http://starofdavida.blogspot.com/2013/05/marital-status-shouldnt-matter-at-mikvah.html

http://www.freshinkforteens.com/articles/boston-commons

Have a great day!

Oholiav covered multiple performances of Rank’s music and offers and interesting look into his life. This article is definitely worth looking at for all of our alumni who remember the fun and good-hearted Jonah Rank, and for any future participants wondering just how incredible our CE’s are!

http://oholiav.com/2013/04/in-the-spotlight-jonahs-love-music-and-mysticism-at-april-21-salon/

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/176688/could-the-holy-ghost-be-jewish/?p=all#ixzz2TnQNX9iM

Then he wondered aloud how I spell my name, and he graded my response. “You got all the letters right,” he said, and laughed when I ask for extra credit for getting them in the proper order: “That’s funny.”

Brooks, 86, is one of only 11 people to have won the grand slam of show business – an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. But despite the accolades, the fame and the riches, he still seems to be that little boy from Brooklyn, just as curious about you as you are about him.

On May 20, the Public Broadcasting Service will premiere “Mel Brooks: Make a Noise,” an extraordinary American Masters special that traces his remarkable career. Less than three weeks later, on June 6, the American Film Institute will honor Brooks with its Lifetime Achievement Award. Still, his conversation with the Forward seemed less an opportunity to promote than to reminisce.

“It’s like a big deal, second only to the Oscars,” he said of the AFI honor before quickly moving on to discuss his remembrances of things past: his mother and her friends drinking coffee from yahrzeit glasses “because coffee was always in a yahrzeit glass, never in a cup – ever. They used to have these jelly jars. The jelly jar was for tea, and yahrzeit glasses were for coffee.”

Brooks’ father died when Mel was just two years old, leaving his mother with four young boys.

“We lived on the fifth floor in the back of a tenement. We were incredibly poor,” he said.

Spending just $2 for a High Holy Day ticket was considered “frivolous.”

Brooks recalled how, growing up, “I was never really interested in the religious aspect of being a Jew. But Rabbi Nachman cured me of that.”

Nachman founded the Breslov Hasidic movement, and Brooks, a voracious reader, says he studied and was moved by his philosophical works. “He wrote a lot of stuff,” Brooks said. “He said talk to God like you talk to a friend. Until I read that, I’d always thought of God as a stern “burn you in fires and fury” tough guy. But Nachman’s thinking was so different, I became a little more religious.”

I asked Brooks if he gets bored answering the same questions over and over again. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “But I make believe I’m not. I’m really a good actor, and I say, ‘That’s an interesting question,’ and answer it. ‘What was your favorite movie?’ ‘How did you get into show business?’ You know.”

But now Brooks does not seem to be acting. He delves into the topic of religion with apparent enthusiasm, gaining vigor as he recalls his grandmother, “who was terribly religious,” putting a handkerchief on her head as she lit Sabbath candles and recited the blessings: “I used to ask my brother, ‘Is this the real McCoy, or is she faking it?’ It was real.”

Passover seems to have been his favorite holiday. It was celebrated at his grandfather Abraham’s house; “Everyone called him Shloimy,” Brooks recalled. “I don’t know why. It should have been Avraham. He would conduct the service. It would be three and a half hours.”

But, he says, Uncle Leon, who was the youngest of his mother’s brothers and therefore placed closest to the children’s end of the table, made the proceedings easier: “Leon saved the day. He’d say, ‘It’s a fly to center field,” and he’d do the whole thing like it was a Dodger game. He would say something like, ‘Mel Ott lifts his legs, swings and it’s going, going, gone’ every time my grandfather said something.”

These days, Brooks attends Seders hosted by Ron and Sheila Clark, respectively a co-writer on three Brooks films and his wife. “You get a lot of gefilte fish, but not too much reading,” he said.

The second night, he and a group of friends often go to the nursing home where Sid Caesar resides: “He can’t feed himself, and he goes from his bed to a wheelchair, but we try to have a Seder on the second night. He may not get it, but we try.”

Folk singer/actor Theodore Bikel occasionally leads the Seder when show-biz rabbi Jerome Cutler isn’t there.

Told he sounds far more Jewish than he lets on, Brooks said: “I like being Jewish. It’s strange. I wouldn’t be anything but. But it still doesn’t mean I ever would have two sets of dishes.”

The mention of Caesar, of course, prompted discussion of Brooks’s career: Borscht Belt tummler, stand-up comic, writer of Caesar’s “Admiral Broadway Review,” “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour.” He was teamed with Neil and Danny Simon, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart, among others, to create the most influential sketch comedy shows in TV history.

