Responses to The Post…

Grace here. You may have seen the recent Washington Post article about Theater J and the discussions about Israeli drama. We recently got this beautiful response from Elaine and Tom, and they were kind enough to let me share it on our blog. Please feel free to leave your own comments and continue the conversation.

Dear Ari Roth and colleagues,

My husband and I have been subscribers to Theater J for several years–and love what you do. We have found the plays interesting, thought-provoking and balanced. We really liked “Return to Haifa” and applaud you for staging it. The Washington Post article inspired us to voice our support.

We are ardent supporters of Israel but that doesn’t mean that Israel is perfect. I believe the creation of Israel was absolutely necessary and its secure continuation equally necessary. At the same time, the reality is that many Palestinian families were displaced. To recognize that, as Theater J has, and to engage in dialogue and seek a peaceful co-existence is simply being honest and fair.

Without this kind of fairness, Theater J would not be the same. We changed our series tickets from The Shakespeare Theater to Theater J after being introduced to a performance there by friends. We were delighted with it and went to other plays and then became season series holders.

PLEASE DON”T CHANGE! You are doing great work, both on and off the stage–hurrah for the Peace Cafes!

Elaine Murphy and Tom Merrick
Washington, DC

Washington Post Feature: “At Theater J, Soul-Searching as Israel Debate Intensifies”

Well, the piece is out, first in print, now on line. Been fielding interesting responses via email all day. Good communication with our new CEO, Carole Zawatsky, throughout the process as well. Here’s her quote from the piece:

“I would suggest the work may be controversial for some individuals, but the choice is to present work at the highest level… For me, the question is, first and foremost, to help this broad public that comes from this place of passion to understand that every voice is honored.”

And here’s how the piece concludes:

“Roth says that in a sense, his new season of plays — with works by Arthur Miller, others about Bernard Madoff and Baruch de Spinoza — is a calculated response to the debates that are occurring in Jewish households across the country. ‘Look at what we’re doing: We’re fighting for the soul of our community. We are enacting dramas, and the subject is the embattled soul of the Jewish people. It’s a community and a people that are split and torn, and we sit on the seams of that divide and we need to reflect that schism: that person who looks deeply at himself, and is divided.’

And the Peace Cafes? Whether they reappear at the community center or not, Roth says that he and Shallal are counting on a slate of future nights of hummus and argument.”

Your thoughts?

Staging Dialogue at Theater J (parts 4 + 5) – The Blog as Metatext: Constructive Conversation/Negative Space

from Staging Dialogue at Theater J: Negotiating Israeli Politics in Jewish Communal Encounters  by Elliot Leffler, University of Minnesota

(the essay starts here, and continues with parts 4 & 5 below – footnotes appear at end – “Works cited” appears at the end of part 2 and will be reposted together with the paper’s conclusion later today…)

The Blog as Metatext: The Relational Aesthetics of the Post-Show Conversation

Ari Roth, Stephen Stern, and Shirley Serotsky, who organize the post-show discussions at Theater J, generally invite a guest or a panel of guests to initiate the dialogue.[1]   At the first performance of Return to Haifa, Anton Goodman, who works as a shaliach (liaison) for the Jewish Agency, filled this role.[2]  As he recalled in a follow-up blog post, Goodman described the play as “opening a raw wound in our history but also celebrating the freedom of speech in Israel” (Goodman np).  Others in the audience were offended by his focus on the liberalism and inclusiveness of the State; this felt inappropriate in light of a narrative that was (at least in part) challenging Jews to acknowledge the way that their society “appropriate[s] everything” from Palestinians (Pladott np).  He was offering a particularist take on a narrative that seemed to challenge Jews to engage in a more universalist critique of Israeli policies.

A Palestinian-American woman (who prefers to remain anonymous) stood up to challenge Goodman’s framing of the event, suggesting that the play itself was an Israeli appropriation of this iconic Palestinian novella.  One blogger who attended the discussion observed, “Though she did not intend her comments to be accusatory in any way, I still felt tensions rise in the theater as she spoke” (McDonough np).  This Palestinian-American woman then wrote an email to Ari Roth, which he posted on the blog with her permission, clarifying her position.  She opened by calling the production “extraordinary,” and ended her email by appreciating Roth’s manner of facilitating the discussion, his personal warmth, and his “inclusive way of handling things.” But in the middle of her email, sandwiched between these compliments, she critiqued the ways that the Palestinian narrative is presented as “secondary” to the Israeli narrative; at times, she felt like the humorous remarks of the Jewish protagonist served to “minimize” the pain of the Palestinian couple (Roth with Anonymous np).

