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.

This was circa 1984. Around the same time, I remember watching a one-off TV special entitled ‘A Night of 1000 stars’. The format was nothing more than a parade of celebrities of yester-year, across a stage. Some were wheeled, others used sticks, the rest were held upright by scantily-clad women. The tone of the show was one of celebration, but there was no getting away from the brutal truth. These actors were all still alive — sure — but for how much longer? Saddam pulled off a similar spectacle a few years later with some US servicemen.

Imagine my excitement when, in the mid-nineties, someone decided to put together a collection of surviving stars from Hollywood’s golden era for an evening of nostalgia at the London Palladium. The show was called ‘A Night of 100 Stars’ (900 must have died since the TV special). I was there for autographs, part of a crowd of expectant fans waiting for the big stars to exit through the stage door. “There goes Dorothy Lamour,” shouted one of the paparazzi, as a large box was carried through the door. “And that must be Jane Russell”, shouted a second, as another large box came through the entrance.

Perhaps this is why some celebrities become reclusive — they sense the unconscious wish of the fan and it disquiets them. The recluse is the bugbear of the autograph collector, but the non-signer elicits a special vitriol. Greta Garbo was one such spoilsport. Everyone knew where she lived, but no one ever got a reply to their autograph request. She never signed anything. You never even got a “Sorry, Ms. Garbo doesn’t sign” note from her secretary. Just a stony silence. Nada. As a result, her signature was worth £1000 during her lifetime. Basically, she was as good as dead.

I used to fantasise regularly about bumping into Garbo. The ice would break pretty quickly, and we’d talk about everything: her career, the pressures of fame, her need to be left alone. We’d get on so well, that when I’d produce a pile of 8” X 10” glossy portraits, she’d break the habit of a lifetime and sign every one for me, adding little inscriptions, such as “I vont to be alone”. We would chuckle together about her reclusiveness over a glass of wine.

Several years after Garbo died, I met a so-called ‘in-person specialist’ — a New Yorker who spends his days stalking celebrities for their autographs—and was amazed when he revealed that he’d actually met Garbo. “I can’t believe you met her,” I said, trying to hide my jealousy, “what did she say?” “Oh,” he replied, “basically, she just told me to get lost.”



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.

‘My starting point,’ Norman tells me over lunch, ‘is always: what do I want to eat?’ He couldn’t find a decent salt-beef sandwich in London, so he opened somewhere that would serve one. Simple. The times cry out for comfort food; and from another perspective (mine), how can secular London Jewry claim to be well integrated if nobody around us knows what a latke is? On the other hand, if Norman serves cholent with oxtail, should I be pleased Jews are at last influencing the thriving British gastronomic scene or worried that an ancient food tradition is drizzling away, one unctuous oxtaily drop at a time?

Eating Jewish food, says Norman, is like getting a big hug; opening a ‘kind of ’ Jewish deli, on the other hand, is probably like moving in with your mother-in-law. Everybody tells head chef Tom Oldroyd that his recipes are wrong: there are herbs in the matzo balls and duck fat in the schmaltz, and that’s before we get to the hot dog. Norman’s attitude to these faux pas is calm. His is not a ghetto mentality: as with northern Italy, he is taking only the bits of Jewish cuisine he likes. It occurs to me that only a very insecure culture would find this threatening. They did blind tastings, he says, and chose their favourite versions. Simple.

All this simplicity is making me uneasy. It’s so… gentile. I turn to the food. The pickled herring on beetroot is plump and subtle, garnished with good dill. Russell is eating a Severn & Wye lox beigel with house schmear. That’s sour cream, naturally. A lunch I won’t be paying for seems the wrong place to point out that it can also mean a bribe.

Mishkins’ menu is the culinary equivalent of Yiddish — a hotpotch that nicks what it needs from the surrounding culture while maintaining flimsy but important links to its roots. There is no reverence here. ‘It’s Jew-ish,’ says Russell. ‘The music is too loud, the lights too low. There may be people who are drunk, or possibly laughing.’ Portion sizes, however, would satisfy the fiercest traditionalist. Interestingly, Russell says that some of the dishes evolved from peasant food into something more delicate — in keeping with the doilies and willow-pattern dishes, perhaps. Or more appropriate to the well-fed West, where no one needs the strength to flee pogroms. This must count as progress. After all, the only people you can’t steal from are those who have nothing.

Nina Caplan

Chrismukkah in the Ghetto



The 7^th district is on fire. At first sight, you think it’s the city getting ready for Christmas. Everywhere, lights and trees are put up at uncharacteristic speed. But in the 7^th this year they’re celebrating the season of lights under a different name: Chrismukkah. To ‘achieve everyday miracles’ is what brings together 18 cultural venues in the heart of the former Jewish quarter, from the moment the firstcandle is lit on 20 December. Kristóf Molnár, 24 — black glasses, dreadlocks sits drinking coffee as he juggles his last year at university with organising the Quarter6Quarter7 festival, currently in its 3^rd year. “Ours will be the biggest celebration in the city,” he says, “a kind of culture clash.” With the Christian holiday falling in the middle of Hanukkah, Budapest’s progressive Jewish community is set on exploding cultural differences. “The idea is to give each other ‘culture’ as a present this year”, he says, “to ‘buy’ culture instead of going shopping at some big Plaza.”

Kristóf is passionate about his festival (he is one of only two organisers). “When I say the word ‘Jew’ in Hungarian (‘Zsidó’), I lower my voice,” he says. “It should not be that way.” With the Holocaust lingering large over debates about Jewish identity in Hungary (suppressed by decades of communism and gentile guilt), Kristóf feels the urge to “shake off this heavy past. We are ordinary people. Speaking for myself, I feel as much Hungarian as I feel Jewish. We want to bring the word ‘Jew’ back into question. Take the weight off.”

