RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Start-up Continent

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column on JTA once again attempts to demonstrate to the "outside world" that there is Jewish life in Europe.....

Startup continent: European Jewry

By Ruth Ellen Gruber · November 10, 2010

ROME (JTA) -- When I was in the United States recently, I gave a series of talks on contemporary Jewish life in Europe. One of my aims was to shed light on some of the creative new initiatives that are shaping the Jewish experience here, often against considerable odds and expectations.

"My eyes were opened to a Jewish world I had no idea existed," one woman told me.

Having written about the Jewish experience in Europe for many years, I sometimes forget how surprised people can be by developments that by now I take for granted.

Americans accustomed to viewing Europe through the prism of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism can be taken aback when they come face to face with such living Jewish realities as newly opened synagogues, crowded Jewish singles weekends and hip-hop klezmer fusion bands.

"American Jews don't tend to think about European Jewry often, and when we do, it is to lament its imminent demise, the victim of an aging, diminishing population and a sharply disturbing increase in anti-Semitism," Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of The New York Jewish Week, wrote this summer.
Some folks -- metaphorically I hope -- go so far as to express shock to find that a country such as Poland is "in color."

"Where had I seen Poland outside of World War II newsreels, Holocaust movies and photos, and, of course, 'Schindler's List'?" Rob Eshman, the editor of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal wrote last month after visiting Poland for the first time. "That entire movie was in black and white, except for the fleeting image of a tragic figure, a doomed little Jewish girl in a bright red dress."

The American Jewish challenge when it comes to modern Poland, he admitted, "is to reverse the 'Schindler's List' images, to see the country as mostly color, with a little black and white."

An optimistic new report now provides statistical backup for the bold new Jewish realities in Europe that I described in my talks.

Published last month, the 2010 Survey of New Jewish Initiatives in Europe aims to provide a "comprehensive snapshot" of Jewish startups -- that is, of "autonomous or independent non-commercial European initiatives" that have been established within the past decade.

"Conventional discussions of Europe often emphasize anti-Semitism, Jewish continuity, and anti-Israel activism," the survey's introduction states. "While we do not dismiss or diminish those concerns, we know that these are only part of the story. The European Jewry we know is confident, vibrant, and growing."

The findings are remarkably positive.

The survey presents data on 136 European Jewish startups and estimates that some 220 to 260 such initiatives are currently in operation, nearly half of them in the former Soviet Union and other post-communist states.

"There are more Jewish startups per capita in Europe than in North America," it says.

These initiatives, the study says, reach as many as 250,000 people, of whom about 41,000 are "regular participants and core members." They span a broad range of ages and affiliation, although European Jewish startup leaders and founders themselves "tend to affiliate with progressive and secular/cultural forms of Judaism."

Other findings reveal that the "vast majority" of these new Jewish initiatives are focused mainly on "Jewish education, arts and culture, or community building," and most of their financing comes from foundation grants and "grass-roots labor."

The survey was carried out by Jumpstart, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that promotes Jewish innovation, in cooperation with the British Pears Foundation and the ROI Community for Young Jewish Innovators based in Jerusalem.

I asked Shawn Landres, Jumpstart's co-founder, whether he thought the survey's findings presented a picture that was too rosy given the challenges still faced by European Jewry.

"I don't think the survey is overly optimistic," he told me. "The numbers of initiatives and the number of people involved (especially the otherwise unaffiliated) are accurate indicators of the creativity of European Jewry."
Still, he conceded, "the financial figures, especially the small budgets and low number of individual financial contributors, indicate just how fragile they are."

Landres noted that the demographic challenges facing European Jews -- long a hot topic for strategic planners -- were "complex." But, he said, they could not be reduced to "a single line in a single direction."

"Even if Jewish numbers in Europe are stagnating or declining overall, the threat or opportunity is in the details," he said. "What about intermarried families that identify as Jewish? What about the 80,000 or so people engaged by these new initiatives who have no other connection to the organized Jewish community? What about key population centers like London, Budapest, and Berlin that will remain Jewishly vibrant for generations to come?"

Landres said the fact that the survey showed nearly twice as many startups per capita in Europe as in North America "should challenge a few stereotypes."

But, he added, "I suppose it shouldn't have been surprising, given the number of respondents who feel that established institutions simply aren't making room for them and their peers."
Landres said all the initiatives analyzed in the survey were in operation as of this year, but he acknowledged that some may not last.

"Even so," he said, "projects need not be permanent to have impact, and the people involved frequently move on to other more successful Jewish communal endeavors armed with invaluable experience. Without risk and tolerance for failure, we cannot make transformative progress."

