Iris Apfel: a Jewish Collector of Great Style
By Benjamin Ivry
88-year-old Iris Barrel Apfel, born to a Jewish family in Astoria, Queens, has long inspired a fashion world in-crowd with her sharp eye for mixing and matching accessories in serendipitous, joyous ways. A inspired collector and shopper, not a designer, Apfel is being honored with a traveling exhibit of her fashion finds, “Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel” which runs until February 7, 2010 at The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, after previous stopovers at New York’s Metropolitan Museum; the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida; and the Nassau County Museum of Art.
Examples of her witty juxtapositions on display include a Lanvin silk taffeta gown accessorized with a 19th century silver and amber arm bracelet from Bhutan, and cuff bracelet from Tibet, . These pan-cultural mixes gave Apfel a reputation for eccentricity years ago, but her ardent fans include Jewish designer Isaac Mizrahi, who recently told The Boston Globe that until recently, people “thought of Iris as a nut. I never thought she was a nut. I thought she had a great eye and was amazing.’’
Other amazed friends include the Paris-based Israeli designer Alber Elbaz, described by Apfel in a recent interview as “just like a Jewish mother. He [is] so sweet. I think he’s a big talent. And I always like when someone is a talent and a person.” Clearly both of these herself, Apfel is a fiery, passionate collector, like Walter Benjamin, whose essay “Unpacking My Library” asserts that “ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects.” For sharing her brightly vivid intimacies, thanks are due to Iris Apfel.
Watch two short videos below. The first is a short interview with Iris Apfel, produced for the Peabody Essex Museum exhibition, Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel.”
The second is a short video on Iris Apfel’s design of a window display at Nordstrom Northshore in Peabody, Massachusetts last month.
November 19, 2009, 9:13pm
Eat Meat from 'Kike on a Bike'
By Dan Friedman
Laughing in the face of both contemporary social networking and traditional food-scrutinizing mores, the San Francisco-based Israeli street-food vendor who calls himself Kike on a Bike has neither twitter nor hecksher.
But you should check out his harissa. Or at least so suggests the food blog at SFWeekly.com.
When approached by their intrepid tweeting blogger Tamara Palmer, KoaB revealed a mouthwatering array of North African foods including:
flatbread, ground beef, roasted eggplant puree, tomato coulis, chickpeas, fennel seeds, onions, and a lob of intense, homemade harissa that was much darker in color than the prefab kind from a tube.
While this re-blogger would suggest moving towards a spicy, apricotted tagine, KoaB revealed a secret desire to branch out into soups. Especially a hearty leg soup. As English pop group The Monks might have said, “Nice leg, shame about the faith.”
Hat tip to Gordon Haber.
November 19, 2009, 4:37pm
Jeopardy Does Jews' Clues in the Holy Land
By Laura Sinberg
I’ll take Israel for $2,000, Alex.
That’s what contestants on Jeopardy will be saying on Monday, November 23, when the famous quiz show is scheduled to have a Double Jeopardy category titled, “A Journey Through Israel.”
Host Alex Trebek and his team, The Clue Crew, traveled to the Holy Land in early September in what was the show’s first time there to tape questions that will air in the upcoming segment and will be scattered as individual clues throughout the year.
They spent nearly three weeks exploring and filming, starting in Tiberias and winding their way around the country.
The questions will give a taste of four of the locations Trebek and two of the three Clue Crew members visited, according to Jimmy McGuire, a Clue Crew member for the past nine seasons.
November 19, 2009, 2:29pm
Israelis Give Abbas a Chance
By Nathan Jeffay
It’s the million shekel question in the Middle East at the moment — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he will quit politics, but is he serious or bluffing? A 60% majority of Israel’s Jewish public thinks the declaration came from tactical considerations while only 24% believe in its sincerity, according to the latest War and Peace Index, a monthly Tel Aviv University poll.
As for whether Abbas is capable of reaching a settlement with Israel that would be acceptable to the Palestinian side and durable, 28% of Jewish Israelis think he can and 68% think or are sure that he cannot.
It seems that suspicion towards Abbas’ declaration, and doubts about his ability to make peace, are also strong among Arab citizens of Israel, with a majority of them also saying he is bluffing about quitting and unlikely to make peace.
