I am still digesting the press release–the lack of a cable hookup means it will take me some effort to watch the actual interview. Other tidbits include Steinhardt inveighing against the use of "mythical" anti-Semitism as a "boogeyman" to "raise money" for Jewish organizations, and against an obsession with the Holocaust that hinders us from thinking "about what we want to accomplish and what we want to be in the 21st century." The "religion of Judaism," he says further, is "so deeply disappointing" in its "practice, its verbiage, its inability to reflect realistically upon our lives."

The only redemption he sees for the "moribund world" of the Diaspora is a relationship with Israel, "my Jewish miracle." He has no respect, mind you, for the political and business establishment of the country, which he described with adjectives such as "awful" and "less than glorious," and he does not seem to be in favor of living there all the time, either. "I have a wonderful house in the middle of Jerusalem," he says. "I love Israel. I love America. And," like Alec Baldwin in bed with Meryl Streep, "it’s a complicated situation."

I admit again that I am only relying here on the sampling of quotes provided in the press release, so I don’t feel justified launching a full critique of Steinhardt’s performance. Instead, I’d like to focus on the first salvo, the oft repeated claim that synagogue Hebrew schools are responsible for the decline of the Jewish people–a claim that is more or less akin to stripping your parents’ house of all viable woodwork, plumbing, and appliances and then wondering why they live in such a dump.

Firstly, it should be noted that Hebrew school has not been a failure, as it is largely responsible for the success of many who have spent time on the editorial board of Heeb, or in the Alpine fortress of Reboot, or the stables of the Foundation for Jewish Culture, or most likely, if you will pardon me, the inner sancta of Jewcy and JDub [Editor’s note: I should just point out that I didn’t go to Hebrew school, but several of my colleagues did].

Anyone who has jockeyed disaffection with the Jewish establishment into a successful career of personal expression on the American mass-media stage, including the Coen brothers (who, since "A Serious Man," I consider the patron saints of the genre), should reflect on the debt of gratitude he or she owes to this half-assed system of religio-ethno-cultural indoctrination. Things might have been far less interesting had the ingredients come out fully-baked.

But, snarkiness aside, the problem with blaming Hebrew School for the collapse of our millennia-old civilization is that such talk, to paraphrase Tevye, blames the cart for the inherent lameness of the horse; exonerates the many who fled the challenge of creating meaningful Jewish life for the sorry state of affairs they left behind, and ignores the implacability of the forces that made them flee in the first place.

For what created the supposition that two to six hours a week of afterschool guttarality could foment a firm commitment to the Jewish people? I don’t think this paradigm was determined deliberately from the outset, by committee. At the turn of the last century, there were viable models of Jewish education, and there was a critical mass of Jewish community prepared to embody them. And then there was mass immigration, and genocide, and breakneck assimilation–from a flummoxed traditional culture into a post-War America that was primed with petroleum to give Jewish people the greatest thrill ride they had ever experienced in a Gentile world.  And, at the end of the day, Hebrew School emerged because it was the best we were allowed to do. Speaking, gloves off, as a working rabbi and education director, trying hard to find ways to reflect the "verbiage" of the Jewish religion "realistically upon our lives," it is frustrating that, by consensus of the parents of my community, I can only educate their children for two hours a week with no homework, and that those hours come well after regular school hours, and that the expectations for behavior and attendance sometimes fall somewhere between a railway station and a monkey house–despite the fact that they are all, without exception, great kids. But this is roughly the extent of the concession that many American Jewish families are willing to make these days to their Jewish identities, and there should be a category of Nobel prize for whoever figures out how to put these parameters to the best use.

There is a lot of talk in circulation about "what we want to accomplish, and what we want to be in the 21st century;" what it will take to "get our groove back," whether that means summoning the "boogeyman," or replacing religion with spirituality, or pretending we’re Jamaican, or humping each other at younger ages with fewer prophylactics, or giving "Jewish barbarians" (Steinhardt’s term) free trips to an Israel whose only redeeming virtue seems to be that we only have to be there sporadically. Of course, it is the responsibility of those who care to come up with compelling answers to the question of why be Jewish. But these answers are getting shorter and shorter, and sounding more and more often like marketing slogans, and, at the end of the day, the lack of substance is less the fault of educators than it is the fault of Jewish consumers who don’t want to buy, no matter how cheap the cost. Beyond that, it is the fault of history.

