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Published Works of Aaron
Howard
Aaron's Archives
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The Unhappiest Day of the Year
| Tisha b’Av commemorates the worst day in Jewish history. In 70 CE, the Roman legions besieging Jerusalem smashed through the Jewish defense lines, reached the Temple and set it on fire.
The historian Josephus wrote: “One would have th |
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Hot Rhetoric, Cool Analysis
| Books discussed in this article:
“Why Jews Should Not Be Liberals”-Larry F. Sternberg (Pelican)
“The Baptizing of America”-Rabbi James Rudin (Thunder’s Mouth Press)
“Party Lines”-Thomas E. Mann and Bruce Cain (Bro |
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Abegg Dead Sea Scholar
| Back in the first century BCE, there was no Hebrew Bible. Or not a Tanach as we understand the term.
There were sacred scriptures. But the list of books that were considered scripture varied between different groups of Jews in that pe |
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Local Rabbi Writes Machzor, Study Guide and Talmud Musical
| The souls of young people can soar as they connect with God through worship. That's what leaders in the Reform movement believed when they began the Children's Liturgy Project a decade ago. Young people needed age appropriate texts and illustrations |
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Group Builds Grassroots Black-Jewish Coalition
| Janice Landweber grew up Black and Jewish in the 1960s. The daughter of biracial parents, her family was very active in the civil rights movement. For days at a time, she would stay with movement families because her parents were in jail for marching |
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Drinking Problem? What Drinking Problem?
| It's called denial. A person start taking alcohol or drugs to cope with stresses in their life. And the next thing you know, the alcohol takes over.
"What happens is that you can't get past yourself," explains David Buchholz. An alcoholic and |
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Aliyah
| Among this year's celebrations of the 350th anniversary of Jews in America, one fact has gone largely unnoticed: we are no longer the world's biggest Jewish community.
At some point in late 2003, Israel became home of the world's large |
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The Revival of a Groundbreaking “Pillar of Fire”
| Ballet was taking a pretty radical departure from the classical ballets that came before when the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) debuted Antony Tudor's “Pillar of Fire” in 1942. Set to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, “Pillar of Fire” got 42 curtain ca |
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Covenant Award Winner Featured At Yom Limmud Weekend
| Welcome back to Houston, Jody Hirsh!
Hirsh was the first Jewish Education Director at the JCC, the Eve Ben-Ora of his day. He returns here February 17-19 as Congregation Brith Shalom’s Scholar-in- Residence and one of the featured Yom |
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A Personal Contact With Death - Aaron Looks At Books:
| Rituals transform those who participate. Our ancestors knew this. That’s why they shaped Judaism with rituals and ceremonies.
Analyzing the transforming power of ritual, cultural anthropologists explain that rituals respond to unpredic |
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“Born To Kvetch”-Michael Wex (St. Martin’s Press)
| Jon Fox provides the best definition of a stand-up comic. Someone who has the material to give completely different performances three shows a night.
“Somebody like a great novelist but in the form of a stand-up comedian,” says Fox. “ |
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All the News That’s Fit to Bury - Aaron Looks At Books:
| Before television and the internet, back in the 1940s when people got their news from newspapers, the New York Times was America’s most influential news organ. The paper was Jewish-owned and edited. And although the Times was the closest America had |
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“Running the World”-David Rothkopf (Public Affairs)
| Are the conspiracy theorists correct? Is there a tiny group altering the course of history and shaping the outcome of world economics? Certainly when it comes to US foreign policy, the power of George W. Bush is rather immense these days. It is no lo |
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Two of Our Greatest Writers - Aaron Looks At Books:
| A writer, like an illusionist, charms the audience’s attention away from the sleight of hand with attitude, presentation and chops.
Magic is all sleight of hand. The secret—what separates the great writer from the pack-- is in technique and p |
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Who We Are and What We Are - Aaron Looks At Books:
| Our identity and the measure of our lives have become increasingly problematic in this age of individuality. The “cultivation of individuality” has become an end in itself; so much so that the definition of freedom, for some, has become the ability t |
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Conspiracies Everywhere You Look - Aaron Looks At Books:
| Like a vampire, rising from the depths of a dark, subterranean, superstitious underworld, the Protocols keep surfacing.
One hundred years ago, the first edition of the book that came to be known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was pu |
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Reb Zalman’s Vision of Judaism - Aaron Looks At Books:
| We are theotropic beings. Just as flowers and trees grow towards the sun (heliotropic), we grow towards God. Call it soul, spark of God or whatever. There is a part of us that seeks to awaken to the holy says Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. How we go |
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Three Passover Books - Aaron Looks At Books:
| The Passover Seder at my grandparent’s home was indeed “the Jewish ethnic equivalent of an American Thanksgiving dinner among family and friends” to coin a description by Rabbi Nathan Laufer. I remember matzo and wine on the table. But no blessings, |
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One Of the Greatest Sports Writers - Aaron Looks At Books:
| “I saw strong men weep this afternoon, expressionless umpires swallow hard, and emotions pump the hearts and glaze the eyes of 61,000 baseball fans in Yankee Stadium.”
The great Washington Post sportswriter Shirley Povich wrote that le |
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Paying the War Bill - Aaron Looks At Books:
| The war on terror costs. It costs the money we spend through our government. It costs indirectly through the cuts we make to federal, state and local budgets. And it costs our kids in the future who will have to pay off the debt we are piling up for |
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Biblical Women: A Traditional Read - Aaron Looks At Books:
| Torah scholarship has only recently opened up to women.
During the last three decades, women have gained entry to the rabbinate in the Conservative and Reform movements. As rabbis, teachers, and learners, Jewish women have increasingl |
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The Best Winter Reads - Aaron Looks At Books:
| It’s not yet winter here. But summer has loosened its grip. One can imagine winter’s approach and the pleasure of curling up against the night chill with a good book. With Chanukah approaching, add book titles or a gift certificate to your holiday “w |
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A Secret Society Steps Into the Spotlight
| Death is democratic. It comes to us all. It’s how we face death that distinguishes us.
Since the first century CE, it’s been Jewish tradition that tahara-- the ritual of washing, purifying and dressing the deceased-- is the inclusive r |
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Jewish Humor: Did You Hear the One About…
| There are two traditional ways of looking at the universe: tragedy and comedy.
The ancient Greeks favored tragedy. And we haven’t had a conversation with Plato in years. The Jewish outlook favored comedy. It comes out of our religious |
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2nd Annual Houston Jewish Film Festival, March 16-26
| "Fateless"
In a recent conversation with memoirist Emil Steinberger, he expresses discomfort in the way so many recent Holocaust memoirs seem to paint the same bleak picture. “There was life and there were possibilities,” he arg |
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A Man In Full
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Bebop passed him by.
At age 75, Harry Sheppard's brain contains a store of musical knowledge that spans every style of jazz since the 1950's. But the jazz vibraphonist and member of Houston's Jewish community doesn't think in t |
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Houston's Best Public Garden
| As late as World War I, the boundaries of Houston were confined to downtown and South Main. During the post-war boom of the 1920s, the city expanded into new neighborhoods including the wealthy planned subdivision west of downtown called River Oaks. |
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Writing A Holocaust Memoir
| The rules for writing a memoir are simple. Tell a good story. Don’t tell lies.
Cut to James Frey’s tearful confession on the “Oprah” show that he lied about parts of his memoir. It wasn’t the first time a writer landed in trouble for d |
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Alzheimer's: An Undoing of the Brain
| A couple plans for their retirement years together. Then one day, the wife experiences a moment of total confusion. It’s just a slight lapse of memory the husband thinks. It happens as you get older.
What begins as a few incid |
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The Rav on Passover
| The Rav is, of course, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a giant of modern Orthodoxy in North America. Although he died in 1993, much of his thought remains in hand written form and on tapes. The material is becoming available to us for the first time th |
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A Different Look at Quran and the Jews
| To Google on “Khaleel Mohammed” is to immediately land in controversy.
A Moslem scholar who studied Islamic law in Saudi Arabia and Canada, Dr. Mohammed is a practicing Moslem. He argues that the Quran not only respected the Jewish religion, |
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Stem Cells Become A Political Issue in Texas
| Nina Brown walks the walk. Actually it’s more like a shuffle. She can’t put one foot in front of the other. So she takes baby steps, tentatively putting each foot out because although she knows what her legs need to do, her brain won’t allow it. She |
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Why Is This Night Different? - A Passover Quiz
| The traditional Pesach story begins with four questions. Our Passover quiz contains forty questions. The maggid asks questions in order to arouse curiosity and participation in the Seder. We hope that our Passover quiz will arouse your interest in Pa |
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Covering Passover Fully
| Rabban Gamliel used to say “Whoever does not mention these three things-- Pesach, matzoh and maror (bitter herbs)—on Passover has not fulfilled his obligation (Mishnah Pesachim 10:5)”.
That’s because we find the underlying mean |
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Jandek: On the Fringe of the Fringe
| The music business is about exposure. The industry works to produce optimum sales of concert tickets and millions of units of recorded product. The industry works to produce maximum airplay on radio and television. The industry works to produce money |
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Brother-Sister Team Debut Film at WorldFest
| Boy leaves heartland America to follow his dreams. Goes to Hollywood to become an actor. He’s unable to break into films. Then a twist of fate opens the door in a big way. But the success he gets isn’t what he wants.
That’s th |
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"When Do We Eat": Turning Dysfunction Into Reconciliation
| “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet…and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a curse” (Malachi 3:23-24) reads the prologue to the film “Whe |
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How Are You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Organic Farm?
| On her 50-acre farm outside Fayetteville, about an hour west of Houston, Gayla Lyons is cutting heads of lettuce from the soil with a machete.
You’ve never seen lettuce like this. There are types with loose heads that form beau |
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Brit Millah: Mixed Feelings About An Old Rite
| Elizabeth Wyner Mark is a 70-something, nice Jewish grandmother. She's not the author you'd expect of a critical, scholarly, feminist book on circumcision.
Mark's book "The Covenant of Circumcision" is part of a Brandeis Univer |
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Israel's Economy: A View From Outside
| Economic experts are bullish on Israel.
At its spring meeting, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) classified Israel as one of the 29 developed countries in its World Economic Outlook for the first time. Until now, Israel w |
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A Family and A Community Wait for Yael's Recovery
| It was shortly after her eighth birthday last August when Yael Chen’s mother first noticed her daughter appeared to be having a problem seeing. Watching her daughter play at their home at their small kibbutz near the Gaza border, Nahal Oz, Keren Zilb |
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Helen Howard (Nov. 26, 1925-May 3, 2006)
| I have a black and white photo of my mom taken in 1964. It's winter. She's wearing a fur coat and she's carrying a sign that says "Save Soviet Jewry".
A photograph is about outward appearances.
My mom is in front of the |
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The Call and Response of Kaddish
| Kaddish calls. There’s a death--a family member--and suddenly, you are called to respond, to stand in a minyan (prayer quorum of ten) to recite the Kaddish.
The prayer takes the form of call and response: with a call to enlarg |
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Two On DVD
| "Ushpizin"
Outside of a documentary, making a film in which the major characters are ultra-Orthodox would appear highly problematic. What’s the audience for this film? Obviously, the ultra-Orthodox won’t be buying popcor |
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Moby Goes Ballet
| The melancholy techno music on Moby’s 1999 smash album “Play” seems more appropriate for club moves than the ballet stage. But leave it to Houston Ballet Artistic Director Stanton Welch to visualize the movement inherent in Moby’s music and be capabl |
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Jews As a Measure of Muslim Intolerance
| What is it about Israel that really angers Arabs? Bruce S. Thornton has a theory.
“Israel is the concentrated physical reminder in their neighborhood of everything that’s gone wrong and is dysfunctional in Islamic civilization |
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Celebrating Shavuot
| Some 3314 years ago, the Jewish people stood at Mount Sinai and something happened.
The holiday of Shavuot celebrates that “something” as a covenant (brit) between God and the Jewish people. Although Near Eastern kings of the B |
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Judging Photos - HCP Show June 2-July 16
| What Madeline Yale says, goes.