He went on to become the 2000 Year Old Man, a character that he and Reiner created, and, of course, to write, direct and star in critically and commercially successful films such as “Blazing Saddles,” “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein.”

The last two were turned into successful Broadway productions, as has been well documented. Less well known is when Brooks first became aware of his comic skills: “I knew it as an infant in the crib. People would peer down and laugh. I said I could do three shows a day.”

The true turning point came at a summer camp in New Jersey for underprivileged kids, funded by Eddie Cantor. At one of the Friday night shows there, Brooks did an imitation of a counselor.

“I brought the house down,” he said, “and I understood then that if you take comedy from life instead of repeating Henny Youngman jokes it works even better. He says he sealed his show business aspirations when he attended his first Broadway performance, with his uncle: “My Uncle Joe was a cab driver. If a cab came down the street without a driver, that was Uncle Joe. He was about 3 feet tall.”

When Uncle Joe was about to call it quits for the night, he’d cruise around Broadway and give free rides back to Brooklyn to theater doormen. Occasionally they would pay him back with free tickets.

In the early 30s, Brooks and his uncle went to see “Anything Goes,” starring Ethel Merman. “We were up in the balcony, and I thought she was still too loud. But that’s where I decided I’m not going to go into the garment center like everyone else.”

Brooks is well known for his incredibly fertile mind, with funny lines coming seemingly from nowhere. At the end of the PBS special, he complained: “If this program was called ‘Dutch Masters,’ I’d have a box of cigars. But I had to be foolish and settle for ‘American Masters.’ No money in it. No cigars. No nothing.”

I pointed out to Brooks that his references to Merman and Cantor might be obscure for today’s audience. “You gotta be over 60 to understand Dutch Masters,” he said. Still, he believes that if he were to start today, “I’d still be funny and famous.”

“I’d have to change my game. I do parody and I do satire, and I would have to satirize what’s around today. I would have to start with ‘Avatar’ and stuff like that, make fun of futuristic adventure stories.”

“My crowd had to know Westerns. They had to know what scraping beans around a tin plate would produce.”

I asked if it is easy being Mel Brooks.

“I think it is,” he said. “I get into a lot of places for nothing. Sometimes it’s a little difficult when a few hundred people want to take a lot of pictures. But I don’t avoid it. I don’t try to sneak in the back door of a theater if people are waiting to see me.”

But is there a “Pagliacci” element about him? Was he the clown crying on the inside? “No, never,” he said emphatically. “I’m sad when real things happen. When I lost my wife [Anne Bancroft], I was desperately unhappy.

“I was very lucky. I chose the path, and I had the three thirds that make one whole.”

He explained: “One third is the neurotic need for attention. That’s the first third. The second third is God-given talent, the ability to sing on key, to move your legs well and dance well, to machine gun a joke with the right rhythm. The third is unstoppable diligence and work. When I do a movie, it’s at least six rewrites of the script.”

Comedy, he claimed, is a way people work their way up the social ladder: “We [Jews] were replaced by blacks, and 40 years from now they’ll be replaced, probably by comics from Thailand. It happens in waves. Every immigrant society, all downtrodden and poor people want to make a living shouting their own praises.”

Toward the end of our interview, Brooks told me he recently had dinner with “two lovely Dutch ladies” who presented him with a plastic-encased chestnut from a tree that stands outside the home where Anne Frank hid in the attic. We took a few minutes trying, translating the Dutch words on the casing.

“I keep it on my desk,” he said. “Is there anything sweeter and nicer than that little girl still having faith in humanity?”

Our first episode features Genesis Intern Sara Blumenthal!

Sara Blumenthal is a rising senior at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where she is a double major in Psychology and Hebrew and Jewish Cultural Studies. Having been a Genesis participant she is looking forward to experiencing Genesis as a staff member. Sara has been steadily engaged in Jewish education since high school: as a Hebrew school teacher aide, overnight camp counselor, and most recently Hebrew school teacher. In her spare time, Sara enjoys dialoguing about complex topics, taking walks in Ann Arbor, swimming, and simply spending time with friends and family. She attends Hillel weekly where she occasionally leads Kabbalat Shabbat. Since Genesis, Sara has returned to Brandeis several times and cannot wait to be back for another great summer.

(1.) What’s something most people don’t know about you?
Most people don’t know that I am ambidextrous. I can write legibly with both of my hands, even at the same time!

