JustASC

Here’s the best part of writing a column and keeping a blog: hearing from old friends. I got the following from Jeff, a childhood friend from the old bungalow colony, which I wrote about this month and below:

I too have fond memories of Lake Champlain. Especially this week (40 years ago) when I think of that old B/W TV set with the Hanger and tin foil that my father set up on a bridge table in front of our bungalows so that everyone from the the colony could gather around to watch Neil Armstrong take that historic step.

One of my fondest memories was when you came by that summer while some of us were outside playing chess. You watched and watched and when I asked you if you wanted to play you told me quietly you didn’t know how. I asked you if you wanted to learn and you said sure just don’t let anyone know I was teaching you. I didn’t have to keep it secret long because you picked up on the game extremely fast. As you probably recall we played all summer. When the day came for you to leave to go back home you asked me for one last game. We played our longest game ever and then finally you made a great move and beat me for the first time. As you pulled away and we were all waving goodbye to you, your mom and dad, your brothers and your dog Madel, my father asked me who won the last big chess game, I told him with a big smile that Andy won it. He turned to me and said then why the big smile and I said “because Andy won it”. He smiled back and looked at me and said from one teacher to another it’s a good feeling isn’t it?

Forty years is a long time but memories of moon landings and chess games with friends last forever.

I was eight when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon 40 years ago today, and like a lot of Americans will always associate it with summer vacation. (Writing for Tablet, Sam Freedman reminisces sadly about a visit to his sister’s sleepaway camp on the momentous day.) We were up at our bungalow colony on Lake Champlain, of course, and my parents were simultaneously playing bridge and following the news on a small black and white television set that needed a coat hanger and tin foil to pick up a fuzzy broadcast from the closest CBS affiliate.

The Eagle landed after I had gone to bed, but I was awakened to see the grainy shots of Aldrin and Armstrong bouncing around on the surface. I had a sty in one of my eyes, and remembered standing in the too-bright kitchen, monocularly and uncomfortably, trying to see what I could.

More thrilling was the package I got in the mail a couple of months later. I found out at some point that if you sent NASA a suck-uppy letter saying you were a fan of the space program, they would send you a goodwill package filled with all kinds of neat swag: 8 x 10 color glossies of the astronauts, a map of the moon, mission patches,and the like. But the best thing I got was a floppy disposable recording of the moon landing that I could play on a standard phonograph.

I must have listened to that thing a few dozen times, because to this day I can recite whole chunks of the transcript, including this bit:

Mission Control: We copy you down, Eagle.

Armstrong: Engine arm is off. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.

Mission control: Roger, tra-Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.

Aldrin: Thank you.

[NASA has a full, annotated transcript here.)

Four decades later, my thoughts don’t run to the technical marvel of the moon landing, but to the relative primitiveness of all the technology that brought it to me. That awful TV set. The U.S. mail! The floppy record. My parents’ record player, housed in a piece of furniture as big as an armoire. Now I can call up a recording of the landing at the click of a mouse.

What I miss about the space age is not the faster, more streamlined world of wonders it promised, but the slower, more human-scaled ways in which I experienced it.

Henry Winkler’s daughter was married last month, and I’m kvelling.

Why do I almost feel compelled to send a gift? I grew up with “Happy Days,” of course, and appreciate Winkler’s proud and understated support for Jewish causes.

But it was his role as lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn on Arrested Development that elevated him in my eyes as a true comic genius.  Zuckerkorn’s clueless self-satisfaction, and self-satisfied cluelessness, were a joy to behold.

Mazel tov!

Ivanka Trump announced her engagment to Jared Kushner via Twitter, the Daily News reported.

New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, who profiled Kushner at length in this week’s issue, has some details, based on an interview with Ms. Trump:

Jared’s orthodox Jewish background presented a challenge to the relationship, but Ivanka has worked hard to show Jared’s parents that she embraces Judaism. This week, she completed her conversion, after studying under Rabbi [Haskel] Lookstein at [Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun] on the Upper East Side. (Before this, they could not be officially engaged.) This spring, for instance, Ivanka attended a benefit for the Mikvah, the traditional Jewish bath, in Jared’s hometown of Livingston, New Jersey, with his mom, Seryl, and his two sisters, Nicole and Dara. One attendee reported that Seryl introduced Ivanka to friends solely as “Ivanka,” and not as Jared’s girlfriend.

That last line is a little, I don’t know, small, no? The couple have been tabloid fodder for a couple of years, the Kushners are gossiped about endlessly in their home town, and Ivanka’s father is one of the most famous men in the country — isn’t it possible, even likely, that the mom was assuming that the other “attendees” would know exactly who Ivanka is?  Do moms regularly introduce their son’s girlfriends as “my son’s girlfriend”?

This goes back to my problem with Sherman’s original article. If, after interviewing ivanka, he was going to include a line in his write-up suggesting Kushner’s mom was cool to the relationship, didn’t he owe Ivanka a chance to respond?  Did he ask her outright:  “Sources tell me the mom has a hard time accepting the relationship. Is that accurate?”

