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

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’

Continue reading: The problem started with the time machine

Only six months before, Koch’s displeasure with the president had become a national news story. On July 25, 2011, the former mayor offered his official endorsement of Republican Bob Turner for Anthony Weiner’s vacated seat in the House of Representatives following the latter’s unceremonious resignation. Despite the fact that Democrats outnumber Republicans there nearly 3 to 1 and have held the office for more than a century, Turner won the 9th District of New York in a landslide. “I didn’t know Bob Turner,” Koch would later confess. “It pissed me off that [Obama] made a demand on Israel that it go back to the peace table and accept the pre-’67 borders.” How else could a self-professed liberal have offered his support of a Tea Party member whose campaign platform included such progressive policies as cutting federal spending by 35 percent, opposing same-sex marriage, and advocating intelligent design? Koch explained: “I perceived [Obama’s] stance on Israel to be hostile. I decided we would send a message.”

The message was received. On Sept. 21, 2011, hours after delivering a speech to the United Nations general assembly in which he denounced the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood and temporarily restored the faith of Israeli loyalists across the country, Obama brokered a détente of his own with one of the Jewish state’s staunchest defenders. Their conversation, held at the New York Public Library, was frank. “He said that my voice was heard outside of New York and that he needed me,” noted the former mayor from his Manhattan office. During their talk, Obama expressed his distress that the Jewish community had grown unhappy with him. “He was surprised because he thought he was doing what they wanted,” said Koch. “I said ‘No, you’re not.’ ” Less than a week after their kibitz, Koch committed to campaign on the president’s behalf in 2012. For a man whose trademark question “How’m I doin’?” has long since fossilized, it appears that flattery—steady and effusive—heals all wounds.

It’s easy to dismiss Obama’s overtures as lip service to one of the nation’s most recognizably Jewish politicians—the political equivalent of visiting your doddering grandfather in Boca. Still, Koch’s influence is irrefutable. Just last week, Beit Morasha, the Jerusalem-based educational center, honored him for his “public service, leadership and commitment to the State of Israel and the Jewish People” during a separate dinner event at Guastavino’s, a banquet hall under the 59th Street bridge that—essentially like Koch himself—has been declared a New York City landmark. The former mayor has proven he will defend Israel against any threat, real or imagined, even if it means cutting off the schnoz of the Democratic Party to spite its face. In the deep winter of his political career, it may be the only issue on which his famously nasal voice still resonates.

***

On an unseasonably warm afternoon this fall, I met Koch at his law firm, Bryan Cave, in midtown Manhattan. (My father is a partner there.) The walls of the former mayor’s corner office were lined with photographs and plaques, their frames practically touching. Above his computer hung a signed picture of President George W. Bush as well as a letter by William F. Buckley typed on stationery from the National Review: “Just an idle note to tell you that I’ve had hours of pleasure and edification reading your lyrical bulletins. You make me feel absolutely useless if I contrast my own nugatory work with your spicy and learned columns. I’ve been ill, but I will recover and descend on you, and we’ll have a good, nostalgic meal.” Below that, in a considerably smaller frame, sat a photo of Barack Obama. An oversized, silver menorah stood on the radiator along the near window.

If Koch’s office doubled as a museum of contemporary political history, then its featured exhibit was Ed Koch, meticulously preserved in all of his ’80s splendor. The former mayor sat motionless behind his desk, a big, chestnut-colored number adorned with family photos, a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer, and a copy of The Little Red Book of New York Wisdom by Former Mayor Ed Koch. He wore a dark gray suit with a two-toned shirt and a set of black suspenders. From the neck down, it almost looked as though he had never left office. From the neck up was a different story. More than 20 years past the normal age of retirement, Koch continues to work five days a week, and all the extra hours on the clock have begun to take their toll. His face looked gaunt, his eyes puffy. Tiny constellations of liver spots now dot his forehead and cheeks. While he insists there have been no residual effects from his assorted heart failures, his speech has grown slower and more deliberate. “I have a balance problem,” he said. “I’ve never fallen, thank God. Breaking a hip is a major fear. But I rarely miss a day of work.”

Of the nearly two dozen titles in the “Ed Koch library,” a term he uses (fondly) for the collection of books that have been written by and about Ed Koch, only 1999’s I’m Not Done Yet! co-authored with Daniel Paisner, attempts to chart his post-mayoral career. The book’s subtitle, Keeping at It, Remaining Relevant, and Having the Time of My Life, serves as a kind of mission statement for Koch. Since leaving office in 1989, he has served as, among other professions, an adjunct professor at New York University, a television judge on The People’s Court, a children’s book author, a political commentator, and a radio host. Then, of course, there’s his ample body of film criticism—much of it archived at the appropriately titled website The Mayor at the Movies. Many of these reviews seem to dance on the edge of self-parody. Take, for example, his thoughts on Terrence Malick’s Oscar-nominated Tree of Life:

What’s the movie about? Got me … The story of the cosmos is better told at the Rose Planetarium in the Museum of Natural History. It didn’t do well with me, although I have to be truthful about it. The audience at the end of the show applauded. I thought to myself, am I the little Japanese boy who said ‘but the king is naked?’ The emperor of Japan. Naked! I thought it was a put-on or a put-down of the audience, but maybe I’m alone. Go see it. You might like it. I didn’t, and I’m giving it a minus.

You can remove Ed Koch from office, but you can’t remove the office from Ed Koch. “People like me because I’m a lot tougher than the major critics,” he said. “I don’t pretend to be an expert.”

Continue reading: Building, and naming, bridges

The Last Kaiser Roll in the Bodega, Hidary’s 2011 collection of poetry, essays, and childhood memoirs, explores the gravitational pull of the two seemingly opposing forces that have shaped her sensibility on and off the poetry scene: the Jewish and Puerto Rican, the Kaiser roll and the bodega, salud and l’chaim, Rosh Hashanah and the Puerto Rican Day Parade, Holocaust survivors and hip-hop. It also describes how it is that a good Jewish girl became a badass slam poet who started performing and competing in what has been a historically male-dominated venue.

After receiving her MFA in theater from Trinity Rep Conservatory at Brown, Hidary wrote her first solo show, Culture Bandit, in 2000 and later performed it at the venerable Nuyorican Poets Café. What, one wonders, would the founders of the crown jewel of Puerto Rican poetry in Manhattan, Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero, think of her usurpation of Puerto Rican identity? In the ’70s, when the café was founded, it was a radical locus for expressing the Puerto Rican experience of discrimination, poverty, white oppression, and cultural angst in New York City. Ethnic cross-dressing would not have been appreciated.

Apparently this is still true today. Hidary has been called a race traitor and has been accused of stealing from Puerto Rican culture, specifically for the catcall mamita (which is also a term of affection). Puerto Rican-ness functions as a metaphor for the tensions between Ashkenazi and Sephardic culture contained in her own identity: Her maternal grandmother is from Aleppo, Syria, whereas her father’s mother is from Latvia. When I asked Hidary about her attraction to Latina identity and her playful yet powerful blurring of identity and cultures, she explained that her parents, progressive secular Jews, sent her to an experimental public school where Latinos, African Americans, and hip-hop predominated. She also went to Hebrew school. But she formed core bonds in her public school with Latino students, especially with a certain Letty Mangual. Hidary says she fell in love with the warmth of her family, their traditions, their food, and even Santa Claus. When I asked her why she felt the need to switch cultural worlds, she pointed to her body. She was a chubby girl growing up and she never felt like this fit within her Jewish community. Instead she found a home in the Puerto Rican body where curves are the norm and being “flaquita,” or super skinny, is most definitely not. And with that, her future identity as a cultural bandit was born.

The opening and closing poems in Hidary’s collection address the discomfort that both she and the curious bystander feel when trying to pin down her ethnicity: “What are you?/ Are you white?/ Are you Puerto Rican/ Are you Italian?/ oh, you’re all jewish?/ do you speak ‘jewish’?” Sometimes curiosity turns to an angry accusation: “Do you think you’re something you’re not?/ you know you’re jewish, right?/ … so if you’re not latina why the hell do you call/ yourself the Hebrew mamita?”

Racial and ethnic tensions are at the heart of Hidary’s work, and watching her perform (there are many YouTube videos of her performances) is like watching a cultural stealth bomber whose goal is to target warehouses of cultural stereotypes. She is a vibrant performer who gathers speed and explodes at the climax of her poems. She is the woman who is too independent, too hard to handle, who can’t relax when she should let things slide. She is the wild woman, the wise woman, the woman that makes men scared. She exploits our settled beliefs and fears about the boundaries of race and gender to generate discomfort, anger and laughter.

When I mention to her that some think we are in the post-race or post-post identity era she scoffs: “Not true.” Although these prejudices are perhaps no longer articulated as openly in our politically correct environment, they persist. Sometimes, Hidary said, because she is Jewish, others assume that she thinks and shares certain complicit and inherited perceptions of African Americans or Latinos. In turn, sometimes, because she “looks” Puerto Rican, people openly share anti-Semitism with her. Because Hidary can “pass” in both communities, she is a secret witness to flourishing underground racial tensions and prejudices. In her book she shares an alarming incident where a fan criticizes her for dating black men and labels her a self-hating Jew. He writes to her, “Vanessa, please do not tell me you date the schvartzes.” Her response is a moving poem; “dear, dear, yeshual,” she writes. “Sometimes the ones I refer to as my people/ are truly the most ignorant strangers to my soul.” And just recently, she said, she took a good friend up to the Bronx for a slam poetry event. While they were in the audience awaiting her friend’s turn, a Latino poet was on the stage. His poem devolved into a diatribe about how Jews control all the money. “It is still the most common and prevalent stereotype that I hear,” she said. “Jews are greedy, Jews are running the world.” When she hears this kind of stuff she always confronts the speaker.

Jews have plenty of lazy or stiff-necked prejudices of their own, especially when it comes to the hybrid identities that Hidary addresses in her work. As someone who frequently speaks to Jewish groups on questions of identity, she has found no shortage of exclusionary stereotypes directed against people whose identities seem unclear, the children of interfaith marriages. “I am in complete support of those who wish to date within the religion, but I don’t believe in turning away interfaith couples and converts,” she said. “I believe we can still have a strong Jewish community by opening up our doors to those who ‘marry out’ and have interfaith children. My work reflects this view, and I am sometimes not sure how it will be received.” Her heightened sense of awareness regarding stereotypes, negative and positive, forces her to constantly question ethnicities and our interpretation of them, and she is not afraid to call people out on their secret beliefs. “I’m something of a cultural policewoman,” she said. “I don’t go proselytizing all over town about it, but if I encounter prejudice I confront it.”

In the end, the collection is a confession of how Hidary switches tribes, how she is not culturally loyal to one ethnicity but to many. And why cultural dislocation is her milieu. She is a poser: “To be—or not to be—a poser,/ That is the question.” For if identity is a cultural construction, then la mamita hebrea de Siria is the perfect construct. And I, as a gringariqueña judía, am proud to recognize the importance of Hebrew mamitas.

New York: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool and S.Y. Agnon’s The Lady and the Peddler get double billing starting Thursday, when La MaMa theater group debuts performances by the Israel-based Nephesh Theater (Through Jan. 29, showtimes, $18). Also premiering Thursday is Lazarre Seymour Simckes’ latest play Open Rehearsal, which tells the tale of a Jewish family clamoring for the spotlight—literally, since the play takes place as though it were what the title says (through Feb. 5, Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m., $12). A highlight of the ongoing Times Square International Theater Festival is self-described Isramerican Sivan Hadari’s ensemble piece 1,934 Days, which features 10 actors of different nationalities reading monologues inspired by soldier Gilad Shalit’s return to Israel—and a Gavin Degraw song (Jan. 18 and Jan 21, 10 p.m.; Jan. 22, 6 p.m.,  $18).

Stephen Sondheim and Tony Kushner meet again at NYU’s Skirball Center, discussing Sondheim’s new lyric anthology to a sold-out crowd (Jan. 17, 8 p.m., check back for ticket availability). On Tuesday, the 92Y kicks off programming centered around its new exhibit on the culture of Terezin with a performance  by chamber group Nash Ensemble and Wolfgang Holzmair (Jan. 17, 8 p.m., from $38).

Frank London joins Tablet contributor Jake Marmer to celebrate the release of Marmer’s new book, Jazz Talmud, with a concert at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue in New York’s East Village (Jan 19, 8 p.m., $10).

Elsewhere: Further south, the North Carolina Art Museum’s exhibit, Rembrandt in America (the show’s only East Coast venue) is in its final weeks, so mosey down to Raleigh as soon as you can (through Jan. 22, $18). In Seattle, Shirley Lauro’s play All Through the Night begins its three-week run. The play tells the stories of four young German women–Ludmilla, Gretchen, Angelika, and Friederike–growing up under Nazism (Through Feb. 12, showtimes, $34.50).

Judy Gold brings her brash comic act to the West Coast, performing Saturday at San Diego’s Jewish Community Center (Jan. 14, 8 p.m., $27). Also performing in Cali that night, north of San Francisco, is Joan Rivers, so choose wisely (Jan. 14, 8 p.m., from $30). Finally, this week’s best-named event takes place Saturday morning in Los Angeles, when Charles Perry discusses “A Thousand and One Fritters: Food in the Arabian Nights”–specifically, what all the food mentioned in Tales From the Thousand and One Nights actually was (Dec. 14, 10:30 a.m., free).

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

Cahan, 48, grew up speaking Yiddish in Antwerp, Belgium, and is determined to save the language from extinction in the Jewish state, where he has lived for the past 30 years. He’s the first to concede he is not the best administrator: He owes roughly $40,000 to city hall for overdue property taxes, he smokes Camel cigarettes inside his library of 40,000 old books, and his meager budget provides the collection with no protection from Tel Aviv’s oppressive summer humidity.

But Cahan, who speaks Hebrew and English as well, also bears a quixotic passion for fully living in the half-dead language he loves. In summer he teaches Yiddish and performs musicals in his native tongue in Lithuania and Poland. He is also the lead singer in the band Mendy Cahan & Der Yiddish Express. On their 2005 album Yiddish Fever he sings translations of “Summertime” and “Fever,” along with other Yiddish classics and his own compositions. He whispers, sighs, and languorously wanders through the words, evoking the full range of emotion in a language often confined to old folk songs.

“After having paved the way through hundreds of years to build Jewish identity, finally we build our homeland,” he told me in English. “I find it unacceptable and wrong if Yiddish would not find its respectful, loving space.”

***

The first time I met Cahan, he was declaiming a poem by I.L. Peretz for a Russian television segment, which happened to be filming at the height of the summer’s protests in Tel Aviv. “Man!” he shouted in Yiddish, while piano accompanist Amnon Fischer read out the Hebrew translation. “Do not think life is a saloon, where everyone can push his way forward with his shoulders and eat and drink while others are watching from afar with glassy eyes and empty stomachs.”

Cahan’s receding mane of gray hair matched his bushy gray eyebrows and piercing blue eyes as he paced the stage. Behind him was a wall of books, the duplicates of works in Yiddish that he did not have the heart to throw away. At the other end of the library was a plastic pool with “a few fishelach,” as he called the fish he had brought to lighten the dusty mood. Three chairs stood together near the stage, their backs each sewn in the images of the greats of Yiddish literature: the gray-bearded Mendele Mocher Sforim, the redhead Sholom Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz, with a black tuft of hair to match his thick moustache. “We are friends, the books and I,” Cahan said. “I think they are in a better place than in a paper mill.”

A walking monument to gathering scattered pieces of a whole, Cahan wore a brown vest whose pockets bulged with two passports, four notebooks, a wallet, a yellow box of cigarettes, a city tax bill, vitamins, reading glasses, a USB drive, a mobile flip phone, tissues, a crumpled 20-shekel note, a lighter, and keys. Cahan said that when he immigrated to Israel from Belgium in 1980, he was surprised to see how sidelined his native tongue had become there.

“Many people spoke Yiddish,” Cahan said of the Israel he encountered. “They would read and meet in clubs, but it seemed as if it wasn’t a part of the whole Israeli experience.” In 1990, he started collecting books. At first, Cahan housed his collection in a dilapidated building in an industrial zone in Jerusalem. He then opened a second library in Tel Aviv. He named the organization overseeing the two libraries “Yung YiDish” in an effort to expand the Yiddish circle beyond the elderly. Yung YiDish is one of several Tel Aviv institutions—some 80 years old, and some open less than a decade—that are doing what they can to revive and preserve the tongue that once united the Jews of Eastern Europe, by teaching the language, offering theater, and printing books.

Cahan said it costs $150,000 to $200,000 to properly run Yung YiDish, but private donors provide only half of that. For the rest, he lives by the seat of his pants, begging city hall for a break on his taxes and meeting with the Ministry of Culture to ask for government funding. Cahan spreads word of his center while teaching in Eastern Europe and performing in cities around the world with significant Jewish populations. He dreams of holding Yiddish-cuisine cooking lessons. And he hopes to eventually sponsor translations of Yiddish classics into English, French, and Chinese and continue to promote Yiddish music and film. “Yiddish is more than just the shtetl,” he said.

***

Yiddish, an amalgam of German, Hebrew, and Aramaic written in Hebrew characters, was once the main Jewish dialect in Eastern Europe. But in Israel it was seen as the prime competition to the revival of Hebrew, according to Avraham Novershtern, the director of the Beth Shalom Aleichem Yiddish cultural center in Tel Aviv. “There was a conscious decision which began in early 20th century that Hebrew would be the language of the new state, and in that decision, there was violence against Yiddish,” said Novershtern. He described incidents of kiosks being burnt for selling Yiddish papers. In the 1930s and ’40s, Yiddish movies were sometimes kept from screens. Fights broke out on the streets over the public use of Yiddish.

Continue reading: Israel’s cosmopolitan heart

While other precincts of New York City take on a tranquil, almost ghost-green glow on Christmas, Borough Park, the Hasidic enclave, teems with commerce and activity on this holy day. Its main drag, 13th Avenue, has the feel of an Asian city: Shanghai or Hong Kong minus the rickshaws and the pedicabs. Cars and pedestrians compete for room and air in narrow straits, and the street has the ambience of an urban bazaar, with chains and banks nestled next to mom-and-pop stores selling clothing, housewares, and just about everything else. The primary objective on our annual shopping trips was to buy a hat for my father, but the outing came with a number of blandishments and outright gifts for me: usually an article or two of clothing, and a post-shopping meal in a neighborhood restaurant.

My father is gimp-legged after he was hit by a car 30 years ago, but he lives a surprisingly nomadic existence in the greater New York area, often reaching all of the city’s five boroughs and many of its suburbs in a single day of rabbinical work. He drives a sporty, silver, late-model Cadillac, and frequently, at day’s end and too far afield to eat at home, he winds up in a kosher restaurant. One might think him to be a kosher-restaurant connoisseur, but he tends not to pay them any mind. In fact, my father’s dining preferences range from deli to dairy, and not much beyond that. My earliest memories of eating with him were in his haunts on the Lower East Side—Sam’s 999 on Essex Street, where he’d order pastrami and a Heineken, and Steinberg’s upstairs dairy restaurant, where he’d have smoked whitefish, coffee, and cheesecake for dessert.

On Christmas Day four years ago, after we had chosen the hat, we then had to choose a restaurant. Did we want milchig or fleishig, dairy or meat? We chose an upscale dairy restaurant. The restaurant was packed with late lunchers like us. There were mothers with strollers and finger-fed babies. Toddlers ate baked ziti, indolent children ate white rolls with butter, and businessmen nattered on at corner tables over lox and sable. My father and I stood for 20 minutes until a table opened near the swinging-door entrance to the kitchen. Then we sat there for another 20 minutes until service arrived. The waiter, who looked like an apparatchik for Josef Stalin, took our order.

My father took out his reading glasses to study the menu, even though he knew what he wanted. “Smoked whitefish,” he told the waiter.

“What else?” the waiter asked.

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?” the waiter said, incredulously.

“You have decaf?” my father asked.

“No. No decaf,” said the waiter.

“Mushroom barley soup?”

“No. Split pea only.”

“Potato salad?”

“No.”

“Tuna salad?”  I asked.

“We’re out.”

“Egg salad?”

“Blintzes only, with sour cream,” he said. “I have to get to other tables. Make up your mind.”

“OK,” I finally said. “Split pea soup and a vegetable omelet. Can you bring my father a seltzer?”

“No seltzer,” the waiter said.

A restaurant with no seltzer? I began to consider the idea that our waiter had traces of sadism. He was short and stout and had the air of someone who had been humiliated often, probably in a faraway land. I thought of him as one of those nondescript soldiers you see in newsreels from a forgotten conflict, like the Russo-Finnish war, perhaps a private in charge of the horses or the latrine. And to deprive my father of seltzer, if indeed he were doing so, was cruel. My father’s love for seltzer cannot be understood in purely physical or even gastronomic terms. It is simply part of him, long fetishized by his digestive track. Still, what was there to do?

We sat for another 20 minutes waiting for our food. It wasn’t a big deal: The restaurant was busy. My father and I passed the time in small talk. We made calculations on our napkins, refinancing our mortgage payments and family budgets. When our portions arrived, we ate silently and, in my father’s case, industriously—storing up glucose for whatever intellectual, physical, and monetary challenges lay ahead.

Then it was time for dessert. It would be cheesecake. Because we were sitting near the kitchen, I had a glimpse of a platter of store-bought cheesecake slices. There were regular, marbled chocolate, and blueberry cheesecakes. While I was in the restroom, my father ordered plain cheesecake. Upon my return, I urged him to reconsider, telling him the marbled chocolate cheesecake was much better, and he agreed. I called to the waiter. “My father changed his mind,” I said. “Instead of the New York plain cheesecake, he wants the marble chocolate cheesecake.” The waiter looked at us in disgust and said, “Once I put in the order, I cannot change it.”

He then spun away and returned shortly with a plate of the plain cheesecake. My father, who had spent his childhood in the Bronx, knew how to be grateful for food and to those who made it. His grandmother kept a carp in the bathtub to make gefilte fish for the Sabbath, and live turkeys occasionally appeared in their apartment to be slaughtered. But here, my father was surprised and annoyed that he was not permitted to have what he wanted for such a niggling and inadequate reason. Never one to make waves, though, he picked up the fork and ate the cheesecake like a boy fearful of offending his mother. “It was good cheesecake,” he said. “But not as good as the marble cheesecake would have been.”

The waiter brought the check, and my father again put on his reading glasses to study it. He took out his credit card. “Are you going to tip this monster?” I asked him. “Well,” my father said sheepishly, “not that he deserves any, but something I suppose.” I said that I wouldn’t tip him at all. My father considered this for a moment and then shook his head slowly. “Ich kenne nichts,” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t do it. I can’t take away his parnassah,” his livelihood.

Centuries of pious passivity had become the gravity that kept my father connected to his loved ones and to his work. His attachments were carefully sewn and cherished, sometimes overly so. To ask my father to withhold the tip was in effect to ask him to depart from a worldview that had kept him going for years. My father’s father was an immigrant house-painter who was both sustained and oppressed by slum lords, painting closets and hanging wallpaper for $20 a room. The fact that my father had ascended the economic ladder enough to drive a Cadillac would only intensify and amplify an indictment of his soul should he withhold the pay of a working man to teach him a lesson about courtesy and civility.

“But Dad,” I said. “This man mistreated us. He was abusive.”

“What should I tell you?” he said with the air of a man who had been asked to do something soul-damaging, like slaughter a calf or put a horse to sleep. “You’re right, but I can’t do it.”

In the face of mistreatment, my father could do nothing, as his father before him could do nothing when his clients decided cavalierly to pay him less than the agreed-upon fee. And standing there in front of my father, with a 150-year potpourri of Jewish piety and passivity—and of honor and dignity—between us, I too could do nothing but, in effect, turn the other cheek on Christmas Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York: Comedian Jackie Hoffman takes on all that is sacred this time of year with her new holiday show, Jackie Hoffman’s A Chanukah Charol. Spoiler alert: She gets visited by the Ghosts of Chanukah Past, Present, and Future (Dec. 11, Dec. 18, Jan. 2, 7:30 p.m., from $35). Shlemiel the First, a klezmer musical set in Chelm, the village of fools imagined by Isaac Bashevis Singer in his stories, opens Tuesday at New York University’s Skirball Center, with regular performances through the end of the month (through Dec. 31, showtimes, from $30). On Tuesday night, Lower East Side gallery and bar CultureFix hosts the Christmukkah edition of Acoustic Nights, featuring young performers doing their best to celebrate the mash-up holiday made famous by nebbishy The O.C. character Seth Cohen (Dec. 13, 7:30 p.m., free). On Monday night, Lou Reed reads from—and signs copies of—his book, The Raven, based on his 2003 Edgar Allan Poe-themed record of the same name, at Brooklyn’s BookCourt (Dec. 12, 7 p.m., free).

“Die, Nazi Scum!” is a real exhibit, featuring Soviet TASS propaganda posters created from 1941 to 1945, currently on display at the Andrew Edlin Gallery (through Jan. 7). Taking the comical-turned-serious cue from Yeshiva University’s current exhibition about comics by female Jewish artists, today the Rubin Museum unveils “Hero, Villain, Yeti: Tibet in Comics,” an extensive exhibit about the various ways Tibet has been depicted in comics since the 1940s (through June 11, $10).

French director Jean-Luc Godard gets his due at the French Institute Alliance Française Tuesday, with three films—Charlotte and Her Boyfriend, All the Boys Are Called Patrick, and Jean-Luc Godard par Claude Ventura—screening throughout the day (Dec. 13, 12:30 p.m., 4 p.m., 7:30 p.m., $10). I Miss You, the 2010 film about two brothers from a Jewish family in 1970s Argentina, the younger of whom is sent to live in Mexico after the older brother, an antigovernment activist, disappears, screens Sunday and Wednesday as part of Iberoamérican Images at the Museum of Modern Art (Dec. 11 5 p.m., Dec. 14, 4 p.m., $12). Joseph Brody’s biography was the starting point for director Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s at-times fantastical film Room and a Half, a semi-fictional account of the writer’s life; it screens Tuesday at the JCC Manhattan (Dec. 13, 7:30 p.m., $11)

Elsewhere: It’s the battle royale—at least for four Massachusetts-based klezmer groups—as they face off Sunday for “Klezmer Conquest: A Battle of the Bands” at Temple Aliyah in Needham. We’re rooting for the Shpilkes Klezmer Band (Dec. 11, 7 p.m., $5). In Philadelphia, learn more about the late writer and activist Grace Paley when Lilly Rivlin’s documentary, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, screens at the National Museum of American Jewish History. Rivlin will stick around for a discussion afterward (Dec. 13, 7 p.m., $12). The Washington Jewish Film Festival ends Sunday, but there’s still time to catch a Saturday-night screening of Love During Wartime or a Sunday matinee of sports documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (Dec. 10, 9:15 p.m., $11; Dec. 11, 2:30, $11). The Oklahoma City Museum of Art continues screening Lars Von Trier’s actually very Jewish film, Melancholia, this weekend, with five chances to see Kirsten Dunst’s mesmerizing performance and encounter Alexander Skarsgård as something other than a vampire (Dec. 9-11, $8).

The Art Gallery of Ontario hosts a celebration of Marc Chagall on Wednesday—an evening of performances by local musicians and performers in conjunction with the ongoing exhibit “Chagall and the Russian Avant Garde,” which closes next month (Dec. 14, 8 p.m., $22.50). In Chicago, do as Mayor Rahm Emanuel does with a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where composer Andrew Bird and sculptor Ian Schneller have installed horned speakers made, ever so industriously, from recycled newsprint and dryer lint (through Dec. 31, $12).

Abroad: Following the final concert of his European tour in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Leonard Cohen’s son, Adam, makes no bones about the enormity of his father’s legacy with a midnight discussion titled, “In The Shadow of My Father Leonard” (Dec. 13, 9 p.m. concert, $48; Dec. 14, 12 a.m. discussion, free with registration). Also detailing the challenges of defying norms from within, the traveling exhibit “Transcending Tradition: Jewish Mathematicians in German-Speaking Academic Culture,” currently on display at Beit Hatfutsot through Wednesday, opens in Haifa the following Saturday.

Sharon Lockhart takes on the work of Israeli choreographer Noa Eshkol with a film installation opening Tuesday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (through Apr. 30, admission $13). A must-see exhibit at Paris’ Grand Palais National Gallery tells the story of the Steins—Gertrude, Leo, and Michael, that is—the American family whose patronage of Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne helped solidify a new era of modern art (through Jan. 16).

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

Already high levels of violence in the South Bronx seemed set to escalate on Dec. 2, when 25-year-old Cornell “Black Benjy” Benjamin, a member of the Ghetto Brothers gang, was killed trying to mediate a dispute between two other gangs. But instead of calling for revenge, the Ghetto Brothers initiated a gathering of gang leaders. Hundreds of gang members came together in a high-school gymnasium in the South Bronx. Instead of wielding weapons, they aired their grievances, voiced their frustrations with society, and negotiated a truce.

The Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting, as it came to be known, took place 40 years ago today. Its truce led to changes in gang culture. Gang members were allowed to enter one another’s turf. Battles that formerly might have been fought to the death on the streets were fought instead in code, on dance floors, where contestants bested each other with words and moves instead of guns and knives. And out of that truce came the birth of break dance and hip-hop, two elements of Bronx culture that became worldwide phenomena.

The central figure in the truce was Benjamin Melendez, the charismatic founder and leader of the Ghetto Brothers, a gang with hundreds, if not thousands, of members. (Melendez may have been the inspiration for the Cyrus character in the 1979 cult film The Warriors.) And after the truce, Melendez began a personal journey, during which he rediscovered and reclaimed his own Jewish roots.

I first learned about Melendez through Dvora Meyers’ story in Tablet Magazine last year. I am an artist, and exploring Jewish identity is a central theme of my work. I later met and photographed Melendez for a series of portraits about New York’s Jewish diversity and, after hearing more of his story, had the idea to turn his life into a graphic novel.

The work, which is in progress and excerpted here, is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Melendez and other gang members and activists. While the novel focuses on the founding of the Ghetto Brothers and the historic truce, it is also a tale about the Puerto Rican migration to New York, the destruction of the Bronx, and the histories of crypto-Jews, gang culture, and hip-hop.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting, selections from the graphic novel, illustrated by the German artist Claudia Ahlering, will be exhibited starting Sunday at the Bronx River Arts Center, just a few blocks from where the historic gathering took place.

New York: Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer’s beloved children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth turns 50 this year, with a sold-out birthday party at the 92Y proving its enduring lovability. Celebrate, sort of, Stalin, with John Hodge’s oddly intriguing new play, Collaborators, about a dissident writer commissioned to write a play for the dictator’s 60th birthday (Dec. 2, 7 p.m., $25). Start the weekend with a visit to The Duplex tonight in the West Village, where New Jersey native and rising star Rachel Millman will be singing, accompanied by keyboardist Daniel A. Weiss (Dec. 2, 9:30 p.m., $10). Then on Saturday, for a reminder of the challenges facing Jewish musical stars of yesteryear, go see Samson Raphaelson’s play The Jazz Singer before it closes next weekend (Dec. 3, 3 p.m., 8 p.m.; Dec. 4, 3 p.m., $22). Or, stick around after Millman’s set, and see if the raven-haired chanteuse might join you.

The Heist Project premieres a one-woman dance show featuring works by five international choreographers, including the Israeli-born Idan Sharabi, a member of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, this weekend (Dec. 2, Dec. 3, 8 p.m., $25). The Alvin Ailey dance theater begins a nine-show run of Minus 16, a work by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, starting next Friday (Dec. 9, 8 p.m., $25 and up).

