For fans of The Metamorphosis, our favorite pieces include a magnet that offers “Protection from Rebirth as an Insect,” and is captioned, “Keep Kafka-esque Futures at bay;” an elegant eight-by-ten-inch hand-cut paper silhouette from etsy user SadGiraffe’s Metamorphosis collection; and an adjustable silver Metamorphosis-themed ring displaying a scuttling orange beetle. Finally, a Franz Kafka Parable Vladmaster Set is also available featuring slides of intriguing images from Kafka’s lesser-known tales that are described by the seller as “brief and enigmatic re-imaginings of traditional mythic and historic figures.”

For more conventional gifts, we obviously recommend Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, published by Nextbook Press.

Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]

The book reviewed was Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, a Nextbook Press title that argues that Nachman and Franz Kafka had lives that, while different in many ways, took on haunting similarities. Myers, however, did not find Kamenetz’s premise haunting, and judged Kamenetz an unworthy investigator into Jewish mysteries.

In response, and writing from the afterlife, the rabbi begins his letter by praising—sarcastically, one imagines—Myers’s decision to focus on Kamenetz’s last book, 1994′s The Jew in the Lotus, a manifesto on the intertwined nature of Judaism and Buddhism. “It is important to make Kamenetz’s seventeen-year-old criticism of Jewish institutions, which doesn’t appear in Burnt Books, seem like a modern American phenomenon born of ill will and ignorance and not part of the self-examination that is as old as the Prophets and really even older,” Nachman writes. “Only the very very learned can be critical of the very very unlearned. Dr. Johnson—who I’ve become quite friendly with here in the afterlife (what a head for Talmud!)—was wrong when he said you don’t have to be a carpenter to criticize a table.”

Other bits of Myers’s review similarly pleased, or rather “pleased,” the dead rabbi. “I’m also glad you didn’t mention in your excellent review the part of the book where Rodger K. feels shame at his own inability to read aloud from the psalms in Hebrew,” Nachman wrote.

Shrewd not to reveal his own dissatisfaction with his Jewish education, his own desire to know more, just as Kafka desired to know more and to learn more in a literal straightforward way alongside all his deeper spiritual struggles. It would only have stirred up misplaced sympathy for the author, who is describing his book as if it were the beginning of the journey and not the end of the journey—and what kind of guide admits he doesn’t really know the way? Sure Dante got lost in a dark wood, but he was Catholic.

A Letter from Nachman [A Commonplace Blog]
Related: Burnt Books

Kafka [Jacket Mechanical]
Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka [Nextbook Press]

I see a man I never met, but even so, I know him well. He was well known in his day and still has instant recognition when pictures are shown of him. He’s riding a horse toward me and he is someone I have been very fond of since the age of 10. It appears to be an old western town (Wild West) and my father and grandfather (mom’s dad) are there, too. I adored my father and grandfather. Oddly, I do not see any of my female relatives, especially my maternal grandmother and aunts, or any of my uncles on both sides of the family. I feel as though I was being kissed by this man when he gets off his horse. Then suddenly he jumps back on it and rides off at great speed.

–Alyssa

Okay, so who is this man? He sounds like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry—or some other cowboy hero from when you were 10. Ten is important; what were you like then? What were you feeling at that age? A girl of 10 is already feeling into becoming a woman, and that romance with this cowboy-man is rooted in the even older romance with the father (and possibly grandfather, since you mention him). And, of course, even deeper, it is the souls’ romance with the divine. The one we keep forgetting and keep trying to remember.

Here it’s very nice because you “adored … father and grandfather.” So that’s fortunate because it means the male archetype can come to you and you don’t have a lot of barriers to being with him. You feel with him the way you would have felt at 10 with your cowboy hero. That’s beautiful. Just understand that’s a capacity of your heart, that’s not just a memory of the past. The 10-year-old girl equals your heart. It’s always alive in you and is reflected in this dream.

One note of caution. Something happens when he kisses you. Your language sounds a bit removed. “I felt as though I was being kissed.” Hmm. I’m guessing you may not have allowed yourself to feel this as deeply as you might have. And that may be why he jump backs on his horse. A greater vulnerability for you with him would be to let the kiss linger. That’s what I would ask you to do with the dream. Right there in that moment when he kisses you, I bet there are some feelings that come up that might be difficult. That’s the place to open the door of the dream further.

Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: The Dream Doctor Is In

I dreamt that I found the wallet of a friend while standing in a lobby of a building. The most notable feature of the wallet is that the address was plainly visible and the address was 44th Street. The address was of great interest to me; however, I do not know why. The wallet was in a satchel and at the bottom of the bag were ponytail holders and swimming goggles. I tried to give the items back to the owner, but I woke up before I knew whether I had contacted them to return the items. I remembered the dream clearly when I woke up, which I seldom do.

–Marcy

Marcy, I’m a little confused about the “friend.” Male or female? What is your relationship to the friend? How do you feel about the friend? “Wallet” is gender-ambiguous, and I suppose so are “ponytail holders.” But I’ll just assume your friend is female—in a session, I’d ask you. And also, more importantly, how do you feel about this friend? What’s your current relationship? That’s pretty important and you don’t say. Nor do you say how you feel about not having contacted the person to return the items.

Unfortunately—and this is Freud’s damage to us—most people read dreams as secret messages. They want “ponytail holders” to be symbolic and the number 44 to have a hidden Kabbalistic meaning. Well, they might, but that’s not where I’d start. Primarily, dreams display feelings and relationships, so it’s actually important to record that part. I don’t know why the address is of interest, and it may not be, except insofar as it’s your friend’s address. Maybe something happened there … that’s an association I’d want to know. Or your focus on it may be you being distracted by your head instead of knowing what you are feeling.

I see a similar issue with “tried to give the items back.” Not sure how you “try” to do that. It seems you either give the items back, or you don’t. This place where you get fuzzy is a place where you are thinking more than you are feeling. My suggestion is: Imagine giving the wallet back to your friend—and tell me how that feels or what comes up for you.

Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: The Dream Doctor Is In

Among other things, the clever set design reflected this tension, playing with an XYZ plane that challenged gravity to the points of laughter and awe. A house on two levels, the space occupied by the famous Gregor Samsa (played by Garðarsson) allows the otherwise business-as-usual man to embrace his spidery locomotion, suspended over the family’s classically normal living room.

Within the space, the actors channeled Kafka’s variously angst-riddled characters in stride, evolving with a fluidity that gracefully ushered in explosive conflict. Perspectives intermingled to create a re-wallpapering of the audience’s experience, reflecting the centuries of tumultuous Central European history that seem still-present in Prague.

Directors Garðarsson and David Farr united Kafka’s less sentimental Metamorphosis with their vision. Gregor’s bug-eyed perspective contrasts with those of his previously affectionate family. Ingvar E. Sigurdsson’s performance as Hermann Samsa recalls Kafka’s rocky relationship with his own father.

Sound design featured prominently as well, courtesy Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Indeed, Kafka is hot this year. Philip Glass has announced that he is composing an opera based on The Trial, and a London stand-up comic is adapting the same novel on stage next month. This month also saw the publication of Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books from Nextbook Press, which reveals surprising parallels between the two tragically abbreviated and spiritual lives of Kafka and Hasidic storyteller Rabbi Nachman.

This Off-Broadway production of Spiderman is Central European suffering plus Björk, housed in the fitting mishmash of architecture of the Harvey Theater.

Metamorphosis is running at BAM’s Harvey Theater through Sunday. It is part of the 2010 Next Wave Festival.

I can honestly say I have no dreams. I am a nocturnal epileptic and so have many fits throughout the night. Am I or am I not having dreams?

–Charlie

Charlie, I can’t address your specific medical issues, since although I am a “dream doctor,” I’m no doctor at all. I don’t even play one on TV. (Well I did play a cardiologist in Stephen Soderbergh’s Schizopolis, but that’s another matter.) Anyway, the research shows that most people sleep in a cycle of four stages, and when they reach the deepest level and then climb back up the ladder to level 3, they have rapid eye movement sleep associated with dreaming. (There’s some more recent contention about this point.) The exceptions are people on certain medications, and people with certain severe brain conditions. I don’t know, Charlie, whether you fit the latter category.

