Agamben and the Camps

On Thursday I had my class read Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz. Instead of stumbling through my own lecture on the material, I asked someone who knows Agamben's work well to come and teach it for me. The lecture and discussion were great, even if my guest lecturer and I disagreed on some minor points. In fact, I'm more excited about Agamben now, particularly because what he's doing is so central to my own work on the ethics of Holocaust representation--especially his ideas about testimony and the Muselmann.

But there was one point of contention that I have not been able to fully work through. Then again, if the truth be told, I'm still working through pretty much of all of Agamben, so it's highly possible that I'm getting some things wrong in my analysis here.

The guest lecturer introduced into the class discussion Agamben's argument that the camps have become the norm (a comment that he apparently makes in Homo Sacer). Agamben uses the paradigm of the concentration camps to suggest that the "bare life" to which the camp inmates were reduced (they were called Muselmanner when they reached this point) is the extreme example of the point to which, today, we are reducing the lives of others. It is an example of the state of exception becoming, well, not an exception. In Agamben's view (or what I think is his view), it is not that we are making Muselmanner out of people, but rather that the Muselmann is the potential outcome of some of our current power structures--to the degree that the political arena begins to dictate the way in which people can live their life. And Agamben is concerned with how these states of exception become the bases for rules and regulations in the real world.

As the guest lecturer suggested, the case of Terri Schiavo provides one example for what is seen as the biopoliticization of human beings. Schiavo, in a vegetative state, was the epitome of "bare life"; she was still breathing, but was unable to speak or make any choices about her life. In this state, she became the object for heated political debates regarding who gets to decide when life should end. The Schiavo case is not an example of what our power structures have necessarily reduced a person to, but of the politicization of bare life, and the laws that are created based on such exceptional circumstances.

Okay, so let me connect all this back to the idea of the camp, and what makes me uncomfortable. In class, the suggestion was made that the idea of the (concentration) camps becoming the norm can be seen in the case of Guantanamo Bay and the treatment of the inmates there, who are treated like prisoners but have no access to legal representation. The "exception" is made here because we are (or, were, given the change in the rhetoric of the new administration in regard to "the war on terror") in exceptional circumstances in a post-911 era. So it's another instance in which laws are made based on exceptional circumstances.

Okay, fine. On one hand, I get what Agamben is saying--the power structures that allow people to be placed into camps and ultimately (at their extreme end) reduced to Muselmanner are also at work in places like Guantanamo Bay. I guess the point is that we need to examine these power structures and understand how they function so that we do not experience the manifestation of their extreme end again.

But I am still not comfortable with saying that the camps have become the norm. The implicit comparison bothers me. Perhaps we might find figures in our world who have become like Muselmann for various reasons, but I fear that in allowing such a comparison to be made we forget that the Muselmann of the camps did not become that way because of any of the choices they made; their mental and physical breaking down was intentional, and it was based on nothing other than the fact that they were Jewish.

De(i)fying the Holocaust

Tonight I was planning to see The Reader, just one of the many Holocaust films that are out right now. But after reading Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Ed Zwick, the director of Defiance, I think I will see this one instead (yes, I plan to see them all, but one film at a time). Interestingly, A.O. Scott suggests that Defiance only re-affirms historical stereotypes, while Goldberg sees it as an attempt to comment on stories of Jewish resistance during WWII that are "insufficiently told."

More to come on Defiance...

Jews, Non-Jews, and Holocaust Memory

I have three days to organize the class I'm teaching this winter--"The Limits of Representation: Ethics and the Holocaust." I'm going to be teaching things like Giorgio Agamben (Remnants of Auschwitz), Primo Levi (The Drowned and the Saved), and Emmanuel Levinas ("Useless Suffering"); as well as fiction like David Grossman's See Under: Love, Aryeh Lev Stollman's The Far Euphrates, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, and Michael Chabon's Final Solution. I'll also look at some poetry by Paul Celan and a couple of films including Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. The texts are all there--I just need to decide how to arrange them.

I was discussing the course with someone, and after listing the texts I planned to include, I heard him ask, "And what non-Jewish writers are you using?" I had to think about it for a second, and I realized that other than Agamben and an essay by Dominick LaCapra, all of the texts are by Jewish writers. But is this really a problem?

Typically when I plan a literature course, I try to include works by writers from different backgrounds. In a contemporary American literature course, for example, I make sure to include works by women and people of different ethnicities. But it didn't occur to me in this context--I simply thought about the works I considered to be the best when it comes to approaching the topic of Ethics and the Holocaust.

