Signing On

As an autograph collector, I can honestly say that all my favourite celebrities are dead. I like them that way: with their auras hermetically sealed. It’s only when celebrities die that we can start to appreciate their lives: what they did for us, how they suffered for their fame. In autograph terms, the death of the celebrity is key: the value of their signature depends on how early and tragic this is.

I used to like my celebrities alive. In fact, I liked them best when they were very, very old. As a star-struck child, I owned a celebrity map of Beverly Hills, and I used to draw my finger across the streets at bedtime, where their homes were marked with little stars. I imagined the security necessary to maintain their privacy. I pictured Actors’ Retirement Homes filled with superstars: George Burns striking up ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’ on a Steinway upright, while Lucille Ball and Gloria Swanson gassed on the sofa, pumped up with make-up. I was not so much concerned with their quality of life, just comforted by the fact that they were continuing. Read more

Salt Beef in Soho + Channukah in Budapest

Salt Beef in Soho



On a London street nowhere near the Jewish heartland, next to a restaurant specialising in pork and opposite a musical about a green monster, a ‘kind of Jewish deli with cocktails’, has bloomed. In a sense, E. Mishkin has been here a while: the distressed planks coating the walls were once floorboards, and the net curtains and squeezy ketchup bottles are as retro as the ‘On Air’ sign above the booth at the back. In another sense, though, he was never here at all. Ask about Mr Mishkin and you’ll get the story of Ezra, a Ukrainian Jew who fled the 1919 pogrom and opened a café in London where his fellow immigrants could get a taste of home. The pogrom is fact, but Ezra Mishkin, like this joint, is the creation of Russell Norman, owner of those famously Jewish restaurants Polpo, Spuntino, Da Polpo and Polpetto.

Norman wanted a name like the old East London cafés but his own isn’t up to the job: if he had been lurking in the Ukraine when the Cossacks galloped in, they would have swerved past him. So, why does a non-Jew known for hip Italian food open a Jewish deli serving Polish pork hotdogs? Is London en route to New York- style culinary integration? A deli has just opened in Marylebone; there’s even a Jewish pop-up restaurant. But both of those are kosher, in every sense. Mishkins is something else. Read more

The Complete History of the Jewish People Starting with David Schneider

Its over. I’m old. I write to you now as an old person. Amend the census, tick the age box marked ‘35 to what-does-it-matter-he’s-pastit-now’, pass on my number to cold-callers with special offers for careful drivers of a certain age. I’m now officially old.

How do I know? Was it Google’s new social network, Google Plus — the first time the internet’s left me feeling I can’t quite keep up? I, the early adopter who mocks Apple’s latest products by typing ‘Sent from my iPad 5’ at the bottom of my emails. Or was it when I saw the latest picture of Sinead O’Connor, once the absolute symbol for me of beauty and rebellion? I’d have married her like a shot in the 80s, if only to hear my worried parents ask: “O’Connor? That’s a Sephardi name, right?” But now time has taken its toll (and its surcharge. And VAT. And from the look of her, several stealth taxes as well). Sinead looks like a frazzled mum who’s forgotten to pick up her youngest from dance class because she was so busy trying to gether eldest to tidy her room and stop writing fan mail to the Pope (ah, how each generation finds its own way to rebel).

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Dispatches

The Big Cheese

The wild, top-hat-and-jeans-clad compére jumped onto the stage to announce the 20 semi-finalists of the second annual New York Cheesemonger Invitational. The crowd roared approval at those über-mongers who could detect age, nationality, name and bloom. For this, the third of four rounds, each contestant was to cut two 1/4 pound chunks of cheese and wrap each in cheese paper in under a minute. To mad applause, the first woman cheesemonger took to the stage. The clock began to tick. She estimated and sliced cheese amounts, posed triumphantly for the audience when her scale read 0.27lbs and began to wrap vigorously.

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What is Our Security?

