A PUBLICATION OF THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS / AUTUMN 2025 | 5786 סתיו
Finding Our Ways On discovering and rediscovering Judaism in a time of upheaval BY MIRIAM ANZOVIN
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Blessings and Greetings from Jerusalem Happy New Year & Shana Tova 5786 - ו ” תשפ שנה טובה!
Jerusalem Foundation of Canada Board of Directors
President and Chair: Joel Reitman C.M.
Past President: Lewis R. Mitz
Vice Chair: David Golden
Vice President: Gary Grundman Secretary: Carol Ryder Members of the Board: David Berger Ariela Cotler Elliott Eisen Heather Fenyes Dr. Jacques Gauthier Sarah Krauss Lorri Kushnir Connie Putterman Danny Ritter Cheryl Rosen Evelyn Bloomfield Schachter Ari Shachter Judi Shostack Doron Telem Joanna Mirsky Wexler Joseph J. Wilder K.C. Gustavo Zentner Vice President: David C. Rosenbaum Treasurer: Paul Levine
Throughout this past year of war and challenges, Jerusalem has been a safe haven for the people of Israel. And during these difficult times, we have brought Jerusalem to Canada to bring a message of hope and optimism that the future can and will be better. Jerusalem is more than a city—it’s a living, breathing tapestry of culture, history, and community. The Jerusalem Foundation ensures it remains vibrant, inclusive, and thriving for generations to come. You can be part of Jerusalem and make a difference.
For more information about the Jerusalem Foundation: Nomi Yeshua, Executive Director: nomiy@jerusalemfoundation.ca Tania Haas, Donor Relations Coordinator: thaas@jerusalemfoundation.ca Tel: 416 922 0000 The Jerusalem Foundation of Canada: 130 Queens Quay East, Suite 1110 – West Tower, Toronto, ON M5A 0P6 Charitable Registration: 108085218RR0001 www.jerusalemfoundation.org Photo credit: Derrick Birkmann, Katie Chase, Keith Levit
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The Canadian Jewish News
THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS IS PROUD TO BE THE WINNER OF THREE 2025 AJPA ROCKOWER AWARDS
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Contents AUTUMN 2025 Feature 5786 סָָתיו
44 Who Gets to Belong? On generational change, TikTok talmud, and a very Jewish tradition of reinvention by MIRIAM ANZOVIN ESSAY
5786 סָָתיו 9
Contents AUTUMN 2025 | 5786 סָָתיו
Letter from the Editor .......... 17
pg 55
IN THE BEGINNING
55 Eating Our Feelings: New York–Style Pizza by COREY MINTZ CULTURE KLATSCH 59 Bookish: A Laughing Matter Jewish jokes in the age of humourlessness by PHOEBE MALTZ BOVY 68 Jewdar Forthcoming books, films, and other new releases of note 21 Jewish Geography 29 The Kibbitz: Moshe Safdie The prolific architect on Jewish aesthetics and the power of design to shape community by AVI FINEGOLD 36 On One Foot: Gossip If lashon hara is a sin, what do we do about Facebook? by AVI FINEGOLD
NEW YORK–STYLE PIZZA IS ALL ABOUT PERFECTING THE CRUST.
80 Comic On dating, conversion, and sharing tradition with new friends by MIRIAM LIBICKI ON THE COVER: Like the essay that anchors this issue, the many paths on the cover celebrate the idea that “there are countless ways of understanding, connecting to, and interpreting Jewishness.”
