BAY AREA EVENTS

Be'chol Lashon Chanukah Celebration
with Congregation Sherith Israel

Celebrate Jewish Diversity!
Free and open to the public

Sunday, December 21, 1-4pm
2266 California Street @ Webster
San Francisco

Schedule:
1-3pm: Activities, Food & Shuk
3-4pm: Candle Lighting, Singing with Lior Benhur, Israeli Dancning with Bihn Au and performance with Sul da Bahia Capoeira.

Workshops & Activities:
Help Save Lives in Africa by making a Tzedakah box for the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda
Gift making workshops with Mitzvah cards, jewelry, and wrapping paper
Chanukiah and beeswax candle making
Dreidel Decoration and Games
Chanukah Cookie Baking
Henna & Face Painting

PLUS!
Global Cuisine - Enjoy latkes, sufganiot, bunuelos, & agua fresca
Chanukah shuk - BUY Chanukah presents from local artists

For more information, click here.

Super 8: Hub Hanukkah Party
Sunday, December 21, 6pm
111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna Street
San Francisco

Sure we could honor the eight days of Hanukkah individually but who has the patience for all that. Instead we decided to pack all eight into one big night.

DeLeon - Sephardic Indie Rock
Sway Machinery – Cantoral Afro Beat
4th Annual PJA Festival of Rights
Latkes
He'Brew Beer tastings
The Candy Store
DJ's
Hanukkah survival kits for the first 150 people at the door.

Sponsored by The Hub at the JCCSF, Reboot, Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA), JDub Records, TZAVTA and American Jewish World Service/AVODAH.

Presented in partnership with Be'chol Lashon

For more information: click here.

Family Day at the Contemporary Jewish Museum
Thursday, December 25, 11am-3pm
736 Mission Street (between 3rd and 4th Streets)
San Francisco

Join in the fun at the Contemporary Jewish Museum's annual Family Day on December 25. Celebrate Hanukkah and festivals of light from around the world as you explore all that the Museum has to offer. Family Day features art-making, exhibitions, special family-friendly performances, and a day of admission-free fun for visitors of all ages.

Learn about traditions of candles, lamps, oil, and lanterns from many cultures as you create your own holiday artwork. Then, visit Museum exhibitions, including In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis and Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered. Be sure not to miss singing and dancing with Jonathan Bayer or the captivating storytelling of Michael Katz--both back at the Museum by popular demand!

Food, beverages, and other delicious holiday treats will be available at the Museum's Cafe on the Square, which will be open throughout Target Family Day.

For more information: click here.

LOS ANGELES EVENT

INDIA

Targeting Tolerance in Mumbai
By Sadia Shepard, December 4, 2008, Forward.com

When my Indian Jewish grandmother married my Indian Muslim grandfather in the 1930s, their marriage was unusual in some ways. But in others it was commonplace. Theirs was a romance of pre-Partition India, and their courtship and early marriage, like so many in Mumbai, unfolded in the grand and intimate spaces of the Taj Hotel — its restaurants, ballrooms and long, grand hallways.

Now, photographs of these same rooms show walls and floors streaked with blood and littered with glass. Nearly 200 people died in the attacks on Mumbai, most of them Indians — Hindus and Muslims alike. The terrorists also targeted foreign tourists, international business people and Jews, killing six at the city’s Chabad center — the first time that Jews have been singled out and massacred on Indian soil.

When the terrorists walked unimpeded into the heart of Mumbai, they exposed the vulnerability of this famously hospitable city. Mumbai is a magnet for people from across India, and from around the world, all seeking something — whether it is wealth, opportunity or the possibility of reinvention. Dreams are Mumbai’s foundation — its currency and its fuel.

I was one of those seekers the day I arrived in 2001. True, I arrived seeking something less tangible than a job. My goal was to discover what role my grandparents’ past might play in my future, to understand what it meant to be tied to both India, the land of their birth, and Pakistan, the land they fled to after the Partition of 1947.

My mother’s own migration to the United States and marriage to my American father meant that my identity was further hyphenated — I was raised in Boston by a Muslim mother, Christian father and Jewish grandmother. What better place to make sense of this confluence than Mumbai, one of the world’s great crucibles? In the city I adopted as my second home there were no bag searches and no guards to bar entry. Mumbai, and its Jewish community, welcomed me, like they have done for so many others, with open doors and open arms.

While the Chabad house targeted by the terrorists served mostly Israelis and other visitors passing through Mumbai, there are also two distinct Jewish communities with deep roots in the city. Members of my grandmother’s community, the Bene Israel, maintain that their forebears arrived in India as early as 175 B.C.E. after being shipwrecked on the Konkan Coast. Then there are the Jews known locally as Baghdadis, who immigrated to India from Iraq as merchant traders during the period of the British Raj.

As a result of changing demographics, most of Mumbai’s eight synagogues are today located in Muslim neighborhoods, on the same sites where they have conducted religious services and Jewish education for hundreds of years. One of these synagogues, Magen David, has had a Muslim custodian for decades. In 2002 I photographed Muhammed as he packed and organized the city’s supply of matzo in anticipation of the Passover holiday, as he does every year.

I asked the synagogue’s caretaker, an elderly woman named Flora, if she had ever encountered problems with the local Muslim community. She rebuffed my question with a swat of her hand. “The problems in Israel are not our problems here,” she explained. “We Jews in India have had good relations with the Muslims, and they with us.” She told me of how, during the Six Day War, Muslim shopkeepers held hands across the synagogue gate to protect it from the possibility of looters, saying that this was a house of God and it should be protected. Nothing happened. She shook her head at the memory, considering it from a distance. “I will never forget the kindness of the Muslims that day,” she said.

Mumbai has long been a city where cooperation and commerce across cultural and religious lines is a way of life. In the 1930s, my grandfather’s business partners included Hindus, Jains and my grandmother’s Jewish father, while my grandmother’s brothers fought in a Sikh regiment of the Indian army. My grandparents’ religious upbringings may have been different, but their love story was shaped by a moment in Indian history when the threat and promise of dissection had not yet torn apart the country.

