Winter 2024
Table of Contents
- Bagels and Balalaikas: A Return to Brighton Beach
- Gross Breesen: A Temporary Haven From Hitler
- American Jewish Orphanages Housed the Most Fortunate Unfortunates
- Israel Spawns Global Family Research Firm
- B’nai B’rith Magazine Winter 2023 issue wins major journalism prize
- Students Confront Anti-Semitism on College Campuses in None Shall Be Afraid Essay Contest
- With Rising Anti-Semitism, the Secure Community Network Is on Guard and on Duty
- Canadian-Israeli Cyclist Gets Good Mileage
- The Yiddish Rock Star—From Galway, Ireland!
- Favorite in Jewish Media from 5784: Our Staff Picks
Bagels and Balalaikas: A Return to Brighton Beach
Photographs and text by Marcia Bricker Halperin
The Q train turns onto Brighton Beach Avenue having rumbled through the quieter parts of Brooklyn to reach a crowded world by the ocean. I have returned to photograph Brighton Beach 45 years after I first documented the arrival of Russian immigrants there in 1979. The neighborhood came to be known as “Little Odessa” because the majority of the original émigrés arrived from that industrial city on the Black Sea.
I stand on a sunny winter day at the crossroads of Brighton Beach and Coney Island Avenues where I encounter the Tashkent Supermarket facing the Vostochny Bazar. The neighborhood continues to be a haven for immigrants with the arrival of Central Asian Muslims as well as people from Uzbekistan, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine.
The Russian language is all around on the signs and in the crowds. Older people pass with shopping carts and walkers, alone or with caretakers. Nearly a third of the residents are at least 60 years old, compared to 12% of the Brooklyn borough-wide population.
I am greeted in Russian when I enter shops. More than half the population of Brighton Beach were born either in Russia or Ukraine, and Russian was the primary language spoken in 35% of the households in 2022. As they have prospered, the younger families have moved to other communities, in Sheepshead Bay, Queens and Fair Lawn, New Jersey. But many return to dine in the restaurants, to shop and to visit the many salons and spas.
Visiting this neighborhood feels like time travel. Commerce spills onto the avenue under the speckled shadow of the elevated train line. At this far southern edge of Brooklyn, people are open to a stranger. I find it easy to meet new people, young and old, and photograph them.
Then
Here the streets were filled with a variety of people more willing and more able to be themselves than in other parts of the city.
Memories of early trips to the shore are associated with my childhood in Brooklyn. The area reminds me of my grandparents and my parents who found the sea air restorative. My photographs of Brighton Beach, while documentary, are also personal explorations.
In the 1970s the city of New York was facing bankruptcy, and neighborhoods like Brighton Beach were in decline. Businesses were moving out and landlords weren’t investing in their properties, thus perpetuating a cycle of deterioration and increasing crime. The easing of visa restrictions for Jews in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s led to a new wave of immigration that halted the progression of Brighton’s decline. Nearly 20,000 Soviet Jewish émigrés would arrive in Brighton between 1975 and 1980 to form the largest community of new Russian Jewish immigrants in this country.
Holidays like Chanukah are celebrated in Brighton Beach to make public customs and rituals that were private or secret or even forgotten for many years in Russia and Ukraine.
NOW
Groups of older people are a common sight on the boardwalk and are most often speaking Russian. There is a senior housing apartment building nearby.
A traditional Uzbekistan bread, Samarkand bread is made in a cylindrical clay oven fired to a high heat. The traditional Uzbek disks of dough are baked vertically.
Within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, community shop owners demonstrated their support for Ukraine. Still, newsstands and shops reflect customers’ strong longing to retain Russian language and culture from beloved childhood candies to Cyrillic puzzle books.
Amidst the vibrant hustle of the 46th Annual Brighton Jubilee, a long-time resident proudly showcases her collection of necklaces.
Outside the St. Petersburg variety store a man plays traditional Russian tunes. Many passersby show their appreciation by slipping bills into his suitcase.
Gross Breesen: A Temporary Haven From Hitler
By Heidi Landecker
In May 1936, my father, George Landecker, arrived at Gross Breesen, a manor farm in Breslau, Silesia, then in Germany. The farm occupied a former nobleman’s estate on 567 acres, and it had just become an agricultural training school for Jewish teenagers, established because the few countries accepting refugees from Nazi Germany wanted farm workers. Dad came from a small town outside Königsberg, a day’s train ride to the north. He was 17.
Breesen had been owned by Willi Rohr, a Polish Jew who leased the estate at no charge to the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (National Council of German Jews), which was setting up such facilities for teenagers no longer allowed to attend German schools.
The council was an umbrella group of Orthodox, Zionist and progressive Jewish organizations, formed in September 1933 to represent German Jewry to the Nazi government. At its head was Rabbi Leo Baeck, president of B’nai B’rith in Germany, who immediately wrote to Adolf Hitler requesting a meeting to discuss the Jewish situation under National Socialism. Baeck received no response.
The council raised money from wealthy members and state and international Jewish organizations to help those who had lost employment. After the Nuremberg laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of German citizenship and their children of the right to public education, it built schools for Jewish youngsters and centers like Breesen for German Jewish youth. By early 1936, with no hope of education or jobs, tens of thousands of Jewish teenagers like my father could only try to emigrate.
Baeck and other leaders, including Otto Hirsch and Julius Seligsohn—who would both die in concentration camps—established some 30 training farms across Germany by 1937, funded by Jewish donors and agencies from Germany and America. Most were Zionist, teaching agriculture and Hebrew for resettlement in what was then Palestine. Breesen was non-Zionist.
The Breesen my father knew ended on Nov. 10, 1938. As part of the Kristallnacht pogrom that began on Nov. 9, the Gestapo arrested all Jewish males over 18. They were sent by train to Buchenwald. My father was by then working on a sheep farm in Bavaria, awaiting papers that would take him and 36 other Breeseners to a farm in Virginia, but while visiting his girlfriend in Frankfurt, he was arrested on
the street.
Headmaster Curt Bondy, a professor of education who had been kicked out of the University of Göttingen in 1935, was arrested at Breesen, too. He and the others arrested there that day would survive.
Back in 1936, when the Reichsvertretung chose Bondy to teach farming to 100-plus teenagers in the countryside, he was a 42-year-old social psychologist who had directed a juvenile prison in Hamburg. That April he began selecting about 130 young people, ages 15 to 17, to learn farming.
