The coupled invitation and challenge presented by Whitman’s poems have attracted hundreds of composers, including Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill, and Leonard Bernstein, who have set them to music. It proved irresistible, too, for Daniel Redman, now a 30-year-old civil rights attorney in San Francisco, when he fell in love with Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s magnum opus, six years ago. Redman had studied musical composition as a teenager, but his attempts to create art songs or choral arrangements around Whitman’s poems left him cold. What finally did feel right to Redman—and became the basis for a 40-minute-long vocal work—was setting Leaves of Grass to Torah-trop-inspired chant. (To watch a video of Redman performing, click here.)

When Redman first encountered Whitman during a winter break from law school at the University of California at Berkeley, he was recently out of the closet and transitioning away from a period of traditional religious observance that had lasted for several years in his young adulthood. Whitman’s celebration of both spiritual and bodily reverie, including love between men, resonated deeply with him in a musical language that Redman eventually came to associate with Jewish prayer.

“I realized that the musical experiences that had been most ecstatic for me had been in a Jewish context,” Redman told me. “But my kavanah”—the intense mindfulness that is supposed to accompany the performance of mitzvot like prayer—“had kind of died in a traditional davening context, and by setting these poems to music, I found a new avenue for that.”

Redman saw something powerful not just in the sounds but in the functional aspects of the trops created by medieval rabbis and still used today to chant Torah and other biblical texts. For one thing, trop, as Redman put it, “serves an exegetical function”: It creates a kind of punctuation that can guide readers through an unwieldy text like the Jewish scriptures or Leaves of Grass, which was published in six (or nine, depending on whom you ask) editions composed over nearly four decades.

Cantillation also acts as an aid to memorization—something especially vital, Redman pointed out, for a diasporic people seeking to transmit values and stories across generations. When you sing a text, “you just internalize it in a way you don’t otherwise,” he said. “It creates a portable tradition.” Redman seems bemused by the audacity of his own project and the questions it raises. Can a single text, particularly one by a dead white man, speak to a collective as diverse as the gay community? Does it matter if Whitman himself hoped to call such a community into existence through his work? Yet despite such questions, he dreams of creating a version of Leaves of Grass that could serve as a portable tradition for another people in diaspora: the gay community.

Redman is quick to note that by adding trops he is not trying to turn Whitman into holy writ. But Whitman, an avowed skeptic of organized religion, at one point referred to Leaves of Grass as a “Bible of the New Religion,” and many scholars have noted his literary debt to the Hebrew scriptures.

Redman’s project made perfect sense to Irwin Keller, the lay leader of Congregation Ner Shalom, a Bay Area Reconstructionist synagogue where Redman chanted Whitman at the end of Friday night services last March.

“It has heaven and it has body and it has suffering, all of these great themes that you get in Psalms, you get in Lamentations, you get in Song of the Sea,” Keller said of Leaves of Grass. These same texts of the Old Testament, he noted—“the ones that are really poetry as opposed to law”—are traditionally set off from more workaday parts of the scriptures by being chanted with their own special trops.

Setting the first two short poems in Leaves of Grass took three years, but then, Redman said, “I started to have a musical vocabulary I could work with.” He can now chant from memory the 24 poems that make up “Inscriptions,” the first book of Leaves of Grass, and several more chosen from the next book, Song of Myself, and from the intensely homoerotic Calamus poems. Over the past year, via word of mouth, Redman has been invited to chant Whitman at the San Francisco Public Library and for a small audience at the home of Esther Schor, a Princeton University professor of English, on her birthday.

When Redman performs, all self-consciousness about his project vanishes. He chants fortissimo, with mesmerizingly total commitment. It’s not a reading of Whitman, it’s “more like a channeling of Whitman,” said Schor, who has written on the poet and his contemporaries. “Everyone was completely dumbstruck by it.”

Rhythmically, Redman’s incantation bears the unmistakable sound of traditional leyning, or Torah chanting. Instead of being fit into a regular meter, each word in a phrase gets its own pattern of elongations and inflections. But its melodies are uncannily distinct from the trops that have been used to chant the Torah and other biblical texts since the medieval period. Different audiences hear different things. Keller heard something Appalachian. Schor detected the strains of Shaker shape-note singing.

And when Lawrence Kramer, a Fordham University English and music professor who has written on Whitman’s musical adaptations, listened to an audio clip of Redman for this article, he heard Whitman. In 1992, an English professor at a Texas community college discovered that the poet, already dead for a century, had left behind a 36-second phonograph recording of lines from his poem “America.” If the recording is authentic, as scholars believe it probably is, it uncannily resurrects the Brooklyn drawl of this poet who celebrated the sound of his own voice. Like Redman, Kramer said, Whitman elongates his vowels, giving his recitation a chant-like quality.

“He refers to his poetry as chant again and again; he suggests it should be musicalized,” Kramer said. “In a way, you can say that what Redman is doing is very much consistent with Whitman’s conception of how his verse should be orally delivered.”

Now, uncannily, first-time novelist Adam Levin is set to publish The Instructions, a preposterously long, immensely ambitious novel on the very same subject. And as if in response to Cohen’s challenge, The Instructions proclaims itself something like the first post-Jewish novel, one that leaves behind the modern-day Jewish literary tradition and starts over. That is to say, The Instructions purports to be a new work of scripture.

The Instructions is in fact a vital work of—no getting around it—American Jewish literature because it imagines that the genre is indeed through and asks what can be written in its place. A Nabokovian book-within-a-book, The Instructions, purports to be a divinely-inspired work by its antihero, teenage would-be messiah Gurion Maccabee. It is Gurion’s astonishing conceit that, out of boredom with the current state of Jewish fiction, he will write, and enact, the word of God instead. “I am not even remotely interested in writing a two-page short story about made-up Jewish people eating dinner,” he explains, “so instead I’ve written scripture.” This is, like most things Gurion says, at least a partial lie: An extraordinary scene in which Jewish people eat dinner begins three pages later. But we also know what he means. Most of the tropes we associate with American Jewish literature have either vanished here or been somehow reversed. The Holocaust and how we remember it get barely a mention. There is no sex, no messy family dynamics. No one is trying to assimilate, join a club that won’t have him as a member, or escape Judaism. Rather, Gurion and his followers want to intensify their Judaism. They are “Israelites”: stronger, prouder, better-armed, more God-fearing versions of the Jews, their predecessors. So what’s left to talk about when we trade the American Jewish novel for ersatz religious-Zionist scripture? Plenty, it turns out: chosenness, nationhood, violence, power, the end of the world—the most important Jewish questions, perhaps, of our day.

Over more than a thousand pages, Gurion turns four days of his childhood in Chicago’s northern suburbs into an epic journey from bondage (in a junior-high lockdown program for behavior problems) to freedom, with unmistakable echoes of the Exodus. Or at least that’s what he wants us to read: This is his Pentateuch, and he has constructed himself as a latter-day Moses. The reader may come to suspect, however, that he is merely a pint-size cult leader. Only God (and perhaps Levin) knows for sure. Gurion’s endless, and endlessly captivating, shaggy-dog story—narrated in a pidgin of invented youth lingo, untranslated bits of Yiddish and Hebrew, extended biblical commentaries, and God-speak (“and I saw that it was good”)—is set in a world just supernatural enough to keep us wondering whether our narrator might be the messiah after all.

A few years after his arrival is prophesied by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson (himself considered the messiah by some Lubavitcher Hasidim), Gurion is born with birthmarks that spell “Adonai,” a mouth full of teeth, and a genius for both leadership (assisted by his ex-IDF-sniper mother) and scholarship (refined by his attorney father, Judah Maccabee). His talent for demagoguery appears early, too. Gurion’s Jewish day school classmates revere him; they are the first to float the messiah theory. Gurion finds a textual loophole that keeps them—and himself—in a state of suspended disbelief. A popular interpretation of Maimonides holds that a potential messiah arises in every generation, though none will be actualized until the time is right. He’s probably not the messiah, but one never knows for sure.

Things begin to go downhill when Gurion, age 9, assaults a teacher who makes fun of his messianic aspirations. He is expelled and sent to another day school. After a local anti-Semitic incident, he arms his new classmates with homemade weapons (slingshots—there’s no cap on the number of biblical heroes he hopes to be identified with), and delivers the first of many sermons that seem to borrow rhetoric from extremist settler groups. “Never again will we cower amidst the masses of the Roman and Canaanite children,” he proclaims. “Blessed is Elohim, Who blesses our weapons.” He gets kicked out of that school, too.

The main action of The Instructions takes place as Gurion, now 10, organizes his fellow inmates in “the Cage” at Aptakisic Junior High, a public school, Cuckoo’s Nest-style. Meanwhile, day-school boys around the city await his instructions. As his two armies line up behind him, Gurion becomes increasingly convinced that he is the savior of the Jews. Things get very dark from there.

Gurion continually diverts us with a Torah’s-worth of memorable subplots. A day-school playground on the morning of the World Trade Center attacks is suffused with terrifying euphoria as the grade-schoolers realize they have finally “become the underdog.” A schism erupts between Jewish and non-Jewish members of the Shovers, a fratty crew at Aptakisic, when a Christian student wants to include an ichthys among the symbols on the group’s identifying scarves. And Gurion’s family is increasingly harassed by Jewish community members when (in a nod to the Skokie affair) Judah Maccabee takes on a neo-Nazi client.

These stories pile up, slowly building evidence for Gurion’s central thesis: Everyone wants, above all else, a pretext or opportunity for doing violence. This bleak view is a hallmark of the teen boy literary canon, to which The Instructions owes much. Behind the unassuming visage of the meekest band geek is a bully whose bloodthirst will be unleashed if he is simply given the chance. And beneath the responsible patter of authority figures is an unalloyed desire to monopolize the legitimate use of violence. “Fear is contempt,” as Gurion’s best friend puts it, “whether the fearful know it or not.”

Gurion believes this cycle of violence is ennobling, and that with God and himself on their side, the Jews will win. This is an easy enough belief system to pin on a Jack Tytell figure crouching with a rifle on a Hebron hilltop. But Gurion struggles to make you, the reader—or at least the Jewish reader—complicit. This is how the scriptural form produces its most unsettling effect: Scriptures directly address followers, or would-be followers, so if you are a Jew reading The Instructions, you are harangued to grab a slingshot and join up. I can only hazard a guess that as a non-Jewish reader, you would not feel so welcome. If, as Gurion likes to remind us, some nags have always considered American Jewish literature a shande far di goyim because it airs vast regions of unsightly Jewish shame, Levin has written a daunting “Israelite” novel with a big “Jews Only” sign on it, exposing vast regions of unsightly Jewish pride.

One way to read The Instructions might be as a giant postmodern gag about the impossibility of ceasing to write American Jewish novels, because wedged between the apocalyptic stuff is a gorgeous portrait of an ordinary Jewish community. Not just Levin but Gurion knows this perfectly well, and to remind us, he constantly looks over his shoulder to his idol Philip Roth. Though he insists his own project is a post-Rothian (because post-Jewish) one, he protests too much.

Ultimately, though, it’s not just the fate of the American Jewish novel, but the fate of the Jewish people—and their relationship to chosenness, nationhood, violence, power, messianism—that is at stake here. I don’t want to give away too much, but let’s just say a hostage situation arises, during which Gurion tells a hostage negotiator to get Roth on the phone. This is a pretty good joke—a young Jewish writer is so desperate for a pat on the head from his literary hero that he sets up a life-or-death situation that will force the author to talk to him.

But Levin won’t let it rest there. Roth finally does get on the phone. “So what do you want from me?” he asks.

Nothing, says Gurion. “You’re hard to get a hold of. You bought me fifty-something minutes.”

In the meantime, he has beaten a boy senseless.

But in the past few years, Horowitz (who appeared in Tablet Magazine last week in a debate over the “Ground Zero mosque”) has also produced two small, philosophically searching, extraordinarily dark memoirs: The End of Time, from 2005, about his diagnosis of prostate cancer, and A Cracking of the Heart, published last year, about the loss of his daughter. In these works, Horowitz has much to say about contemporary Jewish ethics—and particularly about the popular concept of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world,” which he sees as dangerously utopian. If Jews believe they have “a mission to repair the world by bringing about the rule of God’s law on earth,” he argues in The End of Time, they may stop at nothing to see that will done.

Coming from Horowitz, this might seem like a predictably contrarian stance. After all, in Jewish discourse over the past few decades, tikkun olam has become a phrase almost as ubiquitous as Shabbat shalom. Hillel, about whom Joseph Telushkin has written a new biography for the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters series, was the first to apply the concept to interpreting Jewish law. Codified in the Mishnah, elaborated by the Kabbalists as an injunction to restore the world to its divine order, and retrieved from obscurity by the Jewish Renewal movement in the 1960s and ’70s, the term has a connotation of progressive politics but is used today in a broad range of Jewish contexts to signify social action of all sorts. But in fact, Horowitz’s critique seems to have anticipated new rumblings in the Jewish zeitgeist: a reconsideration, from quarters more mainstream than his own, of tikkun olam.

“It’s a new trope on the right,” said Todd Gitlin, co-author with Tablet Magazine staffer Liel Leibovitz of a forthcoming book on the concept of “chosen people” and an occasional sparring partner with Horowitz. Gitlin said he encountered the tikkun olam backlash at a conclave last year, where he heard Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman take aim at the concept. “It suggests that the errors of the left are rooted in a theological mistake—and by implication, these are bad Jews who have forsaken their own people because of a misinterpretation of a text.”

Even Michael Lerner, the rabbi most deeply associated with “tikkun olam”—his magazine Tikkun helped launch the term to prominence in the 1980s—has his qualms.

“As my analysis began to sweep through the Jewish world in the mid-’90s, more and more Jewish organizations were looking for a quick fix,” Lerner said in an email. According to Lerner, such organizations tacked the phrase to occasional volunteer projects but still have yet to address deeper political issues. “It was the adoption of the language of tikkun olam without its substance that has provided some Jews with a new way of feeling proud of their Judaism on the cheap.” (Another progressive rabbi, Jill Jacobs, noted in a 2008 essay that some of her colleagues have suggested tossing out the term or “putting it on a twenty-year hiatus.”)

As Gitlin suggested, Horowitz argues that a theological mistake undergirds the leftist thinking of those like Lerner, whom he called a “menace” in an interview. (“Leftist,” in Horowitz’s usage, is a broad term; it seems to extend, for instance, to most people who vote for Democrats.) While leftists, he claims, hew to the notion that people are born pure and are corrupted by society, conservatives accept the fact that, as he writes in The End of Time, “a black hole lies at the bottom of every human soul.” (Sometimes, for an agnostic Jew, Horowitz sounds very Catholic. “We were given a perfect world, better than socialism,” he told Tablet. “And we couldn’t refrain from the temptation to do evil. I wish that I’d been taught a doctrine of original sin.”)

Coming from this philosophical position, Horowitz believes that attempts at tikkun olam are grave folly. Adherents to the concept—and particularly, those who have tied Jewish ethics to liberal politics—“believe you can make the world holy,” he said in an interview. “And that’s the most dangerous idea around. That’s the Mohammed Atta idea; that’s the idea of the guy who murdered the abortion doctor.” In The End of Time, Horowitz ultimately calls for a kind of anti-humanist existentialism. “Every life is an injustice,” he concludes. “And no one can fix it.” His argument culminates in a disavowal of “Moses, Jesus, Buddha, the Hindu gurus” for their naive encomiums to empathy.

In A Cracking of the Heart, Horowitz’s tone moves from aggrieved to grieving, and his attitude toward tikkun olam shifts slightly along with it. Horowitz’s daughter, Sarah, who had often served as her father’s political interlocutor, died at age 44 in 2008 from complications of Turner syndrome. Sarah was active in a progressive corner of the Jewish world deeply invested in the notion of tikkun olam—“a particular bone of our contentions,” Horowitz wrote. (Tablet Magazine’s predecessor site published an interview with Sarah Horowitz on the subject shortly before her death.) After she died, Horowitz found in Sarah’s apartment a page from the manuscript of The End of Time, which he remembered sending to his daughter in the spirit of debate. “You are not smarter than Moses, Jesus and Buddha,” she had wryly noted in the margins—and to some extent, he conceded.

Others who have inveighed against tikkun olam have done so in more measured terms. Foxman acknowledged that he’d taken a swipe at the concept at last year’s Jewish People’s Policy Planning Conference but said that his problem was not with tikkun olam as a value but with its current ubiquity in religious discourse. “What I’ve been critical of is those who have sold Judaism as, ‘All you have to do is love universally and that’s Judaism,’ ” Foxman said. “It’s not—it’s ersatz Judaism. It’s Judaism lite.” It also, Foxman added pointedly, has the potential to elevate political action on behalf of others while brushing past the theological significance of acting on behalf of Jews.

A similar debate has arisen in mainstream rabbinic circles. In 2006, Gordon Tucker, a Conservative movement leader who serves as rabbi at Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York, delivered a Rosh Hashanah sermon that rebutted an oration being given by a Modern Orthodox rabbi a few suburbs away. The latter sermon, which Tucker had previewed at a rabbinical seminar, was called “The Two Most Dangerous Words in the Hebrew Language”; Tucker said he was “shaken” to hear that the two words were tikkun olam. (Jeremiah Wohlberg, the now-retired author of that sermon, did not respond to calls for comment.)

Asked whether he believed Horowitz’s critique held water, Tucker said that the rabbis of old who originated the concept had specifically guarded against Horowitz’s fears. “The rabbinic tradition is decidedly not utopian, in that it accepts the need to live and work in an imperfect world, and yet at the same time promotes the idea of an obligation to work in the direction of perfecting the world more than it already is,” he wrote in an email. “The words tikkun olam, after all, come from that same non-utopian rabbinic tradition.”

Marissa Brostoff is a former staff writer at Tablet Magazine. She is currently studying for a doctorate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

First there’s Sam himself, who teaches (and models) a combination of reportorial skills and deep background knowledge of subject matter in a way that I think would have inspired me even had my beat been technology or theater or anything, rather than Jews. He provides feedback on student work that, frankly, would ordinarily cost you upwards of $50,000 a year. The students in my class ranged from talented freelancers just out of college to tenure-track Jewish studies professors, which meant highly engaged discussion during class—and a cohort of folks helping each other get their stories published, to this day.

