Archive for category JPS History

On October 22, 2009, friends, family, and colleagues raised a glassed to Ellen Frankel’s 18 years of service and commitment to JPS. We all wish her a rewarding and relaxing retirement.

Please take a moment to read her remarks from the event as well as those from honored guest, Rabbi Ira Stone.

Valedictory at Tribute Gala, October 22, 2009 – Ellen Frankel

Friends and colleagues, Trustees and benefactors, members, and authors, partners, family and honored guests, thank you for this glorious evening. For me, this will always be a night that is different from all other nights!

It seems fitting that my eighteen years at The Jewish Publication Society begin and end with a connection to my favorite Jewish book, Pirke Avot, a collection of ancient rabbinic teachings. Before I came to work for JPS at 1930 Chestnut Street on April Fool’s Day 1991, I commissioned a piece of calligraphy for my office wall, a teaching by the Palestinian sage Ben Zoma: “Eyze hu me-hubad? Ha-me-habayd et ha-bri’ot. ‘Who is honored? One who honors others’” (Avot 4:1). Throughout my tenure at JPS, I have tried to live by that teaching. Tonight, I truly appreciate the wisdom of Ben Zoma’s counsel. How honored I feel!

And now that I am about to leave JPS, I have encounter a teaching by Ben Zoma from the same passage in Pirke Avot. Four days ago I stood with family, including my one and four year old granddaughters, at the grave of my beloved father-in-law, Dr. Reevan Levine, as his headstone was unveiled in the pouring rain. When the cloth was lifted, I was not surprised to see the inscription below his name: “Eyze hu hakham? Ha-lomed mi-kol adam. ‘Who is wise? One who learns from every person’” (Avot 4:1). My father-in-law embodied this principle in his life; and everyone who knew him grew wiser as well. I, too, have learned from the many people I’ve met through my work at JPS, and I hope that they, too, are a bit wiser because of the Torah I’ve shared.

Publishing books is the work of many hands. It’s like baking hallah. Others raise and tend the raw ingredients; prepare and sell the golden loaves; and we enjoy the fruits of their labors. That is why the blessing we recite over the hallah thanks God for bringing forth “bread from the earth.” Not wheat, but bread, the work of many hands, which together with the gifts of divine providence–sun and rain and fertile soil—sustain us.

Like bread, books start from raw seeds, and end as miracles of craft and human industry—as well as a good deal of providence. JPS is blessed in having an extraordinary staff of professionals who turn raw ideas and manuscripts into wonderful books that nourish the Jewish people, and many others as well. Among my colleagues, I owe a special debt to Carol Hupping, who will be serving as interim director. For the past 10 years, Carol has been an invaluable partner, a consummate professional, and a dear friend, and I know that I’m leaving the Society in truly capable hands. JPS is also blessed with an extensive network of talented authors and editors, translators and illustrators, designers and compositors, printers and binders, marketing and sales professionals, consultants and vendors, askers and givers, blurbers and bloggers, and a host of others who collectively make Jewish content so tantalizing and rich. And of course, the Society owes so much to its dedicated Board of Trustees, who have given so generously of their time, energy, resources, counsel, and “kishkes.” So to all of you I say, “Thank you for helping bring forth knowledge and wisdom from the fields of human imagination.

People occasionally say to me: “You must have one of the most interesting jobs in the world!” It’s true. Despite the demands, the stress, the obstacles, and the disappointments, I have enjoyed my work at JPS. It has been endlessly fascinating. Some highlights from the past two decades: As JPS editor, I traveled to the White House, where I met Barbara Bush, her dog Millie, and Big Bird; to the Supreme Court, thanks to Judge Norma Shapiro, where I met Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who gave a breath-taking baton-twirling exhibition first mastered when she was a high school cheerleader; and to the Capitol to celebrate the 3000th anniversary of the founding of Jerusalem, where I met Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Ehud Olmert, and Yitzhak Rabin, just ten days before he was assassinated. While attending the Jerusalem Book Fair, I visited Gershom Scholem’s apartment and tasted his widow Fanya’s famous chocolate cake. I’ve chatted on the phone with Alma Singer about Isaac’s bevy of mistresses with whom she regularly lunched, and had a drink with Arthur Hertzberg in New York’s toney Century Club. I had breakfast with Yehuda Amichai in Jerusalem, lunch with Cynthia Ozick at Jerry and Marciarose Shestack’s lovely home, and dinner with 400 Chabad Hasidim in Washington on the fifth yahrzeit of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

Fundraising for JPS, I met extraordinary philanthropists like Harold Feuerstein, who chose to go bankrupt rather than lay off his employees after his Malden Mills factory burned down; Lloyd Cotsen, founder and CEO of Neutrogena and a passionate folklore collector, who gave JPS over $100,000 to support the publication of Folktales of the Jews but who modestly described himself to me as “just a soap salesman”; and Philadelphia banker Betsy Cohen, who asked me in 1998 when I became CEO what would help JPS the most, and then unhesitatingly donated $50,000 and raised $50,000 more to underwrite the first edition of the Hebrew-English Tanakh. As JPS’s ambassador, I’ve dialogued with Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, and Zoroastrians, and last year attended an interfaith conference which concluded with a papal audience, flanked by Swiss Guards.

