Jerusalem Day (May 31, 2011)

The Israelis celebrate their capital and its long historical significance on May 31 this year. To celebrate, here is the oldest Zionist poem by Judah Halevi, who probably died soon after arriving in Jerusalem in the twelfth century.

My Heart is in the East by Judah Halevi
My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west--
How can I find savor in food? How shall it be sweet to me?
How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet
Zion lies beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains?
A light thing would it seem to me to leave all the good things of Spain--
Seeing how precious in mine eyes to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary

UPDATE: The Israelis have a lot of controversy over Jerusalem Day, based of course in the controversy over Jerusalem itself. See, for example,
Jerusalem Day celebrations will not cover up the city's rot and discrimination: Jerusalem Day is an 'artificial celebration'; Jerusalem is the most ultra-Orthodox city, the most Arab, plagued by negative migration. By Yossi Sarid

Linda Grant: "We Had It So Good"

Time goes by. You're young and have no serious plans. You establish something: a marriage? A job? A life? Suddenly you are aging, or just plain old. Strangers clearly see that you aren't you. But you know you are really the same person you have always been.

Fleeting perceptions that current reality isn't reality are indescribable. But in her latest novel We Had It So Good Linda Grant perfectly captures this sense of time flying by, of change and permanence in conflict. She describes Stephen Newman, her main character in the 1950s: a child in Los Angeles playing in his father's fur-storage business. It's the 60s/70s: Stephen goes to England on a Rhodes scholarship, meets a group of hippie types, is "sent down" from Oxford for making LSD in a research lab. He lives in a "squat." Before he can think, years pass and he and his wife -- one of the girls from the group -- have a beautiful house, children, and a better-than-middle class lifestyle. His wife becomes a psychoanalyst; he becomes a BBC producer. How has he stayed in England so long?

Stephen, the displaced American, has a Jewish immigrant father who came through Ellis Island and a Cuban mother who regrets the way her native land must have changed. His main sense of them is of their great love for him: the English girls he meets have no similar family memory. His mother never goes back to Cuba, but his father at age 90 takes him on a trip to the village in Poland where he lived 80 years before; eventually his father shares a long-concealed truth about his origins and the story he's always told, but not with Stephen, rather with his wife.

Historic events that we readers recognize take their toll. It's the 90s: a man that Stephen once met on the way to be a Rhodes scholar is President of the US. It's the 00s: he thinks his friends have all escaped the terrorist bombing on the London tube, but his daughter is devastated by its effect on her secret lover. His friend from hippie days is a very rich man thanks to an investment guy in New York that never loses money. At the end of the book we can see what's coming to him. We can see so much.

Linda Grant -- already one of my "heroes" -- does it all through her wonderful characterization of Stephen, his wife, their friends, their two children, their parents, and the world that they live in. The whirl of time flying by is remarkably portrayed. Her book When I Lived in Modern Times captured a historical moment effectively and vividly, and she's now done it again.

David Liss: "The Ethical Assassin"

The Ethical Assassin by David Liss is a suspense novel in which a naive character, 17-year-old Lemul Altick suddenly finds himself threatened by bizarre criminals and corrupt policemen in the heat and misery of 1980s Florida. Lem -- whose name is coincidentally the same as Swift's Lemuel Gulliver -- grows up and learns a great deal in his strange voyage of saving himself from a variety of dangers. He learns to deal with strange circumstances, with dishonest employers in his job selling encyclopedias door-to-door, with bullying from his age peers and others, and with ambiguity about which people he can believe or trust. It's not quite as excellent as some novels in this style (like by Graham Greene) but it's good.

The "ethical assassin" of the title is a stealthy, weird-looking, and mysterious character named Melford who offers long discourses on veganism and saving animals from human cruelty. Melford insists on the ethical imperative of his views; his persuasiveness pulls in Lem and at least one other character. Despite all the discussion of the wrongs of eating meat, food in the sense that I usually write about it hardly plays a role in this book.

Lem, attempting to skip meat thanks to Melford's discourses, dislikes the dairy-free bowl of oatmeal that's his only choice at an IHOP; he eats fruit when his hunger tempts him otherwise, and he also resists temptation from a girl who tries to lure him to eat a hamburger -- but this book is truly not about food in the style of many works of detective fiction. Melford's obsession with the ethics of eating meat plays a large role in the unfolding suspense -- making the discussions relevant without (in my opinion) turning this into a philosophic novel. It would in fact be perverse to read this as a tract about "meat is murder" though some of the amazon.com reviewers did read it this way. It's about a bizarre character whose quirk is animal rights.

Lem Altick, like the central characters in Liss's other novels, is a Jew. For Lem, being Jewish has no stated religious or ethical content, it's just one of many taunts from the bullies of his school days and his experiences in the narrative. The extent to which Jewishness has no meaning for Lem is a bit extreme. In Liss's other books, which are set in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the key Jewish characters (the ones who have to get themselves out of dangerous and strange situations) are not practicing their religion; they nevertheless are very conscious of its meaning and customs and how it affects the lives of their Jewish relatives. For Lem, it's nothing but another reason to pick on him, like being overweight (which he had been a few years before).

Since the publication of The Ethical Assassin, Liss has returned to publishing historical fiction, and also seems to be collaborating on some graphic novels. I've read the rest of his novels to date, and liked them. I would judge this the weakest though it's a good read. The historical content of the others gives them a greater depth than this one; the variety of really oddball characters in this one doesn't make up for this lack of depth. I'm looking forward to Liss's new historical novel, scheduled to appear in August.

I wrote this review for my food blog -- "The Ethical Assassin"

Henry Kissinger (May 27, 1923)

Of course I never liked Kissinger's role in the Nixon administration and the Viet Nam war, but recent revelations have made him seem worse than he did before. Consider this excerpt from a recent New York Times article, "In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks" --

An indication of Nixon’s complex relationship with Jews came the afternoon Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, came to visit on March 1, 1973. The tapes capture Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.

But moments after she left, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were brutally dismissive in response to requests that the United States press the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate and escape persecution there.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

Operation Solomon (May 24, 1991)

Operation Solomon was the name given to the rescue of 14,324 Ethiopian Jews by Israeli forces on May 24, 1991. After much negotiation with Ethiopian authorities (and payment of a large sum of money), the Israelis were allowed a very limited time to evacuate the Jewish-Ethiopian refugees from small backwards villages who were waiting to immigrate to Israel. El Al jumbo jets and Hercules C-130s flew in and out of Ethiopia non-stop for 36 hours. This was an even bigger effort than Operation Moses a few years earlier, which flew around 8,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

In my opinion, despite many setbacks, the Israelis' ongoing commitment to these immigrants is also heroic. I have seen early childhood programs, education for young mothers, and other efforts to assimilate them into modern life. Clearly there are many problems, but I respect the efforts.

Charles Aznavour (May 22, 1924)

Charles Aznavour, the famous French singer and actor, was born in Paris to Armenian immigrant parents fleeing from Turkey. He grew up in the Marais, the Jewish neighborhood. He said: "'All my childhood friends are Jews. … I was brought up among them. I finished up having the same gestures, the same way of talking, the same way of joking. During the German occupation, I was arrested several times for being Jewish. Shall we say, I don't have a very Catholic appearance. They'd take me to the command post. I'd show my baptism certificate, but they didn't believe me. They'd make me take down my trousers. As I tell my friends, I am the only Ashkenazi goy in France.'" See "Aznavour, The Last Chanteur"

Al Franken (May 21, 1951)

Now that he’s in politics it’s probably not possible to know if he’s a secular Jew. But he’s surely a hero to secular Jews for bringing humor and politics together in a most unusual way.

Bob Dylan (May 24, 1941)

I really don't see how Bob Dylan, much as I like his music, can mean much as a Jew when he can't seem to make up his mind what religion to be. I think I decided this when I heard his Christmas album a couple of years ago. I thought it was terribly unmusical, really a travesty on his early work. As a reviewer in Intelligent Life Magazine put it: "As he wheezed through “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, he sounded more than ever like a croaking drone."

I agree with the Intelligent Life summary of Dylan:

"He has spent a lifetime defying expectations. When the fans wanted him to remain a folkie, he went electric. When they prized his presumed atheism, he went Christian. When they turn up hoping for folk anthems, he gives them the blues. Inside the old man, a sullen teenager is still trying to get out. As he said himself: forever young."

Michael Chabon (May 24, 1963)

--Michael Chabon on the Simpsons

"I saw my first golem in 1968, in Flushing, New York, shortly before my fifth birthday," Michael Chabon wrote in "Golems I Have Known...A Trickster's Memoir." The last sentence of this essay is: "And, naturally, I'm still telling lies." In the essay, Chabon describes his direct encounters with clay statues created by possibly practicing Kabbalists -- and also claims to be related to Rabbi Loewe of Prague, most famous golem creator. He also describes the progress of his awareness of both the Holocaust and the American civil rights struggle through his experiences with various people during his youth: these things are knit together in the memoir.

