Save the Date to Celebrate!
Two Generations of Judaeans Building a More Just Society in Israel
Young Judaea has always promoted, first and foremost, a love for Israel. But for generations of countless Young Judaeans have expressed this love through their commitment to building a better and more just society in Israel.
As a product of Young Judaea, Miriam Schler grew up with this deep commitment to social action as a path for both her work and her life. Miriam grew up in Gesher Shalom (Long Island) in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. She attended Camp Young Judaea – Sprout Lake and Camp Tel Yehudah and served as the Administrative Vice President of her Young Judaea region while in high school. In 1983 she was a madricha at Sprout Lake where she met her future husband Yehuda Kamari, who was working at Sprout as a tzofeh. Miriam made aliyah in 1989 with the strong Judaean love for Israel and a consciousness that she had the responsibility to make Israel a better and more just society. She immediately involved herself in the Israeli feminist movement and attended law school at Tel Aviv University. Miriam began volunteering for the Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center, putting her feminist and Judaean ideals into action.
Fast-forward thirty years. Miriam is now the Executive Director of the Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center. Yehudah and Miriam are raising a new generation of Tzofim/Judaeans with the values and culture of the two sister movements in which they grew up. For the last three years their children Omri, Michal and Avigyle have attended Tel Yehudah and Sprout Lake.
Last summer Michal was a camper at Sprout Lake. Her madricha, Catie Stewart (also a child of a Judaean alumnus), is now on Young Judaea Year Course. Along with a few other Year Course participants, Catie and her friends formed a social justice initiative in Israel, Garin Kol L’Nashim, promoting women’s rights in Israel. Through Young Judaea connections, Catie and her Year Course friends, Sammy Schwartz and Talia Niederman (who will both be returning as staff members to Tel Yehudah this summer) connected with Miriam and started an internship at the Center, working on raising awareness of sexual assault issues. Two generations of Young Judaeans have joined together in their mission of building a more just society in Israel, turning Young Judaea values into a reality.
From Rosh Machaneh to Chaver Knesset?
Alon Tal, the father of Israel’s environmental movement and an alumnus of Camp Judaea, Tel Yehudah and Year Course, is a founder of the new Israel Green Movement which will be running in the next Israeli Knesset Elections. The founder of Teva V’din–Israel Union for Environmental Defense and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura, was also the Rosh Machaneh at TY (the first summer that current director, David Weinstein, was a merakez at TY.) According to Jweekly.com:
“Three years ago, we reached the glass ceiling in terms of environmental progress,” Tal said recently during a wide-ranging interview at a downtown San Francisco café. “All the environmental indicators are negative — the conservation of land, climate change, greenhouse gas. We have a minister of the environment [Gilad Erdan] who is intelligent and progressive and hardworking, and we’re still losing, because he doesn’t have a party behind him.”
So even though Tal might be more at home in academia, he’s thrown his hat into the political ring. He predicts that in the next Knesset, his party will win three seats, one of which he would occupy. Never mind that in the last national elections in 2009, the movement couldn’t muster enough votes to pass the threshold for even one seat.
Things are different, he says, since last summer’s tent protests galvanized a new generation of Israelis fed up with the country’s high cost of living and ever-increasing social ills.
“I think this kind of party could capture” people’s imaginations, he says with confidence. “I’ve seen the disenchantment. A shocking percentage of young Israelis don’t vote. But I think once we’re in the Knesset, they’ll see what we can do.”
The party’s agenda is as tied to social reform as it is to environmental protection and preservation. Affordable housing, better jobs, public education, an end to hunger (“A country with this high a level of food insecurity is not a Jewish country”) — they’re all on the table.
“The hyperprivatization has to be reined in,” Tal says.
But “this is not a socialist agenda,” he emphasizes. “These are traditional Zionist values.” He also insists that Israel’s green party is a Zionist party. That’s something he made sure of at its founding three years ago. For example, the movement supports Shabbat closures — not public transportation or cultural events, but enough to demonstrate that a Jewish state has a Jewish day of rest. “That’s part of embracing the nonconsumerist heritage of the Jewish people,” he explains. Read the full article here.