My favorite thing about the class, though, was that I got to read, discuss, hear from, and meet about a dozen of our foremost experts on Jewish history and Jewish life: The same scholars and writers one often needs to call when writing, say, a Tablet Magazine article, would show up as guest lecturers.

All of this gets done in only four or five all-day meetings over the course of a school year—which I found to be a reasonable time commitment even as a full-time reporter.

Application guidelines and more information about the seminar are here. Enjoy.

Life During Wartime is as full of Jewish signifiers as any film I have ever seen. Superficially, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man—bar mitzvah rehearsals in the foreground, cantorial music in the background, and, overhead, the thunder of a seriously twisted God of the Old Testament. But, while A Serious Man is a profound meditation on suffering that references Jewish philosophy from the Bible to Kafka, the Jewishness of Life During Wartime is just kind of … there. At its best, it provides the basis for cutting social satire of the provincial Jewish middle class. (Here’s Trish and Harvey on their first date: “Harvey?” “Yes?” “Have you ever been to Israel?” “No. But it’s where I want to be buried.” “Me too.”) But for a film centered around a Jewish family struggling with the concept of forgiveness, it seems there ought to be some kind of animating Jewish idea beneath the surface. Solondz—a one-time yeshiva student—seems to think so, too. “If you grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust, it’s not hard to see those limits of what one can accept, forgive, and so forth,” he told the Forward in a recent interview.

But in Life During Wartime, he frames this question of limits—through the earnest Timmy—in cringingly literal terms. Can you forgive a pedophile? If you forgive a pedophile, can you forgive a terrorist? If you can forgive a terrorist, can you forgive a terrorist who blew up your own office building on 9/11? There is something Talmudic about this attempt to outwit suffering through the creation of neat moral categories, but at a level of parody that seems almost too obvious, like calling your sad movie Happiness or opening the scene of a failed romance with the notes of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” We’ve known at least since Philip Roth left Newark that a thicket of mazel tovs and chai necklaces (Trish wears one) can’t save messed-up suburban Jews from themselves, and instead only throws their foibles into relief. After all these years, I’m still waiting for Solondz to make another masterpiece like Welcome to the Dollhouse, which shows the anatomy of cruelty and suffering in clinical detail rather than commenting on them from an ironic distance.

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee
Related: Slapping the Other Cheek [Forward]

If you have experience in journalism and are familiar with the landscape of American Jewish life, we’d love to hear from you. We are hiring interns to work two or three days a week at our office in New York City. Interns will assist the editorial staff with research and administrative tasks, as well as contributing blog posts and full features, and will receive paid stipends. If you’re interested in applying for the upcoming fall term, which starts August 16, please send a résumé and three writing clips to our internship coordinator, Marissa Brostoff (mbrostoff@tabletmag.com), by Monday, August 2. We look forward to hearing from you.

The main action of Imagining Madoff—playing at Stageworks Hudson in Hudson, New York—takes place during a long, scotch-soaked, pre-recession evening in the study of Solomon Galkin, a Holocaust survivor, poet, and Jewish community leader who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to a certain Nobel laureate. Madoff, as imagined by Margolin, manages the funds of the Manhattan synagogue where Galkin (Howard Green) is treasurer; now Galkin, dazzled with the results, has summoned the magician to his home, hoping Madoff will take on his personal investments as well. The men banter easily, and their business meeting becomes a rambling debate over money, morality, Judaism, the Holocaust, and sex, with Madoff playing the whip-smart cynic to Galkin’s erudite moralist. What Galkin doesn’t know is that, like the hapless mortals of religious allegory who try to out-reason the Devil (as in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) or Death (as in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), his interlocutor holds a stacked deck—and Galkin’s fate—in his hands.

In Margolin’s telling, Madoff (played wonderfully by Mark Margolis) may not literally be Satan, but like the devils of literature, he can be charming, sadistic, and profound at the same time. Sitting in his prison cell, telling his story to a biographer (the scene in Galkin’s study is actually an extended flashback), he makes what may sound like a laughably outrageous claim: “I didn’t really care that much about the money.” But perhaps it’s not so outrageous. Serial killers, we know from the movies, are motivated less by practicality than by perversity—even, like Hannibal Lecter, by refined aesthetics—so, why can’t the same be true of serial extortionists? “There was the music of it,” Madoff says wistfully. The dollars don’t just flash before his eyes; he waltzes with them. Later, he remembers a dream in which his penis is a vagina and his vagina is a wallet. The play’s third character, a former Madoff secretary whom we periodically see testifying before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, offers the deliciously creepy fact that in 10 years, she never saw her former boss get up to go to the bathroom.

Most devilishly of all, Madoff as portrayed by Margolin is a kind of unconscientious objector to the moral universe presided over by the god of Abraham, where piety and obedience are rewarded and hubris is shunned. Galkin, then, is his natural enemy: a man who has seen hell and, instead of capitulating to its amoral code, has embraced Torah, ethics, and the Jewish people. He also happens to be a bit of a sap. Prattling about God and Sandy Koufax in his plush study, he comes across as self-satisfied and somewhat soft in the head. Madoff repeatedly attempts to convince Galkin that the latter’s beloved Talmudic riddles are not paths to higher wisdom but to complacency. Galkin will have none of it: For him, the very fact that a financial sorcerer is managing his synagogue’s funds is evidence of divine favor. “A lot of people ask me: Who is this Madoff? How does he make these miracles with money?” he says. “And I tell them: No one knows! That’s what makes it a miracle!”

Galkin, in short, is Madoff’s perfect mark: His belief in providence and in the goodness of fellow Jews makes him easy to exploit, and that, in turn, means Madoff wins their philosophical debate. His ability to betray his own people reveals the limits of Galkin’s moral imagination. “I wanted to rip up the picture he had of the world,” Madoff tells us. “His picture of the world as a place where some men are purely moral. I wanted to say, ‘Wake up, asshole! Wake up!’ It’s a danger to the world, that picture, that idea of moral men. With that picture in your mind you’ll be murdered in your sleep.”

Margolin’s most disturbing insinuation, as voiced through Madoff—the one, perhaps, that Wiesel found most obscene—is that Galkin’s credulousness mirrors that of the proverbial good Germans, who trusted that a charismatic countryman would not lead them toward catastrophe. “Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t any man, still follow the leader blindly without knowing where he was going?” Madoff demands. Galkin will not entertain the possibility that despite his hard-won moral insights, he too is capable of “just following orders”; Madoff, meanwhile, never seems to consider that such a consummately human failing deserves sympathy rather than contempt.

In the end, the only character willing to consider the possibility that she has erred is the one without a bone to pick about the essential moral character of the world. “I never asked many questions,” Madoff’s secretary tells the SEC guiltily at the beginning of the play. By its end, she has charged herself more harshly than a judge, earthly or celestial, ever would. “I committed a crime,” she says, “and I didn’t even know it.”

So, it came as a surprise when, at 11:30 on that first Saturday night, after an exhausting opening session, about a quarter of the 200 conference-goers, overwhelmingly under 30, gathered to celebrate havdalah, the ceremony that ushers out the Sabbath. As they swayed in a circle singing “Lo Yisa Goy,” a Hebrew folksong—“and into plowshares beat their swords, nations shall learn war no more”—the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network felt for a moment like Jewish summer camp. Many Jewish community leaders would not have been enthusiastic about the scene. And, in echoes that reverberated throughout the conference, neither were some leaders of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

A growing cohort of young Jews actively involved in Jewish life—often in alternative realms like independent minyans, the Yiddish-revival movement, and social-justice organizations—are taking left-wing positions on Israel that leave them feeling marginalized even in the Jewish communities they call home. Ideologically, they range from those who couch their politics in the language of international law and ultimately favor a two-state solution to those who use the more radical language of anti-imperialism and insist that true democracy can never happen within a Jewish state—with countless shades in between. By flirting with the labels “non-Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” without abandoning other traditional affiliations, they have crossed a line into territory where there exists no well-marked space on the American Jewish ideological map.

Into this vacuum came the first conference of the two-year-old International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a still-obscure organization (though one now on the watch list of some mainstream Jewish organizations) with a moniker echoing those of long-defunct groups, like the Jewish Communist Labor Bund, that tethered Jewish specificity to the international left. For many of the young Jews who turned out in Detroit—most en route to the U.S. Social Forum, a major activist expo that was held in the city later that week—the Assembly seemed to promise a distinctly Jewish space in which to engage in or try on the ideas that Zionism does in fact equal racism and that only a one-state solution can mean justice for Palestinians—regardless of whether they take such a hard line in their day-to-day lives.

But then they encountered a new problem: Their elders on the radical left didn’t know what to do with them either. They were too Jewish.

“Folks like us get it from both sides,” said a 27-year-old Jewish religious professional at the conference who requested anonymity because, she said, she feared repercussions if her views became known. “We’re not loyal enough to the Jews and we’re not pure enough for the anti-Zionists.”

The existence of non- and anti-Zionist Jews is in itself nothing novel; from socialist Jewish movements in prewar Eastern Europe to the ultra-Orthodox sect Neturei Karta, they have been around as long as Zionism itself. What may be new is the emergence of a group of Jews whose leftism does not automatically equal secularism, as it did for generations of Marxists, and who, at the same time, grew up in or were welcomed into a liberal sector of the religious landscape that has grown exponentially over the past few decades. It’s not hard these days, at least in most American cities with large Jewish communities, to find synagogues or minyans that explicitly welcome feminists, gay Jews, and those suspicious of religious hierarchies—as well as spaces next door for those more interested in Yiddish culture or social action.

“For the past 10 years, and particularly from the Second Lebanon War up to the present, there’s been a resurgence of Jewish anti-Zionism where Zionism had once been strongest: among secular liberal Jews,” said Sam Freedman, a Columbia University journalism professor who has covered the American Jewish community for decades. In a recent New York Times column, he discussed the revival of the American Council for Judaism, a non-Zionist spinoff of the Reform movement. “It’s gone from being a totally peripheral part of the Jewish scene to some growing minority of the Jewish scene.” (According to Hebrew Union College sociologist Steven M. Cohen, no numbers yet exist on the size of the trend.)

The members of this demographic who turned up at the Assembly of Jews voiced a range of complaints about the Jewish institutions in their lives. A 25-year-old environmental activist named Hillary Lehr from Oakland, California, said she no longer wanted to visit the Reform synagogue she’d attended as a child because its pro-Israel stance was casually embedded into ritual life, from prayers for the Jewish state to tzedakah boxes for the Jewish National Fund. “I want to de-Zionize my synagogue because it’s not about being a Zionist, it’s about Judaism,” Lehr said. “There’s a generation that’s ready to go back to those religious and spiritual spaces. I want to say to my rabbi, ‘I want to come back to my spirituality and I want there to be space for all of us because we’re all Jews.’ ”

Avi Grenadier, 27, who helps run a progressive Jewish radio show called Radio613 in Kingston, Ontario, voiced similar objections about his religious education at a Conservative synagogue in a small Ontario town: Israel, he said, had taken the place of religious content—which meant that when he became disillusioned with the Jewish state, there was no other iteration of Judaism to fall back on. “I knew more about Mossad agents’ biographies than about the Nevi’im,” said Grenadier, who said he studied Jewish texts for the first time last year at Yeshivat Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in Manhattan. He now wears a yarmulke and observes the Sabbath.

Others voiced a complaint specific to institutions at the left-most edge of the mainstream Jewish world: Because opinion on Israel can be expected to vary widely—and explosively—in such congregations and organizations, some, by dictate or custom, have simply made discussion of Israel taboo.

Some non-Zionist Jews say they want what more pro-Israel factions of the community have: spaces where the Jewish state can be freely discussed and, indeed, turned into a political cause. But others questioned whether creating congregations that organize around the Palestinian cause would simply replicate the inextricability of Judaism and Zionism at more traditional places of worship.

“It’s not like I’m trapped in this synagogue where there’s all these Zionist politics on Shabbat and I want to create a Shabbat where there’s all these anti-Zionist politics,” said Aaron Levitt, 40, a former board member at West End Synagogue, a Reconstructionst congregation in Manhattan, who left the shul after several years of trying to unmoor it from allegiance to Israel (and who was not at the conference). “It would be just as bad; it might even be worse.”

Levitt helped start a non-Zionist minyan this year called Page 36 with fellow Jewish pro-Palestinian activists including a young Reconstructionist rabbi, Alissa Wise—not, he said, because he ultimately wants to pray only with political comrades, but as a kind of stopgap measure while truly “Zionist-neutral” congregations remain few and far between. At the same time, he added, the minyan was inspired by frustration with what he sees as a lack of interest among many of his coreligionist political comrades in aspects of spirituality and peoplehood that go beyond Jewish-flavored universalist politics.

“I care about Palestinians as much as anyone else,” said Levitt, “but I’m engaged in all this stuff because I care about Jews and Judaism.”

****
It was around precisely these questions of priorities—whether anti-Zionist Jewish movements should be motivated at their deepest level by concern about Jews, or about Palestinians—that the Assembly of Jews became to some extent factionalized. At one end of the spectrum were Jewish Anti-Zionist Network leaders who argued that Jewishness was relevant to the group’s mission primarily to the extent to which it could be used strategically in the public-relations battle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and that to center their own identities much beyond that would, ironically, become another vehicle for Jewish self-obsession.

“Lots of successful movements have found resources and inspiration in spiritual and cultural work, and none of them have mistaken spiritual and cultural work for the movement itself,” said Sarah Kershnar, one of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network’s founders. “The reason we pushed back on identity being the central place to act from is it sometimes lacks that connection with what’s really happening in the world.”

That reasoning went down well with some participants, particularly older ones who, in many cases, described themselves as red-diaper babies or as having been alienated from an older and more conservative iteration of the Jewish world for decades over anything from politics to sexuality.

At the other end of the spectrum were those who hewed more closely to Levitt’s view. They got their havdalah service on the Assembly’s program (though everyone else left the conference center before it began) and led workshops on “Jewish Anti-Zionist Spiritual Reclamation” and “Reclaiming Ashkenazi Cultural Spaces From a Zionist Agenda.” But tensions repeatedly surfaced, at public discussions and behind the scenes.

“It’s startling how much easier it is to bring my politics to Jewish spaces than to bring my Jewishness here,” said a participant active in the Boston minyan scene who wanted to remain anonymous because she hopes to apply for Hebrew school teaching jobs. “The organizers kept asking, ‘What is the material benefit this will have? How is this going to end Zionism?’ And it was like, we don’t want to justify why we pray.”

For those who left the Assembly of Jews with mixed feelings, the conference may ultimately have connected them less to the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network than to a nascent, nameless network of similarly minded young people. Interested parties passed around sign-up sheets for non-Zionist Yom Kippur retreats and hatched an idea to participate in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement to isolate Israel by selling their own, emphatically Diaspora-made, Jewish ritual objects.

A few days after the Assembly ended, some participants who had stayed in town for the Social Forum held a non-Zionist Shabbat dinner along Detroit’s waterfront. And almost immediately, they encountered a challenge: One of the few other Jewish contingents at the Social Forum had come from Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist youth movement. How to integrate the two groups while giving the anti-Zionists the Shabbat they had been promised? The event’s coordinator crafted a text message that she hoped would address the concerns of Assembly folk while also engaging with their Zionist colleagues.

“As most Jewish spaces marginalize the voices of non- and anti-Zionist Jews, this space will privilege the voices of those Jews,” she wrote. But, she added: “All are welcome.”

If you have experience in journalism and are familiar with the landscape of American Jewish life, we’d love to hear from you. We are hiring interns to work two or three days a week at our office in New York City. Interns will assist the editorial staff with research and administrative tasks, as well as contributing blog posts and full features, and will receive paid stipends. If you’re interested in applying for the upcoming fall term, which starts August 16, please send a résumé and three writing clips to our internship coordinator, Marissa Brostoff (mbrostoff@tabletmag.com), by Monday, August 2. We look forward to hearing from you.

I was an extremely phobic young child—bees, fire, elevators, lawnmowers, forklifts. My most incapacitating fears, though, and the ones that took the longest to get over, involved dozens of books, videos, and songs, ones that, according to the logic of a symbolic universe I can no longer really explain, included elements of horror. So, for example, Volume 8 in the Sesame Street Library, with its two-page spread on Old King Cole and its introduction to the letter Q, may seem innocuous to the average reader, but its tale of Hansel and Gretel absolutely terrified me.

That’s not actually the weird part—as Bruno Bettelheim could tell you, the whole point of fairy tales is to help children process their fears in abstract terms—but my particular mechanism for dealing with such situations was to a) hide the offending book in some distant corner of the house and b) from that safe distance, reclaim any symbols associated with it as my “favorite things.” So in this case, 8 (as in Volume) became my favorite number (it still is); purple (as in the color of the Count, who appears on the book’s cover) became my favorite color; and so on. I’m sure there’s a proper name for this coping strategy somewhere in the psychoanalytic literature, and I would love to know what it is.

One item in my pantheon of fear was an illustrated guide to the Jewish holidays. I’ve long forgotten the name of the book and nearly everything else about it, but the scary part still sticks in my mind: A full-page abstract image, in the section on Tisha B’Av, of gray smokestacks against a dark orange sky. I must have been about five when I came upon this picture, but while I was too young to make the explicit connection with the Holocaust, I knew a Shoah when I saw one. The book was hidden. And, as my puzzled kindergarten teacher eventually found out, Tisha B’Av became my “favorite holiday.” My mom still calls me every year to remind me.

That Tisha B’Av illustration is still one of the first things I picture when I picture the Holocaust, which in itself later became—well, I don’t want to call it my “favorite genocide,” but it was a historical event I assiduously avoided and just as assiduously obsessed over. In retrospect, it’s almost like my entire psychological mechanism was designed specifically for that purpose. It makes me wonder if the proper psychoanalytic term isn’t, simply, Judaism.

