Judaism

A Stroll Down Our Collective Memory Lane

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The warm breeze, aroma of springtime earth, and visions of buds on trees are like a sensory prize at the finish line of this year’s marathon of a winter. Surviving the winter deserves a party, and Alan Maltzman’s two-hour Jewish cultural walking tour of Boston is the perfect way to celebrate. 


A high-tech retiree, Maltzman founded Boston CityWalks in 2006. His menu included tours of the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, downtown Boston, the Freedom Trail and Cambridge. After repeatedly hearing, “Where’s the Jewish tour?,” he decided to add one to his roster in 2009.

Malzman’s goal is to combine history and architecture, with anecdotes and humor. He delivers on all counts.

First, some tips: There are a lot of cobblestones and much of the walk is uphill, so wear comfortable shoes. Bring a snack and some water. And carry a map of Boston — it helps with orientation when roaming through back streets and alleys.

The tour covers a lot of ground, both literally and historically. We begin at the Milk Street Caf, and end at the Holocaust Memorial. In between, we explore old City Hall, Boston Latin School, Beacon Hill’s Back Slope, the VilnaShul, the North and West End, and more. Maltzman’s narrative thread on local Jewish immigration answers questions about our arrival as a people to Puritan Boston’s shores.

The knowledgeable Maltzman, 67, is a Northeastern Universitytrained industrial engineer. His professional niche was starting up new manufacturing plants for Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq; hence his interest in architecture. Born in Chelsea, he grew up loving Boston.

“I thought I knew it all, but when I started these tours I realized how little I actually knew. I now have a library as big as the Library of Congress on the history and architecture of Boston,” he said.

The Famine Memorial (Washington Street/School Street corner), sculptor Robert Shure’s commemoration of the 1845 potato famine that brought the first Irish immigrants to Boston, was our first stop. The significance, explained Maltzman, was that acceptance of the Irish immigrants opened the doors for other groups, including Eastern European and German Jews.

As we meandered towards Beacon Hill, Maltzman peppered facts and figures with delightfully arcane tidbits. We learned, for example, that the Boston Latin student body was 25% Jewish until the first ethnic survey in 1920. After that, the percentage dropped to under 10%. Ho Chi Minh was a chef, Malcolm X was a busboy and the first recipe using chocolate (Boston Cream Pie) was created at the Omni Parker House Hotel. My favorite was the story of how Filene’s got its name. Willem Katz, its founder, was a German Jew who wanted to Americanize his name before emigrating. Not finding “katz” in the dictionary, he substituted “cats,” which led to “feline” and a retail dynasty.

The mid-1880’s Back/North Slope of Beacon Hill was home to the poorest immigrants, including Jews, Italians and Irish, and other “undesirables” such as prostitutes. Maltzman pointed out the architectural differences between North and South Slopes: wooden houses (versus brick); tenement-type structures (versus single family, multi-storied homes); and the presence of stores, noticeably absent to this day in the Boston Brahmin residential area of Beacon Hill.

The Vilna Shul, the former Vilner Congregation, was for me the highlight of the tour. It is now Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture, with a monthly Kabbalat Shabbat service and public programs and events. Of the 50 synagogues that existed within Boston city limits during the 1920’s, this 1919 building is the only one still standing. The second-floor sanctuary is an amalgam of Lithuanian Orthodoxy, New England classical Baroque, art nouveau biblical murals, and pews salvaged from the 1840 Twelfth Baptist Church. Eclectic is an understatement.

The first floor community room houses a small but densely informative History of Jewish Immigration in Boston. It is the only museum of its kind in Boston. We got just a peek; I definitely plan to return.

On our way to the Holocaust Memorial, we stood across the street from the location of the pre-urban renewal West End House. The club was a cornerstone for West End youth for almost 70 years. In 1971, it moved to the Allston-Brighton area and, in 1976, it became one of the first to include female members. There is a West End museum, which was not included on this tour but is open to the public.

The 1995 New England Holocaust Memorial was the last monument we visited. It is no coincidence that it sits on the Freedom Trail. Architect Stanley Saitowitz designed the six, 54-feet high luminous glass towers that sit above six pits. The towers represent six concentration camps; the pits symbolize crematoria. Etched in the towers’ walls are the tattoo numbers of the six million murdered. Walking through the internally lit towers, past the engraved words of survivors, one is struck by the power of memory and impact of the evil that was World War II.

Elie Wiesel, who spoke at the Memorial’s dedication, said at his 1986 Nobel Peace prize acceptance, “For us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering is a noble and necessary act.”

