Ratings Game

joselitJuly 29, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

These days, grading is central to the social contract that exists between professors and their students. Throughout the course of a semester, professors grade their students and at its conclusion students grade – or, as the lingo would have it – “evaluate” – their professors, and everyone’s the wiser, and the better, for it.

That’s the theory. On paper, things don’t work out quite so neatly. Students complain often, and bitterly, that the battery of tests and special projects to which they’re subjected do not adequately reflect their talents. Professors complain just as often and just as bitterly that the evaluations to which they’re subjected simply don’t add up.

Frustration mounts. Students lament the letter grade that is permanently incised on their transcripts, insisting that it’s not right that professors have the last word. But, from the professorial perspective, it’s the students who – quite literally – have the last word and often, it’s a real stunner.

Two examples will have to suffice. One of my cherished colleagues, for whom teaching undergraduates about the Holocaust is no mere academic exercise but a responsibility, decided recently to devote an entire year to the subject rather than cram the rise of Nazism, the growing dehumanization of the Jews and their subsequent extermination into one semester.

One of the students, when asked to account for his experience in the classroom, allowed how he was a bit disappointed with the first half of the course because it didn’t really dovetail with his interests, which extended only to the actual killing of the Jews. Still, he conceded, learning about anti-Semitism and the Nuremberg Laws and reading the memoirs of people such as Victor Klemperer who, in poignant and painstaking detail, recall what befell them was “surprisingly fascinating” (my emphasis). Hmm.

My turn. I had the good fortune earlier in the year to co-teach a course on The Merchant of Venice with another one of my dedicated colleagues, Professor Leslie Jacobson of the Department of Theatre & Dance. While she concentrated on the theatrical end of things, I sought to place the play within its historical context and to highlight the critical role played by the Jews in both the fashioning of the play and its subsequent reception.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that they go hand in hand. To which one of my students – a very good, one, I have to say – wrote in her evaluation that in the event I teach this course again, other aspects of the subject should be emphasized, “not just Jews.”

Take two

joselitJuly 23, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Over the past half century or so, Israel has been associated in the public mind with lots of things, but movie-making has not been among them – at least not until recently. As the Forward observed only last week, that’s about to change. Israel now harbors high hopes of becoming a major production center.

Israel's Ma'ale School of Television, Film and the Arts. Flickr/zeevveez

It’s not the first time. As The New York Times reported way back in May 1960, when Otto Preminger and a crew of 150 actors and technicians descended en masse on Israel to film Exodus, “the experience has immensely stimulated the exalted hopes and plans of many government people and enterprising citizens for the further production of film production here.”

Likened to a “national happening,” the making of the film took the country by storm. Thousands of ordinary citizens eagerly sought out Paul Newman and his co-star Eva Marie Saint for their autographs, took party in a national lottery to serve as extras and consulted their newspapers on a daily basis for information about what scene was being filmed where. Exodus, concluded the Times, was “probably the most publicized entertainment project that has come to this country since its founding.”

In the spotlight – and for reasons having to do with culture rather than geopolitics – Israel warmed to the idea of becoming an alternative to Hollywood. After all, it had much in common with the West Coast, from the availability of dramatic and varied scenery to the prospect of generous financial incentives. These factors, coupled with a reputation for being “the most avid moviegoing nation in the world,” made Israel a natural.

While it’s taken 40 biblical years – and then some – for this possibility to bear fruit, how heartening to see that Israel, someday soon, may be known for its movie magic.

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.