Last Tuesday, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman presented a 1938 Yiddish film, The Singing Blacksmith, at a screening in Brooklyn. The singing blacksmith in question is played by Moishe Oysher, one of the great celebrity cantors and Yiddish movie stars of the World War II era, and from a show of hands taken by Hoberman, most of the few dozen film geeks in the audience had never heard of him before. Little did these trendsetters know they’d gotten in on the best micro-fad of the summer. A day after the screening and by total coincidence, Arik Luck, a young cantor in Chicago with a background in musical theater, released a live album of an all-Oysher musical revue he’d produced earlier this year. And next week (also by coincidence) a newly restored version of Oysher’s last picture, Singing in the Dark, will premiere at the Jerusalem International Film Festival. In a strange cosmic syzygy, Moishe Oysher is having a moment.

It’s particularly striking that the stars have aligned for Oysher, who died in 1958, because for many cantors alive today, it’s been a rough year. In February, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative movement’s flagship educational institution, folded its cantorial school into its rabbinical school, prompting cries of outrage from students and faculty. And a longtime movement in Conservative and Reform synagogues away from hazzanut and toward participatory singing has been exacerbated by the recession, which has prompted some cash-strapped shuls to have their rabbis do double duty as prayer leaders rather than hiring a cantor. At the same time, though, a resurgence of interest in the cantorial music of yore—less among synagogue-goers than among musicians—was recently given an endorsement by no less an eminence than violinist Itzhak Perlman, who, according to prominent klezmer musician Hankus Netsky, will be touring this year with Yitzhak Helfgot, one of today’s biggest cantorial stars.

“I think maybe we’re far enough away from the sound or the period that it sounds new again,” said Mark Slobin, a music professor at Wesleyan University. For younger musicians, he said, cantorial music “wasn’t some kitsch they had to sit through. It’s just kind of a sound, not an investment in an institutional structure.”

Enter Moishe Oysher—yes, that is said to be his given name—a charming, womanizing rogue whose own approach to “institutional structure” involved claiming that, as part of his vocal regimen, he had to smoke in synagogue. Born in Bessarabia in 1907, Oysher—whose story is told in Bridge of Light, Hoberman’s classic study of Yiddish cinema—performed in the Yiddish theaters of New York and Buenos Aires as a young man, but in his early thirties, desiring steady employment, he followed his father and several grandfathers before him into the cantorate. He quickly proved a divisive figure: His vocal chops earned him a job at the First Roumanian-American Congregation, a synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that was known as “the cantor’s Carnegie Hall,” but some congregants recoiled at the notion that a vaudevillian scamp was to lead them in prayer.

“You had people revoking their membership,” said Luck, who joined the staff of Beth Emet, a Reform temple in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, last summer. “People would come with him on Shabbos as witnesses to vouch that he wasn’t taking the train.”

Oysher’s story struck a chord with Luck, who was himself an aspiring stage actor before he entered cantorial school six years ago, “almost in desperation to be happy with what I was doing in my life”—and was “pleasantly surprised” to find that he loved it. In the course of his studies at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, he discovered Oysher and adopted him as a kind of alter ego. Rather than performing a standard recital as he prepared to graduate from HUC last year, Luck put on a full-length musical revue, Arik Luck Is … Moishe Oysher: The Master Singer of His People! This March, he reprised the show at Beth Emet, drawing a crowd of 700; now he wants to take it on the road. (The live album of the concert is now available through Beth Emet and will be more widely available online in a couple of weeks.)

Back on the 1930s Lower East Side, Oysher struck a deal with the local board of rabbis: He would try to rein in his excesses and would refrain from stage acting but would still be allowed to sing everything from cantorial hits to commercial jingles on the Yiddish radio and to pursue his dream of Hollywood stardom. He never made it into mainstream American cinema, but he did become one of the biggest names in Yiddish film. The Singing Blacksmith—which tells of a blacksmith who overcomes his low station and his own womanizing ways to win the hand of a beautiful maiden—was one of his three musicals in that language. (The movie is also known for its director, Edgar G. Ulmer, an Austrian Jewish émigré who made a number of “nationality films” for American immigrants in their native tongues. According to Hoberman, Ulmer constructed a set on the grounds of a New Jersey monastery that features as the shtetl in The Singing Blacksmith; a year later, he used the same “village,” onion domes looming in the background, for a Ukrainian film called Cossacks in Exile.)

Singing in the Dark, Oysher’s one English-language picture, was a 1956 genre hybrid about an amnesiac Holocaust survivor—and cabaret singer— pursued by gangsters. The National Center for Jewish Film, which previously restored Oysher’s Yiddish movies, will premiere its new version of the film next week. The film institute’s single most popular seller, according to its executive director Lisa Rivo, is a 2-disc set, Great Cantors of the Golden Age and Great Cantors in Cinema—both of which, of course, feature Oysher.

“You listen to a lot of classic cantorial music and it sounds very austere,” said Jeremiah Lockwood, frontman of The Sway Machinery, a band that draws on the sounds of hazzanut. Oysher, he said, “was a little bit slumming, there’s an extra vulgarism to his arrangements. There’ll be horns, maybe a little Latin percussion or something. My grandfather looks down on him as being a little bit of a huckster.”

Oysher did not become, like some of his cantorial contemporaries, an opera singer with highbrow gentile audiences; nor did he reach the pantheon of more “austere” celebrity cantors like Yossele Rosenblatt and Moshe Koussevitzky. But he may have had the last laugh. He’s been preserved on film the way no other cantor has, and if Luck gets his way, Oysher will finally make it to the real Carnegie Hall. Meanwhile, there’s no Koussevitzky fad in sight.

Exhibit A, at the moment, is a fracas going on in Toronto, which will host its 30th annual Pride parade on Sunday, July 4 (because Canadians hate America). Back in April, the city of Toronto threatened to revoke funding from Toronto Pride if a group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (which has participated in previous years) was allowed to march in the parade; a month later, Toronto Pride’s board of directors banned the group. Last week, though, after community members who are being honored at the event announced that they would not accept their awards unless this group was allowed back in, Toronto Pride reversed its ruling—and the outcry switched again to the other side.

On one level, this clash involves the same arguments that always come up when an activist group wants to build an “apartheid wall” on a college campus or stick “Israeli apartheid” on a sign at a public (and, in this case, taxpayer-supported) event: One side maintains the necessity of open political discourse, and the other side responds that calling Israel an apartheid state falls outside politics and into hate speech.

But there are also a couple of factors at play that make fights about Israel within LGBT communities unique, and both are related to whether Middle East politics have anything to do with being gay (at least for LGBT folks who don’t live in the Middle East). “What’s next? An anti-Israel float in the Santa Claus Parade?” the heads of a Toronto gay Jewish group and the Canadian Jewish Congress wrote in a joint op-ed last Sunday. But as at least the former writer should know, Pride parades around the world—because they bring together very different parts of LGBT communities—already bring dissent with them, wracked as they are by tensions between “gay politics,” which are about the rights of same-sex lovers to be recognized and protected by the law, and “queer politics,” which take sexual and gender nonconformity as the jumping-off point for a much more expansive critique of systems of power. In this sense, Israel is just one more site around which a debate flares up about what it means to be an LGBT person in a straight world. (This predicament should actually sound familiar to Jews.)

The second and more Israel-specific factor at play has to do with what some LGBT intellectuals and activists are (increasingly audibly) calling “homonationalism,” which refers to the argument one often hears that non-Western (usually Muslim) countries are horribly homophobic, and thus should lose a large measure of credibility when they complain about their own treatment by the West. Israel’s hasbara campaigns have used a lot of this rhetoric recently, so in another sense, groups like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid are responding to that along the same lines as the American liberals who formed the group Not in Our Name at the outset of the Iraq War: Don’t use our American values to justify bombing Baghdad; don’t use our gayness to justify Israel’s occupation.

None of this, of course, resolves the question of whether calling Israel an apartheid state is accurate or acceptable. But it does help to explain why it’s happening, this weekend, on the streets of Toronto.

• Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen argues that Hamas is inflicting more harm on the people of Gaza than Israel is: “Maybe the blockade ought to end—but so, too, should anyone’s dreamy idea of Hamas.” Mr. Cohen, are you trying to take away my lovely Hamas dreams? What’s next, bunnies? [WaPo]

• The AP takes a look at Mahmoud Abbas’ new strategy of cozying up to American Jewish leaders. [AP]

• As we noted this morning, the Three Weeks begin tonight, which means, for many observant Jews, no music. Do Simon and Garfunkel get an exemption?

No one on the panel—including the anti-BDSers, former Forward newspaper editor J.J. Goldberg and Kathleen Peratis, a J Street board member and onetime New Israel Fund vice president—felt uncomfortable asserting that after decades of administering an occupation, Israel has basically gone rogue. But this underlying assumption is treated in much of the Jewish world as an apostasy, which is why Goldberg and Peratis were by far the more mesmerizing side of the debate to watch. J Street, in particular, has been answering to critics from the right since its birth; in fact, that’s why it was born at all. (This evening, in a lovely bit of symmetry, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami will be debating a different Goldberg—that would be Atlantic writer and Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey—who will, presumably, be sitting to Ben-Ami’s right.) But there are plenty of Jews, and Jewish organizations, to the left of J Street as well, albeit ones who are usually left out, and sometimes explicitly blacklisted, from talking to anyone in the community beyond themselves. Watching Goldberg and Peratis reorient themselves to define their positions when challenged from that, other side was fascinating and a bit vertiginous.

Goldberg and Peratis differentiated sharply between Israel-the-occupier, which they condemned—Peratis said she even supported boycotting products made in the settlements—and Israel-the-Jewish-state, even if this latter thing, which they support, is corroded, they said, by the former.

Their pro-BDS opponents—led by Hannah Mermelstein, a member of the pro-BDS group Adalah New York, and Yonatan Shapira, an Israeli-air-force-pilot-turned-left-wing-activist (and, from a show of hands, representing more than half the audience)—convincingly laid out the problem and, perhaps, illusion of the distinction between Israel-the-occupier and Israel-the-Jewish-state.

One of the smartest ripostes to the anti-BDS team came from a young Palestinian man in the audience (apparently one of a few non-Jews present) who asked Peratis why she’d agree to boycott the settlements themselves but not the government that supports them. In response, Peratis stumbled back to her main talking point, which was that the BDS movement wanted to boycott, divest from, and sanction such a large and unwieldy list of things that it would never be effective.

In a less effective tack, the pro-BDSers argued that Israel’s Jewishness and its mistreatment of Palestinians were inextricably linked—a familiar argument in leftist discourse, but one that painted them into a radical corner from which it was more difficult to make pragmatic arguments in support of their cause.

At one point, Shapira asked Goldberg whether he would support BDS if the occupation was still in place in 10 years, or if Israel “killed 14,000 Palestinians.” It was a mean, counterfactual question, and Goldberg could have ignored it. Instead, he said, “Then I would consider my life’s work a failure.”

By high school debate team standards, I’d say Goldberg and Peratis—who were, incidentally, a generation older than their opponents—won the argument: They were elegant, composed, consistent, and, perhaps most to the point, stayed on the topic of tactics rather than getting lost in the ideological mission creep that often hobbles the left. But in a different sense, their opponents won before the debate even started by getting mainstream Jewish community figures to engage them in a church basement at all.

An audience member named Meredith Tax put it best: “A meeting like this hasn’t happened in my presence since before I was born,” she said, to cheers and laughter from the crowd. Tax, it turned out, was born in 1942.

It’s Kafka rather than Joyce who haunts the final section of Witz, in which the world’s remaining Unaffiliated—that is, those who have not converted to the brand of something-like-Judaism that has come to dominate the post-apocalyptic future, or “not chosen to be chosen” in the Newspeak of this new order—are rounded up and sent to their deaths (by a reconstituted Sanhedrin, naturally) in the reopened concentration camps of Polandland. The new genocide victims are, simultaneously, tourists, and their journeys to Whateverwitz, Whywald, and Nohausen, though mandatory, are also luxury vacations. “Give them the Grand Tour, show them the sites, take it all in, the works, allinclusive: then, terminal transfer to extermination facilities situated at the outer limits of major metropolises throughout the Pale … and then to murder them, every one of them, dead, and so only the pure will be left; that’s the plan.” They are flown first-class to Eastern Europe; “gifted with oodles of ointments to apply to their new tattoos”; taken to barracks with minibars and flat-screen televisions. “They’re not scheduled but punctually leisured to death, that’s how we like to think of it.”

But that’s not the Kafkaesque part. Each Unaffiliate either initially passes through one of several gates that leads directly to death or instead gets to pass through the Tourist Gate, and this is determined by a series of gatekeepers on loan from K’s famous parable “Before the Law” (which, I am personally convinced, is a parable about rabbinic Judaism and which I’m also sure inspired the structure of A Serious Man).

In Kafka’s version, a man stands before the gateway of the Law. It’s guarded by a gatekeeper who tells him he can’t go in at the present time, but that it’s possible he will be allowed to enter later. The gatekeeper allows the man to bribe him with all he has “so that you do not think you have failed to do anything,” but still does not let him in. The man waits his whole life, and on his deathbed, he finally asks the gatekeeper why no one else has ever walked through this particular gate. The keeper says, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

In Cohen’s version, the guards at the Tourist Gate (one of whom keeps a bird called a Kavka on his shoulder) allow the Unaffiliated not only to bribe them, but to proffer explanations—as though they were applying for a spot on the March of the Living—of why they, personally, they wish to take a tour of Polandland. (Throughout their entire encounter no one exits through this Tourist Gate.) If an Unaffiliate plays his cards right, the guard will eventually give him the documents that will allow him to tour rather than be murdered in the gas chambers.

But once an eager tour group is assembled and stands before the gate, it will turn out the guards have marked their documents in disappearing ink. If only there were some adjective available to describe such a thing …

It’s not easy to imagine someone even glancing at Joshua Cohen’s 817-page Modernist epic novel Witz and mistaking it for a run-of-the-mill Holocaust memoir or Eastern-European-genealogical romp, of the type that lands on the desks of staffers at Jewish magazines several times per week. But, as though to make absolutely certain that no one gets misled by the w-pronounced-as-a-v in the title, Cohen (at 29, an already-accomplished novelist and essayist) opens Witz with a sort of moat of difficulty. All seeking entry into its main narrative must cross.

For the first 20 pages or so, we find ourselves in a cubistically rendered mincha service in what seems to be an observant Jewish quarter somewhere in the contemporary United States. Then, we cross “from the world of the father to that of the mother,” in Cohen’s words, and land, still confused, at the Shabbos dinner of Hanna and Israel Israelian and their twelve semi-interchangeable daughters. At the end of the meal, Hanna will give birth, right there on the kitchen table, to a son, Benjamin, who happens to come out of the womb already a little old Jewish man. Benjamin will wind up being the last Jew on earth, and the novel’s protagonist. But we don’t know any of that yet.

The Shabbos dinner is divided obliquely into seven parts, one for each of the days of creation. In the first part, images of light are everywhere: The Israelians’ “table, like the sun, almost set”; Israel, finishing up work at his New York law firm before rushing home to New Jersey by sundown, has “the Sabbath to the left of him, Sabbath to the right, but there’s no Sabbath where he’s sitting—the sun stayed above him, just waiting.” In the next part, God creates water: Eldest daughter Rubina, making her bed before the guests (“the Dunkelspiels, the Kestenbaums, the Lembergs, the Friedmans”) arrive, imagines “her bed’s less a bed than an ocean.” Etcetera.

Cohen is not the only contemporary writer to arrange an ambitious novel according to kabbalistic stratagems, but he may be the most committed to the task—like Ulysses, Witz is a book that cries out for an annotated edition.

Cohen also has a Joycean yen for devising strange new compound words—“cleanscooks,” “pushpulling,” “tossturn,” “matzahballs,” “challahknife”—as well as for internal monologues that take place on toilet seats: One guest, Mr. Feigenbaum, spends most of the meal in the bathroom trying to defecate.

In the seventh section—which would be when God rested, for those of you who were asleep during that Hebrew School class—the guests gather up their coats, checking the pockets to make sure the Israelian girls haven’t helped themselves to their wallets. They go home. And then, as though it were the normal conclusion to a Shabbos dinner, the world’s last Jew is born, “His glasses’ lenses, smudgy with fluid, that and His, nu, you know, too, which is hairy as well, the beard down below and apparently, can it be, already circumcised … .”

The Ethicist disagreed. His reasoning: The point of Birthright is that kids who are indifferent to Israel will come along. “Think of this as the Zionist equivalent of those free Poconos weekends whose sponsors hope to sell you a time-share,” Cohen argued. “Apparently enough people, even those not merely uninterested but passionately anti-Poconos, come around to make this marketing technique worth continuing.”

As an analysis of Birthright’s strategy, Cohen’s response seems spot on: Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt have not shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars to preach exclusively to the choir.

I wonder, though, whether it’s in fact accurate that anyone who’s truly “passionately anti-Poconos” has ever “come around” and bought a time-share in Jerusalem “the Poconos”. Birthright takes a deliberately superficial approach to Israeli politics—if you’re trying to sell a time share in the Poconos, you don’t talk about anything deeply upsetting that’s going on there. That’s a strategy that works well for bringing the indifferent around, but the already-critical—not so much. And, though I don’t know Eddy or his daughter, I would guess that, as a young American who wants to study Arabic in Egypt, she may be less indifferent and more critical than he realizes.

The Scroll asked Birthright how they would have responded to Eddy’s letter. If they get back to us, we’ll let you know.

UPDATE: Here’s Birthright’s response—from Gil Troy, chairman of the Taglit-Birthright Israel International Education Committee:

“Birthright Israel is an organization that views a trip to Israel with a group of peers as an essential rite of passage for young Jews. It is a free gift of a ten day trip for Jews aged 18 to 26 who have not been on an organized tour to Israel before, from one, older, generation, to the next. One of Birthright Israel’s core values and defining slogans is “No strings attached.” The gift truly is free. No one is required to arrive at any particular conclusion, embrace any political or religious position, or take any action in return for the gift. All we ask is that each Birthrighter participate in all activities constructively and with an open mind.

