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8/27/2008 False Idols You won't see "Simon Cowell-style tirades" against the contestants on The Upcoming Voice; those "go against God's command that people be kind to one another." The American Idol-style search for "the next big thing in ultra-Orthodox Jewish music" is the brainchild of Radio Jerusalem DJ Menachem Toker, who sees his program as part of a larger cultural project to take "the best from the secular world, but...make it kosher," according to The Guardian. |
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8/27/2008 Growth Spurt “I know what it is like to be confused and look for my identity and search for G-d,” says Y.A. author Sonia Levitin, describing her qualifications. Her novel Strange Relations—which just won the 2008 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Teen Readers—follows a young woman as she wrestles with "assumptions about Hasidic Jews and her own relationship to Judaism." |
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8/27/2008 Piecing It Together The Dead Sea Scrolls are going digital. Until now, fragments have been dispersed throughout museum collections worldwide, but soon enough, "every undergraduate will be able to have a detailed look" at "one of the most sought-after and examined documents on earth," reports the N.Y. Times. |
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8/26/2008 The Lame Games When I first heard about the Heeb Olympics, hosted by Heeb Magazine, my schlock antennae went up. I mean come on, their logo is Olympic rings made out of bagels! The events consist of four videos under two minutes each, just long enough to make you wonder why they exist without sending you into an existential crisis. In the spirit of competition, I will now judge them. In the Instantly Forgettable Gag About Jews and Money category, we have the “Penny Pick-up,” in which the contestants dive for coins. Bonus points for the announcer's use of the word “Shylockian” to describe the winner's enthusiasm. Annoyance level: talkative airplane seatmate. In the Vague Suggestion That Jews Are Not Athletic category, there’s the "Yarmulke Toss.” The prop, a standard-issue special-events yarmulke, was a missed opportunity to select a hilariously multisyllabic name for the couple whose wedding it commemorated. “Celine and Arnold Bayer”? Meh. Also, this category didn’t really deserve its own event, as the whole Olympics made the same point. Annoyance level: hangnail. In the Ashkenazi Food Is Gross category, we have “Gefilte Fish Wrestling,” which takes place in a kiddie pool. This event takes the award for strongest display of whiny hypochondria, with one contestant forfeiting due to a "bad back." Annoyance level: dry contact lens. Finally, in the Jewish Mothers Are Cartoonish and Their Children Can’t Stand Them category, we have the "Disconnecta Yenta," in which people call their mothers only to try to get off the phone with them as quickly as possible. Loses major points for the maternal harassment factor, and for, perhaps, the unfunniest “joke”: a contestant assuring his mom, “I’ll stop seeing the black girl.” Annoyance level: wedgie. I realize that I will not be able to single-handedly end the use of stereotypes as humor, nor do I want to, but I do have one question for the makers of the Heeb Olympics: Why put it out there if it’s not funny? (Plus, if we’re going to lampoon ourselves, a healthy and cathartic amusement when done right, we at least deserve higher production values. After all, don’t we, like, run Hollywood?) This is especially embarrassing given that Hillel Halkin, a journalist at the NY Sun, feels comfortable referring to "the traditional Jewish disdain for physicality" in a non-satirical article today. Halkin makes an argument I actually agree with about why the Olympics are creepy, but his point is not inherently Jewish and has nothing to do with his assertion that the games are "goyishe nakhes." After all, Israelis may not do well at the competition, but it's probably not because their culture is somehow above the "clench-fisted snarl" that Halkin sees as a modern symbol of athletics. |
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8/26/2008 Atonement Clearly psyched about the upcoming holiday (42 days and counting!), Slate features "Yom Kippur," a poem by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Schultz. He writes: You are asked to stand and bow your head, consider the harm you've caused, the respect you've withheld, the anger misspent... |
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8/26/2008 A Separate Peace "In addition to being a writer, you are also a human being, a citizen in your own country, extending from your family to your society and the world around you," Nadine Gordimer told an audience at May's Jerusalem International Writers Conference (The Palestine-Israel Journal has a transcript). "I luckily never suffered any threats of anti-Semitism. I only saw us as Jews who were white and part of the struggle against apartheid." |
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8/26/2008 Against Type Turner Classic Movies is celebrating Tony Curtis, airing a day's worth of films starring the actor known to childhood friends as Bernie Schwartz. The New York Sun's Allen Barra takes the opportunity to recall Curtis's performance in 1961's The Outsider. "Those who can suspend their disbelief of a Jewish kid from the Bronx playing an American Indian," he writes, "can appreciate an extraordinary portrait of a man more alienated from mainstream America than any character played by Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, or Robert De Niro." |
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8/25/2008 Making Faces In The New Yorker, John Updike reviews Fred E. Basten's new biography, Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World, which follows Hollywood's "diminutive Hercules" from his birth (as Max Faktor) in 1904 in the mill town of Lodz, to the forests of Bohemia (where he'd run to escape Russian anti-Semitism), to the Tinseltown labs of his company—where he devised false eyelashes and brewed more than six hundred gallons of light-olive makeup for Ben-Hur. |
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8/25/2008 Religious Predisposition Jennifer Traig, the author of Well Enough Alone: A Cultural History of My Hypochondria, confirms that there's something "absolutely" Jewish about the disease. "There's some honor in" being sick, she tells the Forward, "so why wouldn’t we think we’re sick all the time?" |
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8/25/2008 Radio Days Shalom Auslander always has trouble relaxing; on This American Life, he describes how an exceptionally charming Holocaust survivor almost ruined his tropical vacation. Elsewhere on NPR, the pianist Menahem Pressler recounts the birth of the Beaux Arts Trio, which debuted at Tanglewood in 1955 and gave its final concert last week. |
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8/22/2008 If These Walls Could Talk "The bathroom is an intimate place, and to me the project is very intimate,” Sid Yiddish (aka Charles Bernstein) tells the Chicago Reader. A coordinator of the Bathroom Poetry Project, Yiddish also has plans for projects that extend beyond the stall walls: Next month, he'll be in "a display window of the Flatiron Building performing 'Suite for Furby on Shofar in D Minor,' a solo piece for his 13 Furby dolls." |
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8/22/2008 Family Secrets In Haaretz, Shifra Horn pays a visit to Benjamin Disraeli's New Zealand-based great-granddaughter, whose grandmother, Catherine, was the product of the British statesman's tryst with a French woman. While her grandmother never really spelled out her pedigree, "she would give hints...she referred me to one of his books." |
