Setting off small rooms of sweaty teenagers in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other cities that would tolerate punk and the increasing violence of the scene, MacKaye was part angry adolescent and part caring older brother. He used songs like “Good Guys (don’t wear white),” “No Reason,” and “Filler” to teach his followers to feel and express their emotions directly, to make art and meaning out of whatever materials were at hand. Railing against smoking, drinking, doing drugs, and other corporate-promoted self-destructive behaviors, MacKaye set himself apart from decadent punk progenitors like the Sex Pistols and created the musical sub-genre known as straight-edge punk. After Minor Threat disbanded in 1983, MacKaye formed the legendary 1990s indie rock band Fugazi, which blended poppy hooks with MacKaye’s emotional directness and a DIY ethos on hits like “Waiting Room” and “Song #1.”

MacKaye’s heightened awareness of the importance of music and ritual as expressions of the values that shape communities and hold them together are products of both the D.C. punk scene and of growing up in a family highly engaged with organized religion: MacKaye went to church every Sunday, and his father was the religion editor of the Washington Post. I attended one of the final Minor Threat shows, in Philadelphia in the summer of 1983, as a 16-year-old yeshiva student, and it rewired my brain in ways that continue to deeply affect my life. A few months ago, I went to Washington to meet MacKaye—who is now the father of a young son and the head of his own record label, Dischord—and talk about the energy I’d felt in that room when I was 16, where it came from, and what it meant to me and thousands of other adolescents yearning at once to escape and be on their own and to be told that they were OK. We spent an afternoon talking, drinking tea, eating whole-wheat toast with honey, and talking about music and other things that matter. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Do you remember playing a Minor Threat show in Philadelphia in the summer of 1983?

Where the kids were jumping off the sides? We were fucking good that night. That little run of shows, I just felt like we had hit our stride, we were back to the four piece, we were so lean and so fast, and everything just felt so right. We broke up two months after that. We played our last show on September 24, 1983.

I grew up in the Orthodox Jewish community in New York, and I went down to Philly for that show, and it blew my mind.

Were you actually a practicing Orthodox Jew at that time?

I grew up in that community. Minor Threat was my favorite thing that I had ever seen. Seeing people my age fired up with that communal energy, which was weirdly a lot like the energy that I’d felt from religious people, except you didn’t seem to like religion very much, as far as I could tell from songs like “Filler.” You felt like everyone’s big brother, but you were also really pissed off.

I understand that a lot of the time I looked like I was enraged—I wasn’t really enraged. I might have been pissed about things in a song like “Filler,” in the sense of this is wrong, but what I really was doing was I was taking advantage of the speed of the music and the energy of the room to completely express, to go off, to make it real, to make it visceral.

You wanted to ignite the room.

You may have looked at me like an older brother, but I looked at everyone in the crowd like, “This is us.” We were all peers. The band wasn’t putting on the show, we were all putting on the show.

Straight up, I think music is sacred. I think music is a form of communication that predates language. Music predates religion, it predates business, it predates all of that stuff. It’s serious. It’s not a fucking joke. I’m not a Christian, I’m not a Jew, I’m not a damn anything. I’m not a team member. I understand why people are drawn to that, I respect it, even. But for me there’s something that’s even deeper, more sacred than all that, which is human beings figuring out how to gather. Music can set us free in that moment. And if we’re in a room with other people who are all being affected this way, then you get into that mass energy, this thing that can be really cathartic. And I think it is a really deeply important thing to have happen, catharsis. To go off.

The problem is, because people are drawn to it, because it’s so fucking important, people always say, “How can I set up a tollbooth there?” How can I get them to come to my place, so I can charge them and make money from their rite, their ritual.

When I was a kid, my family were Orthodox Jews, although my parents were complex because they didn’t believe in any of that stuff in a literal way, they just brought us up in that community, in that culture. And so, at one point when I was a kid—maybe 10, 11, I guess it was—things weren’t so good in my home, and there was this real deep Hasidic community in Brooklyn, black hats. And so this one rabbi in my school was like, if you want to go away for the weekend, we can find families and you can spend the Sabbath with them, and I did.

But the weekends were bad, because you were in school during the week, but the weekend was like the warzone.

Yeah, and these people were religious people, so you’d get some spirit or something from them, which sounds bad but it was actually great, and I loved them. They were just in their own world. They’d all eat together with their rabbi, and then at the end someone would start singing these songs and wordless melodies they’d carried with them from Russia, and they would then sing for five or six hours. And it would just be men in this room, singing, and you would feel that intense energy. The next time I felt that again was at your show. But it was different, you know.