As one of the two jurors for the Houston Center for Photography’s (HCP) upcoming 24th Annual Juried Membership Exhibition, Yale examined photographs submitted by 134 artists from all over the cou |
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Engaging In Interfaith Dialogue
| In 1412, Pope Benedict XII invited the Jewish citizens of Aragon, Spain, to an “interfaith dialogue”. Those intellectual get-togethers were called disputations. The purpose was to get the Jews to see the error of their ways and convert.
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Messianic Jews: Three Perspectives
| "You mean you don't believe in Jesus"?
Asked of Jews countless times by Christians, this simple question would appear to clearly define the difference between the two religious belief systems.
Christians |
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Two Conflicts: How We Got In, How To Get Out
| “The Secret Way To War”
Mark Danner
(New York Review Books)
When you’re up to your rear end in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original intention was the drain the swamps.
I’m constantl |
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On Torture #1 - Making The Religious Argument Against Torture
| Although the Bush administration insists it doesn’t condone torture, the White House continues to maintain that “enemy combatants” are beyond the jurisdiction of American courts and that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the battle against terro |
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On Torture #2 - Torture's Rationales
| The use of torture is evil and illegal. So why now a book in which some discuss legitimizing torture? What times are these, what kind of world are we living in that we would allow the application of torture by our consent asks poet Ariel Dorfman. |
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On Torture #3 - Letting Torture In the Back Door
| Books discussed in this article:
The Abu Ghraib Investigations
Steven Strasser, editor (Public Affairs)
The Battle Of the Casbah
General Paul Aussaresses
(Enigma)
Truck of Fools
Carlos Liscano |
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A Modest Path to Modesty
| It was one of those mother-daughter moments. Vicki Teller and her daughter, Ariella, then six, were in Target last December. Ariella was looking to spend a gift card she got for Chanukah.
Mom and daughter are in the doll aisle |
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Barry Manilow As Cultural Icon
| Move over Beatles, Santana, Isley Brothers and Rod Stewart. Give the record to Barry Manilow.
The music industry trade magazine Billboard reports that when Manilow’s latest release "The Greatest Songs of the Fifties" (Arista) d |
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The Spiritual Evil Arrayed Against God
| Why is there evil in this world? If God is one and perfectly good, then how do we account for so much evil in this life?
Sophisticated and ordinary minds have thought about this question. Bernard Bamberger, in his book, “Falle |
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We Can Manage Alzhemier's Better Says Houston Researcher
| A number of current drugs are available to slow down and help minimize the effects of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) but they are incredibly underutilized says a leading Houston researcher.
Dr. Rachelle Doody, M.D., Ph.D is the Effi |
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Paul Simon and - In Houston on July 22
| Two decades ago, when Paul Simon came to Johannesburg to record the initial five tracks for his “Graceland” album, bassist Baghiti Kumalo had to sell newspapers on the streets on Soweto in order to supplement his meager living as a musician. Those ar |
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Catching Up With Craig Taubman
| It’s been a busy year for Jewish music composer, recording artist and “Friday Night Live” service creator Craig Taubman. There’s a new Taubman CD. A new Jew Age music CD “The Shabbat Lounge”. And the expansion of the Craig ‘n Co. Jewish music catalo |
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Israeli Nurses Compare Practices In US and Back Home
| The nursing shortage is a world-wide phenomenon. The shortage of registered nurses in the US is likely to worsen in the next decade as young people leave the field to go into other professions which offer more pay and better working conditions. The a |
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Religion and Tolerance Not an Oxymoron Says Scholar
| Thinking about religious tolerance in the Middle East during this time of savage warfare may appear counterintuitive. But if not now, when, asks Adam B. Seligman.
Professor of Religion at Boston University, Seligman is also a B |
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How To Live a Religious Life
| You can take off that red string bracelet with the stones collected from the burial cave of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai, blessed by a Kabbalist Cohen. It’s not going to protect you against the evil eye. That’s not Kabbalah. Nor is it likely to bring you |
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Three Books About Israel
| Daniel Gordis
“Coming Together, Coming Apart”
(Wiley)
Daniel Gordis’ book “Coming Together, Coming Apart” (Wiley) opens with the muffled booms of Palestinian gunfire coming from Beit Jala to his Jerusalem neighbor |
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Counting the Dead In Iraq
| When do we officially know that Iraqis are engaged in a civil war?
The answer can be partially found in the Pentagon report, “Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq,” a 66-page document issued to Congress issued the last week |
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A Bob Wills Appreciation
| “When you cross that old Red River, Hoss, that just don’t mean a thing,” sang Waylon Jennings, “once you’re down in Texas, Bob Wills is still the king.”
Jennings released his self-penned tribute to Wills in 1975 at the height |
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Houston Congregational Teacher Wins National Award
| School’s in. And although the first- and second-graders in Congregation Beth Yeshurun’s day school may not be aware, they are attending classes with an award-winning teacher.
Judy Maislos received one of the 2006 Grinspoon-Ste |
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How the Territories Became Settlements
| “The Accidental Empire”
Gershom Gorenberg
(Times Books/Henry Holt)
As a result of Israeli military victory in the Six-Day War (June 1967), the territories of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai |
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This Is Serious Politics in the Middle East
| Democracy has come to the Middle East.
When Palestinian voters threw out one of the region’s more corrupt authoritarian regimes in a democratic election, they elected Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), one of the most er |
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Preparing For the High Holidays 1 - How To Gear Up
| If Rosh HaShannah is a time of judgment in Judaism, then the month of Elul on the Jewish calendar is a time of conscious preparation leading up to the High Holidays.
“Our tradition understands this time of the year as a period |
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The Opera That Would Not Be Silenced
| Immediately when Hitler came to power, the Nazis began a program to “purify” German music. The campaign began on April 1. 1933, with a day of boycott of Jewish composers. By the next year, a formal ban was instituted against Jewish music, Jewish musi |
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A Guide to the Films at Jewish Book & Arts Festival
| A screener is an advanced copy of a film sent to distributors, critics and other cinema industry types. Film companies send out screeners, particularly of small, less widely distributed films, so that movie critics will write about the films prior to |
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The Origins of Wahhabi Islam and Jihad
| Charles Allen
“God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad”
(DaCapo)
Washington-area Muslims affiliated with Salafi (or Wahhabi) organizations feel beleaguered says a story in the Septe |
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Judaism Without God? Of Course, Say Secular Jews
| When asked about their Jewish identity in an academic survey, only 53% of US Jews identified themselves as Jewish with respect to religion.
According to Jewish demographer Egon Mayer in his 2001 “American Religious Identification Survey”, that |
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Welcome To Post-Modern warfare
| Yoram Peli
“Generals in the Cabinet Room”
(United States Institute of Peace Press)
The war with Hezbollah barely ended before IDF Chief of Staff (CGS) Dan Halutz was at odds with his generals about the conduct of |
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'S Wonderful: A Definative Look At Gershwin
| In a December article, “The 100 Most Influential Americans Of All Time”, the Atlantic Monthly magazine named Aaron Copland and George Gershwin as two of the five most influential musicians. Is it coincidence that University of Houston John and Rebec |
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Satirist Andy Borowitz To Open Jewish Book Fair
| My favorite Andy Borowitz satire comes from “Try These Fun Hoaxes”, a piece he wrote for The New Yorker magazine in May 2005 with the tag “sometimes you have to do a hoax because it’s so damm funny”.
Borowitz writes “Convince the leade |
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The Legacy of Cordoba In Houston
| Houston will not be mistaken for being a great Sephardic Jewish center like Amsterdam or Leghorn were. But located in Houston, at an unimposing Fondren Southwest strip mall, is Congregacion Ess Hayim, a year-old Spanish-Portuguese congregation. Ess H |
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Those Who Support Terror Should Pay Says Israeli Scholar
| Israel bombed the wrong target. Instead of Lebanon, Israel should have bombed Syrian tank defenses positioned near Lebanon's Baaka Valley as soon as the fighting started says a Jerusalem-based scholar.
Syria is instrumental in |
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Houston Artist's Work Now Housed in Vatican
| In May 1944, Alice Lok Cahana arrived at Auschwitz with her family in a cattle car. As she stood among a group of mothers and children, the camp physician Dr. Joseph Mengele came up to her and asked, “Haben sie kinder (Do you have children?)”. Cahana |
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Leading Off This Year's Jewish Book Fair Lineup
| Ruth Andrew Ellenson, editor
“The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt”
(Plume)
Judaism posits an ideal. And since we, as human beings, can never be ideal, we inevitably fall short. Guilt is the internal reprimand |
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It's a Jewtopian World
| Stereotypes are ideas held about members of particular groups, based solely on membership in that group. When those outside the group employ stereotypes, it’s usually with a negative or prejudicial intent. When insiders employ stereotypes, it usually |
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Book Suggestions for Chanukah Gift Giving
| From the literary point of view, it is the worst of times. Total book reading in America is down and literary reading among the 18-34 demographic segment--that is, novels, plays, short stories and poetry—is precipitously declining.
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Scholar Sees Rosy Future for Jews in Germany
| “How could you live in Germany?”
That’s a question Jeffrey Peck frequently hears. As an American Jew currently teaching and living in Germany, Peck answers that post-1945 Germany is a very different country than its predecesso |
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Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: Three Ways to Get There in Prayer
| Jewish prayer is an “I-you” relationship with God. Nothing can be simpler. Nothing can be more difficult.
“If I’m going to talk with God, this kind of talk begins with the basic notion of saying: ‘Hello, I’m here to ask somethi |
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Reappraising Roosevelt and the Holocaust
| Robert N. Rosen
“Saving the Jews”
(Thunder’s Mouth)
Robert N. Rosen wanted his book to create controversy. He succeeded. Fifty-five historians from universities in the US, Canada and Israel signed a letter protest |
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Give Genetic Testing As a Wedding Gift
| Here's a question about wedding etiquette and good taste. Would a request for a present of genetic testing instead of cash or a piece of china be totally tacky?
Given the fact that there are diseases that can be lethal to Jewish kids and for w |
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Darfur: The Genocide That Won't Go Away
| Houstonians marked Human Rights Day with a program on December 10 at the Holocaust Museum Houston calling for the safety and protection of the people of Darfur. The Houston rally, part of a national “Weekend of Prayer for Darfur”, asked attendees to |
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Before You Marry Consider This...
| Love doesn’t conquer all. In fact, love won’t keep you together once the honeymoon is over. So if you’re thinking of getting married, consider something that will lead to a cohesive relationship: a Marriage 101 class.
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Eavesdropping On A Conversation Among Evangelicals
| Tony Campolo
“Letters To a Young Evangelical”
(Basic Books)
The Apostle Paul wrote letters. Many of his letters were incorporated into the Christian Bible. Paul wrote to clarify ideology, to construct a “center of |
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The Two Faces of Klezmer
| The klezmer revival in the late 1970s brought back a genre that was, in essence, an Old World Yiddish folk music. Yes, there was an American klezmer that included a significant number of recordings in the 1920s. But as Jewish migration from Europe ca |
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The Subversive Siddur
| Jeremy Schonfield
“Undercurrents Of Jewish Prayer”
(Littman)
Why don’t we study the Siddur (prayer book) like we study Torah? Shouldn’t our liturgy--our pathway to God--demand intensive study and deep understandin |
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Death Comes From the Sky
| How the German people suffered! From 1940 to 1945, planes of the British Bomber Command and, later, the U.S. Eighth Air Force, bombed Germany. Allied bombs killed an average of 8,100 German civilians each month from 1941 to autumn 1943. Then, with th |
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The Journey and Legacy of German Jews To America
| Prior to the arrival of more than two million Eastern European Jews beginning in the 1880s, the American Jewish community numbered about a quarter million mostly German-speaking people. But those German Jews who came here between 1820-1880 laid down |
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Making the Case For a Jewish Court
| Halakhah (Jewish Rabbinic law) is more than a code to teach religious and moral values. It’s a genuine legal system. And Rabbi Yosef Carmel would like to see a functioning Jewish court in every community.
