This past week New York had its knickers in a twist when fashion designer John Galliano was spotted wearing an ensemble and sporting a hairdo that, at first blush, summoned up the external appearance of the Hasidim: oversized black hat, long black frockcoat, black knickers and payes.
John Galliano on the Feb. 13, 2013 New York Post cover. Source: The Oregonian, credit: NY Post Some cried ‘foul,’ insisting that Galliano’s get-up was a deliberate affront to the Jews, the designer’s latest expression of malice and maliciousness. Others were equally insistent that Galliano was simply being, well, Galliano, and that his attire was just an expression of his idiosyncratic style. And still others, conceding that Galliano’s clothing was, in fact, “Hasidic-ish,” castigated the designer for being “tone deaf” and “impolitic.”
This latest fashion flap puts me in mind of an earlier, and equally provocative, moment in fashion history: Jean Paul Gaultier’s so-called “Hasidic Collection” of 1993 in which models strutted down the runway in clothing and hats that bore a rather close resemblance to that typically worn by male Hasidim.
Back then, hosannas rather than brickbats characterized the public response. Although some did take offense, most commentators hailed Gaultier’s collection as a witty, good-humored and clever “send-up.”
A few years later, one of Gaultier’s Hasidic creations was even put on a pedestal at the Jewish Museum’s 1996 exhibition, “Too Jewish.” Art historian Linda Nochlin, writing in the catalogue, applauded the designer’s “transvestite imagination,” and the ways in which he “called into question the whole authoritarian structure of Jewish fundamentalism.”
Then, as now, fashion, clearly, is in the eye of the beholder.
In the wake of former New York Mayor Ed Koch’s death last week, tears flowed freely. So, too, did references to a remarkable number of Jewish words, concepts and rituals.
Ed Koch. Flickr/Glenn Dettwiler Some of them came from the deceased himself. In a video interview with the New York Times, which was not published until after Mr. Koch’s death, he allowed as how he, Yidl Itzhak, was “just this little Jewish kid from the Bronx!” His headstone, meanwhile, bore the last words of the journalist Daniel Pearl: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”
Others made a point of characterizing Ed Koch as the “proudest of Jews,” and as a man distinguished, through and through, by his chutzpah.
Then there was the inside joke made by Michael Bloomberg. At Koch’s funeral at the majestic Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, the current mayor began his remarks by saying how gratified he was that Koch had arranged to have his funeral at “my neighborhood shul.” How the 20th century grandees of Temple Emanu-El would have cringed to hear their monument to Reform Judaism likened to a modest, unassuming and decidedly East European synagogue.
It’s a measure of how far things have changed in contemporary America that Bloomberg not only made the remark in the first place, but also saw no need to translate the word “shul” into English: the reference stood on its own. A second, equally revealing, measure of change was the ease and familiarity with which Mayor Koch’s longtime Chief of Staff, Diane Coffey, publicly announced that “a shiva for the family” was going to be held at Gracie Mansion. No explanation necessary.
Elsewhere, the New York Times, for its part, indicated that “mourners, led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, will sit shiva for Mr. Koch at Gracie Mansion.” Did the Times get that wrong? Or had the current mayor just inaugurated a brand new ritual in which political figures publicly mourned the passing of one of their Jewish colleagues?
Either way, there’s no doubt that, in life and in death, Edward I. Koch took Jewishness to a whole new level, rendering it as public as a proclamation from City Hall.
Within the contemporary academy, the topic du jour is globalization and its twin, trans-nationalism. Whatever the subject -- film, music, politics -- you can hardly have a conversation without dutifully acknowledging its presence.
Goya Chick Peas/navarro.com Some references to globalization seem hard won, more a matter of theory than of practice. Not so when it comes to food, where, in both theory and practice, globalization is most truly at home.
Consider, for instance, the humble chickpea, a global food if ever there were one -- the stuff of stews, snacks and street food like falafel, deep-fried little balls of chickpeas. In German, the chickpea is known as kichererbse; in Spanish, it’s called garbanzo, and in the Arab world, it’s known as hummus, where it also does double-duty as the name of the popular spread.
In Yiddish, the chickpea goes by two appellations, depending on the geographical origins of the Yiddish speaker. Those whose Yiddish was shaped by its contiguity to Russia and Ukraine call it nahit; those whose Yiddish grows from Polish soil call it arbes. By whatever name, the Ashkenazic Jewish preparation for chickpeas serves them whole and heavily peppered rather than mashed and spiced with cumin.