My songs are made to be sung by many voices. All I ever want to do is make the whole room sing. Because I knew if everyone’s singing, they’re making a show, they’re part of the music. And it makes for something really phenomenal. I always tell people let’s all sing, sing the songs, let’s make music, fuck buying music, stop downloading it, make it. Be the song. Be the song.

But how do you keep that ritual part of it fresh? That’s the thing I always wondered. Your song with Fugazi, “Waiting Room,” is one of the best songs ever. Lyrically, musically, I never get tired of it. To the extent that there was one Fugazi hit, it was the hit.

That’s my hit song.

So, you played it what, a thousand times?

But what’s not repetitious about it is that every moment is not the last moment, and you never know. Like if you’re having sex with someone, maybe it gets repetitious, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. It’s a song. Every time I played “Waiting Room,” there’s potential for that moment. That song hits people, they love it, it’s important to them.

Just as you were talking I was thinking to myself, there are all these Fugazi songs like “Song #1” or “Bad Mouth” where you could do such delicate, girly versions of them. They would be exquisite.

Yeah, like pop songs. They’re singalongs.

A song is a thing that other people can sing along with you?

I’m going to go pee and think about that one.

[Leaves and returns.]

It’s funny, for me, songs are kind of indefinable shapes. And this might be the difference between music and songs. Records are sonic illusions. We have this little boombox with the speakers that are like two inches big. You have these recordings you put it on, you play these things, and it creates a scenario in which I’m at a concert. But you’re obviously not.

I think of artists and other people, they’re translators. Visual artists see things, and they say, I’m going to translate this, and they take a picture or they paint or they draw. You compose things and you frame it for people, because the way they process they don’t see it the same way. They can see it, but they can’t catch what you’re seeing.

Musicians, I think we hear things in a certain way. I’ve taken out all this noise and I’ve given you this distilled version.

Continue reading: deviants and tribes, the Ten Commandments, and parents as “holy beings.” Or view as a single page.

]]> http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/70804/minor-threats/feed/ 5 http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/60589/kosher-wheels/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=kosher-wheels http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/60589/kosher-wheels/#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:00:08 +0000 Jenny Merkin http://www.tabletmag.com/?p=60589 Spike Mendelsohn and D.C.’s Sixth and I Historic Synagogue are starting a whole new way to kick off your weekend early with a Friday-only lunchtime kosher food truck.

Mendelsohn, famous from his tenure on Top Chef, has made D.C. his culinary stomping ground with restaurants Good Stuff Eatery and We, the Pizza. He’s now taking kosher cuisine by storm. The truck will be dubbed “Sixth & Rye,” and Mendelsohn and co. plan to feature traditional Jewish staples like corned beef sandwiches and knishes. The goal is to make it as “deli-like as possible,” Mendelsohn’s sister told The Feast.

The idea was inspired by the dearth of kosher deli in Washington, and Mendelsohn is interested to expanding the kosher enterprise if it’s successful.

It remains to be seen whether this will just be kosher-style or will have a hashgacha from a local rabbinate, but Sixth and Rye will be parked outside of the former synagogue, and is due to debut at the end of April, perfect timing to break your Passover chametz ban.

Spike Mendelsohn Goes Kosher [The Feast]

“Revolutionaries-for-a-weekend should never get hangovers,” wrote Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night. No doubt a few over-eager attendees at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Saturday rally on the National Mall in Washington conceived of themselves as latter-day Pentagon-levitators—the anti-Vietnam War activists of Mailer’s armies—much as one over-eager columnist conceived of herself and her generation (which is to say, my generation) as going down to our very own Yasgur’s Farm. But I am here to tell you that the operative word in the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” was “and/or.” The event could have been whatever you wanted it to be, which meant that it was nothing at all. It’s not exactly what a Mall rally the weekend before the midterms called for.

At least Mailer’s point about the hangover remained applicable. After a too-long trip for coffee—nobody, not the coffee shops or the Metro Authority (which hauled a record-for-a-Saturday 825,437 passengers) or the organizers themselves guessed the event would draw remotely so many people—a few of us took the bus south down 11th Street toward the Mall. One imagines L’Enfant designed the city for just these sorts of days: a bright, warm fall afternoon, when the denizens of the jagged, swampy hills of the north would pour into the sunken, flat expanse of the Mall, with its undeniable symmetry and open access, and engage in some imagined future ritual of democracy.

