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Marvin Miller

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Marvin Miller
Marvin Miller

On Tuesday,November 26.2012, a great Bronx-born but Brooklyn-bred American Jewish hero, Marvin Miller died. The Malach Hamoves (Angel of Death) claimed him at age 95. His daughter Susan cited liver cancer as the cause but, denied elevation to Baseball’s Hall of Fame, Miller, an outstanding economist and labor leader, may have succumbed to a broken heart.

Several years prior, at the Workmen’s Circle building, I shared a podium with this protean figure. Deeply honored and almost speechless, I greeted him in Yiddish. Why? According to my late mother, at the Workmen’s Circle — home of mame loshen (mother tongue) –one must speak Yiddish. Moreover, I pointed out that baseball’s peerless union leader, Marvin Miller owes his success to the Golden rule, that is to say the Harry Golden rule.  Dress British.  Think Yiddish.

To this paradigm, add a social conscience, rooted in trade union culture, grounded in prophetic tradition, and leavened with core values — and you have an unbeatable force. Marvin Miller recalled that his father worked in lower Manhattan dispensing tsadaka (charity) and wisdom in Chinese, English, and Yiddish.

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Pat Singer Is the Mother of Brighton Beach

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By Tanya Paperny Published February 22, 2013, The Jewish Daily Forward

Pat SingerLocated on the main stretch of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach Avenue, among numerous Russian delis, Russian-language bookstores and a shuttered Russian travel agency, the Brighton Neighborhood Association stands out. Its window is one of the few on the block with signs predominantly in English, and it’s one of the few storefronts near the elevated tracks of the B and Q trains that doesn’t actually sell anything.

This doesn’t stop people — and definitely not elderly Russians — from strolling through the glass front door, unannounced, on a regular basis. Some mistake the office for a thrift store and start lifting up, one by one, the porcelain and enamel elephants, gifts from friends and other tchotchkes on the desk of Pat Singer, founder and executive director of BNA, a not-for-profit social service agency in Brighton Beach, a neighborhood that stretches for one mile along the Atlantic coast.

Singer has to break into her limited knowledge of Russian to shoo them away: “Not magazin, this office! Not for sale, nooo! Get your hands off my desk!”

Singer, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Odessa, is a community leader in this predominantly Russian-speaking neighborhood: “I’m called ‘the Mother of Brighton Beach,’ but I’m a bad mother, because I can’t communicate with my children.”

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The Seltzer Man

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By  Published: April 26, 2013 NYTimes

Eli Miller, 79, New York City’s senior seltzer man.
“I just can’t stay home,” said Eli Miller, 79, who has been delivering seltzer for more than 50 years.

Eli Miller, 79, New York City’s senior seltzer man, hoisted crate after crate of seltzer — weighing 70 pounds apiece — into his van and then draped himself over them.

“I’m running on fumes — the reason I work is, I just can’t stay home,” said Mr. Miller, who has been delivering seltzer in Brooklyn for more than a half-century.

He can afford to retire, but that would mean his customers, many of whom have been with him for decades, might have to resort to store-bought seltzer.

“I don’t want them to have to drink that dreck you buy in the supermarket,” he said, using the Yiddish term for dirt. “So I guess I’ll retire when Gabriel blows his horn.”

Mr. Miller said that when he began delivering, on March 10, 1960, there were perhaps 500 seltzer men in the city, and a half-dozen seltzer bottlers. Now he can count his delivery competition on one hand, and they all fill up at the last seltzer factory in the city: Gomberg Seltzer Works in Canarsie.

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“The Romeos” – Feeding on Memories

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By DAVID DeWITT

Published: NY Times, July 18, 2013
“There’s something historical about us,” says one of the Romeows, a crew of septuagenarians that generally meets every Wednesday in Brooklyn for dinner and conversation. He’s right, and history should record their weekly — but rare — achievement more often. Thank goodness this gentle, affectionate documentary does it.
There’s nothing flashy about “The Romeows” the film or the Romeows the men, but what they’ve created — their life’s art — matters. It’s sitting around a restaurant, eating family style, every Wednesday, just to talk. (Romeows stands for Retired Older Men Eating Out Wednesdays.)
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Joanna Hershon and Adelle Waldman Grow in Brooklyn

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By Adam Langer, Published in the “Jewish Daily Forward”, August 07, 2013 Two of the strongest novels published so far this year, Joanna Hershon’s “A Dual Inheritance” and Adelle Waldman’s “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” happen to be written by young, Brooklyn-based Jewish women writing smartly and wittily from the perspectives of men. This might not be a remarkable fact in and of itself: Look for a smart, witty novelist these… Read More »Joanna Hershon and Adelle Waldman Grow in Brooklyn

Jewish NBA player who scored league’s first basket dies at 94

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Posted on July 30, 2013 by Jewish News – JNS.org.

(Jewish News – JNS.org) Oscar “Ossie” Schectman, a Jewish player who scored the first basket in the history of what evolved into the National Basketball Association (NBA), died Tuesday at age 94.

Schectman’s historic field goal came on Nov. 1, 1946 for the New York Knicks of the Basketball Association of America (BAA)—the precursor to the NBA—against the Toronto Huskies. The Knicks won the game, 68-66.