Quarter6Quarter7, taking its name from the inner parts of the two districts that comprised the Jewish ghetto, is mainly self-sponsored. All the venues — bookstores, cafés, eateries, and art galleries — arrange their own programs. Sirály (“Seagull”), a three-storey-café-library-podium on Király u., is hosting an event in support of the homeless, a Budapest community currently facing criminalisation. Klauzál 13 bookstore will host an open forum prompted by last month’s census (“the older generation, in particular, is afraid to declare its Jewish identity,” says Kristóf ). Set against the characteristic run-down beauty of the district’s main artery, Wesselényi u., the festival promises a seasonal feast of music, light, and night walks.

But for Budapest’s religious community it’s business as usual. On Vasváry Pál u., Chabad at the Pesti Yeshiva (the 1885 synagogue, tucked away in a quiet courtyard) await the return of their rabbis from a conference in New York. The owners of the Fröhlich cukrászda (classic kosher pastry shop) on Dob u. are too busy selling flödni at the ‘Judafest’, the Jewish food festival, to think about Hanukkah. And the cashier of the brightly lit kosher supermarket next door says he “knows nothing; I just ordered the latkes and put the candles up for sale.”

“It’s a festival accessible to everyone,” Kristóf says. “It’s the 21^st century. We want to show all the ways in which young Jews in Budapest are contributing to their communities.” But even he is unsure whether Hungary is ready for such an approach, noting, “We haven’t cleared our conscience.” With the fires of ’44 still glowing through the cracks, Kristóf is kindling new light. “I am looking forward to its aftermath,” he says. He’s right. Different times, different fires.

Ilse Josepha Maria Lazaroms

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).

Still, it was neither of these things that pushed me over the edge. I even coped with the realisation that the ever-increasing barbarian hordes of nasal hair massing at the borders of my nostrils to mock the Pax Romana imposed with difficulty by my nasal scissors now included a considerable number of grey hairs. Yes, I was still young. That’s why over the summer you could have found me dad-dancing at a festival. Never mind that the ground could have auditioned for the part of the Somme circa 1917, here was proof I still had it! I was at a festival! I was a Jew who does camping — something that’s not been popular with our people since the flight from Egypt (if I remember rightly the headliner that year was The Golden Calf ). Even working out that I’d danced to Blondie’s Atomic, first released in 1979, across five different decades didn’t faze me. I was dancing at a festival ergo I was young.

And that’s when I fell victim to hubris (which is like a real bris only more painful). I started telling a story about a previous festival experience: how I’d attempted to avoid using the toilet cubicles, visually the closest we can come to knowing what it was like to stare at the face of Medusa, by taking a couple of imodiums (or is it ‘imodia’?). This binds you up nicely for the long weekend so as a bloke you only need use the far less traumatic urinals. Unfortunately, on this occasion I forgot I’d taken my two imodia and took two more later that day. I didn’t visit a cubicle for 10 days, by which time the only way anything would ever come out would be by caesarean.

It was as I told that story that I heard the click of the generation counter moving on. I was talking about my bowels. What’s more I was asking other people about their ‘movements’, and I didn’t mean whether they were off to see Suede at the Sunshine Arena. I had become my parents, my grandparents even. That elderly Jewish obsession with one’s inner workings that I had up till then so readily mocked was now my inheritance. Maybe my Aunt Esther, who made me think as a boy that the Yiddish for ‘hello’ was ‘are-you-regular?’, had first clocked her obsession at the Plotsk music festival in 1929— the year the organisers caused such controversy by passing over the Tschernowitz Klezmer Band as headliners in favour of Yiddish rapper superstar Jaycob-Z.

Still, I’ve now accepted this change. I know that if you want the more enjoyable inheritances of aging — wisdom, self-knowledge, a growing fondness for Classic FM — you have to accept the downsides and embrace the aging process, warts and all. Because believe me, you will get warts.

So tell me, are you regular?

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.

Billed as a Fight Club meets Dancing with the Stars showdown between 40 international cheesemongers and a buffet of local cheeses, the event was sold out weeks in advance. Despite the flash flood and subway re-routing, the semi-refrigerated warehouse in Long Island City drew 700 glasses-toting, ironic t-shirt wearing,thirty- something hipsters, who stood nibbling golden nuggets off paper plates, nonchalantly bobbing their heads to Detroit techno. At the entrance were stands with ‘Raw Milk Rockstar’ t-shirts, home-grown sodas, and Raclette ‘smores’ — towers of Graham crackers topped with ginger chocolate chunks and drenched in tangy swiss. Past the central giant stage where the competitive cheesing took place were three tables, each a mini Mount Sinai of fromage. On one, a pot of bubbling cheese was being spooned like champagne. And on the other two, plates of goudas, chévres, blues and rinds. Not to mention, baskets of crackers, pastes, crudites; a minyan of accoutrements.

The wrapping round eliminated all except ten finalist cheesemongers, who were put to the ultimate ‘Plate the Slate’ test, where they had 15 minutes to match a cheese with two other ingredients. The winner was Steve Jones, owner of The Cheese Bar in Portland, Oregon, who was crowned the Big Cheese for his pairing of Austrian semi-soft with bacon caramel popcorn. Traif, but to the international panel of judges, tremendous on the eyes and palate. Paol Price of Vermont and Anna Saxelby of New York trailed closely in second and third places, each winning cash prizes and a slice of cheese fame.

Live competitive cheesemongering seems to be the next step for NYC’s foodie obsessives. What better whey forward than with this form of culture?

