In the last five years, the Arab-American Association of New York, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in December, has quintupled its budget to a half-million dollars, drawn from individual donations and foundation support from the likes of the New York Foundation, the Union Square Awards, and the Brooklyn Community Foundation. It is the front line of American acculturation, if not integration, for tens of thousands of ESL-hungry Arab immigrants from Palestine, Morocco, Algeria, and beyond. The organization plays more or less the role that Abraham Cahan’s Forward played for the immigrants of Eastern Europe a century ago.

The executive director of the organization is Linda Sarsour, 31, a Palestinian-American mother of three who wears the hijab and plans to become the first Arab-American on the New York City Council when she runs in 2017, after the local seat opens up. Sarsour, who took over the organization in 2005 and has raised its profile tremendously—she was honored in December as one of 10 Champions of Change by the White House—travels a lot on behalf of the association. The young woman who runs the association day to day, juggling budget memos, the census, and calls from the BBC is all of 24 years old. Her name is Jennie Goldstein, and she is a Jew from the Upper West Side.

“Everything without precedent, or controversial—it lands on my desk,” Goldstein explained when we met. “When Linda’s out, I’m the last answer. I make it rain.”

***

Goldstein has blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, a startling sight among the hijabs worn by the other female staffers. The organization occupies what was once an obstetrician’s office, which explains the waiting area out front and its maze of small, fluorescent-lit rooms. Goldstein’s office is festooned with a poster of a Palestinian hip-hop band and a sign from a protest of the NYPD earlier this month. (“#wtfnypd,” she scrawled on it in Magic Marker as I stood there.)

Goldstein joined the Arab-American Association in 2009 through AmeriCorps after graduating from Middlebury, where she studied international economics. “When I was offered the position, I thought, ‘hell yes,’ ” she told me. “I had seen the posting on the Middlebury career services site, and I just knew that it was my job. I didn’t speak Arabic, but I could wrangle large groups of people. I didn’t come here because I’m a rabble-rousing activist. My interest was in community building. In college, I had to persuade you to come see the band. Here, people are bursting through the door asking for services. It was a real mandate. But it’s been scary to build services you’re not a part of.”

Goldstein’s father is Jewish and her mother is Protestant. Growing up on the Upper West Side, she lit candles for Shabbat on Fridays; she went to church with her mother on Sundays. Being raised by parents of different faiths never confused her because she was never asked to keep anything straight. She accompanied her mother on Sundays because she liked being with her, and she memorized the Lord’s Prayer as a 6-year-old because it “was part of the vernacular of educated people that I wanted to know.”

But she was given enough to go on: The family split what she called “the three major Jewish holidays”—Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Thanksgiving, she explained with a laugh—between her father’s brothers. On Yom Kippur, Goldstein would fast with her best friend, who was also half-Jewish. “School was closed, so we’d go to Macy’s and try on clothes because we felt skinny because we were fasting,” she said. “And then we’d go to a Jewish deli on the Upper West Side and eat dinner.” Her mother was usually the one who harassed her father to light candles on Friday night. “For my mother, the point of religious tradition is tradition. That’s more important than which exact code of ethics it is. As a kid, I saw the church as a community center.”

Continue reading: Smoking shisha in Queens

Outside, on Kingston Avenue, religious men wear black hats and white shirts. The women have on floor-length jean skirts and long-sleeve solid-colored T-shirts. It is easy to understand why they dress this way: Jewish modesty laws are strict, requiring women to cover their elbows, knees, collarbones, and, if married, their hair. But the Frock Swap caters to a different set: religious women who believe they can dress modestly without sacrificing individual panache.

“People want to feel like they look normal, not a frummy religious nerd,” says Chaya, 27, who wears a bold floral top that complements her long, wavy wig. She and Simi, dressed in a two-tiered black sheer top with a skirt that stops just past her knees, hand-pick used, stylish clothes from their friends and sell them once a month either in a rented store or someone’s apartment. A percentage of the money goes to the consignors, and the rest they use to expand their business. Eventually, they’d like to have a pop-up store and perhaps warehouse space to house clothing from a larger network of buyers.

