Is United Synagogue’s House ‘On Fire?’

Middle movement grapples with a way forward at centennial convention.

Stewart Ain for The Jewish Week

Baltimore — United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism was marking its 100th birthday, but while recent survey findings about the movement were sobering, the spirit of the convention itself, dubbed “The Conversation of the Century,” was upbeat in focusing more on the future than the past.

United Synagogue has seen its membership plummet in recent years, necessitating a change in leadership and a total overhaul of the organization. The discussions at the conference were wide ranging, and sacred cows came up for debate.

“Our house is on fire,” Rabbi Edward Feinstein of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, Calif., told a session on conversion, citing the recently released Pew Research Center’s survey of American Jewry.

“If you don’t read anything else in the Pew report, [it is that] we have maybe 10 years left. In the next 10 years you will see a rapid collapse of synagogues and the national organizations that support them. The Pew report is an atomic weapon. There are so many details of that report that they make your hair curl. If we continue what we are doing, our house will burn down.

“What I’m missing at ‘The Conversation’ is a little bit of screaming,” he added, “so I wanted to scream a little bit. At least someone here should.”

The Pew survey showed that only 18 percent of American Jews identify as Conservative, down from 39 percent in 1990, was not included in the program. Organizers said the study, announced on Oct. 7, was released too late. But participants mentioned it in many sessions. (See accompanying story on page TK.)

“Who are the 70 percent of non-Orthodox Jews who are intermarrying?” asked Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann of Chicago on the centennial convention’s sidelines, quoting a figure from the survey.

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Israel Has a Marriage Problem. One American-Born Lawyer Is Trying To Solve It.

Susan Weiss started out trying to win divorce cases, but now her mission is pushing Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate to change its ways

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

Israel has a marriage problem. In April, Hiddush, an Israeli nonprofit, published a “Freedom of Marriage World Map,” which graded countries based on the level of freedom each grants its citizens with regard to personal status. Israel was the only Western country that received a grade of 0, putting it in the company of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.

This data point shocks because it is in conflict with the many other freedoms enjoyed by citizens of Israel. In contrast with areas such as freedom of speech and political opposition, when it comes to marriage and divorce, Judaism is established as the state religion in a very real way, and the rabbinate maintains a monopoly over family law that even the country’s Supreme Court ratifies. The failure to separate church and state in Israel in this one crucial arena has resulted in the imposition on all Israeli citizens—religious or not—of Orthodox Jewish law.

Many of the women who get caught up in the rabbinic court processes are not themselves religious. If you want a divorce, the rabbinic court is the only institution that can grant it. Furthermore, in Orthodox Jewish law and thus Israeli law, a marriage cannot be dissolved from without, as a civil marriage can be. Should a husband decide he doesn’t want to grant his wife a Jewish divorce—or get—no one can force him to; indeed, a forced divorce or get meuseh, as it is called, is invalid in the eyes of the Israeli rabbinate. No civil alternative is available to Israeli citizens.

A woman whose husband refuses her a divorce is known as an agunah—a chained woman. Should she seek a civil divorce in another country and thereupon remarry, even in a civil ceremony, her remarriage would not be recognized by the state of Israel, and her children would be considered mamzerim—bastards—and unable to marry other Jews, according to Jewish law—and, therefore, according to Israeli civil law. (Wives can also veto divorces, but men can override their wives by securing signatures from 100 rabbis; there are few chained men.)

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Sholem Aleichem Created Tevye—and the Modern American Jewish Sense of Tradition

In an excerpt from Nextbook Press’s new biography, the Yiddish master’s funeral at Carnegie Hall begins to shape a legacy

By Jeremy Dauber for Tablet

In his new biography The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber recounts the extraordinary life and career of the man who was dubbed “the Jewish Mark Twain,” a writer who created Tevye—the enduring character at the center of Fiddler on the Roof. Sholem Aleichem’s reputation continued to grow after his death in 1916, as Dauber describes in the following excerpt.

Arrangements had to be made.
It would have to be a public funeral, there was no doubt of that; and the Lower East Side had seen its share of those. Both respected figures like the Yiddish newspaper publisher Kasriel Sarasohn and the Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin and less respected ones like the Jewish gang leader Jack Zelig had been accompanied to their eternal rest by crowds and spectacle. (And at least once, during the funeral of the Orthodox rabbi Jacob Joseph in 1902, by a riot; an outbreak of violence that started when workers tossed bits of iron out of factory windows at procession members led to two hundred riot police “slashing this way and that with their sticks…shoving roughly against men and women alike.”) But the question transcended simple logistics and security: How do you bury, in the words of one of his eulogists, “the Jewish people in microcosm”?

