Uncategorized – Page 4 – From Under the Fig Tree

Critical faculties

joselitJuly 1, 2015November 16, 2017Leave a comment

“Everyone’s a critic,” my mother used to say -- and that was well before blogging made it official. She was right. No matter the subject or the limited extent of our expertise, we can’t wait to weigh in and pronounce judgement, invariably leading with our emotions than with our intellects.

Books — Stack of old books. Flickr/Austin Kirk

No one is immune. You’d think professional critics would hew to a different, and far more elevated, set of standards. Two recent examples of book reviews, drawn from the Jewish Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, respectively, put paid to that idea, underscoring the extent to which the book review has become a platform on which to strut your stuff rather than the author’s.

In the first instance, the reviewer spent more time discussing the sources the author allegedly failed to consult than in reckoning with the substance of her argument -- some 300 pages worth. Demonstrating his erudition at the expense of the author’s, this reviewer contravened one of the cardinal rules of the trade: engage with the book at hand, not with the one you would have written.

In the second instance, the reviewer appeared to be at sea, unable to discern, let alone grapple effectively with, the manifold contributions of the book under consideration. When not missing the point entirely, he fumbled, concluding his review with reference to the book’s price as well as its laudatory blurbs -- to which he took exception. Awfully strange, that. This reviewer violated another cardinal rule of the trade: accepting an assignment for which one is either intellectually or temperamentally ill-suited.

Reviews like these are missed opportunities, writ large. By the time we finish with them, we’ve learned something about the ego, but little else.

Fast track

joselitJune 15, 2015November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I’ve been to a fair number of academic gatherings in my day: conferences and “un-conferences,” workshops, symposia and seminars. By now, I know pretty much what to expect. Sometimes, the proceedings take the form of panel discussions; at other times, frontal lectures are de rigueur and, of course, there’s the inevitable keynote presentation. Sure, you’re bound to pick up a new idea along the way or come face to face with a colleague whose work you know only via the printed page or online discussion groups. But that’s about as exciting as it gets. For the most part, academic gatherings tend to be more dutiful than fun.

Last week’s 15th anniversary celebration of the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center -- ScholarFest LOC, it was called -- was entirely different. It offered its participants, of which I was one, an entirely new form of scholarly exchange: lightning conversation. Much like speed-dating, this entailed a swift-paced give-n-take, a search for common ground, between two people who were not only unacquainted but on markedly different levels of the academic hierarchy.

As you can well imagine, the prospect of being up on a stage chatting away without the benefit (read: safety net) of a lectern, a set of well-prepared remarks and the gift of time had most of us -- both senior and junior colleagues alike -- in a tizzy. An exercise in spontaneity -- and in concision -- it called on skills we hadn’t honed in quite some time. No wonder the room was abuzz in anticipation. Much as we reassured ourselves and one another that we were not being graded on how well we performed, we knew deep down that these lightning conversations tested our mettle.

Most of us, I’m happy to say, passed with flying colors. Once we relaxed our shoulders and our perspective, we might even have enjoyed ourselves. Academics, after all, are not only good talkers. As ScholarFest made clear, we’re fast talkers, too.

Late night

joselitMay 22, 2015November 16, 2017Leave a comment

When I was in college, pulling an all-nighter was a real thrill. Burning the midnight oil, I thought, was an exercise in devotion, a testament to the fires of my imagination. I now know better. I’d much rather be sleeping at 3 in the morning than shaping and reshaping my sentences, drowning my frustrations in mug after mug of black tea.

There’s one night of the year, though, when I still relish the prospect of staying up until the wee hours of the morn and tumbling, bleary-eyed, into bed when everyone else is heading to work, and that’s Erev Shavuoth, or, as it’s increasingly known, Tikkun Leil Shavuoth.

An age-old custom that has taken hold of the contemporary Jewish imagination, the Tikkun has arguably become one of the fastest-growing and most popular moments on the Jewish calendar. Even the most optimistic of observers would never, ever have predicted that the practice of staying up all night to study Torah would flourish in modern-day America -- and flourish among all segments of the Jewish population, not just among its most traditional and observant members.

Dressed in suits or in t-shirts, sporting yarmulkes or some other form of headgear, people gather together in droves. Some show up just for the cheesecake, others for the company and still others for the madcap fun of it all. Many of the attendees are drawn by the programming which tends to be as diverse and varied as they are. At the 14th Street Y Into the Night, you can study gemara, familiarize yourself with the meaning of shmita, stretch your limbs and listen to Bach. Further uptown, at the JCC of Manhattan Shavuot, offerings range from Israeli dance and cooking classes to an intensive encounter with Megillat Ruth.