Chaya Chanin (left) and Simi Polonsky. (Shayna Denburg)

At the sale, Chaya welcomes customers into the store with a glass of wine, and Simi suggests looks. “Can I put a shirt underneath this dress?” asked a customer holding up an emerald, satin, short-sleeved dress. “Let’s try this,” says Simi, who had a brief career as a personal shopper for her mother’s friends in Australia, rushing over with a sharp black blazer, “You’re going to look gorgeous.” Simi says she has to resist the urge to tweak strangers’ outfits. “How could you wake up in the morning and think that you actually look OK?” she admits to thinking of some people she sees on the street.

According to Jewish tradition, explains Sara Labkowski, the director of Machon Chana, a Crown Heights yeshiva program for young women, helping girls dress well is an admirable pursuit. “When we feel well dressed, we can do much more,” she says. “We can be better mothers and wives and community members.”

But that’s where Labkowski’s approval ends. Frock Swap offers clothing that fits a variety of comfort levels: form-fitting dresses, shirts that are too low on their own but can have fabric sown into them, red lace bras that a young woman might (or might not) feel comfortable wearing in front of her husband. While the store does not sell items such as mini-skirts or pants, Labkowski believes that some of its clothing isn’t modest enough. “We have a lot of teenagers, a lot of kids, looking for guidance. They are falling prey to things that are wrong, thinking they are right,” she told me. She believes girls with non-modest clothes might be tempted into following their yetzer hara, or evil inclination.

But for Simi and Chaya, letting women make their own choices about clothing is only natural. They grew up in Sydney, Australia, where girls walked around in bikinis and revealing summer dresses. While they strictly adhere to Jewish law, their father, who is a rabbi, encouraged them to be open to people who practice religion differently.

Liat Rubin, Simi and Chaya’s childhood friend from Australia who visits the Frock Swap sales when in town, is a recent convert to modest dressing. After acting “like everybody that lived by the beach,” she realized she was attracting what she called the wrong type of attention from men. She switched to wearing modest clothes and feels good about the choice: “When I feel like I put an outfit together that looks great and it’s working within the boundaries I am more proud of myself.”

Others say there are clear downsides. “If you ask me if it restricts me, totally!” says Mimi Hecht, who writes a blog about being a mom in Crown Heights. “I can’t say how many times I went shopping with a friend and I’m like ‘It’s so crazy, this is so stupid.’ ” Chaya wishes she could go for a jog without putting on a wig or a hat. “For me it’s challenging to keep being inspired about the way I live and what I do,” admits Simi. “No matter how strong you can feel about something, the world is tempting.”

The novel, Auslander’s first, is both entertaining and disconcerting and Auslander, a Tablet columnist, joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss German tourguides, Palestinian cabdrivers, and the pros and cons of living with hope. (To buy tickets to see Auslander discuss the novel in person on January 25 in San Francisco, click here.) Warning: The interview includes explicit language. [Running time: 20:51.]

How, then, does a religious Jew who is deeply concerned about threats to the environment galvanize her community? Evonne Marzouk, the founder and executive director of Canfei Nesharim, a Jewish environmental organization, addressed that question for Vox Tablet. She spoke to host Sara Ivry about rabbinical and Torah-based justifications for making environmental sustainability a priority, her own journey to environmental advocacy, and the unique skills Orthodox Jews can bring to the challenges of sustainable living. [Running time: 19:38.]

Hoffman is also the deputy editor of Nextbook Press, the book imprint affiliated with Tablet Magazine. He joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the book, how his two careers—novelist and editor—influence one another, and his own experience finding acceptance as a gay Jew. [Running time: 16:09.]

A Hebrew map (with the Mediterranean in the foreground) from a 1698 Haggadah published in Amsterdam.
CREDIT: Courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

In the writing of history, there are no innocent decisions—especially if you are trying to write a compact book about a huge, complex, and polarizing subject, like Michael Brenner’s A Short History of the Jews (Princeton). Brenner, a professor at the University of Munich whose book was published in Germany two years ago, is writing for an audience—Jews and non-Jews alike—who want “just the facts.” Yet every decision about what constitutes a fact, and which facts are important, is laden with assumptions and helps to shape the story in particular ways. Take, for instance, the most basic decision of all: Where does the history of the Jews begin?

