happy last day of chanooka

Happy Thanks-giving!

many things to be thankful for, especially seeing Al Green live at the Wellmont Theater in Montclair, NJ. Not since James Brown have I seen such an electrifying performer. Green is a master - of- ceremonies/preacher/soul singer/dancer/conductor -- you have to love a guy who passes out red roses to the fans in between songs. The Wellmont is beautifully restored, and the sound is good if you sit in the balcony. I heard that the sound on the floor was off. Good we got the cheap seats.

another huge highlight of November was speaking at the Chabad Shluchim conference in Crown Heights. I was also treated to a post-talk dinner (thanks to my cuz Nissen and Necahama Dina!) and I brought one of the Chabad rabbis to the Birthright Israel monologues show at the Triad Theater in Manhattan. A cultural exchange...morningside heights meets crown heights?

Best YOUTUBE channel ever

This genius has youtubed his record player. he plays old 45s.i was searching for an old Howlin' Wolf tune and came across this treasure trove. enjoy

One beauty: Shufflin Shoes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_JT56Z3nfk

Meeting Elie Weisel

Yesterday I had the fortunate opportunity to speak with Professor Elie Weisel. He was invited by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to speak at Michael Steinhardt's home and beforehand I sat next to Professor Weisel in the living room. Needless to say, I was very uncomfortable. Most people were coming up to him and telling them how much they enjoyed Night and he would just smile and say thank you. So I decided to skip the accolades and just ask him what he was working on. Weisel responded that he has just completed his 50th novel (in French) "The Mad Desire to Dance" and that he wasn't slowing down. I asked him if he is reading the younger writers and he told me that of all of them he thinks Nathan Englander is the best. I recommended that he read Todd Hasak-Lowy's The Task of this Translator, which he had not heard of, and I promised to send him a copy. Then we talked a bit about Iran -- he was rightfully upset about Larry King giving a place of honor to Ahmadinejad. We spoke a bit more about my current work and then other people came up to him and heaped on more praise.

When he spoke to the crowd at the party, he told one particularly moving story about the funeral processions of his youth. As the body was taken from the house to the cemetary on the funeral bier, a man would parade before the coffin with a charity box yelling out "Charity saves from Death" Weisel wondered -- How is that so? even those who give charity die!

He asked a friend who said -- charity saves from the sense of being dead while one is alive.

He extrapolated from that teaching that to be truly alive is to see beyond the self. It was a beautiful message for these ten days of repentance.

Rosh Hashannah Poem

And in the Seventh Month

And in the seventh month,

on the first day of the month

ye shall have a holy convocation

ye shall do no manner of servile work

it is a day of blowing the horn

and honey cake

and ye shall wear a decent suit

and have trouble parking

and wave to the Freidmans, the Kleins, the what's-their-names,

and the various other members of the tribe who you haven't seen for a year

and who you honestly don't really like that much

and there shall be much responsive reading

and little legroom

and ye shall look repeatedly at thine timepiece;

and minutes shall pass that seem like hours,

and all shall go home and nap.

and ye shall dream of preparing a burnt-offering for a sweet savour unto the LORD

one young bullock, one ram, seven he-lambs of the first year without blemish,

and you shall look down and find that you are wearing a robe that is too short,

your private parts are uncovered,and ye shall feel a draft in thine loins.

And ye shall awake to the sound of horns

the intro of National Public Radio's All Things Considered

And ye shall find that the new year is full of surprises,

The housing market is booming,unemployment is at its lowest point ever,the streets of Baghdad are quiet,the coexistence university opens in Hebron,cancer can be cured with a mix of nicotine patches and pineapple juice,and the feature story is all about the Jews:

They've stopped worrying.

A sweet savor unto the LORD.

Gates of repentance now open

I was interviewed for this holiday piece in the Seattle Times about posting regrets online....a great idea by two guys who work with JConnect in Seattle.

Birthright Israel NEXT

Happy 60th!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The 60 Bloggers project is a co-production of Jewlicious.com and the Let My People Sing Festival . It is published daily for 60 days to celebrate Israel’s 60 birthday. My contribution to this project is below. Chag Samayach!

Eretz Yisrael

Eretz yisrael

Motherland

Lactating 

tahini

Lukewarm goldstar

Sachlab

I once curled up under a cliff in the machtesh 

thousand star hotel 

Awoken by the sound of wild gazelles

as they jostled for a choice spot by the spring

Ancestral womb land

Your children are spread out from taipei to toledo, 

But they never forget you, tongues cleaving, 

a spoonful of peanut butter, right hands withering

left hands waved into the air swinging like they just don’t care,

feet dreaming of return.

