JCC FOCUSjcccorpuschristi.org/assets/11 November Focus 2018.pdfBy: Dave Wolpe Reference: nytimes.com...

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November 2018 Cheshvan/ Kislev 5779 JCC FOCUS Jewish Community Center of Corpus Christi

Transcript of JCC FOCUSjcccorpuschristi.org/assets/11 November Focus 2018.pdfBy: Dave Wolpe Reference: nytimes.com...

Page 1: JCC FOCUSjcccorpuschristi.org/assets/11 November Focus 2018.pdfBy: Dave Wolpe Reference: nytimes.com The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting What the astonishing

November 2018 Cheshvan/Kislev 5779

JCC FOCUS Jewish Community Center

of Corpus Christi

Page 2: JCC FOCUSjcccorpuschristi.org/assets/11 November Focus 2018.pdfBy: Dave Wolpe Reference: nytimes.com The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting What the astonishing

Director’s Corner Dear JCC Community, It’s impossible to put into words the sadness and grief we feel today for the loss of life at the Tree of L ife Synagogue in P ittsburgh. Once again, the ugly face of vicious, anti-Semitism has reminded us of the fragility of Jew ish life. And, once again we stand together across the world in unity during this time of mourning. We here at the JCC, are constantly evaluating our security procedures as we take to heart our responsibilities to our students, facility and staff. May the memory of the victims be a blessing. May their families be comforted in their sorrow. And may we stand together as Jews and as Americans in defense of all hatred.

B’Shalom, Norma Levens

President - Iris Lehrman

Vice President - Renee Solomon

2nd Vice President - Gary Blum

Secretary - Kari Oshman Rhodes

Treasurer - Matt Adler

Parliamentarian - Carla De Pena

Pres. Appointee - Lois Blum

Pres. Appointee - Linda Snider

Pres. Appointee -Jaron Sela

Board Member - Marcus Lozano

Board Member - Heather Loeb

Board Member - Vincent Muscarello

Board Member - Brittany Sandbach

Board Member - Kristen Erdmann

JCC Director - Norma Levens

JCC Rabbi - Rabbi Roseman

JCC Preschool - Manuela Sela

CBI Rabbi - Rabbi Emanuel

CBI - Leslie Levy

Sisterhood - Jackie Franklin

CJA - Nedra Lockhart

2017-2018 Board of Directors

Board Meeting TBA

Congregation Beth Israel Rabbi Ilan Emanuel

4402 Saratoga Blvd. (361) 857-8181

bethisraelcc.com

President: Jim Gold

Jewish Organizations in Corpus Christi

Combined Jewish Appeal (361) 855-6239

President: Nedra Lockhart

Assistant: Norma Levens

Chabad Coastal Bend Rabbi Naftoli Schmukler

4855 S. Alameda St., Suite 108

(361) 500-2173

chabadcorpus.org

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Jewish Community Council of Corpus Christi

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Patrons Chris & Robert Adler

Vincent & Shirley Muscarello

Susser Family Foundation

Members Marcia Marks

Susan & Bill Martin

Mary K. Mauel

Amanda & Howard Mintz

Amy & Sean Mintz

Theresa & Abraham Moss

Louis Needleman (MD)

Deborah & Scot Oshman

Kari (Oshman) & Scott Rhodes

Phyllis & Rabbi Kenneth Roseman

Ruthie & Tzachi Samocha (PhD)

Hilda & Charles Schechter

Rebecca & Maurice Schmidt

Barb & Chip Schwamb

Manuela & Jaron Sela

Nina Shannon

Linda & Dean Snider

Renee Solomon

Carol Solovey

Marlene & Jack Super

Elizabeth & Jerry Susser

Pat & Sam J. Susser

Phillis Weissman

Helen Wilk

Sue Williams

Mille Zalim

Sustainers Jaki & Richard Hausman

Annette & Melvyn Klein

Laurie & Michael Mintz (MD)

Toby Shor

Angels Annette & Jim Cottingham (MD)

Ginger & Richard Harris

Beatrice Hinojosa

Carol & Sammy Kins

Rona & L. A. Train Members

Randall Berry

Lois & Gary Blum DDS

Jeanne & Mac Brenz

Carla De Pena

Elizabeth Falk

Carol & Don Feferman

Roz & Ron Ferrell (DDS)