ILLUSTRATION BY MELANIE LAMBRICK
10 AUTUMN 2025
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Frances Ackerman • Mae Adler • Stone Zvi Altman • Rhoda Arnold • Elizabeth Avetissian • Marie Axler • Seymour Axler • Howard Baker • Sheldon Berg • David Bernstein • Marie Bickof • Stephen Bindman • Cheryl And David Blinick • Dr. And Mrs. Jack Bottner • Myra Brachfeld • Jimmy Morin Breton • Martin & Elaine Brodsky • Daliah Brown • Michael Cape • Cheryl Cappe • Doris Dalfen Caplan • Michael Carin • Rose Carpino • Marc Cittone • Sherry Clodman • Barry Coburn • Mindi Cofman • Jeffrey Cole • Emma Cunningham • Regina Delovitch • Linda Silver Dranoff • Helen Fisch • Matthew Gillman • Shirley Glazier • Adele Goldstein • Naomi Goltzman • Sandra Gordon • Andrew Gow • Bruce Gram • Ken Grove • Alan Gutmann • Hymie Guttman • Stephen Halperin • Melvyn Himel • E & A Hollinger • Miriam Isenberg • Ian Joffe • Margaret Kardish • Susan Karmazyn • Ian Kitai • Brian Kingstone • Jack Kornblum • Dave Kwinter • Myrna Lambert • Jonathan Leffell • Larry Levine • Dr. Frederick Levenston • Anne Levitsky • Evelyn Lieff • Marsha Megitt • Simha Mendelsohn • Joseph Michaelson • Leah Miller • Aaron Milrad • Gary Mintz • Dr. Joseph Mittelman • Milt Moskowitz • David Moyse • Nita Ngamba • Steven Potoker • Arthur Propst • Arthur Rabinovitch • Joel Rabinowitz • Lorne & Judy Rochwerg • Marlene Rochwerg • Norman Ronski • Igal Rosen • Janet Rosenbaum • Estelle Rosenthal • Carol Rosenthall • Laurel Rothman • Etty Rubin • Robert Rubinoff • Susan Safyan • Linda Samis • Ian Sandler • Jack Schachter • Dr. Brian Schwartz • Hedy Segal • Grace Shafran • Dr. R. Zlotnik Shaul • David Shilman • Lynda Silver • Nicolas Silva-Castellon • Edwin Simon • Pat And Pekka Sinervo • Morris Sosnovitch • Naomi Stern • Miriam Swadron • Sheldon Swaye • Leon Szyfer • Charles Tator • Peter Usher • George Weitzenfeld • Sue Winestock • Harold Wise • Pauline Wintraub • Melvyn Wolfond • Ernest Wolkin • Irwin Wortsman • Neil Zeidel
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Letter from the CEO
A New Year’s Reflection and Commitment to Purpose
A S WE PREPARE to welcome 5786, the Jewish new year invites us to pause — to reflect on the year that has passed and to look ahead with intention and hope. Rosh Hashanah is more than a holiday. It’s a moment of introspec- tion, of realignment. It reminds us that we are each part of a larger story, one that spans generations, communities, and borders. For us at The CJN, this season is also a time to reflect on the values that shape our work and the purpose that drives us forward. This past year brought no short- age of challenges in our communities, across Canada, and around the world. Jewish life has been tested, stretched, and, in many ways, strengthened by how we’ve shown up for one another. Through it all, The CJN has remained committed to delivering journalism that informs, inspires, and connects. We’ve told the difficult stories. We’ve celebrated resilience. And we’ve worked hard to elevate a diverse cho- rus of voices within the Jewish Cana- dian landscape. As we step into the new year, I want to take a moment to thank the
more than 40,000 subscribers, sup- porters, contributors, readers, and listeners who make our work possi- ble. Your trust fuels our mission. It is important to note, especial- ly in a climate where truth and parti- sanship are too often confused, that The CJN is a non-partisan publica- tion. Our role is not to advance politi- cal agendas, but to pursue facts, elevate meaningful discourse, and serve as a platform for a broad spec- trum of Jewish perspectives. We hold ourselves accountable to integ- rity, fairness, and journalistic excel- lence — values that transcend politi- cal lines and speak to the core of who we are as an organization. As the shofar sounds and we be- gin anew, may this year be one of insight, empathy, and courageous storytelling. May it be a year in which our collective conversations bring understanding — not division — and in which community remains at the heart of all we do. Wishing you and your loved ones a sweet, peaceful, and healthy new year. Shana tovah!
MICHAEL WEISDORF CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS
5786 סָָתיו 15
Contributors
SCRIBE QUARTERLY is a magazine about Jewish life, culture, and ideas—a reader’s guide to the contemporary Jewish world.
DOUG Levy is a Boston-based portrait photographer and former professional baseball umpire. His work has appeared in Boston magazine, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes , among others. He lives outside Boston with his wife, son, and two dogs. MELANIE Lambrick is an illustrator based in Victoria. Her work strives to make complex ideas feel both accessible and visually striking, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine , and elsewhere. MIRIAM Libicki has been cartoon- ing since 2003 and screenprinting since 2005. Her primary themes are culture clash and the construction of identity, usually through the prism of her Jewishness and dual American-Israeli citizenship.