(2.) What first got you interested in Jewish Education?
I was a religious school teacher’s assistant in my synagogue throughout high school. I enjoyed teaching Jewish concepts and Hebrew to younger children. Now I am a religious school teacher and love teaching Hebrew to middle school and high school students.

(3.) What course would you take and why? Yes, even a BIMA course!
When I attended Genesis I took a Journalism and Ethics course. Today I would most definitely take the Word Religions course, though all of the courses seem interesting and intellectually stimulating. I would take the World Religions course because I have since become interested in learning about different religions and beliefs through stimulating experiences. I have a desire to expand my knowledge about other religions and learn about religious experiences and identities different from my own, while strengthening my own beliefs.

(4.) What makes you so eager to be an intern?
Genesis had a profound impact on me as a participant. It taught me to think critically about my Jewish identity, American identity, and developing self concept. I cannot wait to be back in this enriching environment to take part in this experience as an intern and witness this incredible process for the 2013 participants. I am also interested in experiential Jewish education, and a Genesis internship is an ideal way to further explore the field, at Brandeis, no less!

(5.) Out of anyone in history, who do you wish could come to Brandeis for one day?
The Dalai Lama. I admire the Dalai Lama’s calmness, compassion, clarity, and wisdom. He conveys a simple yet powerful message that has the potential to impact every person in some way to lead a meaningful life.

The festival of Shavuot marks God’s announcement of his commandments on Mount Sinai. Occurring seven weeks after Passover, the holiday involves no prescribed rituals and can pass virtuously with little ceremony.
Those who observe Shavuot often honor the occasion with all-night Torah classes. Because of its boundless significance, the Sinaitic revelation is commemorated by engaging wisdom and not by executing behaviors. Wisdom is vast and knows no bounds.
In the Jerusalem seminary where I mentor Modern Orthodox students studying abroad, Shavuot is a hard sell. To paraphrase Mark Twain, some of my students want to have read a Torah but few of them want to actually read one.
My FBing, IMing, Instagramming students are challenging to persuade. These young adults dialogue like they Tweet, and 140 characters does not a conversation make. Suggesting that such youth embrace a holiday of ideas would be like asking them to hug a thesaurus.
When I began teaching in 1998, dormitory floors were littered with magazines and books. Back when notebooks came with pens, students could be encouraged to read and write, could be challenged to communicate. Those students, like students always, were hardly mindful of their studies. But unlike the case of today’s 4Gers, it was possible to engage with the minds of those digital neophytes.
That was then. Today’s dormitory is cluttered with wires and suffused with wireless, its occupants sharing files more than ideas. My current students communicate, relate — think — in bizarre combinations of lethargy and haste, clicking from friend to virtual friend and from page to virtual page without pausing to consider the people or books in sight of them. A text-based curriculum that relies heavily on commitment hardly stands a chance.
According to Wired magazine, today’s freshmen are “the first generation born into a world that has never not known digital life.” These digital-from-births are controlled by technology in ways that shape how they relate to others.
Texting, their No. 1 form of communication, is both intimate and distant, “replacing a commitment to a conversation with a series of one-sided communiqués.” No wonder they have a hard time with the Talmud — my students cannot devote themselves to email.
Preferences for shortcuts and concision are not traits of a successful divinity student. The law of the Talmud is tricky, and students are expected to join in a boisterous dialectic to unravel its intent. Achieving transcendence through debate — conversing with God through the medium of His word — is as central to Orthodox Judaism as its precepts. Participation demands qualities not readily found online.
Living in a world created by their parents, digital natives are not to blame. If anyone is at fault, it is adults who fail to nurture those virtues necessary for inspired Orthodoxy — for meaningful, ongoing religious commitment born of an active engagement with God’s word. Damning the Internet is pointless, flawed. A generation of superficially religious youth subsists uninspired, and satirizing them does no good.
Which brings us to Shavuot.
Talmudic tradition maintains that the great voice of God on Sinai has never ceased — that it resonates, forever to be noticed. I would like to believe that in every generation, all can hear that sound, can identify its source, can appreciate its relevance. In truth, only some are moved by its echo; others strain for a chord, others may be not listening. For some there is only quiet.
Shavuot is about participation, not commemoration. About joining a community of listeners. About experiencing the resonance of His expression.
There can be no shortcuts to informed religious conduct. To pretend as much would be misleading. There can also be no substitute for earnest dialogue — with teachers, confidants and texts. Still, the challenge of amplifying that awesome sound to those who do not yet hear it depends on the sensitivity, creativity and patience of those who do. The same digitally distracted child can focus when the subject is of interest. The same digitally isolated soul can join a community when it matters to him most.
For my students to embrace Shavuot, they will have to be convinced it is worth their efforts. Demonstrating as much in 140 characters or fewer may be not possible, but making use of current mediums and references is. Because few of my students write in cursive, persuading them to evolve new ways of thinking will involve my adaptation, too.
A 3,325-year-old noise can be challenging to make out. But it can be #worththeeffort.
Mendel Horowitz is a rabbi and family therapist in Jerusalem, where he maintains a private practice working with adults and children.

