Jewishness: The Inside and the Outside

My transition from living in West Lafayette, Indiana to living in Santa Monica, California has not been easy. But now that I'm finally settled into my new place, I've been able to finish a few novels that I started over the past month or so. Last night, I finished Adam Mansbach's The End of the Jews. I have mixed feelings about it. In some respects it is brilliant--for example, the way in which the three central characters (an old Jewish novelist, his hip-hop loving graffitti artist grandson, and Nina--a young Jewish woman/photographer from former Czechoslavakia) question what it actually means to be Jewish these days. I'm also interested in the way he juxtaposes Jewish and black identity in America.

But I wonder if he is saying something about identity in general, and the ways in which it bends and sometimes even breaks down in what one character calls America, "the culture of the cheeseburger." Nina, for instance, right before the collapse of Communism in Czechoslavakia, meets a jazz trio comprised of three African American men as they are traveling through Eastern Europe. She takes their photographs, and they end up getting her out of Czechoslavakia. She fits well with the group, and the men jokingly suggest that she is "Creole, three generations back."

Later, when she applies for admission to Hunter College, she checks the box next to "Black" on her application, and is awarded a scholarship for young black photographers. We see this duplicity--despite her ignorance (coming from Czechoslavakia) regarding what it meant to be black in America--of course, as horrendous. "If you got a soulful type of vibe," she tells the grandson at one point, as he deals with the fallout of being a Jew who writes about hip-hop, "you can understand the greatness and the sophistacation of any tradition. . . . Art is universal...We gotta deal with that" (187).

On some level it seems rather silly. Thinking one is black or even being accepted into a black community does not make one black. But is it the same, I wonder, with Jewishness? I can convert to Judiasm, for example, but there is no conversion process that will render me an African American. There are different ways of being Jewish--one can be a convert to Judaism and claim Jewishness; or one can be born into an ethnically Jewish family.

But can one identify him or herself as being Jewish if both of these categories are absent? I want to say that it is possible, but not unless the identification is accompanied by a certain respect for what can never be known, in the absence of an ethnic component. I guess such a person is like the Mobius strip, in that s/he is both inside and outside of Jewishness?

Levinas in Seattle

I'm in Seattle for a few days for the North American Levinas Society conference. Because the conference is on campus, rather than in a hotel, all of the participants are staying in residence halls. Basically, I'm in a college dorm room. It sounds bad, but it's really a good thing.

I've realized something. I think better thoughts and get more work done when I am not surrounded by excessive things and gigantic spaces. I did something I told myself I wouldn't do: I came to the conference without having finished my presentation. And, somehow, enclosed in this small, bare space with none of my "things" to distract me, everything has come into focus, and I am excited about Levinas's work and my presentation on his ideas regarding ritual.

I would probably get more writing done if I sold most of my possessions and moved into an empty dorm room.

More on Levinas, later . . .

Unruly Jews

This weekend I had friends in town, and so we did lots of touristy LA things, including Venice Beach. Considering all of the blaring music, dogs, obscenely visible body parts, crack pipe vendors, homeless street performers, and funnel cake, it was sensory overload, to say the least. Anything goes in Venice Beach, literally. So it was surprising to see a little Orthodox shul right there on the boardwalk, next to a dicey clothing store named Unruly.

But then I recalled reading this a few weeks ago:

Worshipers say workers in the shop blast music on Saturday mornings, overwhelming the religious service held with the door open to the boardwalk. When the worshipers ask for the music to be lowered for an hour, they are met with hostility, they say, some of it smacking of anti-Semitism. Once in a while, the police are called. Further, there have been occasions when mannequins dressed in G-strings and other clothes that are decidedly not part of the customary wardrobe of Orthodox Jews have been placed on the synagogue's property line - as a matter of provocation, some members suggest.

Yes, this is terrible. But there's also something terribly funny and ridiculous about the whole thing. It makes me want to experience it for myself...

The Back of God

I'm working on a review of Alicia Ostriker's For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, and am reminded of a certain passage in Exodus:

See, there is a place near me. Station yourself on the rock and as my Presence passes by, I will place you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with my hand until I have passed. Then I will take my hand away and you will see my back; but my face cannot be seen. (Exodus 33:18-23)

Ostriker writes:

"The imagery is suggestively both sexual and mystical. I believe that the 'back' of God, whose beauty and terror would destroy us at close quarters, may be apprehended through the hints, indirections, and subtleties of poetry and storytelling" (7).

Given my own never-ending fascination with Emmanuel Levinas's idea of the face-to-face encounter, and the importance of learning what it means to "see" the face of the Other, the juxtaposition here of G-d's face and back is troublesome. Are we being shielded from the literal face of G-d because it would distract us from seeing and sensing his presence? Are we not yet ready to see his face?

But maybe this is one more prophetic moment for which the Hebrew bible has become notorious. Is it possible that G-d's face, here, cannot be seen because the G-d that we have created and placed in the heavens is always already a reflection of our own failings? I wonder if the prophetic moment, here, rests not in the suggestion that G-d is hiding his face, but in the possibility that we cannot see it. And if we cannot see it, are we not responsible? Responsible for everything?

Or, perhaps there is no face--who, then, is this G-d without a face? I can almost buy into this possibility. Ostriker's reading of this passage reveals all of its human elements: sexuality, beauty, terror, ambiguity, storytelling. One wonders whether this passage is not, on some level, also an indictment of those who have lost sight of the face of the human Other, and, further, whether the pathway to repair lies solely in the art of storytelling.

All the Textures of Sadness

I'm halfway through Janette Turner Hospital's Due Preparations for the Plague, and I'm forever indebted to the person who recommended it to me. Its pieces are all of loss and trauma, terror and obsession, memory and forgetting, absence and presence, gaps and silences. The language of midrash is all over it.

But every time I say that about a book--that is, every time I read midrash into all its cracks and crevices--there is something deeply sorrowful in the narrative. Think of David Grossman's See Under: Love or Aryeh Lev Stollman's The Far Euphrates--two of my favorite midrashic finds. There is sadness all over them.

Somehow, it is always the silences and sadnesses that summon the midrashic impulse from the ruins of atrocity or the apathy of contemporary living.

All day I have turned a passage from this novel over and over in my mind, unable to shake a particular phrase: "all the textures of sadness." The entire passage goes like this:

He remembers all the textures of sadness, his father's sadness, his mother's, and his own, and he remembers the absences, the loneliness, the sound of his mother crying at night. Lowell remembers, remembers...too much, and the silences between his revelations grow long. (97)

All the textures of sadness.

Sadness must be as gray and nuanced as anything else--of this I am certain. How many textures have we forgotten, failed to feel with our hands?

Every once in a while, I feel forgotten textures, misplaced among bright smiles, painful hopes, and feigned optimism. It's been a while, but lately I've felt them again, watched in agony as they materialize in so many new forms. Each texture has the capacity to rock us in a different way. Some are razor sharp, cutting so deeply and precisely that we know we cannot go on. But we do, given the surprising ease with which such clean cuts heal.

Then there are those whose edges are not define-able; they cannot be traversed, their boundaries are both impassable and imperceptable. And it's Emmanuel Levinas's concept of the il y a again. The "there is"--the silences that become rumblings, the emptinesses that are suddenly full of something we cannot touch, yet cannot help but feel.