Judy Batalion

Sushi in Ramallah

The salmon and avocado maki were spanking fresh, the miso soup darkly savoury with its traditional soft tofu and seaweed garnish. Even the tempura hand rolls came faultlessly presented in a lacquered temaki stand. Apart from the fact that we couldn’t accompany our meals with a chilled Asahi beer or two — no alcohol served at this venue — all seemed as it should be at Soho Sushi and Seafood, Palestine’s first and only sushi restaurant. My dinner companion, an Israeli journalist, complained rather grumpily that we were paying Tel Aviv prices for a far inferior meal. I thought this a little unfair. On his side of the Green Line, sushi is a yuppie staple, on sale everywhere from supermarkets to petrol station takeaways. In Ramallah we were a military occupation away from the closest wasabi supplier. Inside, a couple of family groups and the odd international sit amid Japanese-style artwork on the walls, jazz gently bouncing off the lacquer-panelled ceiling and courses arriving in quick succession on oversized, mottled-glass plates. The chefs — trained by a Japanese sushi expert from Tel Aviv — are in an open plan preparation area, its counter piled with fillets of fresh fish imported at huge expense from Israel. As one local tells me with an ironic smile: “Ramallah is the Tel Aviv of Palestine”. It’s certainly changed from the dark days of the second intifada, but Western luxury treats are not a reliable index of wider progress: there’s a sushi restaurant in Kabul and that’s still one of the poorest countries in the world. But along with the usual surfeit of aid workers and journalists Ramallah is increasingly attracting a new and aspirational Palestinian elite. To reach Soho Sushi and Seafood — part of the four-star Caesar Hotel in the upscale neighbourhood of Al-masyoun, the heart of the city’s building boom — I pick my way through a series of building sites, along streets lined with billboards advertising Palestinian banks and telecom companies. Inside, I’m handed an English language menu without having to ask, by a sweet-faced young waitress modishly dressed in black like the rest of the serving staff and chefs. I pick through a vast array of inside-out rolls, tempura and soup noodles, and wash it all down with jasmine tea. The whole effect is decidedly Oriental. But the fact that diners can smoke in between bites of sashimi is a reminder we’re in the Middle East. The peace process remains as moribund as ever. The Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence at the UN, expected later this month, may have just about as much impact on the lives of people here as does this temporary availability of yakitori. Because, in any case, the Ramallah sushi venture was rather short-lived. When I enquire again, ahead of another trip to the region, Ifind out that Soho closed a few months after it opened, having failed to reach its sales target. Now it’s gone back to the tried-and-tested format of Mediterranean-Oriental cuisine. Its manager, Eyad Nimer, is sanguine about the experiment. “I personally love sushi,” he says. “But here, nobody was really interested. It’s not just that it was expensive — to be honest, a lot of people tried it and said ‘yuck, what’s that, it’s nasty, I don’t know what it is’”. “The West Bank doesn’t have a beach,” he explains. “In Palestine, people prefer to eat their fish cooked.”

Daniella Peled

The Messiah of Vilnius

Wyman Brent’s non-Jewishness is a little confusing. This is only partially due to the bright orange yarmulke he occasionally wears; it’s more that he has dedicated a good part of his life towards the Vilnius Jewish Library, of which he is conceiver, founder, fundraiser, book-solicitor, administrator, and, naturally, librarian. The library, after more than eight years of dreaming and planning and setbacks is, amazingly, due to open this November. Brent, 48, originally of Lynchburg, Virginia, is rail-thin and has dark shoulder-length hair left completely un-styled; he looks vaguely monasticfrom the neck down. He speaks easily and softly, never interrupting and with a gentle pride.The library is the product of sheer persistence, serendipity and a complete disregard for the economics involved: he estimates that he’s spent $50,000 to date on the project. “I am simply someone who is very stubborn”, he says. “And I have absolutely no money now.” After three potential locations fell through Brent happened upon some Lithuanian machers and with their help he’s secured the support of the Lithuanian government — which means a rent-free spot and $ 300,000 for renovations. That spot is a second floor walk-up in a courtyard on Gediminas Avenue, a main thoroughfare in downtown Vilnius. It will initially house about 5000 items including books, DVDs, CDs, art, and random memorabilia (like autographed baseballs). He has plans for 100,000 books, though thecurrent space has a capacity of, at shelf-bending maximum, 20,000. “The government will simply have to find me a bigger place,” he said, with a naïve (but thus far vindicated) confidence. Fittingly, it’s through books that Brent discovered both Lithuania and Jewish culture. First there was The Hills of Vilnius by Alfonsas Bieliauskas, which he found while in Russia in the early 90s. And in 2004, while living in San Diego and selling books online, Brent acquired one of the books in Harry Kemelman’s ‘Rabbi Small’ series (Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet etc). He never read it but his roommate, who wasn’t Jewish either, did and quickly developed a rabid Jew-philia. She went to Tijuana, Mexico, interviewed the rabbi and community members, and wrote an article for The Jerusalem Post. (This roommate recently converted to Judaism, something Brent has little interest in.) Then Brent had an epiphany. “It was like a light bulb went off, like in the cartoon”, Brent says. “I love reading, I love Jewish culture, and I love Lithuania — I will open a Jewish library in Vilnius!” Brent immediately began collecting books, bought fancy stationery and sent letters to 36 Jewish institutions in San Diego. He got no replies but acknowledges that this is not surprising: he was a non-Jew with no relevant expertise (or even a college degree) who wanted to start a Jewish library — in Lithuania. Eventually persistence paid off and The Forward sent a reporter to interview him. News of the library spread and books began coming in. Yad Vashem has donated. The Yiddish Library in Amherst is preparing to send 1000 books. Cornell University, Jodi Picoult, and Leonard Nimoy (aka Spock, from the original Star Trek) have all sent books Brent’s way. Sir Martin Gilbert has promised an autographed copy of each of the 79 books he has written or edited. Brent proudly calls Gilbert a friend. Lithuania has a Jewish population of approximately three thousand; whatever Jewish culture there is tends to be produced by and for non-Jews. The yearly Klezmer festival features mostly non-Jewish musicians. A Fiddler on the Roof production, the largest musical in Lithuania’s history, is in the works and there is not a single Jew in the cast or crew. The Vilnius Jewish Library’s ‘Jewish’ criterion is a loose one: any book/film/music created by Jews, featuring Jews, about Jews, has or alludes to a Jewish theme, or in some way just seems Jewish is a candidate. “If it’s not blatantly antisemitic, the library probably has a place for it,” Brent said. (He has yet to turn down a donation.) The film catalogue runs from Two Days in Paris (starring Adam Goldberg) to Zack and Miri Make a Porno (with Seth Rogen). All the Star Wars movies are in (Harrison Ford’s maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants). Brent sees a natural order to this. “Of course we’ll have Schindler’s List,” he said. “And last time I checked, Steven Spielberg is Jewish. So why not Jaws? Why not Jurassic Park? People will say, ‘Jurassic Park scared the hell out of me — maybe these Jews aren’t so bad!’” Brent clearly likes Jews. And it was a Jew —albeit a dead one — who was his matchmaker of sorts. Two years ago, Brent ordered a documentary about Al Jolson from a small, student-run company in Kiel, Germany. Brent was immediately intrigued by the director’s photo and it proceeded from there: next month, that director and Brent are getting married. He shrugs off the mazel tovs. “It’s the only payment I’ve ever received from the library,” he said. “So thank you, Al Jolson!”

