The Axelrod continues its tradition of celebrating Memorial Day weekend with “Strike up the Band,” a swinging big band concert featuring award-winning lead vocalist Gabrielle Stravelli performing the immortal songs of George and Ira Gershwin.

The New York Times compared Ms. Stravelli to “Ella Fitzgerald in her prime,” and she has performed in many of New York’s most prestigious venues as well as concert halls around the world.

The concert will feature the Gershwins’ contribution to the Great American Songbook including dozens of hit songs including “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “’S Wonderful,” “Summertime,” and “I Got Rhythm.”

“Strike up the Band,” at the Axelrod Performing Arts Center on Sunday, May 26 at 3pm will feature Stravelli joined by a 17-piece swing band, including acclaimed jazz pianist Dr. Art “Jazz” Topilow and clarinetist Carl Topilow, conductor of the Cleveland Pops Orchestra.

“The songs of George and Ira Gershwin have remained a vital part of our American musical landscape for a century,” said APAC Artistic Director Andrew DePrisco.

No matter when they were composed, I believe that truly great songs never age; they continue to feel new and timeless.

“When a singer as naturally talented as Gabrielle Stravelli bring her special gifts to two dozen songs by the Gershwins—that’s a holiday event worthy of letting the drums roll out and the trumpets call!”

Award-winning vocalist and songwriter Gabrielle Stravelli (who grew up in Colts Neck, NJ) has garnered critical acclaim and a loyal following through her rich sound, original compositions and her unique take on material from the Great American Songbook as well as by contemporary artists.

A trained actress, The New York Times noted that Stravelli’s “emotional intelligence coincides with a phenomenal voice that she wielded with an easygoing confidence and impeccable taste.”

This month, Stravelli released her fourth album, titled “Pick Up My Pieces,” which is a tribute to Willie Nelson.

Stravelli began singing at age 15 as a soloist with the Orchestra of St. Peter by the Sea in New Jersey and has since performed on stages from Amsterdam to New York. She has been featured at the Caramoor Festival, Jazz at Chautauqua, Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night’s Swing, Birdland Jazz Club, 92Y’s Lyrics and Lyricists Series, Cornelia Street Cafe, 54 Below, Merkin Hall at Kaufman Center, the Iridium Jazz Club, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) where she opened for Esperanza Spalding and Cassandra Wilson. She sings with a “forceful emotional presence and a versatile, well-shaded voice,” says Adam Feldman of Time Out New York, and Peter Haas of Cabaret Scenes describes her voice as “clear and clean, expressive, supple, with unforced power.”

Tickets ranging from $39-$46 can be purchased online at www.axelrodartscenter.com; by phone (732) 531-9106, x14, or in person at the Axelrod Performing Arts Center, 100 Grant Ave., Ocean Township. The theater offers ample, free on-site parking and is completely handicap accessible.

For more information, please visit www.axelrodartscenter.com

Herman Wouk, the bestselling Orthodox Jewish author, died last Friday at the age of 103, ten days shy of his 104th birthday. Wouk’s unmatched literary career spanned for nearly seven decades. He can easily be given credit for ushering Judaism into the American mainstream. Wouk, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for “The Caine Mutiny” in 1951, authored two dozen novels and nonfictions. “The Caine Mutiny”, which was on the best-seller list for two years, and the best-selling “Marjorie Morningstar” from 1955 were both adapted for the screen. His novels “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” were likewise both turned into popular television miniseries.

From the onset, of his debut novel, “Aurora Dawn,” in 1947, to his last book, “Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author” in 2015, Wouk continually wove in themes central to the American Jewish experience into his writings. The prolific and immensely popular writer used his fame to normalize Jewish religious observance in the United States. As reported by VIN News, Wouk made Jewish religious observance appear conventional in his books. Scenes of a Passover seder and a bar mitzvah service became scenes of middle-class American life in “Marjorie Morningstar.” Wouk had a gift for turning a story about Jews into a middle-class American classic.

In his book, “This Is My God”, he introduced readers to the laws of kashrut, family purity and the holidays of Sukkot and Shavuot. In a revolutionary effort, the book showed, through stories from Wouk’s own glamorous Manhattan life, that it was not a paradox to be both a modern prosperous American and a practicing Orthodox Jew.

