Uncategorized – Page 16 – From Under the Fig Tree

All-nighter

joselitJune 10, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Many moons ago, when I was in college, I rarely pulled an all-nighter. I had too hard a time staying up until the wee hours of the morn. But now, when my internal clock sees to it that I’m wide awake in the middle of the night, I have come to understand what I missed way back when. Pulling an all-nighter is fun, especially when you have someone to keep you company.

Shavuot postage stamp, designed by Asher Kalderon. Flickr/Karen Horton.

Just the other evening, I had lots of company, when, in celebration of Shavuot, the ancient Jewish festival that commemorates, among other things, the giving of the Torah, hundreds upon hundreds of American Jews, myself among them, descended en masse on the JCC in Manhattan for a tikkun leil Shavuot, which commenced at 10 p.m. and ended at sunrise. An age-old custom that has been revived of late, the tikkun infuses the rhythms of the all-nighter with religious and cultural meaning.

Flooding the lobby, the halls and the stairwells of the JCC, some of us came for the cheesecake, others in search of companionship and still others for the learning, which ran the gamut from traditional text study to film screenings and classes in meditation and dance.

What was most striking, though, wasn’t the wide and determinedly untraditional array of classes or the spiritedness of those who, in the middle of the night, were avidly engaged in a discussion of one fine point or another. What was most eye-opening, even exhilarating, was the heterogeneity of those in attendance.

The variegatedness of modern Jewish life is often cause for dismay, much less the butt of humor. Most of the time, American Jewry shuttles between joking and fretting about its seemingly characterological inability to agree on anything.

But last Tuesday night, when so many different kinds of Jews came together under one roof and in celebration rather than protest, our variegatedness was, quite literally, a sight to behold and applaud.

Getting hitched

joselitJune 5, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Now that June is upon us, it’s high season for weddings — and reason enough for the Jewish Museum in New York to mount an exhibition of ketubot, Jewish marriage contracts.

The Art of Matrimony showcases 30 different versions of the age-old document. Some hail from the Cairo genizah of the 12th century, others from the atelier of a contemporary artist. Some bear flowers, others fish and still others a sturdy handshake. For all their differences, each ketubbah reflects a union of heart and head.

cupid — A "cheeky" Cupid. Flickr/Cinnamon Cooper

Elsewhere within the museum world, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia has gone a step further in its commitment to the ketubbah by operating a Ketubah Gallery where happy couples can have this “monumental milestone marker,” as one museum official would have it, made to order.

And if that weren’t enough to highlight the central role that the Jewish marriage contract plays, both contemporaneously as well as historically, the most current issue of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture features a fascinating article by Jeffrey Shandler on the multiple and varied meanings the ketubbah has accrued over time and space: at once a legal document and a work of art, a token of steadfastness and an emblem of idiosyncrasy.

In his Transformations of the Ketubbah; Or, The Gallery of Broken Marriages, Shandler does more than chronicle the ways in which the Jewish marriage contract has changed its stripes over the years. His account offers a smart and close reading of the mutually constitutive relationship between the ketubbah and its context, be it domestic or museological, a matter of ritual or of aesthetics.

Given his subject matter, one expects Shandler’s essay to end with a paean to the power of love or with a salute to the stability of Jewish identity. Instead, it concludes on a playfully ironic and decidedly post-modern note: Jewish museums are blessed with an abundance of Jewish marriage contracts because of the frequency of divorce. The “Jewish public,” Shandler tells us, “have repurposed the museum itself by using it as a repository for their unwanted ketubbot.”

In contemporary America, Cupid’s arrows, it seems, have found a new target.

Tidbits

joselitMay 22, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

When I think of Jewish cuisine, D.C. does not immediately spring to mind. But that’s about to change. Well, sort of.

For starters, Sixth and I just launched its very own food truck, cleverly called “Sixth and Rye,” which will purvey a kosher corned beef sandwich, a black and white cookie and other longtime staples of the American Jewish diet on Fridays, just in time for lunch.

Years ago, in his luminous memoir, A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin observed that a family visit to the local deli on a Saturday night marked the conclusion of the Jewish Sabbath and the start of the work week.

These days, things have been turned around. If “Sixth and Rye” is any indication, not only does the deli come to us. Its arrival in the ‘hood -- and only on a Friday -- also heralds the advent of the Sabbath, symbolically linking Jewish food to the Jewish calendar.

Speaking of which, every Friday, Trader Joe’s bins are stocked with challah. What a lovely gesture, I thought as I bought one: a gastronomic salute to, and acknowledgement of, the Jewish Sabbath. That may well the case, but Trader Joe’s also makes a point of saluting challah’s potential as weekend brunch fare, cheering that the ritual bread makes “killer French toast.”

Only in America!

Report card

joselitMay 17, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Now that grades have been submitted, the seniors have graduated and cap and gown have been returned to the back of the closet, it’s time to take stock of what the Program in Judaic Studies has accomplished over the course of the past academic year.

