Hebrew College Blog

She points out Joshua, squirming in his seat and, yet again, asking for a drink of water. It's not clear to the teacher whether he has memorized his lines or is really reading the words. Then there's Rachel, who impulsively calls out answers to the questions asked, but seems unaware that her responses are, at best, only tangentially related to the question. What if she blurts out an answer to the Rabbi's simple question when it's someone else's turn?

Maya sits back and watches what the others in her group do before she begins. Will she be able to step forward when she's supposed to read her lines? And how will Max respond to his classmates if they do something incorrect? In class, he yells at them if they make a mistake. What are the chances that Noa and her parents will even attend on Friday night, considering they are ready to pull her out of school because, as they've put it, "she's having enough difficulty reading English, without having to learn Hebrew too"?

These are examples of the kinds of issues teachers in day and supplemental schools face when working with the diverse learners in their classrooms. Whether teaching in an inclusive classroom or providing individual or small group support, educators know that teaching Hebrew is no simple task, and when students have learning issues, it is even more difficult.

Last year close to 200 educators gathered at Hebrew College to begin to explore ways to teach Hebrew reading at our first GISHA (Good Ideas Supporting Hebrew Access) conference. This year, teachers, administrators and special educators will again join together to investigate teaching strategies for learning Hebrew reading, speaking and writing to students with special needs.

This year's conference is titled Hebrew for Diverse Learners: From Concept to Classroom. At the conference, we will consider the impact of various disabilities (e.g., learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mood disorders, executive function disorders) on students' learning a second language.

Our featured speakers include Drs. Scott Goldberg, Nina Goodman and Elana Weinberger, who will share research results on assessment of students' Hebrew reading and its application to classroom instruction. Dr. Sara Rubinow Simon, co-editor of V'Khol Banayikh: Jewish Education for All, a recently published book on Jewish special education, will be discussing the changes in the field and newly emerging information.

Workshops will offer a variety of topics that include the impact of various disabilities on learning Hebrew, creation of games and teacher-made materials, use of technology, and ways to adapt existing curricula, prayers and text. Sessions will be appropriate for those teaching at all levels in day school and supplemental schools, from elementary students who are just beginning Hebrew to high school students who are studying rabbinic texts.

"Architectures for Special Education" will be the topic of a panel presentation. Educators will discuss how and to what extent they have been able to integrate special education into the administrative and pedagogical aspects of their schools. The question motivating this forum is whether special education must, by its nature, be an "add-on" to educational programming, or whether there are ways to build special education into the fabric of Jewish educational institutions a priori. This will be an excellent opportunity to learn from lead educators how they have planned for differentiation and how their schools have grown in their inclusivity.

In addition, during this year's conference, the first annual S'fatai Tiftah Award will be presented to Jane Cohen, head of school at the South Area Solomon Schechter Day School. Jane has been a passionate voice and advocate for students with special needs. As a leader in advocating for inclusive schools, Jane will be recognized for her work in creating a school that offers differentiated instruction, small classes and intensive programming for students who need extra support.

Join us Sunday, April 25, and Monday, April 26, for our second annual GISHA conference. Registeration is now available online.

--Sandy Miller-Jacobs

Last January, the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College hosted a groundbreaking Arts Seminar. For a week, students had the chance to engage with many different artistic media and to respond to their Judaism in ways many of them had never tried before.What emerged was a sense that our community held great creative energy and that we were expanding the model of how clergy and communities at large might interact with an ancient tradition.

Last summer, Adina Allen (whose mother, Pat Allen, played a formative role in the Arts Seminar) and I brainstormed how we might lift into the light some of the inspiring creative projects going on around us. Through the affectionately titled Ministry of Magic (a.k.a. The Arts Integration Committee of the Rabbinical School), Emunah v'Omanut: Creative Responses to an Ancient Tradition was born.

All members of the Hebrew College community, including family and friends, have been invited to share personal responses to Judaism (think text, ritual, culture, history, theology, spirituality...). Frankly, we have been blown away by the submissions. Pieces range from original CDs to photo montages, poems on prayer to canvasses depicting Midrash. The focus is on the creative process, not on a polished finish product. And most of the pieces are accompanied by an artist statement describing the personal story behind the piece.

