At the beginning of January, Streit’s Matzo announced that they would be closing up shop on the Lower East Side of New York City and moving to New Jersey. The company has been operating out of the same tenement building on Rivington Street since 1925—it’s truly one of the last remaining bastions from the neighborhood’s Jewish, Yiddish-speaking heyday.

Filmmaker Michael Levine, who is making a documentary about Streit’s, opined the closure in Bowery Boogie:

I personally know that this was an agonizing decision for the Streit family, who despite their many challenges, were determined to keep the factory and its workers employed onsite, even as the phone rang daily with offers from developers clamoring to purchase the valuable real estate. I watched as they turned down offer after offer, until the challenges of maintaining a manufacturing business in a drastically changing Lower East Side, as well as the pressures of increased foreign competition, left the company no alternative but to accept.

The loss is, of course, especially painful for the Streit’s workers, many of whom have devoted 30 or more years of their lives to working here, and for whom, like the millions before them who came to the Lower East Side, found opportunity for themselves and their families in that work.

Today, The Guardian posted a poignant video about the factory, featuring interviews with executive vice-president Aron Yagoda (great-grandson of founder Aron Streit), and long-time employee Anthony Zapata. There’s some tension—Yagoda says the business can not continue to operate in its current location; Zapata thinks the move is a “mistake”—but mostly, the feeling is one of sadness and inevitability.

(Image: Workers at Streit’s Matzo factory on New York City’s Lower East Side on May 9, 2012. Credit: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/GettyImages)

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Shelly Oria’s debut short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, is simultaneously delicate and shattering. The book derives its title from a story of the same name, in which an Israeli expat from in New York obsessively tallies the merits of the two cities that she has called home. “It’s an ongoing competition,” she says, “But I forget to keep track, so I have to keep counting all over again.”

Many stories in Oria’s collection are rooted in two cities on opposite sides of the globe, their central characters Israelis who have made their way to the United States. But New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 is more textured than a simple exploration of migration and cultural difference. Quietly and without ceremony, Oria’s narratives veer into worlds that are unidentifiable and bizarre. In ‘The Beginning of a Plan,’ a young woman flees Israel to America to escape criminal prosecution, and discovers that she can quite literally freeze time. In ‘Victor, Changed Man,’ a couple reunites and promptly separates against the backdrop of an anonymous city that has been overtaken by a dense, unyielding fog. Often, the book’s fantastical narratives border on the grotesque. Oria writes of a North American town that traffics in human organs and blood, of another dominated by a band of vengeful, violent women. “We hold our men by their balls,” the nameless protagonist says. “And we squeeze.”

Even in the stories situated in identifiable locations, there is something disarming about the characters, who speak and think in jarring declaratives. “I always look them in the eye throughout, so as not to miss my moment,” says the protagonist of ‘This Way I Don’t Have to Be,’ explaining her addiction to sleeping with married men. “In that moment, their lives turn to air.” But beneath the cryptic authority of statements like these lies confusion and chaos. The lives of Oria’s characters are steeped in loneliness, unrequited love, and confounding lust. They subsist in fluid, often queer, sexual relationships that prove agonizing. Booney, the central character of a story called ‘The Thing About Sophia,’ develops feelings for her female roommate, and is invited into her bed, but not into her heart. In the titular ‘New York 1, Tel Aviv 0,’ an Israeli immigrant moves in with a former IDF soldier and falls desperately for his girlfriend, a woman who cannot be tamed.

Oria author was born in Los Angeles, but raised in Israel, and she taught herself to write fiction in English when she was an adult. If she is at any disadvantage when it comes to proficiency in the language, it does not show. Her sentences are piercing, her tone cool and assured. She is admirably bold in her storytelling, weaving her short narratives with ribbons of the strange and the surreal.

Every now and then, however, Oria overreaches in her attempts at originality. ‘Fully Zipped,’ which chronicles a series of exchanges between a customer and a salesperson in the fitting room of a clothing store, relies more on concept than on characters, and fizzles away without leaving much of an impression. ‘Documentation’ explores the unravelling of a relationship through a catalogue of kisses—a narrative technique that feels gimmicky and stale.

Some of the most striking stories in New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 are, in fact, the ones rendered in simple linear narratives. ‘The Disneyland of Albany,’ the strongest story in the collection and the most overtly political, follows an Israeli artist named Avner, who leaves his young daughter Maya in Tel Aviv when he moves to New York to further his art career. During one of Maya’s visits to the States, Avner travels to Albany to meet a wealthy Jewish patron, who subtly attempts to bully Avner into infusing his work with Zionist symbolism. At one point, Maya becomes agitated when she learns that a community was displaced so Nelson Rockefeller could build Albany’s Empire State Plaza. “Did they use tanks?” she asks, a reference to the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes.