Jacqueline Franklin

Susan & Myron Grossman

Patricia & Robert Harris

Marian (Sussman (MD)) & Michael Hiatt

Barbara (Samuels) & Sam Horner

Ruth Josephs

Karen & Harold Kane

Ruth Kane

Fifi Kieschnick

Jeri Kolpack

Amy & David Krams

Chris & Carl Kuehn

Iris & Andy Lehrman

Bobbie & Len Leshin

Norma Levens

Leslie & Carl Levy

Nedra Lockhart

Gail Gleimer Loeb

Heather & David Loeb

Kenneth Maltz

2018 Jewish Community Center Members

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TWO VERY DIFFERENT JEWISH COMMUNITIES

On a balmy Sunday morning in 1881, Tzar Alexander was riding home from church with his family when a radical anarchist rolled a bomb under his carriage. Who got blamed for the assassination? With typical Russian xenophobia, Jews – aliens of a foreign nation – were held responsible, and a thirty-year onslaught of pogrom and persecution began. Some Jews hunkered down and imagined that the assault would be only temporary and that their normal wretched conditions would soon return. They were painfully wrong. Others joined various social-change movements, like Socialism and Communism, and many enrolled in the new Zionist experiment. By far the largest group, however, were those who decided that they could foresee no good future in Russian lands; four or five million Jews took to the road between 1882

-1924, approximately 2,400,000 entered the United States.

The arrival of this multitude of newcomers whose life-style was so very different from that of the one-generation-settled Western European migrants was traumatic. They dressed in outlandish clothing. They ate different foods, spoke different languages (Yiddish, Polish, Russian, even Rumanian) and prayed in a wholly alien manner. Nearly all of them were desperately poor and, at least according to the norms of the German-Jewish leadership, were unmannered, loud and rough. Their appearance was a challenge to the carefully devised image of the Americanized Jew that these earlier immigrants had cultivated. They certainly did not want their status in the general community diminished or tarnished by association with this rabble from the East.

These German Jews did two things. First, to their everlasting credit, they provided an exemplary network of social services. To be sure, some of their motivation was to Americanize the newer arrivals as quickly as possible. There was a legitimate fear of increased anti-Semitism. Let them shave their beards, dress appropriately and learn English, and maybe the impact on what a Jew was in the mind of America would not be so negatively affected. On a more positive note, these were fellow-Jews in need, and doesn’t our tradition command us to help the poor and the stranger! The second thing they did was change the nature of Reform Judaism. Prior to the 1880s, Reform Jewish services looked a little bit like very liberal Conservative worship. No more. Beginning around 1900, a period which we call CLASSICAL Reform Judaism spread very widely across American Jewish communities. Services used only a bare minimum of Hebrew – and, heaven forbid, never Yiddish. The main service was held on Friday evening, and a number of temples held a second gathering on Sunday morning. Jewish religion and Jewish nationalism were separated, so one could be a loyal American of the Jewish faith, at the same time being either neutral or opposed to Zionism. The rabbi and congregants did not wear distinctively Jewish garb, nor was there any insistence on dietary traditions. Sha’are Emeth Congregation even split after a group of members suggested that Hanukkah always be held on December 25th so they could be more accepted by their neighbors.

You can be certain that many of the immigrants thought these changes were ridiculous, if not downright offensive. The Conservative movement arose as a way to help those who were unable to sustain strict Orthodox practice, but who wanted a very traditional style of Jewish life.

Classical Reform Judaism was based on three ideological principles: first, human beings are fundamentally good; second, that we can control our lives through right thinking and rational decisions will yield inevitable progress and, third, that we can emancipate ourselves from unreliable emotionality if we rely solely on reason.. This is the philosophy of the European Enlightenment taken to its extreme.

