Tag Archives: k’lal yisrael

June 30, 2025 · 7:30 am

Sh’ma, God, Listen   

by Nancy Smiler Levinson (Los Angeles, CA)

 On the boulevard near the bus stop in “Persian Square”

I glance a woman, small, mottled skin     California sun

one foot on the curb, the other in the street

She looks painfully sad, lost among the stream of shoppers                   

and I find myself at her side, my arm around her bony shoulder 

Are you alright?  Do you need help?

Her accent is heavy    with my hearing aids I lean in  

Money  mon-ey I need 

Is that what she is saying?  for food?  bus fare?  just in need?

I begin opening my pocketbook, but her hand stops mine

and she pulls me close  I am Jewish, lady,

tomorrow night comes Rosh Hashanah    I need honey

Ah  of course  I too am Jewish    come   I guide her to the bus bench,

bid her wait for me while I take off on foot, a mission of sorts

Blocks on, thank God, in a small market I find honey on the shelf

To the woman, trusting, waiting for me I hand a bear-shaped bottle

God bless you lady, she says, God bless and keep you 

Shana Tova and an abundance of blessings to you, I respond

So. . .  I performed a small mitzvah quietly with heart and soul

But if one speaks aloud of one’s good deed

it might appear as if acted for applause

and thus in the eyes of God, not count

Now listen, God    Sh’ma   I need to share this

because there is a story here  

almost every mitzvah is a story   

or perhaps a small poem

Nancy Smiler Levinson is author of Moments of Dawn: A Poetic Memoir and a chapbook, The Diagnosis Changes Everything. Her work has appeared in Poetica, Jewish Literary Journal, Hamilton Stone Review, Silver Birch Press, Ink in Thirds, Burningword Literary Journal, Minnesota Memories, Constellations, and elsewhere.In past chapters of her life she worked as a journalist, educational book editor, Head Start teacher, and she published some thirty books for young readers (including a biography of Emma Lazarus).

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November 4, 2024 · 7:30 am

Baby-Boomer Blues

by Howard Wach (New York, NY)

I’m a baby-boomer, Bronx-born, a grandchild of immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, raised in a 1960s Long Island suburb, which was half Jewish and half other white ethnics, everyone newly migrated from city neighborhoods. I matured in the ‘70s, when Jew-barring (or Jew-counting) barriers collapsed across all kinds of American institutions. 

But sudden indifference to Jewish catastrophe and open Jew-hating—the post October 7 legacy—has pushed me and my boomer peers to revisit what we thought were rock-solid certainties. The last eight months changed everything.  

I’m a knowledgeable guy, a teacher, a scholar in my own modest way. But now I wonder what I’ve ever really known. History lulled me to sleep, then woke me with a klop. My everyday worries—money, family, health—have new company, a dangerous twist on the tribalism splintering our civil society. Suddenly, the hyphen connecting “Jewish-American” feels frayed, eroded, anything but certain. 

All my life that hyphen signaled a balance I had no reason to doubt. A birthright, if you will. It never felt conditional or one-sided.  

**********   

In 1906 Shai Wach, an 18-year-old immigrant from Warsaw, arrived in New York and renamed himself Charles. Eleven years later he returned to Europe, a doughboy drafted into the 77th infantry division, the “Melting Pot” division, a polyglot mix of immigrants from lower Manhattan. Charlie fought with the Lost Battalion in the Argonne Forest and returned to New York with a fistful of medals, his patriotism signed and sealed. He marched up Fifth Avenue with his old unit every Armistice Day for decades. Growing up in the Depression-era Bronx, my father Daniel, Charlie’s older son, absorbed the lessons of those parades. 

I never heard my grandfather talk about Israel. New York was his home. The United States was his homeland, and he had the medals to prove it. But his brother perished in Auschwitz (also never discussed); his sister disappeared forever into a wartime Polish convent. I suspect that like his Workmen’s Circle comrades, he had no personal Zionist convictions but believed that the Shoah made Israel necessary. Just not for him, or for his son, or for me. 

