​(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.

For many people, “Key West” conjures up a menagerie of Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall films, home of Ernest Hemmingway, quirky residents and visitors, set in a hurricane-prone resort town adorned with beautiful sunsets.

Arlo Haskell’s The Jews of Key West: Smugglers, Cigar Makers, and Revolutionaries (Sand Paper Press) shows us another dimension of America’s southernmost island city in his skillful portrayal of its 195-year-old Jewish community.
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The author, executive director of the Key West Literary Seminar, introduces us to a robust gallery of Jewish “conchs” (the affectionate name for Key West denizens), including sailors, religious leaders, smugglers, cigar makers, tavern owners, Cuban independence supporters, and activists who helped smuggle European Jewish refugees into the United States from nearby Cuba during the 1920s and 1930s.

(RNS) — Passover and Easter once again coincide this year. The first seder (Passover meal) of the eight-day Jewish festival is on March 30, and Easter falls two days later.
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During this holiday season, the focus for Christians is on the last days of Jesus’ life, the subject of a new documentary hosted by “Downton Abbey” actor Hugh Bonneville. “Jesus: Countdown to Calvary,” will air on most public television stations before Easter.

​Christian Passion plays will be performed in many venues, including an NBC live performance of “Jesus Christ Superstar” on April 1. On the same day, NBC will also air “Easter Mysteries,” an oratorio by Tony-award winner John O’Boyle that focuses on the Jewishness of Jesus and his followers. Both television productions feature an African-American actor portraying Jesus.

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!

Senior Interreligious Adviser, American Jewish Committee &
Visiting Professor of Judaica, Saint Leo University
International Liaison Committee Meeting
Paris, France
March 2, 2011

​It is an honor to address this International Liaison Committee meeting. I thank the officers of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC) who invited me to discuss an important theme that all of us will help define and shape in the years ahead: the future of Catholic-Jewish relations throughout the world.

In age, the ILC and IJCIC have reached the biblical number of forty years and I was privileged to be present at the creation of both in 1971. Extraordinary excitement, energy and élan were in abundance back then…it was only a half dozen years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council and the actions taken there by the world’s Roman Catholic bishops in adopting a series of reforms including, of course, the Nostra Aetate Declaration.
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The year 1971 was also about a quarter century after the end of World War Two and the Shoah; it was an era dominated politically and religiously by those individuals who have been given the title, “The Greatest Generation;” the men and women, both military and civilian, of the Allied nations whose combined extraordinary efforts were required to defeat Nazism and Fascism. It was also an era when Holocaust survivors were rebuilding their personal and professional lives in Europe, Israel, North and South America and elsewhere. Some survivors of the Shoah provided leadership in establishing the ILC and IJCIC.

(RNS) — Four powerful and irreversible forces are rapidly transforming the Jewish and Christian worlds.

But many leaders in both communities are unable or unwilling to recognize these new changes. Such leaders, trapped in the past, risk losing real influence and relevancy and face the grim possibility of being tossed into the “dustbin of history.”

The first two forces relentlessly at work are demography and geography.
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For centuries, Europe and North America were the centers of Christian and Jewish populations and the sources of religious leadership. However, today most Christians reside in Central and South America, Africa and Asia while Christians in Europe and North America are older, and their numbers are declining or barely holding steady.

In his fifteenth book, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Professor James L. Kugel offers a theory to explain why ancient and modern peoples experience God in such profoundly different ways. He delivers a scholarly tour de force that is also accessible to the general reader.

Kugel argues that Abraham, Joseph, Moses, the Hebrew prophets, and other ancient people possessed a “semipermeable mind” that was receptive to seeing, hearing, and meeting the Divine Presence. He asserts that such contacts, which allowed for direct, personal contact with God, take place within the “fog of self,” a dream-like quality most modern people lack.

The Israelites of Scripture, he says, felt they were part of a collective entity open to experiencing the divine; in contrast, moderns tend to be a collection of spiritually closed individuals, ill-equipped to encounter God. Kugel laments that our biblical ancestors’ openness to-meet God attribute has shifted into “…oddly stunted and closed-off organs, which today are scarcely aware of their tiny opening to the Outside [God].”

(RNS) — For the past 26 years, I have been cataloging the most important stories of the year. As a rabbi, I’m particularly interested in stories that impact the world Jewish community. Here are my top 10 Jewish news stories in 2017 in reverse order:
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10. Notable deaths: 2017 saw the deaths of Edith (“Edie”) Windsor, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that helped legalize same-sex marriages; Holocaust survivor Yisrael Kristal, who at his death at age 113 was the world’s oldest man; Otto Warmbier, an Ohio college student who died shortly after his return to the U.S. from a North Korean prison; Jonathan Woocher, an influential scholar and author on Jewish education, and comedian Jerry Lewis.

(RNS) — Hanukkah, which begins Tuesday evening (Dec. 12) has been incorrectly called the “Jewish Christmas” because both holidays emphasize light and take place during the darkest days of winter.

While the two festivals are very different in message and observance, there are, however, some significant links between Hanukkah and Christmas. The New Testament records that Jesus, like other Jews of his time, celebrated the eight days of Hanukkah: “It was the feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem; it was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon.” (John 10:22-23) The Hebrew word “Hanukkah” means “Dedication.”
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If Charles Dickens had written about Hanukkah in a manner similar to his “A Christmas Carol,” the famous English author would have noted that special prayers are recited in Jewish homes each night of the holiday as young (and not so young) children light colorful candles in a candelabrum or menorah. Dickens would surely describe in loving detail the unmistakable aroma and taste of the two traditional holiday treats: potato pancakes fried in oil and loaded with calories and cholesterol along with small jelly doughnuts that rapidly raise a person’s blood sugar level. Gifts are exchanged among family members and friends and a series of well-known songs are sung that are especially beloved by adults — including me — because they evoke warm joyous childhood memories of Hanukkahs long past.