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8/22/2008 Coming to Terms Josh Lambert takes on the cultural history of the "dirty Jew," tracing it through the work of James Joyce and Norman Mailer to South Park. Noting that the evolution of the phrase reveals "not just changing perceptions of Jewishness over the years, but also a transformation in the way we talk about 'dirtiness,'" he tries to sort out the idiom's tangled web of anti-Semitism and sex for Jbooks. |
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8/21/2008 The Far Side The comics anthology Kramer's Ergot, edited by Sammy Harkham, makes "no compromises of any kind to the history of comic art or any other art, nor to politics, nor...to anyone's interpretation of Jewishness," writes self-professed "semi-scholarly critic" Paul Buhle in Jewcy. Buhle compares Harkham's own work to that of Chagall; it's "less joyous...but not necessarily less lyrical." |
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8/21/2008 Teen Spirit When Beverly Hills, 90210 hit the air in the early '90s, some viewers noticed that the show didn't reflect the fact that the real Beverly Hills High was "both predominantly Jewish and heavily Iranian." The forthcoming new version attempts to amend this (sort of), but as Rebecca Spence writes in the Forward, since "most Jewish parts in American film and television have not been played by Jews," the show's casting is "in keeping with Tinseltown tradition." |
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8/21/2008 Jerusalem State of Mind "I believe that peace, practically speaking, is closer than anyone realizes," Avrum Burg, former Peace Now activist, Jewish Agency chairman, Knesset Speaker, and (depending who you ask) "post-Zionist," tells The Jerusalem Post. In The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, he considers the future of the Jewish people and the state of Israel, concluding that "you can be a Jerusalemite in Monsey, and you can be a Babylonian in Tel Aviv. It's about your attitude." |
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8/20/2008 Soviet Sweetheart I got to Regina Spektor’s concert at McCarren Park Pool last Friday just in time to hear her shout “Shabbat Shalom!” to the crowd. I couldn’t believe I had worried that her music would be too small and intimate for a crowded outdoor venue. As those who have seen her perform know, Spektor is an old-fashioned theatrical diva along the lines of Edith Piaf. She warbles and coos, emotes and speak-sings—but instead of sticking to themes of romance and nostalgia, she sings about finding a human tooth on the street, little bags of cocaine, and chemotherapy. Plus, she plays piano like a goddess and writes her own songs. Spektor is the kind of musician that certain types of women (and, I'm sure, many men) relate to with the passionate certainty that they would be good friends if only they were to meet. She reminds me of the Liz Phair I fell in love with when I was fifteen, for confessional lyrics like, "I want all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas"—only I was always secretly glad I hadn’t met Liz. I wasn’t totally sure we’d be friends. After all, underneath the angst and creative energy, she was a skinny blond WASP who hung out with a lot of more-blasé-than-thou rock stars. Regina, on the other hand, could be my (preternaturally beautiful and talented) relative. Her intensity feels, besides empathic and beguiling, well...ethnic. This quality came across in Friday’s performance. In her a cappella rendition of “Dance Anthem of the 80s,” she extended the word “sleep” into a reverie of trilling li li li's reminiscent of Middle-Eastern music or a lilting klezmer clarinet. And in “Apres Moi,” she grunted lustily, and sang expressively in Russian (the song includes several lines by Boris Pasternak that, according to Spektor, loosely translate to the deliciously Russian sentiment, “one must always write about February while weeping”). She speaks with a girlish accent that's part Moscow, part Bronx. Her stage presence conveys moodiness and honesty, flirtation and sensuality. She’s a riot grrrl Barbra Streisand. In an interview a few years ago, Spektor, who emigrated here from the USSR when she was nine, shared this familiar insight about how being Jewish influences her work: “It’s inherited, you don’t even have to think about it...it’s just there.” In another interview, she used the word “propagandish.” Although Spektor is often compared to Bjork and Fiona Apple, her appeal is earthy rather than ethereal. She elevates a lyric about stepping in a "fat loogie”—“Everyone who sees him says, ‘Ew’”—to a grandness Apple reserves for sentiments like, “He’s all I ever knew of love” (and Bjork for, uh, nonsensical shrieks), perfectly capturing the indignities of daily life. She’s emotional, but not in the way typically associated with young singer-songwriters; she displays a range of emotions, and a darkly playful attitude ("You cry until you laugh") that would make her entirely at home at one of my family gatherings. (In fact, if she were willing to play a song, one of my cousins might even split his pants dancing along.) Spektor has repeatedly said that for the most part she does not write songs about her own life, but personal moments certainly slip in; her glee was obvious when she sang the last line of “Bobbing for Apples,” like a proud child reciting the Four Questions: “Someone next door’s fucking to one of my songs!” |
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8/20/2008 Keeping His Faith When Catholic screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce began dramatizing the "apocryphal tale" of a group of Auschwitz prisoners who put God on trial (the verdict: guilty), he was introduced to a "long Jewish tradition of wrangling with God." The resulting film, God On Trial, "became about the fact that people might be capable of having a theological argument on the way to the gas chamber," he tells The Guardian. |
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8/20/2008 Mixed-Up Files The N.Y. Times recounts the "research-intensive journey" that led to the identification of the subjects of a mysterious undated photograph as Marc Chagall and his wife Vava. The famous couple in the photo was initially thought to be David Ben-Gurion and his wife, leading the Times to observe that "the human eye can be unreliable in making positive identifications." |
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8/20/2008 Leo Abse, Member of Parliament As the grandson of "the first Jew to speak Welsh with a Yiddish accent and Yiddish with a Welsh one," the notably well-dressed Abse was an unlikely choice for British Parliament. The MP, who died this week, made his mark as a social reformer, championing gay rights and the protection of children over the course of his thirty year parliamentary career. |
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8/19/2008 Fat Camp In The Guardian yesterday, the columnist Nicholas Lezard noted a rarely mentioned flaw of movies set in Nazi death camps: The prisoners usually look well-fed. “How do you make the inmates look realistically thin?” he asks. His answer: “You don't. You can't starve your extras for four years to give them that so-sought-after degraded, emaciated look. But as anyone who has seen pictures of the camps knows, it is the skeletal appearance of the inmates which stops us from confusing them with the inmates of any other regime.” This isn’t about historical accuracy for its own sake, he argues. “As cinematic representations eventually crowd out actual images of the death camps, we are in danger of thinking that they were no more than unusually murderous prisons. They were worse than that. The Nazis reduced human beings virtually to the point of translucence.” Which makes him wonder: “Should one, then, even be attempting to portray the camps realistically?” Lezard makes this point in the context of praising a movie opening in England next month, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, about two eight-year-old boys on either side of a concentration camp fence. (The movie doesn’t currently have a U.S. release date.) He calls it an “affecting and worthwhile film,” and adds: “It does not offer the consolations handed out by Schindler's List, or Life Is Beautiful (a film which, in my opinion, should never have been made; the memory of it enrages me still).” That angry parenthetical reminded me of something I’d once read in a David Rakoff essay, which I then raced to look up—the essay’s called “The Best Medicine,” in Rakoff’s book Fraud. The passage is a marvelous rant about what he calls Roberto Benigni’s “Holocaust romp.” Life Is Beautiful, Rakoff says, is the most loathsome example of a belief in the curative powers of levity: his recasting as fable the chilling efficiency of the Nazi killing machine; his rendering of a death camp as a budget resort low on blankets; but above all the vile disrespect evidenced by the film’s equation that those who perished were, I suppose, just not funny enough to turn those frowns upside down and survive.Finally, Rakoff lets loose: “One wonders how Benigni might make some of the twentieth century’s other geopolitical tragedies more palatable: A Fish Called Rwanda; The Stop-It-You’re-Killing-Me Fields; To Serb with Love, perhaps?” As one who was similarly enraged by Life Is Beautiful, I’ll say that authenticity is only a starting point when depicting the camps. Artistic intent is everything. |