So I'm teaching a bunch of Jewish men. And I'm not really that concerned about diversity this time around. But maybe this is wrong.

The question is whether or not I have an obligation to seek out books and essays about the Holocaust that are written by non-Jews. And, the second question is whether or not Jews, the primary group targeted by Hitler's genocidal impulses, have some kind of monopoly on the theoretization of Holocaust representation. Does being Jewish give someone a more authentic perspective of the Holocaust, or does it imply some kind of blindspot?

Chanukah Sameach!

Chanukah begins this weekend, but instead of lighting candles, I will be driving from Texas to California, helping someone move to Los Angeles. These are happy times, and they are only getting happier...despite the prospect of spending 22 hours on the road. I had hoped to post my virtual menorah again, but I couldn't get it to work this year for some reason. Then again, I suppose it's not really a menorah, but rather a chanukiah.

Crocodiles and Alligators

I just got back from spending a few days in Texas, and on the flight home I read Aryeh Lev Stollman's collection of stories The Dialogues of Time and Entropy (2003). I have loved Stollman's work ever since I read his novel The Far Euphrates, which I plan to teach in my Ethics and the Holocaust seminar next quarter. His voice is unique, and his narratives are deeply philosophical, scientific, and religious--a strange but alluring combination. Lately, in particular, I am drawn to writers who tell stories that are heavy with loss, but are simultaneously aware of their incapacities to evoke the veryloss they attempt to capture in their work. Stollman does loss in a way that no other writer, to my recollection, does it. Often when I finish one of his stories, I feel a thickness in my chest, an aching of sorts. And I don't know why.

But as much as I love Stollman's work, I don't tend to underline as much as I usually do in works that move me intellectually or spiritually. But there is the occasional one-liner that gets to me in regard to Stollman. In "New Memories," for example, a father tries to show his son the difference between a crocodile and an alligator: "Alexander," he says, "most people can't tell the difference between things. People only see what they know."

When I first read this, I thought to myself, yes, that is true. Certain people in my family, for instance, seem to see only what they have grown up with in regard to the nature of G-d, religion, spirituality, and, of course, politics. But the terrifying moment comes when I realize that I, too, must necessarily have such blindspots.

And yet the so-called quest of the so-called scholar is the pursuit of knowledge and knowing--it's about learning to distinguish the subtle nuances that ripple through every segment of life and living. It's about learning to see the difference between crocodiles and alligators. And I do, in fact, see all those nuances. But what I have come to learn is that often these nuances, and the knowledge they impart to me, are as blinding as the inadequacies that render others inable to see anything other than what they know.

We Are Second Generation

Last night, I watched an Israeli film called Jellyfish that was quite good. It's a film by Etgar Keret, a noteworthy voice in Israeli fiction and cinema, and his wife Shira Geffen. One might expect an Israeli film to be heavy with explicit or implicit references to Israeli politics, Jewish culture, or Judaism. But these elements were completely absent in a film about three women who only happen to live in Israel, and who only happen to speak Hebrew. That's about it--there's certainly a universal kind of flair to it.

I'm interested in this idea of universality as it pertains to literature and film, and the reason for this stems from a discussion I had with my Jewish American Fiction class last week about Nathan Englander's short story "The Twenty-Seventh Man," which concerns 27 Jewish writers rounded up and executed by Stalin. Englander claims that:

"The most important thing for me in this collection is universality and people being able to connect with the characters. I don't think a work of fiction, just because it's about a very specific group, shouldn't have universal themes. I have no interest in a fiction that isn't universal; if it's not universal, then it's not functioning. I'm not making any claims of success, but I can promise you if they're functioning, the stories are more about the setting facilitating the subtext than vice versa."

I was shocked at how invested the students seemed to be in whether a work of fiction should be universal, first of all, and, second, whether a story that contains predominately Jewish characters and uses a smattering of Yiddish and Hebrew terms can even be called universal. The film Jellyfish, however, takes this to another level, by sidestepping any particularist kinds of approaches and successfully stripping the plot and characters of any tell-tale signs of Jewishness.

Except in one very brief but fraught instance. Near the end of the film, one woman tells another woman that her parents were Holocaust survivors. The second woman responds: "You're second-generation?" The first woman shrugs, and says, "We're all second generation of something."

