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Presidential historians put the election in perspective; when women can’t find a place to mourn; Saul Friedländer’s new memoir; more from Tablet Magazine of New York, New York, United States "The destruction of a mural of immigrants on the Lower East Side" for Sunday, November 13, 2016The Troy Brothers Bemoan the Election (An Epistolary Bromance)
GIL TROY AND TEVI TROYThis is part 5 of an exchange between Tevi Troy and his brother Gil Troy about the 2016 presidential election. Here’s part 1 (Nov. 3), part 2 (Nov. 6), part 3 (Nov. 7), and part 4 (Nov. 8), all below.
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Nov. 9, 2016: Tevi Troy writes:
Well, the election is over and a lot of people seem to be panicking about the result. I would caution against it. Obviously, as a Republican, there is much that I am pleased with from last night’s results. I am happy that the Republicans retained both the Senate and the House, and that strong conservative senators like Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, Rob Portman, and Ron Johnson won reelection. On the presidential front, I have had my misgivings about Donald Trump, as this exchange with Gil has made clear. But I also think that there is a positive case to be made from multiple perspectives. (No choice but to be positive—there’s that Troy optimism again.) From my conservative point of view, I am pleased that a Republican president will be picking Supreme Court justices and that President-elect Trump has put forth conservative names for potential Supreme Court vacancies. On the Israel front, I’m quite confident that Trump will be better for Israel than Obama was—admittedly a low bar—and that there is a good chance that he can be significantly better than Obama was, and than Hillary would have been.For my liberal friends, many of my own concerns about Trump stemmed from the fact that he was not a traditional conservative. This could lead to him potentially forming some nontraditional coalitions in Congress, especially if he can’t find common ground with elements of the conservative caucus. You may not like Trump’s rhetoric or his behavior, but he is probably less conservative on an issue-by-issue basis than just about everyone he defeated in winning the GOP nomination.
For Americans in general, remain calm. Trump is flawed, but hysterical accusations that he is some kind of totalitarian or fascist are and have long been not just overstated but plain wrong. In addition, American institutions are strong, and cannot easily be subverted by a president with bad intentions, even if we did at some point elect a president with those tendencies. We are governed by the rule of law and will continue to be governed by the law.
We are governed by the rule of law and will continue to be governed by the law.
The fact is that the presidency changes people. There is a tried-and-true policy process that stays in place in both GOP and Democratic administrations. There is a somewhat laborious White House clearance process for presidential appointments, decisions, and statements. This does not mean that presidents always make the right decisions—far from it—but that decisions are carefully considered and within a relatively narrow band of parameters. The crazy decisions tend to get weeded out in the process. The very weight of the presidency makes Oval Office occupants consider their decisions carefully. A late-night tweet storm is far less likely to come from President Trump than from candidate Trump, just because of the nature of the White House and the White House process. In putting the weight of responsibility upon them, the presidency forces people to act more responsibly. We already saw this last night in the president-elect’s victory speech, in which he said, “Now it’s time to bind the wounds of division, come together as one people.” I thought it was a gracious speech and could point to the fact that the long-awaited “pivot” may finally have come. Will he continue to make some comments that offend? Sure, but that does not mean that he will pose a danger to the republic.
So that’s the positive spin on things. Did I want two more inspiring, less flawed candidates on the ballot in the 2016 election? Absolutely. Do I think that the election of Trump means the end of America or a manifest danger to its inhabitants? Absolutely not.
Gil Troy responds :
Hillary Clinton’s loss has terrified and traumatized almost every one of my friends. All day long, I have been distributing two historical “pacifiers.” One, Coretta Scott King’s prediction in 1980, that with a Ronald Reagan presidency “we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party.” The second, from Richard Neustadt’s political-science classic on the presidency, the notion that the “power of the president is the power to persuade.”These are pacifiers, not predictors. They don’t turn Donald Trump into a mensch. They don’t undo his damaging words during the campaign or the alienation, anger, and fear so many Americans feel today. They don’t give him the experience or stability he lacks. But they are reminders that sometimes our worst fears don’t come true, and that America is bigger and greater than any one individual.
So far, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have played their historical roles gracefully (and I’m not sure that if he had lost, President-elect Donald “rigged election” Trump would have been as gracious). Still, what happened, happened. These next few months will test us all, left and right: Can we bring out the best in ourselves and each other—or the worst?
I am more worried than Tevi. I didn’t and don’t have delicate “misgivings” about Donald Trump. I’m disgusted by his demagoguery, dismayed by his bullying, appalled by his boorishness, stunned by his success despite his governing inexperience.
Still, I believe that America is bigger and greater than any one individual because of three important things: the American system, the American people, and the American idea. I still believe the American system the Framers designed over two centuries ago works brilliantly. Again and again, it has figured out how to bring out the best in people by understanding our flaws, thereby fragmenting power, checking and balancing, serving as a constructive platform for the greatest experiment in liberal nationalism, the United States of America. I still believe in the American people, the heroes who grew this country from a small, divided, racist, sexist, country to a true wonder of the world, that has put much of its ugliest past behind it—even as some work remains. And I still believe in the American idea, the notion that we all have inherent rights, that we all are blessed with the privileges of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but that we also have attendant obligations.
And finally, while I see all the dysfunctions, the disconnects, I also celebrate American the functional, all the everyday miracles we take for granted, including the miracle we all witnessed and over 60 percent of registered voters created yesterday: Defying the predictions, participating peacefully, and initiating what I now hope and trust will be a constructive and respectful transition of power, disproving all the critics and again positioning America as the democratic role model to all those struggling in the impoverished dictatorships that characterize most of the world’s political and economic systems.
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Nov. 8, 2016: Gil Troy writes:
I love a great political slogan. The Revolutionaries’ “Don’t tread on me,” expressed Americans’ desire for independence and dignity. “Fifty-four forty or fight” in 1844 drew a clear line in the sand about American intentions in the Oregon territories. U.S. Grant’s 1864 “Vote as you shot” crudely distinguished between Southern traitors and Northern patriots. Herbert Hoover’s “A chicken in every pot” conveyed the great optimism of the 1920s that prosperity would never end. Franklin Roosevelt’s double whammy, promising “Happy days are here again,” if Americans accepted his “New Deal,” offered reassurance and reforms when Hoover’s prosperity ran out of chickens. Bill Clinton’s 1992 slogan “The new covenant,” while it didn’t quite resonate, conveyed a sense of seriousness, his desire to be seen as “Putting people first” and to forge what he eventually, called, more memorably “The third way,” triangulating between Big Government liberalism and “Government is the problem not the solution” Reaganite conservatism. Even Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can,” while somewhat trite, inspired people, empowering the once powerless, capturing the historic nature of his quest to be the first African-American president.Against that historic background, the emptiness of the 2016 election was captured in the vapidity of the two rivals’ slogans. In fairness, on one level Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton hands-down in the slogan war. Wherever I went, when I would say, even to pro-Clinton crowds, “Donald Trump promises to make America …” they would shout, lustily, “GREAT AGAIN.” And when I added, and “Hillary Clinton promises …” there was often awkward silence—and then, in one high school, great laughter and applause that they had been played. Admittedly, after the Democratic National Convention some would mumble “Stronger together”—which sounds vaguely Stalinistic to me, or “I’m with her”—which evokes “I’m with stupid.”
The meaninglessness of Clinton’s slogans conveyed the void at the heart of her campaign and her vision for America. Walter Mondale-style, she reached out to various interest groups, wooing women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTs, Jews, many of whom were motivated by their fear of Trump. But her campaign was so defensive, so fearful of offending these groups she was courting, so concerned with maintaining her lead, that she didn’t offer a lyrical, inspiring vision that could pass what I call the “Richard Stands Test,” the schoolkid’s misstatement of the Pledge of Allegiance line, “for which it stands.”
Being tolerant and inclusive, while noble, is a foreign policy, not a national, mission statement. Hillary Clinton’s campaign validated (what I called last time) America’s wonderful, welcoming, pluralistic Republic of Everything but did little to build a Republic of Something, to create a new consensus that both creates a new national vision rooted in the past while looking toward the future, and offers any kind of diagnosis and cure for the fundamental ailments that are so clearly afflicting the United States: a de-industrializing economy that isn’t creating enough middle-class jobs; a coarsening culture that is creating legions of the walking wounded lacking discipline, purpose, hope; a fragmenting society that is losing its sense of community; and a polarizing politics that has politicians boasting about the gridlock they will deliver because their hatred of the rival party is trumping their love of America and commitment to governance. Moreover, she offered no promise of retreating from Barack Obama’s assault on the pride, the celebration of American values, the refusal to cower or, yes, apologize, that has always been at the heart of American exceptionalism.
Being tolerant and inclusive, while noble, is a foreign policy, not a national mission statement.
Now, give Trump and his slogan some credit. “Make America great again,” evokes nostalgia for the old Republic of Something. Trump recognizes the serious breakdowns in our economy, culture, society, and politics. His campaign was buoyed by many of the same frustrations that lifted the Bernie Sanders campaign from punchline to powerhouse—although both of them used “free trade” and “Wall Street” as scapegoats that miss the real economic problem. The great mass-middle-class civilization that emerged after World War II enabled autoworkers and longshoremen to earn enough to have savings; today’s economy of part-time Wal-Mart workers and minimum-wage earners in automated factories produces the dislocation and frustration that has fueled this campaign—but not been addressed.
Unfortunately, Trump’s demagogic technique of divide and conquer; his campaign to be the plutocratic king of white-male America, not the increasingly multicultural United States of America; his lack of experience, discipline, consistency, substance, makes him the tribune of The Republic of Nothing, a nation of New Nihilists who will say anything, believe in nothing, and do what pleases them when it pleases them because they lack any core ideals, any true authorities, any traditional anchors. Coming from the world of reality TV—which is fake—running a campaign of 140-character insults and postures, offered a dystopic model not of an improved reality but of a coarsened, vulgar, abusive America.
To the extent that a campaign is a national stress test, America failed—and has become a laughingstock worldwide, no longer inspiring oppressed peoples with this exercise in popular participation but inviting mockery with this plunge into idiocy and unreason.
In a long, brutal history of American elections, this electoral season—and the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump campaigns—will have a special place in the Hall of Shame, among the worst, the most bruising, divisive, demoralizing. But all is not lost—yet. The John Kennedy transition in 1960, the Ronald Reagan transition in 1980, showed that candidates can evolve over three months from won-by-a-whisker damaged winners to confident presidents with a mandate. In a land where history is last week’s most-forwarded YouTube video of cats playing or babies drooling, memories are short and malleable. And in a nation that still represents the great ideals of liberty, democracy, and equality, the possibilities of redemption remain, like prosperity in yet another slogan, just around the corner.
Tevi Troy responds:
It’s hard to disagree with anything in your last missive, so I will pick up where you left off. It is true that this has been an exceedingly dismal campaign, and as we have made clear throughout this exchange, neither of us is very happy about it—nor is the country.But despite the disappointment of this campaign, I believe that there is a reason for hope. First, the unpopularity of both candidates does suggest that most Americans think there is indeed something very wrong with this election, and with the candidates. Both of them won their respective nominations more for structural reasons and flaws in the selection process then for any compelling narrative about a hopeful America that they were trying to convey.
So the candidates are on the debit side, but I would put American institutions and the American people on the asset side of the ledger. American institutions are strong enough to withstand the poor policies of either candidate, and strong enough to resist excessive power grabs by officials who don’t respect democratic norms or the rule of law.
As Gil put it, we remain “a nation that still represents the great ideals of liberty, democracy, and equality.” One bad election will not take that away. I recognize that this may seem overly optimistic. In fact, one piece of feedback we have both received from a mutual friend is that we are excessively optimistic. (We can’t help it: It’s the Troy way.) This particular friend thought that my hope for an American-exceptionalism agenda on the part of the Jewish organizations was a naïve one. I didn’t put that thought out there believing that those organizations would embrace this perspective immediately, but part of the role of we historian-commentators is that we put ideas out there in the hopes that smart people will read them and take us up on them. And there I think is the promise of America. We still have free speech; we still have strong voices out there expressing every different perspective; and we still have hopes for a better tomorrow, whatever our actual tomorrow informs us happens on this Election Day.
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Nov. 7, 2016: Gil Troy writes:
I just completed a four-city, one-week speaking tour. The whole country, from North to South, right to left, Jewish and non-Jewish, seems to be suffering from PTSD: Pre-Trump-Clinton-Election Stress Disorder. Amid all this uncertainty, I am willing to predict that the next president will have a Jewish son-in-law, and despite the anxiety, let’s emphasize one bit of good news: The next president will support Israel more enthusiastically—and hopefully more effectively—than the incumbent.God bless America! In Europe, too many campaigns historically pivoted around the question of who bashed the Jews the most. How wonderful that in the United States, both candidates vie to prove who is more “pro-Israel.” That competition reinforces the broad, left-to-right American consensus that has supported Israel enthusiastically for decades—and, despite our worries, is at a historic peak. That competition stems from the fact that in an ugly world of ISIS and Assad, of Islamicist terrorism and Middle East instability, an anti-Israel president would be anti-American too, overlooking America’s one stable democratic ally in that crazy, critical region. And that competition demonstrates that America’s traditional bipartisan support for Israel is good for America, not just Israel: Healthy democracies need some issues, like supporting Israel, on which both rival parties agree.
I’m not naïve. I understand that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump probably would express their support for Israel in different ways, although I also know that a candidate’s promises are not binding, especially regarding foreign policy. Barack Obama was sure in 2008 that he was going to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, which remains open. I also don’t think he ever imagined—nor did we—that he would kill as many terrorists by drone as he has.
Still, the differences in Clinton’s and Trump’s respective Israel approaches merit debate. Beyond proclaiming the most embarrassing foreign-policy credential—evah—that he was grand marshal of the Israel Day Parade—Trump has alternated between the passionately pro-Netanyahu “Israel right or wrong” school, promising no daylight between the two countries, and the more neutral “let’s make a deal” school, assuming some great deal-maker can impose the right borders on the squabbling partners.
Clinton in her career has vacillated. She started out closer to the “tough love” school President Obama (and the Israeli left) embrace—assuming Big Daddy America must force misbehaving Israel to compromise and stop beating up those nice, disenfranchised Palestinians. As New York senator, she reflected her husband Bill’s “love-love” school, understanding that if Israel feels supported by the United States and respected internationally, it’s more likely to compromise. And, as secretary of state, she was yet another “Peace Processor,” one of those perennially (Shimon) Peres-ian, Sisyphean optimists, who since the 1990s have been negotiating away, again and again and again, without asking why the Oslo peace process failed and what new understandings of reality (and of the Palestinian refusal to accept reality) are required.
In an ideal world, we would have had a mature, substantive, respectful debate in the Jewish community and beyond about which of these five approaches to take. In an even more ideal world, that debate would have taken us to the philosophical assumptions underlying each candidate’s foreign policy. Obama’s years in office have shaken Americans’ traditional faith in American exceptionalism. Both the humiliation imposed on us by Americans being kidnapped, beheaded, and blown up—as well as President Obama’s distaste for America’s traditional self-confidence and sense of national virtue—have many Americans doubting our competence and steadiness abroad, let alone American exceptionalism.
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton’s celebration of American values—particularly her role modeling for women—expressed more faith in America’s special heritage to the world than the president did. Donald Trump’s “great again” talk more crudely expresses a nostalgia for that sense of self-confidence—and that mix of post-WWII power and righteousness with which he grew up. My gut tells me that if the candidates did ever speak in such sophisticated, theoretical terms, Hillary Clinton would park more of her support for Israel in shared values, Donald Trump would park it in the realm of mutual national interests reinforced by admiration for Israel’s chutzpah and strength.
Alas, such heady but important discussions have not even engaged the foreign policy wonk-etariat. Instead, in this electoral race to the bottom, what I have most heard in the Jewish community this week is that “Hillary’s a crook and she’s anti-Israel like Obama” or that “Trump’s a monster and he lies about Israel like he lies about everything else.” What I learn from this is: We must stop using the phrase “anti-Israel” about anyone unless that person truly rejects Israel’s right to exist, and that, whoever wins on Tuesday, we have a lot of healing and rebuilding of trust to do—in the Jewish community and in the good ole’ U.S. of A.
Tevi Troy responds:
Thanks for the note, and safe travels. I was glad I got to see you—briefly—on this trip. I regret the geographic distance between us makes our in-person interactions more limited than I—or our dear mother—would like. As you know, her favorite word is “togetha.”You have previously mentioned to me your concerns about American society and the apparent worsening of such divisions in recent years. I wonder if a presidential election brings out these divisions and things will calm down once the election is over. This does not mean that either presidential candidate will miraculously become popular—or even bearable—post-election, but that people will move on and live their lives once the worst of the election divisions are over.
The excessive rhetoric of campaign season points to another problem, though. I recall that during the 2012 election, people on the left were saying the worst things about Mitt Romney. Ads claimed he fired someone whose spouse then died of cancer, as if he were responsible for the death. Joe Biden told a black audience that Republicans were going to “put y’all back in chains,” which was one of the more disgraceful comments we have heard from a sitting vice president. Then after the election, Romney suddenly became that nice guy who pumped his own gas and went to Disneyland.
Romney is not the only one to get that treatment. John McCain and George W. Bush were subjected to hysterical attacks as if they were all somehow completely outside of the mainstream of American politics. Charlie Cooke had a good piece on this recently, and Jonah Goldberg made a similar point back in July. The excessive rhetoric deployed against previous Republican candidates blunts the potency of similar attacks against Trump. Even some liberals acknowledge this. Bill Maher recently said that Romney, Bush, and McCain “were honorable men who we disagreed with and we should have kept it that way. So we cried wolf, and that was wrong.”
As for the Jewish in-laws, I am not sure that I would take too much comfort there. After all, Hillary’s Jewish adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, sends her missives from his anti-Israel son Max (Gil, can I use the “anti-Israel” designation for Max?) Should I somehow take comfort that both Blumenthals are Jewish? And as for Hillary’s back-and-forth career on Israel, I fear that both her foreign-policy and political advisers will pose a real problem for Israel should she be elected. Campaign manager Robby Mook even told Clinton not to speak about Israel in front of a group of Democratic activists because Israel is presumably so unpopular in those circles.
This does not mean that I pin my hopes on the fact that Ivanka converted to Judaism, or—as Gil points out—that Trump was grand marshal of the Salute to Israel parade. I am, however, generally more comfortable with the Republican position on Israel and on Republican foreign-policy advisers on the subject of Israel. This does not make me pro-Trump, but it does mean that I see it as important that the Republicans retain both the House and Senate, so that they could be a check on the Israel-criticizing tendencies of the Clinton-Obama foreign-policy team. (See, I am already being more careful with the “anti-Israel” term. Perhaps Gil’s admonition will catch on, at least in the Troy family. Sigh.)
While I appreciate and share your hope that both parties in America staunchly support Israel, I see worrisome signs that the parties are diverging on this issue, with the GOP clearly being the more supportive party. And given that you and your family live in Israel, you will feel the results of this election more acutely than I will.
So I join you in hoping that “Love-Love” Hillary emerges; should she win, I fear that we will end up with what you generously called “Tough Love” Hillary. And the “Tough” tends to take precedence over the “Love.”
Gil Troy responds:
Thanks for your concerns. Yes, it was fun seeing you and introducing you to a new kosher restaurant, I assumed you had tried every one of them in New York by now.The growing polarization—and estrangement—in America does worry me. Although you and I could have a fun presidential-historian-nerd duel citing examples of nastiness in previous campaigns with the intensity that you and your son Ezzie fenced by exchanging the names of obscure baseball Hall of Famers when he was 5(!), something feels different. I think of the campaign as a national stress test checking our national health, and often highlighting underlying problems. You’ve repeatedly heard my riff from my Age of Clinton book that we were once a Republic of Something, united by core consensus ideals, and this new Republic of Everything—and Nothing—of ours—is more welcoming but also deeply nihilistic, selfish, tunnel-visioned, lost.
And, yes, you’re right, Max Blumenthal qualifies as anti-Israel, given his loathsome, amoral, ahistorical, disproportionate comparisons between Palestinian cities and Nazi concentration camps. He proves why we shouldn’t use the “anti-Israel” charge too broadly. We need to keep it as a term of opprobrium for hateful extremists like him—otherwise we Jews are also crying wolf.
And, yes, I worry that some of Hillary Clinton advisers, while not “anti-Israel” like Blumenthal, are Bash-Israel-firsters, while others are those sapped, now-wearisome, peace-processing dinosaurs still preaching from a 1990s hymnal, still overlooking Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism.
Some leading Democrat must pull a William F. Buckley. Just as Buckley, America’s leading conservative, called out Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s, saying such anti-Zionism masking anti-Semitism did not belong in the Republican Party, I challenge Barack Obama when he retires to echo Buckley, reading out the genuine haters from the Democratic coalition (note this is an invitation, not a prediction).
But these worries about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are balanced out by seeing the Love-Lovers like Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton’s own leaked intentions to set a different, more constructive, tone with Israel than Obama has. Moreover, I have no idea what Donald Trump would do regarding Israel because I have no idea what this political novice would do regarding anything. He has no political track record—and serious impulse-control problems. Just because a bunch of Orthodox Jewish lawyers on his payroll whose kids study in the West Bank tell him to be pro-Bibi doesn’t guarantee that those sentiments would survive a Trumpian temper tantrum if Netanyahu treated a President Trump as he has treated President Obama.
Your lovely hope—which I share—“that people will move on and live their lives once the worst of the election divisions are over”—is imperiled by this blustering, ungracious candidate who vowed to challenge the legitimacy of American democracy by calling the election “rigged” if the American people dare reject him. This unprecedented assault on the process by a major-party nominee represents a characteristic Trumpian irresponsibility that is far more dangerous—to the United States, and by extension to its allies, including Israel—than the bleatings of little Maxie Blumenthal.
Tevi Troy responds:
Here is potentially something that could bring Jews together over the next four, eight, or even 12 years and beyond. Jews recognize how important American exceptionalism has been for Israel, for the Jewish people in America, and also for the world at large. Even if we as a community have many disagreements on a whole host of domestic and foreign-policy issues, there is–I think—a shared belief in the importance of America as a nation that both protects the Jews but also advances basic ideals about human rights, democracy, and freedom. This could be an agenda item for the wide swath of Jewish organizations that overpopulate Washington: Promote America as a force for good, regardless of who wins the election, and press the incoming administration to make sure it is pursuing that goal. Pursuing this agenda could lead to positive policy responses from the new administration, but it could also help determine the shape of the foreign-policy debate so that we get more acceptable foreign-policy candidates in the year 2020.***
Nov. 6, 2012 Tevi Troy writes:
When the details about the James Comey investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails came out this summer, it seemed like they treated Clinton with kid gloves, handing out a number of immunity deals that normally would not be given and not getting her on record under oath at the start. At the time, Comey was lauded as the greatest lawman since Elliot Ness. Now, when he has come forward and said that they are still investigating and that there is this new trove of emails, he is just this terrible partisan.It seems to me that the Department of Justice is typically fairly aggressive in prosecuting people for these kinds of crimes. Scooter Libby was prosecuted as a result of an investigation about something that it is clear he did not do—leak Valerie Plame’s name to Robert Novak. Dinesh D’Souza was clearly guilty of illegal campaign contributions, but the prison sentence seemed out of whack with what should have been punished with a fine. And Obama’s Affordable Care Act wouldn’t have passed without an extra Democratic senator elected in the wake of a wrongheaded investigation of GOP Sen. Ted Stevens that cost him his Senate seat. I am generally uncomfortable with overly aggressive Department of Justice prosecutions, but if they are going to be engaging in that kind of activity, it is only fair to treat both parties the same way.
What does this all mean for our election? When people start to question the legitimacy in the fairness of government, it erodes the basic building blocks of civil society. I do have a real fear that post-election we could have a significant number of people saying that whichever candidate wins is illegitimate. This would be unfortunate. We have a mostly successful 200-plus-year experiment in a democratic republic, a nation that has given great opportunities to the people who live here but has also been a beacon of hope to the world. I would hope that one election with two awful candidates would not threaten that larger enterprise. Such a result would be a tragedy for this nation, and for the world as a whole.
Gil Troy responds:
Hi—so, here’s where you start seeing a difference in our perspectives. First, if I were to write about the Justice Department and its prosecutorial approach, I would instinctively find examples from both sides of the aisle. Your litany of Republican woes, without saying so exactly, implies partisan bias, just as the Clintons during the 1990s could only see how Republicans criminalized politics by targeting Democrats.Since Watergate, even though political corruption is down dramatically from the bad old days of the 1950s and 1960s, let alone the 19th century, prosecutions for political corruption are up. The good news: less tolerance for behavior that was once normalized. The bad news: the criminalization of politics that has hurt Democrats and Republicans alike.
Second, when the director of the FBI spent 14-and-a-half minutes berating a leading presidential candidate, and 30 seconds explaining that he nevertheless didn’t think her missteps were convictable and thus they were not prosecutable, I was inspired. I thought that was a great lesson in law and civics, that all elements of wrongdoing don’t necessarily justify prosecution in a system that convicts only based on guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” At the same time, I was appalled by the bad judgment Hillary Clinton demonstrated [in choosing to use a private server] and was reminded that, as in the 1990s, the Clintons always used “not prosecutable” as some kind of absolution. “Not prosecutable or convictable,” is not the standard of behavior by which I live or you live or we wish our kids to live—and it is not to me an acceptable standard of behavior for a future president.
And finally, your analysis ends in a kind of sanitized way. When you write, “When people start to question the legitimacy in the fairness of government, it erodes the basic building blocks of civil society,” I wonder, “what people?” This year, it isn’t just a generalized phenomenon. This is a problem that started, in many ways, with Donald Trump’s reprehensible comment about “the rigged election.” And I can’t help wondering that if your seeking refuge into worries about “people” reflects a kind of instinctive protectiveness toward the Republican nominee—even if you dislike him.
More broadly, of course, I agree with you. The polls showing that since the 1950s, faith in government, in Congress, in the presidency, has been plummeting does suggest the crisis of legitimacy about which you spoke. But in this campaign cycle, Donald Trump has been the major cause of those doubts and, on this one, Hillary Clinton shoulders far less blame.