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8/19/2008 Words of Wisdom Max Weinreich didn't want to publish the text of his opus, History of the Yiddish Language, without an equally massive set of footnotes, "even though no more than 10 people would consult them—and he knew all of them," as Ruth Wisse puts it. In the New York Post, Wisse writes that the book "rehabilitates" the language from comic triviality, ultimately arguing that "Yiddish is a repository of the Jewish way of life." |
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8/19/2008 Till Death Do Us Part A "serious halachic dilemma" arose when a German man’s dying wish was "to be buried with his best friend, a bottle of vodka," according to the European Jewish Press. Jewish law forbids burying objects with the dead, but after rabbinic consultation, man and bottle were set to rest side by side. |
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8/19/2008 Unhappy Families In What Happened to Anna K., Irina Reyn transplants Tolstoy's "Great Russian Soul" to a Jewish enclave in Queens, with an updated heroine who is "human, and wonderfully alive," according to the San Fransisco Chronicle. The Christian Science Monitor questions the book's contemporary social resonance, but concludes that Reyn succeeds in examining "how to forge an identity in an adopted country when your homeland has irrevocably changed." |
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8/18/2008 Out of Tune In 1999, conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian cultural theorist Edward Said joined forces to offer what The Guardian calls a "happy consortium as a model for the coexistence of cultures in the Middle East": their mixed Israeli and Arab West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Yet, according to the review, each man's book on the project disappoints: Barenboim's Everything Is Connected is "an insubstantial volume...with a random sampling of interviews," while Said's posthumous essay collection Music at the Limits is "woefully deficient." |
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8/18/2008 Laughter and Tears "If I was making fun of mental illness and I didn’t have it, it would be really tasteless," says British comedian Ruby Wax. "It’s the same rule that says you can make fun of being a Jew if you’re a Jew.” A child of Austrian-Jewish emigrés who's been fighting depression since childhood, Wax brings her latest show to the Edinburgh Fringe as part of a BBC-sponsored campaign for mental health. |
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8/18/2008 Halachic Law "If you give a Jewish guy a ticket, it's very hard," worries new NYPD cadet Shmuel Tenenbaum, who's hoping for a post outside of his native Crown Heights. This is just one of many concerns facing the ten Orthodox Jews joining the force as part of the most observant class to date. The New York Post seems to have learned Yiddish for the occassion, reporting that the new, bagel-shmearing officers have successfully convinced their verklempt parents they ain't meshugana. |
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8/15/2008 Everyone Says They Love Him Why do so many big-name critics lose their faculties when it comes to Woody Allen? For Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen’s latest half-baked effort, they’re swooning like schoolgirls—and not because it features Scarlett Johannson and Penélope Cruz getting it on. Andrew Sarris says Allen “has managed to astound me by coming up with one of the most felicitously written, edited, acted and directed romantic comedies of his entire career.” David Denby says the film “has a natural, flowing vitality to it, a sun-drenched splendor that never falters,” and gushes: “You can feel Allen’s excitement in the sensual atmosphere. Spain!” Roger Ebert calls Woody “the poet of Manhattan” and says, “Allen has directed more than 40 movies in about as many years and written all of them himself. Why isn't he more honored? Do we take him for granted?” “We” certainly don’t. I gave up on Allen long ago. In fact, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the first movie of his I’ve watched in over a decade. And nothing’s changed: It’s as blinkered and lazy as the ‘90s films I got sick of. And critics who haven’t drunk the Woody Kool-Aid agree. “Allen's films have become increasingly underwritten and indifferently directed,” says Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. “Vicky Cristina Barcelona remains half-formed from beginning to end, sullenly refusing to resolve in any satisfactory way and getting increasingly sour and misanthropic without offering anything that even resembles a perceptive glimpse into human behavior.” In the Charlotte Observer, Lawrence Toppman writes, “Allen's laziness is startling, even in so mechanical a filmmaker. He uses a monotonous narrator to tell us what the characters think and do, though he then shows them performing the actions that have just been described.” At Salon, my friend Andrew O’Hehir can’t contain himself: The world of Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems both borrowed and sloppy. We're supposed to accept that Vicky [played as well as possible by the British actress Rebecca Hall] has come to Barcelona expressly to write her thesis about Catalan identity, but can't even speak restaurant-level Spanish or Catalan. That's some kind of inherited Allan Bloom screed about the lameness of American education, not viable satire. Her fiancé (Chris Messina), a one-note dork bound for a Wall Street job and a house in Westchester suburbia, likes to play bridge. Hello? What century is this, Woody? When was the last time anybody under 40 played bridge, except at some so-square-it's-hip 1950s retromania party?I’ll say this much for Allen. Even at his lamest, he creates great roles for great actors. Javier Bardem and Cruz are staggeringly funny and sexy in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, more than compensating for their characters’ implausibility. If you must see it, see it for them. |
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8/15/2008 Now That's a Metamorphosis! Some Kafka scholars are refuting unseemly intimations about the writer that appear in James Hawes' new bio. "To call the illustrated magazines he subscribed to as hardcore porn, is like comparing a poem by Heinrich Heine with an advertising slogan for McDonald's," Anjana Shrivastava is quoted as saying in The Guardian; Hawes tells the paper his detractors "have pored over every memorandum he ever wrote, every insurance report he ever compiled, looking for clues. Yet they have chosen not to show this undoubtedly very dark stuff." |
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8/15/2008 To Have and Have Not "In caste-attuned India, there was always a Jewish pecking order," says The Economist in an appraisal of Edna Fernandes' The Last Jews of Kerala. The book examines the tensions between the different communities, including the Bene Israel. |