And for some reason, this did not rub me the wrong way. Usually I bristle at the suggestion that the Holocaust is just one of many tragedies, and that it is not in any way unique. But this realization--We're all second generation of something--seems to speak more to the sense of entitlement that we often give ourselves based on our own particular experiences, or more accurately, the experiences of those close to us. The statement has less to do with the Holocaust, and more to do with the ways in which people often appropriate the histories of their parents as a way of formulating their own identity.

This not to say that people whose parents are Holocaust survivors, Vietnam Veterans, or anything else do not have a unique sense of what it means to grow up with parents who have sustained traumas and injuries. But there is something to be said about moving past the narcissism of one's own experiences--imagined or otherwise--and becoming accountable for the place one occupies in the here and now.

Conflict and the Bearing of Bodies

A couple of weeks ago I was able to hear author Ehud Havazelet talk about his newest novel, Bearing the Body. Much like his novel, the author had an air of sadness and loss that hung about him. The combination of sorrow, creativity, and critical thinking is one I'm typically drawn to, even if I don't always know what to do with it. But regardless, there was something very honest about Havazelet, and something that felt emotionally raw in everything he said.

I was impressed with both of his talks for many reasons, but what I found most compelling is the sense I got of his own conflict with religion (Judaism) and the religious traditions he grew up with. Havazelet left the ways of Jewish Orthodoxy, but they have left their imprint on him and they color his writing in a way that makes one wonder whether he does not love them after all. Perhaps he is only disappointed with the false promises they imply. It's true: the rules and rituals meant to bind us together as a community can quickly become instruments of exclusion. They create shame where only encouragement should be. They teach us to look outside of our community and see people who are enemies; they teach us to look inside of our community to determine who is best at following the rules, rather than who is best at loving.

"Autobiography must be in part fiction," Havazelet said in his noon seminar. And, "Art must have some opposition in it." I am full of opposition; I wonder if that makes me a work of art. For a story to be good, I've heard it said, there must be conflict and resolution. But in reality, we know little of resolutions; all we know is conflict, unless we are blind enough to close our eyes to it.

Even the body itself is constantly in conflict, both dying and alive in any and every moment. And when we are overcome with sadness or fear or anxiety, the body betrays us with fatigue, headache, upset stomach, or a number of other physical afflictions. I wonder, then, how do we bear the body? And what is it that bears the body?

New Jewish Comics

I've added a new link to my blogroll: EV Comics, which showcases the comics work of Eli Valley, and often deals with Jewish themes. Check it...

For the Love of God

My Shofar review of Alicia Suskin Ostriker's new book, For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, is now online. Ostriker continues to be one of my favorite writers/thinkers of all time...

Perverse Egalitarianism on The First Professorial-American President

My peeps over at Perverse Egalitarianism have now made me laugh twice with their witty little explanation of what they call the "first professorial-American president."

At the end of it, they write:

Now Professorial-Americans look to the future with hope again - if you could only see them yesterday some waving energetically from the balconies of their ivory towers, some excitedly drafting a paper on the significance of the commas in Presidential speeches, some plotting attempts at funny blogging the day after. Indeed, a great day for “the prof” - as they like to be called - a great day for the country that finally comes to terms with its dark anti-professorial past and is eager to move on…

Read it all (and don't forget the comments...equally funny).

The Predatory Dream

I'm reading Ehud Havazelet's Bearing the Body right now, both for pleasure and in preparation to teach it to my Jewish American Fiction class this week. I had originally intended to teach his second collection of short stories, Like Never Before, but found it was out of print. I don't understand why this is so--I liked it so much that I cannot imagine it not going into reprint after reprint. But this is the way it is. Bearing the Body, however, Havazelet's first novel, is even better, and I'm excited because Havazelet will actually be speaking at my university this week as well.

The plot and characters are extremely well-developed, but I think it's the undertones of loss, sorrow, and memory that are the most compelling. And it feels very, very honest. There's something emotionally raw about it that is appealing not on the basis of pathos, but because it gives one the sense that, yes, that's exactly how things are. About a third of the way through I read the following:

The dream had the placidity of memory--not to say memory wasn't painful, Sol would be the last, ever, to claim that. But it was contained, bounded by event, and, most of the time, recollection was a matter of choice. Not like dreams, which knew where to find you, how to get in. (70).