EDITOR IN CHIEF Hamutal Dotan
ART DIRECTOR Carol Moskot CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Phoebe Maltz Bovy
Avi Finegold COPY EDITOR
Leah Borts-Kuperman PRODUCTION MANAGER Etery Podolsky THE CJN CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Michael Weisdorf GENERAL MANAGER Kathy Meitz ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Grace Zweig
MELANIE LAMBRICK COVER
BOARD OF DIRECTORS Bryan Borzykowski President Sam Reitman
Treasurer and Secretary Ira Gluskin, Jay Rosenthal Jacob Smolack, Elizabeth Wolfe FOR GENERAL INQUIRIES INFO@SCRIBEQUARTERLY.CA TO SUBMIT A LETTER TO THE EDITOR: LETTERS@SCRIBEQUARTERLY.CA SCRIBE QUARTERLY™ IS PUBLISHED by The Canadian Jewish News, a Registered Journalism Organization as defined by the Canada Revenue Agency. DONATIONS CAN BE MADE VIA THECJN.CA/DONATE
DOUG LEVY WHO GETS TO BELONG?, P.44
WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF:
MIRIAM LIBICKI COMIC, P.80
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Letter from the Editor
A time to look back, and to look forward
I
our heritage and ancestral wisdom, and in our shared diaspora experi- ences,” she writes. “Jews are discov- ering alternate modes of engaging with Jewish identity and finding com- munity, formats that resonate and create meaning in their lives in new ways — or, sometimes, in ancient ways made new again.” Her piece describes one such path, one such form of engagement. There are many others, and they are a cause for joy and for hope. As we all continue to take stock and to reflect on the future, may we each find this kind of connection and renewal, in whatever form we most need it. L’shanah tovah, HAMUTAL DOTAN EDITOR IN CHIEF SCRIBE QUARTERLY
T IS BUILT INTO our expe- rience of autumn that this is a time for looking back— we take stock, ask forgive- ness, complete a cycle of the Torah. It is simultaneously a time for looking forward: like
schoolkids clutching crisp notebooks for the year ahead, we make plans, hope for fresh starts, begin a new cycle. It is a period of reckoning. This has been even more true than usual in recent years. The Jewish world is under enormous pressure, and in a time of enormous change. Many Jews, perhaps more than they often do, are reckoning with their Jewishness: with their un- derstanding of what it means to be Jewish, with their place in the Jew- ish community, with the obligations and risks that come with being Jew- ish. It is a reckoning that encompass- es politics, generational change, the institutions that have traditionally structured community, and the digi- tal technologies that continue to alter the very structure of society. This process can be difficult; these are hard questions. But it also, as ex- plored so beautifully by Miriam An- zovin in the essay that anchors this issue, creates opportunities. “There are new forms of Jewish community emerging right now—vibrant, com- pelling, full of heart, deeply rooted in
5786 סָָתיו 17
Wishing you a year filled with health, joy, and peace. Shana Tova from EL AL
elal.com
Jewish Geography BULLETINS FROM AROUND THE WORLD, BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY
The Trondheim Synagogue in Norway, which is one of the northernmost in the world.
NORWAY CITY’S ONE-OF-A-KIND APPROACH TO OBSERVING SHABBAT by DAN FELLNER COMMUNITY
IF EVER THERE WAS a synagogue that’s earned the right to throw itself a birthday shindig, it’s the in- triguing house of worship in central Norway, about 350 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. Over the past century, the Trondheim Synagogue has weathered iso- lation from the rest of the Jewish world; the Holocaust, which wiped out half its community; challenges relat- ed to Shabbat observance because of its far northern latitude; and persistent antisemitism. This fall, the synagogue will be observing its centennial with a three-day celebration, culmi- nating in an October 26 event that members of Norway’s royal family, the country’s prime minister, the mayor of Trondheim, and other dignitaries are sched- uled to attend. “There will be speeches, songs, and, of course, we will tell the history of the community,” says John Arne Moen, president of the Trondheim Jewish
5786 סָָתיו 21
Jewish Geography
Community. “We are on the out- skirts of the Jewish world.... You will probably not find a commu- nity like ours any other place in the world.” With a population of about 200,000, Trondheim is Nor- way’s third-largest city, behind Oslo and Bergen. Located on the shores of a fjord that’s an inlet in the Norwegian Sea, the city was founded in the year 997 and was Norway’s capital during the Viking Age. The unlikely story of Jewish life in Trondheim be- gan in the late nineteenth cen- tury, when Jewish immigrants began arriving from Poland and Lithuania, usually because they couldn’t afford to go to Ameri- ca. By 1900, there were more than 100 Jews living in Trond- heim and the city’s first syna- gogue was established. During the next 20 years, the communi- ty grew to more than 300 mem- bers, prompting the need for a larger synagogue. In 1923, an old railway sta- tion at Arkitekt Christies gate 1 was purchased with the financial support of approximately 200 Jews from Oslo and converted into a synagogue. It was inaugu- rated in 1925 and remains, along with the synagogue in Oslo, one of only two synagogues in the country. Germany occupied Norway from 1940 to 1945. The Nazis confiscated the synagogue and used it as a barracks, replacing the Stars of David in the win- dows with swastikas. It’s be- lieved that 165 local Jews, about half of Trondheim’s Jewish pop- ulation at the time, died in the Holocaust, fuelled by robust col- laboration by local authorities.
