לינדזי ווייַזט אוּנדז אירע געפֿילן – אויב ניט מיט אַ גראָבן פֿינגער, איז עס מיט איר נאָגל!

Transliteration:Lindzi vayzt undz ire gefiln—oyb nit mit a grobn finger, iz es mit ir nogl!

Meaning: Lindsay expresses herself—if not by giving the finger, then with her nail!

מעל גיבסאָן … אַזאַ צרה! דוּ באַווייַזט ניט דייַן “מעכטיקע האַרץ” נאָר דייַן שמוּציקע, פּראָסטע צוּנג.

Transliteration: Mel Gibson… Aza tsore! Du bavayzt nit dayn “mekhtike harts” nor dayn shmutsike, proste tsung.

Meaning: Mel Gibson… what troubles! You show not your “Brave Heart” but your dirty, crude tongue.

פּאָל, דער אַכט-פֿיסיקער מאָלוּסק: געווינט אוּן געווינט. ער גיט כשרע עצות, אָבער ער אַליין איז טרייף.

Transliteration: Pol, der akht-fisiker molusk: gevint un gevint. Er git koshere eytses, ober er aleyn iz trayf.

Meaning: Paul, the octopus: he wins and wins again. He gives kosher advice, but he himself is trayf.

ניט שוּלדיק??? אַזאַ אויסוווּרף בלייַבט ווי אַ לייַטישער מענטש?

Transliteration: Nit shuldik??? Aza oysvurf blaybt vi a laytisher mentsh?

Meaning: Not guilty? Such a low-life remains a respectable man?

רינגאָ, ווי צוּ 64, אַזוי צוּ 70. מזל טוב ביז 120!

ווען כ’ווער שוין עלטער פֿאַרלירן די האָר
יאָרן פֿון איצט, הייַנט
וועסטוּ מיר נאָך שיקן אַ קליין וואַלענטייַן
געבוּרטסטאָג קאַרטל, פֿלעשעלע ווייַן?

Transliteration: Ringo, vi tsu 64, azoy tsu 70. Mazl tov biz 120!

Ven kh’ver shoyn elter farlirn di hor
yorn fun itst, haynt
vestu mir nokh shikn a kleyn valentayn
geburtstog kartl, fleshele vayn?

Meaning: Ringo, in 70 as in 64, may you live to 120!

When I get older, losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a Valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine?

• The U.S. and Israeli Reform and Conservative movements are furious at today’s vote on a bill that would give exclusive conversion authority to Israel’s Chief (Orthodox) Rabbinate. [Haaretz]

• Lebanon reinforced its troops in its south with 5,000 more. [WP]

• Meanwhile, Lebanese newspapers are reporting that the July 2006 conflict with Israel is “not over.” [Ynet]

• In a move that resembles 1979’s “morality police,” the Iranian regime is sending 1,000 clerics to Tehran schools to enforce against political dissent. Last month, the teaching of music was banned in Iranian schools. [NYT]

• Congratulations to España, which won the World Cup yesterday in its first-ever final game appearance. [ESPN]

• L’affaire Chomsky has become something of a cause célèbre in Israel. Additional French phrase. [NYT]

• Who knew Ben Bernanke’s middle name was “Shalom”? [NYT]

• A former Justice Department Nazi hunter (no, really) is agitating to have Richard Goldstone investigated for visa ineligibility due to his tenure as an apartheid-era judge. [Jewish Indy]

• Woody Allen (again) spoke up for his friend Roman Polanski, on the grounds that he is “an artist and a nice person.” In fairness, most people are only one or the other. Woody Allen, for example. [HuffPo]

• A dispatch from the West Bank, where the Samaritans—good and otherwise—still celebrate Passover in their own, distinctive way. Yes, this includes sheep-slaughtering. [VQR]

Polanski Breaks Long Silence on His Extradition [NYT]

I thought about him last weekend as I watched the most recent offerings from two of cinema’s contemporary masters, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski. In The Ghost Writer, Polanski’s first film in nearly a decade, a young and bewildered scribe, hired to pen the memoirs of a former British prime minister, soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy involving the International Criminal Court, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Kim Cattrall’s desperate and futile attempts at fashioning something resembling a British accent. In Shutter Island, Scorsese’s biggest hit in many years, a young and bewildered federal marshal, charged with solving a mystery in a creepy mental asylum on a remote rock off the coast of Boston, soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy involving the Office of Strategic Services, the Department of Health and Human Services, and Ben Kingsley’s shiny, bald head. Both films are permeated by a thick mist of paranoia, enshrouding both sky (dark! rainy!) and soul (burdened! terrified!).