Udi Pladott, a Jewish Israeli who attended on the same evening, and who has been living long-term in Virginia, recalled her comments in his own blog post.  He, too, opened and closed with compliments to the theatre, yet he also expanded on her critique, saying “In your production, the story turned from one about Said [the Palestinian protagonist] to one about Miriam [the Israeli protagonist] . . . Your dramatic choices with respect to the original are making the statement that the Palestinian tragedy cannot be recognized and acknowledged unless it is juxtaposed with our own tragedy.”  He charged that the Cameri Theatre was contributing to a self-congratulatory ethos within Israel that celebrates its open-mindedness while “undermining real criticism and real struggles for justice.”  He described the play as a “cocktail . . . that leaves the drinker feeling that the status quo may not be perfect, but it still makes sense.”  Tellingly, Pladott ended his note with the self-reflection, “I have been living here abroad for over 9 years and I see from this distance (and up close, when I visit) a country that’s becoming more and more violent and alien to me.”  With this comment, he attributed his emotional distance from the particularist narrative of the Jewish State to his emerging American identity.   (Pladott np).

Stephen Stern, an American Jew who serves on the Theater J Council, then responded to Udi on the blog.  He politely challenged Udi’s American-universalist distancing from the Jewish-Israeli mainstream, challenging him to consider the ways that mainstream Israeli views are becoming increasingly sensitive to Palestinian concerns.  “Udi,” he pleaded, “don’t write off the engagement of those who count themselves as ‘defenders of Zion’, who praise Israeli democracy, in encountering the Palestinian narrative and its claims.”  He pointed to the efforts underway, both in the Israeli academy and “in all circles in Israel,” to complicate the founding narrative of the state and to wrestle with what that revised history might ethically entail (Stern np).

Finally, Goodman himself wrote a post, responding to the Palestinian-American woman approximately two weeks after the event. 

Staging Dialogue at Theater J (Part 3) – The Community Conversation About Israel Outside the Cultural Sphere

from Staging Dialogue at Theater J: Negotiating Israeli Politics in Jewish Communal Encounters  by Elliot Leffler, University of Minnesota

(the essay starts here, and continues with part 3 below)

The Current Conversation (Or Lack Thereof)

In a 2010 article in The New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart argues that the major institutions that shape public opinion in the American Jewish community have actively discouraged an open conversation about Israeli politics.  By “defending virtually anything any Israeli government does” and publicly discrediting the human rights group that critique government policy, organizations like American-Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Anti-Defamation League set a tone for Jewish-American rhetoric that elides critical thought and nuanced conversation.  They have created a dogma for the Jewish community of what it means to be pro-Israel – a dogma which allows for little dissent (Beinart np).

Inside the primary local institutions of Jewish life in the US – synagogues – Jewish communities often speak the tropes that are modeled by the national organizations, or elide the conversation entirely.   In part, this is because we think of the synagogue primarily as a space for prayer.  When we pray, we speak in unison, move in unison, and refer to ourselves in the first-person plural, nurturing a sense of one-ness or communitas.[1]

([1] “Communitas,” according to anthropologist Victor Turner, is a sense of invigorating, inspiring unity catalyzed by community ritual (Turner 1982 47-48).)

As we do so, we inherently discourage dissent.  (The same resistance happens at other ritual gatherings, in which the ritual event also promotes a sense of communitas: Shabbat dinners, Passover Seders, family reunions, etc.)  Moreover, the pro-Israel symbolism within synagogues (flags in the sanctuary, Israeli art in the lobby, prayers for the State of Israel, etc) enables us to avoid an explicit conversation of how we differ in our feelings about Israel.  These symbols preserve a sense of peace and cohesion in the congregation, as they allow members of a wide variety of ideological stances (left-wing Zionists and right-wing Zionists, for example) to adopt the same symbolism.  We foreground that which we have in common, and privately, we nuance those similarities in very different ways (Cohen 18).

