New York   You’re 25 and still live with your parents?,’ she asked, aware of the ticking clock and all the other potentials she’d meet in the next two hours. ‘Just for now, until I get my organic cream cheese business running,’ he rushed to finish. ‘I-’ ‘They’re holding you back,’ she interrupted, as the buzzer went. ‘You need to overcome your ambivalence. It masks your fear of success.’

This isn’t the kind of conversation you’d normally have while speed dating — even in Jewish neurotic New York — but this is not speed dating but the next best (or arguably first best) thing: speed shrinking.

At this series of events, the tenth of which was held in January at Housing Works charity book store in Soho, the general public can come — for free — to have their heads shrunk and their careers stretched. One side of the room is lined with a row of sex therapists, gay specialists, addiction shrinks and Jewish Freudians and authors like Diana Kirchner, Jonathan Fast, and Sherene Schostak; the other side is lined with literary agents and editors from the likes of William Morris, the New York Times and Marie Claire. Participants choose a queue — depending on whether they want to solve or sell their personal stories — and move along, given three minutes with each head-doctor or literary guru. A comedian hosts, keeping strict time with the buzzer.

Speed shrinking can be more emotional than speed dating, and is probably more worthwhile. Participants know it. They come armed with pressing life and love questions, and with pitches for articles, essays, novels and non-fiction book projects, including studies of orthodox breakdancing to kosher locavore cookbooks. Business cards are flying, if someone is slow moving on to their next seat, another person jumps right in. The vibe is creative: agents and editors looking for work, writers hoping to sell it. Therapists looking to help achieve happiness (and pick up new clients), people seeking tips toward self-actualisation and introductions to therapists whom they might continue to see for 50 minute sessions. (Disclaimer: the three minutes do not comprise actual therapy.)

These happenings — which have taken place in NYC and LA and already featured on CBS and CNN — are organised by New York-based author and journalism professor Susan Shapiro. Its title comes from her first novel — it’s a double entendre for a story about controlling weight and finding a new therapist (and self-acceptance). The protagonist visits 8 shrinks in 8 days, realising she is addicted to therapy. Shapiro’s memoir Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking and Everything Else I Loved in Life Except Sex, is about her experience in addiction therapy. She hopped between dependencies — from cigarettes to alcohol to gum — before transforming her habits to writing books and advancing her career. So, this party that celebrates potential combines both therapy and the writing-marketplace.

January’s shrinkage — which featured acclaimed Jungian astrologist Robert Cook, psycho-pharmacologist Sheri Sprit, and sex hypnotherapist Cathy Beaton as well as editors from Penguin and Out — functioned as a launch for Shapiro’s new book. Co-written with Frederick Woolverton, founder of the Village Institute for Psychotherapy, and her former substance abuse therapist who inspired many of her works, Unhooked: How to Quit Anything, is a collection of case studies that explains addiction as a coping mechanism for handling underlying depression and overwhelming feeling. It guides readers to suffer better, and manage discomfort in a healthy way.

If Jews seem to be addicted to confession, writing memoirs, and therapy, Speed Shrinking evenings salute them all. Plus, refreshments are free

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’)

‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,’ he sings in ‘Positively 4^th Street,’ addressed to the folk music traditionalists who first called him one of their own. Going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, playing commercial country music on Nashville Skyline and releasing a double album of cover songs mischievously titled Self Portrait are just a few examples of Dylan’s propensity to subvert his relationship with his fans in order to jar them from their complacency, like a Biblical prophet. Throughout his career, whether singing about racial injustice in ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Hurricane,’ Cold War anxieties in ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ and ‘Masters of War,’ the treatment of Vietnam War veterans in ‘Clean-Cut Kid,’ or corrupt politicians in ‘Political World’ and ‘The Disease of Conceit,’ Dylan has repeatedly returned to that same prophetic tradition to infuse his songs with a measure of impact and dignity that so obviously sets his work apart from other singer song writers of the rock era. Bono, the singer of the Irish rock band U2 and himself a strong believer in a type of Christianity with ancestral Jewish roots, understands this about Dylan. ‘[Dylan’s] was always a unique critique of modernity,’ he writes. ‘Because in fact Dylan comes from an ancient place, almost medieval… The anachronism, really, is the ’60s. For the rest of his life he’s been howling from some sort of past that we seem to have forgotten but must not . . .’

One of the most rewarding ways of approaching Bob Dylan’s lyrics is to read them as the work of a poetic mind immersed in Jewish texts and engaged in the age-old process of midrash: a kind of formal or informal riffing on texts in order to elucidate or elaborate upon their hidden meanings. Perhaps the most famous of these riffs takes place in one of Dylan’s best-known songs, 1965’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ his whimsical retelling of the Akeidah, the story of the binding of Isaac, which Dylan posits as a conversation between two jaded, cynical hipsters.

G-d said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’

Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’

G-d said ‘No.’

Abe said, ‘What?’

G-d said ‘You can do what you want, Abe But the next time you see me co min’ you better run Abe said, ‘Where you want this killin’ done?’ God said, ‘Out on Highway 61.’

U.S. Route 61, incidentally, is the main highway leading from New Orleans to Dylan’s birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota, where he was born to a man named Abram.

In 1982, Dylan’s son Samuel became bar mitzvah in Jerusalem. Shortly thereafter, Dylan’s earnest prophetic style gave way to a hardline Zionism that suffused the 1983 album Infidels, with a sleeve featuring Dylan overlooking the Old City.  The song ‘Neighbourhood Bully’ defends Israeli aggression with little regard for the plight of the Palestinians :

Well, the neighbourhood bully, he’s just one man

His enemies say he’s on their land

They got him outnumbered about a million to one

He got no place to escape to, no place to run

He’s the neighbourhood bully

Coming as it did in the wake of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, this strongly nationalistic identification with Jewish peoplehood and land did not endear Dylan to those still on the Left. Neither did the song ‘Union Sundown’ on the same album, whose chorus appeared to be a critique of organised labour :

Well, it’s sundown on the union

And what’s made in the U.S.A.

Sure was a good idea

’Til greed got in the way.

A scathing review in New York City’s Village Voice, dubbed Dylan ‘the William F. Buckley of rock and roll,’ in reference to the founding editor of the conservative journal, the National Review. For many, it seemed, the one-time ‘voice of a generation’ had turned into a right-wing crank, a Bible-thumping, washed-up relic of the sixties. Dylan’s album sales plummeted to an all time low and where they remained for much of the 1980s, when he seemed, at best,irrelevant or, at worst, pathetic.  In the final year of the decade, however, Dylan returned with one of the strongest albums of his career. Oh Mercy reflects a mind steeped in a Jewish worldview and one whose creative vision prompted what became his Never Ending Tour. This tour has been going on for over two decades and, at nearly 70, Dylan continues to play around one hundred concerts each year. ‘Everything Is Broken’ portrays the Kabbalistic concept of a world in a state of disrepair, and ‘Political World’ includes a vivid description of Kiddush HaShem, the religiously inspired martyrdom of those who were dying in Auschwitz around the time Dylan was born.  When Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in 1991, the focus of his acceptance speech was a passage that astute listeners recognised as a paraphrase of Psalm 27, the prayer based upon notions of repentance that lie at the heart of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy. Dylan, it seemed, was transmitting a coded message to those who may have thought he had forsaken them. Why else accept a Grammy Award by paraphrasing a Jewish prayer written by Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsch, the spiritual leader of traditional German Jewry in the mid-nineteenth century?

Dylan has continued to find inspiration in Jewish scripture in recent years. His 1997 Grammy Award–winning album, Time Out of Mind, is a catalogue of regret and reflections on mortality (released shortly after his recovery from a near fatal heart infection); ‘I was born here and I’ll die here against my will,’ he sings in ‘Not Dark Yet’, paraphrasing Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers, from the Mishnah 4:29): ‘Against your will you were born, against your will you die.’ The same album’s opening track, ‘Love Sick,’ borrows its unusual central complaint from King Solomon’s love poetry as expressed in Song of Songs 2:7:

‘[Bereft of your presence], I am sick with love’ or, to put it more succinctly, as does Dylan, ‘I’m sick of love… I’m love sick’, the cry of an aging lonely man who engages with other people only when he takes the stage for one of his concerts on the Never Ending Tour.

In recent years, Dylan has been spotted at Yom Kippur services, typically at whatever Chabad synagogue he finds himself near as he tours the world. The central imagery of the concluding Neilah service, that of a penitent standing at a gate, praying to be written into the Book of Life before the doors are shut, finds its way into Time Out of Mind’s ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’:

Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore I’ve been walking that lonesome valley Trying to get to heaven before they close the door.

Knocking on heaven’s door may not be unique to Bob Dylan, but the Neilah reference undoubtedly is, and it frames his own late work within a Jewish context of sober reflection and repentance.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner), from which this essay has been adapted.

Please visit him on the web at www.dylanprophet.com

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.
This is not the first time religious left-wing associations have involved themselves in Israeli politics. In the 1980’s the late Rabbi Yehudah Amital founded Memad, a moderate left-wing movement. Deeply upset by the massacre in Sabra and Shatila in 1982 during the first Lebanon war, Amital saw the need to challenge the growing sense that religious Judaism was synonymous with nationalist politics; the people of Israel, he proposed, were more important than the land of Israel. In 1988, Memad failed to pass the election threshold and has since integrated into Labour, where it makes up a fraction of the dwindling party. Memad was involved in leading the Birthright Israel project and in promoting joint secular-religious prayers on high holidays in community centers. They were also a part of the ‘Citizens’ Accord Forum,’ which tried to promote a grassroots dialogue between Jewish and Arab Israelis, but remained quite marginal. Netivot-Shalom and Oz ve-Shalom started as two small movements in the beginning of the 1980’s but soon united to form Oz ve-Shalom- Netivot Shalom. Further to the left than Memad, this group was composed of religious Israeli intellectuals wishing to deliver an ideological alternative to religious Zionism through educational programmes. Apart from periodic seminars and conferences, the movement’s main activity was and still is its portion-of-the-week pamphlet, distributed in selected synagogues, especially in Jerusalem. The most visible group of religious left-wing activists today is Rabbis for Human Rights, which wages campaigns for social and economic justice and protests against human rights abuses such as the intimidation of Palestinian farmers by settlers and military forces; they even escort hundreds of farmers during the harvest, serving as human shields. Most of the rabbis active in this organisation are non-Orthodox and therefore marginalised in Israeli religious discourse. Despite their achievements, these groups have not succeeded in creating an effective counter-voice to the prevailing nationalism among religious Jews. The religious establishment has played a vital role in perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation, aligning itself with the extreme right since 1967. This phenomenon can be called also clear when setting the moral criteria expected from inhabitants of the holy city: ‘Lord, who shall sojourn in Thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell upon Thy holy mountain? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh truth in his heart; That hath no slander upon his tongue, nor doeth evil to his fellow, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.’ (Psalms 15, 1-3). Since when is it Jewish to treat your neighbours as inferior and expel non-Jewish working immigrants from your society because they pose an ‘ethnic threat’ to the maintenance of a Jewish majority? Numerous verses in the Torah warn us to remember our time in Egypt as gerim, inhabitants who do not enjoy the full status of citizens. A compelling example is found in Exodus 23:9: ‘And a Ger shalt thou not oppress; for ye know the heart of a Ger, seeing ye were Gerim in the land of Egypt.’ Judaism, unlike democracy or dictatorship, is a not a form of government. The religious activism I’m engaged with is in no way a dominant trend in contemporary Israel. We are a small group within an overwhelming majority of right-wing religious congregations. Some of us belong to the more liberal congre- gations in Jerusalem, both politically as well as halachically, but most of us do not belong to one particular congregation. Within the religious part of Israel we are absolutely anonymous. The only recognition we receive from the wider religious community is through the heated responses we attract from the religious settlers in Sheikh-Jarrah, who fail to understand how a person can claim to be religious and at the same time ‘love the Arab terrorists’. It is mainly through verbal confrontation with the settlers that we, religious peace activists, are addressed ‘in the name of the Whole’. Just as Israel needs a new democratic, anti- fascist leadership, so it is in want of a new (and in the same time very old and original) set of Jewish tenets. These are vital not only to Jews in Israel, but to all Jews, wherever they may be.

Hillel Ben Sasson: born and living in Jerusalem, is a member of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement. He is working towards completion of his PhD in Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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.’

