PresenTense Magazine Issue One by PresenTense

PORTRAIT OF A WRITER: DARA HORN

JEWS IN SPACE: SCI-FI OF THE HEBREW KIND ISSUE ONE

TT hh ee FF ii rr ee TT hh ii ss TT ii m m ee

HERE HERE AND AND THERE: THERE: STILL STILL LIFE LIFE OF OF AN AN AMERICAN AMERICAN JEW JEW AND AND KATYUSHAS KATYUSHAS

Zionism and me

fall/Winter 2006

wrestling with israel

Tastes great, lesS filling the need for content in jewish culture

presentense $4.95

www.presentense.org

a soldier comes home memoir

contents

features

Here and There

editor & publisher Ariel Beery executive editor Beth Pollak senior editor Esther D. Kustanowitz associate editors Sam Brody, Alexandra Cooper,

David Dabscheck, Devorah Klein, Rebecca Leicht, Mordechai Levy-Eichel & Ariella Saperstein

assistant editors

Brauna Doidge, Jeremy Greenfield, Simi Hinden & michal Shinnar

music editor Sarah Sundberg poetry editor Yehuda Hausman food editor Miriam Segura theater editor Lonnie Schwartz development Polly Zavadivker art director Lina Tuv art team TALINA DESIGN\layout, hillel Smith\ads,

Alex bosco & adam levinstein\web, Peter Orosz\ food comic

photo editor Avital Aronowitz photographers Arnon Toussia-Cohen\COVER, NIV

CALDERON\COVER, eli somer\COVER, Hans Håkansson, paul burani, sarah mcgee, DANIEL K. GEBHART, PUJA PARAKH, ROB LEVY, LAYA MILLMAN, RINAT MALKES, CARLOS VILLARREAL, MARKUS WAGNER, JULIAN VOLOJ, THOMAS GIGOLD, STEVE RHODES, MICHELLE AMINI, SVEN WERKMEISTER & AVITAL ARONOWITIZ

still life of an american jew and katyushas by Lindsay Litowitz

Leaving the Laptop Behind college kids volunteer in the north by Jason Lustig

Sleepless in Seattle the attack on the federation by Shira Kaufman

waiting at the window the war back home by Alieza Salzberg

Txt Msg

the kibbutz and katyushas by Asaf Be’eri

Zionism and Me wrestling with israel

by Esther D. Kustanowitz

Home and Back Again returning to berkeley from the war by Stephanie May

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc -nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

creative commons we think the creative commons approach to content is smart because it gives creators flexibility in their licensing choices and it allows for seamless sharing of content. at presentense, our exclusive rights to content expire after no more than 120 days. at that time, we encourage our authors and photographers to adopt a cc license for their work. CC

WWW.PRESENTENSE.ORG printed in canada Post Office. Haifa, Israel

PresenTensemagazine.org contents

Photograph by Arnon Toussia-Cohen

issue one 2006

contents 34

reviews books

34 jews in space

sci-fi of the hebrew kind by Matthue Roth books

editorial 04

36 why this judaism is different protestant judaism

by Mordechai Levy-Eichel

books

37 searching for her humanity and anonymity in jerusalem

Letters to the editor

38 call for return fielding questions on lebanon by Lynley-Shimat Lys

around the world

06 sweden there are jews in sweden?

By Sarah Sundberg

08 denmark

great danes

by Karoline Raquel Henriques

09 argentina

habla hebreo?

By Gabriel Weitz

NEWS

17 all together now

the havurah movement lives on

by Ben Murane

19 holiday in the name of jewish social action month

by Paul Thomas

18 definition of the issue

tikkun

by Yoav Cohen

by Abigail Pickus

film

theater

39 tastes great, less filling

the need for content in jewish culture

by Avi Fox-Rosen

music

41 Four Sounds beats from around the world

by Shirley Furman

arts poetry

12 hizbullah

by Ben Pincus

poetry

22 our sons

by Miriam Lock

42 portrait of a writer

dara horn interviewed

by Ariella Saperstein

food

44 the whole wheat

28 today’s new Jews

views

wearing different hats by avi poupko

photoessay

whole-wheat pasta, shemura matzah, and other frum farinacious musings by Miriam Segura

memoir

46 a soldier comes home

by Oren Griffin

30 fingerprints of

backpage

deserted jewish new york by Julian Voloj

48 marine ecology of the middle east by william levin

PresenTense is a grassroots effort to invigorate Jewish Life and Hebrew Culture made possible by a network of friends and supporters. Special thanks to: Bleecker and Sullivan Advertising, the Croitoroos, the Hausmans, the ZAVADIVKERS, Lisa Eisen, Ariel Foxman, Inbal Freund, Zach Gelman, David Green, Yossi Klein Halevi, Marc Kramer, Jeff Rubin, Yehuda Sarna, Saul Singer, Roy Sparrow and Daniel Treiman. PresenTense has 501(c)3 nonprofit status thanks to the fiscal sponsorship of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and supports itself by selling advertising and receiving donations. Special support has been provided by the ICC Israel Action Grant Project, supported by the Avi Chai Foundation, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and Morris B. Squire. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SUPPORT PRESENTENSE IN ITS MISSION TO ENRICH JEWISH LIFE, PLEASE MAKE CHECKS PAYABLE TO THE NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR JEWISH CULTURE, NOTING “PRESENTENSE” IN THE MEMO LINE. CHECKS CAN BE MAILED TO: NFJC, 330 SEVENTH AVENUE, 21ST FL., NEW YORK, NY 10001 PRESENTENSE ACCEPTS SUBMISSIONS, PITCHES AND LETTERS TO THE EDITOR BY EMAIL: editor@presentense.org

02 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org contents

EDITORIAL

war and community

hen you think of war, what comes to mind? Most of us tend to think of war in an abstract sense. Living in the Western world, we, the children of a post-Vietnam and post-draft generation, are used to an unbearable lightness of citizenship. The most our countries ask from us is to pay taxes and to, sometimes, vote—which we do, sometimes. It is hard for many of us to imagine being called up in the middle of washing dishes, of walking to work, of packing a lunch, and told that we have eight hours to get to a military base because our country needs us to defend it with our lives. That call was received by hundreds of thousands of Israelis this past summer, and they responded in droves. Most units were overwhelmed by volunteers. Fathers kissed their young children, women left friends and partners with a hug, students left classes in the middle of finals week, and waiters left restaurants unstaffed to serve at different posts. It was normalcy interrupted; but such is the rhythm of life in Israel. What about those of us who could not or did not serve? Some rushed to the North to help however we could (“Here and There” and “Leaving the Laptop Behind” pages 10 and 14), others dealt with the war’s effects back home or at their jobs (“Waiting at the Window”, “Txt Msg” and “Home and Back Again” pages 20, 23 and 26), and there were those who saw the repercussions of the war within their own communities, even half a world away from the Middle East (“Sweden” and “Sleepless in Seattle” pages 6 and 15). While war raged in Israel, Jewish life continued around the world. Jewish life flourished in exciting new religious directions (“All Together Now” and “Today’s New Jews” pages 17 and 28), social directions (“Holiday in the Name Of ” page 19) and in all manner of cultural directions (see our packed review section, page 34). Books, films and music all continued to enhance the landscape of Jewish life and culture. As the late Israeli folk legend Meir Ariel once sung, “We got past Pharaoh, we’ll get past this too.” Will the cease-fire hold? Probably not, if Iran has anything to say about it. But even if peace prevails—as we all hope that it will—the questions the war has raised must be addressed by Jews around the world, whether or not they have a direct connection to the soldiers in the IDF, to those who live, fight and die for the Jewish right to exist in the only land we ever called home as a people. We hope PresenTense, as a transdenominational marketplace of ideas, will provoke awareness and discussion of these questions within our various communities. We look forward to hearing from you, our readers, even if you too have more questions than answers. editorial

PresenTensemagazine.org editorial

issue one 2006

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

An Artist’s Response

I was very pleased to see the coverage that the art exhibition 58 was given in PresenTense (“58,” Summer 2006).” Despite making certain choices that I would not have made when they described my work and the inspirations for what I captured through my cameras lens, I found the perspective of the reviewer useful towards examination of my work. I do want to say that the “nuisance” (p.34) of the wall was only the tip of the iceberg as far as I see the effect of the barrier on the population, since we have to be aware of various short term and long term effects of what I depicted in the pieces presented in the exhibit. To the people who have to live every day with artificial barriers to their lives it is much more than a nuisance. I also want to say that though I produced my work with a very specific intention, I present it to people to gaze on and see what they will. If it can produce conflict and heat, and from that can come discussion, that is also part of my intention. Thank you again for your publication’s support of Jewish arts and arts in general.

such a community with open arms. I hope the American Jewish community can heed Juan Mejia’s thoughtful call for action so that the world Jewish community will recognize the right of all individuals who were once among our people to come home. Jerry Goldstein New York, NY.

Social Justice for All

Congratulations to Benjamin Small for his revealing piece on Jewish poverty in New York (“Jewish Poverty: In Our Own Backyard,” Summer 2006). The ignorance of many Jewish New Yorkers to the poverty that permeates the Russian, Orthodox and elderly communities reflects the pro-found separation that exists within our community. However, despite the shortcomings cited

by William Rapfogel and John Ruskay, both men oversee very successful social service agencies that are the envy of their field. Jews still do, by and large, take care of their own. The question I would ask is, “What is the Jewish community doing to end the systemic poverty that plagues Jews and non-Jews alike?” Here our record is less impressive. While individual Jews support economic justice work, few Jewish foundations or large donors do. With some important exceptions, including national organizations like Jewish Funds for Justice (where I am currently employed) and the Religious Action Center, or local ones like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York and Progressive Jewish Alliance in California, Jewish groups do not challenge the systems that

keep wages low, housing scarce, health care unaffordable, and public education inadequate. In any case, keep up the good work, PresenTense. An auspicious debut. MIk moore New York, NY.

Don’t Think Too Hard

Quite frankly, your critic (“Guilt-Free Jewish Theater,” Summer 2006) is clearly out of touch with our audiences and the majority of theatergoers—she needs to lighten up and laugh— theatre can be fun and it’s ok to have a good time and laugh at yourself (just like the 300,000 people that have seen our show and made it one of the biggest hits in town). Sincerely, the producers Jewtopia

Shlomo Adam Roth North American Director of Hashomer Hatzair, New York, NY.

Recognize Rights of Latin Jews

I was shocked and appalled to hear how Latin Jews who have reconnected with their heritage have been treated by the world Jewish community (“Los Judios Nuevos,” Summer 2006). I was especially perplexed by Israel’s actions—it seems to me that a country that unceasingly advocates for immigration would welcome

04 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org letters

AROUND THE WORLD

Sweden, a country of nine million, is home to approximately eighteen thousand Jews. Swedenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Jewish community might be small, but unlike others in Europe, it flourished after World War II due to an influx of of post-war immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe and their descendants.

Raoul Wallenberg Monument. Stockholm, Sweden

06 issue one 2006

Photograph by Hans Hakansson

PresenTensemagazine.org around the world

SWEDEN

there are jews in sweden?

When I tell Americans that I am a Swedish Jew, the reaction runs the gamut from incredulity to curiosity. Growing up, I was aware that it was a tad unusual to be Jewish in Sweden, but it wasn’t until I moved to New York that I realized that most American Jews view Jews from anywhere in Europe as a strange and near-extinct species. “I often encounter the question of whether there is a future for Jewish life in Europe,” said Noomi Weinryb, deputy director of Paideia, a center for Jewish studies in Stockholm. “People think that it’s all about the Holocaust. Growing up in Stockholm, that’s not even an issue really, but that’s the level of reasoning that I deal with.” If negative attitudes toward Jews exist in Sweden, they tend to be subtle. A recent survey concerning anti-Jewish attitudes in Sweden conducted by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention and The Living History Forum was publicized in Sweden last spring. Levels of anti-Semitism in Sweden are likely no worse than in the United States and, as Weinryb points out, “it would be off the mark to label Sweden as anti-Semitic.” However, some of the survey results were disturbing. Among other things, 26 percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement “Jews have major influence on the global economy.” The survey also showed that antiJewish ideas in Sweden were tied to negative feelings toward Israel, and that the levels of “systematically anti-Semitic views” were significantly higher among Muslims (39 percent) than in the overall Swedish population (5 percent). The survey was widely criticized in the media; many professed disbelief in the results. Critics said survey questions were too slanted and the research methods not rigorous enough. To be a Swede

Some of the media criticism of the survey seemed like a knee-jerk reaction stemming from the collective Swedish self-image of Sweden as the neutral and infinitely tolerant country of Raoul Wallenberg. One might say that the survey was only the latest way in which this self-image had been tested by the relatively new phenomenon of sizeable ethnic minorities living in Sweden. Jews were more or

PresenTensemagazine.org around the world

less the only ethnic minority (besides Roma) in Sweden until 20 or 30 years ago, when the country saw an influx of larger groups of immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Middle East. Swedes currently are in the process of redefining “Swedishness” as they negotiate newly hyphenated identities. The bulk of Swedish Jews differ from other ethnic minorities in that most are born in Sweden and tend to be highly integrated into Swedish society. Yet many people in Sweden retain an essentially ethnic, rather

same humanistic impulse to side with the apparent underdog has also contributed to Sweden’s long-standing reputation as a proPalestinian country. “Opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have become a way of sparring in political debates, even though Swedish opinions don’t matter on the ground in Israel,” said Jonatan Fried, a Swedish-Jewish political blogger and freelance writer. There is perhaps also a tendency in Sweden to relate to minorities primarily

If a minority can’t be pitied and cared for, then how does one relate to it? than civic, definition of what a Swede is. Partly due to the impulse to resist assimilation and partly due to appearance, Jews in Sweden fall somewhere between recent immigrants and ethnic Swedes on the scale of what is considered “Swedish.” “The differentiation between Swedes and others is based on the way you look, your name and your accent,” said Swedish-Jewish playwright Jonathan Metzger. “If you look dark like me, people will assume that you’re an immigrant and will classify you as one, then when they hear you speak perfect Swedish, they get confused and re-classify.” Anti-Jewish or Anti-Israel?

Other forms of xenophobia no doubt present a bigger problem and have a wider impact in Sweden today than anti-Semitism. Yet one result of the survey that most seem to agree with is the degree to which anti-Jewish sentiment in Sweden is connected to antiIsrael attitudes. “I’ve never felt threatened as a Jew in Sweden,” Metzger said. “However, lately I do feel that the language has changed in mainstream media. It has become more acceptable to say certain things, never explicitly anti-Jewish, but insinuations about the Israel Lobby and Jewish power have become more common.” Jews are the archetypal minority in Europe and have since the Holocaust been poster children for where European xenophobia can lead. The Swedish ethos of solidarity with oppressed minorities led to much Swedish sympathy for European Jews in the post-war years and a flurry of Holocaust remembrance in the ‘90s. The

as victims. “Jewish community leaders sometimes fall into playing the role of theJew-as-victim,” Fried said, “but there is also a way in which the government likes to place all minorities in the victim category.” Herein lies part of the duality in Swedish attitudes toward Jews. If a minority can’t be pitied and cared for, then how does one relate to it? “Many people in Sweden have a hard time squaring the image of the Israeli perpetrator with the image of the Jew as Holocaust victim,” Metzger said. “A fairly common perception in Sweden is that Jews only have themselves to blame if certain Muslims hate them, because of what ‘they’ are doing to the Palestinians. Jews are often lumped together with Israel in the public debate, which is a problem.” Metzger adds that Jews in Sweden struggle to reconcile their relationship to Israel with their identity as Swedish Jews. “Jews in Sweden try to have it both ways. On the one hand we say ‘We’re not Israelis, we’re Jews. Why are you calling in threats to the synagogue in Stockholm? On the other hand the Jewish congregation, which supposedly represents all Jews in Stockholm, gives official uncritical support to every Israeli political and military action. That is a very mixed message to be sending.” Or just xenophobia?