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8/15/2008 Jerry Wexler, Music Producer Raised in Manhattan by immigrant parents, Wexler worked as a reporter for Billboard, where he coined the term rhythm and blues. After journalism, he turned to producing, signing on Led Zeppelin and working with other musicians, including Bob Dylan and Dire Straits. He died today. |
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8/14/2008 By Any Other Nationality Had they been French and not Italian, Elsa Morante and her husband Alberto Moravia "would have been as much celebrated as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir," according to Lily Tuck. Her biography, Woman of Rome, is a kind of "personal essay about the flights and vicissitudes attendant on a life...devoted to the imagination," according to The Washington Post. |
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8/14/2008 There Will Be Blood Brad Pitt's signed on to Quentin Tarantino's remake of Inglorious Bastards. The heartthrob is set to play Aldo the Apache, an American Jew named for his "signature move of scalping Nazi soldiers," according to the Forward. |
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8/14/2008 Moving On Up In the United States, says Chaim Waxman, "the cost of Jewish living has become increasingly intolerable." His solution? Move to Israel. He makes his economic argument in The Jerusalem Post. |
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8/13/2008 The Daily Mirror A major part of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’s M.O. is the merciless, politically incorrect skewering of all kinds of people by reducing them to their most obvious stereotypes, or sometimes not even bothering with the stereotypes but jumping directly to insults. Obviously, even at its most simplified, Judaism represents a Venn diagram of race, religion, and ethnicity. But it feels like a relief from this cultural conundrum when The Daily Show treats Jewishness in the same way it treats race—as a primarily unchosen (if cherished) quality that nevertheless affects every aspect of people’s lives. In a recent segment mocking the well-publicized concern that elderly Jews in Florida will not vote for Obama, the show sent African American correspondent Wyatt Cernac to a retirement community to talk with a group over early-bird specials. Although the subject certainly gave the residents enough rope to hang themselves, there was only the occasional silly remark. Instead, the piece was a lighthearted jab at racial stereotyping, with Cernac attempting a joke about a “ferkakte mofo” and declaring, “I love a good shmear of liver,” to which one of the older Jews replies, “And I love fried chicken!” Cernac asks who among the residents has been robbed by a black man, and raises his own hand. A woman suggests that Obama's middle name is a problem for some voters; one man offers, “His first name, Barack, is a Hebrew name,” while another responds, “Why does it matter if his middle name is Hussein or Yankel?” After recently attending a panel on blacks and Jews that, while interesting, was a bit of a lefty lovefest, I appreciate this irreverent but unusually straightforward treatment of the issue. Another segment from last week pokes fun at the media’s over-attention to the “race card.” Stewart procures a lamp and unleashes the Race Genie (Jason Jones), who refers to Stewart as “Jewboy” and “Dr. Kikenstein” and warns him that he has only three wishes and shouldn’t “try to ‘Jew it up’ to four,” before posing the question, “Am I an intrinsic tendency to be with one’s own, or a pernicious fear of the other?” This kind of racy goofiness demonstrates yet again how ethnic stereotypes lose their power when hurled at everyone at once. Of course, the show could just be playing all of this for laughs. Last night’s show included a sight gag in which correspondent Rob Riggle mistook the Great Wall of China for the Wailing Wall, and prayed there—although as Stewart pointed out, Riggle seems to have learned Jewish prayers by watching Jerry Lewis, as he mostly just “chemmed” and “chawed.” |
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8/13/2008 Roman Holiday "In that room on Via Clelia, I managed to create a world that corresponded to nothing outside it," writes André Aciman of his years in Italy. Retracing paths trod in adolescence, Aciman considers the nature of his art: "writing sees figures where life sees things; things we leave behind, figures we keep." Meanwhile, Milton Glaser talks about designing book covers for Philip Roth. |
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8/13/2008 Ghetto Fabulous A French shop owner is facing accusations she incited “racial hatred by inscriptions with anti-Semitic character,” reports the European Jewish Press. She was selling T-shirts bearing the slogan "Jews forbidden from entering the park" in Polish and German, inspired by 1940 banners from Lodz. |
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8/13/2008 Sing Out, Louise! With stage and screen projects pending on both sides of the Atlantic, Israeli director Uri Paster's clear about his goals: "I don't want to become an American director, but I do want to make modern Jewish movies." Upcoming projects include a film about the early roots of Zionism, a musical billed as "a contemporary take on the biblical story of Noah's ark, with a twist," and the launch of the Jewish Academy for the Art of Musicals in L.A. |
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8/12/2008 Custody Battle Stan Lee, Joe Kubert, and Neal Adams are rallying behind Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, an artist who survived Auschwitz by painting portraits for Josef Mengele, with a six-page comic about her plight. Her works are at the camp's museum, which has refused her requests for their return. "You can't help but feel horrified and perhaps sickened by this nuttiness," Adams tells The New York Times. |
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8/12/2008 Notes From the Maghreb With songs lasting nearly half an hour, chaabi has faded from Algeria's music scene. Yet the wistful genre, known as the "blues of the casbah," is not altogether forgotten. This musical style was introduced into the region some five hundred years ago with Jews and Muslims who'd fled Spain, according to a story on NPR. |
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8/12/2008 Ted Solotaroff, Editor Raised in New Jersey by a father who had "that sort of driving energy that established the Jewish middle class," as he put it, Solotaroff embarked on a literary career, writing criticism for Commentary and founding New American Review, where he championed the likes of E.L. Doctorow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Philip Roth. In addition to editing, he wrote two volumes of criticism and two memoirs, Truth Comes in Blows and First Loves. He died last week. |
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8/11/2008 Backwards Glance “I have the habit of thinking about that past in collective terms . . . chiefly because in my childhood we were still members of a tribal community,” says Emanuel Litvinoff, commenting on his 1972 memoir Journey Through a Small Planet. In The Guardian the poet and novelist discusses his literary career, his “problem of identity,” and his notorious confrontation with T.S. Eliot. |
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8/11/2008 Words, Words, Words The Great Isaiah Scroll, on display at the Israel Museum, gives visitors the thrill of being “ordinary people . . . able to read, and at least partly understand, an ancient Hebrew text,” according to a New York Times story about the evolution of modern Hebrew; on Nextbook, Daniel Estrin had a similar report. |
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8/11/2008 Eating It Up “The Orthodox community is ready for high-end food,” says Abraham Banda, owner of Brooklyn’s new kosher megastore, Pomegranate. With beef-rib steaks going for twenty-four bucks a pound, it’s not a destination for the short of cash. Meanwhile, The Washington Post navigates the odyssey of kosher delis in the Baltimore suburbs, sorting the good, the great, and the “just so-so.” |