Born in the Bronx on May 27, 1915, Wouk was the son of immigrants from Belarus. Wouk, who had an early love for reading, attended Columbia University, where he served as editor of its humor magazine. He also took courses at Yeshiva University. Wouk also proudly served in the U.S. navy during WWII, and received a U.S. Navy Lone Sailor Award.

For a brief time, after graduating, Wouk abandoned his religious lifestyle when he became a radio dramatist, writing for the renowned comedian Fred Allen. Although he was successful, Wouk said he felt his life was empty without Jewish learning and religion. He permanently returned to his pious level of observance. Despite numerous moves, secular peers and criticism in many cases, everywhere he resided he was sure to set up Jewish study and prayer groups.

Wouk appeared on the cover of Time in 1955. The magazine lauded Wouk’s unusual blend of popularity and success, alongside his unrelenting Jewish religious observance. “He is a devout Orthodox Jew who had achieved worldly success in worldly-wise Manhattan while adhering to dietary prohibitions and traditional rituals which many of his fellow Jews find embarrassing,” the article wrote.

Wouk was a dedicated husband to the same woman for more than six decades. Wouk is survived by two of his sons, Nathaniel and Joseph, and three grandchildren.

His first inklings of the immediacy of Nazi atrocities took place in a neighborhood bakery, in 1956, where the four-year-old Bobby Rosen spotted the tattoo on the forearm of a woman working the counter and coaxed a whispered explanation from his mother. This opens an awareness of the ubiquity of such signs in his neighborhood, and why “A day never passed when I didn’t hear somebody express an opinion about the Nazis—usually my father,” a World War II veteran who was particularly infuriated by the sight of German-designed cars. “Yeah, we all hated the Nazis,” Rosen continues, “and if anybody didn’t, he kept his fool mouth shut about it.”

Rosen describes his boyhood in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in his new memoir Bobby in Naziland (Headpress). This book follows the best-selling Nowhere Man, an account John Lennon’s final days.

Bobby in Naziland takes an episodic stroll through a Jewish neighborhood that seemed stuck in its own kind of timelessness, colored by the multi-directional progression of prejudices reported throughout the book. Anyone who is German is, of course, a target, which for Rosen included his building’s super, Mr. Kruger (“My father called him ‘that damn Kraut’”). “We also routinely beat the shit out of his blond and suspiciously Aryan-looking twin sons … who were my age.”

But there also were Catholics to despise, and Poles and Puerto Ricans. “It was garden-variety bigotry, inane and vicious at the same time.” What Tom Lehrer parodied in his song “National Brotherhood Week” played out for real in Flatbush, where “everyone … I knew hated black people—Jew and goyim alike.” Although racial integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers made it seem as if the borough “were some kind of racially harmonious mecca,” in truth it was bad enough that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had to be applied to Brooklyn as well as the former Confederacy.

We meet the author as a belligerent, foul-mouthed child, fighting with kids in the neighborhood. Kids like the three Alesio brothers. “I don’t know why the sight of them made me crazy. It just did.” His stretch of Brooklyn’s East 17th Street is defined by the families who lived nearby, a variety that he soon learned included an all-encompassing other: the goyim, a term he learned from his parents and grandparents.

It was a term intended to define people like his downstairs neighbor Brian Riley, who suffered physical abuse at the hands of his alcoholic stepfather. As Rosen’s mother explained, the goyim “drink, and then they come home and beat their kids. Aren’t you glad we’re not like that?”

The book’s very readable twenty chapters have a journalist’s precision and a humorist’s facility with language, all put to excellent use in building a compelling sense of the complicated nature of family and neighborhood. “Whatever was happening in Flatbush in the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s … was rich material that demanded further exploration.” After writing down what he remembered, Rosen had 400 pages of material to distill. And “what jumped out at me were Nazis—they were everywhere.”

The young author finds glory in his father’s World War II keepsakes, and, with Third Reich escapees reported on the loose, even contemplates joining the Mossad to search them out. Thus the 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann was a matter of huge excitement in the neighborhood. What complicates the triumph in retrospect is a result of Rosen’s later research, when he discovered that the man who fingered Eichmann, a onetime Dachau political prisoner named Lothar Hermann, was himself arrested and tortured by the Mossad when they decided, against all evidence, that he was Josef Mengele—and that Israel finally paid him the $10,000 Eichmann-capture reward a dozen years after that capture. To Rosen, that part of the story “changes the very essence of what everybody thought they knew about how Israeli intelligence agents had managed to snatch Adolf Eichmann off a Buenos Aires street.”