An inexpensive, tasty and filling snack, chickpeas were once sold on the yidishe gas, the Jewish street, by itinerant vendors who piled them high in a paper cone. Later still, arbes/nahit became one of the staples commonly found at the kiddish, the post Sabbath service repast, where they would be arrayed in all their glory in a glass bowl. Hungry worshipers would grab a handful and pop them into their mouth: the Jewish equivalent of popcorn.
Recently, the kiddush was the subject of an incisive and affectionately rendered article by Leah Koenig. Though she trained her sights on herring, egg kichel and schnapps rather than on arbes, Koenig’s account sheds light on how and why we come by our culinary predilections, highlighting the ways in which food orients us as we make our way in this increasingly globalized world of ours.
Gil Nahmany. Femme Fractal (2011). Source: Corcoran The exhibition will take your breath away, especially if your idea of Israeli art and craft is that of olive wood plaques and patinated greenware. Holding its own -- and then some -- with the best of what Milan has to offer, the objects on view are the very last word in innovative and sophisticated design.
For nearly a year now, Bezalel has been making the rounds of the United States, showcasing its handiwork and captivating audiences at venues as varied as Sotheby’s in Chicago, the Maltz Museum in Cleveland, and MICA in Baltimore.
This isn’t the first time, though, that Bezalel hit the road. Way back when, in 1914 and again in 1926, the school’s visionary founder, Boris Schatz, visited the United States, hoping to familiarize American Jews with his institution. “I can go about the country making speeches on behalf of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, but there’s nothing quite as effective as an exhibition. It speaks for itself,” Schatz declared.
Contemporary observers agreed, crowding New York’s Madison Square Garden and then, years later, its Grand Central Palace, where displays of hammered copper vases, filigreed silver bracelets, delicately wrought ceramics, and harmoniously colored rugs filled the space and delighted the eye.
But then, the value of these creations resided as much in their ideology as in their aesthetic appeal. Mr. Schatz’s efforts, it was said at the time, “remove from the Jews the reproach that they care not for beauty, that they can only deal in beautiful objects but cannot create them.” Or, as Schatz himself so poignantly put it, Bezalel would make it possible, at long last, for the Jews to “acquire for our art citizenship rights in the arts of all nations.”
Ever since I began this blog a few years ago, I’ve developed the habit of squirreling away things -- a chance remark, a funny incident, an enlightening news article -- for future use. This week’s post, in honor of Tu B’shevat, the New Year of the trees or Jewish Arbor Day, draws on one of those finds: a piece in the New York Times about one orthodox Jewish community’s sensitivity to its fruit trees.
Borough Park. Flickr/Violette79 Inspired more by the dictates of halakha (Jewish law) than by the promptings of eco-consciousness, the residents of Borough Park, Brooklyn, it turns out, are reluctant to chop down the mulberry trees in their neighborhood lest they “tamper with God’s property.”
What makes this practice even more commendable is that space in Borough Park is in short supply. Once upon a time, way back in the 1920s, its verdant, leafy streets and capacious single-family homes drew thousands of upwardly mobile, middle class New York Jews. Far more heterogeneous than it is today, Borough Park afforded a congenial environment in which Conservative Judaism as well as Zionism took root.
That would change with the influx of frummer yidn, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, in the 1960s. Bearing large families -- demographers claim that Borough Park has the highest birthrate in the city -- they transformed the neighborhood’s composition as well as its infrastructure. A former byword for the good life, Borough Park is now renowned as a citadel -- and an unusually crowded one, at that -- of Orthodoxy.
Living cheek by jowl isn’t usually conducive to embracing Mother Nature, nor is traditional Judaism, which, historically, places more of an emphasis on internal rather than external matters. Under the circumstances, then, the concern displayed by contemporary Borough Park residents for their physical surroundings is to be applauded.
Just when you think there’s little out there that can take you by surprise, along comes the very latest iteration of the so-called “Jewish question”: widespread -- and impassioned -- public speculation as to whether Downton Abbey’s newest character, Martha Levinson, the mother of Lady Cora Crawley, is -- or is not -- Jewish. Casting a gimlet eye on the way in which she speaks her mind, holds her fork, relishes her food and swans around swathed in fur and baubles, some fans of the show read Levinson’s behavior and appearance as that of a nouveaux riche American while others interpret it as Jewish.
Martha Levinson. Source/Downton Abbey site Who’s to say? It’s at this point that things get really intriguing as each side marshals the very latest scholarship to shore up its position, calling on historians to comment on the goings-on within the fictive world of Downton Abbey.
Apparently, I’m among those historians. Unbeknownst to me until a colleague brought it to my attention, my book, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America, was enlisted in support of the position that Martha Levinson is Jewish, through and through. Imagine that?!
