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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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