“Many participants extend their stays, choosing to explore and enjoy Israel or its environs at the conclusion of the ten day trip. Birthright would welcome this participant, encouraging her – as the Ethicist did – to be candid about her motivations. As long as she was a willing and active participant during the ten days, and as long as she was not a negative force seeking to sabotage the program’s goals, Birthright would wish her well in her language studies – and on her Jewish journey, wherever that might take her.”

Should I Help Out the Ex? [NYT]

There’s only one catch: Each institution must use $1 million of its grant money on joint teacher-training endeavors with the other two schools.

If that sounds like an obvious request, you probably don’t remember the interdenominational Jewish politics of the recent past. During the 1980s and 1990s, the three major synagogue movements were widely perceived as being at loggerheads. Movement leaders and observers seem to agree that, in the past decade or so, tensions between the denominations have eased—led in part by a warming of the relationships between the heads of HUC, JTS, and YU, all central institutions within their movements.

But the relative ease with which this arrangement was made may less reflect a burst of newfound harmony among disparate monoliths as much as a loss of power experienced by each. During the period in which relations have improved, major Jewish community donors have eschewed giving to the denominations at all, often contributing instead to robust nondenominational organizations like Birthright and Hillel that target often-unaffiliated youth—and where such “megadonors” also have more control. What the Jim Joseph Foundation may have done is found a creative way to harness the decreased power of the denominations—by combining it.

“They’ve all been hit, but one of the ways to recover your health is to cooperate, save a few bucks, and ideally augment your quality,” said Charles Edelsberg, the Jim Joseph Foundation’s executive director. Edelsberg maintained that his organization is basically neutral on the issue of interdenominational collaboration: The point of the mandate, he said, was to reduce “unnecessary duplication of effort” that would waste the foundation’s dollars; more cooperation between the universities “would be great if it happened, but it’s not something we’re going to measure” when evaluating the success of the grant program, he added.

But the mere existence of the grant-sharing stipulations suggests that the foundation may have an agenda vis-à-vis the movements. “The Jim Joseph grant reflects a general belief among major donors that the denominational differences need to be overcome,” said Steven M. Cohen, a professor of sociology at HUC.

But for those with a strong commitment to the denominations remaining distinct—either for ideological or, for those employed by one of the synagogue movements, professional reasons—harmony between the movements is not necessarily a good thing. That’s especially true for the right-wing of the modern Orthodox movement—which is probably why, of the three university leaders, YU president Richard Joel has been the most direct about having to hold his nose while accepting an offer he couldn’t refuse. Far from celebrating the spirit of the new partnership, Joel took pains to minimize its significance in an interview with Tablet Magazine. “There’s no joint programming involved in any of this,” he said. “There are profound philosophic and doctrinal differences between Orthodoxy and liberal Judaism and this doesn’t represent any change in those differences.” Moreover, he added, “I don’t believe that people from different orientations in Judaism speaking together makes any kind of statement legitimizing or delegitimizing each other.”

Joel himself came out of one of the most successful nondenominational Jewish organizations, the campus movement Hillel, which he presided over for 14 years. But even if he personally understands the wisdom of that model, much of his YU constituency would likely recoil at the idea of working in significant ways with other denominations. “It’s very important that Richard Joel not appear to be moving toward a liberal position that’s untenable for them,” said Adam Ferziger, a historian at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who studies Jewish denominationalism. “It’s a very tough tightrope.”

Ellenson and Eisen, with their more liberal—and, maybe more to the point, more apathetic—memberships, are at greater ease talking up the collaboration. Ellenson went so far as to disavow what he called the “financial carrot” completely in an interview with Tablet Magazine, instead describing the collaboration as “a genuine reflection of a strong religious and ideological commitment to the value of k’lal Yisrael.” Eisen, fittingly occupying a tenuous middle ground, sounded resigned to if not wildly enthusiastic about the new facts on the ground. “I think we’re in a moment where keeping Jews, especially young Jews, involved, is more important than keeping us involved in particular denominations,” he said. “So, all of us recognize this and see why cooperation is necessary because of this mood.”

But, some observers note, these leaders also have a stake in not letting collaboration go too far: As they become more and more ideologically indistinguishable from each other, they run the greater risk of losing their separate identities. The Conservative movement in particular, poised shakily between the other two movements, has been accused from within its own ranks of melding with its Reform counterparts—a fear that has sometimes been stoked by collaborative efforts between JTS and HUC. Earlier this year, for instance, the downsizing of JTS’s cantorial school led some students and faculty to wonder whether their program and HUC’s—which already share some courses—were going to merge. But it seems unlikely that either school—especially JTS, which is reportedly millions of dollars in debt—could have afforded to refuse $11 million even if it had wanted to.

It’s no coincidence that the collaboration between the universities will be directed at the level of their education Masters programs—first because the Jim Joseph Foundation’s focus on young adults is typical of megadonor-sponsored Jewish initiatives, but also because of what the education programs lack: the kind of inextricable relationship to theology and halacha that the universities’ rabbinic and cantorial programs do have.

According to Edelsberg, the schools have talked about using some of their shared grant money to create joint training in experiential education, but even that prospect has not gotten past the discussion stage. And optimists hoping for a slide from pedagogical collaboration on educational matters to collaboration on rabbinical ones should keep their hopes in check. While JTS and HUC offer some joint seminars for rabbinical students, Joel put the kibosh on such prospects involving YU.

“It’s counterintuitive to a contemporary liberal aesthetic,” he said. “But I’m trained as a lawyer. Some things are simply not negotiable.”

The show is produced by the National Yiddish Theater, or Folksbiene, and arrives as that 95-year-old troupe faces real competition from the New Yiddish Rep, which started three years ago partly in reaction to what its founders saw as a certain stuffiness in the older company. The New Yiddish Rep has been stealing a good deal of the very small limelight for Yiddish theater, and the companies have had their public spats. But Hershele seems to mark a reconciliation of sorts—New Yiddish Rep director Shane Baker (whom I profiled last year) appears in the new show. And Hershele is silly, but it’s not stuffy.

The Folksbiene’s program describes the Yiddish folk hero Hershele Ostropolyer as a Robin Hood figure, and it’s true that, as played by Broadway actor Mike Burstyn, he spends much of the show stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. But, unlike his noble English counterpart, he’s a mischievous, peripatetic bum, more Merry Prankster than Merry Man.

At the outset of the show, he bumbles into a shtetl controlled by Kalmen, a greedy pawnbroker. Kalmen’s the kind of guy who, when confronted by a sweet young couple begging to get an heirloom ring out of hock so they can get married, tells them they can have it … for 30 gülden! (Apparently, a lot of money.) Hershele, who’s had an unpleasant run-in with Kalmen himself, makes it his business to drive the miser crazy until he parts with some of his own stash of gold. This involves a range of implausible disguises and accents, some vaudevillian swagger, and a lot of singing.

It wasn’t quite Molière (though Hershele’s characters seemed similarly willing to believe that a person wearing a different hat is a different person), but it was energetic and charming and often very funny. One interesting thing: Kalmen, strutting around in his waistcoat singing an ode to his wife—yes, her name is money—sometimes felt a teeny bit uncomfortably like an anti-Semitic caricature. I’m not sure, however, that this was the fault of Itsy Firestone, the actor who played Kalmen, or of the show’s director, Eleanor Reissa. Instead, I’m going to have to blame this one on anti-Semitism itself. Yiddish folklore is rife with cartoonish greedy businessmen. They are known as rich men. Other European folklores are also rife with cartoonish greedy businessmen. They are known as Jews. The problem isn’t that our ancestors made fun of the Kalmens in their midst. The problem is that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.

Related: The Ventriloquist [Tablet Magazine]

• The flotilla-as-Exodus meme–which, developed by several commentators on Monday, notes the parallels between the British public relations disaster in Mandate Palestine and the Israeli p.r. disaster this week–gains more traction, this time from a former Mossad agent. [Wash Post]

• Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon held a conference call yesterday evening with “more than 700 heads of Jewish federations and Jewish community leaders,” according to a press release. Ayalon’s talking points included linking the flotilla to Hamas and other Islamist organizations, and calling for a refocus on Iran. [Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs]

• But even some staunchly pro-Israel American Jewish leaders are voicing criticisms. “Why did it take so long to get the films [of the ship-board violence] out?” asked Malcolm Hoenlein, executive head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “It appears [the soldiers] weren’t prepared for what they found, even though they knew what they were going to find.” [Jerusalem Post]

Two years ago, determined to do something different, Borden—whose father is Jewish—began taking pictures of Holocaust survivors after the idea came up in conversation with a friend. “When I went online and looked at bodies of work, there were people that had done portraits of survivors but they seemed to be portrayed as victims or as objects, old people with aged skin,” he said. Borden has taken a more naturalistic approach: He shoots his subjects—whom he has found through survivor organizations and by posting advertisements in Jewish newspapers—in their homes, using natural light and few special effects. Each photograph is also accompanied by a short note handwritten by its subject about his or her experience as a survivor. Borden has now photographed about 160 survivors, in England, Australia, and Israel. This month, he is coming to New York. “I think we’re just going to carry on doing it until there aren’t any more survivors,” he said.

The series-in-progress does not yet have a clear destination, though the project’s manager, Miriam Hechtman, said she aims for it to become traveling exhibit and a book. For now, some of the photographs appear on Borden’s website; others appear below for the first time.

Hechtman, who is also working on a documentary about Borden’s project, began traveling with him in Israel. Asked whether she had noticed any commonalities in the homes of the survivors she visited, she said, “I saw a lot of photos.”



All of these elements do appear in Holy Rollers, but their colors are muted and their interactions are half-hearted. Director Kevin Asch chose to go the gentle-coming-of-age story route, focusing on the journey of Jesse Eisenberg’s Sam Gold, a (fictional) 20-year-old straight outta Brooklyn who journeys from restless yeshiva bocher to naïve-but-eager smuggler to minor-league gangsta, until his own soul brings him down (well, and then the cops do). Eisenberg is totally cute in payes, but he basically plays the role as though Sam were any sweet, angsty white kid instead of one from a very specific cultural location.

I’m not objecting to Asch’s decision (which he acknowledged in a Q-and-A after a recent screening of the film in New York) to invent his own hybrid ultra-Orthodox sect, although others have. That seems within the realm of poetic license to me. The problem is that the sect he made up is not particularly convincing. Sam and his friends speak a stereotyped New-York-Jewish-ese with a few extra Yiddish words ostentatiously thrown in, not the complex varieties of Yinglish that are actually spoken in Brooklyn’s Hasidic enclaves. And interactions in his community, from a meeting with a reproachful rabbi to an awkward parentally-supervised date, similarly feel like they were lifted out of the secular world and airbrushed with Hasid dust.

Things feel a little sharper once Sam enters the underworld: Justin Bartha as Yosef, the neighborhood’s bad apple, and Danny Abeckaser as the operation’s mastermind do a good job at capturing the film’s most interesting insight: That staffing a crime ring with extraordinarily sheltered kids is a brilliant tactic that contains the seeds of its own destruction, because once those kids get good at their jobs, they’ll lose the artless innocence that made them such good patsies to begin with.

“Relax, and act Jewish,” Yosef tells Sam the first time he prepares to get on a plane with thousands of “medicine” pills under his hat. But when is Sam acting Jewish? When he bumbles past airport security in black hat and black coat, as unaware of just what he is carrying as the federal agents were? Or is it later, when he emerges as a brilliant young businessman who knows exactly what he is doing?

Inna Grade was the 85-year-old widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade. She was best known in Yiddish literary circles as a somewhat miserable person who spent three decades after her husband’s death blocking scholars and translators from coming anywhere near his work. Many of those scholars and translators started chomping at the bit when Grade died earlier this month, seemingly without a will—and thus no clear inheritor of Chaim’s literary estate.

But a New York attorney is now claiming that Grade composed a will, back in 1992, and that he has a copy. The lawyer told the Times that Grade wanted her husband’s papers to go to a Hebrew University professor of Yiddish named Yehiel Szeintuch and his wife. If valid, the will is a blow to organizations like the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which has reportedly expressed interest in acquiring Chaim Grade’s papers. Additionally, the Times reports that two septuagenarians who say they are Inna Grade’s first cousins have come forward as well, but have not expressed interest in her husband’s estate.

One thing is for sure: There’s a great sultry jazz number missing from Fiddler on the Roof. “If Inna’s got a will, baby, Inna’s got a way.”

New Twists in the Tale of Chaim Grade [NYT]
Related: Keeper of the Flame [Tablet Magazine]

One of the first of the evening’s dozens of events was the world’s second performance of Everything’s Coming Up Moses, which tells the story of the Exodus in under an hour—with inspiration from the music of Gypsy. The musical, premiered by Tablet Magazine in New York this Passover and written by contributing editor Rachel Shukert, was, naturally, performed in the African Hall beneath a taxidermied leopard that was hanging out in a tree overhead. (The very-much-alive penguins strutted at the other end of the hall.)

Amelia Klein

Back in the main atrium (no animals immediately in sight), Gary Shteyngart chatted with editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse and shared excerpts from his forthcoming novel, Super Sad True Love Story. (See main picture.) He was followed by an interview (that quickly turned into a performance) with comedian Sandra Bernhard, who spoke with fellow outré Jewish performer Amichai Lau-Lavie about being both an earnest devotee of kaballah and a hilariously cynical sometime-member of Chabad and the Kabbalah Center. Bernhard, it turns out, is also a longtime Shavuot fan: She first celebrated the holiday Israeli-style on a kibbutz, then became interested in its kabbalistic interpretation, which holds that Shavuot—coming up this evening—offers access to the Ten Utterances, and potentially to immortality.

Sandra Bernhard

Another highlight was Tablet columnist Eddy Portnoy’s disquisition on the 19th-century pseudoscientific field of nasology, which held that a person’s character traits can be determined through the size and shape of his or her nose. (The Jewish nose, of course, was classified as the “commercial” nose, indicating, as Portnoy put it, “strong mercantile acumen.”)

Eddy Portnoy and Gary Shteyngart

No science museum, of course, is complete without its planetarium, which at DAWN became the screening room for video installations from Israel as well as Maurice at the World’s Fair, a Spike Jonze tribute to Maurice Sendak. But the planetarium was at its trippy best during one of the last events of the evening, Tablet Magazine contributing editor Rodger Kamenetz’s introduction to the cosmology of kabbalah—in the form of an astronomy show. Kabbalah, Kamenetz explained, is uniquely suited within religious mythology to helping us conceptualize the fact that we live in a constantly expanding universe—like the Big Bang theory, kabbalah holds that the universe began as a single point of energy (what physicists call “singularity”) and moves ever outward.

With stars still flashing before our eyes, we went to bed. Shavuot hasn’t even started yet, and there’s a lot more staying up to do.

“When you ask people what’s their favorite holiday, I’ve heard people say Passover, Hanukkah, Sukkot, Purim,” says Jonathan Sarna, who teaches American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “I think it’s harder for people to find an emotional attachment to Shavuot than to almost any other Jewish holiday.” According to Sarna and other historians, Shavuot’s trouble catching on is nothing new—it goes back, they say, to the fall of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E.

In its earliest incarnation, Shavuot marked a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the sacrifice of the harvest’s first fruits and is one of a historical trio of harvest celebrations, along with Sukkot and Passover, known as the shalosh regalim. According to Paul Steinberg, a rabbi at the Conservative synagogue Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles and the author of a series of books on the Jewish holidays, rabbis in the Talmudic period needed to reinvent Shavuot after the Jews left Israel for the Diaspora and no longer traveled to Jerusalem with harvest offerings. So, through what Steinberg calls the use of “complicated mathematical formulas” that were debated for centuries, the sages associated Shavuot with the giving of the Torah. But that interpretive shift, says Steinberg, has not “captured the imagination of Jews in America or anywhere else.” (According to Reform rabbi Andy Bachman, who leads Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, some early Zionist settlers went so far as to explicitly reject the rabbinic interpretation of the holiday in favor of the agricultural one and celebrated Shavuot by dancing in the fields and riding on tractors.)

In the United States, Shavuot has met with particularly bad fortune. “They used to say that Jewish holidays needed mazel,” or luck, Sarna says. Hanukkah and Passover—located next to major Christian holidays that Jews want an alternative to—have mazel. Shavuot, marooned in the long stretch between Passover and the High Holidays, has the opposite. “Passover is the last Jewish gesture of the year before you disappear into summer camp, Memorial Day, et cetera,” Bachman says.

Until recently, Shavuot’s overlap with the end of the school year actually did confer some mazel at many Reform and Conservative synagogues, because Confirmation ceremonies—celebrations for high school students who have continued their Jewish education in addition to or instead of bar and bat mitzvahs—have traditionally been held on the holiday. But many congregations, including Bachman’s and Steinberg’s, have recently dropped Confirmation, which is increasingly seen an accommodation to Protestantism without authentic Jewish roots—another inadvertent blow to Shavuot.

Beyond the bad mazel, though, some conjecture that Shavuot may simply be too abstract to become popular among all but the most engaged or observant Jews. “The holidays that have done really well here are either firmly grounded in the home or allow for a kind of interplay between the synagogue and the home,” says Jenna Weissman Joselit, who teaches American Jewish history at George Washington University. Home-based holidays have strong elements of material and ritual—seders for Passover, sukkahs for Sukkot, menorahs for Hanukkah. But on Shavuot, “there’s no stuff and nothing to do, if you don’t go to shul,” Joselit says. “It’s a very serious holiday about law and responsibility and duty.” (All of this might be said as well for the High Holidays, which of course don’t lack for attendance. But the High Holidays make these themes personal, while Shavuot applies them to the Jews as a people—which, Joselit argues, makes them feel more remote.)

Shavuot is the consummate rabbis’ holiday: Its difficult themes of revelation, law, and collective responsibility make it a favorite among scholars—who struggle with how to share their enthusiasm with the laity. Elliot Dorff, a rabbi and professor of theology at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, calls it “my holiday”—precisely for the reasons their congregants may not. And Sarna says, “Shavuot is the holiday of books—it’s a harder sell, but we’re the People of the Book. Maybe it is our most authentic and distinctive holiday in that way.”