While increased conflict in Israel and the Middle East provokes some anti-Jewish feelings, general xenophobia, especially antiMuslim sentiment, also appears to be hard to eradicate. It follows that the discussion of Muslim anti-Jewish prejudice is politically

issue one 2006

incorrect, enmeshed in a messy web of Swedish guilt and anxiety over immigration, racism and integration. One question that might be more prescient than the nuances of possible Swedish anti-Semitism is the general level of acceptance of ethnic minorities. Can one compare Jews to newer immigrant minorities in Sweden, such as Middle Eastern, or Latin American immigrants? Jews are a tiny minority compared to many newer immigrant groups in Sweden, and while Jews might worry about Swedish attitudes towards Jews, other Swedes don’t necessarily spend much time thinking about Jews. “Surveys show that Swedes are secretly anti-Semitic,” Fried said, “but I just don’t think it’s something people really think about a whole lot. ‘The Jew’ is more of an abstract entity, almost a mythical figure in the Swedish consciousness.” Fried said that immigrant groups with the experience of multiple migrations share similarities with Jews in Sweden. “Kurds, for instance, tend to want to be associated with Jews, but the conditions are completely different,” he said. “Jews in Sweden are more like the Italians and Yugoslavians who came as guest workers in the ‘60s, to a welcoming land of plenty. No Jew in Sweden today has had to fight for acceptance in the public arena. The similarity with newer immigrant groups would be the random hate crimes that afflict everyone who is, or is expected to be, different.” The most relevant problem from a Jewish perspective is perhaps defining the line between legitimate anti-Israeli opinions and anti-Jewish stereotypes. There is no doubt that anti-Israeli attitudes do, at times, spill over into anti-Jewish stereotypes and prejudices. It is also clear that there are upswings in such tendencies at times of unrest in the Middle East, as became evident with the recent Israeli bombings of Lebanon and war with Hizbullah. In the first weeks of the conflict there were two separate demonstrations where swastikas where superimposed on stars of David on banners. In late August anti-Israeli protestors clashed with pro-Israeli demonstrators at a demonstration held in central Stockholm by the Sweden-Israel Friendship Association and the Swedish Zionist Federation. “Our community leaders do speak up whenever there is an incident or whenever

08 issue one 2006

things get out of hand and authorities listen,” Weinryb said. “But we as Jews can’t start saying that you’re not allowed to criticize Israel in Swedish media—then we would have a far more censored media than Israel has.” The answer is likely to be found in making room for a wider definition of Swedishness, rather than in trying to silence extreme or politically incorrect opinions. Sweden has its work cut out in terms of redefining national identity, but hopefully that process is underway. Sarah Sundberg Sarah Sundberg lives in New York. Her recent writing includes articles for Nerve.com and Surface Magazine.

DENMARK

great danes

Christian X

Photograph by Paul Burani

When people mention Jews and Denmark, one often hears the wonderful story of Danish king Christian X during World War II. On the morning when the Nazis decreed that all Danish Jews must wear armbands with a yellow star, the king himself wore one on his morning horseback ride through the streets of Copenhagen to show that all Danes are equal. The king’s courageous act encouraged other Danes to follow suit and also don armbands,

effectively thwarting the order. There is only one problem with this uplifting story: it isn’t true. But the pervasiveness of this tale says much about how integrated Jews have felt in Denmark since their arrival back in 1624.

Do Danes make good Jews? From originally being confined, on the orders of the king, to small towns in southern Jutland, the Jewish community slowly spread to bigger towns with Copenhagen serving as its focal point since the 1700s. In tandem with this process, Jews have become remarkably integrated into Danish society, as parents choose quintessential Danish names—as opposed to Jewish ones—for their children. In fact, the word “Jewish” is not even found in the official community designation; instead, we go by the name, “The Congregation of the People of the Mosaic Faith.” So even though the above story was not true, the Danes did rescue some 7000 Jews—almost the complete community—during the war, largely due to their amazement that the Nazis would make a distinction between Danish citizens. While divisiveness and infighting are often met with a knowing smile in many Jewish communities, visitors to Denmark are shocked to discover that we are an “only one” community. There is only one Jewish day school, only one butcher shop, only one rabbi (who is also the only mohel), only one synagogue (where practically everyone complains about the service, but that’s also strangely unifying), only one kindergarten, and only one Jewish cemetery. However, it is difficult to judge how long this unison will last. There are constant rumblings about splitting up and each little group having its own congregation. Of course, even Solomon’s wisdom would be sorely tested deciding how to divide up all these ones, so for the moment this prospect is unlikely. But there is no doubt that life in Denmark has been good to the Jewish community. The welfare state still works and with the high taxes comes free access to education, hospitals and universities. Although the Jews here have been subject to rising anti-Semitism that is a feature across Europe, at the same time there has been a noticeable philo-Semitism among native Danes. For example, during the infamous “Danish

PresenTensemagazine.org around the world

cartoon incident” when Danish embassies were being torched, a common refrain heard on the street was, “This would never have happened with the Jews!” As a result, among the public the general consensus is that Jews make good Danes. However, this hides the real question: do Danes make good Jews? There is a certain feeling of “roughing it” when you live a Jewish life in Denmark. There are no major cultural events or a choice of synagogues to join. If you keep kosher there are only a small selection of products to choose from and there is not even “only one” kosher restaurant. As a result, any Jewish life demands actual effort that fewer and fewer people are willing to invest. Moreover, intermarriage in Denmark is the rule, not the exception—not surprising since it’s hard to find someone that you aren’t either related to or know from kindergarten. The community is so small that if on Thursday you met someone at a café, you can be sure you’ll be asked questions Saturday in shul about it…by his mother! Those who want to live an active Jewish life either make aliyah—emigrate to Israel—or move to bigger Jewish communities in other countries. Is it then possible for a Jewish community to survive in Denmark when fewer and fewer people are involved? And what happens if this community, which barely manages being one, splits into two? However, at the same time there are people dedicated to a Jewish way of life and willing to fight for it. Most important is a small, but noticeable, group of younger Jews who, while they still feel completely Danish, embrace Jewish culture in a way that their parents would have scarcely imagined. Jewish names are worn proudly and there is a concerted effort to organize youth-oriented activities. Looking at this group it will be a long time before there is “only one” Jew in Denmark. Karoline Raquel Henriques Karoline Raquel Henriques is working towards her MA in comparative religious studies at the University of Copenhagen and is the former editor of Funky Jewish.

ARGENTINA

habla hebreo?

After living in Rosario, it is not hard to see why it is said that when the Jews immigrated to Argentina they left their caftans on the boat. That is not to say we are an irreligious lot: out of a community of fewer than 10,000 Jews, we easily can get a few hundred to every Kabbalat

PresenTensemagazine.org around the world

Shabbat and almost 2000 for what a rabbi once called “Judaism’s Super Bowl,” Yom Kippur. But stop any young boy or girl on the street and ask them what do they think is the most important ritual in their Jewish life and you won’t hear many say a bar or bat mitzvah. Instead, without missing a beat, they will blurt out the name of one of the many youth trips to Israel that the community offers, especially the year-long programs, like the one I did between high school and university. Maybe it’s because of the prominence of agricultural communities in our early history, but Argentinean Jewish life has always been infused with a strong secular Zionist component. From the beginning, the Yiddish spoken here did not have the religious inflections of the Rebbes, but rather carried Sholom Aleichem’s secular tone. Kids learned Israel’s national anthem “Hatikvah” before the Shema Israel, and kosher food was not as important as donating money to the JNF. In contrast to the attitude of American Jewry, the Argentinean writer Eliahu Toker wrote: “Of course there is much to do here, as an Argentinean. And there is also the language, the streets, the people, the friends. But there is a living Israel that calls me, and a Jerusalem with which I have a date fixed since centuries ago...” Given this, it is no surprise that Argentina is often cited as the place outside of Israel where Hebrew is best spoken. Last year, a Peruvian tourism agency desperately seeking tour guides for the thousands of Israelis visiting its country came to “recruit” them from Argentina, a country where they knew they would find Hebrew- and Spanish-speaking youth. As a result, when the Jewish community organizations were founded throughout Argentina, it wasn’t only religious bonds and common history that forged ties, but also the desire to build a Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel. Attendance in Jewish schools, which included a strong Zionist element, was almost mandatory among Argentinean youth. Youth groups sprung up throughout the country advocating aliyah, or immigration to Israel. Over the last few years, however, Rosario’s

Jewish community has been hit with many problems. Argentina’s recent financial crisis caused economic difficulties, hurting the Jewish community. A waning of the Zionist spirit, rising intermarriage and increase in assimilation have caused ideological challenges. But we are working to overcome these setbacks. We have reorganized the community, are working on youth outreach programs, and have been helped along the way by American Jewish organizations that have provided us with much needed economic aid. There are still debates between those who think we should all pack our things and move to Israel, and those who believe the Diaspora is an equal option for Jewish life. I, siding with the latter, sometimes feel uneasy working in a community where, until 20 years ago, most Jewish institutions were considered pre-aliyah education. Fortunately, during the last decade most Jews have realized that, just as some Jews stayed in Babel after the Persians, there will always be Jews in Argentina. Gabriel Weitz Gabriel Weitz lives in Rosario, Argentina, and is the editor of STAM!, a magazine for young Jews in Argentina.

A generation ago, in a millioninhabitant city in middle Argentina, there were Jewish youth groups that wouldn’t let you in unless you made a commitment to make aliyah before the age of 25. Sound strange? Welcome to Rosario, Argentina.

issue one 2006

news

“Lindsay Sara, are you going back up north for Shabbat?” “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m staying on campus.”

echnically, I wasn’t lying to my mother. The organization I work for in the United States, Livnot U’Lehibanot, has a campus in Jerusalem as well as in Tzfat. But in a week when Katyushas had begun to rain down on the northern border of Israel, I decided it was better to tell my CNN-addicted mother about my trip north once I had already returned to Jerusalem. The drive from Jerusalem to Tzfat is one I have done many times, and it is one of my favorites. You leave the intensity and noise of the city of Jerusalem behind and enter the calm, lush Galilee. You pass boutique vineyards and villages against a backdrop of pine and fir forests, and valleys with fields of olives, bananas and sunflowers. This time, however, once we left the hills outside of Jerusalem, we were alone. Suddenly, there was no traffic in either direction. Patches of forest were scorched from Katyusha rockets and the ensuing fires. At Afula, army supply trucks whizzed past us as they rushed north. I was lost in my own thoughts when there was a loud boom not too far off. The car phone rang—“Are you okay? A rocket just fell on Afula,” the speakerphone announces.“Yeah, we know. We are fine,” answers the driver, the father of a friend of mine in the army who was getting ready to go off to Lebanon. Then the ambulances begin to scream by. I know that I have now entered a war zone. Life in the north had gone underground. Bomb shelters housed ten families or more in one big room. Most of the shelters were not ready for use when the rockets started falling; some had no running water, electricity, or toilets. There was a severe shortage in food and supplies. Many of the elderly watched their foreign caretakers flee when the rockets came, leaving them with no assistance at all. One old woman was found sitting in her apartment, in the dark, with a bottle of eye drops in her hand. She had an eye infection, and because her caretaker had left days ago,

10 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org news

NEWS here and there

still life of an american jew and katyushas

PresenTensemagazine.org NEWS

issue one 2006

OPPOSITE Boy in Shelter Photograph by Arnon Toussia-Cohen TOP LEFT Caution: Children Crossing

Photograph by Eli Somer TOP RIGHT

poetry

HIZBULLAH

An Editor’s Request Her title said it all. The banality of evil lies in its cliché: I know—let’s kill the Jews! Beware the poet. Canny, he will photoshop your brain, create smoke where there was none remind you of things you thought you knew, that Julius Reuter was a Jew, point out the stain of politics, naming the bloody thing Fagin. Uh-huh.

He will use Greek ideas in a Jewish poem, the last report of a cynic: the first bush took us to a land with no oil. Next, it was Scuds galore. Stiff-necked we missed the point earning another monsoon of missiles, the collective failure of dumb silence, moving forward, more fearful than angry. Bereft of prayer, shall we speak of stigmata? No! Don’t worry, my weary ones, the ashes of Isaac cry out from the altar, his Shofar confusing the Accuser, again like a B-movie villain who just doesn’t get it, until he does get it. It will end as all governments end, with Me. You were expecting gore? Could Hillary have said it better? We end in a prosthetic. Ben Pincus Ben Pincus is a Jew curmudgeon poet who received his MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University.

there was no one to open her eye medicine. When the bombing started, I was working in the office in Tzfat. I took refuge in a bomb shelter with a family I knew well, helping the mother keep the kids busy. After a long period of quiet, I decided to collect my stuff from a heavily exposed room overlooking Mount Meron, where I would definitely not be sleeping. The youngest son, Yitzhar, wanted to come with me. He grabbed my hand and we walked down a few steps to my room. Amzar, an Israeli who takes care of the campus, was in my room, changing the sheets on the bed

12 issue one 2006

Photograph by Sarah McGee

as if we were receiving new guests. He asked me what I was doing, as I quickly stuffed my clothes into a bag. I told him that it was not safe to sleep in this room and I was going to stay somewhere more protected. He let out a hearty chuckle and proclaimed that rockets would never fall here. And that is when I heard it, the piercing whistle of a Katyusha falling. “Get down!” Amzar yelled. We had four to five seconds to take cover. BOOM. It landed 50 meters below and to the right of my room. I did not have time to process what had happened. I immediately went into mother-mode—protect this child and get to safety. I scooped him up and ran up the stairs into a safe room. Hours later, once we saw that no rocket had hit too close for a while, I walked around Tzfat taking pictures of the damage. It was the second day of rocket attacks and no one knew how many more there would be, or where they were going to land. Walking around in the open was not the smartest thing to do, but even seeing the damage with my own eyes did not dissuade me—I felt invincible. I left for Jerusalem days later, but I couldn’t stay there, knowing what the citizens of Tzfat were facing, so I returned. I wanted to help. When I arrived in Tzfat it was late on a Friday afternoon, and the usually bustling city, where people scurry last minute to finish Shabbat preparations, was silent. All of the bakeries, kiosks and grocery stores were closed. In fact, all of the shops on the main street, Rehov Yerushalayim, were closed, except for a small vegetable store. The majority of the people of Tzfat had evacuated, while the remaining citizens—the elderly, the poor and the obstinate—sat at home or holed up in bomb shelters. With planes circling south to put out fires from Katyusha rockets in the surrounding hills, and planes heading north to fight for Israel, the sun slowly set. The group of volunteers I joined up with—staff members of Livnot and their families, three American rabbis, IDF soldiers and others—stood together on the rooftop and prayed for a peaceful Shabbat, facing the fires that continued to burn on nearby Mount Meron. As darkness crept in, and with synagogues closed, we headed to the center of the Old City. The sounds of our voices in the main square attracted a crowd. We were soon joined by the Chief Rabbi of Tzfat, who danced arm-in-arm with soldiers about to head to Lebanon, longtime residents who refused to leave their beloved city, and twenty other brave souls from all over Israel. We celebrated Shabbat against the background noise of Israeli artillery taking out Hizbullah strongholds in southern Lebanon. Shabbat morning was spent visiting the bomb shelters. At one shelter in Tzfat’s Old City, Nechama, an eight-year-old girl wearing a white Shabbat dress, followed a volunteer out of her shelter for the

PresenTensemagazine.org NEWS

first time in days. Her parents were resting on the floor, lying on thin, worn-out mattresses. Some families had been inside for days, without changing clothes, or getting fresh supplies. In the new city of Tzfat, several residents of an eight-story apartment building gathered outside the bomb shelter. Three women, representing three generations from Ethiopia, told us that they had no food and were too scared to leave their apartment building to go to a grocery store five blocks away. The grandmother, in traditional Ethiopian dress, gave me a huge hug and cried as we sang “Am Yisrael Chai” together. The daughter, in jeans and a t-shirt, spoke English well and proudly announced that she would be joining the Israeli army in a few months when she turns eighteen. She did not have a Hebrew name, so one of the visiting rabbis named her Tova and offered her a blessing: that she shall only see good in her life. On we walked—now to the Tzfat Hospital, which had been hit several days ago by a Katyusha. There, we met two soldiers who had just returned from the Lebanese border. One had been hit in the neck by shrapnel, just three millimeters from his spine. A few millimeters to the right and he would have been completely paralyzed. He had

BOOM. I went into mothermode—protect this child and get to safety. surgery earlier that day and is expected to walk out of the hospital. The other soldier was wounded in a tank and brought into a Lebanese house where he laid by himself for two days, listening to gunfire being exchanged. He was taken by tank to the border, switched to a car, then to an ambulance, and finally flown into the Tzfat hospital via helicopter. Hopefully, he will be able to go home soon. It was starting to get late and the sun was sinking in the afternoon sky. Shabbat was coming to a close. Some say, if you never make Havdallah and celebrate the start of a new week, Shabbat goes on and you can stay in that space of sacred time forever. I have never wanted more that Shabbat should never end. Shabbat in Tzfat had somehow kept me safe and protected. It had also protected my friend who was now going off to war. But time waits for no one; the wine was poured, the candles were lit, and the spices smelled, and we bid our protection goodbye. I sat with my friend and we talked for a few hours. It was late and time to say goodbye, and I was speechless. What could I possibly say? There I was, no less a Jew than my friend, no less capable of firing a weapon or risking my life for our homeland. But tomorrow morning he would be off to Lebanon and I would be on a plane back to New York City. I did not allow myself to think about leaving Israel until then. But reality had its way of reminding me. It came in the form of my mother telling me she had a surprise: she was going to treat me to a haircut at an upscale salon upon my return. She would take time off from work and we were going to make a day of it, complete with lunch at my favorite restaurant. Dazed, I realized she was planning our luxurious outing for the day of Tisha B’av, the day Judaism sets aside for the mourning of the destruction of the Temple and the expulsion of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel. As a relatively non-observant Jew, I grew up secular and did not know much about

PresenTensemagazine.org NEWS

Judaism. I did not even know what Tisha B’av was until I lived in Israel. But now, just the thought of getting my hair cut on Tisha B’av, in a beauty salon with perfectly manicured Jewish women, as a war raged in Israel, made me feel uncomfortable. I explained how I felt to my mother; she was disappointed, but she understood. Back in New York, I abandoned my linen wardrobe and scarves for jeans and t-shirts; I sipped coffee with friends; I strolled through Central Park and discussed the latest independent movies. But when I would hear a car backfire or loud construction on the street I was immediately taken back to Tzfat. Back in New York, two men yell at each other on the street, young women yearn for the latest designer purses as they window shop, and 9-to-5ers divulge their innermost thoughts on their cell phones at crosswalks. Don’t they know a war is happening? I want to scream. Don’t they know that my friend is covering his face in green and black paint, getting ready to enter another village in southern Lebanon? Back in New York, I found myself on Friday looking for a place for a Shabbat meal. I called three separate Jewish organizations hosting Friday night meals for young Jews. I was told there was no space at the table or not enough food for me. How could I be turned away for a Shabbat meal? How could a Jew refuse another asking to attend a Friday night dinner? Back in Israel, my last Shabbat dinner consisted of twenty hungry Jews squeezed into one tiny Jerusalem apartment. People literally sat on top of one another. We accommodated last-minute visitors by having people share plates, forks and napkins. Some even ate off of pot lids. Even though the circumstances were not the most comfortable, there we sat, squished and happy with our new “plate buddies.” I long to return to Israel and the north. LiNdsay Litowitz Lindsay Litowitz is the Recruitment Director for Livnot U’Lehibanot in New York City. Livnot is currently running a volunteer program out of its campus in Tzfat; repairing and renovating bomb shelters, clearing debris and rebuilding buildings that were hit by Katyushas during the war.

