saints only a few meters away from the birth spot of Jesus Christ.” (P. 56)
They met a Holocaust survivor at Yad Vashem who impacted them, but one of the Palestinian students writes in her memoir that, through the Yad Vashem experience, she now better understands why Israel essentially is xenophobic towards Palestinians:
“I understand that after two thousand years of persecution and then the Holocaust, the panic they felt and the sense of urgency to get out of Europe may explain that sometimes you don’t care whose land you’re in and whose farms you’re stepping on. You just want to get out and try and seize any opportunity to a life of security, free of fear and torture. . . .BUT . . . I hope future generations are less overwhelmed with anxiety, fear, and distrust of others, as I feel many Jews are. I hear Jews say Hamas, Iran or the Arabs want to wipe out the Jews, throw them into the sea, etc., etc. . . . These claims from Iran and Hamas are at their heart media stunts which in turn play into Israeli politicians’ rhetoric and instill even more fear and xenophobia in the people.” (Pages 38-39)
An Israeli soldier, Yuval, who had served in Lebanon in 2006 spoke apologetically to the group, saying “. . . I would always ask myself what I was doing, why we have wars, etc.” The UCI student continues: “He spoke of Lebanon’s beauty, the mountains, the sea, the nature. . . . This encounter, although unique, left me uneasy. The truth is, as he spoke of Lebanon’s beauty, I felt violated. As if my country is some protected jewel of mine and Yuval had snuck into my room and held that jewel, enjoyed its beauty, and then threw it on the floor and stepped on it. And although the jewel is still here and mine, it is tainted. He had come into Lebanon uninvited, admired its beauty yet contributed to its destruction.” (P. 42) Consistent with the OTI strategy of presenting Israeli speakers primarily left of the mainstream, the group also met with Yonatan Adiri, a former advisor to Shimon Peres. “He both praised and criticized Israel’s democracy,” (P. 46) complaining primarily about compromises that have to be made to form and maintain multi-party coalition governments in Israel. It is ironic that, in advocating compromise with Palestinian Arabs who are not motivated by Israel’s best interests, he lambasted compromise with Israeli Jews, his own people.
The students were afforded a presentation by an Israeli professor, Muli Peleg, a long-time far-Left “Peace Now” organizer and advisor to Yossi Beilin, formerly one of the Knesset’s most far-Left members and a key shaper of the now-discredited Oslo Accords. Peleg left an impression on many of them, with his basic narrative that Israeli and Palestinian leaders never will make peace, but that peace only will come via the “bottom-up process” – i.e., bypassing the established leadership and institutions, and instead starting with people like the students at UCI who then spread the word, build the momentum, mobilize NGOs, and create a movement from the bottom, working its way up until the leaders at the top have no choice but to make compromises for peace. “One of the speakers on our trip, Muli Peleg, a professor in Tel Aviv, believes that one of the main obstacles is convincing Israelis that Palestinians want peace . . . .” (P. 61) There seems no perception that Israel had disengaged unilaterally from South Lebanon and from Gaza, twice taking risks for peace, being punished brutally for having taken those risks. Southern Lebanon has been controlled by the Hezbollah and Gaza by Hamas ever since.
Most of the students come away with a sense that there is no discernible solution to intractable differences in the region, so there needs to be a two-state solution. Their model is the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, co-owned by an Israeli Jew and an Israeli Arab, where Israelis eat and Arabs eat. An Arab woman had come into this center for Jewish-Arab coexistence a few years ago, blew herself up, and thereby murdered 21 people and severely wounded 51 others. The Haifa community came together to restore the restaurant. That restaurant becomes the metaphor of the two-state. The OTI students learned from a Captain in the Israeli Defense Forces that 95% of the two populations want peace. “Unfortunately, it is the other five percent who are not willing to compromise.” (P. 26) It is noteworthy that, when UCI Olive Tree Initiative emphasizes that its program balances Palestinian Arab views and speakers with Israeli views and speakers, in order to provide UCI students a fair and balanced understanding, the selected Israeli presenters are disproportionately left of the mainstream of Israeli society, thus skewing the UCI students’ perceptions. The UCI OTI group did go to Ariel, a city of nearly 20,000 and capital of the Jewish communities in Samaria, where they heard Ron Nachman, the mayor. However, that session does not resonate in the students’ memoirs. Thus, the IDF captain and Prof. Peleg are misperceived as representing mainstream Israeli perspective as a normative counterweight to Palestinian Arab propagandists.
The UCI Hillel Shaliach, Tzvi Raviv, participated. His only memorable thought was his last sentence: “I believe the future of Israel as a Jewish-democratic state is tied with the creation of an independent prosperous Palestinian state.” (P. 44) That was the Zionist professional who served the Jewish students at UCI Hillel for the two or three years he was on shlichut, and who participated on this trip after helping with the creation of OTI in tandem with UCI Hillel and its director. Shannon Shibata, the tour guide, portrays herself as someone who came to the region as pro-Palestinian but changed to neutral, after getting to hear all sides’ narratives, and she echoes the OTI theme, repeatedly encouraging the students to go back as neutrals committed to peace. It is not clear how much Shibata is paid by OTI.
In summary, the publication confirms that the OTI program is not anti-Jewish or anti-Israel, but surely is deeply repugnant to an identifying Jewish community’s ideals for what a normative and healthy Jewish community should be supporting. There would not be Jews today if Judaism’s forebears had been neutrals. When the world was polytheistic, Jews were not neutral on the question of monotheism. When the ancient world worked seven days, Jews were not neutral on the question of a day’s Sabbath. Jews do not send children to Jewish day schools or Hebrew schools for Bar/Bat Mitzvah study to be neutral. Mainstream normative Jews are fair and honest, and also are not neutral. By contrast, while portraying neutrality, the Israeli portion of the two-week OTI trip is top-heavy with apologists from a distinctly Left orientation that minimizes context and Jewish rights to Judea and Samaria. One swallow does not a summer make, nor does Mayor Ron Nachman of Ariel counterbalance a program inexorably tilted, even if unintentionally, towards moral relativism. One student, a non-Jewish/ non-Arab/ non-Moslem lady, came away with this lesson from her OTI travels: “Both Jews and Palestinians have suffered. I cried for both fathers of suicide victims and for the Palestinians who face humiliating discrimination on a daily basis.” (P. 72) In the words of another OTI student upon her return from the trip, and back at her UCI classes:
“Recently we had an assignment on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Our group had to show the Israeli perspective. One person said, I’m so glad I’m in the Israel group because I’m so pro-Israel. That made me upset because I couldn’t figure out why he would be so one-sided. It doesn’t help that he is Asian, not Jewish, so I don’t know where he’s coming from with this. So even on a small level, [now that I have been on OTI]I can help people better understand [neutrality].” (P.93)
Clearly, the problem transcends OTI, which is an important focus, and the greater problem is that the Orange County Hillel is in the hands of people who are focused on raising money but who, among their critical decision makers, include inter alia individuals who have no vision of Jewish authenticity nor the capacity or depth of Jewish knowledge for having such vision. They run an annual Poker Game, which many of the Hillel directors deem the annual highlight of the UCI Hillel calendar year. Soon after the wrenching Moslem Student Union (MSU) annual Hate Israel Week, they do a reactive week of pro-Israel programming whose substance completely dilutes Israel and her character, so that students learn very little about Israel while watching various non-Jewish dance groups perform and while patronizing booths that mostly are substantively superficial, offering very little about Israel. (That week’s main value is that members of the local Jewish community come down to campus and mingle.) The UCI Hillel has moved away from meaningful weekly Shabbat programming to an occasional once-monthly TGIF dinner. Sukkot and Chanukah have passed by. Meanwhile, it is clear that the Federation is in terrible hands. They do a very good job for the community at the annual Lag B’Omer Israel Fest, and some of their agencies do good work, completely separate from affiliation. Thus, the staff of Federation does little by way of Family Services; rather, Jewish Family Services does its excellent work with its own people, even as that agency has been compelled by the economy to merge into the Federation tent. Perhaps most importantly for the job security of Federation professionals in a community whose lay leaders seem mostly to value superficial displays of wealth and substantively void edifices, they raise some good amounts of cash in a city where, as one rabbi of ten years’ pulpit experience explained, “The Jews here are committed a mile wide and one inch deep.”
