Can Palin Win Over Jews?

Sarah Palin.

Israel: Solar Light Unto The Nations?

CNBC’s Jason Gewirtz: Focus on Israel’s clean-tech innovations.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Sharon Udasin

Jason Gewirtz is the senior producer for a CNBC documentary called “Beyond the Barrel: The Race to Fuel the Future,” which began airing last week and focuses on Israeli innovation in the clean-tech industry. While Israel has become a hub for alternative energy research, the Jewish state has yet to put many of its ideas into practice and is still almost completely reliant on oil, Gewirtz says. Gewirtz and his crew also explore Canadian alternative energy usage at the Olympics, German entrepreneurship in solar energy and Chinese environmental research.

A: How did you originally envision this project, and why so much emphasis on Israel?

Q: I pitched this because Israel was hosting an alternative energy conference in Eilat in February. … I wanted to have the reporter stand on the Red Sea, where you can see Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Israel. It’s sort of a shot across Saudi Arabia’s bow — here’s the world’s biggest oil producer, and just 15 miles away they’re having this alternative energy conference.

Evaluate Israel’s relationship to China, a country that is involved in alternative energy research but is also becoming a leading trade partner with Iran.

A lot of Israeli companies are also trying to do a lot of business with China because they’re able to mass-produce things. … Of course there are political problems with Israel and China. China is about to become Iran’s biggest trading partner and acquires about 14 percent of its oil from Iran. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be business with China.

What are some of the most impressive Israeli solar energy developments?

One is Yuval Susskind’s Aora Power at Kibbutz Samar in the Negev. We drove down there from Jerusalem, and from about 40 miles away you start to see this huge tower that is able to capture rays and energy beamed back up from thousands of mirrors pointed at it. This type of “community solar” will be useful for places in India and Africa, where there’s no grid connection and residents need hot water and power from within their own villages.

Another solar energy entrepreneur, Yosef Abramowitz, won many legal battles in order to hook up his company, Arava Power, to the national grid.

What about alternatives other than solar?

Continue reading…

The Jewish Picasso Of Tremont

Herbert Lagin stands before his 9/11 memorial. Inset: Abstract painting suggests the Holocaust. Sharon Udasin

Hidden behind rows of shoddy warehouses, auto-repair junkyards and single-room-occupancy tenements, the Museum of the People of the World is largely invisible to the sporadic passersby in its gritty Bronx location, just east of the Grand Concourse and down the hill from the jagged bedrock of Tremont’s Echo Park.

The museum of what, you say? Where?

In a city of museums — from one on sex to one on biblical art — you won’t find this one in any museum index or listing, in print or online.

The quirky, intensely personal museum, which carries the New Age-y subtitle “A Sanctuary for All Who Enter” and only recently opened to the public, is a testament to one man’s creativity, vision and, perhaps, obsession. It houses hundreds of works, in a dizzying array of media, all made by the hands of 91-year-old Herbert Lagin — a tinkerer, inventor and self-taught “outsider” artist. In a huge storage space adjacent to the lamp-manufacturing facility Lagin has owned and operated for the past 60 years, the works memorialize the Holocaust, 9/11 and religious refugees.

A nondescript door marked “4269” leads inside the facility, which occupies the rear of the bright-orange Western Beef factory outlet. Once inside, past the pastel blue corridor, its paint peeling, a sun-filled and brightly lamp-lit section of the warehouse contains tri-fold screens filled with abstract paintings, chain links dangling from the ceiling and original glasswork scattered here and there. Admission is free, and any donations go to various causes around the world, most recently Haiti.

“He actually redesigned the space with all sorts of machinery and everything — it’s really amazing he did this on his own,” says Lagin’s daughter, Robin Langsam, who is one of five children and is a teacher in Armonk. “He created the vision of it and really followed through.”

A widower, Lagin lives in Great Neck, L.I., but drives in to Tremont several days a week to work in his factory-turned-museum. He says he conceptualized this museum just in the past few years, has been creating artwork since the third grade, when he’d reproduce pictures from classroom textbooks. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lagin graduated from Long Island University while working in a lamp factory and was poised to head to medical school when the Great Depression struck. Foregoing medical school in an effort to support his parents, Lagin continued working at the lamp-manufacturing facility and eventually opened his own factory in the 1950s and purchased other Tremont properties. In addition to his artwork, Lagin has been something of an inventor, acquiring patents for a lamp-mounting tool, a recovery pillow for open-heart surgery patients and forge-proof traveler’s checks, among other items, although never actually marketing these products.

“He’s always been ingenious and creative, even doing something as simple as taking out his little pocketknife and making handles on boxes,” Langsam says. She then maps her father’s artistic trajectory from mixed media to watercolors to copper to etched glass and today, to markers, Cray-Pas and collages.

“You find people who late in their life, when they finish what they’ve had to do for a living, really take on this amazing outburst of original and quite extraordinary artistic expression,” says Selig Sacks, a trustee of the American Folk Art Museum who in 2009 was named one of the top 250 collectors in Art & Antiques Magazine. Sacks examined 40 photos of Lagin’s work, at the request of The Jewish Week.

Near the entrance to the museum, a panel of photographs features twilight snapshots from Lagin’s Great Neck, L.I., backyard of what appears to be the Star of Bethlehem, the star that revealed the birth of Jesus to the magi in Christian tradition. Nearby is a wall spread of framed black-and-white photographs from the U.S. government’s Holocaust archives, to which Lagin has added color and replaced some of the victims’ heads with those of figures like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Islamic terrorists. “That’s [Ahmadinejad] — him as a Jew,” said Lagin, who may well be the only Jewish regular in the largely Hispanic and African-American Tremont neighborhood. “Everybody’s a Jew based on history.”