But the rush of people met a dam just north of the Mall, where an hourglass effect and an ill-placed row of Porta-Potties made things unpleasantly impenetrable. The next 45 minutes were a slow slog eastward toward the Capitol through a three-dimensional, fluid wall of people, emerging behind the stage, where people with press passes and people who knew people with press passes mingled in an almost pastoral setting with passersby and Human Rights Campaign volunteers.

It was here that the actor Sam Waterston, driving past, took a sneak picture of me.

I knew that Waterston had already spoken not because I could hear him—the audio was truly terrible, which no doubt helped cause the mass exodus that began well before the event was through—but because I could make out his show’s trademark chung-chung sound, which bracketed what I now know was Waterston’s stentorian, deadpan reading of a Colbert-penned ode to fear. (“Did you hear that? No? You’re probably going deaf./ It’s your kids back home cooking up some crystal meth.”) But I admit I was surprised when Waterston, sitting alone in the back of a black Town Car that inched away from behind the stage, snapped the picture of me—me in my corduroy sport coat, earnestly striving to look professional on the theory that maybe there would actually be something to cover—backed by the rest of the crowd. He had a giddy, grandfatherly smile on his face, which confirmed my sense that I was at the rally less to stand for a certain set of principles (there was no set of principles) or to be entertained (as I said, you couldn’t hear a thing), but to be an extra in the cast of exactly the sort of non-event alchemized by warm, young bodies and media hype into Great American Spectacle—exactly the sort of non-event, in other words, that Jon Stewart, in his more pious moods, gets a kick out of shaking his head at with a fake non-grin on his face.

Having a grandfatherly television actor appropriate my youthful mojo for his iPhone collection was merely the most focused part of the spectacle, which tried to package itself as irony but was actually something much more depressing and wrong. The rallygoers’ signs—like that from the above-mentioned Earthling—seemed more dedicated to showing off the makers’ wit than anything else. And the hosts’ fundamental message, too—despite Stewart’s celebrated appeal to media decency toward the event’s end—was one of irony made impotent by context: that the best way to beat back the extremists storming the gates of the mainstream is to laugh at them. Stewart had up to 250,000 people watching him, depending on the estimate. But, as Stalin said of the pope, how many divisions has he got?

This is the back of my sign.

While the rally’s opportunity cost was arguably great—a liberal could plausibly see it as a gigantic missed chance—it was basically a poorly run party that confirmed Stewart’s downward trajectory from exciting comedian to, at times, important political spokesperson to, now, the second and no doubt lesser coming of Al Franken. Stewart’s somber, deeply boring speech, which lectured the press that it ought to “hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen,” was so trite and bland that it cannot be taken seriously even by not-serious people. It was as though Stewart were determined to be for the mushy middle what Colbert is for the Fox News right: a parody. And even this character was undercut every step of the way by Stewart’s need to be the comedian, the better to excuse himself for not taking a stronger stand. “The press is our immune system,” he declared. “If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker, and perhaps eczema.” Chuckles.

When I first heard that Jon Stewart was going to hold a rally in favor of moderation, I smelled a rat. Moderation is neither good nor bad: Certain people are right about things, and certain other people are wrong about those things, and how moderate they are has zero bearing on how right or wrong they are. Moreover, Stewart’s moderation happens to be particularly false and damaging, because, say what you will about the demerits of the fringe left and the fringe right, the fringe left is, well, on the fringe, while the fringe right is about to unseat the majority leader of the Senate, win several other Senate and House races, collect hundreds of millions of dollars in donations and book royalties and speaking fees, and have a big impact on the selection of the Republican Party’s standard-bearer for 2012 and what he or she will stand for.

Jon Stewart speaks at least in part as a man with a job dependent on ratings. He is paid to get high ratings by a corporation. Stewart’s a smart guy, and so his corporate interests would naturally make him afraid of actual liberalism—the perfect explanation for his adoption of anti-liberal moderation. Those ratings, meanwhile, are about to face their greatest threat yet, as the one talk-show host with similarly strong cred with the young’uns, Conan O’Brien, has a new show that just happens to start at the same time as Stewart’s and just happens to debut next Monday. And, hey, didn’t Stewart’s crew just publish a new book?

I was upset that so much of my generational cohort failed to see this, that so many would even be able to have a good time. I felt betrayed. I became obsessed; one late night, I found myself adapting Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America” and emailing a few friends:

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Jon Stewart?
I’m obsessed by Jon Stewart.
I watch him every day.
His show stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I watch it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility.
Everybody’s serious but me.