Anthony Cohen suggests that this ability of community to contain discordance is its “great triumph.”  This allows community members to establish a commonality that need not amount to a uniformity (20).  But, if there is no opportunity for community members to discuss, challenge, and refine their ideas, then Zygmunt Bauman argues that community becomes an oppressive place, in which we sacrifice freedom (to think independently) on the altar of communal security (4-5). As I argued in the previous section of this paper, the individuals who comprise the American Jewish community feel an increasing need to discuss and to question Israeli policy.  The emergence of more and more explicitly political plays about Israel throughout the past three decades attests to that need.  But rather than developing this dialogue in institutions that might accommodate a range of opinions, the Jewish community has largely splintered into opposing publics: a right-wing public that circulates its ideas through AIPAC, the ADL, the magazine Commentary, and other institutions, and a left-wing counter-public that circulates its ideas through the NIF, Americans for Peace Now, J Street, and the magazine Tikkun. This bifurcation into separate public spheres has impoverished the Jewish communal dialogue, creating a dual set of dogmas rather than establishing a dynamic space of open conversation and questioning.[2]

([2] A public, according to Michael Warner, is a space of discourse that organizes itself around an uptake of texts and a circulation of responses to those texts.  For instance, the right-wing Jewish magazine Commentary has a readership that engages with each other, through Commentary (and perhaps also through press releases from the ADL, AIPAC, and other Jewish organizations).  This readership constitutes a public.  I’m suggesting that left-wing Jewish organizations and publications, such as Tikkun, have created a counter-public – a public with a subordinate power status that organizes itself in opposition to a dominant public (Warner 2002).  Thus, the discourse largely takes place in two separate spheres. )

Theater J’s programming suggests that perhaps theatre can succeed where other institutions have failed. Plays that express a political opinion – or a number of conflicting opinions – engage audiences in a version of the dialogue that generally seems elusive within the American Jewish community.  Daniele Klapproth argues, after Deborah Tannen, that the process of watching a play is cognitively an active process of narrative involvement: as audience members make sense out of the images and sounds that originate on stage, they participate in a joint interactional achievement with the performers.  They engage in a silent conversation on issues they have been unable to discuss at their synagogues or their other Jewish gatherings.  In producing plays like Pangs of the Messiah and Return to Haifa, and staging readings like Seven Jewish Children, Theater J stimulates this nonverbal “conversation” with its audiences.

Yet Theater J also goes a step further than this silent conversation.  It has structured its programming to include extensive post-show discussions after every production of controversial plays like Return to Haifa and every staged reading of plays like Seven Jewish Children.  The theatre then supplements these conversations, which often last an hour or longer, with periodic “Peace Café” programs in which patrons gather with drinks and snacks to discuss the issues further.  Afterwards, the interactive Theater J blog is available for a continued conversation.  Thus, audience members can extend the conversation – a conversation which began as a tacit but active cognitive interaction with the performers – into a verbal and written engagement with other members of the Washington, DC Jewish community. 

A Letter from Theater J Council Co-Chairs, Marion Lewin & Paul Mason

Affirming Theater J

The past several months have witnessed a spirited but at times disturbing debate about Theater J and its programming. Some commentators and letters in the press have questioned whether programs that illuminate the diverse and often perplexing issues that confront Jewish life and Israeli politics are an appropriate function for a theater like ours. We continue to believe that open dialogue and an honest exploration of issues of truth, faith and justice have always been a part of Jewish tradition and we remain committed to pursuing such in a fair and artistically professional way.

The purpose of this letter is to provide a clear statement of Theater J’s values, its impact and the vital role it has come to play on the local, national and international stage. Our mission is to provide thought provoking, publicly engaged, personal, and passionate plays that celebrate the distinctive urban voice and social vision that are part of the Jewish cultural legacy. We have mounted world premiers by creative luminaries such as Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Keneally, Robert Brustein and Wendy Wasserstein. During the past several seasons we have produced to critical acclaim the hit Israeli plays “Mikveh” and “Pangs of the Messiah;” cutting edge contemporary work like “In Darfur” and “Honey Brown Eyes;” and American classics like “The Price” and “Lost in Yonkers;” plays that address issues of moral relevance in a world that has grown more complex and fractured.

