Events

How are young Jews today giving of their time and money?

This engaging panel asks whether young Jews are "Entitled or Enlightened." The event was held on December 1st, 2009 and featured a conversation with Rabbi Andy Bachman, Gali Cooks, Rabbi Ari Weiss and Tamar Snyder of The Jewish Week. Sponsored by BYFI, Presentense & ROI.

link to part 2 of 2>>

Rabbi Andy Bachman serves as Rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim and is a summer faculty member of the Bronfman Youth Fellowships. He was ordained at HUC-JIR in 1996. After his ordination, he served as Rabbi Educator at Congregation Beth Elohim until 1998, when he became Executive Director of the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life: Hillel at NYU. While at NYU, Rabbi Bachman pioneered award-winning programming in the arts, culture, social action, and Israel advocacy, gaining national recognition for developing new ways of reaching young Jews. In 2003, Rabbi Bachman along with several friends founded Brooklyn Jews, an innovative outreach program engaging the unaffiliated Jews of Brooklyn "where they're at." Rabbi Bachman writes a (almost) daily blog, www.andybachman.com.

Gali Cooks is Director at the Rita & Stanley Kaplan Family Foundation. Previously, she was Founding Director of The PJ Library, which gives Jewish children's books for free to Jewish families with young kids. Before delving into philanthropy, Gali spent several years in Washington, DC as a speechwriter for Israel's Ambassador to the United States, as a Legislative Assistant at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and as a Research Analyst for the Newton & Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust. In addition to her role at the Kaplan Family Foundation, Gali is involved with the New York City Venture Philanthropy Fund. She has a BA in political science and international relations from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently pursuing an MBA at the NYU Stern School of Business.

Rabbi Ari Weiss is Director of Uri L'Tzedek Uri L'Tzedek, the Orthodox social justice movement. Prior to Uri L'Tzedek, he was co-director of the Meorot University Fellowship and has served on the Judaic Studies Faculty of the Heschel School. He has worked as a Jewish educator for the American Jewish World Service, Bnei Akiva, and for the Lauder Foundation on missions to Nicaragua, Ghana, Israel, and Hungary. Rabbi Weiss was ordained in June 2007 by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School in New York.

Tamar S. Snyder is a staff writer at The Jewish Week, America's largest and most influential Jewish newspaper. In addition to being in charge of the "36 Under 36" section highlighting young Jewish innovators, she writes weekly articles and cover stories about philanthropy and Jewish nonprofits. Tamar also writes a monthly column called "Profit Motive" in which she profiles Jewish entrepreneurs. She holds a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia Journalism School and an undergraduate degree from Touro College. Tamar's journalistic work has been featured in several media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, AOL and MSN and Edutopia Magazine. She is a recipient of the 2008 Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.

 

View video clips from our 4/22 discussion:
From Guantanamo to Rikers... Do Prisons Work?

Featuring a panel of young Jews.

• Rachel Farbiarz (BYFI '94) - AJWS Dvar Tzedek Fellow, formerly Staff Attorney with the Prison Law Office in San Quentin
• Aeli Gladstein (AVODAH '04-05) - Coordinator of Court Operations, Bronx Community Solutions
• Daniel Stolzman (BYFI '97) - Producer of "San Quentin Film School"
• Ben Wizner (BYFI '88) - Staff Attorney with the National Security Project, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
• Shmuly Yanklowitz (AJWS ‘03) - co-Founder and co-Director, Uri L'Tzedek, the Orthodox Social Justice Movement

View Complete Bios>>
View resources and links>>

Links

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• itunes feed>>

On Sunday November 9th, BYFI alumni, families & faculty converged at 92YTribeca for the 2008 BYFI Fall Forum, Culture Shock: Jewish Writing in America. The day began with a delightful brunch characterized by catching up and schmoozing, followed by a couple of alumni-led morning sessions featuring BYFI alumni, Dara Horn ‘94, Sheila Jelen ‘87, and Dan Kurtz-Phelan ‘98.
In the afternoon, the Forum was open to the public in association with Nextbook. A series of author panels featuring young, up-and-coming Jewish writers dealt with questions of Jewish literary content in American culture. If you missed the amazing Fall Forum we had last fall, make sure to catch the podcasts below:

• Canon Fodder- What Distinguishes the New Generation of Jewish Writers from Their Predecessors? Rivka Galchen, Josh Henkin, Dara Horn '94. Moderator: Daniel Septimus.
• Babylon and On: Jewish Immigrant Stories from the Middle East André Aciman, Ariel Sabar, Dalia Sofer. Moderator: Sara Ivry.
• What Isn't Jewish Writing These Days: Jews and the Shape of American Culture Elisa Albert, Danny Fingeroth, Itamar Moses '94. Moderator: Jeremy Dauber.

