Back By Popular Demand

The New Shul's Rosh Chodesh group, which ran for four consecutive years is back. Everyone is welcome to join this powerful women's group that is led by Rabbi Joyce Reinitz.

Rosh Chodesh: Celebrating the Cycles of the Moon

Throughout the ages, women have gathered around the appearance of the new moon for creativity, renewal and friendship. Celebrate the cycles of the moon and explore the special themes of each Jewish month. You will be guided through special imagery meditations which open the door to your inner wisdom and deepen your connection to Spirit. No prior knowledge or experience necessary.

Rabbi Joyce Reinitz, ACSW, serves as rabbi and spiritual leader of the Society of Jewish Science in Manhattan and has worked as a psychotherapist and workshop leader for more than 30 years. She skillfully draws from traditional Jewish wisdom to promote health and healing in our contemporary world.

This program will run from October to June. It will meet once a month on Tuesdays. The fee is $300. Email or call the office to register or for more information.

New Shul Member Charlie Komanoff Sounds Off For The Nation

Senate Climate Bill Dies—Does the Environment Win?
Charles Komanoff | July 28, 2010
Published on The Nation

Despite a Democratic supermajority in Congress, and despite President Obama's campaign promise to tackle global warming, there will be no climate bill this year. The demise last week of the Kerry-Lieberman Senate bill [1] makes that official. But that may actually be a good thing: it clears the way for genuine solutions to global warming­­—solutions that ordinary Americans can understand and support. And remember, most Americans do want their government to tackle climate change. A recent Stanford University poll [2] found that 74 percent of the public believes climate change is human-caused, poses real threats and requires government action.

The bill that was withdrawn last week, like the Waxman-Markey bill [3] that squeaked through the House last year and similar measures dating back to a 2003 Senate bill [4] sponsored by John McCain, would have attempted to curb carbon emissions by creating a cap-and-trade market, a corporate-friendly approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Under this system, a "capped" number of carbon emission permits are offered to coal, oil and gas extractors and importers, who can then sell (trade) the permits among themselves. As the volume of emissions permitted by the cap declined over time, the price of the carbon permits would rise, causing fossil-fuel energy to cost more and creating incentives to use less.

Cap-and-trade was popular inside the Beltway—some business interests and many mainstream environmental groups insisted [5] on it—but it is a total loser in the larger battle to excite and mobilize public opinion. Attacks by climate-change denialists took a toll, but the arcane nature of cap-and-trade made it hard to love, and its links to the financial industry, originally viewed as an asset, turned toxic after the housing bubble burst.

There is a better way. Virtually everyone who truly desires emissions reductions agrees that putting a (rising) price on carbon is essential. But there's another, better way to do that, one that also would deliver an economic bonus to a majority of Americans: the government should institute a fee-and-dividend system.

Like cap-and-trade, fee-and-dividend would limit emissions by building a fee for carbon emissions into the price of gasoline, coal-fired electricity and other carbon-based fuels, thereby giving consumers and businesses powerful incentives to use less. As in cap-and-trade, the fee would be imposed at the wellhead or import dock, eventually to be passed down the supply chain to consumers. But there are two critical differences.

First, fee-and-dividend would turn the proceeds of these higher energy costs over to the American public to spend as they wish, rather than to corporate emitters to fatten their bottom lines or to Washington lawmakers to lavish on pet projects. Under fee-and-dividend, each and every American would receive a monthly check, which for most people would offset [6] the higher energy prices caused by the fee.

The other difference is a bit technical but is just as key. Under a cap, the price on carbon would be murky, since it would be set in a vast trading market and determined by fluctuating factors like the economic growth rate, consumer and producer price elasticities and hedge bets by speculators. With the carbon fee, the carbon price would be set up front and its rising trajectory known in advance, allowing consumers and entrepreneurs to bank on the future value of saving energy. The price incentive to move away from carbon-emitting fossil fuels would penetrate every crevice of the economy, ensuring that few if any opportunities to reduce climate-changing emissions were left on the table.

Fee-and-dividend is superior to cap-and-trade on grounds of both political appeal and economic efficiency. Here's how James Hansen, the nation's pre-eminent climate scientist, contrasted the two approaches in an op-ed [7] in the New York Times last December:

Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country's. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger SUV—because the total emissions are set by the cap. In a fee-and-dividend system, every action to reduce emissions—and to keep reducing emissions—would be rewarded. Indeed, knowing that you were saving money by buying a small car might inspire your neighbor to follow suit. Popular demand for efficient vehicles could drive gas-guzzlers off the market. Such snowballing effects could speed us toward a pollution-free world.