What I can say is that “What if I don’t dream?” is the most common question I hear. My answer in 99 percent of the cases is: You do dream. You just don’t remember your dreams. Why? I have some theories.

1) We are out of practice.

2) We don’t understand the “use” of dreams, so we neglect them.

3) Clock radios. No way you will remember a dream if you wake up to someone talking about the news.

4) We may not want to face the truths dream show us about ourselves.

5) We may not have anyone to tell our dreams to. (Tip: If you tell your dream, tell it to someone who loves you. The rabbis say, “Dreams go according to the interpretation.” Therefore, don’t do as Joseph did and tell your dreams to your brothers who hate you. Bad things will happen. Tell them to people who love you. )

Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: The Dream Doctor Is In

First, let me say that I am not Jewish. I had heard the word “Shekhinah” [meaning the presence of God] before, in a Christian Bible study.

–Georgianna

Don’t worry about that. It’s a great dream. It is very clear in Genesis, our primordial dream book in the West, that dreams come from God, give us warnings, and show us other worlds. These are the gifts of the dream. (See my book The History of Last Night’s Dream for explication of these ideas.) So here you, Georgianna, have a dream in which you see Hasidim or observant Jews of some kind, gathered around a PC, and guarding the light.

The term “awesome” comes to mind, in its original sense. And sometimes in life we experience the awesome at peak moments (birth of a child, on a hike through the woods, in love). But even more so in our dreams. It’s what Jacob feels when he dreams of the ladder: “How awesome was this place, and I didn’t know it.” Dreams give us the awesome in a very pure form.

Why Hasidim, since, as you say, you are not Jewish? The answer in part is: You are not Jewish. For you, the Jew is the “other,” therefore the archetypes appear as Hasidim. (A Jew might dream of Catholic priests or the Dalai Lama.) The PC is a nice touch: The personal computer from which the light emerges. So unexpected. But it’s personal, it’s your personal revelation.

The Hasidim are actually there for you; the experience of the light is for you, not them. They don’t react so much because they are of this realm already. They are used to it, it’s like a “PC” to them. But to you it’s new. It’s a holy light and the key point is your feeling of joy and a sense of relief.

There is a “door” in the dream, which is at the end. You express the desire to go closer to the screen. What held you back? Whatever it is, fear or shame, face it … and get closer to the light. The Hasidim are able to be close because they are sitting in grade school desks. They are willing to be students again. In life we may be doctors, lawyers, or Indian chiefs, but with this light we are in grade school again. And that’s a great position from which to see the light.

You may be looking for consolation. But in another sense, consolation is looking for you—and in this dream it found you. Mazel tov. Replay the image of the light coming out of the PC in your mind and feel the joy and relief, and then try coming closer to the screen. Face whatever resistance you feel there. That will deepen your experience.

Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: The Dream Doctor Is In

When Nextbook Press author Rodger Kamenetz isn’t writing books, he works as a dream therapist. And in writing Burnt Books, his newly published dual biography of Franz Kafka and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, he found two Jewish figures who were also fascinated by dreams. As anyone who has read The Metamorphosis or The Trial could tell, Kafka frequently immersed himself in “dreamlike states” when he wrote. Rabbi Nachman also based several of his teachings on dreams. Both drew on the Jewish tradition of dreaming and dream interpretation, rooted in what Kamenetz calls, in The History of Last Night’s Dream, “the primordial dream book in the West, the book of Genesis.”

Now it is time to bring that tradition to the present. Send in your dreams, and Kamenetz will respond with his interpretation.

Here are some guidelines: Keep your dream narratives brief, focus on what is said and done, and mainly on what you feel in each moment of the dream. Briefly identify the persons who appear by indicating how you feel about them (“Joe, my brother-in-law, he scares me”). We reserve the right to edit the dreams to protect privacy. Submissions must be received by November 5. Send them to: dreams@tabletmag.com

When Nextbook Press author Rodger Kamenetz isn’t writing books, he works as a dream therapist. And in writing Burnt Books, his newly published dual biography of Franz Kafka and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, he found two Jewish figures who were also fascinated by dreams. As anyone who has read The Metamorphosis or The Trial could tell, Kafka frequently immersed himself in “dreamlike states” when he wrote. Rabbi Nachman also based several of his teachings on dreams. Both drew on the Jewish tradition of dreaming and dream interpretation, rooted in what Kamenetz calls, in The History of Last Night’s Dream, “the primordial dream book in the West, the book of Genesis.”

Now it is time to bring that tradition to the present. Send in your dreams, and Kamenetz will respond with his interpretation.

Here are some guidelines: Keep your dream narratives brief, focus on what is said and done, and mainly on what you feel in each moment of the dream. Briefly identify the persons who appear by indicating how you feel about them (“Joe, my brother-in-law, he scares me”). We reserve the right to edit the dreams to protect privacy. Submissions must be received by November 5. Send them to: dreams@tabletmag.com

“Rabbi Nachman burned his writing in front of his followers’ eyes to teach a lesson,” Kamenetz wrote last month, on the occasion of the Florida pastor’s threat to burn a Koran. “The ultimate Torah is not a physical object, but a holy manifestation of the ineffable. To draw the primordial Torah down into letters and words is a supreme feat all in itself. Even if no one ever reads it.” Want more? Then check out the book.

Below the jump: Watch Kamenetz’s mishnah on his new work.

Rodger Kamenetz Discusses Burnt Books from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]
Related: Close Encounter [Tablet Magazine]
Pilgrimage [Tablet Magazine]

Kamenetz spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the two men, about the relationship each had to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and about how Nachman’s fable about a turkey responds to Kafka’s tale of an insect. Running time: 17:57.

So, take your best shot! Send us your work, and we will exhibit it online and, possibly, physically, in New York City. Details here.

For more, you’ll have to listen to Monday’s edition of Vox Tablet, in which Kamenetz finishes this tale, and tells others, to host Sara Ivry.

Hanging over it all is the fact that, were it up to Kafka, none of this would be happening: Instead, his good friend Brod would have burned all of Kafka’s work, as per the author’s request. (Of course, as Tablet Magazine columnist Etgar Keret notes to Batuman, “The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”)

Rodger Kamenetz, whose Burnt Books, forthcoming from Nextbook Press, deals with Kafka’s wish extensively, wonders whether the documents shouldn’t stay in Israel: “Kafka had found real love as he was dying, and he clung to the impossible fantasy of emigration to Palestine with real intensity,” Kamenetz writes. “So it seems a kind of fulfillment that after his death his manuscripts made it [to] the promised land, even if he never could.”

Adds Kamenetz, “But Kafka himself saw the issue as far more tortured and complicated.” He would have, wouldn’t he?

After the jump: Batuman on Kafka’s flirtation with Zionism.

Kafka’s actual relationship to Zionism and Jewish culture was, like his relationship to most things, highly ambivalent. (In 1922, Kafka compiled a list of things he had failed at, including piano, languages, gardening, Zionism and anti-Zionism.) Although Brod’s attempts to convert Kafka to Zionism were a source of tension in the early years of their friendship, Kafka grew increasingly sympathetic to the cause. As early as 1912, he discussed a journey to Palestine with Felice Bauer, a dictating-machine representative with whom he was to pursue a long, anguished, mainly epistolary romance. (The two were twice engaged to be married before separating in 1917.) In 1918, Kafka drew up his vision of an early kibbutz. The only nourishment would be bread, dates and water; notably, in light of recent developments, there would be no legal courts: “Palestine needs earth,” Kafka wrote, “but it does not need lawyers.”

