Continue reading: Believe it or not, I found one

No, all Oprah had to do was take a chauffeured SUV over the Brooklyn Bridge to Crown Heights, a place “that is like another place, maybe a little townlet in Europe,” in the words of Aaron Ginsburg, who with his wife Shterna and their nine lovely children is one of the main subjects of “Oprah’s Next Chapter: Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn” a two-part special that will begin airing Sunday night on OWN.

By “Hasidics,” as she refers to them throughout, Oprah is actually speaking of Chabadniks, the most camera-ready of all Hasidic movements and the only one with whom she interacts. I am a totally secular pseudo-atheist—I don’t believe in God, and I’m afraid He can hear me when I say so—but I have never personally met a Lubavitcher I did not find utterly charming. The Ginsburg family, complete with adorable and well-behaved children in Von Trapp-style coordinating jumper outfits, is no exception, answering Oprah’s softball questions in the initial episode with typical breezy cheer: “Having nine kids is a blast!” “Separation between the sexes brings us closer!” “You can’t even tell it’s a wig!” (Oprah, no stranger to a good sheitel herself, is duly appreciative.) Shalom bayit is lovely, but it’s not exactly high-octane viewing.

Yet there is something profoundly illuminating about this special, even for those of us for whom revelations of separate stoves and ritual baths are old hat. The fascination lies in watching Oprah herself, as she struggles, with barely concealed shock, to grasp her own irrelevance in the lives of these people. Oprah may be known for her common touch in interviews, yet she sees herself—quite rightly—as anything but common. Before any given chat can begin, each interview subject must first pay homage to her fame—weeping, hurling themselves into her arms, thanking her for the privilege of being permitted to lay bare to her their souls. Even the FLDS women on the Warren Jeffs polygamist compound told her how much they loved the show.

The Chabadniks, on the other hand, greet Oprah with the sublimely cheerful indifference you might display when meeting, say, the lady who does the restaurant reviews on the little TV in the back seat of New York City cabs. They know she has a TV show, they know her name is Oprah, but they have no idea what Oprah means, and one suspects that they wouldn’t think it was any big deal even if they did. After all, what good is worldwide fame to people this committed to eschewing worldliness? It’s telling, too, that of all the Hasidic practices Oprah interrogates—the arranged marriages, the husband-and-wife two-week no touching rule—the one she keeps coming back to is the fact that none of them have ever watched television. “You don’t know who Shrek is?” she, with increasing desperation, asks the Ginsburg children, who laugh good-naturedly at the nice lady making up the funny words. “Or Miley Cyrus? Or Beyoncé?” She even resorts to name-dropping her own achievements, hoping for some shred of recognition. “I have a magazine,” she tells Shterna, who responds with a blankly encouraging nod, like if you told your grandma you just started a Tumblr. “The kids love to read,” the husband offers gamely, and Oprah exclaims: “I had a book club!” “That’s good,” he replies calmly, encapsulating four millennia of nearly incomprehensible Jewish resistance to assimilation and conversion in an offhand two-word sentence. He might have been talking to Jesus Christ himself: “So you think you’re the Son of God. That’s nice for you.”

It all comes to a head in the second episode, when Oprah has her vaunted sit-down with four Hasidic “wives and mothers,” in which no question is “off-limits.” She’s in her element here, sitting regal as a rebbe in the Ginsburg’s attractive, Talmud-lined library; there’s even a woman who has heard of her, a ba’al teshuva named Brocha, who greets her hostess with a pleasant “I haven’t seen you in 15 years,” as though it was Oprah, and not she, who had retired from public life, as though she was a Sally Jessy Raphael, or G-d forbid, a Rolonda. I don’t mean to imply that the Hasidic women treated this stranger in their midst with any disrespect; far from it. They just blithely, obliviously refused to be any more impressed with her than she was with them.

Then, a wonderful thing happened, something I believe attests to the greatness of the Jewish people, and perhaps the Queen of Talk herself. Divested of special status, Oprah did something I haven’t seen her do in years: She began to relate to these women as her equals. She listened to their explanations of their faith, their family, and their spirituality not just with camera-friendly attentiveness, but genuine openness. She allowed them to speak directly to each other; she let them interrupt her, she even let them talk over her. At the end of the discussion, she looked directly into the camera and solemnly intoned that she had accomplished what she set out to do, the mission she had laid out all along: to prove incontrovertibly that “we are more alike than we are different.” It’s even truer than she knows.

Here’s what a Permanent Wave-sponsored show looks like in practice: A loud electro thump crashes into the graffitied warehouse walls of 285 Kent, a club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Staccato guitars and unstoppable drums loop around each other as J.D. Samson becomes one with the crowd. “Who am I to feel so free?” she hollers into a sea of waving arms. “Who am I?” Every audience member seems to take the question personally, throwing it back not only at Samson, but at an unseen force of oppression that seems to exist in the air right above them. It’s sarcastic, but deadly serious: “WHO. AM I. TO. FEEL SO FREE.”

The chant ends, and Samson’s band, MEN, steps back. Everyone needs a moment to catch their breath. Suddenly a young woman gets on stage, doesn’t bother to announce her name, and demands that the crowd take control of their own bodies: “Tell this to the ads in the subway, the billboards on the street: ‘I’m beautiful just the fucking way I am!’ ” (I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of it.) The crowd is with her, but they seem mostly stunned. Who is she, after all, to feel so free? That’s when it becomes clear that no one here has seen anything like Permanent Wave.

It is impossible to write this piece without mentioning riot grrrl, so let’s get that out of the way now. Born equally out of Reagan and the misogyny of crowds at Reagan Youth shows in the 1980s, riot grrrl bands like Bratmobile, Bikini Kill, and Huggy Bear played loud and fast, addressing subjects like rape, domestic abuse, sexuality, and patriarchy head on and at the top of their lungs. They drew large numbers and critical acclaim, but eventually what all political movements fear is what happened to riot grrrl: It got trapped in amber. Albums like Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped and Heavens to Betsy’s Calculated were put high on a rock critical pedestal, venerated from a thousand feet away where Kathleen Hanna or Corin Tucker’s lyrics couldn’t hurt you any. Such is the fate of any rabble-rouser, but no one emerged to take riot grrrl’s place.

Klein is used to being labeled a “riot-grrrl throwback,” and you don’t have to look far to see links. She openly admits that Sara Marcus’ history of the movement, Girls To the Front, was the initial inspiration for Permanent Wave. And even on that night at 285 Kent, J.D. Samson’s presence left the room a mere two steps away from the original scene. Samson shot to fame with Le Tigre, an electro-dance group fronted by Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna. Given the fact that we’re in the midst of a “full-blown riot grrrl nostalgia trip,” it’d be easy to assume that you can put Permanent Wave on the same Brooklyn retro shelf as manual typewriters and artisanal pickles.

“We don’t call our movement riot grrrl because we’re not riot grrrl bands,” Klein told me over a beer at Brooklyn’s Crown Vic. “Most of the girls in the group don’t even play punk music.” Same goes for the bands they book: As angry as MEN were, no one could associate its electroclash with the minimalist “up the punx” feel of riot grrrl in any musical sense. Klein, whose rise from unemployed English major to punk/indie scene mainstay has been documented by the New York Times, is herself a perfect example of how different styles of music can be embraced as political. After touring with the electric and wordy Titus Andronicus, she left to focus on two bands, the melodious Blue Star Band and minimalist psychedelic duo Hilly Eye, which sounds something like what Sonic Youth would have sounded like if it wanted to fill stadiums in 1979. All three groups are loud in their own way—you could find the riot grrrl in them if you were looking for it—but you could just as easily reference Lightening Bolt, Patti Smith, and a hundred other artists. And as culturally influential as the riot grrrl scene is, Klein and the rest of Permanent Wave choose not to look at it through rose-colored glasses. While every person I talked to for this article had clear reverence for riot grrrl acts, they were upfront that they didn’t consider themselves part of the same scene.

A lot has changed since 1985. Reading Marcus’ book, your heart just aches that it’s all so pre-Internet. One of the main difficulties she presents—and really this was a problem for any activist group in the long-ago days before the advent of the personal computer—was how to get the message out without it being co-opted by the mainstream. That’s hardly a problem now.

