Uncategorized – Page 13 – From Under the Fig Tree

Carry-on

joselitJanuary 30, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

As everyone knows by now, we are what we eat. But we’re also the sum of our associations, many of them derived from museum exhibitions and film screenings.

Take old suitcases, for instance. When I think of these objects, of where they’ve been and what they contain, what springs immediately and incontrovertibly to mind are the dislocations and upsets of migration, not the free-wheeling joys of travel.

I see a battered suitcase and I envision Ellis Island and its jumble of humble, mismatched pieces piled, helter-skelter, one atop another.

I see a dented suitcase and I envision deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto and frightened people clinging desperately to one another and to their worldly goods, all of which are crammed inside a leather portmanteau.

Imagine, then, my surprise to see well worn pieces of luggage freighted with a more positive meaning. I was passing by Brooks Brothers, the venerable clothing establishment, in Chevy Chase, when I noticed that its handsomely appointed windows were filled with sets of vintage suitcases. A design element, these leather and metal carry-alls were intended to show off the clothes, to tantalize would-be consumers with visions of sartorial excitement, possibility and fulfillment.

As I stood there, gawking, I was momentarily taken in by the seductiveness of the display. But not for long. By now, I’m too conditioned by culture and history to see a much- used suitcase and to conjure anything else but loss.

Attention Span

joselitJanuary 19, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

When it comes to spreading the news, people have beat the drum, cued the trumpets, shouted from the mountaintop, taken to the airwaves and telegraphed their intentions.

And so it is with this video, which brings word of our brand new enterprise: GW’s MA in Jewish Cultural Arts.

Recycling

joselitJanuary 15, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I’m often asked how to go about extending the shelf life of yesteryear’s Jewish cultural treasures. It seems to me that studying them in class is one way to keep them fresh and evergreen. Another is through creative recycling.

A lively, smart example of how to preserve Jewish culture by rethinking and extending its meaning, context and form can be found these days at Sixth and I, where a modest and unassuming exhibition, Liana Finck: The Bintel Brief, has just opened.

Taking her cue -- and her material -- from the Forward’s pioneering, and justly celebrated, advice column, Bintel Brief, which debuted in 1906, Liana Finck offers a decidedly post-modern interpretation. ...continue reading "Recycling"

Outsourcing

joselitJanuary 8, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

An offhand remark, a choice bit of gossip, a curious object, obituaries, marital notices – you never know where you’re going to find a juicy historical revelation.

Just the other day, while making my way through the Vows column of Sunday’s New York Times – something I do religiously – I came across a fascinating nugget of history.

There, in a story about the nuptials of one Kramer Morgenthau and his bride Tracy Fleischman, which took place in a former Roman Catholic cathedral in Los Angeles, the reporter referred, in passing, to how the young couple ceremonially drank from a kiddush cup that had been in the distinguished Morgenthau family for generations.

A gift – a gift(!) – from Herbert Lehman, a former governor of New York State, a United States senator and a member in good standing of American Jewry’s elite, whose comings and goings were chronicled in Stephen Birmingham’s celebrated book, Our Crowd, this delicious little tidbit or grace note personalized the mighty Morgenthaus and the redoubtable Lehmans.

To know that they valued a kiddush cup, passing it down from one generation to another, not only made me smile. It quickened my resolve to be on the lookout for history even in the most unlikely of places.

Coming Attractions

joselitDecember 18, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

As the fall semester winds down, I’m sorry to see it go. So many wonderful events took place over the past couple of months – illuminating faculty presentations, lively student get-togethers, spirited literary readings, stimulating star turns by visiting artists and curators from Israel and Poland – that extended the Program’s reach and enriched the GW community.

The spring semester promises to be equally full. Heading the list is our annual Fleischman Lecture, which this year will be held on March 19th at the DC-JCC, with whom we just launched a most promising and vital partnership. The lecture will be delivered by the estimable Alisa Solomon of Columbia University who will be speaking about the making of Fiddler on the Roof.

Fascinating on its own terms, this landmark cultural production also has special meaning for those of us who call DC home: It debuted at the National Theater before making its way to Broadway. (See Frank Rich’s evocative memoir, Ghost Light, for the surprising details.)

Keeping things in the family, so to speak, the Program will also host a two-day Sholem Aleichem fest on April 24th and 25th. The first part of the festival will feature, among other things, a staged reading in both Yiddish and English translation of several of Sholem Aleichem’s short stories. Professor Max Ticktin, as well as several students from GW’s Department of Theatre and Dance, will be doing the honors.

The second part of the festival will feature a screening of Joseph Dorman’s recently released and widely acclaimed documentary on Sholem Aleichem, Laughing in the Darkness. To gild the lily, the filmmaker himself will be on hand to share with us some of the behind-the-scenes tales of how he came to make the film.

With such wonderful events on the horizon, 2012 promises to stimulate our intellects, tickle our funny bones and engage our imaginations. Who can ask for anything more?

Pictures at an Exhibition

joselitDecember 13, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

When American Jews first discovered the Jewish community center, or JCC, way back in the 1920s, what drew them in droves was the novelty of its indoor pool and well-equipped gym.

Today, the JCC’s constituents are just as likely to be drawn by the art on the walls as they are by the prospect of exercise. Two current exhibitions, one at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan and the other at the Washington District of Columbia Jewish Community Center, underscore the increasing importance of the gallery to Jewish communal life.

GRINKER_Ukraine_RuwinGrinkerDacha_2008 — Courtesy of Lori Grinker.

At the Upper West Side home of the JCC, photographer Lori Grinker, in collaboration with her cousin, Richard Grinker, an anthropologist at the George Washington University, takes the measure of her far-flung family. Grinker’s aptly-named show, Distant Relations, which runs through January 5^th, focuses on the ways in which her relatives, citizens of Ukraine, South Africa, England and the United States, come to be at home in today’s world.

