Jewish

Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-first Century?: The Relevance of the Ancient Jewish Text to Our World

mandy — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Lending a somewhat contrarian voice to this collection of essays extolling the virtues of Talmud study, the rabbi Dr. Pinchas Hayman takes umbrage at the question Paul Socken poses in the book’s title: “Why should the indescribable depth, beauty, and challenge of authentic Jewish literature require apologetic essays?” He concludes with his own “more relevant” and “far more difficult” question: “Who needs the twenty-first century if one learns Talmud?”

For Hayman, and several of the contributors to Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-first Century?, the life-long process of learning Talmud provides a safe haven against the threats and anxieties of contemporary life. Talmud study is, as Shaye J.D. Cohen puts it, “what a (male) Jew does.” For Cohen and others, the Talmud is a “feast for the mind,” a “brain teaser” that not only affords intellectual sustenance but also, in the process, constructs one’s Jewish identity. Another contributor, Michael Chernick, echoes Hayman in lamenting a “world focused on ‘now,’” one in which many Jewish people have found Talmud study “old-fashioned” and no longer relevant.

The first (and I believe most compelling) section of the book, though, is written by women who have taught and studied Talmud. As Chernick acknowledges, “patriarchal societies do not tend to preserve women’s thoughts and concerns more than they must,” and he acknowledges that while the view of Talmud as uniformly misogynistic is misguided, much of Talmudic law is problematic for women, to say the least. How do women devote themselves to the study of texts whose rules for women would seem to reverse what many who do live in the twenty-first century would deem desperately needed progress in the areas of women’s rights?

In responding to this question, Devorah Zlochower admits that Talmud study is “a mixed blessing as I find myself engaged in an impossible dance between delight in the tradition and its foundational texts and discomfort with its limitations and exclusions. It is essential for me to understand the texts of our tradition but I cannot do this without wrestling with the tradition simultaneously.” Her description of this uneasy dialog with the past is exciting and unsettling, and it is clearly informed by her twenty-first century feminism. In reading texts on marriage and divorce, and their asymmetric treatment of women, she refuses to ignore the “woman who is chained to a dead marriage by a husband unwilling to grant her a divorce.”

The most universally accessible part of this paean to these foundational texts of Judaism is the joyful and life-affirming process of study, the hard-won, patience-testing, identity-altering commitment to studying the Talmud, page by page, often in study groups and with a partner. The process teaches a tolerance for ambiguity, exercises the intellectual faculties in a way that is transformative, and places participants in a tradition that is thousands of years old. Devora Steinmetz compares the practice of regular study to prayer in a way that all those who interpret texts should be able to appreciate: “But study is different from prayer—or at least from the ways in which most of us experience prayer—in that in study I must open myself to the voice of the other.”

The book is intended primarily for Jewish readers. As Jane Kanarek puts it, “the Talmud gives me a place to be a Jew,” and the collection is a reminder of the “daily Sinai” of Talmudic study, a discipline that leads to revelation and, often, challenge to authority and received opinion. In their polyvocality and contradictoriness, these texts teach the kind of subtlety of interpretation, appreciation for challenge, and an awareness of the “minds of the past” that forged Jewish law and tradition. For non-Jewish readers, the sense of awe and discovery the writers describe as they relate their own experiences with Talmud study, even with brief examples of the kind of exegesis involved, must be taken largely on faith.

The reward for taking up this practice, according to several of the contributors, is a kind of direct access to the divine. While this sort of intense grappling with ancient and very difficult texts is not for the faint of heart, the rewards these writers describe are appealing to all who have felt the allure of textual criticism. Chernick writes, “There is a contemporary sense (malady?) that if a text is very old it must be irrelevant.” An even worse tendency is to view old texts—whether ancient sacred writing, Shakespeare, or the U. S. Constitution, for example—as inviolable, immune to multiple interpretation, subject only to some imagined “literal” meaning. This disciplinary model described here is one that promises to invigorate the study of virtually any challenging text.

As is often the case with such collections, the essays do not speak to each other very successfully, and the order of presentation seems somewhat haphazard. The pieces reflect many of the conflicts that have arisen between Reform and Orthodox Judaism, as well as the broader intellectual divisions of our time. But the book succeeds in making its invitation, and this ancient but vibrant dialectical tradition will surely endure.

Written by: Rick Taylor, January 24th 2011

Eyes Wide Open

mandy — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Haim Tabakman

First Run Features

Viewing Eyes Wide Open is like watching a wrecking ball swing towards a beloved old building from afar; you can see the destructive aftermath coming, but are powerless to stop it. It is a gorgeously filmed demolition, filled with exquisite tenderness and emotion, but a demolition nonetheless.