If the circumstances of Oria’s more ethereal narratives are unnerving and strange, so is this story of a little girl who carries the trauma of her country’s wars. In New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, devastating realities collide with haunting landscapes of the surreal, until it cannot be said where one ends and the other begins.

Related: New Short Story Collection Explores Tel Aviv’s Dark Side

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In December, minimalist soul duo Silk Rhodes released their debut, self-titled album to great acclaim. Steeped in smooth vocals, soulful 1970s melodies, and enigmatic messages about the human experience, their sound is a cross between Prince and The Delfonics, with a touch of 90s R&B—or, as Rolling Stone put it, “the soundtrack for a roller rink on a cloud.”

27-year-old vocalist Sasha Desree (AKA Sasha Winn) grew up in New York City, attended LaGuardia High School, dropped out of SUNY Purchase, then headed to Baltimore where he met producer Michael Collins. They created their first full-length album in Collins’ Honda CR-V, which was set up as a “studio on the go.” They invited anyone and everyone to contribute to the recording process as they drove around Baltimore, and across the country.

Desree spoke with me from the apartment he shares in Los Angeles with Collins about looping, Silk Rhodes’ unique recording process, and why New York is no longer a stomping ground for young artists.

Check out their new video for their debut single, “Pains” here.

How do you feel about the vibes in L.A. vs. New York? Which pace do you prefer?

Living in New York can seem unnecessary after a bit. I’ve been bouncing back and forth now between Oakland and L.A. for the past year. I grew up in New York, lived there for 20 years. Then I went to Baltimore and made music.

Being from New York, your identity as an American is a bit different than the average American. That being said, I think the West Coast is more my pace. I’m a slow and steady kind of person. I’ve noticed that the similarities between L.A. and New York are things I don’t like… They’re both cities that are run by some sort of publicity beast. There’s a machine that’s working and running there and you can smell it. You can sense when it employs people that don’t know that they’re being employed by that machine to do its bidding.

What was your early creative life like in New York?

The community I grew up in [on the Upper West Side] was radical and that’s what it represented to me. As I grew up and explored New York more and more, it seemed as though being radical was not only not a priority for the people in New York, but New York itself made it hard for that to happen. It’s a hard place for artists to live and make enough money. It seems like these cities, more than being places to really live, are like market places. The Union Square Farmers’ Market for example—all of the sellers have farms upstate and they work on their things and bring them to New York and sell them—and then they leave! That’s kind of how I’m starting to feel about New York. Bring the things there, share them, but don’t stay forever.

Just contribute to the big machine and then bounce! There is a weird script-y element to New York and LA.

Totally. And I do love the vibe in East L.A., but these are the cities that write the script for the media all over America. And it seems like things come to California first. This is where the trends are made and then brought to the rest of the country. So it’s very interesting to have that insight here. But New York and L.A. inspire me to dig deep in film and music, and I realize how important those channels are.

Silk Rhodes has a very 1970s soul/funk-inspired sound that incorporates this really minimalist melody. Can you elaborate on your style?

Our connection with 70s soul music really began when we were living in this house together in Baltimore for about a year; that’s where this project gestated. We were listening to some more recent R&B music coming from many kids who had been previously making indie-pop or experimental pop-electronic music, and it seemed like they were still hiding behind the technology or tons of reverb. The emotionality of it was sort of clandestine. You go back and look at 70s soul, the vocals are right there, in front, and the words are equally important. It’s message and groove-driven music. Going back to that 70s sound in terms of the nostalgia was important to us, but also really clearing it out so it was super minimal. There’s nothing but emotions and the words for you to take in as the audience.

I grew up listening to my dad’s jazz records, a lot of John Coltrane, as well as Prince and 90s R&B. As we’ve gone back and found the lost 70s soul, there’s something in the vocal harmony that is so beautiful, and sometimes imperfect.

You guys had a very interesting process recording this record. Most of it was recording on the fly, driving around Baltimore and inviting people to join you. That spontaneity of recording music—do you see this as an anomaly these days, where albums can be so doctored? In listening to your album, even the placing of the tracks sounds spontaneous, but at the same time it has this common thread; this thread of human experience.

