Major Farran’s Hat; Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism 1945-1948

By David Cesarani

William Heinemann, March 2009, £20.00

On the evening of 6 May 1947 Alexander Rubowitz left his parents’ home in Jerusalem and never returned. Rubowitz was 16 at the time, and a member of LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), the smallest and most ardent underground organisation fighting against the British Mandate in Palestine. Commonly referred to by the British as ‘The Stern Gang’, LEHI specialised in acts of terrorism, usually in defiance of the Jewish Agency, which led the Zionist struggle for independence. It later transpired that Rubowitz had been abducted by British  officers, serving in the Special Air Service (SAS), which led the counter-terrorist offensive. One of them, Major Roy Farran, admitted that he killed Rubowitz in the course of his interrogation, by smashing a rock against his head. The body was never found.
Those were violent days in Palestine. Arabs, Jews and the British attacked each other with varying degrees of maliciousness, always supposedly for patriotic purposes. Hence the abduction and killing of Rubowitz are hardly worth more than a footnote in the history of those dramatic times. But both the young Zionist militant and his British assassin became mythological heroes, which gives their story special significance and lifts it above the chronology of routine violence. Read more

A Designated Man

By Moris Farhi

Telegram Books, March 2009, £12.99

In a lecture at Harvard in 1967, Jorge Luis Borges mourned the passing of the epic, a form he loved for its fusion of music and narration and its heroic breadth. In contrast to the myopic and introverted modern novel, it offered a ‘pattern for all men’ — something that we in the contemporary world hungered for just as much as the ancients.
In A Designated Man, set on the fictitious island of Skender, Moris Farhi gives us a darker, starker version of the same struggle we saw in his last novel, Young Turk; again, a multi-ethnic society is in distress. Though graced with fertile soil and a long, distinguished history, Skender is in the grip of what is known locally as the Law. First introduced several centuries earlier, and justified by a rigid concept of honour, it gives its men no choice but to surrender their lives to blood feuds.
The Law has been so successful that it now allows clans that have had all their male feudists wiped out to appoint women in their stead. Any woman who agrees must erase all trace of her femininity thereafter. Any one who resists the Law’s fundamentalist logic can expect a harsh response from Toma, the Law’s chief enforcer, who is responsible for the training and indoctrination of young feudists and also acts as agents for the faceless Gospodins, the mainland clan that has been slowly and quietly buying up the island, in the hope that Skender might one day become a Mediterranean equivalent of Diego Garcia, thereby making them a fortune. Read more

ONE MORE YEAR

By Sana Krasikov

Portobello Books, June 2009, £10.99

Anyone who expects a short story to be an impressionistic wash, a glimpsed moment that requires less than full concentration, should know that the eight stories in Sana Krasikov’s debut collection permit the reader no such idleness. On the contrary, One More Year demands commitment. Its narratives are intricately woven, populated by idiosyncratic characters, of whom many — the boyfriend’s mother, for instance, who lectures on the psychology of endurance after surviving a plane crash — are merely mentioned in passing. Each tale is alive with the minutiae of a fully-realised world and in each the author has amassed enough material to create at least one novel.
Like most of her characters, Krasikov is an émigré from Eastern Europe. Born in the Ukraine, she grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and moved to the United States when she was eight years old. In this acclaimed collection, for which she was awarded the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she describes the immigrant experience from eight different angles, in unsentimental prose laced with bruised compassion. Her characters, whether striving to assimilate in the States or reacclimatise themselves to Russia, are adrift in equally inhospitable lands: ‘an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent to another.’ Read more

Marti Friedlander

By Leonard Bell

Auckland University Press, October 2009, £34.50

‘A very good portrait is a paradox,’ says Leonard Bell, professor of Art History at Auckland University. He considers how revelation and mystery co-exist in the work of Marti Friedlander, and her motivation for each of the 185 photographs included in this handsome book, many now being published for the first time.
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Marti was born in 1928 in London’s East End. Aged three, Marti and her sister Anne were put into an orphanage in Bethnal Green run by the London County Council. In 1933 she moved to the Jewish Orphanage in Norwood. You need to know this about Marti’s early life because it informs so much of her photography. Deeply steeped in Jewish sensibilities, yet always an outsider. Read more