November 18, 2009, 1:37pm
Orthodox Zornberg Receives Coveted Reform Award
By Jake Marmer
In an unprecedented cross-denominational move, Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, who describes herself as an Orthodox Jew, received the highest honor of the Reform Movement — the Maurice N. Eisendrath Bearer of Light Award.
Zornberg, the Jerusalem-based writer and teacher, delivered an acceptance speech that was no less heartfelt for going well beyond the normal hackneyed phrases of humility and gratitude. Watch it below.
Zornberg’s acceptance address — the speech itself starts at 7:00:
Read her recent interview with the Forward here, or the review of her latest book, “The Murmuring Deep”.
Hat tip to Altie Karper.
November 17, 2009, 11:49pm
Best of All Worlds: Tova sings Schaechter-Gottesman at Workman's Circle
By Dan Friedman
What happens when a pan-cultural jazz cabaret diva sings the songs of the first Yiddish poet to win a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship?
Well Theresa Tova has been getting in some practice with the songs of the Forward’s good friend Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, so whatever happens should be of a high caliber.
Find out for yourself at 8pm on Thursday November 19 at the old Forward building, 45 East 33rd Street. If it helps you understand what type of evening it’s going to be, there’ll be cocktails at 6:30!
Listen to a lovely song by Beyle (“Geven Amol Iz a Shetl”) that Tova didn’t sing. And below that, watch Theresa Tova below, singing a nice Jewish song that Beyle didn’t write.
November 17, 2009, 7:52pm
Hergé, Creator of Tintin: Antisemitism for all Ages
By Benjamin Ivry
Steven Spielberg’s 3-D Motion Capture film “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” is due for release in 2011, but already publishers are hurrying to offer books about the Belgian artist Hergé (born Georges Remi in 1907) who created its characters.
The graphic tales of the blank-faced reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy, and friend Captain Haddock, are much beloved around the world. Now that “Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin” by Pierre Assouline (Oxford University Press), a journalistic bio from 1996, and “The Metamorphoses of Tintin: or Tintin for Adults” by Jean-Marie Apostolidès (Stanford University Press) — a revised version of a 1984 psychoanalytic study — are available in English, affection for Hergé as a person may diminish.
Hergé started as an artist for fascist, antisemitic Belgian publications like “Le Soir,” which is, even today, not blameless. In 1941-42, when Belgian Jews, threatened with slave labor, wore the Yellow Star, Hergé’s Tintin adventure, “The Shooting Star,” featured a Jewish villain, Blumenstein the banker, intended, as Assouline explains, to represent the “incarnation of evil.”
Hergé, much criticized by Belgians after the Nazi defeat, revised his most egregious offenses in later editions of his books, but possibly never truly understood why they offended. In 1945, a friend who had been in a German slave labor camp returned and described Jewish concentration camp prisoners, Hergé replied: “You mistook what you saw… First of all, how do you know they were Jews? They must have been common law criminals.” While the antisemitic aura of Tintin has long been known in Europe, the new availability in English of such books will surely raise further questions about what Hergé hath wrought.
Parents anxious to avoid potentially evil writers of children’s books should turn their attention instead to “Asterix and Obelix’s Birthday: The Golden Book” co-authored by that endearing French Jew of Polish origin René Goscinny.
November 17, 2009, 2:11pm
Offbeat Israel: A College Reference Contingent on Joining the IDF
By Nathan Jeffay
Want a reference from your teacher? Then enlist in the army.
There’s deep concern in the IDF about draft dodging, with the figure of army-age males avoiding compulsory military service nearing a third. Of recent, there have been several unusual moves to stem the trend. One was an advertising campaign harnessing the power of sex appeal, as discussed in this Forward article. Then the Interior Ministry began exploring the option of withholding passports in the case of draft dodging — see this Haaretz article.
Now teachers are getting involved.
At Iron Chet, a religious boys’ school in Tel Aviv, the percentage of students obeying their conscription orders stands at 96 — up from 75 in 2006. The school has been doing a hard sell to students on the importance of serving their country. It has also started to withhold benefits to those approaching the end of their school careers, but not yet signed up. For them there’s no place in the graduation ceremony, just a certificate in the mail. They don’t get letters of recommendation for further study and they’re not welcome to return to the school to visit. It will be interesting to see whether this kind of thing spreads to other schools and whether, if it gets the back up of some students, it become the subject of a legal challenge.