The story follows the love between two Orthodox Jews living in Jerusalem. Aaron (an amazing acting job by Zohar Strauss) is a butcher, content living a simple life divided between his wife, children, job, and religious study. When Ezri (played by Ran Danker), a young gay man, is in need of a job, Aaron takes him in and teaches him the butcher trade. Soon it is Ezri who is teaching Aaron—opening his eyes up to fun, the pleasures of sex, freedom, and real human connection. Aaron awakens to a life outside of religion, and fights to reconcile it with everything he has been taught. He struggles to deny his passion for Ezri, seeing it at first as a challenge from God, but soon is overtaken by his desires and finds himself having an affair. Eventually, Aaron’s wife and the rest of the community find out, and the two are ostracized and attacked.

When Aaron’s rabbi visits him and asks him why he does not tell Ezri to leave he responds, “I feel alive. I need him. I was dead, and now I am alive.” It is a quiet but powerful moment, representative of the best of the film. Eyes Wide Open is masterful at silences, using as few words as possible to get its message across. Although the characters say little, we quickly become attached to them and their story. This is due mainly to superb acting by Strauss and Danker, who are well cast and very convincing. The audience genuinely feels their temptation and pain, and is invested in the survival of their relationship.

The message that it is impossible for homosexual relationships to exist within strict religious communities is not a new one. What is unique to the film is that the townspeople are not just against homosexuality. They interfere in each others’ lives and with heterosexual couples as well. Anything deemed immoral is grounds for personal confrontation. Thus, the film is not just looking at how religion restricts homosexual love, but how it restricts everyone. Aaron’s wife suffers as much from his infidelity as he does and the torment he receives from his community for his actions seems a small price to pay for a break from his monotonous, bland old life.

Eyes Wide Open does not offer any easy solutions for integrating religion with personal sexual orientation. But it does indicate that greater acceptance for diversity within religion would benefit everyone. Maybe, the film seems to say, there is some way to stop that wrecking ball before it strikes. Maybe the destruction is not as inevitable as we assume.

Written by: Arielle Burgdorf, January 16th 2011

Mesopotamia

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Arthur Nersesian

Akashic Books

Sandy Bloomgarten is a writer you either envy, pity, or outright hate. In theory, she's an excellent reporter, but often, to pay the bills, she resorts to working for gossip rags like The Enquirer. Who of us in a bind hasn't resorted to similar means? But when tabloid celebrity gossip takes over your professional ambitions and drives you to alcoholism, it may be time to reevaluate your work-life balance.

In an attempt to make ends meet after a bad divorce, Bloomgarten takes a freelance gig near her Tennessean hometown of Mesopotamia, where she's forced to briefly reconnect with the strange, confusing liberal Jewish family that adopted her from a Korean orphanage at birth. Her nearly-mixed-race heritage and her family's strained relationship history could have been teased out in a much more interesting way, but is instead only played up for its freak factor and used by Bloomgarten to demean herself through unnecessary use of slurs like "kook" (a portmanteau of "gook" and "kike") and offset her discomfort as the only "squinty-eyed Jewess" most people have ever encountered.

Along the way to finding a story worth reporting, one of Bloomgarten's sleuth companions ends up dead as they piece together the murder of several local Elvis impersonators. She ends up babysitting for a widow with seven children who sing various songs by The King as punishment. She has orgasmic sex with a Hunchback of Notre Dame-meets-Phantom of the Opera ogre who finds and saves her from being raped by a pack of local hoodlums. These are only a few of the slightly less than believable encounters the fill the first half of Mesopotamia. It only gets weirder from there.

Bloomgarten's legitimate problems—such as alcoholism, accompanying one-night stands with strangers, and other situations which call for an exercise in compromised, possibly poor judgment—are glossed over, which left me with an icky feeling. This is no doubt due in part to having encountered the destructive nature of alcoholism firsthand, though I was generally unsettled by the rampant drunk driving, possibly unprotected NSA sex, and pill-popping found in the book. Is it because I'm the straightedge monogamist type or because the novel, with a female protagonist, was authored by a man without an inherent sense of how a woman would act in these improbable situations? Do I simply misunderstand sexual liberation and flagrant drunkenness as gendered? All of these things are possible. I can often lose myself in fiction, but personal hang-ups aside, this was one novel that failed to sell me on the improbably destructive plot.

If you're going to be able to enjoy Mesopotamia for the hedonistic, celebrity-crazed cultural artifact that it is, you'll need to bone up on A-lister gossip from the past year and retain random Elvis trivia to make sense of the puns and wisecracks. Often, you'll feel like you're spying on some sort of Bizarro World skeptics convention with a few too many of the characters tossing around self-righteous anti-Bush, pro-global warming propaganda that the most devoted leftist thinker would find irritatingly cliche. If you'd like to finish the book without being tempted to hurl it across the room, you'll also want to cultivate a bit more sympathy for the protagonist than I did.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, August 5th 2010

Off and Running

admin — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Nicole Opper

First Run Features

Considering the number of children in need of adoption—and the number of children who are actually adopted each year—it's surprising there aren't more adoption stories being told. Aside from The Locator, we've had especially limited access to stories about adopted children reaching out to their birth parents. The delicate, vulnerable position of someone sending a letter out into the world, waiting and hoping to hear back about where they come from, is still a bit of a mystery, and more than worthwhile. In fact, I knew little about it until my own adopted mother finally reached out to her birth parents at age fifty-six.