W i s h yo u w e re p r e se n t ? a dv e rt i s e i n the pr e s e nt e n se a d s @p r e s e nt e nse m ag azi n e . o r g issue one 2006

leaving the laptop behind college kids volunteer in the north

Photograph by Daniel K. Gebhart

ow did you get to Israel? “I was in the camps. Auschwitz.” Really? “Oh, yes.” Six old yekkes, but this was not the old folks’ home. We did not come here to die, but to survive. It was the miklat—that stuffy, claustrophobic, closed-on-four-sides bomb-shelter built into the bottom of every building in Israel. Never entered, but always ready for when (never if ) the rockets come. It was Nahariyya, the city for ohavim et hahayim, lovers of life. But now it was dead and cold without the heat of feet padding their ways up Ga’aton, the wide main street meant for a bustling city, not Katyusha missiles. As the air-raid sirens cut through the afternoon heat, we raced down the stairs from the apartment, watching the elders as they carefully descended to enter the miklat in time. This was not Dresden, Hiroshima, nor Pol Pot’s killing fields. Nahariyya was not demolished, but it was a war zone in other ways. It was as if we had stepped out of the reality of our daily lives in Jerusalem and into a nightmare. In Jerusalem, we could live in a bubble, dreaming that everything was calm, whereas here we had stepped into a dystopian reality: we were the only people in an entire city, which, just weeks before, had brimmed with the excitement of World Cup soccer matches rather than Katyusha rockets. I don’t think that our friends in the miklat had actually watched the World Cup; they just didn’t seem the type. They did have a television, which they immediately flipped to the news to see if anyone had died. That’s just what you

14 issue one 2006

did, to make sure that your family in Tzfat and Haifa was safe. Thousands of generous Israelis sent help up to the north in many ways: food for those who needed to eat, toys for those who needed to play, and money for those who needed to go out on the town. After so many of my friends had been called up to serve in the army or had lost someone, I couldn’t sit behind my desk and read the news all day. Whenever I am in the States reading the news on the Middle East, I always wish that I could do something, anything, to help out in Israel. Now that I found myself in the Jewish Homeland when the Jewish People needed help, I had to do something. I decided to send myself, so I could deliver supplies in person, together with a smile and a healthy slice of solidarity. I wasn’t the only one. In the basement of the Hotel Carlton in Nahariyya, you could meet Jews from places as far away as Brooklyn and Boston. Perhaps more had come in ’67, but this conflict is no less of an existential one for the Jewish State. Perhaps Israel did not fare so well in the international media, but the real, supremely intense front of this war was not external but extremely personal. For us, this war is—not was, because it is not yet finished—not only about fighting the terrorists and our right to live in peace and quiet in our own country, but about the unity of the Jewish People. As the empty beds, rooms, and floors of Israel filled with Jewish refugees, we all realized the age-old wisdom of the Jews: unless we all stick together, we will all wither away separately. Who will come to our aid except our own? What we learned as we huddled in the shelters is that some of us still believe that by flying around the world, we can make a real difference in strengthening our people. The general goal was to be with the children. An adult accustomed to a desk job has a much easier time sitting in a shelter for weeks at a time. Children have higher standards. Not only is it harder for them to sit still, but it is also difficult to explain to them that there are people who want to kill you simply because you are Jewish and want to have a country of your own, just like everyone else.

But in the building where we were, we did not find any children. They had been sent away long ago, when a Katyusha crashed the party down the street. Here, we met older residents, true veterans of the eternal Jewish war for survival. “Do you want something to drink?” No, thank you. “We’ll bring you some water…How about some cake?” How strange it must be to find yourself with house guests during a time of war. Here we were, bringing them food, and they would not stop asking us to eat theirs! They simply would not be quiet until we each had multiple pieces of their Strauss cake, likely one of the last items left, seeing as how the supermarket had been closed for nearly a month. “Aren’t you hungry? It’s lunch time! Chaim, go turn on the oven and put some burekas in so we can have something real to eat.” No, thank you very much, we protested, but we are fine, we already ate! “What, are you on a diet or something?” Perhaps the most striking element was the bizarre sense of normalcy. How was this different from a “normal” day in the life of Israel? It seems as if our neighbors have always been trying to kill us; this time we just felt it a bit more acutely. Nothing has really changed, and next week it will probably be the same. The best we can do is to keep going. If we ever stop living, we will start dying. For our new friends, this topsy-turvy world is nothing new. They grew up in Hungary, Romania, Germany and many other places, only to be thrown into the German camps, rescued by the Russians, and subsequently thrown into British camps. Finally, they entered their homeland. Did they settle in a beautiful little city in the north to be forced into coarse, above-ground coffins prematurely? For them, this is just another step on the bleak service road known as the fate of their people. But tomorrow the sun will rise, along with the Katyushot from the hijacked garages of Lebanese civilians, and our friends will know that we are still with them—even when we return to our comfortable coffee shops, dorm rooms, and ivory towers across the ocean where no one can touch us. Jason Lustig Jason Lustig is one of the founders of Chalav U’Dvash, Brandeis’ Journal of Zionist Thought.

PresenTensemagazine.org NEWS

sleepless in seattle

the attack on the federation

Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle

Photograph by Puja Parakh

eattle—The closer we are to violence, the scarier it becomes. However, geographical proximity is not the only factor determining how threatening violence can feel. Personally identifying with victims of violence, no matter how spatially distant they might be, can make that violence scary, too. On July 28, an afternoon like most others, a lone gunman walked into the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. Proclaiming to be a Muslim angry about Israel, he gunned down six people, murdering one. Geographically speaking, the Arab-Israeli conflict definitely hit closer to home for us in Seattle than it had in the past. The event is deeply changing the way that some locals approach issues of violence against the Jewish people. But others just assimilate the event into their already-existing paradigm for understanding all acts of terrorism. Such horrendous violence has never struck the local Jewish community, which has a population of approximately 30,000 and has had a presence in Seattle since before 1894. Jewish organizations and synagogues have implemented increased security measures. Many Jewish organizations have moved their operations to undisclosed sites. Individuals working for Jewish organizations have expressed a heightened level of fear, some describing a feeling of anxiety at a simple knock on their office door. The president of Seattle’s local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) advised that the community refrain from attending Sabbath evening services the night of the shooting, and some synagogues cancelled Friday night services entirely. Many local Jews vocally and physically protested this response. Going to synagogue that night became tantamount to a political statement for many people, not just a form of religious expression. This shooting also affected local Jews who had never before been active members of the Jewish community, but perhaps are now feeling the dangers of anti-Semitism in their midst. Lay leaders have remarked that people have been coming out of the woodwork to discuss

PresenTensemagazine.org NEWS

community responses to the shooting. Even those who were barely part of “the community” before seem to be participating. The violence has also struck an emotional chord with non-Jewish Seattleites. The Benzikrys, an Israeli family that has maintained strong ties and affinity to Israel while living in one of Seattle’s suburbs for more than twenty years, remarked that this was the first time their non-Jewish neighbors have reached out to them regarding violence against the Jewish people. Several local Jews have even mentioned being approached by a total strangers expressing concern and blessings to the community. Lauren Jackson, a non-Jewish Seattle WNBA player, placed flowers at the front of the Federation building shortly after the shooting. In her words, “this just hits too close to home.” However, even with an outpouring of support following the shooting, some community members say this attack is no more significant than previous acts of violence. “We already knew Al-Qaeda had outposts in our backyard here in Seattle…as an American living in these times, terrorism is just not a shock anymore,” said Jack Ross, a politically active young Jewish community member. Others say that this the attack is not only an extension of terrorism in America, but also part of an international terror campaign against the Jewish people. Somehow, being just two blocks away from an

Why should violence have to happen in our geographical backyard for us to internalize that it is against us as Jews? attack, as I was for this recent shooting, didn’t make it feel that much closer than being two states away, as I was at the time of the 1999 attack on a Jewish day care center in Los Angeles. Or two continents away, during the ongoing conflict in Israel. Why do some Jews feel the pain of other Jews accutely even when they are geographically remote from each other? Many Jews have a deep personal identification with other Jews, one that supersedes feeling closely connected to, say, Seattle. Tamar Benzikry noted that her non-Jewish neighbors did not react and reach out following international attacks on Jews to the same degree that they showed their empathy in response to the recent Seattle attacks. “Why did they never express their concern before?” she said. “They know we are Israeli, they know all of our relatives live there, and they see the war all over the news for years…why only now?” But for many Jews, violence against our people continents away is just as threatening as violence that is very close. Indeed, why should violence have to happen in our geographical backyard for us to internalize that it is against us as Jews? We are too familiar with terrorism against us. Perhaps we are failing to see how

issue one 2006

much danger we, as American Jews, now face. Doesn’t the violence against us always seem to be written off? ‘It’s because of the ‘Occupation,’ ‘it’s because of what Israel is doing,’ ‘it’s just extremists,’ or in this case, because of the mental instability of the gunman, as people are saying, ‘he’s just crazy, this isn’t a pattern.’ With the recent hit-and-run rampage in San Francisco

by a man claiming to be committing jihad—does this establish a pattern yet? Perhaps the Jewish people are just truly not quite shaken up enough. Indeed, the Seattle Federation shooting hit very close to home, in different ways for all of us. Some of us just feel that all violence against Jews—wherever it strikes—hits close to home. Shira Kaufman Shira Kaufman is a graduate of the University of Washington with a degree in Women’s Studies and a minor in Law, Societies and Justice. An activist, she currently travels between residences on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Seattle.

GOT TO INTERN ? WORK FOR THE PRESENTENSE. internship@presentensemagazine.org

NHC Summer Institute

Photograph by Rob Levy

all together now

et’s be honest: Judaism is an insider’s game. If you don’t know the rules, you can’t play. Without a day school or summer camp immersion, summer trips to Jerusalem and Israeli relatives, you’ve got some major catching up to do. For a kid like me whose childhood was schmeared across the Pacific coast and Great Plains, where winning the lottery felt more likely than happening upon another Jew, I might as well throw my hands up and grab a book on Buddhism. But when 350 Jews from all over the States gathered at Franklin Pierce College this past August, flipping the bird to the establishment was the name of the game. The week-long summer learning institute—called “the ’tute” for short—put on by the National Havurah Committee (NHC) featured text study, reflection, moving worship, performance and poetry, and tons of (vegetarian) food from all walks of Jewish expression. From workshops

PresenTensemagazine.org news

the havurah movement lives on exploring ritual purity to prayer services conducted via meditation, alternative was the word du jour. The ’tute exists as a home for those who are fed up with the insider’s game and are just gonna do it their way. The NHC created the Institute more than twenty years ago for members of independent Jewish communities, each one called a havurah, to share and find other like-minded Jews. Havurot, literally meaning “fellowships,” are the grassroots phenomena changing the faith landscape for Jews in their twenties, thirties and beyond. Is it the rabbi-less services which are so alluring? The promise of a tight-knit communal atmosphere? A shared denomination—or a liberation from denominations? Attendees at the Institute had different reasons for being there, but the common denominator was a desire to find meaning in Judaism beyond what they had been taught—or not taught—in school or at home.

No Longer the Insider’s Game

The first step in breaking the insider’s game was to dispose of hierarchy. Bob Freedman, a congregational rabbi from Vermont, addressed first-time ’tute attendees. “I became a rabbi because I wanted to find a way to make every Jew feel empowered to celebrate Judaism,” he said. “Havurah Judaism is about countering the feeling that Judaism belongs only to the rabbi, that Judaism is an insider’s game.” Although a substantial handful of havurah participants are rabbis or rabbis-tobe, Freedman stressed that havurah Judaism draws a line between “being a rebbe” and “rebbe-ing.” That is, the role of a teacher, the original meaning of “rabbi,” is not the purview of a class of professionals, but to be shared by everyone alike. This philosophy was central throughout the week: alongside scheduled classes by scholars and artists-in-residence, first-time and twentieth-time attendees

issue one 2006

alike presented workshops on a cornucopia of serious, humorous, and pressing topics. Here, anyone can play the rabbi. This approach is generally considered a reaction to the hierarchy of contemporary synagogue life. Being able to pursue spirituality or Jewish literacy without embarrassment underlies the ’tute’s grassroots appeal. “I’m attracted to how communal it is for people our age,” said Lauren Levy, 23, a first-time ’tute attendee. “I’m comfortable exploring it here…At my age, I’m trying to discover more about myself and my Judaism, and havurah Judaism has provided me with a warm, welcoming environment in which to explore all this.” Old Movement, New Leadership

Generation Y-ers seem to be best at customization. Minyans, technically a quorum of ten Jews required for communal prayer, are a staple of Jewish law and have existed since Israelites wandered the desert. Contemporary havurot were first founded in the 1950s as intimate groups within synagogues that shared basic needs of fraternity, burial rites, and life cycles. However, recent newcomers to the summer Institute are different. Current havurot members gather specifically for prayer, calling their groups minyanim. The national havurah movement eagerly has included the latest adaptations, albeit with some bemusement. Realizing its membership was aging, the NHC discovered the primary reason young people could not attend the Institute was financial. In 1993, the NHC created the Everett Fellowship, a scholarship for first-time Institute attendees in their twenties. “The biggest impact personally was my being able to be at the Institute,” recalls Andrea Hodos, 40, who was among the very first class of Everett fellows. “To be part of it, enjoying being with other young people, and with those doing Jewish.” Hodos, a spoken-word and dance artist attending as this summer’s Artist in Residence, remembers what compelled her to continue her involvement with havurot past her first institute. “What was clear immediately upon coming back [was that] the Everett Fellowships evolved, [they have] been completely embraced by the community. And [they have] transformed the community. They’re not just paying lip service.”

18 issue one 2006

In Addition to Shul or Instead?

“This is the shul I attend, and that is the shul I don’t attend.” Or so goes the joke about the man stranded on the desert island who built two synagogues. The attitude exhibited by people at the Institute certainly explains why buildings are being left behind for the open spaces of parks, living rooms, and spare community center rooms. The movement’s advocates are perhaps right to claim alternative minyanim as the fix-it to a steadily encrusting synagogue life. But as much as a majority of young people present at the Institute seem to be fleeing synagogue life, plenty are seeking to reinvigorate it. Emma Kippley-Ogman, 25, a second-year rabbinical student, felt uncomfortable and disturbed at the antagonistic language heard among Institute-goers regarding brick-andmortar establishments. “There’s something precious about walking through the door [of a synagogue] where, as a member of that community, you have a responsibility to be welcoming,” she said. Meanwhile, havurot are growing in size to rival their counterparts. Kehilat Hadar of Manhattan received federation support, opened a beit midrash, and has High Holy Day services. Kol Zimrah, created only four years ago in a living room, is expanding programming to include extra worship in new corners of New York City, as well as workshops on their trademark instrument-led style. To Affiliate or Post-Affiliate?