Tevi Troy responds:
I know I’ll get another crack on Tuesday, but your missive warrants a brief response. I’m happy to list some overly aggressive investigations of Democrats, including those of John Edwards for doing something sordid but not illegal and Sen. Bob Menendez for doing legislative outreach on behalf of a donor that did not seem to be out of the ordinary. The criminalization of political differences leads to careers being ruined and a loss of faith in the system. And on the loss-of-faith point, Trump was wrong to suggest he wouldn’t accept the results of the election. Period. But there were plenty of Democrats questioning the legitimacy of George W. Bush after the 2000 election. And John Kerry waited an inappropriately long time before conceding the 2004 election. Kerry now claims that he was some kind of hero for conceding, but the story at the time was that he had to be pushed into doing so by the late Ted Kennedy.Every election cycle, we hear people threatening to leave the country if their candidate loses. I wish all those who made such threats would follow through with them and not let the door hit them on the way out. Hysterical and dire warnings about the death of the republic based on the results of a particular election are bad for the country and bad for democracy. If Gil wants to see that belief as some kind of secret sympathy for Trump, he is welcome to.
***
Nov. 3, 2016: Tevi Troy writes:
What better way to greet the most depressing election in my memory than to argue politics with my brother. Even though Gil and I grew up in the same house in Queens, we took different political journeys. He was a Democrat early on—I remember he worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1976 Senate campaign. He even introduced me to Pat one time in Central Park. I am the younger brother and, therefore, more of a child of the 1980s. I volunteered for the Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign and was a summer intern for George Bush’s 1988 campaign.Even though Gil and I had different journeys, we now share a lot of similarities of approach. We both have Ph.D.s—he went into academia and I did not. In the post-Sept. 11 world, both of us have been disturbed by the Left, especially when it comes to Israel. In his role as columnist for the Jerusalem Post, Gil has written many trenchant pieces criticizing President Barack Obama’s stances on Israel. I was typically more explicit and political in my approach. I supported Mitt Romney in 2012 and was an adviser to the campaign.
Which brings us to 2016. I have opposed Hillary Clinton from a policy perspective for two-and-a-half decades, but her other issues—setting up her own server as secretary of state, having a distant relationship with the truth, and her participation in “the great enrichment” via Clinton, Inc.—make her a complete nonstarter for me. And I was excited to see so many smart young conservative politicians lining up to join the 2016 GOP race. Yet that process brought us Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.
Liberals somehow see Trump as some kind of extreme conservative. I see him as a big-government liberal. He sees government as the solution to our problems, doesn’t want to make any changes to our unsustainable entitlement programs, and he has the AFL-CIO position on trade. That’s not to mention the allegations about his treatment of women, his avoidance of taxes, his nonpayment of debts, and his publicly demonstrated propensity to pick fights with women, POWs, and parents of slain soldiers, as well as elected—and respected—Republicans such as Paul Ryan.
As Gil knows, I usually get a thrill from voting. But this year, it’s more like a kick in the stomach.
Gil Troy responds:
I know my role here. To make things fun, clear, and tweet-worthy, I’m supposed to play the traditional New York Jewish liberal to my brother—actually my two brothers—the renegade New York Jews turned conservative. (Our older brother Dan Troy is a corporate super-lawyer and former Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush official). And perhaps, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when my hero Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a mainstream Democrat, that kind of simplistic political Punch-and-Judy show would have worked. (Tevi’s excellent first book on Intellectuals and the American Presidency has a great Moynihan chapter, showing where our political and intellectual agendas intersect.)But I’m afraid I have to disappoint. I am too much the academic, too much the moderate, and too disappointed with where the Democratic Party and modern American liberalism have gone, to play the typical liberal.
As an academic who, like Tevi, is often called a “presidential historian” (we professors have to pretend to disdain such simplistic titles), I avoid publicly endorsing any candidates. I am proud when I write something that is praised as balanced, as I just did for Time, pointing out Hillary Clinton’s moral lapses along with the sexism and unreasonable “Clintipathy” that exaggerates her ethical sloppiness into extreme statements about being “the most corrupt candidate ever.” And I am equally proud when I write something historical as I did last week for Politico, tracing the long noble history of Party Bolting, which may have helped some Republicans abandon Donald Trump—without my telling them what to do. My approach to politics is captured in the late former New York Mayor Ed Koch’s great line: “If you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.”
My passionately nonpartisan moderation drives Dan and Tevi crazy, when they’re not busy sending each other secret messages with their fancy right-wing decoder rings. Dan even calls me “the smugwump,” a clever update to the nickname given the 19th-century liberal reformers who abandoned the Republican party in 1884 because they couldn’t support the corrupt former senator and former secretary of state (I’m not making this up) James G. Blaine. They were defined by the dismissive line “that a mugwump is a person sitting on the fence, with his mug on one side and his wump on the other.”
Mea culpa. I find the demands of partisan loyalty—and the resulting intellectual inconsistency—in Washington, D.C. suffocating. (Yes, I get it, hence the “smugwump” designation.)
Dan has another great line. He is often asked: “How could you three grow up as the sons of two New York City schoolteachers and none of you are liberal Democrats?” He responds: “How could any thinking being grow up in a union household in New York in the 1970s and still remain a liberal or a Democrat?” We saw Albert Shanker’s liberal UFT (United Federation of Teachers) disappoint my parents repeatedly. We watched New York City turn from a liberal Great Society paradise into a dirty, smelly, crime-ridden, debt-burdened, bureaucratically sclerotic disaster. And we also saw identity politics make too much of the radical Left turn totalitarian, unthinking, more swayed by who you were rather than what you did or thought, truly irrational, illiberal, and yes, anti-Israel.
So, for a change I find myself in the majority today, agreeing with the record levels of Americans who dislike and mistrust both candidates. In 2016, being a smugwump just means you think and care without partisan blinders on. Whereas writing my recent book on The Age of Clinton made me appreciate Bill Clinton’s centrism more, the Clintons’ moral blindspots perennially disappoint me.
But I also criticize Republicans. Extremist dog-whistling on immigration is reprehensible. I didn’t like “Can’t-play-with-anybody-in-the-sandbox” Ted Cruz and “Callow Marco” Rubio as candidates. I detest Donald Trump’s bullying, his contempt for so many, and his assault on our democracy’s very legitimacy with his “rigged election” demagoguery.
So I share Tevi’s concerns and heartbreak. Traditionally, when asked during campaigns, “Who will win?” I dodge, saying: “As a historian, I find it hard enough to predict the past, I can’t begin to predict the future. But,” I add, “on Election Day, Americans will vote peacefully, so, unlike in so many other countries, ballots not bullets will rule.” These days, I only say the first sentence. I mourn that the ugly demons Donald Trump stirred—and the extreme Left’s menacing response—prevents me from giving my usual prediction of a tranquil Election Day and a peaceful power transition.
Beyond being disappointed, I’m scared.
Tevi Troy responds:
This is unusual, but Gil is wrong about one thing: There is no vast right-wing conspiracy decoder ring. Or if there is, I don’t have one, and Dan has not shown me his. And while I know he takes great comfort in his “moderate’s freedom” and the ability to criticize both sides, I think conservatives deserve credit for their willingness to criticize the GOP candidate this cycle at a time when liberals and Democrats too often overlook the flaws of their standard-bearer.In fact, one of the things that I find most comforting in this election is the degree to which many of the smartest and most able conservative thinkers have been unwilling to get on board with Donald Trump. I don’t see the same degree of self-criticism from the Left. Hillary gets to skate by on her many problematic issues. Even Bernie Sanders, who ran a spirited campaign against her, refused to engage on the email issue when it was clearly an issue on which she was deservedly vulnerable.
I remember in the early 1990s, my late mentor, Ben Wattenberg—an LBJ White House aide and Scoop Jackson Democrat, for the record—used to write that Democrats, when forming a firing squad, do so in a circle. There are no circles on the Democratic firing squads anymore, just a straight line pointing at the GOP. Republicans are the ones who seem to be forming the circles. But when Ben was making his observation following the 1988 election, the Democrats were in the midst of a period of self-criticism. Now Republicans are likely about to enter a similar period of self-reflection, and in that context, a circular firing squad, while ugly, may lead to the re-examination that the party needs in order to right itself, both politically and intellectually.
So while I am dismayed by what’s going on in the current election, and not happy with either of our choices, I do have some faith in the conservative movement’s willingness and ability to have the honest and robust discussions necessary to figure out the way forward. Call this the freedom of members of an intellectual movement rather than party operatives. We are free to think how we like and have no obligation to refrain from criticism of the party.
This vision centered around the freedom to disagree is reminiscent to me of the many robust arguments we had over our Shabbat table growing up. One time I brought home a female friend who left the table crying because she thought we were all yelling at that nice old man who was our grandfather. Well, Grandpa was indeed a nice man, but he also liked a good argument, and he trained his grandsons to follow suit. Perhaps similar training in the crucible of argument at other Shabbat tables is why many conservative Jews have been loud Trump critics.
Going forward, conservatives need to stay true to our principles. One of those principles is freedom. I hope that in the future the Republican Party can find a standard-bearer who celebrates freedom—including the freedom to disagree—and is one who the conservative movement can proudly get behind. This election has not brought it.
***
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Gil Troy and Tevi Troy both write, teach, and speak about American history and modern Jewish identity. Gil is professor of history at McGill University. His latest book is The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s. Tevi is the former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and White House aide. His latest book is Shall We Wake the President: Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office.
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OBSERVANCE / TALIA BLOCH
A Time To Mourn Without a Place to PrayI was standing in a pen, like a holding pen for livestock, or so it sometimes felt. I was in an office building in Lower Manhattan in a small area of a large conference room sectioned-off by a black, fabric folding wall reaching three-quarters to the ceiling. The folding wall was a mechitzah separating the space into a men’s and women’s side for a mincha minyan, or afternoon prayer service, to which I had come to say kaddish for my mother.
The men’s side was spacious. It had two or three large tables, several dozen chairs, and a row of windows along one wall. On our side, there were no chairs or tables, and the folding wall curved around, cutting off access to the windows. The 10 or so women praying stood in staggered fashion, trying to give one another room in the cramped space.
It had been almost 11 months since my mother passed away, approaching the end of the mourning period, and I had visited my share of synagogues and minyanim.
Men have written extensively about their experiences observing the kaddish ritual. In books and articles, they have delved into the origins of the custom and mulled over its beauty and tedium. They have explored the sorrows, rage, frustrations, and comfort that can accompany the year of mourning. Yet, as a woman saying kaddish, I quickly found that instead of being able to immerse myself in this ritual, these precious moments were overshadowed by feelings of self-consciousness and discomfort just because I was a woman trying to honor her mother as a Jew.
***
Immediately following the burial of a parent, a child is immersed in an 11-month mourning period that begins with the seven days of “sitting” shiva and progresses through stages of lesser intensity as the months pass. Throughout this period, the mourner daily recites the kaddish, or more precisely, the Mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer that requires a communal service. When my mother died suddenly in June of last year, I knew I would be reciting kaddish for her, if not every day, then as often as I could. Although not Orthodox, I grew up in a fairly traditional Jewish home, observing a certain amount of Jewish practice and belonging to both Conservative and Orthodox congregations. Some two decades prior, I had watched as my father recited kaddish daily after his own mother passed away.
So on the evening of the Monday that I got up from sitting shiva, I went to services at the Conservative synagogue nearest my home in Brooklyn, which, at the time, had a weekday minyan, but one that still adhered to Orthodox protocol of counting only men toward the quorum of 10 adults required for reciting communal prayers. My husband came along, as much for moral support as to help make the quorum. But when we arrived, we found just three men—the synagogue sexton, my husband, and another man—and one elderly woman. The congregation very rarely got a quorum on weekdays, the sexton told my husband, especially during the summer.
Not to worry, I thought. Given the number and variety of places for Jewish worship in New York City, finding a place to recite kaddish would be as easy as looking up the congregations nearest home and work and checking their daily schedules. And this would have been the case—had I been a man.
Several nights later, I visited an Orthodox congregation one neighborhood over. I was the only woman there. Again my husband came with me, and when it came time to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, I listened from behind the mechitzah as the rabbi asked my husband whether he would be reciting the prayer for me. When my husband replied that I would be saying kaddish myself, the rabbi practically started shouting the prayer in unison with me. Is he trying to help me out in case I don’t know the words, I wondered as I struggled to hold my own, or is he just trying to drown out my voice?
The kaddish does not speak of the dead. Rather, it is an ancient hymn sanctifying God and the divine name. The bereaved affirms faith in God’s ways despite the loss just experienced. Tradition also holds that if an offspring of the deceased leads the community in praising God, this will merit the soul of the departed, ensuring that he or she will achieve salvation. This is why the Mourner’s Kaddish—as well as other versions of the kaddish, of which there are several—may only be recited as part of public prayer. Because women have no role or only a very limited role in public prayer in most Orthodox communities, a woman reciting the kaddish is a matter of controversy. At play are issues of modesty (a woman’s voice is seen as a possible distraction to men during prayer) and whether reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish does, in fact, rise to the status of leading public prayer. While a number of Orthodox congregations permit a woman to recite the kaddish, and some permit it if a man is doing so as well, many don’t allow it at all.
My own synagogue, a Modern Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn, does permit women to say kaddish, and that is where I often went for the Sabbath. But this synagogue had no quorum for daily services, and moreover, it was too far for me to attend on a daily basis.
Liberal branches of Judaism, meanwhile, allow women to participate in public prayer. Yet, there I found the possibilities for attending daily services much more limited and no congregation was close enough to home or work—nor, as a rule, are there liberal independent weekday prayer groups that meet outside of synagogues.
Around my home, therefore, my options for saying kaddish daily turned out to be next to none. Ever hopeful, I looked to possibilities near work—which is how I found myself 11 months later behind that black folding wall in Lower Manhattan. I was grateful that this minyan made provisions for women to pray and that there were women who attended. Yet I was, with one exception, the only woman who ever used her voice during prayer and who said the Mourner’s Kaddish out loud as the men on the other side were reciting it.
Over the months that I had attended services with this group and several others around the city, I found my thoughts consumed more with the uncomfortable experiences of social exclusion than with those of mourning. I may have been thinking of the last time I saw my mother alive or about the week she died when I set out from the office to go to a minyan down the street, but by the time I had taken my place among the worshippers, too often I was caught up in the sorts of feelings one has at a party where you sense you are not wanted or don’t belong.
There was the awkward silence and averted eyes, each time as I waited for the elevator with a group of men—all going to the same minyan. Or the minyan that preferred to know ahead of time if I, as “the woman,” was going to be there.
There was the time when a mechitzah was not yet set up, and as the women moved the panels back and forth, attempting to get them into place, a man stepped over from behind the other side and declared with irritated sarcasm, “Why don’t you just put it where you want it and tell us where to stand,” as if this were not what men were doing to women all the time.
Or the time when the service ended without a Mourner’s Kaddish, because, apparently, no man needed to recite the prayer and the fact that a woman “on the other side” needed to do so was not even a thought.
There was the minyan that, although relatively welcoming—some of the men spoke to me and one even said he was glad to have me join them—had no mechitzah up, so they hastily created one from a tall filing cabinet. Happy enough to oblige, I took my place in the makeshift nook between the wall and the filing cabinet, dropped my things onto a chair that I had squeezed into the space, and waited for services to begin. Just as prayers started, a young man ran over and pushed a chair a few feet in front of me, as if he were closing the gate behind the sheep after they had been led into the pen for the night. Was he afraid I might run out? What else could I do but laugh?
What, I wondered, was so dangerous or infecting about me as a woman that I had to be treated as something to be contained? It was not the mechitzah that I was objecting to; my own shul has one. It was the way it was so often used. It was the way we women had to make ourselves small and silent, even when we just wanted to recite a simple prayer for the dead. Exactly what commandment, I wondered, was a man fulfilling when he drowned out the voice of a woman grieving for her mother? What does this say about the Jewish community? And since Jewish law is said to be grounded in divine will, can this really reflect the intent of a benevolent deity?
There were exceptions, of course—my Brooklyn shul being one of them. A shul in Manhattan’s Garment District was another. These places brought true meaning to the traditional farewell of those leaving a shiva house: “May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” And there are other such congregations in New York, especially on the Upper West Side. Too often, however, I ended up feeling like some sort of interloper, as if I were making a statement by reciting the kaddish, when, in fact, I wasn’t trying to make a statement at all. Even under the best of circumstances, at services where a woman reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish was perfectly acceptable, I felt a bit self-conscious standing among friends or strangers and raising my voice. Grief is private; the kaddish is not.
As the months passed, I became aware that reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish was not just a way to honor my mother, an Israeli-American and a proud and committed Jew. It was also a way to stay close to the days and moments just after her death, and, by extension, a way to remain close to the time before she died—the days, weeks, and months when she was still alive. This, for me, was perhaps the greatest solace that the kaddish conferred. Yet among the greater congregation of Israel, I often felt isolated or tolerated at best, rather than “comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”
Like this article? Sign up for our Daily Digest to get Tablet Magazine’s new content in your inbox each morning.
Talia Bloch is a writer and poet living in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Forward, The Jerusalem Report, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.
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BOOK REVIEWS / ADAM KIRSCH
The men’s side was spacious. It had two or three large tables, several dozen chairs, and a row of windows along one wall. On our side, there were no chairs or tables, and the folding wall curved around, cutting off access to the windows. The 10 or so women praying stood in staggered fashion, trying to give one another room in the cramped space.
It had been almost 11 months since my mother passed away, approaching the end of the mourning period, and I had visited my share of synagogues and minyanim.
Men have written extensively about their experiences observing the kaddish ritual. In books and articles, they have delved into the origins of the custom and mulled over its beauty and tedium. They have explored the sorrows, rage, frustrations, and comfort that can accompany the year of mourning. Yet, as a woman saying kaddish, I quickly found that instead of being able to immerse myself in this ritual, these precious moments were overshadowed by feelings of self-consciousness and discomfort just because I was a woman trying to honor her mother as a Jew.
***
Immediately following the burial of a parent, a child is immersed in an 11-month mourning period that begins with the seven days of “sitting” shiva and progresses through stages of lesser intensity as the months pass. Throughout this period, the mourner daily recites the kaddish, or more precisely, the Mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer that requires a communal service. When my mother died suddenly in June of last year, I knew I would be reciting kaddish for her, if not every day, then as often as I could. Although not Orthodox, I grew up in a fairly traditional Jewish home, observing a certain amount of Jewish practice and belonging to both Conservative and Orthodox congregations. Some two decades prior, I had watched as my father recited kaddish daily after his own mother passed away.
So on the evening of the Monday that I got up from sitting shiva, I went to services at the Conservative synagogue nearest my home in Brooklyn, which, at the time, had a weekday minyan, but one that still adhered to Orthodox protocol of counting only men toward the quorum of 10 adults required for reciting communal prayers. My husband came along, as much for moral support as to help make the quorum. But when we arrived, we found just three men—the synagogue sexton, my husband, and another man—and one elderly woman. The congregation very rarely got a quorum on weekdays, the sexton told my husband, especially during the summer.
Not to worry, I thought. Given the number and variety of places for Jewish worship in New York City, finding a place to recite kaddish would be as easy as looking up the congregations nearest home and work and checking their daily schedules. And this would have been the case—had I been a man.
Several nights later, I visited an Orthodox congregation one neighborhood over. I was the only woman there. Again my husband came with me, and when it came time to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, I listened from behind the mechitzah as the rabbi asked my husband whether he would be reciting the prayer for me. When my husband replied that I would be saying kaddish myself, the rabbi practically started shouting the prayer in unison with me. Is he trying to help me out in case I don’t know the words, I wondered as I struggled to hold my own, or is he just trying to drown out my voice?
The kaddish does not speak of the dead. Rather, it is an ancient hymn sanctifying God and the divine name. The bereaved affirms faith in God’s ways despite the loss just experienced. Tradition also holds that if an offspring of the deceased leads the community in praising God, this will merit the soul of the departed, ensuring that he or she will achieve salvation. This is why the Mourner’s Kaddish—as well as other versions of the kaddish, of which there are several—may only be recited as part of public prayer. Because women have no role or only a very limited role in public prayer in most Orthodox communities, a woman reciting the kaddish is a matter of controversy. At play are issues of modesty (a woman’s voice is seen as a possible distraction to men during prayer) and whether reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish does, in fact, rise to the status of leading public prayer. While a number of Orthodox congregations permit a woman to recite the kaddish, and some permit it if a man is doing so as well, many don’t allow it at all.
My own synagogue, a Modern Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn, does permit women to say kaddish, and that is where I often went for the Sabbath. But this synagogue had no quorum for daily services, and moreover, it was too far for me to attend on a daily basis.
Liberal branches of Judaism, meanwhile, allow women to participate in public prayer. Yet, there I found the possibilities for attending daily services much more limited and no congregation was close enough to home or work—nor, as a rule, are there liberal independent weekday prayer groups that meet outside of synagogues.
Around my home, therefore, my options for saying kaddish daily turned out to be next to none. Ever hopeful, I looked to possibilities near work—which is how I found myself 11 months later behind that black folding wall in Lower Manhattan. I was grateful that this minyan made provisions for women to pray and that there were women who attended. Yet I was, with one exception, the only woman who ever used her voice during prayer and who said the Mourner’s Kaddish out loud as the men on the other side were reciting it.
Over the months that I had attended services with this group and several others around the city, I found my thoughts consumed more with the uncomfortable experiences of social exclusion than with those of mourning. I may have been thinking of the last time I saw my mother alive or about the week she died when I set out from the office to go to a minyan down the street, but by the time I had taken my place among the worshippers, too often I was caught up in the sorts of feelings one has at a party where you sense you are not wanted or don’t belong.
There was the awkward silence and averted eyes, each time as I waited for the elevator with a group of men—all going to the same minyan. Or the minyan that preferred to know ahead of time if I, as “the woman,” was going to be there.
There was the time when a mechitzah was not yet set up, and as the women moved the panels back and forth, attempting to get them into place, a man stepped over from behind the other side and declared with irritated sarcasm, “Why don’t you just put it where you want it and tell us where to stand,” as if this were not what men were doing to women all the time.
Or the time when the service ended without a Mourner’s Kaddish, because, apparently, no man needed to recite the prayer and the fact that a woman “on the other side” needed to do so was not even a thought.
There was the minyan that, although relatively welcoming—some of the men spoke to me and one even said he was glad to have me join them—had no mechitzah up, so they hastily created one from a tall filing cabinet. Happy enough to oblige, I took my place in the makeshift nook between the wall and the filing cabinet, dropped my things onto a chair that I had squeezed into the space, and waited for services to begin. Just as prayers started, a young man ran over and pushed a chair a few feet in front of me, as if he were closing the gate behind the sheep after they had been led into the pen for the night. Was he afraid I might run out? What else could I do but laugh?
What, I wondered, was so dangerous or infecting about me as a woman that I had to be treated as something to be contained? It was not the mechitzah that I was objecting to; my own shul has one. It was the way it was so often used. It was the way we women had to make ourselves small and silent, even when we just wanted to recite a simple prayer for the dead. Exactly what commandment, I wondered, was a man fulfilling when he drowned out the voice of a woman grieving for her mother? What does this say about the Jewish community? And since Jewish law is said to be grounded in divine will, can this really reflect the intent of a benevolent deity?
There were exceptions, of course—my Brooklyn shul being one of them. A shul in Manhattan’s Garment District was another. These places brought true meaning to the traditional farewell of those leaving a shiva house: “May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” And there are other such congregations in New York, especially on the Upper West Side. Too often, however, I ended up feeling like some sort of interloper, as if I were making a statement by reciting the kaddish, when, in fact, I wasn’t trying to make a statement at all. Even under the best of circumstances, at services where a woman reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish was perfectly acceptable, I felt a bit self-conscious standing among friends or strangers and raising my voice. Grief is private; the kaddish is not.
As the months passed, I became aware that reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish was not just a way to honor my mother, an Israeli-American and a proud and committed Jew. It was also a way to stay close to the days and moments just after her death, and, by extension, a way to remain close to the time before she died—the days, weeks, and months when she was still alive. This, for me, was perhaps the greatest solace that the kaddish conferred. Yet among the greater congregation of Israel, I often felt isolated or tolerated at best, rather than “comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”
Like this article? Sign up for our Daily Digest to get Tablet Magazine’s new content in your inbox each morning.
Talia Bloch is a writer and poet living in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Forward, The Jerusalem Report, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.
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BOOK REVIEWS / ADAM KIRSCH
At Home in History, and Nowhere ElseIf there is such a thing as an archetypal 20th-century Jewish life, Saul Friedländer has led it. All three of the central Jewish experiences of the era left their mark on him: the Holocaust, which he survived as a young boy; the founding of Israel, where he moved in 1948; and the rise of Jewish life in America, where he now lives, after retiring from teaching at UCLA. No wonder that a man so shaped and pressed by history became a historian. Friedländer is one of the world’s leading scholars of the Holocaust, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Nazi Germany and the Jews,among many other works. But what does it mean to write the history of events that are, in fact, part of one’s own personal memory? What does a life like Friedländer’s feel like from the inside?
These are the questions he set out to answer in his most personal book, When Memory Comes, a short, sparely written memoir first published in 1978. It has now been released in a new edition, by Other Press, to accompany a newly published second volume of Friedländer’s memoirs, Where Memory Leads. Taken together, these books form a primary document of modern Jewish history—a contribution to the study of the past that uses the tools not of the historian, but of the autobiographer. A scholar attempts to ascertain details and facts, and synthesize them into a complete narrative. A memoirist, however, knows that what matters most about the past, the way it felt, is always elusive, partial, reconstructed rather than recollected. Friedländer’s title tellingly reverses the formula he uses in the epigraph to When Memory Comes, taken from the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink: “When knowledge comes, memory comes too, little by little. Knowledge and memory are one and the same thing.” For Friedländer, it is memory that comes first, bringing a kind of imperfect knowledge in its train.
Friedländer’s early life, as he describes it in Where Memory Leads, followed the pattern of many Central European Jews born at what he calls “the worst possible moment”—in 1932, just months before Hitler took power. “Everyone in our house felt German,” he recalls, and he was called Paul—a Christian name, and a sign of the family’s seemingly complete assimilation into the culture of German-speaking Prague, where they lived. (Later, after he moved to Israel, he would change it to Saul, thus reversing the process that turned the first-century Jew Saul into the Christian saint, Paul.) Like all children, he believed his world to be normal because it was the only world he knew: “The way of life of the Jews in the Prague of my childhood was perhaps futile and ‘rootless,’ seen from a historical viewpoint. Yet this way of life was ours, the one we treasured, and there is no point in pretending otherwise.”
This way of life came to a sudden end in March 1939, when Hitler seized the rump state of Czechoslovakia for the Third Reich. As Jews, Friedländer’s parents knew they had to flee, though they dissembled this fact for their young son: “I was told that we were leaving Prague because the Germans had occupied Czechoslovakia and because we were Czech.” The family ended up, like many Jewish refugees from Hitler, in Paris, which at the time seemed like a haven. Yet as Friedländer shows, the trauma of dislocation and exile was inescapable, even before the worst came. One of his most painful memories of this period comes from the months he spent at a Jewish boarding school, where he was bullied and beaten up by the other students because he did not speak Yiddish or wear a kippah. He was, they taunted, a “goy”—an unspeakably bitter irony, and one that echoes through Friedländer’s later account of his complex, ambivalent relationship with Jewishness.