Not only is that seminal search a matter of discovering identity for the adoptee; it is, potentially, a matter of deep-seated tension between the child and her adoptive parents. My mother actually waited until both of my grandparents had passed before seeking her own answers, to avoid the risk of hurting them.

Nicole Opper's Off and Running provides a candid, thoughtful portrait of such a situation in all its complexities. The documentary follows Avery Klein-Cloud, a charismatic star high school athlete from Brooklyn, who attempts to continue living the life she and her adoptive parents carved out for her while waiting on correspondence from her birth mother. The fact that Avery is trans-racially adopted—the African American daughter to two White Jewish mothers—makes her quest for identity that much more significant.

At the beginning of the film, Avery frankly admits her persistent discomfort in Black social spheres growing up, and later, when a counselor asks, “Do you feel Black?,” Avery says she doesn't know what that means. Her brother Rafi, also adopted but of mixed race, provides an interesting contrast; not only does he seem to have little interest in contacting his birth parents, but he seems entirely unconcerned with his origins. At the very least, he doesn't seem as dependent on where he came from for a sense of self.

Still, Avery's bravery in her search for answers is admirable, and considering how obviously torn she is about her particular situation, she is incredibly forthcoming and self-aware. We get an unexpected amount of access to her private thoughts and feelings about what she's going through, often things that she doesn't even share with her mothers. But as the tension in the Klein-Cloud household escalates, Opper seems to pull back and even gloss over certain pivotal incidents, like a falling out between Avery and her parents that results in her moving out for a period. Opper barely addresses an abortion Avery decides to get when an unwanted pregnancy threatens to impede her track career. In fact, this part of the story is so glossed over that I wasn't entirely sure that it happened.

In the end, Avery's coming of age—and to terms with the fact that she may never meet her birth mother—feels undeserved though still inspiring. Perhaps the fact that Opper has a personal relationship with the family (she was one of Avery's teachers in middle school) can account for her trepidation in handling such sensitive issues. But her reluctance does take away from the moral lesson of the film: that adopted children need to stand by those who've cared for them and showed them support every step of the way, which, in this case, is Avery's unconventional but extraordinary family.

Written by: Caitlin Graham, March 30th 2010

Off and Running

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Directed by Nicole Opper

First Run Features

Off and Running is a very non-traditional coming-of-age story told in a way that deftly conveys one young woman’s unique situation as well as more universal themes. Filmmaker Nicole Opper was afforded intimate access to her subjects, which enabled her to invite the viewer to take a sensitive and warm perspective as the events unfold.

The film’s central subject, a high school track star named Avery Klein-Cloud, is honest and likable. Her story, though specifically about interracial and intercultural adoption, asks questions that many young adults often don’t dare ask aloud. Avery introduces us to her family of white Jewish lesbian mothers and adopted brothers from multi-racial backgrounds during the Jewish festival of Chanukah. At the start of the film, she speaks very matter-of-factly about her decision to attempt to contact her birth mother during her junior year of high school. The significance of this year will be clear to those who have attended school in the U.S.—this is the year that standardized tests and sports results can affect college choices and scholarship options— not a year to be taken lightly. Avery begins to feel the strain, yet perseveres in her quest to find out more about her biological family and reconcile this aspect of her identity with her, at first, seemingly incongruous upbringing.

Along the way, we get to know her adoptive mothers and adopted siblings who all share a similar ‘tell it like it is’ vibe when speaking about serious issues with warmth and humour. Avery meets her old friends from her Jewish elementary school in scenes that further contextualise her upbringing. Filmed chats with another adopted young woman of colour raised by Jewish parents are natural and open—inviting the viewer in and allowing us to experience something we might never have seen otherwise. We also see Avery training for and competing in track meets supported by her long-term boyfriend, and getting to know African American culture with a group of high school friends. She is truly a professional and takes her sport seriously.

What makes this story all the more poignant is that her desire for more contact with her birth mother thwarts her progress in athletics and is detrimental to her relationships within her family. Although there are unexpected developments in this story, Opper maintains a strong, real narrative that shows a complete picture of the desires and feelings on all sides in this family. Opper’s choice to conclude the story the following autumn during the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah is culturally and narratively satisfying.

I found myself empathizing with everyone, which is a testament to the director’s craft. Each of Avery’s brothers shares opinions about her quest, and though one brother is a Princeton freshman and the other is a second-grader, Opper affords them equal screen time in well-framed sequences. Avery’s mothers receive the same fair treatment, and disagreements on screen never feel voyeuristic or melodramatic. There are many television shows aiming for this level of intimacy and family drama. All pale in comparison to Off and Running. Opper has done a great service to this genre, allowing me to reinvest in it as an audience member.