Menchem Kaiser

Manhattan in Berlin

Tell them to fuck off”— scrawled beside a towering photograph of the downtown New York composer and musician John Zorn twisting around his saxophone, this is the welcoming statement to the Berlin Jewish Museum’s exhibition Radical Jewish Culture. One enters the gallery and is enveloped in the sounds of downtown New York circa 1995. Clarinets and saxophones squeal; guitars and accordions clash. Projected onto a wall are credits for the looped audio playlist. The music ranges from tradition Klezmer to John Zorn’s Masada, Frank London and the Klezmatics, Anthony Coleman’s Selfhaters, and David Krakauer’s Klezmer Madness (with their rendition of Michael Alpert’s Yiddish song Chernobyl). The lyrics are printed on the wall in German and English (not Yiddish). Like the high school bedroom of an eccentric Jewish jazzhead, the walls are covered with LPs from cantor Yossele Rosenblatt to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, from the Klezmer Conservatory Band to Sydney Bechet; there are time-faded posters promoting Jewish avant-garde jazz concerts at the now-defunct clubs Knitting Factory and Tonic, important NY venues for the downtown scene. It’s like a fan’s scrapbook, packed with videos, music listening-stations, interviews, CD cases, sketches, diary pages, scribbled musical notation, set lists, and other, often context-less, artefacts of this obscure but influential sub-set of a sub-scene of a sub-culture. The first half of the exhibition asks the questions: “What is Jewish? Radical? Culture?” The second half attempts to answer these questions by exploring the brand dubbed ‘Radical Jewish Culture’, a term created by Zorn for the 1992 Munich Art Project and rejected by some of the artists it represented: guitarist Marc Ribot wanted to call it “Loud and Pushy Music”. The brand went on to promote hundreds of albums on Zorn’s Tzadik label from artists of such diverse eclecticism that it begs the question: what does ‘Jewish’ actually mean? In a small room, footage of a live performance of John Zorn’s aggressive opus and inaugural 1995 Tzadik album, Kristallnacht is screened on continuous loop. The piece combines free jazz elements with traditional Klezmer modes and electronic samples of Hitler speeches and breaking glass, manipulated to migraine inducing high frequencies. With ears ringing, one can come out of the video booth and read a quote from Lenny Bruce (falsely dated 1981 —he died in 1966): “Dig… if you live in New York or any other big city you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter if you are Catholic. If you live in New York you are Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.” As poet Gregory Corso once said about the Beats, “three writers do not a generation make.” Likewise, a few musicians on one label do not a whole culture make. Only cursory attention is given to the broader Jewish, specifically Yiddish, music scenes in America and Europe to which Tzadik is both heir and foil. But the exhibition, though imperfect, represents part of a wider movement to recast Jewish culture as a radically open question. Displayed on a wall is a quote by French- Jewish writer Edmond Jabès, also included in the album notes to Kristallnacht: “It is indeed the impossibility of being an ‘untroubled Jew’, a Jew at peace anchored in his certainties, that has made me the kind of Jew I think I am. This may seem paradoxical but it is precisely in that break — in that non-belonging in search of its belonging — that I am without a doubt most Jewish. The Jew doesn’t just ask questions: he has himself become a question.” Before leaving the gallery and re-reading Zorn’s command to “tell them to fuck off”, a quote by the door from poet Paul Celan offers a somewhat more challenging and mysterious directive: “Thunder your shibboleth here into your alien homeland.” This may be the most Jewish way of telling them to fuck off

Daniel Kahn

‘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…

I read this story as a child and it has never let me go. Today, Iassociate it with the quest for ‘security’: the efforts of individuals, groups and nations attempting to design projects that will guarantee their security.The recurring fantasy of total control over one’s fate was mocked millennia ago within the Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel.Yet we still try to design a solution to what is essentially a psychological and existential dilemma: that none of us knows how or when we will die. The story reminds us that viewing the world through the prism of our fears restricts us in damaging ways. It also reminds us that the stories we are told—and tell ourselves—can shape our fears, as well as contain them and that this world-view can unwittingly catalyse the very thing we fear. The world may be a dangerous place, but more often than we are aware it is we who make it dangerous.Although we know there are people ‘out there’ who hate us, it can be hard to bear the reality that ‘security’—what it is, what we need in order to achieve it, where it comes from, and what we feel threatens it—is an internal experience. Implicitly, this story invites us to construct more life-enhancing stories than those ghosted by our fears.

