To those of us who are deeply immersed in Downton’s intrigues and romances, this is huge news. If you’re not among the converted, the following will mean little to you, and you should probably skip ahead to another piece. And since we know the series’ creator, Julian Fellowes, is currently writing its third season, now is an excellent time to suggest a few plotlines in accordance with the new religious epiphany:

• Having gotten a taste of sharing their estate with the needy when they turned Downton into a military hospital for the wounded veterans of World War I, Lady Cora should offer to put up a Chabad shaliach, and designate Branson, the chauffeur, as a driver of a mitzvah tank to roam around Yorkshire and convince countryside Jews to put on teffilin.

• Speaking of Branson, he’s more than welcome to marry Lady Sybil. The class differences don’t bother us at all, but it would be nice if he went ahead and converted. You know, continuity! Peoplehood!

• As for Mrs. Patmore, the cook, she seems to be doing much better after her eye surgery, but we still haven’t seen even a shtickle of challah in her kitchen. Braid, Mrs. Patmore, braid!

• As Jews, the Granthams can’t stay away from politics for much longer. With the Balfour Declaration having just been given, it would be nice if Lady Edith decided to move to Palestine. We already know she’s fond of farms, and maybe the Holy Land’s soil is all it would take for her to lay down roots and team up with early Zionist pioneers. She could forthwith be referred to by the staff as an Israel Firster.

• Finally, someone show Violet, the dowager countess, how to be a bubbe. Joining Hadassah may be a good first step in the right direction.

Any more suggestions? Post them in the comments, and we’ll pass them along to Fellowes…

Related: The Aristocrats
Earlier: How Jewish is Lady Grantham?
The Jewish Character in Downton Abbey

Conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute’s Guttman Center for Surveys and the Avi Chai Foundation, the survey, which analyzed the responses of 2,800 Israelis, confirmed the truths I held to be self-evident when I grew up in Israel not too long ago. (Avi Chai is affiliated with the Keren Keshet Foundation, which created Nextbook Inc., Tablet Magazine’s publisher.) Back then—after the arrival of McDonald’s but before the second Intifada—it felt like a given that if you were Jewish you most likely had some sort of relationship with God, regardless of your level of observance. Except for a few pesky atheists, my friends and I all defined ourselves as secular even as we fasted on Yom Kippur, took much pleasure in the way the streets cleared up on Friday afternoons, and directed our prayers—about girls we wished would notice us or older brothers we wished would make it home safely from the front—to God.

Not much has changed, according to this new survey. Yet when the findings were released, many of my colleagues on the Israeli left took to the op-ed pages to register their shock and lament the demise of modern Israel. The survey, went the common cri de coeur, was a sure sign of the impending apocalypse, which would finally turn the Jewish state into an intolerant theocracy.

Writing in Haaretz, journalist Uri Misgav argued that the findings reflected a “depressing ideological situation.” The disturbing thing “about those who believe in the theory of the Chosen People,” he wrote, “is the fear that they are not particularly smart,” perceiving the world on “an infantile theological level” that surely should have been vanquished by reason and modernity.

In the same paper, columnist Gideon Levy sounded even grimmer. “You have to give it to the pollsters,” he wrote. “They let the cat out of the bag. … Israeli society isn’t secular, it isn’t liberal, and it isn’t enlightened.”

It’s easy for me to understand Misgav and Levy. Like them, I consider myself a proud member of the battered and decimated tribe known as the Israeli left. Like them, I look with horror as brutes of all stripes—from hill-dwelling Jewish terrorists to Avigdor Lieberman and his comrades in Knesset—trample democracy’s core values. But in their disdain for and fear of religion, Misgav, Levy, and the lion’s share of the Israeli left fail to understand not only their past but also, more troubling, their future. Unless the Israeli left learns how to stop fearing and start loving—or at least understanding—religion, its chances of advancing a popular agenda are slim.

***

It’s tempting for secular, educated adults to see religion as the flickering remnant of a primitive fire that once guided mankind—a fire no longer necessary now that we have the quiet heat of science, technology, and rational thought. And it’s easy to look at an idea like divine election as nothing more than pure chauvinism. I used to entertain these notions. But two years ago, together with my friend and teacher Todd Gitlin, I decided to grapple with these ideas by writing a book.

What I learned startled me. Far from a simple call to exceptionalism, chosenness is a devilishly complex idea. At the height of the biblical drama, at the moment a collection of disparate tribes are made into a solid nation, God appears to the Israelites at Mount Sinai and bequeaths to them their status as his chosen sons and daughters. “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests,” God says, “and a holy nation.” Why the Israelites? What does it mean to be chosen? Are the children of the chosen also chosen in perpetuity? God never tells.

The result is a never-ending quest, over the course of millennia, to solve this divine riddle. To have been chosen means spending a lifetime wondering about what it means to have been chosen. Some possible answers to this question align neatly with the Israeli left’s worst fears: Much of the settler movement is powered by an understanding of chosenness as a divine mandate to occupy land, even when others are living on it.

Continue reading: Chosenness as a challenge

(Secret note to readers: Lana Del Rey! Sure, there’s nothing Jewish about the pop sensation, but we can’t allow ourselves to be the only site on the entire Internet with nothing to say about her debut album, Born to Die, or her scandalous Saturday Night Live performance, or her status as either the coolest thing in music or a manufactured mess, depends on who you ask. So here we are, talking about Lana Del Rey.)

Jewish continuity and the alarmingly dropping rates of communal organization participation, particularly among young teens. One way to address this question

(… is to just look at Lana’s photo. I mean, does anyone really believe she hasn’t had her lips shot up with collagen? Do yourself a favor and Google Lizzy Grant, which is Lana’s given name and her stage name before she became a prefabricated pop tart. Look at her lips. Compare. I mean, come on.)

is to do whatever we can, as a community, to remained attuned to the needs and concerns of those of us seeking to define their identity outside the confines of traditional institutions. We must

(… admit the simple truth here: the only reason not to completely despise Lana Del Rey as the overprivileged daughter of a real estate tycoon who had her daddy buy her a team of producers to tweak every aspect of her career is that unlike Lady Gaga and other recent, post-modern pop icons, Lana is keeping it old school. She’s a fake, but the right kind of fake, the kind that’s about sex, not dresses made out of meat or bizarre, elaborate performances.)

remain alert, and never stop thinking about the images that, as a community, truly matter to us

(… like Lana Del Rey. I mean, we Jews had Amy Winehouse, who had her share of image-driven bravado, but the girl could actually sing, and write terrific music. What can Lana do? Unclear. So much to think about!)

so that we might take appropriate action. Thank you for your time.

Apologies to Dave Barry.

To hear Israel’s comedy geniuses tell it, young American Jews come in three flavors. There’s the fat stoner whose vocabulary consists solely of the word “awesome!” There’s the fat and ugly girl, played by a man and sounding like a deflated dog’s chew toy. And there’s the hot JAP who brags about the fact that her home in the Hamptons is bigger than the entirety of the Jewish state.

At first, I attributed the whole thing to laziness: Stereotypes, after all, are the bluntest weapon in the joke writer’s arsenal. But then I got to thinking. There’s a reason Israelis still find JAP jokes to be the height of comedy, and it has nothing to do with Americans and everything to do with Israelis.

Once upon a time, Israelis saw themselves as khaki-clad toughs, the sort of people who could hop on a plane and fly to Entebbe and free hostages and kick ass. This time was called the 1970s. Since then, the same thing happened to Israel that happens to anyone who grows older and wealthier: It settled down, it got fat, it became better-known for its high-tech entrepreneurs than for its commandos. When it tried to assassinate Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal by injecting poison into his ear, it failed miserably and was shamed into handing Meshaal the antidote. It carried out an operation in Dubai that was more Fletch than James Bond.

So, rather than age gracefully, Israel went looking for someone to pick on. And American Jews are an easy target. They’re gullible—can you believe all the money those suckers are giving us?!? They’re soft, what with spending four years in college instead of three years at some silly desk job, which is what the majority of Israel Defense Forces soldiers end up doing. They’re Diaspora. Let’s make fun of them.

This dynamic, I think, explains the recent spate of insults emanating from Israel, which in addition to this sketch include those preposterous ads encouraging Israelis living in the United States to return home at once. Psychologists call it cognitive dissonance: When someone—a person or a state—holds strong beliefs and perceptions and then those beliefs and perceptions are suddenly and strongly negated by reality, one solution is to introduce a new idea that resolves the tension. In this case, the calming idea is this distortion of American Jews: It doesn’t matter, Israelis tell themselves, that we’re no longer as invincible as we would like to believe we are, because these soft suckers, our cousins from America, are downright laughable.

Meanwhile, it would be big of American Jews who care about Israel, in the face of this ridiculous ridicule, to find a way to help the Jewish state resolve its self-destructive neuroses.