This idea might be starting to catch on: In the past few years, some synagogues have begun holding a tikkun leil Shavuot, or all-night study session, to celebrate the holiday. In its original form, the tikkun, first practiced in the 16th century by kabbalists who were themselves trying to revitalize Shavuot, involved prayer and Torah study from dusk until dawn; non-Orthodox congregations that hold the celebration now usually substitute lectures and roundtable discussions on a variety of subjects. Dorff said that Temple Beth Am, the Conservative synagogue he attends, can pull in 500 people for its tikkun (this year themed around “ethical, spiritual, halakhic implications of our food choices”), with 100 still remaining when the sun rises.

But some question whether the tikkun will ever catch on at most synagogues in a way that even approximates the success of lighter, more family-oriented holiday celebrations. “God bless Elliot Dorff, but Beth Am has a lot of academics and rabbis,” Steinberg said when asked whether he thought all-night study could save Shavuot. “That’s not the case for most synagogues. Most synagogues you get people till 10:00, then it dwindles.” (Indeed, some Jewish communities—in New York, California, and elsewhere—are trying to make the tikkun a more popular destination with performances, film screenings, and Israeli dancing.)

Steinberg’s own congregation is trying a different approach this year: bringing in a cow. Children at the synagogue will have an opportunity to watch a milking demonstration and churn their own butter in conjunction with the tradition of eating dairy on Shavuot. “We’ll see how it goes,” Steinberg says wryly. “It’s an intervention, if you will.”

“Roger Greenberg’s only rival at saying gauche or obnoxious things to anyone in almost any situation is the character played by Larry David in the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Dickstein, the great literary critic, writes of Ben Stiller’s title character. “But while Curb Your Enthusiasm’s once refreshing dose of bile and misanthropy has now degenerated into predictable formula, Greenberg, on the other hand, is guaranteed to set one’s teeth on edge.” It’s important to understand the evolution that resulted in Roger Greenberg.

Dickstein goes on to place the film within the genres of screwball comedy (for the antagonistic romance at its center) and Woody Allen’s brand of “neurotic Jewish comedy.” Those elements are clearly there, but the comparison with Curb Your Enthusiasm is sharpest, and points to a key difference between Woody Allen’s and Larry David’s often-elided comic personas.

The easiest way to explain it is to look at the two comics’ relationships with Los Angeles (where Greenberg takes place as well). When Alvy Singer, Allen’s Annie Hall alter ego, derides L.A. (“the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light”), it’s because he genuinely doesn’t fit in there: Alvy is a nervous arriviste from old Brooklyn whose contempt for Hollywood glamour is rooted in the real fear that he’s about to get chucked out of the party. But David’s character—significantly, a generation younger—lives in L.A. Yes, part of the shtick is that he’s too much of a New Yorker to be able to stand the constant sunshine, but he also cocoons himself in the pampered Hollywood bubble that Allen can’t even handle. David would be roughly as successful at riding the subway as Alvy is at driving a car.

Roger Greenberg, yet another generation younger, is yet another step removed from Alvy’s cultural and class-based anxieties. Greenberg is a born Hollywood insider who’s become an outsider only because he’s a jerk (a troubled one whom we feel sorry for, but basically, a jerk). By the time you get to Greenberg, the thread of distinctively Jewish paranoia that keeps David’s character from being just a rich asshole is lost.

The Inner Nerd [Arguing The World]
Related: Look Out!

Grade was a highly educated woman who wrote poetry and spoke several languages, but she was mostly known for her intense protectiveness of her husband, his work, and his legacy, which led her into battle with many Yiddish literary figures. Since his death in 1982, she blocked many from publishing or translating the work he left behind—and now that she is gone, speculation over the fate of his literary estate has begun.

Inna Grade’s most public battle began in 1978, when Isaac Bashevis Singer became the first (and only) Yiddish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many of his peers, including, reportedly, Chaim Grade, greeted the news with despair: Singer, who was by far the most successful Yiddish writer in America, was also criticized as presenting a patronizing fairy-tale version of Eastern Europe. What Inna Grade saw as a slight against her more-deserving husband became the central fight of her lifetime. In 2004, the centennial of Singer’s birth, she was interviewed in the New York Times. ”I despise [Singer] especially because he is dragging the Jewish literature, Judaism, American literature, American culture back to the land of Moab,” she told Alana Newhouse, now Tablet Magazine’s editor-in-chief, referring to the biblical region where Lot and his daughters began an incestuous affair. ”I profoundly despise all those who eat the bread into which the blasphemous buffoon has urinated.”

But Singer was only the first on Grade’s list of enemies, which was long even by the standards of the often-acrimonious Yiddish world. “She really had hatred for the entire Yiddish establishment,” said Allan Nadler, a professor of religion at Drew University who studied with Chaim Grade as a graduate student at Harvard. And in turn, he said, “she was hated in the Yiddish literary establishment.” According to Nadler, Inna Grade first alienated her husband’s friends and students during his lifetime and continued to stand between the writer and his admirers after his death. “She would not let anyone near his literary bequest,” Nadler said. “The more you loved him, the more impossible she became.”

One person who encountered Inna Grade’s wrath—and her litigiousness—was David Brandes, a producer and screenwriter who adapted Chaim Grade’s short story “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner” into the 1991 feature film The Quarrel. According to Brandes, Grade had signed a contract and production was underway when she became suspicious of the filmmaker’s motives; she later threatened him with lawsuits and made harassing phone calls to his home. “She made my life just miserable, and for no reason at all,” Brandes said.

According to observers, what most outraged people in the Yiddish world about Grade is that many of them loved her late husband’s work and wanted as much as she did for it to reach a wider audience. But her strategy was different from theirs. Grade was apparently more afraid of poor translations and bad adaptations (which she thought had already diminished her husband’s reputation) than she was of no translations or adaptations at all. One of the few people she trusted at the end of her life, a Bronx psychiatrist named Ralph Speken, said, “In order to translate Chaim Grade you have to be at his level, and only Inna was.” Grade translated two of her husband’s books on her own, but Speken and others believe that an untold number of untranslated manuscripts are likely sitting in her apartment.

News of Grade’s death, then, has resulted in barely suppressed expressions of glee from Yiddish scholars dying to get their hands on those manuscripts. “‘My first thought was, ‘Now that she’s dead, someone will be able to get into that damn apartment in the Bronx,’ ” Nadler admitted. “Unless she put it to flames.” Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard, put it more gently. “Now that Grade’s wife has passed away,” she said in an email, “students may have access to his papers, potential translators and publishers to his works.”

Inna Grade, born Inna Hecker, grew up in Russia in a sophisticated family and married Chaim Grade—whose first wife had died in the Holocaust—while still a teenager. According to Speken, Grade had told him that her father, whom he believed was not Jewish, was a physician who ran a field hospital for the Soviet Army during World War II and was executed by the Nazis. In the late 1940s, Grade and her husband immigrated to New York; she told Speken that she later studied literature with the critic Lionel Trilling at Columbia and had two Master’s degrees from that university.

Grade’s mother, also a physician, apparently made it to New York as well—though Grade’s funeral guests reported discovering this only last week as they buried their friend and found the gravestone of Marie Heifetz-Hecker—Grade’s mother—next to her own. This seemingly solves another mystery as well: One rumor long circulated by her detractors was that she was not Jewish. But Heifetz-Hecker’s gravestone, Speken and other guests said, included her name, and her own mother’s name, in Yiddish. Chaim and Inna Grade had no children, and Inna has no known living relatives.

One of Grade’s unforgivable sins, according to her detractors, was her decision to bury her husband in a private ceremony, closed to them, when he died in 1982. Her own funeral last Friday was not much larger. Grade died penniless, apparently without a will, and her funeral costs were paid by the Public Administrator of Bronx County—which also now has authority over the much-desired papers in her apartment. The public administrator tapped Noach Valley, a local rabbi who had never met Grade (but had, as it happened, once presented a plaque to Singer honoring him on behalf of the Jewish Vegetarians of North America) to officiate.

One of the four people in attendance was Brad Silver, a longtime neighbor of Grade’s and the executive vice president of the Bronx Jewish Community Council, which took care of Grade as she became increasingly unable to pay her bills. This week, Silver said, he has been fielding the phone calls from Wisse and from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research wondering about the plans for Grade’s papers. Last year, when Grade was threatened with eviction, Speken was appointed her psychiatrist under the county’s Adult Protective Services program. The two bonded over their shared interests in Maimonides and Jung.

As her health deteriorated, Speken said, Grade became increasingly concerned about what would become of her husband’s papers. Grade and Speken discussed sending them to the University of Krakow, where Grade had contacts, or to an adult education institute at Hebrew University in Jerusalem named for Martin Buber (Grade felt an affinity with the philosopher). About a week before she died, Speken added, Grade related an epiphany that seemed to suggest she had reached a private understanding with her life’s leading antagonist.

“Ralph, my work is done. I was wrong,” Speken said Grade told him. “Singer was not trying to take us back to the land of Moab. The fact is, we never left. All he did was to capitalize on it.”

But for many of the signatories, there’s much more on the line. The “Israel-related content” guidelines that the San Francisco Federation adopted in February grew out of a particularly heated debate that started last summer, after the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, a major annual event that receives Federation funding, outraged donors and community members with a film screening that many regarded as anti-Zionist. But though the festival was the stated impetus for and target of the new guidelines, some observers say there will be collateral damage: Jewish-studies programs at Bay Area universities including the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, and Santa Cruz, and at Stanford University, which have received grants from the Federation and other Jewish donors for decades—and which routinely sponsor flagrantly left-wing professors and guests. Now academics at these programs, 17 of whom signed the Forward letter, worry that they could lose their funding as well—a particularly troubling predicament for those who teach in California’s financially collapsing public university system.

“It’s absolutely disastrous if we lose funding,” said Chana Kronfeld, who teaches Hebrew and Yiddish literature at Berkeley. “In times of huge cuts, we have no funding from anyone sometimes except Federation or community organizations. It’s clearly a campaign to control academic freedom.”

The University of California, widely regarded as one of the best public university systems in the country, was slammed last summer with a $637 million—or 20 percent—cut in state funding, as California itself has teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Since then, the university system—along with California’s other, lower-tier public schools of higher education—have been struggling to stay afloat with drastic measures like mandatory furlough days (and accompanying pay cuts) for faculty and staff and a 32 percent undergraduate tuition hike planned for this fall. “Nothing is off the table,” the Los Angeles Times reported earlier this year.

Under these circumstances, the Federation, along with area Jewish-community donors like the Koret Foundation, the Helen Diller Family Foundation, and the Bernard Osher Foundation—all of which give money both on their own and through the Federation-operated Jewish Community Endowment Fund—have played a vital role in keeping the region’s Jewish-studies programs up and running. At Berkeley, for instance, according to the school’s budget office, the Jewish studies program’s entire $750,000 annual discretionary budget comes from private donations (that budget does not pay for tenured and tenure-track professors, who are loaned from other departments that do get state funding, and it also does not include some graduate student financial aid). The Federation isn’t the biggest donor in this group, but it is important for another reason as well: The philanthropy sponsors the Bay Area Jewish-studies Consortium, which for 20 years has worked to foster intellectual partnerships among Jewish-studies programs or professors at 11 colleges in the region.

That’s not to say that these Jewish-studies programs are powerless before their donors. Universities generally have strict rules that limit donors’ participation in day-to-day academic decisions, and thus far, even cash-strapped UC campuses will walk away from money that comes with too many strings attached. Likewise, Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies has received extensive funding from Tad Taube, the Bay Area’s largest Jewish community donor, but Taube’s conservative politics are far from visible at the program that bears his name.

“Some of the gifts come from donors who are not happy with the political opinions of the faculty” at these programs, said David Biale, a professor of Jewish history at Davis (and a signatory of the Forward letter). “And to their credit, they have continued to support the programs on academic grounds and have not tried to impose their political positions on the programs. But my worry is that, as the atmosphere becomes much more politicized, that could change.”

Things aren’t easy for the Federation either. Pressure on the philanthropy began last summer when the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival presented Rachel, a documentary about a radical young American activist named Rachel Corrie who was killed under disputed circumstances in Gaza and invited Corrie’s mother to speak at the screening. The film festival stokes controversy almost every year, but Rachel caused the biggest fracas yet: A few days before the screening, the president of the festival resigned from her post, and two of the festival’s biggest donors, the Koret Foundation and Taube Philanthropies—both of which are run by Tad Taube—issued a statement condemning the festival’s “egregious error” in showing the film and announcing that funding might be withdrawn the next year.

Much of the anger over the screening was directed at the Federation, another major festival donor, which had offered cautious support for Rachel. On the eve of an Federation board meeting in November, a group of influential donors and community members (including Mem Bernstein, who sits on the board of Nextbook Inc., Tablet Magazine’s publisher) placed an open letter in the local Jewish newspaper, urging the Federation to adopt a proposal making groups “that demonize or defame Israel” ineligible for funding. This, the letter said, would, put the “Film Festival debacle behind us once and for all.” The Federation voted down the vaguely worded proposal but organized a committee to create the more elaborate guidelines that were eventually adopted.

The guidelines’ most specific restriction holds that grantees may not endorse any kind of boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel. This type of campaign has garnered vocal support on the Berkeley campus and within some local leftist Jewish advocacy groups. Nor are grantees permitted to cosponsor programs with groups that do support divestment or that otherwise “undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel.” Within this boundary, though, the guidelines are fairly open-ended. Acceptable, for instance, are “presentations by organizations or individuals that are critical of particular Israeli government policies but are supportive of Israel’s right to exist as a secure independent Jewish democratic state.”

But even if the guidelines are applied forgivingly, they would seem likely to exclude from funding at least some of the Jewish-studies programs the Federation currently supports. Berkeley’s and Stanford’s programs each include a faculty member—respectively, the Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin and the Middle East historian Joel Beinin—who loudly self-identify as anti-Zionist. And several other professors at these schools, as well as the University of California campuses in Davis and Santa Cruz, have publicly supported some form of divestment campaign or belong to organizations that do.

Additionally, any number of staunch Israel critics have spoken or taught as guest lecturers at these programs, including Israeli writers and scholars flown in from the abroad. Berkeley’s Chana Kronfeld, who has sponsored visits by the Israeli novelist David Grossman and the poet Dahlia Ravikovitch, among others profoundly critical of their own country, put it bluntly: “All the major Israeli writers would probably be banned.”

On the subject of any individual writer or professor, it’s difficult to say whether Kronfeld is right. The Federation’s chief operating officer, Jim Offel, told Tablet Magazine that the Federation does not have a list of acceptable and unacceptable organizations and individuals, and that it will make each decision on a case-by-case basis. And the guidelines are too new to have had much effect thus far—they came out after the deadline for most 2010 funding. Grantees are welcome to call the Federation with questions about whether a potential program meets the guidelines, Offel said. “We didn’t invent this,” he added. “It’s general practice for a funding agency to ensure that fundees’ dollars are being used in ways consistent with the core values of the funder.”

But, because of university restrictions on donors’ relationships with the programs they fund, that practice is more complicated in an academic context. Offel maintained that the guidelines apply to all Federation grantees, but David Biale said that in December, while they were working on the guidelines, Federation officials had privately acknowledged to him that they understood “how things work at the university” and “wouldn’t try to meddle in issues of academic freedom.” But, he added, “That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t put pressure on us.”

Ironically, the Helen Diller Family Foundation, whose board members were prominently represented among the signatories of last fall’s open letter urging the Federation to adopt Israel guidelines, faltered in its own attempt to impose similar guidelines on the Jewish studies programs at Berkeley. According to Robert Alter, who teaches Hebrew and comparative literature there, when Bay Area philanthropist Sanford Diller expressed reservations several years ago about the number of leftist Israelis who had been invited for residencies at Berkeley’s Jewish studies program, a university vice-chancellor told him, “If you feel that way, we’ll have to give back the endowment because that conflicts with our academic standards.” Diller, he said, backed off. (Diller declined to comment for this story.)

A similar dispute at Davis, though, went the other way. In 2006, the Koret Foundation added language to its grant contract with Davis stipulating that grant money could not used “in connection with any program that includes anti-Israel sentiments or anti-Semitic elements, speeches, or positions.” Biale, who was chair of the program at the time, said that he sent the letter to the development office and that he believed it had been taken up for review by Davis’s lawyers, but the language has remained in each annual contract to this day.

Faced with this kind of standoff, it seems likely that the Federation would likewise have to choose between not enforcing its guidelines for academic grantees or cutting off funding to the Jewish-studies programs that are among its most prestigious causes.

“I think in the end the policy means they can’t really fund academic programs, because what they’re asking for is that they be the ultimate decider on programmatic issues,” said Charlotte Fonrobert, the co-director of Stanford’s Jewish-studies program. “At some point that decision will have to be made.”

The other option—the one predicted by the Forward letter—is that Federation grantees will simply avoid controversial subjects in order to circumvent the process of consulting with their funders. That can happen even before funders get involved. Diane Wolf, the chair of Jewish studies at Davis and another letter signatory, sheepishly acknowledged that she’s been “trying to get away from those hot-button issues” ever since her program came under attack from some professors in other departments for a panel it hosted two years ago on the 2006 Lebanon War. “It’s so difficult and so time-consuming and emotionally draining,” she said.

It seems unlikely that the Forward letter will lead to any official change in the Federation guidelines, which took so many months and compromises to produce. But it remains an open question whether the letter will damage the relationships between the philanthropy and the grantees who signed. Alter, who chairs the Bay Area Jewish-studies Consortium, said that Amy Rabbino, the consortium’s Federation liaison, called him, “quite upset,” when the letter came out online and asked him why he didn’t consult with her before he signed.

“Maybe I should have,” Alter said. “But then there was an odd turn of the conversation, where Amy said, ‘If Federation is supporting you, why should you attack the Federation?’

“I said to Amy that the same thing goes for Israel,” Alter said. “I personally support the state of Israel but object to some of its policies.”