The first datable reference to the people of Israel comes in the 13th century BCE, on an Egyptian stele erected by Pharaoh Merenptah to celebrate his military victories. By a too-perfect irony, the inscription reads, “Israel is wasted, its seed exists no more.” Start the story here, and the history of the Jews becomes one of resistance and unlikely survival—over and over again, this people would falsify predictions of its destruction.

If you follow traditional Jewish sources, on the other hand, the story would have to begin with God’s promise to Abraham, from Genesis 17: “And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” This origin makes the Jewish story one of chosenness and covenant (it is here that God commands Abraham to circumcise his sons, establishing the b’rit milah), with a special emphasis on the Land of Israel. Or else you could see the beginning of Jewish history in God’s giving of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai, when the people first took on themselves the responsibility of the Law: “And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient” (Exodus 24). Then the story of the Jews would be the story of Torah—Jewishness would be defined as Judaism.

All of these moments are mentioned in the first chapter of Brenner’s book. But the early extra-biblical evidence is too fragmentary, and the biblical evidence too mythical, to be a reliable basis for a historian. Not just the patriarchs and Moses, but much later biblical figures are almost certainly fictional: “The heroic deeds of the Judges, David’s powerful kingdom, Solomon’s resplendent temple—none of these can be supported either by archeological excavations or extra-Biblical sources.” For Brenner, Jewish history properly begins with the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, followed by the exile in Babylon and the rebuilding of the Temple some 70 years later by Ezra and Nehemiah. This series of events transformed the Israelites, subjects of a small Near Eastern kingdom, into Jews, members of a far-flung religious community. “Being a ‘Jew’ or ‘Judean’ did not just mean belonging to an ethnic group with a territory; it was now also a designation that included inhabitants scattered from Babylonia to Egypt who were all adherents of a specific cult—of a religion.”

As Brenner writes, the belief that the Babylonian exile marks the real beginning of Jewish history is not a new one. (Josephus, the Roman-Jewish historian of the 1st century CE, was the first to suggest the difference between Israelites and Jews.) But in Brenner’s hands, this starting point serves to underscore his vision of Jewish history as primarily a struggle about and against assimilation: “The better part of Jewish history would play out between these two poles, attachment to the old homeland and loyalty to the new one,” he summarizes. This focus surely owed something to his German perspective, since it was in Germany, from the late 18th century until 1933, that the problem of assimilation most dominated Jewish consciousness, with the most dramatic and tragic results. And while Brenner’s subject includes all of Jewish history and geography, it is the modern period and the Central European context that provide the center of gravity for A Short History of the Jews.

The question of how to preserve a Jewish identity while functioning in a non-Jewish society is not strictly a modern one. Brenner makes this point eloquently with an illustration of a seal made in Babylon in the 6th century BCE, which reads “belonging to Yehoyishma, daughter of Shamash-shar-usur.” “Conceivably,” Brenner explains, “the father, who had already been given a Babylonian name as a result of acculturation, wanted to give his daughter a Hebrew name as part of a return to Jewish roots.” (In general, the illustrations in the book are superb—many are taken from Haggadahs throughout the ages, succinctly demonstrating the unity-in-variety of Jewish experience.)

The ancient tension between Jewish and non-Jewish identities could sometimes issue in violence, as during the Maccabee rebellion of the 2nd century BCE. Yet as Brenner points out, while we think of Judah Maccabee as the restorer of Jewish independence against Greek domination, here again names tell a more complicated story. The first generation of Hasmonean kings, Judah’s brothers, were called Yehonatan and Shimon; the next generation were called Aristobulus and Hyrcanus—Greek names, and a sign that Hellenism was an unavoidable presence in Judea.