Israeli Parody of Taglit-Birthright Propaganda Trips [Eretz Nehederet]
Related: Mixed Marriage [Tablet Magazine]
Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

But not Cohen: He’s featured on the album’s cover, dressed in a suit and a tie, donning his trademark fedora and wearing dark shades, sitting on a blue wooden chair in a Los Angeles backyard, grinning slightly, and reading a book. It’s a fitting pose for the man he’s become, the kind and pensive dispenser of profound truths who earns in acclaim what he lacks in raw popularity; he’s the only entertainer around who looks as natural receiving Spain’s top literary award from Prince Felipe as he does sharing the dais with Madonna and John Mellencamp at the 2008 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony that honored all three. Even that almanac of cool, the Financial Times, recently saw fit to lionize St. Leonard, calling him “a sage for the post-crisis age.”

It wasn’t a role he was preordained to play. Throughout his life, it often seemed as if Cohen’s greatest talent was for falling out of step. In 1965, when Dylan plugged in and Jim Morrison spent the summer subsisting on LSD and baked beans and forming the Doors, Cohen, then still a poet, appeared on Canadian TV. “I wake up every morning and check if I am in a state of grace,” he told a television crew. “If not, I go back to bed.” He was in his mid-thirties when he first stepped out on stage with a guitar, an experience so traumatic that he fled after a few bars and only came back when Judy Collins, his friend and patron, soothed him and accompanied him back into the limelight. When his career finally took off, mainly in Europe, he realized that the musical milieu with which he most firmly belonged, the singer-songwriters, was rapidly becoming passé. Young fans now wanted their music loud and spirited; Cohen’s was sad and soulful.

Many also found it depressing. In one of his songs, “Field Commander Cohen,” he poked fun at his public image, calling himself “the patron saint of envy/ and the grocer of despair.” An attempt to market him as a mainstream singer led to a collaboration with Phil Spector that ended with Spector holding a gun to Cohen’s head, hijacking the master tape, and releasing his version without Cohen’s consent. Spector’s arrangements took Cohen’s music from folk to funk; the singer, enraged, called the album “a catastrophe,” and the public and the critics agreed. This was in 1977; Cohen released another album, the largely forgotten Recent Songs, two years later, but by 1984 he felt ready for a breakthrough. He submitted nine new songs to his label, Columbia Records, including “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “If It Be Your Will,” and a biblically themed anthem he had hoped would catch on, “Hallelujah.” The label’s boss, the notoriously abrasive Walter Yetnikoff, listened to the tracks, took a long look at his 50-year-old artist, and said, “Look, Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.” He seemed to be speaking for the music industry in general; the album was shelved and eventually picked up by a much smaller label.

How, then, to explain Leonard Cohen’s unlikely third act, and the accolades he now enjoys from the same people who had once dismissed him as too grim for public consumption? Working on a book about Cohen, I asked myself this question frequently, and the best answer I found is right there in the title of his new album, Old Ideas. Although he’s rightfully celebrated for his grace with notes and his dexterity with lyrics, his ideas are the true engine of Cohen’s survival. In a pursuit like rock ’n’ roll, which is entirely devoted to redemption, Cohen’s ideas were not only old but radical. His peers all insisted that salvation was at hand. To go to a Doors concert was to stare at the lithe messiah undressing on stage and believe that it was entirely possible to break on through to the other side. To see Cohen play was to gawk at an aging Jew telling you that life was hard and laced with sorrow but that if we love each other and fuck one another and have the mad courage to laugh even when the sun is clearly setting, we’ll be just all right. To borrow a metaphor from a field never too far from Cohen’s heart, theology, Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, and the rest were all good Christians, and they set themselves up as the redeemers who had to die for the sins of their fans. Cohen was a Jew, and like Jews he believed that salvation was nothing more than a lot of hard work and a small but sustainable reward.

The Jewish messiah, it turned out, was a gaunt poet with a guitar who promised not to whisk us away to some other, better world but to teach us how to come to terms with this one. Cohen’s peers all generated heat, but it was Cohen we’d always turned to for light, sometimes literally, like in the summer of 1970, in the English Isle of Wight, the former home of Queen Victoria and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and a favored retirement spot for naval officers and other assorted Empire types. The island, with its salt-stricken limestone cliffs, looks like the footprint of some enormous animal long extinct, and a few cool cats from London thought the primordial spot could be the British equivalent of Yasgur’s farm. They obtained the necessary permissions and invited the usual suspects. One day, late in August, they arrived: Hendrix and the Doors, Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, Jethro Tull and the Who all set up in trailers just behind the enormous makeshift stage and awaited their turn to play.

Continue reading: The troublemakers

This may sound obvious. It’s not, at least not in Israel, where it was revealed last week that TV star turned political hopeful Yair Lapid was admitted to Bar Ilan University’s Ph.D. program without ever having received a BA. After Haaretz broke the story, the university claimed that it had admitted Lapid to its prestigious program in commentary and culture based on “his literary and journalistic achievements.” Israel’s Council for Higher Education launched an investigation into the affair, calling Bar Ilan’s reasoning “unsatisfactory” and implying that the decision to admit Lapid, sans the appropriate credentials, contradicts the basic tenets of academia. Today the CHE ruled that Lapid’s acceptance into the program was invalid.

This may sound like a tawdry scandal. It’s not. It speaks volumes about the character of the contender most polls predict will sweep a sizable chunk of the Knesset’s seats in the next elections. It also tells you all you need to know about the state of affairs in Israel these days, when a previously respectable university is willing to bestow its highest honor on an individual not because of his scholarship but because of his celebrity.

But why am I complaining? If Lapid was admitted as a doctoral student because he was an author and a journalist, then I—an author and a journalist who already has a Ph.D.—should be appointed university president. Bar Ilan, your move.

Council for Higher Education Rejects Lapid’s PhD Acceptance [Israel National News]
Israeli university probed for accepting Lapid as doctoral student [Haaretz]
Doctoral candidate Yair Lapid accepted without B.A. [Haaretz]
Earlier: Israel’s Great White Hope

If you’ve understood most of the references in the paragraph above, you, sadly, belong to the same wretched class of emotionally precarious quasi-adults in whose minds and hearts Star Wars occupies the realms others furnish with accomplishing life goals or forming meaningful relationships. Which is why the next line hurts: George Lucas has ruined our lives.

I don’t mean that in the obvious way, like the sorry stares my friends and I sometimes get from well-balanced, emotionally available adults when they overhear us discussing issues like the politics of Wookie society or why all spaceships seem to always have their engines on in full thrust yet none ever seem to accelerate. What I mean is that those of us reared on Star Wars too easily subscribe to its creator’s facile mythology that sees all religions as nothing more than particular facets of one grand universal myth and that has little use for cultural distinctions or theological depth. As his newly released production, the World War II film Red Tails, clearly shows, George Lucas’ world is a place where good forever battles evil on a landscape that is smooth and flat and unchanging. The same goes for his entire oeuvre.

***

Lucas, of course, made up little of what would become the organizing principles of his Star Wars universe. An eager student of mythologist and autodidact Joseph Campbell, he adapted the latter’s opus, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, to the world of spacecrafts and laser guns.

“I came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what’s valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is,” Lucas said in one of his several interviews about Campbell. “So, that’s when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe’s books. … It was very eerie because in reading The Hero With a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs. … So, I modified my next draft according to what I’d been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent.”

Or a lot more. The main idea Lucas borrowed from Campbell was that of the monomyth, or the universal structure Campbell argued explained every hero humanity has ever adored, from Jesus Christ to Luke Skywalker. They all followed the same pattern: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” The specifics change—one went to see John on the banks of the Jordan before facing down Pilate, the other visited Yoda in Dagobah before doing battle with Vader—but they don’t matter much. What matters is the string that unites us all, the ur-story we share and that is our common human foundation.

Lucas was better than most at reimagining this human story. By setting his retelling in a galaxy far, far away, and by following Campbell’s guidelines religiously, he created an embodiment of the monomyth that was so powerful it instantly became mythological itself. We impressionable children of the 1980s found in Luke and Han and Leia the sort of universal thrust that most religions seemed to lack. In synagogue, they spoke of a personal God who gave us laws and expected us to keep them. At the multiplex, there was the Force, strange and mysterious and mystical. It was never a hard choice. We all became Talmudists of the Jedi.

Which—and I realize that by writing this I’m forfeiting any future claims to nerdhood—was a terrible thing, intellectually and morally speaking. Campbell certainly had his dazzling strengths as an erudite and engaging scholar of comparative cultures, but his lack of understanding of faith and its machinations is astounding. In an 1985 interview he gave to In Context, a humanist journal, he called the Bible “the most over-advertised book in the world,” dismissed its claim to moral authority, and argued that the violence the Israelites visited on the peoples of Canaan precludes their scriptures from shining an ethical light unto the nations. Any religion, Campbell argued, is nothing more than an invitation to sectarianism and hate.

It’s a popular theme nowadays, one that the nouveau atheists often flaunt. But its core failure, and Campbell’s, is that it fails to see the crucial nuances that set one faith apart from the other. It is true, as Campbell observed, that both Abraham and Kut-o-yis, a legendary hero of Montana’s Blackfeet, experienced hardships as boys and went on to suffer exile before emerging as leaders of their nations. That one went on to become the father of monotheism seems to matter little. Campbell has no patience for the specificity of Abraham’s—or any hero’s—teachings; all he’s interested in are the broad patterns of shared stories.