“Playing for the New York Knickerbockers in the 1946-47 season, Ossie scored the league’s first basket, which placed him permanently in the annals of NBA history,” NBA Commissioner David Stern said in a statement. “On behalf of the entire NBA family, our condolences go out to Ossie’s family.”

Schectman’s basket would later inspire the title of “The First Basket,” a 2008 documentary about Jews and basketball from executive producer David Vyorst.

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Old-meets-new for Modern Orthodox artist fresh off exhibiting work in Miami

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Boerum Hill artist Elke Reva Sudin, 26, recently exhibited an oil painting in Miami through Con Artist, a Lower East Side artists’ space. ‘Showing this painting was personal for me,’ she tells The News.

BY / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS – WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2013, 6:47 PM

Boerum Hill artist Elke Reva Sudin
Boerum Hill artist Elke Reva Sudin is fresh from her first exhibition during Art Basel in Miami

Blending a complex religious identity in modern painting? Brooklyn resident Elke Reva Sudin has it down to an art.

The 26-year-old Boerum Hill artist, a Modern Orthodox Jew, is fresh off of exhibiting her work in Miami as part of the SELECT Fair, an exhibition for emerging artists that ran alongside Art Basel.

The painter said she doesn’t identify herself as an adherent of any one sect of Judaism. “I’m watchful of the commandments,” Sudin told The News. “But culturally, I’m an artist.”

Sudin, perhaps best known for her tongue-in-cheek “Hipsters & Hassids” series in which she compares and contrasts the seemingly contradictory Brooklyn cultures, showed her work, “Yael Approaches the General,” as a part of a Lower East Side-based artists’ space, Con Artist.

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Brooklyn native and longtime Hollywood director tells all in recent memoir

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Allen Baron

Despite his success as a Hollywood film and TV director, Brooklyn native Allen Baron came from humble beginnings. In his recent memoir “Blast of Silence,” published this past July by Parker Publishing, Baron tells all, chronicling his convoluted path to launching a decades-long career in the film industry and revealing his passionate and opinionated take on 20th century Hollywood. “If it was hard to make a connection between the East New York section of Brooklyn where I had been born and this place,” he writes, recalling his experience at the 1965 Academy Awards Governors Ball, “it was almost impossible to see a link between my poverty-stricken years wearing hand-me-down clothes, living among smelly trash cans, nickel and dime stealing, and this glamorous setting.” Replete with a range of photographs depicting his toddler years through his years a director, “Blast of Silence” is a deeply confessional account of Baron’s fascinating life, which began right here in Brooklyn.

Born in East New York, Baron grew up in poverty during the Great Depression. His parents were Polish and Russian immigrants who spoke English with a thick accent and interspersed with Yiddish words. Baron recalls that most of his friends also had foreign-born parents, and that “The kids at Public School 202 would only associate with their ethnic groups.” He lived on Logan Street and then on Sutter Avenue.

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In Brooklyn Heights, local author to discuss South African upbringing

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Brooklyn BookBeat

authors

Though she now calls Brooklyn Heights home, author Ellie Levinson is no stranger to the world abroad. In fact, she’s spent much of her life across the world in South Africa, as she poignantly relates in her recent memoir “Let’s Play Hopscotch, Growing Up Under Apartheid in South Africa” (Tate Publishing & Enterprises). On Tuesday, Dec. 17, Levinson will appear at the Brooklyn Heights Branch Library in conversation with Elizabeth Scholtz, director emeritus of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, who also hails from South Africa. Levinson will read passages from her memoir, which she will discuss with Scholtz, after which there will be a book signing.

In “Let’s Play Hopscotch,” Levinson enlivens her hometown of Welkom, the small region in which she grew up with five siblings. She recalls her experience being raised with a Catholic, Lebanese mother and an English father under apartheid rule and goes on to describe her extensive travels to 42 different countries.

Likening her life to a game of hopscotch, Levinson reflects on hopping from country to country and the endless array of characters she’s met along the way. Most notably, Levinson met Ivan, a Jewish medical student whom she married 36 years ago and with whom she has raised four children.

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She Moved The Pop Music Earth

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How a Brooklyn girl named Carol Klein bridged cultures in the ’60s and rewrote American popular song.

carolekingShe took an unconventional route to superstardom, but it was a soulful road that Carole King traveled. Born Carol Klein in Brooklyn in 1942, she did not set out to become a performer. In “Beautiful,” the new musical about King that opens this Sunday on Broadway, King’s career as a budding songwriter comes to the fore. Starring Jessie Mueller (“On a Clear Day You Can See Forever”) as King, the musical opens a window on a pivotal 1960s era in pop music in which a group of mostly Jewish composers and lyricists wrote for mostly black performers, changing the face of American culture in the process.

Directed by Marc Bruni (“Old Jews Telling Jokes”), the new show traces King’s trajectory from the first tunes that she wrote while attending James Madison High School in Brooklyn. At Queens College, she met her future husband, Gerry Goffin (Jake Epstein), who turned out to be a perfect lyricist for her melodies; their big break came in 1960 with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?,” recorded by The Shirelles, which was the first No. 1 hit by a black girl group, and which led to recordings of King’s songs by The Drifters, The Chiffons, and many others.
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