The Program in Jewish Studies and CU’s Hillel are excited to be able to host award winning poet, author and activist Almog Behar to the Boulder Campus on Monday April 2 at 7:30 pm at Old Main Theater.  This is his first visit to the United States, coming to Boulder after serving as an artist in residence with the Judaic Studies Program at Syracuse University in New York.

Almog Behar is an Israeli Mizrahi (Jew of Arab descent), award winning writer, poet and activist involved in the solidarity movement against the eviction of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Behar is also actively engaged in a small but vibrant community of Jewish and Palestinian Israeli writers—who write in both Hebrew and Arabic—and has participated in the organization of bilingual poetry readings and the compilation of Israeli and Palestinian bilingual poetry collections. Behar’s own fiction and poetry explore the connections between Hebrew and Arabic, insist on the importance of Arabic culture in contemporary Israel and highlight the historic and tradition-based connections between Judaism and Islam and Jewish and Muslim communities in the Middle East.

Join us for an evening with Almog Behar that will include a conversation with Zilla Goodman, Senior Instructor and Head of the Hebrew language and literature program, about his work as a poet, author and activist as well as readings from his recent work.  Additional information about his poetry and activism can be found in an interview with the online magazine Words Without Borders. The following is an excerpt from his poem  “My Arabic is Mute.”

My Arabic is Mute
Strangled in the throat
Cursing itself
Without uttering a word
Sleeping in the suffocating air
Of the shelters of my soul
Hiding
From family members
Behind the shutters of the Hebrew.

Free and open to the public – please RSVP via email to Nicholas.Underwood@colorado.edu or call 303.492.7143.  Almog Behar’s visit has been made possible by generous donors to CU’s Hillel, the Program in Jewish Studies and the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS).  Support for the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is generously provided by Legacy Heritage Fund Limited.

- Contributors include Alan Dershowitz, Dennis Ross, Marlee Matlin, Max Brenner and Lenny Krayzelburg

- Book supports Jewish elder care

Eleven years in the making, “One Egg Is A Fortune” is a book featuring recipes, stories and biographies from fifty prominent Jewish people from around the world. Some of the proceeds from sales go to Jewish elder care.  The book was awarded Best in the World as winner in its category, ”Australia-Pacific – Fundraising, Charity and Community”, in the 17th annual Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Entries came from 172 countries and a gala event was held on March 6th at Les Folies Bergère. Co-author/publishers, Judy Kempler and Pnina Jacobson were there to accept their award.

In an acceptance speech, Kempler stated:

We are all winners here tonight. We are so proud that our book has been honoured on the world stage. We thank all the contributors and people who have helped make this book possible. My late mother-in-law was the inspiration- highlighting the growing need to provide help for our ageing community.”

Jacobson continued and acknowledged

…the hard work provided by all the professionals, during the journey of self-publishing of a high quality book…This award is wonderful and we hope you all buy our book and help raise more funds and care for the elderly.”

While each contributor tells a unique story, their anecdotes suggest that the enjoyment of food is the common thread that binds us together. “One Egg Is A Fortune” is a cookbook full of heart! It is a book for today from years gone by.  This timeless book presents over 100 delicious recipes with clear, easy-to-follow instructions with stunning food photography by Craig Cranko, sophisticated food styling by Michele Cranston (Marie Claire, The New York Times and others), and elegant book design by award winner Melanie Feddersen from i2i Design.

The genesis of this book began over ten years ago. Pnina and Judy met when their children were young. Standing at the bus stop, seeing their children off to school, they would often talk about doing something worthwhile for the community and yet still be stay-at-home mothers, caring for their families.

As they got talking, their shared interest in food emerged, not just the meals but the memories associated with them. And so the concept of the book developed into a mingling of recipes with the warmth of nostalgia and sociological record. At this time, Judy was a carer for her late mother-in-law Viola, and realised that so much more was needed to help our ageing community. They decided then that part of the proceeds from this book would support Jewish aged care.

Each recipe is superbly photographed and accompanied by a story such as Broadway singer Dudu Fisher growing up with his grandmother Frieda, whose Holocaust experience made her want to see her grandson as a fat, happy little boy and for Frieda in the days of the Holocaust an egg was worth a fortune. Hence the title!

The book’s RRP is $45 and can be purchased from the website (oneeggisafortune.com) and through websites of Boulder Jewish News and The Jewish Exponent. It is also available at selected book stores.

Please contact the publishers at info@oneeggisafortune.com for requests for interviews, review copies or ideas on how the book can be used as part of a charity fund raiser.

