history

Horn co-launches book fest

Dara Horn and David Baddiel open the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 6. (photos from JBF)

Early in her new book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, Dara Horn reflects on a controversy at the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, where an employee who wore a kippa to work was told by his employers to hide it under a baseball cap because it might interfere with the museum’s “independent position.”

“The museum finally relented after deliberating for four months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding,” writes Horn.

The snappy summation is typical of the author’s approach: biting wit in the face of affronts of various dreadfulness. And the affronts pile up, supporting the incendiary thesis of the title.

Horn discusses the world’s interest in Anne Frank’s story, including the insistence on repeating the line from her diary, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Leaving aside the fact that Frank wrote these words before she experienced how truly evil at heart some people can be, Horn writes, the line provides a “gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity).”

Horn, who is part of the Feb. 6 launch event for the 2022 Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, is a novelist with a PhD in Yiddish and Hebrew comparative literatures. Her take on contemporary antisemitism is suffused with her understanding of how Western audiences expect “coherence” and often an uplifting ending to the stories in our literature or other entertainment.

“Holocaust novels that have sold millions of copies both in the United States and overseas in recent years are all ‘uplifting,’ even when they include the odd dead kid,” she writes. “The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a recent international mega-bestseller touted for its ‘true story,’ manages to present an Auschwitz that involves a heartwarming romance. Sarah’s Key, The Book Thief, The Boy in [the] Striped Pyjamas, and many other bestsellers, some of which have even become required reading in schools, all involved non-Jewish rescuers who risk or sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all.”

These uplifting stories, she points out, make up a large chunk of Holocaust-related literature, yet illustrate phenomena that were almost nonexistent during the Holocaust: non-Jews risking their lives to save Jews.

“Statistically speaking, this was not the experience of almost any Jews who endured the Holocaust,” she writes. “But for literature in non-Jewish languages, that grim reality is both inconvenient and irrelevant.”

She summarizes: “Dead Jews are supposed to teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption – otherwise, what was the point of killing them in the first place?”

On the subject of non-Jewish rescuers, Horn goes into an extensive exploration of the life of Varian Fry, an American man who worked for the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group of American intellectuals that, beginning in 1940, distributed emergency American visas to endangered European artists and thinkers. What they envisioned rescuing was not so much the individuals themselves, but the very concept of European civilization, which they correctly believed to be in mortal danger from the Nazis. But, rescuing a culture’s greatest artists, writers and thinkers and sequestering them to safety in America, Horn posits, is itself “a sort of eugenics.”

For someone with an explicit distaste for disproportionate attention to rescue stories, Horn devotes a significant chunk in the middle of the book to what amounts to a biography of Fry. As the reader starts wondering how this fits into the larger thesis, Horn points out how the veneration of the more universal European culture for which Fry and his colleagues risked their lives was not extended to the particular Jewish culture that was the expressed target of the Nazis.

“Fry tried to save the culture of Europe, and for that he should be remembered and praised,” Horn writes. “But no one tried to save the culture of Hasidism, for example, with its devotion to ordinary, everyday holiness – or Misnagdim, the opposing religious movement within traditional Eastern European Judaism, whose energy in the years before the war was channeled into the rigourous study of musar, or ethics. Entire academies devoted to the Musar Movement were destroyed, their books burned out of the world, their teachers and leaders and scholars murdered – all the things that everyone feared would happen to the vaunted culture of Europe. No rescue committee was convened on behalf of the many people who devoted their lives and careers to … the actual study of righteousness. For them, there were no Varian Frys.”

Horn notes that, in the 1990s, there was a burgeoning of Holocaust museums and exhibitions all over the United States, including the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

“The idea was that people would come to these museums and learn what the world had done to the Jews, where hatred can lead. They would then stop hating Jews.

“It wasn’t a ridiculous idea, but it seems to have been proven wrong. A generation later, antisemitism is once again the next big thing, and it is hard to go to these museums today without feeling that something profound has shifted.”

She suggests that the lesson some people take from these exhibitions is the opposite of what was intended. The idea of the museums is that everyone should learn the depths to which humanity could skin sink, she writes.

“But this has come to mean that anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high.”

Therefore, when people are shot in a synagogue in Pittsburgh or San Diego, this is “not the Holocaust” and, presumably, nothing to get too concerned about in the greater scheme of Jewish victimization. Harassing Jewish college students is not the Holocaust. Lobbing missiles at sleeping children in Israeli cities is not the Holocaust. Even hounding ancient Jewish communities out of entire countries and seizing their assets is not the Holocaust. Horn does not mention Martin Niemöller, but she seems to be suggesting that, if “they” are coming for “the Jews,” most people will not speak up until it reaches something akin to the Holocaust, which we may have unwittingly recast not as the endpoint of hatred and antisemitism but as the stick by which the world measures threats to Jewish people.

An antisemitic attack in Jersey City, N.J., provides Horn with insights into how mainstream audiences try to make sense of antisemitic violence.

New Jersey’s flagship newspaper, the Star-Ledger, noted that “the attack that killed two Orthodox Jews, an Ecuadorian immigrant and a Jersey City police detective has highlighted racial tension that had been simmering ever since ultra-Orthodox Jews began moving to a lower-income community.”

Horn points out a few of the factual and logical inconsistencies in the media’s coverage, including that the assailants had never lived in Jersey City, so they weren’t reacting to any state of tension there. Moreover, the community that was attacked was accused of “gentrifying” a “minority” neighbourhood.

“This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, in fact came to Jersey City, fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn,” she writes.