Yet while the Internet is a miraculously quick and easy form of communication, it’s brought its own problems. Let’s handle two here: first, the echo-chamber effect and, second, the destruction of local scenes. So, while Tumblr is “how the intersection of caring a lot about feminism and the anonymity of the Internet combines,” according to Zoë Leverant, founder of Permanent Wave’s first West Coast chapter in San Francisco, constant blogging and reblogging also leads to semantic infighting. “The number of people who actually give a fuck about what we’re talking about is really small,” Leverant admits. One thing that appealed to her about Permanent Wave is its listserv, which doubles, says Klein, as community for people “in other countries, people who live all over this country,” who might not have a safe space for openly political and feminist discussion. “Or just no one else appreciates that great artist they found on YouTube.”

Continue reading: Non-magical nights

• An Israeli Facebook group is asking Netanyahu to wait until after Madonna’s May 29 concert in Tel Aviv to attack Iran. [Haaretz]

• Attention Long Islanders: your synagogue’s caterer might have cooked coconut shrimp in the temple’s kosher kitchen. [NYT]

• Major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson’s business, Las Vegas Sands, is under federal investigation. [Reuters]

• A timeline of the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s changing story on the Planned Parenthood funding cut (and an open letter to CEO Nancy Brinker). [ProPublica]

• A Marine sniper team posed with a flag that looked a lot like a Nazi SS flag in Afghanistan. [AP]

It’s Oprah! on Chabad TV!

According to Smith:

The president’s rising fortunes among Jewish voters, at least according to Koch’s brand of polling, may face a critical test in the coming months; whether Washington stands in support if Israel decides to take military action to halt Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons. In perhaps the most important sign of Obama’s strengthened pro-Israel credentials, Koch and others have come to believe that if the Netanyahu government bombs Iranian installations, Obama will back them; and that an American strike isn’t out of the question.

“This is an existential threat to Western civilization,” said Koch. “I think that the president and others have recognized that and will do whatever is required to keep our nation safe.”

Marc Tracy emphasized Koch’s influence in September, particularly the significance of his endorsement of Obama for re-election after playing a key role in New York’s ninth district electing a Republican in the special election:

And this is important for two related reasons. First, it’s a sign that the administration/campaign’s charm offensive—beginning with the embassy rescue, continuing to the unequivocal support Obama offered Israel at the United Nations in both his deeds and his speech, and going through the new revelations of heightened military-to-military cooperation—are having an impact on convincing fence-sitting American Jews that Obama is their friend. Second, it’s important because, as Tevi Troy presciently wrote many months ago in Tablet Magazine, Koch is the emblematic figure of this sort, whom Democratic candidates need on their side.

But let’s not lose sight of what is possibly the best part of this story: Ed Koch’s correspondence. BuzzFeed has a collection of several emails, which Koch’s assistant prints out and gives to him and upon which he writes responses by hand, which then get typed up and sent. That is dedication.

His best response? “Please point out one ‘canard’ in my statement.”

Israel hawks warm to Obama [Politico]
Ed Koch Defends Obama On Israel By Sending “Hand-Written” Emails [BuzzFeed]
Related: Koch Test [Tablet Magazine]
The Changeling
Earlier: Koch Back Obama for ’12

Fool’s Gold

And… a four-line quote from John 8:12, which readers of this blog might recognize as belonging to the New Testament. Better luck next year, Santorum.

Happy Hanukkah from Rick Santorum [Slate]

Writing Footnote

As an actor, one of his early television roles was in The Young Lawyers, for which he was called “the first overtly Jewish leading man in an American television series” by the New York Times. As a director many years later, King was approached by Stanley Kubrick for advice during the filming of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Zalman King, Creator of Soft-Core Films, Dies at 70 [NYT]

Leibovitz writes:

Still, for all his method’s success, Popovic feels that those who should be paying the most attention—academics, politicians, journalists—instead continue to view politics largely as a game played by governments and decided by war. “Nobody, from very prominent political analysts to the world’s intelligence services, could find their own nose when the Arab Spring started. It is always this same old narrative: ‘It happened in Serbia by accident. It happened in Georgia by accident. It happened in Tunisia by accident. But it will never happen in Egypt.’ And this is the mantra we keep hearing—until it happens.”

The Revolutionist [The Atlantic]
Related: Generation X [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Crisis in Cairo
Why Egypt Can Handle Democracy

Face Off

According to the Times:

At its core, the official said, the argument the Israelis make is that once the Iranians get an “impregnable breakout capability” — that is, a place that is protected from a military strike — “it makes no difference whether it will take Iran six months or a year or five years” to fabricate a nuclear weapon, he said.

The Americans have a very different view, according to a second senior official who has discussed the concept with Israelis. He said “there are many other options” to slow Iran’s march to a completed weapon, like shutting off Iran’s oil revenues, taking out facilities that supply centrifuge parts or singling out installations where the Iranians would turn the fuel into a weapon.

The article points out that disagreement between the U.S. and Israel on this issue is inevitable, given Israel’s geographic proximity to Iran (also, that whole ‘wipe Israel off the map’ thing).

In November, Tablet addressed the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, with Anshel Pfeffer asking Will They? and Austin Long asking Can They? Pfeffer argued:

The decision to go to war with Iran is not a political one. It is one of the few issues that transcends Israel’s left-right divide. Benny Begin and Moshe Yaalon, two of the most hardline right-wing ministers in the “Octet Forum,” the Israeli Cabinet’s main decision-making body, are currently opposed to an attack because they believe a military strike will cause a massive backlash from Iran and its proxies and should only be a very last resort. The motives of Netanyahu and Barak are more personal and historical than ideological. The prime minister, the son of a historian, views the Iranian issue through the prism of Jewish survival. In his view, safeguarding Israel against a nuclear threat is the generation’s duty, which has fallen to him. As leader of the opposition, from 2006 to 2009, Netanyahu constantly compared Iran to Germany circa 1938 and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. As prime minister, he has refrained from this terminology but his perspective remains unchanged.

U.S. and Israel Split on Speed of Iran Threat [NYT]
Related: Will They? [Tablet Magazine]
Can They?
Rationale
Earlier: The Iranian Tipping Point Approaches

• A new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear program will likely be harsher than the previous one, after inspectors were denied access to an area suspected to be a main weapons site. [Haaretz]

• What an Israeli strike on Iran could look like. [Free Beacon]

• One of the senior columnists for Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper, Yisrael Hayom, has a contract with Netanyahu’s office to write speeches and lectures. [Haaretz]

• A harrowing look at the frontlines in Syria. [CBS News]

• Jason Diamond on life as a former barista. [NYT]

Happy bagel and lox day!

In December 2010, together with some 30 Israeli defense and political journalists, I boarded a bus that took us to a building on the top of a hill overlooking Glilot junction, five miles north of Tel Aviv. We had come to Mossad headquarters for a meeting with Dagan, who was then the head of the agency. It was supposed to be an off-the-record briefing. But this being Israel, within hours after the meeting ended, most of what Dagan told us was on the Web and in the papers.

What he said was shocking. The Mossad chief told us that Iran would obtain nuclear warheads by 2014 at the earliest, and thus, he argued, there was no need for an Israeli military strike for the time being. Dagan’s claim ran directly counter to the public line of Israel’s defense establishment: that Iran would obtain the bomb much sooner.

Since that meeting more than a year ago, Dagan has been on a crusade to stop Israel from launching an imminent military strike against Iran. He has reiterated the argument that he laid out to us in Mossad headquarters—against a strike and in favor of sanctions and covert operations—at various public events and private conversations over the past year. And though Dagan is no longer head of Mossad, his view carries tremendous weight: His perspective on a possible Israeli strike is shared by many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers and Israel’s security establishment.

Dagan’s campaign has enraged Barak and Netanyahu, who accuse him of undermining Israeli deterrence. Barak and Netanyahu support an Israeli military strike in the near future, and for the past few months, with increasing intensity, they have tried to create the impression that they are considering such an attack this year.

Which view will prevail? At stake is the future of Israel, the lives of Iranians and Israelis, the supply of oil to the United States and the West, and the stability of the whole Middle East.