On Sunday, prep for the season—however you spend it—with Julie Weiner, the Jewish Week’s “In The Mix” columnist, who’s scheduled to discuss holiday tips for interfaith families at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (Dec. 4, 11 a.m., free). Alternately, prep for your inevitably harrowing December travel on Tuesday, at a showing of Je T’aime, I Love You Terminal, an Israeli love story that begins as a young man waits for a flight at the Prague airport. The screening at the JCC in Manhattan includes a discussion with Dani Menkin, the film’s director (Dec. 6, 7:30 p.m., $11).

Elsewhere: In Connecticut, Jonathan Adler is opening one of his whimsically chic home-décor stores in Greenwich. But will the shop feature items found in the “Haute Hannukah” collection? (One dachshund menorah, please.) In San Francisco, the Tikva Records pop-up store opens, stocked with Jewish records and hosting very groovy events through the end of December, when it shuts down. On Sunday, Basya Schecter leads her band, Pharaoh’s Daughter, in a concert sponsored by Denver, Colo.’s Mizel Museum, in conjunction with an art sale (Dec. 4, 1 p.m., $25). Because nine hours couldn’t contain the entirety of the material Claude Lanzmann collected for his seminal, long 1985 film, there is Shoah: The Unseen Interviews. It will be screened twice this week in Chicago. The Wednesday screening at the Chicago Public Library is sold out—there will be a standby line for unclaimed tickets—but Tuesday’s Glencoe screening isn’t, yet (Dec. 6, 7 p.m., free).

Abroad: Jerusalem’s black box theater, Way Off Productions, puts on Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award-winning play, Art!, with eight performances through the end of December (Dec. 3, Dec. 6, Dec. 8, 8 p.m., $13). For the children, Truly Scrumptious is a mini-musical featuring unrelentingly catchy songs and the kind of fantastical plotline accepted only in children’s entertainment (Dec. 8, 8 p.m., $21). This weekend’s Jacob’s Ladder Festival in northern Israel features a smattering of international musicians—and an American comedian who goes by the name Jewmongous.

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

Day One of Parshas Bechukosai, May 18, 2008. The renovated beis medresh, or study hall, which seemed beautiful but stark, almost cold, when it was first opened last fall, is starting to acquire atmosphere. The floors have become a little bit scuffed. The half-flight of steps leading down to the beis medresh, which before the renovation were not only worn with decades of footsteps but also markedly tilted to one side, are neither worn nor tilted yet, but the dark stain that was intended to make the new ones look old is already somewhat scuffed as well. Meanwhile, the empty spaces begin to fill with sounds: A young man who grew up in the Belz Hasidic community in Borough Park, New York, who is in the neighborhood as a guest of Isaac Maxon’s for shabbes, sings snatches of luxuriant liturgical melodies of the Belzer Hasidic community as we wait on Friday evening for the minyan that never happened, and something of the echoes of his tunes remains in the air even after he has left.

I still have the overwhelming impression, though, that when the downstairs was renovated, all the ghosts departed, as well. Some I can and will recall by name or by some other characteristic: Moshe Sternberg, a former dressmaker (the only reason I know is because, once during my first years in the morning minyan, Mr. Sternberg was given the honor of covering the Torah scroll after the reading, and another member spoke up, “Mr. Sternberg was a dressmaker, I think he knows how to cover the Torah”); the gentle Itshe Duhl; nervous Mr. Teigman, who had a print shop in the neighborhood and bitterly opposed Rabbi Singer’s practice of opening up the ark to count the Torah scroll as the tenth for the minyan, threatening at least once to walk out so that there wouldn’t even be nine living Jewish men in the room, let alone ten; Heshy Gleicher (“Cheap Heshy”), who for decades owned a discount store around the corner on Clinton Street; Heshy Kolber (Benny was so contemptuous of him that once he muttered, un dus hot gehat a siti dzhob, “and this had a city job”); Shimen Perlman (a showman with snatches of Yiddish vaudeville and comedy theater; he could imitate a stereotypical Litvak Hebrew school teacher or a mock impresario announcing “Ladies and gents, katshkes un gendz,” “ducks and geese”); Mr. Berger, who used to yell at Heshy Gleicher and others, including me (Rabbi Singer calmed me down by saying, “He just talks loud”; when Elissa would walk in, he became a perfect gentleman; and when Jonah would come in as a toddler, Berger would call affectionately, “Hey, Pupik!”); Ari Lemkin (he should live and be well), a sad young man who eventually became Rabbi Singer’s right-hand man in the shul and resolutely sided with the Singer family once the dispute over the future of the shul broke out; other Heshies and Harries, Moishes and Abes, over the years.

I like to think of their ghosts as being available to make up the minyan, but no one thinks that’s how Jewish law works, not even among the minority of us who continue to accept the custom of counting the Torah scroll. May I share an image, without intending disrespect to any of them, simply because it continues to echo, insistent in my mind? It’s reported that, when the workmen doing the renovation tore up the old, badly worn floor of the beis medresh, they found nothing below it but dirt. Trapped in the dirt, along with a number of live rats, who scurried away but continued to trouble the building as long as the renovation work was in progress, were dozens of dead rats. I’m glad I didn’t see them, and I’m sorry to associate them with memories of past human residents, lehavdil b’elef havdoles, that is, to distinguish with a thousand distinctions. Blame the image on that endearing character, the Death of Rats, a sidekick of the equally colorful and sympathetic Death in Terri Pratchett’s Discworld novels, or maybe on a joke made by a character in Kugelmass’s The Miracle of Intervale Avenue, about another old shul in another borough, that you could put a yarmulke on a rat and include him in the minyan.

If we cannot count those who are physically absent, there is no apparent prohibition against one live male Jew doing double duty, attending one minyan and then moving on to fill the complement for another. This happened regularly, weekday mornings in the 1980s and early 1990s, when, in addition to the minyan at Rabbi Singer’s shul, the Chasam Sopher shul around the corner on Clinton Street had (as it still does) a morning minyan, and when Rabbi Heftler’s shul on Attorney Street still stood. (It has since collapsed, been demolished and replaced by an apartment building that, in its architectural detail, seems to me, at least, deliberately to recall the outlines of the neoclassical shul that once stood on the spot.) Occasionally, during the months after our first child, Jonah, was born, I would proceed on to Attorney Street after finishing at Rabbi Singer’s and come home around 9 in the morning, sometimes having had a shot or two with the old men, but Elissa put a stop to that after a month or two. More frequently, we would call Chasam Sopher and ask them to send one man, or maybe two, but we would always be careful to send them right back if another of our regulars straggled in. Occasionally, though not nearly as often, Chasam Sopher would likewise be short one congregant (they paid yeshiva students to come to the morning minyan, an option our even poorer shul didn’t have), and Rabbi Singer would be absolutely prompt about taking advantage of this opportunity to even the credit-debit balance of this Lower East Side shul economy. One winter morning, he personally left his shul to make the minyan at Chasam Sopher, in such a rush that he slipped on a patch of ice by the doorway, broke his leg, and was in the hospital for weeks.

This exchange system has broken down in recent years. The Stanton Street congregation is in some respects marginalized or even ostracized by the broader (though still rather narrow) Lower East Side Orthodox community, both because of bad memories left over from the struggle between Rabbi Singer’s family and the congregation early in this decade and because of certain issues in Jewish law (the appropriate realm of women’s participation; the possibility of creating an eruv, or boundary marker to permit carrying on the Sabbath, on the Lower East Side) that appear to some to put Stanton Street outside the Orthodox camp. Things came to such a pass that, about a year ago, the rabbi and the president—or perhaps just the president on his own—of Chasam Sopher declared that they would no longer agree to send men to Stanton Street when we needed someone to make the minyan; we had apparently been put under some kind of communal ban.

Well, yesterday in the early evening, at the time for saying the afternoon service of shabbes, Sol Decker decided that he would go to Chasam Sopher to see if he could borrow a tenth. I guess he just decided that the ban wasn’t necessarily going to last forever. He returned promptly with two young Lubavitch Hasidim that I hadn’t met before. One of them, Israeli, but with a reasonably good command of English, told me later that he and his friend had been walking around and went into Chasam Sopher. (He implied that they found the shul more or less by chance, though my assumption has been that when young Lubavitchers walk miles from their base in Crown Heights on shabbes afternoon, they know exactly where they’re headed.) A few minutes later, when Sol walked in, he was told by the Chasam Sopher regulars, “Let the Lubavitchers come with you.” Perhaps the ban is over. In any case, I suppose it was easier to ignore it this time because these two Lubavitchers, “surplus” Jews, were available for dispatch anyway—no regular member of the Chasam Sopher minyan had to be sent. And perhaps next time they need someone, they won’t be too proud to call us, and perhaps next time we need someone, they won’t refuse to send one of their regulars.

Reprinted from Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side by Jonathan Boyarin. Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Boyarin. Used with permission of the publisher, Fordham University Press.

Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery, Lower East Side, Manhattan. No knishery gets more flak than Yonah Schimmel, though this Lower East Side stalwart practically invented the modern knish. So what if it’s not as good as it used to be, and so what if its knishes are too big? If you haven’t already, sit down in the century-old shop and talk to the French tourists and the Hasidic couple next to you. Enjoy your knish with pickles. Try the cherry-and-cheese knish for dessert.

Gottlieb’s Deli, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For a Hasidic deli in the heart of Satmar Williamsburg, Gottlieb’s knish is rather unorthodox. The dough is like a thick sesame seed challah bread crust, and the potatoes are incredibly moist.

Other notable knish-serving local delis: 2nd Avenue Deli, Pastrami Queen, Liebman’s, the Carnegie Deli.

Outside of New York: Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen, San Francisco, Calif. Wise offers knishes on Tuesdays as it figures out how popular they are and whether they should be on the menu all the time. Head then to the Ferry Building in the Embarcadero to see what they’ve got. Offerings so far have included potato and onion, potato and corned beef, and potato with mushroom and kale.

Kenny and Zuke’s Delicatessen, Portland, Ore. Kenny and Zuke’s knishes have flaky pastry on the outside, peppery potato on the inside, and caramelized onions on top.

Jimmy & Drew’s 28th Street Delicatessen, Boulder, Colo. Jimmy and Drew’s offers a breakfast knish with scrambled eggs, corned beef hash, and cheddar cheese.

Some notable knish-serving delis outside of New York: Saul’s Restaurant and Deli, Berkeley, Calif.; Goldman’s Deli, Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Zingerman’s Deli, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Part 1: Annie Hall: “Walking out, my friend Rick, thirty-plus years [Manhattan] resident said, ‘I had forgotten how Jewish a film it is.’ I really hadn’t noticed. But I’m the wrong guy to ask. It’s like saying to a fish, ‘Do things around here seem really wet to you?’ ”

Part 2: Play It Again, Sam and The Purple Rose of Cairo: “Being funny might just be the great aphrodisiac (take that, jowly, shambling war criminal, Henry Kissinger!). Being a pale, translucent, unphotosynthesized schmendrick didn’t matter as long as you were smart and funny.”

Part 3: Mighty Aphrodite and Manhattan Murder Mystery: “This is becoming chore-like already and I still have twenty-three films to go.”

Part 4: Love and Death and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask): “We’re becoming quite the little tribe. … There is me, the white-haired Hummer (meaning man who hums, not hypertrophic military vehicle repurposed for a greedy consumer market), the surly cinéaste, the old woman in the maxi-length down jacket, the fellow who could be doing some sort of Marcel Duchamp Dada experiment on his own body, so conspicuously ill-fitting is his … no, I will go no further with this unkindness.”

Part 5: Bullets Over Broadway and Everyone Says I Love You: “Everyone Says I Love You is a sloppy insult whose cracks and flaws are spackled over with fistfuls of money and sundry diversions in the form of real estate porn.”

Part 6: Radio Days and Broadway Danny Rose: “Radio is more visual than film in precisely the same way that smell evokes memory in an exponentially more complex manner than a picture can. That each voice and song and commercial is a madeleine for Allen is conveyed in every frame.”

Part 7: Bananas and Sleeper: “Bananas’ credits—yellow letters in an inflated ballonish font against a black background routinely pierced with bullet holes while Marvin Hamlisch’s bumptious score plays—are pre-auteur Woody.”

Part 8: Husbands and Wives and Hannah and Her Sisters: “Sidney Pollock—probably a completely nice guy in real life—projects an unpleasant jerk energy. The kind of aging Jewish swinger who still thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

Part 9: Wild Man Blues and Sweet and Lowdown: “The holiday season is over and the New Year under way. The only ones who can now come to a movie in the middle of the day are officially those firmly in my cohort: the old, the halt, the lonely.”

Part 10: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and Another Woman: “What binds these two together is what keeps coming up in Allen’s work: that damned anhedonia; the cerebral intellectualizing that masks a terror of feeling, that incapacity to give oneself over to joy that can leave one a vicarious observer to one’s own life (can you tell he’s hit a nerve?)”

Part 11: Manhattan: “It is at least in part a movie all about hair, both Temporal (Diane Keaton’s not entirely successful late-70s perm) and Divine: the birch plank of Meryl Streep’s mane. … But it is Mariel Hemingway’s impossibly silken horsetail chignon that reigns supreme.”

Part 12: Take the Money and Run and What’s Up, Tiger Lily?: “Throughout her cameo it appears as though [Louise Lasser] has an actual pimple on the end of her nose! It is completely endearing.”

Part 13: Interiors and Stardust Memories: “The symbolism of it is as subtle as a blackjack to the base of the skull.”

Part 14: Zelig and The Front: “Zelig is a story of assimilation, of deep cover, of Jews in America.”

Part 15: Deconstructing Harry and Crimes and Misdemeanors: “The Strand Bag-oisie has come out in full force for the finale.”

Rakoff’s reviews appeared in Tablet Magazine’s predecessor publication, Nextbook.org.

New York: The uber-hip Mondrian Soho hotel has unveiled neighborhood artist Sol Lewitt’s 1979 photographic work, On the Walls of the Lower East Side, quite literally on its Lafayette St. facade. Jenni Wolfson performs her searing one-woman show, Rash, which details her experience working for the United Nations in Rwanda, Sunday evening as part of the All for One solo theater festival (Nov. 20, 7 p.m., $20). On Monday, actress Anne Hathaway hosts the Public Theater forum titled “Does Culture Make Us Who We Are?” with New York Times columnist David Brooks as one of the panelists (Nov. 21, 8 p.m., $25). On Tuesday, McNally Jackson Books hosts writers André Aciman and Sven Sirkerts (Nov. 21, 7 p.m., free). Uptown, the 92Y holds a discussion about Jewish soldiers who fought in the Soviet Red Army in World War II, to accompany an in-house exhibit on the same topic (Nov. 22, 8:15 p.m., $29; exhibit runs through Dec. 29).

Memoirist and reporter Lucette Lagnado talks about her new book, The Arrogant Years, with writer Malachy McCourt at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan (Nov. 30, 7 p.m., $10). Next Tuesday, New York’s Asia Society puts on what is bound to be a knock-out event as part of its Great Debates series: Jewish Talmudic Debate (Nov. 29, 6 p.m., $15).

Elsewhere: In Chapel Hill, N.C., this weekend marks the final performances of the mostly omnivourous theater group The Performance Collective’s jarringly physical take on Jonathan Safran Foer’s dietary tome, Eating Animals (Nov. 18, 19, 8 p.m., $10). Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center exhibits “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” which addresses gender equality and women’s issues and was inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book, Half the Sky (through March 11, 2012, $10). Stop by Sunday to hear from Edna Adan Ismail, a Somalian activist featured in the exhibit (Nov. 19, 12:30 p.m.).

Abroad: On Sunday, the Koffler Chamber Orchestra plays the work of some of artist Marc Chagall’s favorite composers, including Mozart and Tchaikovsky, in conjunction with the very cool-looking exhibit “Chagall and the Russian Avant Garde” at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Nov. 20, 3 p.m., free with $25 museum admission; exhibit runs through Jan. 26, 2012). The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto is putting on a panel called “The Innovators: New Frontiers in the Fashion World,” featuring the co-founders of the voyeur website The Coveteur (Nov 22, 7 p.m., $30).

Vienna’s Jewish Film Festival is under way, featuring the movingly brilliant documentary ‘Til We Meet Again, one Jewish family’s modern-day journey through Austria to uncover the story of a grandmother’s 1939 flight from Vienna (Nov. 27, 12:30 p.m., $8). London’s Jewish Community Centre continues its attention-getting programming Thursday with the discussion “Would we be better off without religion?” featuring former Member of Parliament Evan Harris and playwright Diane Samuels (Nov. 24, 8 p.m. $13 in advance). On Wednesday, in Israel’s port city of Ashdod, the Jerusalem-based Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design debuts the fruits of a two-year partnership with the city in the form of a two-day exhibit, “Bezalel in Ashdod,” with live music and street entertainment (Nov. 23, 7 p.m., free).

Agenda will return Dec. 2.

New York: The eighth annual Festival of New Literature From Europe spans five days beginning Tuesday, features a new film component, and explores the theme “Crime Scene: Europe” at venues across town. Polish writer Zygmunt Miloszewski and other novelists in the thriller genre read (Nov. 15, 7 p.m., free). Fresh off its run at New York’s documentary film festival, Peter Rosen’s 2010 film about enigmatic violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz, God’s Fiddler, opens today at Quad Cinema. See it if you want to learn more about the musician the Muppets twice referenced (through Nov. 18, $11). Postwar bass-baritone powerhouse George London also gets his documentary due: George London: Between Gods and Demons, the 2011 Arthaus Musik film, screens Sunday at the Morgan Library as part of a larger recital series honoring the singer (Nov. 13, 3 p.m., $20).

In a feat of great musical timing, Juilliard Opera hosts the U.S. premiere of Kommilitonen!–Peter Maxwell Davies’ student-centric exploration of activism from the University of Munich to the University of Mississippi. To sustain the attention of today’s students, he uses puppets (Nov. 16, 8 p.m., Nov. 18, 8 p.m., Nov. 20, 2 p.m., $30). The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater brings Golem to the East Village on Thursday, with Vit Horejs’ take on the old ghoulish savior tale set to music by Frank London and performed by life-sized marionettes (through Dec. 4, showtimes, $25). Czech beer and a chance to meet the cast are part of a benefit performance Friday (Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m., from $50).

Odd couple Michael Moore and Wallace Shawn meet again Tuesday, improbably, to discuss Moore’s new book Here Comes Trouble and hopefully also Shawn’s mid-1990s stint as a curmudgeonly high-school teacher in Clueless (Nov. 15, 8 p.m., $29). Michael Showalter leads his three-person debate team Monday in a face-off of epically cute proportions—the question of dogs versus cats—to inaugurate Symphony Space’s kind of brilliant new series (Nov. 14, 8 p.m., $12). Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin, both routinely offensive in funny ways, also go up against each other Saturday night when they perform at two different venues as part of the New York Comedy Festival: Griffin at Carnegie Hall (Nov. 12, 8 p.m., from $44), Silverman at Brooklyn Academy of Music (Nov. 12, 8 p.m., from $36). Curb Your Enthusiasm’s resident potty mouth, Susie Essman, brings her no-nonsense shtick to Caroline’s on Broadway, where she will inevitably curse you out (Nov. 17, 7:30 p.m., $38.25). Happy 125th birthday to the Museum at Eldridge Street—you sure don’t look your age. If you did, Susie would have probably already told you.

Elsewhere, U.S.: Josh Groban alert: 22-year-old jazz phenom and NYU grad Joe Alterman, who has Groban’s schlubby looks, returns home to Atlanta this week, where he’ll take the stage at the indispensable High Museum of Art for a Friday night jazz session. Don’t miss the chance to pinch his cheeks and tell him you remember when he was a little piano-playing boychik (Nov. 18, 5 p.m., $18). The museum also hosts Def Jam co-founders Bill Adler and Cey Adams Wednesday for a discussion about their iconic record label, which they both founded (in 1984) and wrote the book on (Nov. 16, 7 p.m., free). Shulie, Elisabeth Subrin’s 1997 shot-by-shot remake of the 1967 documentary of nice-Jewish-girl-turned-radical-feminist Shulamith Firestone, screens daily (and hourly) at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center as part of this month’s film exhibition on feminist cinema (through Nov. 30, $8). You go, girl. On Thursday, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum opens the totally rad exhibit “California Dreaming,” which traces the evolution of Jewish life in the Bay Area since the Gold Rush and brings some attention to our pioneering, laid-back West Coast brethren (through Oct. 16, 2012, $12).

Abroad: The Oslo International Film Festival kicks off Wednesday with a screening of the psycho-thriller A Dangerous Method, about the high-stakes, tumultuous friendship between Sigmund Freud and his apostle, Carl Jung, and the disturbed woman who came between them (Nov. 16, 9 p.m., $18). Israeli choreographer Hagit Yakira presents her newest work, “Sunday Morning”—an examination of family and identity through dance—this Thursday in London (Nov. 17, 8 p.m., $18). If you want to kick it way, way old school, head to the 12th annual Jerusalem International Oud Festival for some eclectic, traditional musical stylings from various cultures. Please don’t call it a lute (through Nov. 19, prices vary).

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

They were Orthodox Jews with full beards, sidecurls and long black coats, who told her that she was riding a “private bus” and a “Jewish bus.” When she asked why she had to move, a man scolded her.

The driver, the article states, did not intervene. The World explains further:

The B110 bus travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. It is open to the public, and has a route number and tall blue bus stop signs like any other city bus. But the B110 operates according to its own distinct rules. The bus line is run by a private company and serves the Hasidic communities of the two neighborhoods. To avoid physical contact between members of opposite sexes that is prohibited by Hasidic tradition, men sit in the front of the bus and women sit in the back.

According to the New York Post, “Signs written in Hebrew and English direct women to use the back door during busy times.”

What remains to be determined, and likely will be—the Department of Transportation has launched an investigation—is whether a private bus company that provides a public service (and pays the city to do so) largely serving a religious community is exempt from anti-discrimination laws.

Women ride in back on sex-segregated Brooklyn bus line [New York World]
‘Back of bus’ furor [NYP]

Some arguments, particularly arguments about race and music and the ways in which they intertwine, are better off stating their premise right away. This is one of those arguments, and its premise is this: The Beastie Boys are not only one of the greatest groups in hip-hop history, but they are also one of the very few that has remained true to the genre’s essence. Far more than other acts with purer street cred—Tupac, Biggie, NWA—the three scrawny Jews from Brooklyn represent what hip-hop is really about.

A brief historical interlude: Born in the Bronx in the late 1970s, hip-hop emerged primarily as a response to two deeply troubling phenomena ravaging the black and Latino communities—gang violence and disco. Isolating and manipulating the percussion breaks of popular songs and then adorning them with speech addressed both these plagues, creating a musical genre that celebrated the superiority of West Indian and African American sounds like dub and soul over disco’s white, withering soullessness, and a genre that also gave desperate young men something to do that didn’t involve guns.

Because so much of the music was played live, in massive block parties, the men holding the microphones and delivering rhymes had to be creative to entertain the crowds. Call-and-response worked nicely, as did talk of poop, sex, and all the other sweetly corporeal things a mass of sweating, swaying people might enjoy while grinding up against each other. In the late 1970s, when hip-hop acts finally began putting out records, they maintained the same playful air. “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 single by the Sugarhill Gang that is widely considered to be the first hip-hop release in history, had lines like these:

This young reporter I did adore
So I rocked a vicious rhyme like I never did before
She said damn fly guy I’m in love with you
The Casanova legend must have been true
I said by the way baby what’s your name
Said I go by the name of Lois Lane
And you could be my boyfriend you surely can
Just let me quit my boyfriend called Superman
I said he’s a fairy I do suppose
Flyin’ through the air in pantyhose.

The swagger, the put-downs, the randy glee—such was the sound of the new music.

The Beastie Boys fit right in with this rowdy milieu. They began life as a punk band, and their name, they later explained, was an acronym for Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Internal Excellence. The name says it all: All the Beasties ever wanted was to be loud, playful, rude, cool, fuckable, and fun. Their first album, Licensed to Ill, came out late in 1986, and every track on it was a mission statement for the spirit of hip-hop.

Take “Girls,” for example, still the best musical expression on record of the contradicting emotions—confusion, desire, fear, loathing, and ignorance—young men feel when they start taking notice of young women. Like “Rapper’s Delight” and many other early hip-hop songs, this one, too, is rich with humor and a touch of homophobia, the two blunt tools the budding male sexuality has at its disposal to fight off any hint of limpness. Here’s a representative sample:

I hope she’ll say, “Hey me and you should hit the hay!”
I asked her out she said, “No way!”
I should have probably guessed they’re gay
So I broke north with no delay
I heard she moved real far away
That was two years ago this May
I seen her just the other day
Jockin’ Mike D. to my dismay

Each song on the album was an anthem to stupid virility at its most entertaining, and each managed to capture the gestalt of those early block parties. It’s harder than it sounds: Three decades after its release, “Rapper’s Delight” sounds like a lovable but antiquated piece of music, its energy and vivacity drained by the years; Licensed to Ill, on the other hand, still summons the same stomping sensations it did when I first listened to it the week it was released, 25 years ago, when one’s mother throwing out one’s best porno mag was a problem to which I could very much relate.

Rolling Stone, then, was uncommonly astute when it labeled its review of the album “Three Idiots Create a Masterpiece.” Hip-hop being a party genre, each of its peaks should feel like it was scaled by a moron. Rock can have its gnomic lyrics, folk its political consciousness, and pop its perfect little pronouncements of love, but hip-hop is all about the puns, and the best wordplay is delivered by the most shameless smart-alecks. Few were ever more shameless or smart-alecky than the Beasties, circa 1986.

Then, alas, the music died, or at least changed beyond recognition. A new breed of rappers stuffed meaning into every line. Three years after the Beasties’ first release, Public Enemy released what many consider the greatest hip-hop song of all time, “Fight the Power.” It goes like this:

Elvis was a hero to most
But he never meant shit to me you see
Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain
Motherfuck him and John Wayne

The pundits, the academics, and the other men of privilege entrusted with chaperoning hip-hop into cultural respectability were now ready to see in the still-new form a potent political force, a continuation by other means of the 1960s intersection of music and political protest. To be considered acceptable to mainstream America, hip-hop needed to have something to say; rappers would now be shoehorned into the role that Bob Dylan abandoned when he went electric. Which is why most of my hip-hop aficionado friends refused to consider the Beasties as real rappers; they were too happy, too white, and not political enough. How could they possibly be authentic?

But hip-hop’s political era was short-lived. By the 1990s, the genre was dominated by young men who rapped about violence and who cultivated tough, gun-toting personae. There was nothing political about NWA, say, unless one stretches the definition of political to include any display of disaffection, in which case nearly every hip-hop song is political and nearly none is. The so-called gangsta rappers gave hip-hop not only its most exciting tracks in years but also a legacy of mind-dulling uniformity that never went away. Until this day, anyone taking up a microphone and spitting out rhymes needs, first and foremost, to prove that he or she is tough.

But toughness is not what hip-hop was about. If anything, hip-hop was born out of the spirit of frustration with violence and disaffection themselves, which is why Grandmaster Flash, a founding father of hip-hop, wrote his seminal song, “The Message,” berating young black men for perceiving the gangster life as attractive or glorious. Crime, he argued, only leads to misery and overall decay; the alternative is braving the racism, greed, poverty, and all the other plagues that strike black Americans. To connect with one another, it helps to know how to throw a really great party.

The Beasties, afflicted by none of the evils that burdened Flash and his contemporaries, understood that instinctively, which is why Licensed to Ill contains one of the greatest unappreciated protest songs ever written, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party).” It begins thusly:

You wake up late for school man you don’t wanna go
You ask you mom, “Please?” but she still says, “No!”
You missed two classes and no homework
But your teacher preaches class like you’re some kind of jerk

The sense of frustration is so palpable that anyone who hasn’t completely repressed the memory of being a teenager would immediately feel a pang of recognition. Sure, the Beasties didn’t rap about crime or destitution, but their chief concern on the album—the young soul and its nobly idiotic quest to stave off, for as long as is possible, the forces of adulthood eager to crush it with their stony touch—is every bit as profound and universal. Someone who fights for his or her right to party is someone who recognizes how grim the alternatives of passivity and real violence can be.

Compare the song with Public Enemy’s “Party for Your Right to Fight.” Released two years later as a response to the Beasties, the song sounds every bit as one would expect a politically conscious group to sound when corresponding with three skinny Jews who stumbled onto hip-hop by mistake. The lyrics are full of indignation:

J. Edgar Hoover, and he coulda proved to you
He had King and X set up
Also the party with Newton, Cleaver, and Seale
He ended, so get up
Time to get ’em back

“Party for Your Right to Fight” is not only the lesser song—thankfully, few but the ardently enthusiastic remember it today—but also the less political one. Fighting for your right to party means taking a personal stand in defense of an appealing and considered life choice; partying for your right to fight entails little more than following a prescribed, and largely erroneous, script about all powerful white men being racists and about violent action being the only path to redemption.

It’s not surprising, then, that Chuck D’s partner in Public Enemy, Flavor Flav, is now known primarily as a shriveled former crackhead who trawls the murky waters of reality television in search of female companionship, while the Beastie Boys are recognized for their serious and ongoing commitment to a host of social and political issues like Tibetan independence. Flav, like most rappers, was only ever playing a role, while the Beasties were being themselves.

It’s an existential distinction. In his masterful Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre described a waiter at a Parisian café who goes out of his way to play the part of waiter: He balances trays on his arms just so, speaks in a theatrical voice, and does everything he can to be a convincing server. It’s clear to both Sartre and the waiter that the whole thing’s an act, an affectation, which the philosopher termed “bad faith,” or the phenomenon of succumbing to societal pressure and abandoning one’s own true and authentic self in favor of some silly bit of performance.

When Eric Lynn Wright, the son of a postal worker and a school administrator who growing up dealt drugs but also earned a GED and started a successful record label, turned himself into Eazy-E, and then put out a host of songs about murder, beatings, and misogyny, that’s bad faith. When Adam Horovitz and Michael Diamond and Adam Yauch sang about what they liked to do, which was make good music and get drunk and hit on girls, it was the real deal. And never have they expressed their spirit more eloquently than they had in the album’s second-most famous song, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn”:

My job’s ain’t a job it’s a damn good time
City to city I’m running my rhymes
On location touring around the nation
Beastie Boys always on vacation

Amen to that. For a genre obsessed with authenticity, hip-hop has strayed very far from its roots, forcing its practitioners to fake it and seeing as a result an ever-dwindling crop of quality music. This is why we now have Drake and T.I. where only a decade ago stood giants like Mos Def and Talib Kweli. And what we need, if we’re ever to save our beloved music, is more artists to remind us, as the Beasties have, that hip-hop is haimish, and that the only way to make it well is to keep it real.

East Coast: Irene Nemirovsky gets the star treatment with a discussion of her life and works at Barnard College Tuesday (Sept. 27, 7 p.m., free). Vanessa Davis and other female comics artists take center stage in the Yeshiva University Museum exhibition “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women” (through April 15, free with museum admission). Park 51, the Islamic Community Center in downtown Manhattan, is showing photography of immigrant children living in New York City (free). Yoko Ono’s art, created pre-John Lennon and also in collaboration with the Beatle, is on display at Stony Brook University’s Staller Center gallery (through Oct. 15, free).

The New York Arab American comedy festival kicks off this weekend, with headliner shows Tuesday and Wednesday at the Gotham Comedy Club (Sept. 27 and 28, 8 p.m., $20). Off-Broadway Week runs Monday through Oct. 9.: Don’t miss Long Island native Adam Kantor in Avenue Q. Tovah Feldshuh takes Westchester with her new one-woman show, Aging Is Optional (Sept. 24, 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., $65). Not optional is keeping your regrets bottled up: 10Q hosts a confessional event Tuesday, at Manhattan’s Drom (Sept. 27, 8 p.m., from $7).

