Good Friday morning!

Jews in Los Angeles reacted with shock and questions to news that American Jewish University is placing its Sunny & Isadore Familian Campus, which figures prominently in the lives of some Jewish Angelenos,  up for sale, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Esther Kustanowitz.

The Brandeis Bardin Campus in Simi Valley, home of the Brandeis Collegiate Institute and Camp Alonim, will remain under American Jewish University ownership and is not part of the sale. The Familian campus is in Los Angeles’ Bel Air neighborhood.

“For those of us who have been students or teachers there, or who have lived in University of Judaism [as AJU was previously called]/AJU housing —in my case, all of the above — this certainly is the end of an era,” Shawn Landres, co-founder of Jumpstart Labs, told eJP as news of the planned sale, which was first reported by the Jewish Journal, spread. “It also is potentially a historical and evolutionary milestone analogous to the sale of Los Angeles synagogues as they moved west, or even to the sale of Denver’s Rose Hospital that created the Rose Community Foundation.”

The sale raises several questions, Landres said, “Might AJU & Hebrew Union College L.A. finally join graduate and seminary forces? ….What could a sizable endowment make possible that couldn’t be done before? In other words, this is the beginning of the next chapter of a quintessentially L.A. story.”

Longtime Jewish professional Saul Korin, who is both an alum of AJU (then UJ) and a former employee, told eJP that the campus was “both an asset and a liability.”

“The dorms needed to be filled and after the end of the undergraduate program that was always going to be difficult,” said Korin, now based in Portland, Ore. “Hopefully this move will allow the campus to continue to serve the Los Angeles and larger Jewish community for the next 80 years.”

“This does not have to be a loss for the Jewish community,” Sam Yebri, a co-founder of Iranian-Jewish-American organization 30 Years After who is running for L.A. City Council, told eJP. “It is a massive strategic opportunity for another institution to leverage this incredible campus for continued learning and service. I hope our community and our city don’t squander this opportunity.”

MAKING MOVES

Jewish Review of Books goes independent

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After 12 years under the umbrella of the Tikvah Fund, the Jewish Review of Books (JRB) has spun off into an independent publication with its own eponymous foundation. The publication’s editor, Abe Socher, said the Jewish Review of Books Foundation will make sure that the quarterly magazine receives the attention it deserves while the Tikvah Fund focuses on other projects, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales. 

Prioritizing: The magazine features book reviews as well as other cultural criticism and coverage of the Jewish intellectual world. Socher, a religion professor emeritus at Oberlin College, characterized the decision as mutual, and said Tikvah had been “enormously supportive” in the past. “I wanted to make sure that such a publication would continue to thrive and this seemed the best way forward to me,” Socher told eJP. 

Initial support: Financially, Socher said the JRB Foundation would initially be in sound financial shape. Its main funder is the The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation, which is contributing $1.5 million over three years. Mandel’s CEO, former Brandeis University President Jehuda Reinharz, is the chair of the JRB Foundation, and Stephen Hoffman, Mandel’s chairman, is also on the JRB Foundation board.

Preserving print: Hoffman told eJP that Mandel decided to fund the JRB Foundation because it admires both the magazine’s content and its print format. The magazine’s print content is accompanied by illustrations and published in a large-print edition that, Socher joked, makes it difficult to surreptitiously read in synagogue. “We think this is a piece that needs to be able to [be] held in your hand, sit on your table for a little bit, come back to it. Online reading doesn’t allow that to happen as easily,” Hoffman said. 

Digital future: Tikvah, by contrast, is placing a greater focus on digital media, executive director Eric Cohen told eJP. In addition to the digital publication Mosaic, Cohen said Tikvah is funding a growing number of video courses and podcasts. He told eJP that JRB was “one of our greatest successes” at Tikvah. Socher did not attribute the spin-off to ideological differences with Tikvah, which leans to the right, though he did say that being independent would allow the magazine to embody “the conviction that the ideas and achievements of Jewish religion, literature and scholarship are interesting and valuable in and of themselves.”

Read the full story here.

HEARD YESTERDAY

Arab party’s Abbas dismisses claims Israel is an ‘apartheid state’

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Mansour Abbas, an Arab political leader in Israel’s governing coalition, declined to call Israel an apartheid state during a virtual event with The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington, D.C., think tank, on Thursday. He also voiced support for the Abraham Accords and affirmed that Israel was created as a Jewish state, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales reports. 

Making history: Abbas’ party, Ra’am, was the first independent Arab party in history to join an Israeli governing coalition. “If you’re talking about the state of relations within the State of Israel, I would not call it ‘apartheid,’” he said, referencing a recent report by Amnesty International that accused Israel of apartheid both within its recognized borders and in the West Bank. Critics of the report have pointed to Abbas as an example of minority rights in Israel, which he echoed. “In practice, I’m inside the coalition, and if I wanted to be in the government [as a minister], I could have been in the government… I don’t say, ‘You’re a racist,’ or ‘The state is racist,’ or ‘This is an apartheid state,’ or ‘not apartheid.’”

Emphasizing partnership: Abbas at times sidestepped contentious questions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, instead emphasizing his vision of Arab-Jewish partnership. “We want peace to dwell in the Holy Land between Jews and Arabs, and that the Palestinian issue will be addressed,” he said. But he added that his top priority was the welfare of Israel’s Arab citizens, and said “we failed” because the government “did not pay attention to the situation in the mixed cities,” Arab-Jewish cities where riots erupted last May. He added, “You can’t always aspire to change the world when you can’t protect your own private world, your community.”

Supporting the accords: Abbas did say that he supports the Abraham Accords, Israel’s recent normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, and added, “If there are other agreements, we will definitely support them.”

Watch the full conversation here.

SELF-CARE

Caring for school leaders

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“Last week marked the shloshim, the 30-day period of mourning according to Jewish law, after my father passed away, so I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about what it is to care for yourself and others, and what it is to be cared for,” writes Paul Bernstein, CEO of Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Minhag: “So much of our mourning tradition stems from minhag or tradition, so I realized that I was making a conscious choice to immerse myself in so many Jewish mourning practices. I found myself more deeply and intensely engaged than my pre-mourning self might have anticipated. Because of the gradual transition through traditional mourning stages, from grief to reentry to community, I have been able to accept the care and love of others around me and my family. The mourning structures helped me to accept their lovingkindness.”

Structures: “In parashat Terumah, the Torah portion this week, we read in great detail about structures. The building of the Mishkan or Tabernacle is a monumental and crucial moment in Jewish history… There is no tax or obligation to give for the Mishkan. The entire project starts at the heart, with a kind of instinctual desire to participate…The same is true as you mourn. The structures are an extraordinarily important part of our lives. And yet, their impact is to help manifest what comes from your heart, and enable the heartfelt love and support of the community around you to come through.”

Supporting our educational leaders: “As I think about how difficult it can be to support our educational leaders, I wonder how we elevate established structures, such as a head support committee, to provide the support educators most need, in these extraordinary times. The structures can best help if we can create an environment where school leaders, and those in the position to support them, are able to open their hearts, and put the structures to work for their mutual benefit.”

Trusted approaches: “Caring for leaders is so critical to the future of the Jewish community. When it comes to the ‘care and tending’ of Jewish educational leaders — those who are responsible for one of the Jewish community’s most treasured endeavors — there are trusted approaches, guidelines and patterns to emulate, just as in the construction of the Mishkan detailed in current and upcoming Torah portions.”

Read the full piece here.

Pic of the Day

Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile via Getty Images

Barnabas Szollos of Israel competes during yesterday’s men’s combined slalom event at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games at the National Alpine Skiing Center in Yanqing, China.