***

The roots of the tension within the highest level of Israel’s political-military leadership go back nearly five years, when Barak, Dagan, and the rest of the Cabinet were faced with the delicate question of whether to bomb Syria’s nuclear reactor in the Dir al-Zur region. In summer 2007, the Cabinet, led by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, deliberated behind closed doors to discuss the assessments of Mossad and Israeli military intelligence of a big structure that Syria was secretly building near the Euphrates River. The undisputed conclusion was that Syria was constructing a reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs and that the plans for the reactor had been provided by North Korea.

The Cabinet’s overwhelming decision was to order the Israeli air force to launch a military strike before radioactive materials would be introduced and it would be too late. Barak was the most senior Cabinet member to oppose the idea, and he argued that Israel could wait a few more months. Olmert, then-Chief of Staff General Gabi Ashkenazi, Dagan, and other Cabinet ministers were astonished to hear it. They suspected that Barak had a hidden agenda motivated by his own ambition to be prime minister. That summer, Barak and the Cabinet knew that within three or four months the findings of an inquiry commission investigating the 2006 Lebanon war would be released. They expected the commission would blame Olmert for major failures of the war, and thus he would be forced to resign. Barak hoped to replace him.

Over the course of a few weeks, Barak realized that he was in unsplendid isolation. Ultimately, he decided to join his Cabinet colleagues in approving the attack. (The Cabinet voted 13 to 1 to approve the attack. Avi Dichter, then minister of homeland security, opposed it.) In September 2007, eight U.S.-made Israeli F-16 fighter planes destroyed Syria’s nuclear ambitions when they bombed the reactor.

Barak’s behavior during that process caused Dagan and other military leaders to lose their faith in him. As one senior official put it, “If he zigzagged then, what assures us that his motives this time are pure?” Indeed, three years ago in private conversation, Barak opposed a military strike by Israel against Iran. So, what made him change his mind? It’s not clear. One possibility is that he wants to please Netanyahu in the hopes that the prime minister will take him aboard Likud and reinstate him in the Defense Ministry after the next elections, which are set for November 2013 but most likely will be sooner.

Continue reading: ‘When the sword is on our neck’

Cedar’s latest film sparkles with intelligence and droll characterizations but is hardly the kind of movie you’d expect to break out beyond its homegrown base. Yet that is exactly what has happened, making a good argument for the more local the product, the more universal its appeal: Even before its Oscar nod, the film picked up the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, where it was acquired by Sony Classics. It will be interesting to see whether Footnote, which opens in early March in New York and Los Angeles, lives up to its early billing—whether viewers will respond with equal enthusiasm to its quirky human drama, in which Talmud scholarship and Hebrew philology feature as much as the personal lives of the characters. One of the singular pleasures of this film is the way it delves into the aches and pains of an esoteric intelligentsia, a group who don’t usually get much play in the popular media, without becoming self-conscious in the process. Cedar moves with ease from scenes featuring academic tempests in a teapot to those that give us a glimpse of the domestic backgrounds of his two main characters. Shlomo Bar Aba, who is a well-known comic in Israel, is superb as Eliezer Shkolnik, the dour academic outsider who finally—almost—gets his moment of glory, and the other roles, including Lior Ashkenazi as Eliezer’s son, a deft academic player, and Alisa Rosen, as Eliezer’s shut-out wife, are equally well-cast. The closing 15 minutes of the film, which are choreographed as much as directed, are priceless.

Last weekend, after Shabbat was over in Israel and in anticipation of the movie’s release, I spoke on the phone with the 43-year-old director at his home in Tel Aviv. Cedar, who immigrated to Israel from New York with his family at the age of 6 and later studied philosophy and theater history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and NYU Film School, is married and the father of three children, ages 10, 6, and 2.

Did the response to the film surprise you, especially given its very specific Jerusalem setting?

When it was accepted to Cannes, I was in shock. It was very hard to picture this film in a competition in Cannes. I think a lot of the people there had a similar response: that it was an odd choice. Cannes gives it the kind of exposure that’s so hard to get with a film. And then Sony buying it on the first day. It’s a narrow crack a film goes through, and Cannes is a gateway. More than a film that can only take place in Israel, it’s a Jerusalem film. Even if it had taken place someplace else geographically, it’s still a Jerusalem film. Two scholars fighting over the tiniest nuance of language: That’s what Jerusalem is—or what I want it to be.

Did you have any model for the kind of film you were trying to make?

It’s a film that can’t be compared to anything. While we were preparing the shoot, we decided that the way the father character sees the world—in extreme detail, the way a philologist looks at a text—was the way we were going to look at the story. Extremely subjectively and not considering the larger context. My previous films had left me with a lot of ideas that I didn’t know how to fit into the story; that’s the way narrative films are. Because of the style of this film, its flexibility, anything that was important to the story found its way onto the screen.

What led you to cast Shlomo Bar Aba as Eliezer Shkolnik?

There’s something about him that’s reminiscent of Peter Sellers—someone people don’t know what to expect from, although Israelis know him and expect to laugh when they see him. I had him in mind when I was writing the film, but I didn’t know him and didn’t know if he could deliver. When I met him I thought he was wrong, but during the rehearsal period and during the discussion of the character it turned out that there were so many things he identified with. He’s very connected to this kind of person.

How autobiographical is the film?

It’s more my nightmare than my life. The jealousy between a father and son—the inability to be proud of your child—is something I’m afraid of more than I actually feel.

Continue reading: Hollywood today

Kagan’s purpose in defending U.S. foreign-policy activism here is to deflect criticism of America’s unpopular engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is no easy task, and to perform it, Kagan adopts the two-stage approach to persuasion made famous by Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man: Establish first that there is trouble in River City, and then propose a solution, namely a marching band. Kagan also offers a marching band, but with 40 divisions behind it.

Where River City is concerned, Kagan’s argument is unexceptionable: Without American leadership, the feckless Europeans can’t be counted on to do anything, and the Chinese can’t be counted on not to do things badly. America shouldn’t abandon its position as the leading world power.

What America should do with that position is a different question. In his columns at the Weekly Standard and the Washington Post and in a series of books, Kagan has been the punditry’s most insistent advocate of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. After 6,400 U.S. dead and more than 30,000 wounded, and direct and indirect expenditures in excess of $3 trillion, nation-building is ballot-box poison. Kagan finds it easier to preach generalities. That makes the present volume read like a poor man’s cholent, with the meat of the matter lost in filler. His most important and controversial assertion is that Muslim democracy constitutes a new global wave of democratic advance, but he makes his case weakly and in passing.

“Americans have often been plagued by doubt [about nation-building],” Kagan allows. “They have resented the costs, both material and moral. Wars are expensive, and occupations even more so. A century ago it was José Santos Zelaya and Victoriano Huerta. In recent years it has been Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi.” That’s like saying, “Honey, I bought a lawn mower, a tennis racket, a Bentley, and a new set of patio furniture.” The highest estimate I have seen for the cost of America’s 1998 action against Serbia’s Milosevic, refugee resettlement and all, is about $25 billion, perhaps a hundredth of the combined costs of Iraq and Afghanistan—not to mention the near absence of casualties.

There was little opposition to bombing Serbia and sending peacekeepers afterward. But there has been impassioned objection from both left and right to a massive, multiyear commitment on the premise that America could engineer Muslim democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even worse, the Iraqi adventure exacerbated the Iranian nuclear threat. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, explained in 2009, America couldn’t strike at Iran’s bomb-building capacity: “We have lots of Americans who live in that region who are under the threat envelope right now [because of the] capability that Iran has across the Gulf.”

In 2004, Kagan lauded in the New York Times the “small but growing movement among scholars of Islam, a group diverse enough to include Gilles Kepel of France and [fellow Weekly Standard contributor] Reuel Marc Gerecht of the United States, that believes the real promise of democracy lies with devout Muslims.” And he continues to believe that the world revolves around the prospects for Muslim democracy. After the second great wave of democracy that followed World War II, and a third wave from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Kagan writes:

it is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of the Third Wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history.

He has no illusions that Muslim democracy, should it materialize, will be friendly to America:

Americans, having helped topple dictators in the Middle East, are not sure how they feel about what may follow. The inevitable victory of Islamist parties in some Arab states will probably bring governments to power that are less accommodating to some American interests than the previous dictatorships had been.

But Kagan thinks this is a good thing rather than a bad thing: “Americans’ enduring interest in a liberal world order generally transcends other, more narrow and temporary interests. The United States can lose an Egyptian ally but still gain a healthier world order.” Indeed, he lauds the Obama Administration for helping to topple erstwhile Arab allies: “America found itself withdrawing support from longtime allies like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. … American power became a decisive factor shaping the regional and international environment in which the Arab political turmoil unfolded.”