Kafka’s plans to move to Palestine grew more concrete only as their fulfillment grew less likely. He began studying Hebrew in 1921. According to his teacher, Puah Ben-Tovim, “he already knew he was dying” and seemed to regard their lessons “as a kind of miracle cure,” preparing “long lists of words he wanted to know”; rendered speechless by coughing, he would implore his teacher “with those huge dark eyes of his to stay for one more word, and another, and yet another.” In 1923, Ben-Tovim visited Kafka and Dora Diamant in Berlin. She found them living in bohemian squalor, reading to each other in Hebrew and fantasizing about opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv, where Diamant would work in the kitchen and Kafka would wait on tables. “Dora didn’t know how to cook, and he would have been hopeless as a waiter,” Ben-Tovim observed. Then again, “in those days most restaurants in Tel Aviv were run by couples just like them.” Ben-Tovim left one of Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks in the National Library, where I saw it this spring: a long list of those words from which Kafka expected such miracles: “tuberculosis,” “to languish,” “sorrow,” “affliction,” “genius,” “pestilence,” “belt.”

Brod’s interpretation of Kafka as a Zionist manqué is now on trial: if not, technically, in the court of law, then certainly in the court of public opinion. “Why does Kafka belong here?” asks Mark Gelber, a literature professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “Because the Zionist enterprise was important to him.” Gelber told me he considers Kafka’s animal stories to participate in a Zionist discourse, from which “Kafka removes the particularist markers, erases the particularist traces.” (This lack of “particularist markers” makes Kafka particularly susceptible to different interpretations and ascriptions: those same animal stories caused Elias Canetti to call Kafka “the only essentially Chinese writer to be found in the West.”) Many European critics—for example, Reiner Stach, Kafka’s most recent and thorough biographer—object to the view of Kafka as “a Zionist or a religious author.” “The fact that specifically Jewish experiences are reflected in his works does not—as Brod believed—make him the protagonist of a ‘Jewish’ literature,” Stach told me. Rather, “Kafka’s oeuvre stands in the context of European literary modernity, and his texts are among the foundational documents of this modernity.”

In a perfect world, Kafka could be both engaged with a specifically Jewish discourse and a foundational author of European modernity. As Brod himself observes of “The Castle,” a “specifically Jewish interpretation goes hand in hand with what is common to humanity, without either excluding or even disturbing the other.” But an original manuscript can be in only one place at a time. The choice between Israel and Germany could not be more symbolically fraught.

Kafka’s Last Trial [New York Times Magazine]
Related: Kafka Manuscripts: The Fight Over Kafka [Huffington Post]
Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: New Kafka Papers To Be Revealed

• A dispatch from the great Uman, Ukraine, Hasidic pilgrimage for Rabbi Nachman. (Rodger Kamenetz went for Tablet Magazine.) [Slate]

• Guess which American religious group tends to give the most to charity (income-adjusted)? [Miller-McCune]

• While Israeli law has long switched the country to daylight-savings time before Yom Kippur to make fasting easier, the holiday’s earliness this year brought the separation-of-synagogue-and-state issue into high relief. [Religious News Service/HuffPo]

• Why do the novels of official Tablet Magazine Man Booker Prize nominee Howard Jacobson have trouble attracting readers outside Britain? [New York Jewish Week/Jewish Ideas Daily]

• The Conservatives represent the smallest movement in Europe—but also the fastest-growing. [JTA]

Harold Gould (né Goldstein) died today at 86. He’s really good at playing a pompous blowhard in Love and Death.

To make sure the righteous travelers catch no glimpse of the iniquitous world outside, a new group of entrepreneurial Bratslav hasidim devised a solution: A dark piece of cloth placed over the face. The ideal fabric, they wrote, was the stretchy and flexible lycra, and the ideal colors black, blue, or brown. The entrepreneurs promoted the veiled look in colorful pamphlets distributed throughout the haredi Israeli town of Bnei Brak, which featured the slogan, “Smiling all the way to Uman.” Wearing a thick sheet of fabric to cover one’s face, they added, may look strange, but “provides a bountiful reward” to those who do it.

By the end of the holiday, more than 14,000 of the late rabbi’s followers will have left Israel for Uman on nearly 100 flights. No word on how many of them will have worn lycra veils, but as you can see from the photograph, the number will be greater than zero.

This Year in Uman: Hasids Don ‘Veils’ En Route to Rabbi Nachman’s Tomb [Haaretz]
Related: Pilgrimage [Tablet Magazine]
Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]

Those questions may appear nebulous, simultaneously too elusive and too deep for anyone to attempt to answer seriously. But look at the landscape of Jewish life and two broad currents suggest themselves, two divergent agendas that address much more than the question of conversion alone. On the one hand, those who imagine Judaism as an exclusive enterprise advocate that the religion and its followers alike should move in ever-diminishing circles, orbiting around a small nucleus of rabbis entrusted with parsing the halachic laws. This approach is not without its merits; trying to make sense of an ancient faith in a modern world is a mighty and baffling task, and the drive inward, toward purity and certainty, is both instinctive and immensely reassuring.

But those of us who believe that Judaism’s survival also depends on its ability to adapt to the spiritual and practical challenges imposed by modernity must reject the urge to narrow our common horizons. Instead, we must examine our boundaries and beliefs and work to welcome new people, new traditions, and new ideas into the fold. To some, such talk may have the airy, hollow ring of universalist New Age spirituality. But that is not the case—as we think will be clear from the collection of essays by rabbis and writers, scholars and cooks, comedians and community leaders in Tablet Magazine’s High Holiday package. Some of these articles and essays are personal, others historical. In them, we hope each reader will find his or her own path toward answering Judaism’s essential questions, impossible and beautiful and all-encompassing—the only questions worth asking.

Judaism’s greatest sages have always plunged into the depths of doubt in an effort to find morsels of wisdom. This holiday season, two of our contributors evoke the memories of such men: Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in an essay coming tomorrow, writes about Hillel the Elder, who defined Jewish peoplehood in radically inclusive terms, and Rodger Kamenetz recalls his journey to commune with the spirit of the late Nachman of Bratslav, a 19th-century rabbi who made his home among the non-believers in the hope of showing them the merits of faith.

These rabbis—and other, less illustrious but no less righteous men and women throughout history—embody Judaism’s finest qualities. As their respective communities sought solace and comfort in closed doors and closed minds, they ventured out and struggled to expand the boundaries of peoplehood, occasionally disregarding the letter in service of the spirit. It is doubt, they realized, that makes the believer’s faith more meaningful, and it is compassion for others that makes one’s understanding of oneself more complete. Armed with these convictions, they engaged with the world; more than any enforcer of strict rules or arbiter of stern edicts, they taught us what it means to be Jewish.

As we approach Rosh Hashanah, we would do well to abandon the pointless fights that have embroiled so many of us for so long, and to insist instead that there are other, better, more urgent questions for us to be asking. We must ask how we can invite as many newcomers to partake in Judaism—as those interviewed by Joan Nathan for her food column have done—without eroding the religion’s core tenets. We must ask what forms of innovative communal structures we might erect to serve the needs of those whom consequences placed just outside the reach of tradition’s grasp, as Rabbi Andy Bachman does in a Vox Tablet podcast about, of all things, burial customs.

Most important, we must ask which of our beliefs guide us forward and which are merely vantage points to the past. And we must do so without turning denominational divides into weapons of divisiveness. In the course of recent American Jewish history, Reform and Conservative rabbis have sometimes preferred strict interpretations of Jewish law, while Orthodox rabbis have allowed room for ambiguity. Indeed, it is the Orthodox rabbi Avi Shafran who here reminds us of the inherent dangers of generalizations and collective judgments, a shortcoming from which Jews of all stripes are not immune.

Unlike Passover or Purim, Rosh Hashanah has no haggadah or megillah, no seminal text that invites us to ponder the meaning of the holiday. It is up to us to stir up debate, to ask what traditions still matter and what should be reconsidered. We hope you’ll find kindling for conversation in the articles and other content we’re publishing this week. And even if not, at the very least try the pomegranate martini.

Shanah tova, from everyone at Tablet Magazine.

Jews belong to the oldest book club in the world, and we’ve been dissolving time forever in our old stories, rereading them every week for thousands of years. Why do we do it? Rabbi Nachman, our great tale teller, said stories are meant to heal the soul. And in truth, five years ago, when I thought I was a homeless man, I found soul comfort in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and in stories of the rabbis, too.