The post Stop Blaming Hebrew School appeared first on Jewcy.

Nonetheless, Yonath’s Nobel is obviously a mark of great distinction for the individual, and a source of national pride, perhaps all the more so in a nation as embattled as the State of Israel. Commentators have already calculated that Israel now holds the distinction of raising the most Nobel laureates per capita, a claim that certainly smacks of "Jewish exceptionalism" with all of its myriad complications. What is to some the vulgar habit of keeping a scorecard of notable Jews (think the "Hanukkah Song") or even tracing the divine hand at work behind the accomplishments of the Chosen People, is to others a justifiable attempt to exorcise Jewish self-loathing and a sign of the hard work of a despised and displaced minority to justify itself in the eyes of the world (think "Jackie Robinson").

Yonath is the ninth Israeli to win a Nobel, three of which, including hers, have been for accomplishments in the field of chemistry. Neck in neck with the chem winners are the three recipients of the Peace Prize: Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. (Given that the peace process sometimes seems, unfortunately, to have produced little more than ‘fool’s gold’, we might better call it the Nobel Prize for Alchemy). Two Israelis, Daniel Kahneman (2002), and Robert Autmann (2005), have taken home the medal for economics, and one, the great S. Y. Agnon (1966), for literature.

I’m more than happy to let you know that I aced Modern Hebrew Literature at Hebrew U., and so have a pretty good handle on what Agnon did that was so great. Yonath’s work on the structure and function of ribosomes, the sub-cellular mechanisms that translate RNA into protein, is more of a brain-breaker. Over the several decades of her career, which has included appointments in Pittsburgh, Cambridge, Chicago, Hamburg, and Berlin as well as collaboration with NASA and the establishment of her own lab in Rehovot, she has pioneered groundbreaking methods of ribosomal mapping, particularly "cryocrystallography"–flash freezing them in crystallized form, enabling detailed analysis while minimizing the damage caused by exposure to x-rays. This has allowed her to lay bare the sub-structure of what had previously been considered an unchartably assymetrical organelle, with implications not just for abstract scientific knowledge, but for the development of targeted antibiotics.

International recognition has the power to transform dedicated laboratory scientists into high-profile spokespeople, and Yonath is no exception. The first woman of any nationality to win the chemistry prize in over forty years, taking her place among the meager five percent of Nobel prize winners who have been female, she has already proven comfortable serving as an inspiration for women in science. "Women make up half of the population," she told the Israeli media, "I think the population is losing half of the human brain power by not encouraging women to go into the sciences." Born to a poor family in Geula, during the British Mandate, and receiving her schooling only through a combination of parental sacrifice and perseverance, Yonath’s journey also has all of the resonance of a classic Horatio Alger story.

In addition, it almost goes without saying that owing to Israel’s difficult position on the international stage, the event of one of its own receiving the Nobel Prize will not pass without reference to the Israel-Palestine situation. Already hackles have been raised by the omission of Israeli laureates from a retrospective list of winners printed in The Guardian, which, at the end of the day, can probably be chalked up to something like a Freudian typo. Yonath herself has been quite vocal in her opinions, calling for the release of all Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails, on the grounds that incarceration will only further radicalize them. Some have welcomed her use of the Nobel platform to express this view, especially in the midst of the Netanyahu-Lieberman era, while others have encouraged her to stick to cryocrystallography.

The post Ada Yonath: Israel’s First Female Nobelist appeared first on Jewcy.

I spent several of the months that made up last summer and fall putting together a piece for them on the state of the new Jewish media.  It was a lot of fun to write.  I chatted with the familiar cast of characters, who gave me retrospectives as well as assessments of the present and visions of the future.  In talks with foundation people, I also got a chance to piece together an understanding of how the Jewish old guard was reacting to all of this upstart activity.  It was this relationship that interested me most: the marriage of questionable convenience between the young people who wanted to throw pie in the face of the establishment, and the older folks who were willing to endure it because it heartened them to see so many young Jews getting together to throw pie.  

The article finally came out this week, and I submit it for your perusal, though in the end a number of circumstances have conspired to undercut most of the relevance it might at one time have aspired to.  The Book Center had to hold off running it for close to six months, because of money problems, even as the same economic contraction changed the circumstances of a number of the new media organs I had reported on. The version Pakn Treger is running is also scaled down from the version I submitted, excising in particular a lot of the blunt money talk that I found so interesting.  (And the title wasn’t my idea.)  