Best of all, however, have been my encounters with so many different authors—secular and Orthodox, scholarly and popular, long dead and in the bloom of youth. In many cases, the books I acquired and helped shape were the authors’ first. That was true of Rachel Adler, Jill Hammer, Avivah Zornberg, and 83 year old Ruby Daniel of Cochin, India, the first Jewish woman from that community ever to publish a book. In other cases, a JPS book has simply added another notch to an author’s bibliography. That’s certainly true of authors like Elliot Dorff, Larry Schiffman, and Norman Lamm. In Dr. Lamm’s case, I was tickled when I first read what he had to say about me in the acknowledgments to his JPS book, The Shema: “I shall not reveal to her my dark thoughts when I saw how extensively and meticulously she marked up my original typescript.” Luckily, he had brighter thoughts by the time the book came out.

In a few rare instances, I was privileged to help rescue memories from the ashes—such as the eye witness photographs that were snapped through a buttonhole by Raul Wallenberg’s Jewish chauffeur, Tom Veres, which are included in the JPS young biography of Wallenberg; and the English translation of Vedem, the weekly boys’ magazine from Terezin, which was hidden in the commandant’s stable and then suppressed for 45 years by the Czech Communists; and the record of abandoned synagogues in small towns and villages throughout Central and Southern Europe, discovered and painstakingly documented by two retired art researchers from Israel. One of my hardest tasks as editor has been to say “no” to many of these Holocaust memoirs and studies, for all of them unique, all of them compelling, and all of them deserving an audience. But JPS has had to make tough choices about how to spend its scant resources. For the most part, I think we’ve chosen wisely—although a few big ones, alas, have gotten away.

By way of valediction, I’d like to sum up briefly why I’ve devoted so much of my adult life to JPS, and why it is my hope that the Society will continue on in good health, which is the original meaning of the Latin word “vale” in valediction. I want to focus specifically on three of JPS’s core values which have remained constant and relevant over more than 120 years: diversity, unity, and community.

First, diversity. JPS is part of a long and precious tradition, devoted to preserving the essential vitality of Torah, understood in its broadest sense as “general Jewish learning.” You’ve heard the joke about “two Jews, three opinions”? Well, the Midrash declares that the Torah has not three, but seventy points of view or “faces” (Numbers Rabbah 13:15), each of which reveals a part of divine truth. The Talmud conveys the same message through the following story about the famous rabbinic rivals, Hillel and Shammai:
For three years there was a dispute between the followers of Hillel and the followers of Shammai, the former insisting that “the law agrees with our views,” and the latter, that “the law agrees with our views.” Then a bat kol, a voice from heaven, proclaimed: “Eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim hayim, ‘These and those are the words of the living God.’”

However, many people fail to quote the rest of that heavenly proclamation: “but the law agrees with the rulings of Beit Hillel.”

The Talmud goes on to explain why the School of Hillel prevailed over that of Shammai. It was not because the former had a monopoly on the truth, but because they were “kindly and modest” in their disputes with their opponents, and studied the rulings of Shammai’s followers as well as those of their champion Hillel’s, and were so humble that they cited the words of Beit Shammai before their own (Eruvin 13b). Jewish tradition has long regarded the many debates between Hillel and Shammai as a machloket l’shem shamayim—arguments for the sake of heaven, that is, disputes waged in the service of the common good.

From its founding, JPS has followed the path of Beit Hillel, committed to serving as a forum for all Jewish voices—traditional and liberal, male and female, religious and secular, American and Israeli, critical and pious. Today in our polarized community, this approach is becoming increasingly rare. That is why JPS remains so important to contemporary Jewish life, providing a safe place for Jews to engage in disputes l’shem shamayim, for the sake of heaven.

The second value is unity. The idea that a Jewish Publication Society could unify American Jews dates back more than 160 years, four decades before the current JPS began. In 1845, a Prussian Jewish immigrant named Isaac Leeser left his first American home in Richmond, Virginia, to take over the pulpit at Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. Among his many achievements during his lifetime were translating the Jewish Bible single-handedly into English, starting the first Jewish magazine in America, The Occident, and founding the first American Jewish Publication Society, which operated in Philadelphia until 1851 when a fire put it out of business.