It was communal riots in the wake of Partition that compelled my grandparents to leave. So much was uncertain at the time of the British withdrawal, and my grandfather hoped that tensions would dissipate quickly and life would return to normal. But as news reports of Hindu and Muslim neighbors attacking one another mounted, he became fearful for his family’s safety and moved his wife and children to Karachi.

Their migration was part of the single largest transfer of populations in human history, as nearly 15 million people, Hindus in what became Pakistan and Muslims in newly independent India, gathered what few belongings they could carry and swapped one country for another. The ensuing violence that shook the Subcontinent left a million people dead.

The bitter legacy of Partition — including the unresolved fate of Kashmir — haunts the Subcontinent to this day, fueling tensions that have erupted sporadically and sometimes violently in Mumbai in the ensuing 61 years. But it is the city’s larger promise of a multi-layered, cosmopolitan reality — the very aspect of the city that brought my grandparents together and compelled me to return — that made it a tempting target for militants seeking to reignite hostilities between India and Pakistan. In striking at Mumbai, the terrorists tried to destroy the foundations of hope for regional harmony and cooperation. It is vital that Indians and Pakistanis not let them succeed.

A Day of Reckoning for Indian Jewish Detective
By Larry Cohler-Esses, December 4, 2008, Forward.com

In the midst of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Samson Talkar did something he had never done before on Shabbat: He packed a pistol before leaving for synagogue.

Talkar, a retired chief of homicides with the Mumbai police, was not frightened. But as last week’s terrorist siege on his city entered its third day, the unflappable pensioner considered the situation in which his congregation would be meeting to pray.

“This was the first time anything like this had happened in Bombay,” he explained in a phone interview with the Forward. “So I took my personal revolver with me. If they attack, I told my wife, at least two bullets must come from my revolver.”

The 72-year-old Talkar is a member of India’s B’nai Israel Jewish community, which is thought to be descended from Jews who came to the subcontinent from the Holy Land some 2,000 years ago. Talkar’s place in Mumbai society, as an assistant police commissioner, is a reflection of the integrated role that India’s estimated 5,000 Jews have achieved in the country.

“They have held high positions in the army and the civil service. And they have always been very proud of their heritage,” said Judy Amit, chief operating officer of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and a former country director in India for the organization. “They are very well integrated into the society.”

India’s Jewish communities, which have historically been centered in the cities of Mumbai, Calcutta and Cochin, were estimated to have 40,000 members in 1948. Since then, most have moved to Israel, some to the United States. Those still in India remain ensconced among the country’s countless castes, cults, sects and religions. It is a country in which they have never experienced persecution as Jews.

Against this background, the decision of the terrorist band to include Mumbai’s Chabad center among its targets came as an unprecedented shock.

Unlike in Europe, where many synagogues hold services under heavy security, none of Mumbai’s nine synagogues have received police protection. Many are located in Muslim neighborhoods.

That may change now. According to Talkar, the police in recent days have begun to provide the synagogues protection.

The Chabad house, an outreach center targeting the many young Israelis and other Western Jews who pass through Mumbai, had little to do with these indigenous communities. But its director, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg—one of six Jews murdered at the site—was a known figure.

“I used to go to him when I had difficulty on a sermon,” recalled Talkar, who acts as a lay spiritual leader at his synagogue, Shaare Rason. “But I found I didn’t agree with some of his views. They were very Orthodox. But he was a good man. This was an unfortunate incident.”

In Talkar’s personal view—not based, he stressed, on any inside information—the terrorists’ decision to hit Chabad rather than the indigenous Indian Jewish community stemmed from their desire to hit Israelis, who were likely to be found at the center.

Israel, he noted, has been providing India with weapons and high-tech monitoring equipment to support India’s war in Kashmir, the Himalayan state over which Pakistan and India have fought since 1948.

“It says to the Israelis, stop giving India all this material and making them stronger,” he said.

Holtzberg was not the only victim Talkar has met before. Three of Talkar’s closest friends were among the 14 Mumbai police officers killed in the battles.

Talkar, who received the Presidential Medal for Gallantry when he was injured while saving two of his colleagues, is unabashed in his grief.

“Every death is a bad thing,” he said. “But I feel the death of my colleagues more deeply.”

CHANUKAH FEATURES

Looking for a meaningful Chanukah gift... How about mosquito nets?

HELP provide mosquito nets to significantly reduce malaria, the primary cause of death in Africa. Be’chol Lashon is helping the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda to improve health care. And, one of the best ways to improve healthcare is to prevent people from getting sick. Additionally, life saving services provided by the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda to their Christian and Muslim neighbors fosters good will and cooperation.

Donate Here

 

The Gift of a Miracle
By Marla Feldman, December 7, 2008, JTA

Each year at Chanukah we spin the dreidel, reminding ourselves that "a great miracle happened there." With faith and activism the Maccabees led our people to a great victory and assured the survival of the Jewish people in ancient days. With faith and activism, we, too, can make miracles happen in our own time. We can assure the survival of millions of children in Africa who unnecessarily fall prey to the deadly bite of malaria-infested mosquitoes. We can make a great miracle happen there for the cost of a $10 bed net.

The global challenges we face are staggering. Around the world, more than 800 million people go hungry every day -- 300 million of them children. More than 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water and 2.6 billion live without decent sanitation. And every 30 seconds a child in Africa dies of malaria.

In an age of unprecedented prosperity, science and technology, there is no excuse for the ongoing plagues of starvation and famine, illiteracy and diseases borne of ignorance. And yet, the amount of aid flowing to Africa from all the nations of the world totaled less than the amount of annual bonuses Wall Street gave to itself this year.

Determined to do better, the Reform movement is working to bring relief to the millions of African refugees who face not only the threats of continuing violence and hunger, but also the threat of malaria that rages in refugee camps.

Around the world, malaria infects nearly 500 million people each year, kills more than 1 million of those and is the leading killer of children in Africa. The economic impact of this illness -- $12 billion annually -- undermines the capacity of impoverished nations to climb out of debt and overwhelms their medical infrastructure. Yet malaria is entirely preventable. The use of insecticide-treated bed nets alone can reduce malaria rates by 90 percent in areas with high coverage. One bed net can keep an entire family safe from malaria for up to four years.

