Yo, JudÍo

Borges and the Jews

If I am not one of Thy repetitions or errata…
—J.L.B., ‘The Secret Miracle’

Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges was overwhelmed by a strange feeling of unworthiness. Read more

A Time to Speak Out

Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity

By Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose, Barbara Rosenbaum (eds.)

Yale University Press, 2008, £30

When Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) announced its existence in February 2007, with an article in The Guardian by Brian Klug and the publication of a founding declaration with one hundred signatories, it created a stir of controversy in the British Jewish world and beyond. They were described as ‘Jews for Genocide’ by the Jewish Chronicle’s columnist Melanie Phillips, who accused them on a Newsnight debate of straying ‘into the realm of demonisation’ of Israel. Even the vastly more thoughtful Howard Jacobson characterised IJV’s position as ‘self-indulgent fantasy’ and ‘gesture politics’. But the new group also received enthusiastic praise, and the initial signatories were soon joined by hundreds more. Read more

Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet

by Nili Scharf Gold

Brandeis, 2008, £29.95

Yehuda Amichai is one of that great generation of Israeli poets who shattered traditional forms and used the materials of daily life and the language of the streets. The voice in his poetry is unapologetic, wry, matter of fact. It was very much the voice of the man I first met in Jerusalem at a party given by the theatre director Arieh Sachs. Amichai was then in his forties, short and compact,with an amused shrug I thought peculiarly Israeli: that is to say, less weary than an Eastern European shrug, but acknowledging equally the awkward unpredictability of events.
Amichai was a courageous soldier who ran guns for Haganah in 1948 and fought in all Israel’s subsequent wars. Like most Israelis then he recognised a human dignity in fighting, after so many European Jews had found the limits of putting their faith in law-abiding passivity. But he didn’t like soldiering, and he never forgot the murderous cost of war.

The bereaved father
has grown very thin:
he has lost the weight of his son

Two decades later, when I met him again in his refurbished home in Yemen Moshe, I remembered his poem about the impermanence of any building in Jerusalem where the stones of the mountains roll down at night towards the stone houses ‘Like wolves coming to howl at the dogs/Who have become the slaves of men’.  The last time I saw him in London he had just been given a literary prize in Egypt and was uncharacteristically glum. When I asked why, he said simply: ‘They hate us.’ Read more

The rise of the Jewish nerds

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

MIZRAHI

Only because I had lurking bronchitis and reading made my eyes hurt and I’d run out of DVDs — only then did I flick on the TV to watch Israel’s first Big Brother. Only after noting my bad luck in having to witness the reality TV phenomenon take hold twice over and in two languages did I wonder if there’d be any manifestations of ethnic tension in this programme. It took around five minutes to surface. Forgive the lack of names and the paraphrasing, but basically the Ashkenazi-origin young woman was upset over the abrupt manners of a Mizrahi housemate, which were interpreted as rude and which were not apologized for so much as explained away, as the Mizrahi contestant said something like: ‘This is what you get, it’s what I am — I can’t be European.’ Bingo.

Reality-TV aficionados know that the format is predicated on the sort of psychological profiling that is designed to create precisely such tensions. But that doesn’t mitigate the point that ethnic tensions clearly do still exist in Israel. The Big Brother incident — variations of which repeat on a daily basis in real life, some harmless and some serious — is proof of the one thing that so many Israelis believe is no longer the case: that ethnic origin is at all relevant or a source of disharmony within the Jewish state. Read more

Doing Write by History

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

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

Radicalism and Conformity: Jewish Collectors of New Art

I was asked to write an article on Jewish art collectors in England. For a few seconds I felt tempted to reel off a list of names of the most prominent art collectors, investors, Russian oligarchs and celebrity bidders in the main auctions of the major salerooms. But such articles are legion and widely available in Hello or the opening pages of the Evening Standard magazine. I wanted to avoid all the spin and promotion too often associated with the world of contemporary art and instead penetrate a little deeper to discuss why people collect art and why Jews appear to have been disproportionately drawn to it. Read more

The End of the Jew as Metaphor

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

Benjamin Harshav: The Moscow Yiddish Theatre

Yale University Press, 2008, £30

The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (Moskver idisher melukhisher teater), usually referred to by its Russian acronym, Goset, was one of the crown jewels of modern Jewish creativity. Its story has the making of Shakespearean drama: daring, uplifting and tragic. It is a tale of innovative artistry, personal talent, Jewish commitment, political shenanigans, great hopes and broken promises which ends with assassination and institutional liquidation.  Read more

Hare and Hounds

ONE

The PLAYWRIGHT walks onto the stage. A spotlight catches up with him. He looks up and nods at the audience.