The same goes for Lucas. His good guys are so good that their unique brand of righteousness hardly matters. Take, for example, the issue of the Force, the power Jedi knights possess to manipulate the physical world with their minds. Here’s the best explanation of how it works (Lucas later concocted other, less-convincing ones), delivered by Obi Wan-Kenobi: “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. … A Jedi can feel the force flowing through him.”

Continue reading: ‘What do non-Jedi feel?’

But not in Israel.

Most of those who blogged or tweeted about the piece were residents of Arab countries. And most of these Arab readers neglected to mention that the celebratory piece was written by an Israeli journalist and published in an Israeli political blog. Israelis, on their end, largely ignored the piece, as they do nearly everything +972 does. According to Noam Sheizaf, +972’s editor in chief, only about 20 percent of the magazine’s readers are Israeli, a testament to the growing unpopularity of its progressive politics in a nation governed by a coalition, led by the Likud, of those who place land and faith above all else.

Rejected by the Arabs, ignored by the Jews: This is the reality with which the magazine’s 15 or so writers have to contend, writing, as they do, in English for a largely American audience. The magazine’s name is no coincidence: It is a tribute to Israel’s international calling code and an acknowledgement that, increasingly, any serious conversation about Israel’s policies is to be had outside of Israel’s borders.

Sparking that conversation is +972’s purpose. The magazine was founded last August,
almost by accident, when Goldman, Sheizaf, Ami Kaufman, and Dimi Reider met in Tel Aviv and agreed to collaborate. At the time, all were working journalists—Goldman and Reider were writing on a freelance basis for a host of international publications, Kaufman was an editor at several Israeli newspapers, Sheizaf was a political columnist for the local edition of Time Out, and all had blogs in English that aimed to provide Israeli news and commentary for an international audience. What began by posting each others’ stories on Facebook quickly evolved into a joint platform. From the first, the +972 crew agreed on an unorthodox journalistic ethos: All the magazine’s bloggers have complete freedom to write whenever and whatever they want. The magazine has a top editor, but the bloggers can fire him or her if they please. And whoever comes on board does so gratis. Other writers were quick to join. The website traffic monitor Alexa shows that visits to the magazine have grown exponentially since its inception, more than doubling in the past few months alone.

The magazine’s loose, horizontal structure, however, is not altogether porous: Underlining everything +972 does is a dedication to promoting a progressive worldview of Israeli politics, advocating an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and protecting human and civil rights in Israel and Palestine. And while the magazine’s reported pieces—roughly half of its content—adhere to sound journalistic practices of news gathering and unbiased reporting, its op-eds and critical essays support specific causes and are aimed at social and political change.

“I think there’s still a chance to resolve things,” said Sheizaf, 37, referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “but it’s not going to happen without dramatic pressure from abroad. Left on their own, Israelis will continue the occupation and the current political trends forever.” That’s why Sheizaf caters the magazine to English-speaking readers around the world. “It’s good to internationalize the conversation,” he added. “I believe in this thing we do. I think to bring honest, grassroots voices in English out of Israel, is of the essence.”

Just what these voices might say is unpredictable. Some, like Yossi Gurvitz—a veteran Israeli journalist and former Orthodox Jew—support the one-state solution that would turn Israel and the West Bank into one nation, with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of their ethnicity. Others, like the American-born Larry Derfner, a former writer for the Jerusalem Post, define themselves as liberal Zionists and support a two-state solution.

“I feel we have a very wide range of opinions [within the left],” said Sheizaf. “If we were more hot-headed, we’d fight each other. But compared to Israeli society and its nationalism and consensus and racism, we’re very focused. This hobby of the left, of having a fierce debate between people standing an inch away in the same ghetto, these arguments are interesting, but not enough to break the package.” And so, while +972’s bloggers often find themselves on opposite ends of their political camp’s most urgent questions, they realize that, for the most part, these differences are nearly invisible to the average American readers.

Plus, Sheizaf added, theirs isn’t an experiment just in politics, but in journalism as well: With traditional media pressed for funds and readers, the magazine’s renown—including frequent mentions in the New York Times—stems in part from its innovative journalistic practices.

Continue reading: Tear gas and Tel Aviv

There are many rational arguments against the legislation. But there’s another, emotional, and particularly Jewish one. As I’ve written before, there’s something deeply Jewish about the contemporary Internet, or Web 2.0. The new web, as novelist Lev Grossman poignantly put it, is “a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter,” a massive community without a center or a hierarchy that shares, constantly questions, and endlessly debates, and occasionally reforms, its values and rules. Which is to say, it’s all very Jewish.

All that would go away should the new bills be passed and control of content and expression placed at the discretion of the courts. We who have thrived and survived by keeping information unfettered and available for debate should do whatever we can to see to it that every new technology allows us the same freedoms.

This week, Yair Lapid, Yosef’s son and one of Israel’s most popular journalists, announced his intentions of entering the political arena. No one was surprised: Lapid Jr.’s de facto election campaign began years ago, and was conducted in the television news magazine he hosts on the nation’s most popular broadcast network and in the column he writes in the nation’s most popular newspaper. Some grumbled that a journalist so clearly committed to changing careers should abandon his media platforms or risk considerable ethical violations. Lapid didn’t seem bothered, reportedly meeting with a cadre of politicians, senior officers, and other public figures in an effort to start his own independent party. That party, and its newly recruited members, are both yet unnamed. Still, Israeli polls this week predicted that Lapid may win as many as 20 Knesset seats in the next elections, making his new party Israel’s third largest.

Which is a fine opportunity to stop and appraise the famous man. Like his father before him, Lapid is a natural on TV. While père made his fortune outshouting his ideological opponents on political panel shows, fils has constructed a slicker public image. With a perfectly coiffed and massively gelled shock of salt-and-pepper hair and a penchant for tight, black t-shirts, Lapid is Israel’s Everyman Superman: he’s sensitive yet masculine, fiercely secular yet deeply connected to his Jewish identity, determined yet willing to listen. His columns and television appearances convey the same message: all Israelis are different yet all Israelis are alike, and they should all work together for a bright, common, uncomplicated future.

If this sounds a touch sophomoric, it is. Lapid is a lot like that person in high school who is class president and good looking and beloved by the teachers and adored by the girls and chummy with the guys and full of bonhomie and pep, yet has said or thought or done nothing original or remarkable in his entire life. Which, in Israel’s contemporary political reality, makes him not only desirable but downright dangerous. Most likely, his new party will fizzle away just like his father’s—and every other recent overnight political sensation. In the meantime, however, his popularity is likely to thrust Israel further into the political abyss it’s been busily cultivating for the past year.

Take, for example, the rift between secular and ultra-Orthodox Israelis. With riots erupting recently in several Israeli towns, and with anti-female practices gaining hold in Haredi communities in blatant violation of the state’s laws, Israel is long overdue for a serious, scathing debate about the limits of tolerance and the nature of religion. Instead, Lapid gave a recent speech in front of utlra-Orthodox youth and called for cooperation and collaboration. We should all work together, he told them, the state is ours to share.

It’s a lovely sentiment. It’s also an idiotic one. The ultra-Orthodox zealots who called a young girl a “whore” for not dressing modestly enough, who rioted to keep women relegated to the back of the bus, who throw soiled diapers at police officers trying to keep them from shutting down main roads on Shabbat—these cats are not looking for a dialogue. Nor are the settlers who smash IDF officers in the face with bricks and set mosques on fire. Nor are the MKs who splash water in the face of colleagues with whom they disagree. What Israel needs, then, is a principled leader capable of charting a course of action and then sticking to it. Prime Minister Netanyahu is notoriously incapable on that front, doing his best to be all things to all people. Lapid would be even worse.

Yair Lapid’s Political Foray Seen Swiping Seats from Kadima [Haaretz]

As a professor of video games, I am often called upon by the top intelligence agencies in the world to apply my skills against nefarious regimes and other enemies of freedom. Usually, my work is stealthy, hard to detect. But I’m no match for Iran’s stellar spooks, who yesterday blew my cover.

Having arrested Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, an American citizen, former marine, and video game designer, the eminences in Teheran claimed him a spy and the software development company he worked for a cover for the CIA.

As the video games blog Kotaku reported yesterday, the company in question, Kuma Games, received a substantial grant from the federal government to develop a game that would help American soldiers develop “mission-specific language knowledge.” Hekmati was the project’s principle investigator.

Of course, less astute observers mightn’t have batted an eyelid. Naively, these gullible unfortunates would have assumed that since video games came into being as a military-funded project in the 1960s—the original purpose was to sharpen the reflexes of combat soldiers—and since the use of gaming in military simulation is merely a part of a long tradition of war games that began with the Prussian army in 1812, there was nothing nefarious about the American army using interactive digital technologies as training tools. But the Iranians are sharper then that; they saw right through the ploy, and condemned Hekmati to death.