Strolling down our collective memory lane on a beautiful spring day in Boston felt like just such an act. Thank you, Alan Maltzman, for your Jewish Cultural Tour and for providing a means to perform the mitzvah of remembrance.
To sign up for a Boston Jewish Cultural Walking Tour, visit zerve.com/BostonWalks/Jewish. The cost is $25 for a two-hour tour.

Pictured above: Alan Maltzman is the owner of Boston CityWalks and is a tour guide for the Jewish Cultural Walking Tour of Boston.

Shavit’s Patriotic, Personal Narrative of Israel

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Ari Shavit’s “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel” is a literary magnetic force. It attracts with enchanting rhapsodies about the miracles of the land of Israel and the early Zionist years; it repels with tales of occupation, corruption and cruelty. It navigates through the entirety of the Israeli experience, from 1897 to 2013, with 16 epochal pit stops. It extols Israel’s greatness and censures her weakness. It is positive and negative, and every gradation inbetween.

Shavit is a distinguished Israeli journalist who has compiled a patriotic, personal and powerful narrative. His clear and engaging style makes the sometimes incomprehensible complexities of Israeli politics understandable, even to one whose familiarity with the plays and the players is cursory. His interviews with key historical figures are intimate and raw, his scholarship exhaustive and praiseworthy. With a style that combines Studs Terkel, James Michener and ThomasFriedman, it is no wonder this book is a bestseller.

Shavit begins at his and Israel’s beginning, with his Zionist British great-grandfather’s 1897 trip to Palestine. Herbert Bentwich’s purpose was to evaluate the land as a potential national homeland for the Jews. What he saw led to his conclusion that the land was physically suitable. What he chose not to see would underpin the triumph and tragedy of Israel. While the 500,000 Palestinians living as nomads lacked cogent national identity, they were undeniably there in 1897.

Throughout his book, Shavit repeatedly links Israel’s current existential challenges to the single question, “How could they not have seen them?” By personalizing the tales, the reader feels what Shavit feels, and sees what he sees. We stand beside the early settlers as they clear the swamps, we smell the first orange blossoms in Rehovot, and we tingle alongside early kibbutzniks with the thrill of “creating something from nothing.” We also cringe at Lydda in 1948, where the War of Independence leads the Zionists to “throw off the yoke of morality,” looting, torturing and expelling Palestinians into the desert. “Lydda is our black box,” Shavit avers. “In it lies the dark secret of Zionism.”

There are chapters on the 1967 launch of Israel’s nuclear program, Tel Aviv’s frenzied culture, Israel’s religious zealots, and of course, the occupations and settlements. In “Up the Galilee,” a Palestinian-Israeli attorney provides apenetrating alternative viewpoint. “Existential Challenge” examines Iran.

“My Promised Land,” however, is much more than the sum of its parts. It is an exceptionally crafted valentine to Israel from her rebellious but unconditionally loving son. Shavit acknowledges her faults and wonders, but mostly he worries about her future.

“This start-up nation must restart itself,” he opines. “This immature political entity must grow up. Out of disintegration and despair we must rise to the challenge of the most ambitious project of all: nation rebuilding. The resurrection of the Israeli people.”

Is Shavit optimistic that this can happen? There are as many who would say yes as no. And every gradation in between.

Ari Shavit Random House Publishing, 2013 

Bernie Madoff: Jewish Rogue or Rogue Jew?

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We humans pay a price for our free will, and that price is accountability for our actions. According to Jewish thought, we are born with two opposing inclinations, one good (“yetzer ha-tov”) and one evil (“yetzer ha-ra”). Yetzer ha-tov gives us the opportunity to become closer to God. Yetzer ha-ra is not a demonic external force, but rather an undisciplined abuse of natural appetites and passions. These God-given instincts are not intrinsically evil, but harm ensues when we cede them control.

It is through our knowing and willing acts that we indulge our evil or good impulses. Our bible is full of characters who exemplify this dualism. Cain and Esau are no less human than Abel and Jacob; they simply have made different choices. The underlying issue becomes not judging one good and the other evil, but rather understanding what motivated them to act as they did.

In “Imagining Madoff,” Deborah Margolin’s 2010 provocative and compelling play, we meet two such men. Both are Jewish. Both weave biblical parables, Talmudic quotes and Jewish jokes into their conversation. One is Bernie Madoff; the other is Solomon Galkin, a synagogue treasurer, former concentration camp inmate, and poet/Talmudic philosopher. Galkin is based not so loosely on Elie Wiesel. Madoff is unabashedly based on the Ponzi maestro. The play’s spotlight mostly alternates between Madoff’s maximum-security cell, where his consciousness streams aloud to an invisible biographer, and Gaulkin’s plush study, where he and Madoff bond during an all-nighter fueled by scotch. They yak like boyhood chums, alighting on such topics as baseball, sex, lust, humor, friendship, money, God, guilt, Judaism and the Holocaust.