Chabon explains that a golem is among other things (and especially for modern or post-moderns) a metaphor for artistic and literary creation. Originally, the kabbalists made golems as an imitation of god's work creating Adam, also from clay. God animated the inert clay Adam; thus, the rabbis pretended or imitated him in the incantations they used over their statues. Of course the legends had it that they were sometimes successful, and the statues really came to life. After a childhood of encounters with golems, Chabon used the story of Rabbi Loewe and his golem in his Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The Holocaust played a role in that book, as it did in the memoir.

I'm a big fan of Chabon. Besides Kavalier & Clay, I loved his book The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate, comic, ironic history of the Jews in the twentieth century where settlement in Alaska takes place instead of the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. His playful treatment of Jewish history and identity really appeals to me. I'm especially amused by the fact that the essay, which ends "I'm still telling lies" has been attacked for being false.

Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940)

Joseph Brodsky is one of the many modern Russian-Jewish-emigre poets whose works I have not read. He's special to me because for a short time he was a poet in residence at the University of Michigan and lived less than a block from my house. I never knowingly saw him. He did not like it much in our town. In a poem about Ann Arbor he wrote:

“In the country of dentists, whose daughters order clothes /
from London catalogues, . . . /
I, whose mouth houses ruins /
more total than the Parthenon’s, /
a spy, an interloper, /
the fifth column of a rotten civilization..." -- From a New Yorker review of Brodsky: A Literary Life, May 23, 2011

On the complex question of Brodsky’s Jewishness:

“In one sense, Brodsky is unequivocal on this subject: ‘I’m a Jew. One hundred percent. You can’t be more Jewish than I am,’ he told an interviewer. Yet he was typical of his Soviet Jewish generation in having absolutely no knowledge of Judaism—apparently he did not even read the Bible until he was in his twenties—and his understanding of Jewishness seems to have been passive and minimal. ‘When anybody asked what my ethnic background was, I of course answered Jewish,’ he explained, ‘but that didn’t happen often. There was really no need to ask. I can’t say a Russian r.’ Brodsky saw Jewishness in terms of such details of speech and appearance, like his prominent nose and pale skin. It could also be a cause of (fairly minor) discrimination: He recalled being teased by classmates and having his application to the Naval Academy rejected because of anti-Semitism.” From Another review of the same book, "Nowhere Man" by Adam Kirsch.

Studs Terkel (May 16, 1912)

Terkel was a prize-winning author and radio broadcast personality who spoke for the common man by interviewing many of them. He described himself in many interviews at the end of his very long life (1912-2008)

About religion he said: “I happen to be an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is, don't you? A cowardly atheist. I, myself, don't believe in any afterlife. I do believe in this life, and what you do in this life is what it's all about.” -- from an NPR broadcast.

About his background he said, “My mother came from Bialystock, near the Russo-Polish border, a very cosmopolitan town decimated by the Nazis. My father came from a suburb [and was] a tailor.”

And about whether his Jewish background influenced him: “Of course it has. That’s a baby’s question. Of course it played a tremendous role. My father voted for [Socialist Party candidate] Eugene V. Debs for president. Of course, there’s anti-Semitism. Of course, there’s anti-everything. There’s always nativism. At the moment, it seems to be more [about] color, than anything else.” – from an article in the Jewish Journal.

Madeleine Albright (May 15, 1937)

Madeleine Albright never knew that her parents were Jewish until hearings were being held for her appointment as Secretary of State. Or at least that's what she said. She had no Jewish identity whatsoever, though seemed more gracious about discovering one. The public was nevertheless content to view her as Jewish, showing something about what that means. Does that make her a secular Jew? I'm not sure.

She told Time magazine in 2006 “I have a somewhat confused religious background.”

Mark Zuckerberg (May 14, 1984)

Do you think founding Facebook makes Zuckerberg into a hero? Or do you think Facebook policies make him an anti-hero? My list wouldn't be complete without this current center of public interest. I’m a Facebook user, but I’m really not that interested in gossip about the founder, movies about the founder, or whatever about the founder.

Zalkind Hourwitz

I recently read A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz. In it, the author, Frances Malino, analyzes the effect of the French Revolution on the various Jewish communities in France at the time. By careful scholarship on Hourwitz's participation in the Revolution, she clarifies the Revolutionary-era issues of the nature of citizenship, the full meaning of the "rights of man" and who was entitled to these rights, and how civil liberties such as voting could be assigned or withheld. Hourwitz, a self-educated Polish Jew who arrived in France just before the Revolution, makes a perfect example for exploring these issues. His views foreshadowed the famous revolutionary formulation that "it is necessary to refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals." (Clermont-Tonnerre, cited by Malino p. 81)

The questions of Jewish participation in French civic life first arose during the initial meetings of the Estates General at the end of the French monarchy, and continued until Napoleon took over and created a new definition of the Jewish community. Throughout Hourwitz played a serious role. At the center of the debate was the conflict between the existing autonomous Jewish communities in France -- which paid collective taxes, were run by rabbis, and often suppressed the wishes of their members -- and individual Jews who wanted to be independent without giving up their faith. (It's amazing how different this was from the simultaneous recognition of the rights of Jews in the United States, for whom an autonomous community without individual rights would have been unthinkable, and who received the rights of citizens under the constitution without debate.)

A contest in Metz -- home to one of the poorest and most despised autonomous Jewish communities -- was Hourwitz's first appearance in the intellectual life of France. Although he was a recent immigrant with somewhat limited skills, he wrote an essay to answer the contest question: how could the Jews of France be made more useful and happier? His essay, an "Apology for the Jews," won the prize jointly with the Abbe Grégoire and another entrant. Both of them had far more prestige and higher formal qualifications.

His simple answer to the question was: “The means to make the Jews happy and useful? Here it is, cease to make them unhappy and useless, in giving them, or rather returning to them, the rights of citizenship.” (Malino p. 18)

Hourwitz, born in 1751 near Lublin, immigrated to France in around 1787. He lived there until his death in 1812; after years of participation in French civic life, taking the citizens' oath, serving in the national guard, and engaging with the experts in the continuing debate over the rights of Jews and other issues, he finally was allowed to become a citizen in the later part of the Revolutionary era. Besides his prize-wining “Apology” for the Jews, he also worked for the Biblioteque Nationale and wrote several books on language and linguistics.

Hourwitz was always faithful to his ideals: his Jewish identity and the revolutionary principals of equality and liberty. For much of his life he was a poor and disfranchised alien and often had to make a living selling old clothes. He managed to obtain and keep the respect of his revolutionary colleagues who were eligible to vote and often served in the Revolutionary government. Above all, he was a survivor during the time when many fell to the guillotine.

The ability of modern Jews to make the choice to be secular or religious was first being explored by Hourwitz and his contemporaries, so the book touches on issues that are important to my efforts here.

Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918)

Feynman was an undisputed genius in physics and other sciences, with many solid accomplishments and a Nobel Prize. People who watched the hearings investigating the Challenger disaster are unlikely to forget the way he convinced everyone that there was a real cause being hidden by NASA: the O-rings that didn't stand up to take-off conditions.

Sometimes I wonder why Feynman had to write books like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, inventing a clever, quirky, irreverent persona to go with these solid accomplishments. Bongo drums. Lock picking. Rejecting Japanese because different people had to use different levels of language. All kinds of bad-boy stuff. (A really good read!)

Feynman's self-characterization includes being a secular Jew: completely non-believing and non-observant. When he was applying to college in 1939, anti-Jewish quotas in Ivy League schools meant he couldn't get in to many if them, despite his obvious gifts -- he received his education at MIT. Perhaps his flamboyant self-image later in his books owes something to having been rejected earlier. Perhaps not.

Mort Sahl (May 11, 1927)

Does anyone remember Mort Sahl? He's credited in some places with inventing stand-up comedy. Someone invented it? Who knew? I thought it was invented by Jews in the Catskills long before he was born. Well, I include him because he was such a model of hipness when I was impressionable.

Irving Berlin (May 11, 1888)

Jews, the cultural athletes, seem to define everything. And when you bring up the subject don’t forget the Jew who wrote the songs that define so much that's American: “White Christmas,” “God Bless America,” “Puttin on the Ritz,” and “In your Easter Bonnet.” Hundreds more, of course.

Daniel Bell (May 10, 1919)

At the time of Daniel Bell's death in January of this year, I learned quite a bit about his influence and accomplishments, of which I had little prior awareness. He was a member of a circle of American Jewish intellectuals including Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer.

According to his obituary in the New York Times, Bell had the religious trajectory typical of many intellectual Jews in his generation: he became a nonbeliever and a socialist at the time of his Bar Mitzvah, and later became part of a secular Marxist leftist Jewish circle at City College of New York including Kristol, Howe, and Glazer.