His arch-rival Alex Ferguson lost no time responding in kind. Addressing Wayne Rooney’s complaints about United’s lack of big signings, he gave us a pastoral parable of his own:

Sometimes you look in a field and you see a cow and you think it’s a better cow than you’ve got in your own field… and it never really works out that way. It’s probably the same cow, or not as good as your own cow.  How to interpret these remarks? The obvious allusions are, in the first case, to the midrash Shir HaShirim Rabbah I:19, which likens the unique truth of the Torah to the purity of milk; and in the second case to Genesis 41.1, where we find the grass-isn’t-greener cow-next-door of Fergie’s fancy cropping up in Pharaoh’s dreams. In his sleep, the Egyptian monarch sees seven beautiful cows grazing on the bank of the Nile, whereupon seven ugly cows turn up and eat them alive. Joseph interprets this as an omen: seven years of plenty will be followed by seven of drought, and Pharaoh had better hoard his grain while he can. The theme of financial prudence reminds us of the common thread linking the staff changes at Liverpool with the lack of world-class signings at United: debt.  For the travails of both clubs result from leveraged buyouts, in which businessmen used the clubs themselves as collateral for loans to buy them with — and now the monstrous interest payments are swallowing their transfer budgets whole.  To find out more about the psychology of debt, let’s scroll a few pages back, to another tale of seven-year sentences: Genesis 29-32, where we find Joseph’s father, Jacob, tending his flocks.  Or, rather, tending his uncle Laban’s flocks. Jacob has spent the best years of his life labouring for this gonif Laban, who’s not the only Jewish crook in history, but is surely the only one to carry a crook.  And as far as his nephew’s concerned, he really puts the ewes in ‘usury’. Every morning, when the other shepherds get to work, Jacob’s already in his uncle’s field; every evening, he’s still shearing away when they’re back home tucking into a nice fleshpot. And the amazing thing is, he’s not even getting paid for it.  No, Jacob’s working off a debt. He put in seven long years for the hand of Laban’s daughter, curvaceous Rachel, but got scammed into taking her sister, Leah with the lazy eye. That got his goat, alright. But when he complained, his uncle told him to stop bleating and put in another seven years for Rachel. And Jake, that romantic — that fanatic — said yes! Only this time, he asked for the girl up front. So fourteen years and twelve kids down the line, here he is, still shvitzing in the sun under the iron yoke of debt.

You might say he’s a madman, and maybe you’d be right. But then, you don’t know Rachel. Ah, what a woman.  Fourteen years haven’t touched her, three kids neither (though it does help when you can delegate a couple of them to your maidservant). But it’s not just about beauty. Working to win Rachel defines stole his brother’s birthright. She gives him an identity, a history to be proud of.  And anyway, what is time, what is toil, when you’re already in heaven? For each seven years ‘seemed to him but a few days, such was his love for her’.

If you’re a fan of United or (until their apparent rescue) Liverpool, you can probably sympathise with Jacob. You pay a fortune for transport, ticket, a scrap of red polyester or a Plasticine pie, but little of your hard-earned cash will be invested in players: it’s all just servicing debt. To the owners, the club is a cash cow, there to be milked for all it’s worth. And yet, for the most part, you can’t stop going, can’t stop caring. Too much of that history and identity, you see. Love-sick fool, you know you’re getting stiffed, but the lure is too powerful. Perhaps, like Jacob, deep down you enjoy the exploitation. After all, what better way to prove your love than to suffer for it?

As we’ve found out of late, though, it’s not just our football clubs that are in danger of being ruined by debt. After a feast of borrowing that lasted — as it happens — seven years, a fiscal famine is upon us all. Such indignities may be shocking in the West, but terminally indebted governments are nothing new elsewhere. And when the country’s broke, you realize that modern civilisation has not moved as far from the farm as it seemed. One winter in Soviet Moscow, the rumour went round that a meat delivery had arrived from the collective farm. Real sausage! Within minutes, a vast queue wound round Peshkov the butcher’s, like an anaconda round a cow.  But after an hour, the manager came out and announced, ‘Comrades, there is less meat than we thought. Can all the Jews leave.’ Out go the Jews. Two hours later, the manager faces the crowd again: ‘I’m afraid there’s even less than we thought — only enough for Party members.’ Half the crowd shuffles off.  An hour later: ‘There really is very little meat. Anyone who didn’t fight in the October Revolution must go.’ Now just two old men are left. Three hours later, as darkness falls, the manager emerges:

‘Comrades, there will be no sausage after all today.’ ‘You see,’ says one old man to the other, ‘The Jews get the best deal.’

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

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 free-lance Talmudic Scholar.

• Unlike the majority of British citizens, the overwhelming majority of Israel’s 7.5 million citizens have little or no recourse to any long-standing democratic tradition which values accommodation and compromise. The great majority of Jewish-Israelis, 80% of all Israeli citizens, originate from across the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe — most recently from the former Soviet Union. Like Israel’s Arab citizens — 90% of whom are Sunni Muslims — none of these groups has recourse to any democratic tradition whatsoever pre-1948 or prior to its immigration.

• This lack of democratic tradition translates quite literally into a lack of democratic competency and intuition. Axiomatic democratic truths — that inalienable rights precede duties, that minority rights are as precious as majority rule, that democracy is as much about managing deep disagreements as determining outcomes — are not well understood or valued.

• Shaped and sustained by the regional conflict, Jewish and Arab citizens overwhelmingly live and learn separately, rarely, if ever meeting each other in equal-status settings. The result is a volatile cocktail of unfamiliarity and fear that make the prospects of a decent shared future seem entirely remote.

• For secular and religious Jewish citizens the levels of mutual ignorance, alienation and fear — highlighted in many research studies — are almost as harsh. While intra-Jewish relations do not carry with them the same fears of physical violence, they are, existentially, no less terrifying .

• While the deep divides between immigrant and veteran Israelis and, increasingly, between rich and poor, research indicates that these two fissures, both cutting across the heart and soul of Israeli society, present the greatest challenges to the cohesion and sustainability of Israeli society.

• Finally — as if all this was not enough — all these challenges are underpinned and exacerbated by a rudimentary lack of fundamental agreements between Israeli citizens about the character and shape of the state. While the British elections certainly touched on extremely big issues, fundamental questions of borders and primary sources of authority have either been long resolved or are being managed within consensually accepted democratic processes.

So, in the face of such extreme challenges, what are the primary tasks of a citizenship educator personally committed to the Jewish and democratic vision for Israel as presented in Israel’s Proclamation of Independence; a National Homeland for the Jewish People fair to all its citizens?

Setting aside the urgent need for regional accommodation — prior to which all internal society-building is to some extent a ‘ground-laying and -holding operation’ — there are two essential educational missions without which the future is bound to be bleak:

1.    School-based citizenship education to familiarise all Israeli children from kindergarten to high-school with the diversity that characterises Israeli society and help them imagine and construct a better win-win shared future based on the consensual idea of fairness — a powerful idea grounded in the distinct secular and religious traditions of all Israelis. Such an effort must provide realistic strategies that help overcome the physical division of Israeli students into separate — secular and religious, Jewish and Arab — school streams, creating a situation which poses the greatest structural obstacle to forging familiarity between young Israelis.

2.    A broader public education effort aiming to improve the quality of the polluted political air that our children are forced to breath. Such an effort, aiming to instill the basic and inter-connected ideas of fairness, citizenship and diversity across Israeli society should be directed primarily at young adults whose attitudes, recent research has shown, are especially negative towards their fellow citizens and towards basic democratic concepts, without which no diverse collective can hope to survive. Such an initiative might over time create a more positive public discourse and environment from which our politicians of all backgrounds — currently thriving on divisive and disrespectful dialogue — will hopefully learn.

In a deep sense, both these strategies are underpinned by a fundamental need for us — all 7.5 million Israeli citizens — to imagine a new and better ‘us’ that accommodates our deep disagreements and strives within the respectful but still broad bounds of possible agreements to shape a better shared future. That, possibly above all, is the fundamentally consensual, respectful and compromise-driven ethos of Britain’s ‘hard fought’ recent elections, from which we in Israel can learn a great deal.

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.
Although I discussed the ‘virtually Jewish’ phenomenon in a general European context, some of the most visible (and to some observers most troubling) manifestations were — and still are — observed in Poland, the historic heartland of Jewish life in Europe, where, as the scholar Jonathan Webber once noted, ‘the remarkable characteristic of anything to do with Jews…is its intensity.’
A project undertaken by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) provided a vivid statistical illustration of this. Between May 2000 and April 2001, it attempted to ‘map’ Jewish cultural activities in four European countries with small Jewish communities. The countries chosen — Poland, Sweden, Italy and Belgium — have a total Jewish population of well under 100,000 and had very different Jewish histories both before World War II and during and after the Shoah.
‘The results are simply astonishing, and as yet we have no idea what to make of them,’ Webber, who was an academic consultant on the project, reported in July 2001 at a conference in Budapest on Jewish identities in the post-communist era. ‘There is clearly no correlation between the considerable size of this cultural production and the percentage of Jews in a given total population of a particular country.’ It is almost, he added, as if ‘once one starts to have public Jewish culture, it simply continues to generate further events.’
Indeed, out of the four countries surveyed, Poland, with its tiny Jewish population (depending on how one defines ‘Jew,’ estimates vary from 3,000 to 20,000 or more in a total population of about 40 million), was by far the Jewish cultural champion, with 196 individual events and fully seven Jewish cultural festivals, including the annual Festival of Jewish culture in Krakow — the ‘largest and most important event’ recorded in the JPR survey.
The Festival — founded in 1988 by two young, non-Jewish intellectuals for a primarily non-Jewish public — takes place in Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter of Krakow, and nowhere, perhaps, has become more symbolic of the ‘virtually Jewish’ trends and the questions they raise than here.Centered on the most extensive surviving complex of Jewish built heritage in east-central Europe — synagogues, cemeteries, homes, marketplaces and other buildings and monuments, Kazimierz since the early 1990s has grown, and, indeed, been molded, into one of the major centers of Jewish tourism in Europe.
The post-communist development has seen the restoration of several synagogues and has brought new life and new business to what had long languished as the archetypical ‘Jewish ghost town.’ Even 15 years ago, much of Jewish Kazimierz was a derelict slum. At the same time this development has made the district one of the most prominent symbols of what has been called the marketing or ‘commodification’ of Jewish culture. The new Jewish-style cafes, boutiques, souvenir kitsch and constantly roving tour groups create an environment that has caused (and still causes) a deep sense of unease among some visitors, particularly as Krakow is only an hour’s drive from Auschwitz and often serves as a focal point for visits to the notorious death camp.
Writing about Kazimierz in 2006, for example, in a review of Jan T. Gross’s 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, the American journalist Ruth Franklin scorned what she termed the ‘much ballyhooed renaissance of Jewish culture in Poland, complete with sold-out klezmer festivals and a popular brand of spirits called “Kosher Vodka.” She wrote: ‘Half a dozen Jewish-themed hotels welcome visitors to Kazimierz, with names like “Alef” and “Ester” and “Klezmer Hois”; the “Eden” sports mezuzahs on every door and advertises ‘the only mikveh bath in Poland,’ as if it were a Jacuzzi.’ She goes on, ‘This grim carnival of Holocaust tourism and Western capital is neither a sign nor a symptom of a greater change in Polish society. It is evidence only of the Polish national schizophrenia on the subject of Jews. It is lovely to restore old buildings and to cherish a culture that has perished. But the celebration of the Jews of Poland cannot substitute for a genuine confrontation with the manner of their disappearance: when, where and by whom. There is no indication that the consumers of ‘Kosher Vodka’ are interested in engaging in such a reckoning any time soon.’
While it is hard to disagree with Franklin’s assertions, there is a bigger picture which she ignores. Poland does, indeed, have a certain schizophrenia towards its Jewish past but this schizophrenia has been demonstrated in loud and even lacerating public nationwide debates which is infinitely better, and ultimately more healthy, thatn the absolute denial and silence that existed until the 1980s.
‘When I began working in Poland in 1990, it was almost completely taboo to tell your friends that you are Jewish,’ Poland’s American-born chief rabbi Michael Schudrich told me recently. ‘Today, it is just a normal thing to say to almost anybody here in Poland. What was taboo only 20 years ago, is today a curiosity or interesting or [indicates] respect — and for some [it is] of no consequence at all.’
Likewise, in July 2006, Michael Steinlauf, an American academic expert on Yiddish culture and Polish-Jewish relations and the author of the book Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997), told me that to him, during the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, the Kazimierz district’s main square, Szeroka street, formed a symbolic ‘headquarters of the Diaspora’ thanks to the numerous cultural events and the many international Jewish artists, performers and fans who attended. I was speaking to him after he had enjoyed Friday night dinner with friends and family at one of the Szeroka street restaurants — a newly opened ‘mainstream’ restaurant, not one of the Jewish-style cafes. ‘We had a table for 11 and lit the candles,’ he told me. ‘The couple from the next table came over saying “Shalom Aleichem”. I’ve never done this anywhere else. It’s never been as easy to be a Jew than on Szeroka street the night before [the Festival’s outdoor final concert there].’
Krakow is home to several institutions promoting education on Jewish subjects. These include the Jewish studies centre at Jagiellonian University, founded in 1986, as well as the Jewish Culture Centre, established in 1993, as well as the Galicia Jewish Museum, founded by the late British photographer Chris Schwarz in 2004. The Jewish Culture Festival recently opened its own permanent culture and education centre called Cheder.
These institutions, which offer varied programs of lectures, classes, concerts and workshops, are generally run by non-Jews to serve the general public, including tourists. But all benefit from the input of Jewish scholars and Jewish religious and cultural figures.
The number of Jews in Krakow remains tiny — somewhere between 200 and 400 depending on whom you talk to. But the Jewish community has raised its own profile in recent years, in part thanks to the formation of a Jewish youth group, Czulent, in 2004 and also to the opening in 2008 of a modern Jewish Community Centre. (Mainly funded by World Jewish Relief and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the JCC project had a somewhat high profile from the outset. It came about, remarkably, at the urging of Prince Charles, who had visited Krakow in 2002 and was moved by the plight of the poor and aging Jews of the city. Charles himself returned  to Krakow last year for its inauguration; wearing a kippah he helped affix a mezuzah to the door.)
The JCC director, Jonathan Ornstein, is a 39-year-old New Yorker who made aliyah and then moved to Krakow about seven years ago to teach Hebrew at the Jagiellonian University. Ornstein  contradicts the stereotype of the traditional Jew as portrayed in the old paintings and photographs that fill books, decorate the local Jewish-style cafes or are caricatured in the wooden figurines for sale in souvenir shops and craft markets. Knowledgeable but iconoclastic, and an avowed ‘Jewish vegetarian atheist,’ he took part in an ‘atheist pride’ march in Krakow this year, carrying a sign reading ‘Thank God I’m an atheist.’ Not only that, he created a Facebook group called ‘I want the Beastie Boys to play the XX Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow.’
Recently, I noted to Ornstein that that is increasingly little direct memory anymore in Poland of a time when the country was home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. For the student-age crowd that attends Jewish Culture Festival events or hangs out in the music pubs that have made Kazimierz the scene of trendy night life, what goes on today is what ‘Jewish’ means. Few of them can even remember a time before the Festival existed or before the district was a Jewish tourist attraction, with all the attendant commercialization.
He agreed. Kazimierz, Ornstein said, was to his mind not the ‘former’ but the ‘present’ Jewish quarter of Krakow.
‘Nobody alive today has a good memory of Kazimierz when it was better than it is now,’ he said. ‘There was the war, and then after the war it was derelict for decades. Now, it’s the hippest place in the city. The whole ‘former’ thing is based on history, not living memory.’
The success of the Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow helped spark other Jewish festivals of various types around the country. In 2000, the JPR Mapping project identified seven of them. Today, the number is much greater: in 2009, I counted more than 20, including at least two Jewish film festivals.
Some were one-day affairs, others spanned a weekend or longer. Some took place in towns with small Jewish communities, such as Wroclaw, Poznan and Gdansk. Others took place where no Jews live today. These included the sixth edition of a festival dedicated to the Yiddish author Shalom Asch, scheduled for early December in the central town of Kutno, the third edition of an annual Jewish culture festival in the village of Checiny, a Jewish theatre festival in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, the annual Jewish culture festival in Chmielnik, a Jewish culture festival in Bialystok, another in Szczekonciny, another in Przysucha, and so on. Festivals celebrating a diversity of cultures and religions, including Judaism, took place in Lodz, Wlodowa and Szczebrzeszyn.
‘I often joke that now the mayor of every small town feels obliged to make excuses [if] he/she has no Jewish Festival in his/her town,’ Anna Dodziuk, a psychotherapist who is also a Jewish activist and editor, told me. ‘To put it short: it is politically correct now to explore the Jewish history of the local communities, to commemorate Jews of a shtetl who perished in Holocaust, to celebrate somehow Jewish culture. So more and more Jews start to feel secure enough to be openly Jewish (or to be visible).’
In fact, some of the festivals had religious observance at their heart. One of these was a Shabbaton weekend held in October in Kielce. Most of Kielce’s 25,000 pre-war Jewish were killed in Treblinka, but the town is far better known for what happened after the war; it is infamous for the July 1946 pogrom that killed 42 Jews, an attack that formed the basis of Jan T. Gross’s book Fear.
The event brought prayers to the synagogue for the first time since the Holocaust — the building has been used as an archive for nearly 60 years. It also included lectures, workshops, exhibitions, concerts and film screenings. It was the latest in a series of Shabbaton programs in long-disused synagogues in Poland organized by Michael Traison, an observant Jewish America lawyer who has an office in Warsaw and has spent much of his time in Poland over the past 15 years.
Jews and Catholics took part in the event. ‘For the first time in my life I could celebrate the beginning of the Shabbat,’ a Catholic man wrote on the Shabbaton web site. ‘I could feel myself what I already knew theoretically, namely — what the Shabbat means for Jews who treat their faith seriously. Boi kala is also a challenge or a question on how I, a Christian man, treat my “shabbat” — Sunday. Thanks to Jews’ testimony of how they treat their holy day, I treat my one more seriously.’
The biggest Jewish Culture Festival outside Krakow was the sixth edition of the annual ‘Singer’s Warsaw’ festival in the Polish capital at the beginning of September. Singer’s Warsaw is sponsored by the secular Jewish Shalom organization. Shalom was founded in 1988 and is headed by the Yiddish singer Golda Tencer, now in her 60s, who for years was the star of Warsaw’s State Yiddish Theatre — her husband, Szymon Szurmiej, has been head of the Theatre since 1969.
The Shalom Foundation has sponsored events such as high school essay competitions on Jewish topics, concerts, art exhibits, Jewish film festivals, a Jewish song competition, and the like. Outside of Poland, however, it is best known for the remarkable 1996 exhibition and book And I Still See Their Faces.This was a collection of more than 450 photographs of Polish Jews, ranging from formal studio portraits to faded snapshots of everyday life. They were culled from photographs sent in — mainly by non-Jewish Poles — from all over Poland. The number of photos sent in, about 8,000, more or less equals the number of self-identifying Jews living in Poland today.
The exhibit showed the broadest cross-section possible of Jews in pre-war Poland, orthodox and secular; assimilated and traditional. As such it turned somatic and other stereotypes (including that of Jews as victims) on their head. In the pictures, wrote Tencer in an introduction to the book, ‘the light falls on faces still free of terror and fear. We can see on them quiet reflection, the joy of family life, a smile that manifests belief in a friendly world.’
Paradoxically, much of this sensitivity is trumped by theatricality in the way that the Singer Festival is mounted.
The Festival’s stated aim, according to its web- site is ‘to reconstruct the prewar atmosphere here in order to present the annihilated world of the Polish Jews.’ Unlike in Krakow, where the entire Kazimierz district remains largest intact, almost all of downtown Warsaw, including the Jewish quarter and wartime Ghetto, was destroyed during the Second World War. The Singer festival takes place in and around one-block-long Prozna street, one of the only streets in Warsaw’s historic downtown Jewish district to have survived.
During the festival, the dilapidated street is turned into a sort of stage, with old photographs of Polish Jews affixed to windows or hung from wires attached to the buildings. I admit that I haven’t attended the Singer Festival, but — from afar — the costumed, Renaissance Faire-style ‘performing the Jew’ that is described on the festival’s web site (and shown in posted pictures) makes me rather more uneasy than do many of the other manifestations of public Jewish culture:

Along Próžna Street we create Jewish cafés, quaint shops and workshops. We construct an old bookstore and a newspaper office in which [Isaac Bashevis] Singer worked in New York before the war. Each year we make a wine bar and a bakery. Everyone can come inside, and have a look at collected odds and ends in use at the beginning of the twentieth-century. There are lots of souvenirs to be bought from street vendors and many home-made tidbits to be tasted. Many characteristic figures appear in the streets during the festival: Hasidics, merchants, painters, shoemakers, tailors, printers, blacksmiths, barrel organ players, entertainers, florists. All of them contributed to making Warsaw uniquely colorful. During the festival, just as in the past, one can hear klezmer music, chants from synagogues, as well as well-known traditional Jewish songs, in the heart of the Polish capital. The past reality is revived by many exhibitions and plays, artists’ installations, scientific sessions, and meetings with writers and Jewish artists. Yiddish culture returns through prewar films, song and dance workshops, paper cutting, ceramics as well as Hebrew calligraphy, lectures and discussion groups.

My use of the term ‘Virtual’ deliberately played on the cyberspace concept of virtual worlds and virtual communities exiting on the Internet. Even back then, these included many, many Jewish websites.
‘People can enter, move around and engage in cyberspace virtual worlds without physically leaving their desks or quitting their “real world” identities,’ I wrote in my 2002 book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe:

Online, however, they can assume other identities, play other roles and be, or act as if they are, whoever they want. Like virtual worlds on the Internet, the various aspects of ‘Virtual Jewry’ are linked together and overlapping. One can approach them either passively, as a mere consumer, or ‘interactively,’ in a participatory manner, through, for example, performance and interpretation. They may be enriched by input from contemporary Jewish communal, intellectual, institutional, or religious sources, or they may be self-contained within totally non-Jewish contexts.

Virtually Jewish came out several years before the advent of social networking sites such as Facebook, and also well before what has been called a ‘Virtual Diaspora’ took root in the online world known as Second Life, where a ‘virtual synagogue’, Temple Beth Israel, was established there in 2006.
One year later, reported 2Life Magazine, Second Life’s Jewish community was ‘more diverse in age, religious affiliation and […] geographical origin than any community could be in the real world, and it also includes many religious seekers who use Second Life as a tool to explore their own roots, many of them with little to no Jewish educational background.’
Second Life Judaism, it said, was ‘a unique intercultural dialogue within various streams of Judaism, within various Diasporas and Israel, within various age groups and with Jews and non-Jews. Judaism in Second Life is a mélange of different identities, in which age, origin, gender, and even religious affiliation are unimportant. It is an experiment with an uncertain outcome, but with obvious potential for new and creative ways to explore culture, heritage and identity.’
The ‘virtual diaspora’ in Second Life is symptomatic of an even broader Jewish presence in cyberspace which has grown exponentially in the past decade and which now includes many websites, blogs and Facebook groups that originate in Poland — among Jews and ‘virtual Jews’ alike. Among the most impressive and inclusive of these is the so-called ‘Virtual Shtetl,’ a web portal set up by the huge new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is under construction in Warsaw. Its aim is to be both an information portal as well as a sort of Jewish social networking site. ‘The “Virtual Shtetl” is a museum without barriers, a consequent extension of the real Museum,’ the website says. ‘Its main objective is to provide a unique social forum for everyone interested in Polish-Jewish life.’
The website includes constantly expanding databases of historic and contemporary photographs and archival information about specific towns all around Poland, as well as blog-like, frequently updated news items and announcements of Jewish interest related to Poland. In October alone there were more than 60 items posted.
‘Currently, our portal is a source of information but, in the future, it will also include an interactive system by which Internet users will interact with each other,’ the site says, in phrases that echo my own description of interaction in the flesh and blood ‘virtual Jewish world.’
The Virtual Shtetl, it says, ‘will create a link between Polish-Jewish history and the contemporary, multi-cultural world.’
These ‘virtual’ links will enhance links that already exist, creating a sort of clearing house for many activities that already take place. Indeed, the past decade already the Krakow Jewish Festival has included a ceremony at which the Israeli ambassador honors non-Jewish Poles who preserve, conserve and promote Jewish culture and memory.
It is all part of a process of ‘normalisation’ Dodziuk said. ‘I’m sure it has its influence on a Jewish perception of the situation in Poland.’ For local populations in many places, she said, ‘These pre-war Jewish inhabitants have become “our people,” part of our local tradition.’ Earlier this year, she added, on a trip with an Israel friend through eastern and southeastern Poland, she met many people in small towns who now considered the Jewish history of these one-times shtetls part and parcel of their own local past and personal memories.

‘It is,’ she said, ‘obviously much more and much deeper than political correctness.’

Ruth Ellen Gruber’s books include National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe, Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere), and Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe. She blogs on Jewish heritage issues at http://jewish-heritage-travel.blogspot.com

Konstanty Gebert is a reporter and columnist at Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s biggest daily newspaper, and  the founder of the Jewish intellectual monthly Midrasz.

He will be speaking at Limmud Conference 2009.

This essay was originally published in: Konstanty Gebert: Living in the Land of Ashes; Austeria, Krakow — Budapest 2008.

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.

BW: Back in the late nineteenth century, the topic of language evolution became so disreputable that the Cercle Linguistique de Paris banned speculation on the origins of human language. Discussion of language evolution disappeared for most of the twentieth century but has recently had a spectacular revival, with numerous books expounding various theories (among others) relating the evolution of human language to specific genetic mutations, mutual grooming, adornment of the body, and singing. What is your perspective on the evolution of human language?

SP: A fairly conventional one, I would have thought: that language evolved as an adaptation to communication in a knowledge-using, social species. Language coevolved with technological know-how and social cooperation (which, like language, are absent or rudimentary in other animals) because the three abilities reinforce each other. Know-how can be multiplied by accumulating other people’s discoveries; cooperation is enhanced when the parties have commodities that they can share at a low cost to themselves (knowledge is the ultimate shareable commodity); and language itself depends on people being in a cooperative relationship — to be ‘on speaking terms,’ as we say. This triad of lifestyle features may be called ‘the cognitive niche.’ But while I think that this is pretty straightforward, many theoreticians on the evolution of language have opted for more exotic theories, as you have noted.

BW: Michael Tomasello, in his recent book, Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009), regards one of the most striking features of human children in contrast to the young of other species as their urge to be collaborative and helpful. How does such an observation fit in with the relationship between the psychology of the individual and society?

SP: As I mentioned, humans are truly an unusual species in the degree to which we cooperate with nonrelatives — the basis for human society. Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists tell us that this activity offers huge payoffs, but a suite of cognitive and emotional abilities are needed to sustain it. These include the ability to offer help to those who need it, recognize other individuals, remember how they treated you in the past, and experience the moral emotions (such as anger, gratitude, guilt, sympathy, and trust) that impel you to reciprocate. It’s not surprising that these abilities are well developed in humans, and emerge early in development.

BW: Psychologists and linguists have for many years created theoretical models of cognition and language. With advances in brain imaging techniques we understand much more about networks in the brain and how the brain functions.  Will neuroscience begin to constrain cognitive and linguistic theories or will there remain a place for abstract models?

