He began psychotherapy at age 4 and started using hard drugs at 12. By the time he was 15 he had flunked out of junior high three times, been falsely accused of rape, had stays in various mental institutions, and, oh yes, spent six weeks a year in the Satmar community in Brooklyn, where his deaf father, who also had Gaucher’s disease, had remarried.

“I was just in this huge identity middle ground,” Kasher, who is hearing, said in an interview, reflecting on his troubled teenage years.

Back then he lived most the year in Oakland, Calif., with his brother, now an Orthodox rabbi at the University of California, Berkeley, and his mother, a secular Jew who is also deaf. They were on welfare, and Kasher was one of the only white kids in a nearly all-black school. His mother, unsure of what to do with Kasher, had him in and out of mental institutions, rehab centers and, when he was sober enough for school, special-ed programs for the seriously mentally disabled.

“Smart-stupid; black-white; religious-secular” — either side of any of those identities never quite fit, making it hard for him to find his place anywhere, Kasher said. Drugs became his refuge. “When I found a group of derelicts in the back of school, they taught me how to smoke pot and drop acid,” he said. And suddenly, “it made me feel good.”
LINK:http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/books/here_absurdity

This is what the parents of 24-year-old Hannah Horvath, played by series creator, director and writer Lena Dunham, tell her over dinner. She is two years out of college working as an unpaid intern at an indie publishing house living in a crappy apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn with a roommate while being heavily subsidized by her professor parents.

Sound familiar? It should. Over the last half-decade, countless articles have chronicled the exploits and failings of the Millennials, the generation whose experience is being represented on this show. And as many accounts have noted, this cohort has had a more difficult time than previous generations finding jobs and adult identities, with some remaining dependent financially on their sympathetic Boomer parents. Hannah’s own father, when confronted by the pathetic sight of his daughter, high on opium tea, mumbling on the floor, declares to his wife, “It’s hard for me to watch her struggle.” He is undoubtedly echoing the sentiments of many a parent who has mailed a check to his post-college child.

But watch them struggle we will, and it won’t be pretty. However it’s a particular type of struggle and not one that is very easy to get behind. “Girls” is not the story of underdogs, the children of immigrants or even a young adult from a middle-class background struggling in a recession that has been particularly hard on recent graduates. It follows four daughters of upper-class privilege — Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and college student Shoshana. These young women are not encountering institutional barriers to success but their own too-fortunate upbringings, which reinforced the idea that the lives and careers that awaited them were special and meaningful. They were not expecting boring nine-to-fives where no one saw them as unique snowflakes who have lived enough to write memoirs, as Hannah is doing while her parents foot the bills. (Hilariously, hers seems to be about six pages long, as befitting a 24-year-old who hasn’t been a child soldier, battled a life-threatening illness or escaped from a cult.)

One blogger humorously suggested that the series could be renamed “First World Problems.” And in that, you can detect the majority of the criticisms of the program. After being feted by nearly every major critic before its April 15 premiere on HBO, the backlash, which was predictably fierce, has largely been about the white privilege of the characters, how the problems of the characters are hardly representative of Millennial women with student loans, or from the lower socioeconomic strata, or who work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Which is to say, most of them.

Add to this casting decisions — in addition to Dunham, who is Jewish and the daughter of artist Laurie Simmons, the other three women are from equally if not more prestigious backgrounds – that make the cries of “class/racial privilege” seem even more credible. The other three leads in the pilot are played by Allison Williams, the daughter of NBC News anchor Brian Williams; Zosia Mamet, progeny of the famed playwright David Mamet; and Jemima Kirke, the daughter of the drummer of the rock band Bad Company. While all four are quite good in their parts — the acting throughout is naturalistic — the choices do seem a little culturally tone deaf. It’s one thing to watch a show about privilege. It’s quite another, more uncomfortable thing to watch one cast entirely comprised of its beneficiaries, which is then touted through its marketing and via interviews as representing all women.

While white privilege and class privilege are certainly nothing new on television — “Two and a Half Men” is a show about white male privilege if ever there was one — it is not entirely unfair to criticize “Girls” on these grounds, either. Unlike “Men” and many of the female-centric comedies that premiered this fall, which merely aim to be funny, “Girls” seems to aspire to do more than get laughs. It aims to be a realistic depiction of young women today. And this generation, which has been frequently called “multiracial,” helped elect President Obama and protested economic inequality en masse at Occupy Wall Street. Some awareness of these “facts on the ground” would be welcome, especially when one chooses to set it in Brooklyn, which is actually only one-third white.

While I definitely subscribe to the write-what-you-know camp (hello — I primarily write for Jewish publications), I guess I’m disappointed that Dunham seems to “know” so little of New York, much less the world. Thus far, her work, which also includes the semi-autobiographical feature, “Tiny Furniture,” has betrayed a stunning lack of curiosity about other strata of the city in which she was born and raised.