The book concludes rather unexpectedly, not with recipes for solving the contemporary crisis or explicit calls to action, but rather with reflections of her experience with Daf Yomi, the page-a-day, seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Babylonian Talmud. She provides a lovely and succinct explanation of Rabbinic Judaism.

“Until the year 70 CE, Judaism had been centred at the ancient temple in Jerusalem, where worship was mediated through priests offering sacrifices,” writes Horn. “After the Romans destroyed this temple and exiled the people, there was no particular reason for this religion, or even simply this people, to survive in any form. But on the eve of this temple’s destruction, one sage, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, had himself smuggled out of the besieged city of Jerusalem in a coffin, after which he convinced the Roman general Vespasian to allow him to open an academy for Torah scholars in a small town far from Jerusalem. Both Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and Judaism faked their own deaths in order to survive this cataclysm. The small cadre of scholars in that small town reinvented this religion by turning it into a virtual-reality system, replacing temple rituals with equally ritualized blessings and prayers, study of Torah, and elaborately regulated interpersonal ethics. The sages frantically arguing about when and how to recite which prayers are survivors and descendants of survivors, remnants of a destroyed world. They are anxious about remembering every last detail of that lost connection to God, like mourners obsessing over the tiniest memories of a beloved they have lost. One might expect that this memory would eventually fade, that people would ‘move on.’ Instead the opposite happens. Once the process of memory becomes important, the details do not fade but rather accrue – because the memory itself becomes a living thing, enriched by every subsequent generation that brings new meaning to it.”

Without batting readers over the head, Horn seems to be advocating what Jews have always done – finding meaning, comfort and guidance by interrogating ideas and arguing across centuries with the greatest minds of the tradition. She may be, as she says, “part of a ridiculously small minority that nonetheless played a behemoth role in other people’s imaginations,” but her Daf Yomi practice reminds her that she is far from alone.

“I turn the page and return, carried by fellow readers living and dead, all turning the pages with me,” she concludes.

Horn will be joined at the virtual festival opening Feb. 6, 1 p.m., by David Baddiel, whose book Jews Don’t Count shares themes and emotions with Horn’s. Baddiel’s book, like others in this (sadly) flourishing genre, was reviewed in these pages recently (jewishindependent.ca/ tackling-the-hatred-head-on). They will be in conversation with Marsha Lederman, Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail.

For the full book festival schedule, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

The light of democracy

Tomorrow is Black Excellence Day. The day is adjacent to the birth date of Martin Luther King Jr. and is being recognized in at least 20 B.C. school districts.

Founded last year to draw attention to the lack of Black history being taught in Canadian schools and to highlight the struggles of racialized Canadians, it was originally named Black Shirt Day. The name followed the pattern of other social justice days, such as Pink Shirt Day (anti-bullying) and Orange Shirt Day (truth and reconciliation). Unfortunately, the name Black Shirt Day carries unintentional connotations. The Blackshirts were fascist paramilitary thugs in Italy, akin to the German Nazi Brownshirts.

Many people in the Jewish community expressed concern over the name, as did the B.C. Human Rights Commission. Among the Jewish groups that spoke with the Ninandotoo Society, whose members initiated the commemoration last year, were the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA). In an interview with CBC, Geoffrey Druker, Pacific region chair of CIJA, said, “We were kind of gutted. It was painful because we still have Holocaust survivors among us and anybody who suffered from fascism and black shirts would have been hurt.”

In response to the comments, the Ninandotoo Society created Black Excellence Day, which still focuses on the ongoing civil rights struggle of Black and racialized Canadians and the need for a mandatory curriculum on Black history.

Kamika Williams, president of the society (“nina ndoto” means “I have a dream” in Swahili), told CBC, “For us, it wasn’t a matter of should we change the name, it was what should we change the name to. It would be very hypocritical of us to fight against racism within the Black community and then turn the other cheek when other racialized groups inform us of the racist nuances within their community.”

She said most of the discussions focused on “building solidarity … how do we move forward, how do we work together, how do we stay unified and combat racism together.”

Despite the fascist connotations, however, another group, Anti-Racism Coalition of Vancouver, is still going ahead with a Black Shirt Day, with the imprimatur of Independent Jewish Voices of Canada, among others.

Black Excellence Day (Jan. 15) and Martin Luther King Day (this year on Jan. 17 though his actual birthday is Jan. 15) fall just over a week after Jan. 6. This year, Jan. 6 was a time of widespread reexamination of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol a year earlier. CNN, MSNBC and other mainstream networks provided exhaustive reviews of the events of that day and insights into the larger meaning for its victims – Capitol police, elected officials, staffers, their families and so forth – while right-wing media perpetuated their line that the attempted coup was nothing more than rambunctious tourists.

The Atlantic magazine’s current issue, with the cover story “January 6 was practise,” devotes almost every word in the magazine to the events of that day and what it means for the future. Relatively obscure civil servants and elections administrators were, in some instances, the main bulwark against Trump’s efforts to subvert the will of voters in states like Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere. But, argues the Atlantic, supporters of the insurrection and the “big lie” that Trump won and the election was stolen are now taking their places at the most sensitive (if least understood) nexus of the election bureaucracy. The alarming, pessimistic tone of the magazine’s issue could be summed up as: American democracy has about three years to live.

Various media have raised alarms about these attempts to grab the election levers – and revisited how it was not so much institutions or constitutional niceties that prevented Trump’s coup attempt from succeeding but a very small number of stiff-backed individuals, including then-vice president Mike Pence, who provided the frail barricade around the will of the country’s voters.