Herziliya, the NIMBY capital of Israel, is up in arms. The wealthy seaside town is to continue to play host to an airport. The municipality, backed by residents, is desperate to have it closed down, but the National Council for Planning and Construction has rejected the petition to do so. Herziliya, heavily populated by top-level businessmen and diplomats, probably counts the country’s most frequent fliers among its residents. But they are concerned that the airport is noisy and lowers the value of their homes.
November 16, 2009, 3:34pm
Sex and Shtetls for Californians
By Dan Friedman
UC Berkeley’s “Sex and Shtetl” Yiddish conference got off to a hot start last night with bawdy Yiddish folksongs expertly performed by Cantor Sharon Bernstein. This was followed by Dr. Ada Rapoport-Albert’s juicy lecture on illicit sexual practices among the followers of the false Jewish messiah, Jacob Frank. Monday’s fare expects to be just as hot, with all manner of Yiddish gender-bending and sexual activity. Terrific films like “Mamele” and “Mizrekh un mayrev” have been chosen to accompany the conference. It doesn’t seem like this is going to be your typically dry academic conference. As Berkeley Professor Naomi Seidman told JWeekly, “I hope it’s a little damp.”
What’s in a Name? Russian Jewish Composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg
By Benjamin Ivry
A November 22nd recital by the noted Latvian-born cellist Yosif Feigelson at New York’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is a welcome opportunity to experience the sinuously graceful and dramatic cello music of the Russian composer of Polish-Jewish origin, Mieczyslaw Weinberg.
I once asked Weinberg’s colleague, the Russian Jewish conductor Rudolf Barshai, if the composer’s Judaism had hindered his musical career. Barshai replied that Weinberg “never traveled outside of the USSR. I think he was scared of imprisonment until the end of his days.” Indeed, Weinberg’s father-in-law, the mighty Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered on Stalin’s orders, and Weinberg himself was arrested in 1953 as part of the aftershock of Stalin’s notorious Doctors’ Plot.
In addition to antisemitism, simple transliteration from the Russian may have also obscured this gifted musician’s legacy to posterity, as his name is sometimes written Moisey Vainberg, Vaynberg, or Wajnberg, making recognition and, more recently, internet searches more than usually difficult. (Weinberg is not alone in this; the name of the superb Russian Jewish conductor Arnold Katz, leader of the Novosibirsk Symphony, is often spelled “Kaz” in the West, making an already-underrated musician all the more difficult to find for CD buyers). Fortunately, Naxos reportedly plans to reprint Feigelson’s 1996 recordings of Weinberg, previously available on Olympia CDs, which reveal delightful flair and nuance.
Other Naxos Weinberg cello, chamber, and orchestral CD releases, as well as a much-praised Chandos series further enrich our understanding of this highly individual talent who, despite his worship of Shostakovich (and the admiration was mutual), never became a mere sound-alike.
Indeed, there is a Prokofiev-like exuberance to some of Weinberg’s works. His discovery as a major talent of his time is long overdue, and music lovers owe Yosif Feigelson a vote of thanks for his efforts.
Listen below to two recordings of movements from Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s enigmatic, deeply felt “Piano Quintet in F minor,” with its brilliant writing for strings.
and here.
November 13, 2009, 6:30pm
McWhorter Questions Efforts To Save Dying Languages
By Elissa Strauss
In an essay in the recent issue of the World Affairs Journal, linguist and Columbia literature professor John McWhorter questions the effort to save dying languages:
What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it. But this idea is fragile. Certainly language is a key aspect of what distinguishes one group from another. However, a language itself does not correspond to the particulars of a culture but to a faceless process that creates new languages as the result of geographical separation.
At one point McWhorter discusses Yiddish directly:
At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation — such as that of the Amish — or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity, but because they lived in an apartheid society.)
At first, McWhorter’s column made me bristle. I don’t speak Yiddish fluently, but feel that the mamaloshen is a linchpin of my Jewish cultural identity, and rely on it daily to adequately express myself. What a shame it would be, I thought, to just accept its death.