I hope and trust strong diplomacy and light coercion will eventually commute his sentence and see to it that he’s freed. If not, it might be time to launch the Mechanized Assault Routine Iranian Operation. It’s something secret we video game scholars/C.I.A. operatives are busy developing.

Iran Calls Video Games Part of C.I.A. Plot [NYT The Lede]

More than a decade ago, on the morning of my 21st birthday, I had a quick coffee at the espresso bar across the street from my apartment in the north of Tel Aviv and then rushed to catch a ride to Jerusalem. In my bag, I had a book, a scarf, and a few changes of underwear. I wouldn’t need much else where I was headed, a filthy patch of concrete across the street from the prime minister’s mansion, where I intended to spend the next week or so on a hunger strike.

The cause mattered much to me back then. It matters less now. It had to do with tuitions and how impossibly pricey they had become, and how a tiny nation dependent on the ingenuity of its people couldn’t afford for its college graduation rates to drop below 50 percent, and how a growing segment of the population, the ultra-Orthodox, paid nothing for their schooling and nothing in taxes and nothing by way of military service. We started off raising these concerns in classrooms, which soon led to daylong strikes. Nothing happened. We took to the streets, and so did the police. It didn’t take much more than a billy club to the shin for many of us to get radicalized. This was in August; by November, we had a plan.

The plan involved starving ourselves in front of Benjamin Netanyahu’s home, demanding an audience. Once granted, we’d present him with our plan for reforming higher education and allowing more of Israel’s disenfranchised to attend college. We had drawn up a detailed proposal, with spreadsheets and hard numbers. It made sense, and so we huddled on the small Jerusalem plaza—settlers and ex-Communists and former officers in elite army units and new immigrants, the well-off and the less-so, all young and optimistic—to change our reality.

We failed. And when we did, I knew I had to leave.

It was hard for me, at the time, to explain why. It’s hard for me still. But reading Clancy Sigal’s 1961 novel, Going Away, I felt again as I did that winter morning when, from my hospital bed—I had eventually collapsed after nearly two weeks without sustenance—I heard that the strike had ended and that our encampment was disbanding and that no gains have been made at all.

To the extent that its plot matters, the largely autobiographical novel—subtitled “A Report, A Memoir”—chronicles the cross-country journey of its narrator, a former radical left-wing activist. The year is 1956, and all across America everyone is voting for Eisenhower. The only thing a former Communist could do, then, is head out to the nearest boat and decamp for Europe. En route, he visits with the comrades of old: the radical poet of West Virginia, the Indian who rages at his ancestors’ policies of appeasement toward the white man, the brilliant youthful thinker turned into a broken tool of the crumbling Communist Party, each of them writhing under the weight of shattered expectations.

Like Saul Silverman. A former union firebrand, he was, by ’56, a rich and fat insurance salesman. “He was grimly determined to hold on to what he had,” Sigal writes, “and not to sacrifice much of it in the name of the death rattles of a moribund movement. Saul had discovered home, children, and family.”

It’s that last sentence that keeps the sentiment from belonging in the dustbin of historical clichés. Saul Silverman is not just the archetypal sobered radical, bitter and caustic; he has a family now, a meaningful life, a happiness that is personal and private. Sigal recognizes this, and the book’s immense appeal lies in its intimate portraits of people drained of their sense of purpose but not of their vitality.

It’s a familiar feeling, I think, for anyone who has ever belonged to a movement, namely that life goes on long after hope had died. And yet, Going Away is, oddly, not a hopeless book. When he finally boards the ship that takes him away to foreign shores, the novel’s narrator, his mind reeling with memory after memory of soured friendships and lost causes, says a sweet farewell to the land that he loves.

“And yet,” he declares, “I loved America. Although I could point to few or none of its parts as justification, I felt ineradicably convinced of the direction of America, of the uncertain majesty of its momentum and yes, even that most dangerous of words, destiny. I was part of that direction, beneficiary, critic. The relationship was too complicated. I had to leave. I had outlived my time, had lived too faithfully according to the code of my generation. A new way of life was appearing in America I was no longer equipped to understand, new qualities I was not equipped to see.”

Call it Sigal’s Law of Movements: Each movement is destined to fail, and yet each movement is destined, in its roaring descent, to provide just enough of a thrust for the next movement to rise.

I didn’t get that at 21. I was too angry, and too hungry, to understand how movements worked. Perhaps I still don’t. But looking at Occupy Wall Street, I feel, alongside my trepidations—at their lack of interest in electoral politics, at their distrust of Democrats and unions and other potential partners for change, at their infatuation with process and rejection of organizational hierarchies—also a wild sense of hope.

Before reading Sigal, I was more inclined to ignore or suppress this strange and uplifting feeling. But the narrator’s stream of consciousness put me in touch with my own, filled as it is with recollections of a few precious political achievements floating in a dark sea of disappointment. Which led to the following realization: By any measurable yardstick, Occupy Wall Street is likely to fail. Most likely, the movement’s aversion to grown-up politics would lead it to clash with both Republicans and Democrats come convention time. It’s not impossible to see Barack Obama pressed by his opponents and his natural inclination toward the center to distance himself from the growingly radical movement and the movement, in turn, robbing the president of support he badly needs to secure his re-election. It’s not unlikely that Occupy’s immense life force will be spent in an endless cycle of internal meetings and inward-facing resolutions, driving it further away from the 99 percent of Americans it purports to represent.

And yet, Occupy’s virtue is merely in its existence. Like physical energy, political energy, too, is always conserved; when one movement fails, the next inherits its vitality and moves on. Occupy’s failure, then, will become the launching pad for some other movement some other time, and the general assembly and its human microphone may become just as much an inspirational icon as Woodstock and its guitars.

Going Away was an underground hit with the activists of the 1960s, and the activists of the 1960s were an underground hit with us in the 1990s. The young hopefuls who camped in tents in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel this summer, demanding change, sometimes cited us as a precedent. Each generation tries. Each generation fails. But there is, to quote an old radical Lubavitcher concept, no fear and no despair with true believers. We carry on. Eventually, we’re certain, we’ll succeed.

The very same Elkin was behind a recent bill to investigate left-wing non-profits who receive funding from international sources. His argument revolved around the assertion that in making the IDF’s actions public, leftist activists were jeopardizing IDF soldiers and state security. None of the non-profits, however, reported on future or current operations; Elkin did, and in so doing put Israeli soldiers in direct physical harm.

One of Elkin’s fellow informants, National Union MK Uri Ariel, made no apologies once his role in supporting the extremists became public. “If a person who transfers information about IDF movements is a spy,” he said, “then I am a spy.”
Ariel has it exactly right. He is a spy, and should be treated as one, along with Elkin and anyone else who knowingly supplied classified information pertaining to military movements to armed and radical terrorists who then used it to confront and attack Israeli soldiers. They should be arrested, tried, and jailed.

Of course, that will never happen. With a strong grasp on the parliament, Elkin, Ariel, and their colleagues are free to continue their crusade against democracy. Some other recent examples: In a debate earlier this morning—convened by right-wing legislators in order to discipline an Arab-Israeli school principal who dared to take his students to a Tel Aviv march for human rights—Yisrael Beitinu MK Anastasia Michaeli interrupted Labor MK Ghaleb Majadale, himself an Israeli Arab, as the latter was defending the principal’s actions. Majadale told Michaeli to shut up, at which point she calmly left the room, obtained a glass of water, returned to the room, and threw the water in Majadale’s face. Alex Miller, the panel’s chairman and a member of Yisrael Beitinu, refused to discipline Michaeli.

It is time to stop mincing words. Anyone who cares at all about its future should insist that Elkin and his ilk are tossed out of the parliament and put in prison where they rightly belong.

Israel Charges 5 West Bank Settlers in Army Clash [NYT]
Second Israeli MK Admits to Having Given Settlers Information on IDF Movements [Haaretz]
Related: Unruly [Tablet Magazine]

Capitalizing on this affinity between reality show and national psyche, Big Brother’s producers do their best to highlight the conflicts that make up Israeli society. Previous seasons have focused around tensions between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews, the rich and the poor, the religious and the secular. But in a nod to the increasingly jagged nature of Israeli civic life, the theme du jour is politics.

On one end of the divide is Eran Trtakovsky (second row, third on the right), a striking-looking long-time veteran of the IDF’s intelligence corps. In the show’s introductory video, he did his best James Bond impersonation before dropping the smooth façade and stating that he hated Arabs as much as he hated cancer, seeing both as a malignant force certain to kill him.

In the left corner, equally as attractive, is Saar Szekely (third row, on the left). Wearing a wristband emblazoned with the Palestinian flag, he claimed he agreed to be on the show only in order to call attention to the topics that really matter, like the plight of Palestinian prisoners.

Even before these two had a chance to lock horns, enraged viewers began a campaign to eject Szekely from the Big Brother villa, asserting that his criticism of Israel as an apartheid state made him unfit for participation in the unofficial national reality show. In the meantime, millions of Israelis tune in to watch what is essentially a prime time political argument. After are, there are far worse things to watch on TV.