After the fall of France in 1940, the Friedländers fled to a small town called Neris, but soon they were no longer safe even there. Paul’s parents took a last, desperate step: They had their son baptized as a Catholic and entrusted him to the care of a severe, conservative Catholic school. In his reserved style, Friedländer conveys the utter desolation and misery he felt at being separated from his parents, which led him, at the age of just 10, to attempt to drown himself. He would never see them again: As he learned much later, they were captured while attempting to cross the border into Switzerland and deported to Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Paul-Henri, as he was now known, embraced Catholicism with the ardor of a preadolescent. The contradiction of his situation was flagrant: Here was a Jewish boy being hidden by Catholics who embraced the anti-Semitic Vichy regime and admired Marshal Petain.
Yet at least Friedländer had found a kind of home; and then he lost this one too, after the war, when he was released into the custody of a local Jewish guardian. By the age of 16, when he started at a prestigious lycee in Paris, Friedländer had been through more shock, dislocation, and loss than most people experience in a lifetime. It was as a reaction to all this, he makes clear, that he embraced Zionism. Only in Israel could he find anything like a secure home: “I did not become a Zionist by way of a renewal of contact with buried emotional layers, but rather as a result of logical argument, of a simple line of reasoning that nonetheless in those days seemed to me to be a compelling one.”
In 1948, as the War of Independence raged, Friedländer determined to join the Jewish state at any price. Although he knew little about intra-Zionist politics, he lied about his age and joined Betar, the youth group associated with the Irgun, the right-wing terrorist organization. Fatefully, the ship he boarded to leave Europe was none other than the Altalena. Students of Israeli history will recognize the name: Packed with Irgun fighters and weaponry, the ship was seen as a threat by the new government of David Ben-Gurion and was not allowed to dock. Friedländer left the ship with most of the passengers before it got embroiled in a gun battle with the IDF and was sunk outside Tel Aviv. For years afterward, Friedländer writes, any Israeli who learned that he had been on board the Altalena looked at him with suspicion.
This story, with its stranger-than-fiction twists and unspeakable emotional devastation, is told in When Memory Comes with a kind of quiet amazement, as though Friedländer himself doesn’t know exactly what to make of it. The scars of his childhood, he makes clear, never left him: He was prone to panic attacks, emotionally withdrawn, and phobic. The narrative that unfolds in the book is regularly punctuated by scenes from the then-present, where Friedländer is writing it in Jerusalem in 1977, and so we know that, in spite of everything, he survived, even thrived—he married, had children, became an eminent professor. Yet Friedländer makes very clear that he is not writing a story with a happy ending, much less a Zionist fable about redemption through aliyah. Instead, writing just as Israel was beginning peace talks with Sadat’s Egypt, Friedländer looks around him and is gravely suspicious of the country he lives in—a Jewish state occupying Palestinian land, prey to what he sees as extreme nationalism. Walking the streets of Tel Aviv, he writes, “aroused in me a feeling of malaise …and somewhere awakened in me profound misgivings that, perhaps, went to the very heart of things.”
When Memory Comes is a small masterpiece in the literature of the Holocaust. Its new sequel, Where Memory Leads, is a more conventional kind of memoir because it deals with a more normal, adult life, but it displays the same probing intelligence at work. The book follows the course of Friedländer’s life from 1948, when he arrived in Israel, down to the present; and it makes clear that while Friedländer was an Israeli, he retained an emotional and often physical distance from his adopted country. After spending five years in Israel and doing work in an army intelligence unit—an experience he passes over almost completely—Friedländer returned to Paris for graduate study. He went on to work as a secretary to Nahum Goldmann, the Zionist leader, which involved frequent travel between Jerusalem and New York. He got his doctorate in Geneva and spent part of every year there, even after he occupied a chair at Hebrew University and later at Tel Aviv University. And in the last part of his career he moved to Los Angeles, to teach at UCLA—a place about as far removed from Israel and Europe as you could get, spiritually and geographically.
Friedländer has an interesting store of anecdotes about the people and places he encountered—mainly scholars, from Gershom Scholem to Ernest Nolte—and he traces the growth, over decades, of his scholarly understanding of the Holocaust. He also notes that he played a vocal role on the Israeli left, participating (or trying to) in dialogues with Palestinians, and criticizing the West Bank settlements from the very beginning. He is dismayed by the vicious and thoughtless anti-Israelism that now pervades academia, yet he is also highly critical of what Israel has become: “If the present trend is not reversed…then, metaphorically speaking, regarding the values Israel once held dear, regarding the survival of an Israeli democracy, there is nothing more to say than God help us.” Yet throughout all his peregrinations, geographic and political, Friedländer always returns to the central fact that his is a Jewish story: “If anyone were to ask me what I consider my core identity, beyond any cultural imprint, something I would never be willing to deny or give up, I would answer without the least hesitation: I am a Jew, albeit one without any religious or tradition-related attachments, yet indelibly marked by the Shoah. Ultimately, I am nothing else.”
***
You can help support Tablet’s unique brand of Jewish journalism. Click here to donate today.
Adam Kirsch is the director of the MA program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature.
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MUSIC / LIEL LEIBOVITZ
These are the questions he set out to answer in his most personal book, When Memory Comes, a short, sparely written memoir first published in 1978. It has now been released in a new edition, by Other Press, to accompany a newly published second volume of Friedländer’s memoirs, Where Memory Leads. Taken together, these books form a primary document of modern Jewish history—a contribution to the study of the past that uses the tools not of the historian, but of the autobiographer. A scholar attempts to ascertain details and facts, and synthesize them into a complete narrative. A memoirist, however, knows that what matters most about the past, the way it felt, is always elusive, partial, reconstructed rather than recollected. Friedländer’s title tellingly reverses the formula he uses in the epigraph to When Memory Comes, taken from the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink: “When knowledge comes, memory comes too, little by little. Knowledge and memory are one and the same thing.” For Friedländer, it is memory that comes first, bringing a kind of imperfect knowledge in its train.
Friedländer’s early life, as he describes it in Where Memory Leads, followed the pattern of many Central European Jews born at what he calls “the worst possible moment”—in 1932, just months before Hitler took power. “Everyone in our house felt German,” he recalls, and he was called Paul—a Christian name, and a sign of the family’s seemingly complete assimilation into the culture of German-speaking Prague, where they lived. (Later, after he moved to Israel, he would change it to Saul, thus reversing the process that turned the first-century Jew Saul into the Christian saint, Paul.) Like all children, he believed his world to be normal because it was the only world he knew: “The way of life of the Jews in the Prague of my childhood was perhaps futile and ‘rootless,’ seen from a historical viewpoint. Yet this way of life was ours, the one we treasured, and there is no point in pretending otherwise.”
This way of life came to a sudden end in March 1939, when Hitler seized the rump state of Czechoslovakia for the Third Reich. As Jews, Friedländer’s parents knew they had to flee, though they dissembled this fact for their young son: “I was told that we were leaving Prague because the Germans had occupied Czechoslovakia and because we were Czech.” The family ended up, like many Jewish refugees from Hitler, in Paris, which at the time seemed like a haven. Yet as Friedländer shows, the trauma of dislocation and exile was inescapable, even before the worst came. One of his most painful memories of this period comes from the months he spent at a Jewish boarding school, where he was bullied and beaten up by the other students because he did not speak Yiddish or wear a kippah. He was, they taunted, a “goy”—an unspeakably bitter irony, and one that echoes through Friedländer’s later account of his complex, ambivalent relationship with Jewishness.
After the fall of France in 1940, the Friedländers fled to a small town called Neris, but soon they were no longer safe even there. Paul’s parents took a last, desperate step: They had their son baptized as a Catholic and entrusted him to the care of a severe, conservative Catholic school. In his reserved style, Friedländer conveys the utter desolation and misery he felt at being separated from his parents, which led him, at the age of just 10, to attempt to drown himself. He would never see them again: As he learned much later, they were captured while attempting to cross the border into Switzerland and deported to Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Paul-Henri, as he was now known, embraced Catholicism with the ardor of a preadolescent. The contradiction of his situation was flagrant: Here was a Jewish boy being hidden by Catholics who embraced the anti-Semitic Vichy regime and admired Marshal Petain.
Yet at least Friedländer had found a kind of home; and then he lost this one too, after the war, when he was released into the custody of a local Jewish guardian. By the age of 16, when he started at a prestigious lycee in Paris, Friedländer had been through more shock, dislocation, and loss than most people experience in a lifetime. It was as a reaction to all this, he makes clear, that he embraced Zionism. Only in Israel could he find anything like a secure home: “I did not become a Zionist by way of a renewal of contact with buried emotional layers, but rather as a result of logical argument, of a simple line of reasoning that nonetheless in those days seemed to me to be a compelling one.”
In 1948, as the War of Independence raged, Friedländer determined to join the Jewish state at any price. Although he knew little about intra-Zionist politics, he lied about his age and joined Betar, the youth group associated with the Irgun, the right-wing terrorist organization. Fatefully, the ship he boarded to leave Europe was none other than the Altalena. Students of Israeli history will recognize the name: Packed with Irgun fighters and weaponry, the ship was seen as a threat by the new government of David Ben-Gurion and was not allowed to dock. Friedländer left the ship with most of the passengers before it got embroiled in a gun battle with the IDF and was sunk outside Tel Aviv. For years afterward, Friedländer writes, any Israeli who learned that he had been on board the Altalena looked at him with suspicion.
This story, with its stranger-than-fiction twists and unspeakable emotional devastation, is told in When Memory Comes with a kind of quiet amazement, as though Friedländer himself doesn’t know exactly what to make of it. The scars of his childhood, he makes clear, never left him: He was prone to panic attacks, emotionally withdrawn, and phobic. The narrative that unfolds in the book is regularly punctuated by scenes from the then-present, where Friedländer is writing it in Jerusalem in 1977, and so we know that, in spite of everything, he survived, even thrived—he married, had children, became an eminent professor. Yet Friedländer makes very clear that he is not writing a story with a happy ending, much less a Zionist fable about redemption through aliyah. Instead, writing just as Israel was beginning peace talks with Sadat’s Egypt, Friedländer looks around him and is gravely suspicious of the country he lives in—a Jewish state occupying Palestinian land, prey to what he sees as extreme nationalism. Walking the streets of Tel Aviv, he writes, “aroused in me a feeling of malaise …and somewhere awakened in me profound misgivings that, perhaps, went to the very heart of things.”
When Memory Comes is a small masterpiece in the literature of the Holocaust. Its new sequel, Where Memory Leads, is a more conventional kind of memoir because it deals with a more normal, adult life, but it displays the same probing intelligence at work. The book follows the course of Friedländer’s life from 1948, when he arrived in Israel, down to the present; and it makes clear that while Friedländer was an Israeli, he retained an emotional and often physical distance from his adopted country. After spending five years in Israel and doing work in an army intelligence unit—an experience he passes over almost completely—Friedländer returned to Paris for graduate study. He went on to work as a secretary to Nahum Goldmann, the Zionist leader, which involved frequent travel between Jerusalem and New York. He got his doctorate in Geneva and spent part of every year there, even after he occupied a chair at Hebrew University and later at Tel Aviv University. And in the last part of his career he moved to Los Angeles, to teach at UCLA—a place about as far removed from Israel and Europe as you could get, spiritually and geographically.
Friedländer has an interesting store of anecdotes about the people and places he encountered—mainly scholars, from Gershom Scholem to Ernest Nolte—and he traces the growth, over decades, of his scholarly understanding of the Holocaust. He also notes that he played a vocal role on the Israeli left, participating (or trying to) in dialogues with Palestinians, and criticizing the West Bank settlements from the very beginning. He is dismayed by the vicious and thoughtless anti-Israelism that now pervades academia, yet he is also highly critical of what Israel has become: “If the present trend is not reversed…then, metaphorically speaking, regarding the values Israel once held dear, regarding the survival of an Israeli democracy, there is nothing more to say than God help us.” Yet throughout all his peregrinations, geographic and political, Friedländer always returns to the central fact that his is a Jewish story: “If anyone were to ask me what I consider my core identity, beyond any cultural imprint, something I would never be willing to deny or give up, I would answer without the least hesitation: I am a Jew, albeit one without any religious or tradition-related attachments, yet indelibly marked by the Shoah. Ultimately, I am nothing else.”
***
You can help support Tablet’s unique brand of Jewish journalism. Click here to donate today.
Adam Kirsch is the director of the MA program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature.
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MUSIC / LIEL LEIBOVITZ
All We Need Is Love—and Leonard CohenWhat does a man do? bears and dares;
and how does a little boy fare? He fares.
(“Mr. Pou & The Alphabet,” John Berryman)
I’m turning 40 in a few weeks. I wasn’t expecting it. Like most of us, I’ve spent a lifetime learning a vocabulary fit to describe only the thrusts and pleasures of youth. I have many words for hope. I have odes to future plans. And I have faith. But don’t ask me about my right knee—it creaks now like the floor of an old hotel—or about the dread I feel each night, watching my children sleep and knowing that I can’t protect them, not from everything, not forever. I’ve lived a hard and sobering life, but my failures still confound me, and, on certain cold nights, so do my desires. And my heart breaks too easily these days, weighed down by the darkness that creeps in from every crack in the culture. I don’t know the words to describe the path forward, mine and ours. Thank God my rabbi, Leonard Cohen, does.
He released a new album last week, his 14th. I won’t bother searching for the right adjectives to describe it; that would be dumb, like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the tallest mountain. It’s Cohen’s line, delivered in response to the news that his contemporary, Dylan, had just won the Nobel Prize. But Cohen could’ve easily been talking about himself: His new album is majestic, but its beauty gains nothing from description. Like a mountain, it is immediately and completely evident, inscrutable and inescapable. Like a mountain, it prompts a reckoning.
Which is not to suggest that the album is ominous. Its title may be You Want It Darker, but darkness has always found Cohen ambivalent; he may appreciate the purity of despair, but it has never been his drug. Unlike Dylan—for whom it’s never dark yet but always getting there—Cohen sees more layers to the night. His songbook is a manual for living with defeat, and its force has never been as moving or as clear as it is in the nine songs that make up his latest release.
Consider the following, from “Steer Your Way”:
Not, mind you, change it, let alone tear it up: Just transform it. Our best efforts at repentance and rebirth, Rabbi Lew wisely noted, “will not change what happens to us; rather, they will change us.” That is the essence—of Judaism, of growing older with grace, and of Cohen’s new album, an essential guide to both; it’s going to get darker, it always does, but that’s all the more reason to try harder, not an invitation to surrender.
There’s fight in every one of Cohen’s new songs, illuminated by the wisdom of his years but powered by a lust for life that is rare even in artists who are decades younger. “I was fighting with temptation / But I didn’t want to win,” he sings with an almost audible wink, “A man like me don’t like to see / Temptation caving in.” It’s an invigorating sentiment, reminding us that even our most glaring flaws are not without their secret joys, and that our missteps, too, eventually take us to where we need to be. We may love and lose, we may try and we may stumble, but we feel, and the more we do the more alive we are even as we slouch toward the great eternal rest. “I heard the snake was baffled by his sin,” he muses in one of the album’s finest expressions of this profound idea, “He shed his scales to find the snake within / but born again is born without a skin / The poison enters into everything.” Teshuvah, or return—to righteousness, to our true selves, to those we love—is often difficult, sometimes deadly, always essential. There’s simply no other way.
I have no idea if the Lord of Song consults the Hebrew calendar, but it can hardly be a coincidence that Cohen’s album was released during Sukkot, our most Cohenesque of holidays. Immediately following the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement, Sukkot instructs us in ritual, as Cohen does us in song, to rejoice in brokenness. We are commanded to leave our comfortable homes—a subtle reminder that they’re not as stable and sheltering as we’d like to think—and instead eat and sleep in a ramshackle structure that’s nothing if not a monument to impermanence. Having spent the Days of Awe in meditation and prayer, we begin the year with a physical reminder that all must and does pass, and that the best we can do with the time we are given is to knock down our walls and open our doors and our hearts.
It’s a radical notion for a culture like ours, so solipsistic and so sophomorically obsessed with unequivocal triumphs. But Cohen has always been there for us, our singing prophet, reminding us to bear and dare, asking us to steer our hearts not to higher ground, to some more perfect ideal, or even to God, but back into ourselves, and into the hearts of others, no matter how painful it may be. Like a magical mantra, his wisdom grows more powerful with each repetition, pulling us away from our distractions and into its light. With this perfect new album we may begin to transcend: All we need is love—and Leonard Cohen.
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Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.
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A Beloved Jewish Mural Is Whitewashed, and the Lower East Side Mourns Residents of a storied Jewish neighborhood in New York City are furious after a developer failed to inform the community of its plans to erase a historic mural by Marjorie Ingall
On Monday morning, a historic mural created by Lower East Side Jewish teenagers 43 years ago was summarily whitewashed by a real estate developer. Art lovers and preservationists in the neighborhood are horrified.
Neighborhood blog The Lo-Down, which broke the story, reported last week that the Ascend Group had purchased three adjacent parcels of land on East Broadway. The middle parcel is the Bialystoker building, an official New York City landmark. Constructed in 1929 by immigrants from Bialystok, the wedding-cake-like art deco building—adorned with medallions depicting the 12 tribes of Israel—is a former nursing home and community center that was shuttered in 2011; thanks to the efforts of local activists, it was granted landmark status in 2013. The Bialystoker is protected from destruction. But the park on one side and the office building on the other are slated for demolition, to be replaced by two vast residential buildings that will sandwich the Bialystocker.
The mural being painted in July, 1971. (Image: Lenny Rosenberg)
The mural at 232 East Broadway was on the office building side. Called “Our Strength Is Our Heritage, Our Heritage Is Our Life,” it depicted central events from Jewish and Lower East Side history. Back in 1972, CityArts, a longtime public art organization that pairs professional artists and New York City students to create mosaics and murals around the city, approached the Lower East Side youth organization Young Israel about creating a Jewish mural. CityArts invited the Young Israel teens to collaborate; the students researched, debated what to include, then designed and painted the mural. The left side depicted Lower East Side history: Ellis Island immigration, the dawn of the labor movement, the early importance of The Forward newspaper. The middle section was devoted to religion: a rebbe praying, a woman lighting Shabbat candles, a menorah. There was also modern world history: A fire representing the Holocaust, a flag and map of the modern state of Israel, the massacre of Jewish Olympians at Munich. The far right side of the mural depicted the faces of the teens themselves and their families.
The mural, nearly complete, 1971. (Image: Lenny Rosenberg)
All this disappeared in a day, unannounced, under a coat of white paint.
Sara Krivisky, one of the teenagers (she was on the lower right side of the mural, wearing a Star of David necklace) is heartbroken. “I grew up on the Lower East Side,” she said in an interview. “I live in Florida now, but that mural is part of my family history—that’s my face, my parents’ faces, up there. My parents were Holocaust survivors who came from Poland to the Lower East Side after the war. I just turned 60, and it’s my heart and soul. My kids, the mural has become a part of them. My son moved to New York, and he used to send me pictures of his friends and the mural—part of his own personal walking tour. My daughter took a picture of me pointing to my own face on the mural and captioned it, ‘That’s my mama!’ My youngest son heard that it was destroyed and called to make sure I was OK.”
Michelle Rosenberg, a young architect who could see the mural from her apartment window, was devastated too. “It was a very rich mural, filled with lots of pieces of history,” she said. “You could spend 30 minutes looking at it and identifying the different events and people depicted. Sure it was old and peeling, but so are we all. Watching it get whitewashed made me panic. It was an intentional act of disrespect, a reminder that the goal of gentrification is to destroy communities. And of course it’s impossible not to read the erasing of a Jewish symbol as an act of anti-Semitism. Especially one that has Holocaust survivors depicted. Eek.”
Sara Krivisky pointing at herself in the mural. (Image: Ariel Krivisky)
The developer, Rob Kaliner of the Ascend Group, told the New York Post, “The building is going to be demolished anyway, and I wanted to make sure for the safety of residents and the people walking around there that it was taken care of without pieces falling off. We really apologize to anyone who was upset about it, but we wanted to make sure we kept the area safe, and that’s what we accomplished. I would feel terrible if anyone was to get hurt because of the site conditions.”
Rosenberg and Krivisky both scoffed at this explanation. “There was no functional reason to remove it, considering that the building will be demolished anyway,” Rosenberg said. Krivisky added, “I’d love for it to be replicated elsewhere in the neighborhood. For years I tried to get CityArts to touch up the mural; they didn’t have the money. But the money is there in that area now. There are so many developers, and there are street artists doing amazing projects. The neighborhood is changing. But I think there is still hope to bring back the history on some level.”
Krivisky sighed. “The Lower East Side was a wonderful place to grow up. I wouldn’t change it for anything. I’d love to recreate the mural, bring back the people who are on the wall, have them bring their kids, have a big community event—everyone, the old and the new.”
Previous: Finding Bella Abzug in Art
Marjorie Ingall is a columnist for Tablet Magazine, and author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children.
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Lil Dicky, Rap’s Funniest Jew, Ends a Tour in Brussels Watching a self-deprecating Jewish artist perform in a newly xenophobic Europe by Jesse BernsteinIt’s a strange time to be Jewish in Europe right now. Right-wing leaders like Viktor Orban, Marine La Pen, and Geert Wilders are using strikingly recognizable language to describe Muslim refugees, while left-wing political parties across the continent almost uniformly condemn Israel with varying degrees of vitriol. Some Eastern European countries continue to downplay their roles in the Holocaust; other counties, like Ukraine, have made admirable efforts to do the opposite. Meanwhile, Jews have been the victims of targeted attacks in France, Denmark, and England; synagogues and Jewish schools have begun to resemble military fortresses. At the same time, Jews are flocking to cities like Berlin, once an unthinkable place of refuge. And the amount of attacks against Jews seems to be dropping. The fever may be breaking, but the dominant feeling is unease.
Lil Dicky performing during his ‘Dick or Treat’ tour. (Image: Courtesy of the author) (Facebook)
These sentiments and facts were on my mind when I went to see a performance by Lil Dicky, one of the best Jewish rappers alive, in Brussels last week. I was particularly wondering how I’d feel, and how the crowd would take it, when he would arrive onstage dressed in a skeleton onesie, and call himself a kike—a common punchline for the rapper whose skills are as sharp as his self-degrading comedic schtick. It would be for the fans. For the laughs. And I didn’t know how I would feel.
* * *
Bored and dissatisfied with a promising career in advertising, Philadelphia-area Jew Dave Burd, an avid rap fan, started to record some songs on his Macbook Pro (which wound up getting a shout-out on a later album). Finally, he decided that they were good enough to put online, and within 24 hours of uploading the music video for “Ex-Boyfriend” on YouTube, he’d racked up over a million views. The crude, hilarious video featuring a chance run-in with a girlfriend’s ex, showcased his prodigious flow and lyrical ability, and his comedic sensibilities continues to be the base of his persona. The punchlines, as would become his calling card, often used his Jewish identity as a target.
A mixtape and a Kickstarter-financed album followed, and lo and behold, the newly christened Lil Dicky had a No. 1 album on the rap charts. Now, with new representation in Scooter Braun (and co-signs from the likes of Kevin Durant, Snoop Dogg, and Sarah Silverman), Dicky’s finishing up his third tour, “Dick or Treat” (it’s Halloween-themed) and on your TV for everything from Carl’s Jr. to Trojan.
An hour prior to Dicky’s show at the Ancienne Belgique in downtown Brussels, the last stop of his maiden European voyage, I counted more guys dressed in cheapo pharaoh costumes (two) than female humans (one), though the latter is wearing a Snow White get-up that Disney might object to. Even though Halloween had occurred a few days prior, everyone was still in a festive mood, Dicky included.
For our interview, Lil Dicky and I found ourselves in a bit of a time-crunch because of what his manager described to me as a Belgian waffle-related emergency. But by the time we sat down in the smoky green room overlooking the Boulevard Anspach, the Cheltenham, PA native reflected on the success he’s had since the release of Professional Rapper in 2015, his first mainstream success. “I’m feeling progress…in terms of like, the perception, yeah,” he said. “I feel like I’m perceived in a higher light than ever. But still, a long ways to go.” Until? Dicky started miming people saying things about him, like “’He’s, like, an iconic rap artist and an iconic comedian.” He ruminated for a second. “And an iconic father, and husband.”
As for European crowds, Dicky said he’s been amazed by the turnout. “It’s always baffling to me, like, how do these people know who I am?,” he wondered. “Crowds in the United States, they know I’m back three times a year… You go to New York, L.A., you know, it’s not gonna be the same as you go to, like, Amsterdam.”
When I asked Dicky what it felt like to be so publicly Jewish in Europe in the current climate, he jumped right in. “I didn’t even know [European anti-Semitism] was a thing. My parents, a few other older people, were like, ‘Uch, people are anti-Semitic out there.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, really? I haven’t experienced an ounce of that.’ But I’m also totally oblivious.”
Later, we chatted about Philadelphia sports (on Carson Wentz and Joel Embiid: “I see them both being, like, first-ballot Hall of Famers”), but then it’s time to get into costume.
* * *
The question of brazenly public Judaism is pertinent in a way it hasn’t been a while, with everyone from Twitter eggs to former mayors of London ready to pounce on anyone who declares themselves a Member of the Tribe. Just as we seemed to have returned to a world where open anti-Semitism was more acceptable, do we need to return a world where Judaism becomes something you shouldn’t advertise? And especially in Dicky’s case, where he’s happy to joke about haggling with waiters and his bar mitzvah money, the question begs to be asked: can we afford that sort of levity right now?
The Halloween-themed show was a perfect encapsulation of Dicky. There were almost as many brief snippets of stand-up and skits as there were songs, and by the time he was pouring salsa into an appreciative fan’s mouth and flinging charcuterie into the crowd to raucous cheers, it was clear that this was a different kind of rap show.
Lil Dicky in his skeleton onesie (Image courtesy of the author).
Skits included trick-or-treat drop-bys from Tupac, Biggie, Harambe, Michael Jackson, and, as I was warned, Hitler (booed to oblivion). Fighting through some microphone issues, Dicky had the crowd sing the Belgian national anthem, fed front-row fans bunches of grapes, and (passably!) sang almost all of “I Believe I Can Fly.” He asked the crowd to imagine that he drove a Bugatti, and that they all drove Bugattis, too (perhaps the most succinct summary of rap’s mainstream appeal as there’s ever been). For his last song before the encore, “Lemme Freak,” our friend Snow White was invited up on to the stage to receive a lap dance and a bouquet.
