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June 16, 2008
After the Lecture
The Fifth Annual Ariel Avrech ZT'L Memorial Lecture was well attended, and a resounding sucess. Rabbi Dr. Gil S. Perl's lecture was informative, compelling and beautifully organized. The audience was held in rapt attention throughout as Rabbi Dr. Perl delivered a thought provoking analysis of a little known corner of vital 19th Century Jewish intellectual and spiritual history.
The lecture was video taped and we will be posting this fine presentation here at Seraphic Secret as soon as possible.
Yosef Abrahamson, 16, right, with his mother, Dinah, and his sister, Sarah,
near their home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
In the meantime, here's a story Ariel ZT'L would have adored, a portrait of an amazing young Jewish man and his family.
Moments before Yosef Abrahamson, 16, accepted an award for the essay he’d written in a competition sponsored by the Police Athletic League, an officer approached him to complain about his fedora. The hat, an essential wardrobe item for Hasidic men, was gaudy, the policeman told him, and what’s with all these kids today and their nose rings and their attitudes. A second police officer, overhearing the conversation, came over to steer away the first one, who reappeared a few minutes later to apologize. He’d never seen a Hasidic Jew, he told Yosef.
A policeman working in New York who’d never seen a Hasidic Jew? What he probably meant, Yosef theorized, was “that he’d never seen a Hasidic Jew of color. I think he was probably making some assumptions there.”
Thanks to his Egyptian father, who left the family when Yosef was young, and his maternal grandfather, who was of African descent by way of Panama, Yosef looks African-American (though his family prefers to describe themselves as Jews of color, believing their culture to be exclusively Jewish). Yosef moved to Crown Heights only a year ago, until then having lived in Omaha, where his mother’s maternal family, German Jewish merchants, had settled several generations earlier.
To read the entire article, please click here.
And from Debbie Schlussel an important report on who's raising money for Barack Obama. What a shock. But I know, if you're a Kool-Aid Democrat, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters except Obama's soaring and empty rhetoric.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at June 16, 2008 07:23 AM
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