Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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In 1976, Steve Silberman, then a 19-year-old freshman at Oberlin College, took a bus to New York City to see Allen Ginsberg read. With Silberman was his first boyfriend. Silberman had been in the closet throughout high school, one of many reasons he drew inspiration from the outspokenly gay Ginsberg. “I sat in the front row, and Allen comes out, and I had never seen a middle-aged man look so happy and fully present and awake and authentic, and there was just no bullshit about him,” recalls Silberman, 55, now a San Francisco writer and con...
In June 1965, during the most violent days of the civil rights movement, 21-year-old Paul Saltzman drove from Toronto to Mississippi to become a freedom fighter with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Just a year before, Klansmen from Neshoba County, Miss., had assassinated the young activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and the year before that, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death outside his Mississippi home. Within hours of arriving in the Delta, Saltzman—a Canadian Jew whose uncles were p...
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Four generations of Lieberman boys stare out from a collage that hangs from a corridor wall in Johannesburg, South Africa. Each boy is 7—a significant number in the life of the first boy, from whom the others descend photographically and genealogically. An ordeal that befell Israel Lieberman at that age would spur him to safeguard his sons against disaster, and they have done the same for their sons. The collage attests to Lieberman’s scars, but also to his mother’s unquenc...
JOSHUA TREE, Calif. (JTA)—In 1968, only six years after founding the AEPi chapter at his Long Island University campus, Steven Silberfein took one of the thousand names of the Hindu god Vishnu and became Sridhar Silberfein. A year later, the one-time Jewish fraternity brother escorted the Hindu teacher Swami Satchidananda to the stage at Woodstock to deliver an invocation in front of 500,000 flower children. Surveying the crowd, Silberfein turned to the cotton-bearded swami and said, ...
NEW YORK (JTA) —Over the past half century, intermarriage has become increasingly common in the United States among all religions—but among Jews at the highest rate. Why that is the case is one of the questions Naomi Schaefer Riley probes in her new book, “‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America” (Oxford University Press). One of the main reasons, Riley finds, is that the older people get, the more likely they are to intermarry—and Jews tend to marry older than A...
With about 40 games gone by— one quarter of the season—here’s a look at how the JMLs are faring as of May 19: Like last year, New York Mets first baseman Ike Davis has gotten off to a horrible start, so much so that fans and media are clamoring for his demotion to the minor leagues. In 39 games, Davis is batting just .156 with four home runs and nine runs batted in. The New York Yankees signed Kevin Youkilis to fill in for third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who was due to miss at least half the s...
When reading a novel, I focus more on plot and character analysis than the author’s writing style. Yet, when considering two recent works by Israeli writers, the differences in their prose was impossible to ignore. In her first novel, “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid” (Hogarth), Shani Boianjiu, who wrote in English, employs very blunt language in order to portray a young, disaffected generation of Israelis. A.B. Yehoshua, in his latest work, “The Retrospective” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), offers very lush writing and complex sentences...
CHICAGO—By the time Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Captain Ziv Shilon realized an explosive device had detonated near him while on patrol near the Gaza border, his left hand was torn off and his right hand was still hanging on by just a few pieces of skin. Ten surgeries and months of rehabilitation later, his left hand has been replaced by a hook prosthesis and his right hand is paralyzed. That’s not going to stop him, he insists. Despite his injury, Shilon plans to enroll in law school and to late...
Israel has more museums per capita than anywhere else in the world. With 230-plus museums (and counting), visitors and locals have the luxury of choosing which topic—art, science, history, design, architecture, technology—appeals to them most. Every year since 1977, the International Council of Museums has celebrated the importance of these cultural institutions in the development of society with an International Museum Day on or around May 18. Some 32,000 museums in 130 countries par...
Heritage Florida Jewish News is accepting nominations for the 2013 Heritage Human Service Award, which will be presented in August at the annual meeting of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando. “For more than 25 years, individuals who have made major, voluntary contributions of their talent, time, energy, and effort to the Central Florida community have been honored with the selection and presentation of this award,” says Jeff Gaeser, editor and publisher of the Heritage. Last year’s recipient was Dr. Zena Sulkes. The Heritage is accep...
Barbara Walters retiring NEW YORK (JTA)—After 37 years at ABC, Barbara Walters is calling it quits, the network announced. “It’s time,” said Walters, 83. “I keep thinking of the line from ‘Cabaret’: ‘When I go, I’m going like Chelsea.’ When I go there is not going to be any, ‘Please can I have another appearance?’ I don’t want to do any more interviews. I don’t want to do any other programs. I’m not joining CNN. This is it.” Over the course of her 50-year career, Walters did more than interview an endless list of VIPs. As the nation’s first...
NEW YORK (JTA)—“You have night blindness,” the Israeli army doctor announced unsympathetically at my pre-service medical examination. “You’re dismissed from your IDF mandatory army service by law,” he said and called the next soldier-to-be. I was frightened by the diagnosis. I had worn glasses since I was 3, but I never thought I would lose my vision at 18. It turned out not to be as serious as it sounded: My eyes just didn’t get used to darkness as quickly as they should. It took me time to digest the enormity of the news: I didn’t need t...
”Oy am I fahklempt” department… You know what fahklempt means… eyes tear up and a lump in the throat. That’s how I felt after just seeing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on television with James Cagney. (I know very few actor’s names these days. It feels great to see a name I recognize.) Anyway, although I know that Hollywood movies take liberties with the whole truth, it was still nice to hear the story of George M. Cohan, who at the turn of the last century, wrote songs like “Give my regards to Broadw...