November 13, 2009, 3:08pm
Israel's Monument to 9/11
By Nathan Jeffay
Whatever tensions may exist between Jerusalem and Washington at the moment, there was a show of unity this week as Israeli leaders and American officials came together to unveil a 9/11 memorial. With that, Jerusalem became one of the first cities outside the U.S. with a memorial to 9/11 victims.
Visitors of Arazim Park in Jerusalem cannot miss the monument. It includes a sculpture that stands 30-feet high, and is composed of a waving American flag transformed into a memorial flame — standing on a granite grey base that uses some material from the original Twin Towers. The sculpture was donated by Edward Blank, a Jewish man from New York whose wife died a few days before 9/11 and who saw it as a good way to “recognize the many feelings I was having.”
The sculpture lies within a large plaza, which contains the names of everyone who died as a result of the terror attacks. There are benches to sit and reflect.
The memorial was not an initiative of the Israeli government, but rather of the Jewish National Fund-USA/Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael. Nevertheless, the government was represented at the ceremony by the likes of minister Benny Begin. And donors of the monument, in their speeches, presented it as an initiative that binds the two countries on a leadership level.
Relations of victims voiced similar sentiments. Israel Defense Forces Brigadier General (Ret.) Dov Shefi, whose 34-year-old son Hagay was killed on 9/11 while addressing a conference of bankers at the Windows of the World restaurant on the 106th Floor of the North Tower, said that the memorial “symbolizes the identification of the State of Israel, of J.N.F. and the donors, with the thousands of families of the victims of September 11th throughout the world, with the United States and with the City of New York.”
November 12, 2009, 10:22pm
Kerouac's Elevator Crush, Nice Jewish Girl
By Dan Friedman
Robert Frank’s 83 photographs in his 1957 book “The Americans” were seminal and provoked SF MoMA to hang the book, 50 years later, as an exhibition. An exhibition that we discussed here.
A crucial image in knowing “What was really going on with Americans” was “Elevator — Miami Beach, 1955.” It featured the elevator girl that prompted Jack Kerouac, in the introduction, to write “To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes. And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?”
Now we know, at least her name, Sharon Goldstein aged 15 (now Sharon Collins). She was the elevator girl at Miami’s Sherry Frontenac Hotel. Picturesoup has the story, but not the Jewish story — inquiring tribe minds demand to know more about Goldstein, how she was snapped by landsman Frank, how she came to move to San Francisco and can she tell us what she was thinking about in the picture?
Hat tip Dave Drimer.
November 12, 2009, 12:56pm
The Amazing Jew: Salsa Legend Larry Harlow
By Benjamin Ivry
Jews are drawn to Latin music, much as they are to Chinese food, by a combination of sensual pleasure and the liberation which comes from exoticism. Such is the conclusion to be drawn from the stellar career of salsa music performer and composer Larry Harlow (born Lawrence Ira Kahn in Brooklyn in 1939), who earned the moniker “El Judio Maravilloso” (The Amazing Jew) from admiring salsa colleagues.
Harlow, still actively touring, is not the only Jewish salsa king, as a whole generation of “mamboniks” in the Catskills a half-century ago included the bandleader Alfredito Levy (born Alan Levy in Forest Hills, Queens) and sax player Schep Pullman, who performed under the name “Chepito” to sound more Latin. Yet Harlow’s majestic series of records on the Fania label are unique, breathing joyous authenticity and rhythmic verve. His utterly idiomatic and elegant mastery has made Harlow a favorite at universities like Yale.
Harlow’s musical roots ascend to his father, Buddy Kahn, who worked as a bandleader at New York’s Latin Quarter nightclub under the stage name Buddy Harlowe. Some Jewish-Latin cultural interactions may end comically, as when the great Puerto Rican musician Jimmy Sabater ordered Schav at a Catskills restaurant.
Five years ago, “The Forward”’s Jay Michaelson reviewed, in a light-hearted essay in cross-culturalism, a humor CD entitled “Meshugeneh Mambo” by the Cleveland-based Yiddishe Cup Klezmer Band. Harlow’s music is of another order entirely: passionate, direct, soaringly authoritative. His prolific output of many dozens of CDs is a rich legacy for music lovers everywhere.
Catch Larry Harlow live on Nov 14-15th at Pembroke Pines, Florida and on November 20-21 at California State University, Los Angeles.
Watch a PBS documentary on Harlow (introduced by another Latino legend, the Mets’ Keith Hernandez) parts 1 and 2 below.