Fiction as History (as Fiction)

In an article in the Times, Anthony Beevor calls The Kindly Ones ‘a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come’. The review is eminently quotable, of course, but alert readers will have to ask: Really? Scholars?
Told from a point of view both sensationalist and horrifying — that of an SS officer who is an accomplice to all the worst excesses of the war — The Kindly Ones is nevertheless a well-written book. It offers a high style that could easily be a pastiche of Thomas Mann, but goes further than Mann ever did in examining individual guilt in the communal crime of war by describing with chilling meticulousness the criminal acts themselves. Dozens, if not hundreds, of deaths, many gruesome, are given individual attention. The tone is even, the pace stately and measured, the details stomach-turning. From the Commissar Order and the siege of Stalingrad to the Final Solution, tens of pages at a time are dedicated to reproducing conversations in which seemingly intelligent men argue the tertiary particulars of mass murder and enact the most sordid crimes. The writing is in the best taste, it could be argued, and the content the worst.
Some reviewers have argued that because of the book’s opening (‘Oh, my human brothers’), this is a story about how any one could become a Nazi, but the book’s narrator, Maximilian Aue, is a monster, and has been one since long before the war. Forever scarred by the disappearance of his father and his childhood incest with his twin, he begins a make-believe relationship with his sister in which he eats her excrement and has sex with her in a torture chamber. When he is not inhabiting this fantasy, he is an unrepentant murderer who kills not just Jews and other ‘enemies of the Reich’, but both his mother and his best friend for no apparent reason — hardly an everyman. Read more

City of David

The appropriateness of Messianic hopes in an era pronounced as violent and bleak can seem to touch the nadir of madness or near the course to insanity. Nevertheless, it is precisely at these times that the appeal to the Messianic seems more intense, real and credible.
Michael Heller in his new collection of poetry, Eschaton writes: ‘Impossible for me to write of other topics, mathematics and language or / mathematics and Zion’ (Letter and Dream of Walter Benjamin). He takes heart in a new hope of ‘after-selves’ or the co-ordinate — ‘reliev[ing,] the self-awareness of non-self’ — which he alludes to in A Terror of Tonality.
Throughout a collection which immerses itself  in the devastation of September 11th and in the ruined landscapes of Sarajevo and Somalia — to name just a few of the massacre sites included — the word that occasions mention most frequently is ‘surcease’, a word that suggests overarching disaster but that also foreshadows some relief.
The Age of The Poet considers both the decline of the poet but also of the age in which he breeds. There sounds one possible note of relief: ‘but for surcease, for stillness / for not thinking.’ ‘Not thinking,’ can mean two things in Heller’s symbology: the relief from ‘garrulousness’ (Finding the Mode), and the reliable possibility of metaphysical end-points — ‘Wasn’t this how looking out was to become looking in, one’s ghosts no / longer blocking reflection?’(In the Studio).
What bespeaks the heartfelt nature of this collection is only apparent in its deliberate organisation. By placing the most epiphanic material  in the first two sections of  the book, the effect is one of high to low tension rather than ascending arc. The descent into the nether-reaches of sepulchral thanatos and eschaton are tinged still in this framework with embraces and remembrances of those ‘small ceremonies of life,’ left behind; ultimately I think affirming life and the will to live, while facing harbingers of death. In the midst of devastation, Heller exhorts an unorthodox vision; of life the way it would be after the facts of history, of a rejoining spirit of play after death and catastrophes: Read more

The Novel of Nonel and Vovel

When Nonel and Vovel made work about the Middle East in 2000 they were asked: who are your audiences? When they make work about the Middle East in 2009 the common question is: do you do it because it is trendy?