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8/8/2008 Smaller Than Life The festival of Elliott Gould’s films from the ’70s going on now at BAMcinématek (until August 21) has gotten plenty of deserved attention. Its weeklong run of M*A*S*H ended yesterday; now the one-day runs of classics like The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Little Murders begin. If you think you’ll have other chances to see them, guess again: four of the movies—I Love My Wife (Gould as a philandering surgeon), Getting Straight (Gould as a Vietnam-vet-turned-college-student, alongside an incredibly young Harrison Ford), Busting (Gould as an L.A. cop), and Ingmar Bergman’s The Touch (“Gould is miscast and dialogue embarrassingly awkward,” raves Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide)—aren’t on DVD. Just go. Lest we forget, Gould—born Elliott Goldstein 70 years ago this month, and raised in Brooklyn—takes his heritage seriously. As J. Hoberman said in an excellent Village Voice appreciation last year: In his heyday, “Gould identified with a whole Jewish-American revolution. He and [Brooklyn buddy Jack] Brodsky planned movies based on novels by Bernard Malamud and Bruce Jay Friedman—they bought the bestseller Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask as a comedy vehicle for homeboy Woody Allen.” In 2002 Gould told Aish.com that he had attended Hebrew school as a child, adding: “There’s not a moment that I’m not Jewish and I cherish it. I know colleagues and people who condescend and are not terribly respectful. I think that it’s difficult sometimes to be observant.” He also noted: My first wife, Barbra Streisand, became an icon, larger than life, and I had no understanding of why anybody would want to make themselves into something that isn’t real. Why would anybody want an identity that makes itself an illusion bigger than life? Nothing is bigger in life other than God. And none of us is God.Fun fact: In the as-yet-unreleased movie The Deal, Gould plays a publicity-hungry rabbi who serves as a technical adviser on a movie set. When it screened at Sundance this year, the filmmakers handed out red yarmulkes. |
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8/8/2008 Them’s Fighting Words! “Jewish writing is over,” Vivian Gornick tells the Boston Review, arguing that while authors like Roth and Bellow “created world-class literature out of the immigrant experience,” today there is “really nothing to write about.” She dismisses current darlings Chabon and Safran Foer as “cashing in on a world that’s long gone . . . making things out of it that belong to their grandfathers.” |
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8/8/2008 Basketball Diaries When a young Sam Balter made the 1936 U.S. Olympic Basketball team, it hadn't occured to him that the games would be in Germany. Wondering "what kind of propaganda team would it be if...there were no Jews on the American team?" Balter made the agonizing decision to compete. Carrie Kahn considers her grandfather's account of those Olympics on NPR. |
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8/8/2008 Striking a Chord Stewart Wallace had “no prior experience with any Chinese music” before his opera adaptation of Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, set to open in San Francisco next month. But differences in background were dwarfed by commonalities: “Amy’s mother was from China, and my grandparents were from the Ukraine. The things I experienced when I read the book, based on Amy’s mother’s experience, resonate with me . . . in a very direct way.” |
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8/7/2008 And Now, the Recipes  Photo: Vilseskogen / L S1 cup lentils 3 cups water 3 tablespoons olive oil 1/2 leek, cleaned and cut into 1/2-inch pieces 2 cloves garlic, peeled and split lengthwise 2 teaspoons salt, more to taste 2 tablespoons fresh marjoram Over medium heat, add the olive oil to a large saucepan or Dutch oven. When heated, add the leeks and garlic. Stir for about three minutes until they begin to take on hints of brown on the surface and edges. Add the lentils, and quickly add the water. Add the salt (this helps the lentils to cook a little quicker). Bring to a boil, then lower heat to a bare simmer. Stir occasionally for about 45 minutes, until the water has reduced and become a stew-like sauce. Add the marjoram and cook for 10 more minutes. Lamb Lentil Stew 1/4 pound lamb stew meat 2 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 cup lentils 3 cups water 1/2 leek, cleaned and cut into 1/2-inch pieces 2 cloves garlic, peeled and split lengthwise 2 teaspoons salt, more to taste 2 tablespoons each fresh marjoram, fresh mint, and fresh parsley Over medium heat, melt the butter in a large saucepan or Dutch oven, add lamb to the butter and cook, being careful not to burn the butter, until the lamb browns, about 6 to 10 minutes. Add the leeks and garlic. Stir for about three minutes until they begin to take on hints of brown on the surface and edges. Add the lentils, and quickly add the water. Add the salt. Bring to a boil, then lower heat to a bare simmer. Stir occasionally for about 45 minutes, until the water has reduced and become a stew-like sauce. Add the marjoram, mint, and parsley and cook for 10 more minutes. |
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8/7/2008 Miracle on 168th Street By persuading his friends to move “semi-en-masse” from the Upper West Side to Washington Heights, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer aims to “plant the seeds for a vibrant egalitarian Jewish community.” One member of the great Manhattan migration bravely tells The Sun, “We decided to be pioneers to some extent.” |
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8/7/2008 Passing the Torch “We joke about going to the Maccabiah Games and setting a world record,” says Jason Lezak, but he and two other Jewish swimmers will be competing for the U.S. in Beijing instead. JTA reports on the seven Jews who’ll be representing America in the Olympics, starting with tomorrow’s opening ceremonies. Meanwhile, the only religious member of Israel's Olympic delegation, tae kwon do star Bat-El Gaterer, is subsisting on cups of instant kosher noodles. |
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8/7/2008 Order Restored Heeb announces that we can all breathe a sigh of relief: Tam Tams are back in stock. When the Newark-based Manischewitz factory “ran into technical problems with some newly installed, state-of-the-art matzah-making machines” in December, it stopped making the crackers. MarketWatch can hardly contain its excitement: Tam Tams “will return to local supermarkets starting this week!” |