I really wanted to like this show. Not am I only part of its target demographic (albeit at the tail end) — I’m 29, I live in Brooklyn (in addition to being born and raised here) and have a creative career — but I loved the idea of a woman like Dunham, at the age of just 25, being given unprecedented creative control over a series. And perhaps because I and many others like me had been hoping for more, we were bound to be disappointed.

Over at Jezebel, Dodai Stewart writes, “If ‘Girls’ was merely a terrible show with zero potential, none of this would be up for discussion. Part of the problem is that the creator, Lena Dunham, and the premise — a kind of more realistic ‘Sex and The City’ — have so much potential.”

And she’s right — there is actually stuff to like about “Girls.” The female characters aren’t total caricatures. They don’t fit neatly into archetypes — the creative one, the smart one, the prim one and the slut — as they did on the show’s predecessor, “Sex and the City.” The dialogue felt natural even if a bit too much of it referred to social media. (We get it — kids these days narrate their lives on Twitter and don’t use their phones as phones.) It was also squeamishly entertaining to watch the least sexy sex scene I’ve ever seen on television. It was a nice change of pace from the highly stylized iterations we typically see on TV where everyone’s always having fun and no one’s head accidentally hits the headboard. And in this television season where writers have used “vagina” as a punch line, as though the term in and of itself was humorous, Dunham actually lands a vagina joke that is legitimately funny.

Are bad sex and vag jokes enough to get me to tune in to future episodes? Well, while I’m inclined to give the show another shot and see how Dunham and Co. develop the characters, unfortunately I’m part her target demographic. This means I don’t have a subscription to HBO. Ultimately, “Girls” might be for the parents of post-collegiate girls who want to see how their retirement savings are being spent.

“What have I got for you now?” booms the thickly accented master pastry chef Ron Ben-Israel as he overlooks the chefs’ workstations. “Another mandatory ingredient — tahini paste!”

This is “Sweet Genius,” the hit Food Network show that recently began its second season.

Ron Ben-Israel, a former dancer, has gone on to become the host of Food Network's "Sweet Genius." (Food Network)

Chefs compete to earn the coveted title, win $10,000 and impress Ben-Israel, the show’s host, judge and original sweet genius, who often asks competitors to include ingredients not typically found in desserts.

“When you talk about a level of skill and craftsmanship, the other cake purveyors in the city are in awe of Ron’s work,” says Ashlea Halpern, New York Magazine’s strategist editor. “He’s one of the best in New York. He’s perfected the model.”

Ben-Israel doesn’t like to focus on the genius moniker, however, and he was even a bit intimidated by the idea when Food Network proposed it, he told JTA in an interview at Ron Ben-Israel Cakes, his New York bake shop. He prefers to concentrate on the “sweet” part of the title and considers himself more like a guide to the show’s contestants.

For the few who impress Ben-Israel enough to also earn the title, the recognition — and prize money — can be a career booster.

When pastry chef Amos Hayon competed on “Sweet Genius” last season, he was on the verge of returning to his native Israel, having failed to make a living in the United States. After Ben-Israel crowned him a sweet genius and awarded him $10,000, things began to pick up.

In addition to traveling to food festivals nationwide, Hayon is a pastry chef at a restaurant on Long Island in suburban New York.

He calls Ben-Israel an inspiration both for his accomplishments as a baker and as a gay Israeli who realized his dream.

“He’s my guru,” Hayon says. “He gave me a lot of energy, power to do this. Somebody came before me, and I know I can do this also.”

Ben-Israel’s confections can be seen on the pages of Martha Stewart Living, People, New York Magazine and Vogue, and they are staples at such establishments as the Waldorf-Astoria, Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton.

Cakes have always been popular, says Ben-Israel, 54, but television has given bakers permission to make them the main attraction.

“In a Bar Mitzvah you do the candle-lighting ceremony with the cake. Every birthday the cake is the big moment,” he says. Now because of the growing pop-culture spotlight, “every cake-maker knows how important they are. I always knew it.”

The Food Network studios are a long way from Ben-Israel’s beginnings in Tel Aviv, and even further from his original career as a dancer.

He attended a Tel Aviv high school that focused on the arts, and then while he was serving in the Israel Defense Forces in the late 1970s, a friend got him interested in ballet. After completing his mandatory army service, he joined Bat Dor, an Israeli dance troupe.

Ben-Israel then began studying dance techniques across Europe, Canada and the United States. When he arrived in New York City in the mid-1980s, he says he knew he was there to stay.

“I really feel Tel Aviv has a lot, but everything in New York is just more,” he says.

In between applying for grants to fund his dance studies, Ben-Israel began picking up odd jobs designing store window displays and working in bakeries.

“Toward the end of my career, grants were drying up and I needed to support myself,” recalls Ben-Israel, who had grown up watching his Viennese mother make fantastic desserts. “I was able to come in [to bakeries] and observe — and with my ego, tell them how to do it better.”