Although Abrams is best known as an architect of neoconservative foreign policy, he, along with Robin Wright, a veteran foreign affairs journalist, and David Albright, an authority on the technical side of nuclear weaponry, all spoke with the profound intellectual ambivalence of chessmasters facing an equally brilliant opponent. “It’s hard to believe that Iran’s not making nuclear weapons, but it’s very hard to prove that Iran is making nuclear weapons,” Albright admitted. And the point at which the United States will decide to take stronger action against Ahmadinejad’s regime, he added, will likely be the point at which we can no longer say with certainty that Iran does not have nukes. It’s the kind of Schrödinger’s cat scenario that gave schoolchildren and senior policy analysts anxiety attacks during the Cold War.

No one on stage was itching for either an immediate U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iran, though Abrams, more than the others, argued that such a strike could eventually become the best available option. Even Abrams maintained that, for now, a window remains open for the U.N. Security Council to impose “crippling sanctions” on Iran—essentially, stopping the country from exporting oil and importing petroleum—in a bid to stoke government-toppling unrest among Iran’s civilians. But that window is closing, Abrams noted: “They don’t talk about ‘crippling sanctions’ anymore—they talk about ‘sanctions that bite.’ But I can tell you, what’s going to come out of the Security Council is sanctions that nibble.”

Ultimately, the crowd seemed to have a much clearer opinion of “What to Do About Iran’s Nuclear Program” than the speakers did. The panelists, seated beneath twin American and Israeli flags, only occasionally brought up Israel, and when they did, they discussed it as just one of several important players in the Iranian nukes game. But every time the prospect of an Israeli military strike came up, the crowd cheered. The garrulous man sitting next to me, a retired civil servant named Michael Kirmayer who wore a “Friends of the IDF” cap and wristbands calling for the release of Gilad Shalit, knew exactly what ought to be done: bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran. “Bush wanted to do it, but was stopped by liberal left anti-Israel people,” he told me. “I have no question,” he added, “that Obama’s not qualified or competent to be president of this country.”

I’ll take Elliott Abrams any day.

Related: The Shadow Viceroy [Tablet Magazine]

Eric Lesser looked out over the containers of Thai carryout, the bottles of wine and the Shabbat candles. ‘Should we do Shalom Aleichem?’ he asked, and the whole table began singing a warbled but hearty version of the song that welcomes Shabbat. In Lesser’s group house of Obama staff assistants, Friday-night Shabbat dinners have become something of a ritual, a chance to relax and spend a few hours with friends.

Lesser, who is an aide to Obama adviser David Axelrod (ahem), and friends—including housemates Herbie Ziskend, an assistant in the vice president’s office; Jake Levine, a White House energy policy analyst; and Josh Lipsky, who works in the White House visitors’ office—are not the first Jews to congregate near the center of power in Washington, D.C. But what’s striking about the young Obama staffers is how off-handedly they wear their Jewishness—or how off-handedly the New York Times covers their Jewishness, which may amount to the same thing. The word “Jewish” never appears in the article. The Lesser household’s Shabbat dinners are discussed as though they were Christmas or Thanksgiving rituals—interesting in the details, unremarkable for being celebrated in the first place. There is not even a hint that “doing Shabbat” means the staffers are not only all Jews, but all observant Jews.

Further notable is what they do after the meal: Go out for the evening. Hey, it’s Friday!

At the end of every Friday dinner, the tradition is that everyone goes around the table and says something from the past week for which they’re grateful. Over Whole Foods gingerbread and brownies, Lesser looked at his watch and announced, “O.K., we’ve got to do this and then get out of here.” They all had other friends they were trying to see that night.

Rather than connoting religiosity or low-level tribalism (“let’s get away from the goyim for a few hours”), for this crew Shabbat is just a day—or evening—of rest, open to non-Jewish friends as well. It’s not so different, perhaps, from another NYT favorite, the annual Obama administration Seder, likewise a family affair that, unless you take an implausibly cynical reading (why aren’t Chuck Schumer and Abe Foxman invited?), isn’t connected with a larger mission of Jewish outreach. For all the spin in some circles about this administration being unfriendly to Jews, both the junior and senior Obama staffers are making Jewishness seem more and more normal. Maybe that’s what part of the fear is about.

All the Obama 20-Somethings [NYTM]

• Israel Lobby co-author John Mearsheimer postulated in a speech today that Israel and the Palestinians are off the two-state solution track and that instead full-fledged apartheid will be followed by a bi-national state. Extending the apartheid analogy further than it usually goes, he classified a number of prominent American Zionists, from Abe Foxman of the ADL to Marty Peretz of the New Republic, as “new Afrikaners.” [Jerusalem Fund]

• The New Yorker proffers a real-life courtroom drama by Janet Malcolm about the 2009 trial of a woman who hired her cousin to murder her estranged husband at a playground—all set within the Bukharan Jewish community in Queens. Subscription unfortunately required. [New Yorker]

• Police apprehended a young man outside a Dallas Jewish cemetery who had removed and stolen a foot from a body in one of the graves. He told the cops that he “took it from a Jew girl just because I wanted a foot.” [Vos Iz Neias]

One of the more interesting statements to come out of the morass was a speech by Berkeley professor and social theorist Judith Butler, delivered Wednesday night in support of divestment. “If you want to say that the historical understanding of Israel’s genesis gives it exceptional standing in the world,” she writes, “then you disagree with those early Zionist thinkers, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes among them, who thought that Israel must not only live in equality with other nations, but must also exemplify principles of equality and social justice in its actions and policies.” By rehabilitating, in leftist university discourse, the word “Zionist,” Butler has once again changed—or tried to change—a conversation.

You Will Not Be Alone [The Nation]

• In a case of people-unclear-on-the-concept, 90-year-old alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk—extradited by Germany from the U.S. last year—called his trial, currently proceeding in Munich, “torture.” [JTA]

• A report on global anti-Semitism released by Tel Aviv University last week claims that incidents doubled last year—because, leftist journalist Max Blumenthal says, it includes such dubiously qualifying events as the release of the Goldstone Report (written, of course, by a self-identifying Zionist Jew). [Huffington Post]

• The Israeli government has denied conductor and political provocateur Daniel Barenboim permission to perform with his youth orchestra in Gaza, on the grounds that no concert shall be held while Gilad Shalit remains imprisoned there. No word on whether Hamas wants to trade Shalit for a 15-year-old second violist. [Coteret]

• Tomorrow you can buy Real Housewife of New York City Jill Zarin’s new book, Secrets of a Jewish Mother, in which “you’ll learn how to make her methods your very own.” Then you too can go on Good Morning New York and apologize for acting like a crazy person on reality television.
[My Fox New York]

Prior to his current incarnation as bike advocate, Herzfeld spent a year shuttling back and forth between the Dominican Republic, where he ran operations for a telecom company called SkyMax Dominicana, and Brooklyn, where SkyMax’s parent company is based. On paper, it was an absurdly good fit: Herzfeld reported to the company’s owner, a Williamsburg Satmar gentleman named Moses Greenfield, but he also got to indulge his penchant for Dominican culture, and particularly merengue. Naturally, he was bitten by the merengue bug while he was a bad student at Yeshiva University, which is conveniently located in the heavily Dominican Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.

In the spring of 2007, after Herzfeld clashed with his colleagues one too many times, Greenfield fired him. An ugly dispute followed over how much money Herzfeld was owed. As per their contract, the parties took their conflict to the beth din, or rabbinical court.

The Beth Din of America is an odd institution: The judges are Orthodox rabbis (and their decisions are binding only because the claimants have agreed to use them as arbitrators), but the lawyers are … lawyers. In fact, Greenfield’s attorney in this case was Nat Lewin, an Orthodox lawyer who regularly argues before the Supreme Court. (Says Herzfeld of his foe, “He’s the guy who if they don’t let you wear a yarmulke and you’re an astronaut, he’ll sue NASA.”) According to Herzfeld, Lewin’s approach to the beth din case was to besmirch Herzfeld’s character and to highlight his least Orthodox habits. And so Exhibit A, in Herzfeld’s telling—Lewin says it was only a minor detail of the case—was a photograph of Herzfeld dancing the merengue with a Dominican woman dressed a tad short of modestly.

“In the Orthodox community, there’s no worse crime than mixed dancing,” Herzfeld explains. (By “mixed,” he means gender, although his dance partner’s skin color probably didn’t help.) “They wanted to show that they were at a higher level of religiosity than me.” The incriminating photo appears on Herzfeld’s Facebook page, followed by a seriously impressive number of punning captions submitted by Herzfeld and his friends, from “the behind the rabbis maligned” to “the dark tail that made the Hasidim turn pale.”

According to Herzfeld, the photo was used in court to back up the even weightier charge that he had sexually harassed two Dominican SkyMax employees. Lewin presented affidavits signed by the young women making these claims; Herzfeld asserts that their supervisors paid them to sign the statements, and indeed—at Herzfeld’s behest—one woman later said as much on video. (Lewin in turn counters that the harassment charges were just a small part of the evidence that Herzfeld’s conduct as a SkyMax employee was inappropriate.)

The beth din ruled that Herzfeld was entitled to some of the profits he demanded. However, in Herzfeld’s view, it did not go far enough in enforcing the verdict—to the point that, almost three years after the case first reached the beth din, he is suing Greenfield in civil court, where a hearing will take place later this month. Lewin has moved on from the case, but Herzfeld remains on a mission against him. Among the attorney’s highest-profile clients of the past few years are the Rubashkins, the ultra-Orthodox family that owned the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa that was shut down after a huge immigration raid. The day of the raid, Herzfeld said, Lewin was in the beth din with him. “I think the way it happened,” he said, “was that God punished the Rubashkins because Nat Lewin did what he did.”

Herzfeld, meanwhile, reports being happily married to an Orthodox woman. So, how does she feel about his merengue dancing?

“Eh,” Herzfeld replies. “She prefers to salsa.”

Clash of the Bearded Ones [NYMag]
Earlier: Bike Lane Battle Takes A Turn for the Civil

• The Iowa meatpacking plant once owned by kosher slaughter behemoth Agriprocessors, which shut down after a 2008 immigration raid, is producing (kosher) beef again for the first time, its new owner says. [Vos Iz Neias]

• An Israeli bookstore chain stopped selling a book called The National Left, a political manifesto denouncing settlers and calling for a revival of the Israeli left wing, after receiving “many complaints that the book hurts the feelings of some of our customers.” [NYT]

• The Nation reexamines the life and legacy of the late Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg. [The Nation]

• Self-congratulations are due: the Webby Awards have named Tablet Magazine an honoree in the category of “Religion and Spirituality” on the Web! [Webby Awards]

Last night, Swiss Muslim public intellectual Tariq Ramadan was welcomed with even greater fanfare—having been barred from America by the Bush administration, this was his first trip to the U.S. in six years—to Cooper Union (over 100 blocks down from Columbia!) to headline a panel called “Secularism, Islam, and Democracy: Muslims in Europe and the West.” Ramadan asserted the need for the U.S. and Europe to respect the Enlightenment value of free expression—including the freedom of Muslims like himself to criticize the West without fear of censure or violence. Wearing his trademark spiffy white shirt and blazer, no tie, most buttons buttoned, fielding questions in his charming European accent from New Yorker staff writer George Packer and flaking for the American Civil Liberties Union, which cosponsored his talk, Ramadan was … well, you get the idea.

Lévy and Ramadan hate each other. They feuded after Ramadan published an article in 2003 accusing Lévy and other French-Jewish intellectuals of selling out their political consciences for Israeli interests when they supported the Iraq War. I would like to propose that this is a classic case of sibling rivalry—classic even in the Freudian sense—as the two, as though separated at birth, compete for the love and legacy of the same father. Both men make fairly obvious points about the necessity of upholding “European values” despite the challenges of Muslim emigration to the West, and both give themselves massive credit for doing so. BHL believes Islam thus far has not shown itself to be compatible with these values, but offers prayers for a reformist Muslim intellectual to come along and resolve the clash of civilizations; Ramadan believes Islam is compatible with these values, and that he is the intellectual of BHL’s dreams. Oh Father Enlightenment, who is your favorite son?

Earlier: Live, From New York, It’s Tariq Ramadan
A French Intellectual’s French Views of Islam

The novel, As a Driven Leaf, tells a grandly elaborated version of the story of Elisha ben Abuya, a historical personage whose excommunication on charges of apostasy in the second century is described in the Talmud. In Steinberg’s reading, Elisha is a progenitor of modern man, torn between faith and reason, group loyalty and assimilation. But where most rabbis would analyze those themes in an essay or sermon, Steinberg—the philosophically trained spiritual leader of the elite Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan and a disciple of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the father of Reconstructionist Judaism—gives us cinematic visions of desert armies, crumbling temples, and even the occasional ripped bodice. At the end of the novel, Elisha, cast out by both the Romans and his own people, says goodbye to his remaining disciple, mounts his horse, and rides off into the distance.

“It’s so out of nowhere, so sui generis,” said Josh Lambert, a professor of Jewish literature at New York University and Tablet Magazine contributor. “It really doesn’t fit—unlike Henry Roth or most of the other [American Jewish] writers we can name from the same period, it doesn’t even seem to aspire to being a literary text. If someone wanted to place Steinberg in a literary tradition, it would probably go back to these very flat ‘life of Christ’ novels from the late 19th and early 20th century—with Steinberg saying, ‘We can do the same thing for Jewish history.’”

Not knowing what to do with it, Lambert said, critics have never paid the novel much attention. And yet, As a Driven Leaf has never been out of print; it remains so popular, in fact, that Steinberg’s publisher has taken the unusual step of posthumously releasing the rabbi’s unfinished second novel, The Prophet’s Wife, which comes out this weekend.

Rather than finding a place in the American Jewish literary canon, As a Driven Leaf has become part of an unofficial reading list shared by young adults from liberal Orthodox and traditional Conservative backgrounds. Along with books like Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, an entire demographic, it seems, reads As a Driven Leaf by the end of college. “Just like every American reads Johnny Tremain or The Grapes of Wrath, it was assumed that everyone had read it,” said David Lerner, now a Conservative rabbi in Lexington, Massachusetts, of the novel’s ubiquity during his time at Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox high school in Manhattan. Lerner is 38; his father, Stephen Lerner, also a Conservative rabbi, is 70 and read As a Driven Leaf while in rabbinical school. Both Lerners still give or recommend the book to students.

The obvious reason for the novel’s endurance among young readers from observant backgrounds is that they can relate to its protagonist’s struggle to define his religious identity. But there is another layer, too, one that has not escaped Jewish educators who now teach the book: It brings to life a historical period central to Jewish thought but not much represented in literature. By putting new words in the rabbis’ mouths, and endowing them with personal lives, Steinberg turned the Talmudic sages into people. “How do you identify with Rashi?” asked Ron Gejman, a Columbia senior and Conservative day-school graduate who read As a Driven Leaf after his freshman year of college. “He’s this brilliant guy who you can’t possibly fathom. And you read Steinberg, and you get this glimpse into these few scholars’ lives, and they have the same problems you have, the same struggles you have. It means the traditions were molded and I can mold them too.”

Steinberg died of heart failure at the age of 46 in 1950. He left behind an incomplete 400-page manuscript of The Prophet’s Wife, which his sons David, the president of Long Island University, and Jonathan, a historian, have been trying to figure out what to do with since their mother’s death four decades ago. Over the years, David said, they approached luminaries including Potok, Elie Wiesel, John Hersey, and Hermann Wouk to write an ending for the novel; some of them tried, but ultimately, according to David, “they all said, ‘I can’t finish another man’s work.’ ” Meanwhile, the manuscript sat in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society, its existence known to very few; the entry on As a Driven Leaf in Lambert’s anthology of American Jewish fiction, published early last year, notes specifically that Steinberg never wrote a second novel. Behrman House, Steinberg’s publisher, will release The Prophet’s Wife on Sunday, Steinberg’s 60th yahrtzeit.

In part, no doubt, because it is a fragment, The Prophet’s Wife lacks the allegorical clarity of As a Driven Leaf. It takes up the figure of Hosea, who, according to the book of prophecy from the eighth century BCE that bears his name, was commanded by God to marry a harlot so that he would understand the adultery Jews commit when they are not true to their creator. In Steinberg’s version, Hosea is a respectable but spineless scribe who falls under the influence of the prophet Amos, who has been imprisoned for decrying the corruption of the local Jewish kingdom. He returns home only to find his beautiful but unloving wife Gomer in the arms of his debased brother Iddo. (Columbia University journalism professor Ari L. Goldman, who helped bring The Prophet’s Wife into print, suggests that the relationship between Hosea and Gomer may have been partially inspired by Steinberg’s own tempestuous marriage and that the delicacy of the issue was one reason that the novel went unpublished for so many years.) The book leaves off with the suggestion that, after much indecision, Hosea will take his revenge.

Unlike the fainthearted Hosea, As a Driven Leaf’s Elisha, whose idealistic quest for secular knowledge devolves into an unholy alliance with the Roman government, is a larger-than-life existential hero—or at least that’s how many fans of the book read him. “The question is whether Elisha is a cautionary tale or someone to admire,” said Jordan Hirsch, a senior at Columbia University. That ambiguity has long kept the book off reading lists at more conservative yeshivas. In a 1996 foreword to the novel, Potok describes searching for Steinberg’s work in the library of Yeshiva University, the Modern Orthodox movement’s flagship educational institution, when he was a student there in the early 1950s.

“My query to the librarian elicited the terse response: ‘We do not keep his books here,’ ” Potok writes. “And to my further question as to why not, came the answer, laden with scorn: ‘He is from that other school, and a heretic.’ ” (“That other school” was the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary.) “I don’t think my high school would ever stick it on its curriculum,” said Hirsch, who attended Yavneh Academy in Dallas. “There’d be some people who would think it sent a dangerous message to impressionable high schoolers.” He read the novel after his junior year of high school, when it was recommended by Bronfman Youth Fellowships, a program that takes American teenagers to Israel.

Whether Steinberg’s second novel will find favor with admirers of his first remains to be seen. “It’s a riskier proposition to publish an incomplete novel than a complete novel,” acknowledged David Behrman, the head of Behrman House. But Steinberg tapped into an apparent hunger for Technicolor epics about ancient Jewish life—witness the more recent success of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent—that does not seem to have ebbed. The Prophet’s Wife, then, has a fighting chance.