Is havurah Judaism going to blow the insider’s game open and wipe troublesome denominations and Jewish infighting off the map? Is it trans-denominational, postdenominational or capable of playing along with them? The answer is truthfully nonthreatening. Despite its myriad incarnations or, misleadingly, dominating liberal politics, the havurah movement is united by one, singular principle: lay empowerment. Flexible enough for affiliated stalwarts and post-denominational iconoclasts, it can both reinvigorate a congregation culture dependent on Jewish professionals and build Jewish life where few options in worship exist. BEn Murane Ben Murane is the Executive Director of the Jewish Student Press Service and New Voices magazine. He believes New York Jews are not in diaspora, but may yet be redeemable.

DEFINITION OF THE ISSUE Tikkun

Tikkun is derived from the Hebrew verb “letaken,” meaning to fix or repair. The well-known spiritual meaning of this verb is inferred from two phrases: “tikkun olam,” literally meaning “repairing the world” and “tikkun midot” meaning “repairing the character.” Both phrases are many times shortened and only the word tikkun is used, the spiritual meaning being understood from the context. The phrase “tikkun olam” itself is not mentioned in the Bible, and it appears for the first time in the Mishnah, the authoritative interpretation of Jewish law. There it is used in a context that suggests we are obligated to do things not because the Jewish law so stipulates but in order to “repair the world.” The phrase appeared later in the Aleynu prayer. It was apparently first incorporated in the Rosh Hashanah (New Year) prayer book. Eventually it was included in the thrice-daily prayer rituals. This means that the Jewish people have been praying for world repair for about a thousand years. For many years the Sages understood this to mean, “repairing the character.” Many tracts were written about “tikkun midot,” attempting to explain the working of the human soul and how to perfect yourself. The most famous of these is Mesillat Yesharim, the treatise on ethics composed in 1740 by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto. The general attitude in these writings was that repairing the character was a personal matter. This changed in the 16th century when Rabbi Isaac Luria interpreted Jewish Mysticism (Kabala) and suggested that tikkun olam is obligatory for every Jew, and perhaps the main reason for his existence. Now in everyday use, tikkun olam is stripped of religious meaning. Instead of striving to perfection in the eyes of God, many define tikkun olam as striving to change the world through political and social action. But we are still left with two questions. First, what is a repaired world, and what would life be like in such a world? Second, how do we get there? This fruitful discussion continues to animate (and agitate) Jewish life, and most likely will continue to do so until the Messiah arrives. In which case, being Jewish, he will probably drop everything and join in the argument. Yoav Cohen Yoav Cohen is author of The Israeli Tikkun Blog, where you can find the full text of this article at http://the-israeli-tikkun-blog. blogspot.com.

PresenTensemagazine.org news

holiday in the name of jewish social action month

he Jewish calendar is filled with holidays every month of the year except one. Now a group of young activists is asking that Jews from around the world mark the Hebrew month of Cheshvan (which this year runs from October 23 to November 21) as “Jewish Social Action Month.” KolDor, a global network of young Jews, created the holiday in partnership with the Prime Minister’s Office of Israel and the organization SocialAction. Social action events in celebration of this global initiative are already in effect throughout the United States, and in Israel, Britain, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa. Examples of the activities planned include assistance in the north of Israel after the recent war, a partnership with schools in Nepal, an economic justice week in California and a conference on social justice in Mexico City. The UJA Federation of New York and Hadassah will be funding many of the community service and social action projects. In Israel, Jewish Social Action Month will be launched at the Knesset with an event hosted by Knesset Member Rabbi Michael Melchior. “Social action is a vital part of the Jewish tradition that unites Jews of many different religious and cultural backgrounds,” KolDor member Jay Michaelson said. “Until now, there has been no single holiday devoted to it.” In the Jewish tradition, the month of Cheshvan is often described as MarCheshvan (“bitter Cheshvan”), a time of bitterness, as it has no holidays. But Israeli President Katsav commented that making Jewish Social Action a permanent part of the Jewish calendar will “lead to the removal of the Mar ‘bitter’ preface to the name of the month.”

Kindergarten in Netanya, Israel

Photograph by Sarah McGee

Social action is a vital part of the Jewish tradition that unites Jews of many different religious and cultural backgrounds.

paul thomas Paul Thomas is a professional at KolDor, a global network of Jewish activists.

PresenTensemagazine.org news

issue one 2006

VIEWS

waiting at the window

the war back home

Photograph by Laya Millman

20 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org views

editating on one foot in tree pose, I try to clear my mind of all stressful thoughts. But my, it wanders: Maybe they won’t let him out on leave tomorrow, maybe I shouldn’t get my hopes up. I lose my balance, almost falling on my face. Aharon, my husband, has only been on reserve duty for one week, but it feels like an eternity, and the projected time he will be in the army on miluim, a month, is four eternities. The day he’s called up on a Tzav Shmonei (an emergency command to immediately report for reserve duty) falls during the most brutal fighting in Lebanon. Though he is not stationed in the North, I am a wreck. As soon as he gets the call, he drags out his old uniform. He stands out in his olive greens as we walk through downtown Jerusalem, buying a couple of last-minute supplies. I am uncomfortable with the stares and the smiles, the pats on the back from knowing strangers. When did we personally decide to join this war? A sour taste of pride mixed with fear fills my mouth. On the way to the bus, we stop to buy a watch that Aharon needs for reserve service. The graying saleswoman tries to sell us the same watch her own son wore in the army. Becoming a surrogate grandmother, she adopts as her own all chayalim, Israeli soldiers, who stop in her shop on the way to the front. “Don’t worry if the watch breaks,” she says. “You can always get another one. Just take care of yourself, you are not replaceable.” I smile at the extended Israeli family that emerges in times of national danger, but was this supposed to be comforting to me? For a while I reject our part in the national picture; I see my pain as purely personal. I buy myself chocolate and Wacky Mac for dinner. I avoid the news most of the day. I stay up late, leave the lights on, and talk to friends in America who I haven’t heard from in ages. Mostly, I think. At first, I think about myself and the interruption miluim has caused to my summer and my relationship with Aharon. The timeless expanse of waiting is a wasteland of uncertainty that nurtures nightmares far better than daydreams. In Aharon’s absence, I start to notice all the things I need him for, all the things I love him for. While this sounds like the perfect preparation for a romantic homecoming, his temporary absence enhances the fears of a permanent ‘what if,’ things I dare not write on paper, but think about over and over. To regain balance, I try to control my thoughts, to tell myself everything will be okay. But I find that I can barely think about after-miluim because I don’t exactly know when that will be. A captive of the army, I start to realize that my fate is intermingled with that of the country. I hope for a cease-fire because it might bring him home sooner, but it still seems random that Aharon’s schedule is determined by the War in Lebanon. This feeling of detachment is reinforced by Aharon’s early service.

What if… What if… Images of darkness, men lying on the ground in wait, and chaotic battles run through my head.

PresenTensemagazine.org views

I enjoy talking to him while he washes dishes and cleans the toilets of the base. While I’m sure this isn’t fun for him, to me it means that he is safer. When he picks up his gun and sets its sight for his eye, I envision him doing guard duty at the gate of a quiet kibbutz. But then, the word ambush slips out, and his shifts are at night. No more good-night conversations and I am plunged back into uncertainties. What if… What if… Images of darkness, men lying on the ground in wait, and chaotic battles run through my head. Hell, I’m not even sure what an ambush is. I want to believe, in the wake of Lebanon, that Gaza really is as quiet as it seems from the news, that I really am tfu tfu tfu lucky. One day I burst out in tears when a young woman’s voice on the radio dedicates an hour of nationalistic army marches to the “soldiers protecting us in the North and in Gaza.” And Gaza, I think to myself. No, Gaza is safer than Lebanon; he doesn’t need an hour of songs dedicated to him. But in Gaza he is protecting Israel, protecting Jerusalem, protecting me. While my wish for safety entails a retreat from the national need for soldiers, my Zionist devotion forces me to accept this sacrifice despite its sting. One night, I read through lists of people who were killed in Lebanon the day before. A short paragraph describes their hobbies, their personalities, their frozen dreams. Is it possible to reconcile the personal loss and the national need? When I hear the casualty count, I mourn the soldiers with a sense of thanks and respect, believing they died, in some way, for me. I wonder if that could be a solace if – God forbid… and I don’t want to find out. I grew up on Leon Uris’ Exodus and camp lessons of “it is good to die for your country—it is good to have a country to die for.” But is that true for Michael Levin’s family, who lost their son in Lebanon last week? Perhaps in some way these questions are born of too much time to think. When all you can do is brood, your thoughts become your weapon, your shield, as well as your own friendly fire. I wonder, why should I be any luckier than any other spouse or parent whose husband, wife, or child is sent into Lebanon? Why should I sit here and hope that my husband sees no action, is faced by no enemy? Did he go to miluim to clean the bathrooms of the army base? Of course, I moved to Israel and made aliyah knowing that miluim would kidnap my husband for a month every year. In the abstract, I thought that this was a sacrifice I was willing to make for the defense of the Jewish state. Who am I to retract my sacrifice, to choose a month of quiet, and not a month of war, in which my husband will serve? As a new immigrant, I am struggling with wanting to prove that we are willing to do what it takes to belong, while wishing the price of membership wasn’t so high. As I sit immobilized by my Home Front station, I wonder whether I might put my own life on the line for the Jewish State. For now, I go to coffee shops to write. I ride the buses. I volunteer at a camp in Jerusalem making plaster masks of the faces of shell-shocked seven-yearolds who are ‘visiting’ Jerusalem after three weeks in a bomb shelter. I smooth the plaster over their small features. They wait patiently with unnatural calm. I wish they would smile, but that would break the drying plaster. I want a mask to cover my own tears, a mask that looks tough and proud of my soldier husband. Paradoxically, in my search for inner balance, I don’t follow my urge to go to the North to volunteer while the rockets are still falling. I try to keep a schedule, mark the calendar, mark the time as it passes.

issue one 2006

Perhaps I am scared, or maybe I don’t feel like we should both be in danger at once. I have taken the safe role. One person’s risk is enough of a contribution. My romantic Zionist vision of a fearless independent woman married to a tanned and toned Israeli soldier somehow is not as rosy as I thought it might be. In the mix of real life and idealism, I am on

a roller coaster of fear and hope, of connection to my home in the Jewish state and loneliness in my empty house. As I learn to be an Israeli, I am discovering the feeling of belonging, and that it’s okay to hope for an easy miluim. Perhaps I need to stand on both my feet this month. Alieza Salzberg Alieza Salzberg is currently studying Talmud at Matan, Jerusalem and working on an MA in Creative Writing at City College, NYC.

poetry

OUR SONS

three sons in the army, she told me her mouth one straight line only one in Lebanon though he called to say goodbye won’t be able to call again for awhile she reminds me of another woman I know who gave birth to six little boys all in a row I always knew, said the mom, when one fell in battle that six boys meant six soldiers and one might not come home

a bride waits in her room for the groom who will never come her tears dripping on the white dress she holds in her lap while across a few years and miles another groom still waits for his bride blown up with her father in Jerusalem the night before they were to wed a suicide bomber out on the town looking for a blast to get him to heaven our sons move forward stealthily into the night olive green uniforms blending with the grasses blowing in the hot night breeze. Miriam Lock

Miriam Lock is a writer and translator who, in her free time, works as the English secretary in the Office of the President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

PRESENTENSE is now available for institutional subscription. We'll send you heaps of dynamic Jewish life in print on the cheap, and then you distribute the here and now to your community. For more information, email info@presentensemagazine.org www.presentensemagazine.org

txt msg

the kibbutz and katyushas

was at lunch when my cell phone buzzed. My colleagues and I at the translation company where I work were debating which of the rooms in the building were safe from Katyushas. Though we were in Petah Tikva—not far from Tel Aviv—it was a somber mood; Hizbullah’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah had announced the other day that he had a surprise in store. But there is only so much time you can spend speculating. I reached down to check my phone. It was a text message. “Alert,” it told me. “Homefront command requests you go to your bomb shelters due to the missile alert.” My cell phone is registered under my father’s name and is on the kibbutz network. Since my kibbutz is on the front lines, Homefront command helped set up a system to alert members when there is a chance that Katyushas will fall in the area. And fall they did. For a couple of days I had reports coming in right from the battlefield about Katyushas falling on nearby settlements. The call home to make sure my parents knew about the attacks quickly would become routine. I’d call home, and there would be no answer. I’d call my father’s cell

ALERT

Photograph by Rinat Malkes

Homefront command requests you go to your bomb shelters due to the missile alert.

phone. No answer. I’d call my mother’s cell phone, and she’d invariably say, “Hi sweetie, I’m not on the Kibbutz, I’m on this trip far from the border. How are you?” “I just got this Katyushas alert. I called our home number and dad’s cell phone, but there’s no answer!” “Oh, don’t worry, Dad’s probably asleep in the house, and he doesn’t hear the phone ringing...” My parents never went to the shelter. In fact, when I came to visit, I met them sitting outside the house in our Sukkah, eating sunflower seeds straight from the dried flower. We had a quiet

My father said that he and my mother were not afraid. This was not their first war. PresenTensemagazine.org views

Fire on Kibbutz Iron

conversation punctuated by the sound of artillery, like the sort of conversation you have in a nightclub with drum-and-bass sounds coming from the other room. My father said that he and my mother were not afraid. This was not their first war, and this time, he said, he intended to sit out the war on the couch in the living room in front of the TV. But to please my mother, he’d sleep in the basement whenever Mom had one of her hunches. When I returned to Tel Aviv from the north, the city looked as if it was about to burst. Parking, a chronic Tel Avivian problem even in peacetime, became literally impossible. The refugees who made it to Tel Aviv were on a sort of vacation. With shopping, sightseeing and beaches ahead of them, some of them looked like they were at peace.

