Uncategorized – Page 10 – From Under the Fig Tree

Bookends

joselitSeptember 23, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Stories about Jewish books don’t often appear in the news, but within the past few days there have been not one, but two, feature articles about them.

The first piece took the form of a review by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York titled “Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries.”

Exulting in the 52 treasures on view, many of them illuminated Hebrew manuscripts and some that date as far back as the 11th century, the Times’ chief culture critic -- who will soon be visiting GW for a series of workshops and talks -- found much that pleased the eye, engaged the intellect, and buoyed the spirit.

The second piece is a study in contrast. Written by Paul Berger, it appeared on the front page of The Forward and took as its subject the recent decision by the American Jewish Committee to deaccession its once storied research library.

Its shelves filled with mimeographed reports, cassette tapes, and other items whose preciousness stemmed from their contemporaneity rather than their historicity or aesthetic appeal, the AJC’s Library was meant to be used rather than contemplated. Little wonder, then, that sadness suffuses Berger’s account, along with the merest whiff -- a frisson -- of something potentially scandalous.

But that’s not how I choose to read it. Instead, I prefer to juxtapose these two stories of two different collections with two entirely different outcomes and to read them as two halves of a cautionary tale: the fate of the Jewish book, whether grand or quotidian, resides with us.

Blast from the past

joselitSeptember 16, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Among the thousands of objects on view in London in 1887 at the storied Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition were 18 shofaroth, or, as the catalogue text would have it, “ram’s horn trumpets.” Variously described as “old,” “very old,” “quaint and old,” and “black from age,” these instruments were heralded for their association with practices that went as far back as the Bible.

The antiquity of the shofar was not the only thing of interest to the exhibition’s organizers. What also fascinated them was its distinctive sound. Without going into any detail, they categorically allowed how it was downright “distressing to Western ears.”

An exercise in both apologetics and ethnography, the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition reflected many of the prejudices of its time. Designed to demystify the Jews, their history and material culture, it ended up rendering them more of a curiosity than the stuff of common ground.

In the years since the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition made its debut, we’ve come to see things differently. Instead of apologizing for and explaining away the persistence of age-old customs, practices and sounds, this generation of modern Jews is more apt to relish than rue them.

As we stand poised to usher in 5773, let the distinctive sounds of the shofar ring as loudly and clearly as a clarion call: Shanah tovah, a good year, for one and all.

Reverb 1

joselitSeptember 9, 2012November 16, 20171 Comment

Over the years, I’ve attended lots of symposia but never one that began with the ringing of chimes and concluded with a most hearty and prolonged round of applause. These two sounds, along with the sight of presenters swaying to the beat of “Yiddish Melodies in Swing” or singing the praises of the “Cohen on the Radio” vaudeville sketches with their catch-all phrase, “Radio, Shmadio,” were in full throttle at last week’s Library of Congress salute to Henry Sapoznik and the donation of his collection of Yiddish radio memorabilia.

Old radio — Old Radio. Flickr/Christos Kotsakis

Now a part of the American Folklife Center where, one hopes, it will receive a new lease on life, this treasure trove of auditory materials underscores the vibrancy of American Jewish life at the grass roots. Whether poking fun at “Sam the man who made the pants too long,” or rendering the familiar Campbell Soup jingle auf yidish, as in “Campbell Soup iz – um um - immer gut,” or introducing the very latest Hebrew folksongs, Yiddish radio informed, entertained and sustained audiences of the interwar years.

Fifty years later, Yiddish radio had the same effect on the nearly 200 people in attendance at this symposium. It held us in its static-y embrace. At many a conference, it’s customary to find more participants holding impromptu conversations in the hallway than paying attention to the proceedings.

But here, audience members sat for hours on end and listened, actually listened, to the fragments of Yiddish radio programming that have somehow survived. Nothing if not appreciative and engaged, they laughed at the funny bits, scratched their heads at other moments and consistently plied the presenters with all manner of questions.