Today, Moen estimates there are 200 Jews living in Trond- heim; about three-quarters are members of the synagogue. Shabbat services are typical- ly held every other Friday. The chief rabbi of Norway, Michael Melchior, lives in Israel but pe- riodically travels to Oslo and Trondheim to conduct services. (Melchior’s father was the long- time chief rabbi of Denmark.) When Melchior isn’t in town, services are usually led by Israeli-born Asher Serussi, a re- ligious leader in the communi- ty who has lived in Trondheim for 30 years. Serussi describes the Trondheim Synagogue as “Orthodox but very flexible and modern.… Most of the people here are not observant Jews,” he says. “Our members are interest- ed in the Jewish culture and tra- ditions, but they don’t keep ko- sher and they don’t keep Shab- bat. They enjoy very much when we have celebrations for holi- days — then it’s a full house” For the more religious, the question about how to handle Shabbat’s start and end times has been a topic of debate ever since the congregation was founded in 1905. According to halakhah, Shabbat begins a few minutes before sunset and lasts for twenty-five hours, but Trond- heim is located so far north that the amount of daylight can vary between twenty hours in the summer to just four hours in the winter. In a country known as “the land of the midnight sun,” what’s an Orthodox congregation to do? Other communities in far north- ern latitudes handle the issue in a variety of ways. Some set the
Shabbat clock based on Jerusa- lem time, while others divide the day equally into two twelve-hour segments. Some start Shabbat at the traditional moment, even if that means lighting candles around midnight. Moen says the Trondheim congregation devel- oped its own approach in its ear- ly years: here, Shabbat begins at 5:30 p.m. on Fridays and ends at 6:30 p.m. on Saturdays, re- gardless of the time of year and whether there’s sunlight or po- lar darkness. “We have grown up with it,” says Moen. “We are the only Orthodox synagogue in the world doing it this way.” There is a small museum in the same building as the syna- gogue, designed in part to com- bat antisemitism. The Jewish Museum Trondheim opened in 1997 and attracts 7,000 visi- tors a year, many of them local schoolchildren. They come on field trips to learn about the Ho- locaust and the history of Jew- ish life in Trondheim. The base- ment of the museum has a small mikveh that hasn’t been used since before the German occu- pation. At the urging of two lo- cal Orthodox families, it is now in the process of being restored. Moen says that despite its many challenges, the Trondheim Jewish community is now on solid footing and looking for- ward to continuing to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of residents and tourists. “We have a lot of young people and we ha- ven’t seen this much activity in our community since before the war. We have a beautiful shul. If you want a place to pray, the syn- agogue is open to any Jew that wants to come.” JTA
22 AUTUMN 2025
Jewish Geography
institution Lansky founded in 1980 as a then 24-year-old grad- uate student of Yiddish. More than one visitor to the YBC’s campus in Amherst, Massachu- setts has compared the shelves and shelves of Yiddish books, rescued from dumpsters and the attics and basements of ag- ing readers, to the colossal gov- ernment warehouse seen in the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark . But Spielberg also seemed to understand what has driven Lansky, who retired in June as the centre’s president; his successor is Susan Bronson, the centre’s executive director for the past 14 years. Lansky started amassing the collection by going door to door, asking elderly Jews and their offspring for the books they might otherwise have thrown away. The rescue proj- ect could easily have remained a warehouse of old books, dusty treasures mouldering in the dark, occasionally accessed by scholars and hobbyists. In- stead, the collection of some 1.5 million volumes is the founda- tion of an institution that now includes Yiddish classes, aca- demic fellowships, a training program for translators, schol- arly conferences, a publisher of books in translation, an oral his- tory archive, a podcast, and that digitized library of both classic and obscure Yiddish books. The Yiddish Book Center celebrates and commemorates what Lansky calls “one of the most concentrated outpour- ings of literary creativity in all of Jewish history,” lasting rough- ly from the 1860s to the imme- diate aftermath of World War
CULTURE AARON LANSKY BUILT A HOME FOR YIDDISH BOOKS. NOW HE’S HANDING OVER THE KEYS by ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
STEVEN SPIELBERG had already donated money to the Yiddish Book Center when he asked if the centre’s founder, Aaron Lansky, might fly out to Los Angeles and drop by his office. The filmmaker doesn’t usually meet with the beneficiaries of his philanthropy, Lansky told me recently, but wanted to explain his support for what is now the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library at the YBC, an online col- lection of more than 12,000 Yiddish titles. “‘You have to understand,’ he said, ‘that what I do for a living is I tell stories,’” Lansky recalls Spielberg telling him. “‘The idea that you have miles of Jewish stories that have yet to be told, that’s just irre- sistible to someone like me.’” Spielberg may not even have been the first supporter of the Yid- dish Book Center to find something, well, Spielbergian about an
Reproductions of book and magazine covers hang over the main book room of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.