If Dicky had any doubts about calling attention to his Judaism in Europe over and over again, they certainly didn’t show. A lot of quick jokes seem to slip by undetected, and as for anything approaching anti-Semitism, when Dicky asked the audience what they know about him, a girl in the front row yelled—nicely!—“Jew!” which did seem to throw him for a second. And when he performed “All K,” featuring gem-like lyrics such as, “What you know about a balla / born and raised on the Kaballah,” Dicky got some of his biggest cheers of the show. And that’s a good thing.
Previous: The Uproarious Rise of Lil Dicky
Lil Dicky Is a Great Pick to Educate the Youth About the Benefits of Condoms
Related: Jewish Rap Kingpins and the Politics of Musical Identity
Jesse Bernstein is a former Intern at Tablet.
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Israeli and Palestinian Activists Go Head-to-Head at George Mason University After being shunned from covering a Students for Justice in Palestine conference, I attended a ‘counter event,’ showing that pro-Israel organizations have the grit to fight back by Jonathan Bronitsky
Over the weekend, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), which coordinates more than 160 chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), held its sixth annual conference just outside the nation’s capital at George Mason University (GMU), Virginia’s largest public research university. The conference was hosted by George Mason University Students Against Israeli Apartheid and held on-campus on the third floor of the student Johnson Center. It was attended by more than 200 activists from the U.S. and abroad. Its theme was “Critical Mass: With Our Roots in Resistance, Forging a Just Future.” The Anti-Defamation League, far from a “right-wing” institution, has labeled SJP “the primary organizer of anti-Israel events on U.S. college campuses and the group most responsible for bringing divestment resolutions to votes in front of student governments.” I was keen to check out the conference and learn more about its aims and the motivations of its attendees.and how does a little boy fare? He fares.
(“Mr. Pou & The Alphabet,” John Berryman)
I’m turning 40 in a few weeks. I wasn’t expecting it. Like most of us, I’ve spent a lifetime learning a vocabulary fit to describe only the thrusts and pleasures of youth. I have many words for hope. I have odes to future plans. And I have faith. But don’t ask me about my right knee—it creaks now like the floor of an old hotel—or about the dread I feel each night, watching my children sleep and knowing that I can’t protect them, not from everything, not forever. I’ve lived a hard and sobering life, but my failures still confound me, and, on certain cold nights, so do my desires. And my heart breaks too easily these days, weighed down by the darkness that creeps in from every crack in the culture. I don’t know the words to describe the path forward, mine and ours. Thank God my rabbi, Leonard Cohen, does.
He released a new album last week, his 14th. I won’t bother searching for the right adjectives to describe it; that would be dumb, like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the tallest mountain. It’s Cohen’s line, delivered in response to the news that his contemporary, Dylan, had just won the Nobel Prize. But Cohen could’ve easily been talking about himself: His new album is majestic, but its beauty gains nothing from description. Like a mountain, it is immediately and completely evident, inscrutable and inescapable. Like a mountain, it prompts a reckoning.
Which is not to suggest that the album is ominous. Its title may be You Want It Darker, but darkness has always found Cohen ambivalent; he may appreciate the purity of despair, but it has never been his drug. Unlike Dylan—for whom it’s never dark yet but always getting there—Cohen sees more layers to the night. His songbook is a manual for living with defeat, and its force has never been as moving or as clear as it is in the nine songs that make up his latest release.
Consider the following, from “Steer Your Way”:
Steer your path through the pain
that is far more real than you
That has smashed the Cosmic Model,
that has blinded every View
And please don’t make me go there,
though there be a God or not
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
It’s about as elegant an expression of Jewish theology as we have ever received. In its infancy—as the late Rabbi Alan Lew notes in his wonderful book This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, a title of which Cohen, I imagine, would approve—the old religion had a rosy-eyed view of the world. Four things, the Babylonian Talmud teaches us, “will cause God to tear up the decree of judgment which has been issued against a person: acts of righteousness, fervent prayer, changing one’s name, and changing one’s behavior.” But if you’ve lived as long as Cohen has—he’s 82 now, just a kid with a crazy dream—you know that prayer and good deeds and all kinds of change aren’t enough and that sometimes the righteous, whatever their name may be, are struck down and suffer and die. Judaism realized this, too, eventually, which is why the liturgy came to offer an amended view of fate. The Unetaneh Tokef prayer, for example, which Cohen had translated into a transcendent song, tells us that “Teshuvah, prayer, and righteous deeds can transform the evil of the decree.”Not, mind you, change it, let alone tear it up: Just transform it. Our best efforts at repentance and rebirth, Rabbi Lew wisely noted, “will not change what happens to us; rather, they will change us.” That is the essence—of Judaism, of growing older with grace, and of Cohen’s new album, an essential guide to both; it’s going to get darker, it always does, but that’s all the more reason to try harder, not an invitation to surrender.
There’s fight in every one of Cohen’s new songs, illuminated by the wisdom of his years but powered by a lust for life that is rare even in artists who are decades younger. “I was fighting with temptation / But I didn’t want to win,” he sings with an almost audible wink, “A man like me don’t like to see / Temptation caving in.” It’s an invigorating sentiment, reminding us that even our most glaring flaws are not without their secret joys, and that our missteps, too, eventually take us to where we need to be. We may love and lose, we may try and we may stumble, but we feel, and the more we do the more alive we are even as we slouch toward the great eternal rest. “I heard the snake was baffled by his sin,” he muses in one of the album’s finest expressions of this profound idea, “He shed his scales to find the snake within / but born again is born without a skin / The poison enters into everything.” Teshuvah, or return—to righteousness, to our true selves, to those we love—is often difficult, sometimes deadly, always essential. There’s simply no other way.
I have no idea if the Lord of Song consults the Hebrew calendar, but it can hardly be a coincidence that Cohen’s album was released during Sukkot, our most Cohenesque of holidays. Immediately following the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement, Sukkot instructs us in ritual, as Cohen does us in song, to rejoice in brokenness. We are commanded to leave our comfortable homes—a subtle reminder that they’re not as stable and sheltering as we’d like to think—and instead eat and sleep in a ramshackle structure that’s nothing if not a monument to impermanence. Having spent the Days of Awe in meditation and prayer, we begin the year with a physical reminder that all must and does pass, and that the best we can do with the time we are given is to knock down our walls and open our doors and our hearts.
It’s a radical notion for a culture like ours, so solipsistic and so sophomorically obsessed with unequivocal triumphs. But Cohen has always been there for us, our singing prophet, reminding us to bear and dare, asking us to steer our hearts not to higher ground, to some more perfect ideal, or even to God, but back into ourselves, and into the hearts of others, no matter how painful it may be. Like a magical mantra, his wisdom grows more powerful with each repetition, pulling us away from our distractions and into its light. With this perfect new album we may begin to transcend: All we need is love—and Leonard Cohen.
***
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Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.
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A Beloved Jewish Mural Is Whitewashed, and the Lower East Side Mourns Residents of a storied Jewish neighborhood in New York City are furious after a developer failed to inform the community of its plans to erase a historic mural by Marjorie IngallOn Monday morning, a historic mural created by Lower East Side Jewish teenagers 43 years ago was summarily whitewashed by a real estate developer. Art lovers and preservationists in the neighborhood are horrified.
Neighborhood blog The Lo-Down, which broke the story, reported last week that the Ascend Group had purchased three adjacent parcels of land on East Broadway. The middle parcel is the Bialystoker building, an official New York City landmark. Constructed in 1929 by immigrants from Bialystok, the wedding-cake-like art deco building—adorned with medallions depicting the 12 tribes of Israel—is a former nursing home and community center that was shuttered in 2011; thanks to the efforts of local activists, it was granted landmark status in 2013. The Bialystoker is protected from destruction. But the park on one side and the office building on the other are slated for demolition, to be replaced by two vast residential buildings that will sandwich the Bialystocker.
The mural being painted in July, 1971. (Image: Lenny Rosenberg)
The mural at 232 East Broadway was on the office building side. Called “Our Strength Is Our Heritage, Our Heritage Is Our Life,” it depicted central events from Jewish and Lower East Side history. Back in 1972, CityArts, a longtime public art organization that pairs professional artists and New York City students to create mosaics and murals around the city, approached the Lower East Side youth organization Young Israel about creating a Jewish mural. CityArts invited the Young Israel teens to collaborate; the students researched, debated what to include, then designed and painted the mural. The left side depicted Lower East Side history: Ellis Island immigration, the dawn of the labor movement, the early importance of The Forward newspaper. The middle section was devoted to religion: a rebbe praying, a woman lighting Shabbat candles, a menorah. There was also modern world history: A fire representing the Holocaust, a flag and map of the modern state of Israel, the massacre of Jewish Olympians at Munich. The far right side of the mural depicted the faces of the teens themselves and their families.
The mural, nearly complete, 1971. (Image: Lenny Rosenberg)
All this disappeared in a day, unannounced, under a coat of white paint.
Sara Krivisky, one of the teenagers (she was on the lower right side of the mural, wearing a Star of David necklace) is heartbroken. “I grew up on the Lower East Side,” she said in an interview. “I live in Florida now, but that mural is part of my family history—that’s my face, my parents’ faces, up there. My parents were Holocaust survivors who came from Poland to the Lower East Side after the war. I just turned 60, and it’s my heart and soul. My kids, the mural has become a part of them. My son moved to New York, and he used to send me pictures of his friends and the mural—part of his own personal walking tour. My daughter took a picture of me pointing to my own face on the mural and captioned it, ‘That’s my mama!’ My youngest son heard that it was destroyed and called to make sure I was OK.”
Michelle Rosenberg, a young architect who could see the mural from her apartment window, was devastated too. “It was a very rich mural, filled with lots of pieces of history,” she said. “You could spend 30 minutes looking at it and identifying the different events and people depicted. Sure it was old and peeling, but so are we all. Watching it get whitewashed made me panic. It was an intentional act of disrespect, a reminder that the goal of gentrification is to destroy communities. And of course it’s impossible not to read the erasing of a Jewish symbol as an act of anti-Semitism. Especially one that has Holocaust survivors depicted. Eek.”
Sara Krivisky pointing at herself in the mural. (Image: Ariel Krivisky)
The developer, Rob Kaliner of the Ascend Group, told the New York Post, “The building is going to be demolished anyway, and I wanted to make sure for the safety of residents and the people walking around there that it was taken care of without pieces falling off. We really apologize to anyone who was upset about it, but we wanted to make sure we kept the area safe, and that’s what we accomplished. I would feel terrible if anyone was to get hurt because of the site conditions.”
Rosenberg and Krivisky both scoffed at this explanation. “There was no functional reason to remove it, considering that the building will be demolished anyway,” Rosenberg said. Krivisky added, “I’d love for it to be replicated elsewhere in the neighborhood. For years I tried to get CityArts to touch up the mural; they didn’t have the money. But the money is there in that area now. There are so many developers, and there are street artists doing amazing projects. The neighborhood is changing. But I think there is still hope to bring back the history on some level.”
Krivisky sighed. “The Lower East Side was a wonderful place to grow up. I wouldn’t change it for anything. I’d love to recreate the mural, bring back the people who are on the wall, have them bring their kids, have a big community event—everyone, the old and the new.”
Previous: Finding Bella Abzug in Art
Marjorie Ingall is a columnist for Tablet Magazine, and author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children.
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Lil Dicky, Rap’s Funniest Jew, Ends a Tour in Brussels Watching a self-deprecating Jewish artist perform in a newly xenophobic Europe by Jesse BernsteinIt’s a strange time to be Jewish in Europe right now. Right-wing leaders like Viktor Orban, Marine La Pen, and Geert Wilders are using strikingly recognizable language to describe Muslim refugees, while left-wing political parties across the continent almost uniformly condemn Israel with varying degrees of vitriol. Some Eastern European countries continue to downplay their roles in the Holocaust; other counties, like Ukraine, have made admirable efforts to do the opposite. Meanwhile, Jews have been the victims of targeted attacks in France, Denmark, and England; synagogues and Jewish schools have begun to resemble military fortresses. At the same time, Jews are flocking to cities like Berlin, once an unthinkable place of refuge. And the amount of attacks against Jews seems to be dropping. The fever may be breaking, but the dominant feeling is unease.Lil Dicky performing during his ‘Dick or Treat’ tour. (Image: Courtesy of the author) (Facebook)
These sentiments and facts were on my mind when I went to see a performance by Lil Dicky, one of the best Jewish rappers alive, in Brussels last week. I was particularly wondering how I’d feel, and how the crowd would take it, when he would arrive onstage dressed in a skeleton onesie, and call himself a kike—a common punchline for the rapper whose skills are as sharp as his self-degrading comedic schtick. It would be for the fans. For the laughs. And I didn’t know how I would feel.
* * *
Bored and dissatisfied with a promising career in advertising, Philadelphia-area Jew Dave Burd, an avid rap fan, started to record some songs on his Macbook Pro (which wound up getting a shout-out on a later album). Finally, he decided that they were good enough to put online, and within 24 hours of uploading the music video for “Ex-Boyfriend” on YouTube, he’d racked up over a million views. The crude, hilarious video featuring a chance run-in with a girlfriend’s ex, showcased his prodigious flow and lyrical ability, and his comedic sensibilities continues to be the base of his persona. The punchlines, as would become his calling card, often used his Jewish identity as a target.
A mixtape and a Kickstarter-financed album followed, and lo and behold, the newly christened Lil Dicky had a No. 1 album on the rap charts. Now, with new representation in Scooter Braun (and co-signs from the likes of Kevin Durant, Snoop Dogg, and Sarah Silverman), Dicky’s finishing up his third tour, “Dick or Treat” (it’s Halloween-themed) and on your TV for everything from Carl’s Jr. to Trojan.
An hour prior to Dicky’s show at the Ancienne Belgique in downtown Brussels, the last stop of his maiden European voyage, I counted more guys dressed in cheapo pharaoh costumes (two) than female humans (one), though the latter is wearing a Snow White get-up that Disney might object to. Even though Halloween had occurred a few days prior, everyone was still in a festive mood, Dicky included.
For our interview, Lil Dicky and I found ourselves in a bit of a time-crunch because of what his manager described to me as a Belgian waffle-related emergency. But by the time we sat down in the smoky green room overlooking the Boulevard Anspach, the Cheltenham, PA native reflected on the success he’s had since the release of Professional Rapper in 2015, his first mainstream success. “I’m feeling progress…in terms of like, the perception, yeah,” he said. “I feel like I’m perceived in a higher light than ever. But still, a long ways to go.” Until? Dicky started miming people saying things about him, like “’He’s, like, an iconic rap artist and an iconic comedian.” He ruminated for a second. “And an iconic father, and husband.”
As for European crowds, Dicky said he’s been amazed by the turnout. “It’s always baffling to me, like, how do these people know who I am?,” he wondered. “Crowds in the United States, they know I’m back three times a year… You go to New York, L.A., you know, it’s not gonna be the same as you go to, like, Amsterdam.”
When I asked Dicky what it felt like to be so publicly Jewish in Europe in the current climate, he jumped right in. “I didn’t even know [European anti-Semitism] was a thing. My parents, a few other older people, were like, ‘Uch, people are anti-Semitic out there.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, really? I haven’t experienced an ounce of that.’ But I’m also totally oblivious.”
Later, we chatted about Philadelphia sports (on Carson Wentz and Joel Embiid: “I see them both being, like, first-ballot Hall of Famers”), but then it’s time to get into costume.
* * *
The question of brazenly public Judaism is pertinent in a way it hasn’t been a while, with everyone from Twitter eggs to former mayors of London ready to pounce on anyone who declares themselves a Member of the Tribe. Just as we seemed to have returned to a world where open anti-Semitism was more acceptable, do we need to return a world where Judaism becomes something you shouldn’t advertise? And especially in Dicky’s case, where he’s happy to joke about haggling with waiters and his bar mitzvah money, the question begs to be asked: can we afford that sort of levity right now?
The Halloween-themed show was a perfect encapsulation of Dicky. There were almost as many brief snippets of stand-up and skits as there were songs, and by the time he was pouring salsa into an appreciative fan’s mouth and flinging charcuterie into the crowd to raucous cheers, it was clear that this was a different kind of rap show.
Lil Dicky in his skeleton onesie (Image courtesy of the author).
Skits included trick-or-treat drop-bys from Tupac, Biggie, Harambe, Michael Jackson, and, as I was warned, Hitler (booed to oblivion). Fighting through some microphone issues, Dicky had the crowd sing the Belgian national anthem, fed front-row fans bunches of grapes, and (passably!) sang almost all of “I Believe I Can Fly.” He asked the crowd to imagine that he drove a Bugatti, and that they all drove Bugattis, too (perhaps the most succinct summary of rap’s mainstream appeal as there’s ever been). For his last song before the encore, “Lemme Freak,” our friend Snow White was invited up on to the stage to receive a lap dance and a bouquet.
If Dicky had any doubts about calling attention to his Judaism in Europe over and over again, they certainly didn’t show. A lot of quick jokes seem to slip by undetected, and as for anything approaching anti-Semitism, when Dicky asked the audience what they know about him, a girl in the front row yelled—nicely!—“Jew!” which did seem to throw him for a second. And when he performed “All K,” featuring gem-like lyrics such as, “What you know about a balla / born and raised on the Kaballah,” Dicky got some of his biggest cheers of the show. And that’s a good thing.
Previous: The Uproarious Rise of Lil Dicky
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Jesse Bernstein is a former Intern at Tablet.
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Israeli and Palestinian Activists Go Head-to-Head at George Mason University After being shunned from covering a Students for Justice in Palestine conference, I attended a ‘counter event,’ showing that pro-Israel organizations have the grit to fight back by Jonathan BronitskyOn a beautiful, cloudless, and unusually warm November morning, I went to the registration desk and asked SJP communications personnel for comment, but I was told that both organizers and attendees would only speak with “registered media.” I explained to a recent graduate from Tufts University, who was in charge of NSJP’s media email account, that I was a freelance journalist. I gave her my business card and pulled up my website on my iPhone to provide her with a sense of my writings. She was genuinely sympathetic, interested, and instructed that I apply for a credential through NSJP’s website. I did, but my application would soon be denied. The Tufts alumna had indeed explained upfront that approval was unlikely because my request was “the day of” and her organization was worried about infiltration and negative press. She specified that a “right-wing publication,” which had tried to link SJP with Hamas, also sought a credential.
I respect that NSJP was holding a private event. As such, I further appreciate that it was wary to have journalists floating around its reserved area and observing its workshops. That being said, there were two things I found troubling with the experience up-front.
First, NSJP had not just meticulously cultivated media access, but it had apparently also done so on an overtly ad hoc basis. Through conversation a few paces outside the conference area, I learned that a reporter from The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, applied for a credential two weeks prior to the event yet was turned down. A reporter with Ha’aretz was approved—but he was not permitted to enter the conference. Conversely, a freelance reporter with Mondoweiss, a progressive and anti-Zionist website, received a credential 11 days prior without even asking for it: NSJP had actually taken the initiative of mailing it. Also, a reporter and a cameraperson with Al Jazeera showed up without advance notice and were swiftly given credentials, which consisted of lanyards affixed with handwritten notecards.
Second, and more disturbingly, NSJP organizers seemingly inculcated a sense of paranoia among its attendees, ostensibly with the aim of maintaining silence and order. Just sitting in a chair on the third floor of the Johnson Center, I heard one NSJP organizer warn a group of attendees there were “hard-core conservatives lurking around.” Another, while expressing concern to a colleague about his profile on the Canary Mission database, worried aloud about the number of pro-Israel “spies” now on American campuses. (Canary Mission, according to its website, “was created to document the people and groups that are promoting hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on college campuses in North America.”)
At the beginning of the day, the Tufts alumna kindly entreated that I not approach attendees for comment. Why? Because attendees had been assured that the conference was private and there wouldn’t be much press present. I immediately pointed out that I was free to approach attendees—they were, after all, readily identifiable due to their nametags emblazoned with the image of Palestine—beyond the conference’s designated space on the third floor. She was visibly unsettled, but acknowledged, hesitantly, that I was correct.
My efforts, nonetheless, were futile.
I requested comment from 20 attendees and, unfortunately, all of them declined. I even offered to keep everything “on background.” Some, it was clear, were eager to share their thoughts. But after every time I went up an attendee, an NSJP organizer—whom I can only describe as a “spotter”—would sprint from her lookout post at the conference’s entrance and warn that I was, again, “outside media.” Moreover, NSJP wouldn’t even allow me to look at the literature on the registration desk it had produced for the conference. I informed NSJP several times that I merely wanted to provide the public with the most accurate picture of their organization and event as possible. “We’re sorry, we can’t help you,” I was told, over and over.
Nevertheless, I easily discerned a markedly critical attitude toward the U.S. as well as Israel. Within earshot, attendees milling about passionately disparaged “systemic racism,” bigotry, and income inequality in America. Later in the day, one attendee, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago and self-proclaimed “comunista,” tweeted a selfie with the caption, “That awkward moment when you’re at #NSJP2016 but you walk through a Pence rally #AmericaWasNeverGreat.” (Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence held a rally at GMU on Saturday evening.) On Sunday, another attendee, also using the #NSJP2016 hashtag, tweeted a photo with shoes piled atop an Israeli flag on the floor with the caption, “Best doormat ever.” It was since been deleted. Perhaps most alarmingly, a number of outwardly violent messages were fired out across social media. One attendee, for example, after discovering that pro-Israel activists were also on site, tweeted, “I’ll fuck up a Zionist.”
* * *
A “counter event” of nearly 50 pro-Israel students, activists, and local residents also took place on Saturday in the Johnson Center. It consisted of a panel discussion on the ground floor, hosted by Christians United for Israel, and, afterward, a separate demonstration on the third floor, organized by Turning Point USA, a nationwide campus non-profit “promoting limited government and capitalism.” The panel featured Noah Pollak, Executive Director at the Emergency Committee for Israel, Izzy Ezagui, a former squad commander in the Israel Defense Forces, and Jonathan Schanzer, Vice President of Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who has testified before Congress about SJP’s financial and institutional backing.
Mid-afternoon, pro-Israel advocates gathered for the Turning Point USA-organized demonstration at the entrance of the NSJP’s conference. For about 20 minutes, they chanted Zionist slogans, mocked the “illiberalism” of SJP’s brand of “social justice,” and sang “Hatikvah.” They also carried signs that read, “Jewish Lives Matter—Say NO to HATE,” “Know the Truth: BDS = HATE MOVEMENT,” “Say NO to Anti-Semitism,” “HATE GROUP: SJP – HATE MOVEMENT: BDS,” “Why Won’t SJP Boycott Syria, Russia, and Iran?” and “SJP Calls Murder of Civilians ‘Resistance.’” SJP activists reacted by locking arms, facing away, and repeatedly directing each other to “not engage.”
Noticeably absent from the counter event were establishment Jewish groups, such as Hillel, Israel on Campus Coalition, AIPAC on Campus, and StandWithUs. For the most part, the people willing to challenge BDS and defend the Jewish state were Christians, conservatives, and free-speech advocates. Lending credibility to a growing sense that the Jewish-American community’s preeminent organizations are allergic to confrontation were the preemptive actions taken by the Hillel at George Mason University Hillel. It launched a website, “Embrace Diversity,” and held a series of alternative events that promised to “provide safe engaging spaces for Jewish and pro-Israel students.” For instance, last Tuesday, it held a program called “Tikkum Olam Around the World”; on Friday, an interfaith Shabbat dinner; and, on Saturday, an off-campus Havdalah and bonfire. These events took place despite the fact that “SJP seeks to vilify Israel and creates a hostile environment that can lead to anti-Semitism,” as Rabbi Joshua Ackerman, Executive Director of George Mason University’s Hillel, acknowledged in a mass email.
Meanwhile, the counter event participants considered their approach—which they initially deemed “an experiment”—a tremendous success. The panel and demonstration represented a break with the Jewish-American community’s prototypical responses to the BDS movement: addressing accusations—and, thus, lending them an air of legitimacy— and holding “pro-Israel” events. The panel, specifically, was designed to be singularly “anti-BDS.”
“Our aim,” stated Jessica Marzucco, director of CUFI on Campus, “was to bring the truth about Israel and the BDS movement to a campus that has been inundated with false, anti-Israel messages—and this panel achieved just that. There are challenges along the way, but the truth is on our side. As long as we stand up and speak out, we will win the debate.”
“We wanted to put out a message about SJP,” stated Pollak, a panelist. “We wanted to show people in the media what BDS really is. It’s a hate group and a hate movement. The social justice rhetoric they spout is a lie. They’re really supporters of terrorism. They have no positive agenda. They only desire to wipe out Israel.”
As for the demonstration, it was judged a victory for free speech. “When no one else wanted to go up against SJP and their reputation to intimidate and silence opinions not their own,” said Jordan Miller, Virginia Field Director at Turning Point USA, “our organization was happy to empower, organize, and mobilize a large group of people to show SJP that they don’t get to control the Israeli-Palestinian narrative.” Ron Feingold, Director of Israel Engagement and Outreach at Turning Point USA, affirmed: “Those that attended SJP’s national conference now know that if they choose to continue to try to silence Jewish and pro-Israel communities they will have organized and empowered activists standing up to their hate.”
Pollak appended that the demonstration had the additional benefit of turning the tables on SJP. “They’ve been doing this to us for years now,” he said. “They’ve been putting us in a lose-lose situation because their message was the only one getting out. But when they were taking pictures and video of our protesters on Saturday, the world was seeing our message: SJP is a pro-terrorist organization. That’s a win for us.”
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Jonathan Bronitsky is a Washington, D.C.-based political historian. You can read his writings at jbronitsky.com and follow him @jbronitsky.
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Leonard Cohen dead at 82; the futile rage of Trump supporters; how Syria’s Assad played the U.S. media; death of a Bronx accent; more from Tablet Magazine of New York, New York, United States "On Veterans Day, remembering an army chaplain who made a difference in Vietnam" for Friday, November 11, 2016Want to Understand the Futile Rage of Trump’s Supporters? Consider the Palestinians.
LIEL LEIBOVITZ In the midwest and the Middle East alike, cultures that favor outrage over outcome never get very farI used to be a lefty.
Growing up in Israel, I attended demonstrations against the occupation, organized dialogue groups with Palestinian colleagues, and campaigned vigorously for candidates I believed would bring about peace and reconciliation. Slowly, my worldview changed, a shift that deserves its own lengthy consideration. But here’s one key reason for why I moved from left to right: I refused to see the Palestinians as any less worthy of dignity or capable of agency than myself.