The film looks good as well—kudos to director of photography Jacob Akira Okada and editor Cheree Dillon. Thankfully, there is no voice-over narration, or even excessive exposition: occasional captions show the passage of time. A sympathetic and unobtrusive soundtrack by Daniel Bernard Roumain gives the film even greater depth. Home movie footage and a few still photos provided by this very honest and dignified family round out the story visually.

Feminist? Yes. This is a true story about a young, Jewish, African-American woman who knows her own mind, stands by her decisions, and learns from her mistakes. Unusually, but very successfully, Avery Klein-Cloud co-wrote the film and has actively supported the production process. I’m sure others who see this original documentary will join me in routing for Avery’s and the film’s continued success.

Written by: Chella Quint, February 16th 2010

Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Michael Rothberg

Stanford University Press

In Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg offers an alternative to competitive memory, or the idea that the capacity to remember historical injustices is limited and that any attention to one injustice diminishes our capacity to memorialize another. Rothberg also disputes the idea that comparisons between atrocities erase differences between them and imply a false equivalence. In focusing on the Holocaust, Rothberg navigates between two extremes: the tendency to proclaim the Holocaust so distinct that it should not be compared to anything else, and the tendency to universalize the Holocaust, turning it into an abstract lesson about good and evil that can be applied to any and all atrocities. His solution is “multidirectional memory,” which describes collective memory as “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing; as productive and not privative.” In other words, comparisons can both aid in understanding and illuminate differences.

In part one, Rothberg explores the idea of “boomerang effects” found in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Aimé Césaire’s works on colonialism and genocide. Through these works and many others, Rothberg examines how, prior to a full accounting for the Holocaust and its reinvention as a historically unique event, scholars such as Arendt and Césaire were constructing the Holocaust and totalitarianism as colonial practices, ideas and structures brought to Europe from the colonies. While Rothberg does a serviceable job of explaining and justifying the productive nature of the comparisons in the abstract, he glosses over the unfortunate concrete relationship between colonial genocides and the Holocaust, specifically Hitler‘s modeling of concentration camps after the North American reservation system and his co-opting of the language and tactics of the so-called Wild West. He mentions these links briefly, but so vaguely as to conceal them from any reader not familiar with the historical facts.

In part two, Rothberg focuses on the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, André Schwarz-Bart, and Caryl Phillips as they explore the light the Holocaust and anti-Semitism shed on the Black experience in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. Here, the comparisons are limited to the abstract connections between the historical oppression of people of African descent (including slavery, colonialism, segregation, and genocide) and the Nazis’ racialization, ghettoization, and extermination of the Jews. This section also emphasizes both peoples’ histories with “ghettos, ruins, and other diasporic spaces.” This is perhaps the best example of multidirectional memory in the book.

In parts III and IV, Rothberg explores various works (both literary and cinematic) to examine the connections between the Holocaust and the Algerian War in the waning days of French colonialism and the opening days of the Eichmann trial that would transform the public discourse surrounding the Holocaust. Here, Rothberg does a better job of distinguishing the abstract connections between colonialism, racism, and the Holocaust from the concrete connections between French treatment of the Algerians and French complicity in the Holocaust. Perhaps most disturbing is the implication that a timely attempt to address French complicity in the Holocaust may have prevented many if not all of the atrocities committed against the Algerians, as both involved the same people, places, and tactics.

Overall, Rothberg does a decent job of showing how multidirectional memory can improve understanding through comparison; however, the book fails in a few places. By limiting himself to elite discourse, Rothberg underestimates the public’s capacity to undermine or diminish memory of one atrocity through competition with another as part of the self-fulfilling nature of competitive memory. He also doesn’t seem to fully explore how the taboo against comparisons in general and certain comparisons specifically undermines attempts to make such comparisons productive. Finally, his language is often so stereotypically academic that it may be inaccessible to non-experts. In the end, I am left uncertain whether to recommend the book or suggest that readers attempt to find some other work that addresses these concepts more clearly and completely.

Written by: Melinda Barton, February 12th 2010

Living History: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement

admin — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:59:00 +0000

By James Horrox

AK Press

“I am neutral on Israel,” I said as I helped lay out the first issue of a women’s newspaper one evening in the early seventies. “After all, I am not Jewish.” Like many critical of nationalism, I was silent. After all, comments on Israeli policy can be matches igniting discussions among friends and co-workers that end in bitterness, charges of anti-Semitism, or in the case of Jewish critics, of being “self-hating Jews.” Frankly, only the bombing of Lebanon in 2006 and the invasion of Gaza last winter pushed me into open criticism of Israeli policies and my first participation in protests. White phosphorus, like napalm, is just plain wrong.