However you explain it -- as an exercise in pluralism, an expression of postdenominationalism, a version of DIY Judaism, a form of neo-Hasidism, an instance of Jewish renewal -- by whatever name, the joint is jumping come 10 p.m. on Erev Shavouth and remains in motion until sunrise.

Be there. It’s probably as close as any of us will ever get to Mount Sinai.

Ma nishma?

joselitMay 10, 2015November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Summer camp has inspired a spate of feature films, a series of exhibitions and any number of spoofs. Most recently, it gave rise to a “convening” at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University. Twenty specialists in anthropology, education, history, linguistics, religious studies, and sociology, pooling their resources, came together to explore the role of Hebrew at Jewish summer camp. I was among them.

In this day and age where experiential education rules the roost, you might think we spent much of our time outdoors, in keeping with our subject matter. We didn’t. Apart from an “ice-breaker” exercise, which took place outside, on a small sliver of grass, we held forth while sitting around a table.

And held forth we did, straining to keep our nostalgia for camp from overwhelming our critical insights. Many of us, it turned out, had a direct and personal connection to the issue at hand, having attended a summer camp where Hebrew, in one form or another, was the language of song or prayer, signage, theatrics, or daily life.

The tension between the personal and the professional added a lot to the proceedings, infusing our conversation about the “linguistic landscape,” IRBs and “translatability” with a spiritedness and a lightness that is often absent at academic gatherings.

I don’t mean to suggest that all was fun and games. We took our charge to explore the role of Hebrew at summer camp with high seriousness, so much so that at times the dueling perspectives of history and sociology came awfully close to resembling color war.

But not for long. Much like summer camp, things ended well, each of us vowing to keep in touch until we met again. L’hitraot!

Embedded

joselitApril 19, 2015November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Stones abound in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, but none bear the weight of history quite like the one known as der shteyn. The stone. Planted in the landscape in 1947, it marked the future home of a monument to the six million Jews who had perished in what came to be known as the Holocaust.

Riverside Park Holocaust Memorial site — Riverside Park Holocaust memorial site/Bosc d'Anjou

Fifteen thousand people, among them city officials, high ranking ambassadors and 100 survivors of Buchenwald and Dachau attended the cornerstone-laying ceremony, as did representatives of the 34 different Jewish groups that constituted the monument’s sponsor, the American Memorial to Six Million Jews of Europe, Inc.

The memorial was never built. These days, the compact spot where it was to have been is encircled by an iron fence. Within its precincts lies a granite plaque, its surface worn by time and the weather, which reads: “This is the site for the American memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Battle April-May 1943 and to the six million Jews of Europe martyred in the cause of human liberty.”

Stalled by both financial and aesthetic challenges, the monument’s fate was sealed by New York’s Art Commission which, when asked in 1964 to rule on the appropriateness of two, admittedly oversized, designs, rejected them both.

Some members thought the proposed monument “might distress children in the park.” Others thought it would set a bad precedent, prompting other groups to insist on planting their own memorials on public grounds. And still others insisted that the city’s parks were no place for mourning. “We feel parks are for relaxation and not for the commemoration of massacres,” declared Arnold Whitridge, president of the Art Commission. And that was that.

Or so you’d think. But that would be to discount the will of the people and the process of cultural improvisation by which a tiny plot of land was transformed into a memorial site all its own. Each year, a hundred or so people -- most of them affiliated with the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Workmen’s Circle and the Jewish Labor Committee -- come together in Riverside Park to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

This year, I was among them. At first blush, I was struck by the anomalousness of the entire enterprise. Here we were, a clutch of mourners attending to the sadness of Jewish history as dogs scampered by, kids zoomed along on their scooters and neighborhood residents were out and about on a leisurely Sunday stroll.

But as I settled into my plastic seat and took in the Yiddish that filled the air, it felt right: modest, unassuming and true. We didn’t need a towering monument to remind us that, in the words of the Hymn of the Partisans, which we sang with gusto, mir zaynen doh! We are here.

Chance encounters

joselitFebruary 9, 2015November 16, 2017Leave a comment

When you’re an historian conducting research, you just never know what you’re going to discover. Archival finding aids and previously published citations guide your hand and point you in the right direction, but now and again you happen upon something completely unexpected -- a juicy bit of gossip, a clever turn of phrase, a little known event -- that deepens your understanding of the past and lifts your spirits. Serendipity can often be the historian’s best friend.