I recently had a conversation with a young Jewish woman who was preparing a Channukah pageant for local children at the provincial Arts Centre where she works. She’d been approached by a woman in a hijab and a conversation had ensued. The woman said she’d just arrived in the UK from the Middle East with her child and was exploring the neighbourhood.The Centre’s publicity had caught her eye and she was wondering if the event was open to everyone. Something about this conversation felt ‘troubling’: the visiting woman seemed ‘glassy-eyed’ and had a ‘vacant’ look; she seemed rather needy and during a follow-up conversation the next day she hadn’t seemed satisfied by the resources offered to her that were available in the area. The woman telling me this story started to wonder if this woman was hiding something: why should a Muslim woman be interested in the details for a Channukah event? Perhaps she was a suicide bomber and this open event, where anyone was welcome, would make a perfect target. Perhaps, she thought, she should cancel the event, just in case.

She called the CST—the Jewish community’s self- appointed ‘Community Security Trust’—to report her suspicions and seek advice, which was duly provided. Although she felt they were ‘measured and reassuring’ in their response, she nevertheless decided, on reflection, to cancel the event. She regretted the lost opportunity for children of all faiths and none to come together, dress up and celebrate, but once her anxiety had been triggered she couldn’t rid herself of her ‘gut feelings’.

This story—and it is not a parable—filled me with an immense sadness. I knew that this enlightened young woman had a sound understanding of how we uncon- sciously project onto others disowned feelings from within ourselves, and then feel ourselves threatened by those very feelings. If even she had succumbed to collective Jewish unease about Muslims, what hope was there for our collective well-being in the UK, when the community is led by those with a less psychologically-informed and more outwardly belligerent approach to questions about security?
Who will reflect on the ways in which our own unconscious aggression, our own explosive rage, is projected—so that we feel we live in a hugely insecure world that is liable to blow up in our face, metaphorically or literally, at any moment? Who or what can we trust, we say, if we can’t trust our ‘gut feelings’? Our deep fear of annihilation may be generated in the earliest stages of our lives and can re-awaken when catalysed by a current situation; or it can be projected forward as a picture of our future.

Here the personal and the collective merge. As a community, have we any sense of the historically-deter- mined unconscious hostility we hold within us that is continually being projected that we are then obliged to protect ourselves from? And what terrifying crimes do we unconsciously imagine we have committed that would need to be punished by all those aggressors ‘out there’ waiting to attack us?

We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess.

The stories we tell ourselves—about the persecutory world ‘out there’ and the undying hatred of our enemies— provide a sort of comfort: they offer a coherent narrative for our lives. By constantly reaching for and repeating the same familiar story—the story of our insecurity—we unconsciously fabricate for ourselves a kind of security. It is, of course, a pseudo-security, but its advantage—it offers ersatz ‘meaning’—can outweigh (and help us avoid) the painful psychological task of facing up to the innate vulnerability that is intrinsic to being human.
We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess. But feelings of ‘insecurity’ are psychological, spiritual, existential – such feelings can’t be eliminated by more of this chimera we name ‘security’.

Today, bitachon is used in modern Hebrew to mean ‘security’ in a military/political context. It’s travelled a long way from its original meaning in Biblical Hebrew: ‘trust in what we cannot see’. The prophet Isaiah demanded trust in the unseen and intangible—‘God’—rather than in human power alone. Of course since the Shoah such trust has been exposed as hopelessly naïve, even dangerously deluded. In our post-Shoah world, where bitachon has become secularised, Jews put their trust in what they can see, and in the power of their own hands. Who dares to disagree with this pragmatism? Who would disavow this realpolitik? Even the religious settlers on the West Bank with HaShem in their hearts have an Uzi in their hands.

So is that to be the last word on ‘security’? Is that what a 3000 year-old tradition of Jewish struggle to articulate a moral vision comes down to? ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’? Perhaps Isaiah’s understanding needs re-visioning. Perhaps to experience ‘security’ we need a renewed faith in aspects of ourselves that we Jews used to attribute to the Holy One of Israel: a capacity for compassion and reverence towards other human beings, a capacity to discern forms of idolatry that offer false security, a capacity to transmute anger into a passion for justice, and an enduring capacity for truth-telling that holds the impossible tension between love of the Jewish people and a responsibility to the ‘other’, the stranger, the outsider, who may never love us but whose well-being is still our concern.

Rabbi Howard Cooper is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, the Director of Spiritual Development at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and an author. His latest book is The Alphabet of Paradise: An A-Z of Spirituality for Everyday Life. He blogs at www.howardcoopersblog.blogspot.com

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?

Stalin wrote some solid poetry, and Gaddafi is a lovely novelist

It can happen off duty as well. Just the other day at a picnic, after I’d revealed my profession to a group of strangers, one of them asked, without an ounce of irony, ‘So, do you get much Hitler, then?’ I laughed awkwardly, as if he and I were on the inside of a joke, and offered a sort of apology: ‘Well, no, not really. I don’t tend to do Nazis.’ They murdered my family, I should have added, which sort of puts me off selling their autographs.Though, as you bring it up, I’m as obsessed with Nazis as the next man. But then, I’m Jewish. What’s your excuse?

Some time ago, I confess, I did have a brief period of doing Nazis. A signed copy of Mein Kampf came up in auction and I had an overwhelming urge to buy it. I fought with myself, wondered whether my desire for a Hitler autograph meant that I was an anti-Semite. And then I got tired of the discussion and asserted my Third Generation right to buy Nazi memorabilia. So, I bought it. And it was mine. Mein Kampf arrived, I installed it on my bookshelf, and I found that I kept on picking it up and touching it, tracing my finger over the handwriting, showing it to friends.I still wasn’t sure if I was a traumatised victim identifying with and appeasing the aggressor or just another despicable Hitler fanatic. As serendipity would have it, I owned one of Sigmund Freud’s walking sticks at the same time, which I kept under my bed. I remember handling both objects simultaneously, creating a sort of Freud-Hitler axis of good and evil. I trusted Freud to represent my interests and explain away my Hitler obsession. Or was I just using Freud as cover for my own Nazism? It was hard to tell.