Carmel is Av Beit Din |
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Klezmatics and Rumshinsky Are Big Winners
| The Klezmatics
“Wonder Wheel”
(Jewish Music Group)
The envelope, please. And the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music album goes to…The Klezmatics!
The contempo |
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Because They Hate, Should We?
| Brigitte Gabriel
“Because They Hate”
(St. Martin’s Press)
Lebanese Christians have fallen. Now matter how the future of Lebanon plays out, Christians will be a numerical minority with reduced power and poss |
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Keeping Kosher #1 - 30 Days and the First Steps
| Give us 30 days and we’ll show you easy it is to keep kosher. That was the challenge thrown out to visitors at The Kosher Extravaganza.
The morning-long event held on February 25 at the Beren Academy, brought together local ko |
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Keeping Kosher #2 - What It Used to Be Like in Houston
| Karen Rosenblatt has been keeping kosher in Houston since 1975. Three decades ago, keeping kosher was much more difficult than it is now, she says.
“We had one kosher meat market, Goodman’s, on Buffalo Speedway near South Main, |
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Israeli Pianist Anat Fort Takes the Intuitive Road
| Speaking about the melodic substance of jazz, pianist John Lewis once said the goal is to find a graceful way to get from one place to another.
When it comes to beauty of form, composition and movement in contemporary jazz, Isr |
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Reconsidering "Fiddler"
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I hated "Fiddler On the Roof" when it was first released in 1971.
I was young and in love with French cinema. French film seemed to embrace the feeling of hostility we had towards the establishment. The New Wave film ma |
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Third Annual Jewish Film Fest
| An Israeli Buddy Film About Two Women Soldiers
One consequence of the Israeli occupation and the continuous Palestinian low intensity conflict is that all Arabs have come to be regarded as potential terrorist bombers. The role |
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Good and Evil In the Holocaust
| Books discussed in this article:
Carmen Callil-Bad Faith (Knopf)
Ben-Zion Gold-The Life of Jews in Poland Before the Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press)
Roberta Kremer-Broken Threads (Palgrave Macmillan)
Morde |
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Ethiopian Jews in Israel: Their Story So Far
| When the Ethiopian Jews first began arriving in Israel about 25 years ago, they came from a variety of villages spread across Northwest Ethiopia. There was little communication between the rural Jewish communities and less ability to travel between |
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Answers To the Heart's and Mind's Eternal Questions
| It’s the first date between the leading characters in Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s new novel “Kabbalah: A Love Story” (Morgan Road Books). Seated in a café, astronomer Dr. Isabel Benveniste asks Rabbi Kalman Stern, “Why did you become a rabbi?”
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Baseball's Important Numbers
| “Opinions don’t get you closer to the truth”, says Jonah Keri in the preface to “Baseball Between the Numbers”.
Everyone’s got opinions. This being the start of the 2007 baseball season, sports radio station hosts, |
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Painter Blends Biblical Figures and Jewish Folktales
| Think of Dan RiiS Grife’s “Tanakh” paintings as the stuff of legends. Within each of his acrylic on copper panels is Bible stories, myths, Midrashim and folktales. It’s a place where spiritual imagination meets Jewish storytelling.
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Israeli Folk Dance: More Than the Hora
| The definition of “folk dance”, according to Wikipedia, is dance developed spontaneously without a choreographer, originating in the 19th century or earlier, not currently copyrighted, dominated by an inherited tradition rather than by innovation and |
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Jews In the South
| Books discussed in this article:
Rabbi Henry Cohen II
“Kindler of Souls”
(University of Texas Press)
Eli N. Evans
“The Provincials”
(University of North Carolina Press)
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9/11
| The 9/11 terrorist attack was an epoch defining event. Not only was there an attack on American soil but the events entered into the narratives of our lives because we shared them live and replayed on television.
A year later, we are t |
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On the Matisyahu Phenomenon
| Matisyahu
Youth
(Epic)
No Jewish music artist has ever peaked on Billboard’s Top Ten prior to Matisyahu in March 2006. But then, the young Hassidic roots reggae rapper is the most unlikely pop star in or outside J |
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First Love In the Islamic Republic - Aaron At the Movies:
| Most of director Abolfazl Jalili’s films are prohibited from being screened in Iran. Not surprising, if the autobiographical “Abjad” represents his feature works.
Set in the religious city of Isfahan on the eve of the Islamic revolutio |
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Three Questions Christians Ask
| San Antonio’s Temple Beth-El Rabbi Emeritus Samuel M. Stahl addresses many audiences in churches and Christian colleges. There are always three questions his non-Jewish audiences ask. Why don’t Jews believe in an afterlife? Why don’t Jews believe in |
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Steve Tyrell Here March 17-19
| I had a bone to pick with Steve Tyrell.
Yes, the gravelly-voiced Houston native, master of the great American songbook on CDs like “A New Standard” and “Standard Time” and producer/engineer of volumes two and three of Rod St |
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Shalom Comrade
| Various Artists
Shalom Comrade: Yiddish Music in the Soviet Union 1928-1961
(Wergo)
Despite an emigration rate of some two million, in 1917 more Jews lived in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the wor |
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Israel's Economy: A View From Inside
| Among all of Israel’s positive economic growth indicators, one huge deficeit stands out. The country’s economic disparity keeps getting larger.
As measured by economic inequality, poverty rates and other indicators, the gap bet |
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Singing Past Idi Amin
| Before modern times, religion governed the details of daily behavior in all aspects of Jewish life. Religion was grounded in the awe of HaShem. Just as the ancient Israelites lived by an absolute faith in the Lord, so, too, did generations of Jews. |
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Recent Fiction
| “The Attack”
Yasmina Khadra
(Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
Israeli Arab Dr. Amin Jaafari has completed eight grueling hours in the Ichalov operating room, repairing the victims of a Tel Aviv suicide bomber. Sho |
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Peter Himmelman: Creating In An Imperfect World
| On stage at a typical rock concert, the band re-creates their hits and album favorites, note for note. Then, there’s a Peter Himmelman concert where you never know what will happen.
Himmelman pauses after a song to ask the audi |
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How A Curator Presents Modern Art
| Museum curator. The word "curator" comes from the Latin "curate" which means to be responsible for the soul of others.
Another root for curator is "to care for," as in caring for a work of art by providing a good home for it. |
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Understanding and Resisting the Lure of The Dark Side
| This was the experiment: in a mock prison constructed in the Stanford Psychology Building, 24 college undergrads were recruited to participate in a two-week “prison simulation”. By coin toss, the participants were divided in two teams, prisoners and |
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A Tribute to TUTS Frank Young
| The New York Times once called "Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS) founder and CEO Frank Young “the David Merrick of the provinces". That’s a compliment to Young and a put down of Houston. But on September 15 1968, when Young produced, directed and condu |
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Seeing A Bedouin Village Through Photographs
| Kim Frumin arrived in the Bedouin village of Abu Kaf with a Fulbright scholarship and a plan: take 10 kids who had never used a camera in their lives and turn them into photographers.
The results can be viewed in the photograph |
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If Life Is a Test, Are We Passing?
| Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis
“Life Is A Test”
(Shaar Press)
During this year’s Seder, a friend opened lively discussion when she voiced her objection to the text of the Kadesh prayer. “God who has chosen us from all |
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A Smokey Room and the Soft Sounds of Yiddish
| In Theresa Tova’s hands, Yiddish songs aren’t about maidens rocking their child’s cradle in a corner of the Temple while pure white goats stand nearby. When Tova sings “The Saxophone Player”, she purrs, “I heard your notes from out of the deep/they c |
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A Casualty of Terrorism
| In many countries throughout the Middle East, Asia and Africa, people can be thrown in prison for years without a trial or without being charged with a crime. That’s not the case in this country because of the writ of habeas corpus. The sole functio |
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Stay All Night and Just A Little Longer
| For Passover, it’s matzoh. Hanukah has candles. But the holiday of Shavuot is unique in that it has no specific mitzvah associated with it.
That’s why it’s called “the humble holiday” says TORCH Rabbi Yossi Grossman |
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On Hamas: Scholar Expects Short Fatah-Hamas Truce
| They continue declaring cease-fires. But fighting continues into the second week between Hamas and Fatah in the Gaza Strip.
Even if a cease-fire holds, it will be temporary, says Director of the Stein Program on Terrorism Matth |
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Summer Reading For Minds Not On Vacation
| Books are dangerous. Books can change your mind. They can challenge your prejudices and your perceptions. To be a people of the book means inhaling a writer’s consciousness and experience. It means being in dialogue with the text.
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The British Unions' Boycott of Israel
| The May 30 British University and College Union (UCU) vote for a boycott of Israel’s academic institutions is not winning many friends worldwide. The British union called for a freeze on all EU funding of Israeli academic institutions and for coopera |
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"A Mighty Heart": A Daniel Pearl Story
| Daniel Pearl’s death was one of those moments of clarity.
Recorded on a three minute, 36 second video, titled “The Slaughter of the Spy Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl”, the visual opens with Daniel, naked from the waist up. |
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Young and Ready to Go to Work or War
| Daniel Brook
“The Trap”
Times Books
Selling out. In the 1960s, that meant taking any job with regular hours and a steady paycheck. In the 1980s, it meant taking a job for big bucks. Today it means taking a job wit |
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Including Everybody In the Family Conversation
| Progressive Zionist. Simply a term for a Jewish traitor says the Right. An oxymoron says the Left, since Israel is an apartheid state engaged in ethnic cleansing and therefore indefensible from a progressive perspective.
At th |
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Charges of Deicide
| Jeremy Cohen
“Christ Killers”
(Oxford)
Who killed Jesus? Historically, we don’t have any hard evidence as to who did it and why his execution occurred. Facts don’t matter. Within 40 years of his death, Jews got th |
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Zionism and Its Discontents
| There’s little new about anti-Zionism. As far back as 1956, the anti-Zionist British historian Arnold Toynbee attacked Israel as “the vile example of that hyper-nationalist obduracy which stands in the way of world culture”. In 1975, the United Natio |
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Tisha B'Av: Out of Destruction, A New Beginning
| Judaism was finished. Roman legions smashed into the Holy Temple on the ninth day of the month of Av (Tisha B’Av) in 70 CE. Romans burned the Temple to the ground. In the Jewish war for independence, more than a million Jews died (out of a total popu |
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New Jewish Museum Rises in San Francisco
| With two exceptions, Jewish museums in the United States are either Holocaust or heritage. The Council of American Jewish Museums lists 75 institutional members—nearly all monuments to Jewish history or Holocaust themed. In contrast, a $47-million mu |
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Aiming At the Infidels
| Lee Harris
“The Suicide Of Reason”
(Basic Books)
That inevitable crisis. A protagonist is forced to make an immediate decision and take action. It’s the turning point in any novel or script.
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Reconstructionist Havurah Stresses Renewal and Evolution
| Modern life shattered the authority of the otherworldly Jewish tradition, wrote Mordecai Kaplan. In order to strengthen the communal will to live and deal with the radically different conditions of world Jewry, a reconstruction of Judaism as a religi |
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Houstonian Fulfills Dream to Become Pulpit Rabbi
| On August 1, 2004, Houstonian Debbie Israel Dubin sat in Ben Gurion Airport awaiting a call. Although it was her birthday, Dubin wasn’t expecting a call on her cell phone. The call she contemplated spoke to a much deeper need in her life.
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Sidney Berger: From Yiddish Theater to Shakespeare
| “The play’s the thing,” said Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Few people in Houston understand that more than Sidney Berger.
Director of University of Houston’s School of Theater and Dance since 1969 and co-founder of the Houston Shakesp |
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Doctors and Patients Examine Each Other
| My father fell in his garage. Fortunately it happened about 3 in the afternoon on a Saturday and the garage door was up. A neighbor noticed him on the floor and phoned me.