Adina Allen, Rick Lawerence, Suzie Schwartz, Sarah Tasman and I have been enthusiastically preparing for the opening since the beginning of this school year. The pieces will be on display at HC, and there will be an opening celebration, including food and music, on Saturday, March 13th at 7:30 p.m.

Mark your calendars!

--Shoshana Friedman

Shoshana Friedman is a first year student in the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College. 

"Yonatan can't see us growing ugly anymore. 'We'll never be as handsome as we are today,' he would always say, and I wouldn't ask if that was meant to make us feel better, because it didn't.

"What? Are you totally out of it? How could you not know this game? No way you don't know it. It's called  'What He Can't Do Anymore,' and it's what everyone plays when a friend is killed."

So opens Ron Leshem's novel, Beaufort, a powerful story about a group of young Israeli soldiers stationed at an Israeli outpost in southern Lebanon, named for the medieval fort nearby. In cinematic detail, Leshem creates a world of brutality and pathos, populated by teenagers who are serving in the IDF in the late 1990s, struggling to survive and make sense of a war that has become increasingly unpopular back home.

A reporter for Yediot Ahronot in the fall of 2000, Leshem was assigned to cover the IDF unit that lost the first soldier to be killed in that controversial war. "A Tel Aviv pencil pusher, I wasn't accustomed to the smells in the field," he writes of his experience with the Givati Brigade Engineering Corps, "but there I was taking down every curse and swear word in my notepad and trying, in vain, to peel back the armor of the company commander, who was tormented at having the media around." Those initial interviews, and the ones that followed with young IDF soldiers who had served on the Lebanese battle front, inspired Leshem's work of fiction.

Hailed by critics and the generation of Israeli soldiers who served in Lebanon as the true voice of that sobering period, Beaufort won the Sapir Prize--Israel's top literary award--for 2006, as well as the Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for military literature. The book has sold over 100,000 copies and been translated into 10 languages. Along with film director Joseph Cedar (Time of Favor, Campfire), Leshem co-wrote the screenplay for Beaufort. Cedar received the Silver Bear for his direction of Beaufort at the Berlin Film Festival 2007, and the film was a nominee for best foreign film at the 2007 Academy Awards.

Please join us for an evening with Ron Leshem on Sunday, February 21, 7:00 p.m., at Hebrew College, for an account of how he wrote the novel and Israeli society's reaction. The program will include clips from the film and will be presented in English. You'll find more information and ticket registration details at hebrewcollege.edu/leshem.

--Evelyn Herwitz

Evelyn Herwitz is Director of Marketing and Communications at Hebrew College. She read Beaufort over a recent weekend and found the book impossible to put down.

The Jews of Hamburg and Berlin who sought to reform their religion in the early 19th century asked that same question. They wanted their worship to resemble as much as possible that of their Lutheran neighbors, so they eliminated the practice of chanting (or "cantillating") the Torah.

In ancient Rome, several prominent orators expressed their distaste for the Jewish practice. Cicero, writing in the first century BCE condemned what he called the "Asiatic" practice of chanting a text. And one hundred years later Quintilian wrote, "The practice of chanting instead of speaking . . . is the worst feature of . . . oratory."

Apparently some Jews at the time were intimidated by these criticisms. By the late 3rd century, Rabbi Yohanan felt the need to remind his co-religionists that it was a requirement to chant the Torah with its appropriate melody. The Talmud (TB Megillah 32a) records, "Rabbi Yohanan said: Anyone who reads [Torah] without a melody . . . , of him the Bible says (Ezekiel 20:25), ‘Do they think I gave them laws that were not good?'"

Why do we chant the Torah? Why did Rabbi Yohanan prohibit the reading of Torah without its proper cantillation? First of all, we do it because music makes the words of the Torah more beautiful. We call that hiddur mitzvah--we adorn our synagogue with physical decorations, and we adorn our words with music.