A large pool of applicants
Bondy interviewed more than 400 candidates, mostly urban kids from across Germany, asking grueling questions about character, religion, moral values and goals.
My father had grown up in an East Prussian village and was also forced to leave school. Dad had captained his soccer team; suddenly, at 15, he wasn’t allowed to play. He found work in a clothing factory in nearby Königsberg—now Kaliningrad, in Russia—and joined a Jewish youth group established by the Reichsvertretung. There he read about Gross Breesen, which might help him settle in another country. The road to becoming a teacher, his dream, was now closed, so he applied.
Most applicants were the children of doctors and lawyers who paid tuition. Dad did not. My grandfather worked for the railway, ferrying goods by horse cart from the train station to Nordenberg’s merchants. Even though Opa, as I called him, earned an Iron Cross fighting for Germany in the First World War, Germany forced him to stop working in 1935. My father was the oldest of five; the family could never have afforded tuition.
At Gross Breesen, the students lived in the manor house, which they called the “Schloss” (castle). The sprawling estate’s livestock, crops and produce were maintained by non-Jewish laborers whose families had worked there for generations. These “Instleute,” or permanent farmworkers, were paid in housing, produce from the estate and given a small wage. It was almost a feudal arrangement, according to Werner T. Angress, a Breesener who became a historian.
The kids in the manor house had plumbing and electricity; the “Instleute,” living above the cow barns, had neither. In “Witness to the Storm: A Jewish Journey from Nazi Berlin to the 82nd Airborne, 1920-1945,” Angress writes that the adult workers had an outhouse; their children used a collective dung heap.
A Jewish farm manager, Erwin Scheier, supervised the trainees’ farming lessons; a gentile boss, Herr Gamroth, managed the workers. Dairy cows, horses and mules had to be fed. A Jewish master carpenter taught the boys to build. A non-Jewish blacksmith taught them to shoe the animals that hauled machinery. The 25 female students handled cooking and laundry, as expected everywhere of women in the 1930s. A few escaped to work in the cow barn, and in summer everyone pitched hay.
Scheier managed the haymakers, somehow preventing injury among novices wielding pitchforks and scythes. His wife, Ruth, oversaw the women, who baked bread, gardened, canned vegetables, darned socks and washed clothing—by hand—for a community of at least 140, which included “interns,” the students’ slightly older counselors.
The non-Jewish workers labored alongside the young Jews, an affiliation that was largely peaceful if not—by Nazi race law—friendly. Breesen had a cranky old tractor that my father developed a knack for. The workers let Dad drive it; most of the trainees feared it.
Bondy’s three pillars
To settle the students abroad, Bondy taught “three pillars”: farming, German culture and Judaism. After a day in the field, students read aloud from German literature or staged plays. The philosopher Martin Buber visited and gave seminars. In the evening, a string trio performed. My father learned to love opera at Breesen. On the farm in Upstate New York that Dad bought in 1946, the cows in our dairy barn included Aida, Carmen
and Tosca.
Religious teaching was part of Bondy’s mandate, and students celebrated the Sabbath every Friday night.
Photos: © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eric F. Bowes
On Saturdays, Bondy delivered “life lessons,” lectures on values. He asked students what they had learned from daily incidents on the farm, discussing generosity, self-awareness and working with others. He stressed that the community was more important than the individual. By the trainees’ accounts years later, he was a strict disciplinarian but a charismatic teacher.
Were the Nazis aware of Breesen? Of course. But Bondy encouraged discussion of current events and had a newspaper delivered every day, so the students knew they lived on an island of security, even if they didn’t know how temporary it would be. Angress writes that, according to the Russian State Military Archives opened in Moscow after the Soviet Union fell, the Schutzstaffel, or secret service, knew the details of daily life on the farm. Perhaps the manager, Gamroth, had been the informer.
In 1936-38, well before the “Final Solution,” to murder Jews on a massive scale, the Nazis allowed farm schools like Breesen to exist because they were helping Jews leave Germany—a goal of the government determined to make the country “Juden” free. And the Reichsvertretung was searching frantically for countries to accept them.
When Dad was arrested, he was deported east to Buchenwald. That he met the Breeseners there was fortuitous because they had blankets, and Dad had nothing. It was also easier to resist the Nazis as a group, practicing Bondy’s life lessons. The trainees were strong from working outdoors, and helped one another in the camp, sharing food and helping the elderly to the latrine. Years later, Dad would call that meeting in the concentration camp the first Gross Breesen reunion. The happy pictures in the photo albums made by one Breesener, which many carried out of Germany, hide the reality of life beyond the farm and their uncertain fate.
Dad died at 93, in 2012. He rarely talked about his two months in Buchenwald, but my husband once asked him what the first night was like. Dad replied that he remembered being too frightened to go to the latrine, with inevitable results.
At Breesen there’d been many plans for resettlement as a group, to Brazil, to Australia, to Kenya. None succeeded, although small groups of Breeseners did eventually immigrate to those countries and to Palestine. But in January 1939, to get out of Buchenwald, they needed visas to another country to prove they could leave Germany, complying with Nazi policy. Angress, who had escaped to Holland before Kristallnacht, worked every channel with the Reichsvertretung to get Dutch visas for the prisoners to immigrate to a refugee camp near Amsterdam. When they succeeded, the Gestapo freed the Breeseners, saying to leave immediately or face rearrest.
With a college teaching job in Richmond, Virginia, Bondy was able to obtain a U.S. visa. He continued helping Breeseners emigrate. My father and Angress were part of a longstanding project with William Thalhimer, a Jewish businessman in Richmond, who bought a farm in Nottaway County. Thalhimer persuaded the U.S. State Department that these young German farmers on his land wouldn’t be an economic burden, and Washington let them in. In 1940, when Dad arrived, only 4,000 Germans were admitted even though the quota was 26,000.
And Breesen? After Kristallnacht, some of the “Insleute” ransacked the castle, smashing the piano. The farm training continued under a new director until August 1941, when the Gestapo shuttered the school and converted it to a labor camp. By October, Jews were not allowed to leave Germany. This last generation of Breeseners was deported to Auschwitz, where they died.
In 1984, my father organized the second Gross Breesen reunion, in Upstate New York, and helped arrange many that followed, including one in Israel. I attended those, and when I was in my 20s and 30s, Breeseners in Berlin, Costa Rica and the U.S. hosted me for visits and dinners.