One doubts if any outcome in the Arab world would change Kagan’s mind. In fact, an Islamist government may be the least of Egypt’s problems. With its economy in free fall and its foreign exchange reserves running out, Egypt may soon find itself with no government at all, like Somalia. The Deputy Supreme Guide (that is his actual title) of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood warned recently that economic collapse would “transform a peaceful revolution into a hunger revolution” and asked for American help. Nonetheless, Egypt also is prosecuting American democracy activists, risking the American aid it now receives.

Continue reading: Democratic processes

• New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the candidate favored by GOP Jews for vice president, told AIPAC that Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies. [Weekly Standard]

• More on the controversy at Hadassah. [Forward]

• Israel’s labor union is on strike. [NYT]

• Henrique Capriles Radonski, a politician in Venezuela, intends to challenge Chavez when he runs for a third term. [Forward]

• Delta Airlines replaced the phrase “Occupied Palestinian Territories” with “Palestinian Territories” on its destination list after receiving complaints (the airline doesn’t fly to the West Bank or Gaza Strip). [JTA]

The gist of the email:

I heard from you directly, or through the grapevine, that you:

1) Are Jewish
2) Voted for President Obama in 2008
3) Might not vote for President Obama again in 2012.

If all three of these statements are true, are you willing to speak on the phone about your changing sentiment toward the President? The interviews will be used for informational purposes only — we will not publish your name anywhere or make the contents of your interview public. The study is being conducted by my friends at the Republican Jewish Coalition to better understand the frustrations some Jewish voters are experiencing with President Obama.

Will you be participating?

Republican Jewish Group ISO Discontented Jews [BuzzFeed]
Related: United Jewish Appeal [Tablet Magazine]

Hostage Crisis

In November, Pejman Yousefzadeh, an Iranian-American Jew, articulated a similar sense of widespread concern in Tablet Magazine:

And, finally, there is Iran’s conflict with Israel. It’s an issue that torments Iranian Jews, who care deeply about what happens to Iran but are not willing to see the Islamic regime harm Israel’s security interests or the lives of innocent Israelis—many of whom are émigrés from Iran. Were it a conflict with any other country antagonistic toward Israel, Iranian Jews would have significantly less hesitation—if any—in endorsing a military response to any threat to Israel. But in this case, the country antagonistic toward Israel is Iran, to which Iranian Jews naturally and obviously continue to feel a deep tie. As such, Iranian Jews are faced with a revolting choice: endorse military strikes against Iran that may—or may not—set back the nuclear program but may also kill scores of Iranians, or do nothing and gamble that Israel will not be consumed by a nuclear conflagration.

Jews With Ties To Iran And Israel Feel Conflicted [NPR]
Related: Personal Revolution [Tablet Magazine]

In November, Allison Hoffman detailed the plans for the proposed museum, which would have accompanied a Hyatt Hotel. Maybe they could convince co-religionist Ivanka?

Old Post Office to become 250-room Trump hotel [Washington Post]
Related: Museum Quality

Never Too Old

In 2004, at the age of 29, Portland-based photographer Lauren Henkin learned she had a growth in her abdomen. The tumor was benign, and though the doctor recommended surgery to remove it, Henkin resisted. By 2009, a different growth had taken over one of her ovaries, and she had to undergo surgery to remove the ovary. Still, she elected not to have doctors remove the original mass, which she describes as having become, strangely, an adopted part of her body. It took another year of increasing discomfort and illness for her to elect to have the mass removed.

In despair, she found inspiration, turning to her surroundings to make sense of what was going on inside her:

Sometime before the first surgery, I began photographing urban landscapes—trees, weeds, shrubs and other vegetation attempting to grow in unlikely places. At times invasive, at times reclaiming, at times succumbing, it was hard to know whether to champion these subjects or hone my garden shears. There is a fine line between what is deemed invasive and what is merely reclaiming a rightful environment. Who am I to judge, even when the domain is my own body? I never connected these urban growths to the ones in me. I was drawn to them because they persevere. They are survivors. Emerging through asphalt, suffocated by electrical wires, trapped between buildings, standing proud even in defeat, they are both accommodating and unyielding. I respect them.

Her images, profound and disturbing, feature trees growing out of dumpsters and brilliantly green vegetation clinging to massive concrete bridge supports. What better time than Tu B’Shevat, which honors nature and life and growth, to reflect on survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s what nature is all about.

Lauren Henkin
Related: Green Day [Tablet Magazine]

Sentimental Journey

But even the contours of the race aren’t set in stone, because nobody knows for sure whether New York’s Ninth Congressional District will in November be what it is now—Albany has yet to complete its census-compelled redistricting. The Times reads the tea leaves and guesses that the Ninth will be kept stet. But Sheinkopf is less confident: “If you can predict the Congressional lines, you’d be sitting next to Odin and Thor,” he quipped. And he explained one complication: “The lines are going to depend to a large extent on whether the Queens County [Democratic Party] Leader, Joseph Crowley, a member of Congress, chooses to get out of the Bronx, where he has part of his district,” he said. If Crowley wants to alter his district, according to Sheinkopf, that would in turn start a chain reaction in which various districts on geographic Long Island get pushed eastward (in which case the representative most likely to get pushed off altogether is Carolyn McCarthy, a Democrat representing parts of Nassau County, including the Five Towns). And a Ninth District that is farther east—with less of Queens or Brooklyn and potentially a bit of Nassau County—is more likely to stay Republican.

But, Sheinkopf added, “Anybody who tells you they know the answer—except for the people drawing the lines—needs to be hospitalized.”

Democrat in Bid to Reclaim Weiner’s Seat from GOP [NYT]
Related: Republican-Jewish Coalition [Tablet Magazine]

• The appointment of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister of the interim government, following the unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah, has drawn criticism from Palestinians. [Jerusalem Post]

• Shoah director Claude Lanzmann was detained at Ben Gurion airport after a female security worker filed a complaint that he hugged and kissed her against her will. He was released and boarded a flight to France. [Haaretz]

• One of the emails leaked from Assad’s office after the group Anonymous hacked the mail server offers tips in advance of Assad’s December interview with Barbara Walters. [Haaretz]

• Mossad agents codenamed Eichmann “Dybbuk,” and other things you’ll learn at the Eichmann exhibit in Tel Aviv. [AP]

• Middle-finger giving singer M.I.A. has split from her fiancee Benjamin Bronfman (son of philanthropists Sherry and Edgar Bronfman), with whom she has a two-year-old child. [NY Daily News]

One of the U.S. organizations that’s been targeted, the International Republican Institute, released a statement on Sunday arguing that these arrests represent a “politically motivated effort to squash Egypt’s growing civil society, orchestrated through the courts, in part by Mubarak-era holdovers.” Perhaps the organization, headed by Sam LaHood, son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and one of the Americans set to be prosecuted, put out this statement to give the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces a chance to blame the incident on Egypt’s bogeyman.

But the truth is that this crisis has nothing to do with civil society or the work that American pro-democracy groups do in the new Egypt. Had American hikers been available for kidnapping, they’d have served just as well as LaHood and the 18 others. No, this is simple extortion—and the Egyptian government expects to be paid.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has already dubbed this the “Obama Hostage Crisis.” He’s not too far off. What Ayatollah Khomeini said about the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis applies equally well here: America cannot do a damn thing.

By blaming the situation on “Mubarak-era holdovers,” the International Republican Institute seems to be suggesting that this incident does not really reflect the new Egypt. Instead, it must be the old regime that is responsible for threatening Americans. Only Mubarak’s cronies could want to hold back Egyptian democracy.

The reality is rather different. A December Gallup poll showed that 71 percent of Egyptians oppose U.S. economic aid of any sort, and that 74 percent oppose “direct U.S. aid to Egyptian civil society organizations.” While this doesn’t mean the majority of Egyptians support threatening American democracy activists with prison time, such behavior on the part of the country’s ruling authorities certainly reflects popular opinion—and that’s to say nothing of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, who combined won more than two-thirds of parliament in recent elections. Given their history of resistance to the West and their perception of the United States as an imperial power, it’s safe to assume that these groups aren’t much interested in U.S. involvement in Egypt’s new political arena.