Saveur magazine’s Gabriella Gershenson wrangles Dine Out Irene, an eat-out event in and around New York City where a percentage of your check goes to New York farmers (Sept. 25, reservations recommended). Iraqi-Jewish artist Michael Rakowitz, best known for his cooking-slash-teaching-slash-art project Enemy Kitchen, will take up residence at the ever-morphing restaurant Park Avenue Autumn, where he will follow in Marina Abramovic’s creative footsteps and collaborate with chef Kevin Lasko on something that might taste good.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art hosts the excessively titled event, “Interfaith Forum: A Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Protestant conversation about Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” presented with the nearby National Museum of American Jewish History and featuring JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen (a Tablet contributor) as one of the speakers (Sept. 25, 2 p.m., $13.50). Philly also celebrates Oktoberfest (Sept. 24, 12 p.m., free). Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt hits up the Harvard bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss his new book The Swerve and the rise of humanism (Sept. 26, 7 p.m., free).

West Coast: Steven Spielberg’s epic boy-meets-alien film, E.T., screens at the trendy but controversial Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Saturday night, with a live DJ before and after to minimize the creep factor. Bring your own Skittles (Sept. 24, 8 p.m., $10). The Last Bookstore in L.A. is hosting a “literary vaudeville event” called “5 Jews You Might Not Want to Invite for Passover”—one of whom may or may not be Spielberg (Sept. 25, 2 p.m., free). Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills reveals its new sanctuary and social hall Saturday with a dessert reception (Sept. 24, 7 p.m., free).

In Between: The Art Institute of Chicago exhibits “Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention,” featuring more than 100 drawings, models, and photographs from the famed architect of Chicago’s Marina City apartment towers (through Jan. 15, 2012, $18). Kansas City, Mo., just unveiled the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, a $413 million downtown anchor project that looks part Dyson vacuum cleaner and part spaceport. The 20th anniversary of 1991’s Slacker gave the Milwaukee Art Center an excuse to finally get around to a Richard Linklater film series, which runs through next month. The cult classic screens Saturday (Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m., $8). Polish band Dikanda plays the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival in Bloomington, Ind., this weekend (Sept. 24, 10:30 p.m., from $37).

Abroad: The Klezmatics continue their 25th-anniversary world tour with a stop in Prague Tuesday at the Plac Akropolis (Sept. 27, 7:30 p.m., $26). The Tel Aviv Museum of Art brings the work of well-known local graffiti artists to a more institutionalized setting for “Inside Job: Street Art in Tel Aviv” (free). The Jerusalem Post weighed in on burgers and determined that one of Tel Aviv’s five best are to be had at Wolfnights. Jerusalem’s Eden Hotel hosts a pre-Rosh Hashanah market, where vendors will be selling olive oil, organic fruits, and cakes, with live jazz (Sept. 26, 5-8 p.m., free).

Anywhere: Suburgatory, the latest TV show to depict the horrors of suburban life—vampire free, we can only hope—stars Jeremy Sisto, formerly that creep Elton of Clueless, as the father of a ripped-from-Manhattan teen, played by rising star Jane Levy (premieres Sept. 28, 8:30 p.m., ABC). It’s no longer your grandfather’s Jewish eyewear operation, now that the hip Moscot spectacles company releases new retro-inspired, cheekily-named frames the Bissle and the Mensch. The trailer for the film version of the graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat looks more promising than the film version of Les Mis, even if Hugh Jackman stars.

Comic book writer Scott Snyder discussed the dark future of his popular creations, a student at the University of Pennsylvania honored Claudia Gould, who is set to take over at the Jewish Museum after 12 years at the school’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Maurice Sendak talked Bumble-Ardy, his lastest book, on NPR’s Fresh Air. Don’t forget that tomorrow is National Punctuation Day, which is, apparently, a thing.

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

The California I come from doesn’t have many rules or much reverence for family history. It’s a moneyed Eden populated by parents who didn’t like the rules and who forsook family history for a new world order on the Pacific Rim. They colonized a paradise, and 40 years later, mental exercise isn’t nearly so popular as Pilates class. Nobody was really Jewish. Nobody was really anything.

Like most teenagers, I wanted to belong to a pre-established, recognizable category of person. The quickest shortcuts are obvious to anyone: play a sport or party. Party I did, but not hard enough or often enough to secure an identity for myself. And dribbling a ball seemed silly. I was a child who read a lot, and I became a teenager who read more. It was really just a failure of imagination: I didn’t know what else to do. The novels I read were like social field guides. They helped me to identify different species of humans and told me how to evolve into the ones I liked best.

The authors I liked most, it turned out, were Jews—the long-famous ones with universal appeal. Judy Blume gave way to Cynthia Ozick. I never latched onto Bellow, but I like Nathanael West a lot. And of course there was Philip Roth, whose slapstick raunch was good for more than just prurient nights. His virile, foul-mouthed protagonists were particular while also representing something larger about a people I wasn’t a part of. There was manageable oppression everywhere—outside the home, where they were called “kikes,” and inside the home too, where mothers forced ungodly amounts of food on them and demanded intimate knowledge of their bodily functions. Here, in Newark, N.J., was a world of expectations and obligations, of ancient traditions and urgent ambitions—a world of enough pain to motivate.

Even John Updike, literary prince of the Protestants, seemed to share my envy. I understood while reading Bech: A Book—his parodic, postmodern novel-in-stories about a washed-up novelist—why, given the choice, Updike would choose as his alter-ego an esteemed writer like himself but with an extra sprinkle of charismatic glitter: Jewishness. While the adoring, fictional critics within the book may praise Henry Bech for his “quixotic, excessively tender, strangely anti-Semitic Semitic sensibility,” Bech himself doesn’t lack intellectual insecurity or the notorious neuroses native to his race. Updike’s shticky self-reflexivity (“Bech’s weakness for Wasps was well known”) also made sense to me. It’s what gave the book not only its prankishness but its heart, too. The aching antihero that emerges in Bech: A Book has little in common with Updike’s usual protagonists. As opposed to his gin-sipping, gentile counterparts, Bech is more interested in taking women than in taking stoic swims, more invested in earning public praise than in earning a silent father’s lock-jawed approval. I mean, who wouldn’t be?

As much as I identified with Updike’s covetous gaze, like so many 14-year-olds, what I really desired, more than anything else, was honorary membership in J.D. Salinger’s Glass family. They had everything I didn’t: a private language (of spiritual crisis, Sappho, and soap shards); a chicken soup-pushing mother; and a family mythology so mentally incestuous and hermetically sealed that it suffocated their leader in suicide. I was shrewd enough to be suspicious of Salinger’s obsessive reverence for his own characters, but it didn’t prevent me from wanting to be one of them.

It’s no wonder teenagers love the Glass family, and it’s no wonder I was so keen on focusing on their Jewishness and then glamorizing it. They are a flock of loners, too sentient for the world, all but homeless outside of the family apartment, and—most crucially—empowered by their collective Otherness. Kurt Cobain would have made a good Glass.

What doubt there is among Jews about Salinger’s Jewishness should be punctured at least a little by Franny’s agonized monologue about materialism, which she moans to Zooey from her pathologized place on the living room couch: “I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge?” Until Zooey responds, it’s almost irrelevant that Franny’s not alone in the room. Her monologue about the hypocrisy of intellectual aspiration verges, at times, on soliloquy, and it’s nothing if not a display of crippling Jewish guilt.

There is a lot written about Salinger’s Jewishness (his father was Jewish, his mother an Irish Catholic who passed as Jewish when she married) and how relevant it was to his work. It’s hard to deny that the basic makeup of his characters matches that of the caricatured Jew: anxious, world-weary, simultaneously proud and self-loathing, forever grappling with a neurotic sense of foreboding. The Glass family is also only half-Jewish, but growing up, they seemed fully Jewish to me—mostly, I think, because they were from New York.

Then I actually moved to New York, for college, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by real New York Jews for the first time. Initially, it was intoxicating. That what distinguished them was clearly more geographical than it was religious didn’t matter in the least. Obviously, I knew Jews in California too, but they weren’t like these Jews. The California Jews hadn’t been bar mitzvahed. And they certainly hadn’t been familiar with magazine mastheads or new Criterion Collection releases. At home—on weekends—they ate foods whose literal English translations (whitefish salad, honey cake) were almost as rapturous as the Hebrew ones I was unable to pronounce.

It’s not on purpose that I’ve never dated a non-Jew, but one’s attractions are always a bit aspirational, so it makes sense that I haven’t. Even Ben, my “fake boyfriend,” is Jewish. We met within the first week of college and still chat online almost every day. For four years, we slept in the same bed on Friday nights but never thought to touch one another. We edited each others’ papers and sought each others’ romantic counsel. Ben always made a theatrical show of fairness. He made me replace the food I ate from his cupboards and always remembered when I owed him $5. I’d roll my eyes and fork over the cash. “What?” he’d ask, “You think I’m going to let some goy waltz in here and bleed me dry?” It was all sort of a joke, but not really. I always missed him when he went home for the High Holidays. In affectionate moods, he told me I could “pass.”

Jewish boyfriends (real and fake) certainly seem to call their mothers a lot, not that I have any point of reference. The cliché feels true, though. I’m good with other peoples’ mothers: I like conspiratorial exasperation, and I enjoy eating dinner almost as much as I enjoy wrapping the leftovers in tin foil afterwards. It’s possible, easy even—especially at mealtimes—to be too solicitous a shiksa, too curious a colonizer. I’ve attended enough Seders at this point to not treat them like study-abroad programs, but still, it’s good to express genuine interest in your competition. Perhaps this will change over the years—I imagine it will—but for now, I’m attracted to men who have obligations to people other than me. A Jewish mother guarantees this.

One Jewish friend had parents who hosted a huge, buffet-style brunch each fall in their apartment overlooking Central Park. Men with advanced degrees and well-trimmed beards introduced themselves between bites of bagels. Small children scampered down hallways and played games on the Oriental carpets. My friend’s mother enjoyed herself—smiling, chatting, cooing at babies—but she remained alert the whole time, seeing to it that no coffee cup went below half-full. The idea was that everyone felt taken care of. In California, such a celebration (casual, multigenerational) usually calls for potlucks. Picnic tables are laid with wooden bowls full of ancient grains. Dessert is fresh fruit, and you drink sulfite-free Merlot. Everyone goes heavy on the goat cheese, and nobody stresses out about anything. The idea is that everyone takes care of themselves.

Even the spectacularly wealthy, spectacularly fun kids in college were saved, in some elusive, Jewish way, from appearing as gauche as they otherwise might have. Their parents might have been rock stars or media moguls, but they still collected first editions and went to publishing parties. There were breathtaking socialites who skipped class to both walk in fashion shows and host exclusive Seders. Tangled artfully in delicate gold necklaces, they wore tiny, diamond-encrusted stars of David. They made elaborate attempts at concealing new tattoos from their parents, which of course weren’t only disapproved of but also forbidden. The regard for tradition was touching, even if it was half-assed. The fact that they attended to Jewish family obligations implied that besides beauty and undeniable charm, they knew they had something bigger than themselves to be proud of and preserve.

The lesson, I guess, is that we—the goyim who aspire to some cursory definition of Jewishness—see you in a different way than you see yourselves. I say “we” because my feelings on this score are widespread enough to have become something of a literary trope. “What was Zabar’s? How did you get there? What was lox? Why was it orange? Did the Pleshettes really eat fish for breakfast? Who was Diaghilev? What was a gouache, a pentimento, a rugelach? Please tell me,” pleads Mitchell Grammaticus, one of the three main characters in Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot. Like Eugenides himself, Mitchell is the son of Greek immigrants from Detroit. He’s a religious-studies major at Brown in the early 1980s, and his roommate, Larry Pleshette, is from Riverdale. Larry’s parents serve on the boards of artistic nonprofits; they house ballerinas defecting from Kiev; Leonard Bernstein is known to have come over for drinks. Their house is like a shrine for Mitchell, full of totemic objects. He describes the contents of their freezer (rum raisin ice cream) with more ecstasy than he does any of his spiritual epiphanies.

For a long time, I felt as Mitchell did about the Jews I met in college—awed and finally in the presence of people, not characters, whose image I could approximate. But the longer I live in New York, the less impressed I am with the Jews, which is as it should be. Scanning the world and classifying its inhabitants might be a useful way to live when you’re very young, but at a certain point, it becomes obvious that there are more exceptions to the rules than there are rules, enough people who surprise you to realize that there aren’t any meaningful classifications at all. I think I was stunted a bit in this regard because of my exposure to the Jews I met in college, who in the beginning at least, really did seem to confirm what I had read about and romanticized in high school.

After six years in New York, I can barely count on one hand the non-Jews I know. I hear of stylish Purims and secret latke recipes; friends catch the biblical allusions I don’t and are more comfortable than I am joking about Hasids. But it’s not like Judaism is some magical charm that makes for bookish, indoor superheroes. All the things I once took to be synecdoche for Semitism are really just certain sorts of class signifier—ones made accessible by a mere college degree. It’s not that they’re superficial so much as they are shared, and therefore no longer special-seeming.

Though I’ve finally shaken the simple syllogism held in my mind all these years that conflates Jewishness with literacy with virtue, you wouldn’t guess it from looking at my life. It’s all my adolescent daydreams made manifest. If I could sit my adolescent self down for a minute, I’d commend her impulses and tell her not to worry. I’d tell her that in a few years she’d be surrounded by real-life versions of the characters she read about, but not to get too excited—that it would be exciting at first, and then annoying, and before long totally normal. I’d tell her she’d live in New York and that her mayor would share a surname with Franny’s cat. I’d tell her to keep reading Jewish books that convince teenagers that it’s cool to be smart.

Whatever jokes were once made about “the Johns” (Cheever, Updike, Knowles) are now made about “the Jonathans” (Lethem, Safran Foer, Ames). The Johns have infidelity, swimming pools, and study hall proctors; the Jonathans have Tourette, shtetls, and HBO shows filmed in Cobble Hill. We are a better-read (and -fed) elite. We still have status symbols. And though it may sound specious to some, a ruling class that reads is better than one that doesn’t.

Venerating Jewishness as a teenager was not an act of rebellion, but it was a way of questioning and ultimately rejecting a culture whose sense of purpose—to say nothing of prestige—seemed extemporaneously contrived. I spent my youth wanting to belong to a club that I thought wouldn’t have someone like me for a member. What I didn’t know then was how easily, and how soon, I would be approved.

There were problems: segregation, slums, crime, redlining, a calcified school system, corruption great and small, but the city and its enlightened citizens, one felt, were strong enough to overcome these miseries. Moses’ high-rise slum clearance, however, was not a solution but a brutal intensification of the problems, as Jane Jacobs argued in “Downtown Is for People.”

I had been working for Doubleday at the time and offered Jane a contract for a book based on her Fortune article, which I had reprinted in a collection of essays called The Exploding Metropolis. Two years later I moved to Random House. Jane moved with me and in January 1961 delivered the manuscript of her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which I read without interruption or emendation. There was little to edit. I would eventually publish all but the last of the several books that followed, many composed on her old Remington, for which she must have laid in a supply of ribbons before typewriters became obsolete.

Editors and their authors seldom form deep friendships for the same reason that psychiatrists and their patients keep their distance: The relationship requires candor that mixes poorly with intimacy. Perhaps because her manuscripts needed little editing and were usually delivered on time, Jane and I were an exception to this rule. We were kindred spirits. She did not use a literary agent. We negotiated directly, book by book, and formed a lifelong intellectual and professional friendship that survived her move to Toronto during the Vietnam War. Together we explored eastern Canada, from the great provincial parks to the mining towns along the permafrost above the tree line and still farther north to Moose Factory at the bottom of James Bay, a once flourishing entrepôt of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where we were surprised to find amid the ramshackle Cree dwellings two Chinese restaurants offering Mets Canadien et Chinois, a relic of the Chinese laborers who built in the 1920s the railroad that terminates there—an example, as Jane pointed out, of how one kind of work leads to another.

We seldom discussed our personal lives. I knew that Jane’s father had been a family physician and her mother a nurse and that she was fond of her brother, John, a federal judge; that she had been born and raised in Scranton, Pa., and had come to New York in 1943 hoping to become a journalist. I was not surprised to learn later from a biographer that she had been a defiant high-school student with a sense of humor and a sharp eye for cant, and a problem for her uninspiring teachers: a contrarian even then. She was rewarded for her candor with poor grades and planned to skip college. She took instead courses in the extension program at Columbia, where she could take only the courses she wanted and would write a book, Constitutional Chaff, that was published by the Columbia University Press, an impressive debut for a self-educated, nonmatriculated, and uncredentialed scholar at the age of 25. The book was a study of the rejected proposals for the United States Constitution. Jane, who was her own best critic, refused to show me a copy and chose not to discuss this first effort.

Like all of Jane’s work, Death and Life is about how human beings by their own devices instinctively create vital communities and how these communities and their economies are subject to corruption or obliteration by ambitious individuals in positions of power, whether well-meaning, vicious, or foolish. Death and Life, and especially her subsequent books, are thus about the dynamics of civilization, how vital economies and their societies are formed, elaborated, and sustained, and the forces that thwart and ruin them. This, rather more than her critique of city planning, I believe, accounts for the continued interest in her work. Her sympathies are with the slow accretion of custom and skills, of social norms and ingenious solutions to practical problems. She was fascinated by how new kinds of work evolve, in vital societies, from older forms, a process often stifled by its own success: for example, how Detroit’s early Great Lakes traders learned to build their own boats, then to make paint varnishes and brass fittings, and eventually master steam-engine technology and metallurgic skills, which led to engines for cars, so that the combination of Detroit’s skills made it the logical center of automobile manufacturing, whose dominance by the 20th century created an industrial monoculture that led to Detroit’s collapse and an irrational, environmentally pernicious national transportation system.

Such dire comparisons are not unusual for Hasidim. As in other fundamentalist communities, everything is understood to be powerfully meaningful within a single, comprehensive worldview. Renting apartments to artistn, like watching television or buying a “trayf” cellphone—that is, one that takes pictures or accesses the web, thereby offending Hasidic standards of modest conduct—has the potential to undermine the sacred mission of an entire Hasidic community and, therefore, of the Jewish people as a whole.

Some Hasidim also understand Sept. 11 as an occasion for miracles. In 2002, a Skvirer Hasid published a Yiddish book on the attacks, recounting cases of people who, thanks to supernal intervention, missed their plane or left late for work and so escaped the destruction. The book’s title, Himl Signaln, or “heavenly signals” in English, is telling in its ambivalence. Were these attacks terrorist messages that came from the sky—one possible meaning of himl—or were they divinely ordained signs from on high?

Here, the two possibilities are one and the same, the former guided by the latter. Therefore, to cite but one example from the book, a devout, God-fearing Jew who worked in the twin towers survived the attack on Sept. 11 because he had a doctor’s appointment that morning—not by happenstance but by a miraculous intervention that affirmed his piety.

Many Americans found their faith—in religion, in government, in humankind—shaken, or at the very least troubled, by the events of Sept. 11. American Jews were alarmed at anti-Semitic responses to the attacks, including malicious rumors that Jews “knew” to stay away from the World Trade Center on that fateful day. The Hasidic response to Sept. 11 appears to be quite different: The attacks did not cause them to question their faith in God, nor did defamatory conspiracy theories disturb their embrace of Jewish chosenness. Sept. 11 may have altered the convictions of many people, in some cases radically. But for others, including these Hasidim, it reinforced strongly held beliefs, becoming for them a case study in divine authority and a metaphor for urban destruction.

The remembrance of Sept. 11 in this one Jewish community offers an object lesson in both the power and the limits of catastrophe as a shared experience. The terrorist attacks galvanized people around the world, riveted by the horrifying images that swiftly circulated through the mass media. The global outpouring of sympathy for New Yorkers was extraordinary. But it did not take long for Sept. 11 to become a divisive subject, whether locally, nationally, or worldwide, as debates proliferated: what its causes were, who was at fault, how it should be responded to, how it should be remembered.

The 10th anniversary of the attacks may well seem an appropriate time for Americans to come together as a nation, especially in a period that is so politically riven. At the same time, it is worth remembering that even events of the enormity of Sept. 11 do not change everything, though at first it may seem as though they do. Rather, they erupt in the midst of busy lives, each going about its busy-ness with a different sense of purpose. Catastrophes evoke an intense desire to restore life to its former business, to reassert its sense of purpose. Those whose lives rest on firm foundations of faith, like these Hasidim, are most likely to reaffirm their convictions. Those who are by nature skeptical find that they have that much more to question.

Fein began to make national flags out of white fabric, using sewing, embroidery, and appliqué to fashion in monochrome the design that would, in ordinary circumstances, have made a colorful banner. He began with the American flag but quickly realized, he says, “The U.S. flag alone seemed out of balance.” So, he decided to re-create all 193 flags of the United Nations in white-on-white. It’s taken him almost 10 years to complete the task in time for the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.

The process proved painstaking. For the better half of the decade, Fein seemed plagued by fits and starts. The sewing, while soothing, began isolating him, and by 2006 Fein had to acknowledge a growing need to share the process with others and make community-building part of the flag-making. He began standing in public with eight flags, engaging people in discussion about the project. And he sought production assistance from a group of dedicated volunteers of all skill levels. These helpers—schoolchildren, congregants at his synagogue, Facebook fans of the project, other artists, and the public—ironed fabric, sewed stripes, and finished edges.

He completed the last flag this spring and took the installation to Vassar College, where he had received his bachelor’s in art in 1993, as part of a symposium he co-led with Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick (the two are married) on issues of art, politics, and peace. “Aaron has a bone-deep vision of a world in which remembrance and healing can coexist,” Lithwick says. “That’s the truest expression of Tikkun Olam I can imagine.”

“Flags are visceral representations of political ideas,” Fein says. Among the resonant symbols the project evokes is the traditional white flag of surrender. But in this case, any surrender intended would be something closer to giving in to the nature of change, as well as, more personally for Fein, letting go of social defenses and making himself vulnerable as he shared his flags with the public.

As a Jew, Fein perhaps inevitably felt some traditional resonances arise as he worked on “White Flags.” When setting up the installation at Vassar this spring, he suddenly realized he’d created a kind of a room among the hanging flags. “I began to see that the installation could welcome and provide refuge to visitors from all sides, like the Tent of Abraham.” He also fashioned the flags into the skin of his family’s sukkah. The physical and symbolic ephemerality of the flags seemed the perfect enclosure to reinforce the transitory symbolism of Sukkot. “Living with White Flags over the years,” he says, “these things in my life would come to me, like Abraham’s tent, which for me was a good way to describe a longing that I have about a world I’d like to help create.”

I came to Rescue Me fairly recently, when I casually downloaded an episode one night last July and ended up watching all 13 shows of season one in a single sitting. Looking back, I think I expected the show to be shallow and self-important, but what I encountered was something else: a drama, a comedy, an extended frat-house romp, an essay on the white ethnic melting pot in which Irish, Italians, and Jews have stewed together for the past century, and one of the filthiest soap operas ever made. It was also, I soon realized, a surprisingly useful mourning ritual—and possibly the culture’s best artistic engagement with the traumatic events of Sept. 11.

***

Rescue Me’s competition in the field of Sept. 11-related art has not been all that impressive. There was the Sex and the City episode in which Carrie exhorts “the girls” to shop in support of their wounded city, and Neil LaBute’s more poignant though ultimately just as glancing 2002 play, The Mercy Seat. Paul Greengrass’ United 93 was a real-time, delicately fictionalized recreation of the harrowing flight of the plane driven by hijackers into a Pennsylvania field, a film that applied the cleansing antiseptic of fact to the wounds of that day but fell short of being able to offer the ameliorative bandage of feeling. Then there was Oliver Stone’s 2006 World Trade Center, which, through its combination of off-putting bravado and ham-handed sentimentality, managed to offer neither.

Rescue Me had the courage to look squarely at the aftermath of Sept. 11 while also venturing bravely into the fog of the overwhelming, often inexplicable, and long-lasting emotions that the day aroused. The show was created by television producer Peter Tolan and actor Denis Leary, the latter of whom also stars as its lead, Tommy Gavin—a “seething urgent animal” who, driven by an otherworldly combination of bravery, rage, sweetness, alcoholism, an insatiable sex drive, and a wicked wit, is a character worthy of Greek myth.

Tommy is also a black hole that threatens to swallow any (sometimes all) of the characters in the show—which, it should be said, was cast to perfection. John Scurti played Tommy’s slovenly, witty best friend; Daniel Sunjata was the Puerto Rican dreamboat; Mike Lombardi and Broadway veteran Steven Pasquale were resident bumbling idiots with terrific comedic timing; and Andrea Roth and the inimitable Callie Thorne stood as the two pulsing female poles between which Tommy pings for all seven seasons: Janet, his long-suffering, insufferable blonde wife, and Sheila, the lunatic brunette mistress, who—because this crowd really does seem to model its family values on the House of Atreus—is also his dead cousin’s widow. It’s a motley crew, but that’s the point: Each character’s relationship to the others, and to Sept. 11, is different. By tracking all of them simultaneously, and over the long haul of seven seasons, Rescue Me managed to present a grieving process that felt both intimate and also like a collective portrait of the experience of an entire city in mourning.

Somewhere in the middle of watching the third season, the thought occurred to me: Was Sept. 11 the moment I officially became a New Yorker? I moved to the city from leafy, suburban Long Island in 1993 to attend Barnard; by my mid-20s, my college fling with New York had matured into a grown-up commitment. But I knew none of the thousands of people who died on Sept. 11, 2001, and so to ground my connection to the city in a tragedy that was so directly personal for so many of my near-neighbors felt mawkish and pretentious. As I continued to watch Rescue Me, though, I realized the show was proposing something altogether different.

***

Television offers the ability to experience a cast of characters over a simultaneous extended period of their lives and our own: They grow (or don’t) as we grow (and don’t). This matters even more when the operative emotions being processed are grief and fear, both of which need nothing as much as the long arc of time to become comprehensible. And yet, for all this seemingly woo-woo chatter, Rescue Me was never for the faint of heart. It was a button-pushing, boundary-flouting, testosterone-fueled slayer of artifice pulling at scabs and seemingly healthy skin alike. Everyone—the Irish, the Jews, the Puerto Ricans, the Italians, the Catholic Church, Sept. 11 widows—was routinely tweaked with matter-of-fact, sometimes-gasp-inducing vulgarity, and none of the show’s best lines can be quoted here. These include the dialogue in one of my favorite moments: a knockout scene that takes place when misogynistic comments to a female firefighter land the crew in sensitivity training. (Let’s just say George Carlin could be the episode’s patron saint.)

Many of the storylines were patently ridiculous, and some of the scenes were unspeakably gruesome—including one in which Tommy looks up after giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a badly burned black boy. “Uh, Tommy,” someone awkwardly notes, “The kid’s lips. … They’re, uh, they’re stuck to yours.” In another one of the show’s most talked-about episodes, Tommy rapes his wife; in the next scene, she is placidly reading a magazine on the couch. Later, one of the characters asserts his belief that Sept. 11 could have been an inside job—an idea that, in a department that lost 343 men that day, is not simply unpatriotic; it’s psychologically destabilizing.

As I hit the third season, I realized that the show’s truly radical element was its lithe toggling between absurd stand-up comedy; reflexive raunchiness; a commitment to civic values, if not the circus of politics; and, last but not least, enough proximity to death to appreciate the importance of emotional and psychological clarity. That’s about as close to a personal motto as I get, which might be why—despite their obvious and insane flaws—I started to almost wish I could know, even live among, the characters of Rescue Me.

Experiencing their perseverations over seven seasons has been, at times, unbelievably frustrating: Tommy’s two concubines approach and repel him like magnets that reverse their charges each morning; Pasquale and Lombardi’s characters rarely stray far from low comedy; and—the see-saw on which every other episode seems to hinge—Tommy routinely jumps on and off the wagon. For a while, this last bit of back-and-forth was the most maddening for me—until I realized that Tommy’s dance with alcohol mimics exactly what it feels like to writhe in a certain kind of extended pain: excruciating, soon exasperating, eventually even boring. In such instances, reaching to anything for relief—including levers that have, time and again, proven useless and even toxic—is not just human; it is almost hopeful. Tommy is an alcoholic who can be racist, chauvinist, manipulative, and cruel, but at least he is fighting to stay alive. And the longer he does, the safer the rest of this city will be. “Let me tell you something,” Tommy spits, before storming out of the sensitivity training session. “Next time I walk into a burning building and refuse to bring out anyone who’s not the same color as me, that’s when you can bring my angry, sober, pink, Irish ass back down here.”

This kind of values-based impropriety is the show’s real argot, and it made working- and middle-class New York sexy again—a welcome respite after the one-two punch of shows like King of Queens, which marked the outer boroughs as havens of schlubby quaintness, and Sex and the City, which gave well-off Manhattan a monopoly on sex and pathos. On Rescue Me, pretense is the hobby of the privileged, and a meaningless, boring one at that. By contrast, Tommy Gavin and Co. live the way we all should—not, as Hallmark cards instruct us, as if every day could be our last, but as if every day was, miraculously, another day: another opportunity to laugh, eat, work, have sex, drink, or smoke, and hardly a thing to waste on superficial rectitude. “The best place to get into a discussion is a firehouse,” according to Tommy. “There’s nothing sacred here.”

Purity demands space—room to keep everyone and everything looking pristine. People in firehouses don’t have the luxury of physical or spiritual space from the imperatives of their own best and worst impulses, or from each other. “That’s the beauty and the terror of it,” Leary told me recently. “I have this group of people who will know everything about me, whether I like it or not—and sometimes before I do.”

It was in this way that Rescue Me’s firehouse grew into a metaphor for my city. Here we live pressed up against each other, in a sweaty, passionate, uncomfortable crush that can, if you let it, melt away artifice and bring out your crudest, most generous, maybe most obnoxious but finally truest self. In the period after Sept. 11, this crush—which I had always viewed as an uncomplicated good—began to seem like a terrifying liability, because it was what made me, and everyone around me here, so vulnerable: One can do so much damage in a small space. Taking this idea as their Archimedean point, the creators of Rescue Me crafted the love letter to New York that I didn’t have the fortitude to write—not a note of simple infatuation, but an unquiet missive from a heartbroken partner, desperately trying to burn off enough pain and fear and rage to stay put.

And I loathe myself for worrying. I have a kid who doesn’t want to be less than perfect. I see it as my job to get her to chill. I don’t want her to pick up on my anxiety. But I am plenty anxious.

I am also a hypocrite. I was so freaking self-congratulatory about her admission to a lovely, warm, diverse, progressive, mixed-age-classroom-having elementary school in our neighborhood. Admission was by lottery, and her admission was by no means assured. So, I’d had her do giftedness testing, in case we needed more options. She spent a year in a middling public pre-K program, where she was punched in the face by a 5-year-old and where an inexperienced classroom teacher had a temper tantrum so severe I watched her kick a door, repeatedly, as hard as she could. When I talked to the school’s parent coordinator about the chaos in the classroom, she blamed other kids in the class. By name.

In any case, Josie was admitted to the lovely little progressive school, so I had the delicious luxury of not having to send her back to the unimpressive school and getting to turn down the gifted program. I used to joke about being the only Jewish mother who didn’t want her kid in a G&T program. “No G&T unless it includes Bombay Sapphire!” I’d joke. Reading some of my early columns, I want to travel back in time to punch myself in the face.

Because if Josie hadn’t gotten in to this school, which I know is an unusual, special place, she’d be in a gifted program.