At the age of 36, after 15 years as a professional dancer, he began baking full time. In 1996, while on display in the windows of Mikimoto on Fifth Avenue, his cakes began grabbing national attention and Ben-Israel soon started receiving commissions from De Beers, Bloomingdale’s and Bergdorf-Goodman.

The New York Times dubbed Ben-Israel “the Manolo Blahnik of cakes.”

In 1999 he opened Ron Ben-Israel Cakes in New York’s SoHo neighborhood with one oven and one mixer. As people fled downtown New York after the 9/11 tragedy, he was able to capitalize on lower rents and expand his operation.

Coming from a secular Israeli upbringing, Ben-Israel wasn’t ideologically interested in making his shop kosher, but for a caterer for some of New York City’s biggest hotels, it was a prudent business decision.

He chose OK Laboratories, the Chabad-affiliated kashrut organization headquartered in Brooklyn, which now certifies his shop’s pareve cakes.

The Chabad rabbis, Ben-Israel says, have a certain spirit that has ignited his own passion for Judaism. He never thought about owning separate Passover dishes while living in Israel, but now he owns a set, as well as a dozen Haggadahs, a shofar and a menorah.

“I became more sentimental,” he says. “It’s a matter of age, but also not being in Israel on a regular basis, I miss a lot of the traditions that are just natural in Israel and you don’t even think about it because you’re surrounded by Jews. So I had to distinguish myself.”

Jewish and Israeli cultures have certainly influenced the master baker. Challah, he says, is one of his favorite things to bake — but he doesn’t do just any challah.

“My version has olive oil, semolina flour, honey, and I make six braids,” he says. “It takes the whole day.”

As the son of Holocaust survivors, being Israeli and Jewish are sources of pride for Ben-Israel.

A “textbook second-generation survivor,” Ben-Israel remembers listening to his parents’ stories and realizing an emptiness within them that has trickled down to him. The creativity of baking helps fill that emptiness, he says.

“My parents were artists, so my salvation was to make pretty things — and ultimately delicious things at the same time,” he says.

In 2007, Ben-Israel designed a cake celebrating the 100th anniversary of New York’s Plaza Hotel, which the Israeli conglomerate Elad Properties had purchased earlier in the decade. The connection quickly raised his profile in his homeland. The chef tries to return to Israel at least once a year, and he would love to do an Israeli version of “Sweet Genius.”

While Ben-Israel no longer votes in Israeli elections — he doesn’t believe it’s right for him to vote if he doesn’t live in the country — he maintains a strong sense of pride in Israel and its accomplishments, especially in women’s and gay rights.

Still, he says, there is a long way to go.

“I always admire people in Israel who come out because it’s such a small place and everybody’s looking at you,” Ben-Israel says, noting that while he himself came out in Israel, being openly gay was common at the art school he attended.

Between running his cake shop, hosting “Sweet Genius,” and teaching at The International Culinary Center, founded as The French Culinary Institute, Ben-Israel appears to have time for little else. Still, he continues to seek new challenges.

Perhaps peacemaker?

“The Palestinians do cakes with the same products,” he says. “I’d be open to bridge the gap with sugar and cake.”

Matthew Koven, left, and Roger Ramkissoon stand next to their new L.A. deli truck. (Edmon J. Rodman)

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — It’s not a dinner for schmucks but a lunch served by one.

That may sound harsh, but how else to introduce a new food truck rolling on the streets of Los Angeles called “Schmuck with a Truck”?

On only his eighth day of business, the yellow lunch truck with the likeness of co-owner Matthew Koven painted prominently on the side is parked on a busy West L.A. street at lunchtime drawing the interest and laughs of hungry mostly 20-  and 30-somethings who work in the nearby dot.com businesses.

“This is my rolling restaurant,” Koven says as a stream of patrons stops by to check out his menu.

It’s a menu not for the kosher crowd, but one for deli aficianados. Along with deli standards such as pastrami and Reuben sandwiches, it includes the “Lean schmuck,” sliced turkey on multigrain bread with avocado; the “Oy vey wrap,” roast beef with potato salad and American cheese; and the ultimate Schmuckwich — dark chocolate, peanut butter and fresh banana with grape or strawberry jelly on multigrain bread.

“I’m a Manhattan Jewish boy, a schmuck by default,” says Koven, who seems quite comfortable with the sometime pejorative both as a business name and wry means of self-identification.

“Schmuck” in every day usage is typically taken to mean a foolish or contemptible person, a jerk.

“You gotta be a schmuck to do this,” he says smiling as he explains how his “New York delicatessen on wheels” came to be.

Koven and partner Roger Ramkissoon, who he describes as a “Trinidadian schmuck,” were newbie Angelenos, having left New York only three weeks before.

“I had a Middle Eastern restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was forced to close due to subway construction. Thank you, MTA,” says Koven, who tried to get his truck rolling in New York City but found the required permits difficult to obtain.