Alon once said of Tel Yehudah, “…the simple harmony of camp life with the lovely and gentle environment of the Deleware Rover and the apple trees in the New York mountains surely constituted an ideal that continues to resonate – and set a standard for harmony that we need to reestablish between the Jewish people and their homeland.” We are proud that Tel Yehudah has been inspiration in Alon’s environmental work.
From Parsha Players to The Colbert Report
Who says writing parsha players every Saturday morning can’t seed the beginnings of a lifelong career? Following his years of gathering friends each week to write hilarious skits for Saturday morning’s parsha players at Tel Yehudah and continuing on to write for various publications and shows in college, Jay Katsir has been a member of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report writing staff since the show launched in 2005.
Stephen Colbert and Jay the Intern - June 2011
Of course, six years later Haaretz realized that this hilarious MOT (member-of-the-tribe) is also a product of Israeli parentage. The result – a funny, lighthearted interview that explores the inner workings of The Report, the emergence of his character “Jay the Intern“, as well as Jay’s personal connection with Israel (including a shout out to his YJ involvement!)
Everyone will have to break out their Ivrit (Hebrew) skills for this one!
חתום בנשיכה: ראיון עם תסריטאי דו”ח קולבר ג’יי קציר
לפני כחודש וחצי בישר סטיוון קולבר ב”דו’ח קולבר” כי יש לו “חדשות גדולות – לג’יי המתמחה נולד ילד, עזרא מקס”. קולבר איחל לג’יי מזל טוב “מכל הלב”, ועוד דרש לדעת, שוב “מכל הלב – איפה אתה?!”. המנחה הממושקף בעל הבלורית השחורה של התוכנית שעיקרה פרשנות חדשותית ומשודרת ב”קומדי סנטרל” בארצות הברית, הסביר למתמחה הצעיר והמזוקן שלו, דמות שתסריטאי התוכנית ג’יי קציר מגלם, כי הוא זקוק לו נואשות. “אני חמוד לא פחות מעזרא”, טען. “אני אוכל, אני ישן, אני בוכה, אני יכול לעשות את צרכי בחיתול”.
קציר, תסריטאי בן 30 שכותב לתוכנית המשובחת הזאת, חזר לפני כמה שבועות לעבודה, “אבל ‘ג’יי המתמחה’ נמצא בקירור”, הוא אומר בראיון מניו יורק. קציר כותב בתוכנית מראשיתה, ב-2005, “עוד לפני שהיא נכנסה להפקה, הייתי בצוות המקים שלה”, הוא מסביר. לפני העבודה שלו ב”דו”ח קולבר” כתב מערכונים קצרים לערוץ הילדים ניקלודיאון וכן גילם בה רובוט, “שהבעית ילדים” לדבריו
Click here to read the full interview on Haaretz! (Or, if you want to cheat…copy the article and paste it into Google Translate!)
Jay Katsir attended Sprout Lake and Tel Yehudah as a camper and staff member. He wrote many hilarious bits for Parsha Players and Onegs alike! To see more of Jay’s more recent work (and to have a good laugh), visit www.colbertnation.com.
Tel Yehudah Helps Launch a Career!
A philosophy major when at the University of Texas, the 30-year-old self-taught chef says his interest in cooking started when he became a fan of TV’s Japanese Iron Chef… Kogan currently spends his days contentedly preparing food according to Jewish religious practices. Kosher is procedural, he explains—the best-known facet may be the separation of meat and dairy. “Kosher, first of all, involves no blessings or holy water,” he says. “It’s purely an operational method just like cross-contamination or anything. That’s my short answer. Except the procedure is very, very complicated, and it’s entirely based on Jewish law.”
Chef David Kogan
He’s held about a dozen full-time jobs since graduation, but the first opportunity to run a kitchen was at Camp Tel Yehudah, the national teen leadership camp of Young Judaea in Barryville, New York.