The Times Literary Supplement (London) ranked two of Bell’s books, “The End of Ideology” and the “Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” among the 100 most influential books since World War II. He was a leader in liberal and left-wing thought for many years, and participated in active discussions of ideology as the prominent associates of his youth moved far to the right.

From his obituary:

"Indeed, for all the ideological wars he had witnessed, Mr. Bell disdained labels, particularly as they were applied to him. Over the years he would offer his own political profile, declaring what he called his 'triune' view of himself: 'a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture.'"

Israel Independence Day

Israel's Independence Day falls on various dates, according to the Jewish calendar: 5 Iyer, this year, today May 9. The official declaration of a Jewish state was May 14, 1948.

After more than 60 years, many Jews feel conflicted about issues to do with Israel. Many things have changed; public opinion has changed. Israel has become a touchstone for anti-Jewish hatred, on the rise again. In 1948, much was different.

I can only imagine the range of emotions that were felt in 1948 by American Jews who were still dealing with the full revelation of the Holocaust. In trying to imagine what the state of Israel meant to them, I find insight in this poem by Karl Shapiro:

Israel
When I think of the liberation of Palestine,
When my eye conceives the great black English line
Spanning world news of two thousand years,
My heart leaps forward like a hungry dog,
My heart is thrown back in its tangled chain,
My soul is hangdog in a Western chair.

When I think of the battle for Zion I hear
The drop of chains, the starting forth of feet,
And I remain chained in a Western chair.
My blood beats like a bird against a wall,
I feel the weight of prisons in my skull
Falling away; my forebears stare through stone.

When I see the name of Israel high in print
The fences crumble in my flesh;
I sink Deep in a Western chair and rest my soul.
I look the stranger clear to the blue depths
Of his unclouded eye. I say my name
Aloud for the first time unconsciously.

Speak of the tillage of a million heads
No more. Speak of the evil myth no more
Of one who harried Jesus on his way
Saying, Go faster. Speak no more
Of the Yellow badge, secta nefaria.
Speak only the name of the living land.

Mordecai Anielewicz: Died May 8, 1943

Mordecai Anielewicz died May 8, 1943 in the final stages of the Warsaw Ghetto, whose defense he helped to organize. His exact date of birth and probably his exact religious feelings are unknown. But he’s a hero to anyone Jewish for leading the struggle against the Nazis, who elsewhere encountered so little opposition.

Here is an excerpt from a letter he wrote shortly before his death and the fall of the ghetto:

"It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. One thing is clear, what happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto. One of our companies held out for 40 minutes and another for more than 6 hours. The mine set in the 'brushmakers' area exploded. Several of our companies attacked the dispersing Germans. Our losses in manpower are minimal. That is also an achievement. Y. [Yechiel] fell. He fell a hero, at the machine-gun. I feel that great things are happening and what we dared do is of great, enormous importance...."

"It is impossible to describe the conditions under which the Jews of the ghetto are now living. Only a few will be able to hold out. The remainder will die sooner or later. Their fate is decided. In almost all the hiding places in which thousands are concealing themselves it is not possible to light a candle for lack of air."

"...The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts. I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men in battle." -- Letter of April 23, 1943

"Mona in the Promised Land" Published May 7, 1996

Author Gish Jen published the novel Mona in the Promised Land on May 7, 1996. Mona, the title character, is the daughter of two Chinese immigrants, but she decides to become Jewish, as most of her friends are. Mona's parents have already bought a home in a Jewish suburb because they think that Chinese are the “new Jews” and that by sending their children to the schools there they will give them a better education. It's a very funny and also insightful book.

Jen’s birth name was Lillian, but she renamed herself Gish in honor of Lillian Gish – another reason to like her! I can't find Gish Jen's birthday, though she appears to have been born in 1955.

Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856)

From time to time in recent years I’ve read articles saying how important Freud still is, how influential, how pervasively his thought colors our culture. Then the authors or journalists writing the articles suggest that no one reads his works or follows his example as a psychoanalyst any more. For one thing, health insurance companies no longer accept resposibility for endless 1-hour sessions on the couch. If anyone has a couch. Some studies may show that a "talking cure" is still effective, but it's so much more costly than a pill, they all point out, that no one cares if it's better or not.

Freudian thought and philosophy, as I understand them, reflect his nonreligious Jewish identity – he created a way of thinking about the human mind for the 20th century. Maybe Freud is a model secular Jew. Suppose that Freud did change some of the jokes in his famous joke book, and take out the Yiddish punch lines and make them supposedly more universal -- at least I heard a lecture that demonstrated this. So what?

I once visited Freud’s house in Vienna – now a museum – and was impressed by the old films that were being shown, in which the Nazis marched down the very street where his home stood. The film included the voice of his daughter describing how the family felt when they saw the storm troops marching and their fellow citizens applauding and adoring them including all that adoration meant. The Nazis in fact classified all psychoanalysis as Jewish aberration, and tried to remake a pure Nazi version. Freud had to flee. His couch is not in the museum in Vienna, it's in London where he was exiled. Anti-Jewish Freud hating is more subtle now but far from nonexistent.

None of this changes Freud's accomplishment, especially his central influence on early 20th century European writers. When I try to understand his importance, my admiration rises. However, Freud is neither anti-hero nor to me. I just don’t think about him very often, any more than I think about Marx -- coincidentally separate in birthday by only one day.

Karl Marx (May 5, 1818)

Hero or antihero? I really don’t think about Marx much, and I don’t know if he can be held responsible for the 20th century excesses done in his name. He was a definite Jewish antisemite, which makes me lean towards antihero.

Amos Oz (May 4, 1939)

Amos Oz is one of my favorite Israeli authors. His autobiographical work A Tale of Love and Darkness clarified my understanding of the history of Israel. His work in favor of a peaceful solution to the violence and ill-will between Israelis and Palestinians is idealistic -- maybe too idealistic for my analysis of the increasingly bad situation.

Golda Meir (May 3, 1898)

Golda Meir started out the same as many of our grandmothers or great-grandmothers: she came to the United States with her parents, seeking a better life. But she became an American-style activist. Then she became a committed Zionist, moved on to Israel, and became a political leader and head of state. Hero!

Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Day

Today is Holocaust memorial day in Israel. The editorial in Haaretz reminds readers of the moral lessons of the Holocaust as well as the lessons Israelis have learned about having a strong state of one's own.

"One [moral] lesson must be that such horrors can arise within a purportedly enlightened society, even one with a democratic government, and that it is perilous to overlook worrying signs - such as incipient indications of nationalism or damages caused by racism - that presage a descent down a slippery slope with all the attendant consequences.

"From this standpoint, there is reason for concern in Israel. From one Holocaust Remembrance Day to the next, our society has deteriorated, as seen in the appearance of worrying indications of hatred of foreigners and the oppression of the 'other,' along with palpable cracks in the resilience of democratic governance here. This must be of concern to each Israeli every day of the year, but on Holocaust Remembrance Day, it takes on special significance." -- Israel should have learned the Holocaust's lessons of nationalism

This suggestion can apply anywhere in any democracy, I think. And I believe that one can honor the 6,000,000 while still trying to see a broader lesson in the horrors of those events.

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923)

Catch 22 is Heller’s most famous book, and the one that will probably be best remembered. His characters are vivid, as is his description of the futility felt by soldiers in a war. It was famous, but did anyone learn anything about futility? Can one learn?  

Good as Gold is a book about New York Jews that I think has already been forgotten, because who can follow a satire about Henry Kissinger and the Nixon era any more?

May Day

What did the labor movement mean to Jews in the first half of the 20th century? Jewish Socialists, International Labor activists, Communists, Yiddish socialists, Russian Jews, the Bundt -- so many secularizing Jews were leftists who saw May 1 as the international day to celebrate labor. Now much is forgotten, and we don’t even remember it on May 1.

Alice B. Toklas (April 30, 1877)

In 1933 the not-yet famous Gertrude Stein wrote the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, saying she waited for Alice to write it herself, and finally gave up and did it for her. They had been together since 1907 and Stein sometimes referred to Alice as her wife. The Autobiography was Gertrude's first big success as a writer -- before that she had mainly been an influence on a generation of writers in Paris.

One of Gertrude Stein’s most often paraphrased statements was about Alice’s birthplace, Oakland, CA: when you get there, there’s no there there.

After Gertrude Stein died Stein’s family disowned Alice and took all their possessions (gay marriage didn’t exist, the “real” family got everything). To support herself, Alice wrote a cookbook memorializing the foods the two of them had enjoyed together. Alice had a second round of fame in the 1960s, shortly before her death, because of the recipe she included for cannabis brownies.