As it turns out, I was much more serious than the event demanded. Stewart will never have the influence of Ginsberg’s totem of irresistible and rotten Americana: midcentury Time magazine.

Everything will probably be OK.

Incidentally, if you’ve read David Brooks, you’ll know that my generation’s Woodstock will be not this but some networking get-together. Whatever this was, though, I arrived on Friday night via Greenbelt, Md., near where Interstate 95 dead-ends into the Capitol Beltway. The buses from New York to downtown D.C. had sold out over a week before, no doubt because of the rally; mine stopped first in Baltimore and then deposited me and about a dozen others, many of whom, I gathered, were headed for a homecoming weekend of tailgating in College Park (Maryland would crush Wake Forest, 62-14), at a half-empty parking lot abutted by an office park and the terminus of the Washington Metro’s Green Line.

Andrew Silow-Carroll, who got to know Cohen and her husband, David (who survives her, as do her 100-year-old mother and two children), while editing Washington Jewish Week, has further reminiscence. He notes that the two were to be awarded the Abraham Joshua Heschel Award from Jews United for Justice this month; David used to work at Americans for Peace Now.

And Michael Schaffer, the editor of Washington City Paper, observes of whoever ends up buying Politics & Prose (which may be a group that includes Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg), “the largest chunk of their investment in the store will not come because its inventory is that large or its Connecticut Avenue storefront is that appealing. It’ll involve buying access to the network of loyal customers Cohen and Meade painstakingly developed.”

As a fiercely proud member of that network, I’ll let my earlier words speak for themselves.

Carla Cohen Dies; Co-founder of D.C. Bookstore Politics & Prose [WP]
Carla Cohen, Washington Bookseller [JustASC]
Carla Cohen R.I.P. [City Paper]
Earlier: Reflections on a Book Paradise

And Sam Tanenhaus’ review is fantastic in itself—it particularly helped me clarify how I felt about the novel’s haunting, literally breath-taking final section. (It is, granted, almost impossibly rhapsodic—here is a very positive but more measured take.) Tanenhaus is especially perceptive when teasing out all the permutations of the novel’s ambitious (and self-admittedly grandiose) title. He treats its political implications with particular sensitivity—sometimes more than Franzen does himself.

Here is where I step in as the Jewish blogger™ and say that, despite the above, I did have one problem with the novel. While its two most prominent Jewish characters—Patty Berglund, one half of the novel’s central couple, who grew up in a politically prominent Westchester County Jewish home, and the memorable rocker-cum-builder Richard Katz—are as finely drawn as any characters you will find in contemporary American fiction, there is additionally a minor Jewish character who left a distinctly metallic taste in my mouth. (Franzen himself is not Jewish.)

Tanenhaus will cede only that Franzen’s most over-the-top political set-piece “flirts with burlesque.” That set-piece is Thanksgiving dinner (relevantly, in 2001) at the McLean, Va., home of a Jewish neoconservative éminence grise, a D.C. think-tanker who is the father of Jonathan, Joey Berglund’s first-year roommate at the University of Virginia, and also of Jenna, whom Joey pursues. Here’s the scene:

Jonathan and Jenna’s father, at the far end of the table, was holding forth on foreign affairs at such commanding length that, little by little, the other conversations petered out. The turkey-like cords in his neck were more noticeable in the flesh than on TV, and it turned out to be the almost shrunken smallness of his skull that made his white, white smile so prominent. The fact that such a wizened person had sired the amazing Jenna seemed to Joey of a piece with his eminence. He spoke of the “new blood libel” that was circulating in the Arab world, the lie about there having been no Jews in the twin towers on 9/11, and of the need, in times of national emergency, to counter evil lies with benevolent half-truths. He spoke of Plato as if he’d personally received enlightenment at his Athenian feet. He referred to members of the president’s cabinet by their first names, explaining how “we” had been “leaning on” the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom. In normal times, he said, the great mass of American public opinion was isolationist and know-nothing, but the terrorist attacks had given “us” a golden opportunity, the first since the end of the Cold War, for “the philosopher” (which philosopher, exactly, Joey wasn’t clear on or had missed an earlier reference to) to step in and unite the country behind the mission that his philosophy had revealed as right and necessary. “We have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts,” he said, with his smile, to an uncle who had mildly challenged him about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities. “Our modern media are very blurry shadows on the wall, and the philosopher has to be prepared to manipulate these shadows in the service of a greater truth.”