William Styron was resident in a Flatbush rooming house in 1949, which provided the setting for Sophie’s Choice. The novel examines consequences of the Holocaust, specifically its effect on post-war Flatbush where, notes Rosen, “Sophie could have been the fictional incarnation of any number of my neighbors.” But his fascination with all things Nazi-related also drew him into a secret reading of William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with its lurid accounts of torturous abuse. “Oh, I’ll become numb to it all in a couple of years,” writes Rosen, “and soon enough the very notion of genocidal slaughter will cease to appall me.”

Rosen’s father owned and operated a candy store near his home, which provides the setting for many of the memoir’s scenes. Such as the time Duke Snider, a legendary Brooklyn Dodger, stopped by for what he’d heard were “the best egg creams on Church Avenue.” And there are Rosen’s own stints there as a soda jerk, which allowed him to develop a journalist’s skill at unobtrusively eavesdropping.

As a boy growing up in the early 1960s, he observed signal events like Roger Maris’s home-run streak and the progression of the space missions, which galvanized his family and friends. The death of Pope John XXIII, in June 1963, drew little neighborhood attention. But the assassination of President Kennedy, five months later, changed everything. As Rosen puts it, “The Wall began to crumble.” National mourning was stoked by an aggressive media. “It seemed that every magazine that went on sale at my father’s candy store—Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post, and even Playboy—had something about the Kennedy assassination on the cover.” It was the first of two events that finally breached the neighborhood’s isolation, finished by the arrival of the Beatles.

Bobby in Naziland portrays the neighborhood during that particular decade with the characterizations and insight of a good novel, although at times it seems a little too dispassionate as the adult Robert reviews the antics of young Bobby with what must be elusive objectiveness. But it really is the neighborhood that’s the star of the story. You don’t have to be Jewish—or a Brooklynite—to be enchanted by this book. But it’s going to take you even further home if you are.

—B. A. Nilsson is a freelance writer who has been covering literature, the arts, and food for a variety of publications for more than thirty years.

When Israeli singer and looping artist Netta Barzilai won the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest in Portugal last May, all of Israel was ecstatic. Beyond watching their native daughter win big on an international stage, Netta’s triumph meant that, as per the competition’s longstanding tradition, Israel would be granted the honor of hosting Eurovision in 2019.

As expected, Israel’s fourth opportunity to host the international song competition was thrilling. Tourists from around the world descended on Tel Aviv for glitz, glam and great music, and Israel pulled out all the stops to make its many guests feel at home. But at the center of it all was a golden opportunity: a platform for organic cultural exchange and open dialogue in a country that has met with mixed reviews from many of the nations in contention for Eurovision’s top prize. Thankfully, Israel delivered on that as well.

“I’m pretty sure all the artists have been experiencing the same pressures, the same kind of Twitter extremism. I’ve spoken with some of the other artists, everyone feels conflicted by it, everyone feels under pressure,” Australian singer Kate Miller-Heidke told Australia’s SBS News in Tel Aviv just ahead of Eurovision. “Since being here in Israel, I’ve been even more sure about the value of open dialogue.”

Understanding the power of music and art in cross-cultural dialogue, top Israeli institutions have been promoting ‘artivism’ programs for decades, providing budding artists with opportunities for simultaneous self-discovery and a thorough, rhetoric-free rediscovery of Israel on their own terms. Leading the pack is Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem, whose Ceramics and Glass Department hosts an annual “International Week” exchange program as winter turns to spring.

At the beginning of March, Bezalel Academy played host to 20 art students from universities around the world, challenging them to reexamine their craft – and any preconceived notions of Israel – while collaborating with Bezalel students throughout the weeklong program. The exchange students and their Israeli peers quickly meshed, learning that as artists, they don’t have to speak the same language to join in on the conversation.

“Art is a language, with the magic being that it creates conversations. You have your own opinions, which can either be accepted by others or they can create their own opinions from it,” said Shi Lowidt, a second year Ceramics and Glass Design student at Bezalel Academy. “Through our projects, the international students are seeing Israel in a different light. Back home, they heard the news and assumed that Israel was a war-torn country, but now they are seeing that it is a lot more nuanced than that. They were amazed to tell me how safe and secure they feel here.”