Becoming a reviewer has made me a better reader. Instead of dismissing works I don’t enjoy, I now analyze why they didn’t appeal to me: Is it something personal, for example, did a character or plot line trouble me? Does the author’s prose or writing style enhance the telling of the story for me or distract from it? Would other readers relish the book even if I didn’t find it to my taste? Two recent novels—“The Middlesteins” by Jami Attenberg (Grand Central Publishing) and “A Town of Empty Rooms...
“I don’t think I’m in any way a sociopath,” said Ariel Vromen, the Israeli-born filmmaker behind “The Iceman,” inspired by the true story of one of America’s most notorious mob hitmen, Richard Kuklinski, who died in prison in 2006. Yet Vromen remembers watching an HBO documentary about Kuklinski in 2007 and feeling a kind of empathy, even a connection, to the 6-foot-5, 300-pound killer who claimed to have whacked at least 100 men between the 1960s and the 1980s, all while maintaining his double life as a devoted family man in suburban New Jerse...
On a warm Sunday morning last month in Washington Square Park, parents were leisurely pushing strollers, sunbathers were strewn about on the grass, and people of all ages were lounging on the wooden benches and sipping coffee. Meanwhile about 15 sixth graders darted around in groups of two or three, their heads bent over iPhones and iPads, shouting out things like, “I just found the foreman. He gave me the money!” “We have to go back to Rose,” and “The shtarkers are after us!” The kids, students at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s religious sch...
PRAIA, Cape Verde (JTA)—A Portuguese rabbi and a Moroccan diplomat stood shoulder to shoulder in a Catholic cemetery here while 200 mourners howled in grief as they buried a resident of this island off the western coast of Africa. The foreigners had come to Cape Verde’s main cemetery earlier this month not to bury a local, but for the rededication of 10 gravestones of Moroccan Jews—members of an extinct community whose roots trace to the 1860s. With virtually no practicing Jews on Cape Verde...
PHILADELPHIA—The summer of 2013 is shaping up to be a pretty good one for the former Melvin James Kaminsky, better known as Mel Brooks. In addition to his son Max’s bestselling zombie apocalypse oral history, “World War Z,” being made into one of the year’s most anticipated blockbusters, Brooks will be given the 41st Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute in June. The recognition is only surprising in that it took so long; three of Brooks’ films are ranked in the AFI’s Top 1...
When Alexander Stille’s mother died in 1993, she left few papers behind—just some letters, photographs and remnants of the lists she maintained to organize her life. Everything was in its proper place; her bills were paid and her will was signed. His father died about two years later, surrounded by mountainous piles of newspapers and books. A man who had been displaced twice in his life—first from Russia and then from Italy—leaving everything behind, he had a hard time throwing anything out. “His closet was kind of a rest home for retired c...
When Rabbi Baruch HaLevi took over as spiritual leader of Congregation Shirat Hayam in Swampscott, Mass., which is just outside Boston, Shabbat attendance was anemic and two small rival factions in the synagogue were always arguing over which group was being called to the Torah more often. These days, 300 to 500 people take part in the Conservative congregation’s Shabbat offerings and the place is now considered among the most dynamic in the country. It has been mentioned by some as a suburban version of B’nai Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper...
This year, at least seven Jewish athletes will ply their trade on Major League rosters (two more are on the disabled list). It might be argued that a much larger contribution to the game has been made by the scores of Jewish men and women who write about the national pastime. “501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die” includes several such titles by sportswriters, historians, statisticians and novelists. While these may not necessarily be the best books on the topics, they enc...
Writer Jonathan Ames, creator of the HBO television series “Bored to Death,” is known for his fearless and exhibitionistic persona. One can find YouTube videos of him eating herring and boxing at the same time, having knives thrown at him by a person called “Throwdini,” and ranting drunkenly at an awards ceremony. And when it comes to writing, Ames’s essays tend to cover racy topics. Given these exploits, it’s a bit surprising to learn that Ames’s recent trip to Israel made his Jewish mother hap...
The first time that Sid Kaplan saw a photograph being developed he was 10 years old. In a makeshift darkroom in the corner of a bedroom in a friend’s Bronx apartment, he watched the image emerge onto the paper in a bath of chemicals. “I just got hypnotized and addicted to the whole thing,” says Kaplan, now 75 and many, many images later. You may never have heard of Sid Kaplan, but his hand and eye are behind many of the greatest photographs that have been on view in museums and galleries since the 1960s. A master printer, he has done darkr...
If Peter Max’s life had turned out the way he originally planned, he wouldn’t be an artist. “I always thought I was going to become an astronomer because I loved astronomy so much,” Max says. “I thought art was something that kids do, a hobby.” Max’s “hobby” has made him one of the most popular artists of the last 50 years, a painter whose dazzlingly colorful, easily recognizable work is among the most collectible in the art market. He has painted everything from musicians Jimi Hendrix and...
EFRAT, West Bank (JTA)—One Christmas eve, as Jews across the country headed for Chinese restaurants, I found myself in a church choir. The church, on the outskirts of Boston and straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, had hired me to sing for their service. As the clock struck 11, I entered the sanctuary with the choir, our robes and music illuminated only by the candles each of us held. “Once in royal David’s city stood a lowly cattle shed,” we intoned in a near-whisper as the organ w...
