The community center for GLBT youth in Tel Aviv where a horrifying hate crime took place just days ago has reopened.
Bullet holes still mark the walls of the room where Nir Katz, 26, and Liz Trobishi, 16, were killed, and over a dozen other young people were wounded, at the hands of a masked gunman.
The Foundation for Jewish Culture mourns the loss of life and sends its prayers for a speedy recovery to all those injured. We stand with the LGBT community in Israel as it begins the hard work of returning to normal.
(via the Forward)
We mourn the passing of choreographer Merce Cunningham, a gentle man who made enormous changes in the way that dance is made and seen around the world. Merce was deeply spiritual and understood the great power of time and space and their intersection. His dancers had a supreme power of their own, based on extremely rigorous technique that derived from Merce’s respect for and extension of the architecture of the human body in the realms of time and space. He was never afraid to press past the boundaries of “acceptable” art and ultimately his own aesthetic and philosophy gave enormous freedom to generations of artists who followed.
I had the great honor and privilege of working with Merce in 1987. Thanks to my dear friend Bessie Schonberg, we met to discuss his participation in a crazy idea I had to bring dance to Grand Central Terminal (it was not the beautiful station we see now and I had no prior experience to recommend me). It seemed to me that this place where time and space met, in the center of the city, was the ideal locus for his work. Astonishingly he agreed, and was game enough to have his company dressing room in the old OTB office off the main floor (which he shared with them, albeit, in a curtained off area). He had no airs, only quiet enthusiasm, and after two nights of 8000 people sitting on the floor watching for an hour with rapt attention, he commented, “so many people, free to come and go, and who stayed and were relatively quiet…”
To the end, he was thoughtful, thought provoking and kind. As in all things, his exit was extraordinarily elegant. His enormous presence will be deeply missed. Our sympathy to his company and all the dancers, musicians, visual artists, administrators, presenters, and audiences who participated in his work and who it so profoundly touched. May his memory be a blessing.
-Elise Bernhardt, President and CEO, Foundation for Jewish Culture
Alysa Stanton, ordained June 6, is the first female African-American rabbi. You know that, right? It was kind of a big deal. The basic facts were widely reported, and we, the dear readers, were tacitly entrusted with the task of understanding why this is such an important story and then of acknowledging the implications and drawing the appropriate conclusions.
Jvoices(.com), seconded by jewcy(.com), was dissatisfied with this treatment of Stanton’s story, which, like all stories linked to big issues (this time it’s racism), should have been an invitation to dialogue and introspection.
I was apprehensive at first: “disproportionate attention is paid to her gender, racial background, and path to Judaism when her work and character should receive equal coverage, if not be at the forefront” - we know that her race is less important than her theology, but this doesn’t make it irrelevant. Please don’t make this some kind of plea for silent mainstream acceptance on the basis of the belief in a post-racial fantasyland. We’re past that kind of daydream, right? Please?
Well, as it turns out, we actually are. The need to downplay Stanton’s race comes from the appropriate placement of her story into Judaism’s racial history. This, in turn, requires the breakdown of the “systemic polarization” of race in America into black and white, omitting the in-between shades. When we do that, we realize that Judaism, and its clergy, has a racially diverse history, and that Stanton’s ordination, while indeed the first of something, is not nearly as momentous as people want it to be.
But is that it, then? We’ve got Jewish clergy in all shades of brown, so it doesn’t matter that Stanton is black? No: we’ve got Jewish clergy in all shades, and all shades matter. That is the point.
Now you’re allowed to ask why that matters. Even though it shouldn’t. Or should it? The undercurrent implicit in all this is that the mainstream, popular (i.e. non-scholarly) history of Judaism has been “Ashkenaized” and that it’s time to undo the damage. But does this consist of race becoming an axis along which Judaism is structured (along with denomination and geography, feel free to think of others), whereby we acknowledge race and its effect on the individual’s personal Jewish experience? Or does it, in an appeal to our post-racial utopia, get a somewhat less pronounced treatment, lingering in the backs of our minds, but lingering nonetheless? If we add another hyphen to American Jewish identity (black/Asian/hispanic/Indian/white/etc. – Jewish – American), will it act as a divisor, or will it serve to acknowledge forces that have long been ignored?
Or maybe it’s just been way too long since any of us actually went to shul.
-Isaac TheIntern
Filed under: Thoughts
From June 5-14, 2009 the Asia Society, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and New York University Center for Dialogues presented Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas — the largest, multi-venue celebration of Islamic cultures ever presented in the United States.
Starting from the belief that the arts and cultural exchange programs have the unique power to create new connections between people locally and globally, Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas was designed to share and celebrate the arts and culture of Muslim societies. According to festival literature:
“Islam is the world’s second-largest religion, with an estimated one billion-plus members—approximately 600,000 in New York City, with nearly 100,000 in Brooklyn alone—but many non-Muslim Americans have had only limited exposure to the faith, its civilization, diverse cultures, and traditions. Arts and culture play a vital role in helping us learn more about each other by providing new perspectives and fostering the mutual respect that leads to peaceful co-existence among people.”
By all accounts this was an extraordinary festival showcasing world-class arts and culture ranging from the contemporary to the traditional. I encourage you to visit their website and learn more about it.
The fact that major secular arts and culture organizations embarked on this enormous undertaking to create understanding and dialogue with the Muslim world should raise important and pressing questions for those involved in Jewish culture. For instance – why does it seem so unlikely that a secular institution would spend significant resources to explore Jewish culture, arts & ideas? And if they were to do so, what would that festival look like? Would it continue to reinforce a narrow vision of Jewish identity or would it reflect the global, diverse, complicated and multifaceted tapestry that is World Jewry? (more…)