I empathized with the young men and women who had to submit to degrading searches on their way to work or to school. I was stung by the fear and the shame of the families awoken in the middle of the night by soldiers demanding to search their homes. But imagining what I would do were I in their shoes, I again and again came to the same conclusion: I would try to negotiate a better future for my people. I would come to terms with Israel’s existence and its might, and push to secure an independent state where I could be the master of my own destiny. I would use violence, maybe, but never wantonly, never targeting the innocent. This is precisely what my grandfather’s generation had done decades earlier, and what every successful national liberation movement had done as well. Sadly, time and again the Palestinians chose differently, opting for outrage over outcomes and victimhood over nationhood.
Many of my friends excused this rage, saying it was perfectly understandable given the circumstances. That made me furious: Like me, I reasoned, the Palestinians were adults, and adults should know that actions have consequences. Adults take responsibility for their actions. Adults don’t scream and pout and expect someone else to swing by and magically make everything all right. Because I respect them, I am waiting for the Palestinians to show up. When they stop calling for bloodshed, when they abandon their attempts to score cheap points against Israel in the U.N.and elsewhere, when they recover from their love of juvenile public relations stunts, we’ll sit and talk and discuss the concessions most Israelis are eager to make to live in peace side by side with their neighbors.
I’m bringing all of this up because rage and the deplorable things it makes people do are again in the news. Trying to explain the shocking election of Donald Trump—a man who lacks the experience, the temperament, and the basic human decency required to assume the highest office in the land—many resorted to a story about the so-called “Dignity Deficit.” It goes like this: Trump was elected because he captured the silent rage of millions of Americans who were sick of being ignored by the media and the political class and other assorted elites, sick of being ridiculed by the guardians of progressive purity who chastised them for being odious hicks because they failed to passionately advocate for transgender bathrooms or strongly denounce insensitive Halloween costumes, sick of hearing no one in a position of power speak about the economic devastation so many Americans have suffered these past 20 years. These people, the story concludes, were hurt and humiliated, so they gravitated to the loud outsider who recognized their grievances and promised to burn down the corrupt system.
It’s a compelling explanation. It’s also a political and moral disaster.
Don’t get me wrong: The grievances are justified. The economic hardships are real and they’re horrifying, as is the failure of so many—in Washington, in the press—to acknowledge them. But I feel the same way about the dispossessed in the Midwest as I do about those in the West Bank: No matter how sharp your pain, no matter how true your claims, no matter how sweeping your sorrow, you still have a responsibility to act like adults, rationally and carefully charting a course towards a better future for you and your children. Shockingly, millions of Americans refused to do just that. Instead, they voted for a malignant narcissist who advocated violence against women, immigrants, minorities, and the weak. They voted for a man with a long record of failure and deceit. They voted for a man who came dangerously close to treason by cheering on a foreign power to interfere in our democratic process. They voted for a goon who threatened not to comply with the principles of democracy should he happen lose. And by doing so they have made it very, very difficult for many of us to seriously consider reconciliation.
I don’t believe for one minute that the majority of Trump’s voters are racist, although some of them certainly are, including some too close for comfort to the president-elect. Nor do I believe that all those who voted for the Republican did so because they hate women, although I think it would be madness to deny that misogyny played a very decisive role in this election. What I believe happened is something more elemental and more tragic, the refusal of millions of people to fulfill their civic duty by participating in the relatively dull yet ultimately inimitable political process and instead surrendering their voice to an authoritarian thug who promised to restore some sort of greatness.
That’s a terrifying realization, and it leaves the future unclear. We can talk about the press and how it failed to capture the perspective and the plight of those who have lost their jobs and their hope. We can talk about PC culture and its corrosive impact. We can—and must—talk about the need for empathy, for opening our hearts and our minds, for trying to move forward with anyone who is willing to move forward with us. We can acknowledge the rage, but we should never assume that rage somehow justifies tossing all reason aside, giving in to hateful speech, and risking dangerous and potentially violent implications just to get back at your enemies, real or imagined. It didn’t work in Ramallah, and it won’t work in Racine.
***
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Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.
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MIDDLE EAST / TONY BADRAN
Taking Dictation From a Dictator Tablet Annotates the News: How Syria’s Assad played the U.S. mediaLast week, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, through his father-in-law’s organization in Britain, invited a number of correspondents for American media outlets—including The New York Times, the L.A. Times, The New Yorker and NPR—to attend a conference in Damascus, where they could meet with the great man and his aides. The regime was looking, in the words of The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins, “to argue their case.”
In fact, the regime’s “case,” however warped, was looking to do more than just to validate “its side of the story.” Its “case”—however obscene—has been unchanged since the first days of the uprising. Rather, the purpose of the conference and the meetings that followed was to normalize the idea of Western engagement with Syria’s blood-stained dictatorship. The dispatches generated by the regime’s attempt at normalization in the L.A. Times, NPR and the Financial Times faithfully fulfilled their journalistic mission by clothing the Assad regime’s talking points—chiefly the importance of paring down or eliminating sanctions against the regime—in the form of human-interest stories, which regime spokespeople and activists then repeated and retweeted.
While all the outlets were invited to listen to Assad lecture, only two chose to use their platforms to host the dictator’s personal recitation of his talking points as though it was some kind of exclusive or “scoop”: The New Yorker, which ran Filkins’ piece, which was more or less straight-up transcription. And Anne Barnard’s much longer piece, serial iterations of which have appeared in The New York Times. I have annotated one version of the Barnard piece in the link below.
These stenographic exercises, in which hand-picked reporters are invited to take dictation from the dictator, are a genre familiar to readers of Arab newspapers, although perhaps less so to American readers. Since dozens of such pieces have been written, the idea that the content of any of them might count as “scoops” or even “news” is laughable. In fact, they are all pretty much the same: The pieces repeat stock lines about the dictator’s “confidence.” About his English. About his geekiness. By now, none of these tired “points of interest” is the least bit original to its author. All play into an image Assad has deliberately cultivated since coming to power.
Some reporters, looking to save a little face, try to “challenge” the dictator with “tough questions” about his oppression—which is hardly news to Assad or to anyone else in Syria. Having fully anticipated such obvious questions, and having answered them dozens of times before, the dictator brushes them off quickly, and then dictation resumes.
Sitting down at their laptops, reporters justify their role in this farce by claiming that they have bravely “exposed” Assad as a ruler “disconnected from reality,” a discovery that in turn is supposed to be “chilling”—as though five years of mass murder and gassing children hasn’t already relayed the essence of who this man is in far more graphic and disturbing detail than any of the journalistic interlocutors in his palace can muster. Some reporters gratuitously volunteer flattering or humanizing comments, or even engage with his warped logic, as though weighing both sides of a complicated case. The result is invariably nauseating.
For Assad, what matters is that members of the mainstream American media came to Damascus and served as stage props for his cameras, and agreed to give him free access to their platforms at home.
To read a detailed annotation of the Barnard piece, click here.
***
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Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.
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FAMILY / BENJAMIN BALTHASER
In fact, the regime’s “case,” however warped, was looking to do more than just to validate “its side of the story.” Its “case”—however obscene—has been unchanged since the first days of the uprising. Rather, the purpose of the conference and the meetings that followed was to normalize the idea of Western engagement with Syria’s blood-stained dictatorship. The dispatches generated by the regime’s attempt at normalization in the L.A. Times, NPR and the Financial Times faithfully fulfilled their journalistic mission by clothing the Assad regime’s talking points—chiefly the importance of paring down or eliminating sanctions against the regime—in the form of human-interest stories, which regime spokespeople and activists then repeated and retweeted.
While all the outlets were invited to listen to Assad lecture, only two chose to use their platforms to host the dictator’s personal recitation of his talking points as though it was some kind of exclusive or “scoop”: The New Yorker, which ran Filkins’ piece, which was more or less straight-up transcription. And Anne Barnard’s much longer piece, serial iterations of which have appeared in The New York Times. I have annotated one version of the Barnard piece in the link below.
These stenographic exercises, in which hand-picked reporters are invited to take dictation from the dictator, are a genre familiar to readers of Arab newspapers, although perhaps less so to American readers. Since dozens of such pieces have been written, the idea that the content of any of them might count as “scoops” or even “news” is laughable. In fact, they are all pretty much the same: The pieces repeat stock lines about the dictator’s “confidence.” About his English. About his geekiness. By now, none of these tired “points of interest” is the least bit original to its author. All play into an image Assad has deliberately cultivated since coming to power.
Some reporters, looking to save a little face, try to “challenge” the dictator with “tough questions” about his oppression—which is hardly news to Assad or to anyone else in Syria. Having fully anticipated such obvious questions, and having answered them dozens of times before, the dictator brushes them off quickly, and then dictation resumes.
Sitting down at their laptops, reporters justify their role in this farce by claiming that they have bravely “exposed” Assad as a ruler “disconnected from reality,” a discovery that in turn is supposed to be “chilling”—as though five years of mass murder and gassing children hasn’t already relayed the essence of who this man is in far more graphic and disturbing detail than any of the journalistic interlocutors in his palace can muster. Some reporters gratuitously volunteer flattering or humanizing comments, or even engage with his warped logic, as though weighing both sides of a complicated case. The result is invariably nauseating.
For Assad, what matters is that members of the mainstream American media came to Damascus and served as stage props for his cameras, and agreed to give him free access to their platforms at home.
To read a detailed annotation of the Barnard piece, click here.
***
You can help support Tablet’s unique brand of Jewish journalism. Click here to donate today.
Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.
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FAMILY / BENJAMIN BALTHASER
Epitaph for a Bronx Accent My uncle was one of the last speakers of a language that once united a borough’s Jews
There’s a saying that to lose a language is to lose a whole world. My uncle, Robert Tolchin (Americanized from Tolchinsky)—who died in September—was one of the last great speakers of Jewish Bronx, a particular nasal intonation of English so acid and sharp that, like radiation from Chernobyl, it could kill trees. Perhaps, indeed, it is why there are so few trees in the Bronx.As a child, I was terrified of his accent. It could deliver withering disdain and disapproval; it seemed made of harder stuff than my flat Californian televisual patter. Words came out on rails, they were electrified; if I stood close enough, I could fall under their tracks and never get up.
One might just say I was terrified of my uncle, but I never heard it that way: It was always the voice. It was not the yawning New Jersey “oi” of my father’s tonality; it was not the Philly slide of my grandfather; it was not my great-grandmother’s rural Ukrainian trill.
It was an urban accent, an accent of pavement, of piss steaming into your nostrils on a hot day, it was an accent that had to fight for space on subway trains; it had the speed and brazen efficiency of a New York taxi cutting through traffic. “Gettin-a cah” was not just a request, it was motor-horn, an emergency siren, a gunshot.
I don’t know much about my uncle’s family history. He was an in-law; he married my aunt in the early ’60s. He wasn’t given to the speculative romance of family storytelling. Bob didn’t narrativize; he never tried to fit his own life within larger historical trends or some final horizon of meaning. Life was immediate, in a hurry, and made of the hard, unbending stuff of facts.
But I did learn some things. His father owned a tailor shop in Manhattan that was wiped out in what Bob called “the Eisenhower recession” of the late 1950s—the same recession that shuttered my grandfather’s laundry in North Hollywood as well. Shortly after, his father died of a heart attack. Bob had to drop out of Cornell to help his mother and family.
I’ve long suspected that Bob personally blamed the Republican Party for destroying his career as an economist and killing his father. But Bob would never say such a thing. In fact, that would be the kind of poetic connection between two things—Bob’s fierce hatred of the Republican Party and his personal anger at his father’s death—that he would dismiss as “horseshit.” Horseshit was a word he liked. So was “fuckhead.” And “asshole.”
Bob did not like poetry. He liked science fiction, the kind that spends pages on the small technical details of the future world. He liked police procedurals; he liked anyone who demonstrated competence in the material world of objects and the complex world of machines. He liked genre fiction—I suspect because it followed clear rules and did not deal in moral complexities and ambiguity. I’m pretty sure he hated movies; at least, he never talked about them, and we never went to see one together. I imagine they might require too much suspension of disbelief, too much careless adolescent yearning. He liked dinner; he liked lox and bagels; he took a particular pleasure in slicing through a bagel with a giant bread knife and not spilling a single poppy. He liked delis and corned beef.
He liked numbers, the bluntness of data; he liked the hard structure of a table or graph. I have sometimes been tempted to say that Bob was a conservative: He hated Ralph Nader and was lukewarm about Bernie Sanders. But it wasn’t conservatism—Bob was a New Deal Democrat through and through. Rather, it was a distrust of romantics; of dreamers; of people who had no plan. I would say it was a lower-middle-class shopkeeper’s distrust of people who didn’t have cash on hand. It was a uniquely Jewish fear, I might add, of uncertainty; of being noticed too much.
And when I talk about the lost world of his Bronx accent, I should say, it was an accent that carried with it the history of the old Jewish left. “The Communist Party had its Bronx headquarters on the first floor of my building,” he told me once. He could compare French labor unions with American labor unions (he liked the latter because “they understood how to negotiate a contract”). He told me how his father would read the New York Daily News on the subway in the morning, and the left-wing PM on the way home, to correct all the errors of the first newspaper. He knew this history, or rather, I should say, he absorbed it in the air the way smoke leaves its traces in the lung.
Maybe I could give a better flavor of the accent and all its contradictions by describing a picture of him at a Jewish summer camp that hung in his hallway, along with photos of the family, some living, most dead: In a Camp Merrimac T-shirt, in the blazing sun, he is slouching, short, frowning, dark, off to one side, in the shadows. He frowns at the trees, at the ferns, at the broad, athletic lawn in front of him. “What I am doing in New Hampshire?” the frown asks, with no particular curiosity, or interest, in what the answer might have been.
For Jews who argued politics with each other, it’s strange to say, Israel almost never came up. I got the sense that he felt about the Jewish nationalists the same as he felt about the far left: They were romantics; they wanted something that was both impractical and had no basis in material reality for existence. They longed for a premodern past that had nothing to do with the blunt, concrete, sweat-stained world of cash-and-carry Bronx shopkeepers. There would be no settlements built with such a sour accent as his; no revival of dead languages, no mystical ideas of Jewish brotherhood.
Social critic Raymond Williams might call his accent a “structure of feeling,” part of the common sense of a social formation one belongs to, often whether they like it or not. If Bob were raised anywhere other than Jewish New York City in the 1940s, he might have been a conservative. He had the temperament. His love of technical expertise; his dislike of literature, speculation, imagination. His impatience for the poetry of suffering and loss that is so much of the culture of resistance. His distaste for the radical left and social disruption of any kind. And yet, to most Americans, he would be a left-liberal: a passionate supporter of Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, and Barbara Boxer. Milton Friedman was a favorite swear word (and he usually would insert a swear before, after, or during the utterance of his name), and he even once gave me a book about the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Growing up poor and Jewish in New York in the ’40s may not have improved Bob’s temperament, but it never allowed him to forget his class. His world was one of the left, even more evident for the fact that he wanted little part of it.
Despite being one of the most Jewish men I’ve met, he was completely uninterested in Jewish ritual or Jewish community; he was scandalized when we invited a rabbi for my grandmother’s memorial service and bemused when I said I attended high-holiday services. Yet all of his friends were Jewish. His diet was Jewish. And even when he ate pulled pork, he did it with the relish of a Jew.
Perhaps it would also help to give you the look of the man: He was short, moody, acerbic, and very bald, the sort of body grown in the small rooms of giant apartment buildings; that must fit in crowded subways cars and elbow to the front of deli counters. Like a plant that survives in near-total darkness, he had pale spindly arms and a bulbous middle; he slouched as if to walk closer to the ground.
And yet it was a meticulous slouch. He shaved his head with a razor every day—it was so perfectly round and clean my brother and I joked you could send satellite images off its surface. I remember reading once of a half-wit bank robber in the Old West who shot a bald man in the head to see if his skull would deflect bullets. While it is clear the bank robber was a sadistic moron, I had to admit on reading that I understood from where this perverse curiosity emerged: Bob’s head gleamed like one of those scientifically engineered chemistry mixing bowls.
One thing I could never understand about my uncle was his love of Los Angeles. L.A. seemed everything for which Bob would have “unaffected scorn,” if may quote Fitzgerald. L.A. is glitter, neon, obsessed with health and taken to dreamy flights of entrepreneurial fancy, a town that could produce both Hollywood and a photogenic Satanic serial killer, the Night Stalker. It contained the Beach Boys and NWA, home to the defense industry and the porn industry. Bob, with his bald head, his refusal to exercise, his moody temper, his nasal voice, seemed out of step with a city that prided itself on rude health and vitality. Perhaps only in the way that speaks to his relentless appreciation for the material, I could understand it. There is the sunshine that, as Carey McWilliams wrote, has the uniform quality as a factory-made commodity. For someone who loved facts and distrusted dreams, L.A. was a fantasy one could literally taste.
Perhaps Bob loved L.A. in the way only a Jewish kid from the Bronx could love it. It was the most Jewish of all fantasies: Superman, written of course, by a New York Jew. To walk into a phone booth Clark Kent and emerge on the other side a true, square-jawed American. To live in L.A. was to experience America as its most elaborate fantasy, delivered in the concrete and reliable form of good weather, good food, air-conditioning, and broad, elegant highways that are made for cars the way the Great Plains are made for horses.
And yet, L.A. ruined him. The downsizing of NASA and the aerospace industry in the area led to mass layoffs among computer engineers. He was laid off so many times he’d actually had a retirement party in his late 50s only to be rehired by the same company a week later. For all the sunshine, the chronic threat of unemployment destroyed his health: first carpal tunnel, then Crohn’s disease, then finally liver failure from the medication he took to fight Crohn’s. I can’t help but think his escape from New York—and his father’s death in his shtetl profession—never left him. Bob got a technical education precisely to not have to suffer the same fate as his father. But even after learning to program computers for NASA and Lockheed-Martin, instead of sewing the lining of coats, he fell victim to the same economic forces that ruined his father.
I don’t know if Bob was happy. I don’t know if that’s a question that would have occurred to him. He had all the things his accent demanded: an education (even if at CCNY, not Cornell), a wife 2 inches taller than him, a house, a wine cellar. Maybe he was surprised by his own relative success, as long as it lasted. Or maybe the misery, and the success, were contained by his accent, that long, grinding cycle of Jewish suffering and promise. And all that complex Jewish history that he was a part of even as he was apart from it, is gone with the same finality as his human voice.
I don’t know where an accent goes when it dies. Perhaps I should have recorded him the way indigenous people, in those tribes that have been decimated, will sometimes record the last of their older relatives who speak a dying language. But it is all of a piece: His hunched shoulders, his dark eyebrows, the deep circles under his eyes, and his acerbic tone—a recording could not do it credit. We remember the Rosenbergs; some of us even remember Mike Gold and Dorothy Healey. But it is Bob Tolchin, in all of his contradictions, who made up the quiet world of left-wing Jewish American life, in its whiteness, its otherness, its Americanness, its un-Americanness, its disavowal, its materialism, its ordinariness. Perhaps it would be easier to say: He was the last un-assimilated Jew I knew, so much more so for the fact that he would roll his eyes at the thought and tell me, “That’s horseshit.”
***
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Benjamin Balthaser is Associate Professor of Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature at Indiana University, South Bend.
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FAMILY / NAOMI SANDWEISS
The Great War’s Jewish Soldiers On Veterans Day, I remember my grandfather, who fought in World War I as a Jew and an AmericanPvt. Benjamin Feinstein. (Courtesy of the author)
When I was growing up, raised by Reform Jewish parents in a secular community in Columbia, Md., my sister and I used to ask each other, “Are you Jewish first or American first?” In truth, the hyphen could have gone one way or the other, Jewish-American or American-Jewish, depending upon the circumstances each one of us presented.
Before their World War I service, my grandfather Benjamin Feinstein and my husband’s grandfather Joseph Sandweiss probably wouldn’t have considered such a question. Immigrants who left their homes in Eastern Europe a century ago to escape poverty, persecution, and conscription, both men lived in America’s Jewish ghettos, segregated and identified as Jews whether they liked it or not. Just a few years later, both young men spent 1917-18 at war. Benjamin served with the American army in France, while Joseph joined the Jewish Legion and served with the British forces on the Middle Eastern Front.
In his book The Long Way Home, David Laskin recounts the experiences of immigrant soldiers who represented one-fifth of the U.S. Armed Forces in World War I. He writes, “In many cases just a few years or even months separated their arrival at Ellis Island from their induction in the American Expeditionary Forces. The coincidence profoundly altered the course of their lives.” For Benjamin and Joseph, did their experiences in the Great War shift their perceptions of themselves as Jewish or American? Before their military service, Benjamin and Joseph probably could have never even entertained the question I posed to my sister. But as we mark Veterans Day—originally known as Armistice Day, set on Nov. 11 to commemorate the signing of the armistice that ended World War I in 1918—I am left to wonder about their military service and how it may have influenced their acculturation and shaped their Jewish and American identities.
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In 1897, 4-year-old Benjamin journeyed from his native Warsaw with his mother and sister to join his father in Philadelphia. By the time Benjamin was 6, his parents, Annie and Nathan, added a second son, Louis, to their brood. The family moved to New York, entering the garment business like so many other Eastern European Jewish immigrants. But Benjamin wasn’t interested in his father’s corset shop. Benjamin’s education ended at about age 10 when he went to work as a painter. His great passion, however, was boxing. Small and compact, he was a skilled street fighter with a temperament to match. It was only to honor his mother’s wishes that Benjamin retired his boxing gloves. Still, the fiery young man was known to pick bar fights that frequently ended in brawls. Family legend has it that he even beat future lightweight professional boxer Benny “Ghetto Wizard” Leonard in a street fight.
A recruitment poster for the Jewish Legion featuring the ”Daughter of Zion.“ The text reads, “Your Old New Land must have you! Join the Jewish regiment.”
Joseph, my husband’s grandfather, was by all accounts also a strong-willed young man. Born two years after Benjamin, Joseph grew up in the Russian town of Bereznitz. Sent by his family to cheder with the intention of training to be a cantor, Joseph was more interested in the penny broadsides hidden inside his books than the religious texts he was supposed to study. By age 15, Joseph was eager to leave his village, where boys his age were routinely rounded up and conscripted by the Russian army, a dire circumstance for any Jewish boy. Joseph’s older brother hid in a cellar to avoid the tzar’s draft, eventually dying from an illness he contracted there. Joseph instead made his way to Warsaw, working and walking his way across Europe. Finally, he saved enough to reach England, where a Jewish refugee agency helped him travel to the United States in the hopes of being reunited with his uncle, Shlamie Sandweiss, who lived in Detroit and ran a rooming house. Once he arrived, Joseph took a job sorting glass in a bottle yard and attended night school to learn English. Joseph and his fellow roomers were idealistic young men with Zionist ideals. Perhaps influenced by the Yiddish-language posters recruiting men for the all-volunteer Jewish Legion—serving under British rule in Ottoman-occupied Palestine—21-year-old Joseph was first in line to enlist in the British-led unit at Detroit’s recruiting office after war broke out in Europe.
Meanwhile, in November 1917, Benjamin, like some 40,000 other men in New York, began military training at Camp Upton on Long Island, which he described as a “second cold to the North Pole.” Benjamin’s parents and siblings sent socks and gloves, along with pleas to come home when he had a day off. In addition to exchanging letters, the family visited Camp Upton on several occasions. That December, Rabbi Schulman of New York’s Beth-El Synagogue addressed the Camp Upton recruits: “The Maccabeean spirit is the spirit of what is best in Israel’s history. … The Almighty is testing it in this terrible furnace of this great world-war. Death is not the worst evil. The worst evil is so to degrade life as to cling to it like a whipped slave rather than to rise and fight for everything that makes life worthy.”
Benjamin didn’t try to hide some of the realities of warfare from his family. In his letters, which are in my father’s safekeeping, Benjamin wrote his brother Louis about the equipment he encountered during training: “Dear Brother, as I see you take an interest in warfare, let me explain a few things. About the gas mask. It is made of rubberized goods and the eyes through which you look are made of glass. You breathe through your mouth as there is a pair of pinchers which is the mask which fits tight about your nose. And right under your chin, there is a rubber pipe, which is connected to a tin box. It can protect you for 17 hours. After that it is no good. I had it on for about a half-hour and I nearly choked. But the average time they wear it is eight hours, which is the rule on the European battle front.” By February 1918, Benjamin and his unit were in active service in France where they kept the railroad tracks in good shape and supplied the boys in the trenches with ammunition and supplies. On Aug. 2, 1918, he reported, “As I am writing this letter, I can hear the roar of the Artillery.”
Meanwhile, Joseph began his Jewish Legion training just across the Detroit River in Canada, at Fort Edward near Windsor, Ontario. One of 5,000 North American enlistees, Joseph served alongside David Ben-Gurion, future prime minister of Israel. Joseph’s master sergeant, a burly Irish fellow, frequently taunted and berated his Jewish charges, provoking them to fight. Finally, one day, Joseph agreed. Outskilled, Joseph had to rely on his wits to have any chance of winning the fight. As he faced his rival, Joseph bent down and threw a fistful of sand in his opponent’s face, followed by a quick punch to the blinded fellow. The response was not what Joseph expected; from that moment on, Joseph received the Irishman’s respect. Still, confused by the strong English and Irish accents he encountered, Joseph and many of his fellow soldiers reverted to speaking Yiddish and Russian, which divided them from their British counterparts. By August 1918, Joseph and the rest of the 39th Battalion of the British Fusiliers arrived in Egypt, one of three Jewish Legion groups in place to capture Palestine from the Turks.
From the European front, Benjamin still wrote frequently to his parents and siblings, even dispensing brotherly advice to his sister Frances and his brother Louis. “Sister … it is my greatest wish that you take an example of married life from our dear mother and father … And follow their advice in everything they tell you, as they know the game from A to Z. And this should be followed by my dear brother in college life and later in married life.” Benjamin’s service was not without its pleasures. Like other doughboys, he used his time off to travel to Paris, Nice, and Monte Carlo. “Oh, boy, oh, joy what a time,” he wrote his brother. It is apparent that the joyful times included a girl. Marie Giane Galleti, whose letter (which my father had translated from Italian) is also among my grandfather’s papers, wrote to the American serviceman: “I think night and day of you and I believe that you also think of me. It would give me a lot of pleasure to have news from you. A thousand kisses.” Despite the excitement of the romance, it may have been a revelation to the Jewish boy that he was fully accepted as an American soldier, transcending the religious and ethnic divides that characterized his childhood.
The war drew to a close amid fierce fighting. On Sept. 19, 1918, Joseph’s battalion attacked the Turkish army in the Battle of Megiddo, emerging victorious; it was only another month before Turkey surrendered. Within days, Benjamin’s division in France began preparing for the Argonne offensive, a three-month battle that took place in the rugged French terrain. The battle was to be one of the last of the war, and one of the deadliest. Over 100,000 Americans lost their lives. Fighting alongside the French and British, American men were surrounded by the sounds of machine guns and airplanes. The Allies progressed, capturing areas formerly held by Germany. Finally, on Nov. 11, 1918, the armistice was signed; celebrations in Paris included marching, singing, and shouting.