Turn it and turn it, say the rabbis of Torah, for all is contained within it. What if we might say the same of sadness, that every time we turn it--every time we are turned by it--we find it contains the whole world?

Stones, Messiahs, and Revelations

There's something I love about this world, and it's that every time people think they've figured something out and that they have all the answers, a new piece of information somehow manages to materialize and calls everything into question. Depending on how you look at it, this can be either frustrating or liberating. I tend to think it is, most often, the latter.

In the New York Times today:

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate. [...]

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day. “Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,” Mr. Boyarin said. [...]

“His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,” Mr. Knohl said. “This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.”

They're calling it "Gabriel's Revelation," but my favorite thing about this is the fact that the stone is broken, and that some of the text is faded. Even revelations often fail to reveal all. I'll be interested to read about what comes of us over the next few months.

The Return of the Jewish Nose: Reading Yasmina Khadra's The Attack

Cross-posted at Jewcy.com.

Unless you are a fan of Tex-Mex, trucks with balls, scorching heat, and museums commemorating George W. Bush, there are very few reasons to spend the summer in southeast Texas. But I happen to be here visiting someone, and so I’ve taken the opportunity to sit in on his Texas A&M University class on contemporary world literature, where the focus is literature and terrorism.

For today, we read Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack (2007). Khadra (his real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul) is a former Algerian army officer turned novelist, and this novel, despite its unsophisticated writing style, does a pretty good job of getting college students to think and talk about terrorism in an unfiltered way. The only problem is that the book is so severely biased against Israelis and Jews that one wonders how unfiltered the discussion can truly be.

The storyline goes something like this: Arab-Israeli surgeon is called to the hospital where he learns his wife has been killed in a restaurant bombing. He later finds out that his wife was in fact the suicide bomber. The rest of the book, with all of its undeveloped plot threads, is about his attempts to uncover her secret life and come to grips with what he sees as her betrayal of him. The important thing to note is that it’s not that he needs to come to grips with what his wife has done to innocent men, women, and children in a crowded restaurant, but with what he sees as her personal betrayal of him.

A bit self-absorbed, no?

It’s not that the novel doesn’t tell a good story or address timely issues. It definitely kept me reading, but perhaps that was also because of the all but latent anti-Semitism that kept jumping out at me. Like many people, I tend to like to stare at things that repulse me. Although I run the risk of sounding like an anti-Semitic ambulance chaser, it is difficult not to read between the lines when nearly every time Khadra’s narrator introduces a new Jewish character, he refers to his “unattractive nostrils” or depicts him looking down his “nose” at the narrator. Or, in the absence of the description of a character’s unflattering nose, he depicts them as fat, selfish, and always gobbling things up.

Those nasty Jews—always gobbling things up and looking down their unattractive noses at everyone else. I’m not quite sure how the reviewers who suggested this book depicts both sides of the Arab/Israeli conflict missed this aspect of the book. But I’m sure it’s not the author’s main point.

The main point, actually, seems to be one long, whining “what about me?” Once you sift through the rambling prose, the narrator seems to say little more than: “Why didn’t my wife think about the trouble her suicide bombing would cause me? Why do Israeli Jews stop me at checkpoints because of the way I look? Why do the Jews keep talking about their problems when it’s really the Arabs who’ve suffered?”

The narrator visits an old Israeli Jew who goes on and on and on about surviving the Holocaust, only to say, finally, “I talk too much . . . I’ll never understand why the survivors of a tragedy feel compelled to make people believe they’re more to be pitied than the ones who didn’t make it.”

Take that, you blabbering large-nosed Jewish survivor. It’s MY turn to suffer, the narrator seems to say. Everybody wants to talk about their suffering.

The point the author makes seems to be the question of why Jews are still talking about the Holocaust when Palestinians are being subjected to the same kind of evils in Israel. But the problem isn’t that the author draws attention (justifiably) to Palestinian pain. The problem is in the comparison.

Suffering is suffering. It does no good to compare one group of people’s suffering to another, or to minimize one in favor of another. I cannot blame the Palestinian boy who sees his family home bulldozed by Israeli soldiers and vows to take revenge any less than I blame the Holocaust survivor for finding it impossible to stop talking about his experience.

They have both earned the right to hate. And we are all responsible for acknowledging both perspectives. But even the right to such hate does not justify a lashing out that takes innocent lives, though this novel seems to suggest otherwise in its villainization of Israeli Jews.

The narrator says, “All too aware of the stereotypes that mark me out in the public square, I strive to overcome them, one by one, by doing the best I can do and putting up with the incivilities of my Jewish comrades.” Words of wisdom from the narrator who can’t stop himself from seeing Jews only through negative stereotypes. (Then again, note above my own heinous Texas stereotyping.)

But the person teaching the literature class tells me that while the narrator is indeed despicable when it comes to Jewish stereotyping, we are also supposed to see in him a critique of male Arab culture. The narrator’s preoccupation with his male ego and his anger over his wife’s betrayal of him on a personal level may reveal (from the author’s point of view) some of the problems of Arab male-female relationships. Indeed, at one point he goes nuts thinking that his wife may have cheated on him with another man, and suggests that such an act is worse than the suicide bombing.

The narrator, my friend suggests, cannot escape from the stereotypical Arab masculinity that forces him to see Jews with big noses and gluttonous appetites, and to see women as his private property. But sometimes he has a breakthrough: “Every Jew in Palestine is a bit of an Arab, and no Arab in Israel can deny that he’s a little Jewish.”

It’s unclear what we’re supposed to think in regard to this character. I find him to be pathetic, self-absorbed, and downright despicable. But students in the class tended to be more sympathetic toward him. And I guess that is the danger of this novel—if the author meant to critique Arab culture’s own biases, it’s not altogether clear. My fear is that this novel does more to reinforce negative stereotypes than critique them.

Summer Reading

Years ago, I used to love reading Amy Tan. Last year, she came to Purdue for a reading, and she was really great in person--full of life and energy and lots of clever little insights. So I bought her newest book after the reading--Saving Fish From Drowning. It's been sitting on my desk for over a year, and I finally decided to start reading it. I'm only a couple of chapters in, and it's not really doing anything for me, but I'm going to give it a chance. I am starting to think that my reading tastes must have changed profoundly since beginning graduate school many years ago. I'm not sure I'll get through this one...

I also just finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. I hated it for the first few pages, with all of its cryptic talk about "carers" and "donors." But then I got really sucked in, and I can't say quite why without giving away the plot. It was another one that had been sitting on my desk for a couple of years...

So now I have Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases, which just came out in paperback, and I'm really excited about this one...

And then I have The Cyclist, which I'm trying to read this weekend...

I'm also re-reading Alicia Ostriker's For the Love of God so that I can write a review for Shofar, as well as Ezra Cappell's American Talmud for Modern Fiction Studies.

I feel like I need one more really great novel...

Changes...

This has been a big week. I successfully defended my dissertation, participated in the graduation ceremony (and snuck out early), and introduced my family to Chicago and Indiana. My family, of course, was proud of me, but they were a bit disappointed that my new "doctor" status does not enable me to dispense prescriptions. Now, I'm going to enjoy my last week in Indiana, before I travel down to Texas for the summer, and before we move on out to Los Angeles. Lots of changes ahead...

