From Oligarch to Icon

The plight of Mikhail Khodorkovsky raises questions about the place of Russian Jews today

Peering from behind bars, his hair shorn to prison regulation length, Mikhail Khodorkovsky maintains a quiet dignity. Once the richest man in Russia and head of the giant Yukos oil conglomerate, he has become a cause célèbre as Russia’s most famous political prisoner and an increasingly irritating thorn in the side of the Putin administration. His case highlights Russia’s ingrained authoritarianism, an image Putin has been at pains to challenge, as well as drawing attention to the uncomfortable phenomenon of the Jewish oligarch. More widely it invites consideration of the position of Jews in post-communist Russia and why it is that so many of them left. Read more

Occupying God

Protestors Across the Globe Rely on the Language of Morality of the Great Religious Civilisations

Three cities, three continents, three faiths. In Egypt’s Tahrir square, young secular activists worked together with members of the banned Muslim brotherhood in their shared goal to overthrow Mubarak’s regime. In New York, over 1000 people attended a Kol Nidrei service at the site of Occupy Wall Street. In London, protestors camped in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, causing resignations of many clergy and ruptures within the entire Church of England. Religion has been a surprising but consistent presence in the movement, though its influence has often been implicit rather than overt. Whatever the individual beliefs of its proponents, in the absence of an alternative vocabulary, the Occupy movement has been forced to fall back upon the language of religion to articulate its critique of contemporary society. Today’s challenge to the financial system based on values and collective morality has unearthed a world never fully buried by the Enlightenment.

Read more

I Need a Hero

Mel Gibson’s Planned Judah Maccabee Blockbuster Shows He Still Doesn’t Get it.

All good heroes have to change. So all the storytelling gurus and literary theorists, from Aristotle onwards, agree. If you get to Act III and there’s been no transformation, you’ve lost your audience. There are, of course, exceptions: sit-com protagonists rarely change; there are a few great ‘stuck’ characters, like Peter Pan, whose very inability to grow is the hallmark of their identity; and high literature sometimes throws up a clever-dick like Ovid, who wrote an epic, Metamorphoses, in which the hero was Change itself. But, in Hollywood at least, the Rule of Change is a hurdle few heroes can vault.

The tricky bit, for writers, is that their heroes must also stay the same. It’s no good having Han Solo slough off his vanity and cynicism and embrace the Light Side, if it turns him into another earnest Luke Skywalker. Elizabeth I’s transformation from woman of passion to ivory-skinned Virgin Queen only moves us if we know her passion is still seething beneath her leaden foundation.

Seen in this context,  Mel Gibson’s decision to make a film about Judah Maccabee comes straight out of the screenwriting primer. Right now, Gibson is at the nadir of the Act II crisis — what script-doctors call ‘Descent to the Deepest Cave.’ Already consumed by alcoholism and battered by domestic strife, Gibson has branded himself a pariah with his rants about Jews. He has to change. But his redemptive transformation will be entirely in character. For, as with Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, the story of Judah Maccabee offers the opportunity for a rich historical drama, with lovingly evoked scenes of sadistic torture and a hero prevailing against numerically superior but spiritually impoverished foes. Only this time, it will be a Jewish hero. Presto, change-o, Mel is kosher again — and yet somehow he’s still Mel. But what exactly is a Jewish hero? And does Judah Maccabee count as one, anyway? Read more

Two of a Kind

As The Palestinians Prepare to Declare Independence, the parallels between Israel and Palestine appear more striking

After the first Zionist conference in 1897, Theodor Herzl confided to his diary,“In Basel I created the Jewish state”. By the end of this month, Mahmoud Abbas may also declare — in another Swiss location —“In Geneva I created the Palestinian state”. On that day the PLO will present a call for the United Nations General Assembly in New York to approve Palestinian independence. If the Assembly passes it and the Security Council does not wield a veto, then the PLO observer mission at UN Offices in Geneva will upgrade to full member’s status. The very act of declaring independence and the coincidental Swiss connection brings the Palestinians curiously into line with the founders of the State of Israel, whose own declaration of independence was a pragmatic acceptance of the available over the greater ideal. Once aligned, multiple parallels between Israel and Palestine become visible across their social and political structures, some of which date from the Mandate. Through a historical and cultural consideration of the Palestinian’s proposed bid, it is possible to assess these parallels and see better how a future two-state solution might find an optimum modus operandi.