“I have put sweat equity into learning what kosher really is,” Kogan says. “At the end of the day, I’m like an operations expert and a logistics expert.” Born in Philadelphia, he spent part of his childhood in Arizona and went to high school in Houston. He had been a camper and a counselor at the Young Judaea camp before the opportunity came to take over the food operations there.
With his well-trimmed beard and crisp green chef’s jacket, Kogan can joke now about the steep learning curve for preparing 2,000 meals a day, seven days a week, at the camp. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he recalls. “My friend gave me an overview and said, ‘Good luck!’” While in a hurry getting ready for a parents-weekend cookout, Kogan called the bakery and ordered “500 ham, 500 hot” for an anticipated total of 1,000 hamburger and hot dog buns—only to find piles of boxes totaling 500 dozen of each at the doorstep the next morning.
“You make big mistakes, you only make them once,” he says. Garlic bread and salads with lots of croutons were featured on the camp menu that summer. He has returned to run the camp kitchen for four summers.
Click here to read the full article highlighting David on Edible Austin.
David attended TY as a camper in the 90′s, served on National Mazkirut, and returned for many summers as a staff member, most recently as our Food Service Director. We are so proud to have been such an integral part of David’s career path. David currently serves as the executive chef and director of catering and kosher operations for Ecstatic Cuisine out of Austin, TX.
TY Alum Named Executive Director of American Jewish Committee Atlanta
Sheri Labovitz, an attorney and past AJC Atlanta chapter president, served as interim director for six months following the departure of former director Judy Marx. “He’s a known quantity,” Labovitz said of Wilker. “We’ve been the beneficiary of his intelligence, diligence, energy and out-of-the-box thinking” [in his previous role as associate director]. “He brings an infectious enthusiasm that comes with his youth.”What’s Next?
Check out a new CNN show produced by TY alumnus, Joshua Belsky. Josh is a TV producer who recently developed, piloted and helped launch the new show, The Next List. Hosted by CNN’s Dr Sanjay Gupta, The Next List profiles agents-of-change by exploring their passion, personal history and unique thinking which empowers their successes that will ultimately impact all our lives.
Each week we profile innovators, visionaries and agents of change. They’re not household names just yet, but they’re movers and shakers in their own world. We’re introducing them to you because these individuals are steadily mapping the course to the future with their new ideas. Like our Next Listers, we aim to be as innovative, visionary and passionate about telling you their stories. Join us.
WHO: Hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta
WHEN: Sundays at 2pm E.T.
WHERE: Only on CNN
This week the show focuses on Heather Knight, a social roboticist. From the Next List blog:
Heather Knight is an intelligent, outgoing, bubbly tech geek. Oh, and did we mention she’s also a social roboticist?
So, what’s a social roboticist, you ask? Heather says the best way to explain what she does, is to show you herself. So take a look at “The Next List’s” amazing profile of Heather Knight and her robot, Data. She’ll dazzle you with her ability to merge techy robotics with inspiring art, acting and choreography. Plus, she and Data, make a terrific standup comedy duo.
Together she and Data explore the roles of how humans and robots interact. And Heather’s using that information to make better technology that can help people flourish — now and for years to come.
Watch the segment about Heather Knight and other stories that have made the Next List here.
Josh Belsky, from Ganei Yehudah, was a camper at TY 1980-1984, attended Year Course 1984-85, worked at TY in 1986 and was a madrich for Hadracha in 1987.
Thankful for Gilad Shalit’s Return and TY Connections
As we prepare for Thanksgiving, we all have so much to be thankful for this year. For the Tel Yehudah community, we are of course thankful that Gilad Shalit is back home with his family. And while Thanksgiving might not be celebrated tomorrow in Israel, here in the States we are adding Gilad Shalit’s return to our reasons to give thanks. (Israelis eat enough turkey anyway: According to the National Turkey Federation, Israel leads the world in turkey consumption. At a whopping 26.9 pounds per capita, Israelis consumed about 45% more than Americans! Thanks Camp Judaea for that fact.)