And these ideological underpinnings were, one-after-another, knocked out from under Classical Reform by developments in the mid-20th century. The notion of control went first as the Great Depression taught us that we could not even control one sector of life, the economy, much less everything. Then came WWII and its revelation that citizens of the “most cultured nation in the world” could be mass murderers and bestial monsters. We were no longer able to delude ourselves about human goodness; sin and evil exist. Finally, in 1947, the State of Israel was born. Classical Reform Jews found themselves swept away by emotions and loyalties that they thought had been erased decades before. By 1967, the realization that Jews were a people as well as a religion had permeated the entire fabric of American Jewish life.

So where did this lead? Stay alert for next month’s installment.

Rabbi Roseman’s Corner

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By: Dave Wolpe Reference: nytimes.com

The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting What the astonishing Chiune Sugihara teaches us about moral heroism.

NAGOYA, Japan — “Even a hunter cannot kill a bird that flies to him for refuge.” This Samurai maxim inspired one gifted and courageous man to save thousands of people in defiance of his government and at the cost of his career. On Friday I came to Nagoya at the invitation of the Japanese government to speak in honor of his memory. The astonishing Chiune Sugihara raises again the questions: What shapes a moral hero? And how does someone choose to save people that others turn away? Research on those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust shows that many exhibited a streak of independence from an early age. Sugihara was unconventional in a society known for prizing conformity. His father insisted that his son, a top student, become a doctor. But Sugihara wanted to study languages and travel and immerse himself in literature. Forced to sit for the medical exam, he left the entire answer sheet blank. The same willfulness was on display when he entered the diplomatic corps and, as vice minister of the Foreign Affairs Department for Japan in Manchuria in 1934, resigned in protest of the Japanese treatment of the Chinese. A second characteristic of such heroes and heroines, as the psychologist Philip Zimbardo writes, is “that the very same situations that inflame the hostile imagination in some people, making them villains, can also instill the heroic imagination in other people, prompting them to perform heroic deeds.” While the world around him disregarded the plight of the Jews, Sugihara was unable to ignore their desperation. In 1939 Sugihara was sent to Lithuania, where he ran the consulate. There he was soon confronted with Jews fleeing from German occupied Poland. Three times Sugihara cabled his embassy asking for permission to issue visas to the refugees. The cable from K. Tanaka at the foreign ministry read: “Concerning transit visas requested previously stop advise absolutely not to be issued any traveler not holding firm end visa with guaranteed departure ex japan stop no exceptions stop no further inquires expected stop.” Sugihara talked about the refusal with his wife, Yukiko, and his children and decided that despite the inevitable damage to his career, he would defy his government. Mr. Zimbardo calls the capacity to act differently the “heroic imagination,” a focus on one’s duty to help and protect others. This ability is exceptional, but the people who have it are often understated. Years after the war, Sugihara spoke about his actions as natural: “We had thousands of people hanging around the windows of our residence,” he said in a 1977 interview. “There was no other way.” On Friday I spoke at Sugihara’s old high school in Nagoya, during a ceremony unveiling a bronze statue of him handing visas to a refugee family. After the ceremony, in front of some 1,200 students, I spoke with his one remaining child, his son Nobuki, who arrived from Belgium to honor his father’s memory. He told me his father was “a very simple man. He was kind, loved reading, gardening and most of all children. He never thought what he did was notable or unusual.” Most of the world saw throngs of desperate foreigners. Sugihara saw human beings and he knew he could save them through prosaic but essential action: “A lot of it was handwriting work,” he said. Day and night he wrote visas. He issued as many visas in a day as would normally be issued in a month. His wife, Yukiko, massaged his hands at night, aching from the constant effort. When Japan finally closed down the embassy in September 1940, he took the stationery with him and continued to write visas that had no legal standing but worked because of the seal of the government and his name. At least 6,000 visas were issued for people to travel through Japan to other destinations, and in many cases entire families traveled on a single visa. It has been estimated that over 40,000 people are alive today because of this one man. With the consulate closed, Sugihara had to leave. He gave the consulate stamp to a refugee to forge more visas, and he literally threw visas out of the train window to refugees on the platform. After the war, Sugihara was dismissed from the foreign office. He and his wife lost a 7-year-old child and he worked at menial jobs. It was not until 1968 when a survivor, Yehoshua Nishri, found him that his contribution was recognized. Nishri had been a teenager in Poland saved by a Sugihara visa and was now at the Israeli embassy in Tokyo. In the intervening years Sugihara never spoke about his wartime activities. Even many close to him had no idea that he was a hero. Sugihara died in 1986. Nine years earlier he gave an interview and was asked why he did it: “I told the Ministry of Foreign Affairs it was a matter of humanity. I did not care if I lost my job. Anyone else would have done the same thing if they were in my place.” Of course many were in his place — and very few acted like Sugihara. Moral courage is rare and moral greatness even rarer. It requires a mysterious and potent combination of empathy, will and deep conviction that social norms cannot shake. How would Sugihara have responded to the refugee crisis we face today, and the response of so many leaders to bolt the gates of entry? There is no simple response adequate to the enormity of the situation. But we have to keep before us the image of a single man, overtaxed, isolated and inundated, who refused to close his eyes to the chaos outside his window. He understood the obligations common to us all and heard in the pleadings of an alien tongue the universal message of pain. On Friday, I told the students that one day in each of their lives there would be a moment when they would have to decide whether to close the door or open their hearts. When that moment arrives, I implored them, remember that they came from the same school as a great man who when the birds flew to him for refuge, did not turn them away.