So we have a Hillel Foundation of Orange County and a UCI Hillel that is rudderless, without a vision or the people in the critical roles capable of having a vision, and a Federation being guided by those with a vision inimical to ours supported by patrons who are pleased that their Jewish Community Center is 125,000 square feet with a gymnasium, health and fitness center, two basketball courts, pool and aquatics center, and a Holocaust memorial garden. And it was designated a “Facility of Merit” by Athletic Business Magazine, too. With that kind of wealth, it is easy to see how the community would not notice, below the radar, that the Federation has submitted the community’s name and reputation, and has devoted Jewish charitable funds, towards so deeply flawed and damaging a project as the UCI Olive Tree Initiative.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Supporting the Jewish Boycott of the Federation of O.C.
Sign the Petition at: http://www.ha-emet.com/petition.html
From the Desk of Rabbi Dov Fischer
I have just signed this petition, and I encourage you to sign it, too: http://www.ha-emet.com/petition.html
And please do not hesitate to circulate this far and wide.
I attach (below my signature block) my recent commentary on the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI), along with those written by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and by Prof. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin of UC Santa Cruz. You may also wish to visit any of these websites:
http://www.redcounty.com/content/wolf-sheeps-clothing-ucirvine-olive-tree-initiative
www.ha-emet.com
http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/
http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/
www.jewtudes.com
You may think to yourself: “I cannot believe that the Jewish Federation of Orange County really would support something so toxic with Jewish money, and that the UCI Hillel Organization would endorse something so toxic. There must be a mistake.” Please understand: I have been involved in Jewish community organizations for nearly forty years. I have seen the American Jewish Congress fight public menorah lightings, going to court to stop Chabad and others from lighting menorahs in public. I have lived through the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith giving a significant national award to Hugh Hefner for his “courage” in embodying the First Amendment and Free Press by publishing women’s naked photos. More recently, I have watched the George Soros-funded “J Street” work against the security of the State of Israel, arguing in so many words that, hey, we also are Jews, and we and George Soros only want what’s best. I have lived through it all and have seen it all. Well, not “all” – because only G-d knows what tomorrow may bring.
I am joined in my views on this matter by a wide range of Orthodox rabbis throughout the United States, as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Center. If Jewish parents want their sons or daughters to travel to “Palestine” and Jordan on Rosh Hashanah to attend lectures by trained, professional Palestinian Arab propagandists devoted to destroying Israel as a Jewish state, let them do it on their own dime. It does not matter that the same “Olive Tree” (“OTI”) program also brings them to Israel to hear a wide range of Israeli views on the Israel/”Palestine” question. Rather, OTI simply is not a proper cause for the expenditure of Jewish Federation funds -- whether directly from one Federation account or through a “Rose Project” of Federation that assists Jewish students financially with tzedakah funds to help them pay for their airfare and tuition to attend such OTI programs – during this Great Recession when, everyday, rabbis like me are approached for assistance by Jews in need right here in Irvine and throughout Orange County. This is worse than odious and abhorrent. In a word, it is . . .
. . .Foolish.
In arriving at this moment, Orange County Jewry now joins other Jewish communities throughout America in formally beginning to ask: Who exactly are the people who run these “Jewish” community organizations that take our money supposedly to support “our” agenda? What exactly are their private agendas? Do these individuals share our core views? Our core values? Yes, we like their emailed newsletters, and we know they do some real good with some of our funds, for Jewish families, for Jewish singles – but what else are they doing with the rest of our tzedakah, besides the stuff we expect them to be doing? Who are they? Who elected them? What do they privately stand for? And when do we have a say?
This Petition begins a new chapter in Orange County Jewish history. It marks Jews in Orange County standing up and saying, “We want accountability for how our tzedakah is spent.” And if a kid wants to spend Rosh Hashanah in “Palestine,” learning why Israel should cease to exist, let him pay for it – not public tzedakah funds.
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
From the Desk of Rabbi Dov Fischer
Having read the letter of December 8, 2010 by Dr. Daniel Wehrenfennig, director of the UCI Olive Tree Initiative (OTI), responding to valid concerns raised by Prof. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, I now feel it is time for Jews in Orange County to withhold any further support for the Jewish Federation of Orange County until the Federation disassociates and withdraws from continuing to support the OTI, directly or indirectly, with Jewish charitable funds. I likewise will now urge all individuals of similar mind to mine to withhold support from the Jewish Federation of Orange County on those same terms. The notion that the Jewish Federation is taking Jewish charitable dollars and spending Jewish tzedakah funds to assist UCI Jewish students to participate in OTI is so profoundly disturbing that I cannot see how any Jewish philanthropist would want to know that her hard-won earnings during this Great Recession are being spent in this manner.
Jewish funds should not be expended on paying for Jewish students to travel throughout “Palestinian” towns and villages to hear lectures by trained anti-Israel propagandists from “Palestine,” as part of an OTI mission to expose Jewish students to a “balanced” understanding of narratives: (i) on the one hand, Israel’s unequivocal right to live, (ii) balanced on the other hand with the right of Palestinian Arabs to aspire towards absorbing and nullifying the only Jewish state in the world – the death of Israel. In the words of Dr. Wehrenfennig : “The Olive Tree Initiative is an experiential learning initiative that shows both, and even multiple sides and narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” My Young Israel synagogue does not bring Christian missionaries to our congregation so that our congregants can better receive a “balanced view” of theological narratives. Our “experiential learning initiative” is attained by educating our members by presenting information, including information believed by others – “and even multiple sides and narratives” – for their benefit. We educate expansively, beyond insularity. Yet, we do not need Christian missionaries to educate us. We do not bring Christian missionaries to teach their version of Torah, their version of Isaiah 7:14 or 53, to our teens and college students. We teach. Likewise, we do not need – and we certainly should not contribute towards such endeavor with Jewish tzedakah funds – Palestinians dedicated to the death of Israel to educate our Jewish college students for balance. There are ample Jewish educational programs, from a wide range of perspectives, that can educate ably, presenting multiple perspectives.