Whether exploring the millennial history of Jerusalem, taking the measure of Israeli culture, learning about the making of Jewish books, reckoning with the American Jewish experience and the challenges of memory or meeting weekly with contemporary Jewish writers, our classes have deepened our students’ critical encounter with the richness and complexity of Jewish arts and letters, geopolitics and philosophy.

The faculty, too, has been energized by a wide array of informal, work-in-process presentations given each month by its colleagues on topics that encompassed art, politics and the self, the ancient Near East, medieval England, late 19th century Germany and contemporary Latin America.

Public programs, meanwhile, have enlarged our audience as well as our opportunities for partnerships with neighboring institutions. From the Cedar Film Retrospective, which was held on campus as well as at the D.C.-JCC, to “Tough Guys,” a cooperative venture with American University and the Foundation for Jewish Culture; from the annual Fleischman Lecture at The Phillips Collection to a behind-the-scenes tour of the new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, the Program in Judaic Studies has made a point of extending its reach into the community at large.

As we close the books on this academic year, we look forward to expanding our repertoire of courses and public events for the fall term. For starters, GW will welcome its very first Schusterman Visiting Artist from Israel -- Sharon Ya’ari is his name -- who will offer a very special honors course, “Eye on Israel: Photography of the Middle East,” as well as deliver a public talk hosted by the Department of Fine Arts and Art History.
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Shipshape

joselitMay 5, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Since coming to Washington 18 months ago, I’ve had lots of rewarding experiences, but none quite as memorable as my recent excursion to the U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command at the D.C. Navy Yard, where I delivered a speech in commemoration of the Holocaust to a varied and engaged audience of military personnel and civilians.

Anchors outside the Customs House, Kings Lynn Quayside. — Flickr/Paul Belson

I came to the Navy Yard wearing two hats. One was that of an historian, whose charge was to suggest something of the ways in which history complicates and enriches the world we currently inhabit. Toward that end, my talk, “Past Imperfect,” explored how the past relentlessly and inexorably intrudes on the present, especially when it comes to the continuous stream of new revelations — archival, cinematic and material — about the Shoah.

In that connection, we screened and then discussed Yael Hersonski’s recently released documentary, A Film Unfinished, whose provenance is both fascinating and chilling. At the end of the war, 60 minutes of raw film was discovered in an East German archive. Labelled simply “Das Ghetto,” it trained its sights on daily life within the Warsaw Ghetto only three short months before its liquidation. For years, historians took this vividly detailed film to be an accurate ethnographic record of ghetto life but, as it turns out, many of its scenes had been simulated and staged by the Nazis.

Complicating our understanding of what constitutes reality, let alone history, Hersonski’s affecting film not only draws heavily on “Das Ghetto,” but also includes interviews with five of its former inhabitants as well as testimony provided in the wake of the war by one of the film’s cameramen. This tangle of fact, fiction and personal memory mesmerizes and disturbs in equal measure. A must-see.

The other hat I wore was that of a daughter of a World War II veteran who, as a young and innocent sailor of 18, served on the flagship, the USS Augusta, during the Normandy invasion. My father was extremely proud of his service and, as he grew older, made a point of wearing a cap on which the words “USS Augusta” were prominently imprinted. He would have gotten a real kick out of learning that I had been asked to speak to a latter-day generation of the navy.

From where I sit, it’s not often that the personal and the professional come together quite like this, which made my presentation at the Navy Yard particularly meaningful to me. Citizen, scholar, daughter – for once the different strands of my life were neatly braided together like insignia on a uniform.

Magid

joselitApril 17, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This year, or so it seems to me, the American Jewish community is awash in new editions of the haggadah, the age-old ritual text that structures the Passover seder.

Haggadot. Source: Flickr/Sanford Kearns.

At one end of the spectrum, there’s the stunning Washington Haggadah, a facsimile edition of a 15th century text. Its brightly colored illustrations of daily life -- women stir the pot, an entire family crowds atop a horse, birds chirp, a jester beats a drum -- dazzle the eye and enlarge our sense of wonder at the ways in which earlier generations of Jews claimed the haggadah as their own.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a brand new version of the Maxwell House Haggadah, whose very ordinariness belies its extraordinary hold on the American Jewish imagination. Households across the country may lack a Kiddush cup and perhaps even a set of Shabbat candlesticks, but chances are they own a copy or two of the unadorned and down-to-earth Maxwell House Haggadah, which has been around in one form or another since the 1930s.

These most recent iterations of the text are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. If history is any guide, and I sure hope it is, American Jewry and its sister communities around the globe have, over time, generated any number of fascinating Passover texts, many of which can be found at GW’s very own Kiev Collection.
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Legal tender

joselitApril 6, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Several years ago, one of my students wrote a witty and incisive paper on the popularity of lawyer jokes in American culture. But being a good lawyer, as my current students have come to understand, is no laughing matter.