Read more

Walking the Wire

HBO’s hit drama bypasses individualism to expose the systems that fail urban America

The American Dream is one of upward mobility, but also sideways movement. The aspiration to greatness comes with a rhetoric of self-sufficiency that causes people to move along and start again, rather than navigating existing structures. Not only was the founding event of the United States a secession, but the most traumatic moment in American history — the Civil War — was also a failed attempt at the same thing. From Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Splendid Isolation’ to the libertarian Tea Party movement, the United States has tended to view government involvement as an intrusion and to laud those who start afresh over those who try to improve what already exists.

The frontier myth romanticises the West as the place where American ideals of equality, democracy and innovation are forged. Despite 82% of the population already living in cities by 2008, the metaphors of individual freedom are still predominantly rural. The most iconic of these is the cowboy — beholden to no law but that of natural justice — who can ride off into the plains carrying nothing but his six-shooter. If you don’t like the current system, just “get out of Dodge” (a phrase made popular by Gunsmoke, the legendary television show about the settlement of the West) and start again.
Read more

Doubled Up With Laughter

Jonathan Ames and the emasculated Jewish male

The notion that Jewish men are somehow less masculine than their gentile counterparts is an old anti-Semitic trope: Jewish men menstruate, medieval anti-Semites asserted, and need periodic top-ups of human blood.The ancient Greeks abhorred circumcision, and Antiochus IV, the Seleucid king, tried to have it banned. ‘The castration complex,’ said Freud, ‘is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis—a piece of his penis, they think—and this gives them the right to despise Jews.’

No one has done more to spread the notion that Jewish men are not real men than Otto Weininger, the fin de siècle Viennese philosopher who divided humanity into two types:masculine and feminine. His distinction was based not upon biology but temperament, thus the world was peopled by masculine women and feminine men.Weininger (who converted to Christianity) conflates what he calls feminine traits (cowardliness, passivity, amorality, unreason and sex) with ‘Jewishness’. Genius, naturally, is Christian—or, to be more precise, Aryan. He excoriates Judaism, attributing to it all the faults he finds with modernity—capitalism, materialism, Marxism, amorality, decadence, deracination, decline. Avoiding both the ‘biological’ racism of the Nazis that followed in his wake and the religious prejudice that preceded him,Weininger identifies Judaism as ‘a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion amongst the Jews.’ In his magnum opus, Sex and Character, he describes the paradig- matic feminised Jew. It bears an uncanny, albeit jaundiced, resemblance to The Herring Wonder, the boxing moniker of cult novelist Jonathan Ames. Read more

Appropriations of Bruno Schulz

Despite his tiny oeuvre and tragically short life, the legendary Polish writer’s legacy to Western literature continues to grow

The Street of Crocodiles—Celina Wieniewska’s translation of Bruno Schulz’s stories (originally published in Polish under the title Cinnamon Shops)—is the tree from which Jonathan Safran Foer carves his latest work, Tree of Codes. Carves, with a knife—a real rather than metaphorical one—excising most of Schulz’s words to form new phrases and sentences with those remaining. Foer writes that he has long wished ‘to create a die-cut book by erasure, a book whose meaning was exhumed from another book’ and that he chose The Street of Crocodiles, being the richest text that he knows,‘feeling that [he] was…transcribing a dream that The Street of Crocodiles might have had’. Tree of Codes, he acknowledges, ‘is a small response to that great book’ and part of ‘The Great Book’ from which all Schulz’s stories come. Foer takes his place in a line of western writers who have appropriated not just Schulz’s modest oeuvre but also his life story, rendering the figure of Schulz himself as a symbol of loss and absence.