Against the current occupation of Gaza, is there a positive aspect to the project of a Jewish homeland that led to this tragedy? The answer is “yes,” if one returns to early in the last century to the early kibbutz movement. For this, A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement by James Horrox has done so much to make anti-authoritarian thought more widely available.

Horrox begins his history of the kibbutz movement with an introduction to modern anarchism, starting with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, credited with giving this political philosophy its name. Also, Horrox addresses the often-repeated libel that “anarchist” is synonymous with “terrorist.” Yes, there have been instances of violence, but the violence is miniscule compared to the violent deeds of those committed to other political philosophies, for example, nationalists. The Jewish socialists who dreamed of an egalitarian, nonauthoritarian society were deeply influenced by Peter Kropotkin, the Russian aristocrat who worked with Jewish workers during his exile in England and spoke fluent Yiddish. Who knew? His ideas about the need for a balance of intellectual and physical labor, rejection of the wage system, and holding property in common were ones that inspired those who went to what is now Israel at the beginning of the last century to revitalize a people.

Inspired by him and other thinkers, they founded cooperatives that served the member/owners in all aspects of their lives. Governmental power (Turkish and British) was weak at the time, so the kibbutzim were relatively free to create these self-managed organizations whose members met each other’s needs rather than looking to an authority. Most of the farms of the first wave of immigrants defaulted to hierarchical management and the employment of Arab workers, replicating old patterns from Russia and Eastern Europe. Many efforts at economic self-sufficiency through agriculture were hamstrung by conditions placed on Rothschild family funding, which required that agents manage the farms and supervise the workers and that a single crop be planted. They were dependent on capitalist money. (Think Bill Gates and his predilection for genetically engineered seeds and you get the idea.)

The Second Aliya, the next wave of immigrants were shocked that the old patterns of exploitation were being reconstituted in these first farms, and the newcomers were determined to be self-sufficient. Their farm, Degania, the progenitor of the kibbutz, was successful and its members ran it their way: egalitarian with a mix of crops. The utopian movement they started lasted a lot longer than the Paris Commune and the communes of revolutionary Spain. Even so, Horrox argues, their influence was eroded by the Israeli push for a state and the machinations of the British.

In this unacknowledged history, today’s radical will find cautionary and inspiring stories, even if neither Jewish nor anarchist.

Written by: Frances Chapman, December 20th 2009

German for Travelers : A Novel in 95 Lessons

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:42:00 +0000

By Norah Labiner

Coffee House Press

Norah Labiner's third novel German for Travelers reads a lot more like poetry than prose. Each chapter, which is framed as a lesson, begins with a seemingly disconnected sentence translated into English from German, before jumping to a different time period, country, character, or all three. Though a somewhat dizzying read, German for Travelers is a unique family history told through a gradual unraveling of a long kept family secret. It might also be described as a nonfiction mystery novel—à la Truman Capote—that takes as a starting point Sigmund Freud's famous (and, from a feminist perspective, rather notorious) Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.

The novel’s narrative(s) center on the Leopold/Berlin family who are descendants of a renowned Jewish German psychoanalyst, Franz Apfel. It begins besides Lemon Leopold's pool in her Hollywood mansion, year 2000-something. Lemon is a famous Hollywood actress; her brother Ben a frustrated psychoanalyst. Their cousin, Eliza Berlin is a gloomy romance writer who, unlike Lemon, has had a lot of "rotten luck". Lemon and Eliza, in fact, are opposites in almost every way. If they weren't cousins, they would no doubt never cross paths, but as can only happen with family, the unlikely pair travel together to Berlin to unravel the unsolved case of "Elsa Z"—their great-grandfather's incurable patient.

In some ways, German for Travelers is a critique of Freud's Dora, and perhaps of the limits of psychoanalysis in that, in Elsa's case, the doctor never discovers the obvious (and ruinous, for him) truth about Elsa until it is too late. Elsa is also turned into a somewhat prophet of the approaching Holocaust (although I actually found this aspect of Elsa's character a little hard to swallow). It is successful, I think, in highlighting some of the misogyny and homophobia of Freud's incomplete analysis of Dora—but the novel is too short, and there is too much going on in it, to form a sustained and coherent critique.

It’s Labiner's characters who manage to stay with the reader by the time the book spirals to its end. I found the dark, world-weary romance writer Eliza and her deceased husband Hans two of the most compelling characters in the novel. Hans is portrayed as a haunted, tragic, yet romantic character—though we are never quite sure if we are seeing him through the narrator (who is constantly shifting) or Eliza's point of view. For example:

He lamented: Time is the fire in which we burn. He pronounced: Every man his own football! He railed: I think of Germany at night: the thought keeps me awake till light. Once as he and Eliza rushed through a station to catch a departing train—he made it onto the platform first—and he called out to her: Run, comrade, run; the world is behind you. (Lesson 13)

I was, at first, somewhat frustrated with the chapters given to the Hollywood-dwelling siblings, Lemon and Ben Leopold, but I came to feel that there was a lot of truth to the characterization of these two somewhat superficial personalities who nevertheless are respectively intrigued and haunted by their family's past. Lemon and Ben's parents were (publicly) an image of the sugar-coated all-American family; one, however, that is hiding a few scandalous secrets. Lemon, Ben and Eliza's grandparents were Holocaust survivors who, as is often the case with many Holocaust survivors of that generation, (and in fact survivors of such traumas in general) never seemed to speak about their pasts. Their grandfather, in fact, after the war, is supposed to have lost his mind, and hence rendered voiceless. I found the way the novel touched on the trans-generational effects of trauma, and the effects of the repression of family history, quite touchingly and intelligently portrayed.