There’s every reason to believe that Gertrude and Alice observed no religion whatsoever but also never repudiated their Jewish roots: Secular. Jews.

Elena Kagan (April 28, 1960)

Kagan hasn't been on the Supreme Court for very long -- I'm hoping that her presence will be a force for good things. Several decisions pending right now are very important. But it's really too early to say what her legacy will be.

Armenian Genocide (April 24, 1915)

April 24, 1915, was the start of a long series of violent persecutions of Turkish Armenians. Modern Turkish governments have been reluctant to acknowledge what their predecessors did, but there is little controversy among mainstream historians that this was a genocide, including death marches and mass murders.

Richard Holbrooke (April 24, 1941)

Obituaries for Richard Holbrooke (who died in December, 2010) depicted a career diplomat who made a difference, especially for his role in the Dayton Peace Accords ending the war in Bosnia. Holbrooke was raised as a Quaker; his parents were totally assimilated Jews who had fled from Hitler. While never religious, he says he “never had any doubt about my background, my parents never disguised it.”

The following statements strike me as an impressive collection:

• Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Holbrooke's death was "a big loss for the American people."
• Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said: "His services will be long remembered. The best tribute to him is to reiterate our resolve to root out extremism and usher in peace."
• The Anti Defamation League statement said: “He was proud of his Jewish identity and he was a good friend of the state of Israel. His death is a loss to the world, to America, and to the Jewish people,”
• And Holbrooke himself said “When I joined the foreign service in 1962, my grandmother was still alive; she was Swiss-Jewish, not German-Jewish, and she said, ‘How can you be a diplomat? Jews can’t possibly succeed in the diplomatic world; it’s not possible.’ I said to my grandmother something like, ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’ It never occurred to me.”

The Freedom Riders: 50 years ago

If you want to read about heroism in Americans, here's a very good article:

Remembering the Freedom Rides

In one town, "members of the Ku Klux Klan ... set fire to one bus and beat riders on the other with pipes, chains and bats." At every stop, menacing crowds threatened the nonviolent freedom riders with beatings and worse. Although their idealism hadn't prepared them for the level of near-lethal attacks, they persisted, and eventually, succeeded in creating a better America. The article describes the freedom rides as well as a number of memorials that now stand along the route their buses took 50 years ago.

Jewish Daily Forward founded on April 22, 1897

The Forward, or Forverts, was a secular Jewish paper, dedicated to the huge immigrant community of Yiddish-speaking Jews in the US around 100 years ago.

In their own words:

"The Forverts is a legendary name in American journalism and Jewish life. Launched as a Yiddish-language newspaper on April 22, 1897, the Forverts(Jewish Daily Forward) fought for social justice, helped generations of immigrants to enter American life, broke some of the most significant news stories of the century, and eloquently defended democracy and Jewish rights. Under the leadership of its founding editor, the charismatic Abraham Cahan, the Forverts embodied the voice of the Jewish immigrant."

"By the early 1930s the Forverts had become one of America's premier metropolitan dailies, with a nationwide circulation topping 275,000 and influence that reached around the world and into the Oval Office. Thousands more listened regularly to the Forward's Yiddish-language radio station, WEVD. The newspaper's editorial staff included, at one time or another, nearly every major luminary in the then-thriving world of Yiddish literature, from the beloved "poet of the sweatshops," Morris Rosenfeld, to Sholem Asch, Avrom Reisin, and the future Nobel laureates Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel. " -- From the Forward Online

And the Forward is still going strong on the web! 

Max Weinreich (April 22, 1894)

Weinreich, a Yiddish scholar, founded YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut — Yiddish Scientific Institute) in Vilna in 1925. When he fled the Holocaust he moved YIVO to New York. He was in many ways a pioneer of secular Jewish identity in Yiddish culture.

Heroic Resistance in China

In a New York Times op-ed yesterday titled "Dangerous Arts," Salman Rushdie summarized the situation of outspoken artists and writers in China today, especially Ai Weiwei, who disappeared and appeared to have been arrested by Chinese authorities April 4. Rushdie (himself the target of a terrible campaign from Iran that lasted decades) says "The disappearance is made worse by reports that Mr. Ai has started to 'confess.' His release is a matter of extreme urgency and the governments of the free world have a clear duty in this matter."

Rushdie reminds us of historic persecutions of brave and outspoken artists, not mentioning his own experience:

"The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, but his poetry has outlasted the Roman Empire. Osip Mandelstam died in a Stalinist work camp, but his poetry has outlived the Soviet Union. Federico García Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but his poetry has survived that tyrannical regime."

"We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight...."

"When artists venture into politics the risks to reputation and integrity are ever-present. But outside the free world, where criticism of power is at best difficult and at worst all but impossible, creative figures like Mr. Ai and his colleagues are often the only ones with the courage to speak truth against the lies of tyrants. We needed the samizdat truth-tellers to reveal the ugliness of the Soviet Union. Today the government of China has become the world’s greatest threat to freedom of speech, and so we need Ai Weiwei, Liao Yiwu and Liu Xiaobo."

Passover (April 18-26, 2011)

Passover is a holiday for all Jews. I've read that more Jews in America participate in a Seder than in any other Jewish ritual. The Haggadah -- which can be rewritten to reflect a huge variety of philosophies, including secular ones -- tells us that all Jews came out of Egypt and then stood with the former Egyptian slaves when Moses delivered the law. Who knows, maybe we believe it in some secular way or another.

I can think of a number of reasons why Passover appeals to secular Jews like me. First, Passover is a family holiday, celebrated at home. The rabbis and other synagogue authorities don't play a role. Their dismissal of secular Jews as  not being real Jews, or their wish to change secular Jews into ones who act more like them, can't reach you at your own dining table. Also, they can't bore you to death.

Passover appeals to secular Americans because it commemorates freedom from tyranny and the values of a free society. For religious Jews, it may have additional meanings, but the value of freedom resonates for many secular Jews and other Americans as well. For example, recent feminists have added some details to their Seders that put women's rights into the spotlight. The Seder's flexible nature allows one to have independent ideas, to be as religious or irreligious as one likes, to choose elements of tradition, and also to maintain a Jewish identity. Of course this also depends on one's guest list or host's ideas too -- I don't mean to imply that this is an exercise in giving offense.

Passover has fantastic food traditions. The challenge of giving up bread and other leavened foods inspired cooks for generations. The holiday falls at the most food-deprived time of year in Eastern Europe where most American Jews originate. However, the importance of the holiday meant that poor people were supplied with food or money, and that people of modest means saved up some luxury items from the previous growing season. Insight into history of Jews in other times and environments is embedded in the food traditions.

Some secular Jews may give up bread, but you don't have to do so to enjoy the joyful and generous foodways of the holiday. My father, who was an inventive secular Jew, always bought a few rye breads from the local Jewish bakery before it closed for Passover, and stowed them in the freezer so he wouldn't have to give up anything. The holiday wasn't originally held at a time when food was scarce, but that was the case in the Shtetls -- giving up bread was a really serious sacrifice in my father's childhood. I view the holiday as a time to think about the old days, when food was less abundant, as well as about other traditions -- see Passover in my food blog.

My father also maintained that a Seder should last no more than 10 minutes. An Israeli expert making suggestions for broadening tradition at secular Israelis' Seders almost agrees. He pointed out that the Haggadah became longer and longer over the centuries stating: "In the ninth century, the Haggadah could be read in 20 minutes."

Passover's appeal to secular Jews reminds me of something that I heard at a seminar about Jewish languages a few weeks ago. Being secular (whether in the context of language or another context) is done within the context of a religion. When you are a secular Jew, that means you are some kind of Jew, not a nothing. The speaker, Anita Norich, pointed out that some people said that in the Yugoslav war, the battle was between those who didn't go to church and those who didn't go to the mosque. I'm a Jew who doesn't go to synagogue, but like many others, I celebrate Passover at home in my own way.

Leo Frank (April 17, 1884)

Leo Frank was lynched in Marietta, Georgia, on August 17, 1915, the only Jew to be lynched in America. The fact that he was a prominent, college-educated, northern-born Jew in this Southern town had clearly contributed to the injustice of his arrest and the sentiment at his trial. Jurors in fact had openly expressed their hatred of him.

A mob first kidnapped Frank from jail. “Townsfolk were proudly photographed beneath Frank's swinging corpse, pictures still valued today by their descendants.”

From Jewish Virtual Library:

"Southern Jewish historians note that Atlanta Jewry has still not fully recovered from the trauma of the Leo Frank case, and that the Temple bombing of the early 1960s simply reopened those wounds. Another legacy of the case is that, to help defend Frank, B'nai B'rith created its (now-independent) Anti-Defamation League. In 1986, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles finally granted Leo Frank a posthumous pardon, not on the grounds that they thought him innocent, but because his lynching deprived him of his right to further appeal."