Music can also help us create a havdallah, a distinction that marks the difference between sacred reading and secular reading. And music can serve as a marker of function, time and place. For example, on Rosh Hashana we use a special melody for reading the Akeda (the story of Abraham's binding of Isaac), but when that same story is read on Shabbat a month later, we use the regular melody. If we just read the texts without melody, we would lose a significant way to mark the holiness of the occasion. On Rosh Hashana we change the synagogue's decorations and vestments to white ones, and we change the melodies, as well.

Anthropologists have found that every society on this planet has developed some form of musical expression. Music is a natural means of dramatizing a text, of intensifying its emotional qualities. Furthermore, many cultures around the globe attribute the origins of music to their deities. Since music is a gift from the gods, naturally we would use music to communicate with the gods and to speak in a divine language.

There are more mundane reasons, as well. Music helps us learn. It's much easier to memorize a song than a poem. Singers can project their voices over long distances more efficiently than those who merely speak. And before the introduction of microphones, those who read Torah in large synagogues were responsible for their own amplification.

But, wait! There's more. Chanting a text can help eliminate ambiguity. Inflection (raising and lowering of pitch), dynamics (variable levels of loudness) and rhythm (lengthening and shortening syllables) can help clarify the meaning of words and phrases. In fact, the Hebrew expression for the system underlying the cantillation of the Bible is ta'amey ha-mikra, the meanings of the reading.

Come to our workshop on March 21 to learn more about how chanting can clarify our understanding of the text, and how and when the cantillation symbols came about.

--Joshua Jacobson

Joshua Jacobson is Acting Dean of the School of Jewish Music, Founding Director of the Zamir Chorale of Boston, Artists-in-Residence at Hebrew College, and Visiting Professor of Jewish Music. He is author of the definitive work, Chanting the Hebrew Bible: The Art of Cantillation (JPS, 2002). 

On Sunday, March 21, the School of Jewish Music will present A Jewish Music Medley, including free afternoon workshops with SJM faculty and an evening concert by Hebrew College and community choral groups, at Wellesley College's Houghton Memorial Chapel.

For 58 years, two acetate records made of the two events lay forgotten in the College library. Then, in fall 2009, they were digitized and put online for all to enjoy, at the Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive (DJSA), the world's leading Internet site for recordings of Jewish interest, at www.dartmouth.edu/~djsa.

The Academic Convocation recording includes an invocation by Rabbi Israel Kazis, a Hebrew and English address by Professor Nisson Touroff, and remarks and award of degrees by Dean Eisig Silberschlag. The Ben-Gurion recording includes a speech by the Grand Old Man and words of welcome, in Ivrit, by Abraham Yanover, president of the student body.

These two records are just part of a remarkable joint endeavor by the Dartmouth College Jewish Sound Archive and the Hebrew College Rae and Joseph Gann Library to digitize the library's entire collection of 1400 vinyls and 78s and place them on the DJSA's web site. This web site already offers over 13,000 tracks of Jewish music and the spoken word, including hazanut, folksong, humor, storytelling, documentaries and loads more, much of it in Hebrew, Yiddish and English, as well as several other languages. Many of these albums have been donated by individuals from across the U.S. One quarter of the Hebrew College collection is already online, and the rest is waiting in the queue.

Since 2002, students and scholars from around the world (and, of course, from Hebrew College's cantorial program) have been logging on to the DJSA, to search, to listen, to view the labels and to read the record sleeves close up. What makes this such a valuable resource for study, as well as sheer enjoyment, is that it is fully searchable--by title, composer, lyric source, occasion (e.g. Yom Kippur, Tu B'Shvat), and so on. The key to this is a simple but sophisticated transliteration system that overcomes the anarchic spelling of Hebrew and Yiddish words.

You can access the DJSA directly from the Hebrew College campus. From off campus, please send an email to djsa@hebrewcollege.edu to receive your user name, password and instructions. Be sure to include your name, email address and Student ID or Gann Library membership bar code in the body of the email.

By the way, are you sitting on Jewish vinyls or 78s that you can no longer play? Then contact Dr. Alex Hartov at alex.hartov@dartmouth.edu. If the DJSA don't yet have these in our collection, they may even be able to make you a CD of them for your personal enjoyment.