I ran over to his house, just down the stre |
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A New Pluralist Poland Attracts Immigration
| When the Solidarity movement defeated the Communists in Poland’s first pluralistic elections in August 1989, institutions of civil society replaced the structure of the Communist state. Since then, major changes occurred in Poland’s economics and the |
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Encountering Jewish Music That's Been Written Off
| If you want to know about the world of modern American Jewish music, of course there are the 50 music CDs released by the Milken Archive. But do Milken’s Jewish tone poems and jazz psalms truly represent American culture “in all its diversity”? |
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"Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Jewish Connection
| Of course, the 3.2 million-year-old fossil of Lucy is the star of the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) exhibition “Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia”, which opens on Aug. 31. But in addition to Lucy, the exhibit features more th |
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Michael Chabon To Read in Houston
| “These are strange times to be a Jew,” says the Zamenhof Hotel manager, opening Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” (Harper Collins). Reversion approaches. The Federal District of Sitka, home to more than two million Jews since the Holoc |
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How Do We Know What the Bible Says?
| There’s more than one way to read the Hebrew Bible. You could read it literally. Very Lutheran, but what happens when the text conflicts with our modern sense? You could read it in the light of modern biblical scholarship: what the Bible meant in its |
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Felix Mendelssohn: The Price of Assimilation
| Studies of Felix Mendelssohn the Man are as numerous as studies of Mendelssohn the Composer/Conductor. As a conductor, Mendelssohn was among the first? to adopt the baton and to develop systematic orchestral rehearsal techniques. He was responsible f |
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The Transformation of Iran
| It’s a rough time to be an Iran-lover. We’re far from the heady days of 1997 and Mohammad Khatami’s election to Iran’s presidency—a time when dialogue with the West, political reform in Iran and even reconciliation with the United States s |
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The Jewish Relationship To Power
| “The loss of Jewish sovereignty was the defining political event in the life of the Jewish people,” writes Ruth Wisse in the opening of her new book “Jews and Power”. More than the Holocaust, more than any other event, the Roman leveling of Jerusalem |
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Jewish CDs - Dancing On the Temple Floor
| Lawrence Dermer
Third House Rising
(Musical Messages Inc.)
Get them dancing. The message will follow, as Lawrence Dermer exhorts on his CD of Jewish songs “Third House Rising”. Dancing as we climb.
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How We Got Here in Oratorio Form
| In traditional opera, an oratorio is the telling of a story in a speech-like musical setting. Although we tend to associate religious themes with oratorios, Houston writer and librettist Leah Lax wants audiences to re-think of her oratorio “The Refug |
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Spy Novelist Daniel Silva Opens Book Fair
| Russians made good villains. Arabs make even better ones.
In the world of the spy novel, the classic Russian bad guy was a ruthless Soviet espionage agent motivated by Cold War ideology. Daniel Silva creates the classic Arab v |
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What? Nobody Wants A Byline?
| These days, everyone claims to be an author. From speechwriters to the guy who created the “axis of evil” slogan, from artistic works to images, trade names and slogans--it’s all intellectual property. In contrast, there are no authors in rabbinic li |
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Hatred and the Human Condition
| The first week of September, 2004, was a week when the cultures of hatred seemed to explode in violence.
On Tuesday, Palestinian suicide bombers affiliated with Hamas blew up two busses in Beersheba killing 16 people and injuring more than 100 |
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Can The Rifts In Pakistan Be Healed?
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Since the late 1970s, prolonged ethnic and religious inter-communal violence has dominated Pakistan. For example, there’s increasing Shia-Sunni strife, rising confrontations in Baluchistan and the Northwest frontier, the presence of as many a |
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US Diplomacy In Trouble
| A rare window opened into contemporary US diplomacy with media coverage of a recent US State Department public meeting. At an October 31 town hall meeting, diplomats publicly criticized fundamental aspects of American policies in Iraq. US Foreign Ser |
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New Siddur Isn’t Taking Houston Reform Community By Storm
| From its beginning in 1985, the goal in creating a new Reform siddur (prayer book) was the idea that Reform Jews hold diverse beliefs. Thus, any new Reform siddur would have to respond to the movement’s diversity and invite full participation without |
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Who Misses the Words In These Songs?
| Take 26 passionate songs written by Spanish and Argentinean composers. Put Kim Kashkashian and Robert Levin to work transcribing them for viola and piano. Polish the transcriptions until each song’s inherent shape and fluorescence are flawless. Recor |
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Just Like Us, Only Less So
| Jared Cohen
“Children Of Jihad”
(Gotham Books)
The premise: a 25-year-old Jewish Rhodes Scholar journeys to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran to interview young Arabs. He discovers the under-30 Arab youth culture is f |
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What A Newspaper Can Do Best
| There are some stories that can best be told through long form journalism.
In the summer of 2005, three Washington Post staff reporters began discussing the impending tenth anniversary of the Million Man March. What had become |
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I'm OK--You're Not
| I’m an authentic Jew. You are not. My practices are really Jewish. Yours are not.
Jewish identity often comes down to this basic contest, especially when one looks at American Jews. In the largest and most powerful Diaspora com |
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Back In the USSR
| Historian Orlando Figes’ “The Whisperers” (Metropolitan Books) is about private life in Stalin’s Russia. There was no private life in Stalin’s Russia.
Prior to the 1917 Revolution, Communists saw the creation of a new type of |
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Writer Talks About "Bleeding Kansas" and The Red Heifer
| Crime fans know Sara Paretsky as author of the V.I. Warshawski detective series. When a writer is linked to a successful franchise, especially mysteries, there’s always risk when she delivers a completely different book.
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A Historian Examines The George H.W. Bush Legacy
| A year after his election to the US Congress in 1966 as the first Republican to represent Houston, George H.W. Bush voted to cut NASA’s appropriations. Given the fact that some 300,000 voters were connected to the Johnson Space Center and local aeros |
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Screenwriter Works His Way Back To Jersey
| There’s an old saw in the theater that goes “Write Yiddish, cast British”. In co-writing the script of “Jersey Boys”, Marshall Brickman wrote Yiddish and cast Italian.
“Jersey Boys” is, of course, the 2006 Tony Award-winning m |
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It's Still the Economy
| “Untethered market forces lead to bad things. You simply can’t run an economy as complicated as ours on ideology alone,” warned the Economic Policy Institute’s Jared Bernstein recently. Yet for the past eight years, the US economy has been directed b |
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Politics On Top of the Holy Mount
| The meeting place of heaven and earth is 37.5 acres or about 33 football fields in area. Located atop Mount Moriah-- not really a single mountain but is a series of ridges--is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
“The Temple Mount is the gr |
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Tu B’Shevat: How Perspectives On the Holiday Have Changed
| The holiday of Tu B’Shevat is like the ugly duckling that grew into a swan. Never mentioned in Tanach, Tu B'Shevat (the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shevat) was once simply the yearly date for reckoning the age of trees. In modern times, the holid |
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Knot To Worry: The ABC's of Tallit Cleaning
| Mr. Goldberg needs his tallit (prayer shawl) cleaned. So he sends it to the neighborhood dry cleaner, which happens to be owned by a Chinese family. They tell him to come back in three days. When he returns, they give him the bill, which comes to $50 |
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Jewish High Concept Books
| Originating in Hollywood, the term “high concept” refers to a concise film idea that can easily be understood by all. For example: “It’s doomsday. A giant asteroid is about to crash into the planet Earth.” The film, of course, is “Armageddon”. |
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Women's Torah Commentary Marks A Historic First
| Torah has never been strictly limited to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Torah also includes the interpretations—in particular, the classical rabbinic texts-- that grew up around Torah. Both written Torah and oral Torah (which encompasses u |
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Diaspora In Berkeley
| Imagine the period when Jews were restricted to living in cramped, dilapidated walled quarters, European ghettos or North African mellahs. Artistic, intellectual and social influences of the larger non-Jewish world were strictly controlled. Then imag |
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Will The Poor Always Be With Us?
| Ninety-four percent of the world’s income goes to 40% of the world’s population. The other 60% of our human family lives on 6 percent. The bottom billion people are falling apart. They live in dirt poor nations on one dollar a day or less, trapped in |
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- Part 1: Jewish Theology Can Guide Our Thinking Says Scholar
| Ancient societies often demonstrated a distinct response to people with a disability: murder. In Greece and Rome, for example, infanticide was the widely accepted response to a child born with physical disabilities. Even Plato and Aristotle agreed th |
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- Part 2: Parents Speak
| When you are the parent of a child with disabilities, there’s never a time when you are able to sit back and think, “This will be okay.” Everything can be a challenge--including being Jewish.
In theory, the Jewish community sh |
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- Part 4: Lessons In How To Turn Visions Into Reality
| Colleen Horton began as an advocate for her daughter who has autism. She simply wanted to make sure her daughter got a quality education. The more Horton engaged her local school district, the more she realized that almost all kids with special needs |
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- Part 5: Film Asks: How Inclusive Is Our Prayer?
| Prayer is not simply speaking to The Master of the World. It’s also expecting a response.
In director Ilana Trachtman’s feature documentary “Praying With Lior”, we meet Lior Liebling, a 12-year-old Jewish boy whose developmenta |
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Forget The middle East Peace Process
| Daniel C. Kurtzer and Scott B. Lasensky
“Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East”
(United States Institute of Peace)
In 1991, the U.S. Institute of Peace published “Making Peace Amon |
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Part 6 A Houston Report Card
| To quote the Chasidic master Yehudi HaKadosh: “Good intentions alone, not accompanied by action, are without value. The main thing is the action, as this is what makes the intention so profound.” The needs of Jews with disabilities and their families |
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Resuming the 20th Century Musical Conversation
| Robin Hood saved his life.
Austrian Jewish composer Erich Korngold didn’t share the fate of other European Jews “by dumb luck” as he used to say.
As Houston Community College at Northwest College Fine Ar |
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Houstonian Brings The Cards
| Ross Dinerstein delivered the picture. His film, “The Grand”, opens in Houston and nine other cities on April 4. But don’t look for Dinerstein on screen or behind the camera. The Houston native is a film producer.
The term “ |
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Orthodox Urged to Broaden the Conversation
| The 2007 American Jewish Committee (AJC) Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion released early in March made official what many in the community informally have observed: the differences between the Orthodox and non-Orthodox are widening. &nbs |
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Houston Mayor Impressed By Ancient and Modern in Israel
| Now that Houston Mayor Bill White has been to Israel, he chides his Jewish friends who say they’ve been meaning to go but just haven’t made the trip. The mayor visited the Jewish state for the first time March 15-20 as part of a fact-finding mission |
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Race, Wright and Passover
| The Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy won’t go away. Too many people have a vested interest in connecting Senator Barack Obama to intemperate comments made by his former pastor.
In Sen. Obama’s March 18 speech on race, the pres |
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- Preparing For the Seder
| One of the most important things an actor does to prepare for a part is script analysis. A script can be a powerful and limitless resource for creativity, passion and transformation. But those qualities are difficult to bring about without first anal |
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An Eye For An Eye?
| Some 135 nations worldwide have outlawed the death penalty. The United States holds sixth place in the number of annual state executions, behind China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan.
The death penalty is just plain wro |
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What Were the Temple Scribes Writing?
| Karel Van Der Toorn
“Scribal Culture”
(Harvard University Press)
Pre-Talmudic Judaism was an oral culture. The majority of “The People of the Book” were non-literate. Reading and writing was restricted to a profes |
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Carole King and Her Hebrew Daughters
| Prior to the release of Carole King’s “Tapestry” in March 1971, the musical genre “singer/songwriter” did not exist. True, there were a few women in rock: the “girl groups”--the Shirelles, Chiffons, Ronettes, Crystals and Supremes; and course, Aretha |
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Who Is the Real Islamic Enemy?
| Olivier Roy
“The Politics of Chaos In the Middle East”
(Columbia)
When it comes to Middle Eastern politics, academic and consultant to the French Foreign Ministry Olivier Roy might be described as a political real |
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Taking Steps At Meyerland Minyan to Deepen the Service
| Historically, most new synagogues are born as a result of demographic changes in a community. Sometimes a new congregation forms because of a faction split. Members of the Meyerland Minyan started their shul in 2001 because they wanted to walk to ser |
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Make Us Holy As G-d Is Holy
| “Turn it and turn it again for everything is in it.” That’s what the rabbis in the first century said about Torah. Rabbi Seymour Rossel uses the same phrase to open his new book “The Torah Portion-by-Portion” (Torah Aura).
