The Binding of Isaac.
CREDIT: Will Deutsch

The Jewish mother we know: over-involved, long-suffering, a nag who gives her kids her all—and never lets them forget it.

Or at least we know enough to know, from our evolved 21st-century perch, that the old stereotype no longer applies and that the jokes it gave rise to have pretty much lost their zing.

The Jewish father is harder to place. He doesn’t even offer a caricature to debunk.

We can say this much: He’s at the office, in the study house, on the road. He is—or at least, historically, has been—a figure distinguished, as much as anything, by his absence. Even when home, he’s preoccupied—tuning the radio to news of far-off wars, hiding behind his newspaper, trying to obscure himself behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. And then there are instances when the Jewish father just ups and leaves. The Forward of yore published whole galleries of missing husbands, men so intoxicated—or perhaps overwhelmed—by the New World, they’d simply lost themselves in it.

Seen in this light, it’s no wonder the Jewish mother became such an overbearing figure. She had to pick up the slack.

***

The Jewish father’s aloofness is not a recent development. It can be traced back to the very beginning, to Abraham. He’s a man so devoted to his God—an abstraction no one else had come to believe in yet—that he’s prepared to kill his favorite son, Isaac. Some have attributed this willingness to a species of blind faith, but I’m partial to a different reading. Yes, it’s true that when called to action, Abraham appears ready. “Hineni,” he says. “Here I am.” But as father and son ascend the mountain together, and the horror of the task ahead comes into focus, Isaac calls to Abraham. “My father,” he says plaintively. And the reply is the key, for in responding to his boy Abraham employs the same formula he used to answer God. “Hineni,” he says. But this time around, the “here” signifies not the seeker’s readiness for duty but the father’s allegiance to his son. And this is the essence of Abraham’s trial: It springs not from undivided devotion, but a double pull—to God and to his son, to the celestial and the terrestrial, to the world of abstraction and the world of the real.

Even in the modern world, where God has come to occupy a less commanding place, the Abrahamic template persists. In what can be seen as the 20th century’s paradigmatic story of the tension between Jewish father and son—the relationship of Franz and Hermann Kafka—God’s diminished place (which, seen another way, can be understood as the shift away from religious observance) is central. In the 45-page lament that has come to be known as the Letter to His Father, Kafka bemoans the shrunken brand of Judaism that his father had passed on to him. “We might both have found each other in Judaism,” he says wistfully. Instead, they have estrangement, coldness, silence. In a way, Hermann and Franz Kafka invert the model established by Abraham and Isaac. With the Kafkas, it’s the son whose gaze is focused heavenward and the father who—with his appetites, his loud voice, his bourgeois respectability—is rooted to the earth. The roles are reversed, but the gulf remains.

As literary artifact, Kafka’s letter is extraordinary, but in the feeling it voices, it is far from unique. In his biography of Paul Celan, John Felstiner reports of the poet’s once having said that in Jewish homes Kafka’s anguished letter had to be written “over and over again,” generation after generation. That such a sentiment could have been voiced by one whose own father died while in Nazi captivity makes it doubly poignant.

***

Does a discussion of Jewish fathers and sons have to be so relentlessly bleak? It’s a vexed relationship, sure, but does it yield only tragedy? Not necessarily. There can be common ground. There is, after all, baseball.

Michael Chabon, who has written searchingly on the question of aloof fathers, has said that in spite of all the indignities the game has suffered since its mid-century heyday—artificial turf, the designated hitter, free agency, drugs—baseball “is still a gift given by fathers to sons.”

I’m not sure what Chabon was getting at here—my own father has never been a baseball fan—but I can venture a guess. Baseball may be a game of runs, hits, and errors, but it’s also a game of silences: the pause between pitches, the interval between innings. Following a game can mean eying the action on the field or watching the flag billow atop the flagpole. Sitting in the bleachers, the spectator, like Abraham on Mount Moriah, can be connected at once to heaven and earth.

Judaism has long offered its own version of this—you might even call it our national pastime—an activity that mixes close scrutiny with detached reflection, the concrete and the abstract, black and white: the study of text. Books are the gift that our fathers have bequeathed to us. The most notable example here, of course, is the five-volume set gifted by God (the aloof father par excellence) at Sinai. Notable, too, is that for all that kept Kafka and his father apart, it was with a sheaf of paper that Franz tried to bridge the gap.