On the self-destructive quest to feel secure

 

‘Security. A word that these days seems simultaneously both to conceal so much and to reveal so much.’ – John Berger

A man is told that he will die from a fall. Such is the terror this generates in him that he decides never to leave his home again. But confining himself to his house doesn’t remove the fear.A sense of security is not so easily gained, for fear has its own authority. He could, after all, fall down the stairs—he lives in a mansion and there are many flights of stairs. So he decides,‘for safety’s sake’, to confine himself to the ground floor. But soon he realises that the floors downstairs are polished: couldn’t he easily slip and break his neck? The dining-room, however, is fully carpeted, so he decides to live only in that room. Ordering his staff to serve his meals there, he never leaves the room. Yet still he feels unsafe: he thinks,‘I could still stumble and fall, hit my head and die’. So he orders an armchair to be placed in the middle of the room, away from all sharp objects and hard surfaces and—in a moment of triumphant certitude —insists that his servants tie him down into the chair. A sense of security descends. No danger now of a fall, he thinks. The loss of his freedoms is nothing compared to the relief that his fear can never come true. But when he hears the rustling above him, and feels grains of plaster on his skin, he looks up and sees the ancient crystal chandelier over his chair unmoor itself from its casing and begin to fall towards him…

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Buying Hitler

On the psychpathology of the collector and the attraction of dictator art

Anyone like to buy Schindler’s list? I don’t mean a DVD of the film: I mean Schindler’s list. It’s available for $1.2 million on a U.S. website, apparently ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’. But what kind of person would take such an opportunity? The dedicated collector of Holocaustiana? Someone seeking that elusive dinner party ice-breaker? Or a different kind of collector altogether, the military history kind? There are other more sinister things on the market too: Dr. Mengele’s diary, anyone?

As a Jewish manuscript dealer, there can be those awkward moments when autograph collecting merges effortlessly into Neo-Nazism. When that Floridian collector turned out to have a moat around his house, guns and fourteen signed portraits of Hitler on his wall, for instance. Oh, and that time when a young German dealer added to his display a schoolbook penned by the nine-year-old Heinrich Himmler. It’s hard to know how to respond at such moments—produce a Magen David and twiddle it nervously, smile at the embarrassing whiff of anti-Semitism and hope that it will all go away, or just call the police?

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Amos, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Bob

One of the first original compositions that the young Bob Dylan debuted in folk clubs in New York upon arriving from Minnesota in 1961 was ‘Talkin’ Hava Negilah Blues.’ Introduced by Dylan as ‘a foreign song I learned in Utah,’ the song consists almost entirely of the singer trying to get the words ‘hava nagila’ out of his mouth. ‘Ha… Va…ha…Va… neh … gee…lah,’ he sings, as if the words were strange and foreign, before putting it all together in a slow and carefully enunciated ‘Ha-va Na-gee-lah,’ immediately followed by an anomalous yodel.

What this self-mockery belied was a profound connection to Jewish tradition, one that characterised and influenced Dylan’s entire oeuvre. His work stems from the ancient tradition of Jewish prophecy. The prophet, or navi, was a truth-teller to and an admonisher of his people: literally, a ‘proclaimer.’ The Prophets, whose sermons and declarations are collected in the biblical books of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others, were, in a sense, social critics—the original protest singers, if you will. They warned against backsliding, immorality and lawbreaking and foretold the bloody consequences of this behaviour. The torah of Dylan and the Torah of Moses share many overlaps: in the book of Prophets, Ezekiel recounts a vision of angels: ‘The soles of their feet… their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches’ [Ezekiel 1:7, 13]. In ‘The Wicked Messenger,’ a song about a scorned prophet from his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, Dylan sings, ‘The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.’ In Exodus 33:20, G-d warns Moses, ‘No human can see my face and live’ a warning repeated in the chorus of ‘I and I,’ on the 1983 album, Infidels:

I and I

One says to the other

No man sees my face and lives.