Whether taking contemporary photographs of old-time images that are evocatively arrayed on a desk much like a still-life, or capturing her young cousins exuberantly at play on the soccer field, Grinker celebrates the Diaspora and with it, the elusive meaning of connection. ...continue reading "Pictures at an Exhibition"

Roots

joselitDecember 4, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Not since the 1939 debut of Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene: A Novel Based on the Life of Christ, has so much media attention been showered on the Jewish perspective on Jesus and the New Testament.

The recent release of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, an Oxford University Press publication co-edited by Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy Jill Levine, has generated considerable attention at conferences, in the press and online. When I asked Professor Brettler to account for the book’s success, he responded by saying that “this is a new era,” one in which Jews no longer regard the New Testament as “dangerous,” but rather as a text that is “important for Judaism.”

Seventy years earlier, Asch’s sympathetic treatment of Jesus rocked the Jewish community, some of whose members all but placed the once-popular author beyond the pale of social acceptance. Abraham Cahan, the editor of The Forward, led the charge, insisting that Asch’s yidishkayt iz yezuskayt, that his claims to Jewishness were actually those of Jesus-ness.

The Jewish court of public opinion indicted Asch on a number of counts. That the celebrated Yiddish writer chose to publish his nearly 700 page novel in English translation rather than in the original Yiddish was tantamount in many circles to his having given up on Yiddish as a viable modern language. Asch’s decision, explains literary historian Anita Norich, constituted a real breach in “literary decorum.”

Bad timing compounded matters. 1939 was not the time to call for a rapprochement between Judaism and Christianity. Worse still, Asch’s sympathetic treatment of Jesus and of the early history of the church seemed to suggest that he was guilty of proselytizing.

Where the American Jewish community virtually anathematized Asch and turned its back on The Nazarene, the non-Jewish community roundly applauded the novel as a “masterpiece,” lifting it onto the best-seller list.

I suspect it won’t be too long before Amazon recommends to its readers that when they purchase The Jewish Annotated New Testament, they add The Nazarene to their shopping cart as well.

Rites of Passage

joselitNovember 27, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

At first blush, most of us are probably inclined to liken religious ritual to an heirloom, something handed down to us from our parents and grandparents. We’re enjoined, sometimes explicitly and sometimes more tacitly, to take care of rituals, to ensure that they don’t vanish. When seen from that perspective, ours is the responsibility of stewards, curators and historians.

But now and again, we’re reminded of an alternative reality, one in which we’re not just caretakers but architects of ritual practice. And when that happens, we come to see that rituals themselves are anything but static.

Take, for instance, the steadily growing popularity of the bat mitzvah. An innovation of the 1920s, it took hold, little by little, within American Jewish circles, slowly gathering momentum and acceptance. By the 1980s, the bat mitzvah had become as entrenched and widespread an American Jewish phenomenon as its male counterpart, the bar mitzvah whose origins dated back to the 13th century. ...continue reading "Rites of Passage"

Word play 1

joselitNovember 14, 2011November 16, 20171 Comment

From last Monday evening through Sunday afternoon, my week has been of a piece. That usually doesn’t happen: Most of the time, Monday bears little relationship to Tuesday and even less relationship to Sunday.

But if upbringings have ‘themes,’ as Calvin Trillin once put it so beautifully in Messages from My Father, this past week had one, too, and that was the power of language.

On Monday evening, the Polish Embassy was the scene of a dazzling presentation by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on the creation of a museum in Warsaw that will chronicle and interpret the thousand-year-old history of Polish Jews. The images that she brought to bear were splendid, but what really packed a wallop was the passionate and resolute prose that accompanied them.

Much the same could be said of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s campus talk on Tuesday evening, where the subject at hand was the fate of objects in an increasingly virtual world. Once again, her artful words and lively cadences compelled the audience to sit up and pay close attention.

And then, on Sunday afternoon, at Politics & Prose, the beloved author and GW professor of creative writing Faye Moskowitz read selections from her book, And The Bridge is Love, which enjoys the good fortune of being reprinted some twenty years after its first release.

All of us in the standing-room-only audience hung on each and every one of Faye Moskowitz’s finely wrought sentences, finding in them the kind of wisdom, humor, affirmation and solace that only words can bring.

A good week, then, for prose and those who keep it afloat.

Close Encounters 1

joselitNovember 6, 2011November 16, 20171 Comment

These days, when digital devices rule the roost, it’s often hard to make the case for the old-fashioned rituals of social interaction.

What seems to be going the way of the dinosaur is the kind of camaraderie and good fellowship that can only take place face-to-face, within the context of the public square and its institutions such as theatres and museums, where conversations are born of serendipity.

crowd — Flickr/Saskatchewan Jazz Festival

Yes, I know that texting is a marvelous way to keep in touch, but there’s something about watching a performance or looking at objects within the company of others that does a better job of bringing us together.

Last night’s performance of The Merchant of Venice at GW’s Bett’s Auditorium was a case in point. Though much to my dismay, several students seated right in front of me spent much of the show texting away, most of the audience – especially those who stayed for the post-performance talk-back – forged a relationship with the play and its actors that was alive, rather than mediated. For several hours on a Saturday night in November, a disparate group of people found common cause in a 400 year old play.

Much the same can be said of visiting a museum and of looking at the real thing rather than at simulacra or avatars. There’s an immediacy to the experience, a sense of belonging to something larger than one’s self, that is well worth celebrating, much less preserving.

But don’t take my word for it. This Tuesday evening, November 8th, at 7 p.m., at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium (School of Media & Public Affairs), NYU University Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will be speaking on “The Elusive Object: The Meaning of Things in a Digital Age.” Be there.