"In Support of Corporate Farms"

I've just discovered that another of my friends, the notorious Cody Lumpkin, has a poem appearing on Verse Daily. Cody, Leslie St. John (see my previous post), and I once shared a hotel room at a literature conference in Louisville. I wonder if this means that I, too, will soon have a poem that appears on Verse Daily. Probably not, since I don't tend to write much poetry. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of Cody doing yoga, or I would post that as well.

"In Support of Corporate Farms "

Stalin scythed wheat in Russian Georgia, Mao waddled knee-
deep in a rice paddy field, and Saddam Hussein tended his uncle's
melon patch on the banks of the Euphrates. Mussolini

would be the type of dictator to keep a tomato garden.
I think this might say something about human existence:
what the land makes us do. The disenfranchised Cain giving

the boulder to Abel. Closeness to a speck of ground
only makes us want more. To kill whoever needs to be killed
to get it and to hang them by their fat calloused toes
under the drying sun. Marx had it wrong. The revolution

[Keep reading...]

Things That Bend

My lovely friend Leslie St. John has published this equally lovely poem, and it appears on VerseDaily today. (Oh, and the picture above, is of Leslie.)

"Things That Bend "
After Dorianne Laux's "What's Broken"

The inch worm in the window sill, curling

In a bank of light. Snow-soaked porch steps,

Old pinewood floors. The neck, the back—
My body bends into another body. Firelight

Bends around his shoulders, a half-moon
Around stars, around the tops of trees.

Keep reading...

Michael Chabon

I had the honor of introducing Michael Chabon the other night, when he came to Purdue as our annual Literary Awards speaker. I've had the fortune (or, misfortune, sometimes) of meeting and getting to know a number of writers in my field, but I was particularly impressed with Chabon. He's a nice guy, a real person--not pretentious or egotistical, like one or two other writers in my field with whom I've had interactions. And he was a very entertaining reader, which was refreshing, since often readings by some of the greatest writers can be the dullest experiences on earth. Yay for Michael Chabon!

Oh, Happy Day

Today was one of the happiest days I've had in a long time.

It started off with teaching Bible as Literature. Today we talked about the rebellion of Korah against Moses, in Numbers 16. It's one of my favorite parts of the text. It's the one where Korah pisses Moses off, and so the ground opens up and swallows Korah and all of his followers--except that it's not meant to be read literally. It's a metaphor for how deep and great is the chasm between two parties who fail to communicate with each other.

And then I came home, made coffee, and laid on my couch, watching the rain through my window, and thinking about all of the work I have to do on my dissertation before tomorrow.

Then I got a lovely email, from someone I love very much. How much happier my day suddenly became. It's amazing how powerful words can be--an amazing reminder that we should always use them carefully and lovingly.

Then I thought for a while about moving to LA in a few months, and of all of the new directions my life is taking, and I was happy. I am excited to be in warm weather, to do the work I love, and to be with the people I love.

Once I finally got situated and began working on my dissertation, trying to finish a chapter on Krzysztof Kieslowski's films, I was happy again, because I remembered how much I love my project.

Of course, it would've been a happier day had I actually finished the dissertation chapter, but it was still a day worth having. Tomorrow will be stressful, but today was happy.

Religion, Faith, and Alchemy

I am constantly on the lookout for new ways to explain my own ambivalence about religion. I despise it, and yet it has made who I am, and it forms the basis for nearly all of my endeavors: academic, spiritual, psychological. I am drawn to religion, but only in the sense that it must necessarily be an ongoing process, rather than a product of one group of people's musings on the nature of God. Religion, for me, is beautiful only when it is allowed to be fluid, constantly evolving and in flux, and when it teaches people to love other people. Why? Because I think that is how God must be.

When I was 19 or 20, my then-boyfriend, a year younger than me, gave me The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho--he said the book had meant a lot to him. I loved the book, though I didn't really get it all at the time, since I was so immersed in a community that privileged rules and rituals over real spiritual inquiry.

Today I was reminded of this when I saw that over at Jewcy.com there is an interview with novelist Paulo Coelho that gets at some of my evolved ideas of God and religion in a very insightful way.

Paul Coelho:

"I think that traditional religions face this backlash because they overlook the necessity of personal faith. To follow rituals is extremely important for the cult, but religious leaders should understand our individual faith, our need for actions that truly stir the souls of the men and women. Because these institutions have been ineffective in doing this, we have been seeing a gradual disinterest in all segments of society.

I always say that religion and faith have to be thought of separately—mainly because faith is sometimes at odds with the cult. You can find this difference in other realms, including politics. We all know that laws are different from rights. We all know that certain laws may be unjust and that we have the right to oppose them if we think they are unfounded. The same goes for religion: individuals don’t accept rules that are no longer tied to their personal lives and questionings. People need meaning and only life and faith can supply this, not merely rules."

Joey Kurtzman, the interviewer, asks:

"Along the same lines, as we try to remake our faith so that it can serve some purpose for us, how careful should we be about violating the 'authenticity' of the tradition?"

Paulo Coelho:

"First you need to be clear about the 'authenticity' of tradition. In my eyes, personal faith is the beating heart of this authenticity. This is the living fabric of all religions."

It's true--when tradition stops meaning something to people, and when it loses its ability to move people, perhaps it has stopped mattering. And perhaps, when that happens, people must create new traditions.

Why Do the Wicked Prosper?

I've been working on my dissertation all evening. I'm tired of writing about theoretical things, so this post is going to be something different.

I was driving home from the library late this afternoon, and I heard myself say, out loud, "God has blessed me with so many things I do not deserve." I don't really know where it came from, other than that it is an idea that is built into the tenets of the religion in which I was raised. Somehow there are still so many remnants of that religion, both good and bad, in my consciousness. I tend to be a person who is always surrounded by some trauma, disaster, or catastrophe of some kind. Somehow, though, I never feel sorry for myself, because I always have a crazy story to tell.

The latest catastrophe was me falling on the ice and crushing my dog's foot--not one broken bone, but countless broken bones. It's so my style to go extreme, all the way. But there have been a few really great things that have happened for me over the past couple of weeks as well. And so tonight, without realizing it, I was reflecting on them in a rare moment of positive thinking; I say "rare," since I tend to be a "my glass is two thirds empty" kind of person.

But as soon as the word "blessed" came out my mouth, it was crushed with the resounding biblical lament of King David: "Why do the wicked prosper?" And I thought to myself, how would one know if she was blessed? Then it occurred to me, that perhaps I am not blessed. Perhaps I am downright wicked, and that is why I prosper--a chilling thought.

From Boilermaker to Bruin: The Journey Begins

It's official: as of July 1, I will be a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish American Literature at UCLA. The teaching load is extremely light, and I will have ample time and resources for research.

But, more importantly, I will have warm weather. I've had my fill of Midwestern winters. A couple of weeks ago, as a matter of fact, I slipped on the ice while carrying my little dog. When we fell, I crushed pretty much every bone in his little foot. Now, post-surgery, I will be taking care of him for the next six weeks. He's my little invalid.

We both look forward to the impending move back to Southern California. I don't want to live in a place where ice forms on the ground--very dangerous. This week is spring break, here at Purdue, and the weather was typical for this time a year: snow showers and highs of 35 degrees.