Bruno Schulz’s literary career began in 1934 and was abruptly cut short by the Second World War.As early as the 1920s he had received some recognition as a graphic artist but his discovery, by the psychological-realist prose writer, Zofia Nałkowska, led to the publication of his short story collection, Cinnamon Shops.This established him as one of the leading proponents of the Polish avantgarde, alongside such writers as Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (‘Witkacy’). Following the war, all experimental writing was suppressed by the Communists, who enforced a rigid cultural agenda of Socialist Realism, and it was not until the Thaw in 1956 that Schulz’s works were published again. Schulz’s biographer, the poet Jerzy Ficowski, dedicated much of his life to tracing his lost letters and drawings; he never gave up searching for Schulz’s legendary lost novel, The Messiah, which is said to have been given to non-Jewish friends for safekeeping (or perhaps sent to Thomas Mann, whose Joseph and his Brothers he greatly admired).

Read more

The Drama of Prophecy: On Stefan Zweig and ‘Jeremiah’

When in the late summer of 1939 Stefan Zweig drafted his contribution to the 17th international PEN congress in Stockholm, he called history not only a ‘poetess’ but historical episodes ‘God’s workshops’. It was rare for God to feature at all, let alone prominently, in his work. Since the mid-1920s, Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew, had been one of the most prominent representatives of German- language literature worldwide, yet he had felt that he had no choice but to emigrate from Fascist-prone Austria well before the Anschluss. Was Fascism also one of God’s workshops, according to Zweig? Or were these workshops more like laboratories for cruel experiments with humans, and our reactions to them test cases of morality?

Read more

The Least and the Last of the Jews

Figuring the Jew in Postwar French Thought

‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!’We are all German Jews. This is the famous slogan taken up by throngs of students during the May 1968 protests in Paris.The cry was most immediately the response of a crowd to the news that the movement’s leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been denied re-entry into France after a brief trip abroad. This spontaneous act of sympathy marked an event in the history of France’s Jews, a moment when the Jew, understood as a figure on the margins of the culture, a rootless wanderer, a foreigner, publically came to represent a political ideal. As such, this event registered the history of the figure of the Jew perhaps more than the history of the Jews themselves: a moment when a shift in value, wrought by the crucible of the Shoah, manifested itself publically and politically.

Read more

A People Apart?

‘Ah, the scandal of the Jews as the chosen people!’

Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse

There is a familiar view about Judaism—and specifically its difference from Christianity—that is expressed in the contrast between particularism and universalism. On this view, Christianity is inclusive, embracing all people everywhere regardless of their national or ethnic identity. Judaism, in contrast, is exclusive, a private club for the chosen few. There are Jews as well as Christians who subscribe to this view. Some are embarrassed by our so-called tribalism. Others take pride in our supposed superiority. Sometimes, especially these days, this pride takes the form of a politics that asserts our prerogative and privilege over other groups. But, whatever form it takes, there is a fatal flaw, a tiny ingredient that is missing from this characterization of the Jewish people: its Jewishness.

Read more

Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Jewish Paradox of Russian Music