Around the space hang black chain links symbolic of wartime bondage, and behind the photographs mixed colors of paint trickle down the wall like blood. In a corner hangs a wooden cutout of a man, dangling from the ceiling on a hangman’s noose.  Continue reading…

**Also re-posted on Jewlicious.com

Snapshot from The Jewish Week’s homepage:

Israel Versus iPad

Tech writers baffled by Israel’s ban on Apple’s iPad.

Building Birthright Alumni Networks

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Morlie Levin: New Birthright NEXT new CEO sees alumni group reaching “critical mass.”

Morlie Levin, formerly the national executive director of Hadassah, is slated next month to take on the new post of CEO at Birthright Israel NEXT. She is expected to lead a nationwide expansion of the Birthright alumni organization, currently in seven cities, so that it has a presence in 10-15 cities. Prior to her position at Hadassah, Levin was the vice president of strategic planning at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, where she sought new ways to engage young donors.

Q: What are your thoughts as you join the Birthright Israel NEXT team?

A:I’m thrilled and humbled to have this opportunity. You may know about the NEXT Shabbat activities — NEXT is on track to host its 100,000th Shabbat meal. We’re getting to the point, what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as “the tipping point,” where you begin to get enough of a critical mass so you really can build communities of people with an interest in learning more, with an interest in practicing more, with an interest in looking at the world through a Jewish lens, with an interest in taking an active, informed stance vis-à-vis the State of Israel and Jewish people worldwide. Many people are worried about the Jewish future — yes, there’s a lot to worry about, but there’s a lot to be pleased and excited about.

Though you first visited Israel in 1991, when your children were already grown, how did your trip compare to the Birthright experience?

Although I don’t fit the demographic profile, I’m a classic Birthrighter: my Jewish identity and connection was dramatically enhanced by an adult trip to the land, and interaction with the people of Israel. So I viscerally understand this really from my own experience how profound the Birthright experience is in many cases and the kind of effect it can have.

Continue reading…

(Also posted on Jewlicious.com).

It’s now over 7.5 years since my unabashedly glorious days  as a marching band geek, but I have to share the most impressive shot from the Israeli army’s marching performance at this year’s  official Yom Ha’atzmaut military ceremony at Har Herzl:

How the hell did they do that? Somehow I can’t imagine the East Brunswick High School marching band successfully forming the head of Theodore Herzl. Then again, these guys aren’t trying to play instruments at the same time as they’re marching. But still, wow. And HAPPY 62nd BIRTHDAY, ISRAEL! Wish I could be there to celebrate with you.

“Jerusalem must remain the world’s Jewish spiritual capital, not a symbol of anguish and bitterness, but a symbol of trust and hope…Jerusalem is the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul.”-Elie Wiesel, from his Wall Street Journal and New York Times full-page ads this week.

On this Yom Hazikaron, we remember the fallen soldiers who continually fight to maintain this fundamental right for the Jewish people. And I remember how on last year at just a few hours past this time, I was standing on the highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with my parents (who were visiting Israel for the first time), when the siren went off across the entire State of Israel to remind everyone of this sobering fact and memorialize those who no longer can be there to share it with us.

Watch my lovely friend Liron Mark give a speech at Hebrew University’s Yom HaShoah ceremony (still need to add English subtitles). She’s leading a special project working with Israeli Holocaust survivors, to help them properly fill out forms required to get them additional funds. For more information on that, you can read an article she wrote here (again, Hebrew only currently): http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/092/408.html.

(Reposted here from Jewlicious.com)

Just one complaint was enough for Britain’s Advertising Standard Agency to decide that the kotel should no longer be part of Israel tourism advertisements circulated in the United Kingdom.

The contentious ad shows a photograph of the Western Wall with the Dome of the Rock in background, alongside a photo of Tel Aviv-Yafo, as part of a “Day 3″ in Israel suggested itinerary from ThinkIsrael.com (Israel’s Ministry of Tourism).

“The status of the occupied territory of the West Bank was the subject of much international dispute, and because we considered that the ad implied that the part of east Jerusalem featured in the image was part of the State of Israel, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead,” the ruling reads, as reported in The Jerusalem Post, London’s The Jewish Chronicle and other news sources.

Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, is irate, calling the Western Wall “the heart and soul of the Jewish people and the State of Israel” determining that the ASA has made a “shameful accusation showing a complete ignorance of history,” according to a Reuters report. The Israeli Tourism Ministry, he continues, will continue to run ads showing images of the Kotel.

I couldn’t agree more with Barkat (not that my humble opinion has any significance), and it is absolutely absurd to suggest that the Kotel is not part of Israeli soil. The last time I checked, it was the Israeli government controlling entrance and exit to the holy grounds and an Israeli flag waving proudly over the heads of visitors in prayer here. The Western Wall is perhaps the holiest site of the Jewish people — especially while Judaism’s truly holiest site, the Temple Mount, continues to be under the stringent management of the Muslim Waqf.

Meanwhile, my Jewish friends in England inform me that in today’s Jewish Telegraph letters page, an Israeli woman notes that the day following the UK’s decision to ban the kotel ad, the enormous cloud generated from the Icelandic volcanic eruption grounded all non-emergency flights into and out of Britain. Perhaps the hand of God, the writer suggests? An eleventh plague?