Letters
LETTERS "STARTER" LIBRARY To the Editor: Your choice of people selected to offer ten books as a "starter" of a Jewish library was weighted, unfortunately, on the side of the professional. It...
...The Kit-tel who was a Nazi produced a Hebrew text of Mishnah, not the Bible...
...Such an attitude is usually expressed in the programs created for synagogue schools...
...Each family should probably be treated as a case...
...A working principle among folks in that line of work is that "anything you can instill is a miracle, given your students' families' total lack of Jewishness...
...With a small h, we refer to what can happen to anyone...
...According to Mr...
...Taken together, this means that by the end of the 1970s, OPEC will not generate enough revenues to cover even much scaled-down versions of the spending needs of its members...
...This prospect should be emphasized to the Arabs as a powerful inducement for them to come to terms with Israel...
...Sherry Levy Reiner Topeka, Kansas WOMEN'S ROLE To the Editor: Regarding Ida Selavan's letter (November 1977) on Jewish feminism, I suggest that Jewish women are sorely needed to help maintain the daily min-yan...
...Eban remembers...
...With a capital H, we refer to ours...
...At present, the institutional offering for each of these families is identical...
...Three sessions became three years of monthly meetings, warm friendships, and the source of my own enlightenment...
...But the act of offering can only be interpreted as an attempt to end the war—as a compassionate recognition of human needs which no one is meeting...
...Steve Zipperstein, Chairperson Jewish Student Press Service Governing Board New York, New York LECTURE CIRCUIT To the Editor: Sanford Pinsker (October 1977) has had discouraging experiences on the lecture circuit, especially, it seems, with women's groups...
...Zev Davis Oak Park, Michigan To the Editor: On behalf of Dr...
...At a time when women were beginning to explore their relationships with other women, it showed me the real world of our mothers...
...These guides cost $1.50 each including postage (or 750 each for bulk orders of fifty or more), and are available from the National Jewish Conference Center, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 923, New York, New York 10019, telephone (212) 582-6116...
...For the first program I planned to defend Portnoy's description of his mother as a literary device...
...Michael Blankfort Los Angeles, California To the Editor: I was curious about your lists of basic books that belong in a Jewish library (November 1977) and found that, except for the Bible, Siddurim and Chu-mashim (I have four sets) as well as some of the historical works, I lack most of these books...
...Books that can turn minds are more important...
...For example, if I had been asked, I would have included Ludwig Lewisohn's The Island Within...
...Rhea Blachman Philadelphia, Pennsylvania AUTHOR'S NOTE To the Editor: Permit me to correct two errors in "Jubilee in Tubingen" (December 1977), one mine, one yours...
...These so-called as-similationists must be welcomed into the Jewish ranks...
...The whole of my article was pointing toward that small h. Jacob Neusner Providence, Rhode Island JEWISH EDUCATION To the Editor: Although I am pleased by the events in Rochester, one aspect of the problem that Paul Wesel overlooks in "The Quickening of Jewish Education" (December 1977) is the common practice among Jewish educators of looking down their noses at the parents of their students...
...If that is a basic understanding of Judaism, it doesn't have any more depth than the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch which was published at the end of the 19th century and was followed by at least two more works, more incisive and scholarly...
...The Political Committee adopted the Partition Plan by a vote of 25 against 13, and not 22 against 13, as Mr...
...When I moved away the group continued...
...The Catalog presents a Judaism that only is happy and smiling—and never seems to suffer a real human conflict...
...Your error was to print, "There really was a Holocaust...
...And I felt admiration and pride...
...But he also repeats so many stereotypes: Jewish women, Jewish women's groups, rabbis, "program chairmen...
...I am not sure that the Catalog has as specific a concern, or that it addresses the reader's needs...
...And such a war it is...
...besides a lucid text it has a very adequate annotated bibliography that may lead to further study...
...The holocaust to which I referred, represented for me by the boulevard down to the Brandenburg Gate, at which East Berlin begins, is the German, not the Jewish one: a society left without a usable past...
...And others...
...Wages and costs in Israel are appreciably lower than in the U.S...
...defend, of course, because I would be talking to Mrs...
...In such a situation the child newly inspired with Jewish spirit can fray the marital ties between his parents...
...Benno Weiser Varon Brookline, Massachusetts JEWISH PRESS To the Editor: Gary Rosenblatt chose to open his excellent analysis of "The Jewish de-Press" (November 1977) with a quote from Neil Reisner's recent article in Response...
...We can get capital investment, we can get the American, German, Dutch, Swedish, British, Danish experts...
...Pinsker means, I know, to strike a humorous note...