The health and survival of American democracy, put mildly, is not a matter of concern for Americans only. Its demise would eliminate what moral suasion the country holds in the world – to say nothing of the potential for misuse of military power. For Canadians, chaos on the other side of the world’s longest undefended border would be cause for serious concern. And any threat to democracy is a threat, foremost, to the most vulnerable and marginalized, Jews included.

Sadly and scarily, this phenomenon is not exclusive to the United States – illiberal strains are gaining ground in various places in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere. What is needed (among many other things) is a mass cultural movement recognizing these dangers and ensuring the health of democracy – or at least giving it a fighting chance if a chunk of the population rejects the outcome of future elections.

While the United States, Canada and pretty much every democracy have not always lived up to their promise – indeed, they have failed in serious ways – democracy is our collective best chance to achieve just societies. For countless Jews, and millions of others yearning to breathe free, America has been a beacon, despite its flaws. We must not just hope, but take action to help make sure its light – and that of other democracies – does not go out.

A Methuselah update

Methuselah’s roots go back to the time of Masada, and even earlier. (photo from Arava Institute)

For many years, in anticipation of Tu b’Shevat, I have written about a date palm tree in the Arava that fascinates me – Methuselah.

Methuselah’s relatively new beginnings can be attributed to London-born Dr. Sarah Sallon, director of the Louis Borick Natural Medicine Research Centre at Hadassah Medical Centre, and California-born botanist Dr. Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura.

According to Sallon, “in 2005, we were interested in rejuvenating lost flora of Eretz Yisrael. One of the lost flora is the Judaean date. I was discussing with some scientists about their work, trying to extract DNA from ancient seeds.” Sallon asked, “If we had ancient seeds, why couldn’t we grow them?”

From 1963 to 1965, archeologists Yigal Yadin and Ehud Netzer excavated the fortress Masada, which was built by King Herod between 37 and 31 BCE and was home to almost a thousand zealots until the Romans breached the wall in 72 CE and found the bodies of the Jews who had lived there and killed themselves, rather than being taken as prisoners. At the site, Yadin and Netzer found date palm seeds, which were subsequently stored at Bar-Ilan University.

Sallon asked Netzer for a few seeds, and received five. She took them to Solowey, who took three of the 2,000-year-old seeds and planted them in January 2005. Other seeds were sent to the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, for radiocarbon dating. They were also tested to see if they had anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-cancer, anti-fungal, anti-malarial, anti-oxidant or other medicinal properties.

The date palm is one of the best medicinal trees. Domesticated more than 6,000 years ago, it can be male or female, and produces dates. Medicine of the date palm has been used for lung disease, colds, heart disease, hair growth and other things.

After eight weeks, in 2005, one seed successfully germinated and was named Methuselah, after the biblical person who was said to have lived 969 years.

Initially, the first leaves had white spots because of a lack of chlorophyll. At 15 months, the seedling was transferred to a larger pot. After 26 months, the plant showed normal development.

In 2011, when its exact location was being kept a secret, I was permitted to see a photograph of Methuselah. At the time, it was two metres high and in a “protected quarantine site,” due to its scientific and financial value.

In April 2011, a white flower appeared on the inner part of the tree, indicating that Methuselah was male. In 2017, there was hope for Methuselah to be bred with a female tree to produce the same date variety that was common in ancient Judea.

In December 2019, Solowey sent me an update on Methuselah – he had grown to four metres tall. Also during that year, Solowey had gotten six ancient date seeds from archeological sites: “Adam” from Masada; “Jonah,” “Uriel,” “Boaz” and “Judith” (or “Yehudit’) from Qumram; and “Hannah” from Wadi Makukh, a winter water channel in the Judean desert surrounded by high cliffs and containing a number of caves that were surveyed from 1986 to 1989.

Early that December, Methuselah was pollinated by Hannah and Solowey cultivated 111 semi-dry dates, “really nice, big, blondish, semi-dry dates from her with a honey aftertaste.”

In March 2020, Hannah flowered, and Solowey told me: “we are thinking of making a genetic line from Hannah.”

At the end of November 2021, Solowey wrote to me again. She said, “Well, we got 600 beautiful dates from Hannah (whose seed was 175 years older than Methuselah’s seed) this September. We planted Yehudit, another female, on Sukkot. We are considering tissue culture. I have two males still in the greenhouse.”

Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, lecturer, book reviewer and food writer in Jerusalem. She created and leads the weekly English-language Shuk Walks in Machane Yehuda, she has compiled and edited nine kosher cookbooks, and is the author of Witness to History: Ten Years as a Woman Journalist in Israel.

Four solos and a duet

Livona Ellis, left, and Rebecca Margolick, right, perform together Dec. 17 and 18 at Scotiabank Dance Centre. (photo by Faviola Perez)

Next weekend, choreographers and dancers Livona Ellis and Rebecca Margolick will première their first collaboration, a duet called Fortress. The Dec. 17 and 18 performances at the Scotiabank Dance Centre also feature four solo works.

Ellis performs Unmoved, “a response to the idea of overcoming the limitations we place on ourselves,” and Margolick’s solo Bunker draws “on themes of memory and the shared history of previous generations of women.” The other two solo pieces were revived last season specifically for them: Peter Bingham’s Woman Walking (away) (1997), danced by Ellis, and Allen Kaeja’s Trace Elements (2000), performed by Margolick. (See jewishindependent.ca/albert-solos-reimagined.)

Both dancers have had the chance to perform for live audiences recently and both have been touring – New York-based Margolick internationally with her own work and locally based Ellis with Ballet BC, for audiences in Ottawa and Montreal.