Writing about this first JPS in his magazine, Leeser declared that

“All we ever needed to become a great people was union; and whatever tends to produce it is a step towards national greatness…Should the publication society be firmly established, and progress prosperously,…a bond of kindliness may be in time engendered as may tend to develop yet farther the true brotherly love which ought to exist in Israel, and produce yet greater results for the common welfare, than the mere publication of books, though this in itself is an object of the highest importance.”

(Leeser could certainly have used a good editor.) Leeser’s goal is more urgent now as Jews disperse ever further into every corner of the English-speaking world, and into cyberspace.

The third value is community. As a non-profit, JPS solicits tax-free contributions to support its work. But as in the case with many non-profits, the philanthropic street runs both ways. JPS also gives back to the community—through its books and programs. Its contributions include two English translations of the Hebrew Bible, the more recent of which serves as the Torah text for both Reform and Conservative humashim; a series of critical Bible commentaries, which form the backbone of Etz Hayim, the new Conservative humash; and dozens of works on Jewish thought, practice, ethics, Bible interpretation, community history, fiction, poetry, and other subjects. In addition, JPS gives away free books. In its first decades, the Society distributed free of charge 10% of the print run of each new title. Throughout the twentieth century down to the present time, JPS has supplied free JPS Bibles to all Jews in the American armed services, totaling millions of volumes over several wars. Today, Jewish men and women serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and on US bases around the world carry a wallet-size JPS Tanakh in their uniform pockets. In addition, the Society provides free JPS books to schools in Israel, to remote Jewish communities in Africa, Asia, and South America, and to needy American congregations stretching from Nome, Alaska to Auburn, Maine.

For these reasons—because JPS promotes and preserves Jewish diversity, unity and community in addition to nourishing Jewish textual culture and literacy—the Society deserves ongoing support.

Today we stand poised at a critical juncture in the Jewish story. Throughout our history, there have been certain defining moments when Judaism rebooted the Torah, its foundational text, in response to catastrophe and opportunity. When the First Temple was destroyed, Jews invented the synagogue and the prayerbook to sustain themselves in exile; when the Second Temple was destroyed six centuries later, the Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash emerged to counteract the corrosive effects of Diaspora. In response to the calamitous expulsion from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century, Jews elaborated the Kabbalah to reinterpret their fate; after the twin blows of the false messiah, Shabtai Zevi, and the brutal Chmielnicki pogroms in Poland, Hasidism developed to restore people’s hope and faith.

Now it is our turn to dispel the shadow of the Shoah, to engage new Jewish generations in the next iteration of Torah, this time online, collaborative, global, and trans-denominational. Through the collective efforts of JPS staff, Trustees, donors, and volunteers, JPS has created a prototype for this process, the Tagged Tanakh, a ground-breaking online platform, which offers a more inclusive forum for dialogue and dialectic l’shem shamayim, for the sake of heaven. This project, which needs two more years of development and a million dollars to launch into the world, will then reveal the seventy faces of Torah to a broader audience than ever before, making the Jewish conversation international and accessible across the Jewish spectrum. “These and those”–the tags, commentaries, annotations, and links added by scholars, authors, Jewish experts, and laypeople to the Tagged Tanakh and curated by JPS—will also be divrei Elohim hayim, the words of the living God.

I’d like to end on very a personal note. I leave my position as JPS executive with mixed feelings. During these last five months, I’ve been on a roller coaster of emotions—grief and loss, excitement and relief, anticipation and anxiety. I suppose we all experience such a mix of feelings when we stop doing something we know and love, and take a leap into the unknown. But as British Prime Minister Lloyd George once said, “You cannot cross a chasm in two small jumps.” I have much that I want to do in the coming months—write, teach, consult, take up guitar again, exercise, participate more actively in my synagogue, have tea with friends, become a student again. I also look forward to reading Jewish books for sheer pleasure.

But I also want to remain connected to JPS, which has been so important to me personally and professionally. I hope you’ll join me in strengthening your own connections to the Society, and helping JPS build its future, which in turn will build the future of Jewish learning and literacy in America.

I want to leave you with one last teaching from Pirke Avot. It comes at the end of the collection and is attributed to a sage named Ben Bag Bag, perhaps a fictional character but one who is given some of the best lines in Jewish tradition. Ben Bag Bag said about the Torah, referring to Jewish tradition in general: Turn it and turn it, for all is in it. Reflect on it, grow old and gray with it, and do not leave it; for you will have no better guide than it (Avot 5:25).

Although you can’t see the gray in my hair because it’s camouflaged, I can assure you that I have indeed grown older with Torah, and plan to continue to do so. Thank you all for giving me the privilege of spending so many years turning these precious words over and over. May JPS continue to turn them as well, and may the Society go from strength to strength!

