Jews and the Jesus Problem

In an essay in The Forward, Jay Michaelson writes about the Jesus issue in the Jewish community:

"One wonders when, if ever, we Jews will be able to heal from the trauma of Christian oppression and actually learn from, while still differentiating ourselves from, Christian teaching and tradition. Along my own spiritual path, I’ve been amazed at how much I learn from the teachings of other traditions — Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Sufism — yet how jittery I get when it comes to Christianity. Yes, like many Jews, I have an appreciation for the teachings of Jesus, and I even wrote my master’s thesis on Paul and the Talmud. But this isn’t enough. I want to understand Christ the way Christians do — not to become one of them, but in order to enrich my own religious life. I want to learn from them how to have a personal relationship with a personal, humanized, embodied God who cares, and who saves. I want to experience Jesus as a human being enlightened enough to see everyone as holy, even the impure, the leprous and the marginalized. And I want to follow his example, seeing all my fellow human beings and myself as sons and daughters of God."

I like this paragraph because it resonates with something I often say as I try to reconcile my Christian background with my Jewish impulses. Perhaps it doesn't matter whether or not one believes that Jesus is the son of God. Perhaps it is more important that we live a life like his, that we learn to see the value of loving our neighbor.

Thou Shalt Argue With G-d

This week I've been reading a recent collection of Jewish fiction called Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction From the Edge. I've read most of the authors in the book, but some were new to me. Aimee Bender, Ellen Umansky, and Rachel Kadish are three writers who I'll likely return to--good stuff.

In Kadish's "The Argument,"a man named Kreutzer is sent to a nursing home to see if he can get the old dementia-stricken rabbi to reveal the whereabouts of the deed to the synagogue. Kreutzer, who had previously made it a weekly ritual of his to compose notes to the rabbi expressing his dissatisfaction with the sermons, finds the encounters to be awkward. Kreutzer can't get the rabbi to recall ever being in a synagogue, let alone the words of the sh'ma or any other prayers.

In one instance, Kreutzer recalls his own younger days, when he attended a cheder:

"Paired with another boy--for a Jew must study with a partner, a co-counsel in the court of the One True Judge--[he] was instructed in the skills of debate. When God's people debate His tradition, He knows they love Him. True faith, the rabbis taught, was an unresolved argument. Jews argued; in His heavens God laughed and was satisfied."

As someone who loves to argue with religion and tradition (and G-d), this resonates with me because I know that I do it out of love. And when I feel that I hate it, it is only because it feels, for a moment at least, that the argument that surrounds it--the dialogue--has come to a close. And there is nothing in that space. Nothing for me.

I'm also reminded of something that E. L. Doctorow has said in a couple of different places: "True faith cannot answer the intellect with a patronizing smile." The unresolved questions and arguments that surround faith, religion, sacred texts, and G-d are the necessary realization of "true" faith.

I've decided that, yes, G-d is pleased when we argue His traditions. But somehow we are always left wanting more, never satisfied in the way that He must be. But perhaps that is as close to happiness or satisfaction that we can come in this world.

Kosher Adventures

Today was a long day, and not just because I have been sick for the past two weeks. The other day, I was invited to a seder (for tonight, the first night of Pesach) at the home of an Orthodox Jewish friend of mine. I was asked to bring the charoset, kosher wine, and some kind of kosher for Passover entree. No big deal, I thought to myself. This is Los Angeles, and I can wait until the last minute to collect these goods. Kosher food is everywhere in LA, right?

Not really.

Normally I would jump at the chance to make my own charoset and cook up some food for the seder. But I don't keep kosher, which means nothing I might cook could possibly be kosher for Passover. So I took a drive up Wilshire, but Whole Foods was sold out of the kosher for Passover potato latkes, and nobody knew what charoset was. They kept pointing me toward the matzo. I did, however, find a bottle of kosher for Passover wine.

I finally found one kosher glatt market on Santa Monica Boulevard, but the place was madness and mayhem, with lots of pushing and shoving and very little left on the shelves. They had neither charoset nor prepared kosher for Passover entrees.

So I traveled over to the Pico-Robertson area, where all the kosher restaurants and markets of LA can be found. But it was 4pm and they were all closed. "Why would you look for charoset now?" asked one very large and sweaty Iranian Jewish man who kept pushing back his yarmulke.

Great question. I never did find what I was looking for.

Fake Holocaust Memoir Contest

Are you kidding me? I am speechless.

Holocaust Films and Second Generation Voices

I just watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It's set during WWII and is about an 8-year-old boy, the son of an SS soldier in charge of one of the camps, who befriends a boy his age on the other side of the fence. Near the end of the film, the German boy actually dons a prisoner's attire and sneaks into the camp, with dire consequences. I suppose it puts a new spin on the idea of artists going into the camps in order to represent the Holocaust.

At first I was opposed to the idea of this film--respecting the unknowability of the tragedy and all that--but I think I liked it in the end. The moments depicted within the gates of the camp are minimal, and the entire narrative is told primarily through the eyes of the 8-year-old. What remains is the child's untainted perspective of how senseless and illogical and barbaric everything really is.