Whether re-enacting elements of the 1950s espionage trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – a topic which remains as timely and as hotly contested as it first was 60 years ago — or interacting with professor Jeffrey Rosen of GW’s Law School who came to our class to discuss Justice Louis Brandeis’ views on privacy, or watching “Disturbing the Universe,” a rich and complicated documentary about William Kunstler, the larger-than-life human rights lawyer, my GW students, I would hope, now realize that the legal profession isn’t simply a nice way to make a living.

I’d like to think that our multiple and varied engagement over this past week with both the noble and the ignoble aspects of the courtroom might encourage those who aspire to a career in the law to set the bar just a wee bit higher.

Chosen-ness

joselitMarch 21, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

There aren’t too many novels that can lay claim to a second, much less a third, lease on life as both a film and a play, especially when the subject at hand has to do with religion and faith. But The Chosen, Chaim Potok’s novel of Orthodox Jewish life in Brooklyn during the waning years of the 1940s, has, of late, scored a home run.

These days, it takes the form of a critically acclaimed play which, thanks to a creative partnership between Theater J and Arena Stage, can be seen at the latter’s 800-seat Fichandler Theatre downtown.

Nearly 30 years earlier, The Chosen, its palette awash in brown and ochre, was brought to the silver screen, where the likes of Maximillian Schell and Rod Steiger inhabited the roles of a modern Orthodox Jew and a Hasidic rebbe, respectively. The film’s opening scene -- a baseball game between yeshiva boys and their Hasidic counterparts -- remains as powerful today as it first did a generation ago.

And before that, the novel made its debut in 1967. Initial reviews were lukewarm and tepid.

Eliot Fremont-Smith, writing in The New York Times, called the book “thematically overstuffed and dramatically undernourished,” adding, snippily, that its dramatic arc had been reached by page 37. (He subsequently changed his mind about the book, admitting that his initial judgment had been too hasty.)

But the reading public took to The Chosen with great and immediate relish and within a few months’ time, this revelatory coming of age story had become a runaway best-seller, first in cloth and then in paperback. The novel, related its publisher with unbridled glee, “is one of the happiest phenomena in recent publishing history,” noting that it “rings just as true in Iowa as in Brooklyn.”

An exercise in de-mystification, a study in friendship, a tale of fathers and sons – all these are possible explanations for the book’s hold on the American imagination. Whatever the reason, The Chosen is well worth another look.

But hurry: the play, followed by a talk-back between yours truly and Ari Roth, the artistic director of Theater J, is scheduled to close next Sunday.

Music men

joselitMarch 10, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Just the other night, amidst the glorious surroundings of the Music Room of The Phillips Collection, whose walls are bedecked with one masterpiece after another, over 100 people gathered together under the aegis of GW’s Program in Judaic Studies to hear Professor James Loeffler of the University of Virginia incisively discuss how it came to pass that the violin became known as the “Jewish national instrument.”

I suspect this was the very first time that the Music Room rang with explicit talk of the storied relationship between the Jews and classical music. But it’s hardly the first time that the nation’s capitol engaged in such a discussion.

Many years before, Israel Zangwill’s potboiler of a play, “The Melting Pot,” debuted in D.C. Applauded enthusiastically by Teddy Roosevelt, the country’s president at the time, the four-act drama centered on music.

In Zangwill’s imagined universe, settlement houses in the heart of the ghetto pulsed with music, immigrant Jews named Mendel gave piano lessons to American boys named Johnny, while a Russian Jewish violinist composed a symphonic salute to the United States, which he fulsomely called “Sinfonia Americana.”

Here, and elsewhere throughout the play, Zangwill gave voice to the belief that listening to a concerto or a symphony or a march was not just an aesthetic experience but a civic and communal one with the capacity to weld together America’s oldest and newest citizens. From where he sat, music was key to an expansive and inclusive sense of the world.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many Jews took up the violin, that instrument of longing and possibility?

Object lesson

joselitMarch 7, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In my household, Sundays are usually given over to two rituals: reading The New York Times and taking in a museum exhibition. I suspect your household is no different.

But, as I explained recently to a group of GW alumni who had come together on a rainy Sunday morning to visit the brand new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia as part of an alumni series called “GW Culture Buffs,” the mere thought of doing exactly what we were doing had once generated more than its fair share of controversy.

We take our Sundays-at-the-museum for granted; earlier generations of culture buffs did not. Many museum officials and their elite patrons were initially rather resistant to the idea of opening the doors of, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on a Sunday, fearful lest it attract the wrong kind of people—those with “vandal hands” or broken English. A Sunday at the Met, they warned, was a “perilous experiment.”

Metropolitan Museum button — Once upon a time, Met entry buttons were useless on a Sunday. Credit: Charley Lhasa/Flickr

Americans, especially Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side, didn’t see things quite that way and joined hands with socially conscious civic reformers to expand the franchise of museum-going by writing editorials in the Yiddish press and circulating petitions on the Jewish street.

Where America’s elite believed that visiting a museum was a privilege, Americans at the grass roots believed that it was a right, a perquisite of urban citizenship.

Were it not for the zealousness and passion with which they defended that belief, the nation’s museums would be grand, if empty, spaces.