So in partnership with the U.N. Foundation's Nothing But Nets campaign, the Reform movement has made a commitment to provide 50,000 nets to save 50,000 families from the anguish of malaria.

Soon we will make our first delivery of nets to a refugee camp in Uganda, completely “covering” the camp of 18,000 victims from Sudan, Rwanda and, most recently, victims of the current crisis in Congo. This is a critical time, as the rainy season makes malaria-infested mosquitoes insidious. The sad truth is that there would be no nets delivered to this camp if it were not for the Reform movement's Nothing But Nets fund-raising efforts.

Much attention has been devoted to malaria in recent years, with billionaire philanthropists such as Bill Gates and the World Bank pouring funds into the cause. They are focusing on combating this particular disease because it is an achievable goal. We actually CAN eliminate malaria deaths around the world -- we've already done so in this country and in most other western nations. In Zambia, Ethiopia and Rwanda, when they instituted a comprehensive plan that included the use of insecticide-treated bed nets and both indoor and outdoor spraying, they reduced malaria rates by 50 percent in just two years. In Sri Lanka, malaria rates were reduced from 400,000 cases per year to fewer than 200 cases that resulted in no deaths last year. A great miracle really can happen there.

Cynics may claim that one individual cannot save the world, yet Judaism obligates us to try, reminding us that saving a single life is the equivalent of saving the entire world. At the bargain price of just $10, every one of us has the capacity to save a life. There is no better gift to give this Chanukah season than the gift of a miracle. Send a net; save a life.

A Bagel-Flavored Beat Rocks Its New Fans
By Dave Itzkoff, December 11, 2008, The New York Times

Growing up in Liverpool, England, in the 1980s, Roger Bennett was not a traditional Jew. In his adolescence he was as likely to be found on Saturday mornings at soccer games as at synagogue, and had a bar mitzvah immediately followed by a punk-rock theme party.

But while he was being introduced to A Flock of Seagulls and Echo and the Bunnymen, Mr. Bennett, now 38, an author and musicologist, was also secretly savoring a different kind of pop. Through his mother he discovered the albums of the Barry Sisters, two Jewish siblings who performed Yiddish covers of “My Way” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” and the Irving Fields Trio, whose 1959 album “Bagels and Bongos” set traditional Jewish songs to Latin rhythms. “If Hebrew school had sounded like that,” Mr. Bennett said in an interview, “I never would have left.”

Today Mr. Bennett is part of an informal scene of performers and music aficionados who hope to introduce this category of Jewish music 2.0 — built from folk tunes and religious chants, and upgraded with modern-day beats and instruments — to a wider audience.

Potentially, anyone can appreciate the blend of traditions in, say, “Mazel Tov, Mis Amigos,” released in 1961 by Juan Calle and His Latin Lantzmen. But the genre is one that resonates especially with younger listeners who identify themselves, culturally if not spiritually, as Jewish and who seek this music in the course of rediscovering their own heritage, particularly as Hanukkah approaches.

“When people say, ‘How come I’ve not heard this before?,’ they’re not just talking about the music and the musicians,” Mr. Bennett said. “They’re talking about a more complicated sense of history than the one we’ve been handed.” As a founder of the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation (named for the music scholar Abraham Zevi Idelsohn), Mr. Bennett has helped create many avenues to bring bygone Jewish music to younger listeners, from a Web site, idelsounds.com, to a book, “And You Shall Know Us By the Trail of Our Vinyl” (Crown, 2008), that Mr. Bennett wrote with Josh Kun, who is an occasional contributor to The New York Times. He has also helped organize a concert at Joe’s Pub on Thursday evening, featuring many of the artists celebrated in the book (including Mr. Fields of “Bagels and Bongos” fame).

Other tastemakers take different approaches to fostering musical connections to Jewish roots. Since 2002 Aaron Bisman, a founder of the nonprofit label JDub Records, has been releasing albums by artists like DeLeon, a group that blends Sephardic music of medieval Spain with contemporary indie rock, and Golem, a klezmer punk band. During Hanukkah, JDub also promotes its artists through a series of parties called Jewltide; one is scheduled for Dec. 24 at Southpaw in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Among the missions of the label is to appeal to Jews “in a globalized world, where we no longer want to assimilate and be like everybody else,” Mr. Bisman said. “Now we want to find the uniqueness that we have to share.”

The son of a rabbi (who leads a congregation in Scottsdale, Ariz.), Mr. Bisman is especially attuned to attitudinal shifts that have occurred among Jews in just one generation. Whereas his father might encourage Jews to connect through synagogues or community centers, Mr. Bisman said he sought to cultivate relationships through music that “a high-school kid could roll down the windows of his car, drive into his high-school parking lot and feel really proud of. Like, ‘This is mine, and it sounds dope.’ ”

The musician Erran Baron Cohen has used the coming holiday as an occasion to release his album “Songs in the Key of Hanukkah,” which offers 21st century takes on the holiday’s familiar tunes. (For example it includes a hip-hop version of “Dreidel” performed by the Orthodox Jewish rapper Y-Love.)

Mr. Baron Cohen, the frontman of the world-beat band Zohar (and a brother of the “Borat” comedian Sacha Baron Cohen), said that it was no coincidence that so many of these musical projects are promoted around Hanukkah, a holiday that often arrives hand in hand with Christmas. “With the record industry,” he said, “that’s their key time to sell anything.”

But Mr. Baron Cohen added that Hanukkah was more mirthful than the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. “The big, serious festivals have great music, but they’re also very heavy,” he said. “They are about repentance and atoning for sins, so maybe doing a light-hearted album is not the most proper thing.”

The creators of these projects acknowledge that they are unlikely to achieve mainstream commercial success and emphasize that they are not simply looking to mine easy laughs from Jewish kitsch.