Lipsyte’s satirical novel The Ask, released last week, concerns the transformation of Milo Burke, an overeducated, underemployed wannabe art star, into a truly down-at-the-heels schmo. When we first meet Milo, he is a man in socioeconomic limbo: In early middle age, with a wife and a young son, he has a “good shitty job” in the development office of a so-so university but still dreams of becoming a great painter; he is poorer than he was growing up but of a higher social class than his neighbors in Astoria, Queens. As a result, he has contracted an au courant malady: a case of white liberal guilt exacerbated by the dread that the privilege he loathes himself for is about to be taken away. Milo’s condition deteriorates significantly after he gets fired (for lashing out at a trustafarian art student, natch), only to be rehired on the condition that he can coax a major donation from Purdy Stuart, a former college friend and now a sleazy millionaire who needs him for a job just slightly less compromising than that of a Mafia bagman. All this is quite grim, though hilarious in Lipsyte’s telling, but there’s also a redemptive aspect to the novel that’s easy to overlook. When Milo slips down the class ladder, there is something waiting for him at the bottom: an ethnic identity that had eluded him when he was a just-average hipster. By the end of the book, he is a grade-A shlemiel.

Milo is half-Jewish—on the side that halachically counts—but he primarily identifies, at the outset of his unfortunate journey, as a wannabe art star, which in his world amounts to a demographic category. Newly fired, he spends his days wandering the streets of Astoria and, employing the classic bohemian inversion of “there goes the neighborhood,” worrying that people just like himself will move in and ruin its heartening mixed-income multiculturalism. “They were infiltrating, the freaking me’s,” he thinks on one of his walks. “The me’s were going to wreck everything, hike rents, demand better salads. The me’s were going to drive me away.” Milo’s shame-faced identification as the aggressor keeps his own ethnic affinities at arm’s length. “I never said gypped, or Indian giver, or paddy wagon, or accused anyone of welshing on a bet,” he reflects wistfully on the sincerity of his own liberalism. “I never even called myself a yid with that tribal swagger I envied in others, though I had a right, or half a right, from my mother’s side.”

But once Milo has been knocked from the creative class into a milieu that includes laborers, Iraq veterans, and underworld types, other people start, in effect, calling him a yid, and—through having to contend with the slur—he becomes one. A doltish neighborhood carpenter offers him a deck-building gig and takes the opportunity to pitch him a concept for a reality show, predicting (wrongly), “You seem like the kind of college boy who may be a broke screw-up but is ultimately part of the vast conspiracy of movers and shakers who move and shake our society. Jewish, right?” Meanwhile, Purdy’s shady attorney Lee Moss (“a hardworking shark, a true Jew lawyer” of “the old breed,” Purdy calls him) immediately recognizes Milo as a landsman. “I can tell you’re a no-account putz,” Moss says, “but you and I, we’re on the same side of the fence.” Soon enough, Milo is having paranoid dreams about being insulted by an anti-Semitic Benjamin Franklin and regretting his decision not to have had his son circumcised.

What’s funny about professional shlemiels from Groucho to Woody is their insistent and absurd contrariness in the face of the obvious bounds imposed on them (“I would never join a club that would accept me as a member”). Left by his wife, the anchor of his shaky existence, Milo finally reaches the sublime heights of negation mastered by his comic predecessors. He comes to take a certain pride in his Jewishness if for no reason other than to mock those real and imagined enemies who see him simply as a yid. “Come kill me as a Jew, flog me to death in a desert quarry, bayonet me in the Pale, gas me in your Polish camp, behead me on your camcorder, I still would not believe. To me that was the true test of courage: to not submit to the faith they assume you possess and will kill you for.” It is in this quixotic spirit that Milo ends up, despite himself, what he always kind of wanted to be: an unapologetically bitter, authentically ethnic guy with no more need to worry that he is gentrifying Queens.

With The Ask, Lipsyte surely wins this month’s if not this year’s award for deftest reworking of this tragicomic, supposedly superannuated comic material, but he’s not the only one who still finds it funny. It appears in a different form in the film Greenberg—the latest from director Noah Baumbach, who at 40 is just a year younger than Lipsyte—which comes out in two weeks. Like The Ask, Greenberg is a sharply attuned comedy of social class, though in this case, the shlemiel at its center is Roger Greenberg, a middle-aged, emotionally disturbed scion of a wealthy Los Angeles family (played by Ben Stiller) who has an affair with his brother’s personal assistant (Greta Gerwig). Woody Allen fans will notice nods to Annie Hall in a moment when Stiller becomes momentarily indistinguishable from a crowd of Hasidim, and in Gerwig’s charming but genuinely awkward character who, like Annie, shyly sings at a local nightclub. But beyond these references, there is little overt Jewishness in Greenberg, save for an early scene when Roger’s Semitic looks are mentioned in jest by a fellow guest at a pool party.

“I’m not even … I’m only half,” Roger protests.

“You look full,” the guest says.

“That’s not what I usually get,” Roger says. “People think I look Italian. And since my mom is Protestant I’m actually not Jewish at all.”

The joke’s on Roger—not just in this scene, which ends with his interlocutor mimicking his expressive hand gestures—but in the entire movie, because Baumbach has given his film such an unavoidably Jewish title. This is slightly cruel, given that Roger can’t answer back, but it’s a brilliant deconstruction of the Jewish joke par excellence: Greenberg, one assumes, wouldn’t want to be in a movie that would accept his name as its title.

The shlemiel is alive and not too well, which is just the way he should be.

• British PM Gordon Brown has awarded medals to 27 countrymen who saved Jews from Nazis, calling them “Heroes of the Holocaust.” [Telegraph]

• Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has accused Israeli military police of arresting Palestinian minors, who are accused of throwing stones at settlers, in violent nighttime raids. [AP]

• AIPAC has taken the unusual step of sending every Congress member a “sharply worded letter” demanding an investigation into how $107 billion in federal grants has been awarded to companies that do business in Iran. [JTA]

• Less surprisingly, a poll finds that 74 percent of Israel’s religious Jews believe they are “more moral” than the general public. [Ynet]

About halfway through Conviction, a melodrama about the Spanish Inquisition, a beautiful young crypto-Jewess sings a Halevi poem, “Shabbat, my love!”, to her lover, a priest:

Now ’tis dusk. With sudden light distilled
From one sweet face, the world is filled;
The turmoil of my heart is stilled—
For you have arrived, Shabbat, my love!

Check out the full text of the poem, and enjoy the rest of Andalusian History Month.

Conviction [NYT]

Related: Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]
The Pilgrim [Tablet Magazine]
Life of a Poet [Tablet Magazine]

The shift comes at a delicate time for the institution and for the Conservative movement, for which it serves as spiritual incubator and intellectual home. The school is reportedly millions of dollars in debt. At the same time, the once-vibrant movement has seen a steady shrinking of its membership rolls and a parallel diminution in what sets it apart from Judaism’s Reform movement.

These tensions come to the fore in the institution of the cantorate. In the immediate postwar years, most Reform and Conservative congregations boasted a charismatic, operatic cantor, who sometimes even eclipsed the rabbi. Reform Judaism began a move away from this model toward more participatory services in the 1960s and ’70s. The Conservative movement has been caught in something of a bind: while it has more recently embraced the shift in an effort to lure a younger audience, doing so has served to further blur the line that divided it from the Reform movement.

On Monday afternoon, JTS chancellor Arnold Eisen met with a large, distraught group of students, alumni, and faculty to defend the de facto demotion of the cantorial school. While students complained about a lack of institutional transparency, Eisen reassured the assembly that the cantorial school would not be closing. Monday’s meeting may be the only student-administration faceoff in recent memory in which a polite student body prepared for the face-off with a “Solidarity Mincha,” or afternoon prayer service, and in which student leaders requested that the chancellor not only promise to give students more decision-making power, but that he ratify that promise by signing a covenant, or brit.

The reorganization did not come as a complete surprise. Faculty, if not yet students, got a whiff last year that big changes were ahead in the cantorial school. Last spring, the seminary’s board hired Jack Ukeles, a management consultant who often works with Jewish organizations, to develop a strategic plan for revamping the institution. The plan that Ukeles drafted a few months later advised shutting down the cantorial school altogether. Chancellor Eisen has stated repeatedly that he never even considered implementing that suggestion—and Provost Alan Cooper told Tablet Magazine that the changes now being announced have nothing to do with Ukeles’s report—but rumors nevertheless began to circulate.

“Everyone jumped to the worst possible conclusions after it came out,” said Alberto Mizrahi, a Miller School alumnus who is now a cantor at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago and a frequent music coach at his alma mater. “Everyone has something to say: Are we going to close the school? Are we going to merge with Hebrew Union College?”
There’s no truth to the latter rumor either, the administration says, though cantorial students at JTS and HUC, the Reform movement seminary, last year began sharing some classes on musical technique.

While the faculty’s worst fears were not realized, they were reactivated Friday afternoon when students and professors were informed via an email from Eisen that “the position of dean of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School will no longer be part of the academic structure of JTS.” He further explained that the previously autonomous cantorial school will, as of this summer, fall under the same umbrella as the seminary’s larger rabbinical school, and will be supervised by the rabbinical school’s dean, Danny Nevins. It also announced, less controversially, that JTS’s graduate and undergraduate schools of academic Jewish studies will soon share a dean as well.

Shortly after the email was sent, Shabbat began, and for a strange 24 hours, everyone on the religiously observant campus was at least officially at rest. Once the Sabbath ended, though, cantorial students began feverishly posting alarmed status updates on their Facebook pages: one student was “very worried about the future of the North American Cantorate”; another ominously referenced the upcoming meeting with Eisen: “Crisis at JTS Cantorial School. Monday is the Day of Judgment.” Meanwhile, Cooper sent a memo that attempted to dispel the rumors about the cantorial school closing, merging with HUC, or being taken over by the rabbinical school. Though students say their worst fears have subsided, they are still—as student representatives said at Monday’s meeting—worried about being left out of the process, and devastated about the loss of their dean.

“JTS has always been the place for people who sought to maintain traditional nusach [musical style] in the service—to move forward and add contemporary music as well, but also to preserve some of the great pieces we have from the golden age of hazzanut [cantorial performance] when cantors were really something,” said Rebecca Platt, a second-year cantorial student. “Now I’m concerned about whether we’re going to be able to maintain that, without Henry and without a very autonomous program.”

The economic logic of the move goes beyond JTS’s budget deficit, said Andy Shugerman, a recent graduate of the JTS rabbinical school who now runs educational programs for the seminary in Florida and the South. Some small synagogues are cutting costs by hiring just one spiritual leader instead of a rabbi and a cantor. By making the boundary between rabbinic and cantorial training more fluid—teaching rabbis to lead a congregation in prayer and training cantors more extensively in halacha—JTS hopes it can make its alumni more marketable at a particularly vulnerable time.

The softening of that boundary could be a silver lining of Eisen’s plan, cantorial students said, and not just because of the dismal job market. Historically, relationships between rabbis and cantors have been rocky—JTS itself didn’t allow cantors to sleep in its dorms, which were for rabbinical students only, until the 1970s. “What might finally start happening is bringing together the rabbinical and cantorial schools, and that might be great,” said Yakov Hadash, a fourth-year cantorial student and the president of the Miller School’s student organization.

Eisen and Cooper have publicly framed the restructuring of the cantorial school as part of a philosophical shift toward a future model of the Conservative movement, a demonstration of just how far the pendulum has swung in Conservative circles away from traditional hazzanut. But outside the JTS administration, even those sympathetic to the plan see it as primarily an economic decision. “The school is in major financial trouble, and Henry Rosenblum, who is an old and dear friend of mine, is one of the statistics that happens in this world,” Alberto Mizrahi said.

It’s not yet known who will be hired as the new cantorial school director—a position that will encompass some duties of the erstwhile cantorial school dean but will be subsidiary to the rabbinical dean—and how long a search for that person will take place. Students in their first few years of the five-year cantorial program, Hadash said, are concerned about whether their academic lives will be thrown out of whack if they are temporarily leaderless—and that, if they don’t like the yet-to-be-appointed director, things might not improve.

Most of all, though, students are mourning Rosenblum’s departure; he held his position for 12 years and had, by all accounts, been an important mentor, advocate, and emotional support system for JTS students both in an out of the cantorial school. Said Platt, “Our hearts are collectively a little broken.”

With additional reporting by Jenny Merkin.

The scene, which takes up almost a quarter of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, is classic American Jewish comedy, but it’s just as notable for the joke it doesn’t make: the obvious one about emasculating mothers who hang out in the bathroom with their grown sons. When the mother, Bessie Glass, touches her son Zooey’s bare back as he shaves and compliments how “broad and lovely” he’s gotten, he recoils—not because she’s broken an Oedipal taboo, but because he’s afraid that too much reflection on the beauty of his physical form will corrupt him spiritually. Zooey has plenty of complaints, but Portnoy’s is not one of them.

What do we do with J.D. Salinger, the midcentury American Jewish anomaly who wrote the episode above (which the writer Janet Malcolm has called “one of the most remarkable mother-and-son scenes in literature”) and many like it? As the writers who’ve eulogized him in the past week have demonstrated, we can love him with a slightly defensive fervor, as though a superior critic might at any moment squash his literary reputation forever; or look beyond his small oeuvre to the subcultures of fans it has spawned; or use the strange path of his career to think through larger questions of what we want from our authors. But how do we do with Salinger what we do with most famous writers when they die—that is, figure out where they fit into our individual and collective literary canons?

One potential place to “put” Salinger would be with the other American Jewish male writers who came to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s—authors like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, who’ve come to define an era in American Jewish literature. Up to a point, this makes sense: like various among them, Salinger served in and wrote about World War II and critiqued the culture of the American boom times that followed. Like them, he masterfully combined elements of high and low art, a practice that since then has become almost synonymous with the American aesthetic. And like them, his work was frequently animated by a quarrel with the religious affiliation of his youth. But—and this slight distinction makes all the difference—he was picking a different fight with Jewishness. It had nothing to do with the strangulations of insular community life, or the struggle to move beyond immigrant parents and become American, or to move beyond a castrating old-world mother and become a man. Salinger’s assimilated, upper-middle-class characters don’t have to worry about these things; in fact, Franny and Zooey Glass and their five siblings—his most Jewishly identified characters—are, like Salinger himself, technically only half-Jewish. The specter of intermarriage (or, to put it in more Rothian terms, the possibility of banging shiksas) isn’t a taboo-smashing fantasy, here; it’s a very comfortable fact.

Salinger’s quarrel with Jewishness was about structures of thought that are much less visible and less risible than the clannishness of immigrants: he objects to the premiums placed on education, analysis, intelligence itself. The Glass family stories concern the attempt of seven brilliant siblings to escape from brilliance—and, in particular, from the psychoanalytic thought that permeated Jewish intellectual life at the time. If Alex Portnoy visits his Dr. Spielvogel in an attempt to cure himself of the strangulating effects of parochial Jewish community, the Glass children turn to eastern religion to escape the limitations of a world where everyone sees an analyst.

In a well-meaning educational experiment that forms the background of Franny and Zooey, the eldest and brainiest of the siblings, Seymour and Buddy, force-feed the youngest, Zooey and Franny, on a steady diet of Buddhist and Christian mysticism from the time they’re small children. Their syllabus includes “the Upanishads and the Diamond Sutra and Eckhart,” “Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankarachya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna.” (Moses, for his part, comes up exactly once, marshaled by Zooey as an example of a prophet who “was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that,” but was no Jesus.)

The plan backfires: like many graduates of progressive schools, Franny and Zooey grow up to feel that their idealistic education has rendered them even less capable of interacting with the outside world than they would be otherwise. Each twist of the knot makes the siblings more dependent on each other, trapped in a dialectic of knowledge and “no-knowledge” that no one else understands. They spend the duration of the book sitting around their messy Upper West Side apartment (“Bessie’s kibbutz,” Buddy calls it) stroking their cat, Bloomberg, and arguing about how to get out of the metaphysical mess they’ve gotten themselves into. Other than in relation to their heritage, no one ever explicitly mentions Jewishness, but the whole thing is so Jewish it makes you wonder if, by contrast, Alex Portnoy could just as well have been Armenian.

The tragedy of Salinger’s career, as many critics have noted, is that he seems to have been, ultimately, unable to get out of the intellectual trap he so brilliantly described his characters being stuck in. It’s hard not to wonder whether they—and he—might have been able to pry themselves loose if they had had a slightly less dismal view of sex. There’s virtually no sex, at least in any conventional sense of the word, in any of the Glass family stories. (There’s an implication in “Franny” that the young woman and her boyfriend have slept together, and some even read the story as implying that she’s pregnant.) The only way it even comes up, for the most part, is in abstracted form as “desire” or “attachment,” which the Buddhist-influenced siblings believe ought to be avoided; or, even more abstractly, as the cure for malaise recommended by psychoanalysis, for which they have unanimous contempt. This is, in fact, where Salinger diverges most sharply from Bellow, Mailer, and Roth, all of whom were profoundly influenced by psychoanalytic thought and whose explicit writing about sex changed the way sex was written about—and perhaps even how it was performed.

It’s quite possible that Salinger would have had a longer career if he had allowed his characters more plot-motivating desires (carnal or otherwise), but it’s just as likely that the very good work of his that we do have has been underappreciated because we just don’t know what to do with his lack of what, in Franny and Zooey, he derisively calls “testicularity.” Or, to be more precise, critics don’t know what to do with him. Fiction writers seem to, though. Mailer, Bellow, and company are hardly dusty, and Roth, for all we know, may have his best years still ahead of him—but it’s Salinger’s presence, more than any of theirs, that can be seen in much of the fiction currently being produced by young writers, including his lack of engagement with sex. Last month, cultural critic Katie Roiphe lamented in a New York Times Book Review essay that “young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent” to Roth, Mailer, Bellow, and Updike, have “repudiated the virility of their predecessors.” She blames a censorious brand of feminism for the alleged generational shift toward “passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite.” To whatever extent she’s right about the phenomenon, she’s wrong about the cause. Possibly one or two of the young male writers she accuses of prudery have read Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. Every one of them has read Salinger.