It is unconscionable that a Jewish Federation would expend even supplementary Jewish charitable funds to fly and transport Jewish UCI students on programs that compromise the Shabbat – and all the more so, incredibly so, that desecrate Rosh Hashanah. What Jewish philanthropist is so bereft of meaningful Jewish charitable choices for his philanthropic generosity that he must have his tzedakah employed for sending Jewish students to a program that spends part of Rosh Hashanah in a Jewish setting and part of Rosh Hashanah in “Palestine”? Dr. Daniel Wehrenfennig, director of the UCI Olive Tree Initiative, means well when he writes: “Again, if the Jewish students wanted to they could opt out of the Jordan trip or parts of it because of religious reasons,” but he does not realize how damning the statement is. I do not want my college Jewish son or daughter being flown or otherwise transported to “Palestine” and Jordan, along with Israel, during Rosh Hashanah, with some concession of “opting out” from the group dynamic “because of religious reasons.” I want my Jewish son or daughter, if spending time in Israel during the High Holy Day season, devoting that time to experiencing the Days of Awe with everyone else in the group, thus creating a reinforcing socializing and educating experience. The college years pass by so rapidly, and these moments must be cherished for the opportunities they offer us to educate and welcome Jewish students to the meaning of Jewish life.
Please do not misunderstand. Someday my son or daughter will find himself in situations that amply integrate him with the rest of the world. She will meet and encounter Palestinians. She will be on business travel as Shabbat draws near and may need to individuate herself from the mainstream to observe Shabbat. So it will be for them, as it has been for me. In ten years as an attorney with two of America’s most prominent law firms, I socialized and integrated with people of all backgrounds in my firms, and I arranged with judges and opposing counsel to calendar court days so that I would not be compelled to compromise Shabbat or Jewish holy festivals. Despite never having attended an OTI Rosh Hashanah program, I was thoroughly capable of socially integrating my lifestyle and religious beliefs with others, including Arab Moslem friends. But during my formative college years, my time in Israel was spent attending Jewish programs that did not divide Rosh Hashanah with Bethlehem, “Palestine” or trips to Jordan. Perhaps some parents (or college students) differ from me, and they respectively want their children (or for themselves) to attend programs that “balance” Israel’s right to live with a normative Palestinian perspective that Israel should be destroyed as a Jewish State, and perhaps they want to be on a program that gives them the option of spending half their Rosh Hashanah in Bethlehem under the aegis of anti-Israel Palestinian propagandists trained in reaching American youths, like Rachel Corrie, and sensitizing them to the “Palestinian narrative.” They have that right – but not to have it funded, directly or indirectly, with Jewish Federation charitable dollars.
Dr. Daniel Wehrenfennig, director of the UCI Olive Tree Initiative (OTI), has written his letter, in explicit pertinent part, to defend the practice of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, its Rose Project, and other of its funding channels to participate in allocating Jewish charitable funds towards OTI. That is Dr. Wehrenfennig’s right and institutional responsibility. I, too, am entitled to my right and responsibility to act in accordance with my free conscience. As a rabbi, a religious leader and teacher in the Jewish community of Irvine in Orange County, I also have a right and a responsibility. At this moment in time, in the face of this very unfortunate situation, my responsibility is to announce publicly that I believe it proper for Jews to withhold any further contributions from the Jewish Federation of Orange County until the Federation publicly and explicitly assures the Jewish community that it no longer will participate materially in supporting Jewish student participation at Olive Tree Institute programs that bring UCI Jewish students in part to “Palestine,” where those Jewish students are exposed to trained and skilled Palestinian Arab propagandists educating them with the “Palestinian narrative” that would mark the death of Israel as a Jewish state. I urge others to follow my lead, and I will encourage others whom I know to spread this call far and wide.
I am grateful to Prof. Rossman-Benjamin for her leadership in bringing to the surface truths that needed to be exposed.
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
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From the Simon Wiesenthal Center:
From: Rabbi Aron Hier
Director
Campus Outreach
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Shalom Elcott
President and CEO
Jewish Federation of Orange County
shalom@jfoc.org
Dear Mr. Elcott,
I have become aware of an event on November 22, 2010, in which the Olive Tree Initiative will be providing a platform for anti-Israel activist and International Solidarity Movement cofounder George Rishmawi. Further, the Olive Tree Initiative that will be hosting him is funded in part by Jewish philanthropy, through your organization as well as Hillel at UC Irvine.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center urges the Jewish Federation to disassociate itself from an event that invites the leader of a group whose own website states the following:
“Apartheid is not going to be defeated by words alone; occupation, oppression and domination are going to be dismantled the same way they were erected — through people’s action. The Israeli army and apartheid in Palestine can be defeated by strategic, disciplined unarmed resistance, utilizing the effective resources Palestinians can mobilize — including international participation.”
We further urge the Jewish Federation to investigate the Olive Tree Initiative, which has selected a speaker who advocates overthrowing the Jewish State. What kind of group would funnel impressionable Jewish students into this “wolf in sheep’s clothing” program that aids and abets the enemies of Israel in their pernicious mission?
I look forward to hearing from you about this serious matter.
Rabbi Aron Hier
Director
Campus Outreach
cc: Rabbi Marvin Hier
Rabbi Abraham Cooper
Rabbi Meyer May
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From: Prof. Tammi Benjamin
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 5:30 AM
To: oti@uci.edu
Dear Dr. Daniel Wehrenfennig,
You did not write to me directly, though you did blind-copy me on your recent widely-circulated letter (forwarded below), in which you mentioned my name 18 times and attacked a letter I had sent to the heads of the Orange County Jewish Federation and Hillel. My letter urged these Jewish communal organizations to withdraw their funding and promotion of the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) because at least 15 of the OTI's speakers are affiliated with organizations that have ties to terrorist groups that have murdered Jews, advocate the elimination of the Jewish state, and support boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel. I also pointed out to the OC Federation and Hillel that it is wrong for Jewish communal resources to be used for a trip that engages Jewish students in activities that desecrate Jewish holy days, such as the OTI trip in 2010, during which students spent the two days of Rosh Hashanah and the following Sabbath (and other Sabbaths) engaged in non-Jewish activity in Jordan and the disputed territories.
You fiercely criticized my letter, stating that I "made up facts" and that my analysis was "incomplete and misleading," "completely inaccurate," and filled with "wrong information and missing facts," "a pattern of misinformation," "erroneous statements," and "distortion." I would like to reply to your charges, which I believe are wholly baseless, extremely disingenuous, and highly offense to the Jewish community in general, and to me personally as a UC faculty member, and as a Jew.
As I understand them, your primary charges against me are the following:
· I based my analysis of the OTI 2010 trip on a preliminary version of the itinerary and not on the final version.