5786 סָָתיו 23
Jewish Geography
HISTORY FRENCH PARLIAMENT UNANIMOUSLY VOTES TO POSTHUMOUSLY PROMOTE ALFRED DREYFUS by GRACE GILSON
II. As newly emancipated Jews encountered modernity, they created a vast Yiddish litera- ture both high- and low-brow: books, literary journals, news- papers, plays, songs, and films. It was a literature, according to Lansky’s mentor, the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse, “that, if it suffers from anything, suffers from its youthfulness, from the exaggerated emphasis on inno- vativeness and on modernity and originality.” Lansky says Yiddish litera- ture asks the essential question, “What does it mean for Jews to live in a modern world?” That question gnawed at him as a student, first at Hampshire Col- lege and later at McGill Uni- versity, and led him to marshal teams of collectors with wheel- barrows and pickup trucks. “The idea that we were going to go reinvent ourselves in a modern world without reference to this vast literature seemed kind of foolish to me,” he says. Lansky is under no illusion that Yiddish will be revived as a spoken language outside of the haredi Orthodox communi- ty. But both in the original and in translation, Yiddish litera- ture will continue to offer new possibilities for Jews and non- Jews to understand the “dialec- tic” of Jewish culture: religious and secular, holy and profane, triumphant and tragic. “What I would put my money on is that Jews, as a people, can’t get by with religion alone,” says Lan- sky. “There’s also a day-to-day side of Jewish life.... The most profound works of Jewish liter- ature are those works that em- brace that dialectic.” JTA
A FRENCH PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE unanimously approved a bill this summer to posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus, more than 130 years after he was framed for treason in one of the defining antisemitic incidents of the nineteenth century. Dreyfus, a Jewish French army captain, was falsely accused of es- pionage and convicted of treason in 1894, decades after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The trial — playing out in a West- ern European republic purportedly committed to equal rights — be- came an international scandal and symbol of enduring antisemitism on the continent. French writer Émile Zola published a famous open letter titled “J’accuse!” charging the government and army of “treason against humanity” by playing to the public’s antisemitism. The trial also re- portedly persuaded Theodor Herzl, who covered it as a journalist, to turn to Zionism. He is now considered the chief ideological influence behind Israel’s establishment. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated, returned to the military, and died in 1935, but the incident, widely known as the Dreyfus Affair, is seen as a stain on French history. More than a century later, the French parliament’s National Defence and Armed Forces Commit- tee unanimously voted to promote him to the rank of brigadier gen- eral, a decision that was supported in a unanimous vote by the full National Assembly a few days later. “Accused, humiliated and condemned because he was Jewish, Al- fred Dreyfus was dismissed from the army, imprisoned and exiled to Devil’s Island,” wrote former French prime minister Gabriel Attal, who has Jewish ancestry, in a post on X. “More than 130 years later, the national representation honors the values and principles of the Republic. It has come to do justice. It has come to give this man, who fought for France, everything he is due. A French hero. “ The French embassy in Israel also praised the vote in a statement on X. “The French Nation is just and does not forget,” the statement said. “This rights an injustice, honors a warrior, and clarifies that antisemitism, from history to today, will never have a place in the Republic.” JTA
24 AUTUMN 2025
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The Kibbitz Architect Moshe Safdie on Jewish aesthetics and the power of design to shape community by AVI FINEGOLD
“BELONGING IS NOT IN THE EYES OF THE ARCHITECT; IT’S IN THE EYES OF THE USER.”
5786 סָָתיו 29
The Kibbitz
F EW ARCHITECTS launch with the splash Moshe Safdie did: Habitat 67, the now iconic housing development showcased at Montreal’s world’s fair, grew out of his master’s thesis. In the half-century since that first project, Safdie has proven to be a versatile and prolific architect. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, and the Khalsa Heritage Centre in Anandpur Sahib, India, all demonstrate the breadth of his abilities. We sat down this summer to discuss his many projects in Israel, Jewish aes- thetics, and the importance of light in architecture.
land that was cleared around the walls was kind of a no man’s land in terms of urban activity, and it created this very powerful bridge which is full of life almost all the time. Because of its position between different commu- nities, it also, by definition, attracts all the people. So Mamilla, when you walk around, there’s a lot of Ortho- dox, some haredi, the secular Jerusa- lemites, there’s tourists, there’s Arabs —and those who are visibly Arabs, walking around freely with the dress and head covers, etc. There are a sig- nificant number of Arabs serving and buying in the shops. So it is really a place where the public realm is mixed and cohabitated, and it gives it a cer- tain richness. It also created a flow between the Old City, between Jaffa Gate and the new city: on the chagim you get people going to prayers at the wall, during Ramadan you get a flow of people coming from Sheikh Jarrah. So it’s a mixer. In The Body of Faith , Jewish theolo- gian and philosopher Michael Wy- schogrod wrote about the Jewish community that “the level of taste in the Jewish community—and not only in the Orthodox commu- nity—is very low. Families that could afford the best live in homes decorated in the most pedestrian taste, lacking all individuality and personal statement. And when an attempt is made to express some in- dividuality, more often than not the result is merely weird rather than in good taste.” He went on to say that it’s a “very dangerous development, not mainly because our synagogues and homes exhibit poor taste, but because a totally bourgeois Juda- ism will be a dead Judaism.… A bourgeois Judaism is dead because it is out of contact with the explo- sive ferment of the religious spirit.”