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8/6/2008 Adaptation Now that I had established the restrictions (and worked through the compromises), I could count my allowances. Genesis notes that Jacob’s stew was red. This posed an issue: To match the color, I’d need to use red lentils. The red lentils grown today are notorious for turning to mush very quickly. I doubted that Jacob’s stew was a thick mush. Since his red lentils were harvested in the wild, they would probably have had some bite to them, and were probably much closer to the whole lentils we know today. So I chose run-of-the-mill green lentils. I figured that the wild onions Jacob had available were far less pungent than the common yellow onions that we weep as we cut today, so I opted for leeks. Garlic may well have changed over the millennia, but probably not so much that I’d have to use a substitute. As for herbs, marjoram, mint, and parsley were all indigenous to the region. And since Isaac, the patriarch, was a successful herder, I assumed there wouldn’t be any shortage of lamb. But just in case, I’d make two versions: one with lamb, and one without. And I took it a step further. Since olives were bountiful, I’d use olive oil in the lamb-less version instead of butter, making it suitable for vegans. In the spirit of excessive experimentation, I also chose to double the batch of lamb lentil stew, divide it in half, and add parsley and mint to one, marjoram to the other. The vegan version would be seasoned with marjoram alone. The prep work and cooking were pretty simple. For the leeks, cut off all but about 1/2-inch of the greens and discard. Cut the leek in half lengthwise, rinse away the grit, and then chop the halves crosswise into 1/2-inch pieces. Peel the garlic and cut the cloves in half, again lengthwise. Tear up the mint into pinky nail-size bits, pull the marjoram off its stem (I used all the marjoram in one of those small 3/4-ounce plastic containers you get in the supermarket), and roughly chop about 1/3 of a bunch of parsley. I intended to sweat the leeks and garlic—sweating means to just soften in the oil—but got distracted by a cat wandering outside the kitchen. Plus, my heat was too high. I wound up lightly caramelizing—giving a little color to—the vegetables. This was a happy accident, since it gave things a richer flavor in the end. Note that it’s a good idea not to boil the lentils; boiling makes them fall apart more quickly, so just keep them at a very gentle simmer. Lentils need about a 1:3 ratio of beans to water, but if things start looking sticky, deviate from the recipe and add some more. One more note: The volatile oils that give herbs their flavor and aroma don’t stand up well to heat, and dissipate quickly. When the stew is about ten minutes away from being done, add your herbs—that's just enough time to diffuse the flavor. If you do it earlier, you won’t taste their presence very much. I followed the same basic procedures for both the meatless and lamb versions, with one exception: I browned the lamb stew meat in a little butter, removed it, and then caramelized the vegetables in the mix of butter and rendered lamb. Upon conclusion, my taster wandered in. I asked if she would be willing to exchange everything in her bank account, her car, and any future earnings for a steaming bowl of any of the lentil stews on the stove. I had no bread at the ready, however. Whether it was common sense or the lack of bread, she declined, but offered to taste it anyway. I tasted, too. Both of us were impressed, and thought that with a slight tweaking of the salt and the marjoram, mixing the marjoram lamb stew with the parsley and mint lamb stew, and adding maybe a spoonful of Greek yogurt on top, I’d have something that would help one understand Esau’s moment of weakness. At least just a little. Next time: the recipes. |
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8/6/2008 Books Without Borders Seeking to “canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads,” Jewcy is asking “extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders” for suggestions. The most recent addition to the amorphous project is a pair of books on the Kennedy administration suggested by Jeffrey Sachs. His picks joins those of Jennifer Moses (I.B. Singer), Danny Maseng (Amos Oz), and others. |
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8/6/2008 Lending a Hand In response to Israel’s new laws regulating organ donation, Haredi leaders have introduced the anti-donation “life card,” which states: “I do not give my permission to take from me, not in life nor in death, any organ or part of my body for any purpose.” |
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8/6/2008 The Great Escape While researching the rumor of Adolf Hitler’s Jewish relation, Tanya Gold encountered the “strange subculture of the Nazi-descended Jews.” Wondering if these converts are trying to “expiate the sins of their fathers,” she talks to several Germans whose reasons for converting (discomfort with the Trinity, possession of a “Jewish soul,” and love of Israel) strike her as attempts to process a very difficult past. |
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8/5/2008 The Secret Life of Lentil Stew Our story begins sometime around 1800 BCE, right in the middle of the Bronze Age. Somewhere inland from the Mediterranean, Isaac (son of Abraham) and his wife, Rebecca, wandered the landscape with their herds. Rebecca was pregnant, and would soon give birth to a pair of notorious brothers: Jacob and Esau. Back in those heady, semi-nomadic days, the firstborn wasn’t just a test model for new parents to grind away their neurosis with. No, being the firstborn back then was hitting the jackpot. Most of your father’s goods—and all the authority—were yours upon his passing. Jacob and Esau were twins, but Esau came first. It was pretty close, though: Jacob emerged from the womb clutching his brother’s ankle. Esau, a hairy man, according to the book of Genesis, grew to be a “cunning hunter” and was his father's favorite. Jacob, better loved by his mother, didn’t share Esau’s taste for the open range. Instead, he grew to be “a simple man,” and rather than being a hunter, or even a shepherd, he “dwelled in tents.” Well, it’s not long before we get to see who is really simple, and who is actually cunning. One day, or evening, Esau came in from a hunt empty-handed. He was also apparently crazed from hunger, because when he happened upon Jacob cooking a pot of lentil stew, reason took its leave. Esau demanded a bowl and, sensing an opportunity, Jacob countered that if Esau would give up his birthright, he could have some of the stew. And some bread, too. Weirdly, the deal made good sense to Esau who, a little dramatically, in my opinion, cried (I’m paraphrasing), “I’m about to die of hunger. What good would a birthright do me?” and swore it away to Jacob. Not surprisingly, things between the two brothers went downhill after the incident. Now, I’ve never much considered the lentil, a legume consumed since the dawn of time, dense with protein, and full of fiber. It’s a fine foodstuff, I suppose, but nothing that sings on the palate, or would cause me to trade my future for it. But I haven’t eaten that many, and maybe I've been missing something. Maybe I've just never had them prepared in quite the right way. I wanted to try as close an approximation as I could to what Esau ate. The lentil recipes I looked at were all a little too modern, or definitely not what would have been prepared back in the Bronze Age. Bacon is one tip-off—a lot of lentil recipes call for the stuff. Even recipes from so-called “Bible cookbooks” have been adapted for more modern kitchens. (Or kitchens, period.) Peppers? Tomatoes? Not in the Bronze Age. Spices, too: I suspect spices like cumin or cinnamon came a bit later, after reliable trade routes had been established. I decided to recreate a lentil stew as authentically as possible. I set some restrictions for myself: anything I used would have to be available, in some form or other, to Jacob. Of course, I had to cheat immediately. I would allow myself to use a stove rather than an open fire. Stoking a blaze out in the back of the house seemed like less and less of a good idea the closer I got to actually doing it. Also, since most milk was gotten from camels during the time, I put in an extremely half-hearted search for camel butter. When I found that the local Price Chopper had failed to stock it, I quickly permitted the use of everyday unsalted cow’s milk butter (I did buy organic, though). No pepper, unfortunately, since it wasn’t available in Canaan. I didn’t work too hard to address the issue of cooking vessel authenticity. I supposed that somewhere out there, probably on the same shelf as camel butter, there was a suitable earthenware pot, but I elected to use a pair of Creuset Dutch ovens. I also elected to wear pants, owning neither a robe nor animal skin garments. Next time: leeks, herbs, olive oil, and a skeptical taster. |