We |
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Considering Israel's Second War in Lebanon
| Ha'Artez journalists Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff's book “34 Days” (Palgrave Macmillan) isn't the first word on Israel's Second Lebanese War. Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Max Boot arrived at many of the same conclusions in a 09/04/06 |
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Open the Text, Turn to Page 20 and Read the Word Balloon
| Here’s a Siddur. And there’s a comic book. Two unrelated objects until Howard Salmon connected them and created “The Comic Book Siddur”.
A complete prayer book for a Reform Saturday Shabbat service in graphic novel form, “The Comic Boo |
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Take Me Out to the Ballgame--On Line, That Is
| Statistics evaluate performance. Statistics like batting average have been central to evaluating baseball performance since the game’s invention. Then came computers. They generated new, more powerful ways to crunch numbers and produce statistics. Th |
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The Relationship Between Religion and Violence
| Why must you blot me out in order to tell your religious story? As a Jew, I think it’s fair to ask this question to certain Christians and Muslims. Actually, it’s the central question. Why must Jews convert or die so you can tell your Jesu |
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She's The Queen Of All Things Gross and Slimy
| Sylvia Branzei had an epiphany while cutting her toenails. She began thinking about the gunk underneath her nails. Ewwww! Gross!! Just the sort of gross stuff the kids in her middle school science class loved. Branzei thought: why not teach science t |
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The Arab Center and Its Enemies
| There’s a bulls eye painted on Marwan Muasher’s back. Muasher is the former Jordanian Foreign Minister and the first ambassador to Israel. He’s a moderate Arab politician.
In his book, “The Arab Center”, he lays out the case f |
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In the Court of the Tudor King
| More was going on in the realm of King Henry VIII than serial marriages. Music was apparently an important part of the Tudor court. And of all the Tudor kings, Henry VIII was the most musical. He composed music and wanted only the best professional m |
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Wild Horses Are Still Being Dragged Away
| The first cowboy in the New World was a Jew. If we look at historical evidence instead of Hollywood mythology, we learn that a century before the Pilgrims landed, Sebastian de Mendoza was the first man to appear in Conquista records as a vaquero or c |
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Aging As An Ascent
| Probably the greatest of all-time Houston films is “Urban Cowboy”. Shot locally, starring Debra Winger and John Travolta, “Urban Cowboy” captured a particular era and slice of white, Houston working-class life. Who originally knew that Sis |
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The Situation Now and Back Then
| Iran threatens to wipe Israel off the map as it continues its nuclear program. Hezbollah poises an eyelash away from taking over Lebanon. Hamas lobs rockets ceaselessly into Israel. In Europe, passivity and a concern for trade and stability means eve |
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Building A Print, Layer By Layer
| Making a print is usually simple. The artist transfers an image from a matrix onto a transferring base and makes a limited number of multiple originals. Print maker Orna Feinstein creates one-of-a-kind prints. That’s because Feinstein works in a proc |
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In The Battle of Ideas Against Islamic Radicalism
| Let’s say that, at its core, you have a sacred text that is tribal and exalts its tribe to convert others. And let’s say this sacred text is understood in none but a literal sense as the will of God. And further, let’s say the believers in this sacre |
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Making the Case for Obama In the Jewish Community
| Disaster for the US in the Middle East. The last eight years have left the US and Israel in far more danger they were in 2008. So why would Jews consider voting for someone who represents a continuation of those policies?
That’ |
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Making the Case for McCain In the Jewish Community
| Israel’s security. It’s not the only reason why the Jews should vote for John McCain. But there’s a widespread sense that Israel faces an existential threat to its existence. So support of Israeli trumps whatever comes in second place.
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The Downwardly Mobile Generation
| No health care. Maxxed out plastic. Huge student loans. Rental apartment. Nothing to call your own. Welcome young’uns to the new middle class.
A generation ago, middle class status meant you could expect to own a home, take a v |
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It's Better Than An Israeli Jukebox And It's Now In Houston
| It’s been 17 years since Houston had a Jewish music radio program. The long drought will be over on Sunday, July 6 when “The Jewish Show of Houston” premiers at 4 PM on KNTH, 1070 AM. Shawn Daniel (aka DJ Shahar) will be playing music from Israel as |
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The Wedge of Untruth
| One of the basic tenants of American journalism is the principle of objectivity: the idea of letting the opposites clash and watching as the stronger portions of each emerges. It’s the “We report, you decide” paradigm. But what happens to |
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Mid-East Democracy A Non-Starter Says Scholar
| It’s been six years since America launched the project to bring political reform to the Middle East. As of today in the Arab world, no progress towards democracy is evident. That’s the conclusion of a book-length report card issued by the Carnegie En |
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Where You're The Exhibit
| I’ve seen the museum of the future. It’s right here in Houston.
Although The Health Museum is a work in progress, with the opening of “You: The Exhibit” last month, the museum demonstrates that the future will be about the production o |
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Loving Death More Than Life
| Martin Amis
The Second Plane
(Knopf)
“Racist” and “Tory hater” are two of the milder invectives tossed at British novelist Martin Amis for his articles on Islam. Critics, particularly those on the left, fa |
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The Fast of Tammuz
| Sunday marks the Fast of Tammuz. No food or drink after dawn. No music, haircuts or pleasure trips either.
“The 17th day of the month of Tammuz on the Jewish calendar (which falls on July 20 this year) is one of four fasts that |
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Clarifying Torture As a Moral issue
| No torture is the official U.S. policy. Yet we know Americans practiced torture in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. We also know that on December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first gave blanket approval for numerous interrogatio |
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Fontainebleau in Imagination, Art and Reality
| Sunday in the forest of Fontainebleau. Located just 35 miles southeast of Paris, Fontainebleau became the world’s first nature preserve in 1861 (11 years before Yellowstone, the world’s second preserve, was created). Because of its proximity to Paris |
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A Legal System That Doesn't Promise Certainty
| Elliot Dorff
For The Love of God and People
(Jewish Publication Society)
Why guide one’s life by Halakhah or Jewish law? Fear of punishment and hope for reward are motivators to obey many legal systems. The fear o |
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A Yiddish Masterpiece Appears in Translation
| Der Nister
“The Family Mashber”
(New York Review Books)
Once upon a time, at least before the birth of Literary Theory, novelists understood their work in an almost messianic light. That is to say they saw themsel |
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A Realist Takes On Utopian Politics
| John Gray
Black Mass
(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux)
Does history have an underlying plot? Nonsense, says John Gray.
“Seeing one’s life as an episode in a universal narrative is a fanta |
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Jewish Factionalism: Nothing New Under the Sun
| One of the traditional lessons of Tisha B’Av is that the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE because of sinat chinam (baseless hatred) and factionalism. However, factions don’t come into existence spontaneously said Rabbi Dov Nimchinsky, |
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When the News Media Obstructs the Path to Peace
| War correspondents win prizes. Peace correspondents don’t.
Understand this simple reality and you understand the inherent contradiction between the needs of news and the need of peace process says Gadi Wolfsfeld. News depends on confli |
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Post Modern Jewish Music
| English sociologist Anthony Giddens described “late modernity” or the “post-modern era” as a cultural phenomenon in which cultural systems are uncoupled, lifted out of local contexts and made accessible for use by people in other places, other times |
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Ary Stillman: An Artists Life of Choosing the Less Secure Path
| History is harsh to painters. In certain periods of art history, a few celebrity painters get the notoriety either because their art is appealing or their lives are intriguing. Consider the abstract expressionists, for example. The names Jackson Poll |
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Joshua Nelson: Jewish Music With Lots of Soul
| To hear Joshua Nelson tell it, kosher gospel started with Mahalia Jackson.
“It wouldn’t have been unheard of for Jews to have her recordings because she crossed over and opened herself to a wider audience,” says Nelson. “She |
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Books In Brief
| Jonathan Sarna
A Time To Every Purpose
(Basic Books)
The more one experiences Judaism, the more one appreciates what Judaism is. Thus Judaism is a way of life, of breathing, of making time and space sacred.
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Deepening the Prayer Experience by Deepening the Prayerbook
| Long ago, the rabbis recognized the need to institute regular prayer service. Without a set time for routine prayer, most people would not do it. But as with anything that is done routinely, the human tendency is to make prayer a habit, something don |
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"Sixty Six": A Generation Ago, A Jewish Boy Becomes A Man
| It’s 1966 in England. For 12-year-old Bernie Rubens (Gregg Sulkin), the last kid to be picked for team sports, his upcoming bar mitzvah promises to make him the center of attention for the first time in his life. Bernie envisions “The Gone With the W |
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Figuring Out the Endgame In Iraq
| Linda Robinson
Tell Me How This Ends
(Public Affairs)
“When you’re up to your rear end in alligators” goes the folk wit, “it’s hard to remember that your initial goal was to drain the swamp.” Iraq is alligators all around |
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Galveston Jewish Community Remains Scattered
| The Galveston Jewish community of about 350 is alive and scattered across Texas. Temple B’nai Israel Rabbi Jimmy Kessler, currently staying in Austin, says he’s heard from many Galvestonians, “half by e-mail and half by cell phone” since Hurricane Ik |
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In Their Youth, Dr. Seuss' Characters Went to War
| Horton hated Hitler.
Twelve years before the kind-hearted elephant became famous by exclaiming, “a person is a person no matter how small” in the Dr. Seuss children’s book “Horton Hears A Who”, the cartoon character made his appearanc |
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Galveston's Beth Jacob Weighs Future After Hurricane
| Along with tens of thousands of Galveston evacuees, members of Congregation Beth Jacob are preparing to return to the island city this week. A definitive assessment of the amount of damage to the synagogue will be made.
The good news |
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A Delivery of Prepared Kosher Meals Lightens Post-Ike Houston
| No electricity. No ice. No kosher food. Considering Houston’s reality three days after Hurricane Ike and three days before Shabbat, it appeared as if the upcoming Sabbath on September 19 would be something less than “a vision of the world in its perf |
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It's Fun to Read About Politics
| Royce Flippin, Editor
“Best American Political Writing 2008”
(Public Affairs)
Politics is about power: who has it, who wants it and what one does with it. But the reason it’s fun to read about politics is because |
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Jews and Comic Books, Oy What A Match!
| Comic books were the basement floor in the Hall of Low Culture. But in the late 1930s and early 40s, the comic book industry was easy to get into. Centered in New York City, many of the comic book publishers were Jewish-owned. Although the newspaper, |
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Take A Listen to These New Jewish CDs
| Veretski Pass
Trafik
(Golden Horn)
Look at a map of the old Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia between 1835-1917. Veretski Pass is the trans-Carpathian artery that linked the communities of the Ukraine, Carpathia |
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When Leaders Do Wrong Things
| From the National Potato Council to the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association—everyone wants to have the right leader in place, “the one who can identify the winning path and lead the organization along that path”. Americans have widely come to b |
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A Burial But Not An Obituary
| On a sunny October 19 morning, some 300 people gathered at Beth Yeshurun Post Oak Cemetery to bury a book. The burial, accompanied by a funeral service, was to honor a Sefer Torah from Poland. The Torah scroll, estimated to be 100 years ol |
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Asking Questions About the Meaning of the Holocaust
| A short time ago, I received my Chabad Jewish Art Calendar for 5769. Last year, I sought to find the date that Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) fell on. So I consulted my Chabad calendar. But for some reason, I couldn’t find it on any day in t |
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Best of the Jewish Book Fair Line Up
| Alan Zweibel
Clothing Optional
(Villard)
Writing television comedy is serious business. Alan Zweibel broke into the Comedy A-list by writing sketch comedy for Saturday Night Live. But he’s also succeeded in writin |
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Fiction Allows Us To Identify Ourselves Says Scholar
| Though separated by 16 centuries, both the Talmud and Jewish American literature share a similar aim and scope: that of moral design and purpose. Both attempt to improve humanity by allowing the reader to temporarily see the world through |
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Scholar Takes A New Look at Israel's Greatest Poet
| What a delight for a literary scholar to discover a years worth of a great poet’s personal letters--correspondence that nobody knew existed. Better still, what if these letters provided a vital insight into the poet’s early biography?
