Kid-right window into Israel

"Shalom Sesame" provides a new form and format for Jewish education in the Diaspora.

By EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON
sumsum (photo credit: kobi gideon)
sumsum
(photo credit: kobi gideon)
FURRY BLUE, RED-NOSED global Grover, the famous muppet from Sesame Street, USA, loves falafel. On his trips to Israel, he’s already monstered-itup in a sukka and celebrated a bar mitzva at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. He’s even learned some Hebrew – he knows how to say toda (thank you) and boker tov (good morning, with a distinct American accent). And he’s really having fun meeting all his monster-Muppet and human new Israeli friends.
“I live on Sesame Street,” Grover explains in his familiar screeching, endearing voice, his blue arms waving gregariously like they always do. “But I love meeting people from all over the world and especially Israel.” Grover and his human partner, American TV star actress Annelise van der Pol (“That’s So Raven”), are the stars of a new 12-part DVD series, “Shalom Sesame,” created by Sesame Workshop (the nonprofit group behind Sesame Street productions). After a special appearance at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America in New Orleans in November (in which Oscar the Grouch and Moshe Oofnik opened for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a rousing raspberry), the project will launch in early December at 120 Jewish Community centers.
The series, says Shira Ackerman Simchovitch, director of Educational Content and Outreach for the project, “will provide families with Jewish content and values and help to deepen their engagement with their Judaism. We hope to forge a sense of Jewish identity by providing a taste of Israel, Jewish traditions and culture.”
Simchovitch estimates that the potential audience for the program is approximately 500,000 Jewish children in the pre-school age group in North America.
“Shalom Sesame is providing Diaspora education to Jewish families, many of whom are interfaith families who are not affiliated with the Jewish community,” she says.
“Watching Shalom Sesame, Jewish children can learn about celebrations of Jewish life, they can ‘visit’ unique sites in Israel and learn some basic Hebrew.” The series will meet a crucial need in the Jewish community, she continues. “With increasing numbers of interfaith families and the spiraling costs of day schools, fewer and fewer Jewish children are receiving a Jewish education – some 70 percent of Jewish children in America today are growing up without any formal Jewish education.”
Adds Daniel Labin, former executive director for the project, “Shalom Sesame is about Jewish literacy. We will be providing families with enough of an entrance so that they can engage with central concepts of Judaism. This is an awesome tool – it allows the families, no matter where their Jewish engagement is, to go deeper, to learn something new, to figure out what their Judaism means to them, to become part of the Jewish family. The muppets make it all fun and entertaining. That’s their beauty – they can communicate content that would otherwise be pedantic or boring.”
The first Shalom Sesame, combining segments from Sesame Street and its Hebrew counterpart, Rehov Sumsum, was produced in 1986 and released again in 1990. The home video (and later DVD) sold over one million copies and continues to sell as many as 20,000 a year, making it, says Labin, a top-selling Jewish educational title.
But the style and the format were outdated.
And furthermore, says Simchovitch, “the educational needs of the community have changed. The Jewish community faces greater diversity than ever before. And Israel has changed, too. Not only have Jewish educational materials not kept up with the changes in content, they have not kept up with the advances of the new technological platforms, either. Jewish educational and curricular materials just don’t take into account what kids want to see and how they want to see it.
“We decided to harness the deep affection for the muppets with quality of content, so the series can be the beginning of a point of connection for Jewish families throughout the world,” she explains.
IN THE SHALOM SESAME STORYline, Grover and van der Pol travel to Israel and meet the residents of Rechov Sumsum, Israel’s own multicultural, multilingual version of Sesame Street. The episodes are based on the classic Sesame Street formula, including studio pieces with muppets and humans, animations and the familiar combination of didactic yet childcentered visuals, rhymes and rhythms that keep children watching. In addition to van der Pol, Shalom Sesame will also have several celebrity appearances, including kidpleasers such as US entertainers Jake Gyllenhall, Debra Messing, Debi Mazar, Christina Appelgate and Greg Kinnear.
Israel, says Simchovitch, is a crucial part of Jewish identity. “Jewish children around the world aren’t always aware of the Hebrew and Jewish calendar, which is rooted in Israel – it makes little sense to small children to talk about planting trees on Tu Bishvat in Chicago when there are six inches of snow on the ground. But if they understand spring in Israel and that the shkaidiot (almond trees) are blooming – they can understand the holiday and the values it represents. It can become part of their lives.”
Segments include shofar blowing for Rosh Hashana, monsters building the sukka, an Extreme Makeover of the Temple for Hanukka, featuring Maccabee-dressed Muppets, a Tu Bishvat outing, setting the Shabbat table and even a friendly showdown between rival rabbis Hillel and Shamai, complete with Western drawl narration, as well as animated scenes teaching Hebrew letters and words.
Like American Sesame Street, the shows open in candy-colored animation, with flowers, puffy clouds and a beautiful blue sea. Viewers land on Rehov Sumsum, which presents a diverse, multicultural society, just like Sesame Street. Here, Grover meets his monster and human cousins – Avigail, a 3- year-old Muppet who is constantly asking questions; Moishe Oofnik, Oscar the Grouch’s character cousin; Mahboub, a 6 year old Arab Israeli, and Brosh, everyone’s thoughtful friend. The carefully rainbowed human neighbors include Lemlem, an immigrant from Ethiopia; Boris, a 17-year-old who came from Russia by himself; kippawearing Kobi, who owns an antique shop, and Shoshana, everyone’s ideal, practical, loving, caretaking grandmother, who speaks English with a combination Israeli and Eastern European accent and is a family friend of van der Pol’s character.
