Word play

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.

Whodunit?

joselitOctober 30, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Did he or didn’t he? That’s the question that has laid siege to our popular imagination in the wake of the release of Anonymous, a film that draws on all of the trappings of the lavishly appointed costume drama to advance the notion that Shakespeare’s plays were not actually written by him but by the aristocratic Earl of Oxford.

Everyone, from the “groundlings” to the wisest of our cultural critics, has had something to say. Some call the attribution heresy, others deem it innovative scholarship and still others confess that they don’t much care, one way or another. After all, the play’s the thing, no?

For a sense of what’s at stake in this debate, I suggest you make a beeline for GW’s Betts Theatre where this coming Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the student theatrical troupe, MainStage, will be putting on The Merchant of Venice. Under the lively direction of Leslie Jacobson and with the esteemed and nimble actor, Rick Foucheux, as Shylock, this production promises to set tongues wagging.

History on Parade

joselitOctober 24, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This past Sunday afternoon, the students in my Jewish Geography class got more than they bargained for when they attended a matinee performance of Parade, a two act musical at the historic Ford’s Theatre that centered on the sobering events that culminated in the lynching of Leo Frank of Atlanta in the 19teens.

As luck would have it, we were just about to begin our inquiry into the history of Atlanta’s Jewish community, one in which the Leo Frank case figures prominently, when, thanks to the generosity of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington and its executive director, Laura Cohen Apelbaum, we were able to deepen our engagement with this watershed moment in the American Jewish experience by attending a performance of the celebrated play.

I could be wrong, of course, but I suspect my students hadn’t given too much advance thought to what they would see on the stage – apart, that is, from casually wondering how a musical could possibly do justice to the complexities of a tragic, real life event.

But as we chatted at intermission and then again at the conclusion of the play, it became increasingly clear to all of us, myself included, that a lot more was at stake than historical characters breaking into song.

What Parade underscored in a most immediate and compelling way was the tension between fact and fiction, historicity and creative license. Frequently, the play departed from the historical record, either by telescoping events or, more provocatively still, by having the characters wear an article of clothing (a prayer shawl, for example) or give voice to a turn of phrase (such as the recitation of the Sh’ma) that never, ever happened. ...continue reading "History on Parade"

Picture perfect

joselitOctober 10, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Ever since the late 19th century, much of what we know, or think we know, about the Middle East is derived from photography, whose images run the gamut from ancient ruins to latter-day landscapes scarred by conflict, from scenes of renewal and affirmation to those of despair and anguish.

For years, the American Colony Photo Department in Jerusalem was the source of many of those images. The stereopticon slides, postcards and souvenir albums that bore its imprint, and which can now be found at the Library of Congress, focused on the seeming timelessness of the region’s landscapes and the people who inhabited it, on continuity rather than change.

The work of Sharon Ya’ari, one of Israel’s leading contemporary photographers, is something else again. Like his predecessors, he, too, trains his sights on the landscape, but where they saw only stasis, Mr. Ya’ari sees movement. Reverence was the stock-in-trade of the American Colony photographs. Sharon Ya’ari’s body of work, in striking contrast, places a premium on irony.

13190r american colony — Courtesy of the Library of Congress's collection of American Colony Photo Department.

Currently in residence at GW, where he has the distinction of being its very first Schusterman Foundation Visiting Artist from Israel, Mr. Ya’ari will be giving a talk next week – on October 18th, at noon, at the Library of Congress – in which he will be interpreting a number of American Colony photographs against the grain of his own work.

The juxtaposition of these two compelling, but markedly different, aesthetic and cultural perspectives should make for an illuminating experience and one that I hope many of my readers in the DC area will be able to attend.

As we’re sure to discover, when it comes to the Middle East, there’s always more than meets the eye.

Not in my backyard

joselitOctober 2, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

What a difference a year makes. Last autumn, New York City was all agog at the prospect of “Sukkah City” taking root in Union Square Park. Eleven different designs of an outdoor hut, the fruits of an international design competition, were scattered around the perimeter of the park, drawing thousands of visitors and generating considerable press, all of it favorable.

But this fall, in striking contrast, an attempt to install a sukkah in nearby TriBeCa’s Duane Park by a local Chabad rabbi and his wife kicked up quite a rumpus of disapproval.

In lieu of a chorus of hosannas, of sprightly talk about open source tradition and artistic innovation, the dominant register was of negativity and resistance. Citing the First Amendment, opponents of the sukkah claimed that the structure ran the risk of violating the separation of church and state. “I don’t want to encourage having all sorts of religious things in our public parks,” stated a neighborhood resident.

Perhaps it was too much to hope that “Sukkah City” might betoken a sea change in the public’s embrace of the ancient ritual structure. After all, for much of their history, urban American Jews found it much too difficult to erect a sukkah of their own, preferring to rely on that of their local synagogue.

When American Jews first lived in tenements, there was hardly any room for a sukkah, save for an uncongenial fire escape. Later still, when upwardly mobile American Jews moved to well-equipped apartment houses, erecting a sukkah clashed too strenuously with their newly acquired bourgeois norms of discretion and politesse. And these days, amid heightened concern about the establishment of religion, a public sukkah continues to be somewhat of a shaky proposition.

Still, as things turned out, there is room for common ground. Happily, the residents of TriBeCa secured an alternative venue for the Chabad sukkah. Instead of nesting in a public space, it found a temporary home on an empty lot, the private property of a local real estate company with a strong sense of neighborliness.

History with a Difference

joselitSeptember 26, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

There seems to be no end to the writing of history books. Kindles, Nooks and the corner bookshop are thick with them. So numerous are brand new histories of this, that and the other thing that they threaten to crowd out and supplant the work of previous generations.