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Kill Him First

The people here are not aware of the signifi cance of their acts. They only think they have turned Hebrew into a secular language. That they have released the apocalyptic sting out of it… but God will not remain silent in the language in which he was invoked again and again, thousands of times, to return into our lives.

So wrote Gershom Scholem to his colleague Franz Rosenzweig in his 1926 letter, ‘A Confession about our Language’. Scholem, a young Jewish philosopher from Berlin, had just immigrated to Palestine. He was among the founders of Brit Shalom, an organisation that supported the establishment of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state, and was concerned not only by the dominant political trends of Zionism, but with its very tongue, with the project of reviving, modernising, and secularising Hebrew. Scholem believed that recruiting the sacred biblical language for the modern political Zionist cause would plant a messianic ticking bomb in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people in Palestine.

The echoes of ‘God will not remain silent’ still whisper in the streets of Jerusalem, eighty-four years after these words were written. Although Scholem feared that religious sanctity would either dominate or destroy the people, he did not anticipate the more complex, ambivalent relationship that Zionism would form with religion. He did not assume that the very political struggle that facilitated the return of the Hebrew language actually included asking God, very politely, to remain silent. This attitude enabled the founders of Zionism and the majority of Israelis today to pull out of the sea of Jewish knowledge religious precepts that support their agenda. Like skilful pearl divers, Israeli society has brought up to the surface only those glowing stones which have Zionist purposes, and kept those which do not (including those in which God himself is mentioned) deep at the bottom of the ocean.  Consider some of the more popular Israeli-Jewish ‘moral validations’ of state policy. These validations, drawn exclusively from Jewish tradition and texts, have become part of the political consensus, and secure the place of religion not just in the ‘secular’ political debate but in wider Israeli-Jewish society.

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Not in Our Name: Religious Activism in Sheikh Jarrah

If you happened to walk past the tiny Othman Ibn-Affan street on a Friday evening, you might have been struck by a rather uncommon event: a large group of Palestinians of all ages and left-wing Israeli secular peace-activists gathered around a table on the porch, listening to young religious men and women reciting Kiddush. This anomaly is part of the ongoing activity of religious peace activists who form a small yet dominant part of the Solidarity movement in Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Arab neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. The recent eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah exposes not only the racism inherent in Israeli law but the ugliest side of Jewish religious life. Supported by the police force, and backed by a court ruling, kippah-clad Jewish settlers have entered the evicted houses and transformed the peaceful neighbourhood into a small-scale inferno for its non-Jewish residents. Backed by the Jerusalem police and reinforced by scores of young Shabab (adolescent Charedim, members of an ultra-Orthodox group, who stroll the streets, exempt from military service while officially enrolled in yeshivas), they smash car windows, slash tyres, harass women and children, and provoke fights.
For a growing number of young religious Jews like me, the behaviour of these ultra-Orthodox Jews constitutes a form of blasphemy. For us, attendance at the Friday demonstrations against the house evictions in Sheikh Jarrah has become like going to shul—a mitzvah and testimony to our belief that the Torah must be a source of life and morality, not death, violence and injustice. We stand alongside our secular left-wing friends, integrating traditional methods of protest with our own religious activities in a process that culminates in a uniquely Jewish expression of political and religious belief.

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On Debt

The bible, we often hear, has little relevance to modern, metropolitan life. It records the myths and rituals of primitive men, who lived a hand-to-mouth existence and knew nothing of the Universe. Why should we live our lives according to the fantasies of Neolithic shepherds? In these days of factory farms and cloned sheep, they have a point. But perhaps not all the green Arcadia of the mind is yet concreted over. In the space of a few recent days, two of the biggest bosses in football have issued important dairy-related statements. First it was Rafa Benitez, denouncing the changes made at Liverpool since his departure:

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Towards Democracy

As a British-born Israeli who works to overcome internal divisions within Israeli society, I watched the recent hard-fought British elections with considerable envy.
While comparisons between societies and political cultures are always problematic — and certainly those made between two as different in history and circumstances as our own — such an exercise can nevertheless provide helpful insights. The purpose in this case is not to castigate or excuse the current state of Israeli democracy,  it is rather to offer some explanations into its current fragile state and propose some strategies for improvement. Read more

