joselit – Page 24 – From Under the Fig Tree

Money matters

joselitNovember 1, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Many moons ago, when I was a graduate student in Jewish history happily spending my days doing little else but reading, one of the most intriguing books I encountered was not Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed, or Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrin or, for that matter, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism but Werner Sombart's The Jews and Economic Life.

money — Creative commons licensed image by Flickr user Tracy O.

Published in German in 1911, this work sought to account for why, time and again throughout history, the Jews were to be found on one side, and one side only, of the ledger book--the side that placed a premium on money, on matters mercantile, rather than on agriculture and the production of organic matter. How was it, Sombart asked, that the Jews seemed characterologically drawn to capitalism?

Instead of turning to the usual suspects for answers--to statistics, say, or government records--the German sociologist turned to Judaism or, more to the point, to the desert where Judaism was born. Linking religion to topography and culture to climate, he allowed how the religion of a rootless, desert people accustomed to reckoning with the hard, tree-less environment of the desert gave birth to a way of thinking that rewarded abstraction. And, in the fullness of time, this predilection for abstraction flowered into capitalism.

Wild, wooly, fanciful and fantastic, Sombart's theory drew me like the proverbial moth to the flame. Whether it was right or wrong, grounded in a willful misreading of the Bible or a skillful, daring reinterpretation of it--none of this mattered to me. What mattered was the way Sombart transformed a mode of thinking into a cultural position, a way of being in the world, a social value. To put it another way, I liked the way Sombart thought.

His conclusions, laced with a kind of racism that precluded change, was something else again. But his imaginative process was nothing less than captivating, prompting me to range a bit more freely in my own work on the modern Jewish experience.

It's been years since I've had Sombart in my thoughts. But now, thanks to Jerry Muller's provocative and perceptive new book, Capitalism and the Jews, Sombart is back in my sights.

Muller's lucid and gracefully written account not only devotes a couple of pages to Sombart's musings about the Jews but also makes abundantly--and at times even painfully clear--how money is not simply an economic transaction but a cultural and social phenomenon, whose consequences transcend the marketplace.

Money has meaning, a social meaning, especially when it comes to figuring out the place of the Jews in the modern world.

A gadget for Gods and days

joselitOctober 27, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite, is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.

By Menachem Wecker

Though about half of the 16 artists in the current show at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., are Jewish, curators Eloise Corr Danch and David Zuckerman unabashedly admit there is nothing Jewish about the exhibit, beyond the Jewish venue.

In the catalog to “I’ve Gone Looking for that Feeling Everywhere: An Exhibition of Emerging Artists,” which hangs through Nov. 2, the curators identify “an insistent urge to examine and discover” as a thematic tie-that-binds.

orrery — Orrery courtesy of Sam Zuckerman

“This exhibition celebrates the idea of art as the product of (or byproduct) of that curiosity, of the artists’ need to engage their surroundings and indulge their fascinations,” they write, insisting the art is “visceral, emotional, curious, playful,” rather than “steeped in concept or theory.”

In fact, not only do the curators say there isn’t even anything Jewish, or even spiritual, about the works in the show — though they refer in their statement to “the restless yearning spirit that drives the action” — but the title derives from a Denis Johnson novel, Jesus’ Son, about a drifter.

But Sam Zuckerman, David’s cousin, says his contribution to the show — which is in fact the first work of art he has ever made — has at least a partial Jewish component.

...continue reading "A gadget for Gods and days"

Naming names

joselitOctober 26, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Who among us doesn't have a relative whose name was changed at Ellis Island? Rare, indeed, is the American Jew whose surname is the same as that of his or her European and Israeli cousins. Normative rather than exceptional, the immigrant's acquisition of a new name seems to be as American a phenomenon as, well, apple pie.

But now, in an article published by Dara Horn in Azure magazine, we're told that the changing-of-the-name is itself a bube mayse, an urban legend, a fabrication of the immigrant mind. It simply didn't happen, or, if it did, these flights of onomastic invention took place well before Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe even came to the New World. By Horn's lights, name change had little, if anything, to do with tone deaf inspectors at Ellis Island.

"Ellis Island Medical Exam." Flickr creative commons photo by jjprojects.

In an imaginative and extended riff, Horn not only denies the historicity of name changing but also claims that the whole thing, from start to finish, is a tall tale of expiation, projection and apology. Having so readily turned their backs on the Old World in their eagerness to become one with the New, Jewish immigrants, she claims, made the whole thing up. It's all one big mea culpa for our sins.