********** 

My father spoke more often about his World War II service as he aged. Before he became too frail to travel, he eagerly embarked on a veterans’ “Honor Flight” to visit war monuments in Washington. The day he died a biography of Churchill lay open on the magnifying reading device the VA had given him.  

I turned eighteen just as the Vietnam-era draft ended. A graduate of my high school was killed at Kent State. Some classmates sewed peace symbols on their jeans and joined antiwar protests. Others sneered at the “footprint of the American chicken” and enlisted the moment they could. My peacenik mother hated the war; my proud veteran father defended it. I didn’t know what I believed, but I acted the teenage antiwar hippie, singing along with Country Joe and the Fish and listening to Hendrix tear through the national anthem.  

It never occurred to me—or to anyone I knew—that Jewishness could have any relevance to that all-American strife. National identity was properly a civic affair. We all belonged to this country. I had no Zionist feelings, no desire to make aliyah. But I knew—even through the fog of adolescence—that Israel was a fulfillment, a source of ethnic pride heightened by the miraculous Six-Day War.  I grasped its importance and celebrated the victory, but we were Jewish Americans, secure in that solid identity, feeling no unsettling contradiction or tension. All the old barriers were falling. Wartime dissension aside, what could disturb our happy condition? 

**********

I have a different question now. What made me think I’d escape the history I studied and taught? I’m a lucky Jewish baby-boomer born into the post-Holocaust truce that sidetracked Jew-hating and enabled some of us to vault into corporate suites and institutional power. The truce has faltered for a while, but the October 7 aftermath blew it apart.  

We disappeared into benign, assimilated invisibility. Or so I thought. That dreamy moment in the American empire is over. The sudden disregard for Jewish lives unearthed my half-buried boomer memories: Charlie’s brutal, unspoken knowledge of genocide, my parents looking sideways at goyim, their memory of “Gentiles Only” warnings in employment and real estate ads. Blue numbers tattooed on the forearm of my friend Paul’s father. It all flooded back when I saw torn, defaced posters of Israeli hostages and heard noxious chants rising from massive rallies. I was rudely yanked back into history. 

The shock unleashed a stew of unwelcome emotions in me: anger at “progressives” who abandoned moral sense, who preach simple-minded theories of power, seduce the ignorant, and make Israel the centerpiece of global evil; anger at Israeli zealots who reinforce that corrosive lie—lunatic settlers running wild and the politicians who coddle them; fear for my children, who witness Jewishness embroiled in today’s American strife and may never recover the assurance that “Jewish-American” once meant, the hard-won allegiance my grandfather and father gifted to me. 

**********

In the 1980s I wrote a Ph.D dissertation at Brandeis University about civil society in nineteenth-century Britain. One day I was sitting with friends in a common room when a professor in the History Department, a brash and funny character, dropped by to share his latest insight. “Brandeis has a new theme song,” he announced, “a medley of Hatikvah and Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Then he laughed and walked away. 

Until recently the joke made playful, ironic Jewish sense. It fit perfectly at Brandeis, that model of postwar Jewish-American identity and ambition. In the last eight months I think of it more than any time in the last forty years. But its playfulness is gone, its irony soured. 

Here’s a sign of the times. Brandeis is recruiting Jewish students feeling displaced or frightened at campuses where keffiyehs are fashionable and Zionism is a seven-letter version of a four-letter word.  

That old joke isn’t funny at all anymore. 

Howard Wach is a semi-retired City University of New York academic. He’s written and published articles on educational technology and academic history in various journals, and now writes creative nonfiction and short stories. Palisades Review published his short humorous piece about not buying a time share. 

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June 17, 2024 · 7:30 am

My People

by Marcie Geffner (Ventura, CA)

I lay on the narrow exam table with “everything off” except the blue-and-white hospital gown tied at my neck and open to the back.