That’s not burlesque; it’s vaudeville.

Reflecting on this scene, though, I realize my beef with it stems from something, believe it or not, even more provincial than my Jewishness. For I don’t think the character’s Jewishness is actually the problem. Rather, I think the blame for this anomalously ham-handed scene lies in Franzen’s curious lack of interest in Washington, D.C., as the policy sausage-grinder. (Which is especially odd when you recall that he wrote a very good profile of then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert in 2003.) Much of the novel is set in D.C., yet Franzen never strays from Georgetown; he is superb on the interplay between culture and politics, but no good on how the political process itself exerts its own, small influence on policy’s finishing touches.

It is difficult to accuse Franzen of overmuch cynicism: not when he is drawing an era during which the former Halliburton CEO actually was the vice president, and the deputy defense secretary actually acknowledged that WMD was agreed upon as the prime rationale for invading another country “for bureaucratic reasons.” The shame is not Franzen’s angry argument; it’s that he for once permitted his anger to get the better of his realist aesthetic, and thereby did both a disservice.

Frankly, this is personal, too. I grew up inside the Beltway (figuratively and literally), and am frequently frustrated by outsiders’ flailing attempts to understand the way that place—which, make no mistake, is a company town through and through—works. On top of that, I am good friends, from home, with the son of one of a couple dozen prominent neoconservatives on whom this figure (who is more of a type than a thinly disguised stand-in) could be based. Perhaps my anecdote is barely more valid than Franzen’s fiction, but my friend’s parent had far more fun and interesting things to talk about at the dinner table than the free market and Israel. And, in person anyway, my friend’s parent is everything Franzen’s character is not: generous, hilarious, courteous. I suspect this is true, moreover, of most of them (though not Dick Cheney, who shot his friend). So, it bothered me.

And it bothered me because Jonathan Franzen’s America is so recognizably our America in so many other places. That is because he is most of the time vigilant about preventing his opinions from over-coloring his depictions. It is a shame that he failed here; the result is a brief jolt that sends the reader to somewhere outside the novel, as though you are watching a masterful actor conspicuously forget a single line.

But that’s my two-cents. That, and: Read this great novel!

Related: Peace and War [NYT Book Review]
The Listener [The New Yorker]

But this is also a Jewish story: Because of (for all I know, and assume) the two founders, Barbara Meade and Carla Cohen; because prominent among those hoping to buy the place are Jewish journalists Franklin Foer, the New Republic editor, and Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic national reporter and Tablet Magazine contributing editor; and because of, as Goldberg put it, “our Jewish customers, of which I’ve noticed a couple.” Substitute “Zabar’s,” and you will catch Goldberg’s understatement. (This is only a small part of it, but the store is in—or incredibly near, I’m not sure—the neighborhood of Forest Hills, which gained the moniker “Hanukkah Heights” when many Jews settled there after being kept out of what were then more affluent neighborhoods.)

The bookstore is a delightful, sun-filled space. It has its own separate room for fiction and poetry; the most comprehensive reading series of any bookstore, New York ones included; a generous children’s section; a fantastic café, where you can always count on running into someone you know (and which ingeniously puts its Splenda in a pourable container, as one would normal sugar); and just the most delightful, easygoing aura you could ever hope to come across.

For these reasons and more, it made an indelible mark on its customers through the years. “When I was in high school and couldn’t get a date on Friday night, which was just about every Friday night,” says Foer, “I would spend my time in the aisles of the store.”

Forgive the indulgence—and without delving too deeply into my no doubt equally pathetic high school track record—but may I co-sign Foer’s sentiment? You see, I am from Bethesda, Maryland; my house was a seven-minute car ride—or, as I frequently preferred, a 20-minute bike ride—from the place.

Politics & Prose is where my father took me every Sunday after Hebrew School, which was slightly farther south on Connecticut Avenue: We would listen to BBC’s “My Word” in the car, stop at the bookstore, pick up bread from the neighboring Marvelous Market, and head home. (My father may have the stronger claim to the place, if only because he grew up less than half a mile from where it now stands.) I learned to peruse bookstore shelves in its shelves. Before the days of Amazon, or at least its prevalence, it was always the place that, somehow, against-the-odds, had the book you were looking for. I read my favorite chapter of Ulysses (“Hades,” if you must know) in one of its impossibly comfortable chairs. Writers of books frequently claim to hate readings, but I cannot imagine a more blissful experience than doing a reading there.