Tagging: Bringing Michael Chabon and Giorgio Agamben Together

Oh, what fun! Not to mention a great reason to take a break from dissertation-writing. It seems I've been tagged, and apparently the rules are as follows:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the next three sentences.

5. Tag five people.

As you can see from the above picture of one corner of my desk, which I took just minutes after realizing I'd been tagged, there are two books that seem to be equally closest to me: Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union; and Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz. And if you think they are an unlikely pair, note the strangely close proximity, in my stack of books above, of Amy Tan and Linda Hutcheon.

Anyway, I'm going to cheat and give you both. First, here's Chabon:

Zimbalist struggled for the next hour to understand that move, and for the strength to resist confiding to a ten-year-old whose universe was bounded by the study house, the shul, and the door to his mother's kitchen, the sorrow and dark rapture of Zimbalist's love for the dying widow, how some secret thirst of his own was quenched every time he dribbled cool water through her peeling lips. They played through the remainder of their hour without further conversation. But when it was time for the boy to go, he turned in the doorway of the shop on Ringelblum Avenue and took hold of Zimbalist's sleeve.

And now, Agamben:

For the one who knows, it is felt as an impossibility of speaking; for the one who speaks it is experienced as an equally bitter impossibility to know. [new paragraph] In 1928, Ludwig Binswanger published a study bearing the significant title The Vital Function and Internal History of Life. Introducing into psychiatric terminology a phenomenological vocabulary that is still imprecise, Binswanger deelops the idea of a fundamental heterogeneity between the plane of the physical and psychical vital functions that take place in an organism and in personal consciousness, in which the lived experiences of an individual are organized into an inner unitary history.

I couldn't resist rendering the first sentence in bold. This is why I love Agamben, and this is also why I actually have a good idea for my dissertation.

And now, I choose to tag: Wishydig, Blog of Laughter and Forgetting, A Chair and Two Apples, Mxrk, and Mithical Mindi.

Kosher Boy

Oh, my. I can't decide whether this is hilarious or dangerous. I'm leaning toward the former.

Which Would Jesus Choose?

So I've blogged about something naughty over at Jewcy.com. But, hey, I found the subject matter on NPR, so it's kosher, right?

At the Heart of the Jewish Ethical Conscience: Woody Allen

In a piece on Woody Allen's late films, Jay Michaelson writes:

Judaism is a religion of Job, not just Sunday School, and Allen's extended meditations on the presence or absence of moral order are the essence of the Jewish ethical conscience.

Though Allen has seemingly rejected Judaism as a religion, Michaelson argues that Allen's later films, which aren't typically seen as falling into the same autobiographical vein as most of his earlier ones, are precisely and even traditionally Jewish. Rather than accept theodicy or assert that God knows all, the films depict an internal conflict about what, exactly, constitutes good and evil in this world. They are, in Michaelson's view (and I think I agree to a certain extent), more or less meditations, like the book of Job, on justice and what it means to be ethical.

Throwing God Overboard

I just finished reading Dara Horn's In the Image. It's one of those novels I've been meaning to read for quite some time since it's in my area (Jewish American literature). I think Horn is a spectacular writer, and I like this particular novel because it integrates all sorts of ideas about God, religion, memory, ethics, philosophy, culture, and love. And, it's a great story that's easy to read and easy to get sucked into--not overly experimental or "academic."

Like most academics, I'm an obsessive highlighter and note-taker. Here, however, I found myself highlighting not the things that I would go back and try to integrate into an academic essay, but those things that somehow resonated with me on a personal level. One of the most intriguing things about this text is the idea of hundreds of tefillin being cast over the sides of ships by people who were fleeing the pogroms and their former lives in Russia and Eastern Europe. It's not the main point of the story, but it surfaces and re-surfaces on a few occasions.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it. There's something useful in thinking about the tefillin, instruments used to bind quite literally "the law" (biblically speaking) to the human body, being cast away into a sea of forgetfulness. I am interested in what Commandment looks like today, in a post-Holocaust world, and I like to think that the casting away of tefillin symbolizes an effort to reject literalist readings of the bible and of the notion of Commandment.

At one point in the story, Leora, the main character, is in an old store full of used clothing, furniture, and other odds and ends. She finds an old set of tefillin that is so damaged (having resided at the bottom of the ocean for many years) that the parchment inside is exposed:

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be on your heart. . . You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

What, I wonder, does it mean today, in our world--a world that has been disappointed by the silence and inaction of any divine being--to love God? Is it not possible that a dogmatic and unwavering commitment to the law, and literalist interpretations of it, disallows the possibility to love God?

It is in this spirit that I like the idea of the discareded tefillin. On the other hand, not to be cliche or anything, but is this also an instance of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (okay, so I am cliche)? Must religion and ritual and everything we have perceived of as sacred be cast away in order for us to truly know and "love" God? Sometimes, in some instances, yes, I think so. But sometimes, casting everything "sacred" into the sea of forgetfulness might be the worst mistake we have ever made.

Forgetting, itself, is what might be the most transgressive element of this impulse. I have never believed even in the saying "forgive and forget." And, what is forgiveness, anyway? I know that when I talk about it in class with my students no one can agree on its meaning.

As Leora keeps reading the parchment, she sees:

And if you listen to my commandments...then I will give the land rain in its proper season, early rain and late rain, and you will harvest your grain and wine and oil. I will give grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Take care, lest your heart be deceived and you turn away and serve other gods and worship them. For then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will stop up the heavens and there will be no rain; the earth will not yield its produce, and you will soon disappear from the good land which the Lord gives you (110).

The commandments (and blessings), she realizes with a jolt, are conditional. And it all seems suddenly false to her.

"Surely," she thinks "there were people who listened to the commandments and still found themselves going hungry--not to mention others who ignored the commandments and watched all their dreams come true. . . . If people really had thrown their tefillin overboard on their way to America, people who had been starving to death in Europe and probably still starved in New York, perhaps it wasn't just because tefillin were archaic. Maybe it was because tefillin were wrong" (111).

And yet, it still, sometimes, seems that it would be so much easier to believe in a God who hands out rewards and punishments like an overbearing parent does to his naive and ungrateful child. It would be so much easier to believe in God as the benevolent provider, rather than the God who has shown himself to be so forgetful, apathetic, and downright unloveable at times.

Sometimes I just want to say, "Be who I always believed you were, who I used to imagine you were. Be that. Fix this mess." But I know that the responsibility was never his, that it was always mine.

Levinas, Bak, and Interpretation

I'm currently co-guest-editing an issue of Modern Fiction Studies. The topic is Levinas and Narrative, and we have finally chosen an image for the cover of the issue (above). It's a piece called "Interpretation" (2003) by Samuel Bak, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. Isn't it lovely?

You can see more of Bak's work here.

This is Feminism?

According to an article over at the Forward, Ms Magazine has
refused to run the above advertisement, which features images of Israel’s top female political leaders, and the American Jewish Congress is not too happy about this.

The ad was submitted by the American Jewish Congress to Ms. Magazine, and spotlighted photographs of Dorit Beinisch, president of Israel’s Supreme Court; Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, and Dalia Itzik, speaker of the Knesset, over the text, “This is Israel.”

According to the AJCongress, Ms. initially approved the ad but then reversed course, saying that the ad would “set off a firestorm.”