After his discharge, Pvt. Benjamin Feinstein returned with his unit to New York. He worked for the rest of his life as a commercial painter, a patriotic and proud American to the core, only stopping for a time during World War II to work at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Benjamin married Bessie Silverman, and the couple raised two sons. His eldest son was drafted and served in the Pacific during World War II; his younger son, my father, served stateside in the Air Force during the Korean conflict. Like many young men, both boys used the G.I. Bill to help them complete college and attend law school.
Joseph, like many of his fellow Jewish Legionnaires, contracted malaria and suffered from shell shock. After some time in British military hospitals, he was discharged in 1919 and returned to Detroit, where he resided for the rest of his life, running a grocery store. Joseph’s war memories were mixed, filled with both pride and distress. At one point, he traveled to Israel and received a medal for service from Golda Meir. Ultimately, however, Joseph’s daily life was punctuated by jumpiness, outbursts, and sensitivity to loud noises, undoubtedly the legacy of what we now call PTSD. Joseph married fellow immigrant Sarah Norber and fathered two girls and two boys, several of whom grew committed to Zionism, perhaps inspired by their father’s service.
While Benjamin and Joseph served in different armies and on different fronts, they shared a key experience: the experience of democracy and belonging. The words of Yitzak Liss, a Jewish Legion member, express this sentiment well.
April 29, 1919: Today is the anniversary of a year of my service, a good year for me. I don’t think I will forget it, ever. A year of joys and suffering in full measure. It seems that only yesterday I said good-bye to my dearest. … The best I saw of army life is that one can live in equality, in the battalion, especially our Jewish battalion where people from all corners of the globe with different views, knowledge and trades live together, sleep, eat, dress alike, a true democracy in this respect.
Looking back, I now realize that when my sister and I played the “American first or Jewish first?” game, we forgot something critically important. We forgot to thank our grandfather and men like him for making the choices that allowed two little Jewish girls to ask the question in the first place.
***
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Naomi Sandweiss is the author of Jewish Albuquerque, and editor of Legacy, the publication of the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society.
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NOTEBOOK / HILLEL KUTTLER
When I was growing up, raised by Reform Jewish parents in a secular community in Columbia, Md., my sister and I used to ask each other, “Are you Jewish first or American first?” In truth, the hyphen could have gone one way or the other, Jewish-American or American-Jewish, depending upon the circumstances each one of us presented.
Before their World War I service, my grandfather Benjamin Feinstein and my husband’s grandfather Joseph Sandweiss probably wouldn’t have considered such a question. Immigrants who left their homes in Eastern Europe a century ago to escape poverty, persecution, and conscription, both men lived in America’s Jewish ghettos, segregated and identified as Jews whether they liked it or not. Just a few years later, both young men spent 1917-18 at war. Benjamin served with the American army in France, while Joseph joined the Jewish Legion and served with the British forces on the Middle Eastern Front.
In his book The Long Way Home, David Laskin recounts the experiences of immigrant soldiers who represented one-fifth of the U.S. Armed Forces in World War I. He writes, “In many cases just a few years or even months separated their arrival at Ellis Island from their induction in the American Expeditionary Forces. The coincidence profoundly altered the course of their lives.” For Benjamin and Joseph, did their experiences in the Great War shift their perceptions of themselves as Jewish or American? Before their military service, Benjamin and Joseph probably could have never even entertained the question I posed to my sister. But as we mark Veterans Day—originally known as Armistice Day, set on Nov. 11 to commemorate the signing of the armistice that ended World War I in 1918—I am left to wonder about their military service and how it may have influenced their acculturation and shaped their Jewish and American identities.
***
In 1897, 4-year-old Benjamin journeyed from his native Warsaw with his mother and sister to join his father in Philadelphia. By the time Benjamin was 6, his parents, Annie and Nathan, added a second son, Louis, to their brood. The family moved to New York, entering the garment business like so many other Eastern European Jewish immigrants. But Benjamin wasn’t interested in his father’s corset shop. Benjamin’s education ended at about age 10 when he went to work as a painter. His great passion, however, was boxing. Small and compact, he was a skilled street fighter with a temperament to match. It was only to honor his mother’s wishes that Benjamin retired his boxing gloves. Still, the fiery young man was known to pick bar fights that frequently ended in brawls. Family legend has it that he even beat future lightweight professional boxer Benny “Ghetto Wizard” Leonard in a street fight.
Joseph, my husband’s grandfather, was by all accounts also a strong-willed young man. Born two years after Benjamin, Joseph grew up in the Russian town of Bereznitz. Sent by his family to cheder with the intention of training to be a cantor, Joseph was more interested in the penny broadsides hidden inside his books than the religious texts he was supposed to study. By age 15, Joseph was eager to leave his village, where boys his age were routinely rounded up and conscripted by the Russian army, a dire circumstance for any Jewish boy. Joseph’s older brother hid in a cellar to avoid the tzar’s draft, eventually dying from an illness he contracted there. Joseph instead made his way to Warsaw, working and walking his way across Europe. Finally, he saved enough to reach England, where a Jewish refugee agency helped him travel to the United States in the hopes of being reunited with his uncle, Shlamie Sandweiss, who lived in Detroit and ran a rooming house. Once he arrived, Joseph took a job sorting glass in a bottle yard and attended night school to learn English. Joseph and his fellow roomers were idealistic young men with Zionist ideals. Perhaps influenced by the Yiddish-language posters recruiting men for the all-volunteer Jewish Legion—serving under British rule in Ottoman-occupied Palestine—21-year-old Joseph was first in line to enlist in the British-led unit at Detroit’s recruiting office after war broke out in Europe.
Meanwhile, in November 1917, Benjamin, like some 40,000 other men in New York, began military training at Camp Upton on Long Island, which he described as a “second cold to the North Pole.” Benjamin’s parents and siblings sent socks and gloves, along with pleas to come home when he had a day off. In addition to exchanging letters, the family visited Camp Upton on several occasions. That December, Rabbi Schulman of New York’s Beth-El Synagogue addressed the Camp Upton recruits: “The Maccabeean spirit is the spirit of what is best in Israel’s history. … The Almighty is testing it in this terrible furnace of this great world-war. Death is not the worst evil. The worst evil is so to degrade life as to cling to it like a whipped slave rather than to rise and fight for everything that makes life worthy.”
Benjamin didn’t try to hide some of the realities of warfare from his family. In his letters, which are in my father’s safekeeping, Benjamin wrote his brother Louis about the equipment he encountered during training: “Dear Brother, as I see you take an interest in warfare, let me explain a few things. About the gas mask. It is made of rubberized goods and the eyes through which you look are made of glass. You breathe through your mouth as there is a pair of pinchers which is the mask which fits tight about your nose. And right under your chin, there is a rubber pipe, which is connected to a tin box. It can protect you for 17 hours. After that it is no good. I had it on for about a half-hour and I nearly choked. But the average time they wear it is eight hours, which is the rule on the European battle front.” By February 1918, Benjamin and his unit were in active service in France where they kept the railroad tracks in good shape and supplied the boys in the trenches with ammunition and supplies. On Aug. 2, 1918, he reported, “As I am writing this letter, I can hear the roar of the Artillery.”
Meanwhile, Joseph began his Jewish Legion training just across the Detroit River in Canada, at Fort Edward near Windsor, Ontario. One of 5,000 North American enlistees, Joseph served alongside David Ben-Gurion, future prime minister of Israel. Joseph’s master sergeant, a burly Irish fellow, frequently taunted and berated his Jewish charges, provoking them to fight. Finally, one day, Joseph agreed. Outskilled, Joseph had to rely on his wits to have any chance of winning the fight. As he faced his rival, Joseph bent down and threw a fistful of sand in his opponent’s face, followed by a quick punch to the blinded fellow. The response was not what Joseph expected; from that moment on, Joseph received the Irishman’s respect. Still, confused by the strong English and Irish accents he encountered, Joseph and many of his fellow soldiers reverted to speaking Yiddish and Russian, which divided them from their British counterparts. By August 1918, Joseph and the rest of the 39th Battalion of the British Fusiliers arrived in Egypt, one of three Jewish Legion groups in place to capture Palestine from the Turks.
From the European front, Benjamin still wrote frequently to his parents and siblings, even dispensing brotherly advice to his sister Frances and his brother Louis. “Sister … it is my greatest wish that you take an example of married life from our dear mother and father … And follow their advice in everything they tell you, as they know the game from A to Z. And this should be followed by my dear brother in college life and later in married life.” Benjamin’s service was not without its pleasures. Like other doughboys, he used his time off to travel to Paris, Nice, and Monte Carlo. “Oh, boy, oh, joy what a time,” he wrote his brother. It is apparent that the joyful times included a girl. Marie Giane Galleti, whose letter (which my father had translated from Italian) is also among my grandfather’s papers, wrote to the American serviceman: “I think night and day of you and I believe that you also think of me. It would give me a lot of pleasure to have news from you. A thousand kisses.” Despite the excitement of the romance, it may have been a revelation to the Jewish boy that he was fully accepted as an American soldier, transcending the religious and ethnic divides that characterized his childhood.
The war drew to a close amid fierce fighting. On Sept. 19, 1918, Joseph’s battalion attacked the Turkish army in the Battle of Megiddo, emerging victorious; it was only another month before Turkey surrendered. Within days, Benjamin’s division in France began preparing for the Argonne offensive, a three-month battle that took place in the rugged French terrain. The battle was to be one of the last of the war, and one of the deadliest. Over 100,000 Americans lost their lives. Fighting alongside the French and British, American men were surrounded by the sounds of machine guns and airplanes. The Allies progressed, capturing areas formerly held by Germany. Finally, on Nov. 11, 1918, the armistice was signed; celebrations in Paris included marching, singing, and shouting.
After his discharge, Pvt. Benjamin Feinstein returned with his unit to New York. He worked for the rest of his life as a commercial painter, a patriotic and proud American to the core, only stopping for a time during World War II to work at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Benjamin married Bessie Silverman, and the couple raised two sons. His eldest son was drafted and served in the Pacific during World War II; his younger son, my father, served stateside in the Air Force during the Korean conflict. Like many young men, both boys used the G.I. Bill to help them complete college and attend law school.
Joseph, like many of his fellow Jewish Legionnaires, contracted malaria and suffered from shell shock. After some time in British military hospitals, he was discharged in 1919 and returned to Detroit, where he resided for the rest of his life, running a grocery store. Joseph’s war memories were mixed, filled with both pride and distress. At one point, he traveled to Israel and received a medal for service from Golda Meir. Ultimately, however, Joseph’s daily life was punctuated by jumpiness, outbursts, and sensitivity to loud noises, undoubtedly the legacy of what we now call PTSD. Joseph married fellow immigrant Sarah Norber and fathered two girls and two boys, several of whom grew committed to Zionism, perhaps inspired by their father’s service.
While Benjamin and Joseph served in different armies and on different fronts, they shared a key experience: the experience of democracy and belonging. The words of Yitzak Liss, a Jewish Legion member, express this sentiment well.
April 29, 1919: Today is the anniversary of a year of my service, a good year for me. I don’t think I will forget it, ever. A year of joys and suffering in full measure. It seems that only yesterday I said good-bye to my dearest. … The best I saw of army life is that one can live in equality, in the battalion, especially our Jewish battalion where people from all corners of the globe with different views, knowledge and trades live together, sleep, eat, dress alike, a true democracy in this respect.
Looking back, I now realize that when my sister and I played the “American first or Jewish first?” game, we forgot something critically important. We forgot to thank our grandfather and men like him for making the choices that allowed two little Jewish girls to ask the question in the first place.
***
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Naomi Sandweiss is the author of Jewish Albuquerque, and editor of Legacy, the publication of the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society.
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NOTEBOOK / HILLEL KUTTLER
The Rabbi in Wartime In the fog of war, one chaplain made a difference. So, a grateful veteran decided to learn more about the man he once knew.
Richard Eisenberg in Vietnam. (Courtesy of Richard Eisenberg)For a half-century, the Vietnam War has taken huge bites of Richard Eisenberg’s soul, plaguing him with memories of battles fought and friends lost. He certainly didn’t want to go. In 1960, he graduated Thomas Jefferson High School and bounced between jobs at banks in Manhattan before reaching Vietnam. “I wasn’t doing a whole lot with my life,” he says now. So, hoping to pre-empt the inevitable draft notice, he enlisted in the Army, took eight weeks of basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., then was off to Fort Gordon, Ga., for another two months to become a military policeman. That, he figured, might keep him stateside.
It didn’t. Eisenberg got to Vietnam in August 1964. He’d return, shattered, the following summer.
Lots of vets have rituals to help ease the painful memories: regular visits to the memorial in Washington, drinking sessions with VFW or American Legion buddies. Eisenberg’s ritual is different. He says Kaddish for a fallen friend—one who died not by a bullet but of a heart attack, a military chaplain whom he met just four times.
Every December, Eisenberg, 72, lights a candle on the yahrzeit of the chaplain, a rabbi. Standing in his kitchen those evenings for all these years—first in Brooklyn, then after moving to Denver—he speaks a few words to his wife and two daughters about the rabbi and his loss. He recites a prayer and strikes a match.
Fifty years since the rabbi’s death and a century since his birth, the rabbi’s light flickers in Eisenberg’s soul. But lately the ritual has new heft. For the rabbi’s memory led Eisenberg on a journey, two years ago, across the country, bringing new people into his life, men and women who, in their own very different way, loved the rabbi, too.
***
Early October 1964: Someone shook Pvt. Richard Eisenberg’s shoulder, waking him from an afternoon slumber in the tin hut he called home.
“Who the hell are you?” Eisenberg blurted. He looked up to see the stripes and insignia on the visitor’s shoulder, signifying a lieutenant colonel, a chaplain.
The visitor was Rabbi Meir Engel, a thin, bespectacled, no-nonsense, witty man who retained a trace of his sabra accent from his native Tel Aviv. Engel had come to the U.S. Army’s air base at Soc Trang, along the Mekong River Delta at Vietnam’s southern tip, because that’s what military chaplains did.
Engel loved his job. He’d arrived in Vietnam that summer, right around the time Eisenberg did. He’d fought in the Haganah para-military organization and departed pre-state Israel for New York in 1937 to attend the Jewish Theological Seminary. But Engel left his first pulpit, in Philadelphia, to volunteer in the U.S. military, and he was sent to postwar Japan. He returned to the United States to lead congregations in Greensboro, N.C., and Beverly, Mass., but gave up synagogue life for the chaplaincy, which included serving the Army Command in Heidelberg, Germany, then South Korea and two posts stateside.
“One could see a glow in his eyes and sense the pride in his voice as he described the hurdles he had overcome in order to serve effectively in Vietnam,” wrote a fellow chaplain, Aryeh Lev, in 1964, of a retreat they attended in Tokyo.
Engel “was filled with the joy one derives from feeling needed,” Lev wrote.
Standing in the private’s hut that day, Engel was needed to deliver a singular message: Eisenberg, write home.
“He read me the riot act on the responsibility I have to my parents and my sister. It made me want to cry, to tell you the God’s honest truth,” Eisenberg says now. “I was not being a dutiful son—not writing home. It had a lot to do—I’m not going to lie—with alcohol and drugs. I didn’t want to be there.”
Soon it was Engel’s typed letter that reached Eisenberg’s parents, Samuel and Ida, in Flatbush, a Brooklyn neighborhood. It was dated Oct. 16, 1964.
My dear Mr. & Mrs. Eisenberg,
I should like to introduce myself to you. I am the recently assigned Jewish chaplain to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.
My reason for writing you is that I met your son, Pvt. Richard Eisenberg, during my recent visit to his place of assignment at Soc Trang. I visit there once a month, and am happy to see that he finds the time to meet with the only rabbi stationed there.
I am a father and know of the fears and anxieties parents harbor for their children. It is because of this knowledge that I am writing you to alleviate your concern for your son. I saw Richard, he looks well, is hard working and is counting time till his return to the bosom of his family.
Should there be anything I can do for him or for you, just let me know and I shall do my utmost to comply with your request.
The Eisenbergs had made plenty of requests already—pestering the Pentagon, a member of Congress and even, so family lore has it, President Lyndon Johnson—in a vain attempt to ascertain how their son was faring. Now, finally, they knew something.
***
Later that month: A Cobra gunship touched down at Soc Trang, a small base surrounded by miles upon miles of rice paddies. Wounded soldiers were carried out hurriedly.
Eisenberg squatted at the helicopter’s door. He held dual jobs: two days on, two days off as a military policeman; two days on, two days off flying as a door gunner. The latter was a task Eisenberg volunteered for to lessen his colleagues’ load, but the job was perilous. Door gunners trained their M-60 machine guns on threats that could bring down the helicopter ferrying troops into combat and picking them up a week later—or retrieving “whatever was left of them” by then, Eisenberg explains now.
This was a “whatever was left of them” trip, and the commotion on the tarmac was as heavy as the rain then falling. A lone figure wearing a camouflage poncho rushed up. Eisenberg didn’t know who he was. Then recognition came.
“I’ll get to you later, Richard,” Engel told him as he ran off with a casualty. Recalling the scene nearly a half-century later, Eisenberg corrects himself. “No—he said, ‘I’ll get to you later, Reuven.’ He used my Hebrew name.”
Later, the two men stood under a canopy outside the base’s hospital, the rain still pounding. The chaplain gave the soldier a hug. “You’re doing a good job,” the chaplain said.
The gesture was timely. Eisenberg was in a sour mood.
“It’s not a good day,” he said, “when your guys are hurt.”
***
November 1964: The hurt was Mrs. Eisenberg’s back in Brooklyn, and on this day the chaplain who came to convey it barged into Eisenberg’s tent and pulled rank.
The lieutenant colonel ordered the private to write a letter home.
Nov. 20, 1964
My dear Mrs. Eisenberg:
I had delayed answering your letter of 3 November, 1964, until after my monthly visit to Soc Trang. I returned from there yesterday and am happy to inform you that I saw Richard and spent some time with him.
I hope that you do not mind, but I had a “fatherly” talk with him concerning the importance of writing home regularly. I minced no words, for as a father of a son about the same age as Richard, I felt that it might do him some good. I also left with him a Hanukkah menorah and Hanukkah candles as well as a procedure sheet [about] how to light the candles and what blessings to recite. These, the menorah and candles, were sent to me for distribution to the Jewish men by the Jewish Welfare Board.
As I see Richard once a month, I shall continue to report to you. If there is anything else you would like me to do, just let me know.
Like the earlier one, this letter was typed on the Military Assistance Command’s stationery. Both concluded with Rabbi Engel’s signature, but this one added a handwritten flourish.
Enclosed is a letter written by your son. I told him that I wanted to enclose a letter from him to you with mine.
Engel’s intervention was personal. He couldn’t fathom someone cutting himself off from family. Colleagues would remember his longing for his wife and two sons. In a memorial book published after Engel’s death, Lt. Col. John T. Calter, a fellow chaplain, told of running a retreat in Vietnam for Catholic soldiers at which several lauded Engel. Calter saw Engel soon after the retreat.
“I don’t want to flatter you, Meir, but our Catholics are all singing your praises,” Calter said.
Engel responded: “Please don’t worry about [not] flattering me today. I can use some. I miss my wife, Myra, and my morale is low.”
A Jewish soldier, Earl Kulp, an assistant program officer, wrote this of Engel in the memorial book: “No man in Vietnam felt his separation from his family more deeply [or] counted the remaining days of his separation more fervently and loudly.”
That likely explained Engel’s twisting Eisenberg’s arm to write the letter. It arrived, together with Engel’s, in Flatbush in a now-long-yellowed envelope, franked postage-free. The Eisenbergs kept it, then Richard inherited it, now one of his daughters has it, and eventually her sons will get it.
“He sat down with me, like a father, for a couple of hours, telling me how important it was for a Jewish son to respect his family,” Eisenberg recalls. “Me, a 22-year-old punk from Brooklyn, N.Y. I did not learn that lesson. Rabbi Engel taught me that lesson.”
***
Early December 1964: The rabbi sat beside Eisenberg in the office of the base’s commander, Maj. Joseph Levinson. Engel’s visit, like the previous ones, had boosted the base’s Jewish population to three.
Levinson sat at his desk, Engel and Eisenberg on the couch opposite. The trio schmoozed for 10 minutes, but Eisenberg felt out of place among officers. He made to leave.
“Sir, I think it’s about time I got back to my duty,” Eisenberg said, rising.
“Carry on,” Levinson said.
“No, you should stay a little longer,” Engel said, coaxing him back onto the sofa.
Decades later, Eisenberg scratches his head, reviewing Engel’s response.
He comes up with this: “It was because I was one of his boys, one of his Jewish boys in Vietnam. I sat back down, and he put his arm around me. Just chit-chatting. The rabbi made me feel I belonged in the room.”
The trio remained 20 minutes more. Engel asked Eisenberg, “Are you writing your family on a regular basis?”
“Yes,” Eisenberg replied.
***
Later that month: Levinson rushed up to Eisenberg on the tarmac.
“Why weren’t you at the service?” the commander asked.
“What service?” Eisenberg responded.
“Rabbi Engel passed away,” he was told.
In the early hours of Dec. 16, Engel had died of a heart attack at the U.S. Naval Hospital, in Saigon. He was 50.
Eisenberg slumped in shock, then anger at his commander. He still can’t fathom Levinson’s neglecting to convey such crucial news when it was fresh, when he could have attended Engel’s funeral, said a proper goodbye.
Not being there for Engel, when Engel was there for him—the pain torments Eisenberg still.
“I was devastated,” Eisenberg says now, “and I carried that devastation with me all my time in Vietnam, and since then.”
***
Sept. 13, 2012: Eisenberg and his sister, Ellen Racioppi, began the five-hour drive from Staten Island, N.Y., to Washington, D.C. The day before, they’d visited their parents’ graves, Sept. 14 being Ida’s birthday. Eisenberg, a retired postal worker, returns east once a year, but this trip was different. He’d come to make his peace at another grave, of sorts, one he’d never brought himself to visit. And he came prepared.
The siblings reached the nation’s capital and headed directly to a pointy-tipped stretch of black granite on the National Mall. Eisenberg searched the log book nearby. Of 58,195 dead—one. He found a name in the book and stepped to the reflective stone that is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Meir Engel.
Eisenberg touched the letters carved into the stone on Panel 1E, Line 77. He contemplated, etched the letters onto a paper.
He knelt a moment and placed an envelope on the ground.
Rabbi Engel—you will never know how much you meant to me, read the handwritten, capital-block letters on the inside of the greeting card that came illustrated with a Jewish-star charm.
From the time we first met, you holding me by the neck and ordering me to sit down and write my family, to all those visits on the base for me. It has taken 48 years to get this out of me. Though this is a long time coming and you are long gone, know this: You are never, never—ever—forgotten.
Eisenberg had written his name and unit, the 560th Military Police Company of the 121st Aviation Company, on the card. To the Engel family, the card continued, beneath a hand-drawn line:
I knew Meir all too briefly in Vietnam.
I only wish that I made an effort to contact you sooner. I want you all to know what a wonderful and caring man he was, and I am sorry for your loss. The world was a better place while he was with us. I know that the rabbi would be glad to know that I am at peace now, and I hope that you are as well.
***
Dad did it.
“He finally had the courage to see D.C., the Vietnam Wall,” Dayna Eisenberg Perez thought that afternoon. He was foremost in her mind as she sat before her home computer in suburban Denver, the day’s work teaching English as a second language to high-school students over.
“OK, I’ll search again,” she thought, typing MEIR ENGEL into a search engine.
Not much came up in her spotty attempts over the years. She’d long wanted to see what Engel, the man of legend, looked like, learn about his career and whether he’d left behind a family—fsomething. Always—fnothing.
This day, though, she got scores of hits, mainly Jewish-newspaper articles about a ceremony nearly a year earlier at Arlington National Cemetery, a mile from where her father was likely standing with his sister that very moment.
Jewish Chaplains Memorial—that’s what the articles called the rounded-off plaque mounted on stone. On Chaplains Hill in the country’s most revered graveyard, on the banks of the Potomac, a new monument had been dedicated on Oct. 24, 2011, joining those memorializing the 150 Protestant and the 65 Catholic chaplains who’d died in service. The Jewish plaque, plain but elegant, said tons by saying so little: just 14 names, 14 dates of death, 14 titles of rabbi. The men represented the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox branches of Judaism and had died while serving the U.S. military during the period running from World War II through the Korean War and on to Vietnam.
Only one of the 14 served in all three wars.
Meir Engel.
The program the Jewish Chaplains Council published for the ceremony stated that Engel earned an award for his service in each war, along with two Bronze Stars, two Army Commendation Medals and B’nai B’rith’s Four Chaplains Award. One commendation medal was for serving at Fort Dix, where he remained until 1962, two years before Eisenberg got there for basic training.
Four of the men memorialized on the new plaque died during the Vietnam War. But calculating how many American Jewish military chaplains served in Vietnam then is “tricky,” says Albert Slomovitz, author of the book The Fighting Rabbis: Jewish Military Chaplains and American History, because some may have been based elsewhere, like in Japan, and dropped in periodically or were reservists called up for short-term service.
Those based in Vietnam and on full-time active duty were “probably under a minyan’s worth,” he says, fewer than 10.
Eisenberg Perez didn’t know this, but she saw the rabbi’s name mentioned in several articles—his surname, anyway. That’s because a man named David Engel spoke at the Arlington ceremony, but his connection wasn’t stated.
Eisenberg Perez guessed at David Engel’s identity. She went onto Facebook and typed his name. A posting she read mentioned his being Meir’s son.
“Oh, my God!” she thought. “He has living sons!”
***
Oct. 11, 2012: Eisenberg had returned from Washington. He showed off his pictures of the Vietnam wall, of his hand resting against it, of Engel’s name. He told his family about leaving the card, knowing that no Engel kin would see it. Just as well that he’d made copies beforehand, the better to reread the emotions he had difficulty expressing.
“You’re never going to believe this,” daughter told father as they stood in her kitchen. “Rabbi Engel has living children, and I have made contact with one of the sons.”
Eisenberg stopped by most days after picking up his grandsons Andrew, then 8, and Ryan, 4, from school while their parents were at work. Eisenberg Perez had just come home and delivered this bombshell.
Her father felt like he would pass out.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” he said.
He asked her to confirm that this could be true.
That night, Eisenberg Perez found David Engel’s home address online. Her fingers glided across the keyboard, typing what she later called “a crazy letter” of introduction.
The opening rambled with excitement, but Eisenberg Perez got herself on point.