Today, Breesen is Pałac Brzeźno, a golf resort in Poland, near Wroclaw, the former Breslau. I e-mailed its owners
some of my father’s photos of their hotel’s history, but they never replied.
American Jewish Orphanages Housed the Most Fortunate Unfortunates
By Marlene Trestman
Photos credit: Jewish Children’s Regional Service, New Orleans
In 1866, as he set out into the world to fend for himself, Nathan Goldstein thanked his caregivers “for all the pains you have taken to educate, support, clothe and bring me up to be honest and true.” Writing not to parents or relatives, the 14-year-old was expressing gratitude instead to the board of the Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans, where he had lived for four years following the death of his Polish immigrant father.
So, too, Edgar Goldberg later lauded the “loving care” he received from 1884 to 1891 in the same “dearly beloved institution” in New Orleans. “the Home,” as it was known since its founding in 1856, was one of some 50 Jewish orphanages that operated across this country prior to the mid-twentieth century, born as much from the biblical commandment to care for widows and orphans as from fear of discrimination if Jews did not “care for their own.”
Highly regimented and isolating, often abusive by today’s standards, orphanages did not always engender such glowing praise from their alumni. Nathan and Edgar, however, illustrate the reality that Jewish orphanages, like their many non-Jewish counterparts, once regularly offered a stable and desirable environment for children whose parents—suffering from maladies and misfortunes, if not dead—could not provide the necessary care. Together these 50 Jewish orphanages, including at least five that B’nai B’rith established or sustained, sheltered, fed, clothed and educated tens of thousands of American Jewish children.
Photo credit: B’nai B’rith Archives Collection, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio
These institutions varied greatly in size, with residential populations ranging in the early 1900s from about 90 children at Philadelphia’s Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum and 166 at San Francisco’s Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum to 500 at Cleveland’s Jewish Orphan Asylum and 1,700 at New York City’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Whether called orphanage, asylum or home, or whether the original impetus arose primarily from yellow fever fatalities (New Orleans), Civil War deaths (Cleveland), or rising Eastern European immigration (Atlanta), these Jewish orphanages sought to raise children within the faith and properly educate them to take their place in society as productive Jewish Americans. Although a handful of these institutions adhered to traditional Orthodox observances, such as the Marks Nathan Jewish Orphan Home in Chicago and the Orthodox Jewish Orphans Home in Cincinnati, the vast majority, largely founded and run by German Jews, followed Reform Judaism and reared their charges to embody the values of their prosperous and highly assimilated benefactors. These children would serve, in the words spoken by B’nai B’rith leader Simon Wolf at Atlanta’s Hebrew Orphans’ Home in 1891, as “a rebuke to our enemies and encouragement to our friends.”
Home hallmarks: education, socialization and assimilation
Education was a hallmark of Jewish orphanages, many of which sent their children to public schools, citing the importance of outside socialization to foster good American citizens, supplemented by industrial programs to teach marketable skills. The Home in New Orleans stands out for prioritizing such socialization. In 1904, dissatisfied with the education its children were receiving in public schools, the Home opened the Isidore Newman Manual Training School for its wards to learn alongside children from the community, regardless of religion (but open only to whites in the racially segregated city), whose parents could afford to pay tuition. As a result, “only two classes of society” attended the prestigious school, humorously remarked Home alumnus Louis Peters about his Newman classmates: “The children of the affluent and the children of the Home.”
The design and location of Jewish orphanages served as bold and tangible measures of Jewish philanthropy and the respect accorded by the surrounding communities. B’nai B’rith’s Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, for instance, opened in 1868 in a large, brick former sanitarium on a seven-acre tract bordering an elite German community that housed many of the city’s most distinguished families. In 1886, in partnership with B’nai B’rith, New Orleans’ Jewish orphanage prominently positioned its new structure, lauded as a “magnificent monument to Hebrew benevolence,” amid the city’s stately mansions. “We are making history today,” declared Leo N. Levi, B’nai B’rith District Seven president and future national president, at the laying of the cornerstone as “American Jews, whose wanderings and blistered feet have found a hospitable welcome here, where the constitution of a free and enlightened people guaranteeing equal rights to all men before the law, touches and exalts the persecuted heart like a divine benediction.” After thanking B’nai B’rith for erecting its “Venetian-style” orphanage in his city, Atlanta Mayor John T. Glenn praised Jews “for protecting and sustaining the unfortunate” and for doing “the world good and not harm by living in it.”
Jewish orphanages varied in policies and practices amid evolving standards of childcare. While the New Orleans and Cleveland asylums, for example, adopted “self-government” programs in the early 1900s, placing older children in charge of younger peers to teach their charges responsibility and citizenship, the Atlanta orphanage expressly rejected the innovation, instead aiming to simulate normal family life. The Atlanta facility also responded to mounting criticism of institutional care by embracing parent subsidies and foster care. In contrast, the New Orleans orphanage responded by creating the most “home-like” environment possible, which by the late 1920s included transforming large barracks-style dormitories into small, personalized bedrooms, winning local praise as “The Institution That Is Not an Institution.”
Photo credit: B’nai B’rith Archives Collection, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio
A new mission for Jewish orphanages
By 1940, however, national trends—including the advent of Social Security, declining mortality among child-bearing adults and increased wages—converged to drastically reduce American orphanage populations. Most Jewish orphanages closed and transitioned to provide non-residential services, such as the Jewish Educational Loan Fund in Atlanta, the Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Philadelphia and the Jewish Children’s Regional Service in New Orleans.
Photo credit: B’nai B’rith Archives Collection, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio
Jewish orphanage founders correctly viewed orphan care as a long-term investment. In 1918, for example, B’nai B’rith Second District President Joseph Seligman described the benefits the organization derived from its orphanage partnerships. “The many thousands of wards have made the B’nai B’rith worthwhile. In these children our work shall live, not only in this generation, but in many generations yet unborn.” Many orphanage alumni fulfilled Seligman’s prophecy, including a few notable examples from the New Orleans orphanage.
Following his discharge from the Home, Nathan Goldstein prospered in Greenville, Mississippi, as a retail merchant and banker, donating time and treasure to numerous civic and charitable causes. Within the Jewish community, besides founding and leading Greenville’s Hebrew Union Congregation for 55 years, Goldstein remained grateful to his orphanage, serving on its alumni association before becoming the first alumnus to win election to its board of directors. At its 1929 convention, B’nai B’rith District Seven honored 79-year-old Goldstein.