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. There’s no way to know, leaving idle minds like mine the opportunity to snipe. Of course there’s the possibility that the “one attendee” quoted is Ivanka herself.  But are there rules for journalism or not, and are they suspended when it comes to magazine gossip writing?

The National Jewish Democratic Councilis targeting the NJ gubernatorial race, according to a press release:

We are only just catching our breath from 2008 and already have two significant elections just four months away in New Jersey and Virginia. As we did in 2008, NJDC will play a significant role in keeping both states blue! Will you support our efforts in New Jersey and Virginia by helping us reach our $100,000 goal and contribute to NJDC today?

….This year, NJDC’s outreach and educational campaign will again center on issues of concern to Jewish communities in New Jersey and Virginia. Our plan employs polling, direct mail, ads, training field organizers and surrogate speakers, and phone banking. Extensive analysis of Jewish voting in both states shows that Jewish swing voters will be a key component of a winning election strategy.

 Sincerely,

Marc R. Stanley
Chairman

JTA’s Eric Fingerhut has analysis:

While New Jersey is an obvious place for Jewish outreach, with an estimated 480,000 Jews, Virginia has close to 100,000 Jews, which comes to 1.3 percent of its population — the same Jewish proportion of the population as Ohio. (The key difference is that Ohio Jews, particularly in the Cleveland area, are much more concentrated in particular neighborhoods than, for instance, the Jews in Washington, D.C.’s Virginia suburbs.) In the last month of last year’s presidential campaign, the Obama campaign did set up a Jewish outreach operation in the commonwealth, holding events in Northern Virginia, Richmond and the Tidewater area.

Considering that the left-leaning J Street and Americans for Peace Now got prominent seats at the table when Jewish leaders met with President Obama yesterday, I think it is time other left-leaning groups cool it with the self-congratulatory “maverick” pose. Case in point: This message to listserv members (which arrived in my work mailbox) from Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, The Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace:

Our Rabbis Have Chutzpah

Brit Tzedek is very pleased to share with you an op-ed by Rabbi John Friedman, chair of Brit Tzedek’s 1500-member rabbinic network. It recently appeared on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), the global Jewish news service, and will appear in Jewish papers across the country this week.

….Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller, Rabbinic Cabinet co-chair, led a six-member Brit Tzedek rabbinic delegation that met with the Israeli Consul General in San Francisco on July 13. 

What is exactly so chutzpadik about writing an oped for the JTA (endorsing a settlement freeze) or meeting with an Israeli diplomat? “Chutzpah” in this context seems to mean gutsy and iconoclastic, although at the point when Reform Jewish leader Eric Yoffie, head of perhaps the largest Jewish membership group in the country, tells Obama ‘we are deeply supportive of what you’re trying to do on settlements,’ you can pretty much drop the rebel shtick.

If you keep telling the world that you are outside of the mainstream, they’re bound to believe you.

From the New York Times corrections today:

Because of an editing error, an Associated Press obituary on Saturday about a pioneer in the modern riverboat casino industry referred incorrectly to him at one point. As the obituary correctly noted elsewhere, he was Bernard Goldstein, not “Mr. Bernstein.”

New York magazine has a long article about real estate mogul/newspaper owner Jared Kushner and the whole Kushner family saga. I’m not enough of a Kushnerologist to know what’s new and what isn’t in the story, but there is this tidbit:

Ironically, the Kushners may be headed back to New Jersey. Jared and Charlie are pursuing deals, including buying their old portfolio back from troubled AIG. “You can’t be dynastic about these things,” Jared says. “You have to make a decision about what’s best at the time. Facts change.” 

To this casual reader, the story appears both overly detailed (it’s not quite clear, for example, how Gabriel Sherman got the blow-by-blow account of a disastrous family seder in Miami Beach) and not detailed enough (you never really find out what specific charges patriarch Charlie Kushner faced when he was sent to jail). And while Charlie does seem to have granted Sherman an interview or two, there are a few places that absolutely require some response from him, even if to say “Charles Kushner declined to comment on this acount” or “Charles Kushner denied this account.”

For example, there is a paragraph detailing the machinations Charlie allegedly used to assure Jared’s acceptance at Harvard. Do Jared and Charlie accept this version? Does Frank Lautenberg, named in the anecdote? Did Sherman ever bring it up in his conversations with them? If not, why not? And if he did, did the Kushners respond?

If someone reported that I finagled a kid or a nephew into the Ivies (there’s another anecdote in the piece about Kushner nephew and Penn) I would sure as hell want a chance to respond, certainly for the kid’s sake.

What are the rules of these kinds of stories? If an anecdote is conveyed as the truth, with no citations or documentation or obvious sources, are we to understand that the main people interviewed provided the material or essentially corroborated it? Or at least didn’t deny it?

Of course, I’m one to talk: The NJJN‘s coverage of the Kushner story, about a prominent local philanthropist and Jewish leader, was thin and sparse. I decided early on we didn’t have the resources to tell the story in any more depth than it had already been told in the mainstream press, and was convinced that tick-tock coverage of the families’ travails would alienate more readers than it would serve.