SP: Both are true. Neuroscience will certainly constrain theories of language processing. My own recent attempt in this direction is a study (with Ned Sahin, Eric Halgren and colleagues, recently published in Science) in which we collaborated with neurosurgeons who had implanted electrodes in the brains of epileptic patients to locate the origin of their seizures. Some of the electrodes passed through language-related areas of the brain, and we were able to record electrophysiological activity while the patients were producing words or grammatically inflecting them — a kind of recording which ordinarily could only be done in animals. We saw signs of three successive stages of processing — lexical, grammatical, phonological — which supported one of the major theories of speech production. At the same time, there will always be a place for abstract models (in our case, it gave us an idea what to look for!) Just as one cannot analyze a movie by putting a DVD under a microscope, one cannot understand the brain at the physiological level alone; one also has to understand its design.

BW:You’ve taken up a principled position of atheism. Yet you have dedicated The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Penguin Books, 2008) to your wife: ‘Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, my bashert’. Bashert means predestined or predetermined. (It’s the past participle of the verb bashern, related to Middle High German beschern meaning ‘to allot’ or ‘to apportion’). So although I don’t think you use the term because you believe that your wife and you were determined for each other by God, I wonder if you could expand a bit on your views about Judaism and being Jewish (as an individual and as a member of a community and culture).

SP:  Yes, this was a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of our compatibility at every level, from the genetic (we are carriers of a Tay-Sachs-like gene found only in Ashkenazim) — to the occupational (authors) — to the philosophical (pro-science, pro-reason) — to the religious (secular humanists with an affection for Jewish culture and history). Like many modern Jews, my relationship to Judaism is complicated. I don’t think that ancient religious texts are a source of morality (the Torah sanctions genocide, slavery, and rape, and the Talmud is a recipe for insularity and the oppression of women). Yet I admire Judaism’s millennia-long tradition of ethical disputation and debate. I am not a Zionist in the sense of endorsing a mystical connection between a people and a territory, and am uncomfortable with any religious or ethnic definition of a state, together with many of Israel’s policies. Yet I admire many things about the country, and object to the myopic denunciations and illiberal persecution (not least by certain British academics) of Israel and its citizens. I am an atheist who personally finds many Jewish religious observances to be a bit tedious, yet I am glad that others carry on the traditions, and feel solidarity with Jewish humor, culture, and history. Complicated, perhaps even contradictory — but what could be more Jewish than that?

Bencie Woll is a professor in the Research Department of Cognitive Perceptual and Brain Sciences at University College London and Director of the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre

Steven Pinker is appearing at Jewish Book Week 2010.
www.jewishbookweek.com

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’.
Beyond this, the obvious place for the injection of banter lies in ethnic and denominational rivalry. For instance, Ashkenazis could hang around outside Sephardi shuls, chanting things like, ‘Down with the Armada, you’re going down with the Armada.’ The Sephardim might respond with: ‘You’re supposed to be at Heim.’ Liberal and Reform Jews would adapt the perennial ‘You’re so sh*t it’s unbelievable’ to taunt the Orthodox: ‘Your whole scripture’s unbelievable!’ The frummers, meanwhile, would respond by turning up mob-handed on Yom Kippur, when synagogues swell with once-a-year day-trippers, chanting, ‘Where were you, where were you, where were you on Tu Bishvat?’
Still, the Torah reminds us that it is the aesthetic quality of song, not its lyrical content, that God is really interested in. ‘Lord of deeds, who chooses songs of song,’ we say every morning in the Pesukei Dezimra, the daily prayers. Many commentators have been struck by the phrase translated ‘songs of songs’.  Why use the two words — shirei and zimrah? Avery Lehtflagg, in his always stimulating Mayel Zof Sa’id, points out that shirayim is also the popular pronunciation of sh’yarim — crumbs, remains, leftovers. The shirayim from a rebbe’s meal were prized symbols of sanctity, eaten with relish by his disciples. What, then, are the shirayim zimrah — the ‘crumbs of song’?  Perhaps, Lehtflagg argues, they are the song’s aftertaste, the reverberations that remain in your head when the communal singing ends, the shadow of the transpersonal self you shared for a while with your fellow-worshippers. Good to know they are still in there somewhere, always part of us… aside perhaps from the sociopath with the gold tooth and the passionate views on immigration who sat next to me at Walsall-Swindon the other week. I like to think I left my commonality with him at the turnstile.
To close, a chant for a High Holy Day, to the tune, appropriately enough, of ‘Any Dream Will Do’, from Joseph:

The Ner Tamid (the Ner Tamid)
Shines above the bimah
(whoa-oh)
But it’s getting dimmer (whoa-oh)
Everlasting? Sure…And turnout’s
low (and turnout’s low)
In my opinion (whoa-oh)
Call that a minyan? (whoa-oh)
I make it four…
The rabbi’s lost. (The rabbi’s lost)
His strange oration (whoa-oh)
Bears no relation (whoa-oh)
To the siddur…
And Tekiah (and Tekiah)
Is proving quite a struggle
(whoa-oh)
I’ll never get my kugel (whoa-oh)
This Yom Kippur.

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.

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.

Media reports of violence in this conflict are unlikely to offer any analysis of the political context, the history and the meaning of the power imbalances in the conflict. Uncomfortable as it may be, we are unused to examining in depth what happens between groups and how their behaviour impacts on each other. Without this understanding, it will obfuscate how cycles of violence erupt and what can be done to contain the violence.

There were genuine attempts to move away from left-right alignments in search of a more respectful language and intellectual honesty. Group members expressed an appreciation of having a safe space to talk about their Jewish identity and their relationship with Israel. The commitment to the group was high with a very consistent level of attendance. Group members challenged each other to take responsibility for their own behaviour and to move away from a culture of blame and there was an authentic attempt to exchange ideas in a community-building process. However, some participants displayed immense difficulty in managing the profound differences which emerged, trying to convince other participants of the moral rightness of their position. There were coherent and sometimes strong voices in the group calling for calm and clarity but these were often overwhelmed by the emotion of  those threatened by the act of differentiation.

The aim of the group was not to change minds but to help participants find the capacity to tolerate a range of different views.

The moderate voices, who took a more complex, nuanced position on the conflict (seeing it as a cycle of violence with provocation on all sides) were usually drowned out by the more hard-line voices, an uneasy mirror of the political space between Palestine and Israel where hardline voices dominate even when they are a minority viewpoint.

Many people come into psychotherapy because they cannot manage conflict. Either they avoid it and suffer, or they behave in a way to escalate it and thereby make their world unsafe.  The idea that conflict can be managed, understood and communicated in a safe way is anathema to them. I had hoped that some of these ideas would reverberate in the group and there were genuine attempts by some members to explore this.

The need for an enemy is as clear on the micro level as it is on the international stage. It helps us to define ourselves and gives us security and certainty. The blurring of right and wrong and general uncertainty is distinctly uncomfortable to live with. But the rigid structure we have erected to increase our sense of certainty makes us ill-equipped to deal with conflict. Communities who have been involved in endless conflict find empathy and self-reflection difficult. A more comfortable position is one of a victim psychology in which we do not examine our own behaviour and place the blame with the other side. A resolution of the Palestine-Israel conflict will demand not only political parameters offering justice and security for all parties involved, but it will also involve self-reflection and the very careful use of language, as this defines the conflict not as it is, but as we tell it.  In the words of George Mitchell, when he was appointed the US Middle East special envoy: ‘man creates and sustains conflict and only man can resolve it’.

Gabrielle Rifkind is a group analyst and specialist in conflict resolution. She leads the Middle East programme for Oxford Research Group

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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‘Maturity,’ wrote the Norwegian scholar Stig Itinder Mikserssen, ‘means learning to wait.’ As new-born infants, we feel the mother’s absence — be it only for a few moments — as an absolute loss which, psychoanalysts and mothers-in-law claim, can traumatize us for life. Later, as toddlers, waiting for anything — food, home, tomorrow — whips up in us the boundless, impotent rage of a pint-sized thunder-god. Not until adolescence do we grasp that a period of inactivity is something to be filled — with cigarettes, music, ambivalent grunting, depending on the phase — rather than to be wished away. By then we are on our way to Mikserssen’s ‘maturity’: the understanding that anticipation is more fun than consummation. Unfortunately, it’s only then that we realize we’ve just squandered twenty years of precious waiting-time yearning to be grown-ups.

At this point, psychic well-being demands that we invent something else to wait for — ideally something that will take a lifetime to come. Retirement, perhaps, or the Revolution, or Manchester City winning a trophy. To this end — or lack of end — the Jews went one further: they found a means of waiting forever. Not just on the scale of a lifetime, but on the scale of human history. They called it Messiah. The word originally meant ‘annointed with oil’ and was used to refer to kings, prophets, high priests and fried fish. But over time it was invested with greater significance: the Messiah would be a single man, a divine redeemer who would gather the people from their exile, rule them with strength and wisdom, rekindle in their hearts the love of Torah and extend the blessing of peace across the entire earth. So no pressure then. Not that many are expecting him any time soon. Indeed, stung by Christian claims that he’d already been and gone without their noticing, Jews have made his tardiness, ironically, an article of faith. The Ukrainian scholar E. Zhuslys Gedimov used to tell of the small Hasidic community that employed a local man to stand at the village gates, all day long, all year round, ready to greet the Messiah on his arrival. ‘Fifty measly kopeks a day they’re paying you!’ chided his wife, ‘Even Oleg the ironmonger pays eighty.’ ‘True,’ replied the man, ‘but this is a job for life!’

Jews may not wait patiently or politely (it’s well known there’s no such thing as a polite Jewish waiter), but that’s not to say they don’t enjoy it. For one thing, the Messiah’s prospective arrival inspires courage in dark times; for another, it offers rich opportunities for bickering. Will he be a descendent of David or of Joseph? Is he a person or a symbol of the era of redemption? Is the hour of his advent predetermined, or is there a potential saviour living among us in every generation? And if he was going to be this late, could he not at least have rung?

It is this Messianic vision that has, in part, enabled Jews to endure. And it is the same self-replenishing flask of elated, frustrated hope that allows football fans to survive the barren desert that is the close season. For barely have the floodlights been switched off, the turnstiles locked and the manager sacked, than the football fan begins to dream of salvation. There are no supporters, however hapless and hopeless their club, however plagued by existential doubts and exponential debts, who don’t believe in the imminent arrival of that redeemer, that saviour, that big-money transfer who will lift the spirits and the gates and the whole club back to glory on high. And so they scour the back pages for ‘transfer rumours’, stories sprung full-grown and monstrous from the imaginations of desperate editors; these they copy on to web forums, only to see their own speculations recycled by the hacks as ‘breaking news’; in response to which, chairmen and agents release statements, greedily swallowed by the press and regurgitated for the fans. And so the whole benighted community immerses itself in a timeless ritual: prophecy, interpretation, revelation.

This is all so much fun that most fans far prefer it to the actual football — even fans of thrilling, successful sides. Like end-of-dayers dreaming of the apocalypse, they spend the season secretly wishing it could all be over, the pointless, predictable charade of it all, so they can get down to the real business — doing business with Real. This summer, Madrid fans awaited the arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United. The move seemed perfect. Not only would Ronaldo have brought goals by the score and cups by the plateful; not only would he have had chicas chucking Euros and shounen shoving Yen into Madrid’s coffers; but the winger would even have fulfilled the literal biblical meaning of ‘Messiah’, being routinely plastered with more oil than a Kuwaiti sardine. But it was not to be.  United put their foot down, even though a plaster-cast will prevent the player himself doing so till October. And yet, a wonderful summer holiday was had by all.

And then, suddenly, the wait was over. For me, at any rate, and my fellow City fans. He had arrived. Anointed with all the oil wealth of Abu Dhabi, Dr Sulaiman Al-Fahim strolled in from nowhere, bought the club, and instantly alchemised it into a major global player. Within a day he was promising us Torres, Messi (ah …), even the oleaginous Portuguese genius himself … every foolish dream we’ve ever had to wait for nightfall to live out. And suddenly I don’t know what to do with myself. Why move, when you are cradled in the arms of a giant? Why hope, when all is on offer like milk from the teat? Or, as the essayist Mark der Sentebach put it, ‘Be careful what you pray for, because nothing is duller than heaven.’

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.

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.

Those who level the charge obviously have no doubts. So much so that it’s deployed as the ‘killer fact’: to be called a self-hating Jew explains everything. No more need be said. Self-hatred means being a traitor to your race, an Uncle Tom, siding with the enemy, willing the destruction of your own people. In Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, Sander L. Gilman says it’s ‘a term interchangeable with “Jewish anti-Judaism” or “Jewish anti-Semitism”’.

Recently you could have taken a course in the history of Jewish self-hatred at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The playwright David Mamet deploys the concept in his book, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews (2006), a fierce denunciation of ‘apostate Jews’ and ‘race traitors’. And then there’s the outrageously gross ‘S.H.I.T.’ — Self-Hating, Israel Threatening — ‘list’, a website purportedly ‘exposing’ more than 8,000 self-hating Jews, given credence in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz in July 2007 in an article which argues that Muslims would benefit from a good dose of the kind of public self-hate so common among Jews. Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks refers to it uncritically in his most recent book, The Home We Build Together (an attack on multiculturalism): ‘[Self-hatred] is something Jews know about: we can fairly claim to have invented it (Arthur Koestler once memorably said, “Self-hatred is the Jew’s patriotism”). It occurred in mainland Europe in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century [sic], as Jews internalised the negative image others had of them. It represents the breakdown of an identity, and nothing good can come of it.’