Anyway, the point is that I don’t do Nazis anymore, though Hitler still remains a fascination, something of a guilty pleasure.I guess it’s not surprising,when every other book in my childhood home had Hitler or Holocaust in the title. Plus, my father fanatically collects postcards of synagogues that were destroyed by the Nazis. I have dreams about Hitler sometimes, including a recent one where he and I met at a dinner dance, finding ourselves both tragically without partners. I tell myself that it’s OK to dream about the man who killed my family, that it’s my entitlement. But what possible excuse can a non-Jew have for a Hitler fixation? Shouldn’t they stick to poets or Presidents or ice-skating champions? Something less, well, Jewish?

One of the paradoxes of collecting is the attention the collector pays to the unique blend of items he assembles, whilst simultaneously denying absolutely that the collection says anything at all about him personally, about his issues. I can say from experience that this is because the collector feels himself to be accumulating items not for himself, but for mankind.The collector is so mind-bogglingly un-self-aware,that it never crosses his mind that his collection of, say, autographed photographs of actresses who died very young in tragic circumstances, just might suggest that he has an unhealthily keen interest in the deaths of glamorous young women, which perhaps stems from a repressed desire to kill his own disappointing mother, whose absence from his early years resulted in his spending much of his childhood sat on the sofa beside an au pair, watching Marilyn Monroe movies. No, the collector is oblivious to the cause and effect, and anyway doesn’t want to dwell on his childhood.As far as he is concerned, he is doing what any other rational human being would do if they only had the bright idea, the eye for rarity, and the desire to preserve ‘culture’.

Armed with this kind of insight into the mind of the collector, it’s understandable that I would feel queasy to see another sale of Hitler’s paintings come up for auction in Shropshire last month. Now, I’m not against dictators dabbling in the arts per se—Stalin wrote some solid poetry, and Gaddafi is a lovely novelist—but this is something different. This auction house has been conducting regular Hitler Art sales for several years now, including an auction in 2009 that featured a supposed self-portrait by Hitler, who was shown sitting on a bridge in soulful self-contemplation. There has been much media speculation about the authenticity of the Hitler paintings that keep showing up (they are probably all fakes), but that doesn’t seem to stem the flow. As the auctioneer explained, ‘there is a tremendous fascination in Hitler these days and this sale will provide bidders with a rare opportunity of obtaining a work by Hitler at a time long before he started his campaigns of mass murder and world domination’. Well, I’m glad the auctioneer reminds us that the paintings all date from before all the Holocaust stuff, because otherwise we might be tempted to lump the early, kindly Hitler together with the later meaner Hitler, which seems unfair. Indeed, the auctioneer makes the point that the pictures are ‘all peaceful subjects, without exception, no military, no violent subjects’. It does make you sort of start wondering whether there is real credence to the argument that Adolf Hitler was, primarily, a struggling oil painter.

Oh, and did you know that one of the pictures in the collection—again, questions about authenticity—may have once hung in the offices of Sigmund Freud? (It seems I’m not the only one to summon Freud when cornered by his conscience.) Yes, they found Freud’s address penned on the reverse of a dodgy painting of a church, and it all adds up: Hitler was a struggling artist in Vienna at exactly the same time as Freud was in private practise there. So, Freud must have met the young Hitler, and found him personable enough to buy one of his paintings and hang it on his wall! And presumably Freud must also have recognised some talent in the young Hitler, some possibility of future greatness you’d think, for isn’t future greatness the currency of the art collector?

I have come to realise that collecting itself is a form of revisionism. You focus on a particular person, or period of history, and you necessarily draw attention away from the larger context. You distort historical events, because you have to bend history in order to see your reflection in it, at least the reflection you want to see. It’s ultimately about repair. I shouldn’t be against it, especially as I rely on the psychopathology of the collector to make a living. But it’s not always healthy. Someone once came to my table at a New York autograph fair, wearing a sharp suit and bow-tie, and announced, smugly, that he was looking for unsuccessful Presidential candidates. Sorry, nothing at all, I said. What I should really have done is throw a blanket over him, make him a cup of hot cocoa, and give him some of the love he missed out on as a child, during those months when his parents’ marriage was on the rocks and he was sent away to boarding school and failed all his exams and cried himself to sleep every night. You’ll always be a success in my eyes, I should have told him, but I can’t help thinking that maybe collecting isn’t for you.

Adam Andrusier studied music at Cambridge, where he performed piano recitals and a concerto. He has since formed his own company, selling rare autographs and manuscripts. He has written two novels.

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.

Dylan’s echoing of this encounter between G-d and Moses also references the ‘I-Thou’ theology of Martin Buber, to whose work Dylan was reportedly introduced years earlier by his manager, Albert Grossman. The song paints a bleak portrait of absolute alienation: the narrator is alone even when he’s with a sleeping lover (‘if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk/ I got nothin’ to say, ’specially about whatever was’); he goes out for a walk and concludes ‘Not much happenin’ here/ Nothin’ ever does’ and sees a train platform ‘with nobody in sight’; and he contemplates the end of the world (‘The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right’). Yet through all the emptiness he perseveres—‘I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part’—towards the world, holding on to Buber’s teaching, ‘One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.’

Consciously or not, Bob Dylan’s use of the modes of Jewish prophetic discourse as one of his primary means of communication, determine not just the content of his songs but also his style of delivery, which is closer to declaiming rather than melodic singing. The vocals on his live albums from the 1970s (Before the Flood, Hard Rain, and Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue) are positively stentorian, underscoring his relationship to his audience, whom he never wooed but chided and provoked: You who philosophise, disgrace, and criticise all fears Take the rag away from your face/ Now ain’t the time for your tears.  (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’)

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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.

