​(RNS) — These are the most important events and trends of the year in Jewish life, from the horror of violent anti-Semitism, to the hope of a burgeoning birth rate in Israel.

1. The political stalemate in Israel. After a pair of inconclusive national elections, both Benny Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu, leaders of the two largest political parties, failed to build a viable governing coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. At year’s end, Netanyahu, despite being formally indicted for criminal activities, tenaciously remained in power as prime minister. An unprecedented third election to resolve the deadlock is scheduled for early March 2020.

2. The resurgence of violent anti-Semitism. Nearly 75 years after the end of the Holocaust and World War II, violent acts of anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews and Judaism) sharply increased during the year, including fatal hate crime shootings at a San Diego-area synagogue and a Jersey City kosher market and an unsuccessful attempt to kill worshipers on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in Halle, Germany. They were but three of the growing number of both physical and verbal attacks on Jews in the U.S. and Europe. In France, 89% of French Jewish students report experiencing anti-Jewish abuse and, since 2003, a dozen people have been murdered in that country for the sole reason that they were Jewish.

During his lifetime, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was frequently confused with another internationally famous photographer: his friend Edward Steichen. So, too, were Stieglitz’s remarkable achievements often overshadowed by the fame of his wife, artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

But Phyllis Rose’s book Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters (part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series) brings her subject out of the shadows and into his deserved place in history as the person who made “taking pictures” a respected art form. Rose, a literary critic and a retired professor of English literature at Wesleyan University, has combined her knowledge of photography and modern art with an excellent grasp of the historical trends and events that shaped the artistic world from the Victorian and Gilded Ages to the end of World War II.

Alfred Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey into a wealthy, highly cultured German-Jewish family. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Germany following the failed political revolution in 1848. Alfred’s father, Edward, was a kunstmensch, an art man who “read Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare…studied works by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Leonardo…”

​(RNS) — There have been more positive encounters between Roman Catholics and the Jewish people since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 than there were in the first 2,000 years of the Christian church. But one major flashpoint has remained unresolved: the bitter controversy swirling around the role played by Eugenio Pacelli, whose 19-year pontificate as Pius XII began in 1939, in the wartime treatment of European Jews.

Today Pope Francis announced that the Vatican archives covering Pius XII’s reign will at last be opened. I have been personally involved in this dispute for more than three decades and have long demanded that this obstacle needs to be fully and finally removed if the historic revolution in Catholic-Jewish relations is to deepen and advance.

The most serious charge made against Pius XII by his critics, Catholic and Jewish, is that he was inactive, indifferent, and ineffective in the face of Nazi Germany’s horrific policy of mass murder during the Holocaust, when six million Jews were killed in the heart of what Pope John Paul II has called “Christian Europe.”

​Professor Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) of the Hebrew University – arguably the greatest Jewish scholar of the 20th century – considered himself an archeologist. No, not the kind of person who digs into the history-laden soil of Israel, but rather one who delves into the Jewish religious tradition that Scholem described as “a field strewn with ruins.”

Scholem described his life’s work as “…the modest but necessary task of clearing the ground of much scattered debris and laying bare the outlines of a great and significant chapter in the history of the Jewish religion.”

​(RNS) — Philip Roth’s death at age 85 marks the end of an extraordinary writing career. In my mind, Roth was the greatest American author of the past 60 years.

I’m a fast reader and usually get through most novels quickly. Not so with Roth’s many remarkable writings. His carefully crafted books demand slow reading because of his rich, tightly composed prose. Indeed, I often reread his words again and again simply to admire his magnificent command of the English language.

​(RNS) — For most people April 19 is just another springtime day on the calendar: the baseball season is well underway, it’s often the date for the Boston Marathon, and the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., are usually just past their peak.

But April 19 is deeply embedded within my personal memory bank.

On that date 75 years ago, in 1943, I was a youngster traveling with my family from Alexandria, Va., to Pittsburgh to participate in a Passover seder at my grandparents’ home located in what was then rightly called “The Steel City.”

It was the midst of World War II, and my father, a U.S. Army major, was stationed at Fort Belvoir. He had carefully accumulated enough rationing coupons to provide sufficient gasoline for the round trip in our 1940 Chrysler.

My former boss, the famous and widely respected sportscaster Bob Wolff, died in July 2017 at age 96. Four years earlier, I wrote this tribute to Bob for a section of the Washington Post. Working for Bob proved to be a highlight of my life.   
 
 
In the spring of 1955 I was a freshly minted twenty-year George Washington University graduate waiting to begin rabbinic studies that autumn at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan. In those halcyon years there was plenty of summer employment, and I had planned to be a municipal playground director in my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia.

