Lag Ba’Omer is next week, and one of the customs of this minor holiday is to light bonfires and eat grilled food. In this month’s Inspired Kitchen, we share a vegetarian alternative to the traditional barbecue:

This salad is made with halloumi, a cheese whose firm, rubbery texture lends itself to grilling over a hot flame. Halloumi has its origins in Lebanon and Cyprus. Some claim its roots in Israel lie with Greek-Jewish immigrants. The cheese is best served warm with grilled fish, crusty bread, or fresh fruit for dessert. (MORE)

The story of Jewry and Galveston is one that fascinates me. Many people, even those well-versed in American Jewish history, may not know of the early 20th Century attempt to bring immigrants to the United States via this small Texas town, instead of New York.

I had the privilege of researching hundreds of documents, ship logs, and notes from the venture, left to the American Jewish Historical Society by Rabbi Henry Cohen. Cohen was the on-ground support in Galveston. He himself was quite a character.
Born in England, he rode around Galveston on his bicycle wearing long coat tails. On the cuff of his sleeve, he wrote all of his appointments for the day. He became known as that Chief Rabbi of Texas
At the time, Galveston was an agriculture-based community. Farmers from around the region would come to the city on the weekend to sell their goods. However, the Jewish farmers suffered on Saturday mornings. They would not open their stands at the market until after Shabbat services. Cohen ended services an hour early to help accommodate the community’s needs. At the same time, word got out about Cohen’s dynamic sermons. Christian farmers in for the weekend began attending Shabbat services to listen to the Rabbi. Soon enough, the market closed on Saturday mornings, as all of the farmers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, came to Shabbat services before selling their goods in the afternoon. The term Shabbas goy takes on a new meaning.
It’s stories like this that bring American Jewish history alive.

Recently the Forward exposed its readers to a slice of story, which I’d like to share:

Way back when, in 1907, a number of American Jewish philanthropists, prompted by the redoubtable Jacob Schiff, sought to ameliorate the lot of would-be immigrants by pointing them in the right direction: away from overcrowded and blighted urban areas and toward the wide-open spaces of the West, whose “nature and uncontaminated atmosphere tend to build up constitutions instead of undermining them.” Determined to alleviate the congestion characteristic of the Northeast’s “great ghettos” and to minimize, avant la lettre, the possibility of antisemitism, Schiff and his associates attempted to prevail on those traveling to the New World to enter its precincts via Galveston, Texas, rather than land in New York or Philadelphia. And then, once in that “part of the country in which opportunity still knocks at every man’s door,” the new arrivals were encouraged to start afresh by taking a train to and settling in Omaha, Neb., and Kansas City, Mo.; Des Moines, Iowa, and Texarkana, Ark. (MORE)

At the President’s Conference yesterday, I attended a session called “Jewish Identity: Unraveling or Renewing?” a panel discussion featuring — among others — Rav Yehudah Amital, the founder of Yeshivat Har Etzion, where I spent two formative years in the mid-1990s, and Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor of the New Republic.

Even while I was studying at Har Etzion, I had a complicated relationship with the yeshiva, but I always felt great warmth for Rav Amital, a wise, humble man, who has blazed his own path, negotiating Religious Zionism and the modern State of Israel.

Wieseltier, for his part, is consistently engaging and brilliant, and yesterday he did not disappoint.

He began by noting that the proliferation of conference sessions with similar titles to this one indicates that the discussion of Jewish identity is becoming an important part of Jewish identity.

For someone who authored a book called Against Identity, this is not a compliment.

Of course, Wieseltier isn’t against Jewish identity, he is just against the vacuousness of identity discourse.

“Identity is not self-expression,” Wieseltier repeated for emphasis. “Identity is not customization.”

What is identity, then?

First of all, it is not something passed down by tradition.

“Identity is precisely what is not inherited,” Wieselter opined.

And here’s the Pirkei Avot tie in. Wieseltier quoted Avot 2:17:

Rabbi Yosi said: Let the property of your fellow man be as dear to you as your own. Prepare yourself for the study of the Torah, for the knowledge of it is not yours by inheritance. Let all your deeds be done for the sake of Heaven.

As Wieseltier noted, one might have thought that R. Yosi should have said “Prepare yourself for the study of Torah because it is your inheritance.” But no, one must prepare for Torah because it must be pursued if one is to make it ones own.

And this is not easy. “A real Jewish identity should rob one of sleep on a regular basis,” Wieseltier said, and he railed against the internal relativism of the Jewish community, what he described as: “I like knishes, you like Rambam, let’s be Jewish together.”