Is the application of the concept of ‘Jewish self-hatred’ an objective judgement on a way of thinking, a legitimate diagnosis of a personality disorder? Or is it merely political rhetoric that has got out of hand and says more about the people using it than the people it’s targeted at? I would argue that the latter is true: the concept of ‘Jewish self-hatred’ is entirely bogus and it serves no other purpose than to marginalise and demonise political opponents.

As a formal psychological category, the term ‘self-hatred’ was first used by Sigmund Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1916–17). But according to Professor Gilman, the term ‘self-hating Jew’ comes from a disagreement over the validity of the Jewish Reform movement between neo-Orthodox Jews of the Breslau seminary in Germany and Reform Jews in the nineteenth century. Some neo-Orthodox Jews viewed Reform Jews as ‘inauthentic Jews’ because they felt that the Reformers identified more closely with German Protestantism and German nationalism than with Judaism.

The key point is that the term ‘Jewish self-hatred’ arose from the specific circumstances of Jews in Germany and came increasingly into use at the beginning of the twentieth century. And you could say — following Gilman’s explanation of its first use — that it was one of the radical or extreme reactions to the partial failure or partial success of emancipation, to the results of the attempts by Jews to assimilate into German society.

By the 1900s the formal emancipation of German Jews was complete and they had achieved a very high degree of assimilation. But the more they demonstrated their desire to be the same as everyone else, they more they were acutely reminded of their otherness. The more they distanced themselves from their Jewish identity the further away seemed the prize of complete acceptance. Coping with this double bind was not easy. One response — intended to help overcome those barriers — was to lay the blame, in whole or in part, at the feet of Jews themselves, to see weaknesses and faults in Judaism, Jewish culture, Jewish mannerisms, Jewish ways of behaving and so on — to cultivate the notion of group inferiority. On the one hand, this was an intensification of the lively, and valued, self-criticism among German Jews that had been developing for some time. On the other hand, the fact that it was sometimes couched in Anti-Semitic terms suggested that Jews were internalising the negative images society imposed on them, stemming from the increase in public Anti-Semitism, and seeking to appease their persecutors in order to finally gain acceptance.

At the same time, Jews (and non-Jews) had concerns about the mental and physical health of Jews. There was vigorous debate about the special tendency of Jews to have particular diseases or engage in asocial behaviour, and in particular to experience problems of mental health. (This was a preoccupation in German and Austrian society as a whole.) Some accepted the ‘Jewish disease’ argument and saw it manifest itself in ‘Jewish Anti-Semitism’, in ‘Jewish self-hatred’ — a psychic disorder, a psychopathology reflecting, in Paul Reitter’s words, an ‘inner torment’. (Expressions of group inferiority were not confined to Jews. The historian Shulamit Volkov reminds us that ‘among Germans at the time [they] were both numerous and “amazingly vehement”’.)

Most use of the ‘Jewish self-hatred’ charge was made by Jewish writers, intellectuals, Zionist politicians (who were very often also writers) and religious figures. And traffic went both ways. Assimilationists and anti-Zionists accused Zionists of being self-haters, for promoting the idea of the strong Jew using rhetoric close to that of the Anti-Semites; Zionists accused their opponents of being self-haters, for promoting the image of the Jew that would perpetuate his inferior position in the modern world. And certain German and Austrian Jews have been regarded as the supreme examples of Jewish self-hatred: Heinrich Heine (1797-1856, the leading German romantic poet, essayist and journalist), Otto Weininger (1880-1903, the influential Austrian philosopher who killed himself at 23), Karl Kraus (1874-1936, the Austrian writer, journalist, editor and satirist) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).

Use of the term ‘Jewish self-hatred’ was very prevalent during the years immediately preceding the First World War, when German Jews continued to experience the dilemmas of wishing to become completely assimilated into German society. Theodor Lessing’s book Der judische Selbsthass (Jewish Self-Hate) appeared in 1933 and supposedly charts Lessing’s journey from Jewish self-hater to Zionist.

But the dilemma that led to the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred came to an end with the Holocaust, so there seemed little reason for it to remain current. In most post-Holocaust centres of Jewish life, especially the United States, assimilation, though striven for, was a less anxious process, and Jews were not alone in their quest to integrate. And after the establishment of the state of Israel, losing your identity in order to become part of the national story was no longer the only option for a Jew who felt uncomfortable in the host country. Zionism seemed to represent the ultimate resolution of this identity problem: in Israel the Jew was the national story.

But the concept did not disappear from the lexicon. As the centre of Jewish life shifted from a devastated Europe denuded of Jews to the United States, where there were far fewer barriers to assimilation, so too the concept of Jewish self-hatred migrated to the New World, was reborn and took on additional meanings.

Hugely influential in this rebirth was Kurt Lewin, until 1932 professor of psychology at the University of Berlin. He emigrated from Germany in 1933 after Hitler had come to power. In 1941 he wrote an essay, ‘Self-hatred among Jews’, published in an American Jewish Committee-sponsored journal, which was much cited and frequently quoted. Lewin was the leading exponent of the study of group dynamics in the United States and a highly regarded social psychologist. He reinterpreted the problem as one mostly affecting the group rather than the individual. Not surprisingly, given the threat to Jews at the time, and his view of the failure of German Jewish leaders to give public support to Jewish institutions, he argued that criticism of the group weakens and endangers it, and those responsible for that criticism are unable to adjust to the group’s problems. The result is ‘neurosis’ manifesting itself as self-hatred.

A similar theory — ‘Negro self-hatred’ — had developed in relation to black Americans, also promoted by social psychologists like Lewin who had become highly influential in American society in the 1940s. With both theories being fuelled by conclusions drawn from investigations into growing anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, a ‘convergence zone’, as Susan Glenn described it in Jewish Social Studies (2006), was created ‘in which the figure of the “self-hating Jew” and the “negrophobic negro” were imagined […] by Frantz Fanon as “brothers in misery”’.

The concept of Jewish self-hatred gained wide theoretical currency in the 1940s, and as Glenn writes: ‘During and after the war, individuals and groups across the intellectual, social, cultural, religious and political spectrum deployed the term variously, inconsistently, and with conflicting social and political agendas.’ The 1940s and 1950s were ‘the age of self-hatred’. In effect, a bitter war broke out over questions of Jewish identity. It was a kind of ‘Jewish Cold War’: ‘a contentious public debate [intra-Jewish war] revolving around the question of Jewish group loyalty, Jewish group “survival”, and Jewish nationalism’.

Broadly speaking, this ‘war’ was a response to the success of assimilation. Those Jews who saw assimilation resulting in estrangement from Judaism and distaste for one’s Jewish identity diagnosed the problem as Jewish self-hatred. The cure was ‘positive Jewishness’, or ‘living Judaism’, as the influential Rabbi Milton Steinberg referred to it in A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem (1945). Critics of this movement accused it of promoting ‘narrow-minded ethnic chauvinism and ideological intolerance’.

These debates over Jewish self-hatred continued to the end of the 1970s but eventually died down, losing their force and urgency. But the concept reemerged with new polemical force in the 1980s in debates over Israel, debates which eventually spread to virtually every other western Jewish community.

In the United States, Glenn says, giving financial and moral support to Israel came to constitute ‘the existential definition of American Jewishness’. Which meant that the opposite was also true: criticism of Israel came to constitute the existential definition of ‘Jewish self-hatred’. So writers like Philip Roth were vilified as self-haters for not wanting to put pro-Israelism at the centre of their lives and left-wing Jews like the controversial journalist I. F. Stone were similarly derided for their ‘weakness’ for universalism.

The sharpness of the US exchanges was not mirrored in Britain, and even though Jewish criticism of Israel grew particularly from the 1982 Lebanon war on, the term ‘Jewish self-hater’ was rarely used. It is only relatively recently that Britain has caught up with the United States and Israel in this regard. The self-hatred accusation, now commonly applied, has moved beyond writers to embrace whole classes of people whose one common denominator is their alleged hatred of Israel or their willingness to connive in its delegitimisation out of a misguided sense of guilt for what Jews have done to the Palestinians.

Both of these accusations come together in the contempt with which the Israeli promoters of the 1993 Oslo Accords are now held, principally by right-wing Jews and Israelis. Examples are legion. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a major promoter of such views, published an article by Kenneth Levin of the Harvard Medical School, which seeks to explain how Israelis duped themselves about Oslo: ‘the phenomenon of segments of the community embracing the indictments of the besiegers and seeking relief through self-criticism and self-reform recurs constantly in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. […] some have seen it as a specifically Jewish pathology, a unique Jewish self-hatred.’

Steven Plaut, professor of business administration at Haifa University, asks: ‘Who […] could have dreamed that the fulfilment and realisation of Zionism would be accompanied by the emergence of the most malignant manifestations of Israeli self-hatred and Jewish anti-Semitism?’ In online journal Nativ, Shlomo Sharan, professor emeritus in psychology at Tel Aviv University, argues that the ‘“new” self-hatred […] preaches that living in Israel is immoral because Jewry stole the land from the Arabs’.

It would appear from these and many other writers that self-hating Jews, whether in Israel or the Jewish Diaspora, are not just responsible for taking Israel down the wrong path at Oslo but threaten the very existence of the Jewish people. Netta Kohn Dor-Shav, a US-born clinical psychologist now at Bar Ilan University in Israel, warns: ‘It is fair to say that the plague of Jewish self-hatred is more dangerous for the survival of the Jewish people than any outside threat.’ In a paper for the Ariel Center for Policy Research, titled ‘The Ultimate Enemy — Jews Against Jews’, she says: ‘This self-hatred fuels a vicious cycle that can lead to disaster and dissolution of the Jewish people and the Jewish State.’

The strength of feeling about the ‘self-hatred’ accusation burst into the open on both sides of the Atlantic early in 2007. In the United States, the New York Times brought to public attention growing controversy about a pamphlet by Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, Director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University, titled ‘Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism’, published in December 2006 by the American Jewish Committee (publisher of Kurt Lewin’s 1942 Jewish self-hatred paper), one of America’s leading Jewish defence and advocacy groups, which has become increasingly vociferous in its defence of Israel over the last decade. In Rosenfeld’s own words, the essay takes ‘a hard look at Jewish authors whose statements go well beyond what most reasonable people would see as legitimate criticism of Israel and who call into question the very essence of the Jewish state and its right to continued existence.’ Rosenfeld made no explicit accusation of self-hatred against his ‘progressive’ Jewish targets. But many people believed that was exactly what his text implied. In the words of Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive magazine Tikkun: ‘The atmosphere is hysterical, verging on McCarthyism. You can’t raise questions about Israel without being told you’re an anti-Semite or a self-hating and disloyal Jew.’ And many others thought Rosenfeld had skewered the right offenders. They approved of his criticism of people like Tony Kushner, the playwright, Jacqueline Rose, professor of English literature at Queen Mary College, and Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist, and concluded that he was just calling these people ‘self-hating Jews’ in more subtle ways.

In Britain, a network of a hundred or so progressive Jews critical of Israel’s policies for abusing human rights launched Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) in February 2007. They signed a declaration of principles, published in The Times, the Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle, asserting their right to speak out and arguing that established Jewish organisations fail to represent the diversity of views among the Jewish population, especially on Israel, and inviting others to sign. This provoked a storm of vitriolic criticism from many Jews, but the number of signatories reached 400 by the end of the week of the launch.

The reaction IJV provoked was extraordinary: ‘snide to poisonous to the verbally vicious’ was how Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai Brown described it. Leading the pack, and possibly speaking for many, was Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips who called the signatories ‘Jews for genocide’ in her online diary on 8 February, and ‘the British arm of the pincer of self-destruction’ in the Jewish Chronicle on 16 February. And in an obvious reference to Jewish self-haters through the ages she wrote: ‘One of the most painful aspects of all of the Jewish tragedy is that, throughout the unending history of Jewish persecution — from the medieval Christian converts to Marx and beyond — Jews have figured, for a variety of reasons, as prominent accomplices of those who wished to destroy the Jewish people. These signatories are firmly in that lamentable tradition.’

These extraordinary, and ever more personal, claims are not confined to a right-wing fringe. Professor Robert Wistrich, who now heads the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University, speaks of Jewish self-hatred as ‘a pathological phenomenon’ and Jewish self-haters as being ‘driven by hate and anger against their own people’. Interviewed for his institution’s website, Wistrich excoriates ‘Israeli and Jewish intellectuals who think Israel is to blame for all the problems in the Middle East and even in the world in general. […] They rant on about the Jewish lobby, the Christian lobby, the foreign policy of the United States. Those are often worse than Arab anti-Zionists. In fact I prefer an open-minded Arab intellectual, even if he or she is anti-Israel, to the Chomskys, the Finkelsteins and Ilan Pappes of this world for whom I have no respect at all. They are much more dogmatic, sarcastic, narcissistic and self-righteous than most Arabs I know.’ Edward Alexander, professor emeritus in English at Washington University, helps expose these apparently perfidious Jews in a book of essays he co-edited with Paul Bogdanor, The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders. Interviewed about the book he said: ‘The rhapsodising over Islamic suicide bombers that one finds in such Jewish haters of Israel as Canada’s Michael Neumann or England’s Jacqueline Rose, breaks new ground in the long history of Jewish self-hatred’. Writing about IJV in The Jewish Chronicle, Liberal Rabbi Sidney Brichto called them ‘enemies of the Jewish people’ who ‘must be condemned’. ‘The time for debates between Jews over Israel is over.’ Wicked enemies and worse than Arabs: can self-hating Jews sink any lower?