Chiune Sugihara, in an undated photograph.CreditThe Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images

Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan at a tree planted in memory of Chiune Sugihara in the garden of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.CreditCreditGali Tibbon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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THIS CORE JEWISH VALUE HAS GUIDED RUTH BADER GINSBURG’S CAREER

“When I first started interviewing her, if I asked her questions that she didn’t want to answer, she would just pretend not to hear them,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s biographer Jane Sherron De Hart explains to me. “She would just ignore them.” As Ginsburg got more comfortable with De Hart, she opened up more. And over nine interviews and nearly 15 years, she trusted De Hart to tell her story, from her childhood in Flatbush, Brooklyn, through her legacy on the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life by Jane Sherron De Hart is the first comprehensive biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Released this week, the book is a remarkable 500-page look at the famed justice’s life and achievements. The biography sets out to understand the “private, public, legal, [and] philosophical” life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When I started reading the biography, I wanted to know everything about her. What was she like as a child? How did she fall in love with her husband? What inspired her iconic dissents? How did she become so iconic? And, most importantly, why is she so beloved by liberal millennials — particularly Jewish millennials? What made her the Notorious RBG she is today? De Hart tells me that in recent years, Ginsburg has become such an iconic figure because there’s “the sense that she is speaking truth to power.” She’s become larger-than-life (even though she is physically so, so tiny). With the rise of RBG’s celebrity status — the documentary on her life, the forthcoming biopic (with a song by Kesha!), the count-less tweets and odes to her — where does the biography fit in? It seeks to understand her impact on laws and courts, which is so important, but it also seeks to understand Ruth herself. Most notably, her family and her relationship to her Jewishness. The questions of Ginsburg’s Jewishness is one that comes up again and again. In her iconic quote about trying to get a job after graduating from law school in 1959, she says, “I had three strikes against me. First, I was Jewish, and the Wall Street firms were just be-ginning to accept Jews. Then I was a woman. But the killer was my daughter Jane, who was 4 by then.” When De Hart started interviewing Ginsburg, she was a “very serious person.” De Hart would arrive in her chambers and “she would never so much as say hello until she finished working at her desk.” She wasn’t very eager to talk about her childhood in Flatbush, Brooklyn because of the “sadness identified with” that time (Ginsburg’s elder sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis when Ginsburg was only 2 years old). Yet, however reticent Ginsburg was to speak about her childhood, the biography still gives you a full portrait of her as a child. De Hart makes clear the impact Ginsburg’s mother, Celia, had on her. She writes in the biography how Celia “introduced her daughter to women who demonstrated what it meant to be Jewish, American, and female. These were women of valor, Celia explained, by virtue of their courage and humanity.” These women of valor included Jewish feminist trailblazers like Emma Lazarus, Henrietta Szold, and Lillian Wald.