Charlie Chaplin (April 16,1889)

The notion that Chaplin was Jewish seems to have originated with the Nazis, who hated his politics. His parents seem to have been British vaudeville performers but not Jewish. So his film “The Great Dictator” was a masterpiece of anti-Nazi sentiments but that can, I think, make him a hero to secular Jews.

Google has already celebrated Chaplin's birthday with a Chaplin-style YouTube video.

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452)

There really isn’t any Jewish content to the work of Leonardo, and I don’t know of any substantial interaction with the small Jewish communities that lived in Italy in his time. However, I’m a big fan, and I have a large collection of parodies of Mona Lisa, so here he is!

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743)

Thomas Jefferson, as one of the founding fathers of the United States, represents the development of a welcoming society where civil rights were extended to a much greater number of people than in earlier times. No doubt from a 21^st century perspective it’s too bad he didn’t include women and didn’t adequately condemn slavery, but he made a very important contribution to the way Americans are now able to live.

Jefferson’s views as a Deist also make him appealing to me as a secular Jew: he most emphatically did not intend to insist on Christian belief or practice in the new society. Deists belived that a god was not necessary for understanding the physical universe, but that the laws of science served adequately. The universe for them was a smoothly functioning machine that worked without interference from god. I think this is a highly compatible view for a secular Jew.

Needless to say there are trends in modern America that make me worry about the gifts that Jefferson gave us.

Joseph Pulitzer (April 10, 1847)

Joseph Pulitzer was born in Hungary. His father was a Hungarian grain merchant of Magyar-Jewish origin, and his mother was a German Roman Catholic. As a young man, he volunteered with a recruiter in Germany to go to the US and fight for the Union in the Civil War. Eventually he became the owner of a German-language newspaper in St. Louis, which had a large German community. By 1878, he had mastered the English language, American journalism, and had become owner of the St.Louis Post-Dispatch. Ultimately he also owned newspapers in New York and founded the Pulitzer Prizes.

When I was growing up in St.Louis, we still had a sense of civic pride in living in a city with such an excellent newspaper – I think it still has an outstanding reputation. So Pulitzer, though his family long since had abandoned any Jewish identity, had a sort of heroic status for us. A full biography is here.

Tom Lehrer (April 9, 1928)

Tom Lehrer said: “I used to think atheists were arrogant but now I am one and I like it."

It's been many years since Lehrer performed and recorded his amazing original satires, but they are just as wonderful now as they ever were. Just listen to them!

Songs & More Songs By Tom Lehrer

Ilan Stavans (April 7, 1961)

Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico City where he grew up in a multi lingual environment: Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, later English. He has published essays, books, and critical editions in a variety of areas of literary studies, particularly in Latin American literature and “Spanglish,” language of New York and other homes of Latino immigrants. Last fall, I heard him lecture and had a very brief conversation with him, where I mentioned that his anthologies had introduced me to the fiction of Latin American Jews, and that I was also interested in their cooking. He said as a child he had no idea that the latkes with mole that his family ate were different than the latkes eaten by other Jews for Hanukkah.

Walter Winchell (April 7, 1897)

I remember the staccato sound of Winchell’s broadcasts from my early childhood, but never listened to what was said. Only when I read the counter-factual history The Plot Against America by Philip Roth did I learn that Winchell was Jewish. In Roth's strange version of history, Charles Lindbergh becomes president and makes a pact with the Nazis just before World War II. The book deals with the effect on the Jews of America, particularly one family in New Jersey with a close resemblance to Roth's own. Winchell becomes the hero of the book -- which as far as I know is beyond anything in his real life.

Why Winchell? Roth explained:

“I chose Walter Winchell to lead the political opposition to Lindbergh because, to begin with, the real Walter Winchell hated Lindbergh and along with people like the columnist Dorothy Thompson and Roosevelt's interior secretary, Harold Ickes, attacked him as pro-Nazi from the moment he became the voice of the America First version of nonintervention. Needless to say, Winchell was never a candidate for president, as I have him being in my book. But then neither did Lindbergh become president. I chose Winchell to lead the political opposition because Winchell was the outsize social creature he was -- as Mayor La Guardia says in his eulogy over Winchell's body (in this book only), ‘Walter is too loud, Walter talks too fast, Walter says too much, and yet, by comparison, Walter's vulgarity is something great, and Lindbergh's decorum is hideous.'’'

“What it comes down to is that I wanted Lindbergh opposed not by a saint but by a gossip columnist, the most famous gossip columnist in the country, gross and cheap without apology, whose enemies considered him a loudmouth Jew. Winchell was to gossip what Lindbergh was to flight: the record-breaking pioneer.” – “The Story Behind 'The Plot Against America'” by Roth

Authors

Here is a list of a few authors that I enormously like and enjoy although their works have no direct relevance to my project on defining secular Jewish identity. My choice of heroic figures is very broad, but not infinitely so!

• Margaret Atwood
• Jane Austen
• Barbara Kingsolver
• Martin Cruz Smith (though he did occasionally have a Jewish character in the Renko books)
• Iain Pears (though there was a Jewish character in Dream of Scipio)
• Jorge Amado
• Barbara Ehrenreich
• Julia Child
• Tony Hillerman
• Robert Parker

Emile Zola (April 2, 1840)

The Dreyfus Affair divided late-19th century Republican France. Someone had been passing military secrets from the French to the Germans, and one officer with access to the documents, Dreyfus, came under suspicion because he was a Jew. The evidence against him was dubious, but his race was enough to convict him. This was the era when hatred of Jews was a political position, with every effort on the part of the haters to make anti-Semitism respectable -- in fact, they had coined the term itself to justify their beliefs.

After Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil's Island, evidence against another officer came to light. A major cover-up followed this discovery, including falsification of documents and widespread conspiracy to change facts and create contradictory evidence. The guilty man, Esterhazy, was the perfect opposite of Dreyfus. His family were old European nobility, he was politically right wing, and he appealed to the anti-Semites. His trial was politically charged; after five minutes of deliberation, the judges declared him innocent, and crowds in the streets cried "Long live the Army!" "Long live France!" and "Death to the Jews!" *

Zola published his famous essay "J'accuse" on January 13, 1898, immediately following Esterhazy's trial. Zola's text presented in detail both the false charges against Dreyfus, the weakness of these charges, and the way they had been falsified. The article is in the form of a letter to the President of the Republic, under the pretense that the President was unaware of the vast injustice that had just occurred.

The initial process that led to the injustice he characterized as "hunting for the 'dirty Jews,' which dishonors our time." He also summarized the creation of a false defense for Esterhazy, who initially was ready to concede that he was the spy. He indites the military, the government, and the press for supporting the injustices.

Near the beginning of "J'accuse," Zola said "The truth I will say, because I promised to say it, if justice, regularly seized, did not do it, full and whole. My duty is to speak, I do not want to be an accomplice. My nights would be haunted by the specter of innocence that suffer there, through the most dreadful of tortures, for a crime it did not commit."

"J'accuse" means "I accuse" -- Zola accused the French of mocking justice in their persecution of Dreyfus. He characterized the initial events as follows: "the instructions were made thus, as in a 15th century tale, shrouded in mystery, with a savage complication of circumstances, all based on only one childish charge, this idiotic affair, which was not only a vulgar treason, but was also the most impudent of hoaxes, because the famously delivered secrets were almost all without value. If I insist, it is that the kernel is here, from whence the true crime will later emerge, the terrible denial of justice from which France is sick."

Eloquently, Zola continued with the facts and with his accusation: "That a man could be condemned for this act, is a wonder of iniquity. I defy decent people to read it, without their hearts leaping in indignation and shouting their revolt, while thinking of the unwarranted suffering, over there, on Devil's Island."

Zola concluded with a series of accusations, each beginning with the words "I accuse." He named all those who conspired to condemn an innocent man and exonerate a guilty one for the worst possible reasons, and those who were complicit with the conspirators.

Finally, he ended with these words:

"While proclaiming these charges, I am not unaware of subjecting myself to articles 30 and 31 of the press law of July 29, 1881, which punishes the offense of slander. And it is voluntarily that I expose myself."

"As for the people I accuse, I do not know them, I never saw them, I have against them neither resentment nor hatred. They are for me only entities, spirits of social evil. And the act I accomplished here is only a revolutionary mean for hastening the explosion of truth and justice."

"I have only one passion, that of the light, in the name of humanity which has suffered so and is entitled to happiness. My ignited protest is nothing more than the cry of my heart. That one thus dares to translate for me into court bases and that the investigation takes place at the great day!"

"I am waiting."

"Please accept, Mr. President, the assurance of my deep respect."

Indeed, Zola was tried in court, and had to go into exile as a result of his heroic defense of Dreyfus. I'm a big fan of Zola's novels, but it is this commitment to truth at great risk that makes him a hero.