The accusation of Jewish self-hatred is not always as explicit as in the writings of those I have quoted so far. One of the features of the Rosenfeld AJC paper and the extreme reaction to the launch of IJV is the way Jewish self-hatred is implied in the use of a certain psychologising discourse or through carefully constructed sentences, which can only mean one thing, but provide deniability because an explicit statement is avoided. Rosenfeld proves himself a past master at this. In an article for the New Republic he indignantly denied that he ever called anyone a self-hating Jew or a Jewish anti-Semite. But when he writes in his original paper that: ‘Anti-Zionism is the form much of today’s anti-Semitism takes’, and then in an extended attack on Jacqueline Rose says she ‘typifies one of the most distressing features of the new anti-Semitism — namely, the participation of Jews alongside it, especially in its anti-Zionist expression’, he is a cat’s whisker away from calling her a Jewish anti-Semite. If anti-Semitism today is mostly anti-Zionism and Rose is an anti-Zionist, ‘alongside it’ or not, then according to this perverse logic Rose is anti-Semitic. (Perverse too is the claim that Rose ‘rhapsodises over Islamic suicide bombers’, since she writes categorically in her new book The Last Resistance of her hatred for the phenomenon.) And in an interview for the Religion Report on Australian Broadcasting Company National Radio, Rosenfeld gives the game away by referring to the UK dissenters as people ‘who have problems with their own Jewish identity, and somehow feel that by dissenting radically from the state of Israel, they affirm something precious about themselves. But I’m not a psychoanalyst, I can’t really deal fully with any authority with the pathologies involved here.’ As head of an academic Jewish studies centre and a veteran scholar, it is almost impossible to believe that Rosenfeld uses ‘pathologies’ without being fully aware that the word refers to self-hatred.

Another widely used form of innuendo implying self-hatred is casting aspersions on the Jewishness of critics of Israel. The charge is that such Jews are estranged from their Jewishness, are outside of the Jewish community, express themselves as Jews for the sole purpose of vilifying Israel, do not love their people and by criticising Israel have renounced a core component of their identity. Melanie Phillips is direct: ‘The history of the Jewish people has always been punctuated by Jews with a troubled relationship with their own ethnic identity who have gone along with or even become the prime instigators — see Marx or Freud, for example — of diabolical calumnies against their own people’. Emanuele Ottolenghi, Director of the AJC’s Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute, tells us: ‘The Jewish intellectuals’ […] crusade against Israel is less about justice for the Palestinians than about coming to terms with their own tortured Jewish identity’. He speaks of ‘their effective alienation from Jewish life, Jewish values and Jewish communities’. Similar sentiments were expressed by key figures associated with the Engage website (set up by a group of mostly left of centre Jewish academics to combat the proposed academic boycott of Israel and unmask people alleged to downplay the strength of current anti-Semitism) in an open letter to the organisers of Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP), excoriating them for appearing to justify Hezbollah’s anti-Semitic statements — vehemently denied by JfJfP. Shalom Lappin, professor of computational linguistics at UCL, Eve Garrard, a senior lecturer at Keele University, and Norman Geras, professor emeritus in politics at the University of Manchester, wrote: ‘We are confident that when the history of this period is written and the widespread loss of political reason that characterises our age is finally recognised, your group will be properly consigned to a footnote in the long and dishonourable tradition of Jewish sycophancy and collaboration with hostility that has polluted the margins of European Jewry over the generations’ — an unmistakable reference to self-hating Jews.

When a concept is used so indiscriminately, it must either be faulty in itself or widely misused. Historian Shulamit Volkov is blunt about this: ‘Accusations of self-hatred have a long tradition of being applied by one Jew to another, often as part of some political dispute. Present-day Israelis encounter the term all too often in public discourse, where it is used indistinctly and often demagogically, mainly to avoid coping with criticism from within.’

Many of those who are perfectly happy excoriating Jewish critics of Israel by sitting in judgement on their Jewishness would almost certainly object very strongly to Orthodox rabbis in Israel doing the same thing when they claim the right to determine who is a Jew. This exercise in excommunication is absurd as it relies both on mass psychologising and the apparent intimate knowledge of the private lives and thoughts of thousands of individuals who sign critical adverts, join bodies like JfJfP and become signatories to IJV. Focusing on the Jewish collectivity in this way is rather inappropriate. Shulamit Volkov writes that it is ‘a kind of group therapy’ that ‘leaves us with nothing but a collection of skeletons, no longer flesh and blood’.

The touchstone for being a ‘good Jew’ has increasingly become passion for Israel. But it seems that there is a right and a wrong passion. Essentially, caring about Israel can only mean approving of its policies. Disapproval is synonymous with self-hatred.

To these contradictions and inconsistencies must be added a glaring ignorance of how the self-hatred charge has been applied in the past. For the accusers, Zionism represents the polar opposite of self-hatred. But when Herzl, angered by anti-Zionists, painted the weak ghetto Jew, in his 1897 essay ‘Mauschel’, as the bad Jew who speaks with a Yiddish accent, a ‘scamp’, ‘a distortion of the human character, unspeakably mean and repellent’, interested only in ‘mean profit,’ he was using anti-Semitic attributes — and some accused him of self-hatred. The writer Karl Kraus, himself Jewish (and also branded as a self-hating Jew), attacked Herzl for ‘creating another antisemitic movement’. Far from being the antithesis of Jewish self-hatred, some argue that Zionism was actually a display of it.

Even what might be called the cornerstone of evidence for the existence of Jewish self-hatred, the writings of Heine, Weininger, Kraus and Freud, is crumbling. The work of academics such as Steven Beller (on Weininger), Paul Reitter (on Kraus), Jacqueline Rose (on Freud) and Allan Janik (on the entire phenomenon) shows how the Jewish self-hatred label is a crude mischaracterisation.

In a contribution to The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog at the time of the launch of IJV, Jacqueline Rose wrote: ‘When confronted with this challenge [of being called a self-hating Jew], I am always inclined to ask: “What kind of Jew do you want me to be?”’ Or to put this question another way: What is it to be the opposite of ‘self-hating’? Is it ‘self-loving’? Frederick Raphael already answered this in his review of Gilman’s book for the Jewish Quarterly magazine in 1986: ‘The contempt shown by some English Jews (and Americans like Norman Podhoretz) for blacks who cannot “do what we did” reveals, if nothing else, the danger of self-love as a substitute for self-hatred.’ In any event, the tenor of ‘self-hatred’ accusations shows little sign of endorsing the ‘self-loving Jew’ as the ideal ‘good’ Jew. Nevertheless, the question Rose asks is surely the right one because at the heart of the ‘Jewish self-hatred’ mantra is the assumption that there is a standard-issue Jew to which you must conform. This implies that there is a Jewish essence.

Recognising the concept of self-hatred involves accepting two sets of normative assumptions, as Mick Finlay argues in ‘Pathologising dissent: identity politics, Zionism and the “self-hating Jew”’ (British Journal of Social Psychology, June 2005). It is assumed that there is a correct manner and degree to which people should express their Jewish identities in public; and that there is a set of core values and institutions which one should favour. It is also assumed that Jewishness ‘is or should be a primary identity’ and therefore rejecting it or criticising it is somehow unnatural and wrong. For the psychologists who have endorsed the validity of the concept of ‘Jewish self-hatred’, this turning away from your supposed primary identity is a form of psychopathology: a mental or behavioural disorder. But why should this be so? In his review of Gilman’s book Frederic Raphael wrote: ‘The Jew who decides that Judaism is an unappealing religion or that it implies an arbitrary set of rules for living may have perfectly good reasons for rejecting it or criticising it.’ Criticising an aspect of one’s identity does not automatically imply criticism of that identity per se. The concept is fundamentally weak because it fails to allow that self-criticism can be searching and very deep without becoming self-hatred.

The self-hatred concept seeks to turn the normal into the abnormal. In Germany and Austria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the accusation of self-hatred was levelled at those criticising aspects of Jewish culture, involvement in progressive movements and literary forms, expressing hostility towards other Jews, espousing anti-Semitic stereotypes and using anti-Semitic rhetoric, demonstrating a low level of public identification, supporting Zionism or opposing it. Yet all of these could be explained in other ways. For example, criticism traded between Jewish sub-groups is quite natural and, argues Finlay, ‘similar to those of commentators throughout history who find fault with the morals, manners, superstitions, or language of the poor of their own countries’. Even the use of anti-Semitic rhetoric is no proof of self-hatred. It was common in arguments over Jewish identity in the nineteenth and twentieth century and, as we have already seen, pressed into service for Zionism and for those who opposed it. These behaviours or views are only evidence of self-hate if you accept the essentialist definition of Jewish identity assumed by the accuser.

Finlay shows decisively that the psychologist Kurt Lewin’s ‘description of self-hatred is clearly a judgement about disloyalty and is a rallying call to American Jews. [He] concluded his paper [‘Self-hatred among Jews’] by suggesting that Jews should be asked to sacrifice more for the group.’ This argument looks uncannily like the ‘conceptual’ underpinning of the deluge of self-hatred accusations levelled at critics of Israel today. We have seen that for people like Rosenfeld, Phillips, Ottolenghi, Sharan, Wistrich and others quoted earlier, Zionism and Israel are core Jewish values, and rejecting them is a pathological act consonant with deliberate estrangement from the group. But there has never been a time when all Jewish denominations and groups have accepted Israel and Zionism as core values. Today, hundreds and thousands of strictly Orthodox Jews, many of whom live in Israel, utterly reject the notion that the modern state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism have anything to do with Judaism. The venom of the ‘self-hatred’ accusers is reserved for those labelled ‘progressive’, ‘left-liberal’, ‘left-wing’, for whom Israel and Zionism do not play the role in their Jewish identity which their accusers determine it should do. Some, motivated by the values of social justice which are central to their Jewishness, may well feel that their sense of Jewish identity is affirmed by opposition to the policies of the Israeli government. But to the self-hate accusers there are no legitimate differences of opinion among Jews on key elements of Zionism and Israel.

The concept of the ‘self-hating Jew’ strengthens a narrow, ethnocentric view of the Jewish people. It exerts a monopoly over patriotism. It promotes a definition of Jewish identity which relies on the notion of an eternal enemy, and how much more dangerous when that enemy is a fifth column within the group. It plays on real fears of anti-Semitism and at the same time exaggerates the problem by claiming that critical Jews are ‘infected’ by it too. And it posits an essentialist notion of Jewish identity.

Could the widespread and increasingly indiscriminate use of the self-hatred accusation be a sign of desperation on the part of the accusers? Dissenting voices on Israel have certainly strengthened and multiplied in recent years. Twenty years ago in Britain there were one or two rather small groups promoting a left-wing non-Zionist or anti-Zionist approach, who were regarded as hate figures by the Jewish establishment. Today there are more than a dozen critical groups. Some encompass the views of many hundreds, if not thousands; some are not left-wing. How much easier to dismiss their arguments by levelling the charge of Jewish self-hatred than by engaging with them.

It is too much to hope that by revealing just how bankrupt a concept ‘Jewish self-hatred’ is, discourse among Jews on Israel and Zionism could become more productive, both for Jews themselves and for the sake of achieving justice in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Too much is currently invested in this demonising rhetoric. But if we could edge it closer to the rim of the dustbin of history, we’d be making a start.

Antony Lerman is the director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and is writing here in a personal capacity.

The verbal bitterness between Jews over the Israel-Palestine conflict is intense. If words alone could kill, there would be significant fatalities. Some might say this is asymmetrical warfare. The conventional pro-Israel forces deploy accusations of Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism; the guerrillas who strongly criticise Israel deploy claims of apartheid and human rights violations. Anti-Semitism, apartheid and human rights violations are recognisable phenomena and it’s entirely possible, though increasingly difficult in the Israeli context, to have rational and evidence-based discussions as to whether claims about them are justified. Jewish self-hatred, however, is altogether different. It damns an individual or a group as psychopathological. And in recent years the concept has become remarkably popular as a way of explaining what drives the growing number of Jewish voices and organisations expressing various forms of severe criticism of Israel. But does ‘Jewish self-hatred’ exist?

The International Writers Festival in Jerusalem was a week of encounter and discovery. Comments from the incendiary discussion between Nadine Gordimer and Amos Oz have been quoted in Ha’aretz and the Boston Globe. Here is their conversation.

AO: As soon as they taught me the alphabet I started to write fiercely chauvinistic little poems. I grew up in a militant, right-wing Zionist family and I wrote Israeli propaganda full of exclamation marks. That’s the beginning of my career and I hope the end of my career will not be the same. I draw the line between writing and politics roughly as follows:

Each time I agree with myself one hundred per cent I don’t write a story or a novel, I write an angry article telling the government to go to hell. The government reads my article and it does not go to hell. (I have been writing the same article for thirty or forty years telling the government to go to hell). But when I have a slight disagreement with myself, when I hear more than one voice in me, then I know that I am pregnant with a story or a novel. To make this distinction very clear to me for symbolic reasons I have two pens on my desk, one blue and one black. One pen is to tell the government to go to hell and the other is to write my stories and novels. I never mix the two because they are different voices.

