Lauren Yellen Stands Up for Detroit

TEEN HEROES

By Suzanne Kurtz Sloan

WASHINGTON (JTA) — When Lauren Yellen was in second grade, she met a girl with cerebral palsy who was mute. As a bat mitzvah, Yellen decided to raise money for a specially trained dog to help the girl.

The experience, she said, made her “realize the importance of helping people in general.”

Now a high school senior in Farmington Hills, Mich., Yellen serves as a regional president of BBYO and is the driving force behind a Stand UP drive to help rebuild the city of Detroit. Launched in 2009, Stand UP is the youth organization’s initiative to empower teens to develop community service campaigns.

“Despite the reputation it may have via the media, we understand that [Detroit] is a city filled with endless opportunities,” Yellen said. “Most of us want to change the world one day and, in the city, every little positive thing has an even greater impact on our larger community.”

Yellen has organized field trips for suburban teens to plant trees in the city, visit the Eastern Market (a four-block farmers’ market), attend Major League Baseball games and visit the only still-standing synagogue in Detroit.

“Seeing the cool things that the city has to offer is important to building a strong Detroit and helping out the community,” Yellen said.

The oldest of four siblings, she plans to attend Northern Michigan University next year and would like to study political science and international relations. When her studies are done, she said, “I hope to come back to Detroit and bring hope back to the city.”

JTA spoke to Yellen recently about her biggest influences, her first time in Israel and one of her favorite community service projects.

Who or what are the biggest influences in your life?

The positive work that I’m seeing in the community is my biggest influence.

What have been some of the most meaningful Jewish experiences in your life?

During my sophomore year, I was able to raise enough money to participate in the March of the Living. That was my first time in Israel. [To experience] the progression of the Jewish people, from the concentration camps to Israel, it was super cool.

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The Truth About Pilgrims and Maccabees

By Deanna Mirsky

Did the Pilgrims celebrate Hanukkah? No. Did they know about it, and the Maccabees? Certainly.

THEY STUDIED ALL THE TIME

This gathering of families later called Pilgrims studied, sang psalms, celebrated thanksgivings and endured fasts. The community answered only to its “gathered” members (and reluctantly to its funders).

Plymouth’s literacy was phenomenal: estate inventories from the period before 1660 show that 60-80 percent of households left books. So many books that we don’t begin to have a complete list, because they were often counted as “other small books.”

The Pilgrims were tremendous Bible readers. Their usual text was the Geneva Bible, produced by English Protestant exiles. King James knew that Geneva’s marginal notes and translation choices were full of references to wicked kings and tyrants. Most of the King James translation matches Geneva, but carefully toned down.

The Hanukkah texts aren’t biblical, but Maccabees and Judith were often printed between the “Old” and “New” Testaments, and at least one Geneva Bible at Plymouth included them. Josephus and its fabulous 10th-century derivative, Josippon, were full of heroic material about Judas Maccabeus, available in English and Latin, and were wildly popular among Christians and Jews. Because psalms replaced fixed prayers at Plymouth, our colonists would have known the Hallel psalms sung at Hanukkah well.

THEY LOVED HEBREW

Amazingly, at least two colonists knew Hebrew: Governor William Bradford and Plymouth elder (and teacher) William Brewster, who had run a printing press that published Puritan books and tracts for reshipment to England.

The separatists were in Holland between 1608 and 1620; a year in Amsterdam, then in Leiden, at just the time a Jewish community was forming in Holland. (It is tempting to imagine contacts and to think that Bradford and Brewster learned at the feet of Jews.)

Bradford may have studied Hebrew at Cambridge, and Brewster certainly did. Bradford resumed his study of Hebrew in Plymouth, and his Hebrew exercises and dictionary are bound together with the Of Plimouth Plantation manuscript. More Hebrew is found in the manuscript of another work, his Third Dialogue.

There were many accomplished Christian Hebraists by the 16th century. Printing had enabled cheap production of Bibles and religious works, and made Hebrew texts increasingly available. Hebrew was sacred for Protestants, who saw themselves as the “new Israel.” Followers of John Calvin made ceaseless efforts to create faithful translations and to understand and recreate early Jewish life. Hebrew was a required subject for ministers in (officially) Jew-free England.

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J.D. Salinger's Jewish Roots

Although J.D. Salinger's most widely-known character is Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, his most enduring characters may prove to be Seymour Glass, the protagonist of two of his other books, and the other Glass siblings.

Like the 7 Glass kids, Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. His paternal grandfather was a rabbi who emigrated from Lithuania to Louisville, Kentucky, where he served at a local shul. His father, Sol Salinger, was a kosher cheesemonger, and his mother, Marie Jillich, never properly converted, though she changed her name to Miriam when she married in order to pass as Jewish. Salinger didn't even find out about her Catholic upbringing until shortly after his bar mitzvah.

Like Seymour, Salinger also wrestled with his Jewish and Catholic identities. At the McBurney School, a now-shuttered elite Manhattan private school, he was bullied for being Jewish, and told people to call him Jerry instead of the more Jewish-sounding Jerome. Problems persisted, and he was transferred to Valley Forge Military Academy. However, his new schoolmates weren't much better than his old ones, and his experiences there proved excellent fodder for Catcher in the Rye—which still sells 200,000 copies a year.

- Matthue Roth for Jewniverse

How to Throw a Bargain Bat Mitzvah

By Stephanie Sylverne for Kveller

My daughter studied Hebrew for four years, giving up free time after school and many weekend slumber parties in pursuit of Jewish knowledge. After all that effort, she wanted a fabulous party to mark the occasion of finally being called to the bimah as a bat mitzvah.

And I wanted to give her one. She’d worked hard for it. But I didn’t have a savings account marked “bat mitzvah” set aside, nor did I have tens of thousands of dollars open on credit cards. I’m sure that many parents must save for this from the moment they get a positive pregnancy test, but I was a very young parent, a single one until she was in elementary school, and for most of her life I had been struggling to finish college and pay the bills. I wanted my daughter to have a Jewish education. But I couldn’t take out a mortgage to do it.

I was supposed to be excited about this milestone, but as it drew ever closer, all I felt was dread. It became a chore, an obligation, a source of massive anxiety, not a joy. I wanted nothing to do with the words “bat mitzvah” anymore. And that broke my heart.

So after months of agonizing, I made a decision. I was not going to spend a lot on this bat mitzvah. And I was not going to feel guilty about it either.

B’nai mitzvah celebrations are synonymous with overspending, which often worked against me when I began looking for a place to host hers. The moment the words “bat mitzvah” slipped from my lips, vendors thought (probably from past experience) that this was going to be a free-for-all.

I watched their faces turn from eagerness to annoyance when I declined all the extras they threw at us–did we need a team of trapeze artists to provide entertainment between courses? Perhaps the London Symphony Orchestra could perform entrance music? Would our teenage guests prefer the $150 organic free range chicken or beef in their heirloom mushroom sauce? Or we could have a separate buffet that would serve chicken nuggets for the bargain price of $75 each kid. We could add an ice cream bar for an additional $10 a head and unlimited soda refills for another $8. We could bring our own cake from an outside bakery for dessert but it would be $3 a slice to cut it, even if it’s already cut, and if we want the cake they provide instead, it would also cost $3 a slice.

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