My wife and I were traveling up north when Hurricane Katrina struck, and after the shocking failure of the federal levees, we sat in a cheesy hotel room in New York City drinking scotch and watching television coverage of our fragile city flooding. We were desperate for specifics. Was our home underwater?

A week later, my father died in a Florida nursing home. His body was brought home to Baltimore, where he raised me. We sat shiva at my brother’s house. A rabbi walked up to me and said, “You have lost your home.” I said yes, I think so. He said, “God is also homeless. He lost his ‘home’ because his children quarreled.” I knew he meant the story the rabbis tell, how we Jews lost the House of God because of “groundless hatred.”

God is homeless. That was a comfort somehow. Maybe my losses were part of a bigger story than I knew.

But I still hadn’t seen my home.

The TV showed journalists getting past the checkpoints. So my wife and I ginned up a press pass at a copy shop, and got an editor friend to sign it before we returned to New Orleans. Worked like a charm.

Our lawn was full of rack from Lake Pontchartrain. But our house was just high enough off the ground to escape the flood that took the homes of so many of our dear friends. A 130-mile-an-hour wind blew off half the house’s old roof slates. All I could think about was recovering that roof. I felt so exposed. We all did then.

There were only 10,000 people in New Orleans, and no slate roofers. So I found a company in Baton Rouge to help. Twice their truck was turned away at the checkpoints by the National Guard. They wouldn’t try again unless I came and accompanied them at 4 in the morning.

Somehow I persuaded the guard to let us pass. The roofers climbed my roof to apply the magical felt. In the dawn sky, I could see the outline of the new moon, the morning of the Jewish New Year. Three white heron rowed high above us, majestic, pure, and timeless. They were celebrating the birthday of creation—for the New Year is the birthday of the whole world.

Piles of torn branches baked in the hot sun up and down the street, and rough winds blew past our dry wooden houses. Fires broke out all over the city. On the way to the synagogue, we heard a fire alarm that no one was answering and saw smoke from a mansion off of St. Charles Avenue. Later we learned it had burned to the ground.

The Rosh Hashanah service was held in a packed little chapel. We sat in the anteroom on folding chairs. I couldn’t see the rabbi, but I heard the shofar. As I’d heard the soft friction of the heron wings beating, for the city was so quiet that morning, God was whispering.

We were in the first lines of Genesis: light, darkness, and the first winged creatures.

We roamed the empty streets in the days of awe. Amid shuttered shops, an open one sold ice cream—in one, exquisite flavor: “violet.” I spoke to a policeman who had waded through hell; we were all survivors. I spoke to everybody; there were no divides. Post-Katrina we were all like Jews who share a common history of catastrophe. Every conversation started with the same question: How did you make it through the storm?

In time the wild heron gave way to the inhabitants trickling back. Our street ceased to be a flyway, but we still had no mail service for a year. But we had our local newspaper. We felt abandoned, no longer part of the United States. I scanned the Internet by sitting outside shuttered cafes, then one reopened, and we gathered to be human. One morning in March, I read in the paper. A domestic dispute: The first murder. Cain slew Abel. We were moving deeper into Genesis.

And where are we now, five years later? There’s no single story. Many of us are still in Exodus, wandering far from home. Our Pharaoh is the Army Corps of Engineers, indifferent to God or Congress, and two years late on a project to protect the city. We’ve known the plagues of Egypt from coffin flies, to flood and fire, and bad government at every level. Now BP’s oil plagues our waters. Even before that insult, the marsh was dying of saltwater intrusion from countless cuts from oil company canals. The coast that protects New Orleans is drifting into open water—a football field vanishes every half-hour. We have seven years to save it, and nothing urgent being done. Just plans without funding.

We’ve had lots of plans, liked the detailed plans for the tabernacle that fill the last half of Exodus and the first half of Leviticus. We still haven’t built a place where God and man can meet. Our previous mayor promised “cranes in the sky,” but mainly he made plans. Our new mayor just announced 100 projects to be built right away. And I even believe him. Maybe at least we’ve reached the second part of Numbers, where the journey to Canaan resumes.

What story will be told in the end? Will we loiter at the edge like Moses on Mt. Nebo, or will all of us New Orleanians finally make it to the land of our promise?

Personally right now, I feel at home and homeless, feel the joy and the ruin, the loss and the courage, the sorrow of so many victims in exile, the hate and the love.

Some days I tire of all the stories. Then I dream of moving backward in time. They say it’s impossible but I don’t know. God is not homeless in my dreams. After five years in post-Katrina New Orleans, this New Year I want to go back where all the stories begin, look up in the sky, and see three heron fly.

Rodger Kamenetz lives in New Orleans, where he works as a dream therapist. His next book, Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka, will be published in October as part of the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

In the midst of all these hip new offerings, though, you’ll find something (at least partly) old and traditional: The Mad 7, a one-man show inspired by The Seven Beggars by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, the legendary Hasidic storyteller who died in 1810 (and whose biography, by Rodger Kamenetz, is due out this fall from Nextbook Press).

“Nachman was definitely a Fringe performer in his time,” Yehuda Hyman, who wrote and performs The Mad 7, told The Scroll. “He went against the establishment. He was untraditional, adventurous, and somewhat outrageous. Besides all that, he would occasionally disappear from his followers and show up in another town in costumed disguise, pretending to be someone else. What could be more Fringe?”

Nachman’s story has been updated somewhat. In Hyman’s version, it’s about a San Francisco-based administrative assistant named Elliot Green who embarks on a “mystical quest,” complete with song and dance; on his journey, Elliott meets the characters from the original tale. “The characters of The Seven Beggars are timeless and I have not updated them,” Hyman explained. “It is Elliott’s interaction with them, as a person living in 2010 and his struggle to live a life of meaning in the context of today’s world, that is the updating part. I have tried to be faithful in spirit to Rabbi Nachman’s tale.”

Of course, the whole thing is somewhat abbreviated, because the original tale took Rabbi Nachman 10 days to tell. Hyman had to fit Nachman’s “wild tour of the mysteries of the universe” into a single evening, so he had to be “selective” about what he kept.

“Rabbi Nachman’s essential teachings are about the absolute necessity of finding joy in one’s life and fighting against sadness and depression,” said Hyman. “How do we find and nurture our souls? The Seven Beggars appears to me to be a sort of recipe book for how to achieve this. My hope is that I can pass on some of this beautiful teaching and do it in a way that is easy and entertaining for people.”

The Mad 7 plays through next weekend at the East Village’s 4th Street Theatre.

Related: Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]

It’s always fun to remember that there should not even be a dispute over Kafka’s papers: The great writer instructed Brod to burn everything. (Rodger Kamenetz explores this in detail in Nextbook Press’s forthcoming Burnt Books.) What does it mean to be quarreling over words that should no longer even exist? Again, I am reaching for the appropriate adjective, but it’s not coming to me.

No one knows exactly what documents will be found. Or perhaps inside the box there is another box, which can only be unlocked by a key, which is inside that very box …

Lawyers Open Cache of Unpublished Manuscripts [Guardian]
Related: Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: Dispute Over Kafka’s Papers Is Transparent and Simple

Nextbook Press’s Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratzslav and Franz Kafka, by Rodger Kamenetz, drops in October.

New Stamp Honors Rabbi Nachman of Breslov [Ynet]
Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratzslav and Franz Kafka [Nextbook Press]

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

Amelia Klein

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

Sandra Bernhard

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

Eddy Portnoy and Gary Shteyngart

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

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

Kamenetz gets to use the planetarium at the venue, which is the (super-cool) California Academy of Sciences. “I will be co-piloting a tour of the universe, starting from Planet Earth and going out beyond the Milky Way,” he said. “I will be presenting moments from Genesis, Psalms, Talmud, and Zohar that reflect the feelings of awe and wonder, and how experiencing those feelings helps us feel into a connection to God. In a lot of cases, some of our advanced scientific cosmology, such as the theories of inflation and the Big Bang have remarkable parallels to three-fold story of creation put forth in the Lurianic kabbalah.”

This sounds almost eerily well-suited to a late-night study session, no?

Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]

“I’m so excited, I could just plotz,” Fitzpatrick declared. Fitzpatrick, a middle-aged Irish-Catholic who works as a cook at the Ritz-Carlton, just might have rehearsed this line a few times during the day.

Each year, a new King of the Jieuxs is selected to reign over the Krewe du Jieux, a Mardi Gras parading outfit. Most of the Jieuxs are also Jews, though some of them are only Jew-ish—“you know, with a dash in the middle,” said the krewe’s captain, Renée Heinlein. They were gathered at Donna’s to witness the changing of the guard and to behold the crowning of the new king and his consort, the Jieuxish-American Princess. This year’s princess is Robin White, a half-Jewish French professor and Fitzpatrick’s girlfriend. She wore a gray sweatsuit embroidered in strategic areas with the word “Jieucy” in glittering letters.

As a klezmer-jazz fusion quartet played, krewe members drank cocktails and mingled. They wore giant-nose-and-eyebrow Groucho Marx eyeglasses and plastic blue horns on their heads. “I can’t get my Jew horns to stay on,” one young woman complained, fussing with her hair.

L.J. Goldstein, a photographer and lawyer who founded the Krewe du Jieux in 1996, leaned against the bar and surveyed the scene. He explained that the selection process for Jieuxish royalty relied on a complex algorithm. “I can’t give you the exact ratio,” he said. “But it’s part meritocracy, part seniority, and part nepotism.”

Goldstein is technically taking a yearlong leave of absence as captain (“my shmita year”), handing over official duties to Heinlein, a reading teacher who moved to New Orleans from California last July. But Goldstein still speaks for the krewe—though in truth I couldn’t make out everything he was saying. This was partly because his face was obscured by a bulbous green plastic nose and a pair of huge novelty eyeglasses in the shape of two gilded dollar signs. Later, when he was momentarily unmasked, I could see that he looked a bit like the actor Mark Ruffalo and that he didn’t look old enough to be 42, which he is. Over a violet zoot suit, he wore a thin robe with a Star of David across the chest. Two plastic horns were affixed to his standard-issue New Orleans hipster black derby.

Goldstein took the stage and introduced the outgoing king, the poet Rodger Kamenetz (who is also a Tablet Magazine contributing editor). The king distinguishes himself from the hoi polloi by wearing the exalted Golden Nose. A bagel hung from Kamenetz’s neck, dyed blue and adorned with the words “King Rodger.” Beside him stood the princess – Kamenetz’s wife, the novelist Moira Crone. She flipped her hair back to reveal the Royal Earrings: pierced credit cards, which dangled over her shoulders.

Kamenetz held up a megaphone. “Jew Dat!” he cried.

“Jew Dat!” the crowd roared back.

The new king and princess were crowned. The princess stuck out her chest, pointing to the word “Jieucy” splayed across her breasts. “Let’s see the rear end,” a krewe member requested. The princess obliged.

As the applause faded, Goldstein took the megaphone to offer a bit of interpretive commentary on the krewe’s satiric intentions, presumably for the benefit of the handful of non-Jieuxish patrons scattered around the bar. “We take these Jewish stereotypes that are thrown at us and we embrace them and roll around in them,” he said, as krewe members murmured their assent. “Like a pig in the mud!”

Heinlein, the new captain, took the megaphone. “Attention Jieuxs! Are you ready to run? Then let’s run, Jieuxs, run!”

The krewe ventured out into the damp and drizzle of the New Orleans night, to commence the Running of the Jieuxs. (“It’s funny because Jews don’t run,” Heinlein helpfully explained to me.) The klezmer-jazz band morphed into a marching band, and the Jieuxs danced and skipped through the streets of the Quarter, greeting onlookers with cries of “Oy vey!” and handing out plastic blue eggs on which was printed “Everyone loves a Jieux egg.” Heinlein’s megaphoned voice ricocheted off the cobblestone, filling the narrow streets: “Run, Jieuxs, run!” Near Decatur Street, some scruffy street punks joined in the chant. A pack of portly tourists looked on, smiling uneasily.

Despite the references to Borat, Goldstein is a devoted student of traditional New Orleans culture, and the Running of the Jieuxs is a right proper New Orleans second-line parade, complete with requisite stops at a few favored watering holes. At one point, the procession was joined by Jennifer Jones, a spry African-American woman who is one of the city’s most prolific street paraders. Jones easily adapted her moves to the music of the Jieuxish band, which offered a commendably exotic but decidedly less funky groove than the brass bands that play the parades Jones normally graces.

“Hey,” she said, twirling her feathered white umbrella, “I don’t discriminate!”

***

New Orleans could have used a Krewe du Jieux in 1968. That year, the journalist Calvin Trillin scandalized the Crescent City’s small but prosperous and influential Jewish community with a New Yorker article that laid bare a peculiarly New Orleanian form of anti-Semitism.

Trillin focused on the exclusion of Jews from the elite “old-line” Mardi Gras krewes—secretive male-only groups with names like the Mistick Krewe of Comus and the Knights of Momus. They organized some of the most celebrated Carnival parades and hosted the high-society balls that revolved around Mardi Gras. Jews were also barred from a set of businessmen’s lunch clubs that served as a vital hub of elite social networking and whose memberships overlapped almost completely with the old-line krewes. This pattern of discrimination also extended to African-Americans, as well as Italian-Americans, and other more recent immigrants.

Unlike other minority groups, Jews were generally offered full access to the civic and economic life of New Orleans. Put in perspective, the barriers they faced paled in comparison to the monumental obstacles to equality placed in the path of black New Orleanians. But given the success of the very secular, Reform-dominated Jewish community, Trillin found its enforced absence from specific aspects of elite society to be notable. Most curious to him was the fact that the exclusion was hardly an unspoken rule. “The discrimination against Jews by Carnival krewes and businessmen’s clubs is specific and total, and people even seem to take a certain pride in how specific and total it is,” Trillin wrote.

He explained that the city’s Jewish establishment—“old German-Jewish families that have for years been almost indistinguishable from their gentile peers”—took a quietist approach in response to the exclusion. During Mardi Gras season, he observed, some prominent Jewish families opted to simply leave town. That way, there would no embarrassment for Jews who didn’t receive invitations to the best parties, and no awkwardness for their Christians friends who didn’t invite them.

Peter Wolf, an investment advisor who now lives in New York, was a young man at the time Trillin’s article was published. Wolf grew up in the extended Godchaux family of New Orleans, a wealthy Jewish clan that owned a department store downtown and a sugar company outside the city. “We were an extremely prominent family, but of course when it came to the social clubs and Mardi Gras itself, we were left out,” he told me. “We didn’t really talk about it much. It was kind of just understood. It was very clear that in all other ways, we were major figures in the city. But in that way we weren’t. It’s hard to describe except to say that it had become an accepted situation.”

Perhaps what made the situation acceptable is that it represented a trade-off. In exchange for levels of opportunity and access that other minority groups in New Orleans could only dream of, Jews accepted exclusion from the inner sanctums of elite society. This may seem like a rather small price to pay, but it had profound effects, especially on the community’s young people. Catherine C. Kahn, an erudite and charming historian and archivist of the local Jewish community, grew up in New Orleans in the 1940s. She told me about facing “the five o’clock curtain” as a girl.

“You can be friendly and inseparable at school up to five o’clock,” she recalled, speaking about her relationships with Christians. “But when the five o’clock curtain came down, the Christian kids went to eight o’clocks and nine o’clocks”—parties that marked one’s entry into the debutante system—“and the Jewish kids didn’t.” Another member of Kahn’s generation told me that his son, who is now in his 40s, was so wounded by these practices that he chose to settle elsewhere after college.

Going along with this system of exclusion also had a hidden cost: it meant implicitly complying with a racial caste system whose ugliest prohibitions were aimed at black people. There is some irony to this, because New Orleanian Jews played important roles in the civil-rights movement and efforts to improve the lots of African-Americans during the 1950s and 1960s, often at real personal risk to themselves and their families. These ambiguities and seeming contradictions are hardly uncommon, though, in the complex history of race relations in New Orleans. Indeed, the city’s story is defined by a dizzying array of sub-groups—free people of color, white Creoles, Cajun settlers—navigating their way through a constantly shifting racial hierarchy, sometimes at the expense of those below them.