We are living in a very polarized time. You have written about the Ma- milla district in Jerusalem, which you planned in the early 1970s as a phys- ical, constructed manifestation of an open society. It took over 40 years for it to be fully realized as a shopping district and bridge between the old and new cities, and Jewish and Pales- tinian areas. Can architects still play a role in mending a broken society? I think it’s important to distinguish between what architects can do, which is physical, and between what statesmen and politicians can do, which is create policy. Architects can create the physical setting to improve cohabitation, collaboration, interac- tion: they can have extraordinary im- pact as they design the public realm and how it relates to the urban fabric. But that can only be done via an op- portunity that has to be enacted one way or the other by policy. But, if there is policy in place, the architect can create the physical set- ting. To do that, they need to not just be a strong physical designer of the public realm, but to have their anten- nae out to appreciate various kinds of
forces: how people move in a city, when do they feel secure and inse- cure in a city, how you can mix cer- tain uses. Cohabitation by different populations in residential neighbour- hoods is very difficult, more difficult than commingling in, say, the bazaar, in the marketplace. Right now, I’m working in Singa- pore, which has an interesting mix of minorities: the majority are Chinese, but there are also Indian, Tamil, and Malay communities. The government, by design — and that’s policy plus ar- chitecture — has every one of the new towns mixed racially, because they had race riots in the early years of the state, and they were determined nev- er to let that happen again. They are socially engineering the population in housing projects. You can go far with that. The architect is a player, but not the sole player. Do you think that Mamilla actually fulfilled its function? I think Mamilla is a major success in three ways. First, it created a power- ful link between the Old City and the new city. Before it was done, all the
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Does that resonate? Why have there been so few great synagogues built in the past half-century or so? It does resonate, very much so. Erich Mendelsohn did a couple of synagogues in America. Not great, but pretty good. I have an office of 80 peo- ple, maybe 20 percent are Jews. And when we get a Jewish institution in here, there’s always that sense of skep- ticism. Can we transcend the taste level? With exceptions—the Skirball Center, in Los Angeles, is an exempla- ry exception — it remains true. I think in the haredi and religious community, it’s most extreme. And the sadness for me is it’s not just the aesthetics of building a synagogue; it’s also the way space is used. I did a building for Rav Goren [a former chief rabbi of Israel] called the Idra. It abuts the Western Wall piazza: an old building, quite beautiful, that I restored. And within years, they built a horrible cover on the terrace with an awful makeshift roof. Because they want to have events there, they built fences on the upper roof—the ugliest fences, it looks like a pris- on and has lights that look like pris- on lights. I have my house next door looking down on it, and I said with disbelief that they were doing every- thing you could do to destroy how that building appears in the city and how it contributes to what’s around it. It is disastrous. And that’s true down the line. You go around the Jewish Quarter, which started with some good guide- lines and so on, and people keep add- ing things: terraces, this and that, pergolas—but with no control, and there’s no will. There’s no will of the authorities, the city, or the Hevra Le- shikum Ha’rova [the organization overseeing the development of the Old City in Jerusalem] to control it. There is no judgment of the people
Mamilla plays a cen- tral role in Jerusalem by linking the old and new cities, and the Jewish and Arab quar- ters. Safdie’s plan for the area was approved in 1972; politics, litiga- tion, and opposition by various groups delayed its comple- tion until 2008. In addition to being one of the only places where the full range of Jerusalem’s popu- lation goes to shop, it is remarkable for its blend of contempo- rary architecture with historic buildings. The Skirball Cultural Centre was built over 30 years. It was designed to nestle into the Santa Monica Mountains by integrating stepped gardens throughout the campus, and cre- ating expansive views of the landscape from inside the various buildings.
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The Kibbitz
themselves who are doing all these improvisations. Some people would go further and say it’s because of the Jewish tradition of lo tase lecha pesel umesichah [the prohibition against graven images], that the desire to avoid representational art gets ex- tended to include all sorts of beautifi- cation. But I don’t buy that because, in history, it’s true that we were always impacted by local culture, but that’s inevitable. But there were buildings that people took pride in and care of. I did the national museum of the Sikhs in India. And I’d say India is not a great place for maintenance, gener- ally speaking, but I did it 20 years ago and it is absolutely impeccable be- cause there is this pride. It’s deeper than just aesthetic taste. It’s the cul- ture of caring for the environment. If you had an opportunity to talk to people who don’t think about ar- chitecture or design in this way, how might you get them to begin to appreciate it? When I look at the curriculum in Is- rael—I have grandchildren now of school age, kindergarten age, my one grandson is going to Grade 2 — it’s a pleasure to see what they do in the arts: drawing, observing, having trips to look at nature. I lament the fact that schools in Israel have less and less of that. And I think it’s a very important thing to try and introduce it in the Jew- ish school curriculum. And I know, people always say Jews are not much in the visual arts. But you come to the United States and how many im- portant architects are Jewish? Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, I can go on and on. And the same is true in the world of art — Rothko and others, there’s a good list. So I’d say that when the op- portunity and the education and the exposure are there, there’s no lack of talent and appreciation.
