Review: The Spoon from Minkowitz: A bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands by Judith Fein. Santa Fe: GlobalAdventure.us, 2014. $18.95.

Judith Fein, a former screenwriter and now a travel writer with articles in such venues as The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and National Geographic has written a deeply personal account of her journey in time and space to the stetl in the Ukraine that her grandmother left at the age of seventeen. As a child, Fein was obsessed with this place and could not understand why her grandmother would never tell her more than six facts about where she’d grown up. Given a spoon from Minkowitz, Ukraine by her new father-in-law at her wedding, Fein took this as a sign that she must one day visit, but world traveler that she was, she took decades to embark upon this journey of self-discovery.

Fein is not an observant Jew, but the journey necessarily takes her into corners and collective memories that are distinctly Jewish. The Spoon from Minkowitz is an expedition into personal and cultural identity. However, I continued to be moved by Fein’s insistence on a showing a much bigger picture, on remaining first of all human and writing compassionately of our commonality.

I was especially touched by her comments after a visit to a cemetery of Karaite Jews in Halych, Ukraine. Rabbinic Jews rejected the Karaites because of their differing beliefs, while the Nazis spared them because they also perceived them as non-Jewish. From this paradox, Fein questions how religious beliefs can separate people and even lead to their destruction when carried to an extreme. She so poignantly asks, “Why does anyone care if God is worshipped differently, or if others worship a different God? How do humans descend to such a dark place that they kill other humans because they sit in pews or kneel to pray, wear sidelocks, monks’ robes or turbans, read from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Koran?”

While The Spoon from Minkowitz is about a deep exploration of Jewish roots, it often transcends that to become an exploration of the human condition.

Judith Fein will be the keynote speaker and a workshop presenter at the Albuquerque Jewish Community Center’s A Taste of Honey on February 9.

Partnership Between a Gay Mayor and a Christian Evangelist

One thing Bridge People are about is destroying stereotypes. Who will deign to work with whom? These paradoxes of peacemaking are in part what draw me to people who do bridge work, and I’m not referring to dental labs.

In one of the US’s most secular cities, Portland, the openly gay mayor, Sam Adams was desperate to meet the needs of the city’s poor and its schools. Along came Kevin Palau, vice president of the Luis Palau Association, known worldwide for its evangelism festivals. Palau offered to organize volunteers from evangelical, mainstream Protestant, and Catholic churches to mentor at-risk youth and provide food, clothing and shelter to the needy of Portland.

Evangelicals have been addressing these kinds of needs for a long time, but what is new here is the openness exhibited by both Palau, who is vocally against gay marriage and abortion, and Adams, who is gay, to overlooking their differences in order to serve their community.

In my previous post, I wrote about resistance to the idea of bridging social, political and cultural gaps. As much as we, and I include myself of course, give lip service to wanting to bring peace on earth, we often seem to revel in polarization. It was an evangelical friend who called my attention to the Adams-Palau collaboration, and I confess that I wasn’t sure I wanted to give it coverage. After all, so many in the world, including me, have been hurt by evangelicals’ actions. But here is something to encourage, to say we can work together, even when we don’t share core beliefs and methods. We do share our humanness. Thanks to that friend for telling me about the bridge in Portland.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/08/27/when-a-gay-mayor-partners-with-evangelical-churches-in-portland/

http://gospelmovements.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/USATODAY-Evangelism-2.01.pdf