During the colonial era, Jews were officially barred from residing in Louisiana by the French Code Noir. But the restrictions were never really enforced, and there have been Jews living in New Orleans since 1757, when a Sephardic family from Holland arrived. The community grew rapidly after the Louisiana territory became part of the United States in 1803. At the time Trillin was writing, the Jewish population in New Orleans was probably near its peak, around 12,000. Just before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, that number had fallen to around 9,500. Jews were among the tens of thousands of New Orleanians who never returned to the city after the storm, and the current population is around 8,000, which includes many newcomers to the city. (Population estimates made by the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans cover the entire metropolitan region, including a number of affluent suburbs in parishes that border the city.)

From its earliest days in colonial French, Spanish, and finally American Louisiana, the Jewish community in New Orleans has collectively taken an approach to the gentile world that was highly accomodationist and assimilation-minded, even by the relatively flexible standards of Southern Jewry. But with the publication of Trillin’s article, New Orleanian Jews suddenly were getting attention—precisely because of their efforts to avoid it. The piece caused an uproar within the community. “That New Yorker story had the quality of a forbidden truth being revealed,” the writer Nicholas Lemann recently told me. Lemann, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, grew up in a prominent Jewish family in New Orleans. His father and his late grandfather, both lawyers, were very influential within the community and in the broader city. “Everybody knew about the phenomenon, but nobody talked about it, even in private,” he recalled. “What good could possibly come of it?”

The furor over Trillin’s article inevitably faded, but memories of its impact linger and the issues it raised still roil the community. “That is such crap,” was the testy response I got when I mentioned the article to Kahn, the local Jewish archivist. She sighed. “I’m sorry, but you touched a nerve.” Indeed, in my conversations with dozens of prominent Jewish New Orleanians and ex-pats who now live elsewhere, I heard a broad range of conflicting thoughts and emotions—often from the same person. A few declined to speak about the topic altogether; others asked not to be quoted by name. “I have to be very careful,” said a fourth-generation Jewish New Orleanian businessman, worried he might say something that would “come back and haunt me.”

***

To understand why there is still so much Jewish angst about Mardi Gras, it’s important to understand the festival as a social institution of astounding complexity and enormous economic and political significance. It is a sprawling, all-consuming Carnival that engulfs and reorders the city for the two weeks leading up to Lent. There are nearly as many forms of celebrating Mardi Gras as there are communities in New Orleans, and these forms often bear little resemblance to one another. But if there is a mainstream celebration, it is the series of parades along St. Charles Avenue held during the two weeks prior to Mardi Gras and on Mardi Gras itself. These are carefully planned affairs, heavy on spectacle but light on chaos. They have their roots in a pre-Civil War attempt to save Mardi Gras, which fell on hard times after Louisiana became part of the United States. In 1857, a group of relative newcomers to New Orleans decided to revive Carnival through an act of brazen cultural appropriation, injecting it with a distinctly Anglo-American combination of mass spectacle, organizational science, and classicist pretension—and a lot of cash. They formed a secret society, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, named for the Greek god of festivity and excess, and staged an elaborate theme parade and masquerade ball, reigned over by the deity himself, embodied by a member of the group whose identity was a closely guarded secret.

“It was early Disney,” said James Gill, a columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the author of Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans. “There was a theme for the parade and the ball, and proper organization, and marching in unison, and working very hard on the floats. What Comus brought to the celebration was discipline and order.”

Other krewes formed in the image of Comus, and alongside them grew the parallel universe of gentlemen’s clubs. During the Reconstruction era, the krewes and the clubs served as the reactionary bastion for the deposed Confederate aristocracy. Their Mardi Gras parades became protests against the Union occupation and the enfranchisement of blacks. Comus’s theme in 1873 was “The Missing Links in Darwin’s Origin of the Species.” The parade depicted Union officials as worms, snakes, and hyenas–saving for last a grinning gorilla in the likeness of P.B.S. Pinchback, an African-American who had briefly served as governor of Louisiana the prior year.

This entrenched racial prejudice, which would later be codified during the Jim Crow era, did not extend at first to Jews, small numbers of whom belonged to the old-line krewes and clubs during the 19th century. But with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and virulent nativism in the 1910s, the Jews of New Orleans were finally expelled for good from the very upper echelons of elite society. An important exception is the Rex organization, whose king also acts as the official King of Carnival, and which has always had some Jewish members.

By the time Trillin arrived in 1968, the relationship between Jews and Mardi Gras had changed very little since the 1910s. As for how much has changed since then, it depends whom you ask. “I think some Jews feel an exclusion from the party,” said Rabbi Edward Cohn of Temple Sinai, a Reform temple that boasts the largest congregation in town and serves as a bellwether for the Uptown Jewish establishment. But, he added, “I have Jewish friends who are fervent Mardi Gras participants who say they just love it. They’re out there at every parade, their children ride as soon as they’re old enough, they attend balls, and they have to make sure they’ve got enough white-tie-and-tail outfits to get them through the season.”

Some of the Jews I spoke with, particularly those who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, played down the significance of the issue. “I think the Jewish community generally is very comfortable with Mardi Gras,” said Cathy Glaser, the New Orleans regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s fun, and there are plenty of opportunities for anyone to get involved.” That’s particularly true ever since the advent of Bacchus and Endymion, the “superkrewes” that democratized and supersized Mardi Gras beginning in the late 1960s. The superkrewes were founded by merchants and professionals, many of them Jews, who sought to capitalize on Mardi Gras’ untapped tourist potential. On the weekend before Mardi Gras, they mount massive, glitzy parades presided over by celebrity honorees. This year, Bacchus was portrayed by Drew Brees, the quarterback of the Saints, who is himself something of a deity in New Orleans.

By the 1980s, the superkrewes had completely overshadowed the old-line krewes, whose classical allusions and low-tech parades had come to seem quaint. Still, their symbolic importance kept them relevant—and made them the target of a belated effort to force them to integrate. In 1991, an African-American councilwoman named Dorothy Mae Taylor proposed a city ordinance that would require all krewes that wished to parade on city streets—and thus avail themselves of public services—to prove they did not discriminate based on race in their membership policies. (Perhaps because the ordinance did not have the support of many prominent Jews, religion was not mentioned.) After a sometimes incendiary, sometimes comical public debate, a rather skewed compromise was reached. The krewes would not have to reveal their membership rolls, but they would have to sign sworn affidavits pledging that their policies were not discriminatory. Comus refused to comply and chose to quit parading, as did Proteus and Momus. They would retreat to their racially pure caves and focus all their Mardi Gras energies on their elaborate, invitation-only balls, which are now held on private property. Rex—always considered a bit more liberal—chose to comply and still officially reigns over Carnival. Eight years later, Proteus also complied and returned to parading.

The businessmen’s lunch clubs that are closely linked to the old-line krewes remain bastions of white, Christian manhood. One cannot apply for membership but must be nominated. Exclusivity is maintained via a “blackball” system, which means that a nominee can be vetoed by any current member, who need not reveal himself or his reasons. This makes it exceedingly difficult to prove any discriminatory intent. Still, a few years after Dorothy Mae Taylor’s ordinance passed, a coalition of African-American leaders and civil-rights lawyers persuaded the city to force the clubs to comply with it. The clubs sued preemptively in federal court, and won the case easily, on the grounds that they were private organizations with a First Amendment right to include or exclude whomever they liked. The ruling was upheld on appeal. Thus, Jews and other minorities (and, of course, women) are still unable to access these traditional hubs of elite social networking, which play a vital role in the city’s most important civic ritual and exert an undeniable—if difficult to quantify—influence on its politics and economy.

This is a source of resentment for some Jews. “You have a limited business base here,” said one retired Jewish lawyer, who spent years at one of the city’s major law firms and complained that the clubs had an effect on the bottom lines of many businesses. “They want to keep this as a self-sustaining situation where they take care of each other,” he said of the club’s members. “They’ve got their own doctors and insurance men, and the businesses feed off each other.”