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/176024/shavuot-is-tough-sell-in-age-of–characters/?p=all#ixzz2TEYYBiJL

Scientists usually don’t call each other “liars” and “frauds.”
But that’s how Johns Hopkins University post-doctoral researcher Eran Elhaik describes a group of widely respected geneticists, including Harry Ostrer, professor of pathology and genetics at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine and author of the 2012 book “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People.”
For years now, the findings of Ostrer and several other scientists have stood virtually unchallenged on the genetics of Jews and the story they tell of the common Middle East origins shared by many Jewish populations worldwide. Jews — and Ashkenazim in particular — are indeed one people, Ostrer’s research finds.
It’s a theory that more or less affirms the understanding that many Jews themselves hold of who they are in the world: a people who, though scattered, share an ethnic-racial bond rooted in their common ancestral descent from the indigenous Jews of ancient Judea or Palestine, as the Romans called it after they conquered the Jewish homeland.
But now, Elhaik, an Israeli molecular geneticist, has published research that he says debunks this claim. And that has set off a predictable clash.
“He’s just wrong,” said Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, a leading researcher in Jewish genetics, referring to Elhaik.
The sometimes strong emotions generated by this scientific dispute stem from a politically loaded question that scientists and others have pondered for decades: Where in the world did Ashkenazi Jews come from?
The debate touches upon such sensitive issues as whether the Jewish people is a race or a religion, and whether Jews or Palestinians are descended from the original inhabitants of what is now the State of Israel.
Ostrer’s theory is sometimes marshaled to lend the authority of science to the Zionist narrative, which views the migration of modern-day Jews to what is now Israel, and their rule over that land, as a simple act of repossession by the descendants of the land’s original residents. Ostrer declined to be interviewed for this story. But in his writings, Ostrer points out the dangers of such reductionism; some of the same genetic markers common among Jews, he finds, can be found in Palestinians, as well.
By using sophisticated molecular tools, Feldman, Ostrer and most other scientists in the field have found that Jews are genetically homogeneous. No matter where they live, these scientists say, Jews are genetically more similar to each other than to their non-Jewish neighbors, and they have a shared Middle Eastern ancestry.