PLAYWRIGHT: Oh don’t get up! Yes, of course, I know you’re there. You don’t write sell-out plays without having a permanent audience in mind. First question they ask you in the arts today: “Who’s it for?” The corollary being, “Who’s for it?” My multi-award-winning trick is to stick it to the famous in a you-know-who-ish way. Read more

Tedna Street

On the balconies, sunlight, on poplars, sunlight, on our lips.
Today no one was shooting, there is just sunlight and sunlight. Read more

Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

By Lara Vapnyar

Pantheon Books, June 2008, $20

The comingled complexities of love and food are familiar ingredients in modern fiction, but in Lara Vapnyar’s new collection of short stories it is largely the absence of love that is assuaged or intensified by cooking and eating. Like Vapnyar herself, the protaganists of Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love are émigres from Eastern Europe, cast dazedly adrift in the United States, suspended between assimilation and homesickness. Varying in age, gender and preoccupations, the characters nonetheless share an air of stunned dismay, a somnambulant passivity akin to depression. In each of these six elegantly crafted stories, it is the experience, memory or consequences of a meal that in some way bring them back to life. Read more

If Social Gravities May Sometimes Cross

If social gravities may sometimes cross
her wisened looks when you are on your own–
it is to rub your words on the low depths
of chalky passion slinky naiads loan
only to time, shocking against these shores Read more

Commentary

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

Asylum

JEWISH PERSPECTIVE
How can we not, as Jews, have compassion for asylum seekers? We have only to look to our own history. Read more

To live

To live, as the great book commands,

is to love. Such love is not enough! Read more

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

Dear Gil,

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

Elaine Feinstein: The Russian Jerusalem

Carcanet, May 2008, £9.95

What remains?

Elaine Feinstein’s The Russian Jerusalem calls itself ‘a novel’, and so it is. It’s a time-travelling, magical-realist compendium of a fiction, in which the protagonist — a British Jewish poet, somewhat resembling the author herself — is transported into the lives of the Russian poets of the Silver Age. That it tells the life, and often tragic death, stories of Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Ehrenburg and Babel means that a swathe of history from the dark days of the twentieth century is covered by its less than a hundred and fifty pages. However, Feinstein writes with a passionate celerity which makes The Russian Jerusalem the very opposite of trite costume drama or literary-biographical summary.
It is in particular a book about poetry, and the costs poetry exacts from those who believe in and write it. Arguably, this is what deepens its concerns and, indeed, informs its high style. Fourteen of Feinstein’s own poems stud the text. These are themselves inlaid with quotations from the author’s beloved Russians, as is the surrounding prose narrative, which serve as both summary and breathing space. The effect of these palimpsests is of a conversation between poets; one which the author, with her specialist’s knowledge and wearing her poetic identity-like colours, enters as an equal protagonist. Read more

Berlin My Hero

I can sum it up simply by calling myself a wannabe Jew.

From my earliest days I have had the sense that Jews embody the distillation of what it is to be human. As if being Jewish were somehow a more extreme version of being human. Perhaps this sense I have is heightened by Jewish history with its unmatched defiance of the dual imperatives of time and place. For me, being Jewish embodies the triumph of ideas over events and the persistence of hope against overwhelming odds. As a student in South Africa I came across Two Concepts of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin. When I saw and heard him in Oxford later, I believed, and I still believe, that he was the greatest exponent of a broadly liberal, pluralist politics there has ever been. What he saw, and I think this must be inseparable from his Jewishness, is that fixed credos and closed systems of belief invariably lead to disaster. No one is the sole proprietor of knowledge. In his words ‘there is no incorrigible proposition.’ He understood that freedom is not an absolute: it cannot be guaranteed by subscribing to one political system. To my immense relief he confirmed that there are essentially only two freedoms; the first he called ‘freedom from’ which is the freedom to be left alone as far as possible to do what your inclinations tell you — essentially liberalism — and the other, very dangerous kind of freedom, is ‘freedom to’ which means that you achieve freedom only by total surrender to a state or closed system of belief. In South Africa we who were opposed to the apartheid state were supposed to want the alternative of Marxism, the path chosen by the ANC. It seemed madness to reject apartheid in favour of another absurd belief system, which had all the characteristics of a secular religion. Berlin’s simple distinction of freedoms shone a cool light of hope and truth upon the dark chaos of apartheid. Read more