It was early morning in Los Angeles and I was hungry—empty, really—and tired from the clear liquid diet—apple juice, vegetable broth, ten lemon JELLOs—and the routine colonoscopy “prep” I’d endured the day before.

A surgical assistant approached me with a wristband.

Inwardly, I moaned. Did I have to do this? Answer: yes.

“Hold out your arm,” the assistant instructed. “Just think of this like you’re at a music concert.”

At my side, the stocky, dyed-blond nurse stiffened.

As did I.

It had been only four days since Hamas militants massacred two hundred and sixty people at a dance party in Israel’s Negev Desert. Israeli soldiers now stood guard at the site, strewn with mattresses, tents, food, clothing, and one militant’s dead body, left there as a warning. In Israel, 1,200 people were dead with another 2,800 wounded. In Gaza, the death toll surpassed 1,500. The war had only just begun.

Could anyone be as clueless as this surgical assistant seemed to be? Apparently so.

“That’s…maybe not the best comment right now,” I said.

The nurse murmured, “I am half-Russian, half-Ukrainian.” Her thickly accented voice came low, as if for my ears only.

She sounded like my grandmother. Born in Kishinev, my father’s mother immigrated first to Panama, then to Los Angeles as a young woman.

I was born Jewish and brought up Jewish. As a teenager, I’d spent one glorious, fearless summer in Israel, studying Hebrew, harvesting potatoes, traveling throughout the state and visiting my great-aunt and great-uncle, who lived part-time in Netanya.

Later, though, my feelings toward my religious heritage changed. As an atheist, I had no interest in prayer. As an adult without children, I felt marginalized, even unwelcome, in synagogue life. But I don’t celebrate Christmas, either. No Christmas tree. No Christmas lights. No Christmas cards. I’m an outsider in almost any religious space.

So why did this Hamas massacre in Eretz Yisrael feel so personal?

Because even without formal religion, I’m still a member of the tribe. I’m not always sure what that means, but I’ve never denied it and can’t imagine that I ever would. Jewish values, history and culture are visible threads woven through the fabric of my life. I don’t know whether I still have distant relatives in Israel, but really, everyone who lives there feels to me like my family. Those vicious attacks? Those people murdered? They could’ve been my loved ones. Or me.

I extended my arm toward the surgical assistant.

“I don’t watch all that stuff happening on the news,” she declared, as if “all that stuff” could not have been of less interest to her. Or to anyone.

She snapped the band around my wrist.

I withdrew my arm.

“It’s easy to look away,” I said, “when it’s not your people.”

Marcie Geffner is a writer, editor and book critic in Ventura, Calif. If you’d like to learn more about her and her work, visit her website: www.marciegeffner.com

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November 15, 2021 · 7:00 am

Unwanted Element

by Michal Mahgerefteh (Norfolk, VA)


“Whenever a mortal man uplifts with arrogance his heart,
scholar or prophet, all his gifts shall soon from him depart.”
                                 

The Talmud

Black kippah, black hat and black jacket are your refuge?
You stand on the bima in a white tunic shouting to my chaverim,
“Avoid her Shabbat meals.” In my still soul I feel like a dumb lamb led to the altar.

But against me you have no prayers that separate me from the Circle of David,
decompose my Sephardic essence nor ostracize me from the house of God.

Slowly I understand; your power magnifies littleness. All you do is blow ash 
on the golden cherubim, smearing the name of El Elyon. The Talmud teaches 
that our personal growth and spiritual maturity is an ongoing effort: 

“God caused not His presence on Israel to rest, ’til their labor had shown
of their merit test.” Please understand we are not black or white, we are
cloaked in fabric of many colors.

Michal Mahgerefteh is an award-winning Israeli-American poet, the author of five poetry chapbooks, managing editor of Poetica Magazine, and an active member of The Poetry Society of Virginia. Michal is currently writing her next chapbook, FishMoon, forthcoming May 2022. If you’d like to read more of her work, visit her website: www.Mitak-Art.com

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February 17, 2020 · 6:00 am

Ancestral Memory

By Jena Schwartz (Amherst, MA)

You know that feeling when you remember something but you don’t know if it’s because you really remember or if you’ve heard the story so many times, or seen the photo, that maybe your mind thinks it remembers but doesn’t really?