First, the family decided, you needed an arrangements committee, and they asked Judah Magnes, the head of the New York Kehillah, to head it up. Though the Kehillah didn’t always succeed at its stated goal of unifying New York’s Jewish communal affairs, Magnes was still probably one of the few individuals who could draw together the multitudinous constituencies bridged by Sholem Aleichem’s appeal. Some backstage political struggles notwithstanding, Magnes and the rest of the committee—all friends or associates of Sholem Aleichem’s, as well as committed Zioinists—would produce a smashing success, a national pageant.

The committee’s first decision was to invite over a hundred Yiddish writers to watch over the body in fourteen consecutive three-hour sessions as it lay in state for two days at 968 Kelly Street. Twenty-five thousand people, alerted by black-bordered extra editions of the Yiddish papers, stood in lines stretching for blocks waiting to pay their respects. That Monday, May 15, 1916, three Pereyaslav landsmen, Jews from his hometown, purified and prepared the body. Everything was done strictly according to tradition, though few if any of the writers were traditional—a fitting tribute to Sholem Aleichem, whose own behavior was less traditional than his sensibility.

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Celebrating Thanksgivukkah, a Once-in-a-Lifetime Holiday

By Kate Bigam; Reprinted from ReformJudaism.org

Start basting your turkey and spinning your dreidels, because for the first and only time in our lives, Thanksgivukkah is coming! This November 28th, when American Jews gather around the Thanksgiving table to talk about the things we appreciate and to dig into elaborate feasts, we’ll have another holiday to celebrate, too: Hanukkah.

This year, Thanksgiving and Hanukkah will overlap, producing an anomalistic hybrid holiday that’s come to be known as Thanksgivukkah. There are conflicting reports about whether it’s happened before and when it will happen again, but most mathematicians and calendar experts seem to think this is the first occurence. Although the holidays would’ve overlapped in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln didn’t formally establish the holiday of Thanksgiving until two years later, in 1863, which means that 2013/5774 will mark the first Thanksgivukkah in history.

Just how rare is this holiday? Some reports say Thanksgivukkah will happen again in 2070; others, like Jewish physicist and calendar expert Jonathan Mizrahi, say it won’t repeat itself until 79811. Either way, it’s safe to say that for most of us, Thanksgivukkah is, indeed, a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Now let’s address the big, practical question: How do we celebrate this once-in-a-lifetime holiday?

Glad you asked! Our recipes, ecards, and other resources will help you make this the Thanksgivukkah the best yet – er, the only one yet (and ever). Of course, we know that food is a major part of Jewish holidays and secular American holidays, and because this hybrid holiday has plenty to offer in the way of creative cuisine, many (most!) of our resources focus on food.

Ready to start planning your celebration? Start here:

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‘Homeland’ and ‘24’ Creator Howard Gordon on Terror, Tyranny, and TV as Art

The man behind post-Sept. 11 TV opens up about his background, what goes on in writers rooms, and what he’s working on now

By Alana Newhouse and Liel Leibovitz for Tablet

The most surprising thing about meeting Howard Gordon in person is how calm he is—you would expect the writer and producer behind such shows as 24 and Homeland to radiate just a touch of the existential anxiety his work so potently explores. But on a recent afternoon in TriBeCa, New York, the poet of ticking time bombs and countdown clocks—who had just come from having pizza and a CitiBike ride with his wife, Cami—was thoughtful and laid back as he discussed his path from Long Island to Hollywood fame.

Which, on second thought, isn’t surprising at all: For all of their quivering, mad energy, Gordon’s shows are always much deeper than their surface suggests, concealing profound philosophical and moral questions beneath their suspenseful and fast-paced veneer. In 24, he explored the ever-shifting position of America in a post-Sept. 11 world, which meant looking at everything from torture to political corruption. Homeland went even further, with greater psychological nuance and with America’s foreign policy in the Middle East constantly serving as a bold, dramatic backdrop. And so, when Gordon talked to us about his love for Saul Bellow—that other great American chronicler of power and its limitations, mortality, lust, community, and redemption—it seemed only natural.

As Homeland returns for its third season, we talked to Gordon about mastering the structure of TV storytelling, taking and ignoring criticism, and what it means to be an American. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

***

Alana Newhouse: What is it you’re doing in New York tonight? Giving out some award?

Howard Gordon: I’m being honored by the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. My mother is a docent there.

AN: I didn’t know you were actively involved in Jewish causes. What’s your connection?

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