Snapshots of Judy-Ism or You Have a Right to Remain Jewish

By Judith Solomon Franco

Give it up already! states a concerned friend about my fret over the decreasing Jewish numbers. I cannot, considering the longest-running hatred toward the Jewlet alone the general challenges of poverty, weather, and family and national associations, or even when the Jew is doing well. We Jews need to take a deep breath to see what we have and what we stand to lose. There is no alternative. After all, as Detective Riback of Las Vegas says so affectionately, You have the right to remain Jewish. Thus my eponymous Snapshots of Judy-ism, an encapsulation of Jewish historical and recent affairs through personal anecdotes, compresses characters and polemics for the non-Jew who may be curious about a few Jewish subjects, the Jew about to jump into another religious system, the intermarried Jew, or the Jew considering intermarrying.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524564995

Judith Solomon Franco

Judith Solomon Franco’s primary years in a Christian neighborhood in 1940s Los Angeles, left a lasting imprint on her Jewish identity. Owing to her inclination to debate and question, she was able to reconnect to her Yiddishkeit within the comfort of the Al-mighty’s commitment to her, and such is her commitment to Him. Mrs. Franco has a Bachelor of Arts in Business and a minor in Philosophy, and resides in a growing Jewish community in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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Copyright © 2017 by Judith Solomon Franco.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016919713

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5245-6497-1

Softcover   978-1-5245-6498-8

eBook   978-1-5245-6499-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons,

living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 12/22/2016

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter I – A Snapshot of Some Statistics

Chapter II – A Snapshot of a Personal Note

Chapter III – A Snapshot of the Culture Vulture

Chapter IV – A Snapshot of Gender Politics

Chapter V – A Snapshot of the Nature of Anti-Semitism

Chapter VI – A Snapshot of the Land Libel

Chapter VII – A Snapshot of Christianity

Chapter VIII – A Snapshot of Islam

Chapter IX – A Snapshot of Family Ties

Chapter X – A Snapshot of the Jewish Tour

Afterword

Postcript: A Snapshot of Some Jewish Law

Glossary

References

To my grandmother, Ethel Mintz Solomonobm and parents, Paul and Hilda Solomonobm, and to all those who supported me throughout my endeavor.

Please note certain vocabulary in this book. Thus, to avoid casualness and to respect the awe and love of the Al-mighty, the dash is inserted for the references Al-mighty, G-d, L-rd, or the Hebrew Ha-Shem; the first letter capitalized within the written body for the Al-mighty as in He, Him, His; pronoun she refer to Jewry, Israel, and the Jewish people; Torah rather than Old Testament; Israel for the whole of Jewry; and abbreviations BCE and CE (Before Common Era and Common Era, respectively) in place of the Latin BC and AD.

PROLOGUE

G ive it up, already! states a concerned friend about my fret over decreasing Jewish numbers. I cannot, considering the longest running hatred toward the Jew, let alone the general challenges of poverty, weather, and nation associations or even when the Jew is doing well. We Jews need to take a deep breath to see what we have and what we stand to lose. There is no alternative. After all, as Detective Riback of Las Vegas, says so affectionately, You have the right to remain Jewish. Thus, for the Jew to strengthen his or her Jewish awareness, and for the non-Jew to get a feel for his or her own as well as the Jewish station in an ever-changing world, my eponymous Snapshots of Judy-ism, Part I, an encapsulation of Jewish historical and recent affairs through personal anecdotes, compressed characters, and polemics.

CHAPTER I

A SNAPSHOT OF SOME STATISTICS

That Torah/Talmud DNA swirls inside Jewry’s veins ever since those heady days some 3300 years ago at Mount Sinai is the Al-mighty’s gift to her and to the world. She is as numerous as the stars in the sky,¹ the reminder to the existence of the One G-d of Israel, the mental furniture . . . the pilot project for the entire human race.² However, in spite of the gift, the project seems to be statistically hemorrhaging.

In days of yore, the Jewish singular access to the hinterland was conversion to Christianity, a not-so-easy task for the Jew seeing that a natural mutual separation of family, friend, and community, in addition to facing a suspicious anti-Semitic Christian society. In days of now, the environs make for cost-free access into atheistic and secular religiosity, cultural and religious Christianity, paganism and celebrity iconolatry. Yes, a kind of fratricide is scorching the wilderness of worldliness where nary a betrayal since most of Jewry now do the same anyway, the Jew running as fast as he can into the host environment that use to kill him but now kills him with socialization and economic gains.

As dry as they could be, the following statistics on the Jewish cooperative are far from dry when examining the arithmetically lessening of Jewry as compared to the percentage of the landscape at large. For example, in North America alone, the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project Center indicates that:

- Fifty years ago, the Jewish population was 4 percent and is presently 2.5 percent or 6.5 million Jews (among 330 million Americans);

- 32 percent of Jews exhibit a Christmas tree in their homes;

- 34 percent of Jews think that one can be a Jew and believe in Jesus as Messiah;

- 31 percent of Jews belong to a synagogue;

- 71 percent of non-orthodox Jews intermarry; and

- Jewry replaces herself at about 1.6 children per family against the average 2.1 children, which comes to 0.2 percent or one out of every 514 persons or seventeen million Jews amid the world’s seven billion persons.

Thus, at the rate of fifty thousand Jews vanishing each year and with one Harvard study predicting the American Jewish society depleting to as few as ten thousand by year 2076, early next century American Jewish life will consist primarily of isolated pockets of ultra-Orthodox Jews.³ More than isolated pockets of ultra-Orthodoxy, nonetheless, are paradoxically expanding what with the Lubavitch sect’s Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson encouraging his shluchim (messengers) to open up Chabad houses where the indigenous observant or returnee can experience a full Sabbath, and, as well, other communities doing outreach. Thus, with the help of the Al-mighty, the Jew shall increase despite these numbers as he learns and observes ritual and humane deeds (mitzvos) and that G-d created the world for this very purpose.

We have 3300 years of testing under every possible condition to prove that [Torah still works]. How and why it works is not really so relevant. Is there anyone who refuses to eat because he has not yet fathomed the workings of the digestive tract? (Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Seventh and Last Lubavitcher Rebbe.)

Sage Adin Steinsaltz also encourages the unique among the conquered, to craft one by one, Talmudic centers throughout the Diaspora. The Jew, who, at all odds at a time when Israel and her oral tradition could easily be forgotten, not only did not disappear but also flourished in scholarship and dignity during the longest running 2700-year sojourn in Babylonia. And that the Jew can be himself by returning to the original design of his own being.

CHAPTER II

A SNAPSHOT OF A PERSONAL NOTE

It is the late 1940s. I peek from my bedroom into the parlor where family and friends are listening to the radio. Too young to fully understand what is going on, I hear something about the United Nations reviving Jewish nationalism.

Around the same time, I am sitting in a movie theater. Between movies, I see a newsreel about the genocide culled three years earlier foreshadowing the National Socialist Party’s Gestapo. It showing the uniformed storm-trooper calling for Kristallnacht, the Night of the Smashing Glass, of all Jewish-owned commercial storefronts; the trooper flashing signs Germans, defend yourselves! Don’t buy from the Jews. Jolted, I plan not to discuss the Holocaust to my future children while they are still themselves young.

The Third Reich dumps another load of newcomers onto the campgrounds to join the smiling escort to the rickety barracks where a group of ten men hobble to a cobbled oasis of prayer; soon to be gone from the rumor of genocide fast