Delegitimising the Delegitimisers

I first recall hearing the term ‘delegitimisation’ applied to Israel six or seven years ago at a rather turgid conference in Brussels, when Nathan Sharansky presented it as part of his 3D test for unfair criticism of Israel. The way you could detect this ‘new antisemitism’, he said, was if the critic was applying double standards to Israel, demonising the state, or delegitimising its very existence. Cute and tricksy, I thought at the time. But it seems to be a concept which has now come into its own. Delegitimisation has become the catchword of defenders of Israel, a new battle-cry in the fight to defend the Jewish state — and, if some are to be believed, one which presents an existential threat to its existence. Read more

Virtual Judaism

Representation is a moving target. Jewish culture is undergoing such changes that to pin it down to one representation is an illusion.
Prof. Jonathan Webber, 1999

I’m a Jewish vegetarian atheist.
Jonathan Ornstein, director, Jewish Community Center, Krakow, Poland, 2009

In the mid-1990s I began exploring a phenomenon that I described as ‘filling the Jewish space’ in Europe. Along with the efforts to revive Jewish communal life and reclaim and reassert Jewish identity in post-Holocaust, post-communist countries, I observed what I called a ‘Virtual Jewishness,’ or a ‘Virtual Jewish World,’ peopled by ‘Virtual Jews’ who create, perform, enact or engage with Jewish culture from an outsider perspective, often in the absence of local Jewish populations.
I wrote about non-Jewish klezmer bands, and Jewish museums and Jewish culture festivals organized by non-Jews for a primarily non-Jewish public. And I also described university Jewish studies programmes whose students were mostly Gentile, as well as the commercial exploitation of Jewish heritage, including the promotion of Jewish-themed tourism to synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and other sites of Jewish heritage where few if any Jews live today. Read more

Lessons Unlearned and Learned

When will Emmanuel Olisadebe finally become a real Pole? Only when he too apologises for Jedwabne.’ This cryptic Warsaw joke becomes clear only if one knows that Mr. Olisadebe, originally from Nigeria, is the sometime star of the Polish national football team, and Jedwabne is a town in northeastern Poland where 65 years ago the ethnic Polish part of the population slaughtered their Jewish neighbours. Since April 2000, when this previously unknown fact was revealed in a book called Neighbors, written by Jan Tomasz Gross, an émigré Polish professor at New York University, the issue of Jedwabne has provoked a nationwide debate and soul-searching.
As I noted in the previous essay, which deals specifically with the Catholic Church’s reaction to Jedwabne, ironies abound in this debate, ironies that are well reflected in the joke I quoted above. Mr. Olisadebe was himself a victim of Polish intolerance, the butt of vicious racist attacks by hostile fans. Furthermore, ‘real Poles’ is a self-designation often used by Polish anti-Semites, who want to thus differentiate themselves from the rest of the nation supposedly corrupted by Jewish blood and ideas. In other words, a ‘real Pole’ is precisely what Mr. Olisadebe presumably neither would want to, nor could become, while the apology demanded of him is one he certainly neither should, nor could, deliver. In a nutshell: Jedwabne presents everybody with impossible choices and dilemmas. Read more

Steven Pinker & Bencie Woll

BW:     Steve Pinker – you’re an ‘academic superstar’. Your books are best-sellers; you frequently appear in the media (and are profiled in literary journals). In Europe — certainly in Britain — there’s a form of academic snobbery against academics who become media figures. Some people have called this the ‘Desmond Morris Effect’ after the zoologist who wrote The Naked Ape. Do you feel any tensions between maintaining your academic and media status and roles?