We have created a community of outstanding artists both national and international who attest that Theater J offers a unique opportunity to expand intercultural and artistic horizons. An important part of this endeavor has been our regular post-performance panel discussions focused on bridge building dialogue among people of different backgrounds and views but committed to shaping a more tolerant and peaceful world. In presenting plays that wrestle with the most compelling issues of our time, Theater J plans to continue these discussions that bring balanced, timely and informed perspectives to our offerings.

Our programming will continue to reflect and respect the deep connection we feel to the people and the State of Israel. We are privileged to be part of the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, which showcases multiple artistic disciplines that directly and indirectly elevate our stage and the audiences that come to see our plays.

Theater J has been hailed by the New York Times as “The Premier Theater for Premiers” and has been nominated for over forty Helen Hayes awards. In 2008, the Theater received the Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in Artistic Discipline and has received support from the Theater Communications Group, the Shubert Foundation, and the National Endowment of the Arts. This season we have received critical acclaim for producing “Something You Did”, “Return to Haifa”, “Photograph 51”, and the ‘The Chosen”, the latter performed at the splendidly renovated Arena Stage as that company’s first “Local Guest Company in Residence” production. In his stellar review of “Return to Haifa”, the Washington Post critic, Peter Marks, commented that Theater J had propelled itself “to a new level of engagement with its audience and, perhaps, to the forefront of theaters exposing Americans to drama that stirs the conscience as it illuminates aspects of Jewish culture. “

Looking ahead, Theater J is witnessing a record growth in subscribers for our forthcoming season which will include such exciting and thought-provoking plays as “Imagining Madoff”, “ After the Fall”, “The Whipping Man,” and a special encore run of “New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch De Spinoza”, nominated for three Helen Hayes awards including that of Outstanding Resident Production.

In affirming our Theater we would also like to thank our many subscribers and friends who have given us so much support and encouragement in these past challenging weeks. That our Theater experienced unprecedented success and acclaim during this very same time speaks to the power of art to transform and enrich rather than divide and decry.

- Marion Ein Lewin and Paul Mason, Co-Chairs,
Theater J Council

The Art Will Win Out: In The Midst Of Much Media & Extracurricular Brouhaha, Theater J Keeps Its Focus on The Work

There’s another bundle of press pieces fresh out over the past few hours, extolling THE CHOSEN, promoting PHOTOGRAPH 51, giving voice to the infamous, now-widely circulating COPMA letter (“Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art” – don’t look for a website, there isn’t one) and other “watchdog” group agitations against local Jewish Federations and JCCs, along with today’s naming of Theater J and its artistic director as the Best Fount of Theater Controversy as part of its new BEST OF DC 2011 issue.

Exhausting distractions on the one hand — but the work on stage is what counts — it’s where we’re putting our labors — and the results are there for all to behold.  Shall we enumerate?

Last night saw the first preview of Anna Ziegler’s PHOTOGRAPH 51, which opens Monday (and that opening is—who’d have thunk it—SOLD OUT!). The play’s in great shape and the production is taking advantage of the extra preview time we’ve allotted for it (not wanting to open on Sunday night as we normally might, while THE CHOSEN is closing across town at Arena) by continuing to experiment with an ambitious sound and lighting design reinforcing the prismatic, multi-layered re-telling and re-enactment of the life and impact of Rosalind Franklin upon a cadre of her male colleagues. The major gleaning from last night is just how much the audience comes to rally behind Rosalind early in this play, as the renown scientist arrives at Kings College with the simple request that she be addressed by her new colleagues as “Dr. Franklin” but everyone, repeatedly, continues to address her as “Miss Franklin.” And to watch her spine increasingly stiffen as she is slighted and shunted to the side even as her own independent work ethic helps to isolate her in the collaborative field of scientific investigation, we come to sense the tremendous burden and challenge that Franklin felt trying to realize her ambitions in Cambridge. The play is interweaving comedy and tragedy, social commentary and character study, and its high design concepts and literary concision (the play run 86 minutes and a few extra seconds) makes for a compressed, complex, extremely high-quality jolt of scientific and theatrical time-travel. We can’t wait to see what preview #2 has in store for us tonight!

And we can’t help but share what a winning collaboration this has been between playwright Anna Ziegler, director Daniella Topol, and the team of talented designers and actors. This feature in The Post’s Weekend Magazine section is but the first of several interesting features coming out; last night Voice of America video-recorded 30 minutes of the performance for use in an upcoming feature. And the big news this morning, while this posting is composed, is the new opening adjustments being sent out by our playwright to the company, and the list of fixes on a worklist composed by our director.