My one reserve is that there is so much going on in so few pages that, at its close, it feels somewhat unfinished. It is a part-critique, part-novel, part-history that can barely hold its characters bursting with personality, its references to pop culture and pop psychology, and its weighty themes. However, I also think this is part of the charm of this book: it leaves the reader thinking and, given its digestible size, this might be the kind of book that deserves a repeated reading—or perhaps, given the book's brevity of words, weighty themes, and lingering phrases, it is, as I first suggested, better read as a poem than novel.

Written by: Rachel Liebhaber, November 17th 2009

The Hebrew Tutor of Bel-Air

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:38:00 +0000

By Allan Appel

Coffee House Press

The back copy for The Hebrew Tutor paints a picture that is enticing:

Under threat of nuclear war and the gorgeous California sun, the two [Norman and Bayla] forge a tentative truce. They may not be learning Hebrew, but through the miracle of motorcycles and the epiphanies of the road, Bayla and Norman just might learn to shape their own destinies. And—for a few precious hours—become a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde searching for a reverse Jewish nose job in the City of Angels.

This paragraph implies that we will spend quite a bit of time with "the two," Norman the Hebrew tutor and Bayla the tutored. It implies that this time will be full of adventure, riding motorcycles, under threat from things unseen, playing at Bonnie and Clyde. It suggests a cheeky 'eff you' to Hollywood dogma. All of this happens... but it doesn't receive the focus the copy suggests.

The majority of the book focuses on Norman alone. He is seventeen, and turning into quite the Hebrew scholar, yet he doesn't feel a strong spiritual connection with his studies. His student is impossible—she wants nothing to do with this Bat Mitzvah stuff. Rather than fight her, Norman sits back passively and lets Bayla waste their time. He observes the goings-on at Bayla's, contrasts their rich lifestyle with his family's poverty, and feels shame. Still, he does very little.

Things and people happen to Norman; he does not effect change on his own. As such, the book is fairly slow, trapped in the tutor's head. His thoughts are interesting, but not really enough to sustain the bulk of a novel.

It isn't until the very last that Bayla takes control and the promised motorcycle escapade—full of unexpected twists—happens. Even here the pacing is strange, with several very important days condensed to a few dozen pages. I devoured that part and then wondered why it was so short.

Appel has provided plenty of material for a longer, more immersive discussion of many topics. The setting alone is interesting: A Jewish community in 1960’s Los Angeles, with the Cold War looming. The romantic and married relationships in the book are all less than healthy. Norman's father is a chronic gambler. What is it about Jewish nose jobs? And what sparks Bayla to go looking for a reversal when her own nose is already petite? Perhaps most interesting to feminists: how can Bayla's parents even joke about marrying her off to 'keep her under control?”

The Hebrew Tutor is poorly proportioned, spending too much time following Norman's passive ambling and not enough examination of what happens around him. That said, I like the initial idea behind The Hebrew Tutor, and I like the look of Appel's other books, which also deal with religion in a modern context. I'd like to pick them up and see how they compare.

Written by: Richenda Gould, August 27th 2009

A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:30:00 +0000

By Wadad Makdisi Cortas

Nation Books

Nostalgia is front and center in Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ atmospheric memoir of life in Beirut, a war-torn city once belonging to Syria and later, the capital of Lebanon. Born in 1909, Cortas died in 1979, but her impassioned account of a four-decade career as principal of the Ahliah School for Girls touches on themes that remained pertinent throughout the twentieth century—colonialism and the founding of Israel, among them.

Cortas was fiercely committed to the education of girls and sought international examples to prod her students into imagining an array of possibilities for their lives. American journalist Dorothy Thompson gave a talk on campus; so did Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman president of the UN General Assembly; Bertha Vester, a Jerusalem resident who founded a children’s hospital; and Helen Keller. “Nationalism as a chauvinist ideal never took root in our school,” Cortas writes. “Fairness, humanity, and principles of equal rights all found deep expression in our collective inner life.”