· The speakers, whom I researched and linked directly to their own or their affiliated organization's on-line statements and actions seeking to destroy or harm the Jewish state, never communicated these virulently anti-Israel ideas to the students on the OTI trip. But even if they had, these were only 15 of the over 70 speakers with whom students met.
· I neglected to acknowledge the pro-Israel speakers with whom students met, and whom you claim provided balance to the program.
· I neglected to acknowledge the many Jewish activities in which the students on the 2010 OTI trip participated, as well as to mention that Jewish students had the option to not join the group if an activity conflicted with their religious observance.
I would like to respond to each of your points in turn:
1) You attempt to discredit my serious concerns about many of the OTI speakers by claiming that my analysis was "completely inaccurate" and "misleading" because it was based on an earlier version of the 2010 itinerary, implying that this earlier version was radically different from the final one. But this is simply not so. In fact, of the 15 speakers and organizations whose efforts to harm Israel I documented in my letter, all but two appeared in the final version of the itinerary. Furthermore, of the few speakers who did not appear in the earlier draft but were added to the final version, at least one would certainly have been included in my letter because of his expression of profound anti-Jewish animus: Xavier Abu Eid, the communication advisor for the PLO Negotiation Support Unit, with whom students met in Ramallah on Saturday afternoon September 4th, was one of a number of Christian Palestinian leaders who in 2009 signed Kairos Palestine, a document which applies anti-Semitic supersessionist theology to deny the historic and religious right of the Jews to their homeland, supports BDS efforts, and advocates the elimination of the Jewish state.
However, even if the two versions of the itinerary were substantially different, as you had falsely implied, it still does not deny the accuracy of my analysis. For the on-line version I accessed represents a document of intent, i.e., it indicates the speakers and activities that program organizers like yourself intended to offer students on the 2010 OTI trip, whether or not these were part of the actual itinerary. Therefore, it is arguably an even better indicator of the mission and goals of the OTI's organizers, which clearly included offering as legitimate perspectives (according to your "philosophy of 360-degree education") the views of numerous individuals who have supported efforts to harm the Jewish state and have advocated its elimination, views which our own U.S. State Department defines as anti-Semitic.
So I hope you can see that whether I base my analysis on the earlier version of the itinerary or on the final one, my conclusion will remain the same, namely, that it is unconscionable for Jewish communal funds to be used to support a program that includes anti-Semitic speakers and organizations.
2) The fact that the preliminary itinerary for the 2010 OTI trip represents a document of intent also speaks to your second point, that although they may have previously expressed their virulent opposition to the Jewish State, none of the speakers communicated such sentiments to the students on the OTI trip. Even if you are correct about the content of the speakers' communication with students -- though you bring not one shred of evidence to support your claim -- it does not change the fact that these speakers were chosen by OTI organizers like yourself before you knew what they would say to students! Indeed, some of the most virulently anti-Israel speakers, such as Mazin Qumsiyeh and George N. Rishmawi, were selected to speak to students on the very first OTI trip to Israel in 2008. Surely you could not have known beforehand what these individuals would say to students, and yet you chose them to be part of the OTI trip.
Moreoever if, as I suspect, you did your due diligence before asking these individuals to speak to students, you undoubtedly accessed the very same information about them as I did. I can only surmise, therefore, that not only did you know about the anti-Semitic views of these speakers when you chose them, but you had every reason to believe that they would communicate their views to OTI students.
As for your contention that only 15 of the 70 speakers had known anti-Semitic views, it is hard to fathom why you would think this statistic is at all comforting to the Jewish community. According to my calculations, 15 speakers in 70 means that over 20% of the people who addressed the students on the recent OTI trip had themselves expressed anti-Semitic views or behaviors, or were speaking on behalf of anti-Semitic organizations.
Please understand that after the Nazis slaughtered one-third of my people during the lifetime of my parents and grandparents, I and my co-religionists are understandably skittish about individuals or organizations that engage in, or call for, harming the Jewish State or the Jewish people. For many of us, having even one anti-semitic speaker, in a program that presents such a view as a legitimate perspective, is one too many! Twenty percent is an obscenity!
I hope you are beginning to understand why for many in the Jewish community, asking us to contribute Jewish communal funds in order to expose Jewish and non-Jewish students to such speakers is extremely offensive.
3) Although I did notice the pro-Israel speakers with whom the OTI students met, the presence of such speakers on the itinerary did nothing to improve my opinion of the program, and in fact made me even more concerned about it. That is because I believe these pro-Israel speakers are being unwittingly used to provide a fig leaf of "balance" for the OTI and to give the false impression that pro-Israel and anti-Israel speakers are not only equally represented numerically, but that these two perspectives are somehow objectively equal -- simply two different but equally legitimate narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, this is the kind of thinking that underlies your philosophy of "360-degree education." However, I find such thinking to be both logically and morally flawed.
Do you honestly believe that the argument in favor of BDS is equal and opposite to the argument against it, or that advocating for the elimination of the Jewish state and against the elimination of the Jewish state are equally legitimate positions?? For me as a Jew, and, I would wager, for every other Jew who identifies himself or herself with the mainstream Jewish community, advocating for BDS or the elimination of the Jewish State, perspectives which, as I have noted above, our own U.S. State Department defines as anti-Semitic, are wholly illegitimate. However, by pairing them as you have with legitimate arguments made in defense of the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people, you have given respectability and legitimacy to illegitimate, anti-Semitic perspectives. In my opinion, it is despicable that you have used Jewish communal funds for this morally reprehensible purpose.
4) In case you do not know, Jewish religious observance is more than just eating a meal, saying some prayers, or hearing a lecture on an occasional Sabbath or festival evening. It is a commitment to living a Jewish life according to G-d's will, and it involves full observance of all of the designated holy days. So while I appreciate the educational value of sharing certain Jewish traditions with all of the students on the OTI trip, Jews and non-Jews alike, this in no way "cancels out" or mitigates those aspects of Jewish faith and tradition that were egregiously violated by bringing Jewish students to Ramallah for their first Sabbath in the country, or by taking them to Jordan for two of the holiest days of the Jewish year. And even though I appreciate the fact that Jewish students were given the option of not joining the group in order to observe their religious practice, what about those Jewish students who had no family or friends in Israel with whom to observe the holy days, or who did not feel comfortable separating themselves from the group, or who did not want to miss out on an important part of the OTI trip?
Undoubtedly there are Jewishly-identified students who are not fully observant and do not mind violating the Sabbath or other holy days. Nevertheless, as the director of a program that targets Jewish students and accepts money from Jewish communal organizations representing Jews who care deeply about Jewish faith and tradition, it was the height of religious insensitivity for you to create and/or approve an itinerary that planned for Jewish students who did not opt out of the program on the Jewish holy days, to violate the basic tenets of their faith.
I hope you can appreciate that not one of the hundreds of observant Jews who will read this letter believes that Jewish communal funds should be used to support a program that knowingly violates Jewish faith and tradition in the way that the OTI has.
I would like to make a few final remarks about your letter.