Edgar Goldberg, too, sought to repay his debt of gratitude through service. In 1908, he founded the Jewish Herald, the first subscription weekly newspaper for Houston’s burgeoning Jewish community. Two decades later, B’nai B’rith honored Goldberg, citing not only his work as chair of the order’s most recent convention but also the “unstinted support” he had given Jewish causes as an individual and through his newspaper. Even after his death in 1937, Goldberg’s good work continued through another Home alumnus. Joe Samuels lived in the Home from 1929 to 1936, after which he founded B’nai B’rith’s Downtown Lodge in Houston and organized frequent reunions for fellow “ex-Home kids.” In 1973, after the death of Goldberg’s successor, Samuels purchased the newspaper, today called the Jewish Herald-Voice, in which he carried on Goldberg’s legacy of supporting the Jewish Children’s Regional Service, B’nai B’rith and other Jewish causes until his death in 2011. Samuels’ daughter and grandson run the paper today.
Researching the histories of Jewish orphanage residents
For descendants of orphanage alumni and other family historians, JewishGen (“The Global Home for Jewish Genealogy”) recently launched an online tool through its USA Research Division. The Jewish Orphan database (bit.ly/jewishgen) currently includes a spreadsheet identifying the 1,623 children and 24 widows who lived in New Orleans’ Home, along with birth dates, parents’ names and other information compiled from the Home’s handwritten registry books. In addition, the Jewish Orphan database includes a link to an extensive state-by-state roster of American Jewish orphanages, orphan benevolent societies and their successors, which, although compiled in 2004 and no longer actively maintained, offers a great start to locating Jewish orphanage records.
Herself an orphan, Trestman is the author of Most Fortunate Unfortunates: The Jewish Orphans Home of New Orleans (LSU Press, 2023), and hosts a companion website that includes nearly 100 alumni profiles, detailed appendices and a spreadsheet she shared with the JewishGen USA’s Jewish Orphan Database.
Israel Spawns Global Family Research Firm
By Michele Chabin
When Halle Farber from Teaneck, New Jersey, wanted to learn about her Jewish family’s murky origins, she bypassed the world’s largest family roots research firm, Ancestry.com. Instead, she utilized the resources of a plucky Israeli startup to learn about her heritage. MyHeritage was able to uncover the mysteries of Farber’s genetic family tree.
Farber was shocked—and delighted—to discover a Russian cousin’s family tree, which revealed that her great-grandfather’s parents and siblings had survived World War II after being forcibly relocated from Ukraine to Siberia. Once the Iron Curtain came down, many of their descendants moved to Israel, the U.S. and elsewhere.
MyHeritage—one of the world’s premier family ancestry companies—could be based just about anywhere, but its headquarters are located in Israel, in a nondescript building in Or Yehuda, a Tel Aviv suburb.
Since its formation in 2003, the company has grown from a tiny venture based in its founder Gilad Japhet’s home on Moshav Bnei Atarot, about 10 miles east of Tel Aviv, to an enterprise with over 500 employees in six locations, including Ukraine and the United States.
Japhet’s interest in family research stems from an eighth-grade roots project. He went on to study computer software at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and worked for a time in Silicon Valley before returning to Israel to start MyHeritage.
At the firm’s headquarters, sleek glass cubicles, colorful modern furniture, free snacks in its several kitchens and wood-planked rooftop decks shout “international startup.” Also on display are vintage Israel Independence Day posters and antique maps on the exposed brick walls.
“We have never hidden the fact that MyHeritage is an Israeli company, but what’s important is that MyHeritage is international,” said Aaron Godfrey, the company’s vice president of marketing.
Covering more geographic regions
Though it has a far smaller database than Utah-based Ancestry (8.2 million vs. 25 million samples), MyHeritage “covers more geographic regions than any other test,” DNA Weekly wrote in a recent review of the company. (DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, a molecule containing a genetic code unique for every person.)
“MyHeritage, in particular, often has people who tested outside of North America who may not have tested anywhere else,” said Michael Waas, co-founder of U.S.-based Hollander-Waas Jewish Heritage Services, who utilizes the resources of many DNA testing companies to create family trees, finding clients’ long-lost relatives or tracking down heirs.
For clients who are Jewish or suspect they have Jewish ancestry, “we always start on Ancestry, which has the largest DNA database by far,” Waas said. Once the results come in, Waas typically transfers the data to FamilyTreeDNA, a commercial genetic testing company, and MyHeritage, greatly expanding the potential pool of matches.
While DNA testing is an important resource for all family-seekers, it is a “crucial tool” for Jews searching for unknown relatives, Waas said, “given the enormous upheavals in global Jewish life in the 19th and 20th centuries.” This is especially true in areas where records and archives have been lost due to the Holocaust or other calamities.
As the interest in family history has soared over the past few decades, so too has the demand for resources that allow individuals to explore their genetic and historical origins and build a family tree from the comfort of their homes.
Though less well known than Ancestry and 23andMe, MyHeritage has security features, an easy-to-use, multi-lingual format and a trove of 50 million family trees and 20.7 billion historical records that have made it one of the most popular platforms for amateur and professional genealogists.
Like Ancestry, MyHeritage allows you to build your family tree and analyzes DNA to pinpoint recent ancestors’ ethnicity and their geographic origins. It provides DNA matches to near and distant relatives in its database.
But MyHeritage also offers services most companies don’t. In contrast to Ancestry, which supports only six languages, MyHeritage provides support in an unprecedented 42 languages—ensuring a much more diverse and international database of DNA and family trees. MyHeritage also allows people who have already tested their DNA through Ancestry or another company to upload their results to its DNA database. This boosts the chances of finding relatives in many more countries. An additional tool for photo repair/enhancement and colorization can bring old, damaged or faded photos to life.
“Before” and “after” images of two vintage photos transformed by MyHeritage technology, which supplies color, enhances facial features, sharpens sartorial details and brings out important elements in the surrounding environment.
At the RootsTech 2024 family history technology conference, Japhet announced that MyHeritage was able to analyze DNA from stamps his late grandfather licked decades ago through a cutting-edge process called artifact DNA extraction. The technology will eventually become available to MyHeritage customers, he said.