It’s a measure of the symposium’s success – and of the enduring cultural value of Yiddish radio – that at its conclusion, people were reluctant to sign off.

God and man in Tampa

joselitSeptember 2, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

People in funny hats, empty chairs, a capella singing, overheated rhetoric, a red dress -- the Republicans put on quite a show in Tampa last week at their national convention. Most of it left me cold. What didn’t was the ardent public display of religion, especially the ritualized invocation. The sight of thousands of earnest delegates, their eyes shut tight in prayer as clergymen from denominations that ran the gamut from Orthodox Judaism to Mormonism intoned passages from the Bible or evoked the presence of Jesus, really got me going.

Bible by Mike Johnson — Bible. Flickr/Mike Johnson

I should know better, of course. I spend a lot of my time studying, teaching, and researching the history of religion in modern America. My bookshelves groan under the accumulated weight of book after book on this very subject. I’m even at work on a volume of my own -- on America’s embrace of the Ten Commandments -- the very point of which is the entangled relationship between religion and culture.

And yet, while watching the Republican convention, I was truly taken aback by the ways in which religion was repeatedly affirmed. Some of my coreligionists, I suspect, were thrilled when Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik appeared on the vast stage of the convention hall to deliver the opening invocation, his hard-to-pronounce and decidedly un-American name emblazoned across the screen. Their hearts might have beat a little faster as the rabbi, in ringing but yeshivish tones, highlighted the connections between Biblical and American notions of freedom and, for good measure, punctuated his remarks with a hefty dose of Hebrew. Hebrew! In Tampa! What a triumph for the Jews!

My heart beat a little faster, too, but it wasn’t out of pride. The whole thing, from start to finish, made me really uncomfortable. It’s not that I think that American Jews should hide their light under a bushel; far from it. But the overt politicization of religious expression, let alone the calculated staginess of it all, unsettled me.

There was more to come. Integrating Mormonism as well as Orthodox Judaism into the proceedings, the Republicans invited Kenneth Hutchins, a Mormon bishop from Boston, to give the invocation on the last day of the convention. Replete with explicit references to Jesus in lieu of the more anodyne 'heavenly father,' his remarks made a point of underscoring just how much Mormonism had in common with the other Christian denominations. And lest anyone within earshot might have missed that connection, Hutchins concluded his presentation by blessing the assembled in the name of 'Jesus Christ, our Lord.'

Only in America.

Radio Days 5

joselitAugust 26, 2012November 16, 20175 Comments

Nearly thirty years ago, when musician and musicologist Henry Sapoznik first stumbled across a cache of aluminum transcription disks of Yiddish radio shows from interwar America, little did he suspect that they would find a home at the Library of Congress.

Abandoned in an attic, deposited in a dumpster, the stuff of rummage and tag sales, these acoustic artifacts, which ranged from Yiddish Melodies in Swing to Stuhmer’s Pumpernickel Program, were destined to fade away entirely had not Mr. Sapoznik recognized their value and saved them, often just in the nick of time.

But then, this stalwart champion of American Jewry’s vernacular culture did even more than that. Working together with the award-winning radio producer Dave Isay and the celebrated sound preservationist Andy Lanset, he made sure, for one thing, to preserve this material. For another, he introduced a new generation of listeners, among them historians and linguists, musicians and folklorists, to the contents of Yiddish radio by creating the Yiddish Radio Project,which aired on NPR in 2002. Once forgotten and marginalized, the sounds and sensibilities of Yiddish radio have become an integral part of how contemporary American Jews understand themselves.

Most recently, the storied American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress acquired Sapoznik’s collection of more than 1000 Yiddish radio programs, where they have now taken their rightful place as a part of the nation’s cultural patrimony.

To mark this acquisition, the Library of Congress will be hosting a two-day symposium, “The Stations That Spoke Your Language,” on September 6th and 7th. With programming as varied as Yiddish radio itself, it promises to be a lively and stimulating occasion. More to the point, perhaps, this gathering enables a grateful public to express its deepest thanks to Henry Sapoznik for attuning us to our history.