Until close to the end of the book that bears her name, Franny remains inconsolable, reciting the Jesus Prayer and refusing to eat. Finally, through a theatrical bit of trickery, Zooey gets her attention. “How in hell,” he asks her, “are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?” Compared with what Alex Portnoy might do with a cup of chicken soup, there’s nothing remotely shocking about this moment. But on its own terms, it’s radical. Chicken soup and the mothers who proffer it, here, have lost the power they have elsewhere to keep a young American in a Jewish ghetto. Instead, in this brief moment when Buddhist thought and Jewish family life are reconciled, chicken soup becomes an object of transcendence, a communion wafer or an om—and the mother who bears it just might be Buddha, or Christ, in disguise.

The article—by Abby Wisse Schachter, an editor at the New York Post—employs the common Commentary tactic of labeling a non-traditional idea “trendy,” then further using it as an example of something Wrong With Society Today. The “trend” that’s been spotted this month is the practice of seeing Vashti, the queen of Persia who is deposed at the beginning of the Purim story for refusing to dance naked for her husband, King Ahasuerus, as the true heroine of the holiday tale. In this reading, Queen Esther—Vashti’s replacement, and the traditional one worthy of praise (the scroll that tells the story is named after her)—is a lesser figure: she lacks her predecessor’s admirable chutzpah, relying instead on a more old-fashioned brand of feminine wiles to get what she wants (that is, to save the Jews of the kingdom).

These trendsetters—mostly veterans of the original 1960s/70s women’s movement—are launching a “feminist war on Purim,” Schachter contends. She is justified in her scorn for some of the more inane Purim revisions: surely it is simplistic (not to mention self-parodic) to extol Hillary Clinton as a modern-day Vashti figure, right?

But these extreme, erroneous interpretations may just be the price we pay for the ability to update our readings of ancient stories in light of contemporary values. And it is a price worth paying: the only alternatives to such reinterpretation are to adopt religious fundamentalism or to reject the tales’ teachings altogether.

In fact, that’s what’s happened recently with the Hanukkah story, which a number of readers—and not raging liberals, either—have argued is deeply jingoistic, and bears a moral that extols fanaticism. Rereading the Purim story, which ends with the Jews killing 75,000 Persians, is what allows us not to throw the whole thing out.

The Problem with Purim [Commentary]

On the one hand, he maintained his staunch defense of the Danish newspaper that published Islam-satirizing cartoons in 2005 (he even criticized Remnick for failing to republish the cartoons). On the other, he advocated for laws banning Holocaust denial, and spoke out against French women wearing burqas, which, he said, constitute “a political message” rather than a religious choice.

The other French panelist, Philippe Schmidt—a lawyer who, like Lévy, is affiliated with LICRA—took these arguments even further, proposing that Internet speech be regulated by some kind of supranational body. When a Columbia law professor on the panel pointed out that U.S. participation in such a body would breach the First Amendment, Schmidt replied (in earnest, it seemed), “You can change the First Amendment.” This strange moment only underscored what had already become clear: of the five panelists, including Remnick, the Americans argued for limited restrictions on speech, while the Frenchmen argued for limited restrictions on speech unless the speaker was a Holocaust denier or a religious Muslim.

Lévy, who personifies grandiosity, is easy to make fun of (“my friend Salman Rushdie” came up repeatedly). But the chauvinism of his ideas is no joke. No one asked directly whether he and Schmidt advocated different free speech standards for Muslims than for others, though Remnick cleverly wondered whether Schmidt thought Israel should have prosecuted Jewish extremists who had directed hate speech toward Yitzhak Rabin before the Israeli prime minister’s assassination (cornered, Schmidt said yes). But in his closing remarks, Lévy asserted that, at least at this point in history, Islam is unique among the monotheistic religions in its susceptibility to extremism. “Mainstream” Judaism, he argued, is fundamentally anti-fundamentalist. Lévy’s refusal to acknowledge the significance of Jewish (and Christian) fundamentalism is shared by many on both sides of the Atlantic. But his insistence on couching his biases in a grandiloquent commitment to Enlightenment values is—to engage in a bit of chauvinism—very French.

Last night, though, the warring clans tried to work things out more peaceably, with a debate held at Pete’s Candy Store, a hip Williamsburg music venue. According to a reporter for the blog Free Williamsburg, lead counsel for the Hasids was Isaac Abraham, who ran for city council last fall (he lost, but it was notable that a member of Brooklyn’s large ultra-Orthodox community ran for public office at all). Abraham reportedly lay low on the much-mocked argument that the bikers terrorize the Satmars by showing too much skin; the real problem, he wisely maintained, was that cyclists pose a safety hazard to pedestrians. Cycling advocates retorted that having a dedicated bike lane makes everyone safer. And more or less everyone, Free Williamsburg claimed, blamed the Department of Transportation for failing to listen to their constituents. (The bike advocacy group Transportation Alternatives later disputed that its representative at the debate had derided the DOT.)

So where does this leave the good people of Williamsburg? Perhaps not far from where they started: the attending blogger “left feeling that, though civil, the debate didn’t really get anyone anywhere, other than a few shared laughs and a feeling that neither side is budging more than mere inches.”

On the other hand, a Village Voice writer today declared the entire conflict ridiculous, on the grounds that at least a visible skeleton of the supposedly-removed bike lane is still there on the street. “The last couple of weekends,” he writes, “I pedaled happily on this bike lane with just as much safety as ever, with the Hasids walking along on the sidewalk to my left and some weekend traffic passing by me on my right.”

So at least someone’s happy.

Bicyclists & Hasidic representatives debate the Williamsburg Bike Lane [Free Williamsburg]
Cycling Hipsters are Full of Shit: Bedford Bike Lane Is Still There [Village Voice]

But the book’s real highlight is its “appendix,” in which Goldstein has meticulously collected 36 common arguments for God’s existence, credited to everyone from Descartes to intelligent-design proponents; worked them into formal proofs; and just as formally rebutted them. In creating this catalog, Goldstein, who is both a product of Orthodox day schools and a professor trained in analytic philosophy, has made both a real contribution to intellectual history and written a strange, affecting tale of logic in the tradition of Borges.

Goldstein has written five previous novels, but her most recent book was a study of Baruch Spinoza—whose ideas about God, consciousness, and morality have influenced her profoundly— published by Nextbook Press. Tablet Magazine spoke with Goldstein about 36 Arguments and how the shadow of Spinoza hovers over it.

This is the first novel you’ve written since Betraying Spinoza. Did working on that book affect how you thought about this novel?

By publishing that book I encountered a lot of pro-science, secular humanist, freethinking groups—organized non-religion. I was on the circuit, on both circuits actually: the Jewish circuit and the freethinking circuit. And it became apparent to me that a lot of the people I was speaking with had no idea what it felt like to be religious and to belong to a religious community. I think maybe that’s more apparent to a person who’s Jewish. It’s not a dogma religion, it’s something else—something else we’re all struggling to figure out, of course.

Beyond that, I am a Spinozist; he’s always with me. Spinoza demonstrated that there is a way of having a strong spiritually transcendent experience that is not a conventional religious experience at all—whether or not he’s an atheist is a matter of great debate—and I wanted very much to demonstrate this. So, in 36 Arguments, my atheist-with-a-soul is very much a version of this, the way he keeps stepping out of himself and getting swept away by the exhilaration of existence.

It seemed like some of the arguments in the appendix were familiar from the Spinoza book, too. Were any of them taken from your day school experience?

When I was making that list, I kept trying to think of arguments I had heard over the years but that had never been made formally, the way the classic philosophical ones are, and I turned them into formal proofs. The argument for moral truth gets the biggest rise out of me, because it’s the one that makes people think atheists have no values. It perniciously causes people to think that other citizens are not good people. I certainly heard that argument very much growing up—not so much in yeshiva, because, you know, that’s one of the differences between Judaism and Christianity, it’s not so concerned with proofs for God’s existence, the way it is with the Jesuits, you just take Hashem’s existence for granted and move on from there—but there is that presumption that if you are a believing Jew, you don’t have to struggle to give a foundation to morality. God gave us the Torah and that’s how you have to behave, so you’re relieved of this question of the philosophical foundations of morality. What was there was more the sense that God’s will is synonymous with morality. And also the argument from purpose—that because there’s a God, there’s purpose to our lives.

Would you describe yourself as an atheist?

I would. Well, I have an inclination toward the idea that the world explains itself, that the world is thoroughly self-contained, that if we had a complete vision of the world we could understand why it had to exist. If you describe that as a religious point of view, as Spinoza does, then you could say I had a religious point of view. Do I actually believe that? I’d like to believe that. The idea of explanatory gaps in the universe is ugly to me. But, if you understand belief as the idea that there is a transcendent god who created the universe, then, yes, I reject that. I don’t see evidence of that, and I do see a lot of evidence that it isn’t the case.

How do you feel about the New Atheists? It seems that maybe you’re suggesting that the self-identified freethinkers are a pretty goyish bunch. Do you think Jews have a more nuanced view of religion?

I should say I’m friends with all of them—except Christopher Hitchens, whom I’ve never met. But Richard Dawkins is a friend and Sam Harris is a friend, and Dan Dennett. But in terms of their ideas, the emphasis on belief in God, that that’s the be all and end all of religion, is very Christian.

One of my nephews—he wears a black hat, and he is a professor, but to look at him you would think you knew everything about his metaphysics. He’s my go-to guy when I need any technical knowledge about Talmud. I asked him a very technical question about two years ago about something I was writing, and he said, “Why do you want to know this?” And I said, “You don’t want to know why I want to know this,” because obviously I wanted to use it for some satiric person. And he wrote back, “Aunt Rebecca, I thought you would know me better than this, I’m sure there’s no heretical thought you’ve had that I have not also entertained.” That strikes me as quintessentially Jewish. And it just causes utter amazement: if someone thinks like that, why would they dress like that and send their children to Jewish schools? It’s incomprehensible to them, and it’s not incomprehensible to me.

There’s a lot of conflict in the book between Seltzer and the mathematician women in his life over their different approaches to epistemology—Cass, as a psychologist, is always accused of being too “soft” in his ideas. Are these relationships drawn from your own experience being married to Steven Pinker? And if so, which of you is which?

I think not. But you’re right that both he and I are a strange mixture of soft and hard and it would be hard to say which of us is the hardnosed and which is the softy. I have much more tendency to have these kinds of transcendent spiritual experiences. This is something that I’m given to, probably a lot of artists are; it’s part of what motivates one toward art. I think Steve might roll his eyes a little bit when I talk about these things, but when he finished reading the first chapter he said he had a better understanding of what it’s like to have one of those experiences that aren’t so familiar to him. Also, both of us are very aware of the limits of science. Neither of us think it can answer all questions, at least at this moment—and never will be able to, regardless of how far science progresses.

In one exchange, the man refers to an unnamed third party who’s caught a flight on Saturday night—“motzei Shabbos”—but wasn’t quite sure he “brought the money with him.” “How does somebody travel with $3,700 and they’re not sure they have it?” Orand, who is from Houston, wonders aloud. As her Talmudic interlocutor pontificates further on the whereabouts of the money he is sending her, she makes an observation. “Maybe money is not that important to so many people,” she says, “but if I had $3,700 anywhere, in a drawer, in a pocket, in a suitcase—I’d know exactly where it is.”

How did a young single mother—who wasn’t even officially Jewish until a few weeks ago—get mixed up with a powerful ultra-Orthodox rabbi and his wealthy and influential associates? The short answer, according to Orand, is that she was in the process of converting to Judaism, and Tropper was her supervising rabbi and took gross liberties with his position. But, of course, the long answer is much more interesting.

Orand, 32, grew up in the town of Humble, Texas, a suburb of Houston, where her father was a police officer and a preacher in the evangelical congregation Assemblies of God. As Orand wrote on a Chabad discussion board, she joined her father in missionary work as a young girl and later joined his ministry. Her mother was part of the Messianic Jewish movement—Jews for Jesus is the best-known Messaniac group—and Orand became involved with Messianic synagogues as well.

Orand became pregnant with her first child while still a student in college; she later married Charles Brady Orand, 12 years her senior, who fathered her second child. She went into public relations, representing first a youth orchestra and then the real estate firm Grubb & Ellis. In 2003, when her daughter was 6 and her son was 2, her husband, a then-semi-employed technology consultant known as Brady, declared bankruptcy.

In 2006, the couple divorced after a lengthy court battle. According to Brady’s lawyer, Michael Tracton, Orand also accused Brady in court of having molested her daughter and, in 2007, Brady wound up on probation and on the Texas sex offender registry. Tracton confirmed that Orand made the accusation but says his client maintained his innocence and only agreed to be labeled a sex offender as part of a plea bargain. That same year, according to Tracton, Orand and her husband wound up back in court over visitation rights to their son. Just a few weeks ago, according to an interview with Orand on the counter-missionary website Jewish Israel, the case was decided in Brady’s favor.

As her marriage fell apart, Orand appears to have looked for a new source of faith and stability in her life. In a 2007 post on what is presented online as Orand’s personal MySpace page—one asserted to be such by two of her friends—Orand came “out of the closet,” as it is phrased there, about the faith that had been sustaining her during a difficult time. “I posted a blog quite a while back about my re-dedicating my life to G-d,” she wrote. “This re-dedication has included a lot of study, prayer, and intense research of scripture. What I discovered in my research turned my world upside down.” In an email to Tablet Magazine, Orand did not confirm or deny whether this is, in fact, her own MySpace page.

In October of 2005, the MySpace post continued, she had spent a month in Israel, hoping that when she returned she would be able “to prove one way or another that Jesus was/is in fact the Jewish Messiah”—ordering a Prophecy Edition bible, a popular Messianic version of the scriptures, and going “to work memorizing how Jesus fulfilled each and every one of the prophecies in the Tanakh (Jewish scriptures)…. surely re-affirming my faith, right?”

Instead, according to the post, she determined that she had been lied to in the religious education she received in her father’s house. “What I found when I looked deeper than the one verse references that Jews for Jesus and other missionary sites show is that EVERY ONE of those verses have either been deceptively translated or taken COMPLETELY out of context. When I started to discover this, I think I went through all of the stages of grief, and probably still am. This revelation is huge!”

After this ecstatic missive about the rejection of Christianity, she announces she was being tutored in her new faith by a group called Outreach Judaism, a group that tries to counter the work of Christian missionaries, and that she had decided to become an Orthodox Jew: “Initially, I looked into conversion, but through looking into my family discovered that I am already Jewish! I’ve written enough, so I’ll explain this part later.”

The reasons why Orand initially thought she would not have to convert, and why she subsequently changed her mind, remain unclear, as does the question of how Leib Tropper, who lives in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York, became her supervising rabbi, as she contends. Orand is quite naturally reticent in her dealings with the press. “Publicity is the last thing I ever wanted. I’m simply a nobody in Houston, TX, who made a connection to a powerful Rabbi for help,” she wrote in an email to Tablet Magazine. “My only goal for the past 4 years has been to join the Jewish people, marry, and raise my children in a safe Jewish home.”

In one of the recorded conversations, the man Orand says is Tropper speaks of another man in her life. “You are heartbroken, you are destroyed, and even now you wish that he were different and you could go ahead with your relationship with him, married, not married, whatever will be,” he says in the recording. “You didn’t think about the question of whether you can marry him—he told you from the beginning that he can’t marry you because he is a Kohen.” If Orand hoped to marry a Jewish man and if, as she said in her interview with Jewish Israel, she hoped to make aliyah, then she would have needed a strictly Orthodox conversion recognized by the Israeli government—which is the specialty of Tropper’s Eternal Jewish Family organization.

A month after Orand came out as a prospective Jew, she told friends on MySpace that her job at Grubb & Ellis would most likely be ending, and that she was looking for new employment. By the end of the 2007, she was doing PR for Tovia Singer, the Monsey-based anti-missionary impresario behind Outreach Judaism as well as “The Tovia Singer Show,” a syndicated, politically conservative radio program. Orand starting attending classes at an Orthodox synagogue and volunteering with Bridge Houston, a hard-line local Zionist and anti-defamation organization, where, according to one of the group’s leaders, Ira Bleiweiss, she spearheaded a campaign against Messianic missionaries in the area, showing up in front of the Jewish Community Center, where a Messianic group evangelized each week, and taking them on, biblical verse for biblical verse.

“If there’s somebody protesting on behalf of the Jewish people around here, it’s probably because of her,” another friend from the Jewish community, Jason Levinson, said of Orand. “She very quickly has shown herself to be a hugely valuable part of our community. I see her as an up-and-coming young Jewish leader.”

Shannon Orand had transformed herself from a preacher’s daughter into an Orthodox Jew—keeping kosher, dressing according to Orthodox standards of modesty, and even sending her children to an Orthodox day school. In her online writings, she comes across as a well-spoken woman with standard Orthodox religious and political views, with special fluency in the halachic codes that govern responding to missionaries. When a commenter on Jewish Israel identified only as “Ellen” asked whether it was permissible to burn missionary materials, Oraand responded firmly. “Since my heart is so tangled up emotionally with this issue,” she said, “I have to be careful to rely only on Torah & Halacha on this….If you are a Jew, you are obligated to burn the idolatrous material.”

Her new beliefs and commitments, not surprisingly, have strained or ended many relationships from her Messianic days. One of Orand’s online acquaintances, a Jewish-turned-Messianic rapper named Aviad Cohen, suggested to Tablet that Orand’s horrific conversion experience may have been some kind of message from above. “People choose their own path instead of the path that God lays out for them and then, sometimes things like this happen,” he said.

Orand’s most significant falling-out, though, has been with the person who got her involved with the Messianic movement to begin with. “My mother, who is a devout evangelical/messianic and was never supportive of my conversion efforts, has told me that I’m going to hell and taking her grandchildren with me,” Orand said in her interview with Jewish Israel. Orand’s father, though, has taken a different path: following in his daughter’s footsteps, Orand told the website, he has left the church, and now considers himself a righteous gentile observer of the Laws of Noah, or a Noahide.

“I’ve never known Shannon as anything other than Jewish and as an observant Jew,” said Bleiweiss, who’s known her for two years. “She just has a piece of paper now, but it’s the same Shannon.”

Orand has addressed the question of why she stayed in what