Says AJCongress President Richard Gordon: “Since there is nothing about the ad itself that is offensive, it is obviously the nationality of the women pictured that the management of Ms. fears their readership would find objectionable. For a publication that holds itself out to be in the forefront of the women’s movement, this is nothing short of disgusting and despicable.”

But according to Ms. Magazine’s executive editor, Kathy Spillar, it's not "the women’s nationality but their party affiliation that was the problem. Two of the featured officials, Itzik and Livni, are both members of the Kadima political party," and thus, Spillar said, "the ad would leave Ms. Magazine open to the charge of political favoritism."

The AJCongress created the ad to highlight the fact that women now occupy leading positions in Israel’s executive, legislative and political branches. In response, a Ms. representative said that “we would love to have an ad from you on women’s empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this,” according to the AJCongress.

But, for me, this is the kicker:

“Not only could the ad be seen as favoring certain political parties within Israel over other parties, but also with its slogan, ‘This is Israel,’ the ad implied that women in Israel hold equal positions of power with men,” she said. “Israel, like every other country, has far to go to reach equality for women.”

Now, I don't think anyone is going to argue that the equality gap between men and women has completely closed in any nation. But it's hard to deny that there are some countries that have done a much better job of narrowing this gap than others. In particular, I can think of many countries in the same region as Israel (i.e. Saudi Arabia, where women can't even drive cars) that have done virtually nothing to rectify this situation. In my opinion, the position of women in Israel is one of the best in the world, and the fact that women can hold positions of political influence in Israel should be celebrated by a feminist magazine, especially when considered in contrast to other countries in the Middle and Near East.

I don't know that I agree with the political ideologies of all three of these Israeli women, but I do appreciate the fact that they have been given the opportunity, as women, to hold these positions of power, and I think that is something worth celebrating (or, at least, acknowledging). But the only thing worth acknowledging here is the ease with which Ms. Magazine is able to flaunt its own political and ideological biases at the expense of their own cause.

Who Knew the Nazis Were So Fashionable?

I just discovered this link over at Jewcy.com. It's a piece about five brands the Nazis gave us.

The list includes:

1. Volkswagen -- At this point, is there anyone who does not know that Volkswagens were little Nazi-mobiles designed by none other than Ferdinand Porsche?

Porsche's partner in masterminding the Beetle was also the mastermind of World War II: that crazy, affable buffoon Hitler. Hitler specifically wanted a cheap, sturdy vehicle everyone in Germany would be able to drive. Being the opportunistic businessman that he was, Porsche quickly whipped up the Volkswagen Beetle and lobbied heavily for the Fuhrer's approval. Soon, Porsche had his slave labor factories churning them out by the thousands, and eventually, flying out of dealerships.

2. IBM -- Yeah, I didn't know about this one, but it's kind of creepy.

According to a book a guy wrote about it, as soon as the Nazis invaded a country, they would overhaul the census system using IBM punch cards. Then they'd track down every Jew, Gypsy and any other non-Aryan until they were all rounded up onto cattle carts. And, next stop wasn't Space Mountain.

3. Bayer -- Once proud partial owner of the company that churned out Zyklon B, which means that Bayer was invested not only in getting rid of headaches and other physical ailments, but also in snuffing out Jewish vermin.

On one hand, the company that actually manufactured the gas was just partially owned by IG Farben, and Bayer was just one part of IG Farben. It's like the way we don't think of General Electric as a military contractor, because they make so many other things.

Bayer, though, has continued some of its old douchebaggery into the modern era. First off, Aspirin was invented by a Jewish man, Arthur Eichengrun, whose name Bayer still refuses to acknowledge. To this day, the "official" history of the company denies Eichengrun's involvement in the invention of aspirin, and states that an Aryan invented the drug, because as we all know, Aryans are better at everything.

One such Bayer-employed Aryan was a nice, thoughtful fellow by the name of Josef Mengele, who Bayer sponsored to seek out medical discoveries in the important field of torturing people to death.

4. Siemens -- Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten about this one. These guys think it's cool to trademark the name "Zyklon" for a range of home products. No, that's not offensive at all.

Though they weren't the only company at the time supplying the German war effort, they were certainly the most prolific. Siemens was in charge of Germany's rail infrastructure, communications, power generation ... the list goes on. If the Reichstag was the brain behind the war, Siemens was definitely the right hand that stroked Hitler to ecstatic glory.

5. HUGO BOSS -- Now, this came as a shocker. I had never heard this, but apparently SS soldiers and even Hitler Youth were stylin' in Hugo Boss uniforms. I just bought a Hugo Boss shirt for someone this past holiday season. It's nice to know that I spent $155 on Nazi wear.

Members of the Hitler Youth were also decked out in Boss wear, teaching children an early lesson in looking good whilst beating up minorities.

Koshering the White House

According to Nathan Guttman, over at The Forward, Bush had a "day full of Jews yesterday."

Bush’s Hanukkah tradition exceeds any other Jewish celebration offered by his predecessors. While former presidents held one “holiday celebration” for all religions, it was Bush who started the tradition of having a Hanukkah event for the Jewish community, as well as an Iftar dinner for Muslims during the month of Ramadan.

We don't often have reason to say this, but good for him.

The bigger event was the evening Hanukkah celebration. For the past three years, the party has offered a chance for the White House to make its entire kitchen kosher for a day. The operation was overseen by Rabbi Levi Shemtov, Chabad’s Washington representative. Shemtov said it was first lady Laura Bush who insisted the whole kitchen be koshered instead of bringing in only a limited amount of kosher food.

Well, my goodness, at least something is kosher in the White House. It's a shame that it lasted for only a day . . .

Chanukah Sameach!

Contrary to what you might think, this is not a virtual menorah. It is a virtual chanukiah. I learned this only today, from Tamar Fox, over at Jewcy.com.

A Blasphemous Bit of Theatre

I've posted this over at Jewcy.com.

Death of a Celebrity Writer

A month or so ago, I received a telephone call from a friend who was at a Norman Mailer conference, somewhere in Texas I believe. I didn't know they organized such things. Today, sadly, I read that Norman Mailer has died.

"He's always been at the center of a number of cultural storms and issues," Sipiora says. "He engaged the feminist movement in the '60s and '70s. He's been a prolific sports commentator. He's also been a critic of contemporary fiction forms. So in that sense, he's been very influential in a cultural way."

Conflict seemed to be at the core of Mailer's life and his work. Whether writing about war, murder or boxing, he seemed fascinated by the idea of violence But if critics sometimes found this fascination excessive, Mailer never apologized for pursuing life with a vengeance. Everything, he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross, was fodder for his writing.

"You know, if you're just bookish, there's a tendency to get terribly bitter about people who are physical," Mailer said. "My feeling from the beginning always was, if you are going to be a novelist, I've got to be a novelist who can encompass all kinds of experience. Don't ever narrow down the horizons of what you want to write about."

Although many people have had some quite despicable things to say about Norman Mailer, I kind of like that he was so volatile, complicated, and controversial.

Mailer always wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. But his private life often got as much attention as his prose. Married six times, he was jailed briefly in 1960 for stabbing his second wife, Adele Mailer. And his feuds with fellow writers, including William Styron, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, were infamous. Biographer Mary Dearborn says Mailer was one of the first true celebrity writers.