And me? I was back to the office, back to the conversations, back to figuring out which room was safest. Back to playing the oboe and wishing that the bubble of peace that spread over Tel Aviv would not be punctured by missiles, and would instead expand and grow across borders. Wishing that, instead of solving problems with tanks and missiles, we would do what we forgot to do when we pulled out in 2000— talk to the Lebanese people. Visit them. Make plans for joint tourist ventures, for joint industrial zones, for joint joints. And my father? He saw the whole war on TV in surround sound. Asaf Be’eri Asaf Be’eri was born during the Yom Kippur War, has an Artist diploma from the Rubin Academy of Music, and plays oboe, baroque oboe, recorder and tin whistle.

issue one 2006

NALÂ¬ IO T A N R E T N Â¬I E H Â¬T S Â¬I K R O 3CHOOLÂ¬.ETW Â¬ Y A Â¬ D Â¬$ N Y IT Â¬A N T U N E M M M O E C Â¬# N H A IS WDV HEHÂ¬*EEÂ¬A + Â¬ O4RÂ¬T 6T3E!RÂ¬F !N 2 CE IOÂ¬SNCAHLÂ¬OOLÂ¬ T A N Y R A E T Â¬D N H Â¬I E IS H W Â¬T E S Â¬* Â¬I K IC R T O S LI ETW LÂ¬F.Â¬P LURA 3COHROTOÂ¬O SUPP Â¬ D N Â¬A Â¬ T N IC E M M E E D C A N C A Â¬A V D T Â¬A O E M H O Â¬T R R O Â¬7EÂ¬P Â¬FN TETRIO EN CA EDCU OOHLÂ¬Â¬ H C Â¬S Y A IS Â¬D H W IS *E

Â¬ W E N Â¬* IO IC S T S LU LI INC LÂ¬ LUARA A Â¬P F IM Â¬O X T R O M P

Â¬ P E U C S N E LL E C X E Â¬SS IC M E D A C Â¬A E E T LN O U F M E O S R O Â¬P P EGIOUSÂ¬PUR Â¬7 NÂ¬R IO T A C LI U E D E D N Â¬A Y IT S R E DIV ISHÂ¬ W *E

Â¬ N IO S LU C IN LÂ¬ A IM X MA Â¬ F O Â¬ E R U EXCELLENCEE Â¬V T U F Â¬ E H T Â¬ T A H ESS T Â¬ LN E U F E S I O L P E R U B Â¬ Â¬P E S U 7 IO G LI DIVERSITYÂ¬ANDÂ¬RE PLEÂ¬ISÂ¬ENSHRINEDÂ¬

Â¬0EÂ¬TOHATÂ¬THEÂ¬FUTUREÂ¬OFÂ¬ WILSIH EÂ¬*EEÂ¬B TH7 E ELÂ¬ Â¬THEÂ¬NOTION E EVIS REAOPLEÂ¬ISÂ¬ENSHRINEDÂ¬ LAILSÂ¬9 +W IENÂ¬*Â¬E HÂ¬0 0EOPLEHOOD TH Â¬ H S I N O EW I *LA T Â¬ F O O Â¬N E H Â¬T LÂ¬ E A INÂ¬+ LÂ¬9ISR ATEDÂ¬TOÂ¬EMPOWE RINGÂ¬ ICÂ¬0EOPLEHOOD DH Â¬DEIS !F+Â¬*Â¬IESW 2!63O Â¬ D N Â¬A N E R D IL H Â¬C E T A C U D Â¬TOÂ¬EATEDÂ¬TOÂ¬EMPOWERINGÂ¬ PROFE6S3S!IO+NÂ¬IASLS Â¬DEDIC Â¬FROMÂ¬ACROSSÂ¬THE 2! IRÂ¬FAM S DUCATEÂ¬CHILDRENÂ¬ANDÂ¬ THSESIONALSILÂ¬TIE OÂ¬E HE E PROFE IF Â¬L H IS W E Â¬* F Â¬O M U R T C Â¬T PE SIR ROSS C Â¬A M O R Â¬F S IE IL M A Â¬F E TH E IF Â¬L H IS W E Â¬* F Â¬O M U R T C SPE

0LEASEÂ¬VISITÂ¬WWW RAVSAK ORGÂ¬TOÂ¬LOCATEÂ¬AÂ¬*EWISH COMMUNITYÂ¬DAYÂ¬SCHOOLÂ¬NEARÂ¬YOUÂ¬ANDÂ¬TOÂ¬FINDÂ¬OUTÂ¬HOW 0LEASEÂ¬VISITÂ¬WWW RAVSAK ORGÂ¬TOÂ¬LOCATEÂ¬AÂ¬*EWISH YOUÂ¬CANÂ¬SUPPORTÂ¬2!63!+Â¬INÂ¬OURÂ¬VISIONARYÂ¬WORK Â¬ COMMUNITYÂ¬DAYÂ¬SCHOOLÂ¬NEARÂ¬YOUÂ¬ANDÂ¬TOÂ¬FINDÂ¬OUTÂ¬HOW

zionism and me

wrestling with israel

very day I have about a dozen opportunities to be a Zionist. These chances come via email, landing in my inbox and gunking it up with guilt. “You should be there,” they mock me. “You know there’s only one real way to be a Zionist; but if you’re going to insist on living in galut, in the Diaspora, $18/$36/$3600 is the least you can do.” Despite my frail financial situation, the guilt works—I point-and-click on icons, visit websites, and pay by credit card. I go to fundraisers, I contribute to organizations I think will make the most of my meager contributions, I send pizzas or chocolate or hamburgers to the brave soldiers of the IDF. I send toys to dispossessed Haifa children, fund a northern-dwelling child’s trip to a southerly part of the country, and hope they will forget that their house has been rendered uninhabitable by falling Lebanese Katyusha rockets. Without even taking a subway, I can buy Israeli soaps and Israelmanufactured thongs at Victoria’s Secret, further fueling Israel’s economic growth. Emails from Travelocity and Israir and El Al tempt me with their amazing travel deals—a week in Israel at a four-star hotel and airfare for $699—which are still out of my price range. It would seem that I am in control of my Zionism, but this is economic Zionism, bereft of the emotional satisfaction that guilt demands. Guilt over the state of one’s Zionism is familiar territory to the American Jew. It’s a constant state, most days existing as a mere murmur in the heart, barely audible except in its more assertive moments such as New York’s annual Salute to Israel parade, when the din of Jewish voices proclaim their pride in the streets. If the conflicted Zionist listens closely, the echo of the jubilant and familiar has an undertone of hopelessness. Why are we here? Because we are not there. This summer I was there. When war struck the country, I was in Jerusalem. I found myself staying, opting out of an early-in-the-war escape pass. No one was going to tell me it was or wasn’t safe to be in Israel. No one was going to take away my homeland.

PresenTensemagazine.org views

But even while present in the Land during a time of conflict, I found no solace from Diaspora guilt. I didn’t volunteer at hospitals or with families displaced by bombs lobbed at their homes. I didn’t run north to be an extra pair of hands. I was only visiting. Back in the USA, back to life, things seem safer, sort of. I don’t worry about rockets or suicide bombers in the supermarkets (although perhaps I should). Here is where my apartment is, for now; where my job is, sort of; where my family lives, most of it, anyway. Here, the army is a non-personal entity; my friends, peers, and family have no connection to military service. Over in Israel, another cousin of mine prepares for his induction into the army. When

overwhelm. Send the message quick, without giving it too much thought, and you can push the interchange into past, looking toward future. The induction into the army, the promotion of risk from civilian to combat, raises my alert level to a whole new color: orange to yellow to red, at the apparent expense of the sanctity of the blue and the white. This is where my Zionism breaks down, to the point that I wonder if it was ever Zionism to begin with. If at its core, how I feel about Israel is contingent on Israel not harming the people I love, even if it’s in the service of the country, then my love for the land is not paramount. In admitting my preference for people over land entities, I violate basic rules of nationhood, and realize that soon, my tongue

I close my eyes I see him in diapers; now he’s got a beard and an enlistment date. Elsewhere in Israel, as friends took their army fatigues out of the closet, I felt I had no way to lend any help of significance. I feel the pressure to say something inspiring, meaningful and memorable, words of wisdom and humor to comfort and embrace when I cannot be personally present, to impart a message of love and concern without sounding like a completely neurotic, overbearing caricature of the slightly neurotic, slightly overbearing woman I know I’m capable of one day becoming. I opt for simplicity. But when I say “good luck and be careful,” the implication of mortality is more than I can bear, and I’m tempted to generate more words in an attempt to banish neurosis. But I don’t. I couch concern in terseness, lest too many words escape and

will likely cleave to the roof of my mouth, for I have not placed Jerusalem as the centerpiece of joy in my selfish and self-centered, privileged American life. And despite a love for land and language, I need to face a tentative fact. Either the central message of Zionism has failed me, or it is I who have failed Zionism. A thousand packages to soldiers cannot erase the guilt, nor ensure the safety of the people I love. And although I may love the land, its history, its biblical resonance, its flowersfrom-the-desert miraculous beauty, on some traitorous level, I know that I believe that the earth is just earth without the people who fill it. Esther D. Kustanowitz Esther D. Kustanowitz is senior editor of PresenTense Magazine. She is also a freelance writer and editor, and blogs extensively at MyUrbanKvetch.com, Jewlicious.com and JDatersAnonymous.com.

issue one 2006

home and back again returning to berkeley from the war

they’re more like politically-themed social gatherings than ways to make a statement, and somehow, if they got any coverage, they either seemed trite or militant. Besides, I wasn’t sure where to stand on the issue. And tomorrow was Shabbat. “I’m Stephanie,” I said. “Nate,” he said, then, “Oh you’re the new housemate. Didn’t you just get back from Israel?” “Yeah,” I said. “I heard you went there to stop things,” he said. “Well, uh, I wish I knew how,” I said. I was pretty sure he was being generous. I was just back from birthright – the free ‘beaches and archeology are why you must love Israel and being a Jew’ tour. I went at the

back to Israel. “What was it like there?” Nate asked. I shrugged and said something diplomatic, relieved the question wasn’t “Why did you go? What did you hope to accomplish?” I ventured to offer a few anecdotes about Israeli society and history, and why it supported such militarism. Nate was first to mention terrorism, and Palestinians. “You know you push at someone…,” he trailed off. “You push someone and…”. He looked at me. I smiled as disarmingly as I could, took a deep breath, and launched into how these debates go on in Israel all the time, how no one likes the violence, about the difficulties inherent in negotiating with governments who deny your right to exist. I was feeling lamer

“What was it like there?” Nate asked.

“

Pro-Lebanon Rally, San Francisco Photograph by Carlos Villarreal

re you going to the protest?” I blinked back at the lanky guy with hollow eyes across the kitchen from me. “What protest?” I said. “There’s gonna be a huge protest tomorrow about the stuff in Lebanon.” “Oh,” I said. “No, I’m not going.” I’d given up on such San Francisco protest rallies;

26 issue one 2006

height of the war with Lebanon because it was my last chance before I turned twenty-seven and aged out of the program. Everyone said I was crazy for braving the danger. But I’d returned to live in the crux of radical Bay Area politics—a housing squat turned co-op in North Oakland where anti-government rhetoric is de rigueur, and being a baalat tshuvah—newly religious—is unprecedented. How soon before these people hated me? A housemate, overhearing our conversation, suggested Nate follow the advice of counsel and stay away from protest rallies for a while. Nate, as it turned out, was awaiting his pre-trial for resisting arrest and demonstrating without a permit at a protest rally against the Iraq war two years ago. I gave him my sympathies, saying I had been briefly tuned in four years ago when it all began. He described how his co-defendants had gone from four, to two, to one, to none, as charges were dropped or people decided to plea. He told me about his ordeal with public defenders, and about what it was like to wait and wait and wait —with no job and no money—for the court to mete out punishment for what didn’t seem like much of a crime. Pretty soon talk turned

by the second for parroting the lines I’d been taught, trailing off in turn… “I don’t know,” Nate said. “I just know that if you push someone —” “I hear what you’re saying,” I said, and I did. He was sifting through the mixture of experience and rhetoric to find his place in it, just like I was. “But how would you feel if the Anglo and Latino worlds in this country were more polarized, and Puerto Ricans and people from Guam began expressing their frustration by blowing things up?” “Yeah I guess they’re oppressed by globalization and the capitalist system…” he said pensively. “There’s probably just as much justification for us to be blown up by Mexicans….” “I guess that’s true,” he said. Was he being generous again? Or just not willing to wade further into abstraction or a fight…. He smiled and I smiled, and I could swear we shared a moment in this crazy, mixedup world. stephanie may Stephanie May is the Webmaster for Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley, California and the Program Coordinator for Tapestry, an organization that promotes the multicultural, multi-ethnic nature of the Jewish people.

PresenTensemagazine.org views

Today’s New Jews

wearing different hats

Photograph by Markus Wagner

I don’t wear my black hat anymore, because I feel driven towards something profoundly new...

“

ut of Zion shall come the Torah, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem”—Isaiah 2:3

Once in a while, on one of those cold and lonely Cambridge nights, I crack open the closet door just to get a glimpse of my black hat, with its proud Borsalino rim, which sits in the upper, almost-hidden shelves in my closet. I might even greet it with a resounding “Shalom Aleichem!” just to let him (black hats

28 issue one 2006

are clearly male) know, “you are still revered.” It’s on those nights that I ask myself, “Why did I ever abandon him? When did it stop making sense to wear that regal crown?” I am drawn back to that sweltering Jerusalem Shabbat morning, in the summer of 2000, when I ventured from my Mir Yeshiva ghetto in Me’ah Shearim to the enlightened pastures of the Baka neighborhood, located in the southern hills of Jerusalem. I was not driven by the desire to encounter progressive, free-thinking Jews; I had enough of those guys in the books I kept hidden under my pillowcase in my Mir apartment. But since arriving in Jerusalem a year earlier, I was resolute to seek out those hidden pockets of spirituality, where heavenly Jerusalem mated with its earthly counterpart. I was determined to find a particular minyan whose existence had reached my cloistered ears. I heard that their neo-Hasidic Shabbat morning prayers ran from 8:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m., and it was rumored that the Divine Presence paid a visit during the recitation of the kedushah. Entering proudly with my yeshivish singlebreasted suit, decked out in my Borsalino (a hat brand coveted by members of the Lithuanian

Yeshiva world), I was ready to dance and sing with these throwback Jews of a lost Hasidic era. To my surprise, the beards I expected were not there: instead, there were open-collared shirts. Instead of shtreimles and white socks, there were knitted kipot and open-toed sandals. Despite feeling somewhat out of place in my Brooklyn Hasidic garb, I was easily caught up in the truly heavenly davening. When the reader of the Torah opened with “vayedaber ado-nai” in a high-pitched voice, I was happy that we would be celebrating a bar mitzvah. Imagine my shock when I glanced up from my Chumash, and saw that the “bar mitzvah boy” was actually an adult woman with long, flowing blonde hair. I fled, seeking refuge in the hallway filed with the familiar AWOL worshippers who were escaping the boring parts of the service. Who were these people who had the audacity to pray like R’ Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev and the Seer of Lublin, and yet behave like they were at the treif banquet of the Pittsburgh Reform conference of 1885?! What chutzpah! And by showing up with my black hat, I feared, I had somehow given them credibility; my presence was a kosher stamp on their sins!

PresenTensemagazine.org views

Using my yeshivish yoga breathing, I calmed down and decided to return for Musaf—the Shabbat morning prayer, not wanting to give up praying with a minyan. After all, isn’t that what the Baal Shem Tov would have done—prayed with the sinners? I had come upon the Lieder Minyan—a congregation which later gave birth to Shira Chadasha, the traditional and egalitarian minyan that has in many ways created the movement of independent minyanim now taking hold in the Diaspora. I began to realize that there was something extraordinary taking place in turn-of-the-century Jerusalem. Were these Lieder Minyan folk Orthodox, Neo-Chassidic, or some strange bastardization of Orthodox and Conservative? They struck me as a group of Jews who simply didn’t care what anyone else was doing. They had their own way of doing things— praying like mystics while thinking progressively like rationalists; Isaac Luria and Maimonides all wrapped into one. These Jews were not intimidated by “more religious” Jews, for they could pray with just as much fervor (if not more) as the Me’ah Shearimniks. These Jews were brazenly plowing a new path, on which the individual feels legitimate in drawing from both past and present, while not feeling shackled by the constraints of extreme denominationalism. I felt a profound synergy with what was transpiring in this particular minyan; not so much with its practice, rather with what it represented to me—that it was possible to be deeply concerned about maintaining a living relationship with God and to have that concern manifest itself in innovative and unique ways, outside the normative structure of the preexisting community. Living in Jerusalem seems to have a profoundly liberating and empowering impact on the many Jews who go there seeking a religious path. The nature of this path, for so many Jerusalemites, who reside in places like the German Colony, Baka and Katamon, cannot be embodied by a specific denomination. It is no coincidence that many of the leaders of the independent minyanim in Cambridge, MA, or Washington, DC, spent significant time at places as varied as Pardes,

...something that I discovered in Jerusalem. the Hartman Institute, and the original Burgers Bar on Emek. Maybe it is Jerusalem itself: the abundance of Torah study available, the authentic feeling that accompanies religious life (in whatever form) practiced there, or the visceral tangibility of feeling so connected to an ancient past. In recent years, we have witnessed a rapid retreat from traditional denominational affiliation. This should come as no surprise; after decades of the Jewish American establishment’s virtual infatuation with labels, it is only natural to expect a move toward the rejection of—or at the very least, ambivalence toward—these definitions and demarcations. To many Americans, especially young Americans, these parochial affiliations feel hollow and empty. The trend towards more independent forms of worship reflects a desire for more personally engaging and individualized forms of worship. Early Zionist thinkers often spoke of the creation of a “New Jew.” These New Jews would no longer be held back by the ghetto and rabbis, but were fully capable of thinking for themselves and acting with conviction, confidence and certainty. Some of these New Jews, fresh off the boat from Jerusalem, have apparently infiltrated American Jewish life, creating the necessary environment for the flourishing of the independent minyanim. It is a mini-Zionist-Diaspora Renaissance. The creation of new communities based on individual experiences, which leads to fragmentation, might also result in a unity-in-disunity shared by a series of subcommunities all strung together by loose common denominators. I don’t wear my black hat anymore, because I feel driven towards something profoundly new, something that I discovered in Jerusalem. But I still open that closet every once in a while to remind myself that without that black hat, I probably would not have embarked on my initial journey down King George Street, searching for other Jews who yearned for a taste of the Infinite. Avi Poupko Avi Poupko is the campus rabbi at Harvard University. He received his Semicha in Israel from YU’s Gruss Kollel, and is is the Godfather of Israel’s first fraternity, Beta Beta Omega.