What is “real” memory and what is imprinted on us by exposure or repetition?

My daughter was leaving the house yesterday. As she was passing through the kitchen, I stood to give her a hug, but I stopped short when I reached her, taking in a long look at her face. She looked stunning to me, her beauty timeless. For a moment, I saw so much of my father’s side, and in the very same instant, my mother’s side. It felt uncanny.

This was on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, and I thought all day about memory.

How can we possibly remember what we did not experience firsthand? It does not make sense from a logical standpoint. But I believe in my bones, quite literally, that such memories are real.

I remember the Holocaust and the Inquisition just as I remember lighting Shabbat candles at a table in Romania, in Macedonia, in Poland, just as I remember that I, too, was a slave in Egypt.

I remember nursing babies in the red tent, long days of walking.

I remember running through the forest barefoot in terror.

I remember the smell of soup on the stove and challah in the oven.

I remember weddings, the drinking, and how the girls were not allowed to daven.

I remember fathers teaching daughters and daughters screaming as fathers were hauled away, so many fathers, and brothers, sons.

I remember. I remember the sound of glass shattering, I remember huddling, I remember waiting it out, holding our breath, afraid of every floorboard, every footstep.

I remember the songs and the spices of Saturday at sundown, wishing each other a sweet week, a week of peace, even after, even then.

I remember it all.

Jena Schwartz is a promptress and coach who offers fierce encouragement for writing and life. She lives in Amherst, MA with her wife and two children, ages 13 and 17. Her poetry and personal essays have previously appeared in On Being, Mamalode, Sliver of Stone, and Manifest Station, among other places. She is studying to become a bat mitzvah in May, 2020, at the age of 46. Visit her online home at www.jenaschwartz.com.

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December 16, 2013 · 9:22 am

An Unexpected Discovery

by Laurie Rappeport (Safed, Israel)

Several years ago I became involved in guiding a group of students who were studying the history of the American Jewish Experience through music. The kids were examining Jewish America of the 21st century.

Toward this end they explored the traditional liturgy and music of successive waves of immigrants who made their way to America’s shores over the past 400 years. It was probably one of the most interesting subjects that I’ve ever tackled with a group of students.

The project first brought me into contact with the Milken Archives of American Jewish Music, which provided the students with a significant percentage of our research material. Much of the Milken material relates to the first Jewish immigrants who arrived in South Carolina from Brazil in the mid-1600s. These people were refugees from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions and, after fleeing to South America, were forced to run again when the Inquisition reached South America.

The students had a wonderful time and I put the experience in the back of my mind until recently when I suddenly discovered that the history of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain and forced to wander the world, looking for sanctuary, was, in fact, my own history.

Until that time, as far as I knew, I was a bona fide gefilte fish and kreplach Jew with roots in Poland, Belerus and Lithuania. However, it turns out that one of my grandfathers, who hailed from England, was the descendent of Dutch Jews who were almost certainly of Spanish origin.

In 2008 I received an email from a man in New Zealand. Geoff had been born in Birmingham England and immigrated to New Zealand in the ’50s with his father and brother. However, recent documents had come to light that indicated that Geoff had, in fact, been adopted, and that his biological father had been Jewish.

In following through the family history that my family knew, as well as the history that Geoff had been able to determine, we were able to ascertain that Geoff and my mother were second cousins. A subsequent DNA test with my mother’s brother confirmed the relationship.

Throughout the following year Geoff showed great interest in his Jewish ancestry. Still living in New Zealand, he read voraciously about Judaism and Israel and contacted me on Skype several times a week to find out my take on the things that he was reading. In 2009 Geoff and his wife, Jenny, came to Israel to meet the family and attend my son’s wedding.