The first thought crossing one’s mind after putting down The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (following an exhilarated sigh of disappointment that the roller coaster ride is over) is indeed a morosely existential one: who is going to read this book? Who is going to be inspired by it for action that makes a difference in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
The above quote appears in the ‘art & politics’ chapter of this inter-disciplinary multi-tasking, workaholic, split-personality-disorder-diagnosed Middle-East-conflict-in-space graphic novel in which every chapter is illustrated by a different artist, bracketed by questionnaires, essays, photographs, games and even a crossword puzzle. The climactic chapter is the only one written by someone other than the two artists behind this project, Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour. But when their superhero alter-egos Nonel and Vovel are getting ready to save the day and solve the conflict that transcends our planet’s borders (no spoilers!) the storyline is interrupted by a conversation between Ashery and Sansour in cameo appearance, illustrated into the sci-fi sequence sitting on a bench in London’s South Bank, discussing the problem of handing over the most dramatic chapter to a guest writer (Soren Lind).   Read more

Loving Us Too Much

A polemical book can be one of quality. A strongly argued text can be solidly grounded in reliable evidence. So I wonder whether Will Skidelsky, chairman of the judging panel for the 2009 Jewish Quarterly Wingate literary prize, thought he had such a book in his hands when he described one of the six contenders, Dennis MacShane’s Globalizing Hatred: The New Antisemitism, as an ‘impassioned polemic about the resurgence of anti-Semitism as a global force’? MacShane, a Labour Member of Parliament and a former junior minister, is a talented popularizer of political issues.
A similar description could be applied to a new book by experienced think-tanker Robin Shepherd, who used to run the European programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and is now Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His work, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, also strongly argued, seeks to explain why Israel is accorded disproportionate attention by Europe’s opinion formers. Read more

The Snow Globe

I.

I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life, then, and a soundtrack followed me wherever I went. If I’d met Amichai at another moment — even a year earlier, when I was too little formed to be so radically changed; or a year later, when I was already well into my solidification — it’s unlikely that I’d be writing about him now. Or writing at all.
I was traveling across Israel that summer, on a program intended to foster a generation of young Jewish leaders. We saw sights, smoked a fair amount of pot, played a fair amount of the Jewish version of basketball (characterized by a lot of arguing over esoteric rules), and endeavored to couple.
In the course of the summer, we met with an eclectic cast of Israeli figures: politicians, artists, activists, archeologists, soldiers, kibbutzniks and theologians. Our summer’s final meeting was with Amichai. It’s hard to imagine why he agreed to spend time with us. Perhaps the fellowship was paying him. Perhaps it was a personal debt he owed to one of the organizers. Perhaps he actually bought into the premise of the thing, and genuinely believed — as we never could, thank God — that we were Future Jewish Leaders, that his words might redirect us, if only by a few thousandths of a degree, toward some version of Jewish Leadership that he found palatable or even inspiring. Read more

The Great Debate: The Latke’s Role in the Renaissance, 1991 Debate

When Dear Abby was asked the question ‘Why do Jews always answer a question with a question?’ she replied, ‘How should they answer?’ And when I am asked do I give precedence to the latke or the hamantash? I must reply,despite being absolutely sure of the answer, ‘How should the university answer?’ This is not because I believe that the état c’est moi, whatever you may think. In fact, as president of the University of Chicago, it is my duty never to think.
Let me remind this audience of the stated policy of the university as formulated in the Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action, published and endorsed by the Council of the University Senate in 1967: ‘[There is] a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day, or modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values, however compelling and appealing theymay be.’ Given my fidelity to the idea of the university and the obligation it imposes for a colorless neutrality, therefore, let me say in the most courageously forthright and outspoken terms that both the latke and the hamantash are simply wonderful.We welcome them to our diverse, pluralistic, and tolerant community of scholars, as we have for a hundred years and as we will for the century to come. Read more