In his 1931 short story, ‘Awakening,’ the writer Isaac Babel recalls one of the great cultural spectacles of his childhood in fin-de-siecle Odessa. ‘[In] the course of ten years or so,’ he writes, ‘our town supplied the concert platforms of the world with infant prodigies. From Odessa came Mischa Elman, Zimbalist, Gabrilowitsch. Odessa witnessed the first step of Jascha Heifetz.’ Babel contrasts these Jewish prodigies with his own alter ego’s musical efforts: ‘The sounds dripped from my fiddle like iron filings, causing even me excruciating agony, but father wouldn’t give in. At home there was no talk save of Mischa Elman, exempted by the Tsar himself from military service. Zimbalist, father would have us know, had been presented to the King of England and had played at Buckingham Palace. The parents of Gabrilowitsch had bought two houses in St. Petersburg. Infant prodigies brought wealth to their parents, but though my father could have reconciled himself to poverty, fame he must have.’
‘Fame’ is not a word usually associated with the history of Jews in Eastern Europe. The traditional images—pious yeshiva students, enraptured Hasidim, defiant young socialists, pathetic pogrom victims—leave little room for Jewish violinists charming the Tsars and Russian public alike with their dazzling talents. But Babel’s portrait of the writer as a young, suffering fiddle-player derives from a startling fact of Russian Jewish life: year after year, across both the Tsarist and Soviet eras, a constant stream of musical virtuosi emerged from the Russian conservatories to parade across the stages of Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, conductor Serge Koussevitzky, pianist Vladimir Horowitz, violinist David Oistrakh, pianist Evgeny Kissin—the extraordinary list goes on and on. To be sure, not every Russian Jew was a musical genius, as Babel’s self-mockery suggests. But the Jewish presence in Russian classical music ran as wide as it did deep.

Read more

Said, Barenboim and the West-East Divan Orchestra

Since its formation in 1999, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has prompted an energetic mix of rapture and hostility. Founded by conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim and scholar and writer Edward Said, the organisation has provoked considerable debate through its much-lauded aim to bring together young Israeli and Arab musicians to engage in a ‘constructive musical dialogue’. Said and Barenboim’s many statements on the Western classical canon’s power to enable personal and collective transformation have further piqued discussion. In turn, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has become a site (albeit a rocky one) for broader questions as to what the orchestral experience can or cannot accomplish. More recently, a number of scholarly critiques of the orchestra have emerged, unpicking Said and Barenboim’s claims as to Western music’s unique power to transfigure social experience. Does the orchestra stand as a living ‘utopian republic’, as suggested by Barenboim? Or is the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra only a fantasy of social harmony, doing more to gratify its liberal concert audiences than to address the complexity and hardship of the political landscape in which it operates?

Read more

Dispossession, Discrimination, and Civil Disobedience in Sheikh Jarrah

The May 14th demonstration began as any other. Some 400 protestors convened in the small park in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah as they have done each Friday for months. The bus from Tel Aviv unloaded activists from the coastal city; the circle of drummers, the trade mark of the Sheikh Jarrah movement, began infusing the event with electrifying rhythm. A line was forming in front of the stand in the back where activists and visitors can stock up on ‘Free Sheikh Jarrah’ tee-shirts. Yet the atmosphere was more tense than usual. Read more

Walking the Past

I have spent many years of my professional life as a lawyer and human rights activist struggling to save Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank from being used to establish illegal Israeli settlements. But as the years passed more settlements were built and the landscape in the region where I lived was vanishing. Even after it was affirmed in a 2005 report sponsored by the Israeli government that 40 per cent of the settlements were established on land that Israel acknowledges as privately owned by Palestinians, nothing was done to remove them. To my great dismay, law and legality did not prove to be decisive weapons in our battle against Israeli colonialism. In 2008 I published Palestinian Walks, a book that described the vanishing landscape of Palestine through a series of six walks I took from 1979 to 2007. Read more

Loving Us Too Much

A polemical book can be one of quality. A strongly argued text can be solidly grounded in reliable evidence. So I wonder whether Will Skidelsky, chairman of the judging panel for the 2009 Jewish Quarterly Wingate literary prize, thought he had such a book in his hands when he described one of the six contenders, Dennis MacShane’s Globalizing Hatred: The New Antisemitism, as an ‘impassioned polemic about the resurgence of anti-Semitism as a global force’? MacShane, a Labour Member of Parliament and a former junior minister, is a talented popularizer of political issues.
A similar description could be applied to a new book by experienced think-tanker Robin Shepherd, who used to run the European programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and is now Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His work, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, also strongly argued, seeks to explain why Israel is accorded disproportionate attention by Europe’s opinion formers. Read more

The Snow Globe

I.