I'm struck by two things in particular. First, is the idea that memory is the product of a decision one makes--in other words, that I can choose either to entertain a memory or to suppress it. I tend not to be very good at silencing memories when they surface; I have a tendency to let them run their course and finish in whatever way they will, whether that is joy or tears. So the idea that choice is connected to memories is an interesting one.

Second, and more fascinating for me, is the idea of the dream as a kind of night-time predator--something that comes looking for you when you are most vulnerable. No doubt some dreams are merely the product of the memories we willfully suppress in waking moments. But often we don't know what they are and where they come from; they are the ultimate predator.

I can relate to this, of course, given the fact that the initial impetus for this blog was my fascination with dreams and visions that begin to take shape in the darkness but continue to bloom in daylight. I have mentioned before that I often experience night terrors--moments when I awake during the night and see a figure who has come to kill me. My predatory dreams are often themselves full of predators, whether it is a dark figure with murder on his mind, or (like last night) a giant raccoon perched on my dresser, staring at me with his teeth and claws bared.

I once knew someone who said that he didn't dream, that he had never in his life dreamed a dream in the darkness of night-time sleep. I wonder why dreams prey on some and not others.

Real Jews Vote for McCain: On Liberal Trash and Trendy Jews

I've been virtually paralyzed for the past few days because of a text message exchange I had with someone I have known my entire life (let's call him G). It's disturbing on multiple levels, including but not limited to: the use of religious terms to sanction a hateful viewpoint; the suggestion that one is not a real Jew if he/she defends Obama; the regurgitation of anti-Obama rhetoric that has already been debunked; and the use of personal insults.

I've pasted the exchange below, just because it's so incredible. I was careful to preserve all of the grammatical and spelling errors for greater authenticity.

G: Hi. Are u keeping up with all the news about barrack obama having a lot of pro Palestine friends.

Me: It’s mostly bullsh-t coming from hate groups from what I understand.

G: It seems like he has to many friends that hate Israel.

Me: Who?

G: Rashid khalidi. Who has known obama for 12 years. And also obama and ayers donated money to khalidis organization. Also obama had to give money bk to 39 doners from palistine.

G: Rashid is a PLO advisor, which is a extreme group that spreads anti Semitism. He is now a college professor , Lol. How cme these wierdos like William ayers are allowed to teach in a college and spread their hate agenda. These people take advantage of young , naïve college students who look up to them,

Me: My understanding is that in some cases they have a past that is not their present. They wouldn’t be allowed to teach that stuff. Like when UCLA fired angela davis. And DePaul letting Finkelstein go.

G: Obama was at a going away party for khalidi in 2004. At that same party a young Palestine girl read a poem that rejoiced in the death of jews. That isn’t the past. That is the present and obama went to a muslim school frm the ages of 6 to 10 in Indonesia. He is what he is. Only liberal trash will try to debate and defend obama.

G: I also have a past but I have repented and said what I have done was wrong. Obama has never once said that he was wrong, and ayers to this day believes w (missing)

Me: A lot of these politicians are in bed with the same people—they all want their money.

G: Obama and Ayers shared an office. Lol. That’s like [personal name removed] trying to say that he is not friends with [name removed]. I guess it would be okay to let a child molester babysit a 8 year old girl, as long as he hadn’t done any molesting since 2002.

Me: People are just getting angry and hateful on both sides. That’s even scarier than Obama’s alleged terrorist ties.

G: Unfortunately, for some people being a jew is just a trend.

I love the last line. He tried to appeal to me on the basis of my "Jewishness", and when that didn't work, accused me of being a Jew only because it's trendy. A real Jew, he seems to be saying, would not vote for Obama. I wonder if G knows that 75% of Jews are voting for Obama? I also derive great pleasure from the insinuation that anybody who does not hold the same opinion as G is "liberal trash."

I thought my minimal responses would diffuse what threatened to be a barrage of nasty missives sent my way, but I should have known better than to play with fire. After all, this is the same person who once said to me, in anger, that Hitler should have finished the Jews. This is also the person who has never set foot in a college classroom and consequently despises those who do. But saddest of all, this is also a person who speaks very freely about his Christianity and even uses his faith as the basis for his political hate talk. Somehow, I don't think Jesus would be cool with this.

Then again, I've also known this person to be kind, sensitive, and compassionate. I wonder if it is politics--or the fear that often motivates the hateful rhetoric we call politics--that turn good people into monsters, or whether it simply reveals what was there all along.

The kicker (or the irony, depending on how you look at it): I had been leaning more toward McCain (sans Palin) until this exchange. Hey, G, you're doing damage to the cause, man.