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8/5/2008 Cool Is as Cool Does Did you know that Jews drink Manischewitz? Or that a lot of them live in New York? If not, you might be interested in the schlock extravaganza that is Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe, by Lisa Alcalay Klug. "Imagine an updated combination of the beloved Jewish Catalog meets The Joys of Yiddish with a hip-hop spin that captures the spirit of the times," says the book's website. What a scary thought. Whereas, according to Jennifer Bleyer, “The Catalog conveyed basic information on Judaism in a non-judgmental, folksy tone, as if it had been written by a patient friend,” Cool Jew conveys utterly trivial information about “Heebster”-ism in an aggressively corny tone, as if written by a stand-up comedian on speed. The book's cover is emblazoned with an image of a bling-ed out gold pendant spelling its already obnoxious title. Flip to a random page, and you'll be assaulted with sentences like, “A little dark humor never hoirt nobody.” How is one even meant to pronounce that italicized word? Read further, and you'll have to brace yourself against myriad variations on the “blank, shmank” construction and a cringe-inducing combination of borscht belt humor and hip-hop lingo—apparently, before Jewish life-cycle events, “savvy celebrants register at da local sista’chood gift shop,” and the ninth commandment is, “False testimony ain't where it's at.” In the book’s variation on the Decalogue, readers are asked to pledge: “I will not internalize the stereotype that Jews suck at athletics,” immediately after swearing to "hide $250,000 in diamonds in my pocket and then fund a luncheon with stand-up comedians to entertain and feed the poor.” A section titled “Proofiness” reminds readers that many common expressions come from the Old Testament, and recommends that Jews take credit every time someone utters a phrase such as “at my wit’s end.” How might we do this? “Quietly cite its source, then mumble ‘It all comes from us’...this works especially well when speaking with self-haters and anti-Semites ill-advisedly ill-disposed to the Tribe.” Works well to achieve what, exactly? Adding to any negative perceptions they may have of Jews by acting like a know-it-all and a braggart? If this behavior inspires anyone to abuse or flee from you, it will not be a case of anti-Semitism, or self-hatred. It will be plain old self-defense. On the last page, a certificate declares that the reader has “circumcised all self-hatred from the incomparable Yiddishe neshume and infused it with the steadfast naches of People’chood.” If this book accurately represents our people—cheesy punsters who speak in mock ebonics, can’t let two words go by without adding a "ch" sound, and are so dependent on cultural insulation that they suffer from the “Jeweltide Blues” the day after Christmas (“While everyone else is eating Aunt Felah’s latkes, you sequester yourself in your uncle Fishel’s office with his treasured DSM-IV and hunt for a diagnosis of your strange symptoms...accidentally leaving the cover shmeared with sour cream”)—maybe we should rethink the whole self-hatred thing. |
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8/5/2008 Salad Days In Lara Vapnyar's second collection of stories, "food's true power isn't to make us remember our past. It's to inspire dreams of a better future." Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love captures the world of Brighton Beach without nostalgia, standing out as "a stunning petit four...in a world of saccharin," according to Lizzie Skurnick. |
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8/5/2008 That's Entertainment! "Some people may leave, others may cry...but the only thing that matters is that they've felt something," says Steve Lambert of his company's production at the Edinburgh Fringe. The Factory tries to recreate the last hour in the life of prisoners at Auschwitz and achieves a product that is "less theatre than direct, visceral experience," says The Guardian. |
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8/5/2008 Can This Drink Be Saved? Jennifer 8. Lee traces the egg cream's origins. On account of its ingredients—seltzer, milk, and chocolate syrup—it's "deceptively named" but "no matter which story you hear...it seems to have a strong Jewish connection." Emily Barton mined similar territory; and we've got a whole podcast, belches included, on seltzer. |
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8/4/2008 In Good Taste As a kid, whenever I read a book I liked, I wanted to be a citizen of the world in the story. At varying points in my youth, this meant I very much wanted to till the soil of the Minnesota prairies, live with a group of cast-off pickpockets in nineteenth-century London, or be one of the Corleone sons (thankfully, I didn’t discover Naked Lunch until I was older). I also had a lot of Biblical picture books for children, and wanted to live in a palace like Kings David or Solomon. I even begged my parents to build a luxurious pool lined with marble and erect some pillars along our backyard’s perimeter. In every book I read, I was especially captivated by food—what the pirates ate, what the pioneers had for supper, what Luca Brasi prepared for breakfast. (My mother never got around to serving a supper of watered-down rum and hard tack, a la Long John Silver, like she promised.) If I couldn’t literally be in those worlds, eating what the characters ate seemed like an authentic substitute for the experience. And the food in those Bible picture books was no exception: Abraham serving angels a meal of meat that was undoubtedly superb-tasting, Jacob swindling Esau with a bowl of stew, the lavish feasts of the kings and pharaohs—I wanted to know what it was like to eat those foods. A couple of decades have passed and my literary tastes have (for the most part) turned away from pirates and pioneers. But I’m still fascinated by the eating habits of fictional characters, including Biblical ones. As I write this, I'm living in upstate New York, enrolled as a student in the Culinary Institute of America. I’m finally in a position to begin the explorations and experiments I so badly wanted to try when I was younger. I’ll start at the beginning and figure out how those Biblical foods might have tasted. “Probably pretty bad,” a friend of mine remarked upon hearing the plan. I’m not so sure: Despite differences in epoch and geography, I think things that taste good are perennial. In my kitchen, and on this blog, I intend to find out. |
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8/4/2008 Old Beginnings Philip Roth "can take a tiny literality and squeeze more metaphorical substance from it than would seem possible," says Wyatt Mason. In Harper's, he considers the corpus of the author's opening sentences. Meanwhile, Tom Teicholz works his way through myriad adaptations of Roth's novels in preparation for the upcoming opening of Elegy. |
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8/4/2008 Kings of Israel "We’re the ideal men," says Israeli performer Su Rath Knan, one-third of the Israeli drag trio the Schmooze Brothers. "We’re soft but cheeky and sexy." Among their characters are the "boyish, leering" Sultan SuleMan, and Poison Avi, "a character so exaggeratedly feminine she appears to be a man in drag." |
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8/4/2008 The Chosen Of the four potential running mates John McCain is supposedly considering, Eric Cantor is "by far the most exciting—though potentially risky—choice," says the Telegraph. The only Jewish Republican in the House of Representatives, Cantor could inherit Joe Lieberman's hope of becoming the first Jew to become veep. An announcement could be made as soon as Friday. |