It’s not as preposterous a comparison as you might think. After all, if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was ever made into a movie, it would have to be a romantic comedy.

Like all romantic comedies, this one begins with two protagonists who meet and despise each other, while all along their attraction and compatibility is evident to everyone else. If An Affair to Remember is before your time, think of Israel as Harry, obnoxious and spouting bombastic theories about life (and also Jewish!), and of the Palestinians as Sally, sensitive and insistent on fairness and decorum (and also not Jewish!). If only he gave back a bit of land, and she got rid of her crazy, crazy girlfriend Hamas (played by Carrie Fisher), they could finally be together and spend eternity doing the things they both love to do, like shopping at the Gap in Jerusalem.

But we’ve an entire reel to fill, and so the lovers cannot be united right away. First, they must overcome a series of sweet and preposterous challenges, like dating the other’s best friend or insisting the other recognize his right to be a Jewish state. She shallowly responds to courtship, he responds by building more settlements; the final embrace is postponed yet again, leaving us agitated but hopeful.

Israel, Palestine, here’s a word of advice: when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

Israeli, Palestinian Envoys Agree to Meet Again in Jordan Next Week [Haaretz]
Jerusalem Announces Contentious Construction Ahead of Peace Talks Meet [Haaretz]
Earlier: Israeli-Palestinian ‘Meeting’ Today in Jordan

The settler youth currently busy setting things on fire across the West Bank aren’t big readers. Instead of curling up with a good book, they’d rather engage in more virile pastimes, like vandalizing the homes of their ideological nemeses or smashing senior IDF officers in the face with bricks. Their facility with words is limited to taglines, and the one they chose to describe their recent spree of arsons and beatings is “price tag,” as in making others pay for any infraction, real or perceived, against unquestioned Jewish control over Judea and Samaria. But we’re not too far removed from New Year’s Eve and its customary resolutions to offer another one for the list: This year, the young brutes should read Michael Kohlhaas.

Written in 1811 by Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas has many charms that make it a thoroughly attractive read for contemporary audiences. But even if they don’t care much for its existentialism avant la lettre or its incisive psychological portraits, the rioting settlers might appreciate the work’s main theme: revenge.

Loosely based on real-life events, this novella tells the story of a wealthy horse-dealer who, having failed to obtain justice in court against a cruel and well-connected aristocrat, raises a private army and embarks on a violent crusade before being apprehended and executed. The novella’s emotional crescendo arrives when Martin Luther, in an attempt to stop Kohlhaas’ madness, writes him a scathing letter: “You who say you are sent to wield the sword of justice,” roars the father of the Reformation, “what are you doing, presumptuous man, in the madness of your blind fury, you who are yourself filled with injustice from head to foot? Because the sovereign to whom you owe obedience had denied you your rights, rights in a quarrel over a miserable possession, you rise up, wretch, with fire and sword and, like a wolf of the desert, descend on the peaceful community he protects.”

Most readers are likely to identify with Luther’s scolding and yet still feel even stronger sympathy for Kohlhaas. Like him, we want to believe that justice is absolute, and that we have the right to pursue it to the very end, earthly consequences be damned. Naturally enamored with this theme, Franz Kafka devoted one of the only two public talks he gave to reading segments of Kohlhaas, and he confessed that he could not think of the novella “without being moved to tears and enthusiasm.”

Such were von Kleist’s powers that, writing at the cradle of modernity, he had already detected that vengeance would become the chief sentiment guiding the new age of man. With Luther having loosened the cornerstones of the church, and with the Enlightenment following suit and gilding “the natural and imprescriptible rights of man,” the individual was left with nothing much greater than himself to revere. And with justice newly rooted in the social contract or judged on the scale of actions and their consequences, a hard man like Kohlhaas—searching for justice in its former transcendent seats, the church and the state, and finding both small and tattered—was bound to slip into vengeance. Writing not long after von Kleist, Hegel called revenge “a positive action of a particular will,” by which he meant to say that anyone who, like Michael Kohlhaas or the settler youth, embarked on a campaign of retribution in the name of some exalted, religious ideal was bound to discover that they were really pursuing the narrowest of private interests.

It’s one of those sweet paradoxes that make life so rich and strange: If you truly believe in justice, you know that its origins—like the origins of love and faith and mercy and mirth and valor and hate—are divine, and that it is therefore, in its pure form, largely unknowable to us. If we turn any one of these emotions into the singular banner under which we march, we’re bound to become, like poor Kohlhaas, doomed and distasteful fanatics.

It is a testament to the impoverishment of our time that we too mindlessly brand many of those who follow in Kohlhaas’ steps as conservatives. From lawless Israeli settlers dedicated to erecting a theocratic kingdom to listless U.S. Republicans devoted to little more than dethroning President Barack Obama, the right everywhere nowadays seems to be primarily about revenge. Often, this sentiment is excused as serving some sort of greater good, but von Kleist knew better: Revenge is always personal.

Which, in part, explains why so many in Israel and the United States now observe the right wing with bafflement. Conservatives, we were told by commentators from Edmund Burke forward, value the well-being of society over the grievances of individuals, and they champion slow processes over tempestuous eruptions. But instead we are now plagued with a twisted ideology that is willing to lay waste all that we share and cherish in the service of absolutist fantasies that can be achieved only once real or imagined slights are punished.

If we can learn anything from Michael Kohlhaas, it is that modernity needs an antidote to vengeance. And we can find that in Judaism.

Observed as it was written and practiced for millennia—a version radically different from the bastardized form now practiced by the chauvinistic maniacs who make up the vanguard of the settlers’ movement—Judaism is as clear as it can be on the subject of revenge. It understood, long before John Stuart Mill, that men see only consequences; asking them to turn the other cheek won’t do much good if they’re denied what they believe to be their fair share of the pie. To that end, Judaism largely prefers concrete systems of laws to ephemeral ideas like forgiveness and good will. Paul’s declaration that Christ is the end of the law, then, is, in some ways, a misguided criticism of Judaism: Rather than choosing law over love, Judaism knows that the former is impossible without the latter because human beings, left unfettered, will eventually turn all relations into contests of will. To keep them from hearing voices and embarking on crusades for what they imagine to be celestial causes, they need to be fenced in by rules.

Which makes von Kleist’s book urgent reading: Anyone who thinks that revenge is a good political, moral, militaristic, or economic strategy is welcome to check out how well the same philosophy worked for Michael Kohlhaas.

I was getting ready to sink into a column about the “Festivus” episode of Seinfeld—in which Jerry and the gang observe a holiday invented by George’s father and dedicated to celebrating all that is contentious and irking about the holiday season—to illustrate this theme when the Net started humming with news of Christopher Hitchens’ death, and I was moved to liberally pour myself a glass of rye whiskey and toast the deceased. Like so many of Hitchens’ eulogizers, I mumbled to myself that while I disagreed with many of his convictions, his uncommon ability to use his intellect as a scalpel rather than a hammer when arguing a point, to paraphrase Harry Shearer, made him worthy of begrudging respect.

I downed the rest of my drink, poured myself another, and watched as Jerry Seinfeld and the gang reveled in the Spartan holiday of Festivus and its fabricated traditions—the aluminum pole, the feats of strength, the airing of grievances. But the mind wandered back to Hitchens; seeking distraction, I reached for my copy of his atheist writ, God Is Not Great. Here, to choose but one passage at random, is what it has to say about religion’s metaphysical claims: “One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge.”

It wasn’t just the assertion that the educated and evolved mind had no recourse but to abandon faith and seek instead some steelier view of life that made me angry. Nor was it just the personal slight I felt as someone who, without reservations or remorse, worships a mighty god. These are both rational arguments, and they had little to do with the fury frolicking in my gut; what provoked my demons to dance was the realization—by no means new, but startling each time—that Hitchens’ bluster was itself every bit as dogmatic.

Consider, for example, his now-famous televised tirade on the occasion of Jerry Falwell’s passing: The accent is Balliol, the cadence is measured, but the rhetoric is timeless American fire and brimstone. Squint your eyes just so, and it’s easy enough to imagine that Hitchens is seated not in Anderson Cooper’s studio but in a tent revival somewhere, warning sinners of the wrath of the vengeful god of reason.

Hitchens, of course, isn’t the first atheist to embrace the absence of divinity as an article of faith. As today marks the first night of the Festival of Lights, let us get into the holiday spirit with a Hanukkah-themed poem, titled “We Are Carrying Torches.” Written in the early 1930s by Aharon Ze’ev—a poet who would eventually become the Israel Defense Forces’ first chief education officer—the poem riffs on the holiday’s miraculous mythology to make a stark statement against faith. “No miracle happened to us, we found no can of oil,” it reads. “We quarried the rock until we bled. Let there be light!”