For Wieseltier, some aspects of Jewish tradition are more important and weighty and more appropriate to pursue as part of a serious Jewish life.

“Freedom of the mind should not be an excuse for intellectual and spiritual slackness,” he concluded.

Recently the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs released an interesting report on the Jewish Communities of the Western United States. Written by Dr. Steven Windmueller, director of the School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, the piece goes into the history and demographics of West Coast Jewry.

Too often, in the scholarship of American Jewish life, the Eastern seaboard becomes the main and sometimes only subject of research. But as Windmueller reminds us in the opening of his report, a quarter of American Jews live on the West Coast and that numebr is growing:

Jews of the West represent a new breed of American Jewry. Despite such challenges as low affiliation patterns, high intermarriage rates, and limited financial participation, Western Jewry has generated new organizational models. The Western pioneering spirit seems to have made its mark on Jewish communities as well and inspired their leadership. (MORE)

I’m currently in Jerusalem at a conference convened by Shimon Peres, entitled Facing Tomorrow, in honor of Israel’s 60th birthday. It’s a star-studded event, with last night’s speakers including Peres, Ehud Olmert, Elie Wiesel, and Tony Blair.

So far most of the sessions have suffered from the same problem: overbooking. I just came from a lunchtime panel featuring six Jewish Nobel Prize winners. A nice idea. But WAY too long. Six speeches plus an introduction all before the main course!

The highlight thus far was today’s morning plenary, featuring Amos Oz, Henry Kissinger, Bernard Henri Levy, and Abby Cohen, and moderated by Dennis Ross.

Kissinger spoke first and began by noting that Dennis Ross warned him that if he speaks longer than his allotted 15 minutes a trap door would fall open beneath him. Audience members from across the political spectrum could chuckle together imagining gnomish Kissinger falling through the floor.

Amazingly, the rest of his speech was equally engaging. Kissinger spoke about living through the years of Israel’s rise, and the honor he felt being involved politically in some way.

“I can never treat Israel as a foreign country,” he said.

The thrust of Kissinger’s comments: The nation state is in a process of modification. This is most apparent in the rise of Asia (China and India) and the centralization of the European Union. European states, said Kissinger, have given up sovereignty to become part of the EU.

One ramification of this according to Kissinger is that state’s became great because they could ask their citizens to make compromises and sacrifices. The EU has dissolved this sense of responsibility, and it has yet to be replaced.

Indeed, Kissinger suggested that the differences between the US and Europe have little to do with the policies of this particular administration, rather they come from divergent notions of international affairs, the US still living in a world where risk-taking is sometimes valued.

Kissinger saved his strongest words for Iran. The threat of nuclear weapons in Iran should not be seen as just a threat to Israel, but rather as a threat to the entire international system. If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, despite the international bodies meant to deter them, nuclear weapons are bound to spread to even more countries.

His greatest fear when he worked in government, he said, was that the president would call him in and say: “I exhausted all diplomatic options. Should I use nuclear weapons?”

This was in a two-power world where you could basically predict reactions, but in a 10-power world, this will be impossible.

I rarely agree with the Haredim, but recently they have instituted a boycott against Bamba and other Israeli snacks:

The Haredi Community, an ultra-Orthodox communal organization which strongly opposes Zionism, declared a consumers’ boycott on leading Israeli food brands that have been adorned with the Israeli flag in honor of the country’s 60th birthday. (MORE)

Isn’t a ban on peanut butter-flavored Styrofoam good for the Jews?

Reviewing the efforts of Carter, Jerome M. Segal argues that while “Hamas has indeed said it will never recognize Israel, nor give up on the right of return”, there is plenty to work with here for hammering out an arrangement, since “if Hamas is saying it will accept a ratified treaty as binding law, that is a very big deal. “ (Haaretz)

Zvi Bar’el wants us “to recognize now that a long-term cease-fire cannot coexist peaceably with the policy of sanctions Israel imposes on Gaza.” (Haaretz)

Former defense minister Amir Peretz backs direct negotiations with Hamas and freeing jailed Fatah leader Marwan Baghouti. (Jerusalem Post)

Daniella Peled says that what a Syria-Israel deal would consist of has long been known, but what is lacking is the will to get it done. (Jewish Chronicle)

Is Israel “edging toward ’silent acceptance’ of a truce” in Gaza? (Jerusalem Post)

Akiva Eldar argues that “talk of an alleged breakthrough in the attempts to renew negotiations between Jerusalem and Damascus are nothing more than camouflage for a major setback in Israel’s talks with the Palestinians.” (Haaretz)

Herb Keinon looks at the question of why is it that, just now, Olmert is so interested in negotiating with Syria? (Jerusalem Post)

Hillel — the 1st century sage — is one of Judaism’s great heroes. He is one half of the paradigmatic intellectual/spiritual rivalry in Jewish tradition. Yet his rivalry with Shammai is not remembered for animosity, but rather as the prime example of an argument for the sake of heaven.