“From these past two years of experiencing how quickly it can be taken away and experiencing how deeply I miss it when it’s gone, performing has a renewed sense of urgency and importance for me,” Margolick told the Independent. “I’m so excited to perform for a live audience here in Vancouver, especially because last year, when we were about to do this show for a live audience, on the day of the show, we had to switch to livestream only. A lot of energy has been built in this show over the past three years, and I’m looking forward to being able to share it live.”

While Margolick and Ellis have known each other for a long time, Fortress is their first duet together.

“Livona has always been one of the best dancers and performers I know. We trained at Arts Umbrella together all through high school, but, since then, we hadn’t danced together, until now. So much of collaboration happens outside of the studio and so, in a way, I feel like through our friendship and conversations over the past number of years, the work and ideas were already starting to form and it felt natural to transition to a studio together.

“At the time we decided to work together, I had been creating a solo titled Harbour, which was about my grandmother and my relationship to her both in life and death. One day, Livona and I had a conversation about it and she began talking about her grandmother. I was moved by this, and this conversation naturally spiraled into how we’ve started to see our mothers and grandmothers differently; how we see their influence on us; our desires to become mothers one day, being in our 30s now; how dance has changed for us, etc. The conversation was vibrant and honest and there’s a lot of history and love between us and I just asked if she wanted to create together, and she said yes.”

Ellis added, “One of the silver linings about the pandemic is that we both found ourselves in Vancouver at the same time…. I have always admired Rebecca’s work from afar but we’ve never been in the same place long enough to even begin to think about a collaboration. She was working on Harbour and we started speaking about our family and our grandmothers. This sparked the inspiration for Fortress. We were both doing a lot of reflecting during our various lockdowns and quarantines and found we were thinking a lot about who we are as artists and as women. How does our matriarchal lineage affect who we are today?

“We both feel like we are in a moment of change or transformation,” Ellis continued. “We can feel our experience settling in and grounding us in a way that allows us to move forward into the next chapter of our careers. This felt like the perfect jumping off point to create a duet.”

The pair started creating that work this past August 2021, with a residency hosted by the B.C. Movement Arts Society, rehearsing at the Athletic Hall in Sointula. “We are now working with composer Ivan Shopov from Bulgaria to develop the music, and Mimi Abrahams to develop the lighting,” said Margolick.

For Margolick, while both Bunker and Trace Elements haven’t seen any changes choreographically, “as time goes on, and as I evolve, they naturally do as well.”

“Especially for Trace Elements,” she explained, “it’s been a journey since I began working on it with Allen Kaeja. I started to learn more about Jewish history and specifically Jewish leftist and Jewish resistance history, both in the U.S. and Europe. Specifically, in Trace Elements, there is a spirit of resistance and remembrance in the work, countering the text we hear out loud, text of German propaganda and generational indifference to the history of the Holocaust. In that, I think about resistance fighters, countering the narrative that Jews went quietly towards death – they didn’t. That is a history we’re not often told of, and it’s been a part of my Jewish education to learn that history. The work is really spiritual for me and every time I perform it, I feel the spirit of those who fought and those who keep fighting and inspire me to as well.

“More recently,” she said, “I’ve been learning about Jewish women activists and fighters, especially women like Hannah Senesh, Faye Schulman, Bella Abzug, Emma Goldman, Anna Sokolow and others. I can’t really explain into words how this knowledge affects my performance, but I feel it, and it gives me a sense of grounding and inspiration.”

Margolick highlighted the Jewish Women’s Archive and Judy Batalion’s book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos as resources.

Bunker is also steeped in research. While she premièred the full-length version of the piece (titled Bunker + Vault, which runs 35 minutes) a few weeks ago in San José, Costa Rica, the December performances will include only the first 10 minutes of the work.

“A part of my research for this piece included looking through the archives of the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls at the 92nd Street Y from the late-1800s to mid-1900s,” said Margolick. “The Clara de Hirsch Home was a place where young, poor, mostly Jewish immigrant women were housed and supported with educational resources as they found jobs and worked towards being able to support themselves. These archives were records kept by the staff, with observations and notes about the women who resided there. These observations gave me a window into the lives of the women who lived there, ranging from extreme hardship, repression, mental health issues, Jewish culture, camaraderie, acts of extreme kindness and on and on. Some of these women informed the movements, and spirit of resilience and care in the work.”

Fortress + Four Solos is presented by the Dance Centre and B.C. Movement Arts Dec. 17, 8 p.m., and Dec. 18, 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. For tickets, visit thedancecentre.ca.

Photographing the rebellious

Photographer Dina Goldstein and Myles Peterson, one of her model-collaborators, at Goldstein’s OG Punk exhibit, which is at the Polygon Gallery until Jan. 2. (photo by Dina Goldstein)

Walking past the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, it is hard not to be drawn to the photographs adorning the walls. The powerful portraits of self-described original – OG – punks were taken by Jewish community member Dina Goldstein, whose work is known for its thought-provoking social commentary.

The exhibit OG Punk is on display at the gallery until Jan. 2. Curated by Helga Pakassar, it comprises portraits of major figures from the punk rock scene in Vancouver and Victoria, which were taken by Goldstein over the past year. It is accompanied by an audio guide written by author Michael Turner.

Turner notes, “Goldstein gave her model-collaborators little instruction on what to bring to their shoot, apart from their ‘leathers.’ As for poses, these too were left to the model-collaborators, though it should be noted that the poses chosen for display, as portraits, were decided by Goldstein and exhibition curator Helga Pakasaar.”

“I met some of my model-collaborators by chance around my neighbourhood,” Goldstein told the Independent. “They are artists, musicians and punk devotees; most of them over 50, in punk regalia, hairdos, piercings and tattoos. I was excited by their stories and memories of their time as punks during the late ’70s, ’80s and into the ’90s. There was a vibrant punk scene in Vancouver and Victoria, with local bands, like DOA, incorporating activism and social commentary into their music.