PresenTensemagazine.org views

Brief Dictionary Borsalino a hat brand coveted by members of the Lithuanian Yeshiva world. Mir Yeshiva one of the largest yeshivot today with more than 4000 students. It follows the “Lithuanian” method of Talmud study. Kedushah the climax of the Shabbat morning prayers which speaks of the angels and the Heavenly Throne. R’ Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev a Chassidic Master of the late 18th century known for his ecstatic prayer. Seer of Lublin a Chassidic Master of the late 18th century known for his uncanny ability to see into a person’s soul. Baal Shem Tov considered the founder of the Chassidic movement, he was known for perceiving the “divine spark” in everything. Isaac Luria a great Kabbalist of the 16th century. The Israeli city Tzfat became a center of Kabbalah because of his presence in the city. Burgers Bar on Emek a popular burger joint on Emek Refaim Street in Jerusalem.

issue one 2006

Fingerprints OF

deserted jewish new york

30 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org views

I discovered them the first time on a rainy winter day three years ago. I had an appointment to be fingerprinted in the Bronx. It took me an hour to get there and when I got off the subway I identified the immigration office by the long line of people waiting to get in. Two hours and several chapters of Alfred Kazanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s A Walker in the City later, I only made it close to the door and was informed that I had to make a new appointment. There was no chance I could have my fingerprints taken today. I decided to walk around a little, to explore the neighborhood. A friend of mine had warned me that there is â&#x20AC;&#x153;nothingâ&#x20AC;? around to see. I was thinking about his words when I saw them the first time: The two lions with the Ten Commandments, a little detail of a supermarket with the name Super Mundo.

PresenTensemagazine.org views

issue one 2006

Later I learned that this building used to be the Jacob Schiff Jewish Center, and that along the Grand Concourse there were dozens of former synagogues, but little documentation on this Jewish heritage. I knew that I had to come back to photograph the building. (And to be fingerprinted.) Since then I have traveled hundreds of streets searching for traces of Jewish heritage along the way. For more than two years now, this is my version of a treasure hunt and my way of becoming a New Yorker. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been to many places my native New Yorker friends never visited. My photos show synagogues without Jews, neighborhoods with a Jewish past, but not a Jewish present.

Growing up Jewish in Europe, I carried around the feeling that I was a remnant of a once-thriving culture. Surrounded by former synagogues, forgotten cemeteries, and other icons of Jewish heritage, I saw my heritage; I was its keeper.

Page 30 Mural in the Astoria Center of Israel, Queens Page 31 Former Jacob Schiff Center, Valentine Avenue, The Bronx This page, top Detail of former Jacob Schiff Center, The Bronx This page, bottom Detail of former Hebrew Institute of University Heights, The Bronx Opposite page, top Former synagogue on Washington Avenue, The Bronx Opposite page, bottom left Adventist Church onÂ Forsyth Street, Lower East Side Opposite page, bottom right Hebrew Institute of University Heights, The Bronx

32 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org views

By searching now for Jewish heritage in the home of the largest Jewish Diaspora on the globe, I brought my Old World perspective into the New World. The project has been a race against the clock, as many of the buildings are in bad condition and the threat of demolition looms. Other Jewish buildings have been reinvented as churches, community centers and residential apartments. My black-and-white photography is a re-discovery of nearly forgotten Jewish history. It is also an examination of the way Americans approach their own heritage, as well as the way culture is reborn and reinvented in a city in permanent transition. Julian Voloj Julian Voloj, born in Germany, is a photographer who explores aspects of identity and heritage in his work, and brings others on his exploration through his work with JWalks.org.

PresenTensemagazine.org views

issue one 2006

reviews

Jane Jensen

Photograph by Thomas Gigold

books

JEWS IN SPACE

sci-fi of the hebrew kind

It’s always been something of a geek injoke that several of the founding fathers of modern science-fiction were Jews: authors such as Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison and auteurs like Gene Roddenberry and Steven Spielberg. Science-fiction sagas like The Foundation Trilogy and Star Trek, and comic books like Superman and X-Men were created by children of Jewish immigrants who were firstgeneration Americans. Perhaps it was the need for escapism from a lower-class hard-knock life in the Brooklyn shtetl; perhaps it was that, as kids, everything in the New World seemed like magic and this was a way of processing each new experience. Yet the Jewishness that Jewish creators instilled into their stories went, for the most part, practically unmentioned. Sure, we of the modern Jewish world piece together that the Kal and El that form Superman’s name are Hebrew names for God, and we trade knowing looks when Mr. Spock uses the sign of the Kohanim as a Vulcan salute on Star Trek. Stripping away the exterior however, what today is

seriously Jewish about science-fiction and what does it say? Jack Dann, a science-fiction writer who’s spent a significant part of his career writing explicitly Jewish stories, assembled a manifest of sciencefiction all-stars to write stories for Wandering Stars, a Jewish science-fiction anthology. While Dann himself does not contribute to this anthology, he is well known for his short story “Jumping the Road,” from the collection Jubilee. This ethereal story of his is set in motion by the question, what if Jews existed on planets other than Earth? The main character, a human rabbi, explains that life on other planets challenges most religions. Christians face the problem of an entire planet of unsaveables: like humans that existed before Jesus, aliens are worthy people denied salvation because they haven’t heard of Jesus. With Islam, Muslims wonder why God didn’t find a Prophet Muhammad on each planet. But in Dann’s story, there are alien Jews—replete with an alien Moses, an alien Ten Commandments and an alien Talmud. In “Jumping,” Dann presents a cosmic detective story and relies on his rabbi protagonist to get to the bottom of the mystery. It’s confusing, playfully didactic, and dreamlike—so much so that it starts to remind you of the Talmud itself. Though Dann himself is curiously absent from the writers in Wandering Stars, he edits twelve Jewish science-fiction writers who turn their attention to their native religion with mixed results. Robert Silverberg’s “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV” is a clever story about an asteroid run jointly by secular Israelis, Hasidim, and native Kunivaru aliens, all of whom are forced to cooperate when an unbelieving Israeli dies, becomes a dybbuk, and finds himself

stuck inside the body of one of the Kunivaru. In tone and subject matter it runs right along with turn-of-the-century Yiddish writers, especially when the non-believing Reform rabbi starts protesting and the narrator, another nonbeliever, says, “The Hasidim began to sing; to my everlasting shame I have no idea what the singing was about, for the words were Yiddish of a Galitsianer sort, nearly as alien to me as the Kunivaru tongue.” Some of the authors are less innovative. In both William Tenn’s “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi” and Harlan Ellison’s “I’m Looking for Kadak,” the narrators launch a barrage of Yiddish at the reader that’s so flamboyant and efficacious that one wonders whether its purpose is to set a mood for the story or to somehow throw darts at a bagel-shaped

Wandering Stars Edited by Jack Dann Jewish Lights Publishing, 239 PP 1998 $16.95 Jubilee by Jack Dann Tor Books, 448 PP 2004 $16.95 Dante’s Equation by Jane Jensen Del Rey, 496 PP 2003 $15.95

dartboard and hope it sounds Jewish enough to count. Isaac Asimov’s introduction to the volume makes a point to mention his own lack of Jewishness. Its title, “Why Me?,” is a lot more telling than it’s supposed to be. “I don’t do anything about it, you understand,” he writes. “I attend no services and follow no ritual and have never even undergone that curious puberty rite, the bar mitzvah.” There’s more to Tenn’s and Ellison’s stories than meets the eye, though—and, maybe, more Jewish content than either intended.

Christians faced the problem of an entire planet of unsaveables. Jews didn’t have that problem. Aliens, fine. They’re just like goyim, only with purple or green or rainbow skin.

34 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org reviews

Both protagonists are elderly men who have seen their worlds change before their eyes. In Tell’s, a man leaves Earth and moves to a new world; in Ellison’s, a man watches his whole world die. In both, there is a degree of loss, pity, and aged innocence—of a man who is both wise and foolish, who is fully aware of how many things in the universe he knows nothing about. And maybe this is the essence of what’s Jewish about science-fiction, of the binah, the understanding, that lies behind these writers. It’s less about the medium than the message. And that message—of truth, of survival, of passing on the values and beliefs, if not the Yiddishisms—is what’s at the heart of these stories, if not at their forefront. The message of Asimov’s introduction, and the reiteration of the age-old question “What makes a Jew?” is at least as important in science-fiction as in other spheres. In these stories, Jews are either Orthodox, “slackadox,” or totally secular, which is the same thing Jewish sociologists have been saying for years. But secular Judaism in these stories isn’t dead—it’s background, unstated and somehow implied. In that way, the Yiddishisms of Ellison’s and Tell’s stories is like a futuristic bagels-and-lox Judaism. And, like the aliens of Dann’s story suggest, maybe eventually Judaism won’t be split into secular and religious camps—maybe there will only be the ultra-Orthodox, facing Jerusalem as they pray from each new planet and meteor, and the implied Judaism inside the crouched words and expressions of the secularists.

But what happens when Judaism becomes fully academic—when we’re still reading about Judaism as a religion, but divorced from the actual Jewish people? Jane Jensen’s book Dante’s Equation is a perfect example of the opposite phenomenon—where Judaism is placed at center stage by someone who, Jewishly, doesn’t

have a clue what she’s writing about. Hailed on the front cover as being “grounded in a science that is both creative and cutting edge,” Jensen’s Kabbalah is not pop and flaky. The Bible codes that her characters throw around are wellresearched and workable. The only trouble is, her characters resemble bad stereotypes out of a Nazi propaganda cartoon: religious Jews who variously insult their wives, curse their God, and all speak in a uniformly out-of-place shtetl English that’s the linguistic equivalent of Splenda—it looks like the real thing, even mostly tastes like it, but there’s something off that you can’t quite place. The protagonist, Rabbi Aharon Handalman, an Aish HaTorah rabbi and expert on the Bible Code, is a man with a mission. He’s researching a Holocaust-era rabbi, Yosef Kobinski, whose last name has been hidden in the Bible in more than four hundred different places. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, various people—a fortune-hunter journalist, a Department of Defense operative, and a professor of physics—are all closing in on a mathematical formula that Kobinski discovered in Auschwitz. The first half of the book is a straightforward thriller, along the lines of The Da Vinci Code or Foucault’s Pendulum, in which the characters stumble on clues, chase each other around, and explain elementary concepts of Kabbalah to each other—the struggle between chesed (kindness) and gevurah (strictness), for instance. But, as the characters dig deeper, their conclusions seem more and more off-kilter, and we get to a point where the characters decide that chesed is basically good and gevurah is basically bad, which is pretty much the opposite, as anyone in any stream of Judaism will tell you, of the way things actually go. In addition, there’s a lot of talk about Jewish books and sources, but nothing’s actually mentioned. It’s frustrating in the same way that the movie Pi frustrated mathematicians: the whole plot was about math, yet all the math was done off-screen. It violates one of the cardinal rules of mysteries, which is that an author can’t rely on a clue they haven’t given to the audience. Otherwise, why bother reading? Jensen’s biographical bit in the back cites her credentials as “a longstanding interest in comparative religion and philosophy, perhaps

What happens when Judaism becomes fully academic—when we’re still reading about Judaism as a religion, but divorced from the actual Jewish people? PresenTensemagazine.org reviews

in an effort to balance—or fathom—her upbringing as a fundamentalist minister’s daughter.” The chapters in the book that have to do with physics are fascinating (my near-complete ignorance of physics notwithstanding), but when it comes to religion, the author’s baggage might be showing—such as when Rabbi Aharon’s wife, Hannah, tries to have a conversation with him, and he silences her: “Do we need to have this discussion right now?” In this discussion, Hannah points out that some Orthodox Jews now embrace women studying Torah. Aharon knows this. He knows there is no mitzvah that specifically prohibits it. But to him, this is simply not his idea of women—nor of Torah study. This representation of Orthodox Jews demonstrates irresponsibility and ignorance that borders on outright racism. Even though some Orthodox Jews hold that women shouldn’t study Gemarah, Torah is the essence of our religion. Denying a woman the right to study Torah is the religious equivalent of saying that women shouldn’t speak English, wear clothes, or drink water. Yes, there are instances of men putting down their wives in Orthodox Jewish culture. But—yes, this is me, a married Orthodox Jew living in an ultrareligious community, injecting my personal beliefs into a review—this is wrong. It’s like a white person writing a book about a black man who snorts coke all day and beats his wife—it’s not writing believable characters, and it’s preying on stereotypes. I don’t mean to diminish the book’s other values. As a science thriller, it’s pretty effective. The conclusion that the novel’s physicists arrive at—that human goodness is quantitative, and can be altered at will—is morally startling, and worthy of further examination. Jensen composes action scenes like few writers in science-fiction today. And her central conceit, that science is an heir to religion and doesn’t exist in conflict with it, is explored in a number of riveting conversations where, unusually for a book like this, everyone has valid points. Yet when you peel away the outer layers and consider the essence of her story, it’s all about a bunch of modern people chasing an esoteric Kabbalistic manuscript that they can never hope to understand. And so, in a way, is this book. Matthue Roth Matthue Roth is a writer and performance poet whose novel, Never Mind the Goldbergs, is out in paperback. Matthue writes for Bitch Magazine, Zero and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and reads a lot of comic books.

issue one 2006

R R

books

WHY THIS JUDAISM IS DIFFERENT

How This Night Is Different: Stories By Elisa Albert Free Press, 208 PP 2006 $18.00

protestant judaism

On December 23, 1789, the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre famously announced to the French Revolutionary Assembly that, “As a nation, Jews must be denied everything; as individuals, they must be granted everything.” This grant of liberty to the Jews from a rapidly secularizing Christian Europe complicated Judaism in many ways, with the most fundamental change being its Protestantization: Judaism moved from being centrally defined as a set of rituals and communal gatherings— from an external set of mitzvot—to being about the inner struggle with one’s beliefs, with one’s faith and feelings. Many Jews have been unable to deal well with this epochal change. Hasidim live in enclosed communities, pretending the rest

religion connecting the Jewish people is true, if by now a bit hackneyed. It is too often used as an excuse to ignore religion. Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick and Saul Bellow wrestled (and maybe even bloodied) tradition and law. With such examples, one would expect more contemporary authors who consciously express their Judaism, or positively cultivate it as part of their image, to locate religion, obligation, doubt and mystery as central matters in their work. Or at least I did, especially when I picked up Elisa Albert’s new book, How This Night is Different. Albert is most fascinated by what she disdains. Her stories, save for the last chapter in this volume (a love letter to Philip Roth that

Religion is a permanent aspect of the human condition.

of the world doesn’t merit more than a glance. At the other end of the spectrum, many Jews think the blessings of modernity consist mostly in the freedom it gave them to dispense with their heritage—the Torah for them being simply a great piece of literature they always mean to one day read. With this paradigm shift, Jews as a people have been allowed, if not pushed, to become ever more searching and discriminating about their inheritance. Modernity is a special opportunity for the mature and passionate to critically examine their history, law, poetry, and prayer while at the same time maintaining their ties to their past. Unfortunately, many of those with more liberal sensibilities (a group I usually proudly count myself among) see Judaism as little more than a thin and troubling obligation imposed by the memory of one’s parents. Religion is a permanent aspect of the human condition. However, few American novels today seriously confront the nature of religious life. One would think that Jewish writers, of all people, would seek to remedy this neglect in their work. The cliché that there is a Jewish culture and not simply a Jewish

36 issue one 2006

is both extremely serious and sharply playful), focus on a world she celebrates escaping at the end of the book. The tales are mostly variations on the theme of the shallowness of modern American Jewish life. The Judaism of her characters is put front and center, but scarcely investigated. In the story “Everything But,” Alex insults his wife, Erin, for not remembering the parashah of her Bat Mitzvah, all the while repeatedly mentioning that his was Toldot. (“Alex offers a shadow of a shrug, thumbsdrumming in time with, Erin imagines, his self-satisfied internal repetition of Jacob and Esau, Jacob and Esau, Jacob and Esau.”) In “The Living,” a March of the Living pilgrimage to Auschwitz is another opportunity for Shayna to invidiously compare herself to her brother. This contrast so consumes her that she is unable to record anything at all about her trip to the concentration camp in her notebook. Shayna is powerless to write down even one sentence because it would not be as poetic, as searing, or as elevated as the journal entries her older brother composed on his trip to Poland and Israel. In Albert’s stories familial conflict sweeps away almost everything else. Life consists of

a chronology of personal problems for the characters while their Judaism does little but serve as an occasion for the outbreak of such troubles. The Protestantization of Judaism as embodied here in a reduction of religion to emotional heartache is a fascinating but ultimately poor way to meaningfully explore our religion in the modern world.Judaism is not about arguments with your overbearing parents, and it was not traditionally this way. If it seems to have become so in the modern world, it is no wonder so many people find their heritage unsatisfying. Albert condemns a world she cannot pull herself away from. There is little about faith or doubt in her book. The Judaism of her characters is, to a large degree, unexamined. Their Judaism is pasty, thin and crackly, like old paint. The intellectual edge of Judaism, with its historical attraction to debate and ideas is nowhere to be seen here. Albert summons a certain atmosphere, a certain lifestyle, certain habits, but only to show how trivial they are, how painful and slight Judaism is for some today. Although she has physically decided to leave these people—most significantly by ending her engagement to a man all-toorepresentative of this milieu with her love letter to Roth—she still has yet to do so emotionally and imaginatively. At one point in the letter, she declares “I choose fiction over him [her former fiancé].” But she hasn’t. Her fiction is still about the life she chose to leave. It is not yet about the life that she has apparently chosen to live. If Albert’s Judaism is important enough to shape her characters’ lives, why not make them serious enough to explore their Judaism deeply, with knowledge and love and distance all at the same time? Why not address the deeper dilemma that Modernity brings, instead of making Judaism simply another occasion for family bickering? Mordechai Levy-Eichel Mordechai Levy-Eichel, a New York City native, is a fourth-year student at the University of Chicago studying intellectual history (and sometimes other types of history as well).