The subtext isn’t hard to decipher. A proud Zionist and nonbeliever, Ze’ev believed it was men, not God, who charted the course of human events. The Jewish state shares his sentiment—the poem, set to music, is sung each year in the official national ceremony celebrating Israel’s Independence Day. And yet, like Hitchens’ protestations, Ze’ev’s poem, too, is just another gospel—the only language Ze’ev had to assert man’s existential freedom is the language of that good old religion and the imagery of Hanukkah. The Marxist Zionist atheist Ber Borochov followed a similar path when he denounced God but did so appropriating the Haggadah and celebrating its Wicked Son as a paragon of secular skepticism.

Seinfeld pulls off a similar trick. Just as atheism is really religion in darker shades, the show about nothing is really a show about something grim. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Festivus” episode, which begins with the Hanukkah party of a dentist who converted to Judaism for the jokes, proceeds with a scheme to replace holiday gifts with contributions to fictitious charities, and ends with the dour holiday for the rest of us. That all these plot lines are concerned with religion is not accidental. Seinfeld’s Manhattan is far from a cosmopolitan playground: It is a little island crammed with nasty little people who wave their empty pieties around like pointy sticks, eager to injure each other.

Like Hitchens and the early Zionists, Seinfeld, too, took pride in its wit and irreverence in exposing the fraudulent fools who hide behind religion’s tall walls. Hitchens had Falwell; Jerry has Tim Whatley, the dentist whose reasoning for converting to Judaism is dubious and whose gift-giving practices are Madoff-esque. That Falwell and Whatley were indeed charlatans—I fully subscribe to Hitchens’ assessment of the man who blamed Sept. 11 on gays and the ACLU—matters little. What matters is what we’re left with after the laugh track dies down. And what we’re left with is Festivus.

Now a burgeoning holiday—House Minority Leader Eric Cantor celebrates it with a fundraiser, and former Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle placed an aluminum pole in the executive mansion—Festivus is the apex of a particular brand of secular humanism that replicated the structures of religion but replaced magic with mirth and called it a triumph of the enlightened spirit. G.K. Chesterton—according to Ian McEwan, the subject of Hitchens’ last piece—warned against such phenomena when he railed in his Orthodoxy against the modern intellectual urge to convert the stirrings and mysteries of religion into easy sentiments, jokes, or clichés. He would surely have been appalled to see “tikkun olam,” say, turn from a specifically theological tenet to a worn-out catchphrase, indistinguishable from any other sort of feel-good charity and, without its divine underpinnings, meaningless. And he would, most likely, have been dismayed to see the moronic Festivus, a fabrication that robs ritual of its majesty, reduces it to a punch line, and calls the truth that which is merely a failure of the imagination.

Seinfeld, of course, is a sitcom, and as such is not obligated to do much more than amuse. But its cultural prevalence indicates that its views are widely shared and that, for many, Festivus is the only feasible alternative to Falwell; the choice is between mindless fundamentalism and equally mindless nihilism.

It’s a sad worldview. It’s also profoundly un-Jewish. When faced with the breakdown of religion—which Jews had to do a month after the inception of their organized faith, when those congregated at the foothills of Mount Sinai built themselves a Golden Calf—we do not mock or reject but lament.

Leonard Cohen, the closest thing we have to a prophet and a source of comfort to Hitchens in his final months, captured this obligation perfectly. “As I grew older,” Cohen wrote, “I understood that instructions came with this voice. And the instructions were these: … Never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”

To which we all, those who believe in God and those who do not and those for whom the question is inconsequential, should respond: Hallelujah.

If passed, SOPA will give the attorney general the power to block access to domain names suspected of infringing on copyrighted materials, and the bill is excruciatingly vague on what qualifies. Our current copyright law allows one to achieve immunity from this sort of thing if one fulfills a set of basic, easy-to-define criteria: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protects Websites like YouTube and Tumblr with an orderly system that allows copyright holders to file complaints and ask that infringing materials be taken down. SOPA, by contrast, will leave shut-down decisions entirely in the hands of judges and bureaucrats. And instead of removing individual items, it’ll make entire sites disappear. (The entertainment industry, the main force lobbying for the legislation, argues that such drastic measures are the only way to fight Internet pirates, the majority of whom operate outside U.S. jurisdiction. They’re wrong: all you’d have to do to access the Websites the government had blocked is type in their IP addresses rather than their URLs, something anyone who’s actually illegally downloading would know how to do.)

And SOPA would allow the entertainment industry to go to court against existing and upcoming Internet start-ups dedicated to user-generated content. Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist who helped finance such current technology juggernauts as Twitter, Foursqaure, and Zynga, explained the risk neatly: “Big companies like Google and Apple can afford to defend themselves from litigious content companies,” he wrote. “But three person start-ups cannot. And Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were three person start-ups not so long ago. If they had not had the protection of the safe harbors of the DMCA, they could have been litigated out of business before they even had a chance to grow and develop into the powerhouses they have become.” In other words, the bill would give the dwindling entertainment industry the power to curb the booming Internet industry, among the few growth sectors still fueling our embattled economy.

And then there’s the bill’s blow to free speech—which Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, perhaps the nation’s leading constitutional law expert, argued in a memorandum to Congress violates the First Amendment. Or the fact that by passing the bill America’s Internet censorship practices would be indistinguishable from China’s.

Before it’s too late, then, let’s make sure we stop SOPA. Here’s a good place to start.

Internet Pioneers Oppose U.S. Online Piracy Bills [AFP/Google]

Last week, Tablet Magazine published our list of the 100 greatest Jewish films of all time. At the very bottom was Schindler’s List. In a brief blurb, I called it an “astoundingly stupid” movie, which, in turn, inspired some of our readers to call me a “piece of shit” and a “neo-Nazi”—all for casting an aspersion on what, if they are to be believed, is everyone’s favorite Holocaust movie.

Which makes perfect sense: More than just a regrettable film, Schindler’s List neatly reflects the Manichean mindset of many American Jews, for whom mythology trumps memory and nothing lies beyond good and evil. Those who howled at me weren’t expressing a mere aesthetic judgment; they were defending a worldview.

To understand this worldview, we need only look at Schindler’s List. The film’s two main characters are Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler and Ralph Fiennes’ Nazi officer, Amon Goeth. The first is a philandering and greedy German who sees a little girl in a red coat and has a nearly instantaneous epiphany, realizing that life is precious and that Jews should be saved. The other is a monster; it’s no coincidence that the American Film Institute ranked Goeth at number 15 in its list of the 100 greatest villains of all time, just one spot below the slimy creature who terrorized Sigourney Weaver in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Goeth, too, is an otherworldly sort. He is not, like the real-life murderer on whom he is based, merely a hateful, opportunistic, and cruel young man who relished the chance to play god. He is impenetrable, predatory, inhuman. We have little reason to fear him more than we fear, say, the Nazis in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark or the shark from Jaws; all are terrifying, but all are the sort of baddies we’ll only ever see on-screen, not the kind of ordinary and crooked and all-too-human scum living quietly next door and waiting for a stab at power.

Intelligent filmmakers, like Marcel Ophüls or Claude Lanzmann, long ago forged a cinematic language with which to talk about evil. Its two great grammatical principles are the context and the close-up: Cobble together as many sources as is possible to make a mosaic of meaning, then train the camera on one specific detail and demand an explanation. When it works well, we get moments like Lanzmann’s interview in Shoah with Franz Schalling, the Chelmno guard, whose matter-of-factness about the killing process is more terrifying than any imperious expression Fiennes can conjure, particularly as it appears alongside testimonies by victims and bystanders who had lived through radically divergent versions of the same horror. This approach is superior from both ethical and artistic perspectives, giving every player in this brutal human drama a claim to agency and dignity.

Spielberg’s approach, on the other hand, does not. Schindler’s Jews do not matter. They’re abstractions, spiritual currency so that our “hero” can pay his way toward salvation. Like Goeth, Schindler, too, is busy scrubbing away everything that makes him human.

The film’s blunt simplification enraged the Hungarian-Jewish Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, himself a survivor. Schindler’s List, he argued, was kitsch. “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of ‘civilization’ as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust,” he wrote in his 2001 essay, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” “Here I have in mind those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.”

Stanley Kubrick felt the same way. Abandoning his own Holocaust-themed project after Spielberg’s movie became instantly iconic, Kubrick complained that the prince of Hollywood forever simplified one of the most complex occurrences in human history by crafting, in essence, a competing narrative. “Think [Schindler’s List] is about the Holocaust?” he asked the screenwriter Frederic Raphael, a friend. “That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.”

One can argue, of course, that there are many Holocaust stories to be told, and that Spielberg merely chose to tell his (adapted, as it was, from Thomas Keneally’s book), and that his merely happened to have a hopeful ending. But that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility. Writing of the moral and aesthetic problems art runs into when it attempts to represent pain and suffering, the 18th-century German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing theorized that visual artists follow a two-step process when creating their work: First they choose one moment out of an endless sequence of possible moments for visual representation, and then they submit that moment to the strictures of the artistic process. If the choices they make fit together nicely—the perfect moment represented the perfect way—the result is pleasing. If not, it terrifies. In choosing Schindler’s story, and in representing it as a collection of kinetic symbols swirling in succession on-screen, Spielberg turned an infinitely complex reality into something even worse than kitsch: a spectacle. It’s of little wonder that one of Seinfeld’s funniest plots involved Jerry making out with a woman in a screening of Schindler’s List; a similar joke involving Shoah would have come off as intolerably insensitive, but necking as Neeson and Fiennes duke it out is hilarious because it concedes, however implicitly, that Schindler’s List is just a flick, overrated and overblown, best viewed while heavily petting.