“I have always been attracted to individualism – those who openly express themselves, are unconventional and live an authentic existence,” she said. “Some of the punks were ailing and not well. Some key figures had already passed. Most recently, the iconic Chi Pig, who passed a couple of years ago. I felt an urgency to document this generation of local punks. The project evolved into a series when I was able to collect a good amount of participants.”

Among the participants featured are Murray “The Cretin” Acton, Myles Peterson and wendythirteen. Goldstein sent out questionnaires to better understand the participants. Turner discusses some of the responses to the questions – such as “Has punk changed much since the 1980s?” and “Is punk here to stay?” – in the audio guide, the script of which can be found at mtwebsit.blogspot.com/2021/11/og-punk-2.html.

Though none of the model-collaborators to date are Jewish, Goldstein noted that she “will be continuing to photograph more people for this series in January.”

As for what punk means to her, Goldstein said, “I have always been rebellious. I am non-conventional and have a DIY mentality. My photography requires critical thinking and is a form of activism. My art has been described as satirical, irreverent and subversive.

“As one of my model-collaborators Lisa Jak said and I totally agree: ‘Anywhere and anytime that there is oppression, ignorance, intolerance and f–king stupidity – some punk will be there to question and fight it!’”

London’s Ghetto Songs

Frank London recently released a new album, Ghetto Songs (Venice and Beyond). (photo by Chuck Fishman)

Trumpeter and composer Frank London, an unwavering presence in numerous musical genres for more than four decades, released a new album, Ghetto Songs (Venice and Beyond), on Felmay Records earlier this year. The project incorporates music from around the world and delves into the history of “ghetto music.”

Coming out this past April – to coincide with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 – the concept for Ghetto Songs began in 2016, when the Grammy Award-winning London found himself in Venice on a residency with Beit Venezia, a foundation that aims to promote Jewish thought and culture, and serve as a bridge between people of all cultures and religions.

“It all started with my being invited by Dr. Shaul Bassi and Beit Venezia to go to Venice and conceive a special way to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the opening of the Venice Ghetto, the first segregated urban area to be called a ghetto,” London told the Independent. “The particularity of the Venice Ghetto and the universality of ghettos themselves inspired Ghetto Songs.”

The Jewish ghetto in Venice was situated in the polluted grounds of an ancient copper foundry, or geto. By the early 20th century, the term ghetto came to signify the crowded urban quarters of any minority group.

As London sees it, ghettos are historically complex phenomena. They offer both freedom and restriction, protection and imperilment. By isolating specific groups from the outside world, they become cultural “petri dishes” in which the ghettoized group’s culture can thrive.

Ghetto Songs celebrates the music and poetry that emerges from and about the world’s many ghettos. The playlist for the new release includes 17th-century music and poetry from the Venice ghetto (works from Salomone Rossi, Benedetto Marcello and Sara Copia Sullam); a piyyut (Jewish liturgical poem) from a mellah, a Moroccan Jewish quarter; kwela, street music from South Africa’s townships; and works by Cantor Gershon Sirota, who lived and died in the Warsaw Ghetto. There is also version the 1972 hit by the band War, “The World is a Ghetto.”

When it came to selecting what pieces would be the best fit for an album covering ghetto music encompassing five centuries and numerous locations, London recounted, “This is my favourite part of the process! I do the deep dive: tons of research into music from the world’s ghettos throughout history, across time and place. I pick out songs that I love, but that also tell a story, that inform each other, that complement each other, and that work together as a unified whole despite their incredible differences.”

London has assembled an array of talent for the release. Among the vocalists are tenor Karim Sulayman, Cantor Svetlana “Sveta” Kundish, Yaakov “Yanky” Lemmer (considered one of the best in the new generation of chazzans) and singer/guitarist Brandon Ross. They are joined by drummers Kenny Wollesen and Zeno De Rossi, cellists Francesca Ter-Berg and Marika Hughes, bassists Greg Cohen and Gregg August, and multi-instrumentalist Ilya Shneyveys.

“What might have been seen as challenging – getting the right musicians who can play such a diverse, variegated set of musics, styles, genres, etc., was really no problem. I am blessed to know and work with some of the world’s finest musicians and, with them, there were really no big challenges,” said London. “I have worked with each of these fantastic musicians in different projects and situations – mine, theirs, and as side musicians for others – over my 40-year career.”

To summarize London’s career in the space of an article, let alone a paragraph of two, is not an easy task. Among the artists he has worked with are Itzhak Perlman, Allen Ginsberg, LL Cool J, Mel Tormé, Iggy Pop, John Cale and Jane Siberry. He is a member of the Klezmatics and Hasidic New Wave, as well as leader of the Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars and the Glass House Orchestra, a band that plays Austro-Hungarian Jewish music. London has made 30 solo recordings, is featured on more than 400 CDs and is the recipient of the Hungarian Order of Merit.

The veteran musician is working on several projects at present. These include Ich Bin Eine Hexe, a dance/theatre spectacle about pioneering performance artist Valeska Gert; “Rube G (Music for Brass Trio and Percussion,” a dance score for choreographer and filmmaker Jody Oberfelder; ESN: Songs from the Kitchen, a cooking and music video with Lorin Sklamberg and Sarah Gordon; Salomé: Woman of Valor, a CD with poet Adeena Karasick (jewishindependent.ca/salome-cd-launched); and Transliminal Rites, a CD of improvised music with Eyal Maoz and Guy Barash, who, together with London, make up the EFG Trio.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Walking through our history

Left to right: Drew Carnwath, Measha Brueggergosman and Sam Rosenthal are the main creatives behind the podcast The Christie Pits Riot. (photo by John Ebata)

On Aug. 16, 1933, Toronto experienced what is viewed as one of the worst race riots in Canadian history. Earlier this fall, the Hogtown Collective, an immersive theatre company, released a four-part podcast that recreates the events of that summer evening 88 years ago.