"By inventing a story that depicts their name change as beyond their control ... these immigrants sent a powerful message to future generations: I did not shed my Jewish identity intentionally. And despite the values of the country in which we are living I hope that you won't, either," she writes.

When I shared the latest news with my students, they were taken aback, even baffled. And not just baffled. Suddenly they were cast adrift, floating free of family stories that had once anchored them. Only a few days earlier, one of my students had written lovingly and at great length about how his great grandfather's name had been changed by an official at Ellis Island, and now he was being told that his forbear had made it all up. Who to believe? Dara Horn or grandpa?

The choice is not an easy one. Maybe it's easy for Horn to throw down the gauntlet, come what may. But where does that leave the rest of us who cherish the stories of how Smilensky became Smith, and Zabarsky became Zabar?

Imagine that

joselitOctober 18, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Midterms are upon us and with them, a barrage of dates, facts, lab reports and other exercises that place a premium on processing information.

I thought I'd buck that trend by having the students in my Jewish Geography course, which explores the relationship of the modern Jewish experience to the American landscape, do something a tad more creative: to imagine themselves as newcomers, as immigrants, to the New World and to do so through a venue of their own choosing – or devising.

Drawing on the kit and caboodle of ideas, sounds, impressions (and misimpressions) that constitute their cultural baggage – on family stories passed down from generation to generation as well as on old, sepia-toned photographs - the students were encouraged to think – really think – about what immigration, transplantation and dislocation actually entailed.

I'm delighted to report that they acquitted themselves admirably. Some took to paper, others to song and still others to YouTube, giving voice to diary entries, reminiscences, short stories, recipes and mini-documentaries. A couple of students even created a performance piece.

Several women imagined themselves as men, while a handful of men imagined themselves as women. Some inhabited a world of their own making, creating fictional characters. Others built on the foundational stories of their ancestors. And still others found a congenial, real life historical personality and imagined what it must have been like to have been him or her.

A whole lot of conjuring going on…

One can only wonder what the man in Luis Sanguino's "The Immigrants" is wondering. Creative commons Flickr content by Wally Gobetz.

Yiddish redux

joselitOctober 11, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I've yet to recover from the news that Betty Boop, that sexy cartoon personality of the interwar years who boop-oop-a-dooped her way into America's heart, was reportedly fashioned after the fun-loving, rebellious daughters of the Lower East Side. And now word on the street is that Fred Flintstone, another celebrated American pop culture character, also took his cue – or at least his sound – from Jewish immigrant culture.

Yiddish may not be what it once was – the lingua franca, the daily language, of Ashkenazic Jewry – but it continues to make itself felt and heard in new and unanticipated ways, or what Jeffrey Shandler calls "post vernacular" forms of expression.

While the Rutgers University professor singles out board games and other artifacts that make use of Yiddish, two contemporary phenomena are additional grist for his mill.

Recently, Tablet magazine inaugurated A Yidisher Pop, an online gossip column which innovatively linked our modern-day preoccupation with celebrity to that age-old language.

Elsewhere in the digital universe, the Forward features an online cooking class in Yiddish, "Eat in Good Health," in which the plummy tones of Eve Jochnowitz give the trills of Julia Child a run for their money as she sets about instructing contemporary foodies on how to prepare a brisket and other staples of the traditional Jewish diet.

Closer to home, on GW's campus, a minyan of students comes together twice a week to learn about the subtleties and intricacies of Yiddish under the tutelage of professor Max Ticktin, a devotee and longtime student of the language. Some are drawn to Yiddish by the prospect of connecting with their grandparents, others by its linguistic complexities.

Whatever their motivations or their medium, those who make a point these days of integrating Yiddish into their daily lives are to be commended for sustaining and nurturing a vital part of their cultural patrimony.

Betty Boop (from Wikipedia). She knew how to bat an eyelash, but did she call it viye in Yiddish?

Is an Ancient Menagerie Pagan or Jewish?

joselitOctober 5, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite , is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.

By Menachem Wecker

Though it features illustrations of a menagerie of animals that carry Jewish symbolism, an ancient Roman mosaic discovered in Lod, Israel, in 1996, is not a religious work, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the fourth-century artifact is on exhibit for the first time until April 3, 2011.

Lod Mosaic as displayed — Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

According to the museum's press release, "because the mosaic's imagery has no overt religious content, it cannot be determined whether the owner was a pagan, a Jew, or a Christian."

But virtually all of the animals depicted in the work — birds, bulls, a deer, a donkey, ducks, an elephant, fish, gazelles, a giraffe, hares, leopards, lions, a sea monster, a snake, peacocks, a rhino and a tiger — carry Jewish symbolism.