"This is somebody who aggressively sought out fame," Dearborn says. "He understood the politics of celebrity before anyone else did. The person comparable is Hemingway — who also had celebrity thrust upon him and then came to embrace it."

And What of Dreams

I began this blog a couple of years ago in the context of dreams and darkness, nightmares and absences, memory and the immemorable. I wrote, in the beginning, of segments of dreams that I had, in the event that they somehow connected themselves to an idea, philosophical or otherwise, that I found interesting and applicable beyond the scope of me me me. Of course, this has always been a blog that focuses primarily on issues of religion, philosophy, literature, and Jewishness, but always along with an undercurrent of dreams.

And then a curious thing happened. I stopped dreaming. Or, perhaps my ability to re-member dreams the next morning ceased abruptly. Or, maybe the possibility exists that we might get to a point at which dreams become indistinguishable from reality, a point where there is no such thing as waking up and realizing that we are awake, and that we have dreamed: truth and fiction fused so seamlessly that they are one and the same. And we find that we are happy.

For many months I did not experience the sensation of dreams and dreaming. This is exceptionally odd because I have always had very intense, often disturbing, and always vividly-detailed dreams. And then, nothing.

But now, for the past few weeks actually, I awake with a jolt nearly every morning (and sometimes at various points in the night) and find that I have been dreaming. The dreams are always frightening. They typically involve someone I love betraying me in the cruelest of ways, or else I walk outside to find that a loved one has been violently dismembered, and I can see it all there before me. They are so detailed, and contain so many elements straight out of my "real" life, that I find myself starting to confuse the boundary between my daydreams and my nightmares.

But the real nightmare is the daytime realization that I can't necessarily extrapolate what has truly happened, from what has happened nonetheless. I wonder if that is really a bad thing, though. I wonder why I need to think in polarities: dream vs. reality.

It is all real.

Tonight I was reading Blanchot:

We cannot recall our dreams, they cannot come back to us. If a dream comes--but what sort of coming is a dream's? Through what night does it make its way? If it comes to us, it does so only by way of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness which is not only censorship or simply repression. We dream without memory, in such a way that the dream of any particular night is no doubt a fragment of a response to an immemorial dying, barred by desire's repetitiousness. There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake (nor, for that matter, are you able to be addressed thus, summoned).

I think, also, of Delmore Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and wonder if, indeed, responsibility is somehow connected to dreaming. And yet, writes Schwartz, "I am a book I neither wrote nor read,/ A comic tragic play in which new masquerades/ Astonishing as guns crackle like raids . . ."

Zion Ozeri

I must be on a photography kick. I discovered a new favorite photographer today.

Against Ahmadinejad: A Rally in Pictures

Over at Jewcy.com, Eli Valley has posted some incredible pictures (including the one above) of the UN rally against Ahmadinejad.

Iran's President on Gays, Women, and 9/11

According to a piece in the NY Times today, "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, facing a hostile reception at Columbia University this afternoon, said that Palestinians were suffering because of the Holocaust, proclaimed that there are no homosexuals in his country and said he wanted to visit the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan during his trip to New York 'to show my respect.'"

Only in America. Here are Ahmadinejad's pearls of wisdom regarding gays, women, and the World Trade Center. Pardon my language, please, but I have only one word in response to all three of his assertions: bullshit.

In answer to criticism Mr. Bollinger had made about Iran’s treatment of women and gays, Mr. Ahmadinejad had much to say.

“In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country,” he said to boos and hisses and even some laughter from the audience.

“In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon,” Mr. Ahmadinejad continued, undeterred. “I do not know who has told you that we have it. But as for women, maybe you think that maybe being a woman is a crime.

“It’s not a crime to be a woman. Women are the best creatures created by God. They represent the kindness, the beauty that God instills in them. Women are respected in Iran.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad also said he hoped to visit the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, although police had forbidden him to do so. Mr. Ahmadinejad said he wanted to “show my respect.”

SS Soldiers Have Feelings Too!

I've cross-posted at Jewcy.com.


I have always been a fan of Hannah Arendt.

I have not always, however, been a fan of the "banality of evil" argument. I get it--we are all capable of evil. I agree with that. But when applied to the "logic" of the Holocaust, I think the argument becomes problematic and potentially even transgressive. By saying that anyone could have been capable of the atrocities committed by Nazis and their sympathizers during World War II, we also, whether we intend it or not, minimize the extent to which each individual is responsible for his or her own behavior. We cut the perpetrators a bit of slack by implicitly suggesting that they only did what anyone else would've been equally capable of.

My point: okay, yeah, maybe it could've been anybody, but it wasn't. Each person who contributed in any way to the destruction of Jews and others during the Holocaust is individually responsible. The "it could have been anybody" argument is dangerous because it lessens the degree to which we are all responsible for our actions. And this goes for any genocide or act of violence--not just the Holocaust.

But then . . . there are times when I want to re-think this position.

Today there's a piece in the NYT about a letter received by a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The letter, written by a former US Army Intelligence officer, contained photographs of Auschwitz he had found 60 years ago in Germany.

It's not uncommon for someone to send old photos from the Holocaust to the museum, but these particular pictures depict something that is not often seen.

. . . a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz's senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Hocker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordianist, Hocker lighting the camp's Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break. . . . The album also contains photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz . . .

Museum curators have avoided describing the album as something like "monsters at play" or "killers at their leisure." Ms. Cohen said the photos were instructive in that they showed the murderers were, in some sense, people who also behaved as ordinary human beings. "In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized," she said.

I still don't like the "banality of evil" argument, but needless to say, these kinds of pictures give it a lot more credibility.

I highly suggest watching the slideshow here (turn your speakers on for the audio) -- it's only around two minutes long.

Sweet, Good, Happy, and All Sorts of Other New Year Blessings

Shana Tova Umetuka!

May you have a sweet and good year.

For once, I actually cling--with an embrace that is anything but tentative--to all of the blessings that my Jewish well-wishing friends have been bestowing on me.

Perhaps, I even believe them.

It will be a happy, happy year. A new year.

It has already begun to be sweet.

Jewcy.com has put together a nice little Renewal Reader for the new year. In it, five or six of the regular Jewcy contributors (myself included) offer brief insights on some of their favorite literary quotes--all focusing on beginnings and renewals in a manner that is more off-beat than you might imagine.

Jews and Secret Meetings

This weekend I met a small group of friends for drinks to celebrate the birthday of one of my girlfriends. Her boyfriend's roommate, who I don't know that well but have met on a few occasions, joined us as well. I had a very creepy exchange with him:

Roommate (an Asian male): So, Monica, did you do anything cool this summer?

Monica: Yeah, actually, I was in upstate New York for most of the summer.

Roommate: Oh, cool, what were you doing up there?

Monica: Cornell has this program for literary theory and so I was doing that.

Roommate: Oh, cool, I was up there once for a summer program in high school. I remember we had to walk by waterfalls to get to class. Hey, you must have read that book The Jewish Phenomenon, right? I've been reading it and it's crazy!

Monica: Whu . . . what? Uh, yeah, the waterfalls and gorges at Cornell are amazing.
But, the Jewish . . . what?

Roommate: The Jewish Phenomenon -- it's about how the Jews are so successful and how they can control everything. I grew up around a lot of Jewish kids and now everything makes sense.