In the studio, you try to recapture that solace you get from being alone in your room. So you write it down, record a demo, and then you’re in a studio where you only have so many hours and things can feel a bit rushed. With our recording experience, we… allowed the studio to be anywhere. Be it your room, your car, or anywhere… Sometimes we would have a room full of people in there while we were working on a song, helping think-tank style coming up with ideas for lyrics. And we’ve always been inspired by our friends and the people around us. One of the things that keeps us moving around is that we want to be continuously inspired by new, different people, and we love to meet people who are making things.

Would you just pull over and open up the doors and start blasting music and chatting with people?

We connected in the world of spontaneous creation. We recorded it all over the place while in transit. And it could be anyone. One time these kids were in a gas station trying to sell us weed in Baltimore, and we told them we didn’t want to buy their weed but if they needed a ride we’d do that, under one condition: that they would make music with us all the way there. And they did.

We made some of our best music on porches and during drives in Baltimore, in a motel in Iowa City. We got into this hotel room at 11:00pm and we decided the only way to really get the full night’s limit of the hotel was to use it as a studio as well.

I’ve heard a lot about musicians using looping techniques more and more, but I don’t get it. I know you did this for this record. Can you explain?

Basically you add make multiple layers to a song very quickly. You can do what one might do when recording multiple tracks, but you can do it quickly. So each time it repeats, you add another layer and it can manifest a complex sound very quickly. But I think there’s something really beautiful about doing it all with the voice. There’s something about when you play an instrument and you can get the same thing out of it in terms of expression as you can get with the human voice.

How did you get into music?

The first song I ever sang was actually a Yiddish lullaby. I grew up singing folk songs and political songs from the sixties. I started singing soprano and training opera in middle school, and then as my voice changed I started writing more music. I play keyboard, bass, drums; a little bit of everything. And then of course, a lot of the stuff I’ve done uses heavily looped vocals. Looping has been a real hotbed of creation for us.

I went to college at SUNY Purchase and then I dropped college and kept one teacher. I found this amazing teacher/mentor named Joel Thome, who was Frank Zappa’s musical director for 20 years. He was the sweetest man I’ve ever studied under, or worked with in music in general, and he really expanded my horizons. It really got me into astrology, the occult, and the connections between that and vibration and music.

I moved back to New York and met with Joel once a week for two years. Both my parents are professors actually, and I’m really interested in the mentor system. That was the original form of teacher-student relationship. I’m anti-institution in general. I think that now, the ideal situation is one where both parties are teacher and student, constantly switching between the two. A free-trade agreement.

Catch Silk Rhodes live in New York on January 10.

(Image: Michael Collins and Sasha Desree (right) of Silk Rhodes, courtesy of Theo Jemison.)

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So, one of the terrorists in the recent New York run of the suuuuuper-controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer was played by—who else?—a Jew.

If this is your first time on the internet and you’re unfamiliar with the Klinghoffer fracas (greetings!), I suggest you familiarize yourself here and here. (tl;dr version: a Jewish American named Leon Klinghoffer was murdered aboard a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1985, someone made an opera about it, a lot of people find the opera deeply offensive, others think it’s OK/not that big of a deal/really good.)

Anyway, dancer Jesse Kovarsky has published a very interesting essay on Gawker about his experience playing Omar, the hijacker who shoots Klinghoffer in the opera. Key to landing the role was his “ample facial hair” and “ethnically ambiguous” look—and of course, talent:

I must admit it was a strange phone call to my parents (not opera fans) to let them know I had gotten a leading role in a controversial contemporary opera playing the part of a Palestinian terrorist. As a liberal Jew from the northern suburbs of Chicago, I never imagined those words would come out of my mouth. I also realized I knew very little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In order to preserve my humble naivety, I entered the rehearsal process seeking to gather as much information as I could.

Kovarsky did a lot of reading during rehearsals: Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Palestine by Joe Sacco, The History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, and The Achille Lauro Hijacking by Micahel K. Bohn. “We were viewing the subject matter from as many angles as we could,” he writes. “As there are not two sides to Israel-Palestine, there are not two sides to Klinghoffer.”

So, does Kovarsky sympathize with Omar? Yes and no. On the one hand, he explains, it’s impossible to fully insert yourself into the mind of a terrorist when you’re a secular millennial who doesn’t have any “extreme beliefs.” But on the other hand, having a massive weapon around your neck can certainly help you situate yourself in a zealous, fanatical mindset:

In order for me to gain access to that frame of mind, it ultimately came down to the last five minutes I had to myself before going on stage. That’s when I put my AK-47 around my neck. I felt its weight, its power, and its significance, and I begin to convince myself that everything I did from that point on was for a higher cause.