Tribute to Ellen Frankel – Ira Stone

I am honored to pay tribute to my friend and colleague Ellen Frankel. My first thought was to read to you a paragraph from the original manuscript of either of the two books of mine that Ellen has worked on, and then to read to you that same paragraph after Ellen had done her magic, but I was too embarrassed. However, you should know that I come to praise Ellen, to begin with, in her role as a consummate editor, that is, for her sensitivity to language and sense that lies at the heart of what we might call the trade or the art upon which the larger edifice of the Jewish Publication Society, its place in the American Jewish community and if one might be so bold in the larger history of the Jewish people rests. For as important as the organizational skill of the Editor in Chief of JPS might be, or her public relations skills, or her business acumen or fund raising capabilities, it is the ability to sense the hidden wisdom that lurks in the minds of countless Jewish teachers and thinkers that addresses a particular need of the moment in the life of our people and then to turn that wisdom through the miracle of clear language into a relatively accessible source for others to mine that truly determines the viability of the entire project. Although in my case, making my ideas accessible challenged even Ellen’s skills almost to the breaking point, her ability to do so with extraordinary grace testifies to her abilities beyond a doubt.

Writers love their words, or come to love their words, above all else. The act of writing is so seductive that the words inevitably turn into a kind of idol that can easily obfuscate the meaning that those words were intended in the first place to express. In that sense think of Ellen in the role of Avraham Avinu who, according to the midrash, having determined the worthlessness of his father’s idols smashed them to begin his journey toward the discovery of the one God of Israel. A good editor is an idol smasher. I don’t know how Abraham’s father felt among the shards of idols at his feet, but I know very well that this author could not help but marvel at her ability to discover meaning, the very meaning I intended, by smashing the idols of my words while at the same time making me feel good. Making me feel as though I had finally said what it was I wanted to say, though my words had initially been in the way.

To do this takes more than the proverbial skills of the wordsmith. It requires a commitment to the subject of the book and the effort to enter into the universe of the book’s subject regardless of its distance from her own interests and background. It takes a commitment to do more than look at words on a page, but to grapple with and understand the ideas beneath the words. The effort required for this kind of editing is a severely endangered species in the world of publishing in general. I am eternally gratefully to have benefited from it. The books published by the Jewish Publications Society during the years of Ellen’s tenure have all benefited from this approach and that is something that should be celebrated this evening.

Once we have established the foundation upon which the JPS project stands and pay tribute to Ellen’s centrality in assuring its strength, we can turn to look at the project itself. JPS remains among the only sources for Judaic literature addressed at the educated Jewish and interested non-Jewish layperson on the American scene. The standards of excellence are not merely a matter of market niche. Those standards represent the concretization of a vision. A vision long held, I believe, at JPS, but I believe defended strenuously by Ellen Frankel. In an era when the general level of discourse in America and therefore equally among American Jews was assumed to have dropped; when it was common wisdom that one could not put before the general reading audience anything that might challenge their intellectual comfort zone, Ellen has defended the idea that important ideas, important subjects, deserved and required a level of discourse appropriate to their importance. For this many, many Jewish thinkers, teachers and writers are exceedingly grateful. In the long run, the abstraction we call the American Jewish community will be exceedingly grateful years from now when it looks back to locate the sources of strength that helped propel an otherwise perplexed period of Jewish history into the next phase of its ability to re-invent itself and carry the millennial promise of meaning forward.

For a Rabbi this is a crucial task that Ellen has performed. For a local Rabbi in the Philadelphia community it is a task with personal consequences. If Ellen’s vision of JPS has helped maintain the level of intellectual discourse more generally, having that source located close at hand has helped both shape our community and maintain its vibrancy.

I really did not want to speak about Ellen as though she herself was an abstraction. I am already conscious of how her red pen (we still call it that even though it is now days actually red-lining on a computer screen) would be coursing over these few pages. So let me speak about a scholar and a woman of deep heart, of warm humor, of gentle touch and true grace. Let me say how pleasant it has been to work with her and how supportive she has been to me in the course of developing difficult ideas. Most importantly let me speak about how genuinely interested and attached she has been to the idea of making those words available in the larger cacophony of Jewish conversation and how much she herself is interested in growing and changing and learning through the process. Which brings me to the real celebratory note, in my mind. I am thrilled that this deep and spiritually brimming woman who I have seen continually postpone the urge to share her own thoughts in favor of bringing the thoughts of others to life will now have the opportunity to give more of her inner life to our community. I doubt very much she will need an editor as much as some of us have, but I pray she will find one as astute and sensitive, caring and rigorous as she has been.