According to Shlomo Pesach Toperoff, author of The Animal Kingdom in Jewish Thought, the following animals carry biblical and rabbinic symbolism: donkeys (transportation, redeeming firstborn donkeys per Exodus 13:13, symbol of Issachar), birds (the mother must be shooed before accessing the eggs, doves as peace symbols), elephants (per Berakhot 56b, a wonderful sign when seen in dreams), fish (eaten on Rosh Hashanah to symbolize multiplying), gazelles (frequent appearances in Song of Songs, its speed idealized in Ethics of the Fathers), harts and hinds (symbol of Naphtali), bulls (the Red Heifer), leopards (a character in Daniel's dream, cited in the same part of Ethics of the Fathers as the gazelle), sea monsters (the Leviathan, a Talmudic regular), lions (tribe of Judah), peacocks (brought by King Solomon from Tarshish) and serpents (Edenic embodiment of evil, symbol of Dan).

Hares are sometimes depicted in scenes of Esau returning from the hunt in haggadahs, according to Marc Michael Epstein, professor of religion and Jewish studies at Vassar College and author of the book Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature, which examines animal references in medieval art.

The Torah is referred to as a "loving doe" in the Shavuot prayers, Epstein adds, and hare hunts appear in haggadahs.

The ducks, giraffes, rhinos and tigers stand alone, but shouldn't 13 of 17 be compelling enough?
...continue reading "Is an Ancient Menagerie Pagan or Jewish?"

Can pigs fly?

joselitOctober 3, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

What's kosher -- and what's not -- has been the subject of intense discussion ever since the dietary laws were first promulgated in Leviticus, way back when.

The fault line along which the Jews have defined themselves vis-a-vis the outside world, kashruth in the modern era has also divided the Jews among themselves. With the advent of modernity, growing numbers of Jews began to jettison the dietary laws, insisting that conscience rather than cuisine, ethics rather than ritual behavior, should inspire them.

Others, however, rejected this position out of hand and resolutely kept on keeping kosher, while still others (the majority, perhaps?) sought a middle ground, choosing, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has so evocatively put it, to be "selectively treyf."

Under the confusing circumstances, one might think that kashruth would eventually have gone the way of so many other biblically-mandated practices: into the dustbin of history. But, in this instance, as in so many others that have to do with religion's surprisingly resilient encounter with modernity, not only has keeping kosher not withered away but, as Kosher Nation, Sue Fishkoff's new book vividly points out, it has emerged in the 21st century with renewed vigor, especially among a younger generation of Jews for whom kashruth affords an authentically Jewish response to the ethics and practices of responsible eating.

What, then, are we to make of the recent news that a cookbook roundly celebrating the delights of pork, an animal historically anathematized by the Jews, has recently been published, and in Israel of all places?

Eli Landau's The White Book is hardly the first cookbook whose Jewish author advocated the use of unkosher items. Aunt Babette's Cook Book, which was first released in the United States in 1889 by Bloch Publishing and Printing Company, has it beat by more than a century. But Landau's compendium is surely the first to thrust pork loin front and center and with no sign of apologetics to sweeten the dish.

Could this represent a watershed in the history of the Jewish people, or is it merely a tempest in a teapot?

For some, a pork cookbook sold in Israel makes as much sense as the above sign. Credit: joeventures, creative commons licensed on Flickr.

On the town

joselitSeptember 29, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Chinatown D.C. Can you imagine the Jewish neighborhood that used to be here? Creative commons licensed image by Flickr user shindohd.

On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon, the students in my "Jewish Geography" class and I traipsed around downtown Washington in pursuit of what had once been a thriving Jewish neighborhood.

Seventh Street, we were told by our knowledgeable and affable guide, David McKenzie of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, the sponsor of our walking tour, had long ago been the hub, perhaps even the spine, of D.C.'s Jewish community. But between the looming presence of the Verizon Center and the clamoring presence of a Quiznos on the one hand and a striking array of Chinese signage on the other, our imaginations had to work overtime to visualize the modest storefronts and homes owned and lived in by the Behrends and the Cohens, the Dodeks and the Smalls.

Were it not for a number of synagogues on our tour – or, more precisely still, former synagogues turned churches, whose stained glass windows and exterior markings still bear the faintest traces of Jewish stars – I suspect that many in our merry band of walkers in the city would have been hard put to believe Mr. McKenzie. Essentially, we were asked to take it on faith that once upon a time, downtown had been a Jewish enclave.