Full piece is here.

(Image: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)

Related: The Death of Klinghoffer: “Art for Art’s Sake” or Anti-Semitism?

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As soon as you step off the street and into the theater for a performance of Odd Birdz, you’re welcomed into the whimsical universe of the Israeli theater company Tziporela: a man playing guitar greets you, another shakes your hand, a third asks if you’d like a glass of water. The actors are the exuberant hosts, the audience members their guests. The fourth wall feels permeable in an intimate, Israeli way.

How to describe Odd Birdz? It’s a live theater show consisting of a series of twenty sketches performed by a cast of eight, but also a world unto itself—a surreal, hilarious world where French janitors perform Shakespeare with Jamaican accents, a real-life Pac-Man takes the stage, and a couple on a first date tell the truth about their sexual proclivities and personal grooming habits. The actors met twelve years ago as students at the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio, and last year the troupe was named one of 20 innovative start-ups by EISP, a non-profit Israeli incubator run by the 8200 Alumni Association (an intelligence unit in the Israeli army). Their performances, though carefully scripted, have a improvisational feel, combining drama, dance, mime, and music.

Language is never an issue, as most of the sketches are performed in English. But when Hebrew is incorporated—and it often is—translation becomes a comedic device. In one scene, two actors act as “translators” for two Israeli soap opera characters. As the couple spews melodramatic romantic clichés in Hebrew, the two translators interpret everything from their words and hand gestures to their cigarette puffs. When the dialogue escalates out of control, all one of the translators can say in the midst of the chaos is “lots of emotions”! The drama eventually engulfs the translators, who, it turns out, are having an affair themselves. A more melodramatic story line unfolds involving cheating partners and a pregnancy. At a certain point in this topsy-turvy scene, the actors start to feed lines to the translators. It’s a balagan, but controlled, well-executed one.

Basically, there are no rules in world of Odd Birdz. This self-proclaimed “start-up theater for the start-up nation” is unorthodox, irreverent, playful entertainment—with a serious, provocative side. One of the most absurd scenarios arises when a Jewish-American tourist entering Israel is scrutinized as a security threat (it quickly unravels into a camp disco dance set). There’s no shortage of sexual innuendo or make-out scenes throughout the performance.

Some of the sketches are physical comedies full of ingenuity and invention. In one skit, a couple silently expresses the ups and downs of their relationship by drawing on each other’s t-shirts with sharpies, sketching out a narrative of love and despair. It’s beautiful.

In another standout scene, a husband and wife seated in the audience argue over whether or not they should publicly identify themselves as Israeli. In a heavy accent somewhere between Russian and Israeli, the husband tells the audience that they’re from Oklahoma. His wife Devoraleh (“It means little bee in Hebrew!”) won’t stand for it. She storms down the aisle, enraged. Somewhere along the way she rants about a divorce, exalts herself as an “educator,” spots a former pupil in the audience (apparently she gets recognized everywhere—everywhere being Hamburg and New York) and berates her husband, again and again.

The act succeeds on many levels: it pokes fun at Israeli and Jewish stereotypes, and the habits of people in long-term relationships. But above all, you feel as though you’re in on the joke. This is a couple you know—just on speed and in technicolor.

Odd Birdz is theater that defies categorization. It’s chaotic, it’s warm, it’s exuberant—a cross between your family seder and the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. But this humor has an edge. It forces you to reflect inwards, to think about your own flaws, prejudices, and vanities. Like all good jesters, the Tziporela troupe reminds us that we don’t have to be serious to be perceptive, that sometimes it’s harder to be light than to be heavy, that there’s wisdom wrapped up in satire. Go to be charmed, and to be challenged.

“Odd Birdz” will be showing through November 19 in New York City. Times and tickets here.

Iris Mansour has written for Reuters, The Guardian, and Time Out, among others. In 2011 she traveled from London to the U.S. in search of her American dreams and became prom queen. Now she’s a New Yorker. Follow her on Twitter @irisist.

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Inspired by Hollaback‘s viral (and controversial) video depicting a woman being catcalled on the streets of New York for ten hours straight, comedian Scott Rogowsky has documented his own experience as a publicly identifiable Jewish man. The results are appalling: he is harassed every few blocks by men from the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement, urging him to “do a mitzvah,” sniff an etrog, or say a prayer. They even speculate about whether or not he’s circumcised (captured in the screenshot above).