Americana

joselitAugust 21, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Two friends of mine, ardent champions of all things cultural, were en route to Los Angeles the other day when they decided to stop off in Bentonville, Arkansas, to see the brand new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Flickr / IPBrian.

Given all the advance publicity the museum received, they knew they were in for a treat. The richness of the museum’s holdings, the affability of its setting, the imaginative architecture designed by Moshe Safdie - everything they had read about the institution suggested there would be much to please the eye and delight the senses.

What my friends did not anticipate was meeting up with the Levys and the Franks, a prosperous colonial American Jewish family. But there they were, in all their 18^th century glory: six portraits, one after the other, of the paterfamilias Moses Levy, his daughter, Abigail, son-in-law Jacob Franks and several of their children. You can’t miss them; these oil paintings, the handiwork of Gerardus Duyckinck, are front and center as you enter the museum’s very first gallery.

Once upon a time, these portraits proudly hung in the home of the extended Levy-Frank family and their descendants: proof positive of the beneficence and bounty of America. Somewhere along the line, they became the property of the American Jewish Historical Society which, now and then, put them on display or lent them out to other institutions.

I remember seeing the portraits in the late 1990s at the Jewish Museum in New York where they were the subject of an incisive exhibition called “Facing the New World.” The gentle swell of Moses Levy’s stomach and the slight, insouciant tilt of Abigail Levy Frank’s head caught my eye at the time and has stayed with me ever since.

In the years that followed, the portraits all but disappeared from view, let alone American Jewry’s consciousness, until 2006 when news of their purchase by the Crystal Bridges Museum became public knowledge and a bit of a scandal, to boot.

From what my friends tell me, the Levys and the Franks have found a good home. I’m glad of it. Mindful of the trajectory that took the family from Germany and Britain to the West Indies, New York and Philadelphia – and now to Arkansas - I suspect they would be glad of it, too.

Vision thing

joselitAugust 12, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

According to the latest eye-popping news from Jerusalem, the ultra-orthodox or haredi community has come up with a stunning new way to keep men and women apart: eyeglasses that blur rather than clarify. Turning the notion of 3-D goggles on their head, these specs block out the world instead of embracing it.

I’m not quite sure how the obfuscatory lens work: Do they automatically fog up when sensing the nearby presence of a woman? I’m not even sure they’re real. Could the whole thing be a giant hoax designed to pull the proverbial wool over our eyes? I’d like to think so.

Then again, there’s ample precedent for this kind of thing. Consider the mechitzah, the ritual partition that separates male worshippers from female worshippers. Years ago, an opaque curtain, made out of heavy fabric, stood between them, cutting off everyone’s sight lines. But these days, in many a contemporary orthodox synagogue, the old-fashioned curtain has given way to a technologically sophisticated version of plexiglass that allows women to “see out,” while preventing men from seeing “in.”

When examined from this perspective, it’s not too much of a stretch to liken a pair of so-called modesty glasses to a miniaturized, privatized and portable version of a mechitzah. Wonder of wonders!

Still, I cling to the hope that the story of this brand new invention is a complete and utter fabrication. Otherwise, the prospect of a world in which people--read men--deliberately make a point of not seeing what’s around them is an awfully cloudy one.

Jewish geography

joselitAugust 6, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Entrance to Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida — Holy Land Experience, Orlando, Fla. Flickr/Malcolm Logan

The news that members of the Isaac Bashevis Singer Association of Bilgoraj intend to build a replica of the Western Wall at the site of the Polish town’s Jewish cemetery undoubtedly raised an eyebrow or two.

Coming on the heels of an announcement that the International Pro-Life Memorial and National Life Center is also planning to build a “full-size” replica of the Western Wall -– and in Kansas, no less -- it certainly raised mine, prompting me to think about the practice –- and value -- of authenticity in the 21st century.

Amid the hammer of postmodernism and the juggernaut of digital technology, both of which have altered the meaning of reality, does anyone care about authenticity anymore, especially when it comes to the primacy of place?