You see, I had two choices: the gifted program, or a lovely progressive school in another district that she could have attended if I’d lied about where we lived. Tons of New Yorkers do that. An administrator at that school encouraged me to get a friend in that neighborhood to put my name on her ConEd bill to “prove” I lived there. “We’ll never check,” the administrator assured me. “We want families like yours! If we didn’t admit kids from Brooklyn and the East Village we’d have no economic diversity at all!” I decided I wasn’t up for the moral lesson of telling a 5-year-old that rules are for other people, or the reminders that she shouldn’t tell her classmates where she lived lest someone else’s mommy rat us out to the Department of Education. Such manipulation and deception don’t seem very Jewish. So, if Jo hadn’t been admitted, by sheer luck, to her wonderful school, well, I most likely would have sent her to the gifted program. So, I can shut up with mystical fake-chill I don’t-care-about-test-scores self. And believe me, other parents, I really do have sympathy for the hard decisions you have to make as well.

Is it not clear that this system is broken? Test scores are a moronic way to dictate the future of 4-year-olds. I remember a friend’s child, a very bright, very cat-obsessed little girl, who bombed her Stanford-Binet test—the standard intelligence test for children—for Hunter College Elementary because the psychologist administering the test had a home office with a cat closed in the bedroom. The cat yowled to be let out during the entire test, and instead of thinking about triangles and cause-and-effect, the child could only think KITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTY. Tests for four-year olds privilege savvy, well-connected parents with plenty of books and plenty of disposable income. Some very smart little kids simply can’t sit still for a two-hour test, or have separation anxiety or shyness around strange adults. One study found that only 45 percent of the kids who scored 130 or higher on the Stanford-Binet would do so again if tested on another day. That is not surprising.

But here’s the thing: Josie isn’t 4 anymore. We have to decide what happens next. There is a progressive public middle school in my district that doesn’t require a minimum test score, but it’s so popular there is no guarantee she’ll be admitted. So the question returns: Do we also apply for gifted programs? I am embarrassed of how quickly I looked at her standardized test scores when they were available online, and how quickly I looked to see if her scores were high enough for the possibility. I don’t want to be this person.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, people who think standardized tests are a necessary evil, and that they measure what they’re supposed to measure, are not looking at the actual standardized tests our kids are taking. They are crap. On the English sections there are questions that are semi-coherent. There are huge problems with scoring and with tests being used for purposes for which they weren’t devised. If you read Todd Farley’s Making the Grade: Adventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, written by a guy who both constructed and graded tests (sometimes while massively hung over), it will curl your hair. Then we have the issue of schools being financially rewarded or punished for higher test scores, leading teachers and principals to change the kids scores—to cheat. And most distressingly of all, schools are teaching to the tests, sacrificing deep, wide-ranging, multidisciplinary, multifaceted education to train kids how to fill in little bubbles.

And you know whose responsibility it is to fix this? The Jews. We’re the ones who are better-educated than most Americans; we’re the ones whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents came to this country and relied on public education to learn the language and climb the ladder toward the American Dream. Using our privilege to gain a place in a decent program within a broken system doesn’t let us off the hook. (And now that you’ve asked, yes, I do ponder my decision not to send the kids to Jewish Day School—all the time. But that’s another column.) All our school systems should emphasize good citizenship, multilevel instructional approaches, appreciation of diversity in all its forms, empathy, collaboration, individualized education, and professional development to help teachers teach to different levels in one classroom and handle discipline and classroom management. Because that could help all students.

But my kid is really good at filling in the little bubbles. And that’s what I’m angsting about as school starts this year.

Yet the very fact that I felt a certain relief at the omission of Jews from the list, as well as a certain disappointment, forces me to acknowledge that things are not that simple when it comes to Jews and Sept. 11. We insist on separating the two terms so strictly, perhaps, because so many enemies of the Jews have insisted on linking them in false and dangerous ways. For instance, there is the notorious lie that no Jews died in the World Trade Center, because the 4,000 Jews—or, depending on how the rumor is phrased, 4,000 Israelis—who worked there were warned to stay home. (The origin of this rumor, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, seems to be a Jerusalem Post article that reported that the Israeli Foreign Ministry had received inquiries from the relatives of 4,000 Israelis believed to be in New York City on Sept. 11.) After the attacks, this idea gained traction on the far right and far left, with everyone from David Duke to Amiri Baraka, and it remains disturbingly current in the Muslim world. Eventually the U.S. State Department had to issue a rebuttal pointing out that, in fact, somewhere between 200 to 400 of the ground zero victims were Jewish, in keeping with the proportion of Jews in the local population.

On the one hand, this anti-Semitic rumor is meant to deny Jews a part in the national mourning over Sept. 11, to suggest that they had not suffered their share. In this sense, it is like the (false) allegations of German anti-Semites that Jews had not served in the army in World War I. On the other hand, of course, the accusation of Jewish absence is really supposed to be a proof of Jewish presence: If Jews stayed home on Sept. 11, it must be because other Jews knew what was coming and warned them.

Thus, anti-Semitic rumors suggest that the Mossad brought down the twin towers, either because the real hijackers could not have possessed the technical ability to do so, or because Israel was the real beneficiary of the War on Terror. (A strange kind of benefit, one might think, looking at the history of Israel over the last 10 years.) The power of the slander lies not in its plausibility but in the diabolical way it confounds rebuttal. If Jews are accused of staying home on Sept. 11, they can point to the State Department for a defense; but then the anti-Semite’s question becomes, why is the American government so solicitous of Jewish honor? Is it not because, in the words of one fringe anti-Semite quoted in the ADL report, “our government has for decades been used to further the interests of Israel at the expense of the interests of the American people”?

Some lowlife rabble-rouser said that, but in the years since Sept. 11, an increasing number of respectable people have been saying things close enough to it. Thanks to Stephen Walt (of Harvard) and John J. Mearsheimer (of the University of Chicago), the phrase “Israel Lobby,” often enough translated into “Jewish Lobby,” has become almost as commonplace in American leftist discourse as the phrase “Jewish syndicate” was among the French right during the Dreyfus Affair. Think of how common it was, five or six years ago, to hear opponents of the Iraq War reel off the names of the so-called neoconservatives whose fault it allegedly was—always Jewish names like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith. Remember the bizarre ingenuity that traced the invasion of Iraq to the teachings of a long-dead Jewish mastermind, Leo Strauss.

In this way, the anti-neoconservative rhetoric of the post-Sept. 11 left managed to do for Osama Bin Laden what he could never have achieved on his own. It gave currency and respectability to his belief that events in general, and American policy in particular, can be explained only by reference to Jewish power. This idea is pervasive in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, a book that is necessary to read in the same way that Mein Kampf was once necessary.

Take, for instance, Bin Laden’s statement of Oct. 6, 2002, titled “To the Americans.” “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” he begins, and the first of dozens of enumerated reasons is “You attacked us in Palestine.” In this “you,” the distinction between America, Israel, and the Jews ceases to exist, a point that becomes explicit later on: “[T]he creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals.” Later, in the course of explaining why America is “the worst civilization witnessed in the history of mankind,” Bin Laden explains that “the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense.”

The only proper response to this kind of evil fantasy is to ignore it; yet for American Jews, it was hard to ignore. For the insidious power of this discourse was the way it made American Jews self-conscious about something that should, by rights, have been a source of pride: the identity of American and Jewish interests and values in the post-Sept. 11 age (which is not the same thing as the identity of American and Israeli policies). One reaction, perhaps the first reaction, to hearing Bin Laden’s rhetoric—or its echoes in the words of Walt and Mearsheimer, or Helen Thomas—is to deny its poisonous premise that “the Jews” are running America or America is serving “the Jews.” That denial is true, of course. But it leaves those who insist on it looking, and feeling, scared. It places American Jews in the paradoxical position of denying their own patriotism and belittling their own power.

***

A better response emerges in one of the defining books of the post-Sept. 11 period, Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. What Berman shows, in his analysis of the intellectual genealogy of al-Qaida, is that there’s a good reason why the Jews should occupy a central position in the fight between America and what he called Islamism or Muslim totalitarianism—and not because this is a fight about or against Jewish power. Rather, as in Europe in the 1930s, the fate of the Jews is a bellwether for the fate of liberalism—a social order founded on individual rights, secularism, private property, and the rule of law. Since the first, partial emancipation of European Jews in the French Revolution, Jews have thrived in liberal societies and suffered in illiberal ones. This makes perfect sense when you consider that the Jews, as a tiny and historically persecuted minority in the Christian world, could succeed only to the extent that they were allowed to live as free individuals, in a free society.

Historically, then, the fate of the Jews is tied to the fate of liberalism; and after Sept. 11, Berman showed, the greatest threat to liberal values came from Islamic fundamentalists, who spoke about Jews in terms borrowed from European fascists. Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, blamed Islam’s problems on Marx and Freud: “[T]he atheistic, materialistic doctrine in our world was advocated by a Jew, and the permissive doctrine which is sometimes called ‘the sexual revolution’ was advocated by a Jew. Indeed, most evil theories which try to destroy all values and all that is sacred to mankind are advocated by Jews.” This, as Berman points out, is not theological anti-Judaism (though Qutb voiced that variety as well) but the kind of anti-modern anti-Semitism that identifies the Jew with social dissolution and rootless individualism. But these are the very same things that, when considered as values rather than vices, we think of as essentially American: freedom of the individual, free thought, pluralism.

For the most part, I would leave Exit Art’s stark, hollow exhibition space with the same cry on my lips that unites so many uninformed visitors of contemporary galleries: This is art? Even I can do that. I was often outraged, but I was never bored. And I returned, year after year, strangely drawn to the highly conceptual spectacles on display. I didn’t understand much about the art at Exit Art, but I was strangely drawn to it.

When I read Jeanette Ingberman’s obituary this weekend, my fascination became a bit clearer. The co-founder of Exit Art—together with her partner, the artist Papo Colo—died of leukemia at 59 last week. The obituary in the New York Times touched on all the expected milestones: doyenne of the avant-garde, champion of artists, believer in socially and politically conscious art. But the most curious revelation came somewhere toward the bottom, along with other dutiful bits of biography: Ingberman, the obituary said, attended Yeshiva of Flatbush, the renowned modern Orthodox day school in Brooklyn.

Suddenly, all those spirited, odd installations made perfect sense. They were conceived by a woman trained in forms, or, more accurately, trained to wander down all possible avenues of one particular form, the Talmud. While Judaism’s prohibition on idols might have made for a poor aesthetic tradition, its proclivity toward concepts, toward translating grand and ethereal notions into daily practices, made it stellar training for anyone interested in the heady world of idea-driven modern art.

In this light, I revised my view of the installations I had seen at Exit Art. Taken at face value, the works still seemed banal. The painted eggs, for example, represented fragility; piled up, they were meant to evoke the aftermath of a massacre. And the sweeping man was Sisyphus with a broom, here to remind us of the repetitiveness and the futility of our existence. For both works, and many more like them, the meaning is immediately clear, the experience not particularly interesting. But when you see the same works through a different lens, sharper and more Talmudic, a hidden layer appears. Suddenly, the sweeping man is inviting you to meditate not only on the futility of life but also on the futility of the acts of creating art and, perhaps, of consuming it. All art, after all, is transient: Even a great painting exists for us, godlike, only during the rare and brief moments in which we interact with it. When we leave the museum and go home, we’re left with a memory, an idea. Art is terribly ephemeral that way, and to understand it, to enjoy it, we build systems of looking and recalling.

The art Ingberman promoted challenged those systems repeatedly. In a 2000 interview with the Times, she explained her philosophy bluntly. “We’re constantly asking ourselves: ‘What is an exhibition, anyway?’ ” She knew, of course, that there was no answer. A yeshiva graduate, she was no stranger to the thankless and endless and intoxicating task of dedicating one’s life to interpreting something that is by definition fleeting and ultimately unknowable. But she never stopped trying, and it’s why I, and so many others, kept coming back even if the immediate reaction was bafflement or dislike; we, too, understood that our mission as spectators was to follow Ingberman’s lead and wonder with her, wonder about what art is and how we are to make sense of it in our own lives. Ingberman is gone, but her work, like that of the best Talmudic scholars, lives on, inviting us to argue.

The three historic Manhattan cemeteries belong to Congregation Shearith Israel, a Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in Manhattan and the oldest Jewish congregation in North America, established in 1654. They are perhaps the most durable legacy of New York City’s long-ago Jewish past. The Shearith Israel congregation was founded by 23 Jewish refugees, descendents of Spanish Jews, exiled during the Inquisition, who fled from Recife, Brazil, after it was taken from the Dutch by the Portuguese. They were fleeing anti-Semitism but were greeted coldly by Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general of the colony of New Netherland. From 1654 until 1825, Shearith Israel was the only Jewish congregation in New York City. In its long history, membership of the congregation has included Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, three founders of the New York Stock Exchange, and the poet Emma Lazarus, whose famous words from “The New Colossus” are affixed to the Statue of Liberty. Shearith Israel—the name translated is “Remnant of Israel”—owns a Torah that dates to the American Revolution.

The First Cemetery of Shearith Israel is in southern Manhattan, above the first neighborhoods of New York City; it is the oldest Jewish cemetery in North America. The lot sits near Chatham Square in Chinatown and is lined with the graves of, among others, 22 veterans of the American Revolution and the first American-born rabbi. It was once a place where residents of nearby tenements would hang up their wash, and its trees provided cover for George Washington to hide a battery of guns from the British during the American Revolution. The cemetery, which operated from 1683 until 1828, is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

If you walk north, in the direction the city grew, the Second Cemetery is easier to miss. It sits on a small tract on West 11th Street, just east of 6th Avenue, amid perfectly maintained Greenwich Village townhouses. Established in 1805, the cemetery was cut significantly in size when the expanding city built 11th Street on the city grid as a part of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811.

Twenty headstones from the original Second Cemetery are still standing on 11th Street, beside an old red brick building that was once a Civil War tavern known as The Grapevine, where Union officers would carouse and Southern spies eavesdrop—the origin of the phrase “I heard it through the grapevine,” made famous a century later thanks, variously, to Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye, and a cartoon box of singing raisins.

Of Shearith Israel’s three historic cemeteries, it’s the third that is the most visibly disjointed from its urban enclosure. Unlike the Second Cemetery, an elfin triangle tucked away on a small tree-lined street in Greenwich Village, or the First, which blends in with the nondescript stacks and ramshackle structures of Chinatown, the Third sits on an anonymous block of 21st Street, just west of 6th Avenue. The lot for the Third Cemetery was purchased in 1829 for the then-princely sum of $2,750. Like for the others, at the time of its purchase, the area surrounding the Third Cemetery was still considered to be the outskirts of New York City.

Buildings on three sides make the tract appear diminutive and boxy, like a missing tooth. Large black gates block public entrance from the street. The cemetery operated until 1851, after which a law was enacted forbidding burial anywhere south of Manhattan’s 86th Street. The Third Cemetery has about 250 graves, some of them still legible, others too effaced to read.

To the east of the graveyard once stood the third iteration of the Shearith Israel Synagogue. When the synagogue moved to its present location on an erstwhile duck farm on Central Park West, the old building became Hugh O’Neill’s Dry Goods Store. The O’Neill Building later came under the ownership of the El-Ad Group, an Israeli company whose American real-estate arm converted the building into condominiums, as it did with the Plaza Hotel after purchasing the landmark in 2004. To the west of the cemetery stands another condominium. Nearby, on Seventh Avenue, is the storefront of New York’s newest Trader Joe’s, which is fittingly, among other things, a dry-goods store.

Sentencing Lebovits to the maximum term of up to 32 years in jail, DiMango told the courtroom that both the victim, who was a recovering drug addict, and Lebovits, who had been abused as a boy, epitomized “the ultimate harm and havoc” of sexual abuse. At the time, Lebovits was one of a string of men who had been hauled before a judge on what seemed like an almost monthly basis to face charges of sexually abusing boys. By last spring, the Brooklyn District Attorney had indicted and prosecuted almost 30 men over a period of about 18 months, many of them teachers and rabbis, in what was perceived to be a crackdown on abuse in the ultra-Orthodox world.

Then, this April, without warning, Baruch Lebovits walked out of jail.

Lebovits was free on $250,000 bail following the arrest of a rabbi, Samuel Kellner, on charges of bribery and witness tampering. Kellner was charged with giving a boy—not the boy who addressed the court, but another alleged victim—$10,000 to falsely testify he had been abused by Lebovits and of threatening to bring more victims forward unless the Lebovits family paid him $400,000. Today, the matter is still unresolved.

Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes told a press conference that he remained confident the victim whose testimony secured Lebovits’ conviction—the young man who had addressed the court—was telling the truth and that Lebovits would return to jail. But, regardless of the outcome, the episode represented a major setback for Jewish victims of abuse.

For the past few years, survivors’ advocates have been chipping away at the communal wall of silence that has surrounded abuse in the ultra-Orthodox world and at the various halakhic justifications that have been given for dealing with the issue internally through Jewish courts, known as beit dins. The allegations that now complicate the Lebovits case epitomize some of the worst fears within the community: that the so-called victims are liars, that the secular authorities do not always get the right man, and that, without rabbis as a firewall, innocent people can be publicly shamed and put in prison.

There is little doubt, even among leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community, that sexual abuse of children is a serious problem. As more victims and their families have come forward in recent years, reports of abuse have proliferated. Dov Hikind, a state assembly member whose district includes Borough Park, claims to have gathered material on hundreds of such cases, largely from personal testimony.

The more pressing issue is how to solve that problem. Victims’ advocates and law-enforcement officials continue to urge survivors to report cases to social services or the police. But some leading rabbis in ultra-Orthodox communities like Borough Park continue to insist that adults who suspect abuse must consult a rabbi before reporting it to the authorities. Earlier this month, Agudath Israel of America, the top Orthodox rabbinic authority in the country, released a statement instructing its followers that only a rabbi can decide whether there is enough suspicion in each case to override the Jewish law of mesirah, which prevents Jews from reporting each other to the secular authorities.

Rabbi Yosef Blau, Yeshiva University’s spiritual adviser and a prominent advocate on behalf of survivors, said Lebovits’ harsh sentence followed by the allegations of witness-tampering and bribery would only make a mistrustful community even more suspicious. “We are dealing with an element within the Orthodox community that feels American society is not their friends,” said Blau. “One would have to think that anything that increases that fear is just going to make it more and more difficult to work with them in future.”

In the wake of Lebovits’ release, at least one advocate did not do his cause any favors. Rabbi Nachum Rosenberg, who regularly uses YouTube and a recorded telephone line to rail against abusers, sided with Kellner. In a telephone interview days after Kellner’s arrest for witness tampering, Rosenberg said that he did not know whether Kellner was guilty. “I wasn’t with him at the time,” he said. But shortly afterward, he asserted that the allegations against Kellner were false. “It’s a 100 percent hoax,” he said, before launching into a tirade against Hynes, which included the accusation that the D.A. turned a blind eye to abuse in return for favors from the strictly Orthodox hierarchy. (The D.A. declined to comment on this and other issues related to Lebovits’ case.)

Kellner denies the charges against him. Nevertheless, many advocates are wary of springing to his defense. One, who did not wish to be named, called Rosenberg’s allegiance with Kellner “unfortunate.” “You can’t maintain credibility in these cases by refusing to hear people are behaving badly,” the advocate said.

If Rosenberg comes out of the episode with his reputation diminished, then the D.A. fares little better. During Lebovits’ trial, his family claimed the accusations against him were financially motivated. Yet the D.A. appears to have done nothing to follow up on those claims.

Instead, Lebovits’ defense team hired a private detective to gather the evidence that eventually led to Kellner’s arrest. That detective, Joe Levin, was quoted soon after Lebovits’ release, on the blog Failed Messiah, saying that despite the material he gathered against Kellner, he still believed that Lebovits was guilty. But in a more recent interview, Levin claimed that he was misquoted. “He is clean,” Levin said of Lebovits.

What is clear is that Lebovits’ case highlights just how complex sexual-abuse prosecutions can be. Victims, often as a result of the trauma they have suffered, frequently appear in court with convictions for drug use or petty crime. Victims’ advocates can be erratic and prone to see conspiracy at every turn. Abusers often turn out to have once been abused themselves. Last year, Lebovits’ defense team was joined by the high-profile lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who has called for a new trial. But Lebovits’ fate seems to rest on Kellner, whose next court date, a hearing, is currently set for September 6.

Paul Berger, a staff writer at the Forward, is the co-author or contributing editor of seven books. He has also written for the New York Times, the Daily, and the Jewish Chronicle.

Clarification, August 23: The phone conversation between reporter Paul Berger and Joe Levin, the private detective hired by Lebovits’ defense team, during which Levin said that Lebovits was “clean,” took place in April. Since then, Levin twice declined to comment further on the Lebovits case. In an interview with Tablet Magazine today, Levin said that he had made the original comment in haste, that he had not been misquoted on the Failed Messiah blog, and that he did not wish to talk further on the record because both the Lebovitz and Kellner cases are still open.

Bloomberg dispensed wooden handshakes and rubber smiles as he shuffled to the stage, where an orange banner boasted “Progress at Work.” This was in January, at Bloomberg’s 10th State of the City address, and his public speaking skills were as remedial as ever. He paid slavish attention to the two teleprompters, switching screens at each punctuation mark. “Let me be clear,” he said, whipping his eyes from left to right, “we will not raise taxes to balance the budget”—right to left—“we will choose a third approach”—left to right—“a smarter approach.” Every time Bloomberg neared a potential applause break his words took on more speed and volume but no emotional valence, so that he seemed to be shouting his audience down, preventing them from clapping.

Voters do not want to have a beer with Bloomberg. He is no Bill Clinton, who charmed his way to prominence despite humble roots, and he is no George W. Bush, who managed to seem approachable despite a privileged upbringing. Raised a Conservative Jew in Medford, Mass., Bloomberg is a middle-class boy who likes getting things done. The mayor’s detractors say he has succeeded in electoral politics only because his personal fortune allows him to buy up huge amounts of campaign advertising and because Americans, despite a stubborn streak and a growing antipathy to government, tend to do what television tells them to do. His boosters say that with no debts to unions and no rainbow coalition, he has nothing to run on but his record. He can’t even count on fealty from his younger daughter, Georgina, who recently released an autobiographical novel that may prove embarrassing to the administration. (Asked about her father by the New York Times, Georgina responded with nervous laughter before hopping a plane to Bermuda.)

When reporters ask him if he’ll ever run for president, Bloomberg usually quips that a short, divorced Jewish billionaire could never win. “Part of that joke is that being Jewish is actually not a barrier to running for president, not anymore,” says William Adler, who teaches political science at Yeshiva University. The other part of the joke is that this is more or less the only time Bloomberg plays up his ancestry. “He doesn’t talk Jewish, he doesn’t act Jewish,” says one prominent Jewish (and Jewish-acting) New York Democrat. “I don’t hear anything out of him, in pacing, in tone, in Yiddishisms—it’s even less than the average gentile New Yorker.”

Like most big American cities, New York has a history of sectarian politics. Tammany Hall was an Irish organization. Fiorello LaGuardia, the most revered mayor in the city’s collective memory, succeeded partly because he was a powerful ethnic hybrid—half Italian and half Jewish, fluent in both Italian and Yiddish. “Bloomberg is not interested in ethnic power plays, pitting blacks against Italians—he’s not interested in playing that game,” said Adler. “Then again, he plays a different game, which is called buying your vote. Maybe that’s one of those ‘only in New York’ things. Maybe a rich Jew buying power in Denver or Atlanta wouldn’t play so well.”

In a way, it’s remarkable that anti-Semitic tropes are not more widespread among Bloomberg’s detractors. Among other things, he comes about as close as one person can to controlling the media and finance, with his Bloomberg news service and omnipresent Bloomberg terminals used by Wall Street traders. It may be a testament to his political skill, or to the permissiveness of the current cultural moment, that Bloomberg has still been able to render his Jewishness moot. Whereas Ed Koch used his conspicuous Jewishness as a political tool, Bloomberg is Jewish by blood but not necessarily by temperament. Even Koch notices the difference. “He has his own style,” Koch told me of Bloomberg. “I get emotional. His style is much cooler.”

Bloomberg is a technocrat first and an assimilated Jew second. “Bloomberg has created a space where a Jewish politician no longer has to choose between two traditional molds, the left-wing social justice model or the neocon model,” said the Columbia University political scientist David Epstein. “Any politician—but especially a Jewish politician—can now campaign saying ‘I’ll be an effective Bloomberg-style manager,’ and everyone will intuit what that means.” A few weeks after we spoke, a Jew was elected mayor in Chicago, giving credence to Epstein’s words. Rahm Emanuel is less quiet and less rich than Bloomberg, but he won by playing down his partisan past and running as a pragmatist.

Up the block from Epstein’s Columbia office, at a deli on the corner of West 121st Street and Broadway, I asked the owner his opinion of the mayor. Amni Samhoury was born in Jordan but has lived in Bensonhurst for the last 40 years. “So far he’s a good mayor,” Samhoury said from behind the counter. “The problem is he’s making no place for poor people in the city, no place for middle-wage people.”

I asked Samhoury if he’d voted for Bloomberg. “Of course,” he said. Explaining that I was writing for a Jewish magazine, I asked if his opinion had been swayed one way or the other by Bloomberg’s Jewishness. “I’ll tell you the truth,” Samhoury told me in a bright, helpful tone. “The Jews control the economy. It’s been like this for decades. Not only the United States—they have so many countries under their control.”

“And you voted for a Jew anyway?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” Samhoury said. “He knows business, he knows politics. He performs the job well.”

Samhoury then overcharged me for my soda and gum, but I kept quiet.

***

Both of my grandmothers live in Manhattan—Clare on the Upper West Side and Dorothy near Sutton Place, not far from the apartment where Bloomberg lived before his move to East 79th Street. Grandma Clare aligns, at least superficially, with the kvelling, brisket-cooking, calling-to-make-sure-you’re-warm-enough stereotype of a Jewish grandmother. Grandma Dorothy is also genetically Jewish, but quietly so. To put it crudely, Clare is a brash, Koch-style Jew, while Dorothy is an assimilated Jew of the Bloomberg variety.

I went to visit Clare in the cafeteria of her senior home on West End Avenue. “Maria, this is my baby boy,” she told a woman wearing a hairnet and scooping potato salad onto my tray. “He’s come to put me in an article and make me famous!” I carried her tray to the table, where we sat in plastic rolling chairs and ate our toast. I asked her what she thought about Bloomberg. “I don’t like what he’s doing to the unions,” she bellowed. “And housing! Where are middle-class people supposed to live? Long Island?” Clare grew up speaking Yiddish in Brooklyn. Her father, my great-grandfather, was a member of the Workmen’s Circle, a labor-rights organization founded by socialist Jews in 1900. When David Epstein talked of a “left-wing social justice” tradition in Jewish politics, he was talking about my grandma Clare. Bloomberg got no points with her for being nominally Jewish—it didn’t count against him, certainly, but it did not excuse his centrism.

The next week, the doorman at Dorothy’s building showed me upstairs. Inside, Dorothy apologized for the mess in her foyer: She’d been redecorating. She showed off a new batch of Zimbabwean sculptures she’d placed on pedestals in the living room. Three books were stacked on her mid-century coffee table under a crystal paperweight: Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920s, The Jews of Germany, and The Very Rich: A History of Wealth.

Dorothy’s father was an Orthodox immigrant who owned a laundromat in the Bronx. Dorothy worked her way through night school to become one of the first women to join the NYU Law Review. She made her own money and invested it wisely and still works part-time as an arbiter at the New York Stock Exchange. She thinks in contemporary American society hard work and intelligence are rewarded.

We walked down East 58th Street to a French bistro in a converted townhouse. Grandma Dorothy ordered salmon, well done; I had the striped bass in lobster sauce and Diet Coke in a cocktail glass. “I admire his integrity, the way he’s willing to stand up to the unions,” Dorothy said about Bloomberg. “He grew up middle class, but he happened to be smart enough to develop an amazing company, and now he’s brought his skills to politics. I think he’s a wonderful manager, and his money allows him to maintain his independence. I also like that he calls his mother on the phone every day.” (Bloomberg’s mother, Charlotte, a New Jersey native and the daughter of a Russian immigrant, died at 102 on Sunday.)

“Does your support of him have to do with the fact that he’s Jewish?” I asked.

“I like that he’s Jewish,” she said, “but it has nothing to do with my opinion of him. Ed Koch was Jewish, and I hated him. He was an egomaniac.”

“You don’t buy the rap that Bloomberg is out of touch with the common man?” I asked her.

“Of course not,” she said. “He takes the subway to work.”

Andrew Marantz is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in New York, Slate, the New York Times, and other publications.

The scene came back to bite Schneier a year later when the marriage—Schneier’s fourth—disintegrated. Within months, stories appeared in the New York tabloids hinting at Schneier’s romance with a speech pathologist more than a decade his junior. The rabbi responded with a sensational disclosure of his own: He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “He has been dealing with a very serious illness, and we will have no comment on rumor or innuendo,” Schneier’s friend, the public-relations powerhouse Ken Sunshine, told the New York Post. A joke began circulating about what the rabbi’s new girlfriend could get him for his next birthday: “A bipolar bear.”

Schneier, who founded the Hampton Synagogue in Long Island’s summer playground, advertises himself as an 18th-generation scion of a European rabbinic dynasty. He is also one of the few clergy who occasionally turns up in the gossip pages, more often for his secular antics than for his religious pursuits. Last August, as Schneier’s divorce battle turned ugly, the New York Daily News published grainy private-eye images of the rabbi in workout clothes canoodling with his girlfriend, Gitty Leiner, during a Passover vacation in Israel. (His divorce from Tobi is still being litigated, and in the spring, he traveled to South Florida to celebrate Passover with both Leiner and his only child, 12-year-old Brendan, from his third marriage.)

In public, Schneier’s supporters and benefactors have dismissed his travails as a private matter disconnected from his professional duties as a religious authority and communal leader. “As far as what he does in interfaith relations, the personal side does not seem to have impaired his ability to do his work,” said Michael Schneider, the secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress. “We’re not the morality police, and as far as I’m aware he has not committed any criminal act.” Schneier’s congregants have similarly closed ranks behind him. “We all know he has personal issues in his life, and he either got divorced or will be getting divorced, but that’s his personal life,” said Harvey Kaylie, a Long Island electronics manufacturer who has been among the Hampton Synagogue’s most generous donors. “The success and the feeling and the rewards people get from the synagogue—I can’t compare it to any other synagogue, so he must be doing something right.” Schneier’s friend Jay Rosenbaum, the rabbi of a Reform congregation in suburban Long Island and a former officer of the New York Board of Rabbis, introduced him at a Martin Luther King, Jr. event last winter this way: “He is an individual who does what is right. A courageous soul. A true religious personality. A leader not only of world Jewry, but truly, a world leader.”

Nevertheless, in the weeks after the photographs of Schneier and Leiner appeared, officers of the Rabbinical Council of America, the professional association of Orthodox rabbis—of which Schneier is a member—quietly asked Schneier to resign, a development reported by the Jewish Week. When Schneier declined, the group convened a formal board of inquiry to determine whether he had failed to maintain the standards of decorum expected of an Orthodox rabbi. (Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, the president of the RCA, told me that the inquiry remains open.) Around the same time, Schneier went on sabbatical from his synagogue, an off-season absence he publicly explained as a leave for a book project he is developing with the imam of Manhattan’s largest mosque. Jerry Levin, a synagogue trustee, told me, “We agreed on a sabbatical. I don’t know that we ever got into details of what it was for.” (Schneier says he has not yet signed a publishing contract for the book.)

