The Glass Room

By Simon Mawer

Little, Brown, 2009, £ 16.99

‘Light and space…that is everything you need’. So declares a visitor to the spectacular Landauer House, the architectural apotheosis of modernity erected in the days before the black nightmare of World War II. There would be something almost too neat about this perfect construction, this paean to rationality and progress, emerging just at the point the forces of barbarism are about to descend on Europe, were it not of course essentially true. (The story of the Landauer House, the Glass Room, is based in large part upon the modernist Villa Tugendhat in Brno.) The bright dawn of innovation, of creativity and expectation, slips into twilight even as the Glass Room’s final fittings are being made, without ever seeing the expected day of its promise fulfilled. It is an anachronism almost from the moment of its completion.

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Never Looked Better

An ideological last-days-of-pompeii atmosphere has prompted even official institutions such as Beth Hatefutsoth Museum to comission an exhibition that examines the contemporary instability, even dissolution, of Israel’s formative myths. The concept behind its exhibition Never Looked Better was an invitation to participating artists to re-read the Sonnenfeld archive of classic Zionist photographs as if visiting from Mars. Approaching this epochal collection, as it were, tabula rasa, was a chance to examine the symbolic and emotional legacy of the Zionist aesthetic. Beth Hatefutsoth’s readiness for an essentially ‘post’ discourse is challenging both subscribers and critics of the Zionist ethos, calling for a profound discussion across the board.

It is clear to everyone that the title, Never Looked Better, is ironic. It postulates that the discursive glue unifying the curators, artists and visitors is the shared acknowledgement that such a glue no longer exists.  While scornful of the period in which we really thought we looked our best, the exhibition looks back with a tangible, conflicted nostalgia. The title indeed seems to say that we never looked better than we did in the Sonnenfelds’ photographs. Why did we look so good? Because we believed in the rightness of our cause. Because we had a narrative. We looked good because we were good.

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Jews and Sex

By Nathan Abrams

Five Leaves, 2008, £12.99

In the mid-1990s I worked as a research assistant for Jewish Continuity, the short-lived organisation that sought to ensure the continuity of Judaism in this country. One of its major concerns was preventing intermarriage and, in order to do so, great pains were taken to research the lives of British Jewish single young adults. Notwithstanding the naivety and crudity of some aspects of Jewish Continuity’s ‘anti-intermarriage’ agenda, a detailed picture emerged that contributed to the understanding of British Jewry. But I couldn’t help feeling then, as now, that something was missing — we didn’t investigate what young Jews thought about the prospect and the reality of sex with other Jews. Was intermarriage partially a result of young Jews finding other Jews a sexual turn-off? Are non-Jews more sexually alluring to Jews (and visa versa)? What, in short, is the ‘sexual economy’ of British Jewish life?

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Illuminations

By Eva Hoffman

Harvill Secker 2008, £16.99

Reading Eva Hoffman’s new novel is a mixed experience. At first, I found the rarefied and brittle consciousness of the protagonist, Isabel Merton, hard to engage with. Her life as an internationally famous concert pianist seems both admirable and enviable, yet she is dissatisfied. However, Isabel herself experiences unease at what she thinks of as her ‘hard’ but also ‘de luxe late capitalist life’ as a concert pianist. We read of a European tour she undertakes, travelling between Sofia and Prague, Vienna and London and the cities blur into an indistinguishable round of concert halls and hotels. What stands out for Isabel is a meeting with Anzor Islikhanov, an exiled representative of the Chechen government, and a man driven by energies at odds with her distanced and orderly life. Each recognizes in the other a capacity for passion and commitment: in Anzor’s case, to vengeful patriotism, in Isabel’s, to the power of music. They embark on an affair that seems unlikely; like her namesake Isabel Archer, in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Merton is a young American confronted by European wiles — but this time of a profoundly historical nature.

Forced Labour

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Dictation

By Cynthia Ozick

Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24

I confess to having a thing for the fiction of four of my older Bronx contemporaries. For class acts, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick are a match for any literary backfield Boston, San Francisco, or other cultural capitals might field. In individualised manners, the first three are all realists whose imaginative work is significantly coloured by social or political concerns. Ozick, on the other hand, a keen observer of wounded conscience and blindsided consciousness, is more cerebral than the others as well as less absorbed in the ebb and flow of history.