I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life, then, and a soundtrack followed me wherever I went. If I’d met Amichai at another moment — even a year earlier, when I was too little formed to be so radically changed; or a year later, when I was already well into my solidification — it’s unlikely that I’d be writing about him now. Or writing at all.
I was traveling across Israel that summer, on a program intended to foster a generation of young Jewish leaders. We saw sights, smoked a fair amount of pot, played a fair amount of the Jewish version of basketball (characterized by a lot of arguing over esoteric rules), and endeavored to couple.
In the course of the summer, we met with an eclectic cast of Israeli figures: politicians, artists, activists, archeologists, soldiers, kibbutzniks and theologians. Our summer’s final meeting was with Amichai. It’s hard to imagine why he agreed to spend time with us. Perhaps the fellowship was paying him. Perhaps it was a personal debt he owed to one of the organizers. Perhaps he actually bought into the premise of the thing, and genuinely believed — as we never could, thank God — that we were Future Jewish Leaders, that his words might redirect us, if only by a few thousandths of a degree, toward some version of Jewish Leadership that he found palatable or even inspiring. Read more

The Great Debate: The Latke’s Role in the Renaissance, 1991 Debate

When Dear Abby was asked the question ‘Why do Jews always answer a question with a question?’ she replied, ‘How should they answer?’ And when I am asked do I give precedence to the latke or the hamantash? I must reply,despite being absolutely sure of the answer, ‘How should the university answer?’ This is not because I believe that the état c’est moi, whatever you may think. In fact, as president of the University of Chicago, it is my duty never to think.
Let me remind this audience of the stated policy of the university as formulated in the Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action, published and endorsed by the Council of the University Senate in 1967: ‘[There is] a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day, or modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values, however compelling and appealing theymay be.’ Given my fidelity to the idea of the university and the obligation it imposes for a colorless neutrality, therefore, let me say in the most courageously forthright and outspoken terms that both the latke and the hamantash are simply wonderful.We welcome them to our diverse, pluralistic, and tolerant community of scholars, as we have for a hundred years and as we will for the century to come. Read more

The Great Debate: The Hamantash in Shakespeare, 1965 debate

Who was William Shakespeare?
This question has defied the best scholarly minds for three andone-half centuries. Some critics have said his poems and plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Loxford.Others say that the true author was Francis (you’ll pardon the expression) Bacon.Nonsense! Shakespeare alone, or somebody else with that name, is the true author. That this man of lowly origins — a humble hamantash baker by trade — could have written immortal verse comes as a surprise to some. But not to me. For a careful search of his sonnets and plays clearly reveals the man and the powerful source of his creativity.
The first clue to the mystery is to be found in Shakespeare’s central play, The Merchant of Venice. In act 5, the young hero Lorenzo says to the beautiful Jessica: ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon
this bank! Here we will sit and let the sounds of music creep into our ears.’
Here is a statement that appears to be poetic, clear, and straightforward. But how can it be both poetic on the one hand and clear and straightforward on the other? Modern literary criticism and centuries of Shakespearean scholarship teach us this is impossible. So we must look more closely. Read more

Fish And Fowl

I’ve only been served fish and fowl on the same plate twice. Both times were in the USA, the second was at the J Street inaugural conference Gala dinner in Washington DC this October. J Street is a new Washington lobbying group intent on ‘changing the face of pro-Israel advocacy in the US’. It wants an open debate on Israel, on the same plate as the Israel Right or Wrong lobby, epitomised by AIPAC. As Republican Senator Boustany put it, ‘there must be room for a more open and vigorous debate on the Mid-East conflict.’ For fifty years, AIPAC has monopolised the pro-Israel field. Its legendary influence brooks no criticism of Israel.
Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street’s Executive Director never mentions AIPAC publicly. ‘They can welcome us in; this is a language and a dialogue they are not used to. It will ensure the long-term survival of their institutions and it will mean that the community is a broad tent, strong and vibrant. The other choice is they say “you’re not welcome” and then we’ll either create our own home, or a lot of these people are going to walk away. Everybody loses.’ Read more