In the past year, Schneier has been as visible as ever, jetting around the world to represent Jewish interests in a variety of forums. In October, he went to Qatar in his capacity as a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, of which he is a former chairman, to attend an interfaith summit and used his keynote to rebuke an imam in the name of his fellow Jews. “For millennia we have prayed toward Jerusalem,” the rabbi said. “It is therefore an insult to all of us to accuse us of illegally occupying the city.” The next month, he was in London speaking at the House of Lords. More recently, he’s met with Donald Trump about the developer’s abortive presidential campaign, and been consulted by the Los Angeles Times on the Jewish reaction to President Barack Obama’s Middle East peace plan. Virtually the only real price Schneier has paid for his indiscretion has been his conspicuous absence from Newsweek’s annual ranking of the 50 most influential rabbis in America, after he made the list in 2009 and 2010. In an interview, Schneier said that he had been ineligible for this year’s edition because of his pulpit leave of absence. (In response to a query from Tablet, Newsweek said that was not the case. “No rabbis under consideration were disqualified because of sabbatical status,” said Abigail Pogrebin, who helped compile this year’s list.)

Schneier has now returned to the pulpit in Westhampton Beach he has occupied for 21 years. Last week, more than a hundred congregants, many of them elderly, turned out, at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night, to celebrate Shavuot. The rabbi, who wore a beige blazer and an open-collared shirt, led a lively debate about the specifically Jewish view of the biblical Ten Commandments. The synagogue’s full calendar for the summer season, featuring a performance by the Broadway star Tovah Feldshuh and an evening with political commentator Peter Beinart, testifies to the rabbi’s undiminished clout—and to the willingness of his colleagues and his wealthy backers to let him remain in place as one of the most prominent spokespeople for American Jewry.

***

At 52, Schneier cultivates a manicured presence. He wears eyeglasses from the high-end French brand Fred—which he usually takes off before speaking in public, because, he told me, he thinks he looks at least five years younger without them—and favors French-cuffed shirts accented with Hermès ties. He has a round face framed by receding curls, which on his stocky frame lends him more than a passing resemblance to Bert Lahr. Since his diagnosis as bipolar last year, Schneier says, he has become a “treadmill freak.” “I’ve lost 25 pounds since June,” he told me in March as we walked to a Washington hotspot called Bistro Bis, where we sat down for an extended interview over dinner. After being told that his favorite meal—tuna tartare—was unavailable on the dinner menu, Schneier ordered a beet salad and a mushroom risotto, which in deference to kashrut he asked to have prepared with a vegan base.

Even after going through the tabloid wringer, Schneier still prides himself on the attention he gets from the press. When I asked him about an old clip about a Passover Seder he celebrated in 1993 with Raul Julia, Schneier immediately nodded, saying, “Yeah, on ‘Page Six.’ ” When I said the item I’d seen had come from the Jewish Forward, he shook his head. “Also on ‘Page Six,’ ” he insisted, referring to the New York Post’s legendary gossip roundup. “No, no, it was ‘Page Six.’ ”

Continue reading: the family business, Modern Orthodox day school, and the Westhampton Shab-bus. Or view as a single page.

As the 20th century reached its midpoint, tunesmiths moved elsewhere. (The Brill Building, famously home to later generations of songwriters, is just north of Times Square.) Old buildings came down while new ones went up, and our portion of West 28th is now a bustling commercial hodge-podge bookended by the flower district to the west and the perfume district to the east. To learn more about our new neighborhood—where Emma Goldman founded her anarchist magazine, too, and Zero Mostel had a painting studio—Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke to Jim Mackin, a New York City historian and tour guide, about West 28th Street, how specialized commercial districts come into being, and Irving Berlin’s first big hit. [Running time: 16:17.]

I’d hopped a cab to Ground Zero after President Barack Obama’s speech, wanting to keep that good feeling. I wanted to feel even better: ecstatic-mob better. V-day, moon landing, Berlin wall falling, once-in-a-generation-and-this-one-was-mine happy. And I felt it, I did. I might have felt it even more if the announcement hadn’t come after the liquor stores closed. I chanted, and sang, but I didn’t dance or climb the traffic lights. I just couldn’t get 100 percent into it. I felt like a poseur. It just wasn’t my scene.

Not that Gottlieb’s was really my scene either. My Reform Midwestern upbringing didn’t include a Glatt Kosher deli restaurant—let alone one like Gottlieb’s, in the heart of a neighborhood like Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn—but it did have tables covered in food, surrounded by arguing Jews. If I wanted to be part of the moment, that’s what I needed.

The rent on a tish at Gottlieb’s is a turkey sandwich and an order of French fries. Mine arrived via the capable hands of Menashe Gottlieb, the orange-bearded, red-haired proprietor of the restaurant, who then sat himself down across from me. His eyes were happy as he remembered the night before in the restaurant.

“Everyone started screaming, we got him, we got him,” he said.

According to Joel Tyrnauer, a thickly built 25-year-old janitor with close-cropped hair, in South Williamsburg the news prompted, among other things, a wedding to break into a rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

“It’s a big achievement. I don’t think it ends terrorism, but it is still a big deal,” he explained. “Everyone’s very happy. It’s a great moment.”

That happiness, however, was the only thing anyone agreed on in the deli over the next few hours, as customer/pundits butted heads over the event’s significance.

The largest sticking point for many was whether Obama deserved “credit” for the operation. While Gottlieb was happy with the president’s performance, many were uncomfortable with the idea.

Moishy Finklestein, a 21-year-old student sitting alone with a bowl of pasta salad, was in his father-in-law’s kitchen with his brothers-in-law when they all simultaneously received the same CNN news alert. Their reaction, he said, was “Whoa.”

Finklestein initially seemed torn over whether the president deserved any credit, but he concluded that Obama performed well. “At the end of the day,” he said, “he did the job.” He also said that despite some misgivings he felt more favorably toward Obama.

“He’s lucky it happened on his watch,” Tyrnauer told me as he waited in line to order. “He didn’t do anything. It’s his luck. He did one good thing in his life. He did his job and that’s why he gets credit, not for what he’s done. It doesn’t change the fact of who he is.”

A man calling himself Abraham Weiss shared the feeling. “He shouldn’t get credit. Why does he get it? Anyone would have done it. He deserves no credit at all.” (I later learned that this wasn’t his real name. There was a run of people giving false names and occupations, only to be betrayed by eavesdropping fellow patrons.)

A table of three white-bearded men strongly disagreed.

Isaac Gratt, a Gottlieb’s counterman with thick expressive Dumbledore eyebrows, insisted that Obama should get high credit, for “authorizing the mission, for how he presented it in his speech, for being the commander in chief, and for being bold.” Gratt said he believes Obama is Muslim, but he praised the president because, as he said, “he’s a Muslim and he’s got the guts to do it. It proves he’s an American president.”

His friend, an elderly man clad in all black, agreed. “The president is not just for his people, but for the whole American people. That is what the USA is all about.”

“He will get up in the polls,” predicted Gratt. “Especially after the speech. He presented it so well.”

One of his table-mates, however, was more cautious. “He did an excellent job,” he said, “but Americans are still waiting to see how the economy goes.”

Gratt, who emigrated from England in 1963, soon turned into something of a ringmaster, pointing out people he thought would speak with me (he was often wrong), and interjecting his own opinions when they did.

“I’m upset it gives him a boost to his re-election,” interjected “Donald,” a large man in a blue plaid shirt and short beard at a nearby table.

“It’s a free country. He’s entitled to his opinion,” said Gratt, as he shrugged.

Morty Danino, a construction worker sporting a five o’clock shadow, believed that if Israel had been hunting Bin Laden, they would have found him years ago. “They don’t give up,” he said. “They say they find him: They find him.”

After Danino left, Gratt sidled up to me once again and noted slyly that the hunt for the last conspirators of the Munich massacre stretched decades.

Another man who gave his name as Jacob was discussing the assassination with Joe, an electrician, and Victor, who works in construction. Jacob, a tall man with a round serious face, told me he worked with computers, although I was later told he is the sole owner of a large supermarket in Flatbush. Joe, who sported surprisingly luxurious black hair and the longest payot I’d ever seen, was quieter then his companions. Victor, on the other hand, a tan gentile with grey Trump-esque hair, was slightly more gregarious. He believed that the assassination could have been carried out earlier. “It was put off for political reasons,” he said.

Jacob protested: “They did the best they could.”

I then met Shlomo Bursaf, 31, who subjected me to a brief interrogation before answering any of my questions. Wearing a blue hoodie, he watched me slowly beneath long scarecrow hair and a scraggly beard.

“What is it you do exactly?” he asked me.

“I’m a freelance journalist,” I replied.

“And what does that mean?” he asked. A good question.

“Well,” I tried, “when something happens I go find out about it, I ask people questions and write them down.”

“What does that accomplish?” (I’m still pondering this one.) Bursaf later explained to me how he had psychically predicted three weeks earlier that Bin Laden would soon be killed. His occupation, he said, was “serving God” and “meditation.”

Isaac Friedman had been at Gottlieb’s the night before when the news was announced. His parents had immigrated to Brooklyn from Hungary when Friedman was 2, in 1947. He’s currently recovering from heart surgery, which might mean that he shouldn’t be eating at Gottlieb’s. While we spoke, he continually offered me fried cauliflower and honey-basted chicken wings. He scolded me each time I stopped eating.

Friedman described Bin Laden as a modern Hitler. “He was a tremendous force for leadership. He created hatred and took advantage of poor people.”

He scorned Obama’s critics in the Jewish community. “Maybe Zionists won’t praise him,” he said, “but real religious people will praise him. Hopefully God will get put it in the hats of the people around the world. Just because he doesn’t run everything the way Israelis like, doesn’t mean he’s against Israel. That’s how I feel. Most will get behind him 100 percent.”

Overhearing this, Israel Sturm left his wife at their table to warn me that some of the Hasidim I was interviewing would have “slanted” opinions. An almost 80-year-old psychologist, Sturm lives in Connecticut, but practices in Brooklyn. He wore a sweater vest, a black newsboy cap, and had a white beard cropped in a style that I associate with Hemingway. His spoke slowly, in stilted sentences.

“There’s a lot of stupidity floating around about Obama’s choices. His operations with regard to Israel have been very reasonable; I expect they will continue to be so. What the ignorant conjecture, they will always conjecture.”

Jean Noble, her son Yoni, and her grandson Yehuda were just finishing their meal of stuffed cabbage, corned beef, and, for 2-year-old Yehuda, French fries and pickles. They were from Long Island but made the schlep for the food, they said. Noble is a registered nurse with short kinky hair. When I asked her about what she thought about Bin Laden’s death, she gently argued with Yoni, a smooth-faced law student at Emory dressed smartly in a blue baseball cap, pink shirt, and khakis.

Although her son denied any true significance to Bin Laden’s death, Noble asserted that “it’s symbolically important for America. It brings justice, which is important, but with the backdrop of the Arab Spring it shows a beginning of a new era. His death might bring an end to the radical era.”

Later, we discussed Bin Laden’s burial at sea, which Nobel believed would lessen his martyrdom.

Yoni smiled sardonically and quipped: “We don’t know where Jesus is buried, but it doesn’t change anything.”

An hour later, the Nobles’ table had been taken over by Eli Sussman, a retired inventor in town from Miami for “unexpected surgery.” He was with his son Joel, also from Miami, and his daughter, who declined to give her name because she “didn’t say anything”—although she did punctuate her father’s and brother’s comments with eye-rolling and head-shaking.

The elder Sussman argued that “a lot of tension is going to be in Israel,” although he had some trouble explaining exactly what or why. Joel Sussman argued that with the pact between Hamas and Fatah, Israel has more pressing concerns.

When I asked if he thought Bin Laden’s killing might improve relations between the Jewish community and the U.S. president, he shook his head.

“I don’t think so. The Jewish community is too solid to judge a man from one action,” he said.

Joel, a tan and fit 60-year-old, told me that his daughter had called him from college to ask if there would be repercussions.

“I said to her, ‘Not to worry, the worst is over.’ ”

“It was something in me,” he said over lunch at a Brooklyn café near the apartment he shares with his wife, Liat, and their 2-year-old son, Zohar (glancingly named after Zohar Argov, Israel’s first breakout Mizrahi pop star). “On this instrument, the oud, I could express that. Later, I listened to recordings from that time.” He turned his head to the side, laughing, and lifted his hand dismissively. “It wasn’t good.”

Avital’s humility belies the substance and import of his music: Over the last few years he has become a leading force in a hybrid that synthesizes American jazz, Israeli, Yemeni, Moroccan, and other Arab styles into something genuinely new and vital for its connection to a shared Middle Eastern past. And unlike the self-conscious projects in which many musicians cloak themselves—garments as easily thrown off as put on—Avital’s work has emerged in the course of his search to better understand his identity as a jazz musician, as an Israeli, and as an heir to a Mizrahi cultural tradition historically viewed as inferior by Israel’s Ashkenazi elite.

In 2008, the New Jerusalem Orchestra premiered Avital’s “Debka Fantasia,” an extended composition that unearths the Bedouin roots beneath Israeli folk tunes such as “At Adama (You, Soil).” And in 2009, he presented his “Song of the Earth,” a Middle-Eastern Afro-Jewish musical suite for 13 pieces at Merkin Concert Hall. On March 9, he appeared at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, with the Israeli-Yemenite singer Ravid Kahalani, presenting their joint project, “Yemen Blues.” And on April 2, Avital will perform again with his quartet at the Jazz Gallery, also in New York.

“Omer’s work is very important politically because it represents part of a trend in Israel over the last 10 or 15 years of Mizrahi Sephardim finding public space to reclaim identity,” said Carmel Raz, an Israeli-American violinist and doctoral candidate in music theory at Yale who has performed with Avital. “In the development of Israeli identity, you can be Arab and Jewish and live in Israel. They’re not mutually exclusive. The stage is now open for a broad way of being Jewish.”

Listen to “Eli,” by the group Yemen Blues:

Avital, 39, who has been known to wear a Jewfro, long sideburns, and beads that evoke an Israeli Superfly, grew up in Givatayim, then a middle-class Labor Party redoubt east of Tel Aviv. His late father, Eliyahu, was from a family of mughrabim, North African Jews from Morocco, who emigrated in the late 19th century. His mother, Dalia, comes from a Yemenite family originally from Ta’izz, near Sana’a, home of the great 17th-century poet Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, celebrated by Jews and Arabs alike as the “Shakespeare of Yemen.” While his grandparents prayed as Jews, and lived among Arabs, his parents sought to become secular moderns. Eliyahu, a photographer and free spirit, introduced Omer to big band jazz, Frank Sinatra, European classical, and Arab traditional music. Dalia, dogged and practical, worked for the phone company and pushed her husband to Hebraicize his last name, Abutbul, which means “Father of the Drum.” Abutbul became Avital (“Father of the Dew”), as Israeli as Smith or Jones is American.

“When I grew up, Mizrahi culture was considered garbage compared to the European; nothing to take seriously,” said Avital. “For my parents, there was a survival thing that was key. They wanted for me to be part of something, not grow up in the ghetto. My mother, who is dark-skinned, really suffered. They tried to integrate. They joined the Labor party and believed in the Zionist ideal, but they were laughed at.”

While proclaiming Israel open to all Jews, David Ben-Gurion sometimes referred to Mizrahim as “savages.” “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs,” he wrote in the mid-’60s. “We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.” As the historian Avishai Margalit summarizes: “For the Labor leaders only Ashkenazi Jews had ‘culture’; Oriental Jews had at best a ‘heritage.’ ” In 1977 Menachem Begin exploited their seething resentment, when his right-wing Herut party swept into office with widespread Mizrahi support.

As a boy, Avital won a children’s songwriting contest and began to play an old guitar. He got good enough to audition for the Thelma Yellin School of the Performing Arts, Israel’s predominant incubator of young talent. After a botched first attempt, his mother’s friend, a Yemeni cleaning lady who worked for the school’s music director, got him a second chance. He was accepted, and though generally ostracized for being an Oriental Jew, he was inspired by the sounds of jazz and blues around him and gave up classical guitar for jazz and the acoustic bass. He came under the sway of Emil Ram, a bassist who had studied in New York with Barry Harris at the legendary pianist’s Jazz Cultural Center. Ram, along with the late pianist Amit Golan, who also studied with Harris, carried back to Israel a muscular sense of swing and a historically rooted jazz lexicon.

“He had everything,” remembered Avital. “Meeting Emil meant finding someone who could give you a taste of what was really happening. From then on, I always had Mingus and Ellington in the back of my head.” Avital’s parents felt comfortable watching Omer play jazz, which resonated with Arab music’s tradition of incantation, improvisation, and trance-inducing rhythms.

Before he could pursue a jazz career, Avital, like most high-school graduates in Israel, was compelled to perform mandatory military service, which after a month of basic training he spent in the Air Force Orchestra. At first motivated by a sense of belonging, Avital soon found the experience a nightmare. He was disgusted by what he saw as the army’s anti-Arab and anti-Mizrahi sentiments. He became depressed, buoying himself with incessant chatter about his latest jazz obsession, Clifford Brown, the American bebop trumpeter of the ’50s who co-led a landmark group with tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

“They treat you like human garbage. I met the worst people I ever met. I thought, ‘I don’t want to be living in this country. If this is what’s it’s about, it’s not for me,’ ” he said. “My commander hated me. He’d yell, ‘If I hear the words Clifford Brown one more time, I’m going to send you to grease the bombs in the South!’ I was a bad influence in the orchestra.”

In 1992, following his discharge from the army, Avital boarded a plane with his friend, trombonist Avi Lebovich (the renowned bassist Avishai Cohen was on another flight the same day), and flew to New York to pursue his calling.

“I knew I could play and that what I do doesn’t interest anyone in Israel,” he said. “New York was the place. It allowed me to be something I couldn’t have been without it. I had two dreams: One was to play with the musicians I admired, and the second was to just become a good musician. I just wanted to get better.”

Listen to “Brighter Future,” from Live at Smalls:

Unbeknownst to him, Avital arrived just as a great wave of young jazz talent—global in orientation and possessed of shocking technical proficiency—was cresting in New York. Much of that talent revolved around the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program, where Avital spent a semester getting oriented before continuing his studies at Mannes College. In the early ’90s, New York was full of small bars and restaurants—St. Marks Bar, Nuyorican Poets Café, Zinc Bar, Jules, the Village Gate, the First Street Café—where musicians could play and hang out. (What few are left pay the same or less today as they did then, a sign of a struggling bohemia after dark.) Avital used these opportunities to learn standard tunes and build his confidence.

Now known for the missile-like speed, trajectory, and impact of his improvisation, Avital once remarked that he developed his sound not by acceding to some higher plane of musical understanding, but by deciding at some point only to play—to make heard—those ideas to which he could commit totally: strength through self-editing. To supplement his income he worked for a moving company run by his now brother-in-law.

In 1993 while on a gig at the Village Gate, Avital was heard by the bassist Dwayne Burno, who recommended him to saxophonist Antonio Hart. Hart took him on tour and featured him on his next record, along with Jimmy Cobb, the drummer on Miles Davis’ landmark 1959 recording, Kind of Blue.

Avital also formed his own band, a sextet that featured four tenors, which appeared regularly at Smalls, one of the Greenwich Village clubs where the new wave of young musicians pooled.

“He brought so much, man,” remembered tenor saxophonist Charles Owens, a member of Avital’s group, who plays with a meaty sound that recalls Sonny Rollins. “He was such a badass that when people from Israel were noticed subsequently, they were always compared to him, which was a gift and a curse for them, I suppose, as leaders. I don’t know if he had a specific agenda for an Israeli sound. He was just writing what was in his heart. He brought together jazz, French impressionist harmonies, Middle Eastern rhythms and tonalities, as well as a love for four-part harmony. His pieces were very challenging, not necessarily because there were a lot of notes, but say for example holding the lowest note on your horn for measure after measure, and at a piano or even double piano level. What a great feeling when it came together. Magic.”

New York at that time was, Avital said, an ideal place for exploring his multiple identities. He and guitarist Amos Hoffman would hang out with their friend, a Palestinian oud player and Williamsburg falafel shop owner named Najib Shaheen (brother of the oud player and activist Simon Shaheen), who before buzzing them in would answer his intercom in a mock sinister baritone, “Go away you filthy Jews. You are not welcome here.” In Israel, Avital would take trips to the Sinai desert and spend time with Bedouins. He started speaking with his father in greater depth about North African music and reading about Israel before 1948, when strains of Zionism looked to the Arab, rooted in the land, as an example to emulate rather than a threat to defend against. All the while, his music, characterized by its tuneful gritty romanticism, became more distinctive, personal, and searching.

“I made my own music and people wrote about it. They treated me like I was saying something,” he said. “That wouldn’t have happened in Israel. In New York you can be a human being and think for yourself. In Israel you have to make it your career to think for yourself.”

Listen to “Faith,” from Arrival:

In 1997 Impulse! records signed Avital and prepared to release his first record, Devil Head, but before it could do so, the label dropped the project.

“I was a little disappointed,” said Avital. “I had that band which was going super well. I found myself doing the same things. What do you do next? I had the feeling that I don’t know what I’m doing. And then I met Liat and started this long-distance relationship.”

Avital had been traveling more regularly to Israel, which in the wake of the Oslo accords was slowly becoming a more hopeful place. “Once you had that possibility for peace, it was amazing, that whole Middle Eastern sensibility came to life,” he said. “Israel became a much hipper place for about three years. Everyone was going to India and they brought back a looser vibe. The old Israel was ending. A sense of possibility opens people up.”

Avital started to study Moroccan music and played with Israeli-Arab musicians in Nazareth and the Galilee. He played in joint Jewish and Arab bands with Arnie Lawrence, the American saxophonist who created the jazz program at the New School, made aliyah, and founded the International Center for Creative Music. He moved to Ein Kerem shortly after the events of Sept. 11 and began a course of study combining the European and Middle Eastern musical traditions.

In 2005, longing for the “openness of jazz and society” in New York, Avital returned and began to further develop the concepts he had been working on in Israel. He resurrected his own groups and released a string of albums on Smalls Records, the club’s label. And with the percussionist Yair Harel, the director of the Israel Festival, he co-founded the New Jerusalem Orchestra, which draws on traditional piyutim, or liturgical poems, and the work of modern Israeli poets.

“I’m really trying to rebuild a bridge to the past. I have to learn this tradition. I have to know it,” said Avital. “It’s part of my body. I have to not lose it for the future.”

Avital’s vision of a shared Middle Eastern sound—exuberant, inclusive, and hopeful—could easily provide the soundtrack to the region’s fast-changing present. “In Israel, and in the United States, the Arab world can be seen as unknown, as one block of darkness,” he told me. “And now all of a sudden it’s like the world is seeing the people of these countries for the first time.”

Near Grand Army Plaza he recounted a recent session he had in his apartment with an Iraqi-American trumpeter, a Syrian singer, a Moroccan Berber percussionist, and a Palestinian oud player.

“It was a great vibe,” he said, smiling.

Ben Waltzer is a jazz pianist, journalist, and assistant director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia University.

Irving came to me out of need, which put us on an even footing. This was unexpected, since I owed him a considerable professional debt: In 1969, when I was completing my doctorate at McGill University and teaching sections of the English literature survey course, I petitioned the English Department for permission to introduce courses on Yiddish literature under its aegis. When my colleagues asked how they could justify the inclusion of a subject with no obvious connection to theirs, I pointed out that not a single course in the university dealt with any aspect of Jewish history or culture. Jewish studies would have to start somehow and somewhere: Did they think I’d do better in the German Department? Invited to supply a syllabus, I proposed a course on the Yiddish short story that was based largely on Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s Treasury of Yiddish Stories; almost entirely on its own, it won over my department.

Howe describes in his memoirs the emotional-political pressures of the early 1950s that prompted him to seek refuge in this project of Yiddish translation. Because he read his native language only haltingly, he partnered with a Yiddish poet called “Leyzer” Greenberg, who selected the authors and read his choice of stories aloud until Irving hit on the ones that he liked. In this way, he later quipped, he got to know the lesser Yiddish writers much better than the great ones. As the “outside man” on the project, he conscripted translators from among fellow writers who still knew some Yiddish from home. When Saul Bellow agreed to translate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” Leyzer likewise read the story aloud to him, and Saul sat at the typewriter, translating it sentence by sentence as if taking dictation. The result was so good (if slightly bowdlerized) that Bashevis Singer never allowed Bellow to translate another story, lest Saul be credited for any share of his achievement.

But I digress: I was making the point that Howe and Greenberg’s anthology allowed me to introduce Yiddish literature at McGill. The two men published several more anthologies of Yiddish poetry, essays and stories, until Leyzer’s death in 1977 left Irving without a partner on a project he had come to depend on as the link to his Jewishness.

The most ideologically rigid of the New York Intellectuals, Irving did not change his affiliation over a lifetime. As his fellow leftists turned neo-conservative and their publications edged rightward, he alone remained a socialist, conflating his socialism with what he called Yiddishkayt (Jewishness), so that he could not abandon one without appearing to betray the other. When Jewishness began to matter more to him, he looked for ways to become part of it without compromising his socialist faith, and he’d found a highly creative avenue for this linkage in the transposition of Yiddish literary treasures into English. Leyzer’s death forced him to find a new collaborator on the Yiddish projects that constituted the Jewish portion of his life, and that was how he came to me.

Our first joint venture, The Best of Sholem Aleichem, was conceived when Marty Peretz approached Irving with the idea for this collection to be published by New Republic Books, and Irving—the one with experience—got us to sign away all the rights for $2,000. Irving had composed the introductions to the books he co-edited with Leyzer, but he and I decided to do ours in the form of letters, which we sent back and forth in the days when mail took several days for delivery. Leon Wieseltier, who saw the proofs of the book, asked me whether I noticed that whereas my letters responded to Irving’s by incorporating his comments, his never referred to anything I said. I had noticed it, but it was beneath my pride to show Irving that I cared. And I felt beholden to him. It was his reputation, not mine and not Sholem Aleichem’s, that got our book frontpage coverage in the New York Times Book Review.

We began work on the Sholem Aleichem anthology just as Irving’s most ambitious book, World of Our Fathers, was about to appear. Irving worried that the Times would assign the review of it to Harry Golden, whose work he had panned. Instead, he won the National Book Award, made the best-seller list, and got to tour the country for respectable fees. But fate seemed to conspire against his triumph. His marriage to Ariel Mack, to whom he dedicated this book, was then coming apart. When we started working on the book, he lived with her in a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive; by the time we began our second project, he was in a smaller apartment on the Upper East Side.

Domestic matters apart, I was under the impression that Irving felt more comfortable in smaller spaces. He seemed attracted to socialism because he considered it a losing cause in America, and to Yiddish for the same reason, interpreting it as the culture of what he called the “little man.” When he toured to promote his book, he complained that the well-heeled audiences at synagogues and Jewish community centers were nothing like the garment workers and union organizers whom he had so lovingly portrayed in his book. I pointed out that he had memorialized only those parts of the Lower East Side that had not endured in America. His audiences were made up of the synagogue-goers, Zionists, and immigrants who had made good. The ironies of this ought to have been cause for celebration, but, for Irving, they were instigators of regret.

***

I don’t think Irving would have dignified me as a “political adversary” in the first years that we worked together. Feminists may snigger, but I sensed that he felt protective toward me, trying to shield me from the battles he had been fighting since his teens and to which he now seemed condemned. He obviously enjoyed writing and teaching about literature more than duking it out politically, and he may have wanted to grant me the respite he could not allow himself. “Try to understand that I genuinely did not wish to get into a fight with you,” he wrote after he had treated me to a public putdown at a nasty conference on Jewish literature we had both attended in Berkeley, Calif.:

[This] was not because I dismissed you. It was … in part because I know that polemics exact a heavy price from you in pain and suffering, and I keep saying to myself that it would be best to avoid them. But also, to be honest, I don’t think you’re very good at political polemics, certainly not as good as you are in literary discussions; I feel it’s not your métier, that you force yourself to do it out of a sense of obligation (with attendant anxiety). But I don’t want [to] make it seem that it has been only my goodness of heart—though it’s there—which prompted me to refrain from public argument with you. I think you have no idea how aggressive and combative and provoking you can be, indeed were in San Francisco, and that this elicits strong responses in turn.

Admitting to “contradictory feelings in the matter,” he expressed satisfaction in our ability to remain collaborators and friends, “perhaps the best that can be done under the circumstances.” This was seductive. But though I shared some of his contradictory feelings, he did not have my number. His description of the anxious polemicist, including of her abrasiveness, seemed (then and now) truer of him than of me. In wanting to attain for the Jews the political unexceptionalism to which they were entitled, I was anxious about the outcome, not the process. As between the two of us, he was the one more often accused of harshness, while people were always saying (to my irritation) how nice I was despite my out-of-favor views.

Indeed, Irving and I drew very different conclusions from the Yiddish culture with which we were engaged together. Yiddish wit once observed that Jews had turned links (left) because they were denied their recht (rights). Irving saw some such connection between political weakness and moral strength. I, who was spared the fate of European Jewry by parents who brought me to Canada in 1940, could not romanticize the politics that had allowed my cohort to be turned into fertilizer. While I would not have chosen to be anything but a Jew, it was precisely the study of Yiddish that had taught me not only the dangers but also the corrupting potential of powerlessness. Whereas Sholem Aleichem fully recognized the deformities that poverty bred, and loved Jews despite the humiliation to which they were subject, some of his contemporaries considered weakness a sign of distinction and decried achievement and prosperity as such. I was also aware, from studying Yiddish, that prolonged repression had produced a rash of informers and converts to other faiths, who often outdid gentiles in malignity. Although Irving and I both admired Jewish resiliency, I had come to recognize Jewish political dependency—a corollary of exile—as a deeply flawed political ideal.

***

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, defining Zionism as a form of racism. I was convinced that this charge, lifted straight from the Communist playbook of the 1930s, would greatly advance the Arab war against Israel. By transposing their rhetoric from “We will crush the Jewish State” to “The imperialist Jews are despoiling us,” Arab rulers had forged an anti-liberal alliance among despotisms, autocracies, and dictatorial regimes across the political spectrum. European anti-Semitism in the 1870s had cast the Jews, the beneficiaries of liberal democracy, as its conspiratorial exploiters, so that destroying them became a necessary defense against their alleged domination. By adding the trendy indictment of “racism” to the toxicology of anti-Jewishness, Arabs and Muslims would henceforth rally to their cause Marxists who picked up Stalin’s charge of Zionist-imperialism, internationalists who insisted that Jews should transcend their particularism, and rightists who could now turn the Holocaust indictment of racism against its victims. Talk about a big tent.

Continue reading: an editorial spat, anti-Jewish ammunition, and Robert Frost. Or view as a single page.

There followed a second message, this one from Janis Bellow, explaining that Saul had insisted on phoning us that morning. He was feeling a little better, as we could judge for ourselves if we wanted to come over to pay them a visit. When Len, my husband, and I stopped by later that week, we found Saul uncommonly serene. He sat in the hospital bed that had been set up for him, stroking Moosie the family cat and letting the conversation flow around him rather than through him (as had always been the case before). He was slow to respond when Len tried to engage him on familiar topics, like their native Montreal and family members whom we knew in common. As his message had signaled, Saul was now hors de combat. I realized that Janis was about to lose a husband, their daughter a father, and I—with humble respect for the differences—a comrade-in-arms.

Though Saul was disoriented during those last weeks of his life, his telephone message followed logically from conversations we had been having as long as we had known each other. Like most people, I had first gotten to know him as a reader, but thanks to his extended family in Montreal, he came often to the city where I grew up, and the brief contacts I had with him over the years allowed me to feel I knew him far better than I did. He was my favorite novelist, which meant that I occasionally sparred with him mentally the way his character Moses Herzog does in the letters he writes to Nietzsche and Heidegger. The sparring continued when we became friends, but by that time we were on the same side of every struggle that mattered. It was not surprising that he should have called to tell me he was about to exit the field of battle.