Jay Michaelson returns to the Boulder JCC with his new book, “God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality,” on Monday, April 23 at 7 pm. Co-sponsored by Out Boulder and Keshet, the author talk will focus on the myth that the Bible forbids homosexuality, a myth which Michaelson argues is behind some of the most divisive and painful conflicts of our day.

In his game-changing book, the scholar and activist argues that not only does the Bible not prohibit same-sex intimacy, the vast majority of its teachings support the full equality and dignity of gay and lesbian people, from the first flaw it finds in creation (“It is not good for a person to be alone”) to the way religious communities grow through reflection and conscience.  In short, Michaelson says, religious people should support equality for gays and lesbians not despite their religion — but because of it.

With close readings of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, the latest data on the science of sexual orientation, and a sympathetic, accessible, and ecumenical approach to religious faith, Michaelson makes the case that sexual diversity is part of the beauty of nature, and that the recognition of same-sex families will strengthen, not threaten, the values religious people hold dear.

Michaelson is a writer, scholar, and activist whose work addresses the intersections of religion, sexuality, spirituality, and law.  Two years ago he came to the Boulder JCC to speak about his previous book, “Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism.”

He is the author of three other books and more than 200 articles, essays, and works of fiction. He is the Associate Editor of Religion Dispatches, a Contributing Editor to the Forward newspaper, and Founding Editor of Zeek magazine. His work on behalf of sexual minorities in religious communities has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, and NPR, as well as several anthologies.

In 2009, Jay was included on the “Forward 50” list of “the men and women who are leading the American Jewish community into the 21st century,” and in June, 2010, he won the New York Society for Professional Journalists “Deadline Club” award for opinion writing.

Hitler shook the trees and America picked up the apples.”

In this oft-quoted aphorism of unknown origin, the “tree” was the venerable tradition of arts and culture in Germany that had born rich fruit for centuries. The “apples” were the brilliant artists who were forced to flee Germany and Austria for their very lives.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, many of the greatest minds of their generation found themselves violently uprooted from their homes, history and national identity. Transplanted to the alien American soil, these  creative geniuses promptly transformed the cultural landscape of their host culture.

Most of these apples were deemed rotten by the Third Reich simply based on the fact that they were Jewish, but some were banished because they were anti-Nazi, leftist, or otherwise suspect because of their modernist artistic sensibilities. Indeed, when these refugees hastily packed their bags, they threw in one precious item: the inclination toward artistic modernity.

Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht were notable non-Jewish artists who found themselves unwelcome, indeed in grave danger, in a Germany committed to art that reflected the Aryan values of the Third Reich.  Peter Lorre, Fritz Lang, Otto Klemperer, Lion Feuchtwanger, Max Reinhardt, Hans Eisler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg were among the notable emigres who fled Germany and quickly began to wield enormous influence in America, primarily in talent-hungry Hollywood.

Although many of the best and brightest enjoyed success and lived luxurious lives in this “palm-tree purgatory,” they still felt caught between two worlds and longed for their European homeland. Many others were frustrated by their lack of options, stumbled over the language barrier, and never recovered their careers or lived up to their promise.

Some stories are fascinating tales of resilience and opportunity, but most are tinged with pain. Out of forced exile came a bitter revenge, the re-imagination of American culture.

Join Menorah as we explore the lives of artists who made their mark in film, theater, music, art, literature and dance in their adopted homeland.  Kathryn Bernheimer will discuss ”Artists in Exile”  on Thursday, March 8 at noon at the Boulder JCC. Cost for lunch and learn is $8 at the door.

Mitchell Bard and Menorah Director Kathryn Bernheimer

Mitchell Bard held fifty listeners spellbound Sunday night at the Boulder JCC, summarizing his new book, “The Arab Lobby” and then taking questions for an hour.  Some highights:

• The main movers behind the Arab Lobby are Big Oil and Saudi Arabia.
• Saudi Arabia and the US have a Faustian bargain going back 80 years or more:  Keep the Saudi Royal’s heads attached to their necks, in return for reasonably stable oil prices and supply.
• The only President to get anything else from the Saudis was Kennedy, whose pressure on the Saudis succeeded in getting them to finally outlaw slavery (100 years after the US did).
• The Saudis are paying to influence American textbooks about Middle East history and politics, even down to the K-12 level.

For more, see Stan Kreis’ review of “The Arab Lobby” in the BJN.

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All the historical forces that exist today in the Arab-Israeli conflict are just rebirths of old forces we tend to think of as new. What is new is simply each generation’s discovery of these forces. It proves the old maxim that history does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

And so it is with Mitchell Bard’s new book, “The Arab Lobby.” You may think AIPAC is devising the Mideast policies of the US government. You might think that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2007 book, “The Israel Lobby,” accurately portrays the new state of the US-Israeli relationship whereby the Israeli tail wags the US dog; that the US State Dept. and our military bend to Israeli concerns over American self-interest; that Arabs and Arab states have become more reasonable and Palestinians are now the underdogs; and that Israel is an imperialist and even apartheid state. And finally, you might believe that it is new to say that it is in Israel’s self-interest for the USA to take a more aggressive approach to some presumed Israeli intransigence, for their own good (tough love?).