Leaving the theater after this daunting double-header, I was a shaken man. What, I couldn’t help but wonder, if the the film’s eponymous ghost writer and I had more in common than I’d previously realized? What if I were called upon by my publisher to spend stormy afternoons watching Pierce Brosnan work out? Or what if the doctor’s office I’m slated to visit soon for my yearly physical turns out to be a Shutter Island of sorts, an institution so grim that the most cheerful conversationalist around is Max von Sydow?

Such is the power of paranoia. An inmate at Shutter Island puts it best: reaching out from behind the bars of his cage, he asks a frazzled-looking Leonardo DiCaprio a piercing question. “Do you know what fear does to the mind?” he spits out. “Corrodes it. Rusts it.”

But the lunatic is preaching to the choir. DiCaprio portrays a heaving federal marshal who was among the first Americans to liberate Dachau, and the sites he’d seen there—arranged by Scorsese as obscenely beautiful tableaux vivants of bony death and writhing Nazis—have returned to haunt his dreams. Soon, his mind corrodes and rusts as well.

The death camp connection injects the otherwise baffling movie with one fascinating element: not only is the film a paean to paranoia, but its brand of paranoia is a distinctly Jewish one. When DiCaprio meets von Sydow for the first time, he immediately detects the doctor’s faint German accent and scornfully accuses him of having been a part of Hitler’s killing machine. This is very poor police work—the marshal has no evidence—but it’s the sort of visceral distrust that we’ve all seen in grandfathers, in elderly friends, perhaps even in ourselves.

We’ve certainly seen it in Polanski. Having escaped the Krakow ghetto and lost his mother to Auschwitz’s ovens, the famed director dedicated his career to exploring what could be called the Homo Roman: a man with no past or commitments, trapped in a menacing and strange place, doing his best to survive the wrath of forces beyond his control. J.J. Gittes of Chinatown is such a man, and so is Trelkowski, the terrorized protagonist of The Tenant. It’s no coincidence that the latter is played by Polanski himself—the director, too, is a Polanski character, in real life as much as on-screen. He’s never stopped looking over his shoulder.

This week’s haftorah nicely complements this spirit of paranoia. It’s largely about Amalek, the desert-dwelling descendants of Esau who attacked the Israelites as they were marching out of Egypt. For their crime, the Bible more than once prescribes stern punishment: “Now, go, and you shall smite Amalek, and you shall utterly destroy all that is his, and you shall not have pity on him: and you shall slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

Before we get wrathful with any asses, however, it might help to know just who today’s Amalek is. By most historical accounts, the ancient tribe is no longer with us, at least not in any pure and recognizable form. They’ve been diluted into nonexistence by centuries of wars and intermarriage. This fact—in addition to the inconvenience of dealing with a direct exhortation to commit murder—has led many rabbis and scholars to interpret the animosity toward Amalek either as a historical non-issue (now that Amalekites no longer exists, no smiting is necessary) or as a metaphor (Amalek as code for all the nasty things we’d like to change in ourselves).

For some Jews, however, Amalek is real, and he’s around every corner. A few years ago, for example, Tablet contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg wrote an essay in The New York Times, describing a bris he was attending in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

“I am looking at our life today,” said the newborn’s father, “and what Amalek wants to do is swallow up the people of Israel.”

A young woman attending the service agreed. Her name was Ayelet, a teenager in a long skirt carrying an M-16 rifle; when asked if she thought Amalek was still around, Ayelet didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she replied, pointing towards a nearby Arab village. “The Amalekite spirit is everywhere.”

Naturally, those who see Amalek everywhere are always inclined to try and stamp him out. This is the logic that guided Baruch Goldstein as he celebrated Purim in 1994 by massacring 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs. And this, alas, is the logic that still guides so many of us, in Israel and America alike, who see doom around each corner and sanctify violence as the only available cure.

My commander, then, had it just right: just because we’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get us. But he left out one important reminder, namely that a life spent parsing conspiracies isn’t much of a life at all.



A Conversation With Gore Vidal [Atlantic]

As it happens, Polanski, who has been in a Zurich jail since Saturday, is just about the only person who hasn’t been heard from on the subject of how much, or how little, he has left to atone for, at this late date. On one side are those who insist that Polanski committed a heinous crime and must be held accountable to the law. One conservative blogger, Jim Lindgren, dug up an essay on Salvador Dali’s personal trespasses by George Orwell, who, as it happens, cited the hypothetical rape of little girls in railway carriages by William Shakespeare. “We should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear,” Orwell wrote, in 1944. Or, as Nick Gillespie asked on Reason’s blog, “Would these same people be backing Polanski if he were a Catholic priest?”