Geoff and Jenny continued to research our family’s history but they were also fascinated by Judaism. They returned to Israel the following year to celebrate Rosh Hashana with us and in February 2011, under Israel’s Law of Return, made aliyah. To say that no one was more surprised than I was is an understatement!

Geoff and Jenny joined an ulpan course to learn Hebrew and completed a formal conversion program in February 2012 with a giur and a Jewish wedding celebration as a new Jewish couple. The story of their return to Judaism was featured as a Friday spread in Israel’s largest newspaper. They bought a home and now live a 20-minute walk from my house in Safed in northern Israel.

Geoff has continued to explore our common genealogy and discovered a number of interesting details of our family’s life in England. The majority of England’s Jews are, like America’s Jews, descended from Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (One interesting note: many of these immigrants had intended to make their way to America but, when the ships docked on the eastern shore of Scotland or England, were tricked by the sea captains into thinking that they had arrived in America and never completed the train ride that would have taken them to the western shore and their second boat to America.)

What Geoff discovered was that, in at least two lines of our family, our lineage can be traced back to Dutch Jews who were welcomed to England by Oliver Cromwell in the late 1600s. (Jews were expelled from England in 1266 and were not allowed back into the country until Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, invited them to return.)  The majority of the Jews in Amsterdam during that period were descendants of Jews who had fled Spain in 1492.

Suddenly, my students’ project took on a whole new meaning as I realized that the art, music, traditions and customs of the Mediterranean and Sephardic world comprised my own heritage as well.

There’s still much left to determine about our family’s history, but access to the increasing availability of both English and Dutch records may open the door to new discoveries. One far-flung cousin was able to find her ancestor’s ketubah in Italy while another break-away branch of the family has been located in Australia and New Zealand. It turns out that one of their descendants lives up the road from me in the Golan Heights!

In the meantime, Geoff and Jenny have become core members of our local synagogue. (Geoff arrives every Shabbat morning at 8:00 am. I told him that, in my entire life, I’d never made it to shul before 10:00 am.) Their latest project is wine-making, which they undertook so that, when they spend time in Italy (which they do every summer), they’ll have plenty of kosher wine.

Laurie Rappeport is originally from Detroit. She is an online educator who works with Jewish day school and afternoon school students to teach them about Judaism and Israel. She frequently uses the Milken Archives as a resource for historical studies about Judaism. 

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December 3, 2012 · 8:38 am

Black Hat

by Chaim Weinstein (Brooklyn, NY)

At the close of the Rosh Hashana service the rabbi asks us to be seated.

He knows our kids are squirming and hungry but he has a plan. Smiling securely in our modern orthodox Jewish building, the rabbi deputizes each of us to reach out to our increasingly right-moving Jewish community shuls. Our mission, as the rabbi explains it, is to become friendly and join a minyan and style of davening different from our own. We are to break the barriers, say hello to black-hatted strangers, go to a yeshiva minyan, shukkle, mingle and daven. We are to begin this the very next Shabbat and help bring Jews closer.

I make my way through Brooklyn streets in the fading light of a cold Friday afternoon. Hurrying in my knitted purple yarmulke, camelhair coat, and oxblood loafers to a small synagogue, I feel like I’m a robin among penguins, a rose-vine in a field of black orchids, a square peg in a grid of round holes.

I am in a black-hat neighborhood and it feels like enemy territory, even though we are all Jews.

Despite my discomfort, I smile and wish “Good Shabbos” to passersby, but their eyes merely flick past me and dismiss me with mumbled responses.

I hang my coat on the pitted aluminum coat rack in the rear of their small shul and smile: when I leave, my coat will be easy to find in this field of black cloth and marbleized buttons. Like a rebellious peacock, I parade my colors before these plain-garbed men. It is the very choice of my clothing, I know, that fences me off into self-imposed alienation. But it is only in a shul like this where I feel the need to cover my stylish clothing, to conceal my wedding-banded finger with my right hand. I resent feeling like this.