The eponymously named podcast, The Christie Pits Riot, is seen through the eyes of its 12-year-old protagonist, Joey Rosenbaum. Created by Sam Rosenthal and Drew Cranwath of Hogtown Collective and set amid the circumstances of the Great Depression, Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and escalating ethnic unrest within Toronto, the series also contains an interactive walking tour through the neighbourhood where the riot took place.

The centre of the conflict is a baseball diamond in Christie Pits Park. Tensions began festering during a playoff between two local teams, the Harbord Playground, consisting mostly of Jewish and Italian players, and St. Peter’s, a club sponsored by a local church. Fights erupted and a full-on riot ensued. There were many injuries, but no fatalities.

The mass brawl, which lasted six hours, started after the final out of the second game of a quarterfinal pitting Harbord against St. Peter’s. Two nights earlier, at the first game, a swastika had been displayed by some fans. In the weeks before these games, troubles in Toronto had been brewing more broadly between some Jewish residents and antisemitic groups, primarily those calling themselves the Swastika Club.

A number of Jewish boys and young men who had heard about the swastika incident at the first game rushed to destroy the swastika unfurled at the end of the second. Supporters of both sides, including the Italians, who supported the Jews, joined in the melee.

In the podcast, narrated by Rosenthal, the listener gets a snapshot of life in the city at the time and follows Joey through his day – running errands for his father’s drugstore – along Bloor Street, near the ballpark.

“We wanted the audience to be able to access this story through an emotional, not just historical, perspective,” Rosenthal told the Independent. “Making our hero a young boy allowed us to show the world from his perspective.

“Exploring the deeper issue of systemic racism and antisemitic behaviour can be challenging,” he added. “Our young hero doesn’t understand hatred the way an adult might, so his character provides a means of asking questions about antisemitic racism. We also wanted a way to keep things rooted in the present simultaneously, so as to be able to draw clear parallels to the same problems and issues” that still exist.

The first three instalments take the audience through Depression-era Toronto, with the final episode coming to a head at the fateful game. When the riot breaks out in the story, we find Joey trying to get his friend Rachel home. They are helped along the way by Nala – voiced by Juno Award-winning soprano Measha Brueggergosman – who encourages Joey to stand up for what he believes.

In addition to providing her vocal talent, Brueggergosman was the podcast’s musical supervisor.

In releasing a theatrical production during the pandemic, the creators spotted a chance to provide audiences with a safe and tangible way to experience where the riot happened via the walking tour.

“To look out at Christie Pits Park and imagine what it would be like being in the middle of 1,000-plus people fighting is a terrifying thought, and so it makes the story land in a more visceral way if one can actually be there while listening in,” Rosenthal said. “Since my grandfather owned a store at the corner of Bloor and Manning, the walking tour is a perfect addition to share some of my family history within the broader scope of this chapter from Toronto’s history.”

Several scenes in the story are situated in the drugstore operated by Rosenthal’s grandfather from the early 1920s until the late 1950s. Rosenthal’s father, Joseph, grew up in the neighbourhood and worked there. Joseph was born after the riot, and knew about it from his own father.

“My dad shared many stories of being a young boy in a deeply divided antisemitic Toronto,” said Rosenthal. “When he told me there were once signs posted at the Balmy Beach Club that said, ‘No Jews or Dogs,’ and that there were Swastika Clubs in the 1930s, I felt compelled to tell this story. My father and his friends were often brutalized or threatened whilst walking home from school. I wonder how many Toronto residents know this about our city’s past, and why it seems still entrenched in our present.”

Rosenthal’s hope for the production is that younger listeners not only learn that the riot was a dark chapter in Canadian history, but see it as a way to honour previous generations who paved the way for the diverse culture that Toronto is celebrated for today.

The Christie Pits Riot is available online from multiple providers. The Anchor app can be used by anyone interested in taking the guided walking tour through the Toronto neighbourhood where the riot transpired – the app can be found at hogtownexperience.com.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Lean into our identity

Left to right: Eve Barlow, Noa Tishby and Bari Weiss participate in a Nov. 3 panel hosted by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies. (screenshot)

In a time of burgeoning antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Jews need to lean into their identities, says a leading voice in the fight against anti-Jewish racism.

“In other instances in Jewish history, we believed, wrongly, that the way to get acceptance, the way to get along, was to self-abnegate and erase who we are,” said Bari Weiss. “If there has been one lesson in thousands of years of Jewish history, it’s that that is a terrible strategy.”

Weiss is a former writer at the New York Times. She resigned her position there, citing a hostile work environment, and is the author of the book How to Fight Antisemitism. She was speaking as part of a panel convened Nov. 3 by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (FSWC). She was joined by Eve Barlow, a pop-culture writer who grew up in the United Kingdom and has worked in music journalism as deputy editor for NME New Musical Express but who, most recently, is using her voice to stand up against antisemitism. Also on the panel was Noa Tishby, an Israeli-American actor, producer and author of the book Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth.

The three women have become prominent voices, online and off, in the fight against the latest upsurge of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The Nov. 3 discussion took place in Los Angeles, where all three women are now based. They were joined by Michael Levitt, president and chief executive officer of FCSW, and the panel was moderated by journalist Jamie Gutfreund, both of whom traveled from Toronto for the event, titled State of the Union: Fighting Back Against Hate.