Celia would pass away from cancer two days before Ginsburg graduated from high school. De Hart emphasizes the impact of how Celia taught Ruth the Jewish value of tikkun olam, healing the world. “I think that [tikkun olam] was very much emphasized by her mother,” she explains, “and I think it made particular sense for a child growing up in the depression, in World War II, learning about the Holocaust, and the huge need for repair after the atrocities of the war and the Holocaust. I think [Celia] emphasized the sense of social justice that is very often a part of Judaism.” In an essay from June 2, 1946, a young Ginsburg wrote in her synagogue bulletin about the Holocaust. While not included in de Hart’s biography, but in My Own Words (RBG’s collection of speeches and writings), I found it really telling of this impact Celia had on teaching Ginsburg about her heritage. “The war has left a bloody trail and many deep wounds not too easily healed,” Ginsburg writes. “Many people have been left with scars that take a long time to pass away. We must never forget the horrors which our brethren were subjected to in Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentra-tion camps. Then, too, we must try hard to understand that for righteous people hate and prejudice are neither good occupations nor fit companions.” Clearly, as a 13-year-old, Ginsburg was involved in her Jewish community. When she attend-ed summer camp at Camp Che-Ne-Wah in the Adirondacks (owned by her uncle, Sol Amster, and his wife Cornelia), she acted as

“Camp Rabbi.” However, Ginsburg hasn’t been identified with a synagogue or a temple since her mother died. One thing that pushed her away from organized Judaism was, as De Hart points out, “the fact that women could not take place in the minyan.” De Hart also points to another pivotal moment in Ginsburg’s young adulthood that alienated her from establishment Judaism: “Her father’s business went bankrupt, and he was obviously terribly depressed by her mother’s death, and he had sort of an emotional collapse, and was really living for a while on the money that Ruth had given him — the money that her mother had saved for Ruth’s college.” “During that time,” De Hart continues, “attending service on the High Holidays required membership and he couldn’t pay his dues. [So] the combination [of] a mother who had so emphasized what women had accomplished — couldn’t take part in saying the Mourner’s Kaddish during shiva — and the fact his father lost his seat the temple really created a break between any sort of formal attendance at synagogue and at membership and at temple.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a young lawyer

(Continued on page 9)

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By: Emily Burack Reference: www.heyalma.com

Book Fair & Grandparent’s Day

at the JCC Preschool!

Many years later, when Ginsburg’s granddaughter, Clara, was living in Washington D.C. with her grandmother before she attended Law School, Clara — raised in a multifaith family — wanted to attend the High Holidays services. De Hart remembers, “Ruth was so interesting about it. Because she said, [she was] really impressed, it was a female cantor, and there was a female rabbi, and then she sort of got quiet and she said, you know, if that had been true, earlier, things might have been different. I thought she was referring to her own way of observance.” Yet, Ginsburg keeps her Jewish heritage at the forefront of her work, as De Hart points out again and again in the biography. Ginsburg herself summed up the impact her Jewishness has had on her at a speech she gave at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2004, saying, “My heritage as a Jew and my occupation as a judge fit together symmetrically. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition. I take pride in and draw strength from my heritage, as signs in my chambers attest: a large silver mezuzah on my door post, gift from the Shulamith School for Girls in Brooklyn; on three walls, in artists’ renditions of Hebrew letters, the command from Deuteronomy: ‘tzedek, tzedek, tirdof’ — ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue.’ Those words are ever-present reminders of what judges must do that they ‘may thrive.'” De Hart ends her biography when Ginsburg was in Israel in July 2018, just a few days before President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. De Hart writes that at a screening of RBG (the documentary) in Jerusalem, “Ginsburg talked about the concept of tikkun olam that had become such a vital part of her heritage… Pulling out her pocket copy of America’s foundational legal text, she spoke of her great-granddaughter, saying that she would like to tell her that ‘your equality is a fundamental tenet of the United States.’ [Her plea] made clear the continuity of Ginsburg’s commitment to equal justice. The struggle to repair the world never ceases.”

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Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

CBI Services @ 9 a.m. Torah Study @ 11 a.m.

16 Kislev

2 Kislev

25 Cheshvan

CBI Services @9 a.m.

Torah Study @ 11 a.m.