As a woman, I can not imagine what it would be like to subjected to this sort of harassment on a daily basis. Aside from occasionally being offered Shabbos candles in the subway in Brooklyn, my default position in communal, Orthodox Jewish religious practice is: pretty much invisible. Never have I felt more grateful to not be counted in a minyan. Halachic cloak of invisibility FTW!

Hats off to Rogowsky for his courage and good humor. Now, back to braiding those challahs in the peace and quiet of my kitchen.

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You might have heard of the Sonderkommando Revolt that took place in Auschwitz on October 7, 1944. You might know that on this day, a group of Sonderkommando—Jewish prisoners who were forced to haul bodies out of gas chambers and dispose of them in crematoriums—blew up Crematorium IV and cut through the barbed wire fence surrounding the camp, allowing two hundred prisoners to escape, albeit only temporarily. But you are probably not familiar with the four women who made the revolt possible by smuggling gunpowder from an Auschwitz munitions factory, where they worked as slave laborers.

“October 7, 1944,” a small exhibit at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, pays tribute to Roza Robota, Estera Wajcblum, Regina Szafirsztajn, and Ala Gertner—the female leaders of the Auschwitz resistance, who were ultimately tortured and hanged for their participation in the revolt. Their names, faded from the annals of history, are painted in stark white against one of the gallery’s dark walls. The centerpiece of the exhibit is “Four Women,” a film of interpretive dance by the celebrated choreographer Jonah Bokaer.

Bokaer shot the film in a sparse, grey warehouse, where four dancers took on the personas of Robota, Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner. Because the women were forced into manual labor, and because they hid illicit gunpowder under their nails, much of the performance is preoccupied with the dancers’ hands. They scrape at the ground, paw frantically at their fingertips, and grasp at each other in a desperate, sometimes violent way that evokes the terrifying circumstances of their relationship. For most of the performance, the dancers’ features are obscured by their long hair, until, in a jarring shift of focus, the film cuts between lingering close-ups of their faces. It is a powerful moment of revelation in a performance that strives to shine the spotlight on four courageous women whose stories are often excluded from histories of the Holocaust.

Another reel is projected on the opposite wall, a steady shot of the ruins of Crematorium IV, which Bokaer filmed during a five-day period of immersion at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gallery also displays a series of documents that relate to the revolt with varying degrees of directness; among them are an Auschwitz logbook that contains the name of a man who is believed to be Szafirsztajn’s father, an eyewitness account of the work of the Sonderkommando, and another eyewitness account that describes dead bodies being carried out of a crematorium as a band of prisoner-musicians played in the background.

Though the four women at the center of the exhibit were not part of Auschwitz’s prisoner band, music is central to the installation. Bach’s Violin Partita in D Minor, which Auschwitz’s band was regularly forced to perform, plays in an incessant loop. Behind each glass case containing primary source documents hangs an illuminated sheet of paper, onto which Bokaer painted segments of the Partita’s score.

I know the significance of many of these details because I was given a tour of the exhibit by the museum’s director. But for those who peruse “October 7, 1944” unattended, the gallery offers little curatorial direction. There is no text explaining that the plinths in front of each primary source document are bricks from the ruins of Crematorium IV; no indication that the muddy ruins depicted in the exhibit’s second film are the exploded remnants of that very same crematorium; no hint that Bokaer chose Bach’s Partita as a soundtrack for his installation because it was one of the few melancholy scores to be played in Auschwitz (the others were jaunty polkas, meant to lull Jewish prisoners into a false sense of calm before they were gassed to death).

The decision to keep the exhibit free of textual explanations was deliberate, and there is certainly something to be said for unburdening art installations of belabored discussions about meaning and intention. But the relevance of so many poignant, thoughtful touches is lost as a result of the exhibit’s minimalism. Significantly, I left the gallery knowing very little about Robota, Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner, aside from their names. Though the brochure for “October 7, 1944” claims that the installation strives to “[give] four heroines their place in Holocaust history,” the gallery offers no biographical information about the women who sacrificed themselves for the sake of the resistance. They remain colorless figures, shrouded in the mystery of their hidden pasts.

And so I thought I would divert the course of this review to put forth what little information is known about these four brave women, who were hanged in the last public execution to take place at Auschwitz before the camp was liberated.

Estera Wajcblum was born in Warsaw in 1924. Both of her parents were deaf-mutes, and they were murdered immediately upon the family’s arrival at Auschwitz. After the revolt failed and Wajcblum was contained in a prison block, she smuggled a note to her little sister, who was also a prisoner in the camp. The note read: “Not for me the glad tidings of forthcoming salvation; everything is lost and so I want to live.”

Regina Szafirsztajn was born in Bedzin, Poland. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1943.