Weiss said the first step in confronting the problem must be vocal and unequivocal pride in Judaism and Zionism.

“The mere act of doing that is radical and contagious and changes the whole conversation,” she said. Doing grassroots work building alliances is another overlooked key to confronting the issue, she added.

“Let’s take a page from the book of our political opponents,” she said. “How have they done what they have done? Deep work inside communities on a grassroots level.”

The Black Lives Matter organization – not the wider movement, Weiss stressed, but the leadership of the organization – has exhibited problematic approaches to Jews and Israel. But no one should concede that there are not plenty of African-Americans (and Canadians) who are allies, she said.

“There are huge parts of the Black community that the Jewish community in America can still be allied with; there are other parts of it that we would be extremely foolish to try and ally ourselves with,” Weiss said. “There are other communities though. I’m thinking about Hispanics, I’m thinking about Hindus, I’m thinking about all kinds of other groups that I don’t see our community actively and affirmatively reaching out to and trying to build relationships with based on our mutual interests.”

Weiss warned that the polarization of politics in the United States and across the West does not bode well for Jews.

“That puts Jews in a deeply uncomfortable position because, I believe, where the political centre thrives, Jews thrive because, if the political centre is thriving, it means that there is room for nuance, that there is room for disagreement, that it’s not a kind of Manichaean, black-and-white, pure-impure, red-blue thinking. Right now, that is the world we are living in and – guess what? – we Jews don’t easily slot into either of those categories. We are both hyper-successful and also we are the victims of more hate crimes than any other group in this country. We are white-passing and yet white supremacists hate us because we are the greatest trick the devil has ever played. We predate the newfangled notions of ethnicity, of race, of religion. We are before all of that. I think that there is a dovetailing between fighting antisemitism and fighting Jew-hate, and standing up for liberalism, broadly defined, because, where liberalism thrives … Jews thrive too.”

Much of the panel’s discussion was about flourishing anti-Jewish hatred online, but Barlow warned that no one should assume there is a substantive difference between what happens online and what happens offline.

“We have seen how [online hatred] has contributed vastly to the amount of physical violence that happens offline and you would have to be extremely ignorant to … say right now that what happens online does not have offline ramifications,” said Barlow.

Tishby agreed, but suggested that offline violence may not be inspired by online hate but rather is part of a broader battle.

“Social media is just the tip of the iceberg of a well-funded political campaign that has been waged against Israel in the past 20 years,” Tishby said. “This is not by accident. This happened by design. The language, everything that we are seeing right now, originated in the Durban conference against racism in Durban in 2001 that was so antisemitic that the U.S. and Israel pulled out of it…. They have been putting a lot of money, a lot of effort and a lot of groundwork in going into these social justice causes, going to Black Lives Matter, going to the Women’s March, going to gay and lesbian marches in San Francisco, going to unions and actually slowly changing their minds and poisoning them basically with lies to make them shift against Israel. These are nefarious powers and nefarious countries that want to dismantle the Jewish state, period, end of story.”

screenshot - At a panel discussion hosted by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, journalist Bari Weiss warned of the potential dangers in pressuring social media giants like Facebook to censor certain messages — At a panel discussion hosted by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, journalist Bari Weiss warned of the potential dangers in pressuring social media giants like Facebook to censor certain messages. *(screenshot)*

Acknowledging that some of the most prominent anti-Zionists are themselves Jews, Barlow called the phenomenon “koshering antisemitism.” However, she advocates a compassionate response.

“I believe that how we deal with them has to be different than how we deal with non-Jewish antisemites because they are part of our people, we love them regardless and they are part of our tribe and I think we have to really understand the nuances of why people become anti-Zionist,” Barlow said. “I think a lot of what I see is trauma from the Jewish community and a rejection of the Jewish community that presents itself in this anti-Israel fashion.”

She offered up what she acknowledged as a controversial joke: “Don’t blame Israel for your daddy issues.”

Tishby laid much of the blame for anti-Zionist Jews on the Jewish education system.

“We need to take a good look at ourselves and what we did in order to allow for this,” she said. “We took our kids, put them through … this beautiful Jewish education, we give them all the values and we tell them Israel is the most amazing people and place in the world and we send them off to college without ever acknowledging the concepts of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘apartheid.’ We let college talk to them about this for the first time.… Nobody ever [said], let’s talk about why people call Israel an apartheid state. Let’s have a conversation about this, not when they get to college, [but] when the kid is 12, 13, 14, bring it up. Say, here’s the argument, here is where it’s completely false, here are the facts. Let’s talk about what’s happening in the West Bank.”

Weiss, who has spent her career in mainstream media, said those media outlets are “the most intellectually homogenous environment I’ve ever been in in my entire life.” But she warned against swallowing conspiracy theories.

“I think sometimes people in the Jewish community who are frustrated by this bias imagine some kind of secret conspiratorial meetings where they’re cooking up how to screw the Jews and the Jewish state,” Weiss said. “It’s just a reflection of the consistent bias among all the people that work there.”

The power of social media giants like Facebook and their haphazard responses to hate speech are a problem, Weiss said, but Jews and Zionists may be hastening their own defeat by pressuring them to censor certain messages.