Hansen's example applies equally to renewable energy. Under a cap system, a wind farm, no less than his efficient auto, will lower the price for carbon emission permits, thus undermining the price incentive for other actions that would reduce emissions. In contrast, a carbon fee is immune to this effect, since individual actions have no effect on the legislated carbon price.

But can the environmental movement unite around cap-and-dividend?

For over a dozen years, since before the 1997 Kyoto climate summit, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Charitable Trust and other Big Green groups have been unshakably committed to cap-and-trade. Without bothering to consult grassroots activists or more maverick groups like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, Big Green anointed cap-and-trade as its climate mantra and forged a high-minded Beltway alliance [8] with corporate giants like Exelon and GM.

The idea was to "put a price on carbon," but in secret. Decision-makers at utilities and auto companies would use economic models to intuit the extent to which mandated declines in the amount of carbon emissions permitted by the cap over time would cause the prices of carbon permits (and, hence, fossil fuels) to rise, and would retool their power plants and products accordingly. But ordinary Americans, ponying up more for electricity and heat and gasoline, wouldn't know that the declining cap was driving the higher prices.

That was the plan. Alas, though cap-and-trade had functioned well in a kind of pilot program involving electric utilities and acid rain, it wasn't up to the job of transitioning the American economy from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and renewable sources. To manage that Herculean task in decades rather than centuries, the rising trajectory of fossil fuel prices must be not just steep but plainly visible to all—from the aircraft manufacturer weighing the use of costly exotic materials to raise fuel efficiency, to local officials wrestling with whether a new school should be built in town, near the bus stop and bike lane, or on the car-dependent outskirts. Millions of similar carbon-critical decisions, from the individual level of riding transit and switching light bulbs to the societal level of ensuring that those options are available, attractive and valorized, must be taken with full knowledge of those prices. A stealth price on carbon, one that's lost in the noise of fluctuating prices and general inflation, won't do the job.

The fate of the climate—and perhaps the viability of EDF, NRDC et al. as well—may now turn on the environmental lobby's willingness to embrace the alternative that has been there all along: a revenue-neutral, steadily rising carbon fee, the proceeds from which would be redistributed to Americans via equal monthly dividends—or, in a variant favored by some economists, in which the regressive and anti-jobs payroll tax is phased out [6] as carbon fee revenues ramp up.

A climate bill based on a revenue-neutral and rising carbon fee would not require a cap-and-trade market in carbon derivatives; would be transparent and hence less vulnerable to the K Street carve-outs that turned cap-and-trade bills into laughing stocks; could be imitated internationally (since carbon fees are fungible while carbon caps are not); and wouldn't require a PhD in complexity to grasp. Indeed, one such bill, America's Energy Security Trust Fund Act of 2009 [9], sponsored by Connecticut Democrat John Larson, is all of twenty-one pages, versus upwards of 1,500 for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that squeaked through the House last year and the similar Kerry-Lieberman bill that just died in the Senate. Yet the emission reductions under the Larson bill would be two to three times as great [10] as those from Waxman-Markey.

A climate bill like the Larson bill would also honor a fundamental tenet of environmentalism: that the costs of pollution must be internalized into the price of the activities that cause it.

We can drive emissions reductions throughout the economy while protecting Americans' pocketbooks if we reframe the climate debate. Cap-and-trade is dead, and not a moment too soon. With its simplicity, its transparency and its economic rewards for everyone but die-hard polluters, fee-and-dividend could be a political winner. If environmentalists and others who care about averting climate catastrophe can unite around this approach, the public is ready to be convinced and, one hopes, mobilized. And, as two centuries of struggle for racial, labor and gender justice should have taught us, a mobilized public is essential to winning the climate battle.

Letter To Ricky's NYC CEO - Keep Selling Israeli Products

SIGN TODAY!

Letter To Ricky's NYC CEO - Keep Selling Israeli Products

As part of JCRC-NY's commitment to provide you with meaningful opportunities to support Israel, we are bringing to your attention the latest local manifestation of the global campaign to delegitimize and demonize the State of Israel.

Recently, there has been an effort to boycott AHAVA products sold in Ricky's NYC stores across New York and specifically in Brooklyn. Please help us send a strong message to Ricky's CEO Dom Costello and urge him to continue selling products from Israel in the 23 Ricky’s stores in the Tri-State area.

Please click this link to sign our letter circulate it to your friends.

NYC Premier of "The Dybbuk"

Jonathan Slaff - 55 Perry St. (1M) NYC 10014

212/924-0496 – js@jsnyc.com - representing:

THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY

Crystal Field, Director - 155 First Avenue, NYC 10003

(212) 254-1109 - www.theaterforthenewcity.net

_____________________________________________________________

"The Dybbuk" from England, written and directed by Julia Pascal, with set and movement design by Thomas Kampe, is featured in Theater for the New City's Dream Up Festival.