After visiting Los Angeles several times to check out the burgeoning food truck scene, Koven saw an opportunity for a deli truck and moved forward with his idea.

“It takes years of training to be a professional schmuck, to come to L.A. and do a deli truck,” he explains. “Dare to be different. My wife and friends loved the name.”

It seems to be working.

“The name attracted me,” says Sherman Chin, who works nearby and walked over to order a sandwich.

Also, the name provides a cover for customer banter.

“Isn’t it time the baby try pastrami?’ Koven asks a very pregnant looking woman, who after scanning the menu orders a pastrami and a hot dog.

Another customer asks for his mustard on the side.

“The left or the right?” Koven responds, not missing a beat.

Baron Cohen, star of the prankster mockumentaries “Bruno” and “Borat,” was about to move out, and the office was bare except for some black-leather furniture, wigs from his turn as a gay fashionista in an antechamber and posters of “The Dictator” looming large.

Notoriously reclusive, Baron Cohen eschews interviews except in character, and on this day he was behind a closed door in a nearby office, where the screenwriters were about to join him to concoct further publicity stunts for the dictator character in advance of the film’s release on May 16.

Among other stunts so far, the writers helped plan Baron Cohen’s spilling “ashes of Kim Jong-il” all over Ryan Seacrest (it was actually pancake mix) while Seacrest was live on camera on the red carpet at the Oscars. They also helped Baron Cohen — er, the dictator — blame “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Zionists” for banning his character from the ensuing Academy Awards ceremony.

There is a philosophy behind even the crudest of their pranks and scenes, the writers say.

“What Sacha always tries to do, with ‘Borat,’ ‘Bruno’ and even ‘The Dictator,’ is to make sure your victims are worthy, so that there’s a satirical aspect to the comedy,” said Schaffer, who like Berg and Mandel is a Harvard graduate in his early 40s with executive producing credits on “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “These aren’t innocent victims. And nobody is going to feel sorry for Ryan Seacrest.” Whether this last is true has been up for debate.

Baron Cohen became an international sensation in 2006 with his character Borat, a sexist, anti-Semitic TV anchor allegedly from Kazakhstan who descended upon the United States only to elicit the worst in American culture. In one cringe-worthy sequence, he enlisted unsuspecting patrons of a country western bar to sing along to his ditty “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” In “Bruno” (2009), his fashionista character tries to broker peace between dour Israelis and Palestinians while confusing the word “hummus” with “Hamas.”

The social satire may be pushed even further in “The Dictator,” Baron Cohen’s first scripted film, for which he shares writing credit with Mandel, Schaffer and Berg. The story spotlights Adm. Gen. Shabazz Aladeen, a fascist, misogynistic, Zionist-hating North African despot who is meant to skewer post-Sept. 11 America as he traipses about New York. Only trailers and a two-minute snippet of the film were available before press time, but the action appears to take off as Aladeen arrives in the United States to address the United Nations, only to be kidnapped, shaved and stripped of his identity and left to wander the city until he is rescued by a naive grocery manager played by Anna Faris.

Along the way, Aladeen spars with his ex-head of security (and “chief procurer of women”) played by Ben Kingsley; teams up with his former top scientist, aka Nuclear Nadal; encounters post-Sept. 11 prejudice; and has a run-in with the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

Will he shake the ambassador’s hand? “He does more than shake his hand,” Schaffer said, declining to reveal more.

During the interview, the three writers, who met while working on the Harvard Lampoon, weren’t above skewering their own Jewishness — or lack thereof. Mandel is an Upper West Sider who attended Hebrew school until his bar mitzvah and not a day afterward, Schaffer was such a prankster at his own religious school that he was expelled, and Berg has a Jewish wife but is actually a Swedish-American non-Jew — not that that prevents everyone from assuming he’s a member of the tribe. Berg, in fact, said he was the inspiration for a “Curb” episode in which Larry David’s prickly character is mortified to discover his divorce attorney, also named Berg, is not Jewish and is thus, he fears, “out to screw him.”

In person, “Curb’s” creator is actually a “total mensch,” unlike the show’s eponymous character, who says all the things David wishes he could say in real life, the writers said: “TV Larry is like Superman to real Larry’s Clark Kent,” Mandel said. “Even though Larry could not be more different than Sacha, what they share is a very businesslike approach to what is funny.”

Baron Cohen’s work hasn’t been without its critics. Back in 2006, the Anti-Defamation League worried that “Borat” might enhance rather than dash anti-Semitism in some quarters; “The Dictator” could well elicit charges of encouraging instead of skewering Islamophobia since the World Trade Center attacks.

In The Jerusalem Post, Palestinian writer Ray Hanania suggested that the observantly Jewish Baron Cohen would do better to satirize his own people instead of “picking on easy targets,” such as Arab dictators.