The book, which explores the relationship between clothing and the moral imagination in modern America, does refer to a number of late 19th and early 20th century critiques of sartorial excess, including an editorial that appeared in the American Jewess of 1899 titled “Jewels No Longer Synonymous with Jewess.” Ironically enough, its ringing declaration that the American Jewish woman no longer had need for “glittering tinsels” because she had come instead to appreciate the “rich tints of her coloring and the brilliancy of her eyes” reinforced, rather than diminished, the connection between jewelry and Jewesses.
Can Martha Levinson be far behind? I’m not so sure. Scholarship is one thing, television quite another, and leapfrogging between them is not quite as simple as it may seem.
All the same, what with the considerable to-ing and fro-ing over the presence or absence of Jews at Downton Abbey, you have to wonder what’s at stake. Then again, perhaps it’s merely a new kind of parlor game.
Over winter break, I didn’t want for activity. There were people to see, films to screen and a wealth of exhibitions to behold, one of the most inventive of which was a modest but arresting show at the Jewish Museum called Collection Tableaux. Taking the form of four distinctive mediations -- in paint, paper, glass and fabric -- on the role of the table in Jewish life, the exhibition highlighted the connections between the material and the cultural dimensions of the Jewish experience.
Izhar Patkin, Salonière, 1998/Jewish Museum I relished each of the artworks but, as a practicing historian, I took particular delight in Izhar Patkin’s “Salonnière,” a large scale, stenciled and framed collage of a fussy end table crowded with the kind of stuff one was likely to encounter in the determinedly bourgeois setting of a 19th century German Jewish home: books, bric-a-brac, a tea cup and other appurtenances of the cultured.
A closer look, however, disclosed that what was on display was studded with actual historical references. As the artist would have it, the table belonged to Dorothea von Schlegel, Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter who not only changed her name but her station in life by becoming a saloniste of the highest order. On its surface rested a couple of books, one of which, Florentin, she had penned. Slightly off-center, upsetting the balance, the elegant proportion, of things, was a rather unappealing and hulking porcelain figure of a monkey.
An object out of place, the monkey reflects an equally dislocating historical phenomenon: Frederick II’s insistence that the Jews under his domain -- Moses Mendelssohn, among them -- purchase second rate porcelain from his ailing factory, the Royal Porcelain Works, when finalizing a legal transaction such as marriage. Though an affront to both their newfound aesthetic sensibilities and hard won civic aspirations, the so-called judenporzellan was often passed down from generation to generation. Mendelsohn’s grand-daughter, for instance, recalls how her grandfather had acquired a “menagerie of monkeys, which his children later divided as memorabilia and which we in turn inherited from our parents. We keep them as a remembrance of the good old times,” she reportedly told a friend who, puzzled by their appearance in a home otherwise notable for its good taste, inquired after their origins.
Drawing on this and other accounts, as well as on the far reaches of his imagination, Patkin has given form and dimension to Jewish history. Thanks to his artful fusion of text and image, he has placed the past within reach. What an inspiration!
I’m hopeful that many young Jews will take their cue from Patkin, especially now that Tent: Encounters with Jewish Culture, the latest venture of the consistently innovative Yiddish Book Center, has become a reality.
Under the intellectually nimble and lively direction of Josh Lambert, Tent will be holding a series of week-long seminars over the next few months -- one on comedy, another on creative writing and a third on theater -- that enable Jewish twentysomethings to “connect their cultural enthusiasms with modern Jewish culture and history,” as Mr. Lambert would have it. Once the project takes flight, it’s anticipated that a wide array of Jewish organizations across the country will apply to Tent for support to establish cultural events of their own devising.
Culture, in all of its varied manifestations, is the conduit by which a new generation of Jews finds a place for itself at the table.
Remember the plaintive Pete Seeger song, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? In the wake of a recent research trip to the New York Public Library, I’m inclined to sing a similar song of lament about the fate of the book and call it Where Have All the Books Gone?
New York Public Library. Flickr/Justin Brown The much-bruited about renovation of this storied library has been in the news a lot lately, generating considerable controversy along the way. Its champions insist that relocating millions of volumes to an off-site storage facility will result in a new and improved library, one that meets the challenges of the digital age head-on. Its detractors insist that’s a lot of hooey or, worse still, that the library’s plan sounds the death knell for serious scholarship.
Until now, I found myself in the middle of these two camps, cautiously adopting a wait-and-see attitude. But no more. So dreary, alienating and downright disheartening was this week’s visit to the New York Public Library that I now cast my lot with the naysayers.
It wasn’t that this grand institution was forlorn and abandoned. On the contrary. Throngs –- and I mean throngs –- of people walked its glorious halls, giving adjacent Times Square a run for its money. And the place, bedecked with lights, ribbons and greenery galore, was an absolute delight to behold.