SP: In America the standard example is Carl Sagan, the astronomer who tirelessly promoted science on television and in magazines, but who was blackballed from the National Academy of Sciences. I think attitudes are changing, as scientists realize the importance of spreading scientific literacy and combating pseudoscience. I have never experienced hostility from my colleagues (many thank me for writing books that explain to their relatives what they do for a living!) It’s possible that I get it indirectly, in journal peer reviews and the like, but I try not to let my mind go there, because it would be an excuse not to take criticism seriously. Read more

Why Anti-Semitism Matters by Denis Macshane

The first political pamphlet I ever wrote was in 1978. It revealed and denounced the indifference of British newspapers and television to the problems facing the black and Asian communities in the UK. It asked why there were no Afro-Caribbean or Asian broadcasters, reporters, news-readers or by-lines in our papers. I cited the anti-Semitism of the Daily Mail and Daily Express in the 1930s when they told readers that too many Jews were being allowed into Britain from Germany and that our small island could not face any more aliens arriving to disturb social harmony or compete for professional jobs. I argued that in some respects the media treatment of the then BME communities in the 1960s and 1970s had some similarities.
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Communal Singing

These days, when only the mentally ill, the professionally hired and the irrepressibly Welsh have the nerve to do it, it’s easy to forget there was a time when public singing was as much a part of daily life as public drinking and public moaning about public transport. Students crooned the anthem of their academy, factory workers lullaby’d their shift away, pubs rattled to the rafters with cryptic lyrics involving sailors (I am basing this largely on Ken Loach films: although of the right age to remember such things, I’m also Jewish, with about as much experience of singing in pubs as I have of abseiling down the Alps). My wife’s grandfather serenaded her grandmother beneath her window through the cruel Transylvanian winter. And while not everyone could be a nightingale, even the croakiest crow knew whether he was tenor, alto or baritone. But say serenade or baritone to my teenage Zak, and he’d assume it was new medication for his attention-deficit disorder.

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The Language Barrier by Gabrielle Rifkind

Language is the medium that allows us to understand the world. We see nature, society and human motives not as they are but as our language allows us to see.

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There’s No Place Like Home by Joseph Finlay

Surely we’re all multiculturists now. We accept the necessity of the pluralist democratic state, with multiple groups sharing a contested yet neutral public space. We know, as children of modernity, that we can never be fully ‘at home’, that communities are virtual, free flowing and in flux, and that identities are multiple. We know, from the tradition of post-colonial thought that homelands are always ‘imagined’. We know these things as a society, at least in part, because Jews have taught them to us. As the pioneers of the modern project, Jewish ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were instrumental in creating a world where the borders of nation states were transcended and internationalism became a defining value. Read more

The End of Diaspora and the Rise of a Global Jewish Community

Dear Gil,

As a professor of Jewish Studies and an avid reader of the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s daily news reports, I keep up on global Jewish affairs. Lately, I have been struck by the number of stories about Jewish life thriving in places that might seem surprising: a new Jewish radio station and cultural center in Madrid, Indian Jews leaving Israel to go back to India, hip underground Jewish clubs in Moscow.
At the same time, study after study comes out documenting how American Jews in particular, and some parts of global Jewry in general, are becoming less connected to Israel and are less focused on anti-Semitism as a central element of their Jewish identity. What is going on? Read more

Commentary

Last Saturday, while watching Preston North End hammer Bristol City, I was struck not for the first time by the sight of my fellow fans sporting headphones. Now, it’s possible that some were listening to music. Perhaps the spectacle of Stephen Elliott bludgeoning the visiting defence is further enhanced by St Matthew’s Passion or Girls Aloud belting into your eardrums. Read more

Exclusion

Of all the wounds that rend the human heart, what aches so keenly or heals so slowly as exclusion? The childhood gang we weren’t allowed to join; the lovers entwined, oblivious to our presence; the decision of Southport’s Reform Synagogue to dispense with our rabbinical services over a matter as trivial as a single Opal Fruit on Yom Kippur; each spurning smoulders on down the years like an Everlasting Light. Read more