There is always a certain sense of guilt which accompanies my work. If I wake up in the morning and start work on a novel while the news is full of injustice, violence, savagery and stupidity, I feel guilty for sitting and writing my novel while people are dying a few miles from my home. On the other hand, when I write an angry article telling the government to go to hell I sometimes feel guilty for using my voice, which should be more subtle and complex, for something one dimensional.

But where would we be without guilt? We Jews invented guilt. If don’t feel guilty for a whole day then in the evening I feel guilty for not feeling guilty.

Let me ask you a question, Nadine. How early did you discover that you were living in a wrong society, a corrupt society?

NG: It didn’t come from reading Karl Marx. My awareness of what was wrong in the way we were living came to me by something closer to home. Blacks were forbidden from buying liquor so everyone made home brew. There were raids on white homes where blacks worked. One evening, when I was about ten, there was a hullabaloo in our back yard. My parents and I went out and there were the police ransacking the mattress and belongings of Letty, our house servant. My mother and father stood there and said nothing. This was their private property. Why were the police allowed to treat Letty so brutally? It was incidents like this which made me aware.

My mother was, in many ways, a good liberal. She worked in a group which provided crèche facilities for black children. She also worked with the Red Cross. She believed that things would gradually change, but they both kept on voting for the only party.

When I went, briefly, to university just after the war in 1947, I met a group of white South Africans who had just come back from fighting. They were rebellious and befriended young, politically involved blacks. For the first time I met blacks not as servants but as people. Like me, one black man was writing stories. I realised I had more in common with him than with the young whites. So the human contact brought politics closer. I started to write about what happens within the families and relationships inside political circles. Politics is like a religious faith. It has to be followed, no matter what peripheral damage may be done to human relationships. Some of my black writer friends even had their houses raided and their typewriters taken away.

AO: Fortunately we do not experience anything like that in Israel, but Palestinian writers in the occupied territories do have trouble with the Israeli police. There are some publishing houses in Ramallah in East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank, but these are heavily, closely watched and often censored. There is no censorship now in Gaza because Gaza is no longer under Israeli jurisdiction. The military censor decides whether a book is ‘inciteful’. Incitement is the key word.

Your books combine the political reality with the extremely personal. You can tell a love story against a background of political upheaval or tell a story of political upheaval against the background of a love story. Parents and children, brothers and sisters, family stories. After all, the subject of literature is, if I had to reduce it to one word, I would say ‘families’. If you gave me two words I would say ‘unhappy families’. If you gave me more than two words you will have to read all my works.

NG: I have! And I know your bridge-making and your political statements. The deep reality of everything that has happened here comes to me through your stories and novels.

AO: Almost all my characters have political views. Some of them have politics which are diagonally opposed to my own. Such as a certain character in Black Box. He votes for everything I vote against, nonetheless I tried to give him a credible voice and almost an attractive personality, as far as I could. The thing is trying to get inside the character and never use the struggle between the characters as a means of communicating a political message. To write the simplest dialogue between husband and wife over who takes out the garbage I have to be in the shoes of both of them. This is good practice for politics as well because it teaches you how to understand the other without necessarily agreeing with them.

NG: You waited a long time to write about yourself. You told me this was a personal story and it was painful. How did you finally come to write A Tale of Love and Darkness?

AO: For many years I would not even discuss my parents with my wife and children. I was too angry with my mother for killing herself and with my father for losing her, and with myself for probably being a terrible child. I was so angry I cut them out of my life for many, many years. When I reached the age, nearly sixty, ten years ago, when I could have been my parents’ parent, I began to develop a certain curiosity, and curiosity is a powerful antidote to anger. If I may digress momentarily I must say that I regard curiosity as a moral quality. I think a curious person is not a fanatic. Curiosity is an antidote to fanaticism, because curiosity means trying to imagine the other, trying to put yourself in another’s shoes. I became curious about my parents and this entailed compassion, tolerance, understanding and a certain smile. I found I could write about my parents as if they were my children. I don’t like calling A Tale of Love and Darkness an autobiography because I’m not even the protagonist of this book – it’s more about my parents. I’m a supporting character: my parents are the main protagonists.

Let us now, Nadine, move into areas where you and I may not agree as much as we have done so far: the popular comparison between Israel and South Africa. I know it is popular in left wing circles around the world to label Israel as an apartheid country. Do you or do you not accept this comparison?

NG: I accept it in certain reserved aspects. But we’ve got to go back to ancient history. I’m white. We whites have no ancestral claim whatever to one square inch of the continent of Africa. We don’t come from there in ancient times. So right away you’ve got a difference. It clearly belonged to the blacks and we invaded. So there is no comparison there. Where there is comparison, increasingly in the last few years, is in the methods your police use in the occupied territories; they seem to do exactly what they like, as if they have been given carte blanche to treat people in the most inhuman fashion. If it is a question of forcibly removing people from their homes, this is exactly what happened in South Africa. So there I would compare the methods used and the fact that you have reserved areas where people are herded in.

AO: In my view, twentieth-century well-meaning intellectuals had it easy because all the major conflicts were clear-cut: fascism and anti-fascism was about good guys and bad guys. You knew exactly who you were for and against. Colonialism and decolonisation was black and white. Vietnam was black and white. Apartheid was about good guys and bad guys. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not. It is essentially a conflict between right and right. Or, more recently, between wrong and wrong. The Palestinians are in Palestine because Palestine is their homeland in the same sense that Norway is the homeland of the Norwegians. The Israeli Jews are in Israel for exactly the same reason. They have no other historical homeland, they never had another home. As individuals, Jews can find homes in other countries but not as a nation. The only place where the Jewish people can have the right to self-determination is in their historical homeland. This is a very small country — the size of Sicily. It’s the one and only homeland of the Palestinians and the one and only homeland of the Israelis. Now what we get is two conflicts for the price of one. To the extent that the Palestinians are fighting to be liberated from Israeli occupation, to have their own independent state, to have their own right to self-determination is unquestionable. But to the extent that many Palestinians want Israel to die; that’s where they are wrong. Now the same applies to the Israelis: to the extent that they want to be a free nation in their own country, it’s unquestionable. To the extent that the Israelis want to swallow the Palestinian territories and get two extra bedrooms for the nation, that’s wrong. This is very confusing because on both sides there are legitimate and illegitimate intentions.

It’s very simple to launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favour of the good guys and go to sleep feeling good. In the case of Israel and Palestine you will have to take a complex attitude because the issues are complex. It is not a black and white issue. That’s why I reject comparisons to apartheid. Apartheid was a terrible phenomenon.

NG: You don’t accept that the methods being used are the same as during apartheid?

AO: The methods used by the Israeli military regime in the West Bank have some common denominators with apartheid. But the condition is essentially different because in the case of apartheid, in South Africa, there was no religious clash. There is a religious clash here.

NG: You’ve got your ultra-religious Jews and of course we don’t even have to name the religious fanatics on the other side. This is a great complication. The Palestinians — a large part of them — deny the right of Israel to exist. And on the other side there is the question of occupying Palestinian territory and the right of return. In 1948 Palestinians were removed from their homes. Now in South Africa why didn’t the liberation movement say, ‘You whites! Go back home!’

AO: Which is what many Palestinians are saying to the Israelis. Let’s begin with 1948, an all-out ruthless war. There was a messy ethnic cleansing of both sides. In the territories seized by the Palestinians in 1948 not one Jew was allowed to reside, including the population of the old city of Jerusalem (right behind our backs) who had lived in the old city for centuries. They had been there long before the Arabs. They were cleansed completely at the same time as hundreds of Palestinian Arabs fled or were kicked out of Israel. But let us not forget that, a couple of years later, one million Jews were forcefully kicked out of the Arab Islamic countries so there was a massive transfer of populations on both sides. There is no way the Palestinian refugees of 1948 can return to Israel because if they do there will be two Palestinian states and not one for the Jewish people. The problem of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 will have to be resolved in the future state of Palestine, in the West Bank and Gaza. I am talking about those Palestinians who still live in camps. Those who found themselves new jobs and lives in other countries are looked after. There are tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees who have been rotting in camps in inhuman conditions for sixty years and I’m not going to go now into who’s to blame for their plight. It is not a simple question because the Arab governments wanted them to stay in the camps to provide fuel for anger and fanaticism. They starve them and make them angry so they start making home-made bombs. However, their problem is our problem. If I were negotiating on behalf of Israel, I would have made the issue of the Palestinian refugees in the camps the prime Israeli consideration: Israel will sign no deal unless there is a solution for those refugees in the future state of Palestine. This should be made possible by an international Marshall Plan. Some of the money will have to come from the rich oil-producing Arab countries. And, indeed, some of it will have to come from Israel along with an Israeli recognition of a partial responsibility for the tragedy of these people.

Now the disputed Holy Places, these four square kilometres of Jerusalem behind us. Whose Holy Places are they? My grandmother had a wonderful explanation, although she died before 1967. When I was a little boy she clarified for me, in simple terms, the difference between Jew and Christian. She said, ‘Look, my boy, the Christians believe that the Messiah has been here once and he is coming again one day. We Jews believe he has not been here and is yet to come. Over this you cannot imagine how much bloodshed and hatred and persecution we have suffered. Why can’t everybody simply wait and see? If the Messiah comes saying, “Hello. It’s nice to see you again,” the Jews will have to apologise to the Christians. If, on the other hand, the Messiah comes saying, “How do you do? It’s nice to meet you,” the entire Christian world will have to apologise to the Jews. Until then, she said, live and let live. This is what it’s all about. The question of the Holy Places in Jerusalem should remain unresolved. Everybody should be allowed to pray there. I have suggested that the Holy Places be transferred to Scandinavia for one hundred years, after which they should be returned intact to Jerusalem. By this time we will have worked out something.

NG: I often wish someone had dropped a bomb on them, I’m sorry. But then the ruins would be fought over! It is a ridiculous complication. We are living in modern times; whether we are Jews or Muslims, we have to deal with reality now. And to have to complicate the situation with this problem of the Holy Sites …

AO: To my mind, in Judaism there is no such thing as Holy Sites. The only holy thing is life itself. But you don’t get two Jews to agree with each other. You don’t get one Jew to agree with himself because everyone has a divided mind and soul. So this is a nation of seven and a half million citizens, seven and a half million Prime Ministers, seven and a half million prophets and messiahs, each and every one with their own personal formula of what is Judaism. And this includes the religious people who believe in the holiness of the Holy Places and I have to respect their views out of empathy for difference. We discussed earlier the need to put ourselves inside the shoes of others.

NG: I can’t believe that whatever God’s people believe in can be so destructive. This is not a race conflict. It’s about land.

AO: It’s about land but the fanatics on both sides are trying to turn it into a religious battle. Essentially it’s a real-estate dispute and a tragic one because both the Palestinians and the Israelis are right in claiming this land for themselves. The only solution is a painful compromise between right and right. And I’m a great believer in compromise.

NG: You want a semi-detached house!

AO: My formula for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that they cannot live like one happy family because they are not one, they are not happy, they are not even family — they are two families.

NG: But it’s not a colour thing.

AO: If you look at the audience in front of you, you will see that there is no such thing as a Jewish race. The Jews come in every colour and shape. There are 100,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel and I am told that when the first aeroplane landed in Israel the religious leader of the Ethiopian community cast one terrified glance at the airport and said to his people, ‘Let’s go back. This is not a Jewish country. Everybody here is white.’ So there is no Jewish race or colour. This is about real estate, which is a version of a struggle for power. It’s the only home of both and therefore the house has to be divided in two smaller apartments.

NG: You know the ancient prehistory. Was there not a time when Jews and Arabs lived together here?

AO: There was a time when Jews lived under Arabs. They were tolerated, well treated but made to remember that they lived under the Arabs. This is exactly what we don’t want. We don’t want either the Palestinians or Israelis to live this way.

Prior to that there was a time when Hebrews lived surrounded by other inhabitants of the land and there were endless struggles. The conflict over this land is as old as time itself. Now some people claim that the Hebrews are not the same Hebrews and the Palestinians are not the same Palestinians. What does it matter? What difference does it make?

NG: As you know I, in my own private, humble opinion, believe there must be two states with frontiers agreed upon. It will be painful, but it is the only way.

I want to push you more on a subject we don’t agree on: the wall. You agree that the wall is invading Palestinian territory but you still think there should be a wall.Who decides where the frontier is?

AO: I would not object to the wall if it had been built between Israel and Palestine, but it’s being built in the middle of Palestine. We have the pre-1967 line in place. This is the basis for negotiation. Essentially everybody knows this, including people who object on both sides. Deep down in their heart of hearts both the Israelis and the Palestinians know that the two state solution will be implemented along the lines of the pre-1967 ceasefire lines. Are they happy with it? Not in Israel and not in Palestine. It’s like an amputation for both and it hurts like hell. But this solution is going to be implemented in the end. I can’t tell you when. It’s hard to be a prophet in Jerusalem: there is too much competition.

NG: You would agree that what is happening in the occupied territories is really shameful for the Israelis and for the Jewish people?

AO: I will use a word stronger than shameful. It is criminal. I think the lasting occupation of the Palestinians by the Israelis is a crime, the crime of Israeli society. Now this crime has circumstances, it has background. It began with an all-out Arab attack on Israel, but nonetheless I regard the lasting occupation as a crime.

NG: Well, I have to agree entirely

AO: On this agreement, on this unhappy note, we must end and thank our audience for their patience.