The Great Debate: The Hamantash in Shakespeare, 1965 debate

Who was William Shakespeare?
This question has defied the best scholarly minds for three andone-half centuries. Some critics have said his poems and plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Loxford.Others say that the true author was Francis (you’ll pardon the expression) Bacon.Nonsense! Shakespeare alone, or somebody else with that name, is the true author. That this man of lowly origins — a humble hamantash baker by trade — could have written immortal verse comes as a surprise to some. But not to me. For a careful search of his sonnets and plays clearly reveals the man and the powerful source of his creativity.
The first clue to the mystery is to be found in Shakespeare’s central play, The Merchant of Venice. In act 5, the young hero Lorenzo says to the beautiful Jessica: ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon
this bank! Here we will sit and let the sounds of music creep into our ears.’
Here is a statement that appears to be poetic, clear, and straightforward. But how can it be both poetic on the one hand and clear and straightforward on the other? Modern literary criticism and centuries of Shakespearean scholarship teach us this is impossible. So we must look more closely. Read more

Virtual Judaism

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

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

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

Lessons Unlearned and Learned

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

Steven Pinker & Bencie Woll

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

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

Borges and the Jews part III: Deutsches Requiem

Who shall tell me if you, Israel, are to be found in the lost labyrinth of the secular rivers that is my blood?
—J.L.B., ‘To Israel’

The consensus among Borges’ biographers and critics is that he was deeply apolitical and remained disengaged with local, national, and international affairs throughout his life. It is true that Borges was, especially in his adolescence, a dilettante à la Oscar Wilde minus the ornamental outspokenness. But to certain events he offered political comment, often heavy with sarcasm, of great force. A partial yet enlightening record of his opinions can be found in Selected Non-fiction, edited by Eliot Weinberger. Of the entire selection, only a small portion address the events in Europe; still, they are significant in that they allow a glimpse of Borges’ beliefs and the trenchant style with which he debunked ugly stereotypes. Borges denounced Hitler almost from the start, decrying the arrival of Nazism as a catastrophe for German culture. In ‘A Pedagogy of Hatred,’ he attacks the publication, in Germany of the children’s book Trau keinem Fuchs auf gruener Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid [Don’t Trust Any Fox from a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath]. Here is Suzanne Jill Levine’s translation included in Selected Non-Fiction: Read more

Notes From A Bimah

*severe spoiler alerts

Ruthie, in her gold dress, mumbles a line of her speech about Judith and then is silent. Her hands tremble. We see her cue cards. But she’s not reading what’s on them.
Cut to congregation members who are shouting at her: Louder / Can’t hear you / Speak up / What’s wrong with her / Is she a mute?
Finally, cut back to Ruthie. She responds:
You ask me to be louder, when I’m normally told to be quiet
You ask me to smile, eat more but diet
You tell me today I’m special, when I’ve never been before.
I’ll give you louder… (music begins, voice changes, new scene) hear me roar!

When we decided to make a film that reflected a key moment in Jewish women’s experience, the Knish Collective decided to focus on the moment just before delivering the bat mitzvah address on the bimah. This hyper-important moment, emblematic of the transition into adulthood, is a staple scene for all bar mitzvah films; it’s a sign of the trope. The ‘Bimah moment’ might be said to characterize the genre. Read more

Fish And Fowl

I’ve only been served fish and fowl on the same plate twice. Both times were in the USA, the second was at the J Street inaugural conference Gala dinner in Washington DC this October. J Street is a new Washington lobbying group intent on ‘changing the face of pro-Israel advocacy in the US’. It wants an open debate on Israel, on the same plate as the Israel Right or Wrong lobby, epitomised by AIPAC. As Republican Senator Boustany put it, ‘there must be room for a more open and vigorous debate on the Mid-East conflict.’ For fifty years, AIPAC has monopolised the pro-Israel field. Its legendary influence brooks no criticism of Israel.
Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street’s Executive Director never mentions AIPAC publicly. ‘They can welcome us in; this is a language and a dialogue they are not used to. It will ensure the long-term survival of their institutions and it will mean that the community is a broad tent, strong and vibrant. The other choice is they say “you’re not welcome” and then we’ll either create our own home, or a lot of these people are going to walk away. Everybody loses.’ Read more