One prominent Jewish New Orleanian who was involved in the fight against the old-line krewes and the businessmen’s clubs is Joseph Bernstein. A successful lawyer and entrepreneur, Bernstein is now retired. Ten years ago he moved to Bay St. Louis, a prosperous enclave just over the state line in Mississippi. Bernstein had welcomed the revelations in Trillin’s 1968 article, and he tried to encourage the Jewish community to take a more aggressive stance against discrimination. Frustrated by the lack of support he felt, and bitter about what he saw as the city’s unchanging culture of intolerance, Bernstein gave up. “I got out of New Orleans for the very reasons that Calvin was writing about—this discrimination and anti-Semitism and racism,” he told me recently. “I just couldn’t live there anymore, so I moved away.”

Middle-aged professionals in the Jewish community seem less concerned about the clubs than the older generation, partially because they believe the influence the clubs exert has diminished substantially over the years. I was particularly interested in the views of the city’s most high-profile Jewish resident, Councilman Arnie Fielkow, who is one of the most popular politicians in town. At first, Fielkow told me that he didn’t know enough about the clubs to form an opinion about them. I pressed him a bit. “As a Jewish person I’m always very sensitive to exclusion, and I don’t agree with it,” he said. “But it’s not a top-of-mind issue that I can see from my constituents.” I asked him about the clubs’ political influence. “I have supporters, financial supporters and political supporters, from every realm of this community, and many of them do come from the business community, and I’m sure many of them come from the different krewes and the different clubs,” he said. “But I haven’t focused on that. I mean, my focus is on trying to move New Orleans forward and trying to unify New Orleans.”

To some observers, though, the clubs reflect the very attitudes that prevent unity. “I am still shocked by the casual anti-Semitism you encounter in conversation—even with very educated people—in this town,” said James Gill, a veteran Times-Picayune writer who moved to the United States from his native Great Britain in the 1970s. “It is really quite strange,” He added that he is puzzled by what he sees as the Jewish community’s tacit acceptance of this prejudice. “I don’t know why they put up with it,” he said. “I really don’t.”

***

L.J. Goldstein moved to New Orleans in 1994, when he was in his late 20s. Raised in Manhattan, he had just completed a post-college pre-med program at Towson University in Maryland, and he’d been offered a job as a chemist in a laboratory. “I said, ‘No, thank you, I don’t want to spend my life under fluorescent lights doing this.’ I decided I was going to move to New Orleans to be a photographer. So that’s what I did.”

Soon after moving to the city, Goldstein experienced what he described as a “transformative moment” while watching the Mardi Gras parade of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. The aid and pleasure clubs play a somewhat similar role in the black community to that played by old-line krewes in the white community. The Zulus came to prominence in the early 20th century by staging a Mardi Gras parade that satirized Rex and lampooned white society’s prejudice against black people through a comic embrace of racist stereotypes. That, at least, is how the parade is generally interpreted today, though it continues to discomfit many onlookers, including some African-Americans. The Zulus don blackface and adopt black caricatures from the unpleasant oeuvre of minstrelsy: the Big Shot, the Witch Doctor, Mr. Big Stuff. They wear grass skirts, and their most prized “throws” are coconuts.

But Goldstein found it inspiring. “It was unlike anything I had ever seen before,” he told me recently, reminiscing about his early days in New Orleans. We met at what he calls his bunker—a dark, chaotic workspace near his house in the Tremé area, which is considered by some historians to be the oldest African-American neighborhood in the United States. “You had African-Americans wearing blackface and Afro wigs and handing out spears and coconuts,” he recalled, smiling. “It was refreshing and shocking and normalized.”

After the Zulu parade had passed, Goldstein was surprised to see a procession of klezmer musicians arrive in its wake, leading an impromptu second-line of sorts. The cumulative experience—the street parade, the racial satire, the Jewish music—had a profound effect on him. For the next two years, he joked about creating a krewe that would do for Jews what Zulu did for African-Americans. “You know, we’d wear big noses and throw decorated bagels,” he’d tell friends. The Krewe du Jieux became a reality in 1996 when Goldstein and a few dozen others were invited to form a sub-krewe in the Krewe du Vieux parade.

Krewe du Vieux is a sort of Mardi Gras fringe festival that since the 1980s has provided a very downtown alternative to the staid traditional Uptown parades. It’s an attempt to restore the upside-down quality that once defined Carnival. It features bawdy, often pornographic floats propelled along by some of the city’s best brass bands. The most compelling float this year was the Krewe of Comatose’s “Jindal Drops the Pelican’s Briefs,” which starred a 10-foot tall, uncannily accurate paper-mâché model of Louisiana’s conservative Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. Jindal had five arms: one held a Bible, two others held checks made out to “Creationists, Inc,” and the final two reached for the rear end of huge paper-mâché pelican positioned in front of him. Out of Jindal’s fly poked an oversized pencil. When the float started rolling, a strategically placed motor allowed Jindal to treat the state’s official bird in the manner that many New Orleanians feel he has treated them.

Krewe du Vieux was a good fit for the Jieuxs, who created their own Zulu-esque cast of characters. Their Witch Doctor is the Rich Doctor, their Big Shot is the Big Macher. There is also the Gaza Stripper, played by a local burlesque dancer, and a Jewish Mother, who approaches parade-watchers and worries aloud about their eating habits: “You look so thin. Here, have a bagel!”

But just as Zulu is not universally loved by African-Americans, some Jews took issue with the Krewe du Jieux, at least at first. According to Joel Nitzkin, a health-policy consultant who joined the krewe in its early years, some members of the Jewish establishment found objectionable the krewe’s flaunting of its Jewish identity, even (or perhaps especially) in a humorous way. “That was so against the prevailing ethic at the time,” he said. “They wanted to be in the background. There were certainly lots of people who were active in the Jewish community that were also active in the lay community, but it was like they lived in two separate worlds, and never let the lay community know that they were Jewish.”

Goldstein ultimately earned a law degree from Tulane. Through his photography, he became an avid chronicler of the black community’s parading and musical culture, getting to know many of its leading lights and becoming an honorary member of the Happy House Social Aid and Pleasure Club and a full member of the Tremé Sidewalk Steppers, a parading outfit. He sees the Krewe du Jieux as a means of building a bridge between Jews and blacks in New Orleans. He aims to take ideas from traditional Judaism “and mix them into a modern secular Judaism that is in turn trying to get in touch with what makes New Orleans special, which is its African-American influence. New Orleans wouldn’t be on the map if it weren’t for what the African-Americans did here. But when you look into that history, you see Jewish fingers in the pie. I mean, Louis Armstrong wore a Jewish star around his neck.” (He did so to honor the Karnofsky family, Jewish immigrants who acted as a sort of surrogate family to him.)

Over the years, Goldstein began to take the krewe’s mission more and more seriously. “When people take hold of these stereotypes and debunk them, and take the power away from them, and do this outrageous, comical display, it makes the world a better place for everybody,” he told me.

But not everyone shared this ambitious vision. In 2002, a schism began to develop within the Krewe du Jieux. A number of members objected to what they saw as Goldstein’s autocratic style of leadership. Goldstein concedes that the krewe was not a democracy. “You don’t make art by committee,” is his response.

But there was a deeper problem. Joel Nitzkin, who led the anti-Goldstein faction, explained it this way: “L.J. saw this very, very seriously. You know, this was going be a krewe that was going to save the world. It was going to eliminate anti-Semitism, at least locally, by having a theme that poked fun at certain Jewish stereotypes. And the rest of the group didn’t share that concept. We just wanted to have a good time.”

Nitzkin’s faction ultimately left the Krewe du Jieux to form their own group. The final schism happened, fittingly, in the aftermath of Katrina. After protracted negotiations, a compromise was reached: Goldstein kept the rights to the name Krewe du Jieux and a sort of intellectual-property right to its approach and aesthetic, while Nitzkin and his group kept the spot in the Krewe du Vieux parade, in which they would march as the Krewe du Mishigas. (This year, Goldstein’s group marched in the inaugural parade of Krewedelusion, a new organization that formed partly out of a sense that Krewe du Vieux has become too big and mainstream.)