Bard makes the case that there exists an Arab Lobby, that this Lobby has existed formally since the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and informally through various Arab political formations after the fall of the Ottoman Empire near the end of World War I. The House of Saud, for instance, is one example. More importantly, the same political forces pulling on the US government, the White House, the Arabs, the Palestinians, the Islamists, the Pentagon, and all the parallel institutions of the Israelis has not fundamentally changed over all these years. The one thing that has changed though is that the Arabs are better at lobbying in the USA and have more influence than ever. But not near enough to change their relative strength in our political arena.

One important thing that is true now and was true way back when is that the Arab Lobby does not have a popular base among the US people while the Israel Lobby does.

The Arabs do not seek to call attention to or debate Israel head on because their attempts to do so have always been failures, as Bard points out. They’ve tried this. Their heavy-handed narratives only alienate them from the American people. So they prefer to insinuate themselves in more subdued ways, such as funding and therefore biasing Middle East scholarship departments at important American universities by endowing chairs. Or influencing the placement of their insufficiently critical narratives in our grade school and high school textbooks. Or establishing their extremist Wahhabi schools and mosques in urban and suburban America.

The fact that American support for Israel has not changed since the formation of Israel in 1948 drives the Arabs just plain crazy. But it drives the Arab’s American supporters even crazier. These Americans are an important contingent of so-called Arabists who populate and dominate our own Departments of State and even the Pentagon, some Christian denominations, the old oil industry, universities and intelligentsia, media and philo-Arabists who for various reasons (up to and including hatred of Jews) think Israel’s formation was an historical tragedy. Bard thinks this combination of forces is larger and more powerful than the Israel Lobby, but less politically agile because it fundamentally has to go against American sympathy for Israel and the Jews.

Moreover, Bard says, the Arabists have been consistently wrong in their arguments against Israel and in favor of the Arabs. These historic arguments include that Israel’s formation would be a danger to the Jews, that arming Israel would lead to Israeli over-reaction and war, that Israel would go communist, that the Arab nations would break with the United States and deny us oil, etc. Still, the Arabists manage to continuously dredge up these same arguments in new forms.

From this understanding Bard then makes a new and interesting point: The Arab Lobby morphed from its nascent Jew-hatred, oil-based threats and denial of Israel’s self-determination to support for a narrative of an underdog, oppressed and repressed Palestinian nationhood. Bard makes a case that this new narrative never really accorded with the reality of Israeli-Palestinian politics. In 2002 NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman reported to much excitement that Saudi ruler Crown Prince Abdullah announced at a dinner to which he was invited in Riyadh that the Arabs would bury the hatchet (normalize relations) with Israel if Israel made a complete withdrawal from the disputed territories. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Ohlmert famously made the requisite Israeli-side offer to negotiate on this basis, but the Saudis never responded positively to his entreaties, even changing the terms. Meanwhile, Friedman’s hechsher helped them garner much undeserved goodwill just after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

To continue, the Arabs also succeeded in turning the struggle of narratives from one of an embattled David (Israel) against the Arab Goliath to a religious war in which the Arab and Muslim diaspora could pit a Jewish/Nazi/imperialist state against Islam. Otherwise, why would Muslims in Asia care about the Palestinian problem when they have many others closer to their home? Yet none of this has empirically increased their support among the American people.

Yet the Arabs and Muslims have built many American-based Islamic and Arab organizations precisely to push the religious line: devout and peaceful Muslims against Islamophobia. These organizations get ample funding and backing from Arab sources. The Congress of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is one of these. It bills itself as a Muslim version of the NAACP. But it was founded by elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, it refuses to back Israel against Hamas, and it’s leaders have been put on record in closed meetings as calling itself pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah. They have lost support from a high of 29,000 members after the 9/11 attack to around 1,700 in 2006, according to a report in the Washington Times. Meanwhile, they have been feted by high-level administration operatives and used as counsel on such things as police training against a supposed Islamophobia.

Bard details the more contemporaneous cast of characters: Christian anti-Zionists such as the Presbyterian Church, diplomatic alumni seeking careers as Arab and Muslim favorites, academics who couch the Arab and Muslim narrative in biased terms in the classrooms of our youth and in our universities.

None of these new initiatives has paid off so far in turning America against Israel. Meanwhile the Israeli narrative has grown stronger in America. But can this working relationship be undone? The Arab Lobby would like to do just that.