I do not consider it a trip home unless I have spent a morning caffeinating and working at the downstairs café among the American University law students; graduates of my high school, and, sure, other high schools; the mayor (he dropped by a couple years ago when I was there, don’t remember why); people like my parents; and, sometimes, my parents. If you are an even slightly faithful reader of The Scroll, you have read posts that were written there.

What am I trying to say? No matter if Goldberg describes the city as a “wasteland” (dude, didn’t you grow up on Long Island?), D.C. has a wealth of culture, Jewish and otherwise. But there is no sense even defining the word—and no sense thinking it Jewish—if Politics & Prose is not thought of as a center of culture, and of Jewish culture: A means to culture, and a cultural end unto itself.

In other words, next time you are in the area, I encourage a visit. If you are in town the weekend of the Fourth, look for me there.

Bookstore in Capital Seeks Its Next Chapter [NYT]

Eric Lesser looked out over the containers of Thai carryout, the bottles of wine and the Shabbat candles. ‘Should we do Shalom Aleichem?’ he asked, and the whole table began singing a warbled but hearty version of the song that welcomes Shabbat. In Lesser’s group house of Obama staff assistants, Friday-night Shabbat dinners have become something of a ritual, a chance to relax and spend a few hours with friends.

Lesser, who is an aide to Obama adviser David Axelrod (ahem), and friends—including housemates Herbie Ziskend, an assistant in the vice president’s office; Jake Levine, a White House energy policy analyst; and Josh Lipsky, who works in the White House visitors’ office—are not the first Jews to congregate near the center of power in Washington, D.C. But what’s striking about the young Obama staffers is how off-handedly they wear their Jewishness—or how off-handedly the New York Times covers their Jewishness, which may amount to the same thing. The word “Jewish” never appears in the article. The Lesser household’s Shabbat dinners are discussed as though they were Christmas or Thanksgiving rituals—interesting in the details, unremarkable for being celebrated in the first place. There is not even a hint that “doing Shabbat” means the staffers are not only all Jews, but all observant Jews.

Further notable is what they do after the meal: Go out for the evening. Hey, it’s Friday!

At the end of every Friday dinner, the tradition is that everyone goes around the table and says something from the past week for which they’re grateful. Over Whole Foods gingerbread and brownies, Lesser looked at his watch and announced, “O.K., we’ve got to do this and then get out of here.” They all had other friends they were trying to see that night.

Rather than connoting religiosity or low-level tribalism (“let’s get away from the goyim for a few hours”), for this crew Shabbat is just a day—or evening—of rest, open to non-Jewish friends as well. It’s not so different, perhaps, from another NYT favorite, the annual Obama administration Seder, likewise a family affair that, unless you take an implausibly cynical reading (why aren’t Chuck Schumer and Abe Foxman invited?), isn’t connected with a larger mission of Jewish outreach. For all the spin in some circles about this administration being unfriendly to Jews, both the junior and senior Obama staffers are making Jewishness seem more and more normal. Maybe that’s what part of the fear is about.

All the Obama 20-Somethings [NYTM]

This oft-overlooked chapter of American Jewish history is the focus of a new exhibition from the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington. The show, “Jewish Life in Mr. Lincoln’s City,” comprises a sort of crash course in 19th-century American Jewish life, with a focus on D.C. during the Civil War.

During the war years, the city’s Jewish population grew tenfold: from 200 to nearly 2,000. Seventh Street, now the heart of the city’s Chinatown, became a center of Jewish activity. The district was home to six kosher restaurants. (Washington today has only two.) Without a major industry in town, like the rag trade in New York, most Jewish businesses were mom-and-pop operations. “This neighborhood was never like the Lower East Side,” said David McKenzie, curatorial associate at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington. “Jews were a significant minority within this neighborhood.”

It was only a matter of time before the Jewish community took part in the city’s chief industry: politics. The exhibition, an extension of this year’s bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, focuses on the president’s unique relationship with the city’s burgeoning Jewish community.

“Lincoln is probably the first president to really have personal associations with Jews,” said Gary Zola, executive director of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives.

Lincoln’s closest Jewish contact was Isachar Zacharie—one of the president’s more unlikely aides. Zacharie first appeared in Lincoln’s life as his foot doctor, and soon became an unofficial adviser. The New York World wrote in 1864 that Zacharie “enjoyed Mr. Lincoln’s confidence, perhaps more than any other private individual [and was] perhaps the most favored family visitor to the White House.”