Part 2.
November 11, 2009, 9:32pm
Saz Raps and Dvir Shows It Aint Easy Being Green
By Dan Friedman
If Lawrence Wright’s piece about Gaza in the New Yorker has got you down as it has Marissa Brostoff, then Aaron David Miller’s piece about the stalled peace process is going to give you more food for thought.
But don’t despair about dialogue and meaningful human interactions between different sides of the middle east crisis, The Other Israel Film Festival opens tomorrow opening doors that most of us didn’t even know existed. On Friday night, young Jewish filmmaker Barak Heymann and veteran star Mohammad Bakri will be literally walking through one of those doors to break bread with one another.
The festival kicks off with Jaffa which our own Jordana Horn reviewed last week and features both a film about Palestinian rapper Saz (a contributor to Soulico’s new album ) and the man himself rapping on Sunday night at the JCC in Manhattan.
At 18 all Jewish Israelis are required to begin their army service, but what about the non-Jews and non-Druze? Natan Dvir’s haunting photographic series 18 records those who the Jewish state has decided it cannot call upon for its defense. Put on your magen david keffiyeh and open some doors for peace.
Watch SAZ ripping some rhymes below.
November 11, 2009, 1:43pm
India in New York: Arie Gets Down With Idan Raichel
By Dan Friedman
Last night India.Arie was a surprise special guest at Idan Raichel’s November 10 show at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Dayenu: It would have been enough to have seen India.Arie perform next to Raichel — the combination of musical talent (not to mention hair length) would have been impressive.
But, showbiz trooper that she is, India.Arie wanted to point her vocal chords at one of Raichel’s songs… in Hebrew. Raichel talked about meeting her before she spoke Hebrew but the Grammy-winning singer was quick to note that she still didn’t speak the language well. A point her singing largely proved!
For her obvious happiness to be performing with the Israeli rock star, the audience gave her an A for effort. And for her vocal ability and just presence on stage, a clear I.A!
Large hat tip to Jordana Horn.
November 11, 2009, 12:25pm
Controversy Over Rabin Memorial
By Nathan Jeffay
There’s something of a tug-of-war developing over the annual anniversary rally for assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv on Saturday night for the event, 14 years and a week after he was killed (it was delayed because of the rain last Saturday).
Attended by politicians from three of the five biggest Knesset factions, Labor, Kadima, and Likud, it was seen by some as the coming-of-age of an event that was once a show of strength of the traditional peace camp. Likud lawmaker and education minister Gideon Saar declared from the podium that rightists have been “pushed out of the mourning tent for too long” and said that the time has come for everybody to mourn Rabin together.
Saar sees the county, and the event, as nationalizing Rabin’s memory, some see this as a cop out. Voices from the left are claiming that making the rally less political may make it more inclusive, but say that it’s coming at a cost of Rabin’s legacy.
November 10, 2009, 10:01pm
A Salute to Jewish Theater Producer Joseph Papp
By Benjamin Ivry
The Brooklyn-born Jewish theatrical producer and director Joseph Papp (born Joseph Papirofsky) died of prostate cancer almost exactly eighteen years ago, and has never been more missed, as “Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told,” a new oral history from Doubleday Publishers, proves.
The value of the book, by longtime LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan, is that it is not really a new book, but a patchwork of interviews done over 20 years ago, only to be rejected by the notoriously irascible Papp. The intervening years have provided, an excellent biography by Helen Epstein, “Joe Papp: An American Life” (1994) but Turan’s book has its own historical, documentary value, with personal reminiscences from Papp’s sister Rhoda Lifschutz about their mixed Polish-Lithuanian roots and how the majority of their family were murdered in the Holocaust.
The harsh poverty into which little “Yussel” Papirofsky, as his family called him, was born, as well as his laborer father’s piety, made a lasting impression. Papp told Turan about his father davening in a modest storefront shul: “These were serious working people who prayed every day.” At age twelve, Papp landed a gig as a boy soprano at a Sephardic synagogue on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, and an intense performing career was launched. Papp states in “Free for All”: “What I’ve always experienced more intensely than poverty[…] is antisemitism. I always feel it’s just below the surface: scratch in some way and a lot of it will come out.” This motivated Papp to fight, as he explains, “for any aspect of minority rights, black, Hispanic, and so on. To me, intolerance is a greater threat than poverty.”