‘Entartete Musik’

If Zubin Mehta hadn’t heard the recording, we wouldn’t all be here tonight.’ Thus spoke Barbara Zeisl-Schoenberg on October 4th 2009 following the opening concert of the Vienna Philharmonic subscription series, one of the most prestigious series anywhere with a waiting list of fifteen years per ticket.
The central feature of the concert was Erich Zeisl’s setting of the 92nd Psalm which, in memory of his parents who had been murdered in the camps, he had called Requiem Ebraico. Mehta had already conducted the work in Israel before his decision to make it the centrepiece of the opening of the season. Read more

Victims Are Not Sacrifices

The unspoken sub-text for Uri Hadar’s elegant, emotive and disturbing piece is Primo Levi’s 1982 comment, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, that ‘Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.’ For many Jews, reading this through the lens of their idealisation of Levi as the most principled writer about the Holocaust, the resonance was unbearable. For those who could think about it and not simply discard Levi as a lost soul, too damaged by the Nazis to know his own mind, the question was, ‘What have we done?’ After Sabra and Shatilla, the relative innocence of those of us who had grown up with heroic tales of Zionism was shattered, and questions of responsibility, of guilt, even of reparation were raised. Over time, this set of questions has been obscured or repressed, then uncovered, then repressed again, in a dynamic that in many ways reveals the potency of Uri’s assertion that what is being enacted is an unconscious transmission of victimhood, in which one people is being made to stand in for another. This assaults a self-image of Jews as ethical, and a religious image of Jews and Judaism as a supposed ‘light to the nations’. As Uri suggests, the ‘need to conceive of oneself as good and just’ results in a terrible twisting of reality in the face of events. Read more

Burning Memories: Sacrifice and the Historical Unconscious

In winter 2009 I accidentally came across a eulogy that I wrote in 1970 for my then best friend, Zvika, who was killed by Egyptian fire at the Suez Canal. I received the news of his death at midnight and hitchhiked through the night to reach the funeral from my army base near Eilat. I sat to write my farewell to him in his family home in the Kibbutz where we grew up. One of the lines in my eulogy said: ‘For many years Zvika and his mother represented the Shoah for me. On hearing the word, I immediately visualized them singing ‘Brothers, the shtetl is burning’, a song that always sent shivers down my spine. Its dramatic melody, coupled with its violent images and terrible helplessness, moved, upset and alerted me to a mysterious danger. Both the text and the melody were written by Mordechai Gebirtig, a Galician poet who was killed by the Nazis in 1942.  Gebirtig’s poem, known as ‘The shtetl is burning’ was written in 1938 about a pogrom that took place two years earlier in a small Polish town. It describes the total destruction by fire of the town. The refrain says ‘And you stand by lame, without offering help, without trying to extinguish the burning fire, the fire of the city’. When I started reading what I wrote so many years ago, I did not remember this image of Zvika and his mother singing, and the song of the burning shtetl had all but escaped my memory. Yet, reading my eulogy triggered an avalanche of memories. Read more

Trading Up

‘There is no Palestinian Mandela,’ writes Ari Shavit in Ha’aretz. Journalists and commentators of all stripes have long bemoaned the absence of such a leader to take the Palestinians peacefully towards independence. But while a unifying leader is lacking, policies to build domestic and international trade may be the more decisive factor in achieving de facto statehood. In the West Bank, an entrepreneurial, well-educated private sector is eager to work and grow. Small businesses in Nablus and Ramallah bustle for profits, selling everything from olives and lemons to mobiles phones and marble. They want economic freedom, and may be about to move a step closer to their goal. Read more

Trauma: An Essay on Jewish Guilt

You can’t escape the question of identity. In 1995 various authors contributed essays to a book called The Jew in the Text, Modernity and the Construction of Identity. Prefacing the collection, the editors explain:

It had struck us, and not surprisingly many others at around the same time, that the category of the ‘Jew’, not the history of Jews, Judaism or Jewish culture, but the way in which the ‘Jew’ had been perceived in modern culture, was relatively unexplored. While issues surrounding race, identity, colonialism, and Eurocentrism have become the focus of endless debate and scrutiny, the ‘Jew’ had largely been left out. It is as if the issue of the ‘Jew’ is just as much an embarrassment to contemporary cultural theorists as it was to their European ancestors.¹ Read more

Playing the Jewish Card: Show & Tell

‘Entartete Musik’

‘If Zubin Mehta hadn’t heard the recording, we wouldn’t all be here tonight.’ Thus spoke Barbara Zeisl-Schoenberg on October 4th 2009 following the opening concert of the Vienna Philharmonic subscription series, one of the most prestigious series anywhere with a waiting list of fifteen years per ticket.
The central feature of the concert was Erich Zeisl’s setting of the 92nd Psalm which, in memory of his parents who had been murdered in the camps, he had called Requiem Ebraico. Mehta had already conducted the work in Israel before his decision to make it the centrepiece of the opening of the season. Read more

Fish and Fowl

I’ve only been served fish and fowl on the same plate twice. Both times were in the USA, the second was at the J Street inaugural conference Gala dinner in Washington DC this October. J Street is a new Washington lobbying group intent on ‘changing the face of pro-Israel advocacy in the US’. It wants an open debate on Israel, on the same plate as the Israel Right or Wrong lobby, epitomised by AIPAC. As Republican Senator Boustany put it, ‘there must be room for a more open and vigorous debate on the Mid-East conflict.’ For fifty years, AIPAC has monopolised the pro-Israel field. Its legendary influence brooks no criticism of Israel.
Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street’s Executive Director never mentions AIPAC publicly. ‘They can welcome us in; this is a language and a dialogue they are not used to. It will ensure the long-term survival of their institutions and it will mean that the community is a broad tent, strong and vibrant. The other choice is they say “you’re not welcome” and then we’ll either create our own home, or a lot of these people are going to walk away. Everybody loses.’
Someone spotted the absence of J Street on the Washington grid map. K Street is where all the lobbyists are. The organisation seeks to create a new, but not exclusively Jewish, Pro-Israel Pro-Peace voice. A table guest told me ‘we aren’t anti anything!’ Post-Cast Lead that’s an interesting interpretation. At a session titled The Maze, veteran Knesset Members admitted that the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee is powerless, prompting the question ‘who are the Government of Israel and the IDF accountable to?’ The panellists smiled wryly and shook their heads.
J Street numbers 160,000, after only eighteen months. Its success is partly explained by‘Netroots’ — the combination of networking and the internet — to disseminate political messages via blogs and internet media. Ben Ami learned the effectiveness of Netroots as Policy Director to Howard Dean’s 2005 Presidential campaign. He says ‘Barack Obama owes his presidency to internet politics.’ The other part — some 50,000 supporters — comes from Brit Tzedek V’Shalom — Alliance For Justice and Peace — a more traditional grass-roots organisation integrated into J Street.
The breadth of American Progressive Jewish Israeli interests was reflected in the twenty organisations participating in the conference, including Ameinu and The New Israel Fund. Numbers for the three day conference exceeded 1500, a wow-factor many speakers commented upon. ‘The voice of the silent American Jewish majority’, Ben Ami declared, ‘is silent no longer.’
Reform Rabbi Andy Bachman from Brooklyn wanted to bring his pre-67 Zionism to a jaded younger generation, ‘above all else we have to be a blessing, a moral people.’ Two days prior to the Conference, J Street had hosted 250 students from 60 campuses.
It was like Limmud, but exclusively devoted to Israel and peace. The multiplicity of sessions made choosing hard. In one morning, concurrently: The American Left and Israel; Where Has Israel Peace Activisim Gone? Israel’s Social and Domestic Challenges; How Jews Christians and Muslims Can Work Together For Peace; Setting The Stage For Peace; Culture As A Tool For Change.
C-Span (a private, non-profit company created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a public service to provide free access to the political process) broadcast conference sessions.The Washington Post carried a full page of congratulations from Israeli politicians and ex-Generals.
Located in a hotel an easy walk from the White House, it was a seminal moment in American Jewish and Diaspora–Israel relations, consisting of several seminal moments: invariable applause whenever a Palestinian state and an end to the occupation were called for.Bassim Khoury, who’d just quit the Abbas cabinet over Goldstone said, ‘Its not Left-wing versus Right-wing, but Correct-wing versus Wrong-wing.’
General Jim Jones, National Security Adviser, thanked J Street for ‘the honour of addressing the conference in the name of the President of the United States. You can be sure this administration will be represented at all future conferences.’
During the lobbying day on Capitol Hill, seven hundred J Street conference participants met with senatorial aides. We’d been given a clear brief about the pro-Israel pro-Peace message, but it didn’t prepare us for a chief aide’s ‘What about negotiating with Hamas?’ We discussed it and the aide told us, ‘I don’t even get an answer to that when I ask AIPAC.’
And all the time there were Jewish faces, so familiar I kept asking myself ‘Isn’t that…?’ The indefinable American quality about them promoted stimulating discussions. What about beyond America, I ask Ben Ami. ‘These issues apply to the worldwide Jewish community, in Europe as much as in Israel. We’re going to have to tap into that. It will give everybody strength.’
Washington cabbies all seem to be Eritrean. Mine asked me if I was from J Street. I was stunned. ‘It’s all over the radio,’ he explained, ‘but you’re better than the other group.’ ‘Which other group?’ I asked. ‘AIPAC,’ he said.
And for the record, the fish — cod — was fresher and tastier than the fowl — ‘rubber’ chicken.