Ala Gertner, also from Bedzin, belonged to a wealthy family. She was well-educated, and fluent in German. In late 1940, Gertner was ordered to work at the office of a labor camp in Sosnowiec, Poland. There, she met a man named Bernhard Holtz, and the two were married in the Sosnowiec Ghetto in 1941. The couple was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Twenty-eight letters that Gertner wrote to her friend Sala Kirschner are on display in a permanent collection at the New York Public Library.

Roza Robota was a member of the Hashomer Hatzair socialist movement as a young woman living in Ciechanów, Poland. She liked to be called by her Hebrew name, Shoshanna. After being deported to Auschwitz in 1942, Robota worked in a clothing depot next to Crematorium III. She had connections to the underground resistance, and convinced Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner to join the movement and capitalize on their access to the camp’s munitions factory. Before the noose was tightened around her neck on the day of her execution, Robota called out to the prisoners assembled before the gallows: “Sisters, revenge!”

Four Women (Excerpt), 2014 from Jonah Bokaer on Vimeo.

“October 7, 1944” runs through December 30 at Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

(Image credit: Janek Skarzynski/Getty Images)

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The Mark Chagall murals and crystal chandeliers hanging in the Metropolitan Opera were visible from the barricades on Columbus Avenue and 65th Street, where hundreds of protesters gathered yesterday to denounce the season premiere of John Adams’ controversial opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. The protest drew a varied crowd, ranging from young children accompanied by their families, to college students, to the elderly. Some had arrived as early as noon.

Signs that read “Cancel racist opera, insult to arts” and “Gelb, are you taking terror $$$” were held high during the demonstration. Long after the start of the premiere, cries of “shame, shame, shame”—often led by some of the guest speakers—boomed across Lincoln Center. Notable attendees included former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Congressman Peter King, who both addressed the crowd. “If you listen,” said Giuliani, “you will see that the emotional context of the opera truly romanticizes the terrorists.”

The Death of Klinghoffer, with music by John Adams and a libretto by Alice Goodman, has incited fury since the Met decided added it to its performance schedule in February. The opera is based on the assassination of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jew who was shot and thrown overboard an Italian cruise ship by PLF terrorists in 1985.

Reactions to the opera tend to fall into two opposing camps: those who defend free speech and ‘art for art’s sake,’ and those who claim that the libretto perpetuates anti-Semitism and glorifies terrorists. Most of the people interviewed had not seen the opera or read the entire libretto.

“It’s a chance for us to physically voice our opinions and show our unhappiness—and disappointment—with the Metropolitan opera,” said 19-year-old Rosie Lenoff, who studies psychology at Stern College. “They are saying it’s freedom of expression, freedom of speech, but if it [the opera] was about any other group of people, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it.”

Approximately thirty students aged 14-17 from Rambam Mesivta, located in Lawrence, N.Y., arrived at the rally on a private bus. Students from the school had attended the September 22nd rally as well. “The Met is putting on an opera that they call art, but it’s really glorifying terrorism,” said senior Gabe Motechin, who helped to organize the delegation.

“The problem is that in this historical event there was no conflict—it was a one-sided thing,” said 14-year-old Gidon Kaminer, a student the Heschel School in Manhattan, who was with a group that included his mother and a friend. “A man was shot in the head for no reason and pushed off a boat, so that wouldn’t make for a very interesting opera. In order to create this interesting opera, they have to draw a parallel—they have to create a conflict—they have to humanize them [the terrorists].”

Klinghoffer’s daughters, Lisa and Ilsa, aided by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), requested that the opera not be simulcast or broadcast on the radio as was previously planned. In a statement which will be included in the Met’s playbills, they wrote: “It presents false moral equivalencies without context and offers no real insight into the historical reality and the senseless murder of an American Jew. It rationalizes, romanticizes, and legitimizes the terrorist murder of our father.”

While Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has defended the inclusion of the opera in this year’s concert schedule, he yielded to the joint request of the Klinghoffer family and the ADL.

Hyman Silverglad, an attorney and resident of the Lower East Side, says he knew the Klinghoffers long before the controversy. He denounced the opera for “stimulating anti-Semitism throughout the world,” and took great offense at the argument that censorship is a violation of first amendment rights. He was pleased to see a young presence at the demonstration. He said “it was a sight for sore eyes to finally see young Jewish people taking part in these issues,” many of whom, have “turned off” Jewish affairs due to assimilation.