In this overheated large room of white cloth-covered tables and metal folding chairs, these Jews stare with a brazenness unbecoming true knights of the Torah and defenders of the faithful. Though I am a stranger in their strange land, and the Torah demands that they love me, these Jews stare at me instead with pity and condescension, instead of love and concern.

I pull an Artscroll English siddur from the shelf and move toward an unoccupied table. I’m ready to pray and freeze their antisocial stares with one of my own.  So I stare back at them until they look away first, and I am as pleased with my win as a petulant child.

Most congregants pray and chant, though some talk and gesticulate, ignoring the open prayer books before them. Others weave through the mass of tables and chairs during prayers, removing scholarly tomes from crowded bookcases during prayer. Their brows furrow in concentration, poring over tiny print. They are learning Torah.

I don’t understand how they can do this during prayer, from whom they receive rabbinic approval. If I had an audience with the American president or with a king, I could not read a book openly in his face during that time. How can studying during a prayer session with the king of kings, even learning Torah, be justified? Their talking disturbs me for the same reason, but I am just a visitor so I keep my thoughts to myself.

The time for evening prayer arrives, and when the sexton asks me to lead the services, I am shocked, but I simply smile and nod slowly. Some skeptics here will now hear their first-ever modern Jew leading services. Still, I give them credit for trying me out, me, with my pale-blue shirt and striped tie and unblack shoes and colorful, little knitted yarmulke.

I know my davening surprises them because it sounds authentically East European. They can’t figure me out, and that pleases me: I like being mysterious.

When finished, I get heartfelt back-slaps and smiles from some worshipers. But others are suspicious. One asks me pointblank, “What is someone who looks like you doing in a place like this?”

I am stunned but say nothing, remembering a Torah teaching about not judging a wine by its bottle.  In this shul, my Jewish worth is measured by my clothing and the style and length of my hair. But for me,  Jewishness is in the soul, in memories of childhood, rituals and laws forsaken or embraced.

A young man blocks the return to my seat. Arms across his chest, he blurts his demand: “Why didn’t you wear a black hat when you led the services? Why that tiny Pepsi-Cola cap on the back of your head?” I feel like slapping his arrogance, his holier-than-thou aura. Thoughts furiously bounce around in my head. I want to scream: “If you are all so scrupulous about keeping commandments, how could you ask another Jew such a question? Why do you ignore the dictum ‘love your neighbor as yourself’? And where are your manners and observance of commandments between man and man?”

I feel sad that I must submit to my rabbi that his class experiment was a failure, that some fellow Jews  shunned and mistrusted each other. I can forgive their social  backwardness but not their hypocrisy. I am stone-silent as I think of a song: “It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile,” so I do, and still smiling, I wish him good shabbos.

Then I replace my siddur, retrieve my easy-to-find camelhair coat, and walk out uneasily, disconnected, into the cold night.

For more than thirty years, Chaim Weinstein taught English in grades six through college in New York City public schools as well as in several parochial schools. His poems and stories have appeared on The Jewish Writing Project, and his short story, “Ball Games and Things,” was published in Brooklyn College’s literary magazine, Nocturne.

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June 7, 2010 · 8:25 am

The Hassid and the Tennis Racket

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Outside looking in, his hands on the wire fence,
he stood sallow and sweaty in the hot sun,
dressed in black coat and hat watching me
practicing my pathetic serve,
stabbing at the ball with fly swatter frenzy,
willing it to land in the box with any kind of consistency.
Between tosses, I watched him watching me
through rimless glasses, his blue eyes searching
for some reason for my solitary ritual.
For ten minutes I struggled with my swing.
For ten minutes he did not move a muscle.
His silence screamed at me until, exasperated
I walked over to him and asked, “Do you play?”
He seemed puzzled by my question,
started to answer, but then stopped in mid-word,
and wistfully, I thought, shook his head no,
as if he had finally decided to fall on the side
of the ethereal, instead of the temporal.
At his hesitation, I wish I had had another racket
to invite him to play, to deconstruct the fence
between his universe and mine.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

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