“There may be a tongue-in-cheek factor to some of the music, but that’s not why we do it,” said Courtney Holt, a founder of the Idelsohn Society and the next president of MySpace Music. “If that were all we were doing, we would have stopped a while ago. You burn yourself out on, ‘What wacky Jewish music can we find?’ ”

Several of the vintage artists celebrated by groups like the Idelsohn Society say they are more flattered than surprised by the interest of younger fans. “If I’m surprised, I’m surprised that nobody ever approached me before,” said Avram Grobard, the accordionist and owner of the 1960s-era Manhattan nightspot El Avram. “There’s a lot of stories of New York that I have in my bag, and all the clubs that I worked, that I’d like somebody to register them once and for all.”

For these performers Hanukkah is also an opportunity to remind young listeners that Judaism can be malleable. Years before artists like Mr. Baron Cohen, the cantor Sol Zim had a minor hit in 1974 with “David Superstar,” a religious record inspired by rock bands like Kiss.

As Mr. Zim recalled in an interview: “I found Gene Simmons. I said, ‘My God, here’s a guy from Haifa, whose real name is Chaim.’ All of a sudden I had ideas. Two years later I hear Styx, I hear ‘Come Sail Away,’ I went out of my mind.”

“Today,” he said, “it’s different audiences.” To encourage younger audiences to take part in Jewish tradition, he said, “you have to go with what’s out there.”

CURRENT NEWS

Gene Test Shows Spain's Jewish & Muslim Mix
By Nicholas Wade, December 5, 2008, The New York Times

The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control, a team of geneticists reports.

Twenty percent of the population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry and 11 percent have DNA reflecting Moorish ancestors, the geneticists have found. Historians have debated how many Jews converted and how many chose exile. “One wing grossly underestimates the number of conversions,” said Jane S. Gerber, an expert on Sephardic history at the City University of New York.

The finding bears on two different views of Spanish history, said Jonathan S. Ray, a professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University. One, proposed by the 20th-century historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, holds that Spanish civilization is Catholic and other influences are foreign; the other sees Spain as having been enriched by drawing from all three of its historical cultures, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim.

The study, based on an analysis of Y chromosomes, was conducted by biologists led by Mark A. Jobling of the University of Leicester in England and Francesc Calafell of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. They developed a Y chromosome signature for Sephardic men by studying Sephardic Jewish communities in places where Jews migrated after being expelled from Spain in 1492 to 1496. They also characterized the Y chromosomes of the Arab and Berber army that invaded Spain in A.D. 711 from data on people living in Morocco and Western Sahara.

After a period of forbearance under the Arab Umayyad dynasty, Spain entered a period of religious intolerance, with its Muslim Berber dynasties forcing Christians and Jews to convert to Islam, and the victorious Christians then expelling Jews and Muslims or forcing them to convert. The new genetic study, reported online on Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, indicates there was a high level of conversion among Jews.

Because most of the Y chromosome remains unchanged from father to son, the proportions of Sephardic and Moorish ancestry detected in the present population are probably the same as those just after the 1492 expulsions. A high proportion of people with Sephardic ancestry was to be expected, Dr. Ray said. “Jews formed a very large part of the urban population up until the great conversions,” he said.

Dr. Ray raised the question of what the DNA evidence might mean personally. “If four generations on I have no knowledge of my genetic past, how does that affect my understanding of my own religious association?”

The issue is one that has confronted Dr. Calafell, an author of the study. His own Y chromosome may be of Sephardic ancestry — the test is not definitive for individuals — and his surname is from a town in Catalonia; Jews undergoing conversion often took surnames from place names. But he does not regard his Y chromosome as a strong link to the Sephardic heritage. Assuming no in-breeding, he would have had more than one million living ancestors in A.D. 1500. “My full ancestry is made of many different individuals, and my Y chromosome tells me just about one of them,” he said.

Argentina to Halt Trade with Iran over Jewish Center Bombings
By Haaretz Staff, December 3, 2008, www.Haaretz.com

Argentina has decided to suspend trade with Iran over the Islamic Republic's links to a a string of deadly terror attacks targeting Jews in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, the Argentine Jewish News reported this week.

Argentina's Justice Minister Anibal Fernandez announced the suspension of ties during talks with leaders of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the AJN reported Tuesday.

According to the BBC, howvever, Buenos Aires has denied calling for a suspension in trade and said it has made no such statement.

Argentina and Iran now trade more than $1 billion annually. AJC officials praised the alleged suspension, telling the Argentinian paper that such a move was crucial to aiding ongoing investigation of the terror attacks.

Argentina has charged six former Iranian officials with involvement in the bombings, which left over a hundred people dead, but no convictions have been issued so far. Iran and Hezbollah both deny any connection to the attack.

The investigations have been wracked by controversy and allegations of cover-ups, and former president Nestor Kirchner called them a "national disgrace" in 2005.

A briefing on the matter was given before Julio Schlosser, Secretary General of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires - the site of 1994 bombing which killed people 85 dead - the AJC and AMIA authorities, the AJN reported.

Schlosser praises the Argentine government and its "firm commitment to carry on with the investigation" of the terror attacks following the announcement, according to the AJN.

IDENTITY

Harvey Milk, in Life and on Film, Typifies the Proud Jew as Outsider
By Rebecca Spence, December 11 2008, Forward.com

In an early scene in “Milk” — the new biopic starring Sean Penn as slain gay activist and San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk — Milk, a proud new shop owner in the city’s Castro district, seeks to join his neighborhood business association. He initially gives assurances to a skeptical association leader, saying, “I’m not an interloper.” But in a bit of self-effacing humor, he adds, “I may be a Jew.”

The quip is one of the film’s only mentions of the iconic gay activist’s Jewish identity. But it typifies his brash style and cheeky humor. It also points to Milk’s profound sense of himself as an outsider.

Milk, who grew up on Long Island, was an entirely secular Jew. But according to those who knew him, his New York Jewish upbringing was unmistakable in his character, sense of self and social activist values. In many ways, he embodied the “non-Jewish Jew” vividly described by Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Leon Trotsky.

Despite their distance from Judaism — Deutscher cited Freud and Spinoza as examples — such Jews were “very Jewish indeed,” he wrote.