...Soma Morgenstern's novels, Maurice Samuel's non-fiction, Memoirs of My People, edited by Leo Schwartz, The Goodly Heritage by Avraham Yaari, memoirs of the Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael from the 17th to the 19th centuries...
...My personal footnote to the adoption of the Palestine Partition Resolution, "The History of one Yes," appears in the November issue of Midstream...
...Arab wealth does not vitiate the potential attractiveness of an Israeli offer to accelerate the technological development of its neighbors...
...Eban's recollections were correct...
...The inspiration of history...
...And what could be boosting the morale of that tiny band...
...It is time for the war to end...
...If Pinsker approached his lectures as a mutual learning experience, I suspect his frustration and disdain would begin to dissolve...
...Many sets of parents are at one in their orientation to Judaism, even if it is a mutual commitment to minimalism...
...It is beginning to be clear that these . . . countries . . . will face financial constraints that will require them to cut back their programs to a fraction of what would have been physically possible to accomplish in the next decade...
...But any book that is a dead end, that does not present openings for further readings, is pointless...
...It is as though each major success at the Jewish educational level provides fuel for the fire that eventually burns down the student's house...
...Thank you very much...
...When it first came out, Marshall Sklare wrote in Commentary expressing grave doubts about the work and I have seen them come true...
...It is based on the real figures and the actual sequence of events and would be implausible if Mr...
...His major contention against the book was that it deals with the kitschy aspects of Judaism, rather than the ben adam I'chavero side of Jewish life inasmuch as it spends a great deal of space on baking challah, knitting yar-mulkas, making bar mitzvot, etc., and has a sparse few pages devoted to hachnasat orchim...
...Of course, this isn't the only situation Jewish educators encounter...
...It might have been equally useful to inquire of others, lay people, nonprofessionals, what books of Jewish content had a major influence on affirming or clarifying their Jewish identity...
...Lest readers believe that all speakers react as he does, allow me to share my own quite different experiences...
...It is as good a place as any to begin Jewish commitment...
...It will be a chance for Jewish professionals to acknowledge the startling intelligence and creativity of the average American Jew...
...or Europe...
...In his article, Reisner characterized the Jewish weeklies as consisting "largely of organization press releases, unedited wire service reports, social news and, to put it bluntly, crap...
...This tiny band of Torah-Land Maccabees, pulling off smashing guerilla raids against the Assyrian hordes who would desecrate our ideological Temple...
...For the past year and a half I have been attending services in the Philadelphia area and found that, despite all the hullabaloo about women in minyanim, receiving aliyot, etc., women are not exercising their privileges...
...French Ambassador Parodi called for postponement of the Assembly meeting on November 28, and Thanksgiving Day of 1947 was on November 27...
...With the literature as our touchstone I helped them use their own critical tools...
...But Rosenblatt failed to note that Jewish student journalists are not only blasting the weeklies, but in fact running a press service—the Jewish Student Press Service, which supplies the weeklies with serious features and investigative reporting...
...Jewish educators must realize that the current desecration took place long before the present troop of parents arrived...
...Moran believes it likely that "Saudi Arabia will have to reduce its plan targets and military expenditures by much more than half, stretching the original (unrealistic) vision of national transformation from 5 to 20 years or more...
...Susan Lippman Associate Executive Director National Jewish Conference Center New York, New York EBAN INTERVIEW To the Editor: In the course of his very cogent interview (October 1977) Abba Eban says, "There's certainly no room any longer for any condescension in the Israeli offer of cooperation with the Arab states...
...If we say that we can help you accelerate your technological development, they can say we can do that in any case...
...That act of affiliation alone is marvelously brave...
...Only when educators are willing to become educational social workers— persons who would help each family work out its own program for mutual Jewish growth—will the chanukah (the "rededication") occur...
...Holiday Guides are designed to fuse the conceptual meaning of the holiday with details of observance, and are available for the following holidays: High Holy Days, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Purim, Passover, Sha-vuot, Tisha B'Av...
...Were there peace in the Middle East, Israel could indeed, without any condescension, accelerate the development of the Arab states—by offering them high technology at a comparatively low price...
...they shared the richness of their lives and dreams...
...Books for a library may not be more than just that...
...Craig S. Karpel New York, New York To the Editor: May I point out two mistakes in Abba Eban's "Present at the Birth" (November 1977...
...Lester B. Bronstein Principal, Congregation Beth El Religious School Sudbury, Mass...
...Were I pressed to suggest a book that presents a good overview of Judaism I would recommend Judaism, by Isadore Epstein...
...And only when parents realize that the cruse of oil burning long past its time is really themselves, will it be possible for them to transcend the hideous situation that is theirs as American non-traditional Jews...