You assert that the OTI has "become an important hub for bridge-building, dialogue and cooperation between individual students and student groups," although you have produced no evidence of this being the case.
In fact, the campus climate for Jewish students at UCI has not improved since the establishment of the OTI, and in some ways it has significantly deteriorated.
For instance, in February 2010 members of the Muslim Student Union disgracefully disrupted a talk by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. And just this past May, the MSU hosted a week-long event entitled Israel Apartheid Week: A Call to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel, that featured anti-Semitic imagery and virulently anti-Israel rhetoric from 7 speakers well-known for their animus of Israel, including Imam Abdul Malik Ali, who compared the Jews to Nazis, expressed support for Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and called for the destruction of the "apartheid state of Israel."
Indeed, the campus climate had become so oppressive for Jewish students at UCI last spring that over 100 Jewish UCI students,
including the heads of all of the Jewish student groups and even some students who participated on OTI trips to Israel, signed the following statement in June 2010:
“We are Jewish students at the University of California and we are outraged and deeply offended by the behavior of some student groups on campus who sponsor speakers, films and exhibits that use hateful anti-Jewish rhetoric and imagery and openly support terrorism against Israel and the Jewish people. As Jewish students, we are also deeply disturbed by student initiated boycott and divestment campaigns which falsely accuse the Jewish state of crimes against humanity. Please understand that these speakers, exhibits, events and campaigns are as offensive and hurtful to Jewish students as a “Compton cookout” or noose are to African-American students. We demand that the UC administrators recognize and address the concerns of Jewish students in the same way as they respond to those of all other minority groups.”
At about the same time, over 60 UCI faculty members published an open letter in the campus newspaper stating that they were deeply disturbed about activities on their campus that fomented hatred against Jews and Israelis, and that many faculty and students felt intimidated, and even unsafe at UCI.
So not only has the OTI program not ameliorated the campus climate for Jewish students at UCI, it is my belief that some of the OTI speakers who have met with students have even contributed to the anti-Semitic BDS campaigns at our university, which in turn has led to an increase in anti-Semitic harassment on UC campuses, including at UCI. Consider the following three examples:
· Prof. Mazim Qumsiyeh co-founded both the Boycott Israeli Goods campaign and Al-Awda, an organization which opposes Israel's right to exist, has links to Hamas and Hezbollah, and is a leader in the BDS movement. Al-Awda works closely with Muslim and pro-Palestinian student groups, including the MSU at UCI, to promote anti-Israel divestment campaigns and co-sponsor anti-Semitic events on California campuses. (For more information about Al-Awda's insidious influence on UC campuses, including at UCI, see an article I co-authored entitled "Are Jewish Students Safe on California Campuses?")
· George N. Rishmawi co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and is the current director of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement (PCR), which is under the auspices of the ISM. The ISM has links to terrorist organizations, openly advocates the destruction of the Jewish State, and sends activists and unsuspecting volunteers -- students like Rachel Corrie -- into life-threatening situations in order to protect known terrorists. The ISM has endorsed and promoted BDS campaigns globally, including at the University of California.
· Sam Bahour is one of the original endorsers of the recent California Divestment from Israel Initiative, which calls on the State of California to force two enormous public employee pension funds to divest from Israel. Signatures to qualify this initiative for the California state ballot are being collected on campuses across the state, including at UCI.
I would like to end this letter on a personal note. I am deeply offended that in your email, which you distributed quite widely, you wrongfully attacked my academic integrity and dismissed my legitimate concerns about the OTI's value to the Jewish community. I believe your behavior in this regard is yet one further indication of the unworthiness of the program you direct for Jewish communal funds.
Sincerely,
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin
CC:
UCI Chancellor Drake
UC President Yudof
Shalom Elcott, President and CEO of the Orange County Jewish Federation
Jay S. Feldman, Director of Leadership Development & Rose Project Manager at OC Jewish Federation
Jordan Fruchtman, Executive Director UC Irvine Hillel
Organizations that have expressed concern about anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism on UC campuses:
Americans for a Safe Israel
American Freedom Alliance
American Jewish Committee
Anti-Defamation League
CAMERA
Chabad Student Centers on UC Campuses
Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
David Project
Hasbara Fellows
Hillels on UC campuses
International Hillel
Israel on Campus Coalition
Israel Peace Initiative
Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula, Marina and Sonoma Counties
Jewish Community Relations Council
Jewish Federation of the East Bay
Jewish National Fund
Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA)
National Council of Young Israel
Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism
Orthodox Union
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Stand With Us
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
USD/Hagshama World Zionist Organization
Zionist Organization of America
From the Desk of Rabbi Dov Fischer
I have just signed this petition, and I encourage you to sign it, too: http://www.ha-emet.com/petition.html
And please do not hesitate to circulate this far and wide.
I attach (below my signature block) my recent commentary on the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI), along with those written by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and by Prof. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin of UC Santa Cruz. You may also wish to visit any of these websites:
http://www.redcounty.com/content/wolf-sheeps-clothing-ucirvine-olive-tree-initiative
www.ha-emet.com
http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/
http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/
www.jewtudes.com
You may think to yourself: “I cannot believe that the Jewish Federation of Orange County really would support something so toxic with Jewish money, and that the UCI Hillel Organization would endorse something so toxic. There must be a mistake.” Please understand: I have been involved in Jewish community organizations for nearly forty years. I have seen the American Jewish Congress fight public menorah lightings, going to court to stop Chabad and others from lighting menorahs in public. I have lived through the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith giving a significant national award to Hugh Hefner for his “courage” in embodying the First Amendment and Free Press by publishing women’s naked photos. More recently, I have watched the George Soros-funded “J Street” work against the security of the State of Israel, arguing in so many words that, hey, we also are Jews, and we and George Soros only want what’s best. I have lived through it all and have seen it all. Well, not “all” – because only G-d knows what tomorrow may bring.
I am joined in my views on this matter by a wide range of Orthodox rabbis throughout the United States, as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Center. If Jewish parents want their sons or daughters to travel to “Palestine” and Jordan on Rosh Hashanah to attend lectures by trained, professional Palestinian Arab propagandists devoted to destroying Israel as a Jewish state, let them do it on their own dime. It does not matter that the same “Olive Tree” (“OTI”) program also brings them to Israel to hear a wide range of Israeli views on the Israel/”Palestine” question. Rather, OTI simply is not a proper cause for the expenditure of Jewish Federation funds -- whether directly from one Federation account or through a “Rose Project” of Federation that assists Jewish students financially with tzedakah funds to help them pay for their airfare and tuition to attend such OTI programs – during this Great Recession when, everyday, rabbis like me are approached for assistance by Jews in need right here in Irvine and throughout Orange County. This is worse than odious and abhorrent. In a word, it is . . .
. . .Foolish.