There isn’t much of a tradition of home-schooling among Jews nowadays, of fathers and sons sitting and learning together, but it was once more than just a tradition: It was an obligation. The words avi and mori—my father and teacher—were once, like salt and pepper, a natural pair. It’s amazing—and more than a little humbling—to think that the great medieval scholar Rashi, commonly regarded as the “father” of all the commentators who followed him, was, from the age of 5 onward, taught chiefly by his own father, who was not a great scholar but a poor vintner.

***

My own son, Ezra, isn’t quite ready to be a full-time student—he’s not yet 2—but when the time comes, the economic realities of 21st-century life are most likely going to keep me from being his primary teacher. Instead, I’ll spend my days working in this ethereal realm, trying to figure out what it means to be a Jew today. Happily, every now and then, thoughts of something he’s said or the gallery of pictures I keep on my hard drive let me float down to earth, but, inevitably, after a few minutes, duty will call.

Even during the little time Ezra and I get to spend together each day, I’ll feel the pull of the greater world: the Blackberry, the bank statement, or, lately, the set of ruminations recorded here. But then, as bedtime nears, we’ll gather up a pile of books and lie together side by side. We’ll read and marvel, move swiftly through a book we’ve come to know well or, sometimes, linger on a familiar page and find things we’ve never seen before. As the time wears on and sleepiness begins to take hold of him, he’ll inch closer to me, sometimes so close that by the time he’s ready for bed—a moment he’s come to signal by declaring “Paci, Night-Night”—there’s really no room between us at all.

In 1990, retired and at loose ends, Kirshenblatt picked up a paintbrush and began painting images from his youth. The images served as a complement to an extended series of interviews Kirshenblatt began with his daughter, New York University folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in the late 1960s. These conversations culminated with the 2007 publication of They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust, a panoramic, profusely illustrated portrait of Kirshenblatt’s hometown, compiled by father and daughter. The volume served as a companion to an exhibition first shown at the Judah L. Magnes museum in Berkeley, California, and, later, at The Jewish Museum in New York. The exhibition is still to travel to Amsterdam and Warsaw.

As I wrote in a review in 2007, the book managed to offer a new visual language for describing prewar Eastern European life. In stark contrast with the black-and-white record that had made up our vision, Kirshenblatt’s paintings were untainted by the horrors to come. They offered a picture not of Polish Jewish life as it was before tragedy struck, but simply as it was. The book was a unique achievement: the product at once of scholarly rigor and a boy’s sense of wonder, respect for the dead, and an even greater respect for the living, ethnographic exactitude and artistic style.

At a time when the scholarly establishment is often at odds with the survivor community, Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s collaboration offered a rare synthesis of memoir and scholarship—and we are the richer for it.

Related: Portrait of a Lost Town [Tablet]

What to make of such an intersection? There’s maybe a sociological explanation: there is, of course, no shortage of Jews working in film. There’s a psychological explanation: documentaries about parents can be seen as a species of therapy—albeit in sessions that last around 90 minutes rather than 50. But there’s also the temptation to move beyond the realm of social and behavioral science and reach for something more ancient: the commandment to honor one’s parents.

It’s an unconventional definition of honoring, to be sure. Many of the filmmakers drawn to the nascent genre have had complicated relationships with their parents—or, in some cases, no relationship at all. And so, there’s an element of score-settling involved. (Just look at the picture of William Kunstler that accompanies the article, and it quickly becomes apparent that this is not hagiography.) Yet, it’s clear that what animates these documentaries is a desire to understand—to understand the importance to the broader world of figures who, in the filmmakers’ eyes, once existed only as moms and dads. And what emerges, more often than not, is a sort of grudging respect. Besides, there’s a name for films about family members made without any bite: we call those home movies.

Filmmakers’ Controversy: Their Dad [NYT]

To recap: the case in question concerns a 12-year-old boy, referred to court documents simply as “M,” whose application to London’s Jews’ Free School was rejected on the ground that his mother’s conversion to Judaism was not overseen by Orthodox rabbis. The case has forced a reexamination of whether Judaism is a religion, a race, or an ethnicity. And if there’s anything recent history has taught us, it’s that such discussions rarely yield easy answers.

Among the curious facets of the case is a 2006 law stipulating that in busy years parochial schools—which in Britain receive public funding—can give preference to applicants based on religiously-based criteria. In busy years. But what about the light years? Does the law not force the religious authorities in charge of parochial schools to accept students they would otherwise deem ineligible?

One of the more misguided-seeming solutions to the problem of how to gauge Jewishness if not by matrilineal decent was the Court of Appeals’ introduction of a “religious practice test,” which gives points for things like going to synagogue and doing charitable work. Under such a test, who is deemed most worthy? The student who donates the most? Who prays the longest? The flagellant?