It’s worth noting how these December poll numbers track in parallel to last March’s constitutional referendum. That vote gave the Egyptian electorate a choice: Either vote on a few amendments to the 1971 constitution and push ahead to elections, or write a new constitution, a process that would delay elections. The army and the Islamists favored the first, while the revolutionaries who brought down Mubarak opted for the second, since it would give them a chance to organize coherent political entities capable of winning seats in parliament. Ultimately, three-quarters of the voters sided with the army and the Islamists. Only one quarter voted with the revolutionaries—presumably the same quarter of Egypt’s population that polled in favor of continued U.S. aid to civil society, support that gave rise to the revolution itself.

The most curious question is this: If so many Egyptians are against U.S. aid money to Egyptian civil society, how did organizations like the International Republican Institute and its counterpart, the National Democratic Institute, manage to do their work for so long? If they are charged with operating without a license, but had been working in Egypt regardless for many years before the arrests, how did they get away with it? Because Hosni Mubarak let them.

The man who now lies in a hospital bed in Sharm el-Sheikh under house arrest and is typically blamed for everything that has gone wrong in Egypt over the last 30 years is the same man who was at the helm as Egyptian civil society grew. The revolutionaries who toppled the Egyptian president arose under him. The middle-class, ostensibly liberal-minded, and Western-oriented demonstrators who protested in favor of democracy were drawn from the nonprofit organizations, independent media outlets, and private-sector enterprises that had all come about under Mubarak.

These weren’t real reforms, runs the argument against Mubarak. He didn’t go nearly far enough. It’s true. Forty percent of Egypt’s population still lives on less than $2 a day, and Mubarak’s security services were still torturing and murdering innocent Egyptians, like Khaled Said, whose June 2010 death helped inspire the January revolution.

The tragedy is that the choice the revolution revealed was never between dictatorship and democracy. Rather it was between a pro-American ruler who kept his country out of war and allowed moderate, halting reforms, and whatever order would follow Mubarak. Because the transition into the post-Mubarak era was not managed, neither by Mubarak nor the White House, the post-Mubarak order is effectively a repudiation of everything that Mubarak stood for.

Continue reading: U.S. aid in jeopardy?

This question is raised in very concrete terms by the appearance of What We Talk About When Talk About Anne Frank, the new volume of short stories by Nathan Englander, at the same time as the New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, which features Englander’s translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic text. The story collection declares its quandaries in its title, an allusion to the famous Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Englander’s story of that name copies Carver’s basic situation—two couples in conversation, getting gradually more intoxicated and more dangerously honest. By putting Anne Frank in the title, Englander marks his story as Jewish, but in a particular way: The juxtaposition of Carver and the Holocaust is both a declaration of his own fictional territory and a blatantly bad joke.

The big question about Englander’s work, since his sensational debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges appeared in 1999, is whether his stories transcend their jokey premises to achieve some higher meaning, or simply offer a kind of Jewish minstrelsy. Englander himself is aware of this danger, as he made clear in the story “The Tumblers,” in his first book. This story imagines the fate of the holy fools of Chelm, the town celebrated in Jewish folklore, during the Holocaust. Englander has them escaping deportation to a concentration camp by boarding a train full of circus performers, then posing as a tumbling act in order to survive. The story climaxes with the Chelmites, dressed in pitiful costumes, putting on an incompetent show in front of an audience of Nazis.

The story strives to be a parable, but, as with much of Englander’s work, the more closely you read it, the less coherent the parable seems to be. After all, the crime of the Nazis was not primarily to humiliate Jews; nor can the Jews during the Holocaust be thought of as performers. And if the idea is to show what happens when folktale innocence meets human evil, that was already done supremely well by Isaac Bashevis Singer; inevitably, one reads Englander’s tale as a pale imitation of Singer.

What is distinctive about the Englander story is its sentimentality, which is another way of saying its failure to trust the subject and the reader, its insistence on underscoring the tragedy of the situation with cues and nudges. One such nudge comes when a young Jewish girl is shot by a German soldier: “The bullet left a ruby hole that resembled a charm an immodest girl might wear.” Another comes when the Holocaust is described as “unmatched feats of magic performed with the trains. They go away full … and come back empty, as if never before used.” (This kind of mock-naiveté has more in common with Roberto Benigni than with Singer.)

Where “The Tumblers” makes sense, however, is as an interrogation of Englander’s own treatment of the Holocaust and of Jews. Is writing about these things the way he does equivalent to forcing the innocent Jews of Chelm to dress up and play tricks for a hostile world? For there is indeed something potentially exploitive about the high-concept premises of Englander’s stories about Hasidic and Orthodox Jews. In “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” a moneyed WASP suddenly decides that he has a Jewish soul, and begins to live Jewishly, to the outrage of his disbelieving wife. In “Reb Kringle,” a Hasid with a big belly and beard makes his living as a department-store Santa. In the title story, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” a Hasid is told by his rebbe to go to a prostitute when his wife won’t sleep with him.

The wager of each of these stories is that the comic premise will build and topple over into liberating outrage—as Roth does in early stories like “The Defender of the Faith” or “Eli, the Fanatic”—or else deepen into a Malamud-style magical realism. But the truth is that Englander’s talent is not perfectly suited to either of these purposes, and his stories often seem to end where they begin, with the punchline of their premise. That is when the threat of minstrelsy appears—the possibility that readers will laugh at these stories only as familiar Jewish shtick.

Englander is at his best in a more familiar and old-fashioned kind of realism, in which he simply explores the common humanity behind the surface unfamiliarity of Hasidic or Orthodox life. Englander, who was raised Orthodox on Long Island, is well-situated to do this, just as Sherwood Anderson did it for the inhabitants of his invented Winesburg, Ohio; and a story like Englander’s “The Wig”—in which a Hasidic matron’s disappointed sexual feelings are sensitively imagined—puts the reader in mind of Anderson’s compassionate realism.

Thirteen years later, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, the same impulses are still at war in Englander’s fiction. Once again, he is prone to high-concept stories that trade on the obvious incongruity of Jews—especially old or Orthodox Jews—doing profane things. In the title story, two couples—one pair of assimilated American Jews, one pair of baalei tshuvah from Israel—smoke a lot of pot and get the munchies, and the sight of black hats getting high is a large part of the story’s point. In “Camp Sundown,” a group of Holocaust survivors, convinced that another elderly man is really a concentration camp guard in disguise, murder him in a bout of senile revenge.

Worst of all is “Peep Show,” a story about a former Orthodox Jew who goes into a Times Square peep show and, instead of a stripper, is greeted by his therapist, his mother, and his childhood rabbi. The book’s high-powered blurbs describe Englander as “edgy” and “audacious,” but this fantasia on Jewish guilt is like something Woody Allen would have rejected for being too broad around the year Englander was born. (There are even shrink jokes: “I think it would be best if you paid for my peep. Thus far in your therapy, we’ve constructed a relationship based partly on financial remuneration.”)

Both the shtick and the psychology here are so contrived that it brings home one of the dilemmas Englander faces as a writer: simple belatedness. To rebel against a puritanical Jewish household in the year 2012 is inevitably to repeat the gestures of those who did the same thing in 1932 and 1952 and 1972, and it would take a writer of genius to give that rebellion a genuinely new fictional form.

Even then, the rebellion itself would not speak to today’s young Jews in the way that Roth’s did a half-century ago. If postmodernism, in the 1960s and 1970s, gleefully exposed the nullity of traditional authority and the corrupt partiality of every account of the past, then the post-postmodernism of the writers who emerged in the 1990s is an attempt to rescue the concept of authority and to regain contact with an authentic past. The literary standard-bearer for this generation was, of course, David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s achievement was truly dialectical: Instead of simply rejecting postmodern fictional techniques and returning to an outworn mode of realism (à la Jonathan Franzen), Wallace pushed through the artificiality and self-consciousness of postmodernism to create a new, self-critical sincerity. His achievement, one might say, was to make sentimentality legitimate again.

Continue reading: The chains of tradition

—Three of my cousins, Zipporah, the rebbetzin, that is, wife to a rabbi; Josefina, the Brazilian Bombshell, no more than age 30; and Abdi, the rabbi’s son, a muscular mesomorph with the defect of a lisp.