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How Obama Won 78% Of the Jewish Vote
| Neither Republican appeals to reason or to fear appears to have swayed Jewish voters in the November 4 election. President-elect Barack Obama received 78% of the Jewish vote according to two polls, bettering the 74% of the Jewish vote that John Kerry |
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A Plan to Prevent Future Mass Atrocities
| Call it genocide. Call it ethnic cleansing. The phenomenon is as old as the Assyrian empire: the intent to kill or dispose of an out-group and empty the land of its people and their goods.
Some scholars argue that modern mass atrociti |
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Diaries of Destruction
| By the winter of 1940, the majority of European Jewry was living in ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Nazis began launching the second phase of their war against the Jews.
“There came a point at which many of the Jews in the ghettos |
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Burying the Holocaust By Constructing A Family Mythology
| Madeleine Albright claimed she didn’t know she was Jewish for 59 years. Albright’s father, who served in the Czech diplomatic service, and her mother converted to the Roman Catholic religion. Their motives: a mixture of patriotism, ambition and fear. |
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Conserving A Unique Scroll
| Five megillot (scrolls) are traditionally read in synagogues throughout the year. Who knows six? Seth Irwin does.
Irwin is about to complete the Masters Program in Art Conservation at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It’s the |
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Tom Cruise As The Good German
| From the getgo, Tom Cruise knows what to do. More accurately, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the character Cruise plays in the film “Valkyrie” knows what to do. “We can serve Germany or the fuehrer,” muses von Stauffenberg. “To serve Germany, I must |
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Thinking In Hebrew
| Ilan Stavans
“Resurrecting Hebrew”
(Schocken)
“Losing one’s Hebrew might be a synonym for losing one’s soul,” says a friend of author Ilan Stavans in his new book, “Resurrecting Hebrew”.
Stavans is the per |
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Is A Fear of Heaven Possible In Our Day?
| I’ve belonged to my Conservative shul for 20 years and I do not remember yirat shamayim ever being a topic of discussion. Yirat shamayim is the fear or awe of G-d. We frequently discuss love for G-d and closeness to him. But never fear.
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Jews Fighting Back As Partisans
| In Eastern Europe, Jews organized armed resistance to the Nazis began as early as the summer of 1942. Historians such as Leni Yahill, Yehuda Bauer and Isaiah Trunk have documented armed Jewish resistance both within Jewish frameworks and as members o |
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JSU Seeks to Connct Jewish Students
| Incorporating some Judaism into the non-Jewish high school day. That’s the goal of the Jewish Student Union (JSU), a national Jewish organization for teens attending public high schools.
Active in some 200 high schools across the count |
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How Obama Made It To the White House
| Evan Thomas
“A Long Time Coming”
(Public Affairs)
Early on, Barak Obama saw the Conservative tide in America was turning. He understood that many citizens were sick of politics as usual and yearned for more than r |
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Houston Start-Up Aims To Put Special Needs People To Work
| There’s no life after high school. With an unemployment rate for people with disabilities between 60-65%, most people with disabilities over the age of 22 are sitting in their parents homes, left behind by the business world.
A new sta |
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"Waltz With Bashir": Reclaiming Memory, Frame By Frame
| A pack of 26 snarling, wet-fanged dogs smash through a nighttime urban landscape like a tsunami. The dogs are part of a recurring nightmare that Boaz relates to his friend, Ari Folman, in a bar one evening at the opening of the film “Waltz With Bashi |
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- First Came the Enlightenment, Then Came Assimiliation
| Throw out the Jewish religion. Jettison Zionism. Lose fluency in Hebrew or Yiddish. Empty one’s life of all Jewish content.
Does an “implicit Jewish sensibility” remain to one who has broken with all things Jewish? Does anything Jewis |
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Youth Programs In Jeopardy After Young Judaea Layoff
| The oldest Zionist youth movement in the United States has shut down its local year-around program. Young Judaea (YJ) laid off two Houston staff members and one in Austin as part of a January 13 move that terminated 25-people nationally.
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When One Reads Suffering Back Into the Bible
| People sometimes suffer bitterly in the Hebrew Bible. In the Haftarah for Rosh HaShannah, second day, Rachel cries out for her absent children (Jeremiah 31:15). She weeps. She wails. She refuses to be comforted.
A passage like Rachel i |
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A Love Song to Jerusalem
| A well-traveled friend of mine just returned here after visiting Israel for the first time. “Except possibly for the city of Varanasi (Benares), Jerusalem is the most God-intoxicated city I’ve ever been to,” he said.
Yes, Jerusalem is |
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Books In Brief
| Sholem Aleichem
Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son
(Penguin Classics)
February is Sholem Aleichem Month, celebrating the Yiddish author’s 150th birthday. What better time than the present to read--or re-read--tw |
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Turning 21 and Losing One's Medical Care
| Evan White turned 21 in November. Other Houstonians might have marked the coming of age with a legal alcoholic drink. However, for Evan, the occasion is life threatening. It’s not because of his disease--which IS life threatening, but which he has li |
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Brio Brings Old School Sephardic Music to Houston
| Performing “authentic” Sephardic music is nearly impossible. That’s because one cannot pinpoint the Sephardic musical tradition to one time and place.
Is it the 14th century music of the Spanish Jews? Is it the music of the Jews living |
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Rejecting Pig's Brains Soup and Other Literary Dishes
| When Houstonian Gail Greenberg finished her children’s book, “No Pig’s Brain Soup, Please!” in 2003, she entered it into a national children’s picture book contest. The book finished second in the contest.
Then Greenberg tried to get |
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Finding Leo Zeitlin
| Paula Eisenstein Baker is no detective. But the cellist and adjunct instructor of cello and chamber music at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, tracked down a nearly forgotten Jewish composer, Leo Zeitlin and, in the process, greatly expanded the |
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The Rav's Take On the Great Search
| Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, commonly known as “The Rav”, occupies one of the most important places in 20th century Jewish thought, particularly in the Orthodox community. The arrival of the English translation of his book-length essay “U’Vikkashtem |
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A View of Klezmer Music Beyond
| In a 2001 interview with the Herald-Voice, the Klezmatics lead vocalist Lorin Sklamberg said, "As time goes on, music has less and less personality. People are afraid to be themselves, to be idiosyncratic, to have particular ways of playing that dist |
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The Memoir of a Woman in Orthodoxy
| If Torah is truth and sustenance, then why has Torah study traditionally only been open to males? Ilana Blumberg, graduate of an Orthodox day school, poses this question in her memoir “Houses of Study: A Jewish woman Among Books” (Bison/University of |
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In Every Generation
| Passover is the time of year when we recite from the Haggadah “in every generation they rise up against us to destroy us”. This year, it really seems nearby, so close you can feel its hot breath. Anti-Israel vitriol has been boiling since Gaza. This |
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Putting Up A Mezuzah? You Might Want to Wait Until It's Legal
| Texas home owner’s associations will no longer be able to ban residents from affixing a mezuzah to their front door posts if a bill pending the Texas house passes. The bill, HB 3025, is waiting for passage by The House Committee on Business and Indus |
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Wasn't That A Time?
| Tony Michels
A Fire In Their Hearts
(Harvard University Press)
American Jewish History Associate Professor Tony Michels has a bone to pick with other Jewish historians. Why have they been indifferent to the Jewish |
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The New Geo-Political Realists
| Devin R. Springer, James L. Regens and David N. Edger
Islamic Radicalism and Global Jihad
(Georgetown University Press)
Suppose Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu decided it was now in Israel’s best interests to destro |
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Poor, Unemployed and Jewish in the Bronx
| When Director Cheryl Kaplan wanted to get it right, she asked her dad. Kaplan is directing a revival of Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing!”, a play about a Jewish family in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx.
“My father, Murray Kaplan, |
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In Beaumont: A Short Cruise Into the Wilderness
| As the crew unties the rope that secures The Cardinal to its dock at downtown Beaumont’s Riverfront Park, Debbie Loftus steers the 45 x 12 covered pontoon boat northwest. The Cardinal cruises upstream on the Neches River, past Trinity Island and a pr |
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When the Water Stops, Let 'Em Drink Big Red
| Forget oil and gas. Water has a greater impact on the future of Texas. Oil is economics. Water is life.
Just ask T. Boone Pickens, founder of Mesa Petroleum. He bought the rights to groundwater under 150,000 acres in the Texas Panhandl |
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Volunteers Don't Take A Daily Hot Meal for Granted
| This is the menu for the kosher Shabbat (Friday night) meal: chicken noodle soup, eight ounces; baked chicken, six ounces; steamed broccoli, one-half cup; mashed potatoes, one cup; challah, one slice; fresh grapes, four ounces. Meat and vegetables ar |
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Just An Ordinary German Seduced By Extraordinary Evil
| Good intentions. That’s obviously what screenwriter John Wrathall and director Vicente Amorim had when they embarked on making the film “Good”. The film, set in 1930’s Germany, follows the relentless moral slide of university intellectual John Halder |
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How Was The Second Temple Really Destroyed?
| The Talmud tersely remarks that the Second Temple was destroyed “because of sinat hinam”; that is, groundless hatred or hatred without a cause. The destruction of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem was surely an event in Jewish history as catastrop |
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Topol: An Old Man Before His Time
| Tevye or Sallah? Sure, it’s easy to identify Chaim Topol with the patriarch he’s played on stage and in film over the past 44 years. But as the head of a large Mizrachi immigrant family to Israel, Topol’s Sallah—first on stage and then in the 1964 Is |
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Knowing When to Get Help Is Key Says Alzheimer's Consultant
| Your wife or parent has been having some strange behavior lately. There’s been a change in their ability to communicate and some memory impairment. They keep losing words and needing help to come up with the correct word. This might have started occu |
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Bitter Lemons On the Border
| As Israeli director Eran Riklis’ feature film “Lemon Tree” (Etz Limon) opens, we catch a glimpse of Israeli Defense minister Israel Navon (Doron Tavory) giving a speech on television. “Goals are achieved only if you draw boundaries,” he says. Cut to |
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Israeli Artist Hanoch Piven: Some Found Objects and a Portrait
| Picture Abraham Lincoln’s portrait. Instead of facial hair, his beard is made of chains with broken links. His mouth is a gavel. His nose is a straight edge. The right eye is composed of a lapel button that reads, “let freedom ring”. And his left eye |
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Picturing Eve After the Expulsion
| Elissa Elliott
“Eve: A Novel of the First Woman”
(Delacorte)
“Remembrance is holy. Blame is not.” Thus begins Eve’s story to Naava, one of her daughters. Yes, it’s THAT Eve in Elissa Elliott’s “Eve: A Novel of the First W |
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Changing Jesus
| Susannah Heschel
“The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany”
(Princeton)
Jesus was a Jew. And you can’t change that.
However, a significant number of German Protestant th |
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Assassinating The Terrorist Leadership
| Hamas leader Khalid Mishal shouldn’t be alive today. He came within inches of death when, in September 1997, Mossad operatives got to him on the streets of Amman and injected him with levofentanyl.
But then, the operation went awry. A |
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New Koren Prayerbook Represents
| Walk into any Orthodox shul in America. Pick up a prayer book. Chances are it will be an ArtScroll Siddur.