I gave a little talk at LMU today, and I learned that last week the students listened to a public lecture by a second generation Holocaust survivor who basically denounced every single Holocaust film out there, not to mention the numerous works of fiction that don't quite live up to his expectations when it comes to representing the Holocaust. Apparently, this film was one that he mentioned negatively.

But this leads me to another question that I explored with my students over this past winter quarter: What right does even the second generation survivor have to usurp the narrative of the Holocaust? What right does s/he have to claim authority over the ethics of talking about the event? Are they not, perhaps, still a bit too close to the trauma? Certainly their voices are critical to understanding the ongoing legacy of the Holocaust, but does that also mean that they are authorities on the ethics of Holocaust representation?

The Midrashic Impulse

I don't usually write directly about my main project, but I'll be blogging every now and then over at a friend's blog, and I've just written a post on what I call the "midrashic impulse." The challenge was to write a brief summary of what I'm working on for an audience of educated people who are not in my field. Little do they know, it's often hard enough to explain my project to people who are in my field...

Redeeming the Perpetrator's Voice

Yesterday I heard a talk given by Eyal Sivan at UCLA as part of a conference on Leo Hurwitz's filming of the Eichmann trial. Sivan is the filmmaker responsible for The Specialist, a film inspired by Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem (and by her argument regarding the banality of evil). The film, however, is not without its fair share of controversy, and after listening to Sivan today, I can understand why.

He used two phrases, a number of times, that I found especially provocative. Regarding the editing choices he used in putting together the clips of the actual footage of the trial for his film, Sivan asked, "Why are we not redeeming the perpetrators' voices?" He also talked about what he calls the "silencing of the perpetrator." He then went on to reduce Holocaust scholars' (and Israel's) tendency to "redeem" the voice of the victim to little more than a continuation of the Christian tradition of relying on a Jewish victim narrative.

Yes, of course, he's right--it's exactly the same thing.

Now, I actually like The Specialist, so I have no reason to think ill of Sivan or his work. And I do believe that it's important to hear what the perpetrators are/were saying--not because there are two sides (in the case of the Holocaust), but because Nazi voices are witnesses to the atrocity as well.

My problem here is that an ethical awareness was conspicuously missing from Sivan's claim (at least in this brief talk). He did reference Agamben at one point when he spoke of witness (albeit in a somewhat dismissive manner), so I'm sure he's aware of the importance of such ethical considerations. But there was no discussion of why he feels it is necessary to "redeem" the perpetrators' voices. My answer would be that perhaps in some testimonies--for example in the case of many Nazis who were tried at the Nuremberg trials (i.e. Goering), who neither demonstrated remorse nor offered apology--we need to hear what is not there, namely responsibility.

The absence of ethical awareness that can be seen in many of the testimonies is as important to the memory of the Holocaust as the voice of the survivor, or of the testimony of those who did not survive, whose dead and mutilated bodies speak for them. And in the case of those perpetrators' voices that do admit responsibility to a certain degree--well, we need to hear those too, even if they challenge(d) the dominant narrative of evil, non-human monsters creating heinous crimes by showing us that the perpetrators often seem quite average. And surely this was part of Sivan's goal--to underscore the complexity of the situation rather than buy into the paradigm of good vs evil.

But is it asking too much to suggest that Sivan should address the ethical nuances of this situation rather than to simply demand both sides of the story?

CFP: Humor in Jewish American Literature at the MLA

I'm on the executive committee for the Modern Language Association's Jewish American Lit group. For some reason our CFP for this year's panel at the MLA conference in Philadelphia did not get circulated, so I thought I'd post it here.

Modern Language Association Conference: Philadelphia, PA December 27-29 2009

Panel: "Jewish Wry"--Humor in Jewish American Literature

This panel is a tribute to the late Sarah Blacher Cohen, whose work dealt with humor in Jewish American literature. We are looking for papers that deal with any aspect of humor in Jewish American literature. Please send abstracts to Ann Shapiro at shapirar@aol.com before March 1, 2009

Women Victimizing Women

So it looks like Samira Ahmed Jassim, a 51-year-old Iraqi woman who confessed to recruiting and sending more than 80 female suicide bombers off to their pointless deaths, has been arrested in Iraq.

Sure, we all have causes we believe in. And I think we can agree that suicide bombing is bad for all involved, and is needless to say the epitome of what it means to take something too far. But this woman takes it to yet another level, and makes all the other suicide bombers and recruiters look good, if such a thing were possible:

In a prison interview with the Associated Press — with interrogators nearby — she said that she helped to organise the rapes of young women and then stepped in to persuade the victims to become suicide bombers as their only escape from the shame.

I understand that people who blow themselves and others up think they are fighting for a cause--that they are fighting for the freedom of their people. But who, or what, is Jassim fighting for when she violates, dehumanizes, and sends women off to their deaths all under the guise of obliterating the shame that she herself has given them?

And here I was thinking that Sarah Palin was the big bad witch of the northern hemisphere, with her insistence that rape victims must pay for their own rape kits. Suddenly I feel silly for over-criticizing Palin when there are far worse indecencies being committed against women in other parts of the world.

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.