“Two steps away,” is the mantra in the play, as the race to discover the secret of life–mapping the contours of DNA–heats up. Two artistic steps away…

Across town at our production of The Chosen at Arena Stage, The Forward takes in our production and offers a review interlaced with interview–a most New Yorker-like treatment–and then allows for a second piece on its blog, The Arty Semite.
Here’s the one, “Chosen Again, To Go Onstage: Chaim Potok’s Classic Comes to the Capital’s Fichandler Theater”

and then this post as well, “Choosing ‘The Chosen,’ on Stage and Screen” by Jenna Weissman Joselit who’ll be our post-show panelist on Sunday, March 27 at 5:15 pm, on our final day of performances.

On the front pages of The Forward, we move from art that heals and unifies to art that does the same for some, but also winds up triggering much more difficult conversation, controversy, and ultimately, a call for defunding, generally from those who haven’t seen the work, haven’t heard a word of the discussion, but are adept at doing oppositional research. Such are the achievements of COPMA, “Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art — the local D.C.-area organization seeking to rein in Theatre J has staged protests in the past outside the JCC. Its members met when they were active in a watchdog group that monitored The Washington Post’s coverage of Israel. A few are also active in the organization Holocaust Museum Watch.”
Read the article, “JCCs Are a New Front in the Culture War on Israel Centers in D.C. and N.Y. Criticized for Showing Controversial Films, Plays” by clicking here.

It’s not a well-enough written, nor well-enough documented article, even though the journalist conducts an excellent interview and has culled a lot of material. Too often, as with his last article on the firing of Washington Jewish Week’s editor Debra Rubin, Guttman takes an important subject but doesn’t quote precisely. So be it. This won’t be the last article on this subject at all and, as I told Guttman on Monday, “The Art will win out.”

I also told him that “Theater J is not a political organization; we produce, present and develop art that reflects multiple representations of the world and then we convene conversations that build bridges between diversely assembled panels and audience members.” I told him that “Our COPMA critics haven’t attended a single production or conversation about the art… They “cherry pick and radically overlook the extraordinary, positive achievements of our post-show panelists and their commitment to peace-building efforts and coexistence.”

You won’t read that in The Forward article. But it will come out elsewhere; that “Theater J reaches out to engage the orthodox Jewish community as well as the secular, the liberal, the conservative, the non-observant. Theater J reaches out to the political right as well as to the political left. Theater J lets its art do the talking and the conversations revolve exclusively around the way the art reflects the world. That art–especially art about Israel–has almost always emerged from Israel, authored by Israelis, work that’s been frequently produced at Israel’s leading theaters. like Habimah, Beit Lessin, and the Cameri Theatre.”

But despite the efforts to unify and build a bridge, being a thought-provoking theater means we kick up some dust. And with that comes a certain kind of distinction. Witness today’s feature in The Washington City Paper annual BEST OF DC edition. We’re happy to be quoted correctly by the Arts Editor of the paper.

Washington City Paper BEST OF DC 2011
Best Fount of Theater Controversy

And finally, to put this penchant for controversy back into a bigger perspective, returning to Israel where there are truly lives on the line — where people are dying on both sides — where Israelis are being targeted and murdered — and our hearts are always with those fighting to preserve the country — to keep it safe, and to safeguard its values, its citizens, its soul.  This headline from Ynet:

“Israel’s dissidents are saving the country.”

The dissidents do not need to apologize for anything.

Their country owes them a great deal.

By Gideon Levy

Meanwhile, this theater company can only commit to its mission and what it knows how to do best; focus on the art. Great art will endure. And with it. Its creators, and those who will treasure

Who Would Have Imagined? Imagining Madoff in the News

Shirley here.

As Summer 2010 wraps up I’ll share some final reflections (for now at least) on the phenomenon that was “the Madoff story”. Or “that Wiesel situation”. Or the “wait a minute, what happened with that play you were going to do and then couldn’t do and why was there a cover story in the City Paper all about it” incident.