But the real problem isn’t Spielberg. He is an endlessly talented filmmaker who has directed a few of the works—from E.T. to A.I.—that I consider to be among the finest ever produced. The real problem is the culture that spawned Spielberg, the culture of so many of us in the American Jewish community.

There’s no way to quantify what I’m about to say next and many ways to dismiss it as inaccurate or subjective or untrue. But consider this: From a community that was, until three or four decades ago, not only emotionally equipped but also eager to hold difficult internal debates, we’ve allowed so many of our communal vistas to become splintered terrains of intolerance and mutual suspicion. Try talking about Israel to someone who sees the country in a very different light. Try bringing up conversion next time you run into someone from a different denomination. Chances are the conversation will soon descend into chaos, with each side claiming absolute moral validity for itself and casting calumnies at the other. Put differently, we used to see the world like Lanzmann, as a nuanced and complex place where even the greatest villains deserved a few quiet moments on camera to speak their mind. We now see it like Spielberg saw the Holocaust, in black and white, all feeling and movement.

It’s an attitude we must do everything in our power to resist in every way, from commemorating the past to debating the future. Our tradition is nothing if not a yarn of complications; as appealing as simple images of victimhood (the little boy in the sewer in Spielberg’s film) and redemption (the Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall in the iconic photograph from the Six Day War) might be, it’s our moral, aesthetic, and historical obligation to choose the difficult, the subtle, and the obscure. This, if anything, is the life for which we’ve been chosen.

This is what happened to me this weekend.

On Friday, a young Palestinian man, Mustafa Tamimi, participated in a demonstration against the seizure of lands by a nearby Jewish settlement, Halamish. (Israeli courts had deemed the seizure illegal, but never mind.) Shortly after the demonstration began, Tamimi was struck by a tear gas canister fired at close range (in violation of the army’s rules of engagement) by an IDF soldier. Later that weekend, Tamimi died. His death saddened and enraged me. But what really made my blood boil was, of all things, a tweet.

The tweeter was Peter Lerner, a career officer in my alma mater, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. He wrote: “What was Mustafa thinking running after a moving jeep while throwing stones? #Fail.”

When I served in the unit—which, fortunately, was before Lerner had arrived—I was trained to realize that as the official voice of the army, I had to remain courteous, considerate, and factual. I was told—as if I needed to be told!—that special restraint was called for when dealing with death and injury, and that no matter what the specifics of a given incident might have been, compassion and care were always of the essence. Calling Tamimi “Mustafa,” as if he was a wayward boy; linking to a photo of him lying dying on the ground; attaching the familiar, casual hashtag, “#fail,” as if the whole thing belonged on some hilarious Internet catalogue of goofs and blunders: all of that is inexcusable.

But even leaving behind the moral implications of Lerner’s statement, I find it inconceivable that a spokesperson might think that the best way to speak, officially and publicly, would be by making sport of a human being’s death. That Lerner is still employed makes me deeply ashamed of my unit; but as long as Lerner has a job, I hope you’ll join me in letting him know what you think of his sensibilities. His Twitter handle is @MajPeterLerner; some hashtags you might consider include #utterdisregardforhumanlife, #shameonyou, and, my favorite, #moralfail.

Palestinian Shot With Tear Gas Canister Dies [WP]

Mayer’s sentiment isn’t hard to understand: Even today, six decades after its release, it’s hard to imagine a film more brutally candid—about everything from Hollywood to the human condition—than Wilder’s tale of a has-been movie diva and the young hack writer caught in her web. And candid isn’t what Hollywood was ever about.

It was, however, what Wilder was about. Having escaped the Nazis in the nick of time, and having lost most of his family in Auschwitz, he wasn’t cut out for the fripperies of the film industry. Instead, he made his mark with dark and emotionally harrowing movies, like the noir classic Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend. Both films forced Wilder to fight against Hollywood’s strict adherence to self-censorship—and, in both cases, he won. By 1950, he was likely in a mood to turn his lens on the industry that awarded him all of its laurels but that also tried to claim large swaths of his soul. The result was Sunset Boulevard.

There are many extraordinary things about the film. For one, it is deeply concerned with authenticity: Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille play themselves, and Gloria Swanson brings much of her own past as a silent movie star—including photographs, mementos, and other tchochkes—to her role as Norma Desmond. Even more profoundly, however, the film is as hilarious as it is grim. Indeed, if there’s any message in Sunset Boulevard it’s that life is tough, aspirations are doomed, people are mean, and there’s absolutely no reason not to go through the whole ordeal laughing every step of the way. Is there a more perfect summary of Jewish history?

Annie: We’re not having an affair. He’s married. He just happens to think I’m neat.

Alvy: “Neat.” What are you, 12 years old? That’s one of your Chippewa Falls expressions.

Annie: Who cares? Who cares?

The quivering, defensive statement; the cruel, belittling retort; the exasperated dismissal—here, in three short lines, is intimacy curdling, communication breaking down.

The balance between the deep thought and the easy laugh is a difficult one to strike. Allen never did it again. His very next film was 1978’s Interiors, a kind of Annie Hall without humor or charm. Then came a few other good films—Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters—that tried to follow the old formula but fell short. Then came awful years of letting go of inhibitions, on screen and in life. But we must forgive Woody Allen his caustic comedies, his dull dramas, his forays into sentimentality. We must forgive Woody Allen just about anything, because he gave us Annie Hall. We love this film. We lurve it. We loave it. We luff it.

Such is the tension at the heart of the movie, and it is a testament to Lubitsch’s genius that he turns it into an uproarious string of funny and poignant scenes. Most involve Joseph Tura (Jack Benny), a pompous actor but a decent human being who puts aside his thespian aspirations to bravely play a part in resisting Hitler and his goons. By pretending to be an assortment of Nazi officials, including the Fuhrer himself, Tura and his friends prevail, proving to themselves (and us) that, in the end, we’re all responsible for our own fates—even those living under the most detrimental historical conditions imaginable. And if we’re going to take charge of our lives, we might as well do it with aplomb. After all, all the world’s a stage.

1974, dir. Mel Brooks. “Nein, nein. Zeist est meshuggah.” Thus spoke the Indians in Mel Brooks’ iconic western comedy. Naturally, the Indians speak in Yiddish.

What if, Kaufman asks, you could have your memories erased? What if you could go to sleep and wake up relieved of traumas and heartaches? Jim Carey takes the plunge, in an effort to overcome his breakup with Kate Winslet. And like every young, libidinous Jewish man this side of Portnoy, he learns that it’s not so easy to avoid destiny. Nor, in fact, is it necessarily desirable.

Michel Gondry’s sleek, post-modern touch deracinated this fundamentally Jewish tale quite a bit, but some stark reminders are impossible to avoid. For one thing, almost everyone Carey interacts with—from Winslet’s Clementine Kruczynski to Tom Wilkinson’s Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, the doctor who performs the memory erasure procedure—is of Polish descent. Add to that one scene too many on a train, and you’ve got the modern Jewish experience in one weird, beautiful film.

1969, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. For petty political reasons, Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece fell out of view soon after its 1969 release. Forty years later, it was rediscovered and given the encomia it so richly deserves. The story of a small band of French Resistance fighters and their exploits, it is also the broader tale of humanity’s descent into wartime’s beastly chaos, where courage and cowardice are hard to tell apart.

1976, dir. Sidney Lumet. How great is Paddy Chayefsky’s satire of a morally bankrupt television news division? So great that Beatrice Straight won an Oscar for best supporting actress despite being on screen for all of 5 minutes and 40 seconds. Straight wasn’t alone: Chayefsky, as well as Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch, also walked home with golden statuettes, and the film’s famous line—“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”—became the cri de coeur of American pop culture for decades to come.

“I really wanted to be a Jew,” Lars von Trier said at the Cannes Film Festival this spring. The film he was promoting then, Melancholia, was released in U.S. theaters this week. “And then I found out that I was really a Nazi. Which also gave me some pleasure. I understand Hitler. I think I understand the man, he’s not what you would call a good guy. But I understand much about him. And I sympathize with him a little bit.”

Maybe “promoting” isn’t quite the mot juste: As the Danish director learned instantly after making his comments, anyone empathizing with Hitler hasn’t much chance of being taken seriously.

It’s a shame. Because Melancholia isn’t only a profound, beautiful, and terrifying film; it’s also a wild and courageous exploration of the same sentiment that got von Trier into so much trouble: the cosmic inevitability of Hitler.