Two theater artists, one English Jew and one German, have forged a powerful statement about the Holocaust

WHERE AND WHEN:

August 10 to 25

Theater for the New City (Johnson Theater), 155 First Avenue (at E. 10th Street)

A featured production of TNC's "Dream Up Festival" (www.dreamupfestival.org)

Schedule and ticket info:

Tuesday, August 10 at 7:00 PM; Thursday, August 12 at 7:00 PM; Saturday, August 14 at 2:00 PM; Monday, August 16 at 7:00 PM; Tuesday, August 17 at 7:00 PM; Thursday, August 19 at 7:00 PM; Saturday, August 21 at 2:00 PM; Monday, August 23 at 7:00 PM; Tuesday, August 24 at 7:00 PM; Wednesday, August 25 at 7:00 PM.

Running time: 90 minutes.

$15; box office (212) 254-1109. online ticketing: www.theaterforthenewcity.net.

CRITICS ARE INVITED to all performances

Of the 25 plays to be presented in Theater for the New City's upcoming "Dream Up Festival" August 8 to September 5 (www.dreamupfestival.org), one in particular indicates the expansion of TNC into the international arena. That is "The Dybbuk," written and directed by Julia Pascal (London), with movement and set design by Thomas Kampe (Germany). The piece, performed by an English cast, will have its American debut in the festival, performing ten times between August 10 and August 25. (see schedule below).

A Dybbuk is the soul of someone who has died too early. Julia Pascal's "The Dybbuk" is inspired by Solomon Anski's great Yiddish classic. Pascal's Dybbuk starts in Germany where Judith, a British atheist Jew, looks at today’s Germany and feels that Hitler has won. Judith is haunted by thoughts of her lost family and this leads her in to a dream world haunted by ghosts, or dybbuks.

She imagines a ghetto somewhere in Eastern Europe where five non-religious Jews live their final day before transportation to Auschwitz. In this ghetto, the five Jews argue, discuss Kabbalah, love, sex and death, relate fragments of their lives, play out half remembered scenes from the myth of The Dybbuk (which inspired Anski) and dream of full bellies.

The actual Dybbuk myth is encapsulated in a play world which the Jews walk in and out of, where finally the possession of the young girl’s body by the spirit of her dead lover, is evoked in a four minute Expressionist dance. The work poses the question about why we keep on telling our stories even on the eve of destruction. It has five performers and uses text, movement and music in an homage to a culture that was annihilated by the Nazis.

Thomas Kampe (choreographer/designer) has a profound personal connection to this story, as his father was a member of the Nazi party. He has been a long time collaborator of Julia Pascal. Their continued work together is a defiance of the twisted ideas and a rebuke of the evil events that pervaded their childhoods.

"The Dybbuk" premiered in London at the New End Theatre, Hampstead in July 1992, then the Lillian Bayliss Theatre. Since 1992 it has played in Munich at the festival of Jewish Theatre, at Maubege’s International Theatre Festival, in Poland (British Council tour), Sweden, Belgium and a major British regional tour.

"The Dybbuk" is published by Oberon books in "The Holocaust Trilogy," three plays by Pascal.

The actors of the TNC production, all English, will be Juliet Dante, Stefan Karsberg, Adi Lerer, Simeon Perlin and Anna Savva. Theater for the New City has joined with this talented group of artists to share a creation from the other side of the Atlantic.

Summer Shul Kabbalat Shabbat

Last Friday we celebrated Shabbat on the roof of a members' apartment building. It was a wonderful evening.

Trying to light the Shabbat candles in the wind.

Our amazing sunset.

To see more pics from the night, check out our The New Shul facebook group page. We hope to see you this Friday, July 23rd as we head uptown to celebrate Shabbat with Romemu.

Important Message on Conversion Bill

When Israel was founded in 1948, the Law of Return was created. This law provides that any Jew could immigrate to Israel and become a citizen, and the definition of a Jew was intentionally made extremely broad, so that Jews in danger anywhere in the world could find refuge in the new State of Israel. The Law of Return has always rankled most ultra-orthodox Jewish leaders, because it allows Jews who do not fit the orthodox definition of Jewishness (i.e., born of a Jewish mother, or converted only under the auspices of the ultra-orthodox) to still be able to immigrate to Israel as Jews.

On Tisha B’Av, that sad day in Jewish history that marks the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem, we wanted to share with you the proposed conversion bill that has recently been brought before the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. In spite of the overwhelming opposition by a majority of Jews worldwide, this bill moves full control over who is a Jew in Israel to the ultra-Orthodox chief rabbinate.