The Death of Klinghoffer premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991, only six years after the events that it depicts. Many, including former New York Governor George Pataki, have blasted the title alone, which critics say undermines and trivializes Klinghoffer’s brutal murder. O­peras give dramatic weight to both the protagonists and antagonists, a compositional technique employed by canonical composers like Mozart and Verdi, and The Death of Klinghoffer is no exception. Protesters say they are not enraged over the fact that the terrorists have arias, but rather that they sing lyrics many regard as anti-Semitic. (For example, “whenever poor men are gathered they can find Jews getting fat.”)

Siblings Sam and Shayna Schochet, aged 24 and 19 respectively, took issue with the how the opera frames the politics of Klinghoffer’s murder, arguing that it portrays the hijackers as “freedom fighters.”

“From my own estimation, I conclude that they are sympathizing with the Palestinian terrorists,” said Sam.

Shana added, “they’re humanizing the terrorist… At the end of the day, [Klinghoffer] was a helpless Jewish man who went on a cruise with his wife. He was killed. That’s not [the actions of] a freedom fighter; that’s a terrorist.”

(Image: A protester holds up a sign outside the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center on opening night of the opera, ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ on October 20. Credit: Bryan Thomas/Getty)

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My first real grown-up date, when I was 20, was an absolute calamity. Before agreeing to go, I had what felt like a 40-minute panic attack. “How do you expect to ever find a husband if you’re scared of a coffee date?” asked my Mom. She was right.

I was a ball of utter chaos: Was I supposed to offer to pay? What would happen at the end of the date? What was I supposed wear? What is dating? As we walked into the coffee shop, I tripped for no apparent reason. A kid laughed. Later, my date—a tall, dark, handsome Jewish law student—drove me through a cemetery. We did not go out a second time.

A lot of people are nervous on first dates, but I seem to experience excessive anxiety—or at least, I used to. Why? Because I grew up Modern Orthodox. I attended a yeshiva where there was no opportunity, really, for boys and girls to learn about the secular dating world. My school was co-ed, but it didn’t help the matter. Following halacha, the school’s message about was sex was firm: none of it before marriage. One of the main administrative goals each day was to  keep boys and girls away from each other.

Modern Orthodoxy is kind of a gray area, encompassing was wide range of religious practice. When people ask about my parents’ practic, I hesitate about how to describe them. They keep Shabbat, but my mother wears pants, and they eat vegetarian food at non-kosher restaurants. Some members of my extended family who also call themselves Modern Orthodox are strictly kosher, and cover their hair after marriage. Most Modern Orthodox people venture into the secular world for study and work, but many only socialize with other Orthodox Jews. The level of familiarity with pop culture varies greatly from family to family and person to person.

The messages we received in my community about dating were confusing. Only certain activities were acceptable, and the rules seemed arbitrary. “Dating” meant that you walked to class together and maybe went over to their house for Shabbat lunch. My first boyfriend—who I ogled for three years before we actually started hanging out—lasted all of two weeks. We rode our bikes and sometimes sat next to each other when the whole gang went to the movies. Romantic. As far as the physical aspects of the relationship, hugging was about as far as it went. Maybe the occasional touching of the elbow. No hand-holding and certainly no kissing. It wasn’t just us.

When I was 15, a friend told the entire neighborhood that I was a whore because I sat next to a boy on a shul trip to Hersheypark. I was comfortable hanging out with boys in a friendly, platonic context, but unfortunately, some people in my Modern Orthodox neighborhood did not feel the same. (That same “friend” later got sprung sneaking out with boys, which led to some difficulties getting into seminary. The neighborhood covered for her.)

Every love connection I had was accidental. When you grow up together, you just get thrown together. You don’t date in a traditional sense, you simply hang out closer, with an almost imperceptible increase in frequency.

My first “real” relationship started just before eleventh grade, with a guy whose religious observance swung from eating at Olive Garden and making out with girls, to Orthodoxy, to some variation of the two. The first and only time he spent a weekend at my house, he showed up with a giant black hat that he had spent too much money on, which scared my parents, who wanted me to be observant, but wanted to make sure I stayed true to my own beliefs. With him, I got a taste of almost every type of Judaism.  I thought it would broaden my relationship horizons, that I wouldn’t be so scared of guys and dating. It didn’t. He was the first guy that I had any sort of physical relationship with. Most of that had to do with the fact that he was from a different community and wasn’t raised Modern Orthodox.  When I started dating him I kept most things from my friends, but a few warned me that being with someone who wasn’t religious was a bad idea.