Come and learn more about this important work by Mitchell Bard and deepen your understanding of this subject. Mitchell Bard will make an appearance at the Boulder Jewish Community Center on Sunday, February 12 at 7:00 pm to talk about his new book, “The Arab Lobby.”

Mitchell Bard

The allegation that a powerful Israel lobby exerts undue influence over US policy has been front page news for years. Left largely unexamined until now is the existence of an Arab lobby that not only wields great influence but poses a threat to US interests.

Mitchell Bard will be at the Boulder JCC on Sunday, February 12 at 7 pm to discuss his provocative and eagerly anticipated new book, “The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East.”

Mitchell Bard makes the historic argument that an Arab lobby composed of big oil companies, weapons firms, and Middle Eastern despots is secretly conspiring to undermine decision making in the U.S. capital.  A foreign policy analyst who lectures frequently on U.S.-Middle East policy, Bard boldly asserts that while the lobby has a legitimate role in the debate, most people have no idea that the lobby exists, how it operates or the implications for American interests of its efforts.

After spending more than 20 years researching and writing about the influences on U.S. Middle East policy, Bard was motivated to write the first comprehensive examination of the Arab lobby because of an obsessive mischaracterization of the Israeli lobby which has helped those seeking to delegitimize Israel. At the same time, he realized that few people acknowledge that an Arab lobby exists and that it seeks to exert its own influence on U.S. policy, often working against American values and interests.

“The point of this study is to highlight how the debate may be distorted because of the vast financial resources of the Arab lobby, and to expose some of its efforts to manipulate public opinion and foreign policy, often beyond public view, in ways that have gone largely unnoticed and demand greater scrutiny.”

According to Bard, the Arab lobby has two main components. The first focuses on oil and its goal is to do whatever is necessary to guarantee that Saudi oil continues to flow, which sometimes means ignoring or subverting other U.S. interests. The other part of the lobby is the domestic Arab lobby comprised of Arab and Muslim Americans, academics, non-evangelical Christians and Arabists, whose goal is to promote the Palestinian agenda, though, he notes, they lobby primarily against Israel rather than for any positive pro-Palestinian or pro-Arab agenda.

One of the nation’s leading authorities on U.S.-Israel relations, Mitchell Bard is currently the head of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and director of the Jewish Virtual Library, the world’s most comprehensive online encyclopedia of Jewish history and culture. He is the author of 18 books, including “Will Israel Survive?” and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Middle East Conflict.” For three years he was the editor of the Near East Report, the AIPAC  weekly newsletter on U.S. Middle East policy.

Bard, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA and a master’s degree in public policy from Berkeley, has appeared on Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, CBC, the Jenny Jones Show, al-Jazeera and other local and national television and radio outlets. His work has been published in academic journals, magazines and major newspapers.

Tickets are $10 at the door; free to students with ID. Reservations may be made online at https://boulderjcc.wufoo.com/forms/menorah-the-arab-lobby/. For more information, contact Kathryn Bernheimer at 303-998-1021; Kathryn@boulderjcc.org.

Menorah hosts its first community-wide book club event on Sunday, January 29, at 4 pm. This program is also a commemoration of the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War and includes a book discussion, a meal and a film.

DU Professor Adam Rovner returns to the Boulder JCC to discuss the work of award-winning author Dara Horn and lead a book-club style discussion of her third acclaimed novel, “All Other Nights,” a page-turner set against the backdrop of the Civil War. “All Other Nights,” published in 2009, was selected as New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.

Following a light dinner break featuring Civil War era cuisine (vegetarian), audiences can sit back (or recline) to watch the new documentary, “Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray.” Professor Ronnie Grinberg from CU’s Program in Jewish Studies will lead a discussion about Jewish life during the Civil War after the screening.

Did you know there were 150,00 Jews living in America at the time of the Civil War? And that more Jews lived in Charleston and New Orleans than New York and Philadelphia? Did you know that 10,000 Jews fought in the Civil War? Ever heard of Judah Benjamin, a lawyer and US Senator who was the most prominent and highest ranking Jewish figure in Civil War history, fighting for the Confederacy?

Copies of “All Other Nights” are available at the Boulder JCC Library, HaSifria. But reading Horn’s suspenseful work of historical fiction is not required for participation. The program is for anyone interested in learning more about the role played by Jews as they defended both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War, when allegiances split the Jewish community as deeply as the country at large. Some prominent Jewish voices cited the Torah to justify slavery, while others led the abolitionist movement.

Come celebrate Passover in 1862. Join the African-American spy network. Watch the destruction of Richmond. Next week at One JCC Reads.

Tickets are $18. Click here to reserve your spot.