The Khalsa Heritage Centre (top) incorporates Sikh symbolism throughout the design; while not a religious site, it is a sig- nificant site for Sikhs worldwide and a hall- mark for how to build for a client’s culture while still retaining an architect’s signature. Habitat 67 (right) combied modular building techniques (units were prefabricated and then moved into place) with a striking design. Notre-Dame (opposite page), Paris’ iconic cathedral, recently had its nave restored after a devastating fire in 2019.
Moving from the haredi to the hiloni side, have you ever thought of the Habitat 67 housing complex as an urban kibbutz? Yeah, I think in many ways when I designed it, the kind of collective life of the kibbutz was there. I mean, there wasn’t the common dining room and the children’s house, but there was that sense of collective living. And in fact, what’s interesting is that Habitat, now 60 years later, is very much a communal place. They have a residence committee, they have sub- committees, they have a cookbook that they did, and they have news- letters and internal politics and I’m
very involved because, until recently, I owned an apartment so I would get all the stuff. So it is very much a com- munal place. Could you walk me through the pro- cess of completing a project? How do you balance the site, the program, the client — and how do they all in- form what the ultimate design is? A project is the outcome of a dialogue with a client. No great building can oc- cur without a great client. Clients have real impact on the outcome because it’s part of the dialogue. Good archi- tecture comes out of that dialogue. Sometimes it involves educating the
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as they were a thousand years ago. They’ve been washed and cleaned. You see the stone, beautiful lighting. What makes that place extraordinary? It’s light, the quality of light. It is the resonance between the form and the structural system, the sort of soaring up, soaring structure, the way every- thing sort of meets, columns become pilasters become flying buttresses. There’s a world of ornament, which is an outcome of the crafting of the build- ing. In the case of the church, there’s another layer of art, stained glass win- dows, the sculpture and all that play a role. Now a synagogue is minus the art, minus the sculpture, but not minus the colour necessarily; there is the struc- ture itself and there is the light. The synagogue first of all is a matter of light — light of all kinds. There are so many different qualities of light. Light is an element by which we can have that sense of spiritual uplift. In the case of the synagogue, it also has to do with a sense of the commu- nal. The bimah is an important centre, and then there’s the aron hakodesh , an- other important centre, and the ritual path between them. And then the way people sit in the synagogue looking at each other with the heights, the levels. It’s very hard to give a prescription. I’ve noticed that ever since writing your memoir ( If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture , published in 2022), you’ve done a lot of inter- views. What have you learned about yourself in the process? I think the nice thing about being al- most 87 is that you reach a certain level of security and self-appreciation about what you’ve achieved that allows you to look at things much more open- ly and in an appreciative way. I’d say that, 20 years ago, I would be more cri- tical of things. There is a mellowing.
qualities. What matters is: Is it a won- derful place for learning? Is the class- room an inspiring place? Is it the place where community evolves? These are the ingredients. Then there’s econo- mics and reality and building codes and you are orchestrating and float- ing between them all. What do you think are the elements of great synagogue architecture giv- en the specific needs of any given synagogue, such as an ark or bimah ? I was recently in Paris and I went to see Notre-Dame, which has been re- furbished and rebuilt. And for the first time we’re seeing it with all the walls
client, and sometimes you learn from the client. It’s a dynamic thing. For me, understanding the site with all its subtleties beginning from cli- mate, topography, the surrounding culture, the lifestyle of the community — all these things are important. I gave a lecture series at the Harvard Graduate School of Design this se- mester on the theme of belonging: How do you make a building belong? And belonging is not in the eyes of the architect; it’s in the eyes of the user. If you want to achieve a sense of be- longing, you’ve got to have it emerge in the user. If you do a school, I don’t care about the shapes and sculptural
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On One Foot
THERE IS a parable told of a rabbi who was approached by someone asking for advice about how to curb their tendency to gossip. The rabbi told the penitent to take a feather pillow, tear it open and cast its contents to the wind. The penitent does so and then re- turns; the rabbi continues: then go and gath- er all the feathers back into the pillowcase. “But that is impossible,” the person replied, to which the rabbi said, “Exactly. Just like all the feathers have scattered so far and wide, so too are your words when you speak lashon hara to others.” This parable (likely borrowed from six- teenth century saint Philip Neri) speaks to a very human struggle: we tend to know instinctively that gossip isn’t good, but we also have a hard time avoiding it. While gossip has always been with us, the perva- siveness of social media has brought lashon hara —literally evil speech—to the fore- front of our collective consciousness. Is it possible to be an ethical participant in so- cial media? How do we balance the benefits of social media platforms, like the opportu- nities they provide to speak out against evil and forge new connections, with the temp- tations they create to be snide, snarky, or downright mean to others in public? Here, we consider a question of contemporary relevance and explore how sources both classical and modern address it. by AVI FINEGOLD IF LASHON HARA IS A SIN, WHAT DO WE DO WITH FACEBOOK? Just like Hillel’s student, we all have complex questions that we want answered as simply as possible.