Once I left the bubble of yeshiva and found my footing in the secular world of college and dorms and parties, I realized that those other folks in my community—the ones who attended Orthodox, single-sex high schools—had it easy. My friends whose schools were more Orthodox than Modern were having an easier go at college life because all they went to the same schools (Queens, Stern, YU), never completely leaving the bubble. They dated within their community, with people who had the same level of romantic experience and the same expectations. Their rules of dating were clearly delineated. Most of them are married now. I was the one with the problem: I was dipping my feet in dating pools beyond my depth, with people who were far more experienced and comfortable than me.

In my freshman year of college, my sculpture TA caught my eye. He walked into the studio with his newsboy cap and glasses, making me want to marry him. I lost all motor skills each time he approached my table. Once I accidentally smashed my little statue. My friend Sammi would stand next to me molding her clay and I’d nudge her, asking “What do I do?” The semester was grueling and I was in jeopardy of not finishing my final work of ‘art.’ The closest I got to flirting with him was lying to him about liking to fish. (I saw it on an episode of Gilmore Girls.)

When the semester ended and we all went home for the summer, my big move was sending the TA a Facebook message confessing that I had a big-league crush on him—something a sixteen-year-old might do. Needless to say, the relationship never blossomed, though we did stay in touch.

My yeshiva left me with a pretty solid education, but almost no life skills. It wasn’t until I was nearly done with college that I started to feel at ease in the world of dating, and that was because I decided to work on an ethnography-type thing about the culture of online dating for credit. I actually picked dating as my writing project for the semester so that I’d be forced to learn how to go on a date.

And so, I went on dates. Many dates. I became a student of flirting, plate-sharing, coy glances, teasing. Each dinner or seat at a bar taught me something new. I learned that people who have been dating since they were 14 still get nervous. One of my first dates couldn’t seem to remember the college he went to. Another spilled beer all over the bar counter. And more than a few of them, jittery and clumsy, confessed to me that they were “a bit nervous.” So if I didn’t know how to answer a question or if I spilled my drink or tripped (which happened a lot), it was okay. More importantly, it was pure immersion therapy: the more I pushed myself, the more comfortable I became. After a while I stopped walking into glass doors. Making conversation became much easier. One guy even called me a good “verbal-spatting partner,” which I considered a win.

About three years after I confessed my crush to the TA, he messaged me on Facebook and asked me out. Butterflies were swing-dancing in my stomach, but I kept my cool and it went well. I accidentally called him by a codename Sammi and I had given him, but I covered it up with a cough and a smile. I didn’t feel uncomfortable and I didn’t feel as though I was playing dating catch-up. I felt normal. We didn’t get together, but I finally felt as though I had finally graduated into the adult world of dating.

There were many awkward moments along the way, but I think I have finally leveled off with my peers in the school of love. I am more comfortable now. Not confident all the time, but not frightened whenever I have to talk to a guy.  I’ve found someone to be with who, I think, would be surprised to know what a disaster I used to be. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who grew up in communities similar to mine, and learned that we all share a common naïveté when it comes to the world of secular dating.  But everyone has their ‘thing,’ no? Every person goes into a relationship with baggage or quirks or expectations—so it’s a process of consciously keeping those neuroses in check and not letting them hinder the progression of a relationship (or even that one date). There’s no formula to what works, it’s just a process of trial and error until you one day realize “Hey, this ain’t so bad.”

Daniella Bondar is a MFA Creative Writing Nonfiction student at The New School. Wandering New Yorker. Insomniac. She’s working on a memoir about her gold dress phobia. Follow her on twitter and find her writing at DaniellaRobin.com.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year

The post “50 First Dates”: Learning About Love After Modern Orthodoxy appeared first on Jewcy.

This summer, 24-year-old filmmaker Meir Kalmanson decided to bring a little joy to the sweaty, stressed-out streets of New York—by high-fiving people as they were attempting to hail cabs. The result is this delightful 86-second video, “High Five New York”:

Kalmanson told the New York Daily News that he loves making videos that “are not just funny but also are heartwarming and have a good feel and message… I love seeing all of the people (in New York) and it just clicked in me. ‘How cool would it be to give someone a high five?'”

Very cool. Joyful, even! Kalmanson heroically resisted the temptation to turn around and see how the unwitting high-fivers were reacting to his unsolicited salutation. After a moment of surprise/shock, they all seem pretty delighted by it. (Except for the dude dressed in black at 1:06, who just carries on with his emphatic cell phone conversation like a stereotypical New Yorker in a B-grade rom-com. Yes, those guys exist IRL!)

Enjoy this little ray of tikkun olam.

(Image: YouTube)

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