Out of the Shadows: A Life of Gerda Taro

By François Maspero

Souvenir Press Ltd, October 2008, £12

There’s a sentiment halfway through François Maspero’s biography of Gerda Taro that speaks volumes about both the young war photographer and about the author himself. People must, Maspero supposes, feel a twinge of sadness not to have been the famous photographer Robert Capa. And women must surely also experience a longing, occasionally, to have been his lover Gerda Taro. It’s quite a claim. It is through this lens that Maspero views the brief yet eventful life of Taro and this ardour that motivates his struggle to bring her out of the shadows. Yet it is also this sentiment that at times renders the telling problematic.
Spain. July 1937. Fifteen miles from Madrid, the Battle of Brunete is waged in a desperate attempt to push the nationalists back from the capital. By mid-July the Republican offensive gives way to a fierce nationalist counter-attack. Both sides are raving with thirst, heat and hunger. The countryside is flecked with the human debris of conflict. And then come Franco’s planes, soaring overhead. In the midst of this chaotic scene on July 25th, a petite blonde crouches amid the Republican fighters sheltering in a dugout. She takes picture after picture, calmly reloading her camera as shells explode around them. Her name, La Pequena Rubia, is Gerda Taro. Read more

Kristallnacht and its aftermath within the German Protestant Church

The horrors of Kristallnacht were a moment of rejoicing for Bishop Martin Sasse, head of the Protestant church of Thuringia. A night that brought riots, looting, beatings and widespread destruction of synagogues and Jewish property seemed to fulfill Sasse’s hopes: the Nazi regime was finally ridding the Reich of Jews. Read more

Seven Days in the Art World

By Sarah Thornton

Granta, October 2008, £15.99

Seven Days in the Art World is a slightly misleading title. The book doesn’t cover a continuous week, but takes place over seven disparate days, during which Sarah Thornton attends seven very different contemporary art events. It’s a testament to Thornton’s skill as a narrator that she’s able to combine these distinct facets into a coherent account that’s informative and entertaining, and that never feels weighted down by her five years of research.
Opening with a vignette of a Christie’s auction in New York in 2004, and ending with a chapter on last year’s Venice Biennale, this is a portrait of the art world during the peak of its boom years, marked by crazily escalating prices and levels of hype. Thornton visits the annual Basel art fair, the Turner Prize awards ceremony in London, and the Tokyo studios of superstar-artist Takashi Murakami. She also, as an alternative to such glittering occasions, attends a student seminar at a Los Angeles art school and drops by the New York offices of Artforum magazine.
Thornton has a doctorate in sociology and the most engaging parts of the book are when she’s describing human relationships and social hierarchies: Murakami lording it in first class during a plane journey while fawning museum curators sit back in economy; Read more

The Ethical Challenge in the Object Quality of the Problem

In the summer of 2008 Penelope Curtis, advised by Israeli architect and cultural theorist Eyal Weizman, curated an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds entitled The Object Quality of the Problem. This exhibition won the Visual Arts Award 2008 at the London Jewish Cultural Awards. The citation by the proposing judge, Jeremy Lewison, reads:

Above all the exhibition eloquently and quietly laid bear the dilemmas faced by diaspora Jews in the face of the Palestinian-Israeli problem: how do we judge our fellow Jews who commit acts that in British society we would deplore; how long can we go on making allowances for the Holocaust in condoning belligerent behaviour? In indirectly raising such issues this exhibition makes a valuable contribution to Jewish culture in the United Kingdom.

I suppose I disagree. Read more

Jewish Book News and Reviews

Brief News

Wallace Collection
The Wallace Collection will be holding an exhibition ‘Treasures of the Black Death’, Jewish jewellery from Thuringia from 19th February to 17th May 2009. Read more

Resisting the Demonic Forces of Nationalism

According to Robert Weltsch, the Zionist intellectual and politician, the most important question was whether the Jews would be ‘capable of defending the spiritual values that form the basis of its existence against the tide of nihilism’ and of contrasting the Nazi ideology with a humanist Jewish version of nationalism based on justice and coexistence with other nations. Read more