--Lewis Glinert

The DJSA, which has been featured in the New York Times, is the brainchild of two Dartmouth professors: Dr. Lewis Glinert, a specialist in Hebrew culture and Israeli music, and Dr. Alex Hartov, whose research interests extend from ultrasound and medical imaging to sound engineering.

Hebrew College Mission Statement

Hebrew College promotes excellence in Jewish learning and leadership within a pluralistic environment of open inquiry, intellectual rigor, personal engagement and spiritual creativity. We empower and inspire individuals to contribute their voices and vision to the Jewish community and to bring Jewish values to bear on the critical issues of our time.

Dedicated to building bridges between the academy and the community, we offer diverse educational and cultural programs for youths, adults and Jewish professionals, and seek to invigorate Jewish life through the following core values:

Ahavat Torah: A Love of Learning

At the heart of Hebrew College is our vibrant learning community. We share the conviction that education is the key to Jewish vitality, and we are devoted to rigorous study of the full breadth of Jewish religion and culture. Together, we foster lifelong Jewish learning that engages the whole person, challenging the mind and nourishing the soul.

Areivut: Embracing Communal Responsibility

Jewish leaders in the 21st century must assume responsibility for both the Jewish future and the future of our planet. Hebrew College promotes learning in a context of communal commitment and concern--for our own local community, for Israel and Jewish communities around the world, and for all inhabitants of the earth. Through education, activism, service and interfaith cooperation, we seek to bring healing to a world in need of repair.

Elu v'Elu: Engaging Diversity

As a pluralistic institution, we recognize and value human diversity. Within our own k'lal Yisrael community and in dialogue with people from other faith traditions, we actively engage a multiplicity of experiences and perspectives in an environment of mutual respect. The encounter with different points of view prompts us to ask honest and searching questions of ourselves and of one another, and to see this process as a source of wisdom and strength.

Yetzira: Fostering Jewish Creativity

Judaism, at its best, is a creative intellectual and spiritual encounter between the individual, the community and the received tradition. Hebrew College encourages and empowers learners to see themselves as both inheritors and innovators--active participants in the unfolding story of the Jewish people. We embrace music, literature and the visual and performing arts as sources of inspiration and as vital modes of Jewish discovery and expression.

If asked to give an example of an ancient spiritual literature that vividly explores and richly celebrates eros and intimacy, most Westerners today probably would point to the Kama Sutra of Hinduism or perhaps the Tantric teachings of Buddhism--often without knowing much at all about the substance of those traditions.

The idea of sexual experience as something discussed frankly and embraced deliciously in a religious legacy is an exotic notion to many Jews and Christians. If such an attitude exists anywhere at all in the realm of religion, many in the West suppose, it must be elsewhere, in distant lands and obscure writings, not close to home, not in our own Bible.

It is not quite right to say that the Judeo-Christian world has overlooked a treasure of exquisite sensuality in the Song of Songs. After all, the book can be found in every printing of the Bible, in every synagogue and church, in every library and school, not to mention most North American hotel rooms. Moreover, the Song of Songs has found a vibrant life at the heart of vivid and poignant, even passionate mystical teachings, Jewish and Christian.

Yet it is true to say that the Western world has for centuries swept the overt meaning and the essential power of the Song of Songs under a thick carpet of allegorical and often even puritanical interpretations. If it is true that thoughts of religion are far more likely to make Jews and Christians feel that there is something shameful or bad about their bodies than to bring to mind the words, "All of you is beautiful, my love, there is no flaw in you," then we have all but lost the Song of Songs.

It is well past time to reclaim this treasure.

In the West, we tend not to teach about physical connection when we try to cultivate spiritual wisdom--or we teach about it only in negations. This is a truly dangerous omission and a hazard, because it means that we forget to teach our children and ourselves the most essential spiritual truth about sexual intimacy: that it is an awesome and ultimately revelatory gift, which can only truly be given in freedom, in courage and in trust, and can only truly be received in love.