***

At the start of our friendship, I challenged Saul’s soldierly commitment. The first time was during a spectacular weekend in the spring of 1984 that was orchestrated by Guy Descary, the mayor of Lachine, a small city near Montreal, who had happened upon “Lachine” in a roster of Nobel Prize winners, and decided to name the new library of his suburb after its most famous native son. In a bid to attract full press coverage—he was considering a run for the Montreal mayoralty—Descary arranged a formal dedication of the Saul Bellow Library, to be followed by a celebratory luncheon at the Lachine waterfront. Montreal and its suburbs remain divided into fairly separate ethnic blocs, so that a special excitement accompanies events that draw its various communities together. Here was a French mayor honoring an English writer who made a point of staying in touch with his local Jewish family. Saul invoked Yiddish, English, and French during the ceremonies, demonstrating the mayor’s contention that “Saul Bellow never forgot his roots.”

I was one of many speakers at the luncheon in Saul’s honor, of which I best remember Elizabeth Spencer’s reminiscences about the time she met Saul in Paris in 1949, when he was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The breezy young man she described was still recognizably there as the guest of honor, enjoying the array of local notables, literati, and members of family paying tribute to his talent and charm. More than on the talks, however, my mind was fixed anxiously on the note I had slipped to Saul before we sat down to the meal, whose contents were quite at odds with the reverential tone of my public remarks. Although I knew he did not take kindly to criticism and feared that I might blow my chance of ever getting to know him better, I had felt compelled to share with him my disappointment about something he had recently done—or rather, undone.

My remonstrance had to do with his resignation from the Committee for the Free World—an organization Midge Decter had founded several years earlier “to conduct a battle of ideas in defense of Western values and institutions” by taking public positions for American victory against Soviet influence in the Cold War. To this end, she drew together thinkers from Europe and North America who recognized the danger of Communism, some because they had once been forcibly subject to Communist rule and others because they had at one time “said the blessing over poison”—the Canadian poet A. M. Klein’s description of those who had voluntarily joined the Party. Midge deemed that no less threatening to our democratic societies than Soviet missiles or OPEC cartels were the compatriots among our academic and cultural elites who “blamed America first,” to use the phrase made famous by Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican National Convention. The Committee’s monthly bulletin Contentions drew a bead on writers and columnists who argued that our political system was founded on oppression, that its freedoms were a sham, and that our prosperity depended on the exploitation of poorer nations. Saul Bellow was a charter member of the Committee’s international board, which also included Raymond Aron, William Barrett, Paul Johnson, Leszek Kolakowski, Tom Stoppard, and George Will.

Rather, Saul had been a member. I had just heard that he resigned from the board in protest against an issue of Contentions criticizing certain of that year’s literary prizes for honoring the political rather than literary merits of the winners—two of whom were Bellow’s friends. Contentions called their work “snooty, mindless, and altogether conventional attitudinizing” (Gore Vidal) and evidence of the “exhaustion of serious fiction as a vehicle for significant comment about human affairs” (Stanley Elkin). As we now know from his published letters, Saul asked that his name be removed from the masthead not because he disagreed with these judgments but because the “reviews were in such bad taste that it depressed me to be associated with them.” He continued:

I have for some time been struggling with the growing realization that a problem exists: About Nicaragua we can agree well enough but as soon as you begin to speak of culture you give me the willies…. [Where] there are politics there are bedfellows, and where there are bedfellows there are likely to be fleas, so I scratched my bites in silence. Your Special Issue, however, is different. I can’t allow the editors of Confrontations (sic) to speak in my name, or with my tacit consent as board-member, about writers and literature. When there are enemies to be made I prefer to make them myself, on my own grounds and in my own language. Le mauvais gout mène aux crimes, said Stendhal, who was right of course but who didn’t realize how many criminals history was about to turn loose.

Had I seen the letter, its wit would not have charmed me. So he had “scratched his bites in silence” instead of appreciating the political energy Midge was organizing on our behalf! Weren’t those many criminals that history was about to turn loose reason enough to support the Committee’s work? Given that he understood what was at stake in the Cold War, I was dismayed that he quit the battlefield for what I considered a slight to his vanity.

***

If you are amused by this account of internecine conflict among intellectuals determined to bring down the Soviet Empire, don’t expect a self-mocking disclaimer from me in this quarrel long since resolved. Since I don’t write for The New Yorker, I don’t feel obliged to be ironic when speaking of the free world. Which is not to say that I fail to appreciate some ironies of this little episode: Saul was valuable to the Committee precisely because he insisted on the preeminence of the writer over the warrior. His idealization of the writer’s task was the bedrock of his literary ambition, and that ambition, fully realized in his work, made him far more precious to the Committee than lesser writers (like me) who soldiered better. Those most valuable to a cause may be least willing to submit to its discipline. On the other hand, Contentions had set out to depoliticize literature by highlighting political considerations that had determined literary awards. If the editors were right, Saul would have forfeited his chance of ever winning one of those prizes had he remained on the Contentions masthead. Thus, his political calculations may have run up against their commitment to purer aesthetic and literary judgment. Irony indeed.

Saul and I never did thrash this out. When Len and I joined him for dinner the following evening with the poet Louis Dudek, we talked for hours without mentioning my note. I sensed that Saul did not want to discuss it, and that our acquaintanceship would flourish on his terms or not at all. In agreeing to subordinate public to private objectives, I was making the same kind of calculation of which I was accusing him in quitting the Committee, but I hoped that it would someday allow me to take up the subject with him again.

There was only intermittent contact between Saul and me in the years that followed. That changed when he married Janis Freedman in 1989 and when they moved to Boston soon after Len and I did, in 1993. Their marriage, which was treated as a May-December curiosity—31-year-old student-assistant marries famous novelist-professor—seemed instead to be something entirely different to me: Saul’s homecoming, after a lifetime of search. To be sure, he had found in Janis a lovely young wife, but she also gave him the unconditional love of the mother he had never ceased to mourn. A fellow Canadian, Janis shared his passion for literature, his comfort in being Jewish, and his concern for Israel at a time when that was becoming more important to him. For these and many other reasons there was no couple in Boston with whom Len and I felt more at home. Often Saul and I slipped into Yiddish, which he could no longer speak with his brothers, by then deceased. We were all landsleit, a term I had always associated with immigrants from Europe, but one equally suited to the reunion of us Canadian Jews on American soil.

One of the few subjects Saul and I continued to disagree on was anti-Semitism. As a teenager in Chicago he had heard the anti-Jewish diatribes of Father Coughlan, also a former Canadian, and Saul was convinced that the same hostility still festered in America under a civil surface. I was confident that American democracy was by now too substantial to allow any politician to win office on a platform of anti-Semitism—which was my criterion for code red. My apprehension was trained wholly on the threat from Arab and Muslim aggressors and secondarily on their deputies among our academic elites. In worrying about America, I thought, Saul was mistaking prejudice, which was nasty but not necessarily lethal, for the murderous politics of Jew-blame that leaders used to manipulate restive populations. He, in turn, thought me naïve to discount the potential of plain old Jew-hatred in our midst.

Saul’s political hard-headedness on these issues made me wonder how, during World War II and into the 1950s, he could have ignored the Jewish struggle for survival in Europe and Palestine. When I put the question to him in 1991, he said, “America was not a country to us. It was the world.” I took this to mean that while he and his friends were being drafted into the army, becoming writers, getting married, and trying to earn a living in the throes of the Depression, they were fully absorbed with the challenges of their lives, not with the lives and deaths of co-religionists overseas. I could not imagine this kind of detachment until it occurred to me that his Jewish counterparts in pre-war Europe—say, at the Lublin Yeshiva (founded in 1930) or Vilna’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (founded in 1929)—likewise felt that “Poland is not a country to us. It is the world.” And Jewish Trotskyists, of whom he had been one, were probably equally delusional on both continents.

Ruth Wisse with Saul Bellow at Bellow’s home, 2001.

Janis Bellow

But why belabor this? By the time he moved to Boston Saul had long since made up for the lapses of his youth. He grasped political realities as clearly as anyone I knew, even as he did not care to be a political player. Blessed with genius that came from beyond the summons of the will, he trusted the realm of the spirit more than us plodders who make do with what wisdom and knowledge we wring from mere experience. I once told him that he was the only adult I knew who spoke seriously about the “soul.” This seemed to surprise him coming from someone who kept a kosher home and blessed the Sabbath, but it is possible to obey God and thank God without hankering for the afterlife—as Saul did—and without leaving politics to an unseen agency. I think that Saul held with his eponymous Mr. Sammler that a good man meets the terms of his contract, “terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As we all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.” I happen to love that homespun kaddish at the conclusion of one of my favorite novels, but its sentiment is not mine. My view is rather that in their hearts most people don’t know, and because we don’t know, the Torah was given, reportedly, through Moses at Sinai, so that we may learn good from evil from a legal tradition scrupulously studied and painstakingly transmitted.

***

Though I am tracking here only the part of our friendship that prompted Saul’s parting message to me, I can’t leave out the joy of most of our time together. Every time I taught his work, I invited him to be a guest of the class, and he always came—even when he eventually needed an aide to help him into the building. The students were curious and deferential. He flinched only from questions that pried into the mysteries of composition, but otherwise enjoyed telling about himself, people he knew, and books he liked. He loved to recall his childhood in Lachine, where the kids spoke French, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and the English they were beginning to pick up in the street. His protestations about being called an American Jewish writer seemed irrelevant when he described putting on the ritual fringes that were part of his childhood morning routine or studying parts of Genesis he learned in cheder. “What else but a Jew could I be?” he would say to students who asked about being a Jewish writer. It was the impulse to classify rather than the label itself that bothered him. He didn’t fit any classification.

I had no trouble imagining the fun he and Isaac Rosenfeld had in their teens doing translations of T.S. Eliot and Milton, singing macaronic Yiddish and English songs, and playing verbal chess. Sometimes at the dinner table he would ask Janis to join him in a raunchy Yiddish ditty he had taught her. In Saul’s rendition of “Der Rebbe Elimelekh” (itself the Yiddish adaptation of “Old King Cole”), the merry rabbi at the conclusion of the Sabbath sends not for the fiddlers and drummers with whom he fiddles and drums, but for the shikselekh with whom he shiksels. He had the rabbi frolicking with gentile girls in a verbal construction of his own making. When he’d finish the song, Saul would throw back his head and have us all laughing with him.

Ruth R. Wisse, the author of the Nextbook Press book Jews and Power, is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and a professor of comparative literature at Harvard.

Edward Irving Koch was born in the Bronx and raised in Newark, New Jersey, as a Conservative Jew. He represented New York City in Congress from 1969 to 1977 and served as its mayor from 1978 to 1989. Now 86, he is a partner at the law firm Bryan Cave, where the windowsill of his office, overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral, is decorated with a silver-colored Hanukkiah and dozens of pictures of himself shaking hands with celebrities. Koch is vague about what he does there, beyond building buzz. He has never been married and has no children, and he neither confirms nor denies persistent rumors of homosexuality. “What do I care?” he told New York magazine 13 years ago. “I find it fascinating that people are interested in my sex life at age 73. It’s rather complimentary! But as I say in my book, my answer to questions on this subject is simply: Fuck off.”

When I asked Koch about the importance of Judaism in his life, he called out to his secretary. “Jody! Bring him the tombstone!” She handed me a copy of Koch’s pre-written epitaph: “He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York, and he fiercely loved the people of the City of New York.” The headstone also quotes Daniel Pearl’s last words—“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish”—and notes that these words were spoken “immediately before his beheading by an Islamic terrorist.” Koch believes in God but describes himself as secular.

You came into office in the wake of New York’s financial crisis of the 1970s.

I said, “Whatever it takes, no matter what bricks are thrown at me, I will do to bring New York back to its great past.” And that means sacrifice. You know you’re hurting people. But if you want to keep the city from going in bankruptcy, which would injure even more, there’s no other way out. Now, everybody understands it. Now, guys like [New Jersey governor] Chris Christie—they applaud him. He’s doing what I did. Jerry Brown in California—he’s doing what I did. When I did it, it was unique.

When I ran for a fourth term, I got 42 percent of the vote [in the Democratic primary], and David Dinkins won. What is interesting is that I’m Jewish, but my biggest supporters were Catholic. Italian and Irish Catholic. I generally, over the years, would get 81 percent of their vote. With Jews, I would get 73 percent. People say, “How is that possible? You’re a Jewish boy!” And the answer is that the liberal wing of the Jewish nation doesn’t find me liberal enough. Because I’m a liberal with sanity.

What are some specific issues on which you clash with liberal Jews?

Well, for example, the death penalty. I have supported the death penalty from the beginning of my professional life, when I ran for Congress. I believe it’s liberal, if you believe that protecting society is liberal.

Do you think you’ve moved to the right over the course of your career?

When I was in the Congress, I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I went to Canada and talked to American young men who had left the United States to avoid the draft. And I came back and proposed that American soldiers who resisted the draft, evaded it, be given amnesty; and in addition, American soldier deserters—this is in the middle of the Vietnam War—be given amnesty. People said, “Are you crazy?” President Carter, six months later, gave amnesty to draft resisters and deserters. So I believe, on social issues, I’m as left as you can get. On fiscal issues I’m moderate. I hope I’ve changed over the years, but I certainly don’t believe you could say I’ve moved from the left to the right.

Do you ever feel that American Jews are afraid to support Israel?

I know there was a dearth of support when Obama changed the policy of the United States towards Israel not very long ago. I’m very proud that I aroused the Jewish community and the Christian pro-Israel community and Obama changed his anti-Israel position, most illustrative of that being when he insulted Bibi Netanyahu. As you undoubtedly know, when George Bush ran for reelection—not election—when he was running against, what’s his name—John, Massachusetts …

Kerry.

Kerry, right. Kerry was not good on Israel, in my judgment. So I supported Bush. And I said at the time, publicly, “I don’t agree with him on a single domestic issue. But on the issue of fighting Islamic terrorism”—which, to me, is more important than any other issue, not just because of Israel; it is because Islamic terrorism is seeking to destroy Western civilization. I said, “The Democratic party doesn’t understand that.” The Republican party did. I was shocked when I saw a poll which said that of Democrats, 48 percent supported Israel. 48 percent! Republicans, 70 percent. So I stood up and supported Bush. I have no regrets.

So why didn’t you support John McCain in 2008?

Well, because I’m a Democrat, and I believed that Obama was as good as McCain.

And now you feel you were misled?

I don’t say misled. I misjudged.

Do you think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are good for the Jews?

No. They’re not good for America, which is more important. We are spilling American blood for nothing. We are having American treasure looted by Karzai in particular in Afghanistan. We should pull out today.

So how does that mesh with your take on Islamic terrorism?

I don’t believe that we should fight them the way they want us to fight them. I believe we should bomb them with drones. Afghanistan—it’s not a country.

So you’re supportive of the drone attacks in Pakistan?

Absolutely. Pakistan is not a friend anymore. These are not countries you can depend upon. We shouldn’t have people there, and we shouldn’t give them the billions that we’re giving. With respect to that area, India is our true ally, not Pakistan.

Do you have views on Israeli politics?

Sure I do. I believe in a two-state solution. I believe that Bibi Netanyahu should throw out Lieberman and all those arch right wingers and form a broad cabinet with the center, and that you can have an Arab capital in Jerusalem along with a Jewish capital in Jerusalem. You should have boroughs in the Arab area and the Jewish area where they elect their own local leadership. It’s doable!

Do you think New York Jews stand up for Israel?

I don’t think [they do] enough. I think young people no longer understand the meaning of the Holocaust. Young Jews don’t understand that when Hitler offered to let the Jews out of Germany, there was no nation that would take them—including the United States. And all you have to do is remember the U.S.S. St. Louis, which was turned away. So I think that somehow or other the Jewish community has to educate, and say, “We’re Americans. But we also are like any other people that love our ancestry and our traditions.” And in our case it’s even more important, because there’s never been an effort to exterminate a people, a whole people, as was the case with Hitler and the Jews. Jews who think they’re not included in that extermination effort, should it ever occur again, they’re dead wrong. And we know the nation of Israel will stand up to the best of its ability. It will use its armed forces to protect Jews, as it did at Entebbe.

How did Judaism influence your life growing up?

I’m a secular Jew. I believe in God, I believe in the hereafter, I believe in reward and punishment, and I expect to be rewarded. That’s a partial joke. But I identify as a Jew. And I think when I was mayor, I made that clear. As a result of just being up front about it, I think I was helpful in changing relations vis-a-vis the Jews and making them more positive. I hope so.

Was being Jewish a big part of your life?

No. I go to synagogue twice a year. Park East Synagogue. It’s Orthodox, but that’s only because I like Rabbi Schneier. It has nothing to do with me. I would consider myself a Conservative—the reason I say Conservative, not Reform, is that I am very unhappy to be in a synagogue without a yarmulke. I feel naked.

I wanted to be buried in Manhattan. Near a subway stop, to make it easy to get there. So I got the last burial plot at the Trinity Church up at 155th Street. My tombstone is up there, and it has the Shma Yisroel, in English and Hebrew, and it has the last words of Dan Pearl: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I’m Jewish.” Now, they probably made him say that as they cut his throat on television. Doesn’t make any difference. I think that should become a prayer on Saturday.

There was a forum recently in New York magazine debating who was the best mayor in New York history.

Oh, I saw that. Those were liberal—the historians who were there were all very liberal. They don’t like me. On the other hand, there was just a book out by a liberal historian [Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, by Jonathan Soffer]. He says, when he announced to his confreres, who are all liberal, “I’m going to do a book on Koch,” they said, “Go get him.” But in his book he says that I was better than LaGuardia. He said the problems that I confronted were greater than LaGuardia’s and my responses were better. That’s what he says; I’m not saying it. I don’t mind others saying it, but I’m not saying it.

What do you think makes LaGuardia so popular today?

’Cause he’s dead.

You recently defended Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel.”

Fairness! Don’t you think we should have fairness? What they were trying to do, some of the talking heads, was to blame her for the shooting of the Congresswoman in Tucson. In fact, she sent me a response—Jody! I’d like to give him the Sarah Palin response, her comment to me.

Sarah Palin’s email:

Mr. Koch: I hate to bother you through a personal email account but I wanted to send a “thank you” for your encouraging words. Thank you, sincerely, for sticking your neck out in such a public manner. My family and I appreciate your boldness!

My best to you,
Sarah Palin

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Koch’s response:

Dear Governor:

Thank you for your e-mail. I was delighted to speak out because I believe you were being unfairly attacked by some who wish to politicize the tragedy in Arizona. I believe in spirited political debate, and so do you. Yes, we disagree on many public issues, and that debate is good for America. I wish you and your family the very best in your own pursuit of happiness. God bless America.

All the best.
Ed Koch

Andrew Marantz is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in New York, Slate, the New York Times, and other publications.

While I was living in New Haven a few years ago, I made plans to meet a high-reward, high-maintenance friend halfway at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Bridgeport. It soon became clear that this plan had all the charm of being inconvenient for both of us, and in a hateful place. My friend—I’ll call her Daphne, because that is her name—enlisted her brother to drive to the venue, and it was a great concert: This was during a time that Bruce was closing shows with an apocalyptic, prophetic version of Alan Vega’s “Dream Baby Dream.” After the show, Daphne and I went backstage, and for reasons that escape me, her brother went to move the car, which was ill-advised as there was no way he could get past security without me. Anyway, to bring this on home, we’d been chatting with the Boss for at least 45 minutes, he was telling us about how Philip Roth is his favorite author, and somehow Daphne’s lingering sibling comes up. So we reveal to a very astonished Bruce Springsteen that Daphne’s brother is somewhere in the parking lot waiting for us.

So here’s the takeaway: Bruce is gob-smacked that we have left this poor, lost brother somewhere out there, even though, truth be known, Daphne has issues with anyone she’s related to (and anyone she’s not related to, including people she’s never met), and her brother’s lonely parking lot exile is completely fine with her, I think, and possibly even a desirable thing. In any case, Bruce gets up off the couch, leaves the building, and goes and finds Daphne’s brother, and brings him back to his dressing room.

Now let me make this clear—I’ll even put it in Passover terms: It was Bruce himself and not an angel of Bruce who went looking for the errant brother, even though factotums and minions were here there and everywhere, and could easily have been dispatched.

I really don’t know why Bruce was so kind in this way to Daphne’s brother, who he did not even know, but this story is consistent with others that you’ll hear from almost anybody. People who live in Monmouth County who have been picked up in the Springsteenmobile while hitchhiking, and that sort of thing, is the most common version of this story. I’ve been bringing friends backstage with me to meet Bruce for maybe 15 years now, and he remembers names, he remembers their brothers-in-laws’ names when he signs autographs. He’s a hopeless mensch.

Bruce Springsteen really got any creative person’s dream career, and his good-heartedness and good-spiritedness are part of it: both because it made the people behind the scenes want to do their jobs that much better, but it also means that he connects with an audience in a way that holds them close. Is he really cool? No, of course not. I’m a huge Springsteen fan, and yet if either he or Bob Dylan had to be erased from the world’s hard drive, I would save Bob Dylan’s work for sure—he’s the greater talent, and by leaps and bounds and skyscrapers and rocket blasts. But Bob Dylan is an alien to his public. He’s disconnected and distant in a way that Bruce is present and close, which is, in itself, a talent.

All of this leads me to the strange case of Lou Reed, who makes Bob Dylan look like Will Rogers. Bruce Springsteen, with his good manners and total decency is kind of the nice Jewish boy that Lou Reed—and, of course, Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota—ought to be. Which seems counterintuitive—after all, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan are Jewish, and according to Philip Roth (Bruce’s favorite author after all), the hardest thing for a Jewish boy to be is bad, and yet they are both legendarily unpleasant people.

But you know what? The anecdotal evidence—at least among our artistic icons—suggests that Roth got it wrong. I mean, Norman Mailer was not just a wife-stabbing wretch himself—he actually helped get another wretch out of jail to murder again. Woody Allen’s heart wants what it wants and … oh boy. Roman Polanski—dear me. Leonard Cohen—does he seem nice to you? Never mind Roth himself, who both bears witness against himself and has Claire Bloom and others to corroborate his self-accusations.

So all I can say is: What the fuck was Philip Roth talking about? Yes, yes: I know—the CPA who lives in a split-level in Demarest, New Jersey. All the same, as public figures expressing the notion of Jewish identity—or denying their Jewishness altogether, which is of course the most Jewish thing you can do—the creative Jewish man isn’t very nice at all. In fact, he has been an absolute dick.

To get back to the contrary and instructive example of Bruce Springsteen, playing the role of the Christian character known as the Good Samaritan—what could be less Jewish? All that good-natured generosity is way too open-hearted and even obsequious, it lacks the judgmental prickliness that makes Jews so picky and stingy with their love of human beings, despite a huge and unbridled passion for humanity. In any case, this is the best I can do by way of giving an ethnocentric explanation for the fact that I am trying to write a heartfelt tribute to Lou Reed on the occasion of his 69th birthday, and I can hardly find a soul alive who doesn’t have an unpleasant story to tell about some chance encounter that they had with Lou Reed.

If, like me, you happen to be a native New Yorker, there is a good chance that you take Lou Reed’s presence for granted, like the woman you see almost every day walking her Pomeranian when you are out strolling with your dog: He really lives here, he takes the number 1 train, he sees documentaries about R. Crumb at the Film Forum. The only other celebrity who comes close to being as present within the municipal bloodstream is Ethan Hawke, who proves Kurt Vonnegut was right when he said we are what we pretend to be, because Lou Reed has cultivated ordinary-creative-person-ness with such botanical intensity that it’s become who he is. And so it is, with Lou Reed living among us for many years with his wife Sylvia on West End Avenue opposite the Calhoun School, and now with Laurie Anderson on West 10th Street. An unusual number of people have had chance encounters with him, and apparently it’s been universally unfun.

Lou Reed stories are the opposite of Bruce Springsteen stories. No one’s brother-in-law is ever rescued from a parking lot and treated like a king. The pedestrian admirer or the average autograph desirer is greeted with derisive hostility, with the precise prototype of the punk-rock sneer that has made Lou Reed the precise prototype of the sneering punk-rocker. I remember buying a vinyl version of Live In Italy when I was in high school and getting into the 79th Street subway station on Broadway to be greeted by none other than Mr. Reed, who looked like none other than Robert Plant. Of course I was completely excited by the coincidence. It’s not like I’d bought something common like the first Velvets’ LP or something obvious like Transformer—and I was certain he’d be moved by my fanaticism. I started jumping up and down—I really was jumping up and down—and telling him to look and see what I had, which was no doubt annoying, but still, this was long before the reissue of all the Velvets’ stuff, no one cared about Lou Reed unless he/she was also claiming to be named Holly from Miami, and I was a teenager. Instead of responding, Lou Reed walked away and started kicking the tiled wall at the platform where people waited for the IRT, to show his displeasure with my enthusiasm for his work.

After that I learned my lesson. Many years later, I had an experience that might have been phenomenal if I hadn’t thought better of it at the time. At either the behest or the request of an editor I cared about, some time not long after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I was drinking at the legendary Lion’s Head in Sheridan Square with a young painter who had never been out of East Berlin. I don’t mean that he’d never been out of East Germany—for whatever reason, he had never even ventured beyond city limits, which he explained was strangely common in iron-curtain Europe. Somehow I asked who he’d most like to meet in New York City, and he said that the album Berlin had sustained his cohort for so many years, because it was the only way any of them know that anyone on the other side of the wall knew or cared that they were alive. Of course, the funny part about that album is that when it was made in 1973, Lou Reed had himself never been to Berlin, it was about an idea. And I remember sitting and thinking how great it was that this German guy’s misunderstanding—his idea—about someone else’s understanding—his idea—had such great force. And somewhere between thought and expression—go ahead, assume that I’m lying, if I were you I would—into the bar walks Lou Reed himself. If this were a movie, only no screenwriter trying to maintain anything like verisimilitude would put such an absurdity into a script.

Here’s the takeaway: Despite what has to be called a miracle—I will not call it a coincidence, because this was all too much—I did not get up from my barstool to walk over to Lou’s frosty gulag archipelago on the other side of the Lion’s Head. Even the potential for great beauty—it would have been pretty great, and maybe life-alteringly amazing—wasn’t worth what my cost-benefit analysis told me was a more likely outcome of pedestrian unpleasantness, accompanied by that sneer.

This is why Lou Reed’s career has been both extraordinary and uneven. This is why a lot of those RCA albums from the ’70s are not merely produced distastefully—the quality is also actually shoddy: because that is what the career of an asshole looks like. Sometimes incredibly good work will get done because talented admirers will show up willing to do anything, and so you get an album like New York (made in the ’80s for Sire, but same thing), which was good work all around. But too often one is confronted by something like The Blue Mask, a beautiful contemplation of sobriety and love and commitment that has mediocre production values. Lou Reed’s post-Velvet career makes it obvious that it really was a band, because it’s only in those live recordings at the Academy in the early ’70s, like on Rock n Roll Animal, when Mick Ronson is on guitar, that solo Lou comes close to sounding as interesting as VU Lou. For all his talent, Lou Reed’s recorded output would be a whole lot better if a good collaborator—or two or three—were not so hard for him to find.

Lou Reed, of course, ought to be able to behave like a human being. But he’s not in the service industry—he’s not the waiter telling you about the branzino special, he’s not your florist or your cobbler or your chauffeur. It really doesn’t much matter if he’s polite or rude. It ought to matter to those in his intimate circle, and in the media saturated world, we ought to expect a good persona, but why do we need a good person? Because that’s what we need. The Kardashians are a barely-human shrine to the testament that all that matters is Lou Reed’s personality, because ability to create great works of art is no longer as valuable as a family full of K-named girls.

And that’s what I want to say on behalf of Lou Reed—but you can throw Dylan, Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, and a few others in there too: He came of age, went through a midlife crisis, and is now heading toward his shuffleboard Shangri-la days, in a time when a musician—and really, I should say, a person—truly could have a career. I mean, a substantial, lengthy career, one that allowed a relationship with an audience to develop with the same rhythms of a friendship, one that allowed for lousy work en route to genius, one that actually did allow the personality of the artist to become invested with meaning and significance that could be either delightful or deranged, one that made the music industry seem like a worthy enterprise and not just a bunch of schmucks who got lucky. And career in this context is a good word, it’s not a limiting notion like choosing to become a lawyer because what else is there; it’s a choice that is a real choice.

You might note that Lou Reed, and all the other people I pointed to almost parenthetically, have not hyphenated their lives. They aren’t designing a line of durable sportswear made of organic fibers for Kmart or running a small production company in a studio bungalow. They do the thing they do well, because it’s satisfying, and it’s a full life. And I’d say that people my age are the last group of Americans to know a life of creativity that can sustain a person financially, but also intellectually and emotionally. After us, it’s as if the world lost its ability to focus and stick to the plot. We will never know the life story of Vampire Weekend, because the curvaceous course of a life stretched out before us like a slinky unwinding is not a narrative that anyone knows how to sustain anymore.

What I think I’m saying is that what’s held my interest in Lou Reed through many anecdotes about his miserable personality and many albums that had maybe one good song on them, if that—“Coney Island Baby,” “The Bells,” I could go on and on—is the reality show that is Lou Reed was being expressed through all those albums, high and low, good and bad. He didn’t always get it right, but he tried to keep us informed, he tried to let us know what was up and what was what. He rightly titled an album Growing Up In Public, because that is what he got to do. Lou Reed gave us the first Velvet Underground album in 1965, when he was 23, which means we’ve had 46 years of living a tattered scattered life, one that was underneath the bottle, that involved waves of fear, that eventually brought him to the last shot, and that has gotten him to the point where he is living with and loving a woman who is his equal, who is a substantial person—an outcome about as unlikely as his recovery from heroin addiction (I’ve been told that about one in 35 manage it).

We got to hear this story. We got to hear a life happen in all its imperfection and misery and elation and contentedness, and realize again that the great thing about life is not that the future is predictable—it’s that you have absolutely no idea what will happen. Happy people consider that good news. And if you want to see that human story unfold, if you want to understand that only the unexpected life is worth a damn, spend some time with 46 years of Lou Reed’s work, music that leaped and then looked. Safety is for the godless and the faithless.

Cohen, who has curly brown hair and a round, brightly expressive face set off by a barely perceptible nose ring, turned to the band to count off “Limehouse Blues,” a showpiece of Goodman’s, authoritatively and at a swift tempo. After playing the melody, she began to improvise, building short motifs into longer, harmonically challenging disquisitions. Over the music she draped long tones that seemed to be kept afloat by drummer Lewis Nash’s rhythmic jabs. She bent and shook notes, projecting sound with a physicality that became a dance. The clarinet seems to have a plaintive, pre-modern quality built in, and her sound evoked at once the blues, antique worlds, and indistinct old countries. As the crowd applauded, Wein, 85, beamed at his protégée from the corner banquette where he was sitting, his hands resting on an upright walking cane. Cohen paused to look at her watch. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, smiling, before introducing the band.

Wein—a pre-eminent figure in the jazz world for five decades and founder of the Newport and New Orleans jazz festivals—met Cohen three years ago at a concert sponsored by the Sidney Bechet Society, named for the legendary New Orleans soprano saxophonist. “I heard her play ‘Shreveport Stomp’ and was blown away,” he said. “Her approach to jazz is total. She’s got big ears and respects the tradition but isn’t locked into it. She just played a festival in Puerto Rico and got a standing ovation from 3,000 people. She wasn’t playing salsa but ‘Memories of You.’ ”

For Cohen the last few years have been a blur, recording, performing, founding Anzic, her record company, and earning accolades. She’s been named Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association of America four years running. In 2007 and 2008 she placed at the top of Downbeat Magazine’s International Critics Poll in the “Rising Star: Clarinet” category. This year she was named its top rising jazz star overall.

