Kentridge or Kantorowitz, a fine artist indeed

William Kentridge, a South African artist (and a Jew), has hit the scene in New York.  Currently, you can see his work at MoMa and the Met, and starting May 2nd, at the Jewish Museum.

How's that for a triple whammy?

www.davidkrutpublishing.com

Kentridge's work ranges from original opera to film to collage to sculpture to performance art.  He grew up in a liberal Jewish family in South Africa who was involved in the liberal elite and fighting apartheid.  The nose that is featured on the sets of his opera "The Nose," Kentridge has said, is inspired by his own Ashkenazic Jewish nose.

And what about the name?

Kantorowitz comes from the same place as Kantrowitz and even Kantor, Cantor and various other spelling variations.  Way back when their family in Poland or Russia were probably cantors, or hazzanim.  So belt it out, Mr. Kentridge.  You should be singing your halleluyahs that you've got such a fine showing in NYC this spring.

Haim = Life or Home?

This morning we learned of the tragic death of Corey Haim, the child actor who reached fame and glory in the '80s.  We will forever love Lucas.  As Jews, we wish his family great comfort among the mourners of Zion.

Corey Haim during the '80s

Jewlicious has presumed that his last name meant "life."

While the Hebrew word chayim translates as life (as in L'chayim), it is also possible that Haim could have been from the Yiddish word, heim, which means home (as in heimish - - homey, cozy - -  or alter heim, referring to the old country/home).

Perhaps Haim was shortened from Haimovitch, meaning the "son of a Hayim".  This discussion talks about a Haimovitch family who emigrated from Romania to Montreal and since changed their name to Haines.  Perhaps the Haines and Haim family are related, since Corey was raised in Canada.  Unless Bernie Haim, Corey's father, wants to chime in here, we'll likely be in the dark.

For now, we're motivated to finally watch Lost Boys, which we somehow missed in 1987.

Aaronson is also a Cohen

Riding the Katz and Cohen wave, let's talk about the last name Aaronson (interestingly, this week's Torah portion T'zaveh, discusses at length the priestlihood).  By obvious definition, it means "son of Aaron."  Let's go back historically and look at the original Aaron.  He was the brother of Moses, who led the Children of Israel from Egypt out of slavery (remember the Passover story where frogs were here, frogs were there, frogs were jumping everywhere?).  Aaron was selected as the first High Priest (in Hebrew, kohen gadol).   It would make sense, then, that the descendents of Aaron are also from the priestly lineage and are cohanim as well.

There are, indeed, Aronsons and Aaronsons who are not Jewish, and come from Norweigan backgrounds.

We don't know if composer Jack Aaronson is Jewish, but it sure looks like his gigs down in the West Village in NYC are lots of fun. 



If belting out current Broadway tunes is your thing, then pop in on a Tuesday night and let us know how it goes!

Marie's Crisis Cafe
59 Grove Street
New York, NY
212-243-9323

Katz = Cohen...Live Long and Prosper

We have decided to return to our roots and reinstate the Whole Phamily as a blog about Jewish names.  Names that you've heard.  Names that you haven't.  Ashkenazic names.  Sephardic names.  We will focus on one Jewish name per blog post, and perhaps bring up a person, business, work of art,  or all of the above that bears this name.

To say that Katz is a vintage Jewish last name is an understatement.  If you're from New York, or simply a deli maven, you know Katz's Deli.  Many folks say that their pastrami is the real deal.

Katz's Deli, NYC

We were blown away when, many years ago, we learned that Katz is a priestly name.  Saying Katz is just like saying Cohen, but in German.   Do you recall Spock's Vulcan Salute in Star Trek?

Leonard Nimoy as Spock giving the Vulcan Salute

  Ask a random male Katz today, and he will tell you that the traditional blessing he says in synagogue (be it once in a while or every week) that was passed down by his father is eerily reminscent of the Vulcan Salute.

Shlomo Katz, Israel-based musician

Another Katz of note is Shlomo Katz, a musician bringing on down some of the most beautiful Jewish-infused (hint:  Torah) music out there today.

We heard him perform tonight at an intimate evening of music and story.  We bless him that his music should spread far and wide among alle yidden!

Annie's Goddess Dressing

*note*  this blog post has pretty much nothing to do with Jewish names, and has no right being here.  But since we wrote this when we were off the derech of our blog's direction, we grandfather it in



You haven't tasted salad bliss until you have had it drizzled with Annie's Goddess Dressing.

 Problem for those dietary guideline-following Jews among us (hint:  Kosher) is that we can't eat it.  Cuz it ain't Kosher!