Mandel, Schaffer and Berg quickly stop joking when confronted with these questions. “Let’s be as clear as humanly possible,” Mandel said. “Technically speaking, the dictator is North African. But he is not Muslim. There is no mention of Muslims, or Muslim humor.

“Of course, Aladeen is clearly not a Zionist,” Berg added. “He dislikes Jews, but only as part of an anti-Zionist, anti-West agenda. To us, he’s always been an amalgam of world dictators, like Kim Jong-il, Idi Amin, Gadhafi and Serdar Turkmenbashi of Turkmenistan,” Mandel said.

The writing team came up with the idea for “The Dictator” after Baron Cohen, who had brought them in to collaborate on “Borat” and “Bruno,” asked them to pitch ideas for a new film. When they described a spoof based on the crazed despots of the world, Baron Cohen was hooked.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” Mandel said of some real-life events that inspired scenes in the movie. Turkmenbashi really did pass a law changing the words for two days of the week to his own name; Kim Jong-il, according to North Korean propaganda, hit nine holes in one the first time he played golf; and Gadhafi traveled with his all-female security force, “so the dictator travels with his virgin guard,” Schaffer said.

And don’t forget the kitschy, pseudo-heroic black-light portraits that Saddam Hussein’s sons hung all over their palaces. “So, in the movie, there’s sort of a black-velvet painting of a muscular Aladeen riding a jaguar, clutching the severed head of Albert Einstein,” Mandel said with a laugh.

The writers describe “The Dictator” as the first mainstream-studio comedy to take on the Sept. 11 attacks and the ensuing fear of Arabs — or people mistaken as Arab — particularly where flying vehicles are concerned.

“We do a scene in which Aladeen is somewhat innocently taking a ride in a helicopter, but it’s really about what the two other passengers, Midwestern Americans, are seeing and hearing,” Mandel said. “He’s having a normal conversation in his native tongue about all the wonderful things that New York has to offer, like the Empire State Building, while the other passengers begin to get worried. Then he’s telling a story about how he crashed his Porsche 911 so he’s hoping to get the new 2012 911. But he couldn’t be more innocent.”

The Arab Spring, which took place while “The Dictator” was shooting, required copious revisions of the script. “None of those countries took into account how much rewriting we had to do,” Schaffer quipped.

But for the trio, anyway, writing a scripted film may have proven in some ways easier than Baron Cohen’s previous mockumentaries.

“Whereas in ‘Borat’ and ‘Bruno’ you’re going, ‘I hope this person says this,’ in a script you just go, he says this,’ ” Schaffer said.

“The Dictator” opens in Tucson on Wednesday, May 16.

A childhood favorite of mine, I knew the day would come when I would read it to my son as part of our bedtime ritual. I immediately recalled that bookstore visit when I heard the news that Sendak had died Tuesday from complications of a stroke. He was 83.

Much has been written about Sendak’s imagination and his uncanny ability to create characters to whom children can relate. Many of the characters in his books were developed based on the Torah stories that his father told him as a child. Sendak has said that he embellished those stories to make them more interesting for children.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I saw the Jewish flavor that peppers Sendak’s works.

The characters in his most well-known children’s story are based on his old Jewish relatives. In some of his stories, Yiddish words interspersed with his poetic English.

“Where the Wild Things Are” is even based on the Yiddish vilde chaya (wild beast), which Jewish parents for generations have used to describe rambunctious children.

Some of Sendak’s stories, including “In the Night Kitchen,” speak to his own fears of the Holocaust. His immigrant parents lost most of their family members in the Holocaust and reminded him that he would have had many more cousins were it not for the Nazis.

Having learned that Sendak was influenced by his father’s nightly bedtime stories drawn from the Torah, I have found real value and meaning in reading Sendak’s books to my own children at bedtime. His children’s stories are my kids’ most requested bedtime books.

Over the years, I’ve read “Where the Wild Things Are” to my children many times. In fact, I recently read it to them in Hebrew.

Just a week ago, my daughter brought home a Hebrew version of Sendak’s masterpiece. His brilliance comes through no matter the language.

Turning the pages of the Hebrew translation, I began to laugh as I recalled the author’s uproarious appearance on “The Colbert Report” earlier this year.

Even at 83, Sendak was still entertaining both children and their parents.

His memorable illustrations and ability to turn scary monsters into lovable friends will live on into future generations, and I look forward to the day when my own children will read the stories of Sendak’s wonderful imagination to my grandchildren.

Rabbi Jason Miller, an entrepreneur, blogger and social media expert, is president of Michigan-based Access Computer Technology. He blogs at http://blog.rabbijason.com and is on Twitter @rabbijason.

Gertrude Berg as Molly Goldberg of "The Goldbergs." (CBS Television)

NEW YORK (JTA) – What do Golda Meir, Natalie Portman and Aviva Shalit have in common? They’re all on JTA’s Top Jewish Moms list for 2012.