The situation of Jews in the Greco-Roman period can remind us of the situation of Jews in modern Europe and America—the parallel is often drawn by those warning Jews against getting “lost” in a seductive surrounding culture. But things were very different in the roughly 17 centuries of Jewish history between the fall of the Temple and the beginnings of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe. This was the period in which Jewishness was defined by rabbinic Judaism, with all its variants, mystical offshoots, and heresies. During most of this time—which was, after all, the majority of Jewish history—assimilation was not a temptation because it was not a possibility: Jews could not enter into the surrounding Christian and Muslim worlds and still remain Jews. There was certainly no monolithic Jewish culture during this extended period, but there were many Jewish cultures, from Rashi’s France to Shmuel haNagid’s Spain to the Baal Shem Tov’s Poland.

And it is this heart of Jewish history that A Short History of the Jews has least interest in. Brenner does not have a lot of space to work with, and he necessarily summarizes and abbreviates a great deal; but still, it is notable that it takes him only 60 pages to get from the destruction of the Second Temple, in 70 CE, to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, in 1492. By comparison, his chapter on the Holocaust alone fills almost 30 pages. This is understandable—the Holocaust is the event that looms largest in contemporary Jewish consciousness. But a book that explains the Nuremberg Laws in more detail than the Mishneh Torah is surely offering a distorted picture of the substance and achievement of Jewish history.

It is the result, however, of a perspective on Jewish history that sees it as culminating in emancipation—a term that itself implies that the loss of Jewishness is the price of the entry or re-entry of the Jews into world history. In this 400-page book, we reach Moses Mendelssohn on page 167, and from then on the vicissitudes of the Jews in Western Europe are the main story. Brenner does not neglect Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and America; but his grasp of American Jewry, in particular, is much less sure (it is certainly not a good sign that his chapter on contemporary American Jews is illustrated with photos of Leonard Nimoy and Bob Dylan). In America and in Israel, which Brenner treats very briefly, the classic model of frustrated Jewish assimilation has been overturned, because each country offers Jews a way of being modern without ceasing to be Jewish. Perhaps it’s a sign of this epochal change that A Short History, for all its reliability and informativeness, feels a little old-fashioned.

But she was no ghost. The organizers of my appearance had decided to surprise me by hiring Civil War reenactors to entertain the crowd. In addition to the woman from the restroom, I was introduced to two uniformed men “from the 7th South Carolina Infantry,” along with a 14-year old drummer boy. They had constructed an officers’ tent in the synagogue’s social hall to display their pigs’-hair toothbrushes and period weaponry, including gunpowder packs, revolvers, and muskets.

Like anyone with a passionate interest in something beyond daily life, Civil War reenactors strike many people as obsessive-compulsives, motivated by some obscure commitment that the rest of us know we ought to humor in public—even if we privately believe that they’re nuts. I laughed at their get-ups when I saw them in Harrisburg—then I went home and built a sukkah in my backyard. Maybe such passions ought not seem so strange to me, I realized, given that Jews practically invented historical reenactment.

When I learned that Civil War reenactors sometimes adopt an ancestor’s name and rank, I was reminded of the duchening, the high priests’ blessing, at my family’s synagogue—when my husband, a Levite, washes the hands of the Kohanim before they bless the congregation. The same physical reliving of events occurs when worshippers prostrate themselves on the floor during the recitation of the Temple service on Yom Kippur, or when celebrants light Hanukkah candles. The Passover haggadah tells us that we each must see ourselves as if we personally had come out of Egypt. While the words “as if” animate most text-based Jewish rituals, there is no “as if” in eating matzo any more than there is in eating hardtack. These rituals are not mere commemorations of the past. They are physical reenactments of it.

More fascinating still is the immediacy of the reenactment tradition. Far from being costume dramas of the distant past, historical reenactments in both Jewish culture and among Civil War devotees were already taking place during the lifetimes of people who had lived through the events being reenacted—people, that is, who ought not to have needed to be reminded of these events. In the Torah, the Israelites are commanded to reenact the night before the exodus from Egypt—not the joyous experience of the exodus itself, but rather the “night of watching” before the exodus, the terrifying experience of waiting for the angel of death to pass over their homes—beginning in the year after it occurred. Likewise, Civil War battle reenactments began with the Confederate veterans, who started congregating annually around the end of the 19th century to relive the most traumatic moments of their lives. And while Civil War reenactment may lack the spiritual complexity and purpose of Jewish ritual, it is nonetheless more than a hobby for many. It is, often, a way for participants to honor families, moved by a visceral connection to fathers and grandfathers for whom the reality behind the theater was that much closer to the lives they lived.