To my American ear, particularly to my Jewish American ear, the Quarterly’s tone, despite the affinity and sameness of topics and themes, is startlingly different. I suppose I mean by this that the timbre, the point of view, is (how else could it be?) English. Jewish self-consciousness is ubiquitous, God knows; but it seems to me that British Jewish self-consciousness is somewhat more intense in what we (tritely) call ‘comfort level’. (vide Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights! Not to mention the British media’s views of Israel.) For instance: I cannot conceive of a lukewarm essay like Adam Thirlwell’s turning up in a Jewish periodical here, where passions are perhaps more freely paraded. Partly this is because as a writer he is an original, granted; but also because (here comes chutzpah on my part!) he derives his thesis from a personal circumstance, which always makes for lukewarmness. It is an old, old delusion (the delusion of ahistorical lukewarmness) that can lead to a statement like ‘Svevo’s identity…was Triestine, not Jewish.’ And of course he is right to say that Diaspora is a comedy; but it is not an intelligible comedy, and Thirlwell’s effort to turn halfness into intelligibility is exactly that: an effort. Placelessness? A figure dangling in air, like a Chagall effigy? Nisht ahin, nisht aher means blur: no one can charge Proust with blur! He chose; he was a Frenchman and a Christian; it also helped that he was a genius. Thirlwell may be a genius too, but if he chooses placelessness he will finally end as a literary blur. (Singer: A writer must have an address.) The intellectual value of Judaism, the hallmark of Jewishness, lies precisely in its distinction-making: the knowledge, the bold assertion (it does sometimes require courage), that one thing is not another thing – that a man is not a god, for instance, that the human and the divine are separate realms, that one can’t be half-man and half-god. And that centaurs are chimeras. And that people are born wholes, not halves. And that the purpose of seeing distinctions is to make choices. One can be whole and cosmopolitan too; in fact, to be cosmopolitan one must be whole. To be civilized one must be whole: integer vitae sclerisque purus. (That’s cosmopolitan Horace.) Thirlwell writes that his ‘deeper theory’ (by which he means his shallow feeling) is ‘the Jewish is always half-Jewish.’ Balderdash. Hogwash. Bullshit. Which half? From the waist up or from the waist down?

Cynthia Ozick’s new book Dictation is published in the US by Houghton Mifflin.

On the day the phone call came from Jerusalem I was unprepared. The mention of Jerusalem triggers an avalanche of emotions.

‘Mira, what would you say to a reunion of people involved in the beginning of Israel’s Television Service?’

‘Who came up with the idea?’

‘Micah and I were talking about the old days in Jerusalem, soon after the Six Day War. We thought, wouldn’t it be great to get together in Jerusalem to exchange memories and impressions of what it was like then and to compare it with how things are now… that sort of thing…’

How on earth could one re-enter the mood of that time before the outbreak of the war, when everything simmered with tension? Wars. Jews. Jerusalem. The words wrapped themselves round my head like a belt. Even before the Six Day War, Jerusalem was an embattled city; it’s her misfortune to have become sacred to the two faiths she gave birth to. Worshipped in prayer and lamented for her loss, blessed and cursed, psalms were her crown.

‘I know,’ Naomi continued, ‘it’s forty years since we were rushing around like busy ants in the Television building, in Romema …’

‘Romema’. I repeated the name and remembered the building, in a back street with adjoining open ground, overgrown with thorns and cluttered with various abandoned pieces of machinery. I saw myself entering, passing the two guards on duty, and greeting Miriam, the receptionist, with the usual ‘any messages?’

Looking back at the sixty years of Israel’s statehood, it seems incredible that the Government took so long to create a television station. During the sixties and seventies The People of the Book treated the existence of the little black box with disdain. It was Ben-Gurion’s decisive ‘Lo! No!’ blocking suggestions that Israel should catch up with the rest of the world. And Ben-Gurion’s views counted for something; he was, after all, one of the founders of the State of Israel and Prime Minister. A lover of classical literature, he worried that the nation’s moral and intellectual standards might become corrupted; the cinema’s silver screens were already spreading enough of a cultural pollutant. Israel’s new film industry had the nation flocking to the cinema, although early Israeli films had to compete with superior American and European productions.

Israel did have other tools of mass communication. The mainstream Hebrew press was of a high standard, and there were also scores of multilingual dailies and magazines that were published to cater for new immigrants.

Meanwhile, radio ruled the airwaves. Kol Yisrael, the Voice of Israel, offered the nation a vital link with current events via its hourly news transmissions. In a country where the political situation is volatile, it fulfilled an urgent need for instant access to the latest news. It also provided special programmes for new immigrants, in their own languages and in beginner’s Hebrew. Editors and journalists felt free to experiment, providing a wide range of sophisticated cultural and socially topical programmes. Entertainment slots made use of the abundance of available talents with comedians performing in Hebrew and in Yiddish. As for music, Israel was similarly awash with native and immigrant talent.

The regular Arabic-language slot broadcasting news and non-political programmes was mostly scorned by Israeli Arabs, apart from those geared towards women on health and childcare matters. In general they preferred to tune in to the neighbouring Arab networks. At the time, Israel was the only nation in the Middle East without its own television station although many Israelis already had their own televisions. On good days, transmissions from Jordan and Lebanon could be picked up, and Israel’s Arab population flocked to cafés and other public places equipped with televisions to watch the news, as well as popular Arab entertainment. Many Jews from Arab countries also possessed ‘the little black box’ to watch their favourite singers.

All this changed in 1966/67. Nasser’s virulently anti-Israel propaganda was televised across the Arab-speaking world, stoking unrest further fuelled by false reports about the ongoing destruction of mosques in Israel. This forced the Israeli authorities to finally acknowledge the power of the little black box as a political tool. It was time for Israel to catch up.

*

The almost miraculous victory revived Jewish memories of events both from ancient times and more recent catastrophes, boosting the jubilations. Rare indeed were the occasions when the Jewish people could celebrate a military victory in Jerusalem, as it could now; this had ignited a dormant messianic fervour. The visceral effect on people’s emotions and behaviour was nowhere more pronounced than in Jerusalem. It induced a collective, drunken kind of euphoria, its echoes reaching the Diaspora Jews. The public rejoicing, dancing in the streets and prayers of thanks were that of the Jews. For the Palestinians, it was yet another military defeat by Israel’s armed forces. The first defeat was the result of a war started by three Arab armies, intent on preventing the establishment of a Jewish State in the area allocated by the decision of the United Nations to divide up British-controlled Palestine between the Jews and Palestinians, with Jerusalem designated an Internationally-Controlled city. According to this plan, Israel was originally allotted a modest in size territory; however, after the War of Independence the Israelis emerged with more territory than intended.

The 1967 Arab defeat had added a new chapter to the Palestinian history of victimhood and humiliation. But victories often come at a price, their true measure the military cemeteries of both, the victors and the vanquished. The sorrow and the joy were already overshadowed by dangerous dreams that carried the seeds of future conflicts.

Already then, a few sober voices in Israel were heard to suggest that Israel should negotiate with the Palestinians, but these voices got lost amidst the noise of the triumphal, collective chorus. It was not yet the right time for rational thinking.

*

It is rare in life to be offered an opportunity to participate in something as new and creative as the first TV station in Israel. I regarded it as a great privilege.

The project had begun well before the outbreak of the Six Day War, but the conflict rapidly accelerated the process. Gallili, then Minister of Information (without portfolio) and Professor Elihu Katz, a lecturer at the Penn University in Philadelphia, had already been gathering consultants to assist in the project. 25 foreigners and a core of Israelis were hired and given the title ‘expert’. Some of them were indeed people with experience who had been working for prestigious networks abroad, whose names and individual accomplishments are noted in the TV archives.

The team assembled in the spring of 1978. Upon arrival, the foreign ‘experts’ were accommodated in various hotels. I found myself at the American Colony Hotel, in East Jerusalem. Renowned for its excellence throughout the Middle East, it has a history going back to Turkish rule, when it was set up by the Vesters, an English family. Horatio Vester, the current owner and founder’s grandson, on hearing that I was a filmmaker, showed me a family treasure: an old movie of Allenby’s victorious entry to Jerusalem. It offered me a view of the city that went back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Until recently, the guests had been rich Jordanians, South Arabian sheiks and Egyptian and Lebanese merchants, but now the Arab staff were serving Jews, faces not seen here for a decade. We found out that the Jordanians had destroyed synagogues and cemeteries in the Old City and I didn’t even dare consider what the reverse outcome of the war would have meant for the Jews. And yet I looked at the Palestinians and their catastrophe with compassion. Defeat showed in their faces, politeness shielding their pain.

At Romema, I entered a building already buzzing with activity. In the large room that served as the base for the temporary TV Authority’s broadcasting operations, a huge white board, half the size of the wall, was covered with diagrams detailing the general plan of command, dates, structures and perimeters. At a long table covered with green cloth, placed at the front, the ‘experts’ — mostly men and a few women — were gathering daily to discuss the scope and goals of the planned station.

The official inauguration was to take place on 2nd May 1968, with two live broadcasts of an independence parade (directed by Louis Lentin with Paul Salinger as Chief Cameraman), including a concert given by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

The limited technical facilities didn’t allow for many transmission times: a few hours in the evening, three or four times a week. Under pressure from religious groups, Fridays and Shabbat were excluded, but it did not take long for protesting voices to reverse the exclusion. The next battle was to remove the newly established TV station from the Prime Minister’s office. To great relief, this was also won, and Professor Elihu Katz was appointed Head of the Station. A friendly, unobtrusive man, he was liked by almost everybody, a rare accolade in a workplace of unpredictable characters.

I soon realised that, with no experience of working for a network, I was not in my element. To make myself more useful, I organised small groups of Israeli journalists and photographers to teach them how to think in terms of moving images. We ventured out to various neighbourhoods, shooting short, silent news items. In the evenings, we would sit at the editing tables and watch the results. ‘Let the picture tell the story’ was the motto. In no time the crew were shooting snipppets of street scenes unsupervised and were soon skilled enough to make a longer film. I chose Kibbutz Lochmei Hagetaot ‘Fighters of the Ghettos’ — as the location, and they put us up for four days. The place was a gift for a documentary filmmaker; it was populated by ghetto survivors (including a few important participants in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) and partisans who had chosen to stay together after settling in Israel. It even had its own modest museum. A great deal of improvisation went into the shooting, including using torches for night scenes. Amazingly, after the final edit, the exercise produced a presentable 60 minute film.

One day a prowling journalist, curious about the goings-on in Romema, wandered into the cutting room where the crew were watching the finished film. He was impressed and wrote an article urging that it be used for the forthcoming Holocaust Day. He must have known which strings to pull, as the TV authorities decided to transmit it ahead of their official planned date.

The transmission evening was a traumatic occasion, especially for Jews from Arab countries, who were seeing for the first time the reality of the Final Solution. For me it was more than a technical accomplishment — it was a homage to all those who were part of the Shoah, including my parents and other members of my family.

*

Sitting one day in the American Colony’s oriental garden at a table shaded by a tree and being served English tea, I reflected on my past. Unlike the other foreign ‘experts’, I was not altogether a stranger to Jerusalem.

In 1941 I came from war-torn Europe to Palestine, then ruled by British Mandate. For a year I stayed near Lod at Ben-Shemen, an agricultural village and school run by children, where we divided each day between study and work, learning how to milk cows and feed chickens. When I proved I was better at drawing and painting I was sent to Jerusalem. Under the care of my older sister’s friend, I was shown places of Jewish historical importance and sketched The Tomb of Rachel, a view of the Kotel and some rustic scenes of Arab shepherds with their flocks of sheep or goats in the Valley of Hell.

A now-forgotten fact about Jerusalem is that during the war years, was it was an important crossroads for military traffic. In Poland, I saw first the Germans then the Soviets, but here in Jerusalem, a quiet, provincial city, I saw soldiers of every description, from the British Empire and from occupied Europe. Near the Damascus Gate in the Old City and at Zion Square in the centre, there were signposts to Damascus, Cairo and Tripoli, for the military traffic that ran day and night. Jerusalem was also the city where soldiers of all ranks would come on leave or to recuperate from injuries sustained in the African desert war.

In 1943, in a restaurant near Zion Square, I had a miraculous reunion with my older brother, who lost sight of me and I of him in Poland at the outbreak of the war. I never knew about his time in a Siberian gulag, nor that he joined the Polish army that Stalin allowed to leave the Soviet Union. He arrived from Iraq with his unit now stationed in Palestine and came on leave to visit Jerusalem. The heart-stopping accidental encounter of brother and sister, who hardly recognised each other, is a fragment of history usually omitted by textbooks. Such reunions were rare but not unique in Jerusalem, a city of miracles.

Mira Hamermesh was born in Lodz, Poland. During the Second World War, she was one of a group of lucky Jewish youngsters who managed to find safety in Palestine. An artist, her first exhibition was sponsored by the British Council in Jerusalem, winning her a place at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. After some success as an exhibiting painter, she changed medium to become a filmmaker and was awarded a scholarship to study at the prestigious Polish Film School in Lodz. She has since worked as a director, producer and writer of short features and documentaries, earning many international awards, including the Prix Italia. Israel’s Cinematheque institution recently showed a retrospective of Mira’s 15 films. Her book, The River Of Angry Dogs: A Memoir is available from Pluto Press.