The geneticists’ research backs up what is known as the Rhineland Hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, Ashkenazi Jews descended from Jews who fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century and settled in Southern Europe. In the late Middle Ages they moved into eastern Europe from Germany, or the Rhineland.
“Nonsense,” said Elhaik, a 33-year-old Israeli Jew from Beersheba who earned a doctorate in molecular evolution from the University of Houston. The son of an Italian man and Iranian woman who met in Israel, Elhaik, a dark-haired, compact man, sat down recently for an interview in his bare, narrow cubicle of an office at Hopkins, where he’s worked for four years.
In “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses,” published in December in the online journal Genome Biology and Evolution, Elhaik says he has proved that Ashkenazi Jews’ roots lie in the Caucasus — a region at the border of Europe and Asia that lies between the Black and Caspian seas — not in the Middle East. They are descendants, he argues, of the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived in one of the largest medieval states in Eurasia and then migrated to Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Ashkenazi genes, Elhaik added, are far more heterogeneous than Ostrer and other proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis believe. Elhaik did find a Middle Eastern genetic marker in DNA from Jews, but, he says, it could be from Iran, not ancient Judea.
Elhaik writes that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the eighth century, although many historians believe that only royalty and some members of the aristocracy converted. But widespread conversion by the Khazars is the only way to explain the ballooning of the European Jewish population to 8 million at the beginning of the 20th century from its tiny base in the Middle Ages, Elhaik says.
Elhaik bases his conclusion on an analysis of genetic data published by a team of researchers led by Doron Behar, a population geneticist and senior physician at Israel’s Rambam Medical Center, in Haifa. Using the same data, Behar’s team published in 2010 a paper concluding that most contemporary Jews around the world and some non-Jewish populations from the Levant, or Eastern Mediterranean, are closely related.
Elhaik used some of the same statistical tests as Behar and others, but he chose different comparisons. Elhaik compared “genetic signatures” found in Jewish populations with those of modern-day Armenians and Georgians, which he uses as a stand-in for the long-extinct Khazarians because they live in the same area as the medieval state.
“It’s an unrealistic premise,” said University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer, one of Behar’s co-authors, of Elhaik’s paper. Hammer notes that Armenians have Middle Eastern roots, which, he says, is why they appeared to be genetically related to Ashkenazi Jews in Elhaik’s study.
Hammer, who also co-wrote the first paper that showed modern-day Kohanim are descended from a single male ancestor, calls Elhaik and other Khazarian Hypothesis proponents “outlier folks… who have a minority view that’s not supported scientifically. I think the arguments they make are pretty weak and stretching what we know.”
Feldman, director of Stanford’s Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, echoes Hammer. “If you take all of the careful genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years… there’s no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin,” he said. He added that Elhaik’s paper “is sort of a one-off.”
Elhaik’s statistical analysis would not pass muster with most contemporary scholars, Feldman said: “He appears to be applying the statistics in a way that gives him different results from what everybody else has obtained from essentially similar data.”
Elhaik, who doesn’t believe that Moses, Aaron or the 12 Tribes of Israel ever existed, shrugs off such criticism.
“That’s a circular argument,” he said of the notion that Jews’ and Armenians’ genetic similarities stem from common ancestors in the Middle East and not from Khazaria, the area where the Armenians live. If you believe that, he says, then other non-Jewish populations, such as Georgian, that are genetically similar to Armenians should be considered genetically related to Jews, too, “and so on and so forth.”
Dan Graur, Elhaik’s doctoral supervisor at U.H. and a member of the editorial board of the journal that published his paper, calls his former student “very ambitious, very independent. That’s what I like.” Graur, a Romanian-born Jew who served on the faculty of Tel Aviv University for 22 years before moving 10 years ago to the Houston school, said Elhaik “writes more provocatively than may be needed, but it’s his style.” Graur calls Elhaik’s conclusion that Ashkenazi Jews originated to the east of Germany “a very honest estimate.”
In a news article that accompanied Elhaik’s journal paper, Shlomo Sand, history professor at Tel Aviv University and author of the controversial 2009 book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” said the study vindicated his long-held ideas.
”It’s so obvious for me,” Sand told the journal. “Some people, historians and even scientists, turn a blind eye to the truth. Once, to say Jews were a race was anti-Semitic, now to say they’re not a race is anti-Semitic. It’s crazy how history plays with us.”
The paper has received little coverage in mainstream American media, but it has attracted the attention of anti-Zionists and “anti-Semitic white supremacists,” Elhaik said.
Interestingly, while anti-Zionist bloggers have applauded Elhaik’s work, saying it proves that contemporary Jews have no legitimate claim to Israel, some white supremacists have attacked it.
“The disruptive and conflict-ridden behavior which has marked out Jewish Supremacist activities through the millennia strongly suggests that Jews have remained more or less genetically uniform and have… developed a group evolutionary survival strategy based on a common biological unity — something which strongly militates against the Khazar theory,” former Louisiana state assemblyman David Duke wrote on his blog in February.
“I’m not communicating with them,” Elhaik said of the white supremacists. He says it also bothers him, a veteran of seven years in the Israeli army, that anti-Zionists have capitalized on his research “and they’re not going to be proven wrong anytime soon.”
But proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis also have a political agenda, he said, claiming they “were motivated to justify the Zionist narrative.”
To illustrate his point, Elhaik swivels his chair around to face his computer and calls up a 2010 email exchange with Ostrer.
“It was a great pleasure reading your group’s recent paper, ‘Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,’ that illuminate[s] the history of our people,” Elhaik wrote to Ostrer. “Is it possible to see the data used for the study?”
Ostrer replied that the data are not publicly available. “It is possible to collaborate with the team by writing a brief proposal that outlines what you plan to do,” he wrote. “Criteria for reviewing include novelty and strength of the proposal, non-overlap with current or planned activities, and non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people.” That last requirement, Elhaik argues, reveals the bias of Ostrer and his collaborators.
Allowing scientists access to data only if their research will not defame Jews is “peculiar,” said Catherine DeAngelis, who edited the Journal of the American Medical Association for a decade. “What he does is set himself up for criticism: Wait a minute. What’s this guy trying to hide?”
Despite what his critics claim, Elhaik says, he was not out to prove that contemporary Jews have no connection to the Jewish people of the Bible. His primary research focus is the genetics of mental illness, which, he explains, led him to question the assumption that Ashkenazi Jews are a useful population to study because they’re so homogeneous.
Elhaik says he first read about the Khazarian Hypothesis a decade ago in a 1976 book by the late Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler, “The Thirteenth Tribe,” written before scientists had the tools to compare genomes. Koestler, who was Jewish by birth, said his aim in writing the book was to eliminate the racist underpinnings of anti-Semitism in Europe. “Should this theory be confirmed, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ would become void of meaning,” the book jacket reads. Although Koestler’s book was generally well reviewed, some skeptics questioned the author’s grasp of the history of Khazaria.
Graur is not surprised that Elhaik has stood up against the “clique” of scientists who believe that Jews are genetically homogeneous. “He enjoys being combative,” Graur said. “That’s what science is.”