The Whole Phamily has written in recent years to the company. We have received bogus responses.  Many companies can find Kosher ingredients for their products.  Surely Goddess Dressing, whose ingredients contain nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to kosher food, could do the same.  We encourage you to  write to Annie's join the cause.  Better yet, write them a letter at their Napa offices.  We're certain they'd appreciate anything fun and colorful.  We sent in a letter using pastels.

You can also join the Facebook group.  All 37 of us.   join the cause.  Better yet, write them a letter at their Napa offices.  We're certain they'd appreciate anything fun and colorful. We sent in a letter using pastels.

 

Jonathan Pollard in light of the December 25th terrorist attacks

We are not that political and don't aim to get political in the future at the Whole Phamily, yet we can not help ignore the media discussions on the recent terrorist attempt in Detroit.


Whatever your politics, we can not ignore that one of our very own, Jonathan Pollard,

recently marked his 25th year in prison for trying to help limit terrorist acts.  His sentence for the crime of providing Israeli intelligence information was unfair.  He has been placed in the harshest part of the harshest Federal prison.  The calls for commutation of his sentence have gone, thus far, unanswered by the United States Government


At the very least, we urge you to take a few minutes.
Pull out some stationary or some scrap paper.  
Slap on a .44 cent stamp.

And let Jonathan know that we are all part of the same Ganse Mishpucha..


"Letters are 'oxygen' for Jonathan."


Write him at:


Jonathan Pollard #09185-016
c/o FCI Butner
P.O. Box 1000
Butner, NC
U.S.A  27509-1000



Finally...

Now for the origin of Pollard. Perhaps his name was originally Pollock? Here's what we found online with regard to the Jewishness of Pollard.

Tracing the Tribe blog

As the Whole Phamily is inspired by, but not limited to, Jewish Geneological research, we highly recommend the Tracing the Tribe blog if you have any interest in learning about your own family's history.

The author of the blog, Schelley Talalay Darsashti, also writes the blog for My Heritage.com  (a for-profit venture).

 which we have recommended in the past.  We like that it is an Israel-based family tree building website.

We need our own personal IT guy here at the Whole Phamily and don't have down yet how to get this blog glossy, pretty, and image-linky  (that My Heritage image is just an image, not an actual link to their site!!?!?  Argh!!) , so bear with us while we tweak the system!

If New Yorkers are found to be unhappiest, what about the bulk of the Jews in the U.S.?

A recent study published in the well-respected journal Science found that New Yorkers were the least happy when compared to residents of the rest of the country.  Yes, they came in at the bottom of the barrel of data processed to learn which state churned out the most satisfied people.  If the Jewish population is most dominant in New York state (one estimate is 1.9 million), what does that say for the majority of our people in this country?  Are Jews in New York actually less happy than those elsewhere?  Does it fulfill the Woody Allen stereotype of the neurotic, parasitic, always-worrying, hypchondriac shnorrer?

Surely, even Woody found some happiness through film at least once by way of his mockumentary Zelig
(1983).

 This title character became famous in the 1920s by possessing the skill to morph into various different famous personas.  That's pretty happy, right?  Optimistically, Zelig literally translates as "happy."  Have you known a Seligman, Seelig, or Seligsohn?  Here is a  further look at the name with Zelig as its root.

Living in New York sure can be rough, at least around the edges, and especially when you get a ticket while you're down the block purchasing your muni meter parking ticket.  Any number of Seinfeld or Curb episodes can attest to that type of absurdity that happens day-in, day-out in New York City.  Perhaps this explains why so many Jews headed out west, making Los Angeles quite literally the city of angels for the Jews who had enough saychel  (scroll down for the description of Greece) to move after braving the elements of New York.

(Keep posted for a report on Jews in LA...but not those of the Ashkenazi-bred rye bread deli-pack).

Looking at the bright side of the study, where were Americans happiest?  Louisiana.  Fascinating news since one would think that post-Katrina, folks in the Bayou were still downtrodden and depressed.  But it sure sounds like it's the place to live, if you take the study for what it's worth.  If that's the case, maybe we Jews should all head down to join Reb Uri and Dahlia Topolosky in their holy work with the rebuilding of the Jewish community of New Orleans.

In reality, whether you live in Prospect Heights, Runyon Canyon or Metairie, we should all be filled with Joy because "we want you to be happy, don't live inside the gloom..."