Still, it remains an important story about money, power, religion, and philanthropy, and I’m glad someone is telling it. I wish they had done a more professional job.

Rob Eshman of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles goes to town on Commentary magazine, saying the neoconservative bible has become grumpy, predictable, and cant-filled:

Commentary’s niche, now, is to rail against the left, the Democrats, Obama and pretty much anything new. The current July/August issue has a section titled, “The Hipster Curse,” including an article by Professor D.G. Myers, “The Judaism Rebooters,” which grumbles about a new generation of Jews who dare drag Darfur, global warming and pop-culture relevance into Jewish life. Damn kids! Just for good measure, there’s also an essay by the screenwriter Frederic Raphael grousing that – guess what – there are no good movies anymore. Damn movies!

It’s as if, to paraphrase Woody Allen, “Commentary” and “Senior Living ” have merged to form … “Sedentary.”

Agree? Disagree? Commentary started to lose me when they began printing attacks on evolution written by the Discovery Institute crowd. And I do wish they would provide more of an alternative to the talk radio culture, which seems more interested in “winning” than it does in intellectual engagement. Too many of the articles in recent years seem like a series of talking points memos to the faithful rather than the kinds of articles meant to challenge liberal myths and certainties (let lone examine conservative myths and certainties). Does anyone read Commentary who isn’t already disposed to agree with its ideas? Yes, that’s a societal problem – liberals and conservatives content to look only in the mirror — but wouldn’t it be nice to have a magazine that breaks the mold, that forces ideological opposites to take notice?   

Case in point: John H. Makin’s article in this month’s Commentary, “A Government Failure, Not a Market Failure.” In telling the history of the housing bubble and the economic collapse, he talks about the Clinton administration’s “goal of expanding home ownership” and the current “government’s response to the collapse of the housing bubble,” but skips over the intervening eight years without once mentioning the word “Bush” or suggesting Republicans had been in power during the bubble itself.

A more serious intellectual piece would have engaged with the Bush years, even if to defend his administration’s or party’s financial or regulatory policies or warnings, if any. If the GOP had a better idea, it would have been nice to hear it. If not, it would have pointed to a bipartisan failure, according to the terms of the author’s argument.

But skipping the Bush years entirely is a weak debater’s trick, not worthy of a magazine of ideas.

My column on the bungalow colonies got a big response, thanks in large part to the Union for Reform Judaism, which sent it to subscribers of their daily “Ten Minutes of Torah” email. Here’s a sampling:

You are absolutely on target. I went to Ramah & also non religious but Jewish camps as a kid. I LOVED camp! I live in Harrisburg, PA. When I had a young family, I discovered a family camp in Western PA run by the Pittsburgh YMCA – it was a wonderful, reasonably priced yearly experience for us for 12 years – we always went week 2 and became close with the other week 2 families from western PA and beyond. This sort of low key, fun, engaging Jewish experience would benefit the Jewish community and the families themselves. Thanks for boosting the idea.  –  Ricki Hurwitz

I had spent a summer [at Champlain Colony] in, if I recall, 1962 or 63 (I date it by the time before my brother’s bar mitzvah)- after my father retired from years as a summer camp/social director in the Catskills. I used to say, summarizing my ‘Jewish journey’ in various contexts, that, while I attended a Conservative 3-day a week Hebrew school, and had a mother who grew up in an Orthodox home, I never saw my parents attend any service other than a wedding or the various family B’nei Mitzvah. Then I remembered, at Champlain Colony, my dad would always go to the minyan, because there would not have been enough adult Jews without him, and he felt the responsibility to his community in that Jewishly isolated place.  Thanks for the column.  –  Steven Weiner

Are there such opportunities today for adults? I’d be happy to receive your information. Your comments do seem like worlds away, but I would like to be transported back to that world. –Gary Brock
 

What a great column – “Bring back the Bungalows.” My childhood was in the 40′s. My family didn’t go to camp in the Catskills; we piled into the family Chevy, drove 5 hours to Atlantic City and stayed in a small hotel – not on the beach – where as you say “Jewish was the default.” All the guests and the owners were Jewish; we had three Kosher meals a day and there was a camaraderie that cannot be experienced today at the Four Seasons or even the Ritz Carlton. They are memories that I cherish.  —  Edward J. Gutman, Esq.

I grew up in the Midwest and the south and didn’t have the bungalow colony camp experience as a youngster…but I married a girl from Brooklyn whose parents had taken her and her sister to a cabin community just like you describe on the shores of Lake George when they were growing up in the 50′s and 60′s and we had the chance in the late 70′s and early 80′s to take our kids there for 3 or 4 summers, a week or 10 days each year. The accommodations were a little “basic” but the community feeling among these folks who had spent the same weeks there for 20 or more years, some of them civil servants or teachers, some artists, a few professionals, was truly enriching. Thanks for evoking those memories.  –  Marc J. Sternbaum