Uncategorized – Page 11 – From Under the Fig Tree

Applying Anne Frank

joselitJuly 9, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I learned recently of a brand new app, “Anne’s Amsterdam,” which provides all sorts of digital details, both personal and geographical, about Anne Frank and her city. I can’t say I’m surprised.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Flickr / Fenners1984.

In the years since the publication of her diary, Anne Frank’s life and times – and above all, her house, which has been made into a museum - have lent themselves to a staggering array of iterations, prompting Ian Buruma famously to observe that “about the only thing we haven’t seen so far is Anne Frank on Ice.”

Likening her to a “Jewish Saint Ursula, a Dutch Joan of Arc, a female Christ,” Buruma, some thought, went a bit too far. But if the response of some of Anne Frank’s acolytes and devotees to the news that the chestnut tree to which Miss Frank had referred in her diary was to be cut down is any indication, he may not have gone far enough. A hue and cry of enormous proportions ensued, with some insisting that fragments of the tree be preserved and venerated much as if they were bits of the cross itself.

In true post-modern fashion, these mediations of Anne Frank have also given rise to a veritable cottage industry of interpretations and, well, mediations all their own, of which Francine Prose’s book, Anne Frank: The Book,The Life,The Afterlife and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank are but the latest expressions.

Come October, Indiana University Press will publish Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, and Memory, a volume of essays edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, which explores the impact of Anne Frank on adolescence, museology and toys, among many other things. Based on a symposium at NYU, which I had the good fortune to attend some years back and at which I spoke on the relationship between domesticity and the Anne Frank House, this book is sure to set more tongues wagging than any app.

Flag waving

joselitJuly 3, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

A few weekends ago, while a scholar-in-residence at Temple B’nai Shalom in Northern Virginia, I was privy to a fascinating discussion about the presence -- or absence -- of flags in the sanctuary.

Temple Chai Bimah — Bimah at Temple Chai, a Reform congregation in North Phoenix, Arizona. Flickr/Al_HikesAZ

For years, many American synagogues like this one had featured two flags on the podium or bimah: the Stars & Stripes and the blue & white or “Jewish flag,” which was first associated with the Zionist movement and then with the State of Israel.

Mute but powerful symbols of what historian Jonathan Sarna called the “cult of synthesis” that characterized American Jewish life well into the 1970s, (“The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 5, No. 1/2 Autumn 1998-Winter 1999, pp. 52-79) they once stood like sentinels, guarding the dual dimensions of American Jewry’s patrimony.

But somewhere along the line, the flags vanished altogether, as they had at Temple B’nai Shalom. What happened to them?, a couple of congregants, their memories jolted by our exchange about the visual identity of American Jewry, now wanted to know. Where did they go? And why?

“We still have them,” responded the congregation’s founder and longtime rabbi, Amy Perlin. “They’re in storage.” She gently explained that changing notions about the separation of church and state on the one hand, coupled with heightened concerns about the policies of the State of Israel, rendered them less and less attractive to those in the pews.

In other instances, near as I can tell, it wasn’t ideology so much as interior décor that prompted the removal of the two flags. As more and more congregations redesigned their sanctuaries and reconstituted the bimah to accommodate the needs of their handicapped members as well as a different, more intimate vision of community, the flags went the way of all things.

I’m not sure what any of this says about contemporary American Jewry, but it’s certainly worth contemplating as the Fourth of July swings into view.

Let’s Have Lunch

joselitJune 27, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Lunch is one of the great institutions of modern America. We may eat it on the run and at our desks but there’s no denying that lunch deserves its place in the sun.

As a stalwart member of GW’s Urban Food Task Force which, among other things, encourages our students to eat good, healthy noontime meals, I think about lunch a lot. The food trucks that clog the campus of late give me pause, as do the limited options available for undergrads who keep kosher or observe halal. And don’t get me started on the crowds that pour into Whole Foods or any of the other neighborhood food establishments, transforming the prospect of a nice lunch into a waiting game.

Though my concerns are present-day ones, it turns out they have a history. As “Lunch Hour NYC,” a brand new exhibition at the New York Public Library, makes vividly clear, street foods, crowds and informality have been with us ever since lunch was first invented in and by an industrializing America.

Bound up with the rhythms of the workaday world, the lunch hour took off, generating a wealth of paraphernalia and foodstuffs: carts, fast foods, luncheonettes and lunchrooms, metal lunch boxes and shiny Horn & Hardart Automats; pretzels, hot dogs, pizza, knishes and the soon-to-be ubiquitous tuna sandwich.

After taking stock of this exhibition, I venture to say that we’ll no longer take lunch for granted.