Given the private information that DNA and family trees can reveal, MyHeritage does not share a client’s DNA with third parties, including law enforcement agencies, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies. Nor does it store credit card information. Still, data breaches can happen. In 2018 the company tightened its security after a file containing users’ email addresses and passwords was found on a private server.
Finding relatives via DNA testing or old-fashioned document research can yield family photos, handwritten family trees, birth, marriage and death certificates or other written documentation of a family’s life in the Old Country.
A remarkable root “trip”
Such was the case for Farber, who had been told that her great-grandfather was one of several children. The problem was, she never knew what happened to his parents or siblings after he emigrated from Eastern Europe to the U.S.
“I didn’t know any of their names, or what city or country they had lived in,” Farber said. My great-grandfather had changed his last name to a much shortened American-sounding one. I assumed that his family had died in the Shoah and that research wouldn’t yield any survivors.”
But since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Farber said she has felt “a strong pull to connect to other Jews, especially those on my family tree.” Soon afterward, she decided to explore her roots on MyHeritage.
Farber’s discovery, made in tandem with the site JewishGen, offered different spellings of her grandfather’s surname. The tree also revealed that Halle’s great-grandfather was the oldest of eight, and the only one to leave Eastern Europe.
Farber has since connected with cousins in four countries, who have shared photos of her great-great grandparents, and of family graves in Ukraine.
She has been touched by their stories.
“My new cousins confirmed that my great-grandfather tried to be as generous as he could, and that he sent money and care packages back home to his parents and younger siblings. They said one time he hid money in the heels of a pair of boots and mailed them and a separate letter to his father in Ukraine. His father opened the package and decided the boots would fetch a nice price on the black market, so he sold them. Unfortunately, the letter explaining where the money was hidden arrived too late. Oops!” Farber said.
As useful as DNA testing is for genealogical purposes, “we can never know what the DNA will show,” said Daniel Horowitz, MyHeritage’s genealogy expert. “About 99% of the time clients are fine with the results.” But surprises abound. Children may learn that they are adopted, conceived via a donor egg or sperm, or the result of parental infidelity.
In Jewish families, a married woman’s infidelity with a Jewish man can produce a mamzer, a child born of a relationship that is forbidden in Judaism. The fear of discovering that a child is a mamzer, the most taboo status in Judaism, is evidently the main reason that DNA testing in Israel is illegal unless ordered by a court for reasons of health (such as testing embryos for a genetic disease) or establishing paternity.
As a result, many Israelis take the test while abroad or ask friends to bring the kits with the results to Israel, Horowitz said. Despite the DNA testing ban in Israel, MyHeritage recently helped Elana Milman, a 77-year-old Israeli woman born in a European displaced persons camp, meet the half-brother she never knew she had. When Japhet, the company’s CEO, read about the woman and her yearning to learn the identity of her father, he asked the company’s research team to offer their expertise. Through six months of intensive document research and DNA testing, the team determined that the woman’s father had been a Polish resistance fighter. Milman flew to Poland to meet her sibling, who gave her a warm welcome.
“This is why we do what we do,” Horowitz said.
B’nai B’rith Magazine Winter 2023 issue wins major journalism prize
Congratulations to our own B’nai B’rith Magazine Winter 2023 issue for a top prize in the American Jewish Press Association Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.
First Place: Award for Excellence in Writing About Young Families/People
“When Anti-Semitism Hits Home: How Hate Hurts Kids”
by Beryl Lieff Benderly
Students Confront Anti-Semitism on College Campuses in None Shall Be Afraid Essay Contest
It’s a scary time to be a Jew on campus. In the wake of the savage Hamas attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, anti-Israel protests over the past year have escalated into virulent anti-Semitism, including verbal threats and even instances of physical violence that have created a hostile learning environment. It’s understandable that Jewish students on campuses around the country are afraid to wear their Magen Davids or kippot.
This spring, B’nai B’rith hosted the third annual None Shall Be Afraid Essay Contest for college students. Judges reviewed over 150 essays outlining proposals universities can use to address and combat verbal threats against Israel and Jews on campus. The top three winners were awarded scholarships of $2,500, $1,000 and $500, respectively.
B’nai B’rith created the contest to keep a focus on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in our society. None Shall Be Afraid was inspired by the 1790 letter from George Washington to the congregants of Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, where he quoted Micah 4:4, “Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
First-place winner Ilana Argentar, a freshman at Bradley University, shares her family’s experiences leaving Poland in pursuit of a better life in the United States. In her essay, published below, she ties similarities between the persecution her family faced in the 1930s to the discrimination against Jews today, suggesting that universities take complaints of threats against Jews seriously and address them more decisively.
Second-place winner Rachel Applebaum, a junior at the College of Wooster, writes in her essay about the importance of education and open discussion to confront naive discrimination.
In her essay, third-place winner Faith Ann Lord, a junior at the University of Toledo, emphasizes that by bringing Jewish scholars and speakers to campuses and promoting academic exploration of anti-Semitism, universities can foster a more informed and compassionate student body.
To learn more about B’nai B’rith’s None Shall Be Afraid initiative, visit our section on Combating Anti-Semitism on our website, bnaibrith.org.
Winning Essay by Ilana Argentar
Bradley University, class of 2028, Freshman
A trunk full of books, a bicycle and 30 dollars. That’s what my mom says she and her family had with them when they left Poland as refugees in 1979. My grandparents and great grandparents survived the Holocaust but life in Poland after the war was still not great for Jews. My grandmother was born in Belarus where Jewish children were spit on in the streets and Shabbat candles were lit and prayers whispered behind closed curtains. As an adult in Poland, my Bubbie became accustomed to the word “zyd” used as an insult or, as a compliment, being told that she was, you know, was not like the other Jews. She understood the power and meaning that hateful words possess.
Led by my Bubbie, my family gave up their citizenship and left Poland, with the hope that their children would be more free in the United States to live safely as proud Jews. They were right to do it. As she grew up, my mom’s Jewish identity was firmly planted and grew at preschool, summer camp, Hebrew School and through holidays and celebrations.
I asked my Bubbie her thoughts about the recent sharp rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses. Her response was that “nothing has changed.” She recalled her mother-in-law sharing the story of mandatory “Jew-free Tuesdays” on the university campus in Poland she attended in the1930s. While the Holocaust had not yet officially started, the seeds of hate had already been firmly planted in the DNA of campuses in Europe.
Peoria, Ill.