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/175912/jews-a-race-genetic-theory-comes-under-fierce-atta/?p=all#ixzz2SceibiAZ

SEVENTY years ago today, a group of young men and women fired the shots that began the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is rightly commemorated — through books, memoirs and movies — as an extraordinary act of courage in the face of near-certain death. Those who fought in the ghetto provide the iconic image of heroism, and an antidote to images of Jews being led to the gas chambers.

The uprising was indeed extraordinary. But the manner in which it has been remembered over the years — in Communist Poland, in the West and in Israel — says more about the use of history for contemporary purposes than the uprising itself. The true nature of the uprising cannot be understood through its postwar commemorations but only through its wartime origins.

In the fall of 1940, the Nazis, having defeated Poland, began the herding of nearly half a million Polish Jews into a ghetto in Warsaw. The Nazis forced them to build a wall and then sealed them inside. Children began to die of cold, disease and hunger. Emaciated bodies and corpses lay on the streets.

A Jewish council, headed by Adam Czerniakow, was made responsible by the Germans for organizing the ghetto’s Jews for slave labor, requisitions and soon worse. On July 22, 1942, the Germans began mass deportations to the death camp at Treblinka, about 60 miles to the northeast. They ordered the local Jewish council to prepare the daily deportation lists. Czerniakow knew the transports meant death. He did not call for resistance. Instead, on July 23, he swallowed a cyanide capsule.

Marek Edelman, a commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, declared many years later that he held only one thing against Czerniakow: that he made death his own private affair. “It was necessary to die with fireworks,” Edelman said.

During the summer of 1942, the Germans sent more than 265,000 Jews from the ghetto to the gas chambers, and shot thousands more. It was not easy to organize a Jewish resistance. The Jews had been uprooted, demoralized and impoverished, stricken by typhus and hunger. The Jewish council urged accommodation with the Germans. Reports about the fate of those who had been deported reached the ghetto, but were often not believed. Even as late as 1942, the Final Solution was beyond most imaginations.

But not all imaginations. It was predominantly young, secular men and women who began to organize. After the deportations began, Zionists of various persuasions formed the Jewish Combat Organization and began to procure arms. They were later joined by Communists and members of the Bund, a secular, socialist Jewish workers’ movement, which called for national-cultural autonomy for Jews within a Polish state. The Zionist far right formed its own resistance group, the Jewish Military Union.

In October 1942, the Jewish Combat Organization carried out its first death sentence, assassinating a Jew serving as a policeman in the ghetto. They had to send a message: there was a price for collaboration. By early 1943, most Jews of the ghetto had already been gassed. Those who remained were often young and alone, having lost their families. On Jan. 18, Jewish fighters surprised the German forces entering the ghetto with gunfire. Faced with resistance, the Germans soon ceased deportations.

But three months later, on April 19, they came back. Members of the resistance fired revolvers and threw grenades. The Star of David and the Polish flag were raised side by side on the ghetto’s tallest building. On April 23, Mordekhai Anielewicz, the uprising’s leader, wrote to his socialist Zionist comrade Yitzhak Zuckerman, “Things have surpassed our boldest dreams: the Germans ran away from the ghetto twice.”

The ghetto fighters were poorly armed, but determined. It was an incredible — and hopeless — battle. The Germans set fire to the ghetto. Anielewicz and his unit hid in a bunker. On May 8, when the Germans surrounded them, most of the fighters committed suicide. On May 16, the Nazi SS general Jürgen Stroop reported, “The former Jewish quarter in Warsaw no longer exists.”

