So, sometimes you find yourself someplace in the world without a clue as to what, if any, Jewish community is around you and once you're there, what are you going to do, walk around the street asking? Well, you might, stranger things have happened, of course. Or, you might not even think to look around some places for other MOTs, wrongly assuming we'd be nowhere in sight. However, in all my travels, I have been pleasantly surprised, again and again, to meet and befriend our peeps all over the place.

So, sort-of-regularly, I'm going to do some of the homework for you and focus on different Jewish communities here and there we don't often hear much about. Yes? Great. And to start things off, we're heading to Omaha to catch up with the 6,500-member community.

Omaha: A nice artsy, progressive, Jewy place to visit. Who knew?

Now, I visited Omaha a little over a year ago for the first time--the (Downtown) Omaha Lit Fest is a great time, by the by-- and decided I loved the place with its art and culture, like this wonderful progressive stronghold in the middle of, well, fields.

To travel deeper next time you find yourself in Nebraska, see who you can find of the Jewish community of Omaha-- touch base with The Jewish Federation of Omaha, swing by the Omaha JCC, hit this site that the Federation offers for answers to questions like, "Can you keep kosher in Omaha?" (yes), "Are there any Jewish Day Schools in Omaha?" (yes) and get the scoop on the choices of shuls in Omaha: Temple Israel (Reform-- and they have a gift and Judaica shop), Beth El (conservative-- and they have a gift and Judaica shop, too), Beth Israel (orthodox), a Chabad center (where just last month a challah-thon took place!) and Beyt Shalom (reconstructionist). Then, there's the Kripke Jewish Library, and since you're there, pay a nice little visit to the Rose Blumkin Jewish Home for the elderly (they have a mikveh you can use there, if you call, fyi) and to the Friedel Jewish Academy to meet b'nai Omaha.

Go get your shalom bayit on, wherever your travels take you.

 

 

Last week Francois emailed me about this fascinating article in Haaretz:

Yom Kippur 2007: Jews who hate Reform Jews
By Bradley Burston

The Scene: A spinning class at a smartly appointed gym at a kibbutz in the Judean Hills, a few days before Yom Kippur. The instructor has yet to arrive. "We have a minyan, we can begin anyway," says one member of the class.

"Wait," says another, astride his exercise bike. "Women aren't counted in a minyan."

Debbie Friedman: Does she set your teeth on edge?

"Reform Jews do count women in the minyan," says a woman in the class. The man on the bike is unmoved. "The Reformim aren't Jews," he says.

There are those among us Jewish Israelis, whether we define ourselves as traditionalist or secular-as-Stalin, who cannot abide Reform Judaism and those who choose to practice it.

"I have to admit that the pseudo-spiritualism that the Reform Jewish synagogue manufactures is foreign to me," wrote Gafi Amir in an opinion column in Yedioth Ahronoth this week.

Taking a shot at the "neo-secular, particularly those who congratulate themselves for being enlightened and pluralistic," Amir decided that their level of religious observance will not include the commandments of fasting and searching one's soul.

Full story

Now, moving right past the spinning-class-come-theological-debate, I find this fascinating because I’ve really struggled with my own reactions to Reform Judaism. It weirds me out that it’s a movement that doesn’t even attempt to have standards. I just…don’t get it, I guess.

On the other hand, hate is a pretty strong word. I don’t hate Reform Jews, and I don’t really get people who are way offended by them. By definition they're the least threatening group ever, right? So what’s all the animosity about?

You know, just when I write off the Reform movement they come at me with this amazing programming and I have to admit how much they rock. Check out this article from The Washington Post:
Eric Yoffie: suddenly kind of hot

Jews and Muslims Set Up Big Interfaith Effort

By Michelle Boorstein

Two major Jewish and Muslim organizations unveiled an interfaith dialogue curriculum yesterday and are urging their hundreds of thousands of members to use it. Both sides say it is the broadest Jewish-Muslim interfaith effort in the continent's history.

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, North America's largest Jewish movement, announced the partnership with the Islamic Society of North America at his group's biennial convention in San Diego.

"As a once-persecuted minority in countries where anti-Semitism is still a force, we understand the plight of Muslims in North America today," Yoffie said yesterday. "We live in a world in which religion is manipulated to justify the most horrific acts, a world in which -- make no mistake -- Islamic extremists constitute a profound threat. For some, this is a reason to flee from dialogue, but in fact the opposite is true. When we are killing each other in the name of God, sensible religious people have an obligation to do something about it."