In November 2023, the ADL and Hillel published a poll which stated that 73% of Jewish college students experienced or saw anti-Semitic incidents since the beginning of the school year. Sadly, November 2023 feels worlds away from today, April 2024. Without looking at a new poll, I am confident that we all know that number must have risen exponentially since the fall. Even my TikTok algorithm has stepped up its game, sharing more and more videos each day featuring students rhyming those familiar chants, threatening the destruction of our people and homeland.
Unfortunately, it seems our top universities are leading the way, inspiring and allowing hate to grow, often under the guise of “free speech.” Of course, all speech is not free, and there are limits to free expression in every public environment. Schools must ensure that one person’s right to free speech does not shut down a Jewish student’s right to safety and security.
If they don’t already have one, universities must create a mechanism for students who have witnessed or encountered anti-Semitism or verbal threats against Jews or Israel to submit a complaint and then they must provide the resources necessary to follow up on those complaints. It is important that they work with university police and local law enforcement to take swift and decisive action against all verbal threats. The word must get out: You cannot make threats against Jews and Israel and get away with it.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. teaches that the Holocaust was preventable. Verbal threats are actually warning signs. By taking immediate action, universities still have the opportunity to lead the way, slow down the hate train and ultimately even save Jewish lives. Left unchecked, history has taught us that verbal threats can become actionable and then it is too late.
Remarkably my great grandmother managed to complete her master’s degree in Pedagogy in Poland in the 1930s.This was in spite of the many odds stacked against her, which included the university sanctioned “Jew-free Tuesdays.” Not long after that, most of her family was deported and murdered at Auschwitz, while she escaped and survived by hiding in the Ural Mountains.
As a teenager who has always invited friends over for Shabbat dinners, traveled to Israel and worn my Star of David necklace daily and proudly, this story can’t help but feel like a scary fairy tale from long ago. Yet, when I think about going to college next year and hear the threats against Jews and Israel that have spread throughout campuses, this unbelievable history sadly becomes a little closer and more real to me. Times are definitely scary for Jewish students on campuses. Universities must do what they failed to do for Jewish students in the past and act now to deter and shut down verbal threats before the hate becomes more institutionalized and it is too late.
With Rising Anti-Semitism, the Secure Community Network Is on Guard and on Duty
Photo: Courtesy of the Secure Community Network
Twenty-four hours a day at a command center in Chicago, a team of agents fields reports of anti-Semitic incidents, responds to potential attacks and monitors the dark web for suspicious activity, all in an effort to safeguard the Jewish community.
Over the past year, the nonprofit Secure Community Network (SCN), founded in 2004, has ramped up efforts to combat anti-Semitic incidents throughout the United States. In 2023, there was a 774% increase in swatting against Jewish targets—where someone calls in a fake threat to a facility—and bomb threats, rising from 115 in 2022 to 1,005 last year. Nearly 200 of these threats, mostly targeting synagogues, were reported over a single Shabbat weekend in December.
Threats targeting the Jewish community surged dramatically in the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war.
Laura Strashny, a mother of four from Rockville, Maryland, had never experienced anti-Semitism before the war. Now, she says, her family has encountered anti-Semitic incidents almost every time they go shopping. As a modern Orthodox family, her sons typically wear kippot and tzitzit daily, clearly identifying them as Jewish.
“We’ll walk in the store and one woman’s giving him a dirty look,” Strashny said, referring to her son. “I didn’t feel safe leaving him alone with the cart to get something. I felt afraid.”
A few weeks before Passover, Strashny and her sons were shopping at their local Safeway when a man shouted directly at them: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Her sons now frequently remove their religious garb or cover up their kippot with hats before leaving the house. These experiences have prompted her to pull her children out of public school and enroll them in Jewish schools. “If you don’t know what’s going on, just put a kippah on and go shopping and see what happens,” Strashny said. “It’s really shocking.”
The first point of contact
With a direct line to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center, the SCN is often the first point of contact for civilians and organizations experiencing hate crimes or attacks. Last year, it helped coordinate security responses for the “March for Israel” solidarity rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
The nonprofit’s situational awareness and active shooter trainings are open to the public, which Patrick Daly, SCN’s principal deputy director, recommends individuals and organizations attend annually.
While the vast majority of threats target synagogues, SCN also collaborates with Jewish community centers, summer camps and organizations like Hillel to guide campus security.
Survivors of the 2018 Tree of Life Pittsburgh synagogue massacre and the 2022 Colleyville, Texas, synagogue hostage crisis credited their participation in SCN training with knowing how to immediately respond during the attacks.
“People live because they were trained,” said SCN Senior National Security Advisor Brad Orsini. “Those hostages weren’t rescued; they saved themselves.”
One of the tactics stressed in training in the event of an attack is: “Run. Hide. Fight.” Victims are instructed to distract their attacker. The rabbi in Colleyville threw a water bottle at the perpetrator, giving members a chance to escape.
Rather than pausing Jewish life out of fear, SCN encourages the community to continue practicing Judaism regularly and proudly, while still taking necessary precautions.
Daly urges civilians to report incidents, even after they’ve occurred. He notes that people often hesitate to report what may not be explicit threats, but even a small piece of information can contribute to solving a larger issue.
“There’s a balance between living in a world of paranoia or being a bit attuned to a scenario,” he said. “If I’m on the subway, do I know where the exits are? What am I going to do if something occurs here? Empowerment trumps fear.”
Check your surroundings
Be aware of your surroundings, Daly says, and never engage. “The goal is always de-escalation,” Daly advises. “We don’t rise to the occasion; we fall back on our level of training.”
Orsini emphasizes the importance of securing at-risk facilities: “Lock the front door. Have procedures and policies on who we’re letting in and out of our building.”
With nearly 30 years working as an FBI Special Agent, Orsini said he’s never seen so many hate crimes aimed at Jews. He stressed that Jews cannot solely rely on law enforcement for protection.
Preparedness is paramount. With advanced technology, organizations should routinely test alarms, cameras and panic buttons in addition to conducting facility walkthroughs with the local police department.
“We want the community to be open and thriving,” Orsini said. “We don’t want anybody to stop their event. It’s really important for everybody to continue to be vigilant but continue to be Jewish; continue to celebrate.”
See something suspicious? You can reach SCN’s 24/7 Duty Desk by calling 844-SCN-DESK or dutydesk@securecommunitynetwork.org.