“I think it is a genuinely knotty and complicated question whether or not the Jewish community should be going to these big tech companies and saying, in the same way that you’re censoring x, y and z, also censor the people who hate us,” she said. “My fear is that, in asking these companies [to] do more censorship on our behalf, then, in a way, we are actually feeding the fuel that will come to burn all of us. The ideology that is currently dictating the choices at many of these companies is an ideology that says Zionism is racism. That is part of that broader worldview.… What happens six months from now when … they want to go and censor Zionists because now they have decided that Zionism, to follow the Soviet lie, is a form of racism? Would we be happy with that? I don’t think so.”

The full video can be viewed by registering at friendsofsimonwiesenthalcenter.com.

Wherever did the time go?

A few of the clocks that were stolen from Jerusalem’s L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in 1983, and eventually found and returned. (photos by Daniella Golan)

Over the past few weeks, many countries, including Canada, switched from daylight savings time to standard time. So, it seems like the right time (no pun intended) to talk about the biggest clock and watch robbery in Israel’s history.

Back in 1983, more than 100 antique timepieces vanished from Jerusalem’s L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art. I remember visiting the museum about a year after the robbery, only to find the empty stands and cases – as if the museum staff hoped the watches would magically reappear.

For years, the Israeli police didn’t know where to go with this case. In fact, they struggled for a quarter of a century to solve the mystery of the 102 (a number of media reports stated 106) missing clocks. All that was clear was that, one spring night in 1983, these timepieces disappeared from the museum.

These missing clocks were not like the ones a regular person hangs on their kitchen wall or sits on their nightstand. They were highbrow antiques. Some were inlaid with jewels. Many had been cast from gold. One was made by famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet for Queen Marie Antoinette, but she met up with the guillotine 34 years before Breguet finished the timepiece – actually, Breguet’s son finished what is called an “open-work” watch.

Altogether, the stolen clocks and watches were worth millions of dollars. Given the magnitude of the theft, a special task force within the police was set up. Reportedly, Interpol was contacted, and the company that had insured the collection hired private investigators.

For years, police theorized that only a group of robbers could have taken so many clocks in one night. It turned out, however, that one thief did the job.

The alleged thief was Naaman Diller, also known as Naaman Lidor. He took advantage of the museum’s incompetence at that time. For example, he discovered that the museum’s alarm system did not work. And, while the museum windows apparently had bars, they were more for show than anything else – Diller/Lidor was able to bend a few of them. He had no difficulty entering and exiting undetected with the stolen items and placing them in his truck outside.

Many of the clocks were physically small and relatively light (i.e., pocket-size timepieces). He took most of them out of Israel. Some were hidden in Holland, some in France and the rest went to the United States. Several ended up in the home he set up in the Los Angeles area.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the great monetary value of his haul and because of how renowned some of the pieces were, Dillor/Lidor found it was hard to sell them. He only managed to sell less than 10% of the stolen collection. The majority of these timepieces spent 25 years locked up, unseen.

Following the robbery, Dillor/Lidor lived on and off in Tel Aviv. In the early 2000s, he reportedly was hospitalized in Israel’s Tel HaShomer Hospital, suffering from skin cancer complications. When told that the cancer had spread to the bone, he refused radiation. In 2004, he died in his Tel Aviv apartment and was buried at Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh, his birthplace. In the end, he willed the clocks to his wife, Israeli ex-pat Nili Shamrat.

Within a few years of Dillor/Lidor’s death, an attorney representing the widow entered into a quiet, negotiated “buy-back” with the museum. According to the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art, in 2006, 39 of the original 102 stolen clocks were returned.

Two years down the road, the case further unraveled. The museum officially states that investigators located the remaining clocks in various bank safes. Some media reports said the clocks had been in France and in Holland. In any case, the clocks and watches have since made their way back to the museum. Unlike almost 40 years ago, they are now well-secured, with the clock exhibit housed in a sophisticated light-sensitive vault.

In the United States, the widow was charged with receiving stolen property. In 2010, however, she received a sentence of five years’ probation and 300 hours of community service. In her defence, her lawyer successfully maintained that she was a victim of circumstances – that is, her new husband (although they’d been together for many years, they’d been married for only a year when he died) had only told her about the clocks near the time of his death.

Deborah Rubin Fields is an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams, published in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

A story of Hava Nagila

Among Intergalactic Afikoman’s newest picture books is I Am Hava: A Song’s Story of Love, Hope & Joy, written by Freda Lekowicz and illustrated by Siona Benjamin. It tells the story of the song “Hava Nagila,” from its birth as a niggun (melody without words) in Ukraine, to Jerusalem, to when it received its name and lyrics (though exactly from whom is still a mystery), and its journey around the world to popularity well beyond the Jewish community.

Hava Nagila means “Come and Rejoice,” explains the book, and this story – told by the song herself, personified as a blue-skinned Indian-Jewish girl in a sari – is full of movement and colour. It boldly celebrates the diversity of the Jewish people and our culture.

“For me, Hava’s story is a story of universality and multiculturalism,” Benjamin, who grew up as a Bene Israel Jew in India, writes at the end of the book. “Universality is always born from the specifics. The specifics for me are my Jewishness, my Indianness and my Americanness.

“Many blue-skinned characters populate my paintings,” she continues. “Hava is blue because blue is the colour of the sky and the ocean. Blue is the colour of the globe. Blue is also such a Jewish colour. It’s in the tallit. It’s in the tzitzit. It’s in the Israeli flag.”

Montreal-born Lekowicz also connects personally with the story. She shares that her parents, after the Holocaust, were in a displaced persons camp in Germany. “Like other Holocaust survivors,” she writes, “they were broken and in mourning. Yet the joyful sounds of Hava Nagila sometimes echoed in the camp. ‘Let us celebrate,’ it urged. The song symbolized hope and resilience.”

This lovely and imaginative book does joyous justice to this well-known song.