As we made our way up one decidedly contemporary street and down another, what did my students, who hailed from California and Florida, Ohio and Tennessee, make of this exercise in conjuring up the past? Did it frustrate them? Awaken an appetite for historical sleuthing or extinguish it altogether? More pointedly still, were they saddened by the disappearance of what had once been a vibrant community or did they take it in stride, as an inevitable consequence of change?

They responded to these questions in different ways. Several students spoke of how the neighborhood's Jewish presence managed, somehow, to peek through the scrim of Chinatown. Others rued the fact that what had once been alive was now contained in a history museum. And still others embraced change as the one constant in modern life.

What united these disparate answers was a growing awareness that history lessons can be found on the street as well as in the classroom.

Paper chase

joselitSeptember 26, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

With the digitization of daily life, we're apt (or is it "apps?") to think that paper documents are a thing of the past. But two recent stories, one in The New York Times Sunday magazine and the other in The New York Jewish Week, remind us that in judicial as well as literary circles, paper is the real deal.

The feature story in the Times, which was smartly and imaginatively written by Elif Batuman, has to do with Franz Kafka's legacy, while that of The Jewish Week, the skillful handiwork of reporter Eric Herschthal, focuses on the afterlife of another celebrated writer, Chaim Grade.

Both men left behind a mass of papers - so many, in fact, that they've come to inhabit every nook and cranny of the dust-laden Bronx apartment Grade shared with his wife Inna and, near as anyone can tell, that of the cat-infested Tel Aviv apartment of Eva Hoffe as well. Hoffe, who in a delicious twist of irony, lives on Spinoza Street, is the daughter of Esther Hoffe (Are you still with me?) who was the secretary of Max Brod, the renowned keeper of the Kafka flame.

In both instances, the fate of these materials is up for grabs, giving rise to a truly Kafka-esque spectacle of multiple beneficiaries along with dueling librarians, archivists, court officers and lawyers, each of whom insists that his institution and no other is the most deserving repository. Meanwhile, public health authorities have also entered the fray, valiantly trying to defend Kafka and Grade's writings from the degradations of cats and mites.

Were all this not sufficiently complicated and messy, the absence of an original will compounds matters even further, underscoring how much we imbue paper with value. Photostats apparently exist but as far as the courts are concerned, they have no legal standing. Only the real McCoy will do. Authenticity, it seems, does not inhere in a Xerox.

As I lingered over every detail of these two riveting stories, both of which give new meaning to the notion of a 'page-turner,' I couldn't help wondering what Kafka and Grade would have made of it all.

Photo: Kafka trail (not Trial!) in Cologne. Creative commons content by Flickr user dev null.

Out of the wilderness 2

joselitSeptember 19, 2010November 16, 20172 Comments

Paris has the Eiffel Tower, London its Big Ben and for two days this week, New York has Sukkah City.

Thanks to an architectural competition conceived of by Joshua Foer and administered and funded by Reboot, 12 different, decidedly postmodern versions of the ancient ritual structure (or booth) whose origins date back to Biblical times, will briefly take root in Union Square Park come Sunday and Monday.

Much like Christo's 2005 site specific project, The Gates, in which Central Park was awash in orange-colored flags, its downtown cousin, once the scene of countless labor demonstrations and rallies, is now awash in sukkahs (or, to be correct about it, sukkot).

The intrusion of an age-old, religiously-mandated architectural idiom into the modern urban landscape lends a special frisson, perhaps even a touch of naughtiness, to the proceedings; call it playful incongruity.

Equally incongruous, especially for those familiar with the often hastily cobbled, jerry-built, aesthetically inchoate form of most sukkahs, is the high degree of aestheticism lavished on these 12 exemplars.

Most booths are lucky if they remain standing throughout the week-long festival of Succoth. In striking contrast, these are the handiwork of trained architects; they're beautifully assembled, handsomely crafted, and well thought out.

But then, incongruity and aesthetics are not the only things that render Sukkah City a real treat for the eye and the spirit.

What's most exhilarating is the way the sukkah has been transformed from a curiosity into a spectacle. For much of its history in the United States, the sukkah was a private, unobtrusive bit of business. Mindful of what the neighbors would think, most American Jews, at least until fairly recently, kept their succahs to themselves. Some American Jews even went so far as to miniaturize it, rendering the outdoor structure into a centerpiece for their dining room table.

But no more. Thanks to this imaginative and affirming event – a happening, in the best sense of the word - the sukkah has found a place for itself in the modern public square.

"Single Thread" by Matter Practice. Sukkah City website. Courtesy of Joshua Foer.