Miriam Rinn
Conference considers whether charities need more regulation
Naomi Levine snapped the black-suited attendees to attention at the inaugural conference on charity governance hosted by NYU’s George H. Heyman Jr. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising when she announced, “The boards of foundations [that were defrauded] were accessories to the [Bernard] Madoff disaster.” Levine, the founding executive director of the Heyman Center, was one of the organizers of the conference, as well as a speaker. The conference was presented against a background of swelling criticism of nonprofit governance from Congress, from judges, and from the nonprofit sector itself.
Yiddish-lovers go to camp
I visited Yiddish Vokh, the week-long immersion camp in the Berkshires, because I was feeling nostalgic for the language I had grown up hearing every day, the language I had learned to speak first, then rejected for another richer, far more versatile tongue, then discovered that I hadn’t forgotten at all and began to speak again, haltingly at first, then with more fluency, with my mother, my aunt, and other older relatives. Then my aunt died, and later my mother, and suddenly there wasn’t anyone with whom to speak Yiddish. So I missed it. Or maybe I missed them, or I missed the beginning of my life as I get closer to the end. As they say, it’s complicated.
So I drove up the Taconic in pouring rain to see what — and who — was happening at Yiddish Vokh. I had been sternly forewarned by a young voice on the phone that English was strongly discouraged, so I half expected a group of older people who had learned the language from parents and grandparents, with a sprinkling of younger academic types — the Yiddish ethnography crowd.
Tenafly volunteer tackles new career: Filmmaking
I already had a very strong connection to Nahariya before the [2006 Lebanon] war started,” Avi Naiman said in a recent interview with the Jewish Standard. “I knew what these people were going through, what the million and a half civilians were going through.”
What they were going through — constant bombardment by Hezbollah rockets —is the subject of two documentary films that Naiman, a resident of Tenafly, has just completed and hopes will be seen by Jews and non-Jews alike.