In arriving at this moment, Orange County Jewry now joins other Jewish communities throughout America in formally beginning to ask: Who exactly are the people who run these “Jewish” community organizations that take our money supposedly to support “our” agenda? What exactly are their private agendas? Do these individuals share our core views? Our core values? Yes, we like their emailed newsletters, and we know they do some real good with some of our funds, for Jewish families, for Jewish singles – but what else are they doing with the rest of our tzedakah, besides the stuff we expect them to be doing? Who are they? Who elected them? What do they privately stand for? And when do we have a say?
This Petition begins a new chapter in Orange County Jewish history. It marks Jews in Orange County standing up and saying, “We want accountability for how our tzedakah is spent.” And if a kid wants to spend Rosh Hashanah in “Palestine,” learning why Israel should cease to exist, let him pay for it – not public tzedakah funds.
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
From the Desk of Rabbi Dov Fischer
Having read the letter of December 8, 2010 by Dr. Daniel Wehrenfennig, director of the UCI Olive Tree Initiative (OTI), responding to valid concerns raised by Prof. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, I now feel it is time for Jews in Orange County to withhold any further support for the Jewish Federation of Orange County until the Federation disassociates and withdraws from continuing to support the OTI, directly or indirectly, with Jewish charitable funds. I likewise will now urge all individuals of similar mind to mine to withhold support from the Jewish Federation of Orange County on those same terms. The notion that the Jewish Federation is taking Jewish charitable dollars and spending Jewish tzedakah funds to assist UCI Jewish students to participate in OTI is so profoundly disturbing that I cannot see how any Jewish philanthropist would want to know that her hard-won earnings during this Great Recession are being spent in this manner.
Jewish funds should not be expended on paying for Jewish students to travel throughout “Palestinian” towns and villages to hear lectures by trained anti-Israel propagandists from “Palestine,” as part of an OTI mission to expose Jewish students to a “balanced” understanding of narratives: (i) on the one hand, Israel’s unequivocal right to live, (ii) balanced on the other hand with the right of Palestinian Arabs to aspire towards absorbing and nullifying the only Jewish state in the world – the death of Israel. In the words of Dr. Wehrenfennig : “The Olive Tree Initiative is an experiential learning initiative that shows both, and even multiple sides and narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” My Young Israel synagogue does not bring Christian missionaries to our congregation so that our congregants can better receive a “balanced view” of theological narratives. Our “experiential learning initiative” is attained by educating our members by presenting information, including information believed by others – “and even multiple sides and narratives” – for their benefit. We educate expansively, beyond insularity. Yet, we do not need Christian missionaries to educate us. We do not bring Christian missionaries to teach their version of Torah, their version of Isaiah 7:14 or 53, to our teens and college students. We teach. Likewise, we do not need – and we certainly should not contribute towards such endeavor with Jewish tzedakah funds – Palestinians dedicated to the death of Israel to educate our Jewish college students for balance. There are ample Jewish educational programs, from a wide range of perspectives, that can educate ably, presenting multiple perspectives.
It is unconscionable that a Jewish Federation would expend even supplementary Jewish charitable funds to fly and transport Jewish UCI students on programs that compromise the Shabbat – and all the more so, incredibly so, that desecrate Rosh Hashanah. What Jewish philanthropist is so bereft of meaningful Jewish charitable choices for his philanthropic generosity that he must have his tzedakah employed for sending Jewish students to a program that spends part of Rosh Hashanah in a Jewish setting and part of Rosh Hashanah in “Palestine”? Dr. Daniel Wehrenfennig, director of the UCI Olive Tree Initiative, means well when he writes: “Again, if the Jewish students wanted to they could opt out of the Jordan trip or parts of it because of religious reasons,” but he does not realize how damning the statement is. I do not want my college Jewish son or daughter being flown or otherwise transported to “Palestine” and Jordan, along with Israel, during Rosh Hashanah, with some concession of “opting out” from the group dynamic “because of religious reasons.” I want my Jewish son or daughter, if spending time in Israel during the High Holy Day season, devoting that time to experiencing the Days of Awe with everyone else in the group, thus creating a reinforcing socializing and educating experience. The college years pass by so rapidly, and these moments must be cherished for the opportunities they offer us to educate and welcome Jewish students to the meaning of Jewish life.
Please do not misunderstand. Someday my son or daughter will find himself in situations that amply integrate him with the rest of the world. She will meet and encounter Palestinians. She will be on business travel as Shabbat draws near and may need to individuate herself from the mainstream to observe Shabbat. So it will be for them, as it has been for me. In ten years as an attorney with two of America’s most prominent law firms, I socialized and integrated with people of all backgrounds in my firms, and I arranged with judges and opposing counsel to calendar court days so that I would not be compelled to compromise Shabbat or Jewish holy festivals. Despite never having attended an OTI Rosh Hashanah program, I was thoroughly capable of socially integrating my lifestyle and religious beliefs with others, including Arab Moslem friends. But during my formative college years, my time in Israel was spent attending Jewish programs that did not divide Rosh Hashanah with Bethlehem, “Palestine” or trips to Jordan. Perhaps some parents (or college students) differ from me, and they respectively want their children (or for themselves) to attend programs that “balance” Israel’s right to live with a normative Palestinian perspective that Israel should be destroyed as a Jewish State, and perhaps they want to be on a program that gives them the option of spending half their Rosh Hashanah in Bethlehem under the aegis of anti-Israel Palestinian propagandists trained in reaching American youths, like Rachel Corrie, and sensitizing them to the “Palestinian narrative.” They have that right – but not to have it funded, directly or indirectly, with Jewish Federation charitable dollars.
Dr. Daniel Wehrenfennig, director of the UCI Olive Tree Initiative (OTI), has written his letter, in explicit pertinent part, to defend the practice of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, its Rose Project, and other of its funding channels to participate in allocating Jewish charitable funds towards OTI. That is Dr. Wehrenfennig’s right and institutional responsibility. I, too, am entitled to my right and responsibility to act in accordance with my free conscience. As a rabbi, a religious leader and teacher in the Jewish community of Irvine in Orange County, I also have a right and a responsibility. At this moment in time, in the face of this very unfortunate situation, my responsibility is to announce publicly that I believe it proper for Jews to withhold any further contributions from the Jewish Federation of Orange County until the Federation publicly and explicitly assures the Jewish community that it no longer will participate materially in supporting Jewish student participation at Olive Tree Institute programs that bring UCI Jewish students in part to “Palestine,” where those Jewish students are exposed to trained and skilled Palestinian Arab propagandists educating them with the “Palestinian narrative” that would mark the death of Israel as a Jewish state. I urge others to follow my lead, and I will encourage others whom I know to spread this call far and wide.
I am grateful to Prof. Rossman-Benjamin for her leadership in bringing to the surface truths that needed to be exposed.