Ha-Ba le-Horgekha Hashkem le-Horgo is a teaching of increasing popularity among Israelis.  Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 72:1, its most precise translation is: ‘If someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first.’ It seems that every online newspaper Comment section will include this sentence when discussing Israeli aggression: the Gaza offensive? ‘Kill him first’. The Second Lebanon War? ‘Kill him fi rst’ again. A Google search for the expression ‘kill him first’ and ‘flotilla’ yields more than 4,200 Hebrew results, confi rming the centrality of this narrative.  This convenient license to kill extends beyond the online community to Israeli decision makers and politicians. Following the Second Lebanon War, Ehud Yatom, a Likud MK, explained the asymmetrical death toll of 44 Israeli civilians and 1,191 Lebanese civilians with the same trump card:

‘and if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him fi rst.’ It has been used by Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon when addressing university students about their military reserve service and by Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter when lecturing about IDF strategy. It was also the explanation provided by Minister of Minorities Avishai Braverman for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai. Even Ayoub Kara, a Druze MK from Likud, has used it. When asked about the Iranian nuclear plan Kara showed little originality: ‘I think an attack on Iran will be justifi ed’, he said, ‘since if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him fi rst.’ Meharsayikh u-Makharivayikh Mimekh Yetse’u is another overexploited formula. Translated as ‘your destroyers and devastators will depart from you,’ and taken from Isaiah 49:17, this sentence has become Israeli society’s remedy for criticism that comes from ‘within’—from Jews, either Israeli or Diaspora. It stems from a refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing and brands all critics ‘destroyers’.  From Gideon Levy’s Haaretz articles on the eviction of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah to Judge Goldstone’s report proving that IDF soldiers shot at Palestinians waving white fl ags, the chorus rings out: ‘Destroyers and devastators will depart from you.’ Also for Channel 10’s Shlomi Eldar when he dares to say that ‘Hamas is not a diabolical junta’, and for the eminent Israeli poet Natan Zakh, who supports the end of the siege on Gaza, even volunteering to swim there. The Israeli Government’s recent revival of the embarrassing ‘Ministry of Propaganda’, offi cially known as the Ministry of Public Affairs, effects a similar principle—it ignores the dissenting voices from within Israel, rejecting them as ‘destroyers’ rather than as concerned players. In other words, Israel is not going to rethink its policies, but will only strive to explain them better.

Almost as popular as these two precepts is‘Aniyei ‘Irkha Kodmim, loosely translated as ‘the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city.’ Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 71:1, this is used by Israelis to justify the

preferential treatment of Jews. It is quoted almost every time human rights organisations highlight the inferior treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel or the living conditions for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The use of this quote has intensified lately due to the debate about the thousands of refugees and migrant workers threatened with deportation. The fact that many of them have children who were born in Israel, or that deporting them would endanger their lives, does not convince large parts of the Israeli public, who cleave to principle of the ‘precedence of our poor’. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz announced that at the heart of their plan to reduce unemployment is a strategy of encouraging Israelis not to hire migrant workers, and emphasised that ‘precedence of the poor of your city’ is a sacred principle.  This Talmudic proverb has also served well during wars and military operations. One month before the Israeli attack on Gaza, Yossi Peled, a Minister from Likud, gave a good ‘Jewish’ explanation for the future use of excessive force. ‘I don’t want to hurt the Palestinians living in Gaza Strip, but we need to defend ourselves, or as the Jewish tradition teaches: “The poor of your city take precedence”’ Six weeks later, the poor people of Gaza had buried 1,400 men and women.  These three verses, overused in Israeli-Jewish discourse, exemplify the hijacking of ‘Judaism’ to suit the Zionist programme. It is therefore not surprising that they are much more popular among ‘secular’ and national-religious Jews in Israel than among the traditionally Orthodox Jews. Interestingly, when considered in their religious context, their assumed meanings appear to be quite different. ‘Get up early to kill him first’ refers in contemporary Israel to the pre-emptive strategy of the Israeli military, particularly the notion of defensive rather than offensive action.  The expression supports the Israeli ‘self-defence’ theory by presuming that all enemy casualties are caused either in response to a previous act or a pre-emptive ‘response’ to a future act. But the original verse refers to an individual acting in self-defence, and there is no indication that this teaching applies at state level. Indeed, one can even argue that the sacredness of life lies at the heart of this precept, since it sanctions killing only to preserve life, and only when the enemy is coming to kill you. It is anything but a religious ‘license to kill’. Similarly, ‘your destroyers and devastators will depart from you’ originally taught that foreign elements will eventually leave the country they are trying to destroy and carries no reference to internal criticism and how to handle it.

Zionism’s basic separationist aspirations—Hebrew labour, a Hebrew market, a Hebrew state—have been nurtured and protected by the belief that ‘the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city’. In contemporary Israel, this verse provides a pseudo-religious justification for racist practice, while in its original context it is closer to our own ‘charity begins at home’. According to the Talmud, if two people request a loan from the same rich person and he or she is unable to help both of them, that wealthy individual is ordered to be more generous with the poor of his own city, regardless of religion. In the case of ‘the Jewish state’ of Israel, ‘the poor of your city’ are actually the Palestinians and the migrant workers who remain socially and politically disenfranchised.