That line of argument seems to miss the point of the arrest, which isn’t about the crime itself—Polanski did, after all, plead guilty—but about the responsibility to serve prison time, whether or not it’s what your lawyers negotiated for you. On that point, Hollywood and European heavyweights like Harvey Weinstein and Thierry Fremaux, director of the Cannes film festival, have been quick to argue that Polanski has had quite a hard enough life already; that his victim, Samantha Geimer, has publicly forgiven him and asked that the case be dropped; and, moreover, that he already served the time stipulated in his plea agreement, which, according to an HBO documentary released last year, was subsequently violated by the supervising judge.

“How do you go from the Holocaust to the Manson family with any sort of dignity? In those circumstances, most people could not contribute to art and make the kind of beautiful movies he continues to make,” Weinstein writes in today’s Independent. Others, like the Los Angeles Times’s Patrick Goldstein, who compares the prosecutors who set the arrest in motion to Victor Hugo’s relentless Javert, added that prosecutors in his bankrupt state, which is instituting court furloughs to save money, surely have better things to do than persecute a famous movie director for a crime that, sadly, isn’t that exceptional.

Meanwhile, Newser’s Michael Wolff casts aspersions on the motives of the prosecutors (publicity) and the Swiss (quid pro quo, in connection with ongoing cases relating to UBS’ involvement abetting of tax evasion). “Arresting Polanski is about the L.A. prosecutor’s office’s public relations,” Wolff wrote.

Of course, Polanski already knows how that part of the movie goes. We’ll see whether L.A. really is still Chinatown.

Polanski Seeks Release from Swiss Jail [NYT]
Polanski Appeals Extradition [LAT]

On its own, the joke rings a little silly and stale, but alongside the movie’s other stereotypes—Von Crolock’s horny, homosexual son; a bumbling scientist; and his equally befuddled assistant, played by Polanski—the Yiddish-spouting vampire deftly sends up notions as old as the Blood Libel. Nearly four decades later, Polanski is releasing his version of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, with Ben Kingsley, that master of ethnic disguise, as Fagin. But the usually fearless auteur has Kingsley approach the “merry old gentleman” and leader of Oliver’s pack of London pickpockets cautiously.

Polanski sounds like the perfect director to tackle a cunning and complex Jewish villain. After The Fearless Vampire Killers, he moved onto Rosemary’s Baby, in which Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, seeks advice from Dr. Abraham Sapirstein, a Jewish obstetrician played by the perennial pushover Ralph Bellamy. Turns out the genial doctor is also a witch who’s in league with Rosemary’s husband, her neighbors, and Satan. Much of Rosemary’s Baby, and of Polanski’s work in general, is built on those kind of deadpan inversions. Even when portraying Jewish suffering in The Pianist, Polanski shows the instincts of a sadist. It’s defiantly chilly—think of the early scene when a Nazi guard tips a man in a wheelchair off a balcony—and maybe the least sentimental vision of a Holocaust survivor on film.

There’s a cold breeze blowing through Oliver Twist, too. Polanski films the dark alleys of London in all their brutality, and shuns the novel’s redemptive coincidences—but he also reveals a gentler heart. Oliver starts the film with a quiet stream of tears, and keeps them coming. The sympathy extends to Fagin, as well. In an interview with The New York Times, Kingsley promised a more human take on Dickens’ notorious swindler than previous adaptations, notably David Lean’s 1948 film. That version starred Alec Guinness with a deep, creepy rasp in his voice and an absurd beak based on the George Cruikshank illustrations that accompanied Dickens novel when it was serialized in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837. “I think we have to destroy the stereotypes and replace them with archetypes,” said Kingsley, who strived “to present the Collapsed Father.” Collapsed is the operative word: sporting a bad comb-over, hobbling with a cane, and speaking in a high-pitched, not-quite-Cockney accent, it’s hard to see how Kingsley’s Fagin climbs the stairs, let alone commands a flatful of boys or a killer as vicious as Bill Sikes.