“We acted like old friends,” Madoff tells his biographer. “But that was just us being Jews. We didn’t really know each other.”

Through her insightful and skillfully crafted monologues and dialogues, however, Margolin lets her audiences get to know these two men and discover what makes them tick. Margolin resists prototyping Madoff as an inhuman monster, or Galkin as a paragon of moral authority. She assumes we all know the who, what, when, where and how of each man’s story. Instead, she presents them as multi-dimensional human beings, and trusts her audience to draw their own conclusions about the “why.”

Jeremiah Kissel possesses the role of Madoff with a brilliant sense of electric urgency. His Madoff is complicated and contradictory. One minute he is charming, handsome and smart; the next, he is sleazy, foulmouthed and foul-tempered. He relives crying after he told his first lie as a child, sensing, like a crackhead after his first hit, that he would forever be powerless and addicted to duplicity.

“It was so easy it was painful,” he recounts. “I just told the truth in a completely false way.”

As Galkin, Joel Colodner brings a quiet, weighted, calm confidence to the role. Here is a man who survived evil and doesn’t blame the God who created the men who committed it. If anyone could justify a free pass on amorality, it is Galkin. Instead, he takes solace and refuge in his religion, embracing Torah, ethics, ritual and the goodness of the Jewish people. He, too, is complicated and contradictory.

Ultimately, we see that Madoff and Galkin are two sides of the same Jewish coin. One talks the talk; the other walks the walk. Both have made choices in their lives, but those choices do not alter the fact that they are both Jews. The audience’s job is to notice, not to judge.

When asked why she wrote this play, Margolin answered by email, “The theater is the place where writers and actors ask: Who is this person? Why does he behave as he does?”

“When all is said and done,” she continued, “both Madoff and Galkin are just men. I wanted to ask a dramatic question that explores the seductive beauty and the real and present dangers of absolute faith, either in God, or in men.”

“Recommend” is too tame a word to use in reference to “Imagining Madoff.” I extol it as a sublime work of art, from its brilliant set to its inspired acting to its gifted writing. If you miss its run, you will be sorry.

Pictured above: Joel Colodner (left) starred as Solomon Galkin and Jeremiah Kissel as Bernard Madoff in “Imagining Madoff.”


This Is Not Not Your Bubbe’s Bible

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“Unscrolled: 54 Writers and Artists Wrestle With the Torah” presents 54 of the edgiest and most inventive d’vrei torah imaginable. There are poems, stories, essays, memoirs, plays, recipes, an architectural rendering and a graphic novel. They are penned by contemporary Jewish luminaries such as A.J. Jacobs (“The Year of Living Biblically”), Joshua Foer (“Moonwalking with Einstein”), Damon Lindelof (“Lost”), Jill Soloway (”Afternoon Delight” and “Six Feet Under”) and Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”).

“Unscrolled” had its genesis during animated Torah discussions at the annual meeting of Reboot, a national network of young Jewish creatives and intellectuals devoted to grappling with questions of Jewish identity, community and meaning. The lively Torah dialogues morphed into a book where 54 individuals wrestled with a single section of the Torah, yanking it into the 21st century.

These unorthodox riffs are as uneven as they are varied. While some are serious and traditional, others are hilarious, and some may really offend certain readers. The best stories are in Genesis and Exodus. The results are simultaneously reverent and irreverent; sentimental and raunchy; somber and humorous. While there is not a dull one in the mix, there are a few that confuse profanity with profundity; blasphemy with innovation.

What resonates, however, is how each author succeeded in personalizing the characters and tales of the stories we have heard over and over, year after year. This alone makes “Unscrolled” a work of consequence.

For example, we sit beside Pharaoh at his computer as he Googles “boils,” “lice” and “frogs” on WebMD. We watch Zipporah pout, sulk and vamp as Moses’ neglected wife in a graphic novel version of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. We hear a pensive Miriam muse to herself how she, “star of the sea, star of the river,” delivered her brother Moses not once, but twice. We meet a saucy, mouthy Rebekah at the well, and Esau, “the first Jew to wish he wasn’t.” We rethink “an eye for an eye” through a wise and touching poem. The Tabernacle, all 7,200 cubits of it, finds a home in Manhattan as a vertical skyscraper. Another chapter lists it on MLS.

You get the idea.