The lovers of the Song of Songs knew this truth--and they knew all too well the consequences of its being forgotten. Their society, like our own, mistook intimacy for a commodity to be bought and sold, even taken forcibly. Their society, like our own, responded to the wild and disarming power of sex with fear and with suspicion. In their world as in our own, the voices of social and religious authority had forgotten how to speak the revelations of intimacy. It was at those stakes, and amid very real dangers, that the Song of Songs dared to articulate sexual strength, female and male, and vulnerability, male and female--the truths of the physical aspect in love.

Now, as then, we are more at risk than we are safe when physicality is stigmatized and demonized. When the sexual is silenced and driven to the margins and the shadows then violence and abuse become more and not less likely. Privacy is one thing--with the shared freedom it affords for intimacy--but a society in which sex is treated as though it were in and of itself illicit is not a safe place.

The female lover who speaks in the verses of the Song of Songs knows this danger in her own life, and she needs her male partner to understand her experience. She needs him to know how it is for her in the public places of the world his male society has shaped, what is at risk for her in sensuality and in love.

For his part, the male lover of the Song of Songs dares to tell his female partner a truth that sexual violence in their world as in our own times, aims to mask: that as a sexual being she is a force unto herself, awesome, autonomous, even sometimes frightening to him.

The Song of Songs is a miracle in writing. It is nothing less than a wonder that the Bible bequeaths to us a book of such astounding truthfulness and daring. Allegorical interpretation secured for the Song of Songs a place in the biblical canon--but I can only believe that a divine wisdom knew that we would need this book, in all its truth, to recognize fully the blaze of God in our own lives.

Rabbi Jonah Steinberg is Associate Dean and Director of Academic Development and Advising at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College.

Maya's reading difficulties always plague her in small group work. She refuses to read aloud when the group does choral reading and the others in the group complain that she's not participating and will ruin their grades. The teacher says Maya's lack of participation will not affect the group's grade. Now the students complain that it's not fair for Maya to get the same grade without doing the same work.

Joseph walks into the classroom, pushing aside the other children, toppling over the student projects that are on display at the back table. When the students angrily tell him to stop and to be careful, Joseph starts screaming and hitting. He later tells the teacher that the other students are picking on him and that no one likes him.

Understanding Multiple Causes for Behavioral Problems

Behavioral problems in the classroom are among the most challenging issues that teachers face--whether they are new to the profession or seasoned educators. But disruptive behavior is not always due to an emotional or behavioral disorder: students who are gifted are sometimes bored in class, leading them to act out or to refuse to do assigned work; learning disabilities may disrupt a student's social interactions; students on the autism spectrum have difficulties with transitions and changes in routines.

Successful intervention depends on a holistic understanding of the student and his or her needs, based on a thorough assessment of cognitive, emotional, behavioral and social strengths and deficits.

Choosing the Appropriate Classroom Intervention

Teachers use a variety of interventions to address their students' challenging behaviors, beginning with basics for the whole class and moving toward more individualized strategies when faced with complex and disruptive behaviors. Establishing classroom structure, providing consistent routines and giving students individual attention are all basic, first level interventions. Most, but not all, students respond to these basic classroom management strategies.

For those students who do not respond to the general classroom management strategies, teachers begin to consider the impact of students' learning and social issues on their behaviors. As schools have embraced cooperative learning, we have seen an increase in small group work, and, as a result, both academic and social skills are now necessary for a successful learning experience.

The Social Autopsy

Students with learning disabilities often have difficulty interpreting social cues, frequently not understanding why they get into trouble; as a result, they don't effectively learn from their mistakes. Rick Lavoie, in his book, It's So Much Work to Be Your Friend, offers a new approach--the social autopsy. Using this strategy, the teacher and student review the incident and analyze what occurred, what mistakes were made, what worked and what got the student into difficulty.

Collaborative Problem Solving

Ross Greene, in Lost at School, views children with behavior problems through the lens of lagging social skill development. This analytical framework is frequently used to assess academic challenges but is a new paradigm for understanding behavioral issues. His approach involves remediating social skills using a collaborative problem solving strategy--talking with the student about the problem, taking into account both the teacher's and the student's needs, and jointly creating a solution.