You have nice rocks.

Our rock and our redeemer,

Your dust on our toes

A permanent condition

The axis mundi,

Jerusalem

Belly button 

Umbilical cord to the other side

We sing halleluyahs into your cracks.

To sip a turkish coffee under the shade of your palms? 

To sip a fresh squeezed orange juice on your cliffs that look out over the great sea? 

To sip the cool mountain water cascading off your northern waterfalls? 

We drink in your mother’s milk, Zion,

At pretentious cafes on streets named for city boy socialists turned farmers, 

Plastic chairs in kibbutzim gone condo 

On the porch eleven flights up overlooking the rarely open museum of the Diaspora,

On the Ottoman era tiled rooftops of your old cities, 

We lift our glasses to you. 

Tectonic shifting, trans syro african rifting

Each of your hills and valleys sing a new song unto the Lord on high.

May our dwellings on you be open tents

May we give thanks for your yearly gift of dates, 

The goodness of the land. 

And may we forever merit to not only have our 

bones lie in your rocky soil

but to watch our toddlers crawl across your grassy places.


-Daniel S. Brenner

Jerusalem Post Post

Thanks to Andrew S-C over at the NJ Jewish News, there is this interview with your truly running in the Jerusalem Post about the difference between indoctrination and inspiration. Thanks Andy!

Long time no Post

Friends,

My apologies for not blogging! I have been working on the item below for the past many moons and hiring staff and flying back and forth from one place to the next. In the meantime, good old Reb Blog surpassed 10,000 unique visitors. Not bad for a part-time scribbler. So here is an update of my least six months:

Best Show I saw: Passing Strange
Best Book I Read: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Best Movie: Praying with Lior
Best Music I listened to: Faces Down by Sandre Lerche

A $25 million boost for Birthright alumni

Jacob Berkman

Birthright Israel and the Jim Joseph Foundation are hoping a new $25 million initiative can help keep Birthright Israel alumni engaged once they've returned from their trip.

Published: 04/15/2008

NEW YORK (JTA) – Birthright Israel and the Jim Joseph Foundation are hoping a new $25 million initiative can help create more Jews like Lindsay Litowitz.

Litowitz, 25 and now living in New York, essentially was an unaffiliated Jew when she graduated from the University of Florida in 2004. A free 10-day trip to Israel with Birthright shortly afterward drastically changed her career and Jewish path.

After the trip, she enrolled in graduate school at George Washington University to study economic development. But at a concert in Washington run by the local Birthright alumni community, something clicked: Why was she studying development in western Africa, Litowitz recalls thinking, when she knew so little about her own Jewish culture and language?

She took a leave of abscence from graduate school and moved to Israel for five months on a work study program with Livnot U'Lehibanot, which brings foreigners to learn about Israel and work on community service projects.

Upon returning to the United States, she went to work for Livnot. Now Litowitz is a consultant to several Jewish initiatives, including Birthright.

"It never would have occurred to me to go to Israel; it wasn't on my radar," she said. "Birthright was the gateway and the portal."

Birthright has sent some 160,000 Jews aged 18 to 26 to Israel since it was launched in 2000. It is widely seen as more successful than any modern Jewish identity-forming project in its ability to reach non-Orthodox young adults.

But the challenge has been to sustain the momentum of the Birthright trip and keep the participants from around the world involved in Jewish life. Last summer it created Birthright NEXT to focus on follow-up programming for alumni.

Over the next five years, the Jim Joseph Foundation will give Birthright NEXT some $12.5 million in matching grants to create a network of grassroots organizers to help bring alumni between the ages of 22 and 30 into the Jewish fold, the foundation announced Monday.

"Here you have 20-somethings who developmentally are at a point where they are making very key decisions about who they are, how they will live Jewishly and how they will identify, and this is an extraordinary opportunity to reach them," the executive director of the Jim Joseph Foundation, Charles "Chip" Edelsberg, told JTA.

Combined with another $5 million that the foundation is giving to fund BIrthright trips, the $17.5 million grant is the largest by the foundation since it started making gifts last year.

Birthright alumni still enrolled in college show they are more likely to engage Jewishly once back on campus. Some 40 percent enroll in Jewish studies courses, according to a 2005 study by the Maurice Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis, and Hillel says that some 50 percent of its participants are back from Birthright.

But follow-up with alumni of post-college age has been more difficult.

For many years the budget for post-Birthright programming was a relatively limited $1.5 million per year, according to Susie Gelman, the board chair of the Birthright Israel Foundation.