Physically and organizationally, the book is a pleasure to read. Each section contains a synopsis of the parsha, with the particular verse that inspired the commentator’s interpretation. These synopses, faithful to the biblical text, read with a narrative ease and fluidity. Their pages are bordered in luscious hues. In the back of the book is a userfriendly listing of each contributor, with just enough biographical detail to enhance reading his or her commentary.

We have all heard that humor is part of what binds us as Jews. The 2013 Pew Research Center survey of Jewish Americans reports that 42% believe “having a good sense of humor” is an essential attribute of being Jewish, ranking it higher than being part of a Jewish community, observing Jewish law or eating traditional Jewish foods. While “Unscrolled” may not be everyone’s cup of tea, for the Pew Study’s 42%, this book is a refreshing hoot.

Unscrolled: 54 writers and Artists Wrestle with the Torah; Edited by Roger Bennett Workman Publishing Company, Inc., 2013

My Virgin Visit to Nordstom’s Makeup Department

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I have been to Las Vegas, Reno and Aruba, and left without putting a single quarter into a slot. I have all the television stations and have never seen a single episode of “American Idol,” “Dancing With the Stars” or “Survivor.” Nordstrom opened in Peabody on April 17, 2009, and I had never stepped foot inside its doors. As a 60-something Jewish female, it was time.

I wanted to sport visible proof of my deflowering. What better way than letting the beautician Chanelle use my face as a canvas for her palette of expensive face paint?

In truth, I had a headshot photo shoot scheduled the next day, and oral surgery the previous week had left me looking, well, my age.

Chanelle was gentle with me, cooing encouragement as she removed my glasses and examined every pore with evaluative eyes. She described the procedures I would be undergoing, defining why each product was necessary to achieving her goal. The list was long.

Feeling like an obedient preschooler, I submitted to her authority. My makeup regime is limited to concealer, blush, mascara and lipstick, and then only when attending a gala wedding at the Four Seasons. I had no idea what the four beigecolored pots de maquillage were. Chanelle’s explanation left me feeling I had been living on borrowed time, and that each product would be critical to my survival going forward.

Even in my naked myopia, I could sense the array of clinical instruments to my left, laid out neatly by shape and function. There was no turning back.

Coat after coat was applied, brushed, reapplied and rebrushed. I counted six different brushes, more than the Impressionists ever used to create masterpieces. The makeup had names like primer, foundation, concealer, highlighter and bronzer. I felt like the outside of my house. The functions sounded inherently contradictory: an illuminating concealer, a lightweight foundation and one that lifted as it covered. Even my eyelids needed camouflaging. When I looked atmyself in the mirror, I saw a Prendergast oil painting rather than the captured glow of pubescent skin. I burst out laughing.

Chanelle, bless her heart, soldiered on. Next came the eyes. I was immediately reminded why contact lenses and I had never gotten along. The approaching mascara wand in my peripheral vision elicited a textbook Pavlovian response of watering and blinking. Before the eyeliner had been imbedded between each lash (“Never draw a line across your lids!”), I was fantasizing about makeup removers and a long shower.

The one that really got me, however, was the creation of eyebrows. I truthfully had never felt disadvantaged by my lightly endowed eyebrows. In fact, my girlfriends who are slaves to plucking and waxing are green with envy. I thought they were a lifestyle asset. Not so, apparently. My face would look much more youthful with the framing eyebrows would provide. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a cross between my grandmother and Martin Scorsese.

By contrast, the blush was fun. Unsurprisingly, the one named Orgasm is their top seller. Luckily, it did not match my skin tone, as it was predictably out of stock. My lined dry lips required a $30 remedy. The case, at least, was exquisite, worthy of Faberge. I did not escape purchase-free, but I only added one item to my shopping list of blush, lipstick and gargantuan quantities of concealer (which I would apply with a paint roller, if such a product existed). That add-on purchase? A case full of autumn eye shadows. The included free eyeliner had clinched the deal.

I tried my best to gush and cluck as I gave myself a parting glance in the blindingly lit mirror, but I’m sure I fooled no one. Especially not Chanelle. In the privacy and muted, conventional lighting of my kitchen, however, I did ooh and aah, and yes, admire. Those eyebrows did lift my face, and I’ll be darned if my skin didn’t look 25 years younger. (Okay, maybe closer to 10.) I wondered if the store’s bright lights are deliberately of torture quality to terrify and encourage equity loan-caliber purchases. Ponce de Leon’s ghost holds court in Nordstrom’s makeup department, where he is healthy, wealthy and wrinkle-free.

I am a 60-something Jewish female who has never had Botox or any of its iterations. Don’t count on an article chronicling a change in that status any time soon.

 

Pictured above: The author, after Chanelle did her magic.