Ever combative, Papp brought Shakespeare to an unprecedented range of New Yorkers, and focused on social ills which poverty and racism can bring in a long series of productions like the harrowing 1974 prison drama “Short Eyes,” which I still vividly recall, having attended a performance that, in those rough days of New York life, seemed coruscatingly authentic. This sometimes harrowing realism, which results in electrifyingly memorable theater, is Papp’s legacy, desperately needed on the commercial, embalmed Broadway of today.
Watch a 1978 interview of Joseph Papp by Barbaralee Diamonstein below.
Watch a tribute in song written by Broadway composer William Finn, “Joe Papp” from Finn’s 2003 song composition “Elegies”.
November 10, 2009, 9:39pm
A Bauhausful of Antisemites
By Benjamin Ivry
The 90th anniversary of the founding of Bauhaus movement in 1919 has led to a flurry of museum exhibits across Europe and a Berlin exhibit that is now at New York’s MoMA.
The progressive Bauhaus artists, architects, and designers, led by German architect Walter Adolph Georg Gropius were shut down by the Nazis in 1933, and many immigrated to America soon thereafter. Yet an anecdotal new historical study from Knopf, “The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism” by Nicholas Fox Weber, reminds us that many of these avant-garde artists were sadly traditional in their antisemitism.
In a 1918 letter to his mother quoted by Weber, Gropius writes: “The Jews, this poison which I begin to hate more and more, are destroying us […] They are the devil, the negative element.” His colleague the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, blatantly writes in 1923 to Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg, “I reject you as a Jew,” when Schoenberg asked for explanation of reports that Kandinsky “sees only evil in the action of Jews and in their evil actions only the Jewishness.”
As early as 1923, the Bauhaus took an internal census to dispute German accusations that too many Jews were members, and even the rare Jewish-born members, like textile artist Anni Albers, whom Weber knew in her later years, called her Judaism “that stone around my neck.”
Schoenberg engaged in epistolary arguments (to no avail) with Kandinsky, who along with Gropius blamed their antisemitic feelings being made public on Alma Mahler. A notorious gossip, Mahler, who was then Mrs. Gropius, had been married earlier to one converted Jew (Gustav Mahler) and after divorcing Gropius, would marry another, the novelist Franz Werfel. Repelled by the Bauhaus’s antisemitism, Schoenberg refused any official role in the movement, which surely affected modern musical history, and most likely art history as well (since Schoenberg was a gifted painter, too).
Celebrations of this design movement are incomplete without Weber’s reminder that the most advanced thinkers can also harbor primeval stupidity.
Watch a report on the German celebration of Bauhaus in 2009 below.
At GA, Emanuel Talks U.S. Policy, His Own Jewish Practice
By Nathan Guttman
Filling in for the President of the United States is a tough job for anyone, especially when the audience is made up of 3,000 Jewish activists eagerly anticipating the first address of the President Obama to a Jewish communal organization.
But White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel managed to keep the crowd satisfied in his Tuesday speech at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly. He gave a detailed policy speech, and took on claims against his boss from members of the Jewish community. He also succeeded in making participants laugh, living up to his reputation as one of the sharpest politicians in town.
So here are some of the Emanuel highlights:
• After making a joke at the expense of his Washington, D.C.-based rabbi, Jack Moline, Emanuel shared with the crowd his concern that at next year’s High Holy Day services, he would be moved to the back row. That, according to Emanuel, would actually be better because it would allow him to leave before the service is over.
• On being sent to stand in for President Obama, Emanuel said that he understood that he was not the first choice, but reassured his Jewish listeners that he was not offended. Being a middle child, Emanuel said, prepared him for that.
• Emanuel gave his father credit for instilling in him the value of persistence: “Some of my political opponents would say he instilled this quality a little too successful.”
• But the line that got the most applause was when Emanuel spoke of his plans to travel with his brother Ari to celebrate the bar mitzvah of their respective sons in Israel this year. “That’s cheap, the applause,” Emanuel told the cheering Jewish delegates.“I’ll take an $18 check on behalf of him.”
For more highlights of Emanuel speech, regarding Israel, the Palestinians and Iran, click here.
Read more in the archives
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