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8/1/2008 Bend It Like Bernie Sixty Six opens today in New York City (and a week from today in L.A. and elsewhere). It's a British comedy, set in London in 1966, about a downtrodden 12-year-old named Bernie (Gregg Sulkin) who dreams that his upcoming bar mitzvah will get him the attention he craves—until he realizes it's scheduled for the same day as the World Cup final, which England is miraculously poised to reach. It's fast-paced and slick, with a case of the cutes. "You haven't got a foreskin when you're Jewish," Bernie declares in his narration, "so to make up for it you need a lot of balls." (Oy.) The combination of family bonding, sports hysteria, and nostalgia may make you gag—or weep, depending on your proclivities. The director, Paul Weiland (who co-wrote the script based on his own childhood experience), lays it on thick. Helena Bonham Carter is charming as Bernie's mum ("I had not 'done' Jewish before," she explained recently); seeing Peter Serafinowicz as Bernie's uncle just made me wish I was watching one of his amazing impersonation videos. But if you're going to see just one sentimental foreign film about the World Cup and Jewish values this year, make it Brazil's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, just out on DVD. It's set in 1970 and concerns a soccer-obsessed boy (Mauro, played by Michel Joelsas) who finds himself in the care of a gruff Orthodox man (Germano Haiut) in a lower-middle-class São Paolo neighborhood when his left-wing parents go underground. The director, Cao Hamburger, is less interested in nostalgia than in the details of street life and youthful intrigue. When the World Cup matches begin—Mauro's parents had told him they'd be back by the time they started—Mauro's devotion to his country's team is tinged with melancholy. |
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8/1/2008 Prelude to Disaster Asking "whether music can ever be a form of resistance to an evil ideology," Ronald Harwood's play Collaboration follows the relationship between Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig during the Nazi rise to power. It's running in repertory with Taking Sides, another of Harwood's meditations on the place of the artist in authoritarian society. |
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8/1/2008 Take Note Slate weighs in on the halachic nuances of Obama's purloined prayer note, which landed on the pages of Maariv. Jewish law frowns upon the practice of taking "something dedicated to God and use[ing] it for other purposes—like selling newspapers." |
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8/1/2008 Screen Shots BAM celebrates Elliott Gould with a festival of his '70s films. The actor's most excited to revisit Bergman's The Touch, in which he played "an alienated Jewish-American academic who wrecks the marriage of a Swedish couple," a role for which he considered himself "emotionally ill-equipped." Besides tax breaks, Israel's wooing foreign filmmakers with promises of "short distances, wide diversity of landscapes, the growing popularity of Israeli films," and more. Earlier, Stuart Klawans looked at the creative side of the country's motion picture biz. |
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7/31/2008 Back in the Kitchen Gays and lesbians have taken back the word “queer.” Feminists have taken back “bitch.” Some African-Americans have taken back the n-word, and after my recent trip to Portland, Oregon, I am reminded that vegans and environmentalists have taken back “dirty hippie.” Some Jews have taken back “heeb,” although I didn’t participate in that decision, and have never heard anyone use the word in normal conversation. But the idea that an ethnic slur is neutralized when used by the people it was designed to insult has gone too far when it morphs into an unironic embrace of false and embarrassing stereotypes. When Tina Fey said “bitches get stuff done” on Saturday Night Live, she was reclaiming a positive trait that women have been persecuted for displaying. When Georgie Tarn and Tracey Fine unleashed The Jewish Princess Cookbook (the authors are British, hence “JP” instead of “JAP”), they confirmed the supposed prevalence of a negative trait long unfairly associated with Jewish women. The actual recipes are fairly mundane and occasionally gross-sounding, and the illustrations are chick-lit boilerplate (pastel purses, shoes, diamond rings, and women with abnormally large heads). Pretty much all the “lifestyle” advice is demeaning, hackneyed, and brutally unfunny. Among the vows enumerated in “The Princess Pledge": “I pledge to have bling, but not to wear everything (at once)”; “I pledge that I will make the most of myself, embrace the good parts, and visit a plastic surgeon for the bad parts”; “I pledge that when I visit public bathrooms, I will do the ‘Princess Perch.’” It might as well say “I pledge to be the living embodiment of every cliché about materialistic, high-maintenance, and prissy Jewish females.” Tarn and Fine never miss a chance to extol vanity—carrot cake is “full of vitamins that can be used to improve your suntan,” a beet salad should be made “the day you’re going to have a manicure, since your hands can go a bit purple.” The “Princess Philosophy” section reads: “Today’s Jewish Princess wants to run a wonderful home, look good, produce lovely food, look good, look after her children—did I mention ‘look good’?” Implied throughout is the idea that actual eating is borderline sinful, as it may prevent you from looking like a trophy for the man who is presumably footing the bill for all the spa treatments and stilettos. One of the writers learned to bake “to cope with yearning for my knight in shining armor to turn up on his white charger.” Personally, I might need something stronger than a pastry to cope with such delusional shamelessness. Even the authors’ scant references to Judaism are shallow. After one recipe, they refer to “my grandmother-over-shalom,” which I assume is a childish misinterpretation of the phrase traditionally appended to the names of the dead, “Alav hashalom,” the equivalent of “rest in peace.” Although I searched the book's accompanying materials for a description like “tongue-in-cheek,” I discovered only that the authors’ bio says they relied on "common values” to write the book, and that it “isn’t just a how-to guide, it’s a way of life,” although it is meant to be "humorous" (I found it about as funny as a Sambo doll). It’s bad enough that women in general have to struggle against the ingrained perception that our worth begins and ends on the surface, and that Jews in general face stereotypes of being ostentatious and money-hungry. To reinforce the idea that Jewish women are the apotheosis of both these tired ideas is enough to make me lose my appetite. |
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7/31/2008 You’re Ugly, Too From Art Spiegelman’s “blood-chilling” relationship with his suicidal mother to Ariel Schrag’s sexual indiscretions, the artists named in the A.V. Club’s list of “unflattering moments from autobiographical comics” illustrate the extremes of self-deprecation. |
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7/31/2008 Making the Cut Finnish lawmakers are considering changing the country’s “hazy” circumcision law. New regulations could make the procedure legal so long as it’s “performed by a doctor, according to the parents’ wishes, and with the child's consent.” |
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7/31/2008 Horticultural Criticism For its first three seasons, “Weeds did well at mining Jewish issues for humor, while keeping the humor aimed away from the Jews themselves,” writes Adam Wilson in the Forward. Now, he worries that the show’s portrayal of a diverse contemporary Jewish America has given way to “goy-hating, cash-worshipping” cliché. |
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7/30/2008 My Heart Can’t Go On Two weeks ago, in my first post for Nothing Sacred, I complained that a brilliant filmmaker like Roman Polanski had no business visiting Auschwitz, the site of his mother’s death, with a filmmaker as crummy as Brett Ratner. I wanted to believe that a genuine artist would want nothing to do with a young hack whose films happen to have earned more than a billion dollars. But now I’m eating my words. In an interview last year with The A.V. Club, Ratner told the story of how Polanski came to appear in Ratner’s Rush Hour 3: Roman Polanski loves Rush Hour. Has the world gone mad? Reinforcing this cognitive dissonance is a passage in a book I happen to be reading right now, Carl Wilson’s brilliant | ||||