26 Cheshvan 28 Cheshvan 29 Cheshvan 30 Cheshvan 1 Kislev

3 Kislev 4 Kislev 5 Kislev 6 Kislev 7 Kislev 8 Kislev

10 Kislev 11 Kislev 12 Kislev 13 Kislev 14 Kislev 15 Kislev

27 Cheshvan

CBI Shabbat Services @ 6:30 p.m.

CBI Services @ 9 a.m. Torah Study @ 11 a.m.

CBI Services @ 9 a.m. Torah Study @ 11 a.m.

CBI Shabbat Services @ 6:30 p.m.

17 Kislev 18 Kislev

Shabbat ends

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Shabbat begins

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Shabbat begins

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Shabbat begins

5:17 p.m.

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CBI Shabbat Services @ 6:30 p.m.

Shabbat ends

6:12 p.m.

Shabbat ends

6:16 p.m.

JCC Community Calendar

November 2018 Cheshvan/Kislev 5779

19 Kislev

CBI Shabbat Services @ 6:30 p.m.

Shabbat begins

6:27 p.m.

20 Kislev

24 Cheshvan 23 Cheshvan

21 Kislev 22 Kislev

Shabbat begins

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6:12 p.m. 23 Kislev

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Congregation Beth Israel 7:30pm

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page 13 By: Josefin Dolsten Reference: www.jta.org

A black, Orthodox rabbi’s novel addresses racism in the Jewish community

NEW YORK (JTA) — When Shais Rishon thinks of American Jewish literature, virtually no Jews of color come to mind — as characters or authors. “We’re invisible, pretty much,” he told JTA. As an African-American Orthodox rabbi, Rishon hopes to change that. He recently published a semi-autobiographical novel titled “Ariel Samson: Freelance Rabbi,” under his pen name, MaNishtana. The main character, Ariel, is a 20-something black rabbi navigating life and work in the New York Jewish community while attempting to reconcile his identities. Rishon, 36, says many of the racist experiences Ariel faces within the Jewish community are either based on his own life or stories told to him by other Jews of color. One episode, in which Ariel confronts an Orthodox New York assemblyman over wearing a blackface costume on Purim, is a “verbatim” recollection of a conversation that Rishon had with a real local politician who did that. (Rishon did not reveal the politician’s true identity in his interview with JTA, but based on the description, the book is almost certainly referring to Dov Hikind, who was widely criticized for wearing a blackface costume in 2013 and whom Rishon addressed in an open letter.) Rishon grew up in Brooklyn in a black-Jewish family affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch moment, though today he identifies simply as Orthodox. His mothers’ ancestors have been practicing Judaism since the 1780s, he says. The author and educator, who has written about racism in the Jewish community for years for publications like the Forward and Tablet, hopes his book, which he self-published in September, can challenge wide-held notions about the traditional American Jewish experience. Often, he says, works by black-Jewish authors and artists are seen as reflecting only the African-American experience and not the Jewish one. “There’s a weird dichotomy that happens, where you can have people who are black Jewish authors, but they are nev-er considered part of Jewish American literature,” Rishon said. “James McBride is considered an African-American au-thor, not a Jewish author. Daveed Diggs, when he talks about his experiences, [people say,] ‘Oh, this is an African-American experience.’” The book also shows the questioning that many Jews of color continually face about their backgrounds. In the novel, a man at a Shabbat dinner asks Ariel intrusive questions, including if he is a convert and Ethiopian. Rishon hopes to show why such lines of questioning are hurtful. “When you see somebody with one arm, do you ask them ‘Hey, what’s up with your arm?'” he wonders. “It’s just the basic courtesy of getting to know someone.” Rishon says he has received threatening and angry messages in response to his writing about racism in the Jewish com-munity. He uses a pseudonym in order to shield his family and friends from the backlash. The name is a reference to the Ma Nishtana reading sung on Passover asking why the seder dinner differs from a regular meal. “Instead of ‘What makes this night so different from other nights?’ it’s ‘What makes this Jew so different from other Jews?'” he explains. Outside of his writing, Rishon works full time as a content manager for Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish social justice organization. Rishon also serves as the rabbi for an Orthodox prayer group in New City, a town an hour from Man-hattan where he lives with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. He is pursuing a second rabbinic ordination; he was previ-ously ordained privately. In recent years, Jewish organizations have increasingly focused on embracing and highlighting diversity within their own communities, but Rishon says plenty remains to be done. “I would say it’s just now starting to move in baby steps away from tokenization,” he says. Rishon sees his novel as one step in that direction. “I’m so excited to write this, so there is no confusion,” he says. “I’m an African-American author, yes, and a Jewish-American author, yes — both. To put the Jew of color entry into Jewish American fiction.”