Multiple Choice Jesus?

Casey dissects one of my recent Torah talks on his blog.

You Betcha?

I haven't yet decided how I'm going to vote, and it's rare for me to get political on this blog. But I do know one thing: Sarah Palin bothers me on a number of fundamental levels.

Here's what some Jewish women have had to say about her:

“In the same way I resent her co-opting a feminist message in order to achieve a retrograde goal, I resent her pandering to the insecurities of American Jews,” said Ayelet Waldman, a Berkeley, Calif.-based writer who has been volunteering full time with the Obama campaign.

“She’s the anti-wonk, the anti-intellectual, someone who doesn’t want to brook differences of opinion,” said Susan Weidman Schneider, the editor of Lilith, another Jewish feminist journal. “She is certainly not someone with whom I or other Jewish women I know would identify. There’s a real sense of alienation.”

The down-home charm that Palin projects in lieu of a focus on nuance or detail is particularly off-putting for many Jewish women, who are likely to be highly educated, urban, and upper-middle class. “Most Jewish feminists are not part of the class base that she’s meant to appeal to,” said Alisa Solomon, a professor of journalism at Columbia University. “So when she’s deliberately dropping her ‘g’s and throwing out her ‘you betchas,’ that doesn’t appeal to us. We’re not the audience for it.”

But, perhaps hewing again to class lines, Lynne Bermont, a professor at New York University who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and describes herself as a fairly observant Conservative Jew, told the Forward that, “as a Jewish woman, I am most proud to be part of a tradition that valorizes ethical integrity and intellectual activity… Sarah Palin is antithetical to all of these values.”

To be fair, the article also points out that there is a small percentage of Jewish women who are happy with Sarah Palin, but these women tend to come from Orthodox communities.

Palin and the Feminists

Nicholas D. Kristof for the New York Times:

"There is something about reproductive health — maybe the sex part — that makes some Americans froth and go crazy. We see it in the opposition to condoms to curb AIDS in Africa and in the insistence on abstinence-only sex education in American classrooms (one reason American teenage pregnancy rates are more than double those in Canada). And we see it in the decision of some towns — like Wasilla, Alaska, when Sarah Palin was mayor there — to bill rape victims for the kits used to gather evidence of sex crimes. In most places, police departments pay for rape kits, which cost hundreds of dollars, but while Ms. Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the town decided to save money by billing rape victims."


Somebody--an intelligent male who also happens to be a more conservative thinker--recently said to me, "Where are all the feminists when it comes to Sarah Palin? Shouldn't the feminists be supporting her?" Well, anyone who makes rape victims pay for their own rape kits is no feminist, and this is just one of many reasons why not all women see Palin as someone who is on their side.

My Two Cents Regarding the Torah

I talked Torah with Luke Ford and Joey Kurtzman (formerly of Jewcy.com) last week. In reading some of the transcripts, it sounds more like a sitcom than a Torah discussion.

Meditation Without Tashlich

Tonight is the eve of Rosh Hashanah. For the past four years, I have said Tashlich with Jews from a West Lafayette, Indiana shul, standing atop the bridge over the Wabash River. But I am new to this area, and haven't taken the time to discover a place and people with whom I can seek G-d's forgiveness and forgetfulness.

I have nowhere to go to throw my sins away tomorrow—no water to toss bread into, no current to sweep away my soggy symbolic sins. Maybe I will wander down to the ocean, walk myself through rituals and prayers that are not completely mine, but which possess me entirely. I am both captive to and captivated by your promises, frail though they might feel.

And perhaps this is why we sometimes terrorize those whom we mean only to love. From whence do jealous rages and ridiculous insecurities come? Petty and pathetic, weak and fearful, we sometimes lie prostrate before our own shortcomings, begging them to wrap themselves around us, when really we should be showing them what it means to love toughly.

Who is like You, God, who removes iniquity and overlooks transgression of the remainder of His inheritance. He doesn't remain angry forever because He desires kindness. He will return and He will be merciful to us, and He will conquer our iniquities, and He will cast them into the depths of the seas.

Give truth to Jacob, kindness to Abraham like that you swore to our ancestors from long ago.
From the straits I called upon God, God answered me with expansiveness. God is with me, I will not be afraid, what can man do to me? God is with me to help me, and I will see my foes (annihilated). It is better to take refuge in God than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in God, that to rely on nobles.

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...