Supported by the Gruss Lipper Family Foundation, the Gruss Life Monument Funds and the Jim Joseph Foundation, as well as by several other Jewish family and philanthropic foundations, the 12 segments of Shalom Sesame are part of a larger plan of marketing and distribution. Some segments have already been booked for showing on some PBS channels, and they will also be shown, dubbed, on Israeli TV, as “Shabbat Shalom Sumsum.” The production is also linked with Kveller.com, an outgrowth of the popular MyJewishLearning.com website, which will provide manuals and curricular materials for educators and families, and with the JCCA, the umbrella organization of Jewish Community Centers in America, which will host Shalom Sesame-related events, including the early-December launch.
Mark Horowitz, director of the Early Childhood Department for the JCCA, says that providing adults with the tools to teach their children is crucial. “Shalom Sesame is not a primer on how to live a Jewish life. But many parents, who are so successful in their professional lives, are terrified to even begin to talk to their children about Judaism because they feel they have no background, and no knowledge. And many liberal Jewish parents are uncomfortable talking to their kids about God. The adult programming for Shalom Sesame will provide them with the tools to begin the conversations at the dinner tables.”
Shalom Sesame, like Sesame Street, is kid-centered, but definitely also winking at adults. “Children and adults co-experience watching Sesame Street,” says Gary E.Knell, president and CEO of Sesame Workshop. “Adults really enjoy reliving their own childhood experiences of watching Sesame Street.’
SHALOM SUMSUM IS PRODUCED by the Hop! cable channel in Israel, which is also the co-producer of the Hebrew version, Rehov Sumsum and the Arabic version, Shara’a Simsim. The scripts were prepared and reviewed by a team of experts in Jewish education, spanning, Simchovitch says, the spectrum of Jewish affiliation from Chabad to Reform.
“We tried to come up with something that would be accessible to everyone. One of our biggest challenges was not to alienate anyone in the community. But we also know you can’t please everyone. If someone sees inviting Mahboub [the Arab muppet] into the sukka as offensive – well, at least that person, however misinformed, knows enough to have that opinion, and is therefore not part of the great unaffiliated Jewish group that we are trying to reach.”
Says Daniel Septimus, CEO of MyJewishLearning and kveller.com, “We will have significant inter-connections between Shalom Sesame and our websites. And not every article or piece that we write will be for everyone. But I am confident that everyone will find something of interest and significance for their Jewishness.”
Sesame Street, says Labin, “is a gigantic Rorschach test – it evokes in everyone reactions and sensitivities. Sure, for some it’s not diverse enough and for others it’s too pluralistic. That’s true for all of the Sesame Street productions. We definitely emphasize similarities, not differences, because this series may be one of our last hopes to create a sense of shared Jewish peoplehood. Yes, there are some people in the Jewish world who oppose diversity and multiculturalism, and there are some who would not accept that Lemlem is a Jew if she didn’t covert. But Israel is truly a multicultural country, with awesome diversity, and that is something that we are very proud of.”
Sesame Street is shown or co-produced in some 125 countries around the world, and this demand always requires a delicate balance – promoting the show’s core values, such as optimism and tolerance, for children who live in conflict-fraught and exclusionary societies, including the Balkans and Northern Ireland.
The show is localized, explains Shari Rosenfeld, vice president of International Projects and Business Development for Sesame Workshops. “Each country has a distinctive streetscape, live-action segments featuring local kids and a unique crew of Muppets, and uses a bank of studio segments produced by Sesame Workshop. Bangladesh’s ‘Sisimpur’ uses some traditional Bangladeshi puppets, and South Africa’s ‘Takalani Sesame’ features Kami, an orphaned HIV-positive Muppet.”
On Rehov Sumsum, there are no fights between secularists and haredim or between Arabs and Jews. There are no politics. “We build on the trust factor – Sesame Street is uniquely positioned as a global brand. We emphasize getting along. We believe that on the basis of their similarities, the children will also be able to respect and deal with their differences,” says Rosenfeld.
Indeed, a joint Israeli-Palestinian venture was launched in 1998 and was meant to teach coexistence. But even then, in the heady days of Palestinian-Israeli cooperation before the second intifada, the coproduction quickly deteriorated into political disagreements and arguments over the heights of the muppets and who has the right to claim humus as a national food.
Sesame Street also avoids religion and theology. “This was tricky for us at times,” acknowledges Simchovitch. “It means that we really crystallized our educational goals for the series around the values of Judaism. We emphasized values such as working together when the Muppets rededicate the Temple for Hanukka or hakhnasat orhim [hospitality] with the story of Abraham and the three visitors and inviting people into your sukka.”
The organizers believe that Shalom Sesame can serve as a model for diaspora education for other groups; the show is already being studied for a version for the Arab community, known as the Sesame Mosaic Project, and the Indian diaspora in the US. “Engaging with their home or ancestral country is an important part of all children’s identity,” says Knell.
“The Muppets are taking us on a journey to ourselves and our history. The Muppets are awesome,” Labin concludes.