These are just a few behavioral intervention strategies; their similarity lies in analyzing the problem behavior from a variety of viewpoints and directly addressing the student's social skill deficits. Similar to the approach taken with students who are academically challenged, these approaches enable the teacher to match the intervention to the child's academic, social and behavioral strengths and weaknesses. Using these interventions, the teacher helps students improve their social skills and their understanding of social situations so they can better negotiate their world.

--Sandy Miller-Jacobs

Dr. Sandy Miller-Jacobs is Professor of Jewish Special Education and Director of Jewish Special Education Programs. These issues will be the focus of her spring 2010 online course, "Behavior Management for Inclusive Classrooms," beginning February 1. For registration information, click here.

The Kandinsky exhibit now showing at the Guggenheim displays the relationship between aesthetics and spirituality, the material and the non-material, and the artist and his subject. Kandinsky played all his life with the natural world and its representation in art, and more personal or abstract creations that existed apart from nature. The exhibit lays out three sequential stages of his art: "Impressions," based on real-life subjects; "Improvisations," spontaneous images taken from the subjective world of the inner artist, and "Compositions," premeditated forms developed by the artist through repeated studies.

We can map this three-fold schema onto Jewish cultural activity. The Jew becomes the artist, receiving and creating something. The question becomes the relation of the "artist," i.e. the teacher, or student, or community, to nature, i.e. Jewish culture and tradition.

Impressions consist of Jews making their Judaism based upon the nature of Judaism--its behaviors and beliefs, its ways of being. Rashi does that for a text; every traditionalist Jew does that. Ironically, impressions go both ways: nature maps itself onto its observers, affecting their lives visibly and invisibly; in turn the Jew maps herself onto nature, changing it via her re-presentation of it. Things change and they stay the same, seemingly. Every culture intuitively possesses and requires this immediate, often unstated connection of the artist to external reality, the individual to the group, the member to her tradition. We read words in a Jewish book and that act of reading guides, if not determines our impressions.

We improvise, too. We stand outside of the sacred circle; our immediate self, conscious and unconscious, often compels us more than an organic link to Jewish nature that we may lack in the first place. We create our Judaism from a deeper, more personal place, an infinitely more subjective feeling leaves us in a more uncertain, liminal relation to "Judaism." We may dispense with the words of a prayer book altogether, or the words may transport us to fresh images from our inner lives, barely if at all connected to the classical ideas the words meant to convey.

Most radically, we compose. We may purposefully create new rituals (speaking of museums, the Jewish Museum in NYC now has an exhibit on that subject!). One could argue that Zionism represents that for Jews. Rather than rituals tied to religion and a mythologized history, we now create civil religions tied to everyday realities of politics, state, society and a reality-based history.

Which of these is most authentic? Is that even a good question? Authenticity, i.e. being true to oneself, is, as Lionel Trilling wrote, a shallower approach to morality and to culture than a sincere desire to see oneself as part of something larger than oneself, which is what a tradition forces us to engage.

I thought a lot about this on our long family trip over winter break, visiting my wife's elderly relatives. Her two uncles were both born in Poland, during WWI. One became a rabbi who served a congregation in Burlington, Vermont, for over half a century. The other became a hazzan in suburban Philadelphia, also for over half a century. The rabbi passed away this year; the hazzan stills leads davening at the small Orthodox shul in Ventnor, N.J. I thought about what made these two men special, aside from their sheer goodness and talents.

I realized that they stood out, to me and I'm sure to the thousands of people whom they've touched, because of where they stand in relation to tradition. They live effortlessly inside of a Judaism that constitutes a life system. They each had their own particular take on it, one more liberal than the other intellectually and otherwise, but that's besides the point. No gap separates them from Judaism, no gap separates them from that "nature." Religion isn't a sphere of life, it can only be artificially reduced to an activity. A religious person, like an artist, lives both consciously and unconsciously inside of nature. The techniques of religion just physically express this deeper connection.

A connection now exists for me between these men and the Kandinsky art. To live with moral, intellectual, spiritual sincerity is to be at home with a deep tradition, one that demands as much as it provides. If one is fortunate enough to live such a life of substance and purpose, one can make an art out of one's life, practicing any and all modes of creativity: impressions, improvisations and compositions. It remains, as it has always been, about the freedom and dignity of the self in dialogue with the seriousness of the nature around us, the traditions that nurture us.