A brief exchange on language, love and life.

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

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

United

On the fifteenth day of October the Festival of Judaism began. Its slogan — draped on banners across the entrance and printed on the front of glossy Souvenir Brochures — was ‘the centre of Jewish life is the family home’. In celebration of this theme, the central exhibition of the festival was a Jewish Family Home and excitingly (and this was where bringing in the new young expo team, full of flashy headline-grabbing ideas had really paid off) for the entire duration of the festival, a real authentic Jewish family would be living in the space.
It was quite a coup, one that had attracted the attention not just of the Jewish press, or the British press, but even the worldwide media. Shlomo Luei, Director of the Festival, appeared blinking on various international news feeds. ‘It seemed the natural progression,’ he said. ‘For years, we’ve had demonstrations at the Festival of various aspects of traditional Jewish life that people no longer do at home: koshering chickens, baking challa, taking clothing apart to separate wool and linen and so on. This year we wanted to present a much fuller picture of that ancient way of life; we were very lucky that the Blattsteins  agreed to take part.’ Read more

The Snow Globe

I.

I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life, then, and a soundtrack followed me wherever I went. If I’d met Amichai at another moment — even a year earlier, when I was too little formed to be so radically changed; or a year later, when I was already well into my solidification — it’s unlikely that I’d be writing about him now. Or writing at all.
I was traveling across Israel that summer, on a program intended to foster a generation of young Jewish leaders. We saw sights, smoked a fair amount of pot, played a fair amount of the Jewish version of basketball (characterized by a lot of arguing over esoteric rules), and endeavored to couple.
In the course of the summer, we met with an eclectic cast of Israeli figures: politicians, artists, activists, archeologists, soldiers, kibbutzniks and theologians. Our summer’s final meeting was with Amichai. It’s hard to imagine why he agreed to spend time with us. Perhaps the fellowship was paying him. Perhaps it was a personal debt he owed to one of the organizers. Perhaps he actually bought into the premise of the thing, and genuinely believed — as we never could, thank God — that we were Future Jewish Leaders, that his words might redirect us, if only by a few thousandths of a degree, toward some version of Jewish Leadership that he found palatable or even inspiring. Read more