Keepers of the Flame 1

joselitJune 17, 2012November 16, 20171 Comment

Like the making of history, the writing of history is a collaborative venture. It may look as if ideas are entirely the product of the individual imagination but, as any honest, straight-talking historian will tell you, they are the result of a group effort. The writer-cum-historian gets all the credit but were it not for the efforts of archivists, not much would get done. Keepers of the flame, of the historical record, they are the great unsung heroes of the scholarly enterprise.

Stack of newspapers — Flickr / Ben McLeod.

They are also among the very first to be fired when the chips are down. When it comes to cutting institutional costs, archivists are widely thought to be the most dispensable. After all, goes the reasoning, they are merely stewards of the past – guardians of paper - rather than vital contributors to the present.

True, archivists do not generate money for their institutions. But what they do generate - and sustain and nourish - is a vibrant sense of history, without which the broader community is impoverished in ways that go well beyond the contours of a budget.

Hadassah, the Zionist Women’s Organization of America, is currently celebrating its 100^th birthday. I can think of no better occasion for trumpeting the virtues of its splendid archives, which has been in existence for quite some time now, and for encouraging researchers to make use of its wealth of reports, scrapbooks, memos, letters and photographs.

But, alas, that’s not to be. Hadassah has dispensed with its smart, resourceful and profoundly committed archivist and all but foreclosed the possibility of discovery, of the artful collaboration between historian and archivist.

We are all the poorer for it.

Countdown

joselitJune 10, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

At first blush, numbers seem to be nothing if not neutral, especially when compared with words. Language makes known its intentions from the get-go; numbers, in contrast, don’t freely divulge their meaning and are susceptible to all manner of manipulation.

Little wonder, then, that modern-day Jews have had a fraught relationship with the quantitative imagination. The recent brouhaha over CUNY’s decision to institute “White/Jewish” as a category by which to enumerate and identify its faculty is but the latest in a long series of entangled encounters between the Jews and the numerical.

On the one hand, modern-day Jews once put their faith in numbers, trusting to them to set things right. Determined to prove that Jewish men had participated actively and fully in World War I, the Jews in both the Old World and the New turned to the statistical record.

Equally determined to prove that their coreligionists had not wantonly taken up a life of crime, American Jewry’s cultural custodians of the early 20^th century scoured the criminal docket for numerical proof that the proportion of Jewish malefactors in no way exceeded the proportion of Jews in the population.

Meanwhile, in the late 1920s, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations made excellent use of charts and graphs and other quantitative devices to explore the extent to which Reform Jews at the grass roots attended religious services, furnished their home with ritual objects, read books of Jewish content and actively identified themselves as American Jews.

But then, with the revelation that American universities had made ample use of a numerically-based quota system to contain the percentage of Jews among the nation’s undergraduates, American Jewry’s attitude towards numbers underwent a sea-change: from wholesale embrace to disenchantment. ...continue reading "Countdown"

Is There A Doctor in the House?

joselitMay 29, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Until this past week, the relationship of the Jews to medicine and of faith to healing were subjects of abiding intellectual and ethnographic curiosity but not much more.

Over the years, I had avidly read the work of my colleagues David Ruderman and John Efron on the history of Jewish doctoring both in the 16^th century and at the dawn of the 20^th.

I had also watched with growing fascination as synagogues of every denomination made more and more room in the Shabbat morning service for the collective recitation of a prayer for the sick, a practice that altered the rhythm and sensibility of the liturgy.

What’s more, a visit to Yeshiva University Museum’s brand new exhibition, Trail of the Magic Bullet: The Jewish Encounter with Modern Medicine, 1860-1960, was high on my summer ‘to do’ list. An inquiry into why so many Jews took up medicine, it features a wide array of medical paraphernalia, photographs and archival matter designed to provide the larger historical and cultural context for the Jewish presence in this most modern of professions.

When my husband took ill rather suddenly last weekend and was hospitalized, my professional interest turned, overnight, into something deeply and irrevocably personal. From the doctor in one hospital who told us categorically to stop davening (or dithering) over a pressing medical decision to the signage in another that highlights the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis or care of the whole person, the association between religion and medicine is no longer just an academic pursuit.

Ecosystem

joselitMay 17, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Say you blundered one wet and dreary evening into a town hall meeting in downtown Manhattan and sought to take its measure by listening attentively to the words bandied about by those in the know, words such as ‘ebb and flow,’ ‘cycle,’ ‘crisis,’ and ‘ecosystem.’ You might easily have come away thinking that the matter at hand had to do with stewarding the environment.

You wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but in this instance the environment in question was not Mother Nature’s but rather, the American Jewish community or, more to the point, its relationship to Jewish forms of cultural expression.

Some of the culture mavens at the town hall meeting that evening – a glittering array of talent representative of the “new Jewish culture” - believed that the relationship between the two was enfeebled, perhaps even on “life support.” Others thought it healthy and vital.