Noticing the barrier presented by spoken language, Linda Meripeled, an exchange student from Luxembourg who is majoring in Glass Design at The Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, insisted on spending a few days getting to know her new project partners before diving into their project, though the request was met with resistance by one of her Israeli partners.

“It seems that Israelis are hyper-focused and want to tackle a project right away, figuring it out as they go. This was a completely different method than what I am used to,” explains Meripeled. “I like to establish the experience and emotions I am feeling before starting to use the glass to express them, whereas the Israelis focus a lot more on the actual materials, wanting to start with the glass and then working out what to do with it.”

Meripeled was grateful that she was able to convince her Israeli counterparts to spend the first day of the program touring, as it provided a chance for them to bond and understand each other through philosophical discussions. “There was no one language that we all shared, so we began with body language, the basics of understanding. What at first seemed liked a serious challenge was actually an incredible opportunity for connection.”

“One of the Israeli’s remarked that they were very impressed with how open I am to the unknown,” noted Meripeled, whose parents were anxious about her trip to Israel.” It excites me that I don’t know the language and to experience something new. I learned that for some Israelis it’s a little bit scary not to know, but they told me that they were thankful to have had shared this experience with us and forced to try something new.”

Lowidt, who participated in the program for the first time, was among the grateful Israeli students, as Meripeled’s day out in Jerusalem convinced her to do the same with her own group, which included exchange students and Christian and Muslim classmates from Bezalel. “It was an incredible day that changed my view of Jerusalem, as each one of us was able to reintroduce their holy site to the rest of the group through the lens of their own religion and culture. For me, as a Jew, it was both interesting and overwhelming to have this rare opportunity to see and to learn so much about how the other sides view the conflict, while also being able to impact their perspectives on Judaism and Israel.”

Anri Musahi, an exchange student from Tokyo majoring in Glass Design, was one of four students from Tokyo University of the Arts. Her knowledge about Israel from came from reading books, and her family, inundated with negative reports via the international media, was worried that her trip would be dangerous. Upon arriving in Israel, Musahi was pleasantly surprised to see that daily life carried on normally, with “friends having coffee in cafes, just like they would back home.”

Growing up in Japan, Musahi didn’t have much exposure to other religions and cultures, so meeting Jewish and Muslim students who openly discussed their different religious and political beliefs was an eye-opener. “Tokyo is too normal with no political debates, so it’s refreshing to come here and experience peaceful but heated discussions. I imagined that the Israeli students would be more aggressive, but I was impressed by how much mutual respect was showed towards each religion – people have different religions, but they are still just people, which I think is so beautiful.”

“During the International Week program, the Ceramics and Glass Department hosted a seminar on artivism that was attended by the exchange students and students from three other departments within Bezalel. All of students interacted with artists from a variety of disciplines, who talked about how the projects that they create trigger a response and conversation on personal and social issues, including politics, gender, sexuality, and our shared history. The students then worked together in groups on joint projects that were developed throughout the week,” explained Dr. Eran Ehrlich, Head of Bezalel Academy’s Ceramics and Glass Department.

“The atmosphere was electrifying and moving, and the connection between the students – Jewish, Christian and Palestinian, European and Japanese – was a testament to the brotherhood of humanity, as well as the professional practice and imagination of the participants. The projects were amazing both in terms of conceptual sophistication and performance, in relation to the given time.”

“I believe that given the state of our world, we must encourage our students to embrace openness and curiosity, to seek out a variety of sources of inspiration, as well as varied life experiences beyond the ones they know. International thinking is not only a key to more complex and diverse art, but also important for the future careers of these young multinational artists.”

Echoing the sentiment, Lowidt expresses deep gratitude for the opportunity to participate in the International Week program, which allowed her to grow as an artist and a citizen of the world.

“It was so new and so different, and exactly what we needed to expand our minds and our outlooks. It’s amazing how art can help us develop into such different people and allows us to really see the other. It’s an experience that every artist should have so that they can give it over to the masses through their craft.”

Noam Mirvis is a nonprofit public relations professional living in Jerusalem. Prior to making Aliyah from the United Kingdom in 2017, he spearheaded the first ever pro-Israel lobbying group in the House of Lords in the British Parliament.

High-minded well-known literary types have the chattering classes in thrall with Jew hatred which has, octopus-like, permeated every nook and cranny of what was formerly considered “high” culture

People say that it is usually calm before a storm but I feel uneasy, unbalanced, uprooted, and set adrift in a dangerously familiar sea.