Since it was first published in Brooklyn in 1984, the ArtScroll Siddur has become the liturgical benchmark for most of the Ameri |
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Tim Sparks: Transposing Klezmer To the Guitar
| First, a compliment: Tim Sparks’ “Little Princess” is easily the best Jewish music of the year. Sparks takes the music of the great klezmer clarinetist Naftule Brandwein and re-arranges the repertoire for acoustic fingerstyle guitar trio. The result: |
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Cutting Into Joan Rivers
| More than her comedy, talk shows, or red carpet fashion commentary, the greatest Joan Rivers minute--actually half-minute-- was her 2007 Geico television commercial. Rivers’ line, “Honey, this face has seen more knives than a Benihana”, shows Joan’s |
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Torture Defiles Everything It Touches Says Author
| Dick Chaney calls it “advanced interrogation”. J. Jeremy Wisnewski calls it torture. No matter what term you use, torture should never be permissible.
That’s what Wisnewski argues in “The Ethics of Torture”, a new book he co-authored w |
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The Future of Orthodox Judaism Rooted In Its History
| In 1985, to celebrate their 20th anniversary, the Orthodox gadfly David Singer and his wife flew to Club Med in the Dominican Republic. Singer took care not to violate any kashrut laws, dining on fruit cups and vegetable platters. He recited his pray |
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The Ottoman Empire: When Diversity Was Accepted
| How did Jews and other minorities historically fare under Moslem rule? Were minorities treated with equality, tolerance or persecution?
The question is more than academic. The present conflict between “the West” and “the Islamic world |
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Two Questions For: Daniel Silva
| “The Defector”, spy fiction author Daniel Silva’s ninth novel featuring Israeli Gabriel Allon, begins where his last novel, “Moscow Rules” left off. Allon’s nemesis is Russian espionage agent Ivan Kharkov. Silva will be in Houston to speak and sign h |
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Standing Deep In the Tradition
| Frank London/Lorin Sklamberg
Tsuker-Zis
(Tzadik)
Greg Walls’s Later Prophets
Ha’Orot
(Tzadik)
What is tradition? Is it something passed on from one generation to the next without addit |
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Two Questions For: Marcia Sterling
| How do you dance to klezmer music? Marcia Sterling says there’s an entire dance repertoire that was traditionally done to the Jewish music played at weddings and other social events. Sterling, violinist and band leader of The Best Little Klezmer Band |
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Two Questions For: Al Marks
| Al Marks and his daughter, Karen Marks Aarons, will be featured on twin pianos at
a special benefit Holocaust Museum Houston concert,
"A Journey of Musical Memories". Dates are Wednesday, September 2 beginning with a
reception at |
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Tarantino's Sweet Revenge
| Contemporary critical theory suggests that the purely artistic and the purely historical worlds are never really pure of each other. That is to say, the events of a historical phenomenon like the Holocaust are shaped after the fact through their nar |
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A Classic Revisited for the High Holidays
| What work will you be doing on Yom Kippur?
For some who attend synagogue, the task of the day sounds like: “Something’s happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear/There’s a man on the bimah over there/Telling me that I got to beware |
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Calling In A Shaman To Heal Autism
| If your kid had autism, how far would you go to heal him?
For the parents of Rowan Isaacson, the geographic distance was Mongolia. The treatment was a shamanistic healing ceremony. The outcome? That’s up for grabs as viewers of the ne |
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Democracy In the Middle East and Other Misadventures
| The American social experiment to create democracy in the Middle East has failed.
Failed in Iraq. Failed in Gaza. Failed in Egypt. Failed in the Gulf States.
Let’s exclude the fact that many people in the Middle East w |
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Two Questions For: Larry Miller
| Actor, writer and stand-up comic Larry Miller will appear at The Improv, 7620 Katy Freeway, for five performances September 11-13. Miller stars in the television sit-com “10 Things I Hate About You”, and has appeared in numerous films including “Pret |
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Two Questions for: Rabbi Laura Baum
| Rabbi Laura Baum is the founder of OurJewishCommunity.org, an online congregation that uses blogs, podcasts, online Shabbat services and other technology to engage Jews. This year, the site will videostream live Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur services |
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Two Questions For: Garland Debner Pohl
| Past President of the Catholic Association of Diocesan Ecumenical and Interreligious Officers (CADEIO) and member of the Bishops’ Advisory Committee on Catholic-Jewish Relations of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Garland Debner Pohl is a Hou |
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Who's Your Daddy: A Viral Ad Campaign Gone Wild
| In a September You Tube video, Karen, a young attractive blond Danish woman, holds August, “my baby boy”, who is peacefully drinking his bottle. Karen is seated and speaking into a camera. “I’m doing this video,” she says, “because I’m trying to find |
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A Power Prayer In the Afternoon
| Observant Jews pray three times a day—and in a minyan if they can. Finding a minyan for the mincha (afternoon) is easy in New York. Difficult in Houston--until now.
Welcome to Houston’s only daily mincha minyan outside of a Jewish venu |
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After 65, What Comes Next?
| Here’s a scenario I’ve witnessed played out many times in the men’s locker room at the gym. Guys approaching retirement. Prior to leaving: all excitement and anticipation. Can’t wait to travel, visit the grandkids, golf. Six months into retirement: b |
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A Synagogue Interior Exploding Into Visual Images
| There’s little to like in the architecture of Houston synagogues.
Houston synagogue architecture comes in two styles: gigantic and standard communal. The gigantic synagogue model came out of the post-World War II shift to the suburbs. |
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The Everyday Holiness of Raising Kids
| Becoming a parent is challenging. There’s an ideal, fostered by society: mom and dad should be knowledgeable, patient and respond perfectly to baby’s needs. And if you miss doing a perfect job, you’ve failed in some way. That’s parenting with guilt, |
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Six Constant Mitzvot
| Rabbi Yitzchak Berkowitz
“The 6 Constant Mitzvos”
Based On A Series of Lectures
(ArtScroll)
Although Jews have been given 613 mitzvot as a religious blueprint, it’s almost humanly impossible to perform all |
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A Descendant of the Bielski Partisans Salutes His Grandfather
| As the final credits of the film “Defiance” rolled, Houstonian David Bach’s eyes filled up with tears. The credits informed audiences that the Bielski brothers saved the lives of more than 1200 Jews in the swampy forests of Belarus during the Holocau |
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"A Serious Man": A Serious Comedy
| Blameless and upright is Larry Gopnik. A physics professor at a midwestern university, Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is about to come up for tenure. Then, for no reason, Gopnik begins to be deprived of all the rewards of his upright life. A student trie |
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Israel As a Model of Entrepreneurship
| Israel is an idea factory. The nation has the highest density of start-ups in the world. Per capita venture capital investments are 2.5 times greater than in the innovative United States and 80 times greater than in China. Israel is the world leader |
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Liberal Is Not A Four-Letter Word
| Jews are politically stupid. If we weren’t, we’d all be Conservative. That, in essence, is what Norman Podhoretz argues in his new book “Why Are Jews Liberals?” (Doubleday).
“There is no more vigorous thinker or skilled polemicist in A |
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Writing About Music
| Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. That statement, variously attributed to Martin Mull, Charles Mingus, Elvis Costello and others, suggests something about music is so elusive that it cannot be translated into words.
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D'var Torah: Lekh Lecha
| This morning, I’m going to focus on just two words from today’s Torah portion: lekh lecha.
Literally, it means, “go forth”. Some Biblical commentators have maintained that “lekh lecha” is a stylistic expression, a fairly common express |
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In the Afterlife, We Expand Into What We Really Were
| Call him a “Possibilian”. Nine months ago, the word didn’t exist. Then, during an NPR interview, Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman used the term to describe the space between atheists on the one side and the very rel |
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Inclusive Jewish Communities
| Kids are natural theologians. That’s because they ask the big questions.
“What children do is try to make sense of the world,” says Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson. “They are constantly trying to fit it all together. That’s what theologian |
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A Prisoner In Iran
| I read Haleh Esfandiari’s “My Prison, My Home” (Ecco) during Chanukah. The holiday, which celebrates the emergence light from darkness, was an appropriate time to read this account that celebrates human courage and one woman’s ability to bend history |
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Using Meditation To Further Interfaith Dialogue
| Sometimes, words get in the way. Silence can go deeper.
That’s especially true if you’re trying to get to G-d says Robert J. Hesse, co-founder of the Contemplative Outreach Network, an organization dedicated to interdenominational cont |
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Thinking American
| Seth Lipsky
“The Citizen’s Constitution”
(Basic Books)
William Goetzmann
“Beyond the Revolution”
(Basic Books)
In a photograph taken at a recent “Tea Party” at Houston’s Sam Houston Ra |
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Moving Past Nostalgia In Yiddish Culture
| Nostalgia is a longing or dwelling on the past, usually in an idealized form. Normally, I find nostalgia distasteful, this longing for better days, which is largely mythical. And when you combine nostalgia with Yiddish, I usually find it to be a regr |
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We Regret To Inform You
| Our country has been continuously at war for eight years. Approximately 124,000 young American soldiers are stationed in Iraq. And about 57,000 are in Afghanistan.
Here, we don’t think much about these soldiers. We don’t ha |
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Two Approaches To Yiddish
| The Nazis obliterated the Yiddish language at the height of its cultural flourishing. Although not extinct, Yiddish can hardly function as a linguistic basis for new song lyrics. Thus, for musicians and audiences, the major attitude towards Yiddish s |
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A Theology of Ecology
| Ellen Bernstein started the first Jewish environmental organization in 1988.
“When I started Shomrei Adamah,” she said, “I was looking for a place to hang my hat, Jewishly.”
In the environmental world at that time, a st |
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Don't Kill the Critic
| “Why do you think critics didn’t like your film,” asked a radio host to the director of one of the many Adam Sandler-type comedy films aimed at adolescent audiences.
“I dunno,” he replied. “We made the film to get laughs. It made us l |
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She's Got A Little List
| If your dad, the iconic Johnny Cash, hands you a list of the 100 most essential country songs, and tells you to learn them all, how does a daughter respond? In 1973, Rosanne Cash was 18 years old and contemplating a music career. Her dad was alarmed |
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Free Trade and Freedom
| Vali Nasr
“Forces Of Fortune”
(Free Press)
Fundamentalism and anti-Americanism in the Middle East feeds from resentment. That’s not hard to diagnose. However, Iranian-born scholar Vali Nasr locates the pathology a |
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An Uneasy Slide Downward
| Debt. A national debt of almost $11 trillion that will yoke future generations. Private debt that has the average American family paying 20% of its income to service debt payments. Debt for the costs of a college education that increased 50% between |
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The Completely Integrated Rambam
| Although Moses Maimonides (the Rambam) lived in the 12th century, he remains a fascinating figure for contemporary Jews. Maimonides lived by Torah, wrote legal responsa and was intellectually involved with Halakhah. Yet he also fully embraced Aristot |
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Happy As a Jew in France, Betrayed As a Jew in France
| France was the first European nation to make her Jews citizens. France was the nation where an anti-Dreyfusard coalition perverted the military tribunal system, mobilized anti-Semitic riots and spread nationalist propaganda in order to falsely convic |
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The Compromises Made By Early Zionists
| At its origins, Zionism aimed at nothing less than to alter, in the most fundamental sense, the meaning of being Jewish. By establishing a Jewish national home, the founders of Zionism sought to restore a sense of peoplehood to European Jews, to revi |
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Religion In the White House
| In 2006, then presidential candidate Barack Obama addressed a gathering of evangelicals convened by Rev. Jim Wallis in an attempt to reach out to the religious right constituency. “What I am suggesting is this,” said Obama in his speech, “secularists |
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How History Preserved What Was Lost In Poland
| In 1942, a team of professional and amateur historians in Warsaw prepared for the worst. Having a clear understanding the Nazis destined them for total annihilation, this team buried the documentation of their reduced lives underneath the Warsaw Ghet |
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How To Get Rid Of A Dictatorship
| Gene Sharp has been called a CIA agent and a central figure in a conspiracy to overthrow the Islamist government of Iran. Not bad for an 81-year-old scholar whose organization, the Albert Einstein Institution, operates out of the two-room office in a |
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Grieving After Loss: Going Beyond the Five Stages
| Even though death is inevitable and grief confronts everyone, most people know little about how to react to loss. Grief tends to be portrayed as a paralyzing sadness. Many are familiar with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ “five stages of grief” model.