Ancient Judaism had some modicum of pluralism vis-a-vis Jewish law, and this was manifested most clearly in the fact that although the schools of Hillel and Shammai differed on profound questions of halakah, the followers of each still married the followers of the other.

Of course, in matters of halakhah, Hillel was the victor and we follow his laws. (If it were the other way around, college students would be going to the local Shammai House for Shabbat dinner tonight.)

And while I’m sure we could find problems with Hillel if we wanted to, he appears quite heroically in the first chapter of Pirkei Avot, as well, doling out ethical advice and insights that are both profoundly simple and shockingly easy on contemporary ears.

A series of three mishnayot quoting Hillel begins in Mishnah 12.

1:12 - Hillel and Shammai received the Torah from them. Hillel said: Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving your fellow creatures and bringing them close to the Torah.

Here Hillel the Hero doubles as Hillel the Hippie.

What might get lost in the beauty and simplicity of this teaching is the introduction Hillel gives: “Be of the disciples of Aaron.”

Why is this important?

Because Pirkei Avot began with a reference to Aaron’s brother, Moses, receiving the Torah from Sinai and beginning a chain of transmission and tradition. Pirkei Avot — and all of rabbinic literature — is predicated on Moses receiving the law and passing it along, yet it’s notable that we are never told to be Moses’ students. Why?

Moses represents Torah and law. And while these may be the foundation of rabbinic Judaism, according to Hillel, they must be accompanied by — and perhaps tempered with — Aaron’s values: the pursuit of peace and love.

And, indeed, the biggest contribution of the Mishnah is the final point: To bring people closer to the Torah of Moses, you can’t only invoke Moses. Law and Torah may be important, but you won’t be able to show anyone this without love.

So yesterday, I decided to be all festive and celebrate Israel. Struggling to figure out what I wanted for lunch, I settled on schwarma, and headed to my favorite place in NYC.

As I’m carrying my sack full of humus, pita, tabouli, meat and more, I suddenly realize that I have screwed up. While Israel’s Memorial Day was over in Israel, I was still supposed to be observing it in the US. Yom Ha’atzmaut didn’t start until sundown.

Somehow my meal seemed less festive when it became Yom Hazikaron schwarma.

The confusion was not without cause. Just before heading out, I was talking with my best friend online. She’s in Israel for the year. She was telling me about her day, and at that point, she was getting ready to go out and celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut. I figured I should do the same.

Wouldn’t it more sense if Diaspora Jews celebrated these holidays at the same time as Israelis? I mean they are Israeli national holidays. Does it even make sense to commemorate Israel’s Memorial Day at a time when Israel itself isn’t marking it. Likewise, the biggest Israel parade in the US rarely happens on Israel Independence Day itself.

And isn’t the best way to show solidarity with Israel to celebrate with Israel?

-The High Rabbinical Court of Israel has ruled that all of the thousands of conversions conducted since 1999 by Rabbi Drukman - who heads the Conversion Authority — must be declared invalid. They also ruled that it was permitted to retroactively cancel the conversion of someone who does not observe the Sabbath, doing so to the woman in the actual case, whose conversion was 15 years ago. Their ruling converted her children into gentiles, and “out of extra caution,” they ruled that her husband, a born Jew, could not marry either. (The Jerusalem Post)

-But it turns out that Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar tried to halt the publication of the ruling. (Haaretz)

-And criticism arises quickly. (Haaretz)

-For Yesmao Yela’o, having died speeded up his conversion process. (Haaretz)

-What is billed as “the largest conference of Black, Asian, Latino, and mix-raced Jewish leaders” has its focus on issues around conversion. (Earth Times)

-Rabbi Myron Zuber writes about converting Inca Indians in Peru, but notes, “The Lima Jews do not permit the Inca Jews to enter their synagogue, even though the Incans were converted by a Bais Din of Israel.” (Kulanu)