Alas, the business at hand –- conducting research -– was something else again. In one division of the library, the distance between the reading room and the stacks is now so great that it takes an inordinately long amount of time just to obtain a book, let alone read it. In another division of the library –- the reference room, no less –- the shelves that once contained the standard reference tools I now needed were glaringly empty. Where did they go? When it came to their whereabouts, even the generally knowledgeable reference librarians had no clue; a digital search also came up empty-handed.
As did I. Having spent the better part of an afternoon at the New York Public Library, I didn't have much to show for my efforts and left its precincts feeling churlish rather than uplifted. What a contrast with the experience of earlier generations of patrons who, heartened by their encounter with the “wonder-world of books,” penned expressions of gratitude. One, from 1903, exuberantly put it this way: “I send you as many kisses as there are pennies in the world.”
For those of us with a keen and abiding interest in food, there’s no shortage of events to sate our appetites, from cooking classes and walking tours to panel discussions. They abound -- and often in the most unusual of venues. Just the other night, for instance, the Center for Jewish History in New York expanded its typical bill of fare with a salute to brisket, “one of New York’s most beloved dishes.”
Flickr/Another Pint Please... Organized by the self-styled “culinary curator” Naama Shefi, the program, “Let’s Brisket!” brought together such redoubtable personalities of the food world as Julia Moskin of The New York Times, Mitchell Davis of the James Beard Foundation, and Noah Bermanoff of the critically acclaimed Brooklyn restaurant, Mile End, to extol the virtues of this cut of meat beloved by many Jewish families.
Mine was among them. My mother, trained by her mother, a most excellent cook, made a mean brisket, which she served with great fanfare on the Jewish holidays and on the occasional Shabbat.
But then my parents, together with my siblings, moved to Israel in the 1970s, cutting short our family’s brisket glory days. Much as my mother tried -- and boy, did she try -- a kosher brisket of the kind we enjoyed at 45 Margaret Avenue was not easily to be had. My father, who typically displayed little interest in the kitchen, joined together with her in making the pursuit of brisket a collective project.
With high hopes, the two of them would set off of an afternoon in search of a kosher butcher who, rumor had it, stocked an American-style brisket. Many hours and shekels later, lugging several kilos of the stuff, they would return to 7 Rehov Mendele, where they eagerly attempted to recreate the smells, if not the size, of their American kitchen.
Despite the tenderest of ministrations, the costly hunk of meat shriveled in the pot, from which it emerged a tough, stringy, unappetizing brown mess. My parents’ spirits shriveled, too. Time and time again, they’d come away from the table disappointed, disheartened, and even a bit sorrowful.
My parents’ reaction to these sorry excuses for a brisket struck me as, well, a trifle overdone. But now, for reasons that only became clear in the wake of “Let’s Brisket!,” I see things differently. I’ve come to understand that it was never just about the meat. Rather, the brisket-that-wasn’t bore a larger significance, signaling the incompleteness of their adjustment to Israeli life.
I spend much of my time thinking about the past. Curiously enough, though, my interest remains professional rather than personal: The maintenance of friendships with childhood and high school pals has never been my strong suit. I prefer studying the past to cultivating it.
Flickr/Northridge Alumni Bear Facts My husband, on the other hand, has made a point of keeping in touch with friends from bygone days. In fact, just recently he met up with a former chum whom he had not seen in decades. And therein lies a tale -- a particularly Washington, D.C., tale, to boot.
Several months ago, I gave a talk at the Library of Congress, at the conclusion of which a gentleman approached the podium asking about my last name. “You wouldn’t be related to Richard Joselit?” he tentatively inquired. When I resoundingly replied in the affirmative, saying that the man in question was my husband, the questioner, with mounting animation, told me that the two had been friendly many years ago, but had since lost touch. “Please give him my warmest regards,” he said, offering me his card and email address as well.
I dutifully reported this exchange, which greatly intrigued my husband. He also expressed a keen interest in picking up where he had left off ‘lo these many years and in short order arranged with his old buddy, whose name was Joel, to get together the next time both of them would be in Washington.
I tagged along to their reunion and watched in delight as Joel and Richard rehashed old times, reminisced freely about their summertime exploits, lamented the loss of red hair and lanky frame respectively, and gossiped about what had happened to this one and that. Although time and circumstance had markedly changed both men, they reverted back to their teenage selves within the space of an hour.
At a time when memory is all too often the stuff of recrimination and suffused with both anger and sadness, how wonderful to behold memory as a form of pleasurable exchange.