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the Simon Wiesenthal Center:
From: Rabbi Aron Hier
Director
Campus Outreach
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Shalom Elcott
President and CEO
Jewish Federation of Orange County
shalom@jfoc.org
Dear Mr. Elcott,
I have become aware of an event on November 22, 2010, in which the Olive Tree Initiative will be providing a platform for anti-Israel activist and International Solidarity Movement cofounder George Rishmawi. Further, the Olive Tree Initiative that will be hosting him is funded in part by Jewish philanthropy, through your organization as well as Hillel at UC Irvine.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center urges the Jewish Federation to disassociate itself from an event that invites the leader of a group whose own website states the following:
“Apartheid is not going to be defeated by words alone; occupation, oppression and domination are going to be dismantled the same way they were erected — through people’s action. The Israeli army and apartheid in Palestine can be defeated by strategic, disciplined unarmed resistance, utilizing the effective resources Palestinians can mobilize — including international participation.”
We further urge the Jewish Federation to investigate the Olive Tree Initiative, which has selected a speaker who advocates overthrowing the Jewish State. What kind of group would funnel impressionable Jewish students into this “wolf in sheep’s clothing” program that aids and abets the enemies of Israel in their pernicious mission?
I look forward to hearing from you about this serious matter.
Rabbi Aron Hier
Director
Campus Outreach
cc: Rabbi Marvin Hier
Rabbi Abraham Cooper
Rabbi Meyer May
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Prof. Tammi Benjamin
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 5:30 AM
To: oti@uci.edu
Dear Dr. Daniel Wehrenfennig,
You did not write to me directly, though you did blind-copy me on your recent widely-circulated letter (forwarded below), in which you mentioned my name 18 times and attacked a letter I had sent to the heads of the Orange County Jewish Federation and Hillel. My letter urged these Jewish communal organizations to withdraw their funding and promotion of the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) because at least 15 of the OTI's speakers are affiliated with organizations that have ties to terrorist groups that have murdered Jews, advocate the elimination of the Jewish state, and support boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel. I also pointed out to the OC Federation and Hillel that it is wrong for Jewish communal resources to be used for a trip that engages Jewish students in activities that desecrate Jewish holy days, such as the OTI trip in 2010, during which students spent the two days of Rosh Hashanah and the following Sabbath (and other Sabbaths) engaged in non-Jewish activity in Jordan and the disputed territories.
You fiercely criticized my letter, stating that I "made up facts" and that my analysis was "incomplete and misleading," "completely inaccurate," and filled with "wrong information and missing facts," "a pattern of misinformation," "erroneous statements," and "distortion." I would like to reply to your charges, which I believe are wholly baseless, extremely disingenuous, and highly offense to the Jewish community in general, and to me personally as a UC faculty member, and as a Jew.
As I understand them, your primary charges against me are the following:
· I based my analysis of the OTI 2010 trip on a preliminary version of the itinerary and not on the final version.
· The speakers, whom I researched and linked directly to their own or their affiliated organization's on-line statements and actions seeking to destroy or harm the Jewish state, never communicated these virulently anti-Israel ideas to the students on the OTI trip. But even if they had, these were only 15 of the over 70 speakers with whom students met.
· I neglected to acknowledge the pro-Israel speakers with whom students met, and whom you claim provided balance to the program.
· I neglected to acknowledge the many Jewish activities in which the students on the 2010 OTI trip participated, as well as to mention that Jewish students had the option to not join the group if an activity conflicted with their religious observance.
I would like to respond to each of your points in turn:
1) You attempt to discredit my serious concerns about many of the OTI speakers by claiming that my analysis was "completely inaccurate" and "misleading" because it was based on an earlier version of the 2010 itinerary, implying that this earlier version was radically different from the final one. But this is simply not so. In fact, of the 15 speakers and organizations whose efforts to harm Israel I documented in my letter, all but two appeared in the final version of the itinerary. Furthermore, of the few speakers who did not appear in the earlier draft but were added to the final version, at least one would certainly have been included in my letter because of his expression of profound anti-Jewish animus: Xavier Abu Eid, the communication advisor for the PLO Negotiation Support Unit, with whom students met in Ramallah on Saturday afternoon September 4th, was one of a number of Christian Palestinian leaders who in 2009 signed Kairos Palestine, a document which applies anti-Semitic supersessionist theology to deny the historic and religious right of the Jews to their homeland, supports BDS efforts, and advocates the elimination of the Jewish state.
However, even if the two versions of the itinerary were substantially different, as you had falsely implied, it still does not deny the accuracy of my analysis. For the on-line version I accessed represents a document of intent, i.e., it indicates the speakers and activities that program organizers like yourself intended to offer students on the 2010 OTI trip, whether or not these were part of the actual itinerary. Therefore, it is arguably an even better indicator of the mission and goals of the OTI's organizers, which clearly included offering as legitimate perspectives (according to your "philosophy of 360-degree education") the views of numerous individuals who have supported efforts to harm the Jewish state and have advocated its elimination, views which our own U.S. State Department defines as anti-Semitic.
So I hope you can see that whether I base my analysis on the earlier version of the itinerary or on the final one, my conclusion will remain the same, namely, that it is unconscionable for Jewish communal funds to be used to support a program that includes anti-Semitic speakers and organizations.
2) The fact that the preliminary itinerary for the 2010 OTI trip represents a document of intent also speaks to your second point, that although they may have previously expressed their virulent opposition to the Jewish State, none of the speakers communicated such sentiments to the students on the OTI trip. Even if you are correct about the content of the speakers' communication with students -- though you bring not one shred of evidence to support your claim -- it does not change the fact that these speakers were chosen by OTI organizers like yourself before you knew what they would say to students! Indeed, some of the most virulently anti-Israel speakers, such as Mazin Qumsiyeh and George N. Rishmawi, were selected to speak to students on the very first OTI trip to Israel in 2008. Surely you could not have known beforehand what these individuals would say to students, and yet you chose them to be part of the OTI trip.
Moreoever if, as I suspect, you did your due diligence before asking these individuals to speak to students, you undoubtedly accessed the very same information about them as I did. I can only surmise, therefore, that not only did you know about the anti-Semitic views of these speakers when you chose them, but you had every reason to believe that they would communicate their views to OTI students.
As for your contention that only 15 of the 70 speakers had known anti-Semitic views, it is hard to fathom why you would think this statistic is at all comforting to the Jewish community. According to my calculations, 15 speakers in 70 means that over 20% of the people who addressed the students on the recent OTI trip had themselves expressed anti-Semitic views or behaviors, or were speaking on behalf of anti-Semitic organizations.
Please understand that after the Nazis slaughtered one-third of my people during the lifetime of my parents and grandparents, I and my co-religionists are understandably skittish about individuals or organizations that engage in, or call for, harming the Jewish State or the Jewish people. For many of us, having even one anti-semitic speaker, in a program that presents such a view as a legitimate perspective, is one too many! Twenty percent is an obscenity!
I hope you are beginning to understand why for many in the Jewish community, asking us to contribute Jewish communal funds in order to expose Jewish and non-Jewish students to such speakers is extremely offensive.
3) Although I did notice the pro-Israel speakers with whom the OTI students met, the presence of such speakers on the itinerary did nothing to improve my opinion of the program, and in fact made me even more concerned about it. That is because I believe these pro-Israel speakers are being unwittingly used to provide a fig leaf of "balance" for the OTI and to give the false impression that pro-Israel and anti-Israel speakers are not only equally represented numerically, but that these two perspectives are somehow objectively equal -- simply two different but equally legitimate narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, this is the kind of thinking that underlies your philosophy of "360-degree education." However, I find such thinking to be both logically and morally flawed.