Watching Cohen play, it’s clear why her popularity is growing. Whether on tenor or soprano saxophone or clarinet, Cohen plays with an emotional directness that connects with the listener, which is rare in the New York jazz scene, where musicians are often more apt to display skill than convey feeling. Cohen entertains without pandering. If Cohen isn’t playing, she’s roving around the bandstand, rooting on the soloist, singing back a phrase she liked, doing a dance. She treats the bandstand like her living room, putting her audience at ease. At one gig, she played like a snake charmer, sitting cross-legged on the floor with audience members who couldn’t get a seat.

Listen to “St. James Infirmary,” from Clarinetwork, Live at the Village Vanguard:

***

While Cohen’s musical voice is highly individual, she is also one of a growing number of Israelis on the New York jazz scene today. If you look at the jazz listings, you’re apt to see the following names appearing regularly: Cohen, Avital, Degibri, Silberstein, Aran, Ravitz, Mor, Klein, Tal. And younger Israeli musicians keep coming. For the last few years, Israelis have made up about 9 percent of the student body at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. “Ironically, it’s the Israeli musicians that come who are keeping the flame of the bebop tradition alive,” said Martin Mueller, executive director of the New School’s jazz program. “When they come here, they’re able to take it in so many directions. And there’s an intensity to the music that comes from a culture surrounded on all sides by either water or enemies.”

The level of talent from Israel at times seems uncanny: A YouTube video of Gadi Lehavi, a 13-year-old piano prodigy, playing a duet with saxophonist David Liebman at Smoke, the uptown club, is a sensation in music circles less for the teenager’s prodigious technique than for his probing maturity at the keyboard. Recently at Fat Cat, the Greenwich Village jazz club and pool hall, the veteran black American drummer Billy Kaye led his group through a set of taut hard-bop that sounded as authentic and creative as any Blue Note record from the early sixties. It turned out that three members of the quintet, pianist Jack Glottman, bassist Ben Meigners, and saxophonist Asaf Yuria, are Israelis under 35. Between games of ping-pong, Amit Friedman, a young saxophonist who had come to hear his friends before returning to Israel the next day, commented on the level of jazz talent among his peers: “Maybe it’s a little bit corny, but Jews have had to improvise for thousands of years in order to survive. It’s natural to us.”

***

Anat Cohen, the middle of three children, was born in 1975 and grew up in Tel Aviv. Yuval, her older brother, is a saxophonist, and Avishai, the youngest son, is one of New York’s most prominent trumpeters; together they form the group 3 Cohens. Their grandparents fled Poland in the early 1930s, and their great-uncle helped found Kibbutz Ein Harod. “It’s very difficult in today’s society to live in this idea,” said Anat Cohen, referring to the collectivist ideal of the kibbutz movement, over lunch in Union Square. Earlier, waiting for a table, she’d chatted with a waiter in Portunhol, a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. “There’s always going to be someone who wants more, who wants something else,” she said. “I could never really figure out why people would live in a kibbutz. I’m such a city girl.”

Her now-retired parents, David and Bilha—he was in real estate, and she was a teacher—supported their children’s growing interest in music. “My father knew classical music very well,” said Cohen. “Driving in the car, listening to the radio he could name every composer, every movement, what piece it was. I was fascinated by the way he recognized who wrote what.”

At age 10, Cohen started on the keyboard and at age 12 switched to the clarinet and began playing in a Dixieland band at the Jaffa Conservatory of Music, where she could begin to feel the rhythm of jazz while still following a written part. At age 16, she began playing tenor saxophone in the big band at the prestigious Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Tel Aviv.

Insipired by Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane records, Cohen began to absorb the jazz tradition, but she found few opportunities beyond school performances to develop her musical voice, and like many young musicians she was daunted by the prospect of improvisation. That changed when she met a saxophonist from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn who had immigrated to Israel and shaken up the music scene, Arnold Lawrence Finkelstein, or Arnie Lawrence.

“Arnie is very much responsible for me being here,” said Cohen, remembering him fondly. “I met him when I was a soldier. Something about Arnie that was always so pure. He would talk to you without any judgment or preconception. I’m a human being, you’re a human being, let’s communicate. That was his vibe. I was not used to that. Israel, as wonderful as it is, it’s a very intense place. The level of life there is just very stressful. People are always alert. They have a famous phrase in Hebrew: ‘respect and suspect.’ You always have to kind of check what’s going on around you. People are not always just, ‘We’re all here, we’re all together,’ because you never know.”

Lawrence, who was born in 1938, was a passionate figure. Tutored at a young age by the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, Lawrence at age 17 was leading bands at Birdland, once sharing a double-bill with John Coltrane. In 1986 he founded the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program. Over the years, he would visit Israel with his wife, Liza, a native, making contacts and meeting musicians and performing. By the mid-1990s, Lawrence found himself with fewer gigs and increasingly at odds with the New School’s administration over his nontraditional teaching approach. Liza’s mother’s health was also declining. So, in 1997, Lawrence and Liza moved to Israel permanently to begin anew.

In Jerusalem, Lawrence founded the International Center for Creative Music, which welcomed Jews and Arabs alike. There he would hold his weekly “Harif” sessions, named for a spice. Whoever showed up would be the band that night.

“Every Wednesday we would go,” said Cohen. “I would get in the car, my two brothers and I, and drive to Jerusalem. It was the most special thing for us to do. Maybe there would be just bass or just drums, sometimes just seven saxophones. Arnie would call tunes, play open grooves, whatever, pointing at people to solo. I was the most insecure one at the time, because I was the latest of us coming into jazz. He gave me confidence. He would talk to me after sets about beauty, about people, wonderful vague conversations, not about this note or scale. He was the first one who told me there were no wrong notes.”

***

Walking south on Loisada Street in New York’s Lower East Side, toward The Stone, the experimental jazz club, one steamy evening in late May, you had to pass through music to get to music. The neighborhood, which long ago teemed with the street life of Eastern European Jews, was alive with the sounds of the Hispanic immigrants who followed. Two congueros sat drumming near East 4th Street as neighborhood folks, heads bobbing, some singing, gathered slowly to them like flower petals blooming in reverse. Sidewalk barbecues smoked.

Nearby, another crowd gathered on the corner of Loisada and East 2nd, outside The Stone. Approaching, you could hear English speckled with Hebrew being spoken by yet newer immigrants, young, hiply dressed, with black instrument cases slung over their shoulders. Inside, the small club—no liquor, no food, just music—was packed beyond capacity for New York’s first Festival of Israeli Jazz.

Listen to “Washington Square Park,” from Notes From the Village:

“If you have to lose liquid, let it be sweat and not tears,” said the trombonist Rafi Malkiel, from the stage. It was both a reference to the heat in the room and an epigraph to his composition “River Blue,” binds Jewish and Arabic melodic traditions together within the traditional 12-bar blues form. Malkiel’s newest music, heavily informed also by the Latin groups in which he’s played, is inspired by the concept of water, of life’s liquid nature, its currents of influence.

The ensemble, which includes Cohen and her brother Avishai, began to weave together in rigorously arranged polyphony, grooving muscularly through the Middle Eastern-tinged minor blues. When it finished, Malkiel, an Israeli of Moroccan heritage, thanked the festival’s organizer and curator, Roberto Juan Rodriguez, who stood in the back.

“It takes a Cuban to put on a festival of Israeli music in New York,” said Malkiel, smiling. “I promise you, next year we’ll have a Cuban music festival in Israel.”

Rodriguez, 51, whose close-cropped silvering hair belies his youthful enthusiasm, is a drummer, composer, and the founder of the Sexteto Rodriguez Cuban Jewish All Stars, which appeared this summer at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow (or, as he calls it, the “big powwow”). His group, accented by clarinet and accordion, combines Cuban son and klezmer, evoking an imaginary world where the Buena Vista Social Club and a chapter of the Jewish Labor Bund might exist on the same street.

“I grew up in the Jewish community. I did weddings, bar mitzvahs, and Yiddish theater down in Miami Beach,” said Rodriguez by phone from the Catskill home he shares with his wife, drummer Susie Ibarra, and their young son. “It’s interesting to see the similarities between their culture and mine. I’d go over to my friends’ houses, and their furniture would be covered in plastic. I’d go over to my aunt’s house and their furniture would be covered in plastic. ‘You can’t sit on it! You can’t touch it!’ They’re warm cultures, passionate cultures, and they both have a certain kind of schmaltz. It was easy to just blend in. I never considered Jews to be white. They’d say ‘I’m white.’ ‘No, you’re Jewish.’ ”

Rodriguez’s artistic enterprise, to showcase the various ways Israeli musicians are combining these influences with jazz, was not, however, immune to the political pressures that follow Israelis wherever they go, regardless of their politics. Shortly before the festival began, Rodriguez received an email from Andrew Fellus, a New York music producer and organizer of Artists Against Apartheid, a group that works in concert with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and its counterpart in the United States. Some performers have heeded the groups’ call to boycott Israel. Elvis Costello characterized his cancellation of a recent show as “matter of instinct and conscience.” Carlos Santana and the Pixies have joined in the boycott. Fellus’ email to Rodriguez read: “I noticed that you are curating the upcoming Israeli jazz festival, and curious if you realize this event is being promoted by the Israeli Consulate? You might not want to have your event associated with a government that is responsible for the ongoing ethnic cleansing, colonization and dispossession of Palestinian land.”

Rodriguez replied to Fellus by email: “I am a friend of all musicians and artists from all over the world regardless of what country they are from. I do not appreciate your actions against me curating a program of Israeli musicians who live in New York City, or anyone else for that matter.” He ended the letter: “Where politics and boycotts fall short, music and art goes a very long way. I am inviting you to come and listen to the music. I hope you can make it.”

The first Festival of Israeli Jazz ended without controversy. But the day after its last show, Israeli forces raided a flotilla of ships attempting to break its blockade of the Gaza strip. A battle ensued aboard the lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, that resulted in nine deaths, sparking international outrage and further energizing the movement to boycott Israel. Next year’s festival, which Rodriguez hopes to expand into the Abrons Art Center, may not proceed so smoothly. Fellus’ group was planning to protest an upcoming concert by the Jerusalem String Quartet. The quartet’s April concert in London’s Wigmore Hall was disrupted by hecklers, which forced the BBC to stop its live broadcast of the recital.

***

“I have an ambivalent feeling about the Israeli army,” said Cohen. “Growing up in Tel Aviv, being involved in the arts, the last thing artists want to do is fight.” Young Israeli musicians can audition for a limited number of spots in Israel Defense Force bands; the result can determine whether you end up playing Ellington or invading Gaza. Cohen was accepted into the Air Force Band prior to her induction.

“Basic training was not fun, but it was an interesting experience,” said Cohen. “You’re finishing high school, summer vacation, everything’s beautiful, you’re an optimist, you’re a kid. You finish your exams and very quickly, in July, my mom takes me in the morning. I get on the bus, and they close the doors. Someone’s shouting, ‘Don’t look out the windows!’ Your parents are still standing outside the bus. Immediately”—Cohen snapped her fingers—“you lose your identity.”

Cohen hadn’t known that the First Festival of Israeli Jazz had become politicized, but it came as no surprise.

“I avoid as much as I can any political conversation mainly out of fear,” said Cohen. “It depends on the environment. I went to Dartmouth College to play and went to Chabad House. I had no problem engaging in talking about politics. But I’m afraid of hostile reactions. With cab drivers I always say I’m from Brazil. I don’t say I’m from Israel. It’s happened more than once that someone is blaming me for the government’s policy. And I say, ‘Listen, I live here. I’m a musician. I don’t call the shots.’ ”

As a kid, Cohen traveled abroad as part of youth orchestra. Its members were told not to wear yarmulkas or clothing with Hebrew slogans. “Just hats,” said Cohen. “Try to mingle. It’s a good rule in general. Why be a target if you don’t have to? I remember taking a cab at 3 in the morning, with a Muslim driver. He was explaining that he was not allowed to listen to music because it distracts attention from God. I revealed I was from Israel and as we were just near my street, suddenly he locked the doors. And I freaked out. ‘Please don’t lock the doors.’ I immediately imagined the worst. Maybe he wanted to intimidate me. That was the last time I told a cabdriver that I’m from Israel.”

***

Listen to “Hofim,” from Poetica:

Cohen returned to Israel last year during the incursion into the Gaza Strip. “Conflict is so rooted in the culture,” she said, pondering whether she would ever return to Israel to live. “Everything is a consequence of something that happened before, and not seeing the end of it, it’s so difficult. You cannot live there and not be involved in what’s going on. It got under my skin so deep I couldn’t shake it off. For the first time I told myself, maybe not.”

Now that Israel may face the existential threat of a nuclear Iran, many have suggested that its best and brightest will increasingly choose to live elsewhere. This summer, the Israeli Cabinet implemented a plan to stem “brain drain” among the country’s scientists. Academics are also choosing increasingly work outside of the country.

Cohen suggested that it’s nothing new. “They don’t have to wait for a nuclear weapon from Iran for people to say this is an insane place,” she said. “I keep meeting people who have been here for 30 years. They’re 100 percent Israelis, in their behavior, they way they talk. They visit Israel, they’re connected, and have families there. Israel is a wonderful place to visit. But think about raising kids there. Suicide bombers? Having to send your kid to the army?”

Cohen also noted that there are far fewer jazz stages to play in Israel.

“I’m having a great time and love being on stage, but the amount of stages in a small country is limited,” said Cohen, betraying what seemed like a faint twinge of regret. “Going back to live in Israel is a serious decision.”

“If people just understood that jazz is about life, it’s about taking people from different backgrounds, put them in one room and say, ‘OK, start talk, and communicate, make sense, explain where you come from, respect and listen, react and suggest and don’t take over, be polite,’ ” she said. “How many times have you heard someone playing jazz but not really communicating? I don’t get it, just monologuing. It’s about dialogues and conversations.”

Ben Waltzer is a jazz pianist, journalist, and assistant director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia University.

Last Wednesday, the New York City Council voted to approve an eight-block rezoning that holds as its centerpiece a proposed 17 buildings of affordable housing. Known as the Culver El Estates, the plan includes 68 apartment units to be built by the Orthodox Jewish community that inhabits the area, Borough Park. Unlike most of New York City’s 178,000 public housing units, which average two bedrooms, a majority of the units at Culver El will consist of four- or five-bedroom apartments—intentionally large dwellings to fit the family size of the ultra-Orthodox.

The developer of the Culver El project is the South Brooklyn Community Organization, an arm of the umbrella Hasidic organization Agudath Israel, which, according to a spokesman, has developed more than 300 affordable housing units in New York—most of which have been heavily subsidized by federal or state funds. But this new rezoning initiative, some non-Orthodox residents claim, arrived abruptly, with little word of its development outside the insular Orthodox community, even though it occupied a large, central location in an ethnically diverse neighborhood.

“It’s built for a population―a subset of the population―in the neighborhood,” said area resident Liena Zagare, who blogs about the neighborhood at The Kensington Prospect. “That doesn’t seem right.”

Of the 130,000 families on the waiting list for public housing apartments, according to the city’s Housing Authority, only half a percent request four or more bedrooms, which cost $523 a month in Brooklyn. (Most applicants are waiting for studio apartments with rents starting at $288 a month.) Of course, the number of rooms in a housing-project unit is not alone an indicator of discrimination, and the gaudiest Borough Park abodes are still dwarfed by the towering apartments of Manhattan elites. But in the current tight housing market, large apartments designed for a certain community’s lifestyle can be enough to bring the case to court and test the political muscle of well-organized and connected Orthodox groups.

According to the people behind the Culver El development, the arrival of the project was anything but abrupt. For them, it was a long march through the bureaucratic machinery and neighborhood politics of New York, dating back to 2001, when they brought their proposal to the district’s city councilman. Before then, Orthodox housing projects in the city had met very little resistance.

***

Even by urban standards, Borough Park contains an exceptionally high population density. The maternity ward at the Maimonides Medical Center, in the heart of the neighborhood, delivers more babies than any other hospital in the state.

A report, released last year by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, identified the neighborhood as one of the city’s most “severely crowded.” But Borough Park is also home to the largest concentration of Jews in the United States, a highly observant Orthodox community that clusters its housing around synagogues. The community’s growth has been at the root of a wave of construction projects that has transformed the shape and texture of the neighborhood, pushing the metric known as “median rent burden,” or the fraction of income spent on housing, there to first in Brooklyn, while its income lags behind the rest of the borough.

These pressures—crowding, high prices, and exceptional religious needs—have forced many Orthodox families out of the neighborhood to New Jersey and suburbs elsewhere in New York State, where they aren’t always welcome. Transplanted Orthodox families—in towns upstate and on Long Island—have faced hostile disputes with local populations over housing, said Steven I. Weiss of The Jewish Channel, which regularly covers housing issues. In 2000, the city council in Tenafly, New Jersey, voted to prohibit lechis, the posts ultra-Orthodox use to form an eruv, a physical enclosure, on the Sabbath. Orthodox Jews ran into similar hurdles in the Hamptons, where, two summers ago, residents vigorously opposed construction of an eruv. In the Town of Ramapo, a suburban hamlet in Rockland Couty, New York, locals were irate when new Orthodox residents successfully lobbied for revisions to local zoning laws. “You wonder,” one woman asked The New York Times, “how can someone drop their own little planet on us?”

So far, these tensions have stayed outside New York City’s borders. But as the Orthodox population grows, that may be changing.

“There is no long-term, broad-based disregard for Orthodox neighbors anywhere in Brooklyn akin to what we’ve seen in some American suburbs,” Weiss said. Orthodox residents in Borough Park are a well-established part of the fabric of New York City life, and these housing projects are extensions of their community’s needs. The developers see themselves as the premier providers of affordable housing in their areas and natural advocates for the ultra-Orthodox, who make up an overwhelming majority of the Jewish residents in the neighborhood. By and large, city agencies, particularly under the pro-development Bloomberg Administration, agree. And city officials—eager to attach their names to any affordable housing project—willingly accommodate the particular housing requests of this rapidly growing population that votes in big, organized blocs.

Even if this voting dynamic does not hold, particularly with younger, more independent Orthodox voters, it’s still the reigning conventional wisdom. “I think it’s perceived to be a well-organized vote, and I think politicians respond to well-organized votes,” John Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the City University of New York, recently told The Forward. For Orthodox leaders pushing political initiatives in the city, success depends on keeping their numbers high.

Over the past two decades, housing developments in Borough Park have sprouted as rapidly as the population, and most projects are completed swiftly. In 1992, the city created a special ordinance for the neighborhood that relaxed zoning restrictions, allowing buildings to expand to cover 65 percent of their lot in high-density areas. Between 1996 and 2003, the average number of new housing permits issued in Borough Park was nearly five times greater than in neighboring districts. For the ambitious Culver El development, South Brooklyn Community Organization got subsidies from the New Foundations Program, New York City’s 2000 initiative to promote homeownership. Under the program, city-owned property is doled out to private developers who promise a third of the units—handed out via lottery—will meet certain affordability standards. (SBCO said Culver El will have apartments available for families that make roughly $50,000 to $90,000 a year.) City subsidies are repaid by the developer over time, with incentives built in for occupancy. To alert local residents to the newly available housing, developers are required to advertise in one of the city’s metro dailies, a community paper, and what the law calls an “ethnic newspaper.”

In 2005, Michael Bloomberg officially announced the Borough Park rezoning plan that paved the way for Culver El Estates. And on May 12, 2010, the development won the approval of the city’s Planning Department. A month later, the community board approved, with only two members objecting. One of those no votes was from Maggie Tobin, who lives near the project and said the rezoning squanders a chance to create more open space in the densely populated neighborhood. (The rezoning plan passed in the City Council allocated $600,000 to renovate the nearest park and expand open spaces.) “If there’s enough room for 68 units,” she told me, “it pretty much sounds like there’s going to be a lot of kids there. You can do the math.”

***

The Culver El project is not even the only Brooklyn site causing controversy for this reason. A few miles north, in the Williamsburg neighborhood, a development of 1,895 units of mixed-income housing, known as Broadway Triangle, is facing legal hurdles. Unlike the publicly subsidized, privately built Culver El project, Broadway Triangle is a proposal of the city’s Housing Authority, which administers all the public housing in the five boroughs.

The United Jewish Organization of Williamsburg, a Hasidic service agency with close ties to local Assemblyman Vito Lopez, Brooklyn’s county Democratic leader, won the development rights to Broadway Triangle. UJO secured the development without competitive bids, a rare maneuver that did not go unchallenged. Several local Latino and African-American churches and nonprofits partnered with two area Orthodox organizations, the Central Jewish Council and United Jewish Community Advocacy Relations and Enrichment, to actively oppose the development. The group, called the Broadway Triangle Coalition, has worked primarily with the aid of Brooklyn Legal Services to mount legal challenges to UJO’s project. The building’s apartment sizes and layout—with most apartments, especially those on the lower floors not requiring use of a Sabbath elevator, counting four bedrooms or more—favor the Orthodox, this group claims, and are tantamount to discrimination. If the city is going to offer “affordable housing,” the group argues, then it should be affordable to everyone.

But the main objection to the project is political, explained Martin Needelman of Brooklyn Legal Services. “It’s not just the division of the apartments,” he said of motivation for the lawsuit,” but the process that led up to it that excluded every group that is not aligned with the UJO.”

Last December, the New York City Council approved the Broadway Triangle project by a 36-10 vote. Immediately after the vote, the coalition filed a discrimination lawsuit in a State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Justice Emily Jane Goodman upheld the suit, issuing an injunction to halt the development’s construction. And on May 20, Goodman blocked an attempt to have the suit thrown out. “With such negligible demand for large apartments as compared with smaller ones,” wrote Goodman, “it is questionable why in such a daunting housing crisis, there is so powerful a commitment, with funds, to construct only large, and, therefore, fewer, apartments.” In June, the coalition rejected an offer by the city to settle the lawsuit. Then, on October 13, Goodman suspended the suit in response to a pending federal investigation of Lopez and his nonprofits, an inquiry that will seriously hamper the development from moving forward. So goes the turf war, in court battles and counter-accusations, gaining and giving ground one project at a time.

***

This past August, Rabbi Chaim Israel, the housing development director for the South Brooklyn Community Organization, showed me the Culver El site. Bodegas nestled beside Bangladeshi bazaars and kosher markets in the close-packed storefronts. Standing across from his development’s future home, Israel described the situation as he saw it. “Large families are living with a very unique problem,” he said. “No one wants to rent to large families.” He pointed out another housing project managed by SBCO four blocks away. The units, built nearly two decades ago, still had 95 percent of the original homeowners, he claimed proudly. With Culver El, he wants to invite those formerly denied the opportunity to “join the homeowning society.” When pressed, though, Israel batted away assumptions that units would go exclusively to Orthodox Jews. “They will,” he said of the neighbors hailing from Pakistan, Mexico, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, “have the opportunity to buy just like anybody else.”

Mark Bergen writes about public policy and lives in Chicago.

This essay has motivated nearly all of my work, though perhaps nothing as much as my most recent project: Sukkah City, an international design competition organized with my friend Joshua Foer, based on the primitive, biblical construction of the sukkah. If the members of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association could turn the minor holiday of Hanukkah into a major annual festival, maybe could we reverse the process and restore Sukkot—a ritual once central to the Jewish year—to its rightful pedestal.

***

The Sukkah City crew entered in Union Square as interlopers: a phalanx of nervous architects and engineers accompanying a dozen hulking sukkahs, partially built and arriving on a procession of flatbed trucks. At dusk on the evening of September 18, our convoy had left from a holding site in Brooklyn. We didn’t reach Union Square until downtown was dark.

Our mood had been so calm and optimistic back in the workshop. Over the previous 10 days, teams of architects had arrived from France, England, Japan, and Germany. Not just Jews, but Catholics, Muslims, and Bahai, all unexpectedly joined by a newly discovered yet nonetheless passionate fascination with sukkahs. They had dropped everything to re-locate to New York City, source materials, and coax carpenters, fabricators, and engineers to lend a shoulder and make their visions real.

Three days before the competition, the teams’ arsenals of raw materials—still at the studio in Gowanus—sufficiently resembled sukkahs for us to throw a preview party in Brooklyn. But just as we arrived at the space, a storm of biblical proportions tore through Queens and Brooklyn, rattling down the street in front of our studio, leaving it littered with shattered tree branches. I watched with fear, aware that an encore of this weather in Union Square would immediately tear apart our sukkahs. But many of the architects were delighted, seeing it as some kind of a heavenly sign that everything would be fine, since, after all, God had made schach—the foliage that traditionally covers a sukkah roof—rain from the sky.

Before we knew it, we were on that ride, and then standing at the precipice of our project: Union Square, on a Saturday night.

The plaza crackled with merriment as thousands of New Yorkers and tourists tangled around buskers, jugglers, chess hustlers, and an entire 10-piece New Orleans brass band. A dozen skaters and stunt bikers propelled themselves off the steps below the plaza, careening at speed, buzzing passers-by. The folly of our mission became instantly clear: How were we going to build these sukkahs amidst this havoc, under cover of darkness, in front of a Whole Foods and a Filene’s Basement?

Two enormous banks of floodlights were laboriously wheeled into position. With a flick of a switch, their beam turned night into day (and caused half of the plaza dwellers to scatter instantly away in search of darkness). The sukkah builders seized their chance, scurrying to their assigned positions with drills and hammers at the ready. The build-out began.

Union Square was transformed into a construction site. The sounds of buzzsaws, shredders, and power drills were pierced only by the scream of a forklift backing up—none of which, of course, kept inquisitive New Yorkers from risking life and limb to figure out what was going on, pressing eagerly past the danger signs for a peek. At 4 a.m., we realized just how fast and far word had spread: A gaggle of frat boys stormed the plaza, breathless: Where, they demanded, were the “hookers” they had heard rumor of in Union Square?

By 6:30 a.m., the last of the sukkahs was complete. The architects dragged themselves off to bed. The plaza was eerily silent. I was left almost alone at dawn in Union Square, with only the fantastical structures for company.

The visitors came in droves. First the dog-walkers, followed by young stroller-pushing dads foraging for early cups of coffee. Teams of architectural photographers silently clustered around the exhibits, clicking away, eager to finish their work before the crowds emerged. And then, at 10 a.m., as if from central casting, a crushing mass of New Yorkers descended on the plaza.

A basketball team from the Bronx clustered in a pack. Sailors paraded past. Girlfriends posed daintily in front of a sukkah as their boyfriends snapped away with their cellphones. Elderly couples strolled hand in hand. Entire Orthodox congregations snaked behind as their rabbinical leaders examined the halakhic qualities of each building. By lunchtime, I had heard more than one group of homeless men debating the merits and demerits of the different approaches to schach.

The waves of viewers were relentless, and each brought with it its own set of characters. When night returned, the crowd became younger—the party kids, drinkers, BMX-ers and skaters. At 4 a.m., the square was packed with a mellow crowd for whom the sukkahs were akin to some epic HBO original programming they remained glued to for an hour at a time. By Day 2, our architects had been fairly battered by crowds’ eager, repetitive questions:

• How many shims were in the Shim City sukkah? (Over 10,000.)
• Was Single Thread really made out of single thread of wire? (Yes.)
• Was Log really kosher (Yes, according to our Orthodox engineer)

Every time I saw a tourist snap a photo, each moment our Twitter count trended upward or people asked us where the nearest hardware store was located so they could go and build a sukkah of their very own, I thought of Sarna’s essay and the brilliance of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association who had the smarts to transform a festival with a succinct performance on a single evening.

At 5 p.m. on September 20, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived to present the People’s Choice award to the winner. As he opened the envelope and announced “Fractured Bubble,” a scream emerged from one corner of the plaza. The mothers of the two winning architects had been unable to contain themselves, and—as we learned that moment—there are few sounds more joyous than that of a proud Jewish mother and a proud Bahai mother celebrating in unison.

Roger Bennett is the co-founder of Reboot, Sukkah City, and the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation.

• The United States has convinced Israel that it will take Iran longer—a year, minimum—before its nuclear weapons are operational, somewhat forestalling the possibility of Israeli military action in the near- to mid-future. [NYT]

• President Ahmadinejad reportedly said he was ready to restart fuel swap talks with the five permanent Security Council members (as opposed to Turkey and Brazil, with which he already struck a deal). [Haaretz]

• A new U.N. report says restricted land in Gaza has caused additional misery to a sizeable percentage of its residents. [NYT]

• Here’s the thing, though: The Islamic center almost certainly won’t actually be built. [Politico]

• Amar’e is apparently keeping kosher. [Page Six]

Not long ago, Berkovitz applied for Section 8, a subsidized housing program for low-income New Yorkers, only to be denied on the grounds her income from Social Security was too high. Seven months ago, her monthly food-stamp allotment of $57 was reduced to less than $15. After a $96.50 Medicare deduction, Berkovitz receives just over $1,300 each month, a sum that barely covers her needs, which include 24 pills a day. Berkovitz doesn’t fall below the 2010 federal poverty line, but she lives a meager existence, absolutely dependent on the financial support of government programs and Jewish service organizations.

One of an estimated 38,053 Holocaust survivors in the New York City metropolitan area, according to 2010 projections by Selfhelp Community Services, Berkovitz also counts as one of 4,947 survivors categorized as “near poor.” Selfhelp, which, along with a host of other aid organizations, assists cash-strapped survivors, says that 15,855 survivors in the metropolitan area live below the federal poverty line.

With all the Holocaust museums, educational curriculums, and movies, the fact that survivors continue to struggle well into old age is a tragic irony. Survivors reap very little material benefit from their veneration in the culture at large. While their past is often invoked as a cautionary tale, their present all too easily gets lost in the shuffle. In the immediate post-World War II period, survivors were the focal point of Jewish philanthropic efforts, a claim historian Hasia Diner uses to debunk the alleged “myth of silence” among American Jews after the Holocaust. But while basic services, like jobs and housing, were enough to refresh people’s lives, aid slowed to trickle as survivors aged. Rehabilitation went only so far.

The question of what the descendants of Holocaust perpetrators owe to survivors treads a fine line between moral and material restitution. The moral imperative to, essentially, force countries like Germany, Austria, Poland, and Hungary into a lifetime of apology led to the creation of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany in 1952. Since then, Germany has provided nearly $60 billion to pay individual compensation as well as group social service programs. More than half of Selfhelp’s $7 million annual budget comes from Claims Conference funding.

But the Claims Conference, which budgeted nearly $115 million nationally in 2009 to fund direct compensation payments, social service programs such as home care and food programs, and Holocaust education and research initiatives, is an imperfect system. “There are competitive claims,” Ronald Zweig, a historian at New York University and the author of German Reparations and the Jewish World: a History of the Claims Conference, told me. “The Claims Conference wants to use the money for institutions, for the future, but survivors say, ‘We are the Holocaust.’ ”

Helen Berkovitz, like many needy survivors, feels entitled to whatever she asks for. The Claims Conference allocation system, which indirectly funds programs like psychological counseling and social function, doesn’t affect survivors in the same way as hard cash payments. A few years ago she asked the Claims Conference for a one-time donation to pay for a trip to Auschwitz, where her parents died. After a series of petitions, she says, she was denied.

Depending on the type of camp a survivor endured, plus its geographical location and duration of stay, a survivor might be eligible for monthly payments of 291 euros, or around $400, from the German government through the Claims Conference’s Article 2 Fund. Currently, only 9 percent of U.S. survivors receive Article 2 Funds. The rest of the direct payments are earmarked for emergency use only.