Among those painted as hardliners in the ongoing debate is a Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet. To underscore his point that matrilineal descent is all that concerns him, and that observance matters not at all, he has said that “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish.”

To our mind, the rabbi makes a valid point. There’s just one problem: his position seems to be at odds with his country’s laws.

Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question [NYT]

Ill. High Court OKs ‘Jews Only’ Inheritance [AP]

These worthless Machines now stand directly in the way of the sale of good ones. Their existence causes great pecuniary loss to us…. We, therefore, have an extensive and direct interest in having all bad Sewing Machines finally withdrawn from the market, and our new improved ones substituted in their place.

As a result of the gambit, Singer sales grew that year by 50 percent, and the fortune that those sales helped amass brings us back into the world of 21st-century politics and ideas. The New Republic magazine owes its current existence, at least in part, to the fortune inherited by Singer heiress Anne Peretz, wife of TNR editor-in-chief and part owner Martin Peretz. Ironically enough, recent posts on The Vine, TNR’s environment and energy blog, have been lukewarm on “Cash for Clunkers,” arguing that the program’s potential environmental benefits will, in the end, be quite modest.

Vested Interests [The Atlantic]

Woke up at 5:30. Total of three hours of sleep. Finished health care strategy memo around 2 and then spent a half hour reading Mondoweiss on the separation wall. Good stuff. Examined face through bloodshot eyes. That beak! It’s not getting any smaller. Thought the mustache would maybe minimize it, but all it does is make me look more hairy. Caught glimpse of Washington Monument out the window. Kind of reminds me of the mezuzah that hung on the door of grandma’s Lower East Side tenement. What a horror show that place was. Reeked of cabbage and B.O.

Stumbled over to WH. Oh, do I love the look of all the lissome shiksas as they head down to the Metro. Sure, they’re all scrubbed and focused now, with their iPods and their briefcases, but who knows what mischief they were up to just a few hours ago. Happy to see they finally got my nameplate on my office door. It’s only been a half-year. Probably should have changed the name when I had the chance. Back in Chicago, it worked. They like their ethnics there. Here, it’s just a liability. Even that great Jew Netanyahu de-Judaized his name back when he was fresh out of MIT. Ben Nitay. Who was he trying to kid? What if I’d been Dave Axel? Could have been anything. Could have been the front man in a rock band. Could have been a man in my own right instead of pulling the strings from the sidelines. Meeting with Conference of Presidents today. Lord help me. Hope they don’t make a big stink over the food options again. I guess under W they would ship a whole smorgasbord down from Brooklyn whenever the Jew crew came to call. I think all they’ll have in the Roosevelt room is mixed nuts. Good. Let ’em starve. Maybe I’ll just sit it out. Obama can handle them without me. Seeing the vein in my neck bulge as they go on and on about the “special relationship” might just throw him off his game. Better get that Hebrew “Obama for President” sign out of the closet. And definitely get rid of this map of greater Palestine. Health care strategy session at my place tonight. Should probably order some pizza. Have Melanie call Bella Napoli. Should probably get an assortment of pies. Obama’s so picky. You know what, screw it. Let’s just get three pepperoni.

It’s a provocative, if debatable, position. It’s also a curious one coming from an author who, in a decidedly unimaginative move, lifted the premise of his prize-winning book from another novelist.

‘Life of Pi’ Author Is Said to Get $3 Million Deal [NYT]

One is tempted to wonder how differently things might have turned out if instead of a camera-hiding sleuth, PETA had sent these two beauties to Iowa. But, then, maybe Capitol Hill and Postville aren’t all that far from each other. In the old joke, aren’t the two things you’re never supposed to see produced sausages and laws? And there’s another commonality between Congress and a kosher slaughterhouse: a professed aversion to pork.

Video: Peta Parades Playmates for Vegans [Politico]

Now that the movie’s in theaters, it’s interesting to look back at the piece. Our verdict: it’s a bit defensive, gets a couple of things wrong (Brüno doesn’t say that it was the Jews who should return the pyramids) and raises a question or two (we’d love to know the identity of the “respected Middle East expert in Washington” who made the interview happen), but on the whole Alpher comes out looking OK.

In a review of the movie published in the latest issue of The New Yorker , Alpher comes off looking better still:

[Brüno] even gets Israeli and Palestinian officials together at the same table, holding their hands while he sings a song of (though not in) perfect harmony. It’s horribly awkward, sure, yet the actual questions he puts rely on tired malapropism—mistaking Hamas for hummus, say—and, if you look at the faces of the negotiators, you don’t see dumb humiliation. You see tough, weathered types who have met many dunderheads in their time, and this fop is no different—he’s nothing to them, a speck, and they’ll brush him off the instant he leaves the room.