Canadian-Israeli Cyclist Gets Good Mileage
Leah Goldstein is not a quitter, and never has been, despite a lifetime of challenges that might cause others to settle into a more traditional, less daunting lifestyle. The Canadian-born, Israeli-raised Goldstein, has instead made a career of succeeding against all odds.
A star athlete, she won the 1989 World Bantamweight Kickboxing Championship when she was just 17. For nine years, she served in the Israel Defense Forces as the first female elite commando instructor and worked as an undercover Israeli police officer.
In 2021, the ultra-endurance cyclist became the first woman in the event’s 39-year history to win the Race Across America (RAAM), completing the grueling 3,000-plus-mile race from California to New Jersey in 11 days, three hours, and three minutes.
Her bicycle paths have not always been smooth. She broke her hand during a race in Pennsylvania in 2004. A year later, after winning several races, she crashed during the Cascade Classic, which hospitalized her for more than two months. It seemed then that her career could be over.
But, as she has time and again, Goldstein bounced back. With an unrelenting work ethic, she has continued to move forward at warp speed and, now, at age 55, Goldstein has no plans to slow down.
During the 2021 Race Across America, Goldstein endured a heat wave so intense that most participants dropped out. Sleep deprivation caused her to hallucinate and to fall asleep on the bike. Saddle sores, sunburn and other ailments left her riding in constant pain. She says she’s learned to “be comfortable being uncomfortable.”
Photos: Leahgoldstein.com
With a mile left in the race, a dehydrated and depleted Goldstein struggled to stay on her bike. Lori Friend Moger, her pit crew chief and close friend, says, “It was torture for her” and “scary as hell.” As her heart rate rose to a dangerously high 200 beats per minute, Goldstein stopped frequently, taking breaks to lie in ditches along the route.
Yet Goldstein endured, walking her bike across the finish line and beating her closest competitor by 17 hours.
A “Pollyannaish” view
Moger, who holds a master’s degree in sports psychology, describes her friend as “Pollyannaish,” remarkably upbeat and optimistic: “She doesn’t have doubts like the rest of us. That is the secret sauce to people who do extraordinary things. We’re trained to be realists, and Leah has not harnessed herself in that.”
Goldstein’s philosophy and track record have made her a sought-after motivational speaker.
Her credentials and philosophy are manifest in her book, co-authored with Moger: “No Limits: The Powerful True Story of Leah Goldstein—World Champion Kickboxer, Ultra Endurance Cyclist, Israeli Undercover Police Officer,” published in 2016.
“While most people would be afraid to take on a race like this, I was scared not to,” she writes. “I feared that if I stopped racing, I would lose part of myself. That thing that pumps me full of adrenaline and makes me feel alive would be lost, and I’d never be the same. Competition was like my best friend, and I wasn’t ready to lose it.”
Goldstein credits her family as a source of inspiration and dedicates the book to her maternal grandmother Frieda, who always told her never to use the words “I wish.”
Her parents Simcha and Ahoova were equally influential. Her mother lived in northern China, and her father came from the Soviet Union. Her mom moved to Israel to escape communism and her dad left because of anti-Semitism. They met and married there and relocated to Vancouver after her dad, a sailor, docked in the city, saw financial opportunities. Goldstein was born two months later. Her parents’ examples instilled in her the mindset of never giving up.
In June, Goldstein was among the 49 cyclists who participated in the 4,200-mile Trans Am Bike Race, across 10 states from Oregon to Virginia.
Unlike competitors in the Race Across America, Trans Am participants have no pit crew to aid them. Instead, they are responsible for their own navigation and transporting all their supplies. She placed third overall and was the first woman to cross the finish line. During the ride she faced mechanical issues and navigational challenges, including being chased by dogs and a bear.
Goldstein, as a motivational speaker, draws on her vast life experiences, often sharing her mantra: “You shouldn’t stop living when you’re still alive.”
“We’re so focused on age,” Goldstein says. “I think I am more of a role model now because others look at me and say even at this age, she can still do what she does. I get a lot of messages from people saying, ‘I was thinking of running a marathon or going back to school, and you’ve inspired me.’ If I can keep motivating people to do the things they’ve been thinking about for years, then yay to them, yay to me, all the power to all of us.”
The Yiddish Rock Star—From Galway, Ireland!
Theater historian, playwright and actress Caraid O’Brien is a rock star to fans of Yiddishkeit. This might seem unusual for an Irish Catholic.
O’Brien’s love of languages began with Irish, her ancestral tongue, which she learned from her grandparents in Galway. And that, surprisingly, led her to Yiddish, as an expert in the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews.
David Mazower, writer, bibliographer, researcher and chief curator of the permanent exhibit “Yiddish: A Global Culture” at the Yiddish Book Center, a museum and library in Amherst, Massachusetts has observed that: “As translator, director, producer, actor, scholar, curator and mentor, she is irrepressible, and the most generous collaborator anyone could wish for.”
O’Brien grew up in Boston. As a high school student in the 1980s, she nurtured a love for Ireland’s great writers—Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, whose plays and poetry are in English, and J.M. Synge, who wrote in Irish—and also for Yiddish books in English by Chaim Grade and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and for modern Jewish authors like Philip Roth.
Immersed in the cultures of seemingly disparate peoples, O’Brien grasped their connections: Rooted in legends of the supernatural, Irish and Yiddish literature reveal the histories of resilient peoples who endured poverty, prejudice and isolation but who derived strength from their traditions and family bonds. Each community, O’Brien realized, was “absolutely defined by religion. [Their writers] shared the same self-deprecating humor.” And they did so in their own unique languages.
Photo: Collection of the New York Public Library
Learning from luminaries
While attending Boston University, O’Brien interned at the Yiddish Book Center and then studied Hebrew and Yiddish literature at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. She moved to Manhattan, where she worked on New York University’s Yiddish website and, making the most of her Yiddish fluency, forged connections with legendary stars of the Yiddish theater, then in their 80s and 90s. They had been cheered by audiences throughout their long careers on Second Avenue, home to Manhattan’s legendary Yiddish theaters, and on Broadway, radio and television. They offered her access to their scripts, scores and recordings, treasures which yielded exciting discoveries. Regarding them as “my greatest friends,” O’Brien became determined to “document the history of Yiddish theater through the experiences of people who lived it.”
Photo: Ronald L. Glassman
Photo: Louie Correia/© Caraid O’Brien
Inspired by her special relationship to singing actor and radio personality Seymour Rechtzeit, whom O’Brien calls “the last great troubadour of the Yiddish theater,” she would go on to write his biography.