Her descriptions of visits to Palestine before 1917’s Balfour Declaration—in which Lord Arthur Balfour promised to give Palestine to the Zionists—and following the creation of Israel as a Jewish homeland, are gripping. “For Arabs the problem of Palestine was our common denominator,” she writes. Her position was, in part, shaped by Jawaharlal Nehru’s assertion: “When the British declared that they were willing to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine, Palestine was not a wilderness. There were Arabs and non-Arabs living there, Moslems and Christians… Zionism is a colonial movement. The generous offer of the British was made at the expense of Arabs.”

Cortas’ allies in opposing Israel included Albert Einstein, who favored a bi-national state in Palestine and condemned the violence and terrorism wrought by the Haganah and the Stern Gang against Palestinian villagers. In fact, Cortas consistently sought to include the voices of anti-Zionist Jews in her work, and her outspoken activism always included expression of distress over Jewish persecution in Europe. As the same time, she writes, she felt that it was unjust “that the Arab world was being forced to bear the consequences of Europe’s cruelty.”

Yet despite the efforts of anti-Zionists the world over, in 1949, Israel came into being. Not long after, Lebanon was torn apart by civil war and Cortas’ memoir closes with a searing account of the fighting, 1974-1978. “Hatred breeds hatred,” she concludes, “and love breeds love.”

This simple statement sums up Cortas’ philosophy toward both her students and toward political engagement. An optimist but not a Pollyanna, her example is invigorating. While I wished A World I Loved had provided a bridge between her death and today—an afterward, perhaps, about the Ahliah School and the state of contemporary women’s education in Arab countries—the book is nonetheless fascinating. Full of nuanced historical detail and rich observations, it reintroduces a foremother whose wit and grace help explicate the political quagmires of the twenty-first century.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, May 11th 2009

Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide

admin — Sat, 09 May 2009 16:02:00 +0000

Edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum

Westview Press

In the third edition of this book, Alan Rosenbaum has collected a selection of brilliant, incendiary, and questionable essays addressing a sensitive yet much argued question. To quote Israel W. Charny in the foreword, “This book is outstanding because it brings together in one volume the contentious and often unsavory Tower of Babel of scholars’ voices in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies.” Rosenbaum tries to include a range of voices to create a comprehensive approach.

Rosenbaum says that his goal is to “underscore, in one way or another, the centrality of the Holocaust in any broad-based, contemporary inquiry made within the emerging area of comparative genocide studies.” Meaning, should the Holocaust remain the benchmark for modern genocides? Further, can we study the Holocaust alongside the twentieth century atrocities in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Sudan? Or is the Holocaust a particularly unique case of genocide, and should it be studied only within the context of Holocaust scholarship? Whichever side you support, you would be surprised to find that there are many people who vehemently believe the opposite. When we speak of genocides, especially in the twentieth century, the discussion often becomes personal and fraught with emotion.

For me, the chapters hardest to swallow are those too essentialist and definitive. They try to define exactly what a genocide is and therefore exclude certain atrocities from the category of genocide. This is the case in Barbara B. Green’s "Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide," where she determines that the Great Famine was not genocide because extermination was not the intent. Comparatively, there are essays that illuminate how learning about the Holocaust can shed light on other atrocities and the danger of future genocides, such as in Kinue Tokudome’s "The Holocaust and Japanese Atrocities" and Ben Kiernan’s "Hitler, Pol Pot, and Hutu Power: Common Themes."

The danger of this book is that it assumes a high level of critical thinking on the part of the reader. Due to the fact that questionable claims are made, one must be discerning and comprehensive in her reading of the essays. Do not assume that you can randomly choose one essay to answer the question “is the Holocaust unique?” I would not choose to teach this book, unless we had the time to read and discuss every essay. I would also only read this with a book group that is ready, critical, and understanding enough to discuss the destruction of human life.

Approaching human rights from an academic and intellectual standpoint can alienate and frustrate many people. To aid with a cohesive reading, Charny has included a very helpful list of questions in the foreword to help guide a reading of each chapter. Is the Holocaust Unique? is a challenging and valuable book for many readers. Even if you have your mind made up regarding your answer to this question you not only will find support for your opinions, but also will learn about other atrocities throughout the world. The mass destruction of human life is always wrong, no matter the ideology framing it, and Rosenbaum’s collection of essays helps to build awareness and knowledge about the roots of genocidal violence.

Written by: Claire Burrows, May 9th 2009

Shalom India Housing Society

admin — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:56:00 +0000

By Esther David

The Feminist Press

Shalom India Housing Society is an apartment complex formed in the wake of the shocking riots of 2002 by Erza, an Indian Bene Israel Jew and a contractor by profession. The Society is formed to allow Jews to maintain a separate identity in multi-religious India. The Bene Israel communities trace their descent to Jews who escaped persecution two thousand years ago and were shipwrecked in Alibaug in Mumbai. Since then they have made India their home. Most of the Bene Israelis have now returned to their promised land, leaving very few behind.