This summer Yoffie became the first major Jewish leader to address ISNA, the continent's largest Muslim organization with 30,000 attendants coming to its annual convention. ISNA President Ingrid Mattson will address the 980-congregation Jewish group today, the first leader of a major Muslim group to do so.

The manual and video are built around five sessions that touch on topics including the place of Jerusalem in Jewish and Muslim tradition and history. The toughest potential sticking points will probably be related to Israel and to stereotypes both groups carry about the other, Mark Pelavin, director of interreligious affairs for the Jewish group, said in an interview. "Jews want to know how Muslims feel about terrorism in the name of Islam, and Muslims want to know how Jews feel about Palestinian suffering."

Full Story

The amazing thing about this effort is that it’s not one of those lame, ‘we’re not going to talk about Israel we’re just going to talk about how important it is to respect each other’ gigs. Both sides plan on addressing really serious issues. My guess is it won’t be pretty, but I’m SO psyched that they got this going. Now what I want to know is when the Conservative movement going to step up to the plate.

Meanwhile, over at Jewschool there’s a pretty decent breakdown of all the cool things Yoffie has planned for the next year or so. My favorite part is an excerpt from Yoffie’s big sermon on Saturday:

In recent years, there has been a feverish conversation among communal leaders about how to connect young adults to Jewish life. We all agree that they need Torah study, Jewish ritual and connection to Israel. But all of this has not been enough.

Well, here is my suggestion to these leaders about what they need to do next: They need to speak up for justice. They need to speak up loud, proud and unafraid.

Because our young people are very wise. They know that a Judaism that ghettoizes itself has no real mission and therefore no real purpose. They don’t understand how Jews can pray for the sick every day and then do nothing to get health care to those who need it. In the end, if the Judaism we offer our young does not speak to the great moral issues of the world and of their lives, it will fail to capture their imagination or their hearts.

I kind of have a crush on Eric Yoffie now. But don’t worry, I promise not to have meaningless sex with him.

Choose Your Guru: This photograph of legendary yogi Sting (by Karin Catt) is being auctioned to benefit Donna Karan's Urban Zen Initiative.I am taking notes on a pad designed and provided by fashion guru Donna Karan. Sitting in her studio on an overstuffed floor pillow, Fiji water and raw walnuts within reach, I am admiring scores of taut, burnished individuals dressed in asymmetric, scapula- and clavicle-bearing organic cotton ensembles. Coldplay and Sinead O’Connor’s plaintive melodies emanate from hidden speakers and Donna Karan’s image is projected on white walls in the massive space.

But I am not at a fashion show.

I am at the Well Being Forum, the first event being put forth by Karan’s Urban Zen Initiative. This project began as a legacy for Stephan Weiss, Karan’s husband, who died of cancer in 2001. Its goal, according to Karan, is to “connect the dots” between eastern and western medicine.

For this conference, Karan has summoned a who’s who list of doctors, yoga practitioners, nutritionists, healers—and their famous acolytes—to address an audience of philanthropists, patients and health professionals. Dean Ornish will talk nutrition, Rodney Yee will do yoga. Mehmet Oz—Oprah’s doctor—will discuss patient care. Michael J. Fox and his doctor will discuss living with Parkinson’s. Lou Reed—yes, that Lou Reed—will teach Tai Chi. His longtime partner, artist Laurie Anderson, will lead a meditation. The model Christy Turlington will serve on a women’s health panel.

Think of it as Vogue’s editorial staff taking over the New England Journal of Medicine.

While the motivations behind the project are undeniably good, the concept of an incredibly wealthy celebrity inviting her friends and their gurus to brainstorm in front of a studio full of people either wealthy or powerful enough to get on the guest list is complicated.

Over the next few days, I am going to attend some panels and report back on them. Some questions I’m already asking myself:

Who has access to “spirituality” in our society? What happens when our health and wellbeing are contingent on our ability to pay for guidance?

How can any movement transcend preaching to its own choir?

What’s behind the creative impulse that arises when a loved one passes away? Is it about trying to resurrect the lost person, or satisfying the living person’s narcissism?

How can a room full of like-minded people avoid getting mired in sanctimonious self-congratulation and challenge each other to move forward?

And, finally, if we believe people are capable of healing themselves, doesn’t that assign a cruel and irrational sense of responsibility to the terminally ill?

Feel free to respond to any of these questions now, or later. And do propose any others you think I should be asking.

To check out the Urban Zen Initiative's website, click here.