Selecting religious texts for political use is not a Jewish invention. But the selected adages, which all stem from a Diasporic experience, acquire new meaning and dangers when used by a majority in a sovereign state, and even more again when that state also happens to be the strongest military power in the Middle East. Ironically, Israeli society attributes fundamentalist readings of religious text to Islam, choosing to deny its own decontextualised following of violent texts. With respect to Bava Metzia, the Sanhedrin, and even to the Prophet Isaiah, there are texts more central to Judaism with more urgent lessons for Israeli society: ‘Foreigners living among you will be treated like your own people. Love them as you love yourself, because you were foreigners living in Egypt’ (Leviticus 19:34).  A clear threat to Zionism’s founding principles, this has been marginalised, together with God, and more politically comfortable quotations selected.  Israeli scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has summed up the relationship between Zionism and ‘secular’ Judaism: ‘There is no God, but He promised us the Land.’ God has indeed been left outside the Israeli political debate, replaced by the People and the Land of Israel. Slowly but steadily, concepts such as ‘the State of Israel’, ‘the Arab’, ‘security’, or even the Iranian ‘existential threat’ have been shaped through misquoting of Jewish religious texts, a process aided by national institutions like the Chief Rabbinate, the IDF rabbinate, and the Religious-Zionist movement.  Gershom Scholem warned that God would not remain silent in the language that invoked him thousands of times. The revival of Hebrew and its common use in Israel did not bring God into the lives of ‘secular’ Jews but instead created a dangerous validation of contemporary political dilemmas with the authority of ‘omnipotent’ religious texts.  Contemporary Hebrew with its ancient Biblical resonances grants this political-religious God-free coalition the illusion of entitlement. How long God will remain silent is another story.

Yonatan Mendel is completing a PhD on the relationship between security, politics and Arabic language studies in Israeli-Jewish society.  The research is conducted at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the co-editor of ‘Reflections on Knowledge and Language in Middle Eastern Societies’, which will be published in 2011.

In between beatings and arrests by the police, we managed to hold a bilingual (Hebrew and Arabic) Selichot evening with both Israeli and Palestinian participants. It began with a joint study of Talmud portions on repentance and forgiveness and continued with the chanting of Selichot and Palestinian poems in front of the stolen houses in Sheikh Jarrah. We also built a Sukkah in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, with young Israeli and Palestinian children working together and preparing decorations. This Sukkah was demolished as an illegal building by the munici- pality’s inspectors minutes after it was set up; they neglected to give any excuse why our Sukkah was illegal while thousands of Sukkahs all over the city are considered legal. And every several weeks we conduct a full Shabbat evening ceremony in this tormented neighbourhood, with prayers, Kiddush, and dinner.

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We have a saying in Spanish: ‘White liquid in a bottle has to be milk.’ What does this mean?

Note the classic midrashic style: ‘We have a saying’, replicating the traditional ‘As it is said’; then a quotation; then a rhetorical question. And after that came the meandering exegesis, seemingly unconnected to the opening. Rafa described the way the owners had set about changing the structure of the club and replacing the personnel – including him. He then returned, somewhat cryptically, to his proverb, concluding, ‘So, white liquid in a bottle: milk. You will know who is to blame.’

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Mike Prashker is the director of MERCHAVIM, The Institute for the Advancement of Shared Citizenship in Israel. He was born in London and moved to Israel in 1978. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces he studied and subsequently taught political science at Tel Aviv University. He worked for ten years at Melitz — The Center for Jewish-Zionist Education before founding MERCHAVIM in 1998.

Daniella Peled is editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. A former Foreign Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, she writes widely on international affairs.

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. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

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. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

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So what’s happened? Have we got so carried away with portable music players that we’ve lost our own voices? A clue lies, perhaps, in the only areas where it is still deemed acceptable to seek choral pleasure in public: places of worship and football matches (to be succinct, then: places of worship). Is it any surprise that song still embraces us where we are closest to collective transport, to the merging of many minds into one transpersonal being? It is significant that both Jews and football fans took to singing in response to a constraint: in the case of Jews, the prohibition against use of instruments, in the case of fans, the prohibition against physically smashing each others’ heads in.
So what can the music of synagogue and stadium learn from each other? Certainly, some football chants have felt the influence of religious hymns. Some of you may remember the awed, haunting paean to George Best that used to drift around Old Trafford like a mist: Geeooooor-giiieeeee. Anfield today resounds with a similarly dirge like: Liiiii-verpuuule. Liiiii-verpuuule. On the chirpier side, fans all over the country regale their rivals with a delightful ode to the rumoured complications in their family relationships: ‘Yer mum’s yer dad, yer dad’s yer mum, you interbred [insert regional name here] scum.’ Though the tune has been mistakenly ascribed to the Addams Family theme, the alert ear will pick up the clear influence of Adon Olam — in tune, if perhaps not lyrical content.
What, then, of influence in the other direction? Although the hymns of the siddur are replete with the yearning, the mourning, the passion and the joy familiar from the terraces, it could be argued that they are lacking the element of bile. For instance, though we rabbis are regarded merely as teachers, not holy men — eminent, perhaps, but eminently human —  congregations tend to treat us with a respect out of proportion to our station. Yet some of the irreverence meted upon football referees might be healthy. We would become more assiduous in our scholarship, as well as less prone to hubris, if, for example, the incorrect pronunciation of a rare Aramaic word was met by rowdy chants of ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’ or ‘What a load of rabbis’.

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As a psychotherapist I am keen to understand how hatred and suspicion have become so entrenched in the Palestine-Israel conflict. In my trade, I am trained to look at how individuals or families influence and react with one another. This can be equally true of the political process where history and experience accumulate over time, deeply influencing how nations behave and react to one another. Too often, stories are told – and this is particularly true of the Palestine-Israel conflict – without context and without understanding of the processes that have taken place between people and nations.

Recently I was invited to run a group within the London Jewish community. The aim of the group was to explore some of the deep tensions, scars and splits that have emerged in the community with regard to its relationship with Israel. The underlying thesis was that these splits were not only painful but were undermining effective support for the resolution of the conflict in the Middle East.

The Palestine-Israel conflict evokes such deep polarised emotions in the spirit of ‘for us or against us’ that this very emotion can become part of the problem itself. Loyalty is called on at any price and partisan alignment with one’s own side is perceived as essential. Whether it is within the state of Israel, among the Palestinians themselves or in the diaspora community, anything less than loyal runs the risk of being seen as an act of betrayal.

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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?
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Having spent twenty-one years as a rabbi in his native Morecambe, and a brief spell as inside-right for Preston North End, Rabbi Savage is now a freelance Talmudic Scholar.