In the New York metropolitan area, the Claims Conference supports 10 organizations, which provide the bulk of support. They range from small Orthodox associations, like Borough Park’s Bikur Cholim, to the vast Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, which dispenses funds through 25 Jewish Community Councils.

Selfhelp attends to around 5,600 Holocaust survivors every year in the five boroughs and Nassau County. Since its founding in 1936, Selfhelp’s mission has been to help émigrés from Nazi Germany and, after the war, to remain the “last surviving relative to Holocaust survivors and other victims of Nazi persecution.” It provides everything from laundry and transportation to subsidized health care and financial advice, as well as community-building programs throughout the year and emergency cash assistance to cover utilities, medical bills, food, and clothing. In addition to the natural effects of aging, survivors suffer from a multitude of psychological and social debilities, often stemming from what the vice president for Nazi Victim Services at Selfhelp refers to as the “big black hole” existential question, “Why am I here, and why is my brother not?”

These are questions that face caseworkers across all survivor aid organizations, like Miriam, a client coordinator with the Council of Jewish Organizations of Flatbush, part of the Metropolitan Council network, who visits Berkovitz every couple weeks. (Miriam declined to give her last name.) The visits often delve deeper than banal conversation and become reminiscences. On a mid-December day, Miriam sat across from Berkovitz and teased out her life story. Berkovitz’s survival is likely familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Holocaust, but what has happened to her since often goes unnoticed.

In 1944, the 15-year-old Berkovitz and her family were relocated from Dej, a rural town in what was then northwestern Hungary, to a ghetto on the forested outskirts of town, along with 8,000 other Jews. In June of that year, the ghetto was liquidated, and the residents were herded onto trains bound for Auschwitz.

At the camp, Berkovitz was separated from her mother by Dr. Josef Mengele. She remembers crying for her mother and asking a Polish woman where the guards had taken her parents. The woman, she says, pointed to the smoke billowing from the crematoria, darkening the sky. Berkovitz remembers thinking the smoke was going up to God. Housed in a children’s barrack for eight months, Berkovitz was eventually sent to work in a Siemens factory in Nuremburg. There she fused platinum for airplane parts until her liberation in May 1945. It took the ragged teenager four weeks to return to Dej, now in Romania.

For the next two years, Berkovitz worked as a maid in Klausenburg, a nearby town, before marrying another survivor. The couple left Hungary, spent some time in a displaced-persons camp in Hamburg, and finally settled in Israel, in a small farming community near the Gaza Strip. Without education or money, she and her husband worked as farmers. Berkovitz later attended hairdressing school outside the settlement.

Like other settlers in 1967, Berkovitz, her husband, and their two children left for the United States. The family moved to Borough Park but found that extended family ignored requests to meet. And in New York, misfortune piled on. Berkovitz failed her licensing test to practice hairdressing. The language barrier was insuperable. And the wig-making store she opened in 1973 folded two years later, unable to compete, she says, with Russian immigrants selling cheaper products. Not long after, her husband, who worked at a Queens bakery, was paralyzed in a hit-and-run, leaving him incapacitated and in need of personal care until his death in 1999. Five years after the accident, possibly as a result of stress, Berkovitz suffered a heart attack, forcing her to send her husband to a primary-care facility on Staten Island, where she visited each day.

The final indignity came when, in 1959, Berkovitz had registered for reparations, hiring a Tel Aviv lawyer to manage the process, giving him power of attorney, and then never seeing the 34,000 marks (roughly $8,500) she was owed.

Berkovitz can trace these lines that led her to near poverty, but she can’t explain them. And she’s not alone. On any given day, Miriam, a boisterous 58-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors, might visit up to 10 clients, checking in and chatting, often absorbing unwieldy stories from the war years. While caseworkers provide a comforting presence and find quick-fix solutions to improve quality of life, they sometimes represent the result of Claims Conference allocations, money that survivors feel could go directly into their pockets.

“I’m old, but I’m not meshuggah,” Berkovitz says. “Why does Bikur Cholim need 60 people on staff? They come and tell jokes and they need a salary?” To some extent, Miriam is spared from this complaint, and Berkovitz quickly notes her appreciation of the time Miriam spends chatting.

“There’s a tremendous amount of resentment,” Miriam concedes. “Because they did go though a terrible time, they do feel they should get a bit more, and we’re not doing enough for them. Fair enough. Unfortunately, the money is just not there.”

Following Miriam on her rounds makes the point clear. On an overcast late January day, Miriam moves at a quick pace, scurrying from her car to a client’s front door with determined urgency. She mostly visits women. Today, she’s here to visit Sylvia Goldstein, an 87-year-old Auschwitz survivor. The front door of Goldstein’s building is cracked and grimy; the screen is flecked with white paint. Inside the second-floor apartment light filters in through heavy curtains, leaving the dining room in semi-darkness. Unpacked boxes stuffed with clothing and other belongings fill the room like furniture.

Incapacitated and confined to a reclining chair, Goldstein’s husband, who also survived the Holocaust, needs assistance from two part-time attendants, paid from meager savings. Still, what he needs is a medical, mechanized chair, a $1,000 item that is beyond their budget.

But in order for Miriam to get a chair for Goldstein’s husband, she needs to know where he was during the war. Individual monetary requests for medical equipment require documentation proving a petitioner survived the Holocaust, even if the survivor is already recognized and receiving aid.

Goldstein brings a handful of papers, and she and Miriam try to piece things together. But although Miriam speaks fluent Yiddish, it’s nearly impossible for her to straighten out the survivor’s fractured tale. The dates don’t add up, and Goldstein can’t lucidly state where her husband spent the war years. After nearly 20 minutes of fruitless back-and-forth, Miriam hastily gathers her things and says goodbye, but not before taking a pitying glance at Goldstein’s husband lying motionless in the next room. He looks frozen and stares vacantly at the wall.

One of the harshest self-criticisms for impoverished survivors is that they feel as though they failed at their second chance at life. While they may have raised a successful family, the need for organizational support only prolongs their identity as survivors. Berkovitz, who unquestionably considers herself poor, expects little out of life. When a friend–also a survivor–died, she said others had to chip in $50 each toward a burial.

“My girlfriends are always crying about money,” she said, sitting at her kitchen table, a blistery January wind blowing outside. “Sometimes you get tired from all the crying. I don’t want to think I need more. But I can’t go ask because I’ll feel like a beggar.”

Josh Tapper is a journalist living in New York.

Bearded for years, Berman arrived at the reading clean-shaven, with a powder-blue suit jacket and cropped hair salted gray. (When he goes downtown, he no longer wears a corduroy suit.) He moved comfortably and deliberately at the podium, weaving his poems, uninterrupted by introductions, in with a deeply personal narrative. He spoke about quitting—”I always saw myself as a quitter”—various childhood pursuits, then music, then writing. Some in the audience surely considered other unsaid things Berman quit: A disabling drug addiction and depression. Seven years ago, he went clean after a suicide attempt and embraced Judaism anew. (You can hear him discuss his music and faith in this Vox Tablet podcast, in which he also straps on a guitar and sings Walt Whitman.)

In their first formal outing, 1994′s Starlite Walker, Silver Jews burst forth with a shambled, playful, lo-fi sound. (Stephen Malkmus, a charter member of Silver Jews, would go on to perfect this style with Pavement.) But the strength of the band’s later albums rested less on the music than on Berman’s lyrics. His words, sung in steady baritone, blend literary wit with melancholic Americana. And his poetry does the same.

Berman’s explanation of his departure from music led to his central subject. Contemporary musicians, he disparaged, were “expected to become entrepreneurs.” The increased commercialism he saw while performing brought him to a daunting conclusion: “My dad’s world has subsumed my world.” Berman’s disdain for his father, Rick, the chief lobbyist with Berman and Company, has been public for over a year. Writing to the Forward, Berman couched his opposition to his father in religious terms: “Jews should always identify with the disadvantaged. You cannot ‘graduate’ to a life of self-interest and exploitation.”

For a bulk of the discussion, Berman detailed what he deemed the pervasive impact of his father’s work. “I can’t fight my dad,” he intoned, “but I decided that I would be his nemesis.” And so he has embarked on that project, funding an expository documentary. The effort, he noted, is neither easy nor comfortable. But it is very necessary. “I’m in the process of changing,” he said, “from a reflective person to an active person.”

When the questions began, an audience member asked, sanguinely, why Berman didn’t consider revamping Silver Jews to bankroll this personal project. He brushed the possibility aside, citing the sorry state of today’s rockers (“pandering, pandering, pandering”). But the kernel of his decision is in the transition from reflection—in music, in writing—to action.

This change appears to coincide with a turn in his faith. Or perhaps it’s driven by it. “I’m a complete fraud,” he said, noting his appreciation for Torah study, “because I have no communal relationship with Judaism.” “Now,” he added, “I’m ready to be communal.” He gave a short nod, and left the podium.

Here are the Silver Jews at their final show, early last year:

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Although the project’s fate is in local hands (it has received its Community Board’s OK), the proposal has emerged as a wedge issue in statewide politics: Former Republican Congressman Rick Lazio has made his opposition to the project a centerpiece of his campaign for governor. He joined dozens who shuffled up to the microphone to address the Commission. Most of the speakers urged the Commission to grant landmark status to the building. They want to preserve the city’s historical landscape, they said, but, more importantly, halt the center’s construction.

A handful of speakers voiced their support for the project. Muzaffar Chishti, a Muslim NYU law professor, cited the “interfaith opportunity” that the Cordoba House presented. “I happen to be married to a Jewish woman from New York,” he noted. Opponents in the crowd did not appreciate this tactic. Some shouted sarcastically, “Oh, great!” and “Isn’t that nice?” Opposition to the center, said Zead Ramadan, the board president of New York’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, is not a unique phenomenon. It is the “same thing that’s happening” in other parts of the city, he continued at the microphone: “It’s called Islamophobia.”

But opponents of the proposal, who were swift to note their lack of discrimination, saw the center as inextricably bound to its location, which was actually hit by one of the planes. Like several speakers, Sally Regenhard shared the story of a loved one who died in the terrorist attacks nine years ago. She lost her son. In emotional remarks, she begged the Committee not to “fold to political forces, to political correctness.” She then drew an analogy to a convent a group of Carmelite nuns built at Auschwitz in the 1980s. Eventually, Pope John Paul II drew it to a close because of its strain on Catholic-Jewish relations. We should not, Regenhard insisted, repeat the blunder.

Watching from the side of the auditorium, the Cordoba House proponents quietly disagreed. The house, they claim, is not a mosque, but a community space modeled after the 92nd Street Y and the Jewish Community Center.

In fact, they have partnered with the Manhattan JCC’s executive director, Rabbi Joy Levitt, who, as The Forward reported, voiced her endorsement of the proposed space and of its leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.

But support for the project is not unanimous in the Jewish community (what is?). Two members of a lower Manhattan synagogue sat near the back, applauding the speakers that called for a landmark status. They came to resist the building of the Center—in their opinion, a clandestine mosque—in the shadow of the former towers.

Meanwhile, Robert Shusterman sat for most of the hearing holding a befuddling sign. It simply declared, “FREE HAPPY ENDINGS.” As he took the floor, he explained that he originally opposed the plan. But he had changed his mind, determining that opposition was based on an entrenched fear of Islam. “Is this meeting about landmarks or about Muslims?” he asked rhetorically. His sign, he went on, was intended as a crude innuendo to defuse the tension. The landmark status supporters voiced their disapproval. Members of the Cordoba House laughed. At the back of the auditorium, I asked Shusterman if he was Jewish. Of course, he said. “Who else would be crazy enough to hold a sign like this?”

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He’s also 27. And he lives with his parents, Orthodox Jews, in Staten Island.

Braun’s squad allegedly shuffled in 110 tons of marijuana from Canada since 2007, channeling the drugs through the Akwesasne Native American reservations upstate. According to the Staten Island Advance, authorities seized $30,000 in cash and “drug ledgers for ‘hundreds’ of marijuana shipments” from Braun’s home. They also nabbed 16 cell phones from the young entrepreneur, who once owned a cell phone store in the borough.

Nearly 60 members of Braun’s operation have been arrested by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. But he was the big get. After an earlier raid of a stash house in Staten Island, Braun apparently fled to Israel. Even there, he still ran the show. And his dealing operation was reinforced by partnerships with crime syndicates in Canada and California, including the Hells Angels.

Yesterday, Braun was denied bail. If tried and convicted, he could be sentenced to 30 years to life in prison.

Either way, the tale of the local drug kingpin should, no doubt, hit a theater near you soon.

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Although the differences and grievances, rather than the similarities, between the two groups are hot topics these days, Sudin uses side-by-side pieces to highlight the parallels between the adjacent worlds. “Rocker” and “Hassid Dancing” each show an individual spiritedly engaged with music, while “Gottleib’s Deli” and “Kellog’s Diner” portray the two cornerstone eateries. Sudin’s two favorite works, “2am Hipster Party (Where’s Waldo)” and “2am Hassidic Fabregen” are meant to evoke “the same party, the same enthusiasm,” explained Sudin. She also brings a sense of humor to her work: her “Hipster Bible” bears the word “Irony” in biblical script, and in a depiction of Williamsburg’s controversial bike lane, she makes the composition of Bedford Avenue look like a game of Frogger.

Sudin got the gig by responding to a posting by Aish looking for Jewish art. “It occurred to us that we have all these walls,” explained Adam Jacobs, Managing Director of the Aish Center, who saw an opportunity to meet new groups of people and “let them know about what we do.” Jacobs said the organization is looking for artwork “consistent in our messaging: innovative, true to tradition but artistic and modern.” He aims to start collating Jewish artists on Aish’s website and let them sell their artwork from there. Sudin, originally from the greater Springfield, MA, community, based this series, which has also shown at the Workman’s Circle Building in Murray Hill, on one of her graduating theses from the Pratt Institute. “I see myself as standing in between. I feel connected to both sides, but I’m neither and I can sympathize with both sides,” she said, her hair completely covered in a vibrant yellow scarf, but nose ring showing. “I started college right when hipsterdom started to take off…I lost some friends because of the hipster community.”

Hipsters and Hasids

If Washington Nathan’s father had not been murdered seven years earlier, no one would have noticed that the playboy drank a bit too much. If he had not been suspected of the murder, no one would even have remembered his name. As it was, that night 132 years ago cemented a reputation that persists a century later, and it sealed the ignoble end of New York’s original Jewish aristocracy.

* * *

Benjamin Nathan
CREDIT: Unidentified 19th-century newspaper, as reproduced in The Grandees, by Stephen Birmingham.

Benjamin Nathan’s body was discovered at 5:50 a.m. on July 29, 1870. A thunderstorm had torn through the city around midnight, but as dawn broke it was already hot and humid in Madison Square. Patrick McGuvin, a janitor at the elegant Fifth Avenue Hotel, was hosing down the sidewalk outside the hotel when Washington Nathan burst screaming from the brownstone at 12 West 23rd Street. McGuvin started to move toward him, then paused. He was wise to the antics of the wealthy young men who lived in the surrounding mansions, and despite the hour, Washington, dressed only in his underwear, seemed drunk. Seeing no reason to get involved, McGuvin was stooping to pick up his hose when he heard another shout. The first young man had been joined on the stoop by a second. He, too, was undressed, wearing a nightgown with two dark, wet stains. His socks were soaked with blood up to the ankles.

The bloody one was Frederick Nathan, Washington’s 26-year-old brother. Washington was only 22. Frederick had bloodstains on his chest and socks that trailed blood. It looked as though he had been stabbed, but in fact he was drenched in his father’s blood. The brothers led McGuvin and a passing patrolman inside. Benjamin’s body lay awkwardly between a private office and a reception room on the second story of the brownstone. Benjamin Nathan’s skull had been split six times. The carpet around him was matted with blood. The murder weapon was found by the front door: a two foot long iron bar with its ends flattened at right angles to the shaft. One end was caked red and flecked with gray hairs.

Five generations on, that bloody morning has been all but forgotten by my extended family. I first learned of the scandal from Studies in Murder, a 1924 true crime classic by Edmund Lester Pearson, which I found in my grandparents’ library. When I began looking through old newspapers and scant family archives, I was the first person to revisit the case in at least 40 years.

* * *

Benjamin Nathan was 57 when he was murdered. A prominent member of a wealthy Sephardic family, he had lived a life of astounding luxury. His four-story mansion was among the largest and most extravagant private homes in the city. He wore diamond shirt studs and carried a gold Jurgensen stem-winder on a heavy gold chain. The summer of his death, he had rented a 45-acre estate on a hill in Morristown, New Jersey, complete with a private vineyard, gardens, and a commanding view of two lakes. It was a life unimaginable to most New Yorkers of his day, never mind most Jews. Benjamin Nathan, a vice president of the New York Stock Exchange, was a man who lived like the Astors when the Bronfmans were still in Bessarabia.

A famous incident at Saratoga’s Grand Union Hotel in June 1877 illustrates the gap between the Sephardic elite and the rest of the New York Jewish community at that time. After the hotel’s manager turned away Joseph Seligman, a wealthy German-Jewish banker, the proprietor explained to the New York Times that the move had nothing to do with religion, since, after all “families like the…Nathans are welcome everywhere.”

Among the earliest Jewish immigrants to New York, the Nathans and their clique of Sephardic families were seen as different from the German and Russian Ashkenazic latecomers; they were seen as less Jewish than their coreligionists. The outcome of this bit of assimilationist jujitsu was that Benjamin Nathan was able to serve as president of Shearith Israel, the city’s old Sephardic synagogue, and of Mt. Sinai Hospital, originally known as the Jews’ Hospital, while also being a member of the Union Club and the St. Nicholas Society, an organization for New Yorkers of Dutch ancestry whose forebears arrived in the city before 1785. When Benjamin Nathan died, the Albion, a business newspaper, eulogized him as a Jew who “might easily have been mistaken for a Christian.” That was clearly a compliment.

The Nathans allowed their social standing to go to their heads. In her autobiography, It’s Been Fun, Benjamin’s niece Annie Nathan Meyer, a prominent anti-suffrage feminist and a founder of Barnard College, describes the pride of the Nathans of the mid- to late-19th century as something beyond aristocratic. “Looking back on it, it seems to me that this intense pride, accompanied by a strong sense of noblesse oblige among the Sephardim was the nearest approach to royalty in the United States,” she writes. “The Nathan family possessed this distinguishing trait to a high degree.”

Like royals, Nathans could only marry their social equals—Jews from old Sephardic lines. It was a miniscule pool from which to choose a mate, and there were a few generations of marriages between relatives. At least two of Benjamin Nathan’s seven children married first cousins. So did Edgar Joshua Nathan and Sara Solis Nathan (née Sara Nathan Solis), Benjamin’s niece and nephew and my great-great-grandparents.

It’s hard to reconcile these accounts of the 19th-century Nathans with the family in which I grew up. We still live in Manhattan, and my grandfather and uncle have both served as presidents of Shearith Israel, but that’s where the resemblance stops. We intermarry, we don’t all attend Sephardic synagogues, and we don’t belong to Knickerbocker social clubs. We’re not prominent, and we haven’t seen the sort of wealth that Benjamin enjoyed in generations. There’s still a sense of history and a bit of residual pride, but we’re not Nathans in any royal sense.

If anyone is responsible for our fall, it’s Washington Nathan, the spoiled scion.

* * *

At 22, Washington Nathan was already a notorious man-about-town. He fought regularly with his father over what Washington called his “habits of life” and what Frederick, even more euphemistically, called being “out too late nights” —his drinking, his whoring, and his profligate spending. Benjamin was so concerned about Washington that he wrote a clause into his will placing his son’s inheritance in trust. Washington would only have access to the principal when he married a Jew or turned 25, and even then his mother would have to sign a declaration stating that he was “living a life of regularity and sobriety” and that it would “be safe, proper and advisable” to give him the money.

By all accounts, Washington was also exceedingly attractive. Annie Nathan Meyer calls him “one of the handsomest men I ever saw” in her autobiography. She devotes attention to his eyes, his smile, and his “aura of mystery.” Her autobiography is also the origin of the oft-repeated rumor that the poet Emma Lazarus, another of Washington’s first cousins, was “violently” in love with him, and that this unrequited passion kept her from other men.

His beauty and his entitlement mixed dangerously. Five years after Benjamin’s murder, Washington would find himself in financial straits. At that point he took up with Birdie Bell, a tall, dark-haired woman who was the mistress of George Barnard, a judge who’d been impeached for colluding with Boss Tweed to embezzle from the city. Barnard gave Bell an allowance, which she turned over to the sweet-talking Washington. For four years, that arrangement worked well, until Washington’s mother died and he inherited $100,000. Flush with cash, he had no more need for Bell, and took up with a little-known actress, Alice Harrison. Bell found out and decided she would catch him with his new lover and kill him. Bell and a servant checked in to the New York hotel where Harrison was staying, set up a chair near her open doorway, and watched the hall. Just after 10 a.m. on Bell’s second day of stake-out, a man wearing a heavy coat walked past her into Harrison’s room. Bell sent her servant to knock on the door and confirm whether the man was Washington. He was, and Bell, pistol in hand, burst in, fired twice at Washington, and hit him behind the ear. He stood up, put on his coat, and walked to a surgeon.

* * *

Back in 1870, Benjamin Nathan spent most of the summer at the Morristown estate with his family. His final visit to Manhattan had been made for his mother’s yartzeit, which he wished to observe at Shearith Israel. The night before the murder, his sons accompanied him to synagogue to pray ma’ariv and then to visit his sister. Afterwards, Benjamin went home while Washington and Frederick went their separate ways.

Frederick’s account of the next 12 hours is undisputed. After leaving his aunt’s house he traveled by stagecoach downtown, where he caught a ferry to Brooklyn. He walked to the home of a female friend on Carroll Street and spent a few hours there. It was raining when he left, so Frederick borrowed an umbrella and walked to a Court Street pharmacy for a glass of Vichy water. He then took a horse-drawn trolley to Fulton Ferry, a boat to Manhattan, and another stagecoach uptown. At 21st Street he stopped for a late meal of poached eggs and a brandy mash, and he arrived home around midnight. There were renovations going on at the mansion and the servants hadn’t been prepared for Benjamin’s visit, so a makeshift bed had been set up for him in the reception room on the second floor by piling four mattresses on top of each other. Frederick stuck his head into the room as he climbed up to his own third-floor bedroom. His father was still awake, and asked if he knew where Washington was. Frederick said no, and continued up to bed.

Frederick woke early the next morning, intending to attend shacharit with his father. As he was beginning to dress, Washington walked by his room and said he would go and see if their father was up. Frederick had hardly gotten his socks on when he heard his brother yell. He ran downstairs.

“When I stepped up to his body I felt my stockings grow cold as the blood came upon them,” he later testified. He bent over the body, soaking his shirt with his father’s blood, before following Washington outside to find help.

Benjamin had died around two or three in the morning. The initial theory of the murder supposed that a professional burglar had sneaked into the building the day before, when carpenters were coming and going. He had hidden himself in the cellar until late at night, when he went upstairs to Benjamin’s office, rifled through the clothes Benjamin had left there, and found the key to the safe that sat in the corner. Benjamin was awakened by the noise of the burglar dropping a tin box of papers as he searched the safe for valuables. Terribly nearsighted, Benjamin had groped his way in the dark towards the sound and lunged at the burglar’s throat. The burglar hit him in the hand with the iron bar, freeing himself, and then beat Benjamin about the head.

It was a passable explanation, but questions lingered. Why such brutality in the course of a simple burglary? Why make a robbery attempt on a day the house was occupied when it was empty so much of the summer? And, perhaps, most troublingly, why had no one in the house heard the struggle? Frederick and Washington were only one flight up, while Ann Kelly, the maid, slept on the same floor. Yet no one reported hearing anything the entire night—not the sound of a burglar breaking into the house, nor the sound of a safe being rifled, or even the sound of an iron bar breaking a man’s skull.

* * *

On July 29, 1870, an excitable weekly called the Sunday Mercury published an unsigned article accusing Washington of murdering his father. The rest of the New York press defended Washington, with articles in the Times, the Commercial Advertiser, and the Evening Post condemning the Sunday Mercury. The Jewish Messenger’s response was particularly creative: “The revolting crime of parricide is unknown among the sins of Israel’s commission, and we feel an assurance, which amounts to certainty, that the present unhappy case will not prove an exception.”

Others were even more proactive in their response to the accusations. When a journalist named Isaac G. Reed Jr. was identified as the author of the Sunday Mercury article, Reed received violent threats from people who he said were “friends of Mr. Nathan,” and while he was crossing the Brooklyn ferry one day, he was nearly thrown overboard.

Members of the Nathan Family at the inquest
CREDIT: Unidentified 19th-century newspaper, as reproduced in The Grandees, by Stephen Birmingham.

The coroner’s inquest, begun shortly after the shiva, seemed to be designed specifically to clear Washington’s name. In his charge to the grand jury, the presiding judge made clear who the targets of the inquest were to be. “I think the time has come when every one of you, gentlemen, sworn as grand jurors, should fully realize the condition of things in this City,” Judge Bedford intoned. “The lawless class are daily becoming more daring and reckless. They must be checked in their mad career.” It was clear that he was not referring to the Nathans.

On August 12, a few days into the inquest, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle protested the disparity in treatment between Washington and Frederick, and the Irish Catholic servants of the Nathan family who had suddenly become the prime suspects.

“[T]he inquiry…[has] been marked by notable concessions to the sensibilities of wealthy parties under suspicion, and by wanton war upon the equal sensibilities of poor parties,” wrote the paper’s anonymous columnist. “The two sons of the murdered man, and his other relative, a Hebrew minister, [were] examined with tenderness, courtesy, and with supreme deference for their habits, situations and characters.” Meanwhile, the maid Ann Kelly and her son William, who lived in the attic and sometimes did odd jobs for Benjamin, were subjected to grueling questioning that seemed intended to cast aspersions on their characters. “The son was by interrogatories accused of bastardy, burglary, theft, bounty-jumping, perjury, vagrancy, fornication and murder,” according to the Eagle’s account.

Washington did his part to try to shift suspicion towards William Kelly, mentioning at a hearing on August 11 that he had heard noises upstairs where Kelly slept just before he discovered the body, as if Kelly were returning to his room. Frederick said he had heard no such noises.

Washington’s testimony about his own whereabouts the night of the murder offered an impossibly packed timeframe. Between 7:30 p.m. and 12:20 a.m., Washington claimed to have visited the bar at the St. James Hotel three times, read a magazine at Delmonico’s, visited the Fifth Avenue Hotel, taken in an open-air concert at Madison Square Park, and spent nearly three hours at a brothel. A prostitute named Clara Dale was brought in to corroborate this last claim, to the glee of the press.

* * *

It is unlikely that Washington Nathan killed his father. He had little to gain from Benjamin’s death. After all, the man had given him three or four thousand dollars the previous month, as Washington testified at the inquest, signifying a willingness to support him financially despite concerns about the young man’s character. His inheritance would be large but not too large, given that his mother would still be alive. The theory that the murder was at attempt to hasten the inheritance’s arrival or was an accidental byproduct of an attempt at extortion falls flat.

It seems likely, however, that the inquest and the investigation were rigged.

In 1854, Benjamin Nathan’s sister Rebecca married a young lawyer named Albert Cardozo. Cardozo and Nathan were close. Benjamin used his connections and influence to launch Cardozo’s career, and, just months before the murder, Cardozo named his son Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, a boy who would grow up to be a Supreme Court Justice. Albert was headed for a more ignoble fate.

Cardozo had joined the Tammany Society in 1859 and became a judge five years later. He spent the next eight years in Boss Tweed’s pocket alongside George Barnard and Judge John McCunn, who worked together to help Tweed raid the city’s coffers. Their efforts netted more than $30 million for Tweed by the time he was deposed in the early 1870s. Plenty of stories point to Cardozo’s interference in Benjamin’s murder investigation. Annie Nathan Meyer reports in her autobiography that Robert Nathan, her father and Benjamin’s brother, thought that Cardozo had impeded the investigation.

While no direct evidence of Cardozo’s involvement survives, motive and opportunity are apparent. Cardozo was at the height of his career, but there were already reformist rumblings in the press and among the city’s lawyers, and with an election coming the following year Cardozo couldn’t afford a personal scandal. There was plenty of potential for embarrassment in the investigation of the murder, particularly with interest flowing so quickly towards Washington. If a poorly selected grand jury had indicted Cardozo’s young nephew, he could have been in for a long campaign.

As to the opportunity, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reminded its readers in an 1875 story on the murder, “Cardozo was a Ring Judge. He was all powerful.” Through Tammany he had access to the police, the mayor, much of the press, and the courts. If he had wanted to interfere, he certainly could have.

* * *

No one was ever indicted for Benjamin Nathan’s murder. Articles on new leads in the case appeared every few years for decades, and the entire episode was rehashed in the papers each time a principal player died. Experts on the case often name a professional safe cracker named Billy Forrester as the killer; a Sing Sing inmate named George Ellis told authorities that Forrester had shared with him his plan to rob the Nathan home. Forrester was never brought to trial for the murder. But, after Forrester’s death, his own lawyer implied in statements that he was guilty—assertions intended to clear Washington’s name once and for all.

All accounts of Washington’s later life are depressing. In the years immediately after the murder, he seemed determined to live up to the caricature of excess and disreputability promoted in the popular press. His wedding to Nina Mapleson, the divorced daughter of an opera producer, was held in Yonkers in April 1881. The couple arrived in the city on a morning train and walked to the courthouse, where they asked to be married. Nina wore black. Later, the two ate at a local restaurant. Washington wouldn’t sign the restaurant’s register, but everyone there knew who he was.

The couple lived in a London suburb and later in Paris, where Washington spent much of his time at a hotel frequented by Americans, but “never seemed to find company there,” according to his obituary in the Chicago Tribune. He was “always alone and unattended and wearing upon his face the expression of a man utterly dissolute.” Known as a gambler and a drunk, he’d burned through his large inheritances, and creditors were trying unsuccessfully to seize his last remaining assets.

* * *

The Nathans wanted to be aristocrats, and they got everything that went along with that—prominence and social standing, hopeless sons and crooked cousins. Their place in society had been used for good by decent men like Benjamin, but in Albert’s hands it twisted until it fit alongside the kleptocratic populism of the day.

The idea of the Nathans as Jewish aristocracy declined after Washington’s generation. While his first cousins had included four or five significant political and literary figures, the following generation was less spectacular, with no notable members and no notable scandals. My great-grandfather, Edgar J. Nathan Jr. was 50 years younger than Washington. He served as Manhattan borough president in the 1940s, and his political orientation was telling. Unlike Albert Cardozo, the Tammany Democrat, Edgar entered New York City politics as a Republican anti-Tammany reformist.

The Nathans have done what we can to forget Washington. The “Nathan” entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia, which was written in part by one of Benjamin’s first cousins, mentions Benjamin and two of his sons but excludes Washington and any mention of the murder. My grandfather and his brother, born 50 years after that violent episode, didn’t know about it until middle age, when they both read about it in a book. I learned about it only a few years ago, and my 16-year-old cousin Benjamin Nathan knew nothing of the man whose name he had inherited until I brought it up.

* * *

Washington died at age 44, thinking of his father. He was in Bologne at the time and gray by then. In his last weeks he retold the story of the murder incessantly. “No blood could ever be found on any of my clothes,” he said, according to the Tribune, “yet people say that I killed him. My poor father! My poor father!”

The Washington Post, 1911

Josh Nathan-Kazis is a journalist living in Brooklyn. He is the politics editor of The Faster Times and the former editor-in-chief of New Voices magazine.

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