The Krewe du Mishigas includes an epidemiologist, a physicist, a judge, and a few doctors. In spite of their membership in the city’s professional class—or perhaps because of it—the group gleefully embraces Krewe du Vieux’s X-rated ethos. This year, their theme was “Krewe du Mishigas Stokes the Burning Bush.” I visited the studio where krewe members were putting the final touches on the float. It depicted “Mistress Hot Knish,” a figure composed of a pair of enormous bare breasts adorned with Star of David pasties and a set of splayed legs, in between which sat a glowing orange-and-red “bush.” The Mistress had no head. (“Only the important parts,” a krewe member explained.)

During the parade the following night, I tried to gauge how the Mishigas float was perceived by the audience. One man, a visitor from Alabama, watched the parade on Decatur Street near Jackson Square and cheered as the Krewe du Mishigas passed. I asked him if he “got” the float. “Did I get it?” he said. “All I saw was it was tits and pussy. And we’ve got tits and pussy in Alabama, too.” A block away, I asked some college-age kids if they understood the float. A girl wearing a denim jacket gave me a quizzical look and said, “Of course. They’re burning the Jews. Duh! How could you even ask?”

In 1990, Rodger Kamenetz traveled to Tibet with a group of American Jews to meet the Dalai Lama. On that trip, which he describes in The Jew in the Lotus, he happened to learn that some Buddhists meditate within their dreams. He began to wonder how dreams had been understood in Jewish texts and found that, while they had once been considered a source of revelation, dreams had been all but exiled from the tradition because they were deemed too disturbing or difficult to understand. As Kamenetz went deeper into his own dreams, which he calls “the oldest spiritual technology on the planet,” he found that they did not have any explicitly Jewish content. But in their own strange way—as he recounts in his new book A History of Last Night’s Dream—they did, over the years, begin to lead him back to something like God.

You say that dreams have been exiled from Judaism since Genesis.

There is a twin tradition. One is of the dream as direct revelation that requires no interpretation. That’s embodied in the dreams of Joseph as a boy, and in Jacob’s dream of a ladder between earth and heaven. And then there is the whole tradition of interpretation which actually begins with Joseph’s brothers, who have been quite correctly identified as the first dream interpreters. Their interpretation is full of anxiety and rage.

And you see that same mistrust reflected in the Talmud?

To give them credit, I think the rabbis were concerned for the average person who may not want to take a mystical venture into dreams, or who may not be equipped, or who may be fearful. They also wanted to assert that the Torah is the primary spiritual guide. They limit the scope of the dream very severely based on a passage in Deuteronomy essentially saying that no dream can contradict the Torah.

How has this affected the way we understand dreams now?

Our own response to dreams is often that they’re painful or that they are difficult. They bring up feelings we don’t want to face and we call out for an interpreter who will remove the sting of the dream and soothe us. One can find this not only in the rabbinic project but in the Freudian project, which says that the real meaning of the dream is hidden. But in my view the real meaning of the dream is right on the surface.

You once dreamed of an enormous book that was keeping you from writing.

I walk into my study and I have this feeling I’m going to write something. But in front of the computer monitor is this very large blue book with the letters “K de G” on the cover. The author is the Rabbi K de G, which seems to stand for “Kamenetz on Genesis.” The book reads from back to front and it appears to be a commentary on Genesis. As the dream ends, I’m thumbing through the pages from back to front and have completely missed the fact that behind the book, at a distance, was my father who had given it to me.

So the problem wasn’t so much that this holy book was keeping you from writing, but that it was standing between you and your father?

The book was a gift from my father that could have brought me closer to him. A few years ago I had a dream where my house is falling down and I just call my dad and ask for help. And he comes with a bunch of painters and carpenters and suddenly the house is repaired. It was just the first in a series of dreams that helped to lead me closer to him. One of the great gifts for me was to have this different relationship with my father in the last years of his life.

And what was coming between you and your father in waking life?

My pride. There’s another dream where we’re sitting at a kind of Talmud study. My father knows what a certain word means and I don’t. But I don’t ask him; I think I can figure it all out for myself. I don’t want to be the vulnerable son who needs help. But at a deeper level, this was not just about my relationship to my father, but about my relationship to the Father.

You hear people talk that way in church, but not as often in synagogue.

My answer would be two words: Avinu Malkeinu. Our Father, our King. Obviously Jesus said stuff like that because he also went to Rosh Hashanah services. There’s a whole Yiddish tradition of referring to God as tateynu, as “dear Father.” Our ancestors were very comfortable with the idea that God was a father and a king and a shepherd. But now if we have an emotional relationship to God, that’s immediately seen as goyish. We have drained the feeling level out of our liturgy and then we wonder why people can’t connect. They’re not just words. If God is a father, then I must be like a child.

So how does God appear to you in your dreams?

At the end of the book, I describe a dream where an orphan boy is being visited by his father. The father shows him his hand and says, “My hand is the same as yours.” Then the father leaves and the boy starts sobbing and looks in the mirror. And he’s me: I see my face. That sadness of having lost the Father, in this case not my father but the Father, that yearning to reconnect, not to be an orphan but to be his son—that’s the quest. It’s rather like what Rabbi Nachman said: You have to connect to God from your broken heart. The dream reawakened the feeling of loss, the pain of the separation from God. It’s a tremendous gift to feel that.

You’ve been studying under Marc Bregman, a self-styled “dreamworker” in Vermont.

Marc Bregman grew up as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia in a kind of anti-Semitic environment. He had a strict Jewish father and he rebelled in the 1960s. After he moved to Vermont he was working in the post office by day and seeing clients about their dreams at night. He’s certainly not a traditional Jew or even a nontraditional one. But I know that he is a man of God.

And you have your own clients now. How do you work with their dreams?

We meet once a week for an hour. We try to find the feelings in the dream, the belly button, as Marc calls it. Then we have homework, which is to visualize a moment from one of the dreams that needs change. There’s a rhythm back and forth from night dream to daydream and from daydream to actual life. Usually people come with a problem they’re trying to wrestle with but the dreams often point to some underlying predicament. It could be other people’s expectations. It could be family obligations, guilt, or a sense of duty. We just keep going deeper and over time there’s a shift. The dream becomes a live rehearsal. The changes you make in dreams can change how you behave.

In what sense is this approach to dreams Jewish?

When you’re taking a dream seriously it becomes a spiritual practice. How does that connect to what’s offered by this tradition we belong to where we have Torah and commentary and rabbinic authority and services and holidays and all of that? We struggle with a feeling of loss of connection to God. Religion tries to give us intellectual or ritual answers. People often outsource their spiritual struggles to the experts. Hence the tremendous pressure on rabbinic figures in our community. If we don’t have a personal feeling of a quest, at least if some of us don’t, then it makes the rabbi’s job very, very hard.

Could you have understood your dreams without coming to them from a Jewish angle?

It seemed necessary for me to go through the books, to go through Genesis, to go through the rabbis. And yet it’s true that having done that, it no longer seems quite as relevant. You can find the gift of the dream without Genesis. But it’s promised there.

/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost by monkeyinfez / Paul Hockett; some rights reserved.

You had a series of dreams in which men kept trying to feed you meat.

I had alternated between various dietary restrictions from semi-kosher to vegetarian and wasn’t too faithful to any of them. And all of a sudden these guys are showing up in my dreams serving meat. It started as hors d’oeuvres and ended with giant hunks of beef thrown on a grill by bare-chested Mexican chefs. It was obvious that these were good guys and that they were challenging me with a kind of a male generosity of spirit.

What did you dream last night?

Recently I dreamed I woke up and went to the window. I looked outside and the ground was covered with snow and I felt such joy. It took me back to being a kid in Baltimore thinking, I’m going to spend the whole day playing and I won’t have to go to school. You worry and you plan, you try to make yourself happy, you try to make other people happy and then the snow just falls, you know? It falls on its own.