Tablet Magazine -- Heym on the Range

Here's my recently story for Tablet Magazine about David Dortort, the creator of the iconic TV western Bonanza, who died Sept. 5. I had the pleasure and privilege of spending an afternoon with Dortort and his wife when I was the Visiting Scholar at the Autry National Center in December 2004, working on my continuing and ongoing project on the American West in the European Imagination.

Heym on the Range


By Ruth Ellen Gruber (Nov. 4, 2010)


Some years ago, when I first visited Sikluv Mlyn, a Wild West theme park in the Czech Republic, I was startled by the music piped in to the lobby of my hotel. It was the unmistakable theme song from the iconic TV show Bonanza–sung in Czech. 

Bonanza, which ran from 1959 to 1973, recounted the adventures of the tight-knit Cartwright clan—the patriarch Ben, his three sons Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe—and the goings-on at their sprawling Ponderosa ranch. Syndicated to dozens of countries and dubbed into languages ranging from German to Japanese, it was one of the most popular and widely watched television shows of all time and has had a tremendous impact in honing the image of the American West around the world.

But few viewers realize how deeply rooted the show was in, well, Yiddishkeit (and not just because two of the stars—Lorne Greene as Ben and Michael Landon as Little Joe—were Jewish). 

Bonanza was the brainchild of David Dortort, a pioneering television writer and producer who died in September at the age of 93. The Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Dortort had a lifelong commitment to Jewish causes; among other things, he and his wife Rose, who died in 2007, endowed cultural programs at the American Jewish University and Hillel at UCLA.

I discussed the Jewish underpinnings of Bonanza with Dortort during a lengthy interview at his home in Los Angeles in December 2004, as part of my ongoing research on the American West in the European imagination.

Bonanza’s story lines, he told me, centered on relationships rather than good guy-bad guy gunplay and stressed the values of love, respect, and family ties. He had employed these values, he said, to create a mythic world along the lines of the Arthurian legends, with the Ponderosa a sort of American Camelot and Ben Cartwright a King Arthur figure.

He named the Cartwright patriarch Ben after his own father, a yeshiva bokher who immigrated to the United States at 15 and became an insurance broker in Brooklyn. It wasn’t just a name that the two shared. “Essentially the values that I put into Bonanza are Jewish values that I learned in my home, from my father,” he told me. “One of the great things about the United States is that it’s probably the only country in the history of the world that can be described as a Judaic-Christian civilization. Where else did the Jewish people have the freedom they have in this country and enjoy the opportunities?”

Toward the end of our talk, Dortort shifted the conversation away from Bonanza. He told me a family story that shed light on how his own relationship to myth—and to the West—may have been shaped in part by the exploits of his Uncle Harry, a ne’er-do-well in the Old Country who wound up fighting alongside Pancho Villa in Mexico and battling anti-Semites on a California ranch.

In Dortort’s telling, Harry, his father’s younger brother, left Galicia in about 1916; he made his way to Hamburg and got a job on a ship. Soon, Dortort said, “he finds himself off the coast of Mexico and at a port called Tampico, on the Caribbean, and he hears about a fantastic guy in the interior, deep in the Sierra Madre, called Pancho Villa.”
Harry “jumps ship and makes his way into the Sierra Madre somehow to join Pancho Villa. He fights with Villa against the government of Mexico, and they became very close.” Harry, Dortort said, “was a tough little character. He was known as Pancho Villa’s Jew.”

According to Dortort, Harry was with Pancho Villa in March 1916 when Villa carried out a bloody raid on a U.S. Army garrison at Columbus, New Mexico. Soon after, Harry followed Villa’s advice and fled to Texas—specifically to San Antonio, where there was a Jewish community. There, Dortort recounted, Harry spied a woman on the porch of a house, brushing her long, black hair. “He knows this is a Jewish section of town, so he calls up to her in Yiddish, ‘Are you a Jew?’ And she looks down and says, ‘Yes, but who are you and what do you want to know for?’ He looks up and says, ‘Do you want to get married?’ And she hesitated a moment and said, ‘OK!’ ”

Harry and his bride headed west to California, where they operated a citrus ranch near Pomona. By 1920 or 1921, Harry had become so successful that he arranged for his brother Ben to bring his family out to California from Brooklyn.
Dortort was only 4 or 5 years old. “It was beautiful,” he recalled. “No smog in those days, the mountains were clear, and there was snow on them; southern California was like paradise.”

Nearly 40 years later, he created Bonanza.

 Read story at Tablet Magazine HERE