Moving Forward

From Under the Fig Tree is delighted to announce another first: a content sharing partnership (aka "cross-posting") with the Forward's culture blog, The Arty Semite and its curator, Dan Friedman, who is also the newspaper's arts and culture editor.

To mark the occasion, Menachem Wecker, a staff writer for GW Today and himself a celebrated blogger for the Houston Chronicle, has moderated a conversation between Jenna Weissman Joselit and Dan Friedman on the relationship of the academy to journalism and the arts.

MW: Dan, as someone with a lot of experience in Jewish journalism, what are some of the challenges inherent in interviewing scholars of Jewish history or culture? Is it tough to get professors to speak in anything close to sound bites? What are some of the things you wish all Judaic studies professors hopeful of appearing in the Forward’s arts and culture section knew about your beat?

DF: Well I don't want professors to talk in sound bites, not in my section. But I think that for those professors who write for my section, it's a struggle to get the right mixture of clarity, complexity and conciseness. Coming from an academic background myself, I know that timeliness, brevity and accessibility were not particularly prized in Ph.D. programs. I wonder whether Jenna, who has written in a number of different venues, addresses questions of writing for her students.

MW: Jenna, what's your reaction?

JWJ: Like Dan, I, too, prize the three C's of writing and make a point of sharing them with my students as they work on their papers and presentations. Then again, I also make a point of staying away from the dreaded red pencil markings, which various online editing systems have imported, lest my students flee in horror. I much prefer the more gentle stylings, and nudges, of a gray lead pencil. As Dan points out, I've had the good fortune to write for a number of different venues and this, I have to say, has done wonders for my writing as well as my embrace of deadlines.

MW: Let's try a flipped version of the first question. Jenna, how willing have you found your colleagues in academia to be interviewed by reporters at Jewish publications? Do you think professors tend to see media engagement (and reaching out to the larger, non-scholarly public) as part of their teaching responsibilities? One often hears professors complain that they interview at length with a reporter only to have a sentence-or-two-long quote appear in the final story. Have you encountered this challenge in your own work, or have you heard from colleagues about this?

JWJ: Once upon a time, academics might have held the media at arm's length, but these days as the distinction between high and low culture is increasingly blurred, that's no longer the case.

In fact, many of my colleagues relish the opportunity to engage with the press. At times, admittedly, it's frustrating to speak at length and with subtlety to a reporter only to find one's pearls of wisdom variously mangled, twisted out of context and so radically truncated that you come off sounding like a drunken sailor. Still, it's a risk well worth taking.

MW: Dan, in your previous answer, you spoke about what you expect from scholars who write for your section. What about faculty who are quoted as experts? Is it usually pretty smooth sailing finding experts on Jewish culture and Judaic studies to quote, or are there challenges?

DF: I don't think there's really a shortage of approachable and knowledgeable Jewish faculty experts. There are a relatively large number of interesting Jewish professors and scholars of Jewish Studies, and they are usually gratified when people are interested in their material from outside the field. Having said that, it's a small minority of articles in my section that have reportage that requires the input of expert scholars.

MW: To close, Dan, maybe you could reflect on some of the Jewish culture stories you think are worth keeping an eye on in coming months, and Jenna, can you do the same?

DF: The recession has shrunk the pool of available money which means that the Jewish internet is consolidating. Once again in art, media and in Jewish communities as a whole we are going to see tension between grassroots organizations — communities like Zeek, membership organizations like the Forward on the one hand — and top-down, single philanthropist-driven operations on the other.

One thing I should mention — especially in an exchange with a historian — is the terrific volume of Holocaust work being turned out, in desperation, really, at the imminent disappearance of the last remaining survivors. There's a tremendous, and understandable, anxiety from survivors and those around them that their stories will be lost.

Unfortunately, from my point of view, the quantity is not matched by the quality so most of it goes unremarked upon, but there will be plenty of work for Jenna and her colleagues in the near future sifting through what is essentially oral history and multiple forms of witnessing.

As for the larger picture, for the most part there are three major needles (Israel, America, other Diaspora) through which to play two strands of interesting Jewish art and culture: renewal and hybrid. By renewal I mean generally looking within our own culture for teachings and cultural responses. I enjoy the teaching about the prayer formula "Our God and God of our ancestors," which takes it to mean that, while we should honor the traditions of our ancestors, we must renew that tradition and make it for ourselves. By hybrid I mean the ongoing Jewish response to enlightenment and the availability of a vertiginous depth of non-Jewish culture — rap music, baseball and arguably (how Jewish are the movies?) film.

A couple of great examples of stories to look out for are, on one hand the essentially hybrid new show, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, which we're sponsoring and which will open at the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco.

It is the first stop of a multi-venue, multi-year tour showcasing some of the astonishing work that Jewish women, specifically, have done and are doing in this newly-appreciated art form. And on the other hand, the essentially renewal Nigun Project produced by Forward artist-in-residence Jeremiah Lockwood. Of course all these divisions are useful as much in the breach as in practice — much of the art is simultaneously old/new, inside/outside, American/Israeli/diasporic and religious/secular, because those are the Jewish pressure points out of which art is squeezed.

JWJ: Dan's prognostications of what lies ahead in the world of Jewish arts and letters is nothing less than thrilling. The range of venues and voices in which contemporary Jews, both in the United States and abroad, express their relationship to yidishkayt or, as one 19th century American Jewish woman from Virginia put it, "yehudishkayt," lifts the spirits.

Although the academy is far more slow-moving than the world outside its precincts, which makes it harder to predict what lies in store, there's every reason to think that it, too, is growing increasingly receptive to new ways of thinking.

At GW, for instance, a university-wide initiative to heighten the role of the arts on campus is sure to have far-reaching ramifications for those of us in the humanities and in Judaic studies in particular, encouraging us to make a lot more room in our classroom and on our syllabi for music, film, dance, photography and the visual arts — and as integral partners, not just occasional ornaments.

It's also my sense that more and more of my colleagues are going beyond the conventions of chronology, constructing courses and "constituting the subject," as the lingo would have it, that place a greater premium on big, broad themes that engage the imagination instead of narrowly defined disciplinary concerns.

Meanwhile, the stunning rise of social media has challenged all of us in the classroom, keeping us on our toes—and awake at night, dreaming of new courses and of the manifold possibilities that await.