“They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and of the Jewish intellect,” and “dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures… where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other,” Deutscher argued. “They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations” and were “in society and yet not in it.” It was this, he said, that enabled them to “strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.”

Sharyn Saslafsky, a manager at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission who was a friend of Milk in the 1970s, put it more simply. “He wasn’t a religious Jew, but he was always proud of being Jewish,” she said. “He always had a sense of pride that he came from New York.”

Saslafsky, then a young political activist on the verge of coming out, would often stop by Castro Camera — the camera shop that Milk founded when he moved to San Francisco in 1972 — to talk politics. Saslafsky said that she and Milk often spoke in broken Yiddish, trying to outdo each other with their recollections of their parents’ and grandparents’ phrases. “I would call it the one-upmanship of speaking in Yiddish,” she said.

Born in Woodmere, N.Y., on May 22, 1930, Milk would have been 78 this year. His grandfather, Morris Milk, was a Lithuanian immigrant who opened Milk’s, a successful department store in the family’s heavily Jewish Long Island town. Morris also co-founded a Woodmere synagogue, then known as Sons of Israel.

According to Milk’s nephew, Stuart Milk, the old man had a profound impact on the young Harvey. “Morris had… [an] inclusive paradigm, and was very much a touchstone for Harvey,” Stuart Milk said in an e-mail.

While Harvey Milk may have learned his commitment to inclusivity in part from his Jewish grandfather, he did not carry on his grandfather’s commitment to synagogue life. Friends say that Milk shunned religion altogether.

“He had really strong feelings about the role that organized religion was playing in oppressing gay people,” said Naphtali Offen, a 59-year-old tobacco control researcher who knew Milk. “He felt alienated from Jewish religion.”

Milk was shot and killed by Dan White — an anti-gay Catholic who served alongside Milk on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors — years before the organized Jewish community opened its doors to gay and lesbian rabbis. The more liberal Reform movement finally ordained gay and lesbian clergy beginning in 1990. And the Conservative movement did not approve gay ordination or same-sex unions until two years ago.

Milk’s activism came at the peak of San Francisco’s burgeoning gay rights movement. The 1970s in San Francisco was a time of great hope, particularly for the thousands of gay men who descended on the Castro district from across America and claimed it as their own.

The reverberations of the “Summer of Love” in 1967 were still felt throughout the ’70s, as people experimented with sexuality and a powerful gay identity emerged. Milk, who unsuccessfully ran for office three times, made history in 1977, when he was elected to the city’s board of supervisors and became the first openly gay man to hold office in a major American city.

At the same time that Milk was pushing for people to come out of the closet and publicly embrace their gay identities, there was a subset of gay San Francisco Jews who were embracing their Jewish identities. A group known as the Lost Tribe formed in 1978, after fundamentalist Christian Anita Bryant’s crusade to enact anti-gay legislation came to California in the form of Proposition 6, known as the Briggs Initiative.

The Briggs Initiative, which Milk helped to roundly defeat, would have barred gay and lesbian teachers from teaching in the public school system. The Lost Tribe, comprising dozens of activist gay Jews, worked within the Jewish community to drum up opposition to the initiative. “It was a powerful and bonding time, and people made relationships personally and politically that have continued to this day,” said Avi Rose, a former member of the Lost Tribe. Rose is now executive director of Jewish Family & Children’s Services of the East Bay.

Rose, who also co-edited the 1989 anthology “Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian or Gay and Jewish,” drew a direct connection between being Jewish and being gay. “As Jews, there are things we know about stigma and discrimination, and the importance of being visible,” he said. “I think for a lot of gay Jews, that translated from our Jewish experience to our gay experience. That’s what brought so many of us into the movement in prominent ways.”

Indeed, as with the feminist movement, Jews played leading roles in the early days of the gay rights movement. Milk’s campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg, was Jewish. And in New York, where the movement took shape following the Stonewall Riots of 1969, such leaders as Marty Robinson and Marc Rubin rose to prominence.

These days, Milk’s legacy continues with a new crop of gay Jewish political leaders. The first gay congressman to win election was Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank. And last month, Mark Leno became the first openly gay male member of the California State Senate. Leno, a member of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav — a San Francisco gay and lesbian synagogue — studied for two years at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

When Milk was assassinated November 27, 1978, in the wake of the Prop. 6 defeat, the entire city mourned: Thirty thousand San Franciscans took to the streets for a candle-lit march that began at the Castro and continued on to City Hall. But the first memorial service for the slain politician was actually held at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, which was founded only a year earlier, according to Allen Bennett, the synagogue’s first rabbi, who was openly gay himself.

Bennett, who delivered Milk’s eulogy, said that Milk visited the synagogue on more than one occasion. “He wasn’t there to pray, he was there to get votes,” said Bennett, who is now the rabbi at Temple Israel in Alameda. “So he certainly understood there was a Jewish community he could relate to.”

Bennett also delivered the eulogy at a widely attended service for Milk that was held at one of this city’s largest synagogues, Temple Emanuel. “It wasn’t simply because I was the first openly gay rabbi,” Bennett said. “It was because I was considered Harvey’s rabbi.”

Multiracial Families See Barack Obama as "Other" like them
By Don Terry, November 28, 2008, Los Angeles Times

A rainbow runs through Tyler Winograd's veins.

His mother, Maile, is half black and half Chinese American. His father, Jeff, is white and grew up Jewish in Evanston, Ill.

"I always check 'Other' on my college applications," Winograd said.

But on election day, Winograd was filling out a different kind of form. The 18-year-old accompanied his parents to the polling place across the street from their Glencoe, Ill., home to cast a ballot for president for the first time.

Winograd was excited just to be voting -- a simple act of citizenship that his African American grandfather told him people had died for. His parents were even more excited. The head of the Democratic ticket looked like their son. All of the Winograds voted for Barack Obama.

"I totally feel proud that he's a black man and he's mixed," Maile Winograd said of Obama. "I identified with him so much. What he went through as a biracial person, I went through. And my son must look at Barack and say, 'He looks like me.' That's a good thing. A very good thing."