But these days, with the wholesale digitization of newspapers and archival matter, chance encounters occur less and less frequently. You type in a keyword and the relevant text or passage appears. How wondrous! How efficient! Yet, something gets lost along the way: your eye zeroes in rather than roams freely. This is precisely why I encourage my students to consult the original text rather than rely on an electronic version.

I practice what I preach. Earlier this week, while at the New York Public Library, I was gingerly making my way through the fragile pages of the Occident and Jewish Advocate of 1860 in search of information about a specific event when, lo and behold, I stumbled across a deliciously nasty comment penned by the journal’s editor, Isaac Leeser, about his bête noire, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati.

I knew the two men didn’t get on, but this was something else again -- a whopper of a putdown, and in public, no less. Wrote Leeser: “I.M.W. may continue, for all I care, to be the greatest man living in his own estimation, but this much I will maintain, that if I need any information I shall never go to Cincinnati to obtain it from the man who has caused more disturbance and heart-burning than any other Hebrew within the limits between the Atlantic and Pacific.”

This particular passage had absolutely nothing to do with my project, but it made my day all the same, bringing mid-19th century mudslinging to life. The passage in question makes my point, too, for the odds of it appearing in a digital database are rather slender. Under what rubric or keyword would it show up? Animus? Bruised feelings? Competition? Heartburn?

The printed word

joselitDecember 16, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

As the semester draws to a close, I’m prompted to reflect on some of its highlights, from a lively cooking class with food writer Leah Koenig to an affecting performance, at the Arena Stage, of Fiddler on the Roof.

Middle East Librarians Association GW — Middle East Librarians Association display/GW

Though profoundly satisfying, both experiences were trumped by an unexpectedly moving encounter in the library: The Kiev Collection’s display of “Hebrew Printing in the Arab and Islamic World.” Assembled by its knowledgeable and sage curator, Brad Sabin Hill, and timed to coincide with the annual meeting of the Middle East Librarians Association, this assortment of 30-odd books touched me to my very core.

I’m not sure why. Surely, it wasn’t their subject matter, which ranged from grammatical commentaries on the Bible to a liturgy for mourners. Nor was it a matter of their visual properties, for virtually all of the books on display bore little by way of illustration. And it certainly wasn’t the simple, honest and direct manner in which they were exhibited, row upon row on a wood table. No bells and whistles, no pyrotechnics, dazzled, or distracted, the eye.

But dazzled I was, all the same. Perhaps it had to do with their geographical origins, which spanned Istanbul and Beirut, Tunis and Salonika, Alexandria and Aden -- places which the Jews once called home, but are no more. Then again, maybe it had to do with the ways in which these humble texts managed, somehow, to survive the vicissitudes of Jewish history and to come to rest in Washington, D.C.

Whatever the reason, I left the inviting precincts of the Kiev Collection heartened -- and haunted -- by the presence of these books and the stories they carry.

Crossroads

joselitNovember 25, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Last week, I was quite literally on the road, travelling on trains, planes and buses. No matter the destination -- New York; D.C.; College Park, Maryland; and Cincinnati, Ohio -- the conversation at hand had to do with the future of Judaic Studies. At the risk of sounding like the doomsayers who find their worst fears confirmed by the Pew Center study on contemporary Jewish life, I've come away from my wanderings rather concerned about the ongoing vitality of Judaic Studies. The field is currently celebrating, or about to mark, its 40th birthday on many a college campus, amidst dwindling enrollments and exceedingly anxious university administrators who measure success, or viability, solely in terms of metrics.

Thomas Guignard At the crossroads — "At the crossroads." Flickr/Thomas Guignard

For all its maturity, Judaic Studies is a veritable start-up, especially when compared with other longstanding disciplines in the humanities such as History, English or even Semitics. Along the way, it has experienced more than its fair share of growing pains. Some have to do with the circumstances under which the field is constituted, others with the nature of the academic economy, much less the vagaries of the marketplace, and still others with the vexing matter of its intellectual utility.

University deans decide whether Judaic Studies ought to be administered as a program or as a department, a seemingly insignificant semantic decision whose implications run deep; donors, in turn, provide the financial incentive to set things in motion. The faculty, meanwhile, answers not only to these two constituencies, but to its colleagues as well, many of whom, even forty years on, are still not persuaded that Judaic Studies is a legitimate academic enterprise, with its own distinctive methodologies, body of practices and conceptual concerns.