...In the Winter 1976-77 Foreign Policy, Theodore H. Moran, then of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and currently a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, writes that "the costs of basic industrial, military and social welfare items projected in the budgets of OPEC countries have escalated explosively...
...The book most commonly cited is the Catalog...
...One must go to the Bible with some conviction or one is quickly lost...
...It isn't...
...In many cases it never existed...
...In other words, it is time for educators to join the helping professions...
...Any person in a helping profession can see the absurdity of this arrangement...
...And I don't mean to disregard the works of Milton Steinberg, which had a great impact on me...
...Jewish educators chuckle whenever they hear of an incident in which a student has baffled his mom and dad with a piece of knowledge totally new to them or a demand that the family adopt a ritual that is repugnant to the parents...
...Eban the Ambassador's motion occurred on November 26, and Thanksgiving Day was on November 28 (which was a Friday...
...A better guess is that rectitude and dedication have been distorted by less elevated motives...
...others returned to college themselves...
...In many cases, one parent is tiptoeing away from Jewish life, while his or her partner struggles to grow closer to some sort of tradition...
...The point is that there are different types of Jewish families comprising the clientele of any one educator...
...I wrote, "There really was a holocaust...
...The educators seem to be chalking up these moments as "victories," as though a great war were taking place between the forces of Torah-Land and the forces of Parent-Land...
...Basic Jewish lore, symbols, and songs are gathered together and disseminated like swine flu vaccine, as though prepackaged tidbits will protect students from exposure to the assimilationist environment to which they return each day...
...We dipped into Howe, Kazin, Fiedler, and even Pinsker...
...As a graduate student who had written on Bellow, I was invited to lead three sessions of a sisterhood book club...
...each household should be given the opportunity to work out its own plan for Jewish growth, with the assistance of those persons whose professional expertise is Jewish living and learning...
...A survey of engineering and operating companies working on the largest projects in Saudi Arabia," he notes, "confirms that local construction costs range from two to three (and in some cases four to five) times what comparable facilities would cost in the United States or Western Europe...
...If such a splitting has already started, the young Jewish chauvinist can exacerbate the problem...
...At least one non-Arab OPEC member—Iran—has found Israeli prices, proximity and technical assistance sufficiently attractive to purchase a billion-dollar desalinization plant to be installed in that country by Israeli technicians...
...I have looked at it once or twice since and I could not find much on mourning or the procedures that are involved in handling the less happy events in our lives...
...I think all that we can offer them is liberation from the choking oppression of a conflict which has more negative effects on them than we sometimes realize...
...We have now moved our offices to Manhattan...
...Elie Wiesel will win more minds and hearts than all the siddurim ever printed...
...he shows himself as much a schlemiel as any of us...
...This is not to say that families will rush to take advantage of the offer...
...What happened to the kiddushin, the Jewish holy essence that was so much a part of these parents' marital vows...
...A dress designer who spent her youth next door to Freud read Kafka and compared notes with her grandson at college...
...Portnoys who would attack...
...Together we studied, among others, Ozick and Amos Oz, Jong and Jung, Shylock, Daniel Deronda, and Marjorie Morningstar...
...I found not Sophie Portnoys, nor their cousins whom Pinsker describes, but women who wanted to talk about why they are perceived that way: well-read, intelligent women who were eager to explore their Judaism and their American-Jewish experience...
...it will be an opportunity to employ this talent in the development of viable Jewish living styles which Jewish professionals would never dream of...
...This may seem nitpicking...
...The resources of the oil-producing countries are great but finite...
...It is a (perhaps desperate) call for help, offered up by those who have discovered that, beneath their Assyrian garb, they are really Maccabees after all...
...Unfortunately, the address given in your article is no longer correct...
...Daily prayer has spiritual, emotional and educational value...
...Greenberg and the National Jewish Conference Center, I would like to thank you for printing Steven Shaw's recommendation of the Holiday Guides series by Irving Greenberg, available through the Conference Center...
...The Torah-Land forces must realize that such an acknowledgement is deathly risky...
...They must begin to see the magnitude of the miracle that any holy oil is left to burn at all, and they must soon figure out that their oil takes the form of parents who, despite the low quality of Jewish life in America, have somehow decided to affiliate with a congregation of Jews...
...Needless to say, the Kitzur had its place but at least all three works dealt with the human being and the Jewish solution to confrontations with life...
...In the past few years many Conservative synagogues are counting women for a quorum...
...The degree of development ultimately attained by these nations will be determined by the prices they must pay for capital goods and construction projects...
...It is time for rabbis and melamdim to begin making house calls...
...The experience destroyed my notions about Jewish "matrons...
...they must be helped to take the risks...
Vol. 3 • January 1978 • No. 3