For the parents of multiracial children, Obama's rise has been a vindication of sorts, a presidential rebuttal to a society that has not always been kind to their offspring, labeling them "half-breeds," "tragic mulattoes," "mutts," "mixed nuts," according to Susan Graham, the white mother of two multiracial children and the founder of the California-based Project Race, a 17-year-old nationwide group that advocates for a multiracial classification on all school, employment, census and other forms.

"Our membership has grown since the election," Graham said. "We've been fighting for a long time. This is a great boost for us."

But for Tyler Winograd, Obama's biracial background is no big deal. Winograd is the legal and psychological beneficiary of past struggles for racial and social justice. He and his friends look at race and culture through a different lens than their parents, who lived through the not-so-distant days of segregation, rioting and political assassinations.

"I think it's interesting that Obama is biracial," Winograd said. "But I think it's much more of a sense of pride for mixed-race people who are older or black people who are older, for people who went through the civil rights movement. . . . They had to fight for their rights. My rights were essentially handed to me."

Race, however, continues to be a stubborn puzzle. It wasn't until 2000 that Americans were allowed to check more than one box for race on U.S. census forms. At that time, about 6.83 million people, or 2.4%, checked two or more races on census forms out of a population of about 281 million.

Carolyn Liebler, a sociology professor specializing in family, race and ethnicity at the University of Minnesota, said she expected that the numbers of people identifying as multiracial would be higher in 2010 than they were in 2000 "because the number of mixed-raced marriages are going up" and because of Obama.

Tom W. Smith, an expert on race and demographics at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, calls it the "Obama effect."

"He's made being multiracial salient," Smith said.

Glenna Reyes, 20, grew up on Chicago's North Side, the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Puerto Rican father. She calls herself a "Jewican."

"Most of the people I know are mixed," Reyes said. "Barack Obama represents what a lot of the people I know are. But my friends and I don't see him as the face of biracial pride. We refer to him more as black than biracial. We compare him to Martin Luther King."

Obama, 47, has historically described himself as "black" or "African American." (Now he describes himself as "president-elect.")

But younger multiracial people, such as Winograd, Reyes and Victoria Rodriguez, 27, seem more comfortable identifying themselves as multiracial.

"I personally feel if you're mixed, you should say you're mixed," said Rodriguez, who is half black and half Latino. "Growing up, I had a lot of issues with race -- people trying to define me, saying I wasn't black enough. But I decided I love my mother, I love my father, so I'm mixed."

Like Obama, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, 35, a professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University in New Jersey, identifies herself as black, although her mother is white and her father is African American.

"I was raised to be a black woman with a white mother, like a tall person with a short mother," she said. "I was raised in the South. Biracial was not really an option."

Harris-Lacewell said she did not "normally have mixed-girl emotions," but added: " I had more emotions about being biracial during this campaign then I've ever experienced."

Eddie Heward-Mills, 38, a disc jockey and drummer, never thought he'd live to see a black U.S. president, let alone a black president with a white mother. In other words, a president with a story like his.

"I've heard for years people say, 'I don't see color.' Now I'm starting to believe there are at least some white people who really do feel that way. More than before, that's for sure."

COMMUNITIES AROUND THE WORLD

Bedouin Women Weave Tradition, Economics Together
By Jo-Ann Mort, November 26, 2008, JTA

Every April, the sheep in Israel’s southern Negev are sheared by their Bedouin herders, beginning a process that ends with the production of hefty rugs woven by women from this Bedouin village using a 4,000-year-old technique.

Though the method is old, the women who run the project are part of a new generation of Bedouin women whose work is empowering women who for millennia were denied social and economic opportunities in their conservative society.

At Lakiya Negev Weaving, a project of Sidreh -- a nonprofit Bedouin women’s organization supported by Shatil, the grass-roots Israeli arm of the New Israel Fund -- everyone involved in the production of the rugs, pillows and wall hangings is a woman, from shepherd to weaver to manager.

he group’s showroom is situated at the entrance to the town of Lakiya, just off the main highway and a few minutes’ drive from Beersheva.

It wasn’t always in so prominent a location.

The group’s first building, established shortly after the group was created in 1991, was burned to the ground and its money stolen before the weavers could be paid.

“I think we were a threat to the men,” says Hala Abushareb, a Bedouin woman in her mid-20s who runs the showroom. “But now the daughters see that their mothers are useful. When women are oppressed, men see it. It’s OK when women get paid. A woman pays money to send her daughter to school and to university when she didn’t go herself and now the attitude is different.”

Abushareb has a degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva.

Israel’s Bedouin population numbers roughly 160,000, with the vast majority in the Negev. Bedouin women, who used to work in agriculture and weave tents for shelter, are still in transition in a society that is undergoing dramatic change.

Once agricultural nomads, Bedouin in Israel are increasingly adopting lifestyles similar to those of other Israelis -- building permanent homes, working in non-agricultural jobs, sending their children to school and living in established towns or the Bedouin city of Rahat, about 20 minutes north of Beersheva. Some have made these adjustments willingly; others have clashed with the Israeli government over grazing rights, land use and politics.

Despite these changes, Bedouin women are still mostly discouraged from working outside the home. Lakiya Negev Weaving has been successful by enabling the women to work from their homes.

No longer weaving tents since most families live in homes made of adobe, stone or corrugated tin, the women of Lakiya Negev Weaving keep the ancient Bedouin tradition of weaving alive by creating carpets and other items. As a condition of their employment, the women also must agree to take part in an educational seminar on women’s health.

The organization employs about 70 women, down from a high of 150 when the economy was stronger. Last year the women produced 64 carpets, some of which ended up in Israel’s fanciest neighborhoods. At the European Union’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, a room called Lakiya is filled with rugs made by the women. The rugs also sell in stores in Jerusalem and Haifa.

After the sheared wool is cut from sheep, the puffs are spun into raw wool by hand on a wooden spindle, then dipped into huge boiling vats of dye before being placed in the sun to dry. The women take the wool and weave it on a hand-made loom, leaning over it on their knees as the wool is held up across two cinderblocks.