Your father got my dad through the toughest of times in war, and when he died, a part of my dad died, too.
She went on:
Your father was a true hero and provided support, comfort and faith to Jewish soldiers in a time of war. My sister and I, growing up, would ask our father to tell us stories along with the pictures that he has from Vietnam, and in every story was mention of the chaplain, Meir Engel. Every year, my father lights a memorial candle in memory of your dad. My dad still has the old green “Jewish Bible” (as the military called it) that the Army provided all the men and women. He told me it’s the same one that he and Rabbi Engel prayed from.
And this, of David’s possibly being Meir’s son:
I got goose bumps thinking that I might be able to get in touch with you and tell my dad about the information that I have found! My heart almost stopped as I kept reading the articles. … I know that my dad would be honored to talk to you and tell you stories about your dad and to connect with you.
I would love to hear back from you! Either way, please let me know that you are the right person or that you are not.
***
Oct. 15, 2012: In Shelton, Conn., David Engel had a long day at work manufacturing promotional products. He opened the mail, stunned. Finally, he typed a response and emailed it to Eisenberg Perez.
I just arrived home and read your letter. It was incredible. Yes. I am proudly the son of the late Rabbi Meir Engel (Z”L). I would very much like to speak with you.
Forty-one minutes later, she wrote back.
I am so happy to hear that you are the son of the late Rabbi Engel. This is truly incredible and I am almost at a loss for words in disbelief. What an amazing story!
She told him she could speak by telephone after work.
The next morning, David telephoned his brother. “I’m going to forward something to you,” he told his brother, Rafael “Ray” Engel, who’d just arrived in his office at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a professor of social work. “Make sure you’re alone when you read it.” David forwarded his exchange with Eisenberg Perez.
David was 20 and studying international economics at Berkeley when his father died. Ray was just 8, but he still recalls playing chess with his dad. Ray also remembers a drive they took along northern California’s famed 17-Mile Drive, back when Meir served at Fort Ord.
“You can’t help but remember stuff like that,” Ray says now.
He’s carried those images throughout life, and in telling of them and others Ray passed on bits of his father to his wife Sandy and then to their daughter Yael, now 23, and to their son, 21, who carries a familiar name: Meir Engel.
Ray and David kept the hundreds of letters their dad wrote to them and to their late mother. They also have a box filled with expressions of condolence sent by soldiers whose lives Meir had touched. Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. military in Vietnam, wrote. And one letter was from Navy Cdr. Ann Richman, the chief nurse at the naval hospital in Saigon. She knew Meir well from attending Friday night services regularly. She’d been off duty the night Meir admitted himself with chest pains, but was summoned and arrived just after he died.
He did not suffer, Richman wrote. He had been given medication to relieve the discomfort, and the doctor and nurse attending him said he was resting very quietly at the time he slipped away. I want to assure you that everything medically was done to save him, but it was out of our hands … I had my prayer book with me and I said a little prayer at the bedside.
Meir’s last written words were directed to David, just an hour before taking ill. On Dec. 15, Meir was up late in his room in Saigon’s Majestic Hotel, where many officers stayed. He was reading Howard Fast’s The Naked God. He found the book profound and, in a five-page letter to David, suggested that he read the book, too, although he couldn’t explain precisely why.
Meir abruptly turned personal.
My son, you have no idea how proud I am of your sense of order and law, your sensitivity of right and wrong, your desire for due process rather than the rule of the mob, he wrote with a thick-tipped blue pen, continuing for a few more sentences about rights and the ends justifying the means before realizing that “I am rambling” and “it is tomorrow” already.
I felt like communing with you, my son, whom I love with all my being and all my fiber. God bless you.
And then, using the Hebrew word, father signed off from son.
Abba.
From the medical doctors’ notes, David Engel learned that right after penning those final words, his father walked to the hospital. At about 1:30 a.m., a half-hour after being admitted, he died.
But David Engel had never read anything like this—sentiments typed by a soldier’s child who related the profound effect his dad had on her dad.
After reading Eisenberg Perez’s letter that David had scanned and emailed to him, Ray forwarded it to his wife and children. He then wrote to Eisenberg Perez.
There are no words that I can say about what this letter means, let alone knowing how your father continues to honor the memory of my dad, my Abba. He died when I was eight, so I have only the memories of a young boy.
For a long time growing up, emotionally I could not understand why my Abba had to go to this place called Vietnam and why he never came home—even though rationally and intellectually I understood. Your letter and the memories of your dad speak volumes to help me answer the emotional part.
Ray’s students sometimes approach him at graduation to say they wouldn’t have received a diploma without him. The compliments gratify him, and they’re in the moment. “But 48 years later?” he says of Eisenberg Perez’s reaching out. “It’s overwhelming to think of the impact people can have on one another and how that persists over time. It’s remarkable to me that [someone who] had very little contact with my dad—some, very meaningful, over a four-month period of time—that this is so meaningful to them.”
David spoke with Eisenberg Perez that afternoon, and they did so many more times over the ensuing months. Eisenberg Perez and Ray communicated once by Skype— the first time Ray, a non-techie, used the video-calling system.
Still, writing, talking and viewing are not seeing.
David had a business trip scheduled for Las Vegas in January. The Engels would visit the Eisenbergs then.
The members of the second generation would meet.
The third generation, too.
***
Jan. 12, 2013: It developed in a flash: the discovery, emails, phone calls, planning the gathering. It all was so exciting.
And then this.
Eisenberg was hospitalized with chronic intestinal problems. He underwent emergency surgery.
It happened just as the Engels prepared to leave for Denver.
Eisenberg recuperated in a private room. He was up for the visit. On a shelf lay his little green Bible from Vietnam.
“I wanted to pay my respects so badly, and I had no way to do it,” he says. “And here, 48 years later, this opportunity comes and gets dropped in my lap.
“Everything happened so fast. They wanted to come and see me, which threw me for a loop. I knew what I had to do—I needed to make peace with them, and I needed to tell them how much their father meant to me.”
Eisenberg’s voice cracks, and the telephone line goes silent momentarily. He apologizes.
“Every time I think of it, I get so upset, that I forgot to tell them something. I should’ve asked [them] to pray with me, but I didn’t—to please say a prayer with me for your father.”
Eisenberg had worried he didn’t look respectable in front of the rabbi’s sons and their children, too. He was hooked up to oxygen, tape on his nose, medicated.
“I wanted to tell them how much I loved their father and grandfather,” he says.
Three generations of Eisenbergs and Engels had crammed into room 242 of Parker Adventist Hospital, near Denver. Dayna greeted the Engels in the lobby. David wrapped her in a big hug. The Engel-Eisenberg embrace was on. They rode up in the elevator.
For the Engels: Ray, Sandy, Yael, and Meir had flown in from Pittsburgh; David and his son Jonathan from Connecticut, and his daughter Joanna from California. David’s wife, Sharon, couldn’t make it.
For the Eisenbergs: Richard and his wife Jean, and Dayna and her husband Juan with their two sons. Dayna’s sister, Robyn Wisler, arrived late.
That made 14 people in the room. They all wanted to be there, if not there in the hospital. David told Dayna on the elevator ride that it didn’t matter whether the gathering was at Robyn’s house, as planned, in a hospital room, or even in a bathroom—the main thing was their being together.
Dayna and Richard spoke first, telling why Meir Engel was so important a figure in their lives. She passed around a scrapbook she’d once made of her dad’s Vietnam service.
David explained that Meir served as the U.S. military’s liaison to the Buddhist religious officials as they set up a chaplaincy within the South Vietnamese Army. Meir, who wore a Jewish chaplain’s insignia that depicts the 10 Commandments topped by a Star of David, apparently earned the Buddhists’ trust. As the liaison, David said, his father reported directly to Westmoreland.
That was the context. And here they all were, brought together by the present protagonist and the absent one.
Pvt. Richard Eisenberg: in Vietnam because he didn’t want to be drafted or sent there, so he’d enlisted, hoping that being on the military-police track might keep him stateside.
Lt. Col. Meir Engel: in Vietnam because he wanted to be there, because he couldn’t stomach “having 400 bosses” as a pulpit rabbi at an American synagogue “rather than teach and be a scholar,” as Ray Engel would tell me. “My uncle Alan, on my mother’s side, said that my dad didn’t like to kiss ass,” Ray would add. “My dad had written my brother a letter on his fears of what an American rabbi was becoming.”
The Israeli-American cleric and the Brooklyn-American grunt: one possessing the drive the other lacked, one embracing war’s challenges and the other absorbed in staying alive, one mature and the other finding himself, one the father and the other the son.
The patient handed gifts to the dead man’s flesh and blood: the silver-oak-leaf pin of a lieutenant colonel and the Jewish chaplains’ insignia, items he’d purchased at a shop on Buckley Air Force Base, not far from the hospital.
Eisenberg had hesitated about meeting the Engels. The burden would be heavy, he told his daughter.
Think of Ray and what he wrote, she’d responded. He lost his dad, his Abba, at 8.
Eisenberg understood. A good thing.
“For me, Rich was the first person I ever met who knew my dad in Vietnam,” Ray Engel says now, back in Pittsburgh, where he teaches young people to be good listeners so they can heal others. “Intellectually, I knew why my dad was in Vietnam, but this created a very human connection, and it made it real. To hear the story of their first meeting was quite touching and emotional.”
He continued: “I’m really, really touched that my dad—sorry, I’m going to get emotional—that my dad had that impact on a person,” Ray says. “It’s truly remarkable that he had that kind of influence on somebody he only had a few meetings with.”
The Engels and Eisenbergs have melded. Their yahrzeit flames illuminate. In Hebrew, Meir means “he who brings light.”
***
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A Rabbi in Vietnam
Memories of an Army Chaplain
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Goodbye, Leonard The poet’s greatest talent was his gift for healing by Liel LeibovitzIn the years I’ve spent closely listening to him, Leonard Cohen has taught me many things: how to think about history, how to read a poem, how to chase God. But the greatest gift he gave me, maybe, is showing me how to be kind.I caught my first glimpse of it some years ago, having just finished writing a book about him. Leonard had read it, and he invited me to join him and his band at an intimate gathering at his hotel in New York following one of his concerts here. I said I’d be there and, light-headed, rushed to my closet to figure out what one wore to a night out with Leonard Cohen. I wanted to impress him, and so I put on what I thought was my most discerning outfit and spent an hour circling the block and practicing the clever speech I’d give when I first met my hero.
I ran into him as soon as my wife and I walked into the hotel’s lobby. I dipped into my act, but he interrupted me with his warm smile and took me by the hand, walking me around and introducing me to friends and bandmates, praising me and my writing with the earnest joy of a grandfather taking pleasure in a dear child. I was elated, of course, and more than a little bit awed. I didn’t really understand why this famous and desired man would spend so much time with me, a jittery stranger. It was only after I’d finished my last whisky and said my goodbyes that night that I understood: Leonard had bothered with me precisely because he knew I was jittery, because he understood that I was a stranger in this room thick with friends and colleagues, because he wanted to make me feel at ease and encourage me to abandon my attempts at impressing him and instead speak freely and enjoy the evening. Of his many and considerable talents, this gift for healing was, perhaps, his finest, and in the days and weeks and months that followed our meeting I found myself emulating him, opening my heart and inviting others to unburden theirs.
It’s a skill I’ll need more than ever now that Leonard has left us for prior engagements in more elevated realms. I’m so very fortunate to have known him, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be done singing his praises or trying to decipher the majestic and meaningful mysteries he’s left behind for us weary souls to ponder. This is not a eulogy, then, and no obituary could ever contain the multitudes of his spirit. This is an invitation, more pressing than ever, to do unto others as Leonard Cohen has done unto us and find an appetite for kindness that is only sated when everyone around us is feeling their best.
This, maybe, is what he had in mind when he sang that every heart to love will come but like a refugee, or that love was the only engine of survival. This is the distillation of his life’s work, his manual for living with defeat: we have only each other. Whatever light we bring to this world, whatever strength we find in the face of so much fragility and fear, we do only because we aren’t alone, only because we look out for each other, only because we are kind. This is our one path to redemption, our cold and broken Hallelujah that is sweeter and more true than any other song we know.
I had written to Leonard just last week to tell him I was running the New York City marathon and that, jauntier tunes be damned, I intended to listen to his most recent masterpiece, You Want It Darker, as I huffed my way through the five boroughs. For a short run you could pick whatever pop confection you’d like, I reasoned, but a long and improbable ordeal called for the prophet Cohen. A few hours later, Leonard wrote back with some kind words, urging me, as ever, to take care. He signed his email with the traditional blessing we recite every time we finish reading one of the books of the Torah: Chazak, Chazak, Ve’Nitchazek—be strong, be strong, and may we all be strengthened. Amen to that, Reb Eliezer, and farewell, my dear friend. We are truly fortunate to have basked in your warmth, and may we all spend a lifetime proving ourselves worthy students of your wisdom and your grace.
Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.
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What Will They Do? Four Questions for the Trump Administration No one can predict how the Trump Administration will govern. But watching these signs will give us a sense. by Yair RosenbergAs the dust settles on one of the most surprising electoral outcomes in American history, many are asking what exactly a Trump Administration will do in office. But given that Trump offered few specifics for his many sweeping campaign promises, and often reversed himself throughout the election even on his core issues, such predictions seem like a fool’s errand.And truth be told, this election has seen enough of credentialed pundits with big megaphones making confident predictions about the future that have proven to be completely wrong. So instead of telling you what will happen, I’d like to pose several questions for the next few months whose answers will hopefully tell us more about what a Trump Administration might have in store.
1. Will the many anti-Trump Republican professionals work for him? Will he want them?
Some of the Republican party’s best political and policy talent—particular on foreign policy—refused to support Trump on principle. Many publicly denounced him. Others worked for third-party anti-Trump conservative candidate Evan McMullin. But now, the Trump administration will need to fill hundreds of posts overseeing crucial domestic and national security priorities. Will Trump reach out to his party’s pros? And would they accept his offer? Or will the Trump administration end up being populated by third-rate rejects who latched on to the Trump campaign because no serious one would have them?
Notably, some Republican policy hands remained strategically silent during the election, neither denouncing Trump nor endorsing him. One such example was former George W. Bush National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. Other serious conservative wonks I have spoken to off-the-record endorsed Trump not out of any love for him, but in the belief that he was going to win, and would need sane people around him to guide his presidency. (As it turns out, they were right.) If these people end up populating the upper echelons of a Trump administration, it may end up functioning more like a traditional Republican one. If not, another more troubling question arises…
2. Will alt-right members seep into Trump’s administration, much like they seeped into his Twitter feed?
Throughout Trump’s campaign, he and his surrogates repeatedly mainstreamedpropaganda produced by white nationalists and anti-Semites. This was not deliberate, but rather the result of the campaign essentially relying on an army of internet trolls for PR, because few serious GOP professionals would work for Trump. During the campaign, I wrote that this boded ill for a Trump presidential administration, which could just as easily end up absorbing such bigots into its ranks by osmosis. Whether Trump’s hires look more like @WhiteGenocide or more like Chris Christie, then, is something media outlets and concerned citizens should closely monitor.
3. Which Trump will we get as president?
On election night, viewers saw a side of Trump rarely in evidence during the campaign. “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all of Americans, and this is so important to me,” he said. “For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.”
The magnanimous speech was reminiscent of Trump’s earlier iteration as a New York liberal who decried racism, denounced David Duke, and defended the Clintons. After spending months calling to jail Hillary Clinton, he declared “we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.” And when Trump met with President Obama at the White House today, he dubbed the person whose native birth he’d questioned “a very good man,” and said “it was a great honor being with you.”
As disorienting as it might seem, this Trump reversal should not surprise. “I can be more presidential than anybody, if I want to be,” he said during the Republican primary in March. In January, despite his broadsides against political correctness, Trump declared, “When I’m president I’m a different person. I can do anything. I can be the most politically correct person you have ever seen.” In 1999, he criticized far-right politician Pat Buchanan for “warn[ing] his followers that the United States is controlled by Jews, especially regarding foreign policy” and his “attacks [on] gays, immigrants, welfare recipients.” As BuzzFeed put it, “Donald Trump has even flip flopped on bigotry.”
So, which Trump will show up in the Oval Office? The very presidential, very politically correct former Democrat? Or the vindictive avatar of the 2016 campaign? Likely, it will be a mix, and which persona gets more play may prove profoundly consequential.
4. Will Trump pursue a literal enactment of his most extreme campaign promises, or instead fulfill them with merely symbolic gestures?
Trump’s campaign was defined by policy pledges that were short on specifics but long on grandiosity. He never explained how he’d build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, or the logistics of his proposed shutdown of Muslim immigration. There have been many indicators that these promises were not meant literally. When Trump met with the president of Mexico, he did not raise the issue of payment for the wall, and he hinted to the New York Times editorial board that he’d be flexible on it. Similarly, after Trump’s election, the Muslim plan was removed and then restoredfrom his web site.
So, will Trump actually move forward with his most incendiary ideas? Or will he instead offer token gestures–extend the current border fence for a few hundred feet, announce increased background checks for all immigrants of the sort that are already in place–and then declare victory?
***
Essentially, there is a best case and a worst case scenario for a Trump presidency.
Best case: Trump governs like a populist, hewing largely to public opinion, and delegating most governing tasks to semi-competent people, while he enjoys being a playboy potentate. His domestic promises are forgotten or fulfilled symbolically, and his foreign policy remains largely mainstream.
Worst case: Trump’s victory empowers periodic violent mobs to go after vulnerable minorities, provoking clashes with law enforcement (when they are not tacitly abetted by authorities looking the other way). Trump follows through on his pro-Russian/anti-NATO pledges, emboldening not only Vladimir Putin, but far-right parties across Europe who will set out to mimic Trump’s tactics. Back home, constant stress is placed on America’s democratic institutions by an overreaching and corrupt Trump administration’s attempts to use the machinery of government and mass surveillance to achieve its personal ends. Meanwhile, the economy craters due to poor protectionist policies.
In the end, we’re likely to get some of both scenarios, but which parts are anyone’s guess.
Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet and the editor of the English-language blog of the Israeli National Archives. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
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Missouri Has Elected Its First Jewish Governor A Republican and former Navy SEAL, Eric Greitens is a refreshing counterpoint to Donald Trump by Armin RosenEric Greitens, the Republican who was elected Governor of Missouri on Tuesday, could be one example of the kind of non-traditional and fairly non-ideological candidate voters are apparently now looking for. Soon to be the first Jewish governor in Missouri’s history, Greitens is a Republican with little in the way of a fixed set of political views, and one of three former Navy SEALs to be elected to a major office this week. A non-politician who defeated an establishment democrat moderate enough to have earned the NRA’s endorsement, Greitens made his peace with what politics required in the Year of Trump, and struck a balancing act that he rode all the way to the Missouri governor’s’ mansion.In some respects, Greitens is a refreshing counterpoint to some of Tuesday’s Trump-driven discouragement, someone who Americans can be proud to see in elected office. He’s a Rhodes Scholar and Bronze Star recipient with a decorated record of national service and civic engagement. Greitens is the founder of The Mission Continues, a widely respected organization that connects veterans to community service opportunities, partly to provide them with an ongoing source of purpose and motivation as they return to civilian life. The governor-elect is a subtle and original thinker as well. His 2015 book Resilience is structured as a letter to a fellow Navy SEAL struggling with his transition out of the military, and incorporates hundreds of literary, artistic, and philosophical references to trauma and warfare spanning nearly the full breadth of human civilization. As a Free Beacon profile noted, the principals of “The Great Jewish Hope” are “rooted in Seneca and Cato, rather than Buckley or Von Mises.”
But Greitens hasn’t been immune from the less savory aspects of Trump-era American politics. He positioned himself as a “conservative outsider,” repudiating a raft of previous liberal positions and masking the fact that he had been a democrat just a few years earlier—commonalities he shares with president-elect Donald Trump. In August, Greitens infamously aired a commercial in which he did little more than load and fire a machine gun, a blunt and—one would think, unnecessary—pitch coming from someone who had served four tours of duty in Iraq.
Even so, Greitens now ranks as one of the most intriguing elected officials in the nation—an author, scholar, SEAL, and advocate for veterans who successfully coped with the year’s rising political force, however ugly the results could sometimes be. And he’s only 42. It’s not out of the question that Greitens could eventually add “first Jewish president” to an already impressive resume, especially given the success of a certain other ideologically flexible political newcomer.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based writer. He has written for The Atlantic, City Journal, andWorld Affairs Journal, and was recently a senior reporter for Business Insider.
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An American Prophet, More Important Today Than Ever from Tablet Magazine of New York, New York, United States "Jeffrey Rosen argues that Brandeis was the most farseeing constitutional philosopher of the twentieth century."
Brandeis, the Jewish Jefferson
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Presidential historians keep the election in perspective; Holocaust scholar Saul Friedländer’s new memoir; more from Tablet Magazine of New York, New York, United States "How can a divided America heal?" for Thursday, November 10, 2016The Troy Brothers Bemoan the Election (An Epistolary Bromance)
GIL TROY AND TEVI TROY
Two Queens boys turned presidential historians on opposite sides of America’s great political divide, on what just happened, keeping things in perspective, and the power of the rule of lawThis is part 5 of an exchange between Tevi Troy and his brother Gil Troy about the 2016 presidential election. Here’s part 1 (Nov. 3), part 2 (Nov. 6), part 3 (Nov. 7), and part 4 (Nov. 8), all below.
***
Nov. 9, 2016: Tevi Troy writes:
Well, the election is over and a lot of people seem to be panicking about the result. I would caution against it. Obviously, as a Republican, there is much that I am pleased with from last night’s results. I am happy that the Republicans retained both the Senate and the House, and that strong conservative senators like Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, Rob Portman, and Ron Johnson won reelection. On the presidential front, I have had my misgivings about Donald Trump, as this exchange with Gil has made clear. But I also think that there is a positive case to be made from multiple perspectives. (No choice but to be positive—there’s that Troy optimism again.) From my conservative point of view, I am pleased that a Republican president will be picking Supreme Court justices and that President-elect Trump has put forth conservative names for potential Supreme Court vacancies. On the Israel front, I’m quite confident that Trump will be better for Israel than Obama was—admittedly a low bar—and that there is a good chance that he can be significantly better than Obama was, and than Hillary would have been.For my liberal friends, many of my own concerns about Trump stemmed from the fact that he was not a traditional conservative. This could lead to him potentially forming some nontraditional coalitions in Congress, especially if he can’t find common ground with elements of the conservative caucus. You may not like Trump’s rhetoric or his behavior, but he is probably less conservative on an issue-by-issue basis than just about everyone he defeated in winning the GOP nomination.
For Americans in general, remain calm. Trump is flawed, but hysterical accusations that he is some kind of totalitarian or fascist are and have long been not just overstated but plain wrong. In addition, American institutions are strong, and cannot easily be subverted by a president with bad intentions, even if we did at some point elect a president with those tendencies. We are governed by the rule of law and will continue to be governed by the law.
We are governed by the rule of law and will continue to be governed by the law.
The fact is that the presidency changes people. There is a tried-and-true policy process that stays in place in both GOP and Democratic administrations. There is a somewhat laborious White House clearance process for presidential appointments, decisions, and statements. This does not mean that presidents always make the right decisions—far from it—but that decisions are carefully considered and within a relatively narrow band of parameters. The crazy decisions tend to get weeded out in the process. The very weight of the presidency makes Oval Office occupants consider their decisions carefully. A late-night tweet storm is far less likely to come from President Trump than from candidate Trump, just because of the nature of the White House and the White House process. In putting the weight of responsibility upon them, the presidency forces people to act more responsibly. We already saw this last night in the president-elect’s victory speech, in which he said, “Now it’s time to bind the wounds of division, come together as one people.” I thought it was a gracious speech and could point to the fact that the long-awaited “pivot” may finally have come. Will he continue to make some comments that offend? Sure, but that does not mean that he will pose a danger to the republic.
So that’s the positive spin on things. Did I want two more inspiring, less flawed candidates on the ballot in the 2016 election? Absolutely. Do I think that the election of Trump means the end of America or a manifest danger to its inhabitants? Absolutely not.
Gil Troy responds :
Hillary Clinton’s loss has terrified and traumatized almost every one of my friends. All day long, I have been distributing two historical “pacifiers.” One, Coretta Scott King’s prediction in 1980, that with a Ronald Reagan presidency “we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party.” The second, from Richard Neustadt’s political-science classic on the presidency, the notion that the “power of the president is the power to persuade.”These are pacifiers, not predictors. They don’t turn Donald Trump into a mensch. They don’t undo his damaging words during the campaign or the alienation, anger, and fear so many Americans feel today. They don’t give him the experience or stability he lacks. But they are reminders that sometimes our worst fears don’t come true, and that America is bigger and greater than any one individual.
So far, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have played their historical roles gracefully (and I’m not sure that if he had lost, President-elect Donald “rigged election” Trump would have been as gracious). Still, what happened, happened. These next few months will test us all, left and right: Can we bring out the best in ourselves and each other—or the worst?
I am more worried than Tevi. I didn’t and don’t have delicate “misgivings” about Donald Trump. I’m disgusted by his demagoguery, dismayed by his bullying, appalled by his boorishness, stunned by his success despite his governing inexperience.
Still, I believe that America is bigger and greater than any one individual because of three important things: the American system, the American people, and the American idea. I still believe the American system the Framers designed over two centuries ago works brilliantly. Again and again, it has figured out how to bring out the best in people by understanding our flaws, thereby fragmenting power, checking and balancing, serving as a constructive platform for the greatest experiment in liberal nationalism, the United States of America. I still believe in the American people, the heroes who grew this country from a small, divided, racist, sexist, country to a true wonder of the world, that has put much of its ugliest past behind it—even as some work remains. And I still believe in the American idea, the notion that we all have inherent rights, that we all are blessed with the privileges of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but that we also have attendant obligations.
And finally, while I see all the dysfunctions, the disconnects, I also celebrate American the functional, all the everyday miracles we take for granted, including the miracle we all witnessed and over 60 percent of registered voters created yesterday: Defying the predictions, participating peacefully, and initiating what I now hope and trust will be a constructive and respectful transition of power, disproving all the critics and again positioning America as the democratic role model to all those struggling in the impoverished dictatorships that characterize most of the world’s political and economic systems.