Move the slider above to view the slideshow.

What Isn't Jewish Writing, These Days? - Jews and the Shape of American Culture - Authors: Elisa Albert, Danny Fingeroth, Itamar Moses '94. Moderator: Jeremy Dauber

It came as somewhat of a shock when Elisa Albert, editor-at-large of Jewcy and avid admirer of Philip Roth, declared that she doesn't consider herself "a Jewish writer."  The comment seemed doubly ironic in light of the setting: the final session of the BYFI Fall Forum, which explored the question of "What Isn't Jewish Writing, These Days?"  Moderated by renowned Yiddish scholar and Columbia University Professor Jeremy Dauber, the panel attempted to discern the role of Jews in shaping American culture.  

Albert and her co-panelists-Danny Fingeroth, longtime group editor of Marvel Comic's Spiderman, and Itamar Moses ‘94, acclaimed playwright-seemed to embody the pervasiveness of Jewish writing across American art and literature.  Fingeroth explained the dominance of Eastern European Jews in the comic world, writing from the same cultural background and addressing themes so common to the Jewish experience after World War II-guilt and responsibility in Spiderman, discrimination in X-Men, and even intermarriage in Thor.  Moses identified the "Talmudic structure" of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and Albert discussed the power of Jewishly themed books in attracting sales.

Despite this, neither Moses nor Albert considered their works particularly Jewish.  After dismissing the notion that she is a Jewish writer, Albert asserted that as Jews continue to assimilate into American culture, Jewish writing will increasingly lose substance, relying on shallow cultural indicators (think the infamous "Chrismukkah" TV episode of Josh Schwartz's "The OC").  "Sarah Silverman is funny," she said, "but not because she is Jewish."  Moses also claimed that little if any explicit Jewish content has made its way into his numerous plays.  Take the "Jewish" out of Albert's and Moses's characters, and the true meaning in their stories remains.  

In fact, all three emphatically agreed that the goal of Jewish literature, like any other art, is to take a specific motif and universalize it.  Fingeroth contended that this attempt at universalization renders the role of Jewish themes in comics-and in American culture more broadly-as central rather than incidental.  The panel concurred when he said that "there is an element of Jewishness which everyone is okay with."  Indeed, Fingeroth synthesized the discussion and offered its most fundamental insight into the role of Jewishness in contemporary American life when he stated that "the Jew has become the generalized outsider-insider, to which many Americans can relate."  This concept, according to the panel, lies at the blurry intersect between Jewish and American culture.  

If Jews are the prototypical "outsider-insiders," their fictional icons popularizing terms like "chutzpah" and "kvetch" and flourishing in the realm of comedy, can Jews be taken seriously in American culture?  Both the literary and film worlds have largely been unwilling to depict Jewish characters with any kind of machismo.  Jews are only portrayed in drama when it's a real story, such as in Daniel Craig's film, Defiance.  Fictional Jews that have power-such as Adam Sandler's *Zohan and Adam Goldberg's Hebrew Hammer- serve as comedic farces.  Dauber and Fingeroth pointed to Zionism and its messy, real-world implications as a major factor in this reluctance to approach questions of Jewish power.  Though the last decade has seen America embrace many aspects of Jewishness, this session of the BYFI Fall Forum suggested that there is much yet to be explored in the dynamic interplay between Jewish culture and American life.