—Also: “Miss” Iveta Crumsovatna, Deputy Mayor, town of Jihlava, for Culture, Entertainments, and Sports. On the thin side. Jasmine perfume.

—Last: my feline friend, Hymena, a three-legged cat, green-eyed and red, with the general appearance of a brush that is used to clean bottles.

Let us return to the midnight hour. I had been asleep and dreaming, as is the wont of old men, of pretty little pigtailed things. I was awakened by a rustle and the creak of my door. I in my nightdress sat up: pushing through the crack, a slippered foot and the five plump fingers of a hand. Zipporah! The rebbetzin! Tip-toeing into my chamber. As the full figure drew closer, I calmly addressed her: “Begone, Madam. You are but a dream, a fig leaf of fancy.”

She did not vanish. She came toward me, speaking thus: “Oh, dear man, look at you! Such a nightcap! With a ball at the end.”

Still I resisted. “Madam, Leib Goldkorn cannot be fooled by such a wool-of-the wisp. Be off! To horse!”

But she did not go off. Instead, in her tent-like caftan, she drew closer. “Permission, if you please, to sit?” She pointed to a corner of my feather-filled mattress. I nodded. “Cousin Goldkorn, I have for you certain feelings. Look, I will show them to you.” And with that she pulled both halves of her robe aside.

Like many a youth, I took much interest in the operations of the Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG, particularly the LZ-4, which I once saw sailing over the Bohemian-Moravian Heights, and the LZ-11, the Viktoria Luise, named for the Duchess of Brunswick, who with her high waist and hair in a bun was for the lads of Iglau a hot ticket. What the spouse of Rabbi Yitzhak ben Kaspar did when she offered to show me her feelings was to release from the hanger of her opened caftan two such Zeppelins, which, in this windless atmosphere, hung motionless before my gaping eyes.

It was on this very bed and on that very spot that my mother, Falma, had perched when reading to her only male child a Silesian fairy tale; or rocking him in times of illness; or, on more than one occasion, shedding with him a tear as she complained of the attentions shown to our housemaid by my putative père. Herr Doktor Freud, of nearby Vienna, might say that this was the reason I in the grip of a primitive instinct threw off my nightshirt and lurched forward on all fours, taking the leftward mam in my mouth and suckling there a full moment before changing objects and beginning to nurse at the mam on the right. And in the dark continent? Stirrings.

Suddenly, a crash! a bang! And the door flew wide. The Bombshell!

“Meu Leib! With another amante!”

“Ho, ho. It is not what you think. Nourishment only. Water, water everywhere. You know. And not a drop to drink.”

“Não!”

Uttering that cry, Josefina dashed to the non-Sealy and began to climb aboard. “Not her. Me! I know what Leibie like. Eh? He like the sapatos. Sapatos com salto. With heels.”

By this she meant not any old McAn but her own five-inchers, red with black, shiny stilettos. But the Brazilian did not allow me the pleasure of examining the buckles, the straps, or the ankle knobs trapped inside them; instead, in an athletic maneuver, she leaped to my back, upon whose spine she began to trod.

“Ha, ha. I have hirsute shoulders. This has been from childhood an embarrassment.”

“Olha que coisa mais linda—” The Bombshell was singing the lyrics to “The Girl From Impanema,” while doing a samba across the short ribs.

Now occurred a moment that was even harder to believe. Through the open door strode the Deputy Mayor for Culture, Entertainments, and Sports.

“Leibie, Milácky, it is I, your Iveta.”

Not only that, she was barefoot. Barefoot, comrades! And through the loosened top of her waistcoat the pink eye of each modest mam came a-winking and a-peeking. Was it at that sight, or her smell of gardenia, that my Jewish-style member decided to explore the world outside its S. Klein drawers?

Continue reading: The Breaking Point

• Jared Kushner is reportedly trying to buy the L.A. Dodgers, too. Bring ‘em back, Jared! [NY Daily News]

• Former Dior designer John Galliano was seen at a friend’s birthday party in London, one of his rare public outings since his highly publicized outburst last year. [NY Mag]

• Dave McKenna and Dan Steinberg talk D.C. sports reporting (and, of course, Dan Snyder). [Capital]

• A federal judge ordered that a baroque painting be returned to the heirs of Federico Gentili di Giuseppe, an Italian Jew who died in Paris in 1940. [AP/Online Athens]

• Adam Platt goes to Kutsher’s. [NY Mag]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep the Faith

According to Nathan-Kazis:

Blum alleged that Natan, who was elected as Hadassah’s national president in July, used Hadassah funds to buy favors for members who supported her candidacy for national president. Those favors allegedly included flight upgrades to business class and the unnecessary extension of trips to Israel made on Hadassah business.

Blum charged that Falchuk, who served as Hadassah’s national president from 2007 to 2011, moved furniture and fixtures valued between $10,000 and $20,000 from a Hadassah-owned apartment to her own home without the approval of the organization’s leadership.

Blum also accused Falchuk of charging thousands of dollars in wine, entertainment, and personal trips to Florida to Hadassah’s credit card.

Top Hadassah Officials Probed Over Funds [Forward]

Pregnant Pause

On Sunday, activists and supporters attended an event called “The Bialystoker Home: Past, Present, Future,” designed to showcase the building’s cultural significance and strengthen the arguments for landmark status. The Lo-Down reported yesterday:

The home, shuttered months ago, was until recently being marketed online as a development site. That listing has now vanished, amid rumors that the secretive Bialystoker board was close to signing a deal to sell the building. They have apparently signaled that the prospective buyer would surely walk away from the negotiating table if the the building is designated as an historic landmark. This afternoon there are new indications that a contract could be inked as soon as this week.

According to the same article, State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has stayed out of the issue:

“Among the Speaker’s most ardent supporters on the Lower East Side, members of Grand Street’s Jewish community, there has been little enthusiasm for saving the Bialystoker, in spite of the building’s significance as a Jewish landmark.”

Preservation Groups Make Their Case For Saving the Bialystoker Home [The Lo-Down]
Sale of Bialystoker Home Could Be Imminent; Activists Hope For Political Intervention [The Lo-Down]
Closing a Nursing Home, and a Chapter of New York History [NYT]

From Handel’s resignation letter:

I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it. I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology. Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy. I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants.

Karen Handel, Susan G. Komen official, resigns after Planned Parenthood dispute [Politico]
Earlier: Komen Pulls Planned Parenthood Funding
How Will Pro-Choice Hadassah React to Komen?
Komen Reverses Planned Parenthood Decision

Vigor Juice

It features 23 colorful pages of costumes for babies, young children and teenagers and seven pages of adult costumes. Of the adult costumes, the majority display various professions, animals or television characters and almost all include fishnet stockings, microscopic skirts and revealing tops.

One of the costumes, described in the catalogue as a “sexy cat,” includes a bondage mask and whip, while the “sexy policewoman” includes a latex bodice and handcuffs.

Zohar argued that her costumes offer options for both religious and secular buyers, but it doesn’t look like WIZO is buying it.

‘Pornographic’ Purim Costumes Cause Uproar [Jerusalem Post]

• The Hamas-Fatah unity deal could jeopardize aid for the Palestinian Authority, Rep. Gary Ackerman pointed out, since the United States won’t give money to Hamas. [NYT]

• The U.S. and Israel anti-missile exercise has been rescheduled for October. [JTA]

• Iran, Jeffrey Goldberg argues, is the post-Nazi Jewish nightmare—but Israel can’t attack them alone, he argues. [Bloomberg]

• The U.S. State Department put out a new travel recommendation for Americans visiting Israel: Cover up. [Ynet]

• Why hasn’t anyone resigned from the Susan G. Komen Foundation (other than in protest)? [Jezebel]

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Continue reading: Chosenness as a challenge

“Don’t do that! Bad luck! Shhh!” I tapped out in a frenzy.

“Can’t help it!” he responded.

A clammy wave of fear and irritation washed through me. “But what about the Angel of Death?” I typed, before promptly erasing it. The Angel of Death? In stark black-and-white pixels, on a screen powered by electricity and chemicals and human ingenuity, it looked crazy. I shoved the phone into my bag and slid my gloves back on.