LEVITICUS 19:16/PSALMS 34:13-15 Do not go about as a talebearer among members of your people. Do not profit by the blood of your fel- low [Israelite]: I am the Lord. Who is the man who is eager for life, who desires years of good fortune? Guard your tongue from evil, your lips from deceitful speech. Shun evil and do good, seek amity and pursue it. 1 1 THESE TWO BIBLICAL VERSES create two paral- lel ways of understanding lashon hara: one takes a legalistic approach with an outright prohibition, while the other makes an ethical case encouraging us to pay attention to the language we use. These two approach- es continue throughout the history of Jewish thought, where lashon hara is sometimes treated as a matter of straightforward adherence to mitzvot, and sometimes as a matter of self-improvement. BABYLONIAN TALMUD, ARACHIN 15B Rabbi Yoh.anan says in the name of Rabbi Yosei ben Zimra: Anyone who speaks malicious speech is considered as though he denied the fundamental belief in God. And Reish Lakish says: Anyone who speaks malicious speech increases his sins until the heavens … The Gemara asks: What is considered malicious speech? In other words, how is malicious speech defined and what are the limits of the prohibition? Rava said: For example, if one says: There is always fire at so-and-so’s home, indicating that they are always cooking food there. Abaye said to Rava: What did this person do wrong by saying that there is always fire in that home? His statement is merely revealing the true facts, and is not malicious speech. Rather, it is considered malicious speech if he expressed this in a slanderous manner. For example, if he says: Where else can one find fire except at so-and-so’s home, because they are always cooking food there. 2
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RABBI YISRAEL MEIR KAGAN, SEFER CHOFETZ CHAIM (1873), PART 1:1 PRINCIPLE 1 AND PART 1:10 PRINCIPLE 1-2
It is forbidden to speak demeaningly of one’s friend, even if it be absolute truth. And this is termed ev- erywhere by Chazal lashon hara . Even if one speaks true statements which will not cause any visible damage, one transgresses this prohibition. If one witnessed someone committing a wrong against his fellow—such as theft, damage, embar- rassment, or wrongdoing—even if only a single person saw it — and the offender has not yet repent- ed, it is permitted to relate this to others, for the purpose of helping the guilty person repent and re- pairing the wrong. However, there are seven precise conditions which must be fulfilled before one may speak such beneficial lashon hara: · You personally witnessed the event, or you conducted due diligence to verify its truth. · You are absolutely sure the incident was truly wrongful. · You first approached the offender privately. · No exaggeration — report facts accurately, without embellishment. · You have a purely constructive intent. · There must be no alternative way to achieve the goal. · The harm caused by speaking must be proportionate and fair. 3
3 FOR CENTURIES, RABBINIC TRADITION has included laws about lashon hara , but with a couple of exceptions, most notably Mai- monides, these were scattered across larger texts and not given a com- prehensive treatment. Kagan is the first to collect all these sources into a single work, es- sentially codifying the thinking of the previous generations and also greatly expanding the scope of laws around speech. While he was careful to discuss both the legal and the ethical sides of lashon hara in this book and others that he wrote on the topic, his emphasis on the legalities seems to have had lasting impact: to this day, the work has become extremely popular, with daily study guides and even a foun- dation devoted to promoting lashon hara awareness. However, this legal approach is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as we see in this passage, it gives a framework for how and when something is not only permitted, but obligatory to speak. On the oth- er hand, it means that, unless someone is an expert in the laws, they may feel unable to judge whether they are allowed to say something or not, and err on the side of silence. In the introduction to his book, Kagan lists up to 32 possible Biblical prohibitions that may be violated by speaking lashon hara , many of which aren’t directly related to the act of lashon hara itself: an approach that can have a chilling effect among those who take his work seriously.
2 IN THIS EXCERPT from a longer section of Talmud about lashon hara , the rabbis expand on the dual nature of the dangers it poses, which they frame in terms of the spiritual damage that it can cause as well as a matter of adherence to law. This sets the tone for much of the discussion in later generations, with many tak- ing up the spiritual and ethical dam- age that language can inflict, while others focus more on defining exact- ing parameters for what constitutes bad speech.
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