Getting into the first panel I attend, “Doctors, Embracing a New Way of Thinking,” isn’t easy. After I arrive at the Stephan Weiss studio, deep in the West Village, I get in line to check in with one of many frazzled-looking event coordinators in black headsets. While another writer and I languish at the entrance—“The problem is the PR people have never given us a list of press!” growls a pretty blonde—women carrying bags made of ostrich, lizard and snakeskin are waved in right and left.

I am not particularly bothered by what some might consider a snub—this scene is no different from waiting for backstage access to a fashion show, which I did for years covering beauty and fashion trends for glossy magazines. The VIPS there and here came from the same guest list—in order to attend this series of panels and workshops, one has to be a patron of the Urban Zen initiative; sponsorships range from $6000 to $250000, roughly the same price range as a piece of couture. According to the Urban Zen website, sponsors help fund the attendance of nurses, medical students, and other healing practitioners who would otherwise not be able to attend.

After about ten minutes of waiting outside, my fellow press buddy and I are ushered inside the building to wait some more in the gallery, where a silent auction of serene art photographs is being displayed. In this corral with all the other seatless people I have a good view of the audience, who seem to be getting to know one another, eager for the panel to start.

“I am meeting with Donna next week to discuss strategy,” says the woman I met outside, who is getting anxious that everyone seems to be getting seats but us, “They obviously don’t know who I am.” She is the publisher of an established alternative medicine newsletter, and her sense of entitlement is sort of charming. She may have been to Washington to lobby for universal healthcare, but she’s obviously never been to an NYC PR extravaganza.

Harboring no delusions about my own importance in this crowd, I settle into a conversation with another woman who’s waiting to be seated, a doctor of Chinese medicine. She is in her mid-thirties, Asian-American, and so fashionable and pretty I might have mistaken her for someone from the W magazine society page. She tells me she left corporate America to practice Chinese medicine and I second-guess my assessments of the other people I saw whiz past me at the door. Maybe they were all in the healing arts, too?

Five minutes after the scheduled beginning, we’re still not seated, but a hush comes over the crowd as the panel moves toward the stage, the actor Michael J. Fox, who is living with Parkinson's Disease, at its tail end. Everyone is trying to stare out of the corner of their eye. He is magnetic. With the layout of the room—the stage at the very front, mics, photographers—it is easy to pretend we are attending a press conference for some new TV show. But this is not TV, it’s real. Fox’s gait is a little shaky. And when he gets to the stage, he’s seated next to his neurologist and a melanoma survivor and the head of integrative medicine at Beth Israel medical center—not Meredith Baxter Birney or Justine Bateman. This is real.

No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that celebrities are regular people, it’s deeply disturbing when they become sick. I could offer some pat explanation about the secret sense of satisfaction we feel when the mighty fall, but I don’t think it’s that simple—or that heartless. Once illness or trauma penetrates the placenta of celebrity, affecting those who dwell in our fantasy worlds, it seems, ironically, much more real and threatening to the rest of us. Plus our sense of empathy for them is artificially inflated. We feel as though we know them, so it’s like a good friend or relative is in danger.

Because of this, celebrities can—and should—bring awareness to their diseases by speaking openly about them. This can lead directly to progress, both medical and sociological. Think what Christopher Reeve did for paralysis—he humanized it, brought a real sense of strength and dignity to the wheelchair, and he did more for stem cell research than any other individual.

So why does this who’s who of Hollywood healthcare at the Urban Zen Initiative make me a little uneasy? Why, when the session opens with a moving film featuring Donna Karan, her husband (who passed away), and other famous cancer patients such as Edie Falco, do I catch myself doing an inner eye-roll?

More on this later.

Ann Hulbert shares some insight from a recent Pew study on sexual and political principles of Gen Next that are worth a look in today’s Sunday Times Magazine.

It captures, certainly from my own experience, the rooted openness of a cross section of this generation. Though specifically geared toward views on gay marriage and abortion, the study sheds light on their independence of thought as well as their deep connections to their parents’ generation. And dovetails with one aspect that summarizes their essence: they are, without a doubt, charting something of a new path–wherever it leads, in American political life.

More in relationship to homosexuality than on the abortion question, one sees this study validated, which I suppose makes sense given the more public nature of seeing or knowing two gay people than knowing who had an abortion.

Hulbert writes, “On one level, Gen Nexters sound impatient with a strident stalemate between entrenched judgments of behavior; after all, experience tells them that in the case of both abortion and gay rights, life is complicated and intransigence has only impeded useful social and political compromises. At the same time, Gen Nexters give every indication of being attentive to the moral issues at stake: they aren’t willing to ignore what is troubling about abortion and what is equally troubling about intolerant exclusion. A hardheadedness, but also a high-mindedness and softheartedness, seems to be at work.”