Professionals stationed in key communities reached about 13,000 alumni per year, primarily through the existing community infrastructure and the Jewish federation system.

But Gelman, a strong advocate of the Jewish federation system and the incoming president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, said, "The federation system and Jewish organizations in general have found it challenging to engage many young Jews, especially the unaffiliated."

The Jim Joseph Foundation grant will allow Birthright Israel to build on what existed previously, she said.

"We recognized that we needed additional resources in order to reach out to more alumni and offer them a wider variety of opportunities to explore and strengthen their Jewish identity and sense of connection to Israel and to the Jewish people."

The new Birthright plan will train local directors and station them in 15 cities with high concentrations of Birthright alumni. Each director will hire five fellows, themselves Birthright alumni, in an outreach effort to other past participants.

Birthright's vice president of education, Rabbi Daniel Brenner, will oversee the program nationally.

The program will hinge on how successfully the fellows can gauge what other alumni are doing socially, what they want Judaically and whether they can connect them with the local director.

Brenner says many of the fellows will most likely come from the pool of Americans who have led Birthright trips as counselors because they already have laid the groundwork for grassroots organizing.

"People did not recognize that the most important, energized young leadership from Birthright has already self-identified as such," he said. Some have led five or six Birthright trips and have hundreds of participants in their Facebook profiles.

In some cases, Edelsbeg said, the local directors also will develop their own programming, but the goal is to help Jews who normally would be intimidated by walking into a synagogue or other Jewish institution on his or her own to find outlets within the existing Jewish community.

"It is very clear that the role of the local director is to help young Jews get connected to what already exists," he said. "We do not want to create a parallel stream of Judaism. That is inefficient and irresponsible."

The grant is a natural for the San Francisco-based foundation as it builds upon several other grants, Edelsberg said, pointing specifically to its recent $10.7 million gift to Hillel to create a network of "campus entrepreneurs" charged with finding Jews on campus who do not affiliate with Hillel houses and connecting with them on their own terms.

Until now, Birthright follow-up has consisted of a patchwork of local outposts and periodic programming that even those within Birthright acknowledge has missed a significant percentage of alumni.

Some fear that the $200 million spent to date on Birthright trips might not be reaching its full potential -- a fear compounded by Birthright's desire to increase the number of participants to 40,000 per year over the next five years. That comes to an annual cost estimated at $104 million.

"There is a sense of urgency and importance to this," Edelsberg said. "We want to maximize the investment that has already been made."

The new initiative also will build on successful models like J-Connect Seattle, which is run out of the Hillel of Greater Washington. J-Connect Seattle emphasizes pre-trip and post-trip programming to help build a community out of the 40 young Jews who are on each Birthright tour bus in Israel.

Michael Steinhardt, who founded Birthright with Charles Bronfman, said the Birthright NEXT initiative indicates a shift in focus for Birthright.

Birthright initially was concerned only with getting as many young Jews to Israel as possible and struggling to pay for those trips. But the success of the trips and an influx of money from the likes of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has pledged $60 million for Birthright trips over the past year and a half, has allowed the organization to focus on follow-up as well.

"It is an acknowledgment that from the time we started in 2000 until very recently, the amount of energy and money available for Birthright follow-up was shamefully little," said Steinhardt, the chair of Birthright NEXT. "It wasn't a focus."

Both Birthright officials and observers see the new program as an opportunity to use Birthright as a de facto clearinghouse for outreach.

"The number of people who have gone on these trips means that there is a social network of alumni, regardless of whether they are involved with existing Jewish organizations or not," said Len Saxe, the director of Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies.

Saxe has conducted the lion's share of research on the effect of Birthright on its alumni.

"The significance of the Jim Joseph gift to Birthright NEXT," he said, "is that there will now be resources to help this nascent and evolving network of alumni organizations."

And now....more poetry!!!

Alt-Neu Jewish Music

Clarinet pointed at the ceiling as if to send a blow dart of klezmer tranquilizer into the heart of the Holy Blessed One
The beret wearing drummer tzit-zitzes his hi-hats
The accordionist crying through his palms
Bass man just thumps thump thump thump thump thump thump
And now the squeal of the mad violinist, curly hair aloft, high on heavenly crank,
A bow-stroked eulogy for eighty thousand lost souls, the murdered violinists.

Behind the concert hall in Chestocowa, in the back lot, under thirty feet deep of dirt and bones, the snuck-in under his jacket violin of a buried Jew begins to vibrate

Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

?Now ain’t that sweet music