For Jews whose names end with -ian

We've been so focused on all the Schwartzes, Rosenthals and Bernsteins out there that you'd think we thought all North American Jews came over on the same boat to Ellis Island from the same shtetl in Poland in 1905.  But we were recently thinking about our very nice Persian (and Jewish) childhood friend Jenny whose family moved to our East Coast suburb in the early 80s  (what did we know about the Revolution back then?  We were just kids).  They since moved out to California, and we hadn't heard much about her, but we always knew that the Persian community in Great Neck, Long Island, was strong and growing.

This past July's W magazine ran a very lovely piece about the Persian community in Beverly Hills.  And we thought our 20 person shabbat dinners on the Upper West Side were something to write home about!  According to this article, families can host shabbat dinners for upwards of 60 people.  Now that's a lot of rice and chicken.  Not to mention the crystal and silver.  Does it all get handwashed?

 The community is family-oriented, tight-knit, and encourages their girls to marry young (which doesn't surprise us realizing now that another Persian friend, Debby, married just out of high school.  We were all very surprised, as the typical friend in our suburban high school setting was heading off to college at that point)

The names of the Persian families are so interesting.  Some have the -ian suffix.  Last weekend we met a young Israeli woman whose last name is Elitzur.  This name, meaning god-rock-stone-strength, was Hebraicized from the Persian name Elyasian by her grandfather when they immigrated from Iran.  She had the knowledge that, actually, their family name originated from "Ben Eliyahu" which translates into the son of Elijah.  

And let us not forget the greatest Jewish queen of all, Queen Esther, who was Persian through and through.  Soon enough Purim will be here and we will celebrate her sacrifice of marrying the non Jewish kind Acheshverosh that saved the Jewish people from destruction at the hands of a Jew-hating empire.

Yosef Yerushalmi, of blessed memory

"By common consent, Kafka is not only the strongest modern Jewish writer, but the Jewish writer.  His only rival increasingly seems to be Freud, who, together with Kafka, may yet redefine Jewish culture for us, and so change our sense of Jewish memory."

This is what Harold Bloom wrote in his forward of the late Yosef Yerushalmi's monumental work Zakhor. which explores how modern Jews relate to their histories and memories.

Yerushalmi, the world's leading scholar of Jewish history in our time, has passed away at the age of 77.  Check out the New York Times and Forward  for informative obituaries.

His loss is a great one to the Jewish world today, but his contributions are vast and have affected our community in ways of which the average American Jew might be completely unaware.

The Whole Phamily is interested in the name Yerushalmi.  Before learning about his background and upbringing, we posited that he was a native Jerusalemite, as the Hebrew "Yerushalmi" literally translates as "of Jerusalem" and is a surname used for families who have lived for generations in that city.

Yet, we learned that Yerushalmi has a similar heritage to many of our own Eastern European-born ancestors who immigrated here at the turn of the century.  His father, Yehuda Yerushalmi as noted on Zakhor's dedication page, emigrated to British-ruled Palestine when, we are guessing, he Hebraicized his name.  He then later settled in the Bronx, where the younger Yerushalmi was born and raised.

The concept of changing one's given last name (like Weiss, Perlman, or Ginsberg) at the turn of the century and into a Hebrew equivalent (such as Halivni, Ben-Yehuda, or Ha'am) is still practiced today.  At Ellis Island (likely in Galveston as well), Jews Americanized their names, but in Israel many Jews have Hebraicized.

Last week some of us at the Whole Phamily had the incredible honor and privilege to bear witness to the kiddushin and nissuin (Jewish marriage) of our dear friend D.  At the wedding tisch (where the bride, kallah, rocked the house!) prior to the ceremony,  D touched on the topic of memory, and we could not help but think that he was referring to Yerushalmi, who passed away only weeks before the next chapter of D's journey. We believe that all things happen for a reason:  Yerushalmi's own memory wafted through the honored air of perhaps one of the most bashert couples we have ever had the mazal of knowing.

Is this too much?  It's way over our heads here at the Whole Phamily.  So,we think it's time to kick back and reflect on these Heavy Things.

Meanwhile, if you find an affordable paperback of Zakhor, let us know, since we are returning the copy that has rested on our bookshelf for many years.

Why is that the case?  For your Jewish geography-desiring ears:

Our copy belonged to an old camp friend's college friend who he has known since 8th grade, but that we met on our own during our post-college years through another friend we worked with at a different camp (but of the same Jewish camping movement).  The book is inscribed by his college girlfriend prior to his own post-college visit to Minsk.

And, isn't Minsk (which is now-Belarus) where my great-great grandfather Yisroel Bear was from?  (see the Whole Phamily's 2nd blog post).

Maybe we should get back onto JewishGen...

The connections are endless...