PresenTensemagazine.org reviews

books

SEARCHING FOR HER

humanity and anonymity in jerusalem

“Even though the manager of the human resources division had not sought such a mission, now, in the softly radiant morning, he grasped its unexpected significance.” So begins A Woman in Jerusalem, an allegorical and puzzling tale by one of Israel’s leading man of letters, A.B. Yehoshua. Yehoshua, who began publishing in the 1960s and has won every literary prize in Israel, devotes his eighth novel to following a few days in the life of an unnamed protagonist who is sent on a reluctant journey to a distant land. What prompts this journey is the death of a foreign worker who, having been killed in a terrorist attack, is left unclaimed for days until a bloody pay stub in her purse identifies the bakery as her employer. At the risk of seeming callous, and with a weekly tabloid threatening to expose the bakery’s inhumanity, the Human Resources (HR) manager is charged with accompanying the dead woman’s body back to her native country in the Former Soviet Union. “You’re no longer a manager but an emissary,” says his boss, the elderly owner of the commercial bakery where he works as the HR manager.

Woman in Jerusalem to be a novella, but it surpassed novella length. In many ways, Yehoshua’s latest book harkens back to the early short stories that launched his career in the 1960s and established his reputation as part of the New Wave of Israeli literature, along with Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld. This generation, also called the Generation of the State, was wary of nationalistic fervor of the previous Israeli authors. Influenced by the modernism of Faulkner and Kafka, these young writers focused on the intersection between the needs of the individual and the expectations of the collective whole. This muddled intersection is explored in Yehoshua’s novel in full force. When we first meet the manager in A Woman in Jerusalem, he has worked his way up in the company to become the head of HR to the detriment of his own marriage. That is why he, at middle age, has moved back in with his mother, spars with his ex-wife, tries to salvage a relationship with his teenage daughter, and spends his evenings at a nearby bar, attempting to pick up women. We glean these facts about the manager’s life and yet we never really enter his core. In fact, we never even know his name. Instead, he and the other characters are identified only by their roles. Only the dead woman, Yulia Ragayev, is named. As the manager begins to uncover Yulia’s life, however, his humanity slowly emerges. What he discovers is that this 40-year-old mechanical engineer could only find work in Jerusalem as a cleaning woman in the bakery. Although she settled in Israel with her teenage son and boyfriend, they both moved back home, leaving her alone. A beguiling woman, with “tartan eyes,” she has some kind of allure; first with the night-shift supervisor of the bakery and later, with the HR manager himself who begins to fall in love with her posthumously. The second half of the novel concerns the mission itself. The manager and his cohorts

His is a nostalgic Jerusalem, a “shabby, suffering city” that is “bathed in a glow of importance.” But this idealized city of long ago no longer exists. So the manager, along with a journalist, a photographer, and the dead woman’s sullen teenage son, set out with the coffin to give her a proper burial in her native land. At just under 300 pages, it’s a rather short book for Yehoshua. His novels, such as Mr. Mani, Journey to the End of the Millennium, and most recently , The Liberated Bride, tend to run long. Yehoshua originally intended A

PresenTensemagazine.org reviews

trek through the brutal winter landscape in an old army vehicle, stopping for a time in a forgotten nuclear command post from the Cold War. Although the goal is to meet with the dead woman’s mother and finally bury

A Woman in Jerusalem by A. B. Yehoshua Harcourt 256 PP 2006 $25.00

Yulia, the whole story is really a philosophical musing—more a spiritual and intellectual journey than a physical one. Interspersed in the telling of this story are Greek choruses depicting the perspectives of neighbors, bakery workers and natives from Yulia’s homeland. Indeed, the result is an odd tale, written in Yehoshua’s trademark lulling, undulating prose. While the task put before the HR manager seems straightforward, what emerges are questions about moral obligations both on the personal and national level. Since the novel is set during the second Intifada, Yehoshua is particularly skewering a reality in which the line between the enemy and the civilian has been blurred. While some of the philosophical discussions in the book are universal, his book is particularly Israeli, especially since half of it is set in Yehoshua’s birthplace of Jerusalem, where his family settled in 1830. His is a nostalgic Jerusalem, a “ … shabby, suffering city” that is “bathed in a glow of importance.” But this idealized city of long ago no longer exists. In its place is a city that houses the Yulia Ragayevs of the world, non-Jews who settle in Israel not because of religious conviction but simply to make a living. And sadly, it is often these same foreigners who not only settle in a city not their own, but end up dying in a war not their own.

issue one 2006

R R

Photograph by Steve Rhodes

In this clash between the ideal and the real, the reader is left wondering—what is the message, the core insight, Yehoshua would like us to walk away with? A Woman in Jerusalem is clearly a vehicle for some larger truth, but Yehoshua himself seems to have only the question, not the answer. But perhaps Yehoshua’s answer is exactly that: that in a world in which senseless killings in nearly pointless wars frame our daily life, it is more important to open our eyes to questions than to claim we have the answer. Abigail Pickus Abigail Pickus is a Chicago-based journalist who co-organizes the Nextbook literary series.

film

CALL FOR RETURN

fielding questions on lebanon

When I tied up all the loose ends from the spring semester and got on the plane to Israel this past summer, I was not really expecting that I would get to meet Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai, or that three days later war would break out between Israel and Lebanon. For a recent TV studies class I took at New York University, I researched Yoman Sade (Field Diary) (1982), Gitai’s never-aired TV program about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the events leading up to it. Israeli TV commissioned the program but decided the final program was too controversial to run. It screened as a film at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and other international Field Diary film festivals and has (Yoman Sade) recently been released on by Amos Gitai DVD. Gitai’s earlier TV Facets 163 min 2006 program, Bayit (House) (1980), on the various former owners of a house on Dor v’Dorshav Street

38 issue one 2006

in Jerusalem, was also commissioned by Israeli TV and also never aired there. Instead, it ran as a film in several international film festivals. Gitai recently directed a third film in the House series—News From Home / News From House (2006), which I heard him speak about at the Jerusalem Cinematheque in July. I did not think to ask Gitai about the topic of Lebanon, but when war broke out just days after he spoke at the Cinematheque, Yoman Sade returned to my mind. Gitai’s film suggests that the 1982 invasion of Lebanon actually occurred as a part of Israel’s internal power struggles and faltering sense of identity as a country. He shows footage of soldiers and civilians in day-to-day life in Gaza, Judea and Samaria just before the invasion. This footage gives the impression that Israel was attempting to expand its military reach in several directions at once. It suggests that, after the Yom Kippur War, Israel had lost some of its “David vs. Goliath” sense of military invincibility from the Six-Day War. Incursions into Gaza and the support of settlements in Judea and Samaria did to some degree directly lead up to the Lebanon invasion. Israeli military leaders used civil instability in Lebanon as a call to action—and justification to extend military actions in Lebanon. The film suggests that while Lebanon certainly was in a period of crisis, the 1982 invasion was premature, inefficient, and continued as an occupation for far too long. Through the course of this summer, three Israeli authors known for their left-wing political views called a press conference to share their perspectives on the war, further highlighting the sharp distinctions between the first and second conflicts with Lebanon. Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua said that the invasion of Lebanon was justified, but continued military operations would be going too far.

It surprised me that Oz, a member of Peace Now, the leftist group known for promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, would favor any invasion of a neighboring country. But the group took the stance that this invasion of Lebanon came after a series of kidnappings and military attacks on Israel, which justified a military response. This distinction between military response and military occupation is what would change Gitai’s film were he to direct it again today. Israel has no resources to bring about socioeconomic change in Lebanon, which sits at the root of the problem. If the Israeli invasion of Lebanon had been the answer to the Lebanese internal conflict and the Lebanese-Israeli tension points, the 1982 invasion would have eradicated both problems. But, of course, it did not. Israel has enough of its own problems with civil divisions and socio-economic imbalances that it doesn’t need to take on those of Lebanon or the Palestinian Authority. As Gitai’s film suggests, invading other countries often indicates a military effort to distract from the very real civil divisions and strife in one’s own country. The latest installment in his House series includes conversations with Palestinians, Israelis and others affiliated with a particular Jerusalem residence. With this project, perhaps Gitai suggests we focus on the internal spaces and idiosyncrasies of Israel, and not on wars that cannot be won in other countries. Lynley-Shimat Lys When she’s not hanging out in Israel, LynleyShimat Lys studies Moving Image Archiving and Preservation at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

PresenTensemagazine.org reviews

Photograph by Michelle Amini

theater

TASTES GREAT, LESS FILLING

the need for content in jewish culture

Welcome, fellow young Jewish panculturalists, to an age of expressive possibility. A multitude of Jewish producers, experiences and products awaits us. Jewish culture is no longer confined to the synagogue or community center, but exists today in music, magazines, theater and comedy, featuring a distinct blend of traditionalism and pop culture. If the arts are among the most attractive modes of Jewish engagement for young Jews, as many funders and community organizers believe, then artists’ choices of how to present their work will have significant repercussions in how young Jews create their Jewish identities. The new wave of cultural opportunities begs a familiar Jewish question: Will American Jews relate to Judaism as spectators or as active participants? And is cultural consumption a sufficient act of Jewish engagement? Let’s examine the products of two institutions that have carved an influential niche in fostering new methods of Jewish culture: JDub Records and Storahtelling, producers of genre-bending Jewish musicians and Jewish ritual theater respectively. JDub is a non-profit Jewish record label that fosters contemporary Jewish musicians and presents them in mainstream venues. With event names like “Slivovitz & Soul” and “Jewltide,” artists present their music in contexts with a slight tinge of irony. JDub engineered the first PresenTensemagazine.org reviews

wave of the Matisyahu phenomenon, and its current roster includes Socalled, Golem, The LeeVees and Balkan Beat Box. According to its mission statement, JDub aims to uphold “music and the arts as a valid and vital method of self expression within Judaism and as a means of bridging religious, ethnic, and cultural boundaries.” Matisyahu, until his recent departure from JDub, was the record label’s most renowned success. With an unmistakable Hasidic appearance, complete with full beard and black hat, Matisyahu brought a fresh approach to reggae music and attracted a new audience of Jews who were as interested in his talent as they were in the sheer novelty of the concept. His performance appeals to a fetish of otherness among both Jews and non-Jews: he is the Jew we have no practical interest in emulating, yet we are fascinated with him. As he raps about religious submission, Jerusalem and Reb Schneerson in an approximation of a Jamaican accent, we celebrate a cultural representation of the most obvious and surface elements of

both Jewishness and African Diaspora culture. Above all, Matisyahu is entertaining, and he certainly encourages a Jewish affiliation. Young Jews will meet as they attend his shows and may even feel pride in their Jewishness. But conceptions of Jewish and Rastafarian culture are not necessarily deepened in experiencing his performance. To some, he exemplifies the synthesis of two cultures; to others, pure gimmick. Another success from the JDub school is Socalled—a DJ, accordionist, rapper, cultural critic and musical personality. Remarkably eclectic and tongue in cheek, Socalled creates a captivating musical universe in which Mickey Katz can freestyle in Yiddish over Wu Tangesque beats. Music from his upcoming release “Ghetto-Blaster” is featured on myspace. com/socalled and includes impressive works that push the envelope on sampling. In the main hook of “You Are Never Alone,” he recontextualizes a Hasidic nigun and pulls on past generations of Jewish kitsch with the opening sample, “I’m a Jewish cowboy.” Socalled uses contemporary American archetypes and modalities to communicate the Jewish experience of wandering and displacement. Socalled honestly communicates the complex hybrid of young American Jews without rejecting his upbringing in this mix. The message that ‘you can be a Jew as you are’ is encouraging and empowering. Socalled appeals to kitsch and surface observations of Jewishness while maintaining a deep interaction with his culture. If the audience leaves his shows with greater curiosity about their Jewishness than when they arrived, his product affects Jewish engagement. However, if he serves as background music for a young Jewish mixer, we do not benefit from what Socalled has to offer. If Socalled represents an admirable combination of levity and gravitas for music,

In every project and production, Storahtelling aims for more than entertainment; the goal always includes contemplation, conversation, and ultimately, action among its artists and audience members.

R R

issue one 2006

then Storahtelling is its equivalent for theater. Storahtelling is a theater company and Jewish educational organization spearheaded by actor/storyteller/scholar/performance artist Amichai Lau-Lavie that aims to create a “radical fusion of storytelling, Torah, contemporary performance art and traditional ritual theater.” The company offers a range of programming from performance events in and out of synagogues, to unique riffs on ritual, to educational initiatives. (I claim no objectivity when reflecting on Storahtelling: I am a company member, a musician and educator who is involved with the company. So ingest that grain of salt from here on out). Here’s a look at the first rehearsal of ‘The Birth of Laughter’, a Storahtelling show exploring Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar’s familial turmoil before the birth of Isaac. Rehearsal begins with a day devoted to stepping into the character of Hagar. Actors and musicians collaborating on the production are guided into potential inner workings of Hagar: What

does it mean to be the ‘other woman?’ To be a pawn passed back and forth as a conduit of family transmission, a family you will never be a part of? At Storahtelling, every production is an education. The power of the productions comes from artists immersing their whole selves in Jewish mythology. An amazing success of Storahtelling is that it gathers together ensembles from a company of more than 50 Jewish artists based in New York to step inside the Jewish mythical imagination and creatively expand it. Storahtelling creates opportunities for new responses to Jewish experiences in new contexts. Company members are encouraged to bring their entire selves to the table—as Jews, artists, consumers of pop culture—in creating new Jewish performance. And they show up pretty consistently to the table. The major challenge of Storahtelling is how to expand the collaborative network so observers can see themselves in the stories. In every project and production, Storahtelling

aims for more than entertainment; the goal always includes contemplation, conversation, and ultimately, action among its artists and audience members. In the pastiche that is Jewish-American cultural life, all of the above-noted producers may be effective in bringing Jews together. But Jewish gathering is not enough. Jewish substance should be the goal of the organizations and funders involved in Jewish culture production. We have succeeded in creating a fun and viable Jewish pop culture, but we must raise the bar on meaning. Socalled playfully and selfconsciously explores cross-sections of cultures and opens up potentials for new Jewish context and meanings, and Storahtelling creates holistic artistic frameworks for Jewish participation. I welcome more Jewish culture producers and artists to follow suit. Avi Fox-Rosen Avi Fox-Rosen is a singer/songwriter based in Brooklyn. He is the Musical Director of Kehillat Romemu, a company member with Storahtelling, Artist-in-Residence at Makor, and plays and teaches with many jazz and creative Jewish ensembles.

send us your email! R

we will send you updates. no spam. all PRESENTENSE. updates@presentensemagazine.org

translates the joyful atmosphere of its stage performance to your speakers; the record is a nonstop Gypsy electro party. Among many cultural influences, the Jewish-Israeli factor is apparent on tracks such as “Adir Adirim,” which features Victoria Hanna chanting an ancient Hebrew text accompanied by an upbeat Greek bouzouki. “Gross,” which features the Israeli band Boom Pam, is another Greekstyled track. On the haunting anti-war closing track “La Bush Resistance,” singer Tomer Yosef urges his listeners (in lyrics half-English, halfHebrew) to “bring the dancing and leave the guns.” Yosef sings, “All I have left are the drums of the resistance.” As this album proves, these drums reach beyond borders.