Some placed a premium on the kind of affirmation that comes from a strong sense of self, insisting fervently on the integrity of the idiosyncratic. Others underscored the primacy of Jewish cultural literacy, claiming equally as fervently that contemporary American Jews would be well served were they to “connect to something larger than themselves.” ...continue reading "Ecosystem"

Hot Ticket

joselitMay 8, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

When you combine the sizzling artistry of violinist Alicia Svigals with the smoldering film presence of Pola Negri, the silent film star and Hollywood darling of the interwar years, sparks are sure to fly.

Building on the current fascination with the world of silent films, which The Artist and Hugo set in motion, the Washington Jewish Music Festival will screen The Yellow Ticket, a 1918 film, on Monday evening, May 21^st. Less than an hour in length, this full throttled melodrama explores the triangulated relationship of Jewish identity, prostitution and modernity through its focus on a Jewish woman’s unhappy experiences in St. Petersburg.

The Polish actress whose long red lacquered nails and off-screen romances with Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino prompted the New York Times to dub her the “queen of screen vamps,” the “starriest of stars,” played a Jewish heroine so convincingly that Hitler and Goebbels forbade the showing of her films in Germany because they believed she was Jewish.

At the time that The Yellow Ticket and other silent films were in their heyday, audiences often learned as much about music as they did about the movies, thanks to the live orchestration that accompanied them. Latter-day audiences will have the opportunity to recreate that experience when Alicia Svigals, accompanied by pianist Marilyn Lerner, will both debut and perform her original score.

From start to finish, this synthesis of image and sound is not to be missed.

Keeping the Faith

joselitMay 3, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Determination, persistence and true grit are qualities that we try really hard to instill in our students, but with little success. No matter how often – or how loudly – we tout the virtue of steadfastness, they remain utterly inured to its allure.

When contemporary accomplishments are increasingly measured in terms of fleeting sound bites, undergraduates are hard put to think of spending oodles of time on a term paper, say, or a senior thesis, let alone devoting much of their life to the dogged and single-minded pursuit of a research agenda.

Under the circumstances, the hosannas that have recently greeted the publication of the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson are especially welcome. A consummate stylist with a keen eye for the telling detail, the author has spent years - 36 of them, in fact - accumulating material and insights as well as le mot juste. “It’s not writing that takes Caro so long but, rather, rewriting,” explains Charles McGrath in his recent New York Times profile. Now, that’s what I’d call heroic.

But then, Robert Caro has nothing on Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz who recently completed the very last volume of his monumental translation of and commentary on the Talmud, a project that took him 45 years. Appearing just the other day on the PBS show, “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” Rabbi Steinsaltz seemed energized and eager to keep on making the Talmud “available to everyone.”

Feted by the current members of the United States Supreme Court, including Ginsburg, Kagan and Scalia, who some years back held a reception in his honor at the Supreme Court itself, Steinsaltz takes the life of the mind to new and unimaginable heights.

Whether our interests reside in presidential politics or in hermeneutics, may Adin Steinsaltz and Robert Caro continue to hold us rapt.

Students: take note.

Masquerade

joselitApril 23, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

The Sunday Times is generally full of fascinating stories about this and that. This week’s paper featured the unusually choice tale of one Alan Z. Feuer, who, by dint of will and subterfuge, managed to transform himself from a Brooklyn-born Jewish kid into a socialite, an “Austrian blueblood,” whose métier was the fancy dress ball.

Feuer was hardly the first, and probably not the last, Jewish male to envision himself as someone else. Take, for instance, Trebitsch Lincoln, a character so chameleon-like it’s hard to believe that he did not actually spring from the pages of a potboiler.

Born Ignacz Trebitsch in Hungary, he subsequently converted from Judaism to Christianity, becoming, in short order, a missionary in Canada, a British Member of Parliament, a German spy whose double-dealings were duly noted by the FBI and the abbot of a Buddhist monastery in China. The subject of a wonderful book by Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, this man was as dazzling, and shape-shifting, as they come.

So, too, was Kurban Said, a k a Essad Bey, ne Lev Nussinbaum. Profiled by Tom Reiss in his scintillating read, The Orientalist, this Baku-born Jew, the son of a Russian Jewish woman, exchanged his Western garb and Jewish cultural identity for the flowing robes and turbans of an Arab. Cutting quite the figure in Weimar Germany and interwar Vienna, whose cafes he frequented, Nussinbaum would go on to publish the highly esteemed and widely read 1937 romance novel, Ali and Nino, the story of a knotty love affair between an Azerbaijani Muslim and a Georgian princess.

Feuer had his top hat and tails, Trebitsch his prayer beads and Nussinbaum his turban. And yet, despite their radically dissimilar trajectories, each of these three Jewish men threw over their natal identities in favor of one that was entirely made-up, fashioned from whole cloth.

We’re left to wonder what, if anything, this says about the plasticity of identity in the modern era.