Monica: [speechless]

Roommate: And, yeah, it's cool, so I guess there's like this secret meeting every year that all of the Jewish leaders go to make plans.

Monica: [swallowing the vomit that somehow surfaced in my throat] Oh, really. Wow, that's definitely crazy. What kind of meeting is this?

Roommate: I don't know, because it's like a secret, man.


I think Roommate has been reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Seriously, though, I was completely stunned by this exchange -- not just because there was zero awareness of the anti-Semitic nature of the book he was telling me about (and, to be fair, not all people agree that The Jewish Phenomenon is anti-Semitic), but because he seriously believes that there is a secret meeting of all Jewish leaders every year. The guy was so sweet, and seemed to think it was so cool, that I didn't have the heart to tell him the truth. The most unsettling thing about it is his eagerness to tell me about the book he was reading, and about the secret annual meeting of Jews. This happens to me often -- people know that I do work in Jewish literature and culture, and so they find the need to tell me about a book they've read about Jews, or that once they actually met a Jew, or that they have a Jewish family member. It's such a strange phenomenon in and of itself. But, I'm speechless . . .

Yeshiva Boys Choir: Breaking Boundaries

Tamar Fox, over at Jewcy.com, says of the following video:
I can't decide if I had a spiritual experience while watching this, or if it gave me chills of horror...



I respond to Tamar's post:

Okay. I was simultaneously creeped out and excited when I watched this video. I felt strangely drawn to it, and at first I wasn't sure why I felt a sense of deja vu.

Then I realized what it was.

I wasn't actually born Jewish. Instead, I was born Evangelical Christian, and since I demonstrated a strong proclivity to music from a young age, over the years I found myself singing in various traveling religious choirs, some of which recorded and performed regularly. The product looked and sounded nearly identical to this . . . sans kippot, of course. And, oh yes, there were girls -- I was one of them.

As somebody who has seen the best and worst of both the Jewish and Christian worlds, when I see things like this I get an uncanny feeling -- uncanny because of the moment at which I cannot remember whether this is a Jewish or Christian children's choir. Of course, there are the kippot and the Hebrew lyrics that identify it as Jewish, but otherwise it could've easily been a product of the Jews' Jesus-loving offspring.

Big Bird vs Palestinian Bee

To say that children are impressionable is an understatement, to say the least. From a very young age, humans begin to formulate perceptions of the world around them -- perceptions that are not easily changed, even later in life when the children become adults. I've often said that as much as I support the existence of the State of Israel and its right to defend itself, I can sympathize with Palestinian grief. It's not a black-and-white situation anymore; it's much more nuanced than that. Much more complicated.

I can imagine the impression that is made on a young Palestinian boy who watches his father's face as the family's home is bulldozed by Israelis. I can imagine that the boy might vow to avenge his father, and the family's honor, in any way possible. I can imagine this, and sympathize with such a family's plight, in spite of my "pro-Israel" stance.

But I am disturbed on a much deeper level when the malleability of children's minds is knowingly exploited in destructive and underhanded ways. I just happened to see this piece in the IsraelInsider about a Palestinian children's show that features a giant bee who teaches kids to hate Jews. You can watch the clip here, and I have also copied part of the transcript below.

This so never happened on Sesame Street. So much for tolerance.

Nahoul, a giant bee: "My friends, Al-Aqsa awaits you. My dears, Al-Aqsa is very sad. My friends, Al-Aqsa is being held prisoner and is besieged by the criminal murderers of children. We must arise in order to take revenge upon the criminal Jews, the occupying Zionists. We must liberate Al-Aqsa. Do you know how we can liberate it and get hold of its key, just like it was liberated by Saladin?"

Child host Saraa: "How, Nahoul?"

Nahoul: "How? By means of morning prayers, blood, sacrifice, and pain, by means of martyrs, and with endurance. This is the key. I am so sad, Saraa... Allah Willing, We Will Regain the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Cleanse it of the Impurity of the Zionists"

Saraa: "Don't be sad, Nahoul. I, you, the dear children, even the older ones - the generation of the 'Pioneers of Tomorrow'... Allah willing, we will regain the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and cleanse it of the impurity of the Zionists."

Nahoul: "Allah willing."

Saraa: "On a different subject, Nahoul, let's see what you got up to this week."

Nahoul: "Nothing, Saraa."

Saraa: "Let's see for ourselves."

Nahoul enters the cats' cage at the Gaza Zoo.

Nahoul: "Meow! Meow! I'm opening the door and going in. I opened the door and entered the cage, and the guy didn't see me. I am now standing in the cats' cage. The cats here are asleep - the poor, wretched, imprisoned cats. I feel like abusing them. This cat is asleep. I feel like attacking it."

Nahoul picks up cat by its tail.

"Shoo... Meow..."

Nahoul throws stones and roars at the lions in their cage.

Saraa: "What have you done, Nahoul? Haven't you heard of the hadith of the Prophet..."

Nahoul: "No, Saraa, I haven't heard."

Saraa: "He said that a woman went to Hell because she locked up a cat, without feeding it or letting it eat on its own, Nahoul. Therefore, Allah punished her and sent her to Hell. If you keep doing this, you will have the same fate, Nahoul."
How sweet.

I learned three things from this clip: 1.) Jews are bad and must be destroyed, 2.) Jews must be destroyed, but animals must be cared for, and 3.) If I don't do what Allah wishes (i.e. destroy Jews) I will go to hell.

Nice.

A World Gone Mad

According to a piece in the NYT today, the Indiana State Fair has banned the use of all oils that contain trans fats. So now everyone here can eat guilt-free fried oreos, twinkies, Snickers bars, and Pepsi. Yes, fried Pepsi. As if Indiana fried food was not disgusting enough.

This is why I loved this article:

“This is a slice of heaven,” said Ryan Howell, 31, as he cradled his Combo Plate, which, for the record, consists of one battered Snickers bar, two battered Oreos and a battered Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup — all deep-fried in oil that is trans-fat free, thank goodness.

I used to say that one of the main (though there are many) differences between Indiana and California is the fact that people in Indiana fry everything, and love every second of it, while Californians turn up their nose at fried food and opt instead for trendy plates of low-calorie, high-sodium sushi. And it's true in some sense -- the evidence of this is the fact that in Indiana, at 5'6" and 115 lbs I'm considered runway model thin, but in California I'm an easy candidate for the Jenny Craig weight-loss program.

But I've changed my stance, ever so slightly.

In California we do have our fair share of people who like everything fried. But the difference is that they do not do it out in the open. They know that it is shameful, and so they enjoy their grease-laden fare in secret, in the privacy of their own homes. It's like porn -- most people won't admit to watching it, yet many are secretly addicted to it. But in Indiana, there is no shame in frying anything and everything. It's a world in which deep-fryers occupy daily counterspace with the coffee-maker and toaster. A world gone mad.

I am certainly not making this out to be more sinister than it is. Even the Times hints at its dark underside:

But inside the booth, where the air is dense with oil, workers chuckle about the whole concept. And Mr. Orme himself rarely eats what he cooks here.

“I stay away from fried foods,” he said.

Machu Picchu?

My sister and I have decided to take a trip together in January. We were thinking of going to Machu Picchu, but the recent earthquake in Peru has spooked my sister a bit, and so she may wimp out, and we may end up in Europe again. I just like the way it sounds when I say Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu.