But not Oscar Handlin’s celebrated 1951 account of the immigrant experience, which he evocatively titled The Uprooted. In its 300 pages, Handlin, who died just the other day at the age of 95, put immigration at the center of modern America rather than at its margins, where it had long resided, and in the process created a brand new field: immigration history.

In prose that often verged on the lyrical – or, as one enamored reviewer characterized it, writing with the “grave, moving eloquence of the Psalmist” – the Brooklyn-born, Harvard historian trained his sights on the cultural, economic, religious and social costs of transplantation, on the “thousand trials” that awaited immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ireland and Italy.

Ellis Island — Flickr/Wagner T. Cassimiro "Aranha"

For several generations, The Uprooted was required reading for those with a professional interest in American history. It continues to be read today, more than sixty years later. Most recently, one of my Ph.D. students prepared for her comprehensive examinations by closely scrutinizing the text.

When it first appeared, Handlin’s account was hailed for its narrative sweep, command of historical sources and sensitivity to those at the grass roots. These days, its unblinking emphasis on deracination is what makes waves, as a latter generation of historians, schooled in new ways of thinking about history, are more inclined to highlight continuity rather than rupture between the Old World and the New.

No matter. The Uprooted and with it, the legacy of Oscar Handlin, remains intact. As the New York Times put it way back when in the early 1950s, this was “history with a difference.”

Civics 101

joselitSeptember 20, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled around America in the 1830s, what most impressed him was the nation’s penchant for sociability. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations … religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive,” he wrote bemusedly. “The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes.” Antebellum America was nothing if not a nation of joiners.

The keen-eyed Frenchman did not have America’s Jews in his sights when he put pen to paper, but he might well have. In the years that followed the publication of Democracy in America, they took to organizational life like a duck to water. From coast to coast, the American Jewish landscape was awash in voluntary associations.

A partial list, culled at random from the American Jewish Year Book of 1910, ran to hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish organizations, most of them local. Their ranks included the Hebrew Ladles Helping Hand of Lynn, Massachusetts, and the Hebrew Socialist Club of Salem; the Sons of Moses in St. Paul, the Fraternity of Peace in St. Louis and the Hungarian Brotherly Love Benevolent Society of Yorkville, New York.
...continue reading "Civics 101"

Cain’t say no 1

joselitSeptember 14, 2011November 16, 20171 Comment

Like so many Americans, I was not quite sure how to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Listening to Barber’s Adagio for Strings was one option; attending to the Times’ commemorative edition was another and watching television coverage of the day’s events was a third. But none of these quite satisfied.

Little wonder, then, that when the chance to see the Arena Stage’s production of Oklahoma! presented itself, I jumped at the opportunity.

As it turned out, I wasn’t alone. The theater was packed with a heterogeneous mix of Washingtonians: grandparents with their knowing preteen grandchildren in tow; eager, thirty-something, parents with young children; veteran theater-goers.

The production had the same galvanizing effect on its audience that I suspect it did way back when, in 1943, it first debuted on Broadway, at the height of World War II. We clapped, cheered, bounced up and down in our seats and sang enthusiastically, if off-key, along with the cast.

Then, as now, at a time when things looked awfully bleak, the wit, energy and sheer hopefulness of Oklahoma! offered a reassuring counter-narrative. Then, as now, disparate bands of Americans sought the consolations and supports of community through music, dance and theater.

As an added bonus, I emerged from my encounter with the play even more resolute in my commitment to establishing a MA in Jewish Cultural Arts at GW. Taking my cue from one of the production’s signature songs, “I cain’t say no” to the manifold possibilities this program presents.

GW’s MA in Jewish Cultural Arts -- the very first of its kind in the entire nation -- will make its debut in the fall of next year. Heralding the centrality of culture -- of the visual as well as the performing arts -- to the Jewish experience, it not only enlarges the repertoire of sources on which the academic field of Judaic Studies rests but also creates an infrastructure -- an intellectual community -- given over generously and unstintingly to a critical engagement with the arts.

Just as Oklahoma! set in motion a new direction for the American theater, this MA program, I hope, will offer a new and equally compelling pathway to the study, preservation and promotion of Jewish culture.

Won’t you join me in spreading the word?

Trees grow in Brooklyn

joselitSeptember 6, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In the American Jewish imagination, the curiously named neighborhood known as East New York, Brooklyn, along with that of adjacent Brownsville, are most often associated with the nefarious activities of Murder, Inc. From its headquarters in a candy store at the intersection of Livonia and Saratoga Streets, this Brooklyn gang engaged in loan-sharking, racketeering and murder-for hire, bringing shame and notoriety to the Jewish community.

More benignly, East New York also figured in Alfred Kazin’s lyrical and evocative memoir, A Walker in the City. The end of the line, quite literally, it was the place where the subway quit, the place for those “who lived still beyond.” To get from Manhattan to East New York, Kazin writes, was a matter of a “long pent-up subway ride.”

An immigrant Jewish neighborhood, East New York was also home to my grandparents who, on Schenk Avenue in a brownstone that had seen better days, raised my father and his six siblings, all of whom took off for greener pastures just as soon as they could.

But these days, greener pastures can actually be found in East New York, where a non-profit group called East New York Farms has been busy cultivating a half-acre plot of farmland – and in the middle of Schenk Avenue, no less.
Providing the residents of the neighborhood with affordable and healthy food, promoting economic development and generating a sense of community are just some of the organization’s worthy objectives.

How do you like them apples?