Victims Are Not Sacrifices

The unspoken sub-text for Uri Hadar’s elegant, emotive and disturbing piece is Primo Levi’s 1982 comment, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, that ‘Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.’ For many Jews, reading this through the lens of their idealisation of Levi as the most principled writer about the Holocaust, the resonance was unbearable. For those who could think about it and not simply discard Levi as a lost soul, too damaged by the Nazis to know his own mind, the question was, ‘What have we done?’ After Sabra and Shatilla, the relative innocence of those of us who had grown up with heroic tales of Zionism was shattered, and questions of responsibility, of guilt, even of reparation were raised. Over time, this set of questions has been obscured or repressed, then uncovered, then repressed again, in a dynamic that in many ways reveals the potency of Uri’s assertion that what is being enacted is an unconscious transmission of victimhood, in which one people is being made to stand in for another. This assaults a self-image of Jews as ethical, and a religious image of Jews and Judaism as a supposed ‘light to the nations’. As Uri suggests, the ‘need to conceive of oneself as good and just’ results in a terrible twisting of reality in the face of events. Read more

Burning Memories: Sacrifice and the Historical Unconscious

In winter 2009 I accidentally came across a eulogy that I wrote in 1970 for my then best friend, Zvika, who was killed by Egyptian fire at the Suez Canal. I received the news of his death at midnight and hitchhiked through the night to reach the funeral from my army base near Eilat. I sat to write my farewell to him in his family home in the Kibbutz where we grew up. One of the lines in my eulogy said: ‘For many years Zvika and his mother represented the Shoah for me. On hearing the word, I immediately visualized them singing ‘Brothers, the shtetl is burning’, a song that always sent shivers down my spine. Its dramatic melody, coupled with its violent images and terrible helplessness, moved, upset and alerted me to a mysterious danger. Both the text and the melody were written by Mordechai Gebirtig, a Galician poet who was killed by the Nazis in 1942.  Gebirtig’s poem, known as ‘The shtetl is burning’ was written in 1938 about a pogrom that took place two years earlier in a small Polish town. It describes the total destruction by fire of the town. The refrain says ‘And you stand by lame, without offering help, without trying to extinguish the burning fire, the fire of the city’. When I started reading what I wrote so many years ago, I did not remember this image of Zvika and his mother singing, and the song of the burning shtetl had all but escaped my memory. Yet, reading my eulogy triggered an avalanche of memories. Read more

Trading Up

‘There is no Palestinian Mandela,’ writes Ari Shavit in Ha’aretz. Journalists and commentators of all stripes have long bemoaned the absence of such a leader to take the Palestinians peacefully towards independence. But while a unifying leader is lacking, policies to build domestic and international trade may be the more decisive factor in achieving de facto statehood. In the West Bank, an entrepreneurial, well-educated private sector is eager to work and grow. Small businesses in Nablus and Ramallah bustle for profits, selling everything from olives and lemons to mobiles phones and marble. They want economic freedom, and may be about to move a step closer to their goal. Read more

Trauma: An Essay on Jewish Guilt

You can’t escape the question of identity. In 1995 various authors contributed essays to a book called The Jew in the Text, Modernity and the Construction of Identity. Prefacing the collection, the editors explain:

It had struck us, and not surprisingly many others at around the same time, that the category of the ‘Jew’, not the history of Jews, Judaism or Jewish culture, but the way in which the ‘Jew’ had been perceived in modern culture, was relatively unexplored. While issues surrounding race, identity, colonialism, and Eurocentrism have become the focus of endless debate and scrutiny, the ‘Jew’ had largely been left out. It is as if the issue of the ‘Jew’ is just as much an embarrassment to contemporary cultural theorists as it was to their European ancestors.¹ Read more

Putting the Id back in Yid by Stephen Frosh

The Freudian century began in Vienna but found its eventual home in America. There it was that most psychoanalysts wound up and entered the blood stream of the culture so that Freudian speech and American speech — or at least a certain kind of American speech: broad, aspiring, complaining, witty, frenzied, guilt-ridden — ran together.
At its height, mid-century, American psychoanalysis testified to the presence of unconscious sexual or violent wishes that were geared towards producing trouble. Ego psychology assumed that something explosive (the id) needed controlling and turning to good use. Freud lived at a time of social upheaval and genuine revolutionary fervour, in which the masses, like the unconscious, were breaking free from centuries-long repression. It was also the start of a period of Jewish emancipation that shared these same characteristics. The Jews of the West had burst out of their ghettoes like water breaching a dam, and, despite their continuing exclusion and the continued growth of anti-Semitism (or maybe because of it), their immense, pent-up energy was visible everywhere. Freud’s own work depended on this moment of Jewish freedom which existed in complex relation to the ubiquitous anti-Semitism.

Read more

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

In Empire of Their Own, a worthy, scrupulous and curiously dull account of how immigrant Jews founded the state of mind known as ‘Hollywood’— first in America, then latterly throughout the wider world — its author, Neal Gabler, glosses their Diaspora from the European ghettoes and shtetls, thus: Carl Laemmle, born 1867 in Laupheim, a small village in south-western Germany, ‘…prevailed upon his father, a penurious land speculator, to let him come to America to seek his fortune. He would eventually found Universal Pictures.’ Adolph Zukor, who was born in the Tokay region of Hungary and orphaned as a child, ‘…was bundled off to an uncle nearby, a steely, bloodless rabbinical scholar. Lonely, independent and unloved, Zukor, like Laemmle, petitioned to leave for America and a new life. He would later build Paramount Pictures.’ Then there was William Fox, also from Hungary, whose parents were the émigrés, but whose experiences of ‘hawking soda pop, sandwiches and chimney black he would… parlay into the Fox Film Corporation’.

And of course there was Louis B. Mayer, who ‘had forgotten exactly where in Russia he had been born and on what day,’ and whose voortrek took him to Canada, then to Boston where he made money in the salvage business, before heading west to found Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Benjamin Warner left his wife and children in Poland, worked as a cobbler in Baltimore, brought his family over to the new world, then ‘…For years, he roamed the East and Canada, peddling notions from a wagon before finally settling in Youngstown, Ohio.’ Here Warner raised the four sons whose purchase of a broken film projector set them on the road to become the eponymous Warner Brothers.

Read more

The rise of the Jewish nerds

In the nineteenth-century, you couldn’t forward YouTube videos, but you could purchase and mail a wide variety of postcards with exceedingly mean ethnic caricatures on them. The ones that took the Jew as their subject usually depicted him as clumsy and androgynous — falling off a bicycle, dropping a rifle when drafted into the army, wrestling incompetently with another Jew, being upended by frolicking children — wailing, smiling goofily, groping for his glasses. Read more

The End of the Jew as Metaphor

For some twenty-five or thirty years — between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s — a single explosive development in our literature made the experience of being Jewish-in-America a metaphor that attracted major talents, changed the language, and galvanized imaginative writing throughout a Western world badly in need of a charge. Read more

Doing Write by History

‘Nothing to see here,’ said the cameraman. And before I could even object — ‘But that’s the point!’ — the crew had started their long slog back to the U-Bahn station. Their patience had been overextended one time too many.

They were right.
There was nothing to see.
And I was right too.
That was exactly the point. Read more