"Where did you and your sister go, Monica?"

"Machu Picchu."

Today I noticed that whenever I say "Machu Picchu," I use a voice that differs greatly from my normal speaking voice. I think I also make a strange face when I say "Machu Picchu." I can feel it. Not sure why I need to do this.

My second choice, after Machu Picchu, was the Greek islands. I had envisioned myself lying on the beach by day and chomping on spanikopita and drinking lots of wine by night. But I'm told that the January weather in Greece will not permit me to lie on the beach unless I am fully clothed and possibly wrapped in a blanket.

Down with the Greek islands in January.

Somebody tells me I should consider taking a trip to Texas instead. There is lots to do there.

Maybe Egypt, though. Somehow I envision myself riding atop a camel and gazing out over the pyramids. When I was in Israel many years ago I rode a camel. And at one point, a very scary man tried to buy me for ten camels--he said, in broken English, that I had nice lips. Gross. I thought I was worth much more.

Or, what about Jordan -- isn't that where Petra is? I want to see Petra because I know it only from that scene in that one Indiana Jones movie--The Temple of Doom, I think it's called.

Must decide . . .

Minority Report: Sans Jews

I've cross-posted over at Jewcy.com--feel free to leave your comments there as well.

I recently returned “home” to Indiana from spending the summer at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory. Basically, SCT is like the ultimate nerd camp, where young intellectuals (mostly professors and advanced PhD students) attend seminars and lectures—on literary theory, philosophy, political theory, postcolonialism, and everything in between—all day, everyday, and with a smile. Fortunately, evenings were devoted to reclaiming our cool-ness by going out to all the Ithaca, NY hotspots and drowning our livers in whatever libations the all-too-eager-to-close-at-1am bartenders would pour us (seriously, last call was at 12:30!).

But what does any of this have to do with Jews? Nothing. And, everything, it seems.

In addition to the public lectures and colloquia that all participants (approx. 60) attended, we were each enrolled in one of four seminars that we attended twice a week. I chose a seminar led by Eric Cheyfitz called “What is a Just Society?” On the last day of the seminar, we were asked to fill out evaluation forms. One participant in my seminar, a lusty Latina, was openly angry, groaning and mumbling as she filled out her form.

Later, as a few of us sat outside, I overheard her complaining that there was no diversity at SCT—that all of the seminar leaders and public speakers were white, that there was no minority representation. The few people around her seemed to agree.

Leave it to me to infiltrate myself into a conversation where I am not wanted. “Uh, what about Gayatri Spivak?” I said. Spivak, a heavy-hitter in the world of literary theory, and a South Asian woman, had given a public lecture that was rather bizarre, and in which she relayed too much information about her physical ailments before demanding—ahem, requesting—that the air conditioner be turned off. We were all sweating in sync by the end of her talk. A regular diva, that one. I hope to emulate her one day.

In response, one participant did one of those half-laugh, half-snort things, and said, “Spivak was the token minority.” I was confused. And I was confused because I had counted at least two or three speakers who were Jewish. And Jewish is a minority, right? White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are not minorities. But Jews are minorities. Right?

Apparently not.

As if she had read my mind, the lusty Latina again chimed in, this time with an unveiled air of disgust: “All four seminar leaders are Jews. And two of the three outside speakers are Jews also.” I waited for her to whip out her copy of the Protocols.

Okay, apparently my Jewdar, which is usually right on target, had overlooked a couple Jews. The list of SCT seminar leaders and speakers was as follows:

Daniel Boyarin—My Jewdar did not even have to be turned on for me to know he is Jewish; he’s an openly gay Orthodox Jewish scholar at UC Berkeley who wears both a kippah and suspenders.

Eric Cheyfitz—This guy is Jewish, and he is also pretty bad-ass, and does some cool work with American Indians. He was also a key player in the recent Ward Churchill debacle.

William Connolly—Not a Jew; he was the token WASP.

Dominick LaCapra—Technically not a Jew, but he’s done so much interesting work in Holocaust Studies and trauma theory that he deserves a free pass; in fact, he told me that when he was in Israel, he was the Shabbas Goy, who lit the candles for observant Jews.

Marjorie Levinson—A Jew, of course, who is an expert on Spinoza.

Martha Nussbaum—A convert to Judaism. In her lecture, she kept talking about converting to Judaism from Puritanism. I’m not quite sure what that means. I thought the Puritans died out with the scarlet letter. She wrote a piece on the boycott of Israeli institutions for this summer’s Dissent that I thought was smart and rhetorically savvy, but in her public lecture at Cornell she was anything but that.

Bruce Robbins—A Jew! My Jewdar completely missed this one! He’s totally incognito, except for that Magen David around his neck.

Gayatri Spivak—Like I said, not a Jew, but according to some, the “token minority.”

Ann Laura Stoler—Jewish; an anthropologist over at the New School; the sound of her voice is so loud and abrasive that it scrambled the decoder on my Jewdar and I nearly missed identifying her as Jewish.

In my opinion, this was a great—though perhaps imbalanced—celebration of diversity. But I was one of very few people who saw it that way. Frankly, I was a bit freaked out by the animosity that the presence of so many ethnically Jewish (only one was religiously Jewish) speakers provoked in this particular group of participants. There was something creepy about it—what I mean to say, is that had all of the Jewish participants been Asian or African American or anything else, these people wouldn’t have been upset.

But they were Jewish. And they dominated the playing field. And they were kicking ass.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised—it’s par for the course. You’re not a “minority” once your ethnic group becomes successful or outnumbers the “majority” in any isolated instance. It’s the same reason why, as a scholar of Jewish and Jewish American literature about to enter the job market, I’m afraid to market myself as someone who does ethnic American literature.

So, what’s the story—are Jews no longer minorities?

Everything's a Holocaust, Everyone's a Nazi

There are very few things that drive me crazy (okay, maybe there are more than a few), but one thing that really gets to me is the ease with which people like to evoke the Holocaust as some kind of measuring stick. We don't like what someone is doing, we call them a Nazi. We don't like the way a group of people is treated, we label it a Holocaust. In one of my first graduate classes I remember an openly gay man going on and on about what he called the Holocaust of homosexuals in America. I thought the comparison was ironic, given his equally open stance on Jews: he hated them, and was always ready to bash them for one reason or another.

God, people, be a bit more original -- get a different term.

And then there's Seinfeld's notorious soup Nazi (see below) -- extremely funny, but in poor taste.



Or what about the recent Ward Churchill debacle -- he thought it would be cool to call all of the victims of the World Trade Center collapse "Little Eichmans." Now, I certainly don't think he deserved to be fired for making the remark, but it's beyond gross and inappropriate.

But this one, today (well, actually a couple of months ago), from syndicated radio host Glenn Beck, is really bizarre:

Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government.

You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming.

You can read the whole thing here.

Post-Ithaca Depression and Repression

Repression = The unconscious exclusion of painful impulses, desires, or fears from the conscious mind.

I want to learn how to develop the art of repression.

Then, I would like to repress West Lafayette, Indiana, and everything that comes with it.

Except for the North American Levinas Society.

But it seems rather unlikely that I will be able to repress WL.

I might as well just ask for a magic wand that makes things disappear.

Counting down the days until I can say sooooo loooooooong.