Lincoln’s openness to Zacharie and other Washington Jews helped to forge a lasting bond. After the president’s assassination, Isaac Mayer Wise, one of the most respected American rabbis of his day, offered this appreciation: “The lamented Abraham Lincoln believed himself to be bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.… And, indeed, he preserved numerous features of the Hebrew race, both in countenance and character.”

“Jewish Life in Mr. Lincoln’s City,” will be on view at the Washington Hebrew Congregation until July 20 and then at the Beth El Hebrew Congregation in Alexandria, Va., through December.

Danielle O’Steen is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. She has contributed to Washington Post Express, Capitol File, Art + Auction, DailyCandy, artinfo.com, and other publications.

The AP is also reporting that an official with the union representing the guards says he pushed for bulletproof vests after a man made threatening remarks to guards there several years ago. The wire service notes that von Brunn, a former Navy officer, went to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., last month to complain about increased minority enrollment at the school. The museum, meantime, was to host the premiere of a new play on Wednesday, the day of the shooting, called Anne & Emmett, which imagines a conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both teenaged victims of racism. “I went from opening-night jitters to murder at the museum,” playwright Janet Langhart Cohen told the Washington Post. “It was like a bad dream: A white racist killed a black man at a Jewish shrine.” The play will go on tonight at George Washington University.

DC Museum Reopens After Fatal Shooting [AP via Yahoo!]
Slain Security Guard Remembered as “Teddy Bear” [AP via Yahoo!]
Guards Who Stopped Von Brunn Were Retired Cop, Ex-Marine [WP]
Officials Wanted Vests for Security Guards [AP via Yahoo!]
Attack Underscores Play’s Message [WP]

But acting as if all anti-Semites are basically the same person, just slight variations on a theme, actually underestimates the power of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the power of this pathology lies in its ability to be pressed into service by all kinds of men and women, including people who would never speak to one another. Some anti-Semites are real dangers; others are misguided obsessives; others are just sad sacks. To ignore their diversity is to miss the historical significance of anti-Jewish bigotry.

Since January I have been working on a long investigation for Tablet (to run later this month) of the Holocaust denial movement, of which von Brunn is reported to be a proud member. But as I have seen close-up, it is so riven by internal divisions that it is hardly a “movement” at all. For example, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, is nothing like von Brunn, from what I can tell of news reports describing the alleged D.C. shooter. Weber does not believe in race-mixing, thinks Jews are almost ineluctably disloyal to the countries in which they live, and has worked with some of the worst racists in America. But his temperament is not that of the paranoiac. Rather, he is something of a history buff gone wrong, an obsessive whose deep intelligence collects facts but can’t place them in any kind of context. The Jews fascinate him in an unhealthy way, but he doesn’t attribute to Jews magical powers to plan vast conspiracies and keep them secret. What’s more, in my interviews with him, Weber conceded to me that there may in fact have been gas chambers; he also wrote an article, discussed intelligently in the Forward last January, criticizing several famous Holocaust deniers for being stuck in the past. (Weber would prefer to stop talking about gas chambers and focus instead on the threat of Zionist influence on American foreign policy.) Many of his beliefs are loathsome and wrong, but Weber is not delusional and he is not violent. He is more comfortable with books than with guns.

For many years Weber was closely allied with Bradley Smith, the founder of a one-man shop called the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Like Weber, Smith would never encourage violence, and he too sees himself as something of a litterateur. But while Weber has a master’s degree in history and is widely read, Smith is almost gleeful about his anti-intellectualism. Before becoming active in questioning the existence of Nazi gas chambers, Smith was active in the libertarian movement, and he was drawn to Holocaust denial because he believed questioning of the Holocaust was a taboo worth smashing. Smith sees himself as a free-speech zealot whose great contribution is to ask a question—were there gas chambers?—that most of us are too afraid to ask. And for what it’s worth, Smith has no problem with race-mixing: he lives in Mexico with his Mexican wife.

Smith, in turn, has no use for Willis Carto, who lost control of the Institute for Historical Review in a lawsuit in the early 1990s and went on to found The Barnes Review, perhaps the strangest publication I have ever read. Its purpose seems to be extreme historical revisionism, including Holocaust denial but also the defenses of the indefensible (Charles Lindbergh, Rudolf Hess) and a bizarre white man’s pseudo-populism (“Rediscovering the Forgotten White Ancestors Of Many American Indians”). Carto is where anti-Semitism and racism intersect with a mystical, LaRouche-like detachment from reality.