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Two Questions: Seymour Lipkin
| One of the greatest living Beethoven interpreters, keyboardist Seymour Lipkin, will give an all-Beethoven piano recital for Da Camera on Tuesday, January 26 at 7:30pm at The Menil Collection. The program will include the “Moonlight” Sonata (No. 14 in |
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At the Gateway To Heaven
| The greatest tragedy in the history of the Jewish people was the destruction of the Temple.
We mourn the magnitude of the destruction of the Holocaust because of its proximately in time and because it represents the complete breakdown |
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The Compromises Made By Early Zionists
| At its origins, Zionism aimed at nothing less than to alter, in the most fundamental sense, the meaning of being Jewish. By establishing a Jewish national home, the founders of Zionism sought to restore a sense of peoplehood to European Jews, to revi |
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Ella By Limelight
| Houston’s Steve Tyrell made himself into a star singing the American standards. Rod Stewart revived a sagging career with his American songbook series. Singers from Willie Nelson to Linda Ronstadt to Rufus Wainwright fashioned hit albums covering son |
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Two Questions: James Belcher
| The Alley Theatre’s company member James Belcher steps over to Stages Theatre to star in the Regional Premiere of “A Picasso”, playing from January 27-February 21. It’s 1941 and the Nazis have conquered Paris. Pablo Picasso is summoned by a female Na |
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Not Allowed At the Kotel
| Zionists once argued one of the most important reasons to create a Jewish state was to return Jews to the stage of history. Compared to living in Diaspora, Israel would give Jews the capacity to take the ideas they nurtured in theory and apply them t |
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When Is It Right To Murder the Murderer?
| Attorney David Dow’s in the death penalty business. And business is booming in Harris County.
Texas leads the nation in the number of executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. And Harris County, accounting for more th |
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Austin Gets World Class Photo Collection
| One of the great collections of photography has come to stay on the University of Texas campus in Austin for the next five years. Around 200,000 photographic prints representing photographers active with the Magnum Photos agency will be available for |
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Worlds Created Out of Letters
| Religion is complex, full of a rich diversity of thought, imagination and inspiration. To reduce such complexity down to a single concrete impulse or a single interpretation sheds no light on things divine. It is a failure of imagination. It merely r |
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A Yankee Land Thanks to the Irish and the Jews
| Mick Moloney needs no introduction to fans of Irish music. His work as an academic in collecting and recounting the Irish-American experience through music is possibly peerless. And Moloney’s version of “There Were Roses” is one of the greatest Irish |
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Sunday Get Ready to Fast
| Sunday marks the Fast of Tammuz. No food or drink after dawn. No music, haircuts or pleasure trips either.
“The 17th day of the month of Tammuz on the Jewish calendar (which falls on July 20, 2008 this year) is one of four fast |
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When Throwing A Party Could Mean Life or Death
| Purim is a slightly transgressive holiday.
Historically, Purim has been a holiday for merry-making and mockery--so much so that it has become almost a general rule that "on Purim everything is allowed", even transgressions of a Biblical law su |
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Two Questions: Jonathan Fass
| Director of the JCC’s Center for Jewish Living and Learning (CJLL) Jonathan Fass will offer a class on Israeli photographer Zion Ozeri for four Mondays beginning on March 1 at 11 A. M. Fass’ class is one of 12 CJLL spring adult education classes. For |
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Louis Brandeis: What A Life!
| Melvin I. Urofsky
Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
(Pantheon)
Compared to Louis Brandeis, most contemporary Jewish leaders in the United States appear models of shrunken stature and specialized abilities. Brandeis excell |
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Layers of Memory, Layers of the Present
| Once upon a time, there was a nature preserve located on the site of a former quarry, just ten kilometers from the city center of Krakow. And Poland being what it is, it turns out that the Bonarka Nature Preserve sat on the site of the Plaszow Concen |
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Sixth Annual Jewish Film Festival
| The upcoming 6th Annual Jewish Film Festival promises to be the strongest programs of Jewish cinema that we’ve seen in Houston. Running from March 9-21 in three venues, the festival includes 18 films from the United States, Israel, Denmark and Austra |
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Unexpected Images in Medieval Jewish/Christian Relations
| Traditionally, we think medieval Jewish-Christian relations can be summed up simply: Christians constantly attacked, plundered and expelled Jews. And we were always the victims, without allies.
However, a Rice University historian disp |
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Israeli Forces Taking the Moral High Road
| From the time he sights a possible target, an Israeli tank commander has an eight second window to decide whether to shoot or not to shoot. Eight seconds in which to decide who is a terrorist and who is an innocent. Eight seconds to make a moral deci |
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Leopold Eidlitz: America’s First Jewish Architect
| The United States became a modern industrial nation during the so-called “Gilded Age”. From 1865 onwards, the immigrant population in American cities exploded. The need for industrial workers fueled the rise of cities like New York, Chicago and Bosto |
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Texas Jews: A History On Two Frontiers
| Texas Jews have always imagined themselves as conspicuously different from “normal Jews”. Having always felt at home in Texas, Lone Star Jews point out that we have been a part of Texas history even as far back as 1579 when the Spanish crown granted |
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How A Single State Solution Works In the Middle East
| The most significant long-range consequence of the U.S. war in Iraq is the great shift of power from the Sunni to the Shi’ite community. The March 7 Iraqi parliamentary election confirmed Shi’ite dominance and Sunni eclipse.
In the wak |
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How To Win Friends and Influence Elected Officials
| Democracy is ultimately about the human touch, the contact between the electorate and our elected representatives who are supposed to act in our interests. That’s what 17 Houston women learned first-hand March 21-23 when they went to the 2010 Washing |
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Eichmann--The World's Most Notorious Nazi
| The hunt for, capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann became a watershed moment in history. Before 1960, the world had, in many ways, swept the Holocaust under the rug.
“Neither Jews nor non-Jews wanted to face the Holocaust,” contends Ne |
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Two Questions: Edward Hirsch
| When Edward Hirsch moved from Houston in 2002 to take the helm of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, it marked the first time in American cultural history that a poet or writer had assumed the presidency of such a major foundation. Both t |
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Studying the Exotic Other In Brooklyn
| Used to be that an anthropologist was someone who traveled to exotic places to study aboriginal people. In contrast, anthropologist Ayala Fader took the subway to Brooklyn’s Boro Park to do her fieldwork.
Fader studied how Bobover and |
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Two Questions: Renee Wallace
| Renee Wallace has created a model for our community. Founder of Vita-Living, Inc., Wallace created the first community-based, small group home for people with severe mental retardation in Houston. She tells the story in “Creative Care: the Vita-Livin |
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Houston Forges Cancer Research Links With Israel
| Israel is the location of world-class cancer research. Historically, Professors Isaac Birnbaum and Leo Sachs in Israel made one of the first groundbreaking cancer research discoveries. They laid the foundation for differentiating between cancer cells |
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What the New Health Law Really Means
| Although President Obama signed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, the battle to overhaul our health care system is far from over. At least 12 attorney generals—all Republicans—have filed suits to block the new legis |
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Moving Towards the Light In A Museum Exhibit
| There’s a line of poetry written by the Persian poet Rumi that goes: “I know not how to distinguish myself from light”.
That line seems to communicate the essence of Sufi thought. Followers believe in a discipline that will ultimately |
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Sermons To the Neoconservative Jewish Faithful
| Neoconservative friends occasionally send me links to articles from Commentary magazine. I read them. Unrepentant leftist that I am, I usually find the writing ideologically predictable and aggressively pedantic—particularly if the subject matter is |
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Two Questions: Danny Schmidt
| It’s that time of year to get away to the Hill Country. The Kerrville Folk Festival heads into its final weekend. And Austin singer/songwriter Danny Schmidt will be one of the featured performers at the big Saturday June 12 evening concert. The songs |
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Gypsy Rock In the Czech Republic
| So I’m in Prague, standing in the 10-koruna beer line at a political rally for Karel Schwartzenberg, when I hear the fiddle, electric guitars and drums blast off from the stage.
Whether your party affiliation in the May 28-29 Czech Rep |
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The Helen Thomas Affair
| Hearst News Service columnist Helen Thomas’ offhanded comments to a videotaping Rabbi David Nesenoff that the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home to Poland, Germany or the United States” certainly got our attention. Three days af |
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Baytown's K'Nesseth Israel: The Little Congregation That Could
| After World War II, in small towns throughout the South, the sons and daughters of the Jewish communities left for college and the big cities. There was no one left to go into the family business. Jewish life dwindled. And the synagogue would go up f |
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What Kind of Synagogue Architecture Do We Want?
| At a recent educational presentation on “Synagogue Architecture: Art Objects and Sacred Spaces” given to members of the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Houston architect Mort Levy told a story about a recent ship cruise that |
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When the Messiah Didn't Come
| Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman
“The Rebbe”
(Princeton)
Anyone who considers telling the story of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, necessarily brings a point of view to the subject. |
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One Prayer That Manages To Reach the Most Casual
| “Who will live and who will die,” asks the deeply disturbing Un’taneh Tokef prayer in the Ashkenazi High Holiday machzor. The text, a piyyut (liturgical poem), appears in the deepest part of both the Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur services, during Mus |
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Fall Out From the Conversion Bill Reaches Houston
| A bill before the Israeli Knesset that would give full authority for conversions to the Chief Rabbinate is causing a huge controversy in Israel and in the United States.
The Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee approved 5- |
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Two Degrees of Separation
| Despite a strong connection between Diaspora Jewry and Israel, only 35% of American Jews have actually ever visited Israel.
That statistic intrigues Jewish Federation of Greater Houston President Lee Wunsch and Beth Yeshurun Senior Rab |
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Given The Opportunity To Do Evil, Many Will Do So
| Consider the modern nation whose state policy is to drive out, cleanse or exterminate an ethnic minority living within its borders. How does a state go about implementing this policy?
In the case of Nazi Germany, Adolph Eichmann and hi |
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The New Face of American Aliyah
| They used to come by ship or over land. Historically, Jews who wanted to reach Israel to make aliyah had to overcome many hardships to reach their homeland.
Today, it’s simple: You board an airplane and arrive 11 hours later.
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Aharon Appelfeld: Waiting Out the Holocaust In A Brothel
| Immediately after World War II, Theodor Adorno declared, “No poem could be written after Auschwitz”. He was saying that art--at least traditional forms of art--appeared to have no valid aesthetic response to the Holocaust.
Adorno was i |
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The Morning After Yom Kippur: Be Mindful
| Imagine yourself at Neilah, at the conclusion of the Yom Kippur service. A bit overwhelmed with hunger and fatigue, you are also on a high that comes with the hard work of the day. Maybe, you think of yourself, today I can change the direction of my |
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The Morning After Yom Kippur: Put In A Good Ten Minutes
| Ideally, if you really want to do teshuvah (repentance) for Yom Kippur, you should be considering a strategy to affect your change in the 40 days leading up to the holiday.
However, the Yamim Noraim (Days of Awe) are already upon us. |
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When Academics Look At Religious Rituals
| Rituals work. I recently rediscovered how the doing of rituals affect one’s well being when my father died. Knowing the order required from the moment of death to the funeral service and the burial to observing shivah to reciting kaddish--more import |
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Making Aliyah In 2010: How Best To Serve American Jews
| The early 20th century Zionists probably wouldn’t understand. When they established the Jewish Agency for Palestine in 1929, their singular purpose was to return to the land to rebuild the Jewish national home. For them, aliyah was the main option to |
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Stuffed Into A Metal Sauna On the First Day of War
| During the war in Lebanon, Israeli tanks operated in urban operations for the first time. Former advantages of armored tanks were reigned in by claustrophobic Lebanese urban settings. The frequent shifting of units from the operational control of one |
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A Musical Return To Poland, Birthplace of the Cantor's Art
| If the Cantor’s Assembly, represented by 72 American cantors, had simply held their 2009 convention in Poland, uniting hazzanut to its birthplace for the first time since World War II, dyeinu.
If the entire series of cantors concerts i |
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