With Mother’s Day on Sunday, we present our select group (in alphabetical order but for our final choice):

Bella Abzug — The first Jewish woman elected to Congress, who had two daughters, once famously said, “This woman’s place is in the house: the House of Representatives.” Abzug was a congressional star, but she also was a staunch Zionist, a pioneer in the synagogue and a one-time Jewish Theological Seminary student. What a role model; not to mention those hats.

Robert Edwards – He’s not Jewish or a woman, but the British scientist pioneered the process of in-vitro fertilization, which is used at a higher rate in Israel than in any other country. Arguably, Edwards has birthed tens of thousands of Jewish children. Just don’t ask him to name them.

Amalie Freud — Knowing what we know now about Sigmund Freud, the mother of the father of psychoanalysis must have been one crazy Jewish mother.

“Mrs. Goldberg” (as played by Gertrude Berg) — In her defining role as the irrepressible Mrs. Goldberg, Berg brought a lovable matriarch with a sing-song Brooklyn accent to radio, TV, film and Broadway. She paved the way for other Jewish domestic divas that followed, including Rhoda Morgenstern (played by Valerie Harper) and the Nanny (Fran Drescher), who proved that even a couple of WASP-y kids on Manhattan’s Upper East Side can use a Jewish mom.

Bessie Hillman — When Hillman (then Abramowitz) arrived in Chicago as a teenager in 1905 to escape an arranged marriage back in Russia, she wasn’t going to be just another button sewer earning 5 cents an hour. She started organizing and quickly became a union leader. While she eventually would have two daughters with husband and fellow activist Sidney Hillman, her establishment of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1914 earned her the distinction of being the Mother of American Labor.

Golda Meir – OK, so she wasn’t Israel’s greatest prime minister. But this mother of two who led Israel for five of Israel’s most challenging years remains a favorite among American Jews. Why? One, because they don’t know much about her actual record, and two, because they just love the idea of a skirt-wearing, Milwaukee-raised Russian Jew making tea for global diplomats in her modest Israeli kitchen, plotting out the future of the Jewish state, and giving the Mossad the order to hunt down and kill the terrorists responsible for the 1972 Olympics massacre in Munich. We’re not sure what kind of mom she was to her kids, but she feels like a mother to the Jewish people.

Joan Nathan – Perhaps nothing is more central to being a Yiddishe mama than knowing how to make a good bowl of chicken soup — not to mention brisket, blintzes and borscht (just to name a few b’s). By this measure, Nathan is the tops.

Natalie Portman – This starlet, who seems to be on everyone’s list of favorite Jews, has a new baby, Aleph Portman-Millepied. Who wouldn’t want a talented, unabashedly Jewish, gorgeous, smart, Hollywood star for a mom? (Plus, her fictional children, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia of “Star Wars,” were key to defeating the Evil Empire.)

Aviva Shalit — After her Israeli soldier son Gilad was taken captive by Palestinian militants in a cross-border attack near Gaza in 2006, Aviva and Noam Shalit vowed to do everything in their power to bring him home. With strong parallels to the experiences of Ron Arad and Nachshon Wachsman — Israeli soldiers who never made it out of Arab captivity — there was plenty of reason for skepticism, especially as the years passed. But Aviva and Noam never flagged, mounting a relentless campaign for their son’s release. Last October, their persistence was rewarded when Gilad was returned home (albeit at a very heavy cost to Israel). Jewish mother to the rescue!

Ruth Westheimer — So you think your mother makes you uncomfortable? Try having Dr. Ruth as a mom. Still, you know it’s good advice. Nu, when are you going to get married, already?

Yocheved — She braved Egyptian decree for three months to save her son from certain death, then orchestrated it so he’d be raised in a royal household. And it all paid off: Her boy Moses went on to become the greatest Jewish leader of all time.

The Unsung Heroine — Every day and for thousands of years, Jewish mothers have been making sacrifices large and small to ensure the success of their children and their families, from managing households to raising kids with Jewish values and sensibilities, to giving us the security we need to go out into the world and make something of ourselves. They are not famous because they thought only of us, not themselves. We cannot name them because there are too many. But without them, the Jewish people would be lost. We salute you, Jewish mothers of the world!

(Deborah Fineblum Raub, consulting communications manager at the Jewish Women’s Archive, contributed to this report. For more information on these and other women, please visit the Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia at jwa.org/encyclopedia.)

Every month, PJ Library mails free Jewish-themed children’s books to nearly 100,000 households in North America with a grand ambition: that somewhere between Dr. Seuss and the Berenstain Bears, a child may turn to a book like Vivian Newman’s “Ella’s Trip to Israel” or Laurel Snyder’s “Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher,” and spark a Jewish discussion in a household that doesn’t have enough of them.

“The conversations that take place in the home between parents and children, and parents among themselves, is one of the most important byproducts of this program,” says PJ Library’s director, Marcie Greenfield Simons. “We’re helping Jews on the periphery take those first baby steps to being welcomed by the Jewish community.”