At the center of the efforts behind the scenes to release Gilad Shalit for over five years was Gershon Baskin, known as Gary in his days at TY and YJ. Below Gershon talks about his beginnings as a peace activist while working at Tel Yehudah:
Baskin immigrated to Israel in 1978 after completing a degree at New York University. Four years earlier, he visited Israel for a year with the Young Judaea youth movement, a trip that starting him on his track of advancing Arab-Israeli relations.
“I was working at the movement’s national camp,” he recalled. “I had a map on my board next to my bed with little pins in it connecting all the points that I’ve visited during the year in Israel. One day I came back to the room and someone had drawn a green line on the map. All of a sudden I had this kind of epiphany – it was a really intensive year on Young Judaea Year Course and I took time this summer trying to absorb everything that happened that year. And all of a sudden I realized that I just spent a year in Israel and I didn’t have one conversation with an Arab. I realized at that point that I had this huge hole in my consciousness, my knowledge, my awareness.”
Baskin began reading everything about the Arab-Israeli conflict he could get his hands on, started meeting Arabs and learning Arabic. “It opened up a whole new world,” he said.
Read the rest of the article from Haaretz: “U.S. native behind Shalit deal: Swap won’t lead to more kidnappings” here.
Last Sunday, the details of the ongoing negotiations for Shalit’s release, along with the role Gershon played, were featured in the New York Times Magazine. Read the article “Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life” here.
Of course we understand that the deal to free Gilad Shalit raises serious concerns and questions amongst all of us who care about the safety and security of Israel. And we know that amongst us we have very different opinions about the nature of the agreement. However we are all thankful that Gilad Shalit is now home with his family and also thankful that TY and YJ have and continue to inspire young people to be passionate about their beliefs and passionate about Israel – passionate enough to act on those beliefs and make a difference.
Below is a short video with Noam Shalit, Gilad’s father, thanking campers at TY in 2009 for their ongoing support and activism on behalf of his son:
May this be a very happy Thanksgiving to all of us.
The TY Team
YOUNG JUDAEA NAMES INAUGURAL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Hadassah and Young Judaea jointly announce Simon Klarfeld to lead the national Zionist youth movement
NEW YORK (November 21, 2011) – In its latest move toward independence, Young Judaea announced today that Simon Klarfeld, a highly regarded community builder and innovative educator with critical skills in organizational change, will become its inaugural executive director. Klarfeld is taking the reins at a momentous time in the youth movement’s 102-year history, as it branches off from its longtime parent organization, Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.
In a joint announcement, the two organizations said Klarfeld was chosen for his more than 20 years of experience in working with pluralistic Jewish communities around the world and his vision for Young Judaea’s five Jewish camps nationwide, year-round activities, and preeminent Israel programs, including the most successful freshman gap-year program, Year Course in Israel. Young Judaea reaches more than 5,000 Jewish youth each year from grade school through post-college.
Simon Klarfeld, new Young Judaea Executive Director
“Having lived a life devoted to pluralistic Jewish, Zionist ideals, leading Young Judaea is a real honor for me,” Klarfeld said. “This is an absolutely crucial time for us to refocus and redefine our commitment to helping young Jews explore their identities and connections to Israel in profound, experiential ways. I take great pride in the work I have done in building and strengthening vital, passionate Jewish communities, and Young Judaea is the premier place to continue that work.”
Klarfeld, 44, is a native of London, England, where as a teen, he ran his first overnight summer camp for Jewish teens from across Europe, and chaired the Zionist Youth Council of Great Britain. As a young adult, he lived in Russia, directing activities on behalf of the Soviet Jewry movement there. His work included the training of Jewish youth leaders throughout the then-Soviet Union.
“Simon Klarfeld brings a breadth of inclusive leadership that will inspire Jewish youth to engage at the highest levels possible, something for which Young Judaea has long been known,” said David Bechhofer, president of Young Judaea’s founding board. “He is precisely the right person to pilot Young Judaea at a time when developing leadership – true leadership as Young Judaea has always defined it – is critical to the Jewish community worldwide.”