Shalom India Housing Society traces the life of the Bene Israel Jews settled in West Ahmedabad. The protagonist of the story is Prophet Elijah, who blesses the life of a Bene Israel Jew with happiness. He also grants the wishes of people in the community. Esther David unveils the way Bene Israelis have adapted to Indian ways of religious worship; every Bene Israel Jew in India has poster of Prophet at their home. This violates basic tenets of Judaism, as idol worship is taboo.

The story begins as the prophet visits each house of the Shalom India Housing Society on the first day of Passover when Haggadah was being read out. The book is divided into nineteen chapters and the author enraptures us by sharing the pains, love, passion, and the loneliness of the members of the Shalom Housing Society.

Though humorously tailored, Esther David has portrayed the fears and issues faced by the members of this small community to keep their identity, culture, and beliefs sacrosanct in India, a land of many gods. The author unveils the problems of being a minority community in India, and their yearnings to return to Israel.

Though the characters in this book are Jews settled in India, the insecurities the book vocalizes are the feelings and frustrations of the members of a minority community everywhere in this world. I was deeply touched by these lines “Where is the home? Is our home within us or somewhere else?”

Written by: Sunitha Jayan, April 26th 2009

Love Iranian-American Style

admin — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:50:00 +0000

Directed by Tanaz Eshaghian

Documentary Educational Resources

Finding love is never easy. But having to deal with what your family expects, especially when it contradicts the current society that you are a part of, makes it that much harder. Tanaz is an Iranian-American woman, who has pursued an education and is now a filmmaker. However, she is 26 years old and unmarried, which is unacceptable in her family’s eyes. From their point of view, she must marry a successful Iranian Jewish man, who expects her to be a virgin and be an automatic wife and mother.

Tanaz, on the other hand, wants none of that and is searching for love (her family believes in making matches, not love). Nevertheless, after hearing this from her family for so many years, she puts pressure of her relationships with American men for them to lead to marriage, which is something many men are not ready for or don’t want to hear about at that age. Over a few years, Tanaz documents trying to find love, both with her ideals and her family’s ideals.

Tanaz focuses a good portion of her film on her mother, who allowed Tanaz to pursue an education instead of marrying her off when she was younger. Throughout her filming, she discovers things about her mother: that she believes Tanaz should have married younger, and that it is important for her to marry a proper Iranian man. After having dating difficulties, she decides to go out on the arranged dates her mother and other members of her family make for her. However, she finds that is not what she wants with her life, even though it is a disappointment. By the end of the film, her mother agrees that is never too late for Tanaz to marry, which is a 180 degree turn from earlier, when Tanaz was told she was getting too old for men to find her attractive.

Love Iranian-American Style provides a powerful insight to how family and culture influence how we live our lives and interact in our relationships. Throughout the documentary, you root for Tanaz, that she finds what she needs without having to give up part of herself. In addition, if you have ever had problems finding a lasting relationship, you can relate to her in her journey.

Written by: Elizabeth Stannard Gromisch, December 20th 2007

Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

admin — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 14:03:00 +0000

By Vivian Gornick

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Few books are so gripping that they change your perception of the world around you. Even fewer books make you see your intimate relationships in a whole new light. Because of its bold, honest insights about mothers, daughters and the growing up/growing away process, _Fierce Attachments _made me re-examine my relationship with my own mother.

Fierce Attachments tells the story of the twists and turns of a loving yet angrily ambivalent mother-daughter relationship. The book flits back and forth through time; moving from the author’s childhood in a poor ghettoized Jewish neighborhood in the 1950’s and then coming back to the 1980’s to visit the author’s currently troubled but successful life.

The narrative is structured so that long dramatic stories about the characters and events of the author’s childhood are punctuated by scenes illustrating the everyday concerns and events of her recent life. Nonetheless, these recent activities – dinner with her mother, shopping, a mother and daughter stroll down the city streets – all relate to the lingering feelings the narrator experiences regarding the past. The "current" narrator often tries to clear something up that troubled her in the past only to be frustrated again and again by her "current" mother’s inability to understand or face her daughter’s needs. Gornick does such a wonderful job of describing the strange characters of her childhood that I feel I know the people myself, almost better than I know my own friends.

One reason the book is so evocative is because Gornick fears nothing, and is ruthless in describing the details of her own childhood sexuality and the way it was triggered, ignored and maligned by adults’ careless treatment of her. Gornick does not hesitate to say that her mother was too physically needy when she was mourning the death of her husband – Gornick’s father – and that Gornick could not let another woman touch her, even casually, for years after that experience.

Sometimes the characters and tales of this book seem almost too perfect, too fiction-like for a memoir. In fact, years after the book was written, Vivian Gornick admitted that some of her memoir had been fictionalized (she was outed by an article on Salon.com). However, fiction or memoir, the book retains a profound rendering of the human psyche, and especially, the fierce nature of mothers and daughters. After reading it, you will have _Fierce Attachments’ _brilliant, burning characters and images seared onto your brain.

Written by: Christine Hamm, December 24th 2006