This parallel between Jewish ritual and Civil War reenactment reveals a deep, unexpected similarity in Jewish and Southern culture that distinguishes both from mainstream American public life. Jewish and Southern cultures are both post-traumatic civilizations—they are both built upon a sense of overwhelming obligation to the past.

For the South, the material devastation of a war that destroyed their economy and killed one out of every five white males was second only to the unbearable shame of losing their source of dignity and purpose—their belief in themselves as the true heirs to the American revolution, upholding the supreme American value of independence. For the Jews, the material loss of national sovereignty with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE was second only to the unbearable shame of losing their source of dignity and purpose—the Temple as the divine residence on earth. Both Jews and Southerners are people whose ancestors knew what it meant to lose. Unlike the bright official optimism of American life, both Jews and Southerners have cultivated cultures in which even children must be taught to live on the losing side of history and in which a sense of cultural dignity must be drawn from something other than triumph and success. While Jews and Southerners today no longer live their daily lives with their ancestors’ overwhelming sense of shame and defeat, the memory of that shameful loss and the community’s responses to it (manifested as an outsized sense of group pride, defensiveness, or both) have become part of each group’s identity. And therein lies the disturbing element of the reenactment traditions: the awareness, however hidden, that this former grandeur was lost because of one’s sins.

In Judaism, the sense that the community’s losses are deserved is built into the theological understanding of tragedy. The book of Lamentations unambiguously insists that the Temple’s destruction was due to the sins of the people. This idea, while problematic, is the animating force of much of Jewish civilization: the understanding that Jewish suffering is ultimately the people’s responsibility and therefore preventable. This ancient view pervades even secular Jewish life today on all points of the political spectrum, whether Jews claim that the community is attacked for being too kind to its enemies or for not being kind enough.

In the South, too, reenactments of the past owe their energy to an uncomfortable if unmentioned awareness of the theological understandings of the past. Northern Christian rhetoric at the time of the Civil War interpreted the total destruction of the South as divine punishment for slavery. While racism long outlasted the war, the upending of the world as white Southerners knew it demanded at least a tacit acceptance of the Northern view, even if it took 100 years to take root.

This does not mean that Jews and Southerners have reached the same conclusions about their losses. The unease that many Americans feel when seeing a Confederate flag comes from the fair suspicion that Southern devotion to the past, far from being a sophisticated replaying of trauma, is more akin to fantasy fulfillment—or a deliberate ignoring of the fact that the antebellum South was built on a foundation that can only be described as evil. There is no Southern equivalent of Lamentations, no public grieving for past sins. Yet if Southern culture does not blame itself enough, Jewish culture blames itself too much. And the only reliable eyewitnesses are ghosts.

In a ladies’ room at a Jewish community center in Richmond, Virginia, I encountered another ghost. I had just given a reading from my novel, which opens at a Southern seder during which all the food is served by slaves. In the restroom, a very elderly woman was waiting for me by the sinks. “I have something I need to say to you,” she said in a shaky drawl, and took my hand in hers.

“I grew up here in Richmond, and when I was a little girl, the elderly Jews I knew were people who lived through that time,” she said. “They had owned slaves. Maybe you’ll never find this written in a book, but I remember their faces at the seder when I was a child. And this is all I want to say to you: They were aware of the irony.”

Before I could ask her any more, she left, her 21-century perfume lingering behind her.

Hadeish Yameinu by David Gelernter

David Gelernter, a prominent victim of the Unabomber, is a Yale computer science professor who is also fluent in the history and practice of Judaism. An observant Jew, Gelernter just published Judaism: A Way of Being (Yale University Press). Partly an exploration of the religion’s core themes and partly a defense of adherence to its commandments, the book is also an impassioned and provocative plea for Jews to recognize their religion’s unique relationship to God and to Western civilization. Gelernter spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the importance of separation to Jewish life, about Jewish superiority, and about why Conservative and Reform Judaism appear doomed to failure.