Who knows, maybe Alpher will be the rare dupe who comes out of a Baron Cohen project with a boost.

What Kind of Interviewer Confuses Hamas and Hummus? [Forward]
Mein Camp [The New Yorker]

By this point, much ink and many pixels have been devoted to highlighting the “Jewishness” of Sacha Baron Cohen’s humor. And, to a certain extent, the point is incontestable. In what amounted to a movie-length wink, the “Kazakh” spoken by his Borat was actually a well-polished Hebrew. And his interest in Hasidic garb predates Brüno by at least a decade. That said, it bears remembering that Baron Cohen is also a Brit, and that he is every bit as much an exponent of British comic traditions as he is Jewish ones. Take, for instance, the scene in his new movie (glimpsed already in the film’s red band trailer) where he shows up for a self-defense class armed first with one and then with two dildos. The scene reminded us, and was, no doubt, inspired, at least in part, not by the time he spent in the Labor Zionist youth group Habonim Dror, his undergraduate thesis on Jews in the American civil rights movement, or his nonagenarian Israeli grandmother, but by a classic Monty Python sketch. Anyway, happy Brüno -release day.

Monthy Python: Self Defence [YouTube]

Truth be told, we’re puzzled. Sure, Palin and Prejean were beauty queens, as was Esther, but beyond that, the parallels start to break down. Let’s start with politics. In the presidential campaign, the McCain-Palin ticket was against dialogue with autocratic regimes. Esther, on the other hand, wasn’t just in favor of engagement with a Persian despot—she married one! And while Palin and Prejean are proud of their outsiderness, convinced they’re being persecuted by elites, Esther was the product of a prominent political family. Her uncle Mordechai was a royal adviser—an inside-the-Beltway figure if there ever was one, the Rahm Emanuel of his day. And talk about family values! Esther’s Persia was about as louche a place as they come. When the whole megillah starts, the king, entertaining some friends, summons Esther’s predecessor, Vashti, to come join the party wearing the royal crown—the crown and nothing else, commentators say.

And so maybe the Christian conservatives should cut it out with the Esther comparisons and leave the name to a worthier heiress, someone who embodies the queen’s spirit in all its worldliness and complexity.

Palin Joins Miss California in the Queen Esther Pageant [USA Today]

Does he have a shot? In considering his prospects, it’s perhaps instructive to look to other Jews who’ve tried their luck in The Land of the Midnight Sun. Take, for instance, Joel Fleischman, the city-slick New York doctor played by Rob Morrow on the ’90s drama Northern Exposure who perennially found himself at odds with the mystically-minded denizens of the fictional Alaska town of Cicely.

A San Francisco native, Berkowitz is also a transplant at odds with the ways of his adopted home. He’s a fighter for renewable energy in a state awash in oil money. Last year, he challenged 17-term incumbent Don Young (often referred to as one of the most corrupt men in Congress) and lost.

When Northern Exposure reached the end of its six-year run, a chastened Joel returns home with his tail between his legs. Here’s to hoping that Ethan Berkowitz enjoys a happier fate.

The Jewish Angle on the Palin Resignation [JTA]

UJC Taps Silverman as New Executive [JTA]

A Piece of Brooklyn Perhaps Lost to Time [NYT]

The Court’s argument is strikingly similar to ones used by the Orthodox Union, America’s leading kosher certifying agency, in recent debates over whether animal cruelty or mistreatment of workers played a role in the kosher status of meat produced by the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa. The O.U., like the Israeli court, took a narrow view of kosher certification, arguing that kosher status has to do with food and food only.

I’d be curious to know, though, what the O.U. thinks of the (secular) Israeli court’s recent ruling. If they’re at all in agreement with Israel’s rabbis, the answer is not much.

Court Declares Jew for Jesus ‘Kosher’ [Jerusalem Post]

Chaitman’s position seems to us to be pure chutzpah, but just in case it works, does anyone out there have a recent email from a Nigerian businessman in need of a favor?

Investors Compete for a Piece of the Madoff Pie [NYT]

What if Albania Had Become the Jewish State? [Haaretz]

Except: Sholom Rubashkin, the former CEO of the beleaguered Agriprocessors slaughterhouse, is currently under court order to stay in Iowa’s Allamakee County until his trial. (He stands accused of 142 counts of fraud, money laundering, and immigration-related violations there.) He has, however, gotten special permission—on “religious” grounds—to travel to New York today. What holiday is he observing? The 15th anniversary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s death. The commemoration, Rubashkin’s lawyer said, is of “exceptional religious significance for those of the Lubavitcher faith.” It’s a faith, we imagine, much like Judaism.