The ostensible purpose of the bill (known as the Rotem bill, after its sponsor David Rotem) is to ease the passage to Judaism of some 350,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not legally Jewish. This is a laudable goal. However, Rotem and his party, Yisrael Beitenu, are giving in to the ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition to win this aim. For further details, read this article by J.J. Goldberg of the Jewish Forward newspaper.

Every few years ultra-orthodox political leaders in Israel attempt to maneuver a bill through the Knesset that would consolidate control of Jewish status under their own auspices. To date, those attempts have failed. That is good for all of us: if their effort succeeded, any conversions or weddings performed by any rabbis (including modern orthodox) not endorsed by the ultra-orthodox leadership would be considered invalid in Israel, and any Jew who did not fit the ultra-orthodox definition of Jewishness would no longer be permitted to gain citizenship in Israel, not to mention be legally married, or buried in a Jewish cemetery in Israel. Sadly, it is as bad as it sounds.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he will oppose the proposed conversion bill as it could cause a split within the Jewish people. Nevertheless, as long as the Rotem bill is still on the table, it is critical for us to make our voices heard on the future of the Jewish Diaspora-Israel relationship and our support of the democratic, pluralistic nature of Israel.

There is a good chance to defeat this bill. Jewish organizations within Israel and around the world have been cooperating to persuade Prime Minister Netanyahu to use his prerogative to shelve the bill. If you would like to take action, check out the following, from Anat Hoffman of the Israel Religious Action Center.

For those from North America, please click here to send a letter to the Prime Minister now, or telephone him at 011-972-2-6408457 or send a fax at 011-972-2-6496659. Please do whatever you can to help us prevent this proposal from passing. It will set back religious pluralism in Israel immeasurably and will cause a terrible rift between Israel and the Diaspora, a rift that we cannot afford. The time to act is now.

Opera in the Heart of Tel Aviv

Thanks to member Linda Kahn for sending this to us! What a great way to start our week!

Summer Shul: Torah Schmooze - Parshat Devarim, for discussion on July 15

Torah Schmooze continues at the communal table at Le Pain Quotidien (550 Hudson Street at Perry Street), this Thursday, July 15, from 6:00-7:00 pm. Any and all comers are invited to talk about next week’s Torah portion, Devarim. No special knowledge or expertise is assumed or needed, only a willingness to read the portion in advance (as much of it as possible) and an interest in talking about it, wherever that conversation might go.







Parshat Devarim: Deuteronomy (Devarim) Chapters 1:1 – 3:22


The text itself can be found here:


· English translation #1 (with Hebrew) from Chabad is here (entire portion on one page)

· English translation #2 (with Hebrew) from Mechon Mamre starts here (each chapter is on one page)

· English translation #3 (without Hebrew) from Aish is here (entire portion on one page)

For a list of commentaries, email Aaron at rogueregime at gmail dot com.

You're Invited to Wonderland

From member Wendy Kantor:

May I Introduce you to an enormously creative, four-year-young, modern dance company named GALLIM? Andrea Miller, 28 years old, is the incredibly talented choreographer of modern dance troupe Gallim Dance. A former Ensemble Bat Sheva dancer herself, her company has been honored continuously with remarkable reviews (see the most recent ones).

On July 14th Andrea and GALLIM will be the guest for the Upper West Side JCC's "Works in Progress". Following the presentation of excerpts from her latest work, Wonderland, there will be a Q & A with Andrea.

The Company's debut "Wonderland" will be at The Joyce Theater August 9th-14th. Opening night is August 9th. Please see enclosed invite. On August 11th, you are invited to a reception following the performance. Andrea Miller along with the artist that inspired the evenings piece will join us.

I have been lucky to have been introduced to GALLIM from its inception. Knowing you would also enjoy their work, as I have, it gives me great pleasure in giving you this invitation and introduction to a young flourishing dance company that has accomplished so much. Come and see! And, spread the word.

Resume and Cover Letter Workshop, July 20

Time to dust off the resume - and learn to write a great cover letter! Join member Phyllis Belkin in a workshop where we will break into pairs, and help each other with our resume writing.

We will work on getting your resume to reflect where you are in your career at this point: whether it be a long break after raising children or a complete change in career.

Please come with a hard copy of a resume plus an ad for a job you would like to apply for.

About Phyllis:

Phyllis Belkin is finishing a Master of Urban Planning, with an emphasis in design. She has worked as a photojournalist for the past 20 years. Having just attended a workshop in resume and cover letter writing, Phyllis is happy to share what she has learned.

When: Tuesday, July 20 at 6pm
Where: The New Shul office, 505 8th Avenue, Suite 1212

Space limited. This is open to members and non-members. RSVP required.