--David Starr

Dr. David B. Starr is Vice President for Community Education, Assistant Professor of Jewish History and Dean of Me'ah.  

When we think of the world of our fathers and mothers in Eastern Europe, we think of a Roman Vishniac-esque portrait of the Old Country, typically Russia-Poland: barefoot Jewish children in a heder, or in an unpaved street in a shtetl, or long-bearded, usually pious Jews engaged in modest work or the life of Jewish piety. I can hear "Sunrise, Sunset" playing in the background.

Elisa New's five-generation family memoir, Jacob's Cane, complicates if not overturns these powerful post-Holocaust myths and images we cherish of pre-Holocaust eastern European Jewish life. Her Lithuanian forebears "made it" here in America because they had already made it in cosmopolitan port cities like Riga and smaller town like Shavli.

These eastern Europeans wanted not just money, but to change the world. They believed with an almost religious fervor in the gospel of technology and progress. Applied science could change the world: the factories we work in, the homes we live in, the appliances that convey us, all this and more they believed they could envision, create, manufacture, all of which would improve life, "civilizing" the world. They sought greatness, not just wealth.

Modern Europe enabled these dreams. With the railroad reaching ever eastward came ideas and progress, new technologies and new educational opportunities, creating new industries like leather goods that in some cases depended so heavily on Jews that even the Nazis kept them alive to supply such dry goods to their soldiers.

The cane in New's title belonged to her great-grandfather, Jacob Levy, who became a successful textile manufacturer in Baltimore. His relative by marriage, Bernhard Baron, became even more prosperous, first in America then in London, building the famous Carreras tobacco company, driven in part by the tobacco rolling technologies he patented.

Jacob Levy returned to Lithuania in 1928 to visit his brothers and their families. They presented him with an elegant, carved cane, embellished with the various name-places of their family. New's book elaborates on this metaphor of the various places and directions, gains and losses of Jewish modernity, as her narrative takes us from Lithuania to Baltimore to London. Most poignantly, she describes how her British cousins were knighted in the same year that her Lithuanian brethren met their deaths at the hands of the Nazis.

New's metaphor shows us several things worth remembering and thinking about.

First, memoir can tell a great story, not just for oneself and for one's family, but, done well, for a larger community of readers. This story brings to bear macro issues like migration, technology, war, genocide, socialism and capitalism, democracy and acculturation.

Second, this story showcases the marvels of Jewish history. Our people's history makes a great story: triumph, tragedy, it's all there, coursing through all the twists and turns of the choices ordinary men and women make. Jewish history's drama contextualizes existential issues of the gains and losses always at the center of life.

Finally, this story obliquely stands in relation to two other genres essaying the past, history and memory. By history I mean the scholarly description and analysis of the past, one premised upon the objectivity and dispassion of scholars and their method. Memory signifies the traditionalist way Jews carried their past, via vehicles like the prayer book, the sacred calendar and books like the Passover Haggadah.

New's forebears travelled the road from memory to history, from a traditionalist world to one embracing science and objectivity. So have we all, in one way or another. That world relied upon a braided Jewishness that entwined tribalism and religion, thought and deed.

Modernity unbraided that twine. The Shoah destroyed much of what was left of traditionalist communities and their roots. Israel in its own way replaced tradition with the new Jew and the new Jewish state. Science and progress further undermined tradition's intellectual foundations.

In this post-modern climate, we no longer run from our past. It's too far away to challenge us. It's so far away that even if we seek it we're unlikely to reach it, since chronos carries us forward, not backward. Memoir, however private, personal, fragmented and imperfect, may be one way of preserving at least shards of our past. Time will tell what we do with those pieces.

--David Starr

Dr. David B. Starr is Vice President for Community Education, Assistant Professor of Jewish History and Dean of Me'ah. On December 13, he spoke with Elisa New, author of Jacob's Cane: A Memoir in Five Generations, about the art of the memoir and one woman's journey to discover her family's roots, as part of Hebrew College's People of the New Book series.