Do you honestly believe that the argument in favor of BDS is equal and opposite to the argument against it, or that advocating for the elimination of the Jewish state and against the elimination of the Jewish state are equally legitimate positions?? For me as a Jew, and, I would wager, for every other Jew who identifies himself or herself with the mainstream Jewish community, advocating for BDS or the elimination of the Jewish State, perspectives which, as I have noted above, our own U.S. State Department defines as anti-Semitic, are wholly illegitimate. However, by pairing them as you have with legitimate arguments made in defense of the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people, you have given respectability and legitimacy to illegitimate, anti-Semitic perspectives. In my opinion, it is despicable that you have used Jewish communal funds for this morally reprehensible purpose.
4) In case you do not know, Jewish religious observance is more than just eating a meal, saying some prayers, or hearing a lecture on an occasional Sabbath or festival evening. It is a commitment to living a Jewish life according to G-d's will, and it involves full observance of all of the designated holy days. So while I appreciate the educational value of sharing certain Jewish traditions with all of the students on the OTI trip, Jews and non-Jews alike, this in no way "cancels out" or mitigates those aspects of Jewish faith and tradition that were egregiously violated by bringing Jewish students to Ramallah for their first Sabbath in the country, or by taking them to Jordan for two of the holiest days of the Jewish year. And even though I appreciate the fact that Jewish students were given the option of not joining the group in order to observe their religious practice, what about those Jewish students who had no family or friends in Israel with whom to observe the holy days, or who did not feel comfortable separating themselves from the group, or who did not want to miss out on an important part of the OTI trip?
Undoubtedly there are Jewishly-identified students who are not fully observant and do not mind violating the Sabbath or other holy days. Nevertheless, as the director of a program that targets Jewish students and accepts money from Jewish communal organizations representing Jews who care deeply about Jewish faith and tradition, it was the height of religious insensitivity for you to create and/or approve an itinerary that planned for Jewish students who did not opt out of the program on the Jewish holy days, to violate the basic tenets of their faith.
I hope you can appreciate that not one of the hundreds of observant Jews who will read this letter believes that Jewish communal funds should be used to support a program that knowingly violates Jewish faith and tradition in the way that the OTI has.
I would like to make a few final remarks about your letter.
You assert that the OTI has "become an important hub for bridge-building, dialogue and cooperation between individual students and student groups," although you have produced no evidence of this being the case.
In fact, the campus climate for Jewish students at UCI has not improved since the establishment of the OTI, and in some ways it has significantly deteriorated.
For instance, in February 2010 members of the Muslim Student Union disgracefully disrupted a talk by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. And just this past May, the MSU hosted a week-long event entitled Israel Apartheid Week: A Call to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel, that featured anti-Semitic imagery and virulently anti-Israel rhetoric from 7 speakers well-known for their animus of Israel, including Imam Abdul Malik Ali, who compared the Jews to Nazis, expressed support for Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and called for the destruction of the "apartheid state of Israel."
Indeed, the campus climate had become so oppressive for Jewish students at UCI last spring that over 100 Jewish UCI students,
including the heads of all of the Jewish student groups and even some students who participated on OTI trips to Israel, signed the following statement in June 2010:
“We are Jewish students at the University of California and we are outraged and deeply offended by the behavior of some student groups on campus who sponsor speakers, films and exhibits that use hateful anti-Jewish rhetoric and imagery and openly support terrorism against Israel and the Jewish people. As Jewish students, we are also deeply disturbed by student initiated boycott and divestment campaigns which falsely accuse the Jewish state of crimes against humanity. Please understand that these speakers, exhibits, events and campaigns are as offensive and hurtful to Jewish students as a “Compton cookout” or noose are to African-American students. We demand that the UC administrators recognize and address the concerns of Jewish students in the same way as they respond to those of all other minority groups.”
At about the same time, over 60 UCI faculty members published an open letter in the campus newspaper stating that they were deeply disturbed about activities on their campus that fomented hatred against Jews and Israelis, and that many faculty and students felt intimidated, and even unsafe at UCI.
So not only has the OTI program not ameliorated the campus climate for Jewish students at UCI, it is my belief that some of the OTI speakers who have met with students have even contributed to the anti-Semitic BDS campaigns at our university, which in turn has led to an increase in anti-Semitic harassment on UC campuses, including at UCI. Consider the following three examples:
· Prof. Mazim Qumsiyeh co-founded both the Boycott Israeli Goods campaign and Al-Awda, an organization which opposes Israel's right to exist, has links to Hamas and Hezbollah, and is a leader in the BDS movement. Al-Awda works closely with Muslim and pro-Palestinian student groups, including the MSU at UCI, to promote anti-Israel divestment campaigns and co-sponsor anti-Semitic events on California campuses. (For more information about Al-Awda's insidious influence on UC campuses, including at UCI, see an article I co-authored entitled "Are Jewish Students Safe on California Campuses?")
· George N. Rishmawi co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and is the current director of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement (PCR), which is under the auspices of the ISM. The ISM has links to terrorist organizations, openly advocates the destruction of the Jewish State, and sends activists and unsuspecting volunteers -- students like Rachel Corrie -- into life-threatening situations in order to protect known terrorists. The ISM has endorsed and promoted BDS campaigns globally, including at the University of California.
· Sam Bahour is one of the original endorsers of the recent California Divestment from Israel Initiative, which calls on the State of California to force two enormous public employee pension funds to divest from Israel. Signatures to qualify this initiative for the California state ballot are being collected on campuses across the state, including at UCI.
I would like to end this letter on a personal note. I am deeply offended that in your email, which you distributed quite widely, you wrongfully attacked my academic integrity and dismissed my legitimate concerns about the OTI's value to the Jewish community. I believe your behavior in this regard is yet one further indication of the unworthiness of the program you direct for Jewish communal funds.
Sincerely,
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin
CC:
UCI Chancellor Drake
UC President Yudof
Shalom Elcott, President and CEO of the Orange County Jewish Federation
Jay S. Feldman, Director of Leadership Development & Rose Project Manager at OC Jewish Federation
Jordan Fruchtman, Executive Director UC Irvine Hillel
Organizations that have expressed concern about anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism on UC campuses:
Americans for a Safe Israel
American Freedom Alliance
American Jewish Committee
Anti-Defamation League
CAMERA
Chabad Student Centers on UC Campuses
Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
David Project
Hasbara Fellows
Hillels on UC campuses
International Hillel
Israel on Campus Coalition
Israel Peace Initiative
Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula, Marina and Sonoma Counties
Jewish Community Relations Council
Jewish Federation of the East Bay
Jewish National Fund
Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA)
National Council of Young Israel
Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism
Orthodox Union
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Stand With Us
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
USD/Hagshama World Zionist Organization
Zionist Organization of America
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