During my two years here at Theater J we’ve been involved in our fair share of media-feeding controversies. You’d think that I’d be used to it by now. But I’m still always a bit surprised when the press picks up a story and runs with it. The purist in me wishes that the work itself got this much ink. But alas, the play, is not always, “the thing”.

Important Editorial Musings from The Forward: On “Stifling Our Artists”

Stifling Our Artists
Editorial Notebook
By Jane Eisner
Published January 13, 2010, issue of January 22, 2010.

The fourth annual Schmooze conference took place at the hip City Winery in Lower Manhattan on January 11 and 12, bringing together Jewish artists and presenters to debate, discuss and, well, schmooze. There was talk of a “sea change” this year, and not just because of the financial meltdown or the growing popularity of Fox News.

Instead, the panelists in the session I moderated spoke of a palpable sense of fear and retrenchment in the communities they serve and from many of the donors who fund their work. The elections of Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, combined with the vicious international fallout from Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, have created a chilling atmosphere unlike any these veterans have seen in a long time.

And so the Koffler Centre of the Arts in Toronto was forced to sever ties to an exhibit because the artist was involved in anti-Zionist activities. Theater J in Washington, D.C., was condemned for staging a 10-minute play that was slammed by some as “a ten-minute blood libel.” The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s decision to include a sympathetic film about a pro-Palestinian activist who was killed in Gaza as one of its 71 offerings this year caused an uproar in the notoriously tolerant city.

Provocative art that might have raised eyebrows a few years ago now raises bells of alarm.

The boundaries of acceptable discourse have shifted, and those who care about Jewish art and culture are scrambling to understand where the new lines are drawn.

Final Year-End Press Round-Up: Good News for Judy and “(the truly terrific) Theater J”

Here’s the final line from Moment Magazine and their online review by Sarah Breger, with the header, “A Gold Star for ‘Mommy Queerest’

“Gold ends with an impassioned plea for the legalization of gay marriage—it is one of the only serious parts of the whole production but it hits exactly the right tone and comes off as sincere and not self-righteous. The show kept me laughing the whole time, and even though the production is ending its run at (the truly terrific) Theater J, it is worth seeing on tour. And if Gold finally gets her own sitcom, I for one would watch it.”

And, in case you missed it in the year-end Top Ten lists, Theater J got its own shout-out from The Washington Post and Peter Marks. Here’s the whole bit:

“SPECIAL CITATION: the staged readings of “Seven Jewish Children,” Theater J & Forum Theatre.
Theater J’s artistic director, Ari Roth, put Caryl Churchill’s provocative one-act play under the microscope, yielding up the year’s most illuminating examination of the juncture of art and propaganda.”

Mazel Tov, Ari!

Becky here…

When we all arrived at the office this morning we had an email waiting for us from a Council Member that had the heading above and this inside:
Look who’s among The Forward 50, 2009
(Media and Culture) –

http://www.forward.com/forward-50-2009/

Clicked the link and lo and behold it’s our very own, Ari Roth, listed among the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ruth Messinger, The Coen Brothers…and well 46 other individuals each working dilligently and tirelessly in their own respects.

Curious about how this list was put together I found this…
“The Forward 50 began 15 years ago, the brain-child of Seth Lipsky, founding editor of the English Forward, who went in search “of the men and women who are leading the American Jewish community into the 21st century.”

Ari Roth
Ari Roth, the ebullient playwright and director of Theater J in Washington, D.C., took a risk in the aftermath of January’s Israeli military incursion into Gaza: In March, he staged a reading of Caryl Churchill’s Palestinian protest play, “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza,” at Washington’s Jewish Community Center. After 12 years at Theater J, during which time he consolidated and expanded its quality, reach and repertoire, Roth, 48, is still willing to go out on a limb. Not only did he stage the Churchill play this year — garnering protests — but he had previously staged Motti Lerner’s “Pangs of the Messiah,” about the Israeli settlements, and Hillel Mittelpunkt’s “The Accident,” about Israel’s hypocritical intelligentsia. “I don’t program to offend the Jewish community, but to be in dialogue on issues that are extremely important,” Roth said.

From Shirley…
“Ebullient (adj.)
1. Zestfully enthusiastic.
2. Boiling or seeming to boil; bubbling.

If the shoe fits….

Yay for our ever-enthusiastic and truly zestful AD!”

On behalf of the staff….Mazel Tov, Ari!