After a 12 year ordeal, Dreyfus received a pardon in 1906. Zola did not live to see it, having died in 1902. The French right never gave up their political commitment to Dreyfus's guilt. Evidence meant nothing to them: it was a matter of conviction and faith to condemn a Jew.

*p. 228, Gregor Dallas, Metro Stop Paris, 2008. Reading this book inspired me to look at "J'accuse."

Cesar Chavez (March 31, 1927)

I include Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers of America, as a hero because I admire his fight for the rights of workers. This is a fight that Jewish labor leaders contributed to for a long time, and one that I hope idealistic secular Jews haven't forgotten. Unfortunately Chavez is dead and farm workers are still suffering. And in quite a few states, seemingly established labor rights for many workers, not just farm workers -- such as collective bargaining -- are in danger.

Barney Frank (March 31, 1940)

Barney Frank has been in the US House of Representatives since 1981. He says “I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.”

He also says lots of other things that are both right and clever. A few from his website:

• “Gay people have a different role than other minority groups…Very few black kids have ever had to worry about telling their parents that they were black.”
• “I don’t begrudge Ronald Reagan an occasional nap. We must understand it’s not the dozing off of Ronald Reagan that causes us problems. Its what he does on those moments when he’s awake.”
• “Ronald Reagan believes in the free market like some people believe in unicorns.”
• “In the business I am in, sometimes you get credit for the sun shining and sometimes you get blamed when it rains.”
• "If this is a Christian nation, how come some poor Jew has to get up at 5:30 in the morning to preside over the House of Representatives?"
• “There are rules of excessive civility around here to which I generally subscribe. You do need a certain amount of courtliness in the system. But that, in itself, can become a form of abuse. There are limits to when you restrain yourself from calling a fool a fool.”

Marge Piercy (March 31, 1936)

Marge Piercy's novel He, She, and It is about a golem-type entity in a computer some time in the near future. Many of its characters have a Jewish or Israeli identity, and the action takes place in partly-destroyed world after "the Two Week War a terrorist had launched with a nuclear device that had burned Jerusalem off the map, a conflagration of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that had set the oilfields aflame and destroyed the entire region." I find the use of golem motifs in modern fiction to be very intriguing, and this is one of my favorite examples.

Piercy's other novels also often have interesting secular Jewish characters, such as City of Darkness, City of Light about the French Revolution and Gone to Soldiers about World War II. I'm very fond of the way she puts Jewish characters in the books naturally, without dedicating the book to Jewish themes and concerns. In fact, she might be one of the best writers when it comes to integrating characters who just happen to be assimilated Jews into an ordinary plot.

The only book by Piercy that disappointed me was Pesach for the Rest of Us, which talks about alternative Seders, but which I found rather disorganized and lacking in focus. This one, to my knowledge, is her only explicit Jewish book.

Overall, she's a really excellent secular Jewish author-hero!

Moses Maimonides (March 30, 1135)

Maimonides was a radical thinker in medieval Judaism. According to Kenneth Seeskin writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"His philosophic masterpiece, the Guide of the Perplexed, is a sustained treatment of Jewish thought and practice that seeks to resolve the conflict between religious knowledge and secular." He influenced many subsequent philosophers, including "Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton."

I'm no philosopher, but I recognize that some grasp of Maimonides' thought is necessary if one is to follow a historic discussion of the development of Jewish philosophy, and the argument over which approaches are valid. According to the previously cited article:

"Judaism ... is based on a particular philosophy. Maimonides (GP 1.71) takes this to mean that before Plato and Aristotle introduced science and philosophy to the Greeks, the patriarchs introduced it to Israel. To someone who asks why we have no explicit record of their philosophy, Maimonides answers that any record of such teaching was destroyed when Israel went into exile and suffered persecution. So despite the appearance of a split between Jerusalem and Athens, Maimonides thinks there is only one tradition worth preserving: that which affirms the truth."

"He makes this point in the Introduction to the Guide when he says that what Jewish tradition taught under the guise of ma'aseh bereishit (the account of the beginning) is what Greeks thinkers taught as physics, while what Jewish tradition taught under the guise of ma'aseh merkavah (the account of [Ezekiel's] chariot) is what Greek thinkers taught under the guise of metaphysics. In short, Jewish tradition has always been philosophical. The problem is that these subjects are too difficult for the average worshipper to grasp and must be expressed as parables or metaphors that the educated few will interpret at one level and the average worshipper at another."

Beginning in Maimonides' own lifetime, religious Jews were disturbed by the way he seemed to go to the brink of disbelief (if I understand correctly -- they often used the term "Aristotelian" for this edge). But as a disbeliever, despite my lack of philosophical sophistication, I find him very appealing for this clarity. As the article states: "For an atheist, Maimonides' philosophy shows us what happens if you remove all anthropomorphic content from your conception of God: you remove all content of any kind. In the end, you are left with a God whose essence is unknowable and indescribable Of what possible value is such a conception either to philosophy or religion?"

The Workmen’s Circle

The first convention of the Workman’s Circle took place in New York on March 29-30, 1901. The Workmen’s Circle, founded as a local organization in 1892 and made national in 1900, was (and to some extent still may be) a secular Jewish organization, originally a labor organization that promoted the use of Yiddish. Peak membership: 87,000 in 1925. Again, an example of the Jewish commitment to the labor movement that I mentioned yesterday.

The Workmen's Circle page of the American Jewish Historical society explains that the organization:

"was established as a social and cultural Jewish labor fraternal order. Its purpose was to provide members with mutual aid and health and death benefits and to support the labor and socialist movements of the world. Historically, the Workmen’s Circle was closely tied to Jewish unions, the Yiddish labor press, and the Socialist Party. The Circle was highly dedicated to raising the education levels of members and bringing social change in America. Workmen’s Circle functions provided a place for Jewish radicals of different ideals to mingle. ..."

"The Workmen’s Circle, dedicated to the promotion of progressive Yiddish culture, established a wide array of cultural activities including the publication of books, adult education and singing and drama clubs. It also promoted Jewish education for young people by opening afternoon schools for Jewish children in 1916. In addition, the Workmen’s Circle established homes for the aged, camps, Yiddish theater clubs, and several choirs."

Clearly, the Workmen's Circle was an organization dedicated to secular Jewish life and values. If it had a presence in St.Louis when I was growing up there, I was completely unaware of it, however.

Wisconsin Labor vs. the Triangle Fire

I think of labor rights and unionizing as a Jewish issue as well as an American issue. Today I read an op-ed in the Forward that makes that point. It begins:

"It’s a remarkable coincidence that the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire follows so closely on the heels of the great Wisconsin labor awakening. Like the yearly coincidence of Purim and St. Patrick’s Day, with their overlapping themes of national redemption and drunken revelry, the Wisconsin-Triangle convergence raises a host of fundamental questions about the nature of our society and the mutual obligations of individual and community."

"Here are a few: Has a century of progress made unions and collective bargaining obsolete? Is it really progress when we eliminate workplace disasters by eliminating workplaces? Can we say we’ve learned the lessons of the Triangle tragedy if half of us have learned that rich and poor alike deserve equal access to health care and parental leave, while the other half want to bring back the good old days when workers knew their place and owners were free to run their businesses as they wished without interference from pesky regulators and unions?"

The commemorations of the Triangle Fire, where 100 years ago yesterday 146 young women workers died because they were locked in a dangerous workplace, are reminding people (including me) that labor rights have been a humanitarian and ethical issue for a long time. We seem to be regressing. Maybe workplace safety -- the main issue highlighted by the tragic fire -- continues to receive a commitment even from the worst of the Wisconsin, Ohio, and other Tea Party governors. (Maybe not?) But the right to fair wages and above all the right to bargain, once thought established, is eroding fast.

Leonard Nimoy (March 26, 1931)

Above all, the multi-talented Leonard Nimoy gave the Priestly Blessing (fingers in a V) to Star Trek. Did he also propose that Spock say Live Long and Prosper? Did he help invent the memorable character from another planet who was very intelligent, perfectly saw how earthlings were irrational, but never quite felt at home or nativized? You get my point.