In the past seven years, PJ Library has helped publish more than 200 titles that have filled kids’ shelves in 175 North American communities, become a force in the publishing industry through its mass purchases and spawned two similar programs in Hebrew — one in Israel and one for the children of Israelis living in the United States.

Next month, the organization plans to send out its 3 millionth freely distributed book.

For Harold Grinspoon, the 82-year-old real estate mogul and Jewish philanthropist from Massachusetts who founded the program, PJ Library is about more than just books. It’s meant to be a portal to Jewish life.

“What kind of an educational process are we getting with these kids?” Grinspoon said. “How much are they loving Judaism? Are they baking challahs? Are they dancing and singing and enjoying the joys of Judaism?”

In the absence of an independent, longitudinal study, it’s impossible to say whether this $8 million-a-year program — which is paid for by a 50-50 partnership between Grinspoon’s foundation and local Jewish community partners, including federations, private donors, JCCs, Y’s and synagogues — is having a significant impact on Jewish community engagement or practice.

One Jewish educational professional who asked not to be named said Jewish communities are wasting money delivering free books to mostly middle-class children whose families are, for the most part, already involved in Jewish life.

“To me, it’s about priorities in the Jewish community and how eccentric philanthropists do what they want,” the professional said. “It’s not that there’s a problem with the program, but I question the premise. The logic of you’re giving books to kids and you’ll create lifelong Jews has to get proved.”

PJ Library says most of its recipients hail from households where there were fewer than 10 Jewish books before the deliveries began.

That figure is from a 2010 PJ Library email survey of more than 16,000 recipient households that also showed that 26 percent of respondents were interfaith families, 32 percent were not synagogue affiliated and one-third saying they were unlikely or only somewhat likely to read Jewish content if not for PJ Library.

About three-quarters of respondents said they read the books at least once a week, and the vast majority said it made them feel or think about being Jewish.

The books, which are chosen by a selection committee of educators and editors, run the gamut from explicitly Jewish to barely so.

The themes reflect the personal predilections of the program’s founder, who puts a premium on stories promoting tikkun olam (repairing the world), Jewish summer camp, visiting Israel and contemporary families enjoying Judaism.

Richard Michelson’s “Across the Alley” is a richly illustrated story about prejudice that tells the tale of a black boy and a Jewish boy who live next door to each other but never talk — except at night, when out of view of their friends they become best buddies. It’s mailed to 6- and 7-year-olds.

Latifa Berry Kropf’s “It’s Challah Time!” is a photo-illustrated storybook about baking challah; it’s mailed to 2-year-olds.

Each age group, from 6 months to 8 years old, receives its own age-appropriate books, and all the books include a parents’ guide for further discussion or activity.

“After we get a book, we usually read it for two weeks straight every night,” said Margo Hirsch Strahlberg, a lawyer from Chicago with three children. “For my 6-and-a-half-year-old and my 4-year-old, when we get a book it’s exciting. It’s not really educating us because I send them to a Jewish day school, but it’s complementing what they’re already learning.”

The $100 or so per-household cost of sending a year’s worth of PJ products — 11 books and one CD — is split between the Grinspoon Foundation and the community institutions. The institutions also help market the program to new families and run community events around the books, including pajama Havdalah parties, holiday concerts and intergenerational book readings at senior homes.

Keeping the program free for recipients is the key, PJ officials say, though recipients are asked after a year or two in the program if they’d like to “pay it forward” and make a donation to fund books for someone else.

“The idea that this is a gift from the Jewish community is an important message that each family is getting: You’re part of something bigger,” said Greenfield Simons, PJ’s director.

In the Israeli version of PJ, called Sifriyat Pijama and started in 2009, kids get the books at school as part of a curriculum supported by the Education Ministry. The books are discussed in class before being sent home to some 120,000 Israeli households.

“In most nursery schools they come home with a library book from the school, and they always have to bring them back,” said Medinah Korn, a mother of four in Ramat Beit Shemesh, whose 4-year-old son, Uriel, gets the books through his school. “He’s so excited when he gets one in his knapsack because this one is for keeping.”

The Israeli-American version of the program — called Sifriyat Pijama B’America

Harold Grinspoon, the founder of PJ Library, reads one of the program's books with a gaggle of children. (PJ Library)

(sifriya is Hebrew for library) — uses those same Hebrew books and is geared to children of Israelis living in America who sign up for the program either online or at events hosted by local Jewish day schools.

Next school year, organizers plan to expand the year-old program from 2,000 recipients to 6,000.

“The goal is to give them an appetite to start being affiliated in Jewish life, and eventually increase Israeli enrollment in Jewish day schools,” said Adam Milstein, an Israeli-American investor and Jewish philanthropist from Los Angeles who has put $100,000 into the $600,000 program.

For this initiative, too, half the funding comes from Grinspoon.

Grinspoon is in talks to expand elsewhere in the Jewish world, and PJ already runs an outreach program to boost enrollment in the Russian-speaking Jewish community in New York.