Rubashkin Allowed To Leave Iowa For ‘Jewish’ Holiday [FailedMessiah.com]

Partners Agree to Buy Iowa Kosher Slaughterhouse [AP]

Anti-Semitism is stronger than we think. You know, it’s unfortunate. But this has happened to the Jews. It happened in Spain, it happened in Germany, it’s happening—and now it’s going to happen in America if these people don’t start behaving…. It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.

The notion that Jews are somehow bent on their own destruction—and the subset of it concerning Jewish “self-hatred”—has had a long and ignoble history. It’s a theory that’s still very much in use—by all sides—in today’s debates over Israel. But that it was a theory held by a figure as paranoid—and as self-destructive—as Nixon makes a certain kind of sense.

On Nixon Tapes, Ambivalence Over Abortion, Not Watergate [NYT]

It is instructive to compare Norwood’s argument with an exhibition now on view at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. In Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges, the museum tells the story of how a number of German-Jewish intellectuals—shunned by the elite colleges and universities of the Northeast—found homes for themselves at the historically black colleges of the South.

The exhibition rests, at least in part, on the idea that the injustice of the Jim Crow laws sensitized southern blacks to the plight of Jewish refugees. It’s an idea Norwood’s new book seems to underscore.

American Colleges and the Nazis [NYT]
Beyong Swastika and Jim Crow [Museum of Jewish Heritage]

As you may already have noticed from the structure’s contours—the vaulted ceiling, the soaring antenna-like protrusion, and the five-foot “absence” in the southwest corner—the inspiration here is the Hebrew letter mem. In Jewish mysticism, mem is the letter of water (‘mayim’), which is why we’re standing on this raft. Because the value of the mem in the Jewish system of numerology known as gematria is 40, the home’s temperature must be kept at 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit).

“It’s not just designing a shell or something, or a shape that is iconic, but really creating an environment at every level,” he (actually) told the Times.

Libeskind Designs a Prefab Home [NYT]

Now, as anyone who has tried to ride a bike while wearing an ankle-length caftan can attest, Hasidim are not big cyclists. If Glanz was indeed talking about bike lanes with the mayor’s office, it wasn’t about creating them, as the mayor’s office seems to be suggesting, but keeping them outside an ultra-Orthodox enclave. Scantily clad cyclists were making the community uncomfortable, Hasidic leaders told the Post last fall.

Rerouting the flow of civic life in order to satisfy the demands of an influential splinter group—sounds like the recipe for a jailhouse bar mitzvah.

Rabbi in Jailhouse Bar Mitzvah Inquiry Met With Mayor’s Top Political Strategist [New York Times]

‘Jerusalem Post NY Edition’ Hits the Streets Today [Jerusalem Post]

Weekly Standard May Have Been Shooter Target [Politico]
Earlier: If Murdoch Sells ‘Standard’ Will It Lose Its Balanced Israel Stance?

We’re not sure we share his optimism. But, then, what do we know? We’re just American Jews.

Why Do We Insist on a ‘Jewish’ State? [Haaretz]

Stalled Trains [New York]

Then a Jewish lullaby collection—as well as Ezra’s front teeth—appeared on the scene, bringing with them a host of new questions about bedtime.

At Holocaust Site, Obama Calls Denial ‘Hateful’ [NYT]

Wonton & Kreplach Festival
Potato & Scallion Pancake Festival
Tripe & Kishke Festival
Cholent & Chow Mein Festival
Double Cooked Pork & Yesterday’s Reheated Chicken Festival
Beef & Duck Tongue Festival
Whole Steamed & Gefilte Fish Festival
Brisket & Bean Curd Festival
Grandma’s & General Tso’s Chicken Festival
Corned & Orange Beef Festival
Matzo & Fish Ball Festival
Chop Suey & Chopped Liver Festival
Five Spiced Beef & Alka-Seltzer Festival

Egg Rolls & Egg Creams Festival [EldridgeSteet.org]

I grew up in Michigan, where many of our neighbors had a cottage or cabin “up north”—the vast stretch of the state that was even colder than where we lived. These primitive structures could be used for summer pleasures, like swimming in freezing lakes and swatting away flies the size of hummingbirds, and for utterly mystifying winter pursuits, like ice fishing and cross-country skiing. My parents were displaced New Yorkers. Our primary winter sports were reading and brooding.

And, we’re sure, kvetching.

The Summer Home Bust [Slate]