Shais Rishon’s latest book, “Ariel Samson: Free-lance Rabbi,” tells the story of a 20-something black spiritual leader. (Courtesy of Rishon)

Page 14: JCC FOCUSjcccorpuschristi.org/assets/11 November Focus 2018.pdfBy: Dave Wolpe Reference: nytimes.com The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting What the astonishing

page 14

For more information on the JCC Preschool or the JCC Summer Program Please contact: Manuela Sela, JCC Preschool Director at (361) 855-6239 or

Email: [email protected]

Dear parents, It is fall, and the first cold days have arrived. For our students, November is a very ex-citing month. Our 3-year-olds are going to do a Thanksgiving performance for the entire school and for their family and friends. Before they perform, they will practice all their songs in the classroom and auditorium room. You might hear some new songs soon! We also have our annual Thanksgiving classroom parties (for all classrooms). Please make sure to be in contact with your child’s teacher about the date and time. And I hope you can celebrate Thanksgiving with us! In the classrooms you will see more and more pumpkins and we are talking about being thank-ful and being kind. I am very happy and thankful for being part of the JCC family. I cannot say how much love, joy and laughter these children bring each and every day. Thank you for being part of the JCC Family. I wish everyone a happy and safe Thanksgiving. With warm regards, Manuela Sela

Important days to remember:

November 9th Veterans Shabbat hosted by the PTO 8:30 am (auditorium room) November 14th 3-year-old Thanksgiving program at 10:30 am (auditorium room) November 19th - 21st Thanksgiving break (holiday care available) November 22nd - 23rd Thanksgiving break (no school) November 29th JCC PTO meeting 9:00 am (boardroom)

AGES 15 MONTHS TO KINDERGARTEN

A Note From...

Page 15: JCC FOCUSjcccorpuschristi.org/assets/11 November Focus 2018.pdfBy: Dave Wolpe Reference: nytimes.com The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting What the astonishing

JCC The Place To Be!

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Shabbat and Mitzvahs

Happy Birthday!

November 13th Lisa Bledsoe

(JCC Bookkeeper) November 18th

Savannah Olivarez (PM Care)

November 27th Shayna Sands

(L’Dor V’Dor/ Libarary)

Important Dates to Remember!

Friday, November 9th Veteran’s day celebration hosted by PTO (beginning at 8:30am)

Tuesday, November 14th Pre K 1 & 2 Thanksgiving Program (beginning at 10:30am)

Monday - Wednesday, November 19th - 21st Thanksgiving Break (No School/ Holiday care will be available)

Thursday - Friday, November 22nd - 23rd Thanksgiving Break (No School/ No Holiday care)

Thursday, November 29th PTO Meeting at 6:00pm in boardroom (discussion will be about “Spring Fling”)

Nov. 9th - Veteran’s Day Celebration

Nov. 14th - Pre K 1 & 2 Thanksgiving Program Nov.19th - 21st - Thanksgiving Break

(No school/Holiday care open) Nov. 22nd - 23rd - Thanksgiving Break

(No school/ No Holiday care) Nov. 29th - PTO Meeting

November 2nd ………….Shabbat 9:00am/ Mitzvah Ms. Lisa “Being Thankful” November 9th ………….Shabbat 9:00am/ Mitzvah Ms. Norma “Respect/Veteran’s Day” November 16th …………Shabbat 9:00am/ Mitzvah Ms. Lisa “Being Thankful” November 30th …………Shabbat 9:00am/ Mitzvah Mrs. Marez/ Ms. Diana “Taking Care of the Sick”

Page 16: JCC FOCUSjcccorpuschristi.org/assets/11 November Focus 2018.pdfBy: Dave Wolpe Reference: nytimes.com The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting What the astonishing

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2018 Membership January 1, 2018 - December 31, 2018