Babylon and On: Jewish Immigrant Stories from the Middle East - Authors: André Aciman, Ariel Sabar, Dalia Sofer.  Moderator: Sara Ivry

Middle Eastern Jewish writers tell a different story from the narratives established by turn-of-the-century Eastern European and post-Holocaust immigrant writers. André Aciman, novelist and author of the memoir Out of Egypt, posited that while those earlier waves had returned via their writing to the places they had left behind, Aciman had always remained essentially Egyptian in his writing. Dalia Sofer, whose novel The Septembers of Shiraz is loosely based on her own family's experience, seemed to agree.  The author of My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, Ariel Sabar argued that his own writing dealt with immigration as informed by the American-born son's experience, not by the immigrant experience itself.  Sabar returned to Kurdish Iraq, his father's birthplace, and like Jonathan Safran Foer's character in Everything Is Illuminated, unsuccessfully attempted to find a long-lost relative.

There was dramatic irony in the placement of this panel, between two panels featuring Ashkenazic writers who questioned the importance of immigrant stories, even going so far as to call them "gimmicky." Without knowing the charges, Aciman, Sofer, and Sabar had to establish their validity within the American Jewish literary community. This they accomplished by discussing both the continuity within the Jewish immigrant tradition and the new narratives that they had to offer. In particular, Aciman, a Proustian by nature, offered a number of speculations on the workings of time. Although he resisted the thematic label of "loss"(a divergence from Proust and the many critics who recognize that theme in his writing), he argued that the past, which was the focus of these three writers' work, is at least as important as the present- or future-based narratives of other Jewish writers. The past, though, is not lost for Aciman, whose return to Egypt yielded nothing new-only the same old memories. He need not search for "lost time."

The panel ended with the three authors taking questions from the audience. In response to a query about their research techniques, all three panelists described a certain awkwardness that they felt when deciding whether to proceed with their writing-Aciman was partly ashamed of his adulterous father, Sabar had rejected his father's heritage as a child in California, and Sofer made the choice to write a novel instead of a memoir partly to enable objectivity. Above all, the impression that I got from these three writers was that, beyond the cultural diversity that they bring to the American Jewish literary scene, the ideas that each one tackles-time, family dynamics, and the relationship between the writer, the narrator and the events being discussed-enrich the Jewish cultural renaissance of a Postmodern America.

Attend the the BYFI Fall Forum special morning session for BYFI alumni & families only.

Register for the morning session AND the fall forum now here: www.byfi.org/cultureshock

Socialize with BYFI friends and faculty over a dairy brunch

Attend one of the optional discussion sessions:

The Inside Scoop: Alumni Writers Share Tips For Making a Career Of It - This intimate seminar will provide an opportunity for alumni interested in the field of writing to hear from alumni writers in journalism, fiction and non-fiction about getting started, choosing a style and the challenges and adventures that come with working in this field. Panel members include:

• Dara Horn (BYFI ‘94) author of In the Image & The World to Come

• Anya Kamenetz (BYFI ‘97) author of Generation Debt, staff writer for Fast Company magazine

• Dan Kurtz-Phelan (BYFI ‘98) senior editor at Foreign Affairs magazine

A New Yiddish: Jewish Writing in America - Early Jewish writers chose to write in “Jewish languages.” Today, American Jewish writers generally write about Jewish subjects in particularly “non-Jewish” languages and vernaculars. We'll engage in a close reading of several key texts to better understand the “new Yiddish.”

Presenter: Professor Sheila Jelen (BYFI ’87)

This summer, BYFI alums got together for social evenings. Nearly 50 alums joined BYFI in 6 US cities (Boston, DC, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco) as well as in Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem event included the 2008 Fellows and started with a lecture of Ron Dermer, Israel's out-going economic attaché to the US. He spoke about the perceptions of Israel in the press and on campus and how to think about the basic issues between Israel and the Arab world. Afterwards, alumni got together at Shosh Cafe in Katamon. At the Chicago happy hour, alums also enjoyed a bit of Jewish learning with Rabbi Larry Edwards.

Thank you to the following alumni hosts for making these events a success: Micah Fitzerman-Blue '00, Sarah Cowan '97, Jeffrey Hamilton '01, Alana Kinarsky '03, Brett Krichiver '90, Ben Magarik '01, Joseph Nussbaum '00, Matthew Rascoff '96 & Liba Wenig-Rubinstein '00.

Join alumni, friends and family for an engaging day of discussion, panels and workshops about the new generation of Jewish literary content in American culture. If you're interested in joining our planning committee or leading a workshop at the Fall Forum email becky@byfi.org. Don't miss this interesting day featuring BYFI alums and noted authors Dara Horn '94 and Itamar Moses ‘94 along with many others