I suspect not. When we can recreate the Western Wall in Poland or in the U.S. heartland, encounter the glories of Venice in Las Vegas, engage with the spiritual force of 770 Eastern Parkway, headquarters of the Lubavitcher Hasidim, in a town outside of Tel Aviv, and walk in the footsteps of Jesus at the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Fla., why bother with authenticity? Who needs it?

Well, I do. Call me old-fashioned but if I’m going to have an honest-to-goodness religious experience, I’d much prefer to have it in a place made sacred by history and geography instead of one that has been willed into being.

Ratings Game

joselitJuly 29, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

These days, grading is central to the social contract that exists between professors and their students. Throughout the course of a semester, professors grade their students and at its conclusion students grade – or, as the lingo would have it – “evaluate” – their professors, and everyone’s the wiser, and the better, for it.

That’s the theory. On paper, things don’t work out quite so neatly. Students complain often, and bitterly, that the battery of tests and special projects to which they’re subjected do not adequately reflect their talents. Professors complain just as often and just as bitterly that the evaluations to which they’re subjected simply don’t add up.

Frustration mounts. Students lament the letter grade that is permanently incised on their transcripts, insisting that it’s not right that professors have the last word. But, from the professorial perspective, it’s the students who – quite literally – have the last word and often, it’s a real stunner.

Two examples will have to suffice. One of my cherished colleagues, for whom teaching undergraduates about the Holocaust is no mere academic exercise but a responsibility, decided recently to devote an entire year to the subject rather than cram the rise of Nazism, the growing dehumanization of the Jews and their subsequent extermination into one semester.

One of the students, when asked to account for his experience in the classroom, allowed how he was a bit disappointed with the first half of the course because it didn’t really dovetail with his interests, which extended only to the actual killing of the Jews. Still, he conceded, learning about anti-Semitism and the Nuremberg Laws and reading the memoirs of people such as Victor Klemperer who, in poignant and painstaking detail, recall what befell them was “surprisingly fascinating” (my emphasis). Hmm.

My turn. I had the good fortune earlier in the year to co-teach a course on The Merchant of Venice with another one of my dedicated colleagues, Professor Leslie Jacobson of the Department of Theatre & Dance. While she concentrated on the theatrical end of things, I sought to place the play within its historical context and to highlight the critical role played by the Jews in both the fashioning of the play and its subsequent reception.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that they go hand in hand. To which one of my students – a very good, one, I have to say – wrote in her evaluation that in the event I teach this course again, other aspects of the subject should be emphasized, “not just Jews.”

Take two

joselitJuly 23, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Over the past half century or so, Israel has been associated in the public mind with lots of things, but movie-making has not been among them – at least not until recently. As the Forward observed only last week, that’s about to change. Israel now harbors high hopes of becoming a major production center.

Israel's Ma'ale School of Television, Film and the Arts. Flickr/zeevveez

It’s not the first time. As The New York Times reported way back in May 1960, when Otto Preminger and a crew of 150 actors and technicians descended en masse on Israel to film Exodus, “the experience has immensely stimulated the exalted hopes and plans of many government people and enterprising citizens for the further production of film production here.”

Likened to a “national happening,” the making of the film took the country by storm. Thousands of ordinary citizens eagerly sought out Paul Newman and his co-star Eva Marie Saint for their autographs, took party in a national lottery to serve as extras and consulted their newspapers on a daily basis for information about what scene was being filmed where. Exodus, concluded the Times, was “probably the most publicized entertainment project that has come to this country since its founding.”

In the spotlight – and for reasons having to do with culture rather than geopolitics – Israel warmed to the idea of becoming an alternative to Hollywood. After all, it had much in common with the West Coast, from the availability of dramatic and varied scenery to the prospect of generous financial incentives. These factors, coupled with a reputation for being “the most avid moviegoing nation in the world,” made Israel a natural.

While it’s taken 40 biblical years – and then some – for this possibility to bear fruit, how heartening to see that Israel, someday soon, may be known for its movie magic.