The film is careful to align Fagin not with Sikes or the Artful Dodger—two generations of orphans he ushered into crime—but with that latecomer Oliver. Played by Barney Clark, Oliver spends much of the movie looking for a home, and settles happily enough in Fagin’s abode before crossing the path of Mr. Brownlow, who offers him posh real estate. When Oliver disappears, Fagin fears the boy may “peach” to the police, yet it’s also clear the old man genuinely cares for him, and maybe even sees some of himself in Oliver. In a scene dreamed up by screenwriter Ronald Harwood, Fagin heals Oliver’s wounds with a balm passed on from father to son—placing Oliver, it would seem, next in the family line. The novel never admits such sympathy—if Fagin loves Oliver, it’s for his innocent face: Who would ever pick such a sweet boy out of a lineup?

The only scene which reveals the true darkness in Fagin’s heart comes early on, when Fagin is admiring his private stash of jewels—think of it as a pension plan—and catches Oliver watching him. Immediately, Fagin lunges at Oliver with a pair of scissors (not a breadknife, as in the novel) threatening circumcision, even castration. The scene’s genuinely terrifying, if a little overdone, but at least it reminds us that Fagin is not simply the good old granddad he appears to be. Still, for most the film, it’s Fagin who seems emasculated.

The problem with Kingsley’s performance is not anti-Semitism—if you can look past his prosthetic proboscis, still generous but significantly smaller than the one on Guinness, the only obvious sign of Fagin’s origins is a late scene where, in response to a slew of bad news, he quietly repeats “Oy” a half-dozen times. The situation is quite the opposite: Polanski and Kingsley have transformed Fagin into a victim, depriving him of the scheming malevolence that makes him captivating as a character. Kingsley’s Fagin needs a hug—and he gets one in the next-to-final scene, when Oliver comes to visit him in his prison cell.

Kingsley and Polanski are right to be wary of playing into anti-Semitic tropes, but there’s a difference between depicting a villainous Jew, someone whose evil traits are based in stereotypes, and a Jewish villain, whose background and villainy coexist but are unconnected. To see the difference, one need only watch Ron Moody in Oliver!, Carol Reed’s still-impressive adaptation of Lionel Bart’s musical. Some chide Moody for trafficking in gay stereotypes, but it takes some effort to read his performance that way. What’s far more striking is his wicked charm, welcoming Oliver to his home only to scream at another boy, “Shut up and drink your gin!” when he complains about the sausages. (In case you were wondering, Fagin, in the book and the films, does not keep kosher.) While Guinness uses Fagin’s Jewishness to make him more repulsive, Moody makes it part of Fagin’s charisma, channeling a slight Yiddish accent in “Pick a Pocket” and “Reviewing the Situation.”

The second song, in which Fagin reconsiders but ultimately rejects the honest life, marks Lionel Bart’s only obvious effort to humanize the character, even forgive him—and yet, it never turns him into a casualty of the world the way Kingsley does. The musical’s Fagin knows he could forsake his life of crime but keeps choosing otherwise, even in the final reprise of “Reviewing the Situation.” If Fagin’s a victim, it’s of his own choices, not his circumstances. Kingsley, on the other hand, has imagined an elaborate backstory for Fagin (“brought up by his grandparents, who did not speak a word of English”), going as far as to compare his childhood in London to Polanski’s perilous wanderings in wartime Poland. Like Brody in The Pianist and like Oliver, Fagin simply isn’t in control of his life. When he plots with Bill Sikes, it’s hard not to wonder who’s really in charge.

Neither David Lean nor Lionel Bart had the heart to send Fagin to his death. Lean’s version ends with Fagin’s capture (and the mob’s applause), while Bart, who clearly likes Fagin too much to think of killing him, sends Fagin off into the sunset with the Artful Dodger. But Kingsley plays the final scene in prison, roughly adapted from Dickens’ novel, for all its Oscar-mongering pathos, and the final shot shows the gallows that awaits him. Attempting to avoid one array of stereotypes, he winds up feeding a whole other set: Jews as victims of history rather than agents.

Dickens professed shock when his depiction of a “very old shriveled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair” earned him the ire of England’s Jewish community. In 1863, Eliza Davis, the wife of a banker who had bought Dickens’ London house three years before, accused the usually “large hearted” author of encouraging “a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew.” If Jews took offense, Dickens replied, then “they are a far less sensible, a far less just and a far less good tempered people than I have always supposed them to be.”

But Dickens had the daunting task of imagining a Jewish character in what was then a relative vacuum. Polanski’s Fagin enters into a quite different climate: fiction, film, and television are full of assorted depictions of Jews—nebbishes, hipsters, devils, and ordinary folks in between. If anything, The Pianist earned Polanski the right to create a Jewish villain not mired in stereotypes but nonetheless racy, in all senses of the word.