I used to live firmly in the observable world. When it came to my physical wellbeing, I trusted the power of medical technology to establish cause and effect. Twisted ankle? A quick X-ray shows whether anything is broken. Sore throat? A culture determines whether or not it’s strep, and antibiotics cure it. Tests identifying a cluster of pre-cancerous cells? There’s surgery to scrape them away, and close monitoring to trigger a repeat if they return. Things are, or they are not, and that’s that.

Pregnancy, I assumed, would work the same way. After all, it was a litmus test that confirmed it in the first place: two pink dashes on a plastic stick, easy as handing over $12 at the drugstore. A few weeks later, we heard a heartbeat, transmitted via sonogram, and a few weeks after that got our first visual confirmation via ultrasound that the bump in my belly housed an actual baby, who has two arms and two legs, 10 fingers and 10 toes, two little ears and a tiny button nose.

Then came the genetic tests, which I was startled to discover offer results in the form of percentages, rather than certainties. Our numbers were good, but if we wanted guarantees, we were told, we needed to do an amniocentesis—a test whose chances of hurting the baby were higher than the outside possibility that something was actually wrong. In other words, it was riskier to pursue a definite answer than to trust the statistics—a choice that, for us, was no choice at all. But that little seed of uncertainty took root in my mind and has been steadily watered by a cascade of “wait and sees” on everything from how big the baby will be to how labor will go. Now, with less than a month before delivery, it’s blossomed into the idea that the baby is like Schrödinger’s poor cat: simultaneously perfect and afflicted, not one or the other but both, until he emerges from the black box of my belly into the world, where we can see him for ourselves. Knowing a little bit turns out to be as good, or bad, as not knowing anything at all.

The fact that we live with the uncertainty for nine whole months—and that the evidence of the mystery is always right in front of me—is why, I’ve discovered, pregnancy is a particularly ripe condition for spawning superstition. “Whenever you have a situation where there’s a lot at stake, and you’ve done everything you possibly can to make sure there’s a happy outcome but there’s still a lot of uncertainty, it’s a perfect circumstance for superstitions to emerge,” Stuart Vyse, a professor at Connecticut College who specializes in the psychology of irrational beliefs, told me. “Establishing some kind of ritual or lucky thing you do makes you feel better, because it gives you the illusion of control.”

And Jews have spent centuries accumulating a vast catalog of practices surrounding pregnancy and childbirth: a trove of off-the-shelf totems to fit any anxiety that, for someone as determinedly secular as I am, has the added appeal of coming wrapped in echt Jewish authenticity. “You can trace the magic to the Babylonians, the ancient Greeks, you can see the common denominators,” said Michele Klein, an expert in Jewish birth folklore and customs. “But the Jews have a written heritage and have channeled it and processed it and turned it into a way to maintain Jewish identity, separate from other peoples.” So, expectant Jewish parents can rely on charms like the hamsah to ward off the evil eye or tie red strings around their wrists for good luck—or resort to time-honored tricks like not saying a baby’s name aloud before it is formally bestowed at the bris, eight days after birth, to avoid attracting notice from vindictive spirits.

Which is why, despite there being nothing in the Talmud about my omnipresent Angel of Death, it felt like a distinctly Jewish thing to fear. Along with the evil eye—ayin hara—it’s a concept that has become woven into the warp of Jewish observance, so much so that it can be thought of as “superhalachic.” (Another is the habit of wishing a pregnant woman “b’sha’ah tovah”—“in good time”—rather than a standard mazel tov.) “The overwhelming majority of these things are not legally or textually based,” said Rabbi Dr. Edward Reichman, who teaches Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University. Superstitious habits like not revealing a baby’s intended name before the bris, or not outfitting a nursery until a baby is born, dovetail with other legally sanctioned practices, like not planning a funeral until a person has died. “There is a belief that you don’t want to prophesize or look to the future in ways that are inappropriate,” Reichman told me. “There’s nothing in halacha about not calling a mohel before a baby’s born, but you don’t want to anticipate God’s work—so you wait.”

Continue reading: Psychological incentives

Prohibition—the catastrophically misguided national experiment with legally enforced temperance that began with the ratification of the 18th Amendment (commonly known as the Volstead Act) in October 1919 and ended with its repeal in December 1933—has been brought back to life brilliantly over the past two years by Boardwalk Empire. While its main protagonist is the corrupt Prohibition-era gentile treasurer of Atlantic City, Nucky Thompson (based on the historical crime boss, Enoch L. Johnson), numerous colorful Jewish characters, both historical and fictional, have played prominent roles in the series. Given the notoriety of Jewish bootleggers and gangsters during the Roaring Twenties, this should come as little surprise.

The baptismal murder of Agent Sebso, together with other scenes featuring Jews, illuminates important undercurrents to Prohibition that historians have not adequately explored. Among them are the disproportionate presence of Jews in the alcohol trade, bootlegging, and organized crime, as well as the major roles played by puritanical Protestantism, anti-immigration nativism, and blatant anti-Semitism in advancing and reinforcing America’s temperance laws. There were countless Prohibitionists who, like the fictional Van Alden, believed that for Prohibition to prevail, not only did the demon of alcohol need to be vanquished, but its Jewish manufacturers and purveyors needed to be purged as well.

The appearance, so soon after the conclusion of the second season of Boardwalk Empire, of Marni Davis’ new history, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition, is just short of providential. This fascinating, academically sophisticated, and superbly written exposition of the intricate, often precarious, role that Jews played in every aspect of the American alcohol industry—from production in industrial stills to retail sale in bars and speakeasies across the land, and finally to bootlegging, a crime that created the fortunes of some of North America’s most prominent Jewish philanthropic families—turns out to be a wonderful historical companion to HBO’s most explosive series since The Sopranos and to the recent PBS airing of Ken Burns’ documentary Prohibition. More important, Jews and Booze is a major contribution to the economic history of the Jews in the United States. The book also offers an original and rich exposition of the social and political importance of alcohol—particularly the puritanical fear and loathing of it—in the development of anti-immigration and anti-Semitic sentiments in late 19th- and early 20th-century America.

While Sebso, the fictional Jewish FBI agent, is depicted in the series as half-hearted, inept, and ultimately corruptible, Davis’ study brings back to life the amazing career of the colorful, and incredibly successful, Jewish enforcer of the dry laws, agent Izzy Einstein, whose astonishing record—4,932 arrests in five years, with a 95 percent conviction rate—made him by far the most prolific agent of the Prohibition era. Described by Time magazine as a “fat little Austrian Jew,” Einstein, together with his partner Moe Smith, employed a large and comical array of contrivances—from blackface to drag—to enforce the law, all wonderfully culled by Davis from Einstein’s sensational autobiography, Prohibition Agent No. 1.

The narrative arc of Jews and Booze is astutely limited, beginning with the rapid rise of Jews in the American whiskey trade in the late 19th century to the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933. The establishment of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874 serves Davis well as an opening point of reference in her exploration of the inherent tensions between the puritanically motivated advocates of a “dry” America and American Jews’ cultural values, political convictions, and economic interests. Davis competently, if at times too superficially, records the religious role played by wine in the practice of many of Judaism’s rituals, as well as the historical involvement of European Jews in wine production and the liquor trade going back almost a millennium, from medieval Franco-Germany to the late 19th-century Russian Empire. This deep historical Jewish involvement with alcohol combined with liberal modern Jewish political sensibilities, especially American Jews’ dual commitments to both religion-state separation and free-market enterprise, did not sit easily with the Prohibitionists’ deeply conservative agenda of Christianizing America. Davis makes it obvious why Jews—as a vulnerable immigrant group and religious minority, as adherents of a religion whose rituals require the use of wine, and as a community with a highly disproportionate representation in the alcohol trade—aligned themselves with the “wets” in their decades-long battle to keep alcohol legal and available.

The book’s first half focuses on the surprisingly prominent role played by Jewish immigrants to America in the production, wholesale distribution, and retail dispensation of alcohol, all across the land, from the industrial stills of Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois to the barrooms of crowded, lower-class neighborhoods of America’s major cities, from Atlanta and Charleston to Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Newark’s Third Ward. Davis’ depiction of the numerous alcohol industrialists from among American Reform Judaism’s leading philanthropists during its initial period of development in the United States is particularly rich. That the fortunes made by Jewish whiskey distillers—particularly in Cincinnati, home to this day of the world Reform movement’s flagship rabbinical seminary, the Hebrew Union College of America—endowed some of the country’s most important institutions of Jewish higher learning, including the greatest Judaica research library in the Diaspora, is illustrative of how respectable the alcohol industry was before the agitations for temperance by evangelical Christian polemicists began to take root in the final decade of the 19th century.