An American rabbi put it this way: “I never thought it could happen here. The Pittsburgh shooting made me angry. The San Diego shooting made me afraid.”

Wherever I turn, Israel and the Jews are being falsely accused, defamed, and attacked. Some of us cover the campuses, others cover the media, the internet, national and international politics, the Islamic world, and increasingly, the local attacks on American Jews who are visibly Jewish.

Tragically, those American Jews who are not, have not sprung to the defense of the haredi Jews who are being thrown to the ground and pummeled by young men, usually men of color; or shot down on the Sabbath while at prayer by white supremacists.

As for myself? I cover what high-minded literary types as well as feminists have to say. Doing so never fails to break my heart or strengthen my resolve. Jew hatred has, octopus-like, permeated every nook and cranny of what was formerly considered “high” culture.

The London Review of Books (LRB) and the New York Review of Books (NYRB) almost always have at least one anti-Israel/pro-Palestine piece. Here’s something by Adam Shatz in the May 9, 2019 edition of the high-toned LRB. Shatz is a contributing editor to the LRB, a contributor to the New York Times and the New Yorker, and the former literary critic of The Nation. Titled “Trump’s America, Netanyahu’s Israel” Shatz opens with this:

“Israel’s legislative elections on 9 April were a tribute to Binyamin Netanyahu’s transformation of the political landscape. At no point were they discussed in terms of which candidates might be persuaded by (non-existent) American pressure, or the ‘international community’, to end the occupation. This time the question was which party leader could be trusted by Israeli Jews – Palestinian citizens of Israel are now officially second-class – to manage the occupation, and to expedite the various tasks the Jewish state has mastered: killing Gazans, bulldozing homes, combating the scourge of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), and conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. With his promise to annex the West Bank, Netanyahu had won even before the election was held. It wasn’t simply Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights that sped the incumbent on his way; it was the nature of the conversation – and the fact that the leader of the opposition was Benny Gantz, the IDF commander who presided over the 2014 Operation Protective Edge, in which more than two thousand Gazans were killed.”

Almost every point is a lie. For example, “killing Gazans” should read: “fighting back in self-defense against thousands of rocket attacks launched by Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”

The rest of Shatz’s piece is largely not factual, lacks context, has little historical memory, and is, quite simply, vicious. Here he is in the same piece on anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism:

“Is there an antisemitism of the left? Certainly. Antisemitism, like anti-black racism, is a virus in Western society. But it is one thing to acknowledge its existence in movements that want to see an end to Israel’s occupation – which tend to be left-leaning – and another to claim that it is their defining feature. Israel has recast antisemitism in such a self-serving way that it has become difficult to distinguish between those who take Israel to task as a Jewish state, and those who criticise it as a Jewish state: as an exclusionary ethnocracy and an occupying power.”

Israel is not an “exclusionary ethnocracy” or an “occupying power.” There are far better ways of describing the situation, the “matzav.” Hamas-controlled Gaza is an “exclusionary ethnocracy” as well as a barbaric tyranny. You won’t hear that from Shatz.

A 2019 April issue of the New York Review of Books has a review of “Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History” by Nur Masalha. Titled “The Many Lives of Palestine,” the reviewer, G.W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, damns the Balfour Declaration, insists on the absolutely false statement that an “ancient Palestine” once existed and that it “embraced some of the old territory of the Phoenicians.” Bowersock faults Masalha for not focusing more on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, “the truly great poet of the Palestinian people…(and from whose poetry) one learns what it meant, and still means, to be a Palestinian with cultural roots that reach far back in time.”

Bowersock condemns the “appropriation of Arabic place names after 1948” (actually mostly biblical) and finally praises Masalha for “striving to keep alight the flame of Palestinian culture that despite every attempt to snuff it out, still burns brightly in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and in the world he never left behind.”

My point: These boldly biased reviewers are both Mandarins, and are the gate-keepers of High Culture. Although that Culture now traffics in gutter “tropes,” the professional chattering classes remain in their thrall.

(INN)

Phyllis Chesler is a Ginsburg-Ingerman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, received the 2013 National Jewish Book Award,.authored 18 books, including Women and Madness and The New Anti-Semitism, and 4 studies about honor killing, Her latest books are An American Bride in Kabul, A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.