There’s not too much we can do about university administrators, donors or the economy. But, as Judaic Studies approaches its next forty years, perhaps we could do something about our presence on the academic landscape. Much as I’d prefer to think otherwise, we who traffic in Judaic Studies inhabit an intellectual ghetto, whose gates we zealously monitor. Privileging the mastery of traditional Jewish texts at the expense of other kinds of sources and clinging tightly, stubbornly, to a static and internal hierarchy of interpretive values, we have not always been the most welcoming of neighbors.

Before the next significant birthday rolls around, here’s hoping we can do better.

Exposure

joselitAugust 17, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This past week I took a break from writing to spend time with aspiring fashion designers, experienced garment manufacturers, talented make-up artists and successful shtreimel-makhers. Lest you think I’ve gone off the deep end or, at the very least, am contemplating a radical career change, worry not. My keeping company with these folks was an extension of my long-time interest in the relationship between fashion and Jewishness rather than an abrupt departure from it.

mannequins — Dress forms in a classroom at FIT. Flickr/Lill

Under the welcoming aegis of Tent: Encounters with Jewish Culture, a number of Jewish twenty-somethings with a keen interest in fashion came together in Montreal to explore the professional and communal ties that bind them.

I was on hand to provide perspective and context (a k a history). I posed questions, prepared readings, moderated several panels, tied up loose ends and “debriefed” at day’s close. The idea throughout was to engage the participants, or “the group,” as they preferred to be called, in thinking imaginatively and critically about the interaction between the two distinctive cultural systems of fashion and Jewishness, one of which is predicated on novelty and the other on constancy.

Exposure was the name of the game. Exposure, that is, to the vagaries of the marketplace and the dislocations of history, to Moses and Dame Fashion, to Mitchie’s Matchings and Annie Young Cosmetics. A steady parade of people passed before us, sharing their stories, many of which had to do with both success and setbacks, with triumph as well as loss.

It’s hard to tell how deeply these themes registered with the group, some of whom seemed far more interested in their smartphone than in their surroundings. But one thing clearly emerged: When it comes to fashion, there’s a lot more than meets the eye.

Signs and wonders

joselitMay 18, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

As I write, thousands of GW students and their families gather excitedly on the Mall to celebrate their graduation. Flanked on one side by the U.S. Capitol and on the other by the Washington Monument, they face a galaxy of notables on the dais whose words of both praise and exhortation will fill the air. This is Washington at its most Washingtonian -- grand, exultant, enduring.

Synagogue mural — Credit: Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington/The InTowner

A few miles away, at 415 M Street, there’s another kind of Washington, one which increasing numbers of GW students have come to discover through their classes and internships. This part of town, known to many as Mt. Vernon Square, is humble, modest and in a continuous state of flux. It’s a monument to change.

Consider 415 M Street, whose very address -- so direct and to the point -- underscores the neighborhood’s lack of pretension. Built in the 1860s as a family dwelling, this brick row house subsequently became home to a succession of institutions: The Young Men’s Hebrew Association, the Hebrew Home for the Aged, an Orthodox synagogue known, with no muss or fuss, as Shomrei Shabbos (Keepers of the Sabbath). Later still, before reverting back to private ownership, it housed the Church of Jesus Christ as well as the Metropolitan Community Church. These days, having changed hands once again, 415 M is about to be converted into a condominium.

Taken as a whole, the building’s history is a familiar story of changing demographics, urban succession and gentrification. What renders its history more poignant still is the fairly recent discovery of a second floor mural, whose starry blue sky and half moon of Hebrew letters once hovered above the synagogue’s Ark, anchoring it in space and within the collective imagination of Shomrei Shabbos’s small band of congregants.

Over time, a window was inserted into the wall that contained the mural, disrupting its visual integrity. Its colors have faded, too. What’s more, in a well-intentioned but historically suspect attempt to restore the mural to its full glory, a recent owner of 415 M added a winged lion to the display, complicating matters.

What will become of the mural is anyone’s guess. The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington has expressed a keen interest in safeguarding the artifact’s future. Toward that noble end, this steward of Washington’s Jewish past has launched a fund-raising campaign to secure the necessary funds with which to remove, stabilize, conserve and preserve it. Let’s hope the organization’s efforts will be successful and that this colorful fragment of American Jewish history will be able to take its rightful place among the signs and wonders of the nation’s capital.