GOLEM

fresh off boat

Balkan Beat Box. Berlin, Germany 2006 Photograph by Sven Werkmeister

music

Balkan Beat Box

balkan beat box

The Balkan Beat Box collective is the brainchild of Israel-born, New Yorkbased Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan. On their debut album they merge revolution with tradition and electronic and hip-hop beats with folk music from the Balkans, North Africa and the Middle East. If the world were a village, this is what would be on the local radio station. Known for high-energy live shows packed with improvisation, Balkan Beat Box successfully

PresenTensemagazine.org reviews

This Lower East Side sextet is not your regular klezmer band. Named for the old Jewish legend of a creature fashioned from clay, these New York kids raucously roll off the immigrant boat blasting their version of Eastern European Jewish folk music. Think Fiddler on the Roof with a mohawk. Annette Ezekiel, founder, singer and accordionist, joins vocalist Aaron Diskin to spin grandma’s dusty records like you’ve never heard them spun before. Far from sounding dated or irrelevant, Fresh Off Boat is infused with a punk spirit reminiscent of original New York Gypsy punks Gogol Bordello. The lyrics mix Yiddish, French, English and Russian with an atmosphere fit for CBGB’s or the Knitting Factory. With help from friends such as Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Band, Mike Gordon of Phish and Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, this album just might be the missing link between the traditions of the old country and the western sounds of today.

SOCalled

the socalled seder: a hip hop haggadah

source of old Jewish records. The result is quirky and unexpectedly groovy. Digging for samples among old records featuring Yiddish vaudeville and cantorial music, Dolgin has found a unique way to express and represent his heritage and identity in the spirit of hip-hop. The seder theme not only connects Jews throughout the generations, it also references the theme of Exodus in the African-American tradition and spirituals such as “Let My People Go.” Seen this way, it makes perfect sense for Dolgin to join forces with Wu Tang Clan’s Killah Priest, DJ P Love and an African children’s chorus.

REGINA SPEKTOR

begin to hope

Regina Spektor was born in Russia, raised in the Bronx and used to practice the piano in her local synagogue as a child. On this album she beautifully merges these various aspects of her identity. Since 2001 she has built a devoted fan base with three independently released albums. Begin to Hope, released on Warner Bros. label Sire, is her major label debut and she is likely to lure new listeners in with radio-friendly tracks infused with drum machines, such as “Fidelity” and “On the Radio.” Elsewhere on the album she allows herself to cut loose and explore new depths on slower, piano-laden tracks. In the dark and ominous “Après Moi,” Spektor sings of a biblical flood in English, French and Russian while vocalizing in a manner that would have made her cantor proud. Biblical references are also evident in her modern spin on a famous love story in “Samson.” Throughout the album, Spektor shows off her skills as a classically trained pianist. Taken together with her heavy New York accent, spiked with Russian and Jewish references, she creates a style entirely her own. sHIRLEY FURMAN Shirley Furman was born in the Bronx, NY, raised in Israel, and was trained in alternative music while working at frenchkiss records and insound.com.

Socalled, a.k.a. Josh Dolgin, creates a hip-hop seder on his JDub Records debut. In a riff on the usual R&B and funk records more commonly sampled by hip-hop musicians, Dolgin uses an untapped

issue one 2006

ARTS PORTRAIT OF A writer

interview with dara horn

am one of four siblings who are very close in age, and when we were children, our parents developed elaborate tactics for keeping us from attacking strangers and each other. We traveled a lot as a family (to places like Cambodia and Peru), and to prevent us from beating up the flight attendants, our parents told us that we all had to keep journals during these trips. I took it very seriously, and it taught me a lot about how to be a careful observer. At home, my parents would also assign creative projects to us in order to keep us out of their hair. We’d come home from school and our mother would tell us to write a play and perform it after dinner. It really worked, because now my two sisters are also published writers (my younger sister published her first novel two years ago and is just finishing a second one; my older sister is a journalist who’s written for The New York Times and many other papers and is now working on a first novel) and my brother is a professional animator for television. We still do creative projects together as adults, and we give each other’s characters cameos in our books. One of my sisters is a teacher during the year, and during the summer we actually sit in a café and write together.

I really think that being a writer is more like having an addiction or a disease than having a job—it’s not a choice, it’s a chronic condition, and the question is how to deal with it. For me, the big realization wasn’t about being a writer, but about writing fiction. I always thought I would become a journalist, and I walked around with notebooks, collecting ideas for non-fiction articles and essays. Then one day I read through one of these notebooks, and I realized that a lot of the things I had jotted down had more in common with each other thematically than I would have expected. It occurred to me that all of these little anecdotes and stories and thoughts were just waiting to be woven together into a single plot. I had never written any fiction at all, not even a short story, until I wrote my first novel. One nice thing about writing fiction is that you get to test out ideas without committing yourself to them. I do have deeply held religious beliefs, and I have other beliefs that change as my life changes. But I wrote The World to Come in part as a way of exploring things that I wanted to be true. I think that no matter how rational or secular a person is, there are two things that can never stand up to rational questioning: How can a person who just existed suddenly not exist anymore? And how can someone who never existed suddenly exist? I think we all want to believe in the presence of those who have passed away, and I think we all feel their presence in unexpected ways long after their deaths. The idea in this book of how our deceased ancestors “train” our future descendants by giving them their traits and ways of thinking, might seem strange or “spiritual” (usually a euphemism for “flaky”), but it’s really just

the reality of genetics. Everyone wants to believe in the revival of the dead, but the truth is that the dead do live. Every aspect of them is preserved within us. In terms of being a “young Jewish-American writer in the 21st century,” I disagree with the claim that young Jews are rebelling against Judaism. I actually think that young people of every generation like to rebel against their parents, but the circumstances have changed. For Philip Roth’s generation, the way to rebel against your parents was to come home and announce that you were marrying a non-Jew and eating pork on Yom Kippur. But consider this. People my age (I’m 29) are the grandchildren of people Philip Roth’s age. Our parents and grandparents already did the rebellion-againstJudaism thing. If someone my age wants to rebel against his parents, he won’t tell them he’s eating pork on Yom Kippur and marrying a non-Jew, because his parents probably already did that themselves and wouldn’t be bothered by it at all. Instead, if a Jewish person my age really wants to piss off his parents, he’ll come home and announce that he’s joined ChabadLubavitch, that he’s growing a beard, that he’s getting married at age nineteen and having ten children, and that he refuses to eat in his parents’ house because it’s not kosher enough for him. I’ve taught college courses in Jewish literature, and it’s always astonishing to me how many of my students find their way into varieties of Jewish life (religious, secular, cultural) that their parents would never have imagined. Philip Roth was first published fifty years ago—in a very different America, where being seen as a Jewish writer

The beauty of literature is that it becomes universal precisely through its particulars.

42 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org arts

Dara Horn is an award-winning novelist, essayist, professor and scholar. This Portrait was painted with Dara Horn’s words, by Ariella Saperstein’s pen. For the full interview, see www.presentensemagazine.org

Dara Horn. New York, NY

was a career-killer. Now it’s practically a marketing asset. But I also think that most writers of Philip Roth’s generation actually didn’t know very much about Judaism or even Jewish culture. They were essentially writing about the second-generation immigrant experience, about assimilating into American life. My work is quite different because I’ve written about the content of Jewish tradition, which most of the earlier writers didn’t. Most writers are fearful of being labeled because they feel it may limit their work or their audience. But I’ve actually

PresenTensemagazine.org arts

Photograph by Avital Aronowitz

been surprised by how much non-Jewish readers have taken to my books. I’ve spoken at churches, and I get a lot of mail from non-Jewish and even religiously Christian readers. The beauty of literature is that it becomes universal precisely through its particulars. Ariella Saperstein Ariella Saperstein is Assistant Director at the Anti-Defamation League’s New York Regional Office, covering international, public policy and campus issues.

issue one 2006

The whole wheat

whole-wheat pasta, shemura matzah, and other frum farinacious musings

hen I was a student at a Jerusalem seminary with a notorious reputation for spawning eating disorders, I saw tons of bizarre food behaviors. The weirdest, however, occurred on a balmy Elul night in the kitchenette of my dorm suite. There I lounged with a glass of diet StrawberryBanana Spring mixed with seltzer and a small but valiant chunk of ice, when a particularly svelte suitemate of mine sashayed in and proceeded to rummage through the cupboards. I asked if she was looking for anything in particular. “My Whole Kamut Spirals!” she said. “I’m not eating wheat this month, and dinner was mini-pizzas.” “Your Kamut Spirals are on the top left, and yes, you are,” I giggled. “Thanks. What?!?!?!?” Sometimes being a biologist comes in handy, especially when you have to open up a can of well deserved whole-grain whoopskinny-uninformed-Jewish-girl-tush. “Well, technically, you’ve been eating wheat all summer. Kamut is a variety of wheat, and so is spelt. And your spelt cookies aren’t even whole-grain. Maybe try some quinoa?” I offered, helpfully… But she fled the kitchenette; whether to sob or vomit, I’ll never know.

44 issue one 2006

Traditional Jewish cuisine and wholegrains aren’t always the easiest mix. Until lately, finding a box of whole-wheat matzah or matzah meal was almost impossible, the notorious “let my people go” jokes aside. Whole-wheat challah at most bakeries of my youth consisted of regular challah dough with some caramel coloring added, or, if you were lucky, a half-cup of bran flakes added to the mix or a handful of decorative oats sprinkled on top. However, food-loving Jews all over the religio-cultural spectrum have become increasingly whole- and exotic-grain friendly these days. Noted Jewish cookbook author and sociologist of Jewish food Joan Nathan attributes the beginnings of a change in attitude towards whole-grains to the influx of more worldly, granola-oriented baalei-teshuva kosher cooks, and surely the USDA’s new “My Pyramid” recommendations of daily wholegrain servings have trickled into all but the most isolated of communities. This would explain why I found an intriguing variety of whole-wheat macaroni and fettucini at a large, predominatly Haredi supermarket in Boro Park a few months ago, distributed by Heimishe food-brand giant Landau’s (promulgator of the whole-wheat-matzah-based snack cracker). The rising awareness of the diverse origins of pan-cultural Jewish cuisine from far-flung places has accorded dishes such as bulgur-based

kibbeh, tabbouleh salad and durum-semolina couscous a place of honor on Shabbat and holiday tables of Jews of all descriptions. Even a few kosher restaurants are getting in on the whole-wheat wave. Cafe Viva, a pizzeria on the Upper West Side of Manhattan popular with both JTS students and HAFTR graduates paying outrageous rents for apartments on the corner of Orthodox and Single, offers wholewheat, spelt, or corn-based options for every pizza crust and an impressive array of wholewheat and non-grain-based pastas as well. Might the Diet for a Small Planet one day become a Diet for a Small People? The answer, of course, is no. Thinking that wholesome Jewish unity depends on anything as picayune as changing our challah-fressing habits to wholesome grains sort of misses the point. However, while the vituperative misunderstandings that get in the way of cultural appreciation can leave a bad taste in your mouth, delicious food can fill your belly and your soul—especially when shared in a spirit of camaraderie and gracious openness. MIRIAM sEGURA Miriam Segura is a biotechnologist, a foodie and a Talmudist.

Whole-Wheat Penne Vodka Recipe Set some whole-wheat penne on to boil. Finely dice a small yellow onion and saute in a very small amount of olive oil until translucent but not browned. Chop and seed a bunch of nice tomatoes and put them in the pan with the onion. Let it cook down, stirring occasionally. Add some salt, some red pepper flakes, and I like to put in a few leaves of basil—chopped or snipped—and sometimes I also put in capers, but that’s untraditional. Grind in some black pepper. When the tomatoes look pretty cooked and the liquid is more or less reduced, add a swig of vodka. Once most of it cooks away, add about half a small carton (probably half a cup) of heavy cream (you can use less if you want it less rich). Let it cook a little more, but not too high a flame or the cream will curdle. Drain the penne and add them to the sauce. Stir it around over the heat for a minute, then dish it up!

PresenTensemagazine.org arts

A Comic by Peter Orosz

PresenTensemagazine.org arts

issue one 2006

A soldier comes home memoir

A Photograph by Nama Shefi

46 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org arts

look out the window as the street signs fly by. I’m tired, exhausted, but I won’t let myself fall asleep. It seems as though I’m seeing everything for the first time: bright advertisements for movies, shops open and bustling. So many people. It’s dazzling. Colorful clothes, girls, more girls. Girls who look really good, and those who maybe don’t look so good. But I’m horny so it doesn’t matter. I look down at my worn hands, thinking how smooth they were just a few weeks ago. Everything has changed since then. I’m on my way home from basic training. I was drafted three months ago, and just did twenty-one straight days like a maniac. I didn’t imagine it would be this tough. Special forces boot camp. All day, every day, pushups in the cold mud. The Ashkenazis have burns on their ears and hands, their skin more sensitive to the elements. But everyone’s fists are bleeding. We began doing pushups using our knuckles, on gravel. Like a thousand needles shooting through your fists, magnified each time you push down to go up. This past week was the most difficult so far. A week of target practice, darting from place to place and shooting round after round. The blisters on my trigger finger have burst. We cocked our rifles until the skin on our fingers began to peel, and then we used another finger until the skin peeled from it, too. I look out again. People gesture and bargain in the markets, and go about their everyday business as the bus speeds past. My rugged hands. All this for what? Since I was drafted I’ve almost lost contact with my neighborhood friends. Shiran left me. She said I didn’t call her enough. She has no idea what I am going through. No one really does. My mother thought I was going to gain weight. I went in at 54 kilos, and now after three weeks of hunger I weigh 50. I don’t think I’m going to survive this. Maybe that would be for the best. To have an office job and be home every day. Babes all around. Why do I need this shit? There’s a dated copy of Yediot in my lap. I haven’t read a newspaper or watched television since I left. I have no idea what’s going on. Only now, on the bus home, they gave us old papers for the ride. I skim the one I’m holding. Turns out that there have been lots of suicide attacks lately. The government has decided to go after the terrorists in strength. The operation is called “Defensive Wall.” Two thousand reserve troops, called up to fight. Two already dead. But that still seems far away from me. I’ll never make it through boot camp. I don’t even even get along with the other guys. No one is really my friend. They’ll kick me out for sure on the sociometric test, or maybe my legs won’t last. My knees won’t cut it. The army bus stops at the Central Bus Station, and I switch to a city bus full of citizens. I feel their stares. An older couple looks at me and smiles. What do they want from me? Am I dressed okay? There’s nowhere to sit, so I move to the back, and stand, the heavy duffle bag a dead weight on my back. Three-weeks-worth of laundry. It’s hot. Damn, I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m a little bent over from the bag. Maybe that’s why people are looking at me with strange smiles. Or maybe it’s my fingers, bound and bleeding under tape and band-aids. I get off the bus. A little further and I’m home. I can almost smell my mother’s cooking. A little further, a little further. I’m still bent over with the bag and the damned rifle. A bakery ahead of me. I feel faint as the scent of freshly baked burekas strikes me. I pause to breathe it in. A woman in her forties stands in the doorway with a smile like those on the bus. Only hers is more forceful. There is love in that smile, that look of unconditional care and admiration that a mother gives her son. Suddenly the world freezes around us. Background noises and passers-by seem to disappear as if a single lens were focused just on the two of us. A light emanates from her. I begin to understand… When I am near her, she blows me a kiss. “Thank you! Keep protecting us! And take care of yourself too!” she calls to me, gesturing for me to take something from the store. She probably thinks I was involved in the recent fighting. And that’s what the others thought too. Me, coming home from battle. My back straightens as I walk. I’m a soldier in the Israeli army. I will make it through boot camp to an elite unit. I will serve the country and guarantee a normal life for all these people, even to Shiran who doesn’t really understand. I will kill the suicide bomber before he reaches the shopping mall. I flex my palms, even though my skin cracks and my scabs pull. My injuries are my pride. Oren Griffin Oren Griffin, after spending three years of service in the IDF and taking a long trip to South America, is looking forward to publishing a book of stories from his service.

PresenTensemagazine.org arts

issue one 2006

backpage A William Levin William Levin, also known as Ben Baruch, is the creator of Shabot 6000, a cartoon about a Jewish robot. He lives in Brooklyn and on JewishRobot.com.

48 issue one 2006

PresenTensemagazine.org arts

Home. Land. As soon as you’re welcomed aboard an EL AL flight it’s as good as being in Israel itself. You’ll experience an array of Israeli and international cuisines, a wide selection of audio and video options and the service and dedication of our Israeli crewmembers. We at EL AL are proud to have the flag of Israel on our state-of-the-art planes. As the premier choice for nonstop and direct flights between the USA and Israel, EL AL embodies Israel’s values of innovation and caring and the promise of a genuine Israeli welcome. We’re proud to bring tourism back to Israel. Call 212-768-9200, 1-800-223-6700 or any travel agent. Visit us online at www.elal.com

THE MOST NONSTOP FLIGHTS TO TEL AVIV FROM NEW YORK (JFK/NEWARK) AND THE ONLY NONSTOPS FROM LOS ANGELES AND MIAMI. THE ONLY DIRECT FLIGHTS TO TEL AVIV FROM CHICAGO.