Davis culls from the sermons of America’s most distinguished Reform rabbis, such as Marcus Jastrow and Isaac Mayer Wise, in fashioning a compelling portrait of the regnant Jewish position in the increasingly heated political debates about alcohol regulation. The title of her chapter on Jewish attitudes to alcohol during the pre-Prohibition period, “Do As We Israelites Do” (a quotation from an essay by Rabbi Jastrow), succinctly captures that position, namely that alcohol ought to remain legal and widely available, while those who partake of it should practice moderation, as the Jews have done from time immemorial.

Continue reading: ‘Tank him up’

• The United States formally levied the new sanctions on Iran’s central bank. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• The United States has closed its embassy in Damascus and evacuated its personnel, for safety reasons. [WP]

• The BDS Conference, which was over the weekend at the University of Pennsylvania, was criticized for not allowing a Philadelphia Jewish Exponent reporter in. [JTA]

• Prompted by the Eddie Long fiasco, Peter Manseau considers the dubious history of “goyish Jewish mishagas.” [Religion Dispatches]

• Joe Eszterhas discusses writing the screenplay for Mel Gibson’s Judah Maccabee movie. [NYT Magazine]

Cat on the pitch!

This was a game that came down to two big late-fourth quarter plays: Brady’s incompletion to Wes Welker, his (and the League’s) top receiver, which would have extended the Pats’ drive and possibly allowed them, then holding a 17-15 lead, to put the game away; and, on the first play of the Giants’ subsequent drive, Eli Manning’s 38-yard connection with Mario Manningham up the left sideline. The comparisons of this play to the David Tyree helmet catch of four years ago were facile, even obscene: That earlier play was a bizarre, mystical instance of a young quarterback escaping a sure sack and aimlessly chucking the ball down the field and a no-name receiver guarded by a future Hall of Fame safety miraculously pulling it down; last night’s play was an instance of a proven, clutch, veteran, elite quarterback picking apart a mediocre defense and a favorable alignment with a millimeter-perfect pass. (Here is an excellent dissection of the two plays.)

Analyst Michael Lombardi noted this morning that much credit for the Giants’ two Super Bowls should go to Ernie Accorsi, New York’s general manager for more than a decade, who retired before the season of their last Super Bowl but a few years before had insisted on forgoing Ben Roethlisberger and Philip Rivers for the services of Peyton’s scrawny little brother Eli (he also drafted defensive lineman Justin Tuck, arguably the Giants’ other most valuable player, and hired coach Tom Coughlin). Accorsi is Jewish.

Nextbook Inc. executive director Morton Landowne, a Giants season-ticket-holder for 50 years, was privileged enough to be at the game and emailed last night requesting a tutorial on Coach Bill Belichick’s decision to allow the Giants to score late in the game last night (and running back Ahmad Bradshaw’s seeming reluctance to oblige). Essentially: The Giants had a field position where, if they wanted it, a go-ahead field goal was virtually guaranteed, and they could have run more time off the clock to do it; Belichick was in a sense choosing to need a touchdown to win, with a minute left, over needing a field goal to win, with perhaps fewer than 20 seconds left. This was statistically the correct call. But the Pats were unable to score that touchdown.

And how about that halftime show! (If you didn’t enjoy it, you had set your bar too high.) Yesterday also saw the announcement that Madonna will launch her world tour on May 31 at Ramat Gan Stadium, outside Tel Aviv.

Earlier: Go, Pats

* Green Bay Packers (4), Dallas Cowboys (5), San Francisco 49ers (5), Pittsburgh Steelers (6).

Green Day

10. Principal Skinner. Fought bravely for the Great Satan in Vietnam.

9. Lunchlady Doris. Married a guy named Freedman. Look it up.

8. Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Scurrilous polytheist!

7. Waylon Smithers. “As you can see, the real deal with Waylon Smithers is that he’s Mr. Burns’ assistant. He’s in his early 40s, is unmarried, and currently resides in Springfield.”

6. Kent Brockman. “Brockman,” eh?

5. Artie Ziff. Jewish millionaire voiced by Jon Lovitz.

4. Bart. For much the same reason the Czech Communists feared the Plastic People of the Universe: Bart is rock ‘n’ roll, and rock ‘n’ roll is subversive.

3. Krusty the Clown. Son of Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky. And they dare deny Jews control the entertainment industry!

2. Lisa. Lisa wouldn’t hurt a fly. Instead, she is an extremely bright, curious, inquisitive young woman who is never afraid to say exactly what’s on her mind. It’s difficult to think what could be more threatening to the mullahs. Except …

1. Maggie. Silent. Ever-watching. Omnipresent. Handy with a pistol. Could Maggie be Mossad? Iran can’t take that chance.

Aw, Man! Bart Simpson Joins Barbie in Iran Ban [Reuters]

Cheap Eats

John Banta and Daniel O’Donnell [NYT]

School Ties

The Fatah-Hamas deal, struck by Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Meshaal with the backing of emerging regional power broker Qatar, is as vague: The only step forward appears to be clear agreement that Palestinian Authority President Abbas, of Fatah, will be president. Yet there is some reason to believe that this deal may stick, at least for a little longer than the last one: Both sides need it a little bit more now. The P.A. is losing support, while Hamas is newly active in the West Bank; yet Hamas, which just had to abandon its longtime host in Damascus, is going broke. Just generally, the Palestinian cause needs a shot in the arm right now: As Prime Minister Fayyad pointed out last week, the Arab Spring has sapped what has frequently been the Arab world’s cause célèbre of its usual prestige and glamour. (Fayyad’s future will be a major roadblock as the unity government goes forward: Abbas will want him to stay on as head of government, in part because he is a crucial guarantor of Western support; but the Western-educated, technocratic, relatively moderate Fayyad is anathema to Hamas.)

There is the inconvenient but unavoidable fact that Hamas continues to insist on the right to armed struggle and to all of the land between the river and the sea. The peace process, however, has long been premised on the notion that each side is going to give up something. If Hamas will never give that demand up (and it may well not), then neither peace nor the unity government will work. As long as there is even a nominal peace process, however, we are operating under the assumption that Hamas is capable of adopting, as a negotiating precondition, the assumption that Israel has the right to exist. (Again, not saying it will do this, just that if it doesn’t all this talk is moot.) Moreover, Fatah-Hamas unity was going to have to happen to make the peace process work: Hamas’ popularity means it will need to be part of whichever group speaks on behalf of the Palestinian people. The best we can do is hope that the prerogatives of power and legitimacy and its being cut off from Damascus and Tehran will exert a genuinely moderating influence on the group. So, while Prime Minister Netanyahu is right to repeat the line he used several months ago, during Reconciliation 1.0—that Abbas must choose between peace with Israel or peace with Hamas—we observers can at least entertain the prospect of future Hamas reform.

And it’s telling that, while saying the above publicly (Netanyahu also said the time was “not good” for progress), the Israeli government—which surely knew this deal was coming—has also made some interesting offers privately. It suggested that the current West Bank barrier serve as the future borders of a Palestinian state—which would make for a smaller Palestine than the Palestinians would desire, but that’s why they call it negotiating. And, intriguingly, Israel stepped back from demands for permanent control of the Jordan Valley, insisting only on a “long-term” presence. (Zvika Krieger noticed this change.)

If I were a betting man—and given that I thought the Patriots were going to win last night, thank God I’m not—I’d bet against this working out: Hamas still believes what it believes, which is that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist, and it is not so hard-pressed to change tack. But Reconciliation 2.0 seems a little less ridiculous than Reconciliation 1.0, suggesting it’s conceivable that 4.0 or 5.0, a couple years down the road, will be promising.

Palestinian Factions Reach Unity Deal [NYT]
Support for Palestinian Authority Erodes as Prices and Taxes Rise [NYT]
Fayyad Says Palestinians ‘Marginalized’ By Arab Spring [Bloomberg]
Israel Proposes West Bank Barrier as Border [AP/ABC News]
Earlier: Is Meshaal Stepping Down to Step Up?
On Reconciliation, ‘The Devil Is in the Details’