Not that the mustachioed menace is mentioned anywhere in the movie. The closest Melancholia gets to evil is Charlotte Rampling, who—while wonderfully imperious as an abusive mother—is nonetheless a few steps removed from contemplating a final solution. But from the film’s very first notes, the overture to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, we are never far from the same Romantic soil that sprouted the Third Reich.

The plot, as far as it matters, is divided into two chapters. The first follows Justine, a young and depressive bride, on her wedding day. The blinding-white dress and Kirsten Dunst’s vacuous expression combine to create the closest thing cinema can manage to a void, a gaping hole through which we’re invited to look at the friends and family members gathered in celebration. They’re a dubious bunch, greedy and gabby and self-centered, and we have no qualms with Justine’s efforts to escape the ceremony and its confinements, efforts that include a long bath and a quick romp with someone other than her betrothed. There’s also some talk of a star, Melancholia, which was hiding behind the sun and has now emerged to dazzle the skies with its splendid red glow. One of the revelers comments that there’s no chance of Melancholia ever hitting Earth, and because he is portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland we’re inclined to believe him.

It would spoil very little of the pleasure of watching Melancholia to say that the eponymous red star does end up colliding with Earth and that our home planet and everyone living on it ends up perishing in flames. All the while, the theme from Tristan und Isolde plays hauntingly.

Taken at face value, the movie leaves much to be desired. Its operatic opening, complete with a sequence of celestial bodies hanging low and bright, evokes the same madly grandiose aspirations that turned off so many people to Terence Malick’s Tree of Life and its depiction of the world’s creation. And von Trier’s characters do little more than insinuate, ever so careful not to succumb to real representation or sink to needless emotional depths. But read as an allegory, Melancholia is stunning.

An allegory of what? The film’s name might give us a clue. The word’s original meaning is “black bile;” far from mere sadness, it once represented a state of emotional, physical, and spiritual decline. “At the close of the Middle Ages,” Johan Huizinga wrote in his seminal book on that period, “a sombre melancholy weighs on people’s souls.” A similar sensation afflicts everyone in von Trier’s film. Even those who try their best to be nice and helpful end up paralyzed by some unholy mixture of sorrow, rage, and regret, until, quite literally, Melancholia (the star) destroys everything.

As the star approaches Earth, Justine grows calmer and more radiant. Riding horses in the misty countryside and lying naked by the river, she looks like something out of Wagner, a Valkyrie taking one last nap before darting off to Valhalla. Her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), on the other hand, becomes more and more neurotic, scrambling madly in an effort to avert the catastrophe. That one sister is blonde and lithe and the other is Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter is hard to ignore—the more Justine is intoxicated by madness and ruin, the more frantically Claire tries to appeal to the rational and orderly institutions of society for help. Nothing helps. Doom is imminent.

Which is where Hitler comes in.

Given von Trier’s comments in Cannes, his constant use of one of the Nazi dictator’s favorite pieces of music, his choice of actresses, and his clear metaphysical aspirations—you don’t open your film with images of the world coming to an end unless you’re trying to say something about existence at large—it’s not hard to imagine that the destructive red star might have a swastika emblazoned somewhere on its surface, representing the same demonic force that propelled Hitler to power. Both lurk in the shadows of a highly cultivated society, and both consume a universe far too reasonable to believe that total annihilation is possible.

But von Trier seems less interested in the destruction itself than he is in its theological underpinnings. His sympathy for Hitler is rooted not in some juvenile sense of morbidity or prankishness, but in the same impossible question that occupied so many thinkers in the aftermath of Auschwitz: How, in the wake of such monstrosities, can we still have any hope, any faith? We ask the same while watching the world teeter toward its destruction in Melancholia—should we just accept the demise of all these people? Should we just sit there as humanity screeches and burns?

Von Trier thinks so. Black bile, he argues, is likely to consume us every time, but from the ashes a new world, a new morality, a new life will emerge. Far from a nihilistic celebration of the beauty of destruction, von Trier’s film offers us a radical and necessary theodicy that tells us we’re going to suffer but promises us it’s all for a good cause, the cause being the rebirth of the horrifying as the beautiful and the sublime. Terror gives way to reflection. Suffering gains meaning.

A somewhat similar view was expressed by the rabbi and theologian Ignaz Maybaum. Escaping Berlin in 1939, the Vienna-born Maybaum lost his mother, sisters, and other relatives in the Holocaust. In 1965, he published his attempt at understanding what had happened to the Jews. Titled The Face of God After Auschwitz, the book made a radical claim: Hitler, Maybaum argued, was an instrument of God, used “to purify, to punish a sinful world; the six million Jews; they died an innocent death; they died because of the sins of others.” The Jews, in other words, have become the “suffering servants” Isaiah talked about, and their sacrifice cleansed the world of its evils and ushered in a new era of hope and joy.

Maybaum’s remains a controversial argument—the chief reason, perhaps, why this marvelous thinker and writer isn’t very well-known today. It’s also a theory one imagines von Trier happily adopting. In 2005, he gave an interview to the German weekly Die Zeit, revealing his shock at discovering late in life that the man who’d raised him, a Jewish gentleman named Ulf Trier, was not his biological father. “Before she died,” he said, “my mother told me to be happy that I was the son of this other man. She said my foster father had had no goals and no strength. But he was a loving man. And I was very sad about this revelation.” His real father, von Trier learned, was a German with the unimprovable name of Fritz Michael Hartmann, heir to a long line of classical musicians; von Trier’s mother told him that she believed that by becoming pregnant with Hartmann’s child she would produce an artistic genius. “You then feel manipulated when you really do turn out to be creative,” von Trier mused. “If I’d known that my mother had this plan, I would have become something else. I would have shown her. The slut!”

It’s Melancholia all over again: the inevitable destiny, the suffering, the sublimation, and the eventual redemption. Doomed at birth to a life of hardship, dedicated to bearing witness to the world’s ills, reviled but determined to find beauty and meaning in the darkest hours, von Trier is more of a Jew than he might care to admit, and Melancholia is more of a Jewish movie than he might realize. There’s no redemption here, but nor is there despair. Instead, there are human beings with human fears, some panicking and some calm, and a final moment that is preordained but that is nonetheless surprising, saddening, and beautiful enough to send us out of the theater humming Wagner and dedicated to doing whatever we can to make life count before our own world ends, as it inevitably will. There’s little more we can ask a movie to do.

1982, dir. Alan J. Pakula. Only Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline could save this high-strung adaptation of a plaintive William Styron novel from too-muchness. Luckily, this 1982 costume drama starred Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline.

But like every good scandal, this one is really about something much bigger: the meaning of Zionism. In a blog post titled “A Dissenting Opinion on ‘Aba-Gate,’ ” David Hazony, whom I consider a friend and for whom I have much respect, revealed the ad campaign’s intellectual foundations. In doing so, he was very useful, and he couldn’t have been more wrong. The ads infuriated American Jews because they hit too close to home, he argued. Long accustomed to being world’s Jewry top dog, American Jews, Hazony said, are angry at Israel for standing up and criticizing its obvious deficiencies. To support this argument, Hazony offers more than a few unbacked assertions: for example, that “the richest experiences of Jewish life today” are happening in Israel.

Even if Hazony could prove such spurious claims, his polemic would still betray a regrettable way of thinking. His logic was summed up in the following paragraph: “Many American Jews,” Hazony wrote, “cannot imagine that there’s something really special in Israeli identity, and that Israelis are right to try and protect it by discouraging this new form of intermarriage. The very idea sends a shiver down the American Jewish spine—but isn’t it based on the very same cultural protectiveness that causes American Jewish leaders to discourage the old kind of intermarriage, with non-Jews?”

No, it’s not. Unless, that is, you believe that Jewish-Israeli identity is somehow fundamentally different from Jewish-American identity. It’s not hard to understand. Like so many on both the left and the right in Israel, Hazony appears to interpret the last century of Jewish history thusly: The Diaspora proved to be plagued by disasters (from death camps to intermarriage); Israel proved strong and self-sufficient (from army to high-tech); and therefore Israel must become increasingly central to Jewish identity worldwide and the Diaspora must take the back seat.

To seriously suggest that American Jews “blow a fuse at the thought of losing the leading role” suggests a radically narrow interpretation of Zionism, one that ignores the movement’s extraordinarily diverse heritage and layered history. Zionism, after all, was powerful and successful precisely because it could unite secular and religious Jews, Marxists and Revisionists, poets and patricians. And it succeeded in appealing to Jews worldwide even after the establishment of Israel in 1948 because many Jews, true to the movement’s historical nature, saw Zionism not as a demand to make aliyah but as an invitation to engage in building an extraordinary nation, based on Jewish values, in parts of the biblical promised land. It was a mission that could unite all Jews, and it is sad to see that very same nation doing whatever it can to turn on its partners, flex its muscles, and declare its superiority. The ads may be gone, but the bad attitude, it is evident, is here to stay.

A Dissenting Opinion on ‘Aba-Gate’ [Forward Thinking]
Related: Mixed Marriage [Tablet Magazine]