As books become increasingly digitized, PJ Library says it is committed to sticking with the old pulp-and-paper model.

“There’s something incredibly powerful about parents and children snuggling together with a real book in their hands,” Greenfield Simons said. “We’re pretty wedded to this idea.”

Let’s start with the new film. Without giving away anything, let’s just say it goes there. And, of course, Captain America was launched in 1941 with the iconic image of Captain America punching Hitler right in the face, knocking him for a loop. That’s no surprise — Cap (like Superman, Batman, X-Men and so many other superheroes) was created by two Jews: Joe Simon (born Hymie Simon) and Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg).

Kirby grew up on the tough streets of New York’s Lower East Side, the hub of the Jewish immigrant experience. And so it became Cap’s address, too.

As Kirby recalls, the neighborhood was rough and tumble, with street fights a common occurrence. Likewise, Kirby’s doppelganger, Steve Rogers (Cap’s alias), who started as a small weakling too feeble to join the military, was picked on and bullied. But after an experiment performed by Dr. Reinstein (sounds like Einstein), he quickly became a super soldier tasked with aiding the Allied war effort.

All of this may seem like fantastic child’s play; hit the historic rewind button. At about the same time — some 71 years ago, in June 1941 — as Nazi Germany was attacking a city in Lithuania and establishing the Vilna Ghetto, there actually was a small group of heroic Jews who took on the handle The Avengers. This band of Jewish resistance fighters, also known by the more official sounding United Partisan Organization, operated out of the Ponar forest — the same place that fellow Jews from the ghetto were taken to be shot and buried in mass graves.

One of the leaders of this brigade was Abba Kovner, the famous organizer of the Vilna Ghetto uprising who fought back against the Nazis and planned to carry out a mass act of revenge on the German people soon after the war ended.

The story of these Jewish fighters was documented in “The Avengers,” a 1967 book by Michael Bar-Zohar about Holocaust survivors who tracked down Nazi criminals in an effort to avenge their massacred brethren, and later in the 1986 documentary “The Partisans of Vilna” and on The History Channel. For many Jews, the story goes, the fact that huge numbers of Nazi soldiers were allowed to simply go home once the war had ended was intolerable.

Rich Cohen came out in 2000 with a book by the same title, also about those Jews who sought revenge.

“In the winter of 1941, a charismatic young poet named Abba Kovner formed a Jewish guerrilla group in the Vilna ghetto, in Lithuania,” Cohen wrote. “They sneaked through the city’s sewers, blowing up German transports and outposts with homemade bombs. After the war Kovner and his Avengers hatched a plan to poison 8,000 Nazis imprisoned at Stalag 13 in Nuremberg.”

So as you’re chewing on your popcorn, just remember that lurking behind the colorful costumes, special effects and superhero banter is a deeper real-life storyline.

Instead, he finds hope and inspiration in the resilience of the Jewish people. “To me, it’s not who built the concentration camps but it’s those who were able to go in them as inmates and come out and continue,” he says. Seeing “how amazing the Jewish people are — that we can pick up from such an event and continue to call ourselves Jews or to believe in G-d” has given him a new appreciation for life and for faith.

Lebovic, 49, will be in Tucson on Monday, April 30, to talk about his work at Congregation Anshei Israel, where his parents, Ida and Alex Lebovic, retirees from Los Angeles, are members. An exhibit of 20 large reproductions from the book, which also includes essays by Lebovic, will be on display from 7 to 9 p.m.

His haunting images start with photographs that he digitally manipulates in a variety of ways, including drawing and collaging. The images are surreal, “but I like the realistic look so I always use photographs” as a base, says Lebovic, who sold a successful technical illustration company six years ago to devote himself to his art. He is currently working on a Passover Haggadah.

Although “Black is a Color” might suggest a childhood overshadowed by the horror of the Shoah, “I don’t think I had a traumatic childhood,” he told the AJP. “I had a great childhood.”

His father, who survived Auschwitz, spoke of his experiences often, but he was able to do so without being overly emotional. “We had a good relationship. It wasn’t strained,” says Lebovic. But he did feel some guilt, he acknowledges, a need to “do something special” to honor his father’s survival.

Lebovic is the only one among a brother and 12 cousins who is now Orthodox in his observance. “Trying to make sense of things,” he says, “really directed a lot of my life and made me take things a little more seriously.”

“Black is a Color” expresses his struggle to find a balance between “the stories I grew up on from my father … and the idea that I’m supposed to still believe in a good G-d.” He went back to “the real roots of the religion to see if there is any indication there that a Holocaust does not throw Judaism a curveball.” While Lebovic found no answers that can explain the Holocaust, he says, “I felt comfortable with not knowing.”

Copies of “Black is a Color” will be available for $60 at the exhibit. For more information, call Congregation Anshei Israel at 745-5550 or visit blackisacolor.com.