The rugs feature either the five traditional Bedouin colors -- black, deep green, dark red, white and dark blue -- or contemporary weaves from a palette of 35 colors.

Students from Israel’s top fashion design college, Shenkar in Tel Aviv, provided the weavers with contemporary designs on paper strips, and the rug’s buyers come from all over Israel.

Sometimes, if a customer orders a large rug, neighbors and friends come to the weaver’s home to help out, or the rug is assigned to a home where several women in a family can work on it at once.

The showroom near Lakiya’s entrance doubles as a meeting place for the women, who often come with their young daughters in tow.

“It’s also a social meeting,” Abushareb says. “The women enjoy it. They work a few hours a day, every woman on her own schedule."

Putting the Oy Back into "Ahoy"
By Steven Plaut, October 15, 2008, The Jewish Press

They did not sing "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Manischewitz," nor do they ever seem to appear in any of the Disney films about pirates in the Caribbean. The website piratesinfo.com carries not a single reference to them.

And while September 19 has for a number of years now been designated International Talk Like a Pirate Day (there are even Internet courses available in pirate lingo), none of its initiators seems to have had Ladino (the language spoken by Jewish refugees expelled by the Spanish and Portuguese after the Reconquista) in mind.

Swashbuckling buccaneers who took time to put on tefillin each morning? Better get used to the idea. Long overlooked, the history of Jewish piracy has been garnering increasing interest, with several serious books and articles telling its epic tales.

Many Jewish pirates came from families of refugees who had been expelled by Spain and Portugal. They took to piracy as part of a strategy of revenge on the Iberian powers (though lining their pockets with Spanish doubloons was no doubt also a motive). Many of these pirates mixed traditional Jewish lifestyles with their exploits on the high seas.

* * * * *

Jewish refugees from Portugal first settled in Jamaica in 1511, probably originally as sugar growers, and some took up piracy. The British, led by Admiral William Penn (the father of the William Penn who established Philadelphia), took over the island from the Spanish in 1655, reportedly with assistance from local Jews and Marranos (crypto-Jews), all of whom were allowed to remain.

By 1720, as many as 20 percent of the residents of Kingston were Jews. Over time, Ashkenazi Jews arrived and their synagogues operated alongside the Sephardic ones (the congregations all merged in the 20th century). Jewish tombstones dating back to 1672 have been found there, with Portuguese, Hebrew and English inscriptions.

Some Jews went into local Jamaican politics, and there were so many in the Jamaican parliament in the 19th century that it became the only parliament on earth that did not hold deliberations on Saturday. The Jewish community of Jamaica today numbers a couple hundred and calls itself the United Congregation of Israelites in Jamaica (UCIJA). The active synagogue there is built in Sephardic style and is one of the few left in the world with a sand floor. Naturally, its official website includes a page on the pirate ancestors of Jewish residents (ucija.org/pirates.htm).

According to an article earlier this year in the Israeli weekly Bakihilot, municipal workers in Kingston recently uncovered a long forgotten pirate graveyard. Among the tombstones are those with Jewish stars and Hebrew inscriptions, together with pirate symbols such as the skull and crossbones.

Similar Jewish pirate graves have been found near Bridgetown in the Barbados and in the old Jewish graveyard in Curacao. Jamaican-born Jewish historian Ed Kritzler claims that Jewish pirates once operated there, raiding the Spanish Main wearing tallis shawls. He's just published a book titled Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean and conducts private tours of the "Jewish pirate coves" of Jamaica.

Kritzler's book includes the saga of one Moses Cohen Henriques, who participated in one of history's largest sea heists against Spain. In 1628, Henriques sailed together with Dutch Admiral Piet Hein, of the Dutch West India Company, who hated Spain after having been held as a slave for four years on a Spanish galleon. They raided Spanish ships off Matanzas Bay in Cuba, commandeering large amounts of gold and silver.

Henriques set up his own pirate "Treasure Island" on a deserted island off the Brazilian coast on which Jews could openly practice their religion. (He also served as adviser to Henry Morgan, perhaps the most famous pirate of all time; Errol Flynn played Morgan in the movie "Captain Blood.") After the recapture of Brazil by Portugal in 1654, some of these Jews would sail off to set up a brand new Jewish community in a place called New Amsterdam, now known as New York.

In many cases Jewish pirates collaborated with Holland, a friendly and welcoming state for Jews. One such pirate was Rabbi Samuel Pallache, a leader of the Moroccan Jewish community in Fez. Born in The Hague, he was son of a leading rabbi from Cordoba who ended up in Morocco. From there he was sent to Holland as envoy of the Moroccan sultan, who was seeking allies against Spain. He became a personal friend of Dutch Crown Prince Maurice, who commissioned him as a privateer, and served for years as a pirate under a Netherlands flag and with Dutch letters of marque. Rabbi Pallache recruited Marranos for his crews.

In other cases Jewish pirates worked for the Ottomans. A Jewish pirate named Sinan, known to his Spanish prey as "The Great Jew," was born in what is now Turkey and operated out of Algiers. He first served as second in command to the famous pirate Barbarossa. (No connection to the fictional Barbarossa of the Disney films.) Their pirate flag carried a six-pointed star called the Seal of Solomon by the Ottomans.

Sinan led the force that defeated a Genoan navy hired by Spain to rid the Barbary Coast of corsairs. He then conquered Tripoli in Libya, and was eventually appointed supreme Ottoman naval commander. He is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Albania.

A Jewish pirate named Yaakov Koriel commanded three pirate ships in the Caribbean. He later repented and ended up in Safed as one of the Kabbalah students of the Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria) and is buried near the Ari's grave.

A pirate named David Abrabanel, evidently from the same family as the famous Spanish rabbinic dynasty (which included Rabbi Isaac Abrabanel), joined British privateers after his family was butchered off the South American coast. He used the nom de guerre "Captain Davis" and commanded his own pirate vessel named The Jerusalem. According to at least one report, he was the person who discovered what is now called Easter Island.