Harry Houdini (March 24, 1874)

Houdini was born in Hungary as Erik Weisz; his father was a Rabbi. He remade himself into a magician, escape artist, and famous daredevil.  His Jewish identity is sometimes forgotten, but here is a summary:

"Houdini has attracted many explainers, but few have grappled well with what can be seen as the two sides of the escape artist’s Jewish identity. The first is well-known: his popular death-defying theatrical acts, which represented freedom from his father’s financial failure as well as a more general liberation from the limitations immigrant Jewish life. But there is also Houdini’s less-known second act as a debunker of a mystical group known as the Spiritualists, a crusade that shared much with Emma Goldman’s fiery political tirades and that proved the boundaries of Jewish entertainers in the face of American anti-Semitism." -- From Tablet Magazine

Houdini’s death on October 31, 1926, started a lot of odd and superstitious nonsense – especially in view of his campaign against spiritualism. Maybe one of the strangest things I know about this concerns one of his last meals. This odd bit of trivia appeared in a narrative of an elderly woman, the widow of Dr. Daniel Cohn, who treated Houdini in a Detroit hospital during his last illness. Years after the event she wrote about Houdini's deathbed conversations with her husband:

"One evening while talking about his favorite foods, he said, 'I have a yen for Farmer's Chop Suey.' Farmer's Chop Suey, a dish familiar to most Jewish families, is made of chopped raw vegetables combined with sour cream. Daniel walked to a nearby delicatessen, returned with two portions and while they were eating, Houdini reminisced about his life. 'If I die, ' he said, 'don't be surprised if phony spiritualists declare a national holiday!' His disagreements with spiritualists had taken the form of many public battles." -- From Houdini and my Husband

Israeli Folk Dancing

Without giving it much thought, I always assumed that Israeli folk dancing was eternal, and came to Israel with the Zionist immigrants from Eastern Europe. Wrong! If you want to know the brief history of Israeli folk dance read this article in the Forward: "From Zero to 4,678 in 80 Short Years: The Surprising History Of Israeli Folk Dancing"

A few highlights: The first Israeli folk dance was “Hora Agadati,” created in 1924 in Tel Aviv. "'Mayim Mayim,' by far the world’s most popular Israeli folk dance ... was created by German-trained dancer Else Dublon in 1937 to celebrate finding a water source on a kibbutz." And New York’s Israeli Dance Institute is celebrating 60 years of folk dancing this spring.

Like so many aspects of Israeli culture, folk dancing celebrated the new Jewish freedom and new Jewish body image, according to one of the authors cited in the article. This confirms my not-so-erroneous association of Israeli folk dance with the secular Jewish-Israeli culture that emerged in the mid-20th century.

Moacyr Scliar (March 23, 1937)

Moacyr Scliar, author of The Centaur in the Garden and other works of fiction, just died on February 27. I think his works, often in the style of South-American magical realism but usually about Jewish identity and life there, deserve to be better known than they are.

Scliar’s obituary in the New York Times summarized his life thus: “Moacyr Jaime Scliar was born ... in Porto Alegre [Brazil]. His parents, who emigrated from Bessarabia in 1919, gave him a Brazilian Indian name in a nod to their new cultural surroundings. After attending both Yiddish and Roman Catholic schools, he obtained a medical degree in 1962 and practiced in the public health service until retiring in 1987.”

The centaur in his book belongs to a family of Russian immigrants to Brazil, like Scliar himself: “’At home, you speak Yiddish, eat gefilte fish and celebrate Shabbat,’ he told the Yiddish Book Center in 2003. ‘But in the streets, you have soccer, samba and Portuguese. After a while you feel like a centaur.’”

Happy Purim!

Purim was a secular as well as a religious holiday in the Shtetls of Eastern Europe. Men got drunk, and women competed to send the best food platters and baskets to their friends and relatives. Yes, these customs have a religious origin: but I say they became secular – and fun.

Sholom Aleichem wrote a story that illustrates this point. “Two Shalachmones or A Purim Scandal” tells of two ill-treated maids in his imaginary town, Kasrilevka. On Purim, the two of them meet, each carrying a basket of sweets to the other’s employers.

The smaller of their platters contained a hamantash and other pastries. The second platter contained: “a fine slice of strudel, two big sugar cookies, a large honey teigl, two cushion cakes stamped with a fish on both sides and filled with tiny sweet farfel, and two large slabs of a poppy seed confection, black and glistening, mixed with ground nuts and glazed with honey. Besides all this, there lay on the plate, smiling up at them, a round, golden sweet-smelling orange that wafted its delicious odor right into their nostrils.”

Tempted by the foods on their platters, and resentful of their employers, the two messengers stopped to chat while they ate up most of the items that they were supposed to deliver: beginning with the hamantash. The two families took offense at the disgraceful state of the platters that they therefore received. Their former friendship dissolved in quarrels and resentment until they realized what had occurred.

Bringing gifts of food to friends is a custom still observed among religious Jews. I don't do much for Purim myself, but I think people still manage to have fun. I'm fascinated by another way that Jewish Purim customs were secularized: some of the pre-Lent revelry in Renaissance Venice was influenced by the costumed and masked Purim celebrations in the Ghetto.

Philip Roth (March 19, 1933)

Do you think that no one should give a bad impression of Jews, ever, even in fiction? Then you must really think Roth is an antihero for his famous/infamous portrayal of Portnoy. I'm not sure, but I think Philip Roth is outliving his era of influence and being admired. When he was young he wrote a book called The Great American Novel. That didn't work. Now he seems to be writing only about the disabilities of old age, and I don't want to read it. Some time I'll get around to rereading Portnoy.

Jerry Lewis (March 16, 1926)

Yes, he’s Jewish. His birth name is Joseph Levitch and he was born in New Jersey. So we Jews don’t just get to claim highbrow comedians like Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce. But is Jerry Lewis secular? Is he a hero (if you are not French)? I don't know, he's not high on my list.

Yiddish Theater

I don't know much about the Yiddish Theater, since I do not understand Yiddish beyond a few well-known expressions. Of course I'm aware that the Yiddish Theater played a big role in secular Jewish New York for many years, and that only a few survivors remain from its famous actors. In today's New York Times I read the obituary of one of these -- Shifra Lerer, "who was discovered at age 5 in Argentina by the great Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky and went on to become a winsome and wide-ranging trouper of the Yiddish theater for the next 90 years."

In the two articles (here and here) about her in today's times, I learned quite a few things about these actors and about Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, where the theatrical alliance maintains a special section for those who worked in Yiddish theater in New York. Though I do know about the accomplishments of Thomashefsky, I knew almost none of the other names that were mentioned: Charles Malins, Chana Lipton, Isaak and Lola Feld, Mina Bern, Zypora Spaisman. It's sad that this is a lost artistic endeavor, but I fear that nothing can bring it to life it for me: not only the actors and the language are lost, but the conventions of that era and theatrical style no longer appeal to any but experts, I suspect.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (March 15, 1933)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is definitely one of my all-time heroic people. Her struggle to become a lawyer when women were scarcely tolerated in the field, her personal triumphs over many difficulties, her legal accomplishments, and her outlook as a Supreme Court Justice all have my highest admiration. Did Jewish values help to inspire her to overcome prejudice and barriers? I'd like to think so.

Jennifer 8. Lee (March 15, 1976)

You don't have to be Jewish to be a secular Jewish hero! Here's an example: Jennifer 8. Lee, a Chinese-American woman, wrote The Fortune Cookie Chronicles in which she explored the social history and cultural aspects of Chinese restaurants in America. One chapter is titled "Why Chow Mein is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People" and discusses the American-Jewish love of Chinese restaurants and Chinese food. Her claim: "Chinese food is the ethnic cuisine of the American Jew since they identify with it much more than the Eastern European food of their immigrant ancestors."

I've followed up what she says with additional reading about the subject, and it's very interesting and amusing to learn that by the end of the 19th century, Jewish religious authorities were complaining because Chinese restaurants were contributing to the secularization of American Jewish life. Yay!

The Founding of Zingerman's: Jewish Food becomes Secular

Zingerman’s Deli, still on Detroit Street here in Ann Arbor, and expanding, was founded March 15, 1982 by Paul Saginaw, Michael Monahan, and Ari Weinzweig. A recent book by Ari Weinzweig is on bacon – his self-image as promoted in lectures and writings is that he’s transgressive. But Zingerman’s appeal is that it’s supposed to make you think of an old-fashioned Jewish deli while promoting a variety of gourmet foods for 21^st century cooks and epicures.

I used to shop at Zingerman's much more than I do now. For me it has very little nostalgia, compared to the Jewish delis of St.Louis where I grew up, and where my father shopped for corned beef and half-sour pickles. (In my earliest childhood, the pickles were actually in a barrel, but that's an aside.) I do like the bakery -- the photos are from a Thanksgiving visit on a day when they sell 20,000 loaves of bread.

Yes, Zingerman's has a certain resonance for the secular Jews who like the idea of Jewish food subtly invading the general American diet. After all, bagels did that so long ago that no one even knows where they came from. My brother buys bagels at the open-air market in Galway, Ireland, from a local baker who lives in a nearby village -- and seems to think they are mainstream American. How invaded can you get?

Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923)

Diane Arbus is known for photos that make normal people look abnormal, as well as for directly photographing abnormal people. I find her disturbing and fascinating. Here's her photo of "The Jewish Giant" with his parents. I just don't know what to say about Arbus as a secular Jew, but as far as I know, that's exactly who she was.

Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879)

According to an exhibit at the partially reconstructed New Synagogue of Berlin, which we saw in 2005, Einstein only ever once entered this building  – to play in a concert on his violin. He was resolutely secular and never belonged to any synagogue. Needless to say, this was of no interest to the Nazis, who hounded him out of Germany with a price on his head. 

The exhibit we saw, along with many other celebrations, marked the centennial of his great 1905 physics papers. Now the Germans claim him, and well they might, as he's one of the greatest scientists ever, as well as a humanitarian leader.

Of interest in the aspect of secular Jewish identity: although Einstein evidently stopped believing in God at around age 12, he was a proponent of the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine and an active Zionist fundraiser. He contributed to developing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Charles Krauthammer (March 13, 1950)

Charles Krauthammer is definitely an antihero! But he's a very prominent example of the neoconservative Jewish influence in Washington politics.

Here's an example. In his column on January 21, 2011 – about the Republican vote to repeal the health care law from last year – he wrote “Everything begins with repeal.” Why? He believes the Republican’s phony numbers criticizing the OMB. He’s on the wrong (usually Republican) side of everything no matter how stupid. At least he’s not a secular Jew: he appears to be religious.

Adolph Simon Ochs (March 12, 1858)

Adolph Ochs was the publisher of the New York Times which he purchased in 1896 from its earlier owners. Let’s face it, the New York Times is THE paper for secular Jews, as well as the overall newspaper of record for our country. So I think it's appropriate to memorialize the Jewish founder of the family that runs it.

Ochs was a practicing, not a secular Jew, married to Effie Wise, daughter of Reform Jewish leader Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. Ochs’ descendants, through his daughter Iphigene Bertha Ochs and her husband Arthur Hays Sulzberger, controlled the paper for most of the following century. Their descendant Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. became publisher of the New York Times in 1992 after working his way through a number of lower positions. He was named chairman of The New York Times Company on October 16, 1997, and continues in that position.

International Day of Awesomeness

Yesterday was the International Day of Awesomeness. I celebrate all my awesome heroic figures that I have commemorated on this blog!

Bobby Fischer (March 9, 1943)

Chess once had enormous meaning to Jewish intellectuals in their efforts to become something new and different. At least to some of them – for example, recall the role of chess in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. Bobby Fischer’s genius at chess was undoubtedly of great importance to this older generation of secular-Jewish chess fans.

The extremely troubled life of Bobby Fischer and his search for religion (and his other personal searches) took place at the same time that chess was becoming less and less interesting to a lot of people including Jews. I think they found new ways to be secular while applying their intelligence.

Here’s a personal note: during his radical years in St.Louis long before he met my mother, my father belonged to a cohort of various people including Bobby Fischer’s mother. He thought she was untrustworthy.

Antisemitism in High Fashion

A lot of Europeans still seem to hate us Jews. John Galliano the fashion designer is the most recent. Like many others, he seems to need a lot of drink and drugs to become really nasty and antisemitic, at least to do so in public. So some people are bound to say Jews are just touchy if they think it's real antisemitism. I think that many things inhibit sober antisemites, but in vino veritas and all that. After all, Galliano's outburst was vile enough to break the law in France, though I'll be surprised if he ever goes to trial since he's left the country and seems to be a British citizen.

Linda Grant, a writer who has covered both high fashion and antisemitism, wrote a very enlightening article in the Guardian, "Galliano and the taste for transgression." She pointed out that Galliano's strong suit is transgression, and thus:

"If you are breaker of taboos, then antisemitism is only another taboo, no different from any other. It's the saying of the unsayable. It has become the last frontier for those demanding freedom of speech, for whom everything, even the Holocaust, is fair game. Is Galliano an actual antisemite who hates Jews? Who knows what passes through his mind, but by invoking the name of Hitler and gloating about the gas chambers, he is only doing what others have always paid him to do: shock."

"Fashion's obsession with transgression, its demand that Galliano shock us even more each season, has played its own part in the drunken bar rant. It has lost sight of women, of our desire to dress well and to be beautiful. It has given us the increasingly desperate and exhausted tactic of taboo-busting instead of our wish to cover our imperfect bodies as pleasingly as we can."

Other writers on the Galliano affair have chosen different approaches, for example providing long lists of Jewish fashion designers and trend-setters as an alternative for Jewish women who loved what Gallino produced but now have to reject it if they wish to maintain their self-respect. I think Linda Grant has the best approach: personally I can't imagine why anyone wants to follow the trends or dictates of such designers even if they are not in the least antisemitic.

Georges Perec (March 7, 1936)

Perec was once asked why he didn't write about his personal experience as a child of Holocaust victims -- as a preschooler, he was hidden during World War II and later raised by an aunt and uncle. He referred to his famous and extraordinary work La Disparition (translation: The Disappearance; English title, A Void), a work in which the letter "e" never appears (which is as difficult in his native French as it would be in English, maybe moreso). He said approximately "If a mother could disappear, a letter could disappear." That is, he wrote very obliquely about his experience as a child sent away from Paris and told to forget who he was. Only in one book did he write a bit about his total lack of memory of those early years, and thus his painful amnesia about his parents.

Perec belonged to a group called Oulipo that experimented with language and form in very avant garde ways. But in the background, he seems to have dwelt on his mother's disappearance. After the war, his family applied for benefits for this orphan. They could not get a death certificate: his mother had disappeared into the camps. However, they received a "Certificate de Disparition." When I learned this, I was stunned to see how much this experimental literature was connected to his terrible reality.

I love the playfulness of Oulipo, which included a number of other famous writers, and met in a cafe near the campus of the University of Paris where I have eaten lunch. I'm fascinated by the development of his philosophy, and by the way Perec stuck to writing despite only modest success until nearly the end of his short life. I think that he exemplifies the way that French intellectuals repress any difference between themselves and some sort of ideal Frenchness -- including the way they must avoid any overt Jewishness, even American-style secular Jewishness. It's very different from the way American Jewish intellectuals have developed. But above all, I'm fascinated by the way he still felt that his Jewish identity was at his core, somehow.

Note: I wrote this from memory, and don't own a copy of any of the books where I read his biography. I could be misremembering.

“South Pacific”

The World Premeire of “South Pacific” was March 7, 1949.

“You’ve got to be taught to hate” is one of the most powerful songs in this anti-racist musical. I can only imagine how audiences might have taken the message so soon after World War II and during the era when racism in the US was still overt and cruel. (The 1949 New York Times review by Brooks Atkinson didn’t actually respond to these themes – just mentioned the picturesque island natives and the song “Some Enchanted Evening.” Oh well.)

Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist, had a Jewish grandfather; Richard Rodgers, the composer was Jewish; whatever their religion, I think the theme of this musical resonates with both Jews and non-Jews.

For more see this review.

Cecil Roth (March 5, 1899)

One small detail from a book by Cecil Roth that sticks in my mind is his description of searching antiquarian booksellers in Italy and finding incredibly valuable and sometimes unique sources of history for the books he wrote. This brought home to me what a pioneer he was in the field of Jewish history, and how times have so completely changed in the course of a century.

I have enjoyed every book by Cecil Roth that I have read, including his biographies of Dona Gracia Nasi and her nephew the Duke of Naxos, his biography of Menassah ben Israel, several of his histories of the Jews in specific cities of Italy, and others. I am aware that he was instrumental in making Jewish history part of respectable mainstream history in the refined atmosphere of British academia. And I've bought a biography of him, but I haven't read it yet, so I can't say much more. For anyone who appreciates having systematic Jewish historical books he's definitely a hero.

Giorgio Bassani (March 4, 1916)

When I think of the tragedy of the Italian Jews (in the context of the entire Holocaust tragedy), one of the most vivid portrayals of the event for me is Bassani’s novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The film based on it also contributes to my inner understanding of the fate of the Italian Jewish community.

Kurt Weill (March 2, 1900)

When I think of the legendary atmosphere of 1920s Berlin, Kurt Weill’s music echoes in my head – as sung by his then-wife Lotte Lenya. The Three Penny Opera, Mahagonny, and his other German works are among my favorite 20th century musicals. Against the rising Nazi threat, they defy and also create a brilliant counter-culture.

Then Weill and Lenya, driven out of Germany, became a force in American popular music. His American musical theater successes include Lady in the Dark (collaborators Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin) and One Touch of Venus (with collaborators S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash). An amazing body of work!

Like so many composers of the era, Weill’s music had great appeal for a wide audience, not at all limited by his ethnic background. Nevertheless, his roots were Jewish and he appears to have remained loyal to them, whatever his actual religious beliefs. Weill’s father was a cantor. Further, he worked for Zionism and Jewish relief causes during World War II. (Note: Weill’s Berlin collaborator Bertolt Brecht and his wife, singer Lotte Lenya, were not Jewish.)

Source: Kurt Weill Foundation