Also removed are a couple of zesty citations, including Jewcy founder Tahl Raz agreeing to be quoted calling the establishment Jewish media a "cesspool of mediocrity," awash in a "perfect storm of shit", and a less scatalogical analysis from Elise Bernhardt, of the Foundation for Jewish Culture, on the relationship between cultural producers and potential funders.  "If art is a vehicle," for the outreach agenda of donors, she said, "they need to understand that it’s attracting people for a lot of reasons they don’t necessarily want to deal with.  The job of artists it to ask a lot of questions, and the job of institutions is to hold the fort.  So I think there is always tension."

In the end, this piece might just be a belated image of the new Jewish media landscape, as it appeared last fall in the days right before the stopper was pulled out of the economy, and all that water started swirling down the drain.  And last fall, in and of itself, was already pretty late in the game–the only people expected to be surprised, in November of 2008, that a magazine called Heeb, for instance, exists are precisely subscribers to the magazine of the National Yiddish Book Center.

If nothing else, at least now I can say that they’ve been warned. 

The post Surprise, It’s New Jewish Media appeared first on Jewcy.

Atkins, a board member for the past six years, assumed the chairmanship last summer in a leadership shuffle that included Gordis’s early retirement, part of a move to bring more business acumen to the oversight of the College.  He acknowledged being a dissenting voice during the period of rampant expansion.

“I was not in support of running a deficit,” he said, “but I was in the minority.  The idea that we would build it and they would come always seemed to me like a long shot, like trying to win the lottery. I’ve always advocated a more commercial model—operating according to the bottom line.” 

The College, he said, is exploring a number of strategies for containing its financial hemorrhage and also trying to re-establish trust with its traditional constituency–the Boston Jewish community.  Philanthropic support has stalled, he suggested, as would-be donors wait for the articulation of an effective rehabilitation plan.  

Though relations between the College and CJP, in particular, were badly frayed during Gordis’s expansion, federation president Barry Shrage expressed measured support for the new leadership.  

"Hebrew College is an institution with extraordinary accomplishments that’s made some missteps on the financial side," said Shrage.  "We observed with great concerns, and we conveyed our concern to them.  We feel the new leadership is trying to take the challenges seriously." 

But though he spoke highly of the College’s offerings in the area of community education, in particular its initiatives for adult and teenage learners, he questioned the relevance of holding on to more advanced programming and infrastructure.

"For the rest of it," he said, "the old model doesn’t work.  Trying to be a full-scale academic institution?  What’s the point?" 

Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, the College’s new president, spoke of maintaining the core of current programming, and also reaching out to new audiences through the arts and the Internet.  But he also acknowledged the need for a more sober business model.

"We have to recalibrate the percentage of our operating income that comes from hard sources," he said. “That’s a fairly significant institutional change—not launching programs without having first secured grants or funding."

He has already overseen a round of layoffs, in addition to the third of the staff let go the winter before his arrival, most of them support personnel rather than academic faculty.  He has also put a portion of the College’s rare book collection up for auction.  But the budget still stands at close to $15 million, and with bond interest on the building still fluctuating wildly, it is difficult to calculate a balance.

“The building does play into the financial crisis in a significant way,” Lehmann admitted.  "There are a number of different possibilities as to what will free us from the current debt structure. Not all of them require leaving the building, and not all of them are in our control.  We have to be smart about planning for different contingencies.”

All contingency plans, however, now seem to center on some form of partnership with another regional institution. The College already sponsors limited joint programming with the Andover Newton Theological Seminary and Northeastern University, and is looking to deepen both of those relationships.  Early stage talks with Northeastern, in particular, are now proceeding “at the highest level.”

“I wouldn’t say discussions are far along,” Lehmann said.  “They’re progressing.  In some ways, we’re really just getting our heads around what kind of affiliation it would be.”

He stressed that, at least for now, he does not anticipate the kind of full merger that Baltimore Hebrew University has negotiated with Towson. 

“Our discussions,” he said, "are based on the premise that Hebrew College would retain its own board and organizational structure.  But it’s clear to me that we’re going to have to adopt a different model than the stand-alone institution that does some joint programming.”