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Laish

By Aharon Appelfeld

Schocken Books, 2009, $23.95

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Reform or Die by Hagai Segal

‘The essence of the problem of legislating for electoral reform [in Israel] is that the surgeon is also the patient’
Vernon Bogdanor’s comment written in the early 1990s is as accurate today as it was then. Another Israeli election has passed and another deeply unsatisfactory political picture has emerged. The Israeli public has spoken: the party that won most seats is not in government, it has taken two months for the government to be formed, and that government is a tense marriage between Right, Far-Right and Centre-Left. For anyone aquainted with Israel’s political history will not be surprised.
The current electoral system was introduced during the pre-state Yishuv — the government-in-waiting of the future state of Israel — and it was designed to be as simple and representative as possible, allowing for formal representation to the many diverse groups that made up Mandate Palestine’s Zionist community in order to ensure unity in the movement. It was never intended to be Israel’s permanent electoral system.

Faced with far more pressing problems than the seemingly mundane matter of how to conduct its elections — war, enemies intent on its destruction, integrating hundreds of thousands of immigrants, building the new state, etc. — Israel ‘temporarily’ continued with the system. And it has been stuck with it ever since.
Israeli national parliamentary elections are conducted under a form of Proportional Representation, one of the variants of what is known as the Party List System.
Each party submits a list of up to 120 names — the total number of seats in the Knesset, the unicameral national legislature — which are elected nationwide (Israel being one single electoral district).
Following an election, Knesset seats are distributed as per the order on the lists — if party ‘A’ receive five seats, the individuals listed one to five on their list are elected to the Knesset.
The leader of the party deemed most likely to be able to form a government is invited to do so by the (otherwise ceremonial) State President. If they are not able to, within the timeframe allotted, another party can be offered the opportunity to form the government instead. The leader of the party who succeeds in forming a government becomes Prime Minister.
The only regulating factor in the virtually unimpeded translation of votes into seats is the Threshold, a bar that has to be passed before a party can be eligible to win a seat.
Until the elections for 13th Knesset (1992) the Threshold was one per cent, and during the 16th Knesset (elected 2003) it was increased from 1.5 per cent to two per cent. This is one of the lowest in existence in any PR system — with countries like Turkey placing it at 10 per cent, and with one as high as 20-25 per cent in Eire — which has proven increasingly significant to Israel’s political fortunes as the decades have passed.
The role a regulating mechanism like the Threshold plays in such a system is vital, with its size having a huge bearing on the ability of parties to win seats.  Where the Threshold is low, small parties have an opportunity to secure parliamentary representation, and thus many participate; when the Threshold is high, only parties with higher levels of public support have a chance to win seats, and therefore fewer parties participate.
The Threshold also influences possibly the single most important function of any electoral mechanism: the ability for a government to emerge from an election. When the Threshold is low the chances of a clear winner are low, for it is most unusual in modern democracy for a party to win over 50 per cent of the national vote, and coalitions become inevitable.
However, when the Threshold is high the chances of a clear winner increase significantly: votes of parties failing to pass the Threshold are either discarded or redistributed, meaning that a party winning less than half the seats can secure more than half of the seats.

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Why Anti-Semitism Matters by Denis Macshane

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

‘Anglo-Jewry finds its voice’, trumpeted the front page of the Jewish Chronicle during the harrowing days of the Gaza bombardment.

What voice exactly was this? What was it saying? More importantly, for whom was it speaking?

If the tangible feelings of dismay, paralysis and incredulity around me were anything to go by, whole swathes of Anglo-Jewry were left unspoken for.

Urgently, it seemed, a platform was needed for those unheard voices. The following is a transcript of the first conversation organised by the JQ to establish what these voices might be saying. What are the issues? How might they be broached? How, as a community, might we manage these differences?

The conversation was chaired by Jonathan Boyd (acting director of Jewish Policy Research). The participants were Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg (Rabbi of New North London Syngogue), Douglas Krikler (Chief Executive of the UJIA), Paul Usiskin (Co-chair of Peace Now UK), Geoffrey Alderman, (Columnist, Professor of Politics & Contemporary History at the University of Buckingham) Kevin Sefton, (Limmud Trustee) Joseph Finlay (Musician, involved with Jewdas and the Moishe House), Keith Kahn-Harris (Sociologist, convenor of New Jewish Thought www.newjewishthought.org) and Daniella Peled (journalist and analyst who specialises on the Middle East).

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