The number of Jews who burned to death in the fire is unknown. More than 56,000 Jews were reported captured, about 7,000 of them were shot and 7,000 more were sent to Treblinka. Most of the others were sent to concentration camps and shot in November 1943.

“The only way out was the sewers,” Edelman testified at Stroop’s 1951 trial. Edelman had led the last surviving ghetto fighters to freedom through water that reeked of feces and methane. They were trapped underground for days and some suffocated to death. Perhaps 40 survived. Edelman, together with his fellow survivors Zivia Lubetkin and Yitzhak Zuckerman, went on to fight the Germans again the following year with a division of Polish Communist partisans.

The ghetto uprising was important to Poland’s postwar Communist government. A heroic act was a useful foundation myth for an unpopular regime fighting a civil war against the remnants of an anti-Nazi resistance that had turned against the Communists. In appropriating — and de-Judaizing — the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Communists also sought to suppress the legacy of another anti-Nazi revolt: the 1944 Warsaw uprising. In August 1944, the Polish Home Army, an anti-German resistance connected to the Polish government in exile, rose up against the Nazis for 63 days while the Soviet Red Army remained camped across the river watching the city go up in flames. In postwar Poland, Communists seeking to discredit the Home Army and obscure Moscow’s ignominious role hung posters side by side reading “Glory to the heroic defenders of the ghetto” and “Shame to the fascist servants of the Home Army.”

The ghetto uprising was even more important to the nascent state of Israel, which sought to monopolize the history as a battle for the new Jewish state. The desire was understandable: for a long time Israelis — like Jews elsewhere — preferred to identify only with that tiny fragment of the Jewish population who fired shots during the Holocaust.

Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day was established in 1953 to mark the anniversary of the uprising. “Some Israeli leaders looked back on the Holocaust with fear and sometimes with shame,” wrote the Yad Vashem historian Israel Gutman. “The only usable past, the only history of that period that they adopted for the image of the future was the heroic chapter of resistance.” The struggle for a Jewish state, Gutman explained, was cast as an extension of the uprising.

IN the Israeli version, the uprising was carried out by Zionists — that is, by “New Jews,” who were vigorous, muscular and productive. The diaspora had produced the pale yeshiva boy bent over his books, who was unable to defend himself, and the Jewish council, who, confronted with Hitler’s Final Solution, could do nothing but continue a long tradition of accommodation and hoping for the best.

By contrast, the New Jew envisioned by the Zionists would be bound to his own land and capable of working it himself. He would overcome the emasculation and degradation of the diaspora. It was this New Jew who could transform a humiliating past into a proud future and redeem a unified Jewish nation.

But there was no unified nation, and the ghetto uprising was not a purely Zionist affair. The Jews who found themselves sealed within the ghetto, like the millions of other Jews living in Eastern Europe, were deeply divided — by language and religiosity and class, by national identification and political ideology. Inside the ghetto were Polish speakers and Yiddish speakers; Orthodox, Hasidic, secular Jews; assimilated Jews and nationalists. The Zionists ranged from radical right to radical left. And most politicized Jews were not Zionists; some were Polish socialists, some Communists, some members of the secular socialist Bund. A debate raged between Zionists and the Bund over the issue of “hereness” versus “thereness” — and the Bund believed firmly that the future of the Jews was here, in Poland, alongside their non-Jewish neighbors.

Today, the teleological deceptions of retrospect make it seem a foregone conclusion that the Zionists would win that debate. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, the Bund’s program seemed much more grounded, sensible and realistic: a Jewish workers’ party allied with a larger labor movement, a secular Jewish culture in Yiddish, the language already spoken by most Jews, a future in the place where Jews already lived, alongside people they already knew. The Zionist idea that millions of European Jews would adopt a new language, uproot themselves en masse, and resettle in a Middle Eastern desert amid people about whom they knew nothing was far less realistic.

In 1942, it took time before Bundists and Communists joined Zionists in the creation of the Jewish Combat Organization. They organized themselves into fighting divisions according to political party. Even then, the better-armed Revisionist Zionists — the Zionist far right — remained apart, and fought the Germans separately during the ghetto uprising. The parties had very different ideas about the political future. But the uprising was less about future life than present death.