Several Jewish corsairs operated against Spanish ships off the coast of Chile. There are reports that their galleys were kosher and they abstained from raids on the Sabbath. A maritime museum in Chile today holds letters of communication among these pirates composed in Hebrew.

One pirate leader was named Subatol Deul. On a trip up the coast he stumbled across a ship under the command of the pirate Henry Drake, son of Sir Francis Drake. They decided to create an alliance of anti-Spanish pirates, the "Black Flag Fraternity."

Deul and Drake reportedly buried treasure on an island near Coquimbo in 1645. A chapter in the book Piracy & Plunder: A Murderous Business, by Milton Meltzer, is devoted to Deul's swashbuckling career.

There also were Jewish corsairs based in Curacao next to Venezuela. The local Curacao rabbi once berated his community's pirates when they thoughtlessly attacked a ship owned by a fellow Jew. At least it wasn't done on the Sabbath.

The history of Jewish pirates goes far back: Josephus mentions Jewish pirates operating in the seas off the Land of Israel in Roman times. There is a drawing of a pirate ship inside Jason's Tomb in Jerusalem. The Hasmonean Hyrcanus accused Aristobulus, his brother, of "acts of piracy at sea." In its last days, the Seleucid empire (the one fought by the Maccabees) was plagued by Jewish and Arab pirates.

Pirates operated from coves along the Levantine coast for centuries, and my own city of Haifa was once known as The Little Malta because of its notorious pirates. (The local pirates these days seem to specialize mainly in computer software.)

The fact that some Jews seemed to have taken so easily to the pirate lifestyle may have been due in part to other skills developed by Jews over the centuries. Cartography, for example, was considered a Jewish specialty in the 15th and 16th centuries, and Christopher Columbus is believed to have consulted the work of a Jewish cartographer, one Abraham Cresque of Mallorca, who produced the Catalan Atlas in 1375. Portuguese Jewish cartographers and scientists contributed to Vasco Da Gama's voyage of discovery to the Cape of Good Hope in 1497. Jews also worked on ships as navigators.

* * * * *

Perhaps the most important Jewish pirate of all was the Caribbean pirate Jean Lafitte, a familiar name to many American schoolchildren. He and his men, pirates trained in cannon fire, came to the aid of General (later President) Andrew Jackson and played a critical role in winning the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. A Jean Lafitte National Historic Park stands today on the outskirts of the city.

What is still largely unknown is that Lafitte was a Jew, born either in Western France or in what is now Haiti. A while back my friend Edward Bernard Glick, a retired professor of political science living in Oregon, published an article in the Jerusalem Post (July 14, 2006) on Lafitte's Jewish origins and it stirred up a storm of interest. Parts of Rabbi I. Harold Sharfman's book Jews on the Frontier also discuss Lafitte's life.

According to Glick, "[Lafitte] was a Sephardi Jew, as was his first wife, who was born in the Danish Virgin Islands. In his prime, Lafitte ran not just one pirate sloop but a whole fleet of them simultaneously. He even bought a blacksmith shop in New Orleans, which he used as a front for fencing pirate loot. And he was one of the few buccaneers who didn't die in battle, in prison or on the gallows."

Glick claims the British tried to recruit Lafitte to guide them through the swamps to ambush the Americans, but Lafitte instead showed General "Old Hickory" Jackson Britain's battle plans to attack New Orleans. The rest is history.

Years before the Battle of New Orleans, Louisiana Governor William C. C. Claiborne placed a reward of $500 on Lafitte's head. Lafitte retaliated by putting a $5,000 bounty on the head of the governor. Neither collected.

Lafitte later commanded his own "kingdom" named Campeche on the island of Galveston, Texas, then nominally under Spanish rule. Some of Lafitte's trading activities were conducted by Jao de la Porta, a Portuguese Jew from Spanish Texas. Among their clients was Jim Bowie, made famous at the Alamo and also for the special knife.

* * * * *

Mention of Jewish pirates can pop up in some unexpected places. Just before Rosh Hashanah this year, the liberal Huffington Post website carried a post by humorist Andy Borowitz "reporting" that the group of Somali pirates who had just hijacked a ship full of Ukrainians in the Gulf of Aden was calling a halt to the piracy in honor of the Jewish High Holidays.

Wrote Borowitz: " 'To all of our Jewish friends, we say a hearty Shana Tova,' said pirate spokesman Sugule, moments before the pirates hoisted a Star of David flag over the captured ship. Sugule took pains to indicate that while the pirates were taking a Rosh Hashanah break from their usual plundering and pillaging schedule, they were doing so only out of respect for Jewish pirates and not because they are Jewish themselves. 'None of us Somali pirates are Jewish,' he said. 'Except for Abe in accounting, who's half.' "

And there are others who are getting into the spirit of things. The Bangitout.com Jewish humor website listed a set of halachic challenges for Jewish pirates, including the following:

If you have a hook instead of a hand, on which arm do you put tefillin?
Does your treasure map show how far the eruv extends?
How long do you wait, after capturing a plundered ship, to put up a mezuzah in the captain's cabin?
Should you cover your eye patch with your hand when you say the Shema?
Can you wear a leather boot over your peg leg on Yom Kippur?
Are you able to carry on the plank on Shabbos? If your parrot is on your shoulder, is that carrying?

Personally, I think the biggest challenge to Jewish pirates occurs at Purim. After walking around all year decked out like that, what could they possibly dress up as? Accountants?

In a way, the legacy of Jewish pirates is alive and well in Israel today. One of the most outstanding examples of the Jewish state's derring-do was when it stole five gunboats out of the port of Cherbourg in France - ships that had already been paid for by Israel but that France, as punishment for Israel's Six-Day War victory, was refusing to deliver.

Israeli agents operating through a front corporation seized the ships on December 25, 1969 and sailed them to Haifa. The details of that piracy are engagingly told in The Boats of Cherbourg (1997) by Abraham Rabinovich.

So let's swab the decks, count our doubloons and grant the Jewish pirates their proper place in history. In other words, it's time to put the oy back into "ahoy."

THANK YOU

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