Jonathan Sarna, for his part, saw an overestimation of national donors in the failure of David Gordis’s vision of a revitalized and independent institution.

"There were high hopes that this would become an educational center for the Boston Jewish community," he said. “In a lot of ways, at its peak, that’s what it was.  But they never could make ends meet. David did not demonstrate that if you build it they will come.”

He also saw, in the chastening of the Boston Hebrew College, an object lesson for Jewish institutions in the new economy.

“I suspect,” he said, “the idea that we’ll give a great deal for free—that rich people will pay—will be replaced by hardnosed pay-as-you-go models."

The post Jewish Organizations in the New Economy: The Boston Hebrew College (Part Two) appeared first on Jewcy.

The Federation-sponsored College was founded in 1921 to train Hebrew teachers for a supplementary school system run by the local Bureau of Jewish Education.  Along with sister schools in Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and Baltimore, it has also served as an important address for advanced Jewish study–especially when quotas limited Jewish attendance of American universities–counting historian Jonathan Sarna among its graduates, and David Starr, Nehemia Polen, and Arthur Green among its faculty.

But over the last half century, the College has struggled to keep pace with rapid changes.  Suburbanization precipitated a move from the inner-city Roxbury neighborhood to Brookline in 1951, and then to Newton earlier this decade.  When the BJE’s school network collapsed in the late-60s, the result of a fragmenting community, the declining demand for professionally trained teachers cut into enrollment.  And the mushrooming of Judaic studies departments on American campuses led to a brain drain, with scholars opting for the resources and prestige of secular universities over affiliation with what has been dismissively termed a "Jewish junior college."

All five regional schools have suffered a comparable decline, and have responded either by seeking new paths to relevance or by drastically reducing their overhead.  Chicago’s Spertus Institute, recognizing an increased interest in Jewish fine arts, last year launched a cultural museum in its elegant new building on Michigan Avenue.  The Baltimore Hebrew University, by contrast, after a protracted conflict with its federation sponsors over mission and funding, recently announced a merger with Towson University.

Hebrew College began to chart a new course in 1993 when David Gordis, formerly executive vice president of the American Jewish Committee, as well as one-time vice president at both the Jewish Theological Seminary and the University of Judaism, took over the presidency. Responding to the 1990 National Jewish Population Study, which had for the first time reported an intermarriage rate topping 50 percent, Gordis partnered with Combined Jewish Philanthropies–the Boston federation–in a plan to combat attrition with literacy.  He felt that strengthening Jewish identity through sophisticated communal learning initiatives would also provide the College with a renewed sense of mission.

"I suggested," said Gordis, "that what Hebrew College was all about was serving as a bridge between scholarship and community."

But Gordis also harbored ambitions for transforming Hebrew College into a national institution.  This entailed the rapid development of a flurry of far-reaching programs, including a Ph.D. track in Jewish education, and a transdenominational rabbinical school.  He also moved the College into a brand new, $34 million dollar campus, designed by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie.

Gordis believed this expansion could be funded, initially, out of the College’s available capital,  with increased philanthropy eventually picking up the slack.  An annual budget of $1.5 million at the start of his tenure, over half of it coming from a CJP allocation, had ballooned by 2006 to $16.2 million.  But with no significant increase either in federation dollars or direct giving, financial holdings plummeted.  Between 2003 and 2006, the most intense period of growth, net assets declined approximately from $25 million to $14.5 million.

"I expected," said Gordis, "both a greater involvement by the locally significant funders and by some of the national people."

The consequences of this failed development plan have worsened considerably since the global economic downturn began last fall.  The bond-financing of its building campaign has exposed the College to skyrocketing interest rates, meaning unanticipated monthly expenditures in the hundreds of thousands.  If the College cannot meet its obligations to bondholders, it risks foreclosure.

Unsubstantiated claims have also circulated in the Boston community that money raised to pay for the building was channeled instead into program development, exacerbating the current debt load, a charge of misappropriation disputed by current board chair Mark Atkins.

"There are a lot of rumors," he said. "That was one of them.  But to my knowledge, I have not seen anything relative to misappropriation.  People can question the tactics and their execution, but these things were done in the interest of perpetuating the college by offering superior products."

To be continued… 

The post Jewish Organizations in the New Economy: The Boston Hebrew College (Part One) appeared first on Jewcy.