Edelman, who had survived by escaping through the sewers, was the last living commander of the uprising. After the war, in Communist Poland, he became a cardiologist: “to outwit God,” as he once said. In the 1970s and ’80s he re-emerged in the public sphere as an activist in the anti-Communist opposition, working with the Committee for the Defense of Workers and the Solidarity movement. He died in 2009, and to this day, he is celebrated as a hero in Poland.

He is remembered with more ambivalence in Israel. “Israel has a problem with Jews like Edelman,” the Israeli author Etgar Keret told a Polish newspaper in 2009. “He didn’t want to live here. And he never said that he fought in the ghetto so that the state of Israel would come into being.” Not even Moshe Arens, a former Israeli defense minister and an admirer of Edelman, could persuade an Israeli university to grant the uprising hero an honorary degree.

After the war, Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, who had survived with Edelman, founded a kibbutz in Israel in memory of the ghetto fighters. Edelman remained close to them until they died.

Zionism, however, remained unappealing to him. Nor did he fantasize about reviving the diaspora nationalism of the Bund. He believed the history of Jews in Poland was over. There were no more Jews. “It’s sad for Poland,” he told me in 1997, “because a single-nation state is never a good thing.”

From 1999 to 2012, alumni from all around the world including, just to name a few, Turkey, Russia, Israel, and the US, have submitted photos of themselves and quotes describing how BIMA and Genesis have shaped them. This is the human network brought down to a smaller level, at Brandeis. Specifically, right by that pond. So many participants left with ambition in their eyes, with a desire to look within themselves, with a hunger to explore Judaism, or even with holding another person’s hand (Yes! People have maintained relationships for years after the program, and some even MARRIED each other).

Each summer a new group was brought from every corner of the world to spend their days by Massell Pond, and to learn who and what they are. Participants had the drive to change the program itself and progressively improve and expand the definition of “Jewish Education.” Through their own diverse beliefs and philosophies, each participant learned that there is more than one way to be a Jew. Every participant constantly modified the simple adjective “Jewish” to take on so many more meanings. They, the participants, became teachers, telling their story and providing a question we all constantly wonder: What does a Jew look like, and how must a Jew act?

There is no right and wrong. There is not one Jewish paradigm. Year after year, with so many new participants our horizon has rapidly expanded. There is no set way in how a Jew acts or what one looks like!

With so much diversity and so many voices, we understand and we grow.

Without knowing who came before, or who came after, each and every participant plays a critical role in defining and redefining BIMA and Genesis. So many stories, so many ambitions. You, the alumni, have gone back home, but you have all made BIMA and Genesis what it is today and will have an impact on it, forever.

Alone Time: Quiet moments alone are crucial in marriage, Simi says.
Jeremy understood this a lot earlier than I did. When we were dating he told me that one of the things he learned from his sister’s relationship with her husband is that they could both be sitting in one room together and doing completely different things for hours at a time. He wanted that same dynamic with his significant other. “Well that’s weird,” I thought, because why the hell would you want to be with someone and not spend time with him? “That’s sweet,” I said, because we were dating and that’s what you say when you’re dating someone and disagree with him.
But since we’ve been married, those moments — together, but also alone — have become a lot more frequent. And they hold a lot more appeal. In fact, they are crucial.
Jeremy and I love each other, and we love spending time together, but sometimes, for entirely practical reasons — like he has homework or I have a blog post to write — we need to be able to sit in the same room and not talk for hours at a time. And at other times, for entirely emotional reasons — like we are so tired of each other’s faces that we absolutely need to go hang out with other people — we need to be able to spend time apart. And we need to know that in neither of these scenarios is being apart a bad thing.
I think spending so much time with a single person makes the fewer moments of separation all the more essential. Jeremy and I are both highly independent people — we both have stories from our childhoods about when we would have friends over and sit to the side and read while they talked with each other. (In my case, I would make them read as well.) As much as we prefer each other’s company to anyone else’s, we don’t always want company at all. In fact, I hadn’t realized just how much I need time to myself until I chose to spend all my time with someone else.
Most days, I end work excited to come home to the apartment that I share with my husband, looking forward to the simple joy of a quiet evening with him after he comes home from late-night classes. What we were never taught about Adam and Eve is that even though they were “one flesh,” it wasn’t too hard for them to get away from each other when they needed to because they had the entire world to themselves. (And I’m guessing they needed to get away from each other more and more after the snake incident.) Jeremy and I, on the other hand, have a one-bedroom apartment. And while I can’t wait for him to get home most nights, I often find myself savoring those few hours that I have to myself.

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/just-married/175753/did-adam-and-eve-get-alone-time/#ixzz2S4FdLcjH