And then there are the outright Nazi sympathizers or Klansman types, those who may share elements of other, more cerebral forms of anti-Semitism but also have a visceral sense that the Jews are vermin. In the writings of James K. Warner, for example, one sees none of Weber’s almost admiring sense of the Jews as a cohesive people, nor any of Smith’s relish for testing the limits of free expression. In fact, reading Warner’s attack on Weber as a Mossad agent, alongside his theories about Scientologists and the CIA, one sees exactly the kind of undifferentiated, enraged stupidity that I imagine von Brunn possesses. It’s a zealotry far different from what I have found in Bradley Smith or Mark Weber.

It is tempting, of course, to say, “So what?” The world would be better off without any of it—the racial fear-mongering of Weber, the provocations of Smith, the trashy publications of Carto, the deranged bile of Warner—so why bother to waste too much effort in classification? First, we should be more sophisticated in our thinking; let’s do better than those who pervert truth for a living. Second, it’s smart and pragmatic to try to tell the maniacs from the misguided, the merely stupid, and those just seeking attention. It’s good policing, in other words.

Third, while von Brunn sounds mentally ill in a very obvious way, many anti-Semites and bigots have become what they are by exaggerating in themselves certain traits that are in all of us. Oddly, it would be comforting to imagine that von Brunn’s fellow anti-Semites are all like him, homicidal and deranged. At least we would know what we’re dealing with—and, better yet, we don’t have worry that we or anyone we know could ever be like that.

Finally, we need to recognize the multifarious nature of anti-Semitism. It is different from other bigotries—not worse or more harmful, just different, in historically significant ways. People who hate blacks or Hispanics don’t accuse them of plotting world conspiracies or controlling the Federal Reserve; nobody has accused Mormons of plotting to overthrow capitalism. But Jews are conceived as both money-hungry usurers and anti-American communists; as preening materialists and dirty, schnorring paupers; as genetically inferior but able to control the world through secret cabals. As Sartre famously remarked, if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. Anti-Semitism is not simple, for if it were, it would not be so useful.

Mark Oppenheimer, a Tablet contributing editor,is the author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America. He is currently a lecturer at Yale University.

Security Guard Killed at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum [WP]

But by midnight it was, as Barack Obama said in his inaugural address, time to put away childish things. Downstairs, there was a group discussion with pajama-clad high school kids and their chaperones, who had bussed down from the Baltimore JCC. Students and parent volunteers alike had beaten out their peers in a lottery for the coveted bus and floor spaces that would give them the opportunity to stand in the cold for eight hours staring at a dollhouse-sized Capitol.

Their discussion careened back and forth between the logistical—“Don’t expect your cell phone to work during the inauguration”—and the philosophical—“What historic event would you most like to have witnessed?” Responses to the latter included Woodstock, the burning bush, and, from a girl named Dani Weinberg, “the liberation of a concentration camp. Not any particular one, any of them.”

“Intense. Intense,” replied Melanie Waxman, 37, the Baltimore JCC’s youth and teen director, who was leading the discussion. “I marched on Washington to free Soviet Jews in 1984,” she added. “That was un-freakin’-believable.”

Determined to witness history for themselves, the high schoolers hit the Mall at six the next morning. The group from the community college was only slightly more leisurely: by seven, most of them were in the lobby finishing up their coffee and bagels. They had been hooked up with their sleeping arrangements by sociology professor Lucy Hurston (niece of Zora Neale) and, like the high school kids, had won their spots in a school-wide lottery.

As George W. Bush took off for Crawford, Texas, that afternoon, the slumber party guests stumbled back into the DCJCC and sprawled out on every conceivable surface in a state of giddy exhaustion. The high school students reported that they had succeeded in witnessing history. The experience had been “like a pilgrimage,” said Sister Mary Friel, a psychology professor at Manchester who has been on actual pilgrimages, as she re-caffeinated in advance of the long bus ride home.

Later, the refugees cleared out, back to Baltimore or into the carnivalesque streets of D.C., and the rooms they had inhabited were transformed into party spaces for that night’s “Inaugural Ball for Everyone Else” hosted by Entry Point-Gesher City, an organization that connects young Jewish transplants to the D.C. area. Partygoers, some of whom confessed that they had tried and failed to get into an official ball, drank Heinekens and danced to Britney Spears remixes holding aloft a life-size cutout of Barack Obama—as one guest put it, “like a golden calf.” Then they passed out, some in each other’s beds, and when they woke up it wasn’t with a hangover but with a modicum of hope.