A new translation
In 1998, O’Brien was in the audience watching an English language performance of “Got fun nekome” (God of Vengeance), a Yiddish play about a Jewish brothel owner and his innocent daughter’s affair with a prostitute, when she said she experienced a vision. In the darkened theater, an apparition of the work’s long-dead author, Polish-born Sholem Asch (1880-1957), appeared before her eyes, as a voice admonished: “You know that this is not the play that I wrote.” Taking the message to heart, O’Brien would pen an English translation, which garnered praise for bringing new life to the century-old piece.
In 1999, an experimental theater staged “Got fun nekome,” using O’Brien’s new translation, on the “go-go” platform at Show World Center, a Times Square sex show emporium, which the city had recently shuttered. Its bawdy décor took the play out of its turn-of-the century milieu, creating an immersive experience for patrons. “The audience was very intellectual,” O’Brien recalled. “Yiddish-speaking grandmas came. We put pictures of the Yiddish alphabet up around the stage. It was a mixture of the sacred and the profane, much like Yiddish literature.”
O’Brien described the way her translation “left in a layer of Yiddish, including Asch’s own dialogue from the original script,” revealing the “beauty and musicality of the language” to evoke the play’s original time and place. Some characters spoke only in Yiddish. Even now, her translations are influenced by cast members who enervate and “wake up the script.”
Dedication and brilliance
As Yiddish classes were added to university curricula, and as interest in learning about the amazing scope of Yiddish culture has spawned new generations of enthusiasts, O’Brien’s talents and knowledge have been in constant demand.
The Yiddish Book Center’s Mazower, who is the great-grandson of Sholem Asch, has commented: “In recent decades, nobody has done more to keep Yiddish theater alive and relevant than Caraid O’Brien. And nobody has done it with more energy, dedication and all-round brilliance.”
In addition to her other activities this year, O’Brien directed a large cast in a staged reading of “Miryeml,” a play about children and anti-Semitism at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research last spring and on Sept. 19 premiered her one-person show about Asch’s heroines, “Land of My Soul,” at Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Photo: Courtesy Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, Mass
Favorite in Jewish Media from 5784: Our Staff Picks
Working at a Jewish organization, many of us at B’nai B’rith are avid consumers of Jewish media. Here are our staff’s recommendations from the Hebrew calendar year 5784 that our readers should be watching, listening to and reading.
Shari & Lamb Chop, Documentary
Years before Elmo and Cookie Monster won the hearts of America, the antics of the sweetly insouciant puppet Lamb Chop and her good buddy, beautiful ventriloquist Shari Lewis, conveyed life lessons to generations of kids all over the world. Showcasing decades of archival video and photographs, Lisa D’Apolito’s documentary “Shari & Lamb Chop” pays tribute to a pioneering and multi-talented Jewish artist, an inspiration to boys and girls who spent their childhood tuning in to her show. Lewis’ multiplicity of talent is revealed through rare films dating from the early days of television that will surprise, delight and rekindle memories for her fans.
“Shari & Lamb Chop” is screened at Jewish film festivals nationwide; scheduling dates can be found at shariandlambchopdoc.com. B’nai B’rith’s podcast, hosted by CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin, which features both D’Apolito and Mallory Lewis, Lewis’ daughter, can be viewed on our YouTube channel, and our website.
—Cheryl Kempler, Contributing Editor and staff writer
We Were the Lucky Ones, Miniseries
Set in the thick of World War II, the television miniseries “We Were the Lucky Ones,” follows a close-knit family of Polish Jews as they become separated during their escape from Nazi persecution. This series, both heartbreaking and full of hope, helped me understand the plight that my ancestors faced as it vividly depicts all that was lost during the Holocaust. Based on real events, the story was a powerful reminder of the importance of family that truly epitomizes the resilience of the Jewish people. You can watch “We Were the Lucky Ones” on Hulu.
—Juliet Norman, Deputy Editor
My Friend Anne Frank, Memoir
This remarkable memoir by Hannah Pick-Goslar, a childhood friend of Anne Frank, was completed shortly before the author died at the age of 93 in 2022. Dina Kraft, who is an award-winning contributor to B’nai B’rith Magazine, collaborated with Pick-Goslar to share her heartwarming and heartbreaking story of a friendship that began when they were next-door neighbors in Amsterdam and ended when they were briefly reunited in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before 16-year-old Anne and her sister Margot succumbed to typhus in February 1945. The story traces the increasingly dire plight of Jews as the German “Final Solution” proceeded apace. Thankfully, Pick-Goslar survived and immigrated to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1948. There she worked as a nurse, raised a family and lived to tell her story.
—Eugene L. Meyer, Editor, B’nai B’rith Magazine
Table Manners, Podcast
Several years ago, British Jewish singer-songwriter Jessie Ware decided it was time for her to ask the questions—about food, family and everything in between. Seeking a new creative outlet, Jessie and her mother, Lennie Ware, a social worker, launched their hit podcast “Table Manners” in 2017. During each episode, they prepare and serve meals for visiting celebrities—from musicians and actors to chefs, athletes and even a Beatle (it’s Paul). I tuned in for the thoughtful conversations with interesting guests; I stayed for Jessie and Lennie’s banter and the warmth of two proudly Jewish mothers. Some of my recent favorite guests include Ben Platt, Millie Bobby Brown and Cher. You can listen to “Table Manners” on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
—Alex King, Director of Digital Strategy
Alex Edelman: Just for Us, Comedy Special
A nice Jewish boy attends a meeting of white nationalists and comes away with a funny and thought-provoking show. A masterclass in storytelling by the award-winning stand-up comedian Alex Edelman combines humor, intelligence and heart in his comedy special. He tackles a complex topic with a mix of amusing observations and deep and even moving insights. It’s easy to connect with Edelman’s themes of identity, culture and belonging. While telling this astonishing tale, Edelman offers respect and consideration for his subjects—no small feat given his encounter is with white supremacists. Weaving together mundane and deeper experiences from his life, Edelman’s show works on many levels. “Just for Us” demonstrates how a comedy special can go well beyond simple entertainment: It can also inspire and move us. You can watch “Alex Edelman: Just for Us” on Max. Edelman won an Emmy Award on Sept. 15 for outstanding writing for a variety special.
—Sharon Bender, VP of Communications