Marcie Natan, national president of Hadassah, said Klarfeld’s appointment is one of the final steps in Young Judaea’s path to independence. In June, Hadassah, which had supported Young Judaea for more than 70 years and had been its sole sponsor since 1967, approved a three-year transition toward autonomy that includes significant financial and organizational support to help the youth movement achieve continued success.
“Simon’s passionate devotion to young people and to Israel truly shines through in everything he does,” said Natan, who was involved in the search process to fill the position. “I am confident that he will empower the youth, the staff, and the lay leaders to fashion important conversations and programs about Israel, and I could not be more excited about working together.”
Alan Hoffmann, director-general of the Jewish Agency for Israel, also praised the move: “I know Simon well, and I am more confident than ever about Young Judaea’s prospects as an independent organization under Simon’s leadership.”
Klarfeld, who most recently transformed the Hillel at Columbia University and Barnard College during his seven-year tenure as its executive director, has taught courses on Jewish Perspectives on Leadership, Contemporary Israel, Zionist History and Ideas, and Jewish Philosophy of Freedom, at conferences, universities, and institutes throughout the world. He also has trained informal Jewish educators through the Institute for Informal Jewish Education, the iCenter, Foundation for Jewish Camp, North American Alliance for Jewish Youth, Brandeis University’s Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service, and Machon L’Madrichei Chutz La’Aretz.
Prior to Columbia/Barnard Hillel, Klarfeld professionally served as director of the Soviet Jewry movement in both England and Northern California, vice president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, interim vice president of Birthright Israel North America, and founding director of Genesis at Brandeis – a summer program for high school students.
He lives in Teaneck, N.J., with his wife, Dara Klarfeld (nee Zabb), an alumna of Young Judaea’s Camp Sprout Lake and national high school leadership camp, Tel Yehudah, and their three young children. Klarfeld, who is fluent in Russian and also speaks Hebrew and French, holds a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy and economics from the University of Keele in England, as well as a master’s in Jewish communal service from Brandeis.
Klarfeld will start his new position on December 1 and will work together with Steve Goldberg, Young Judaea’s interim executive director, who was appointed this summer to oversee the transition. Goldberg recently accepted the executive directorship of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City.
Young Judaea, the premier Zionist youth movement worldwide, challenges young people from grade school through post-college to become involved in social and educational activities that sharpen their senses of Jewish and Zionist identity. Young Judaea programs include year-round activities; five summer camps – Camp Judaea, Camp Tel Yehudah, Camp Young Judaea Midwest, Camp Young Judaea Sprout Lake and Camp Young Judaea Texas; Alternative Winter Break; Year Course in Israel freshman gap-year program, including its Shalem Modern Orthodox initiative; Israel summer programs for teens, including YJ Discovery, YJ Machon, and I Speak Israel; Taglit-Birthright “To Israel Now” trips; Amirim college summer offerings; and WUJS Israel post-college internship and study programs. For more information, please visit www.youngjudaea.org.
If you have additional questions, please send them to answers@youngjudaea.org
or call us at 212-303-7448
For more information, please visit www.youngjudaea.org.
Generation Sell: Characterizing an Unknown Generation
Generation Y, Generation Next, the Net Generation, the Millenials, even the Worst Generation – these are all the terms used to categorize a generation born in the mid- to late-70′s through the early 2000′s. But, what do any of these names mean? This generation has lived through arguably the most significant technological development and globalization in history. But, what does it all mean? What defines this group? Who are these Millenials?
William “Billy” Deresiewicz presents fascinating answers to these, and more, questions in his New York Times piece, excerpted below:
EVER since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?
Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned.
So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly.
What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?
Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else. The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.
Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.
Call it Generation Sell.
We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted.
The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.
Try to picture Allen Ginsberg having a chat with Don Draper, across the counter at the local coffeehouse, about the latest Lady Gaga video, and you’ll realize how far we’ve come.
Click here to read Billy’s full article and postulations about this unknown generation in last Sunday’s New York Times! We are proud to say that Billy grew up in Young Judaea in the late 70’s early 80’s, was a camper at TY, served as National Pirsum (1981-82) and was an Aleph Kitchen Boy.