At GWU, I was on the track team and a sports editor of the Hatchet, the University newspaper. Some folks in the athletic department mentioned me to Bob Wolff, the radio/TV announcer of my beloved Washington Senators baseball team. I was elated when he offered me a dream job as his personal assistant for the summer.

Today Bob Wolff is a national icon, an authentic “living legend,” and still going strong at age 92. He is the longest running sports broadcaster in television and radio history and a member of the Baseball and Basketball Halls of Fame. Bob has covered each of the four major league sports leagues as well as soccer. For years he was the play-by-play telecaster for Madison Square Garden events including the Westminster Dog Show.  
 
Back then Bob worked out of his Washington home where he maintained an office replete with numerous files and newspaper clippings. This was, of course, long before we used computers. Much of his success is based upon an extraordinary knowledge of every sport he described on the air and a disciplined work ethic that considered sports broadcasting a serious profession.

My responsibilities were to maintain the individual player and team statistics of the eight American League teams of that era, compile the commercial copy Bob required during broadcasts including “National Bohemian Beer, Oh Boy What A Beer!” and Robert Burns cigars. Interesting, my boss did not smoke or drink. I also studied the sports pages of several newspapers searching for information for use on Bob’s daily radio show, and I checked his incoming mail.

But the best part of my work was to join Bob Wolff for the Senators’ home games in Griffith Stadium (demolished a decade later in 1965), now the site of Howard University’s Hospital.  His broadcast partner was Arch McDonald, and the contrast between Bob and Arch could not have been greater. There was a constant culture clash in the broadcast booth.

The Arkansas-born McDonald was nineteen years older than Bob, a Phi Beta Kappa Duke University graduate and college baseball player. McDonald employed a “good ole boy” style of sports casting filled with folksy commentary and the use of such expressions as “ducks on the pond” to describe runners on base in scoring position.
 
McDonald represented the days when baseball was a game played in the sunshine by country boys in Southern states. But in 1955 Bob represented the advance guard of modern sports announcing with emphasis on statistics, less worshipful player interviews, and interesting descriptions of the intricacies of baseball that unknowing outsiders often viewed as boring and slow moving. 

​Clark Griffith, the Senators’ owner, was an early major league player and team manager. Nicknamed “The Old Fox,” I remember meeting him a few months before his death in October 1955 at age 86. He asked me whether I intended to make sports casting my career. When I replied I would soon be entering rabbinical school, Griffith was at first silent, then shot me a quizzical look and finally said, “I guess they don’t keep batting averages for sermons. Good luck!”

My stadium duties included rounding up players for interviews on Bob’s pre-game TV show, “Dugout Chatter,” and entering locker rooms at the end of a game to escort the day’s star for an appearance on the post-game “Tenth Inning.” Guests usually received a Countess Mara necktie, a Helbros wristwatch or a set of men’s cologne. In special cases the gift was a men’s suit from Raleigh Haberdasher, a fashionable Washington store of the time.
The Senators record that year was 51 wins and 103 defeats. The only bright spot for last place Washington was the presence of Harmon Killebrew, a 19-year slugger who later became a Hall of Famer.

Late in the season I walked into the Cleveland locker room following another Senators defeat. The Indians, pennant winners the year before, were loaded with stars including Bob Feller, Al Rosen, Larry Doby, Bob Lemon, Ralph Kiner, and two rookie “phenoms:” Rocky Colavito and Herb Score. I was surprised a number of Cleveland players sat in front of their lockers reading The Wall Street Journal and not the so-called baseball “bible:” The Sporting News; clear evidence the game was as much a business as a sport.

 Working for Bob Wolff taught me three important lessons that have guided my own career: preparation, professionalism and pride. In the Jewish tradition we say, “May you live to be 120.” Knowing Bob, he just might make it!

(RNS) — “Go Home N—-r.”
In late September, five African-American students in the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Preparatory School, located on the academy’s Colorado Springs, Colo., campus, confronted those three words on their dormitory message boards.
When he learned of the obscene message, Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Jay B. Silveria was furious. Silveria, a combat jet pilot who grew up in an Air Force family, quickly summoned the school’s 4,000 cadets and 1,500 staff members to hear him deliver a powerful lecture on the evils of prejudice and racism.
​“If you’re outraged by those words, then you’re in the right place,” Silveria said. “That kind of behavior has no place at the prep school, has no place at USAFA (the Air Force Academy) and has no place in the United States Air Force. We would all be naive to think that everything is perfect here. We would be naive to think that we shouldn’t discuss this topic. We would also be tone deaf not to think about the backdrop of what’s going on in our country. Things like Charlottesville and Ferguson, the protests in the NFL.”