***
Nov. 8, 2016: Gil Troy writes:
I love a great political slogan. The Revolutionaries’ “Don’t tread on me,” expressed Americans’ desire for independence and dignity. “Fifty-four forty or fight” in 1844 drew a clear line in the sand about American intentions in the Oregon territories. U.S. Grant’s 1864 “Vote as you shot” crudely distinguished between Southern traitors and Northern patriots. Herbert Hoover’s “A chicken in every pot” conveyed the great optimism of the 1920s that prosperity would never end. Franklin Roosevelt’s double whammy, promising “Happy days are here again,” if Americans accepted his “New Deal,” offered reassurance and reforms when Hoover’s prosperity ran out of chickens. Bill Clinton’s 1992 slogan “The new covenant,” while it didn’t quite resonate, conveyed a sense of seriousness, his desire to be seen as “Putting people first” and to forge what he eventually, called, more memorably “The third way,” triangulating between Big Government liberalism and “Government is the problem not the solution” Reaganite conservatism. Even Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can,” while somewhat trite, inspired people, empowering the once powerless, capturing the historic nature of his quest to be the first African-American president.Against that historic background, the emptiness of the 2016 election was captured in the vapidity of the two rivals’ slogans. In fairness, on one level Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton hands-down in the slogan war. Wherever I went, when I would say, even to pro-Clinton crowds, “Donald Trump promises to make America …” they would shout, lustily, “GREAT AGAIN.” And when I added, and “Hillary Clinton promises …” there was often awkward silence—and then, in one high school, great laughter and applause that they had been played. Admittedly, after the Democratic National Convention some would mumble “Stronger together”—which sounds vaguely Stalinistic to me, or “I’m with her”—which evokes “I’m with stupid.”
The meaninglessness of Clinton’s slogans conveyed the void at the heart of her campaign and her vision for America. Walter Mondale-style, she reached out to various interest groups, wooing women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTs, Jews, many of whom were motivated by their fear of Trump. But her campaign was so defensive, so fearful of offending these groups she was courting, so concerned with maintaining her lead, that she didn’t offer a lyrical, inspiring vision that could pass what I call the “Richard Stands Test,” the schoolkid’s misstatement of the Pledge of Allegiance line, “for which it stands.”
Being tolerant and inclusive, while noble, is a foreign policy, not a national, mission statement. Hillary Clinton’s campaign validated (what I called last time) America’s wonderful, welcoming, pluralistic Republic of Everything but did little to build a Republic of Something, to create a new consensus that both creates a new national vision rooted in the past while looking toward the future, and offers any kind of diagnosis and cure for the fundamental ailments that are so clearly afflicting the United States: a de-industrializing economy that isn’t creating enough middle-class jobs; a coarsening culture that is creating legions of the walking wounded lacking discipline, purpose, hope; a fragmenting society that is losing its sense of community; and a polarizing politics that has politicians boasting about the gridlock they will deliver because their hatred of the rival party is trumping their love of America and commitment to governance. Moreover, she offered no promise of retreating from Barack Obama’s assault on the pride, the celebration of American values, the refusal to cower or, yes, apologize, that has always been at the heart of American exceptionalism.
Being tolerant and inclusive, while noble, is a foreign policy, not a national mission statement.
Now, give Trump and his slogan some credit. “Make America great again,” evokes nostalgia for the old Republic of Something. Trump recognizes the serious breakdowns in our economy, culture, society, and politics. His campaign was buoyed by many of the same frustrations that lifted the Bernie Sanders campaign from punchline to powerhouse—although both of them used “free trade” and “Wall Street” as scapegoats that miss the real economic problem. The great mass-middle-class civilization that emerged after World War II enabled autoworkers and longshoremen to earn enough to have savings; today’s economy of part-time Wal-Mart workers and minimum-wage earners in automated factories produces the dislocation and frustration that has fueled this campaign—but not been addressed.
Unfortunately, Trump’s demagogic technique of divide and conquer; his campaign to be the plutocratic king of white-male America, not the increasingly multicultural United States of America; his lack of experience, discipline, consistency, substance, makes him the tribune of The Republic of Nothing, a nation of New Nihilists who will say anything, believe in nothing, and do what pleases them when it pleases them because they lack any core ideals, any true authorities, any traditional anchors. Coming from the world of reality TV—which is fake—running a campaign of 140-character insults and postures, offered a dystopic model not of an improved reality but of a coarsened, vulgar, abusive America.
To the extent that a campaign is a national stress test, America failed—and has become a laughingstock worldwide, no longer inspiring oppressed peoples with this exercise in popular participation but inviting mockery with this plunge into idiocy and unreason.
In a long, brutal history of American elections, this electoral season—and the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump campaigns—will have a special place in the Hall of Shame, among the worst, the most bruising, divisive, demoralizing. But all is not lost—yet. The John Kennedy transition in 1960, the Ronald Reagan transition in 1980, showed that candidates can evolve over three months from won-by-a-whisker damaged winners to confident presidents with a mandate. In a land where history is last week’s most-forwarded YouTube video of cats playing or babies drooling, memories are short and malleable. And in a nation that still represents the great ideals of liberty, democracy, and equality, the possibilities of redemption remain, like prosperity in yet another slogan, just around the corner.
Tevi Troy responds:
It’s hard to disagree with anything in your last missive, so I will pick up where you left off. It is true that this has been an exceedingly dismal campaign, and as we have made clear throughout this exchange, neither of us is very happy about it—nor is the country.But despite the disappointment of this campaign, I believe that there is a reason for hope. First, the unpopularity of both candidates does suggest that most Americans think there is indeed something very wrong with this election, and with the candidates. Both of them won their respective nominations more for structural reasons and flaws in the selection process then for any compelling narrative about a hopeful America that they were trying to convey.
So the candidates are on the debit side, but I would put American institutions and the American people on the asset side of the ledger. American institutions are strong enough to withstand the poor policies of either candidate, and strong enough to resist excessive power grabs by officials who don’t respect democratic norms or the rule of law.
As Gil put it, we remain “a nation that still represents the great ideals of liberty, democracy, and equality.” One bad election will not take that away. I recognize that this may seem overly optimistic. In fact, one piece of feedback we have both received from a mutual friend is that we are excessively optimistic. (We can’t help it: It’s the Troy way.) This particular friend thought that my hope for an American-exceptionalism agenda on the part of the Jewish organizations was a naïve one. I didn’t put that thought out there believing that those organizations would embrace this perspective immediately, but part of the role of we historian-commentators is that we put ideas out there in the hopes that smart people will read them and take us up on them. And there I think is the promise of America. We still have free speech; we still have strong voices out there expressing every different perspective; and we still have hopes for a better tomorrow, whatever our actual tomorrow informs us happens on this Election Day.
***
Nov. 7, 2016: Gil Troy writes:
I just completed a four-city, one-week speaking tour. The whole country, from North to South, right to left, Jewish and non-Jewish, seems to be suffering from PTSD: Pre-Trump-Clinton-Election Stress Disorder. Amid all this uncertainty, I am willing to predict that the next president will have a Jewish son-in-law, and despite the anxiety, let’s emphasize one bit of good news: The next president will support Israel more enthusiastically—and hopefully more effectively—than the incumbent.God bless America! In Europe, too many campaigns historically pivoted around the question of who bashed the Jews the most. How wonderful that in the United States, both candidates vie to prove who is more “pro-Israel.” That competition reinforces the broad, left-to-right American consensus that has supported Israel enthusiastically for decades—and, despite our worries, is at a historic peak. That competition stems from the fact that in an ugly world of ISIS and Assad, of Islamicist terrorism and Middle East instability, an anti-Israel president would be anti-American too, overlooking America’s one stable democratic ally in that crazy, critical region. And that competition demonstrates that America’s traditional bipartisan support for Israel is good for America, not just Israel: Healthy democracies need some issues, like supporting Israel, on which both rival parties agree.
I’m not naïve. I understand that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump probably would express their support for Israel in different ways, although I also know that a candidate’s promises are not binding, especially regarding foreign policy. Barack Obama was sure in 2008 that he was going to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, which remains open. I also don’t think he ever imagined—nor did we—that he would kill as many terrorists by drone as he has.
Still, the differences in Clinton’s and Trump’s respective Israel approaches merit debate. Beyond proclaiming the most embarrassing foreign-policy credential—evah—that he was grand marshal of the Israel Day Parade—Trump has alternated between the passionately pro-Netanyahu “Israel right or wrong” school, promising no daylight between the two countries, and the more neutral “let’s make a deal” school, assuming some great deal-maker can impose the right borders on the squabbling partners.
Clinton in her career has vacillated. She started out closer to the “tough love” school President Obama (and the Israeli left) embrace—assuming Big Daddy America must force misbehaving Israel to compromise and stop beating up those nice, disenfranchised Palestinians. As New York senator, she reflected her husband Bill’s “love-love” school, understanding that if Israel feels supported by the United States and respected internationally, it’s more likely to compromise. And, as secretary of state, she was yet another “Peace Processor,” one of those perennially (Shimon) Peres-ian, Sisyphean optimists, who since the 1990s have been negotiating away, again and again and again, without asking why the Oslo peace process failed and what new understandings of reality (and of the Palestinian refusal to accept reality) are required.
In an ideal world, we would have had a mature, substantive, respectful debate in the Jewish community and beyond about which of these five approaches to take. In an even more ideal world, that debate would have taken us to the philosophical assumptions underlying each candidate’s foreign policy. Obama’s years in office have shaken Americans’ traditional faith in American exceptionalism. Both the humiliation imposed on us by Americans being kidnapped, beheaded, and blown up—as well as President Obama’s distaste for America’s traditional self-confidence and sense of national virtue—have many Americans doubting our competence and steadiness abroad, let alone American exceptionalism.
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton’s celebration of American values—particularly her role modeling for women—expressed more faith in America’s special heritage to the world than the president did. Donald Trump’s “great again” talk more crudely expresses a nostalgia for that sense of self-confidence—and that mix of post-WWII power and righteousness with which he grew up. My gut tells me that if the candidates did ever speak in such sophisticated, theoretical terms, Hillary Clinton would park more of her support for Israel in shared values, Donald Trump would park it in the realm of mutual national interests reinforced by admiration for Israel’s chutzpah and strength.
Alas, such heady but important discussions have not even engaged the foreign policy wonk-etariat. Instead, in this electoral race to the bottom, what I have most heard in the Jewish community this week is that “Hillary’s a crook and she’s anti-Israel like Obama” or that “Trump’s a monster and he lies about Israel like he lies about everything else.” What I learn from this is: We must stop using the phrase “anti-Israel” about anyone unless that person truly rejects Israel’s right to exist, and that, whoever wins on Tuesday, we have a lot of healing and rebuilding of trust to do—in the Jewish community and in the good ole’ U.S. of A.
Tevi Troy responds:
Thanks for the note, and safe travels. I was glad I got to see you—briefly—on this trip. I regret the geographic distance between us makes our in-person interactions more limited than I—or our dear mother—would like. As you know, her favorite word is “togetha.”You have previously mentioned to me your concerns about American society and the apparent worsening of such divisions in recent years. I wonder if a presidential election brings out these divisions and things will calm down once the election is over. This does not mean that either presidential candidate will miraculously become popular—or even bearable—post-election, but that people will move on and live their lives once the worst of the election divisions are over.
The excessive rhetoric of campaign season points to another problem, though. I recall that during the 2012 election, people on the left were saying the worst things about Mitt Romney. Ads claimed he fired someone whose spouse then died of cancer, as if he were responsible for the death. Joe Biden told a black audience that Republicans were going to “put y’all back in chains,” which was one of the more disgraceful comments we have heard from a sitting vice president. Then after the election, Romney suddenly became that nice guy who pumped his own gas and went to Disneyland.
Romney is not the only one to get that treatment. John McCain and George W. Bush were subjected to hysterical attacks as if they were all somehow completely outside of the mainstream of American politics. Charlie Cooke had a good piece on this recently, and Jonah Goldberg made a similar point back in July. The excessive rhetoric deployed against previous Republican candidates blunts the potency of similar attacks against Trump. Even some liberals acknowledge this. Bill Maher recently said that Romney, Bush, and McCain “were honorable men who we disagreed with and we should have kept it that way. So we cried wolf, and that was wrong.”
As for the Jewish in-laws, I am not sure that I would take too much comfort there. After all, Hillary’s Jewish adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, sends her missives from his anti-Israel son Max (Gil, can I use the “anti-Israel” designation for Max?) Should I somehow take comfort that both Blumenthals are Jewish? And as for Hillary’s back-and-forth career on Israel, I fear that both her foreign-policy and political advisers will pose a real problem for Israel should she be elected. Campaign manager Robby Mook even told Clinton not to speak about Israel in front of a group of Democratic activists because Israel is presumably so unpopular in those circles.
This does not mean that I pin my hopes on the fact that Ivanka converted to Judaism, or—as Gil points out—that Trump was grand marshal of the Salute to Israel parade. I am, however, generally more comfortable with the Republican position on Israel and on Republican foreign-policy advisers on the subject of Israel. This does not make me pro-Trump, but it does mean that I see it as important that the Republicans retain both the House and Senate, so that they could be a check on the Israel-criticizing tendencies of the Clinton-Obama foreign-policy team. (See, I am already being more careful with the “anti-Israel” term. Perhaps Gil’s admonition will catch on, at least in the Troy family. Sigh.)
While I appreciate and share your hope that both parties in America staunchly support Israel, I see worrisome signs that the parties are diverging on this issue, with the GOP clearly being the more supportive party. And given that you and your family live in Israel, you will feel the results of this election more acutely than I will.
So I join you in hoping that “Love-Love” Hillary emerges; should she win, I fear that we will end up with what you generously called “Tough Love” Hillary. And the “Tough” tends to take precedence over the “Love.”
Gil Troy responds:
Thanks for your concerns. Yes, it was fun seeing you and introducing you to a new kosher restaurant, I assumed you had tried every one of them in New York by now.The growing polarization—and estrangement—in America does worry me. Although you and I could have a fun presidential-historian-nerd duel citing examples of nastiness in previous campaigns with the intensity that you and your son Ezzie fenced by exchanging the names of obscure baseball Hall of Famers when he was 5(!), something feels different. I think of the campaign as a national stress test checking our national health, and often highlighting underlying problems. You’ve repeatedly heard my riff from my Age of Clinton book that we were once a Republic of Something, united by core consensus ideals, and this new Republic of Everything—and Nothing—of ours—is more welcoming but also deeply nihilistic, selfish, tunnel-visioned, lost.
And, yes, you’re right, Max Blumenthal qualifies as anti-Israel, given his loathsome, amoral, ahistorical, disproportionate comparisons between Palestinian cities and Nazi concentration camps. He proves why we shouldn’t use the “anti-Israel” charge too broadly. We need to keep it as a term of opprobrium for hateful extremists like him—otherwise we Jews are also crying wolf.
And, yes, I worry that some of Hillary Clinton advisers, while not “anti-Israel” like Blumenthal, are Bash-Israel-firsters, while others are those sapped, now-wearisome, peace-processing dinosaurs still preaching from a 1990s hymnal, still overlooking Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism.
Some leading Democrat must pull a William F. Buckley. Just as Buckley, America’s leading conservative, called out Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s, saying such anti-Zionism masking anti-Semitism did not belong in the Republican Party, I challenge Barack Obama when he retires to echo Buckley, reading out the genuine haters from the Democratic coalition (note this is an invitation, not a prediction).
But these worries about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are balanced out by seeing the Love-Lovers like Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton’s own leaked intentions to set a different, more constructive, tone with Israel than Obama has. Moreover, I have no idea what Donald Trump would do regarding Israel because I have no idea what this political novice would do regarding anything. He has no political track record—and serious impulse-control problems. Just because a bunch of Orthodox Jewish lawyers on his payroll whose kids study in the West Bank tell him to be pro-Bibi doesn’t guarantee that those sentiments would survive a Trumpian temper tantrum if Netanyahu treated a President Trump as he has treated President Obama.
Your lovely hope—which I share—“that people will move on and live their lives once the worst of the election divisions are over”—is imperiled by this blustering, ungracious candidate who vowed to challenge the legitimacy of American democracy by calling the election “rigged” if the American people dare reject him. This unprecedented assault on the process by a major-party nominee represents a characteristic Trumpian irresponsibility that is far more dangerous—to the United States, and by extension to its allies, including Israel—than the bleatings of little Maxie Blumenthal.
Tevi Troy responds:
Here is potentially something that could bring Jews together over the next four, eight, or even 12 years and beyond. Jews recognize how important American exceptionalism has been for Israel, for the Jewish people in America, and also for the world at large. Even if we as a community have many disagreements on a whole host of domestic and foreign-policy issues, there is–I think—a shared belief in the importance of America as a nation that both protects the Jews but also advances basic ideals about human rights, democracy, and freedom. This could be an agenda item for the wide swath of Jewish organizations that overpopulate Washington: Promote America as a force for good, regardless of who wins the election, and press the incoming administration to make sure it is pursuing that goal. Pursuing this agenda could lead to positive policy responses from the new administration, but it could also help determine the shape of the foreign-policy debate so that we get more acceptable foreign-policy candidates in the year 2020.***
Nov. 6, 2012 Tevi Troy writes:
When the details about the James Comey investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails came out this summer, it seemed like they treated Clinton with kid gloves, handing out a number of immunity deals that normally would not be given and not getting her on record under oath at the start. At the time, Comey was lauded as the greatest lawman since Elliot Ness. Now, when he has come forward and said that they are still investigating and that there is this new trove of emails, he is just this terrible partisan.It seems to me that the Department of Justice is typically fairly aggressive in prosecuting people for these kinds of crimes. Scooter Libby was prosecuted as a result of an investigation about something that it is clear he did not do—leak Valerie Plame’s name to Robert Novak. Dinesh D’Souza was clearly guilty of illegal campaign contributions, but the prison sentence seemed out of whack with what should have been punished with a fine. And Obama’s Affordable Care Act wouldn’t have passed without an extra Democratic senator elected in the wake of a wrongheaded investigation of GOP Sen. Ted Stevens that cost him his Senate seat. I am generally uncomfortable with overly aggressive Department of Justice prosecutions, but if they are going to be engaging in that kind of activity, it is only fair to treat both parties the same way.
What does this all mean for our election? When people start to question the legitimacy in the fairness of government, it erodes the basic building blocks of civil society. I do have a real fear that post-election we could have a significant number of people saying that whichever candidate wins is illegitimate. This would be unfortunate. We have a mostly successful 200-plus-year experiment in a democratic republic, a nation that has given great opportunities to the people who live here but has also been a beacon of hope to the world. I would hope that one election with two awful candidates would not threaten that larger enterprise. Such a result would be a tragedy for this nation, and for the world as a whole.
Gil Troy responds:
Hi—so, here’s where you start seeing a difference in our perspectives. First, if I were to write about the Justice Department and its prosecutorial approach, I would instinctively find examples from both sides of the aisle. Your litany of Republican woes, without saying so exactly, implies partisan bias, just as the Clintons during the 1990s could only see how Republicans criminalized politics by targeting Democrats.Since Watergate, even though political corruption is down dramatically from the bad old days of the 1950s and 1960s, let alone the 19th century, prosecutions for political corruption are up. The good news: less tolerance for behavior that was once normalized. The bad news: the criminalization of politics that has hurt Democrats and Republicans alike.
Second, when the director of the FBI spent 14-and-a-half minutes berating a leading presidential candidate, and 30 seconds explaining that he nevertheless didn’t think her missteps were convictable and thus they were not prosecutable, I was inspired. I thought that was a great lesson in law and civics, that all elements of wrongdoing don’t necessarily justify prosecution in a system that convicts only based on guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” At the same time, I was appalled by the bad judgment Hillary Clinton demonstrated [in choosing to use a private server] and was reminded that, as in the 1990s, the Clintons always used “not prosecutable” as some kind of absolution. “Not prosecutable or convictable,” is not the standard of behavior by which I live or you live or we wish our kids to live—and it is not to me an acceptable standard of behavior for a future president.
And finally, your analysis ends in a kind of sanitized way. When you write, “When people start to question the legitimacy in the fairness of government, it erodes the basic building blocks of civil society,” I wonder, “what people?” This year, it isn’t just a generalized phenomenon. This is a problem that started, in many ways, with Donald Trump’s reprehensible comment about “the rigged election.” And I can’t help wondering that if your seeking refuge into worries about “people” reflects a kind of instinctive protectiveness toward the Republican nominee—even if you dislike him.
More broadly, of course, I agree with you. The polls showing that since the 1950s, faith in government, in Congress, in the presidency, has been plummeting does suggest the crisis of legitimacy about which you spoke. But in this campaign cycle, Donald Trump has been the major cause of those doubts and, on this one, Hillary Clinton shoulders far less blame.
Tevi Troy responds:
I know I’ll get another crack on Tuesday, but your missive warrants a brief response. I’m happy to list some overly aggressive investigations of Democrats, including those of John Edwards for doing something sordid but not illegal and Sen. Bob Menendez for doing legislative outreach on behalf of a donor that did not seem to be out of the ordinary. The criminalization of political differences leads to careers being ruined and a loss of faith in the system. And on the loss-of-faith point, Trump was wrong to suggest he wouldn’t accept the results of the election. Period. But there were plenty of Democrats questioning the legitimacy of George W. Bush after the 2000 election. And John Kerry waited an inappropriately long time before conceding the 2004 election. Kerry now claims that he was some kind of hero for conceding, but the story at the time was that he had to be pushed into doing so by the late Ted Kennedy.Every election cycle, we hear people threatening to leave the country if their candidate loses. I wish all those who made such threats would follow through with them and not let the door hit them on the way out. Hysterical and dire warnings about the death of the republic based on the results of a particular election are bad for the country and bad for democracy. If Gil wants to see that belief as some kind of secret sympathy for Trump, he is welcome to.
***
Nov. 3, 2016: Tevi Troy writes:
What better way to greet the most depressing election in my memory than to argue politics with my brother. Even though Gil and I grew up in the same house in Queens, we took different political journeys. He was a Democrat early on—I remember he worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1976 Senate campaign. He even introduced me to Pat one time in Central Park. I am the younger brother and, therefore, more of a child of the 1980s. I volunteered for the Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign and was a summer intern for George Bush’s 1988 campaign.Even though Gil and I had different journeys, we now share a lot of similarities of approach. We both have Ph.D.s—he went into academia and I did not. In the post-Sept. 11 world, both of us have been disturbed by the Left, especially when it comes to Israel. In his role as columnist for the Jerusalem Post, Gil has written many trenchant pieces criticizing President Barack Obama’s stances on Israel. I was typically more explicit and political in my approach. I supported Mitt Romney in 2012 and was an adviser to the campaign.
Which brings us to 2016. I have opposed Hillary Clinton from a policy perspective for two-and-a-half decades, but her other issues—setting up her own server as secretary of state, having a distant relationship with the truth, and her participation in “the great enrichment” via Clinton, Inc.—make her a complete nonstarter for me. And I was excited to see so many smart young conservative politicians lining up to join the 2016 GOP race. Yet that process brought us Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.
Liberals somehow see Trump as some kind of extreme conservative. I see him as a big-government liberal. He sees government as the solution to our problems, doesn’t want to make any changes to our unsustainable entitlement programs, and he has the AFL-CIO position on trade. That’s not to mention the allegations about his treatment of women, his avoidance of taxes, his nonpayment of debts, and his publicly demonstrated propensity to pick fights with women, POWs, and parents of slain soldiers, as well as elected—and respected—Republicans such as Paul Ryan.
As Gil knows, I usually get a thrill from voting. But this year, it’s more like a kick in the stomach.
Gil Troy responds:
I know my role here. To make things fun, clear, and tweet-worthy, I’m supposed to play the traditional New York Jewish liberal to my brother—actually my two brothers—the renegade New York Jews turned conservative. (Our older brother Dan Troy is a corporate super-lawyer and former Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush official). And perhaps, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when my hero Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a mainstream Democrat, that kind of simplistic political Punch-and-Judy show would have worked. (Tevi’s excellent first book on Intellectuals and the American Presidency has a great Moynihan chapter, showing where our political and intellectual agendas intersect.)But I’m afraid I have to disappoint. I am too much the academic, too much the moderate, and too disappointed with where the Democratic Party and modern American liberalism have gone, to play the typical liberal.
As an academic who, like Tevi, is often called a “presidential historian” (we professors have to pretend to disdain such simplistic titles), I avoid publicly endorsing any candidates. I am proud when I write something that is praised as balanced, as I just did for Time, pointing out Hillary Clinton’s moral lapses along with the sexism and unreasonable “Clintipathy” that exaggerates her ethical sloppiness into extreme statements about being “the most corrupt candidate ever.” And I am equally proud when I write something historical as I did last week for Politico, tracing the long noble history of Party Bolting, which may have helped some Republicans abandon Donald Trump—without my telling them what to do. My approach to politics is captured in the late former New York Mayor Ed Koch’s great line: “If you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.”
My passionately nonpartisan moderation drives Dan and Tevi crazy, when they’re not busy sending each other secret messages with their fancy right-wing decoder rings. Dan even calls me “the smugwump,” a clever update to the nickname given the 19th-century liberal reformers who abandoned the Republican party in 1884 because they couldn’t support the corrupt former senator and former secretary of state (I’m not making this up) James G. Blaine. They were defined by the dismissive line “that a mugwump is a person sitting on the fence, with his mug on one side and his wump on the other.”
Mea culpa. I find the demands of partisan loyalty—and the resulting intellectual inconsistency—in Washington, D.C. suffocating. (Yes, I get it, hence the “smugwump” designation.)
Dan has another great line. He is often asked: “How could you three grow up as the sons of two New York City schoolteachers and none of you are liberal Democrats?” He responds: “How could any thinking being grow up in a union household in New York in the 1970s and still remain a liberal or a Democrat?” We saw Albert Shanker’s liberal UFT (United Federation of Teachers) disappoint my parents repeatedly. We watched New York City turn from a liberal Great Society paradise into a dirty, smelly, crime-ridden, debt-burdened, bureaucratically sclerotic disaster. And we also saw identity politics make too much of the radical Left turn totalitarian, unthinking, more swayed by who you were rather than what you did or thought, truly irrational, illiberal, and yes, anti-Israel.
So, for a change I find myself in the majority today, agreeing with the record levels of Americans who dislike and mistrust both candidates. In 2016, being a smugwump just means you think and care without partisan blinders on. Whereas writing my recent book on The Age of Clinton made me appreciate Bill Clinton’s centrism more, the Clintons’ moral blindspots perennially disappoint me.
But I also criticize Republicans. Extremist dog-whistling on immigration is reprehensible. I didn’t like “Can’t-play-with-anybody-in-the-sandbox” Ted Cruz and “Callow Marco” Rubio as candidates. I detest Donald Trump’s bullying, his contempt for so many, and his assault on our democracy’s very legitimacy with his “rigged election” demagoguery.
So I share Tevi’s concerns and heartbreak. Traditionally, when asked during campaigns, “Who will win?” I dodge, saying: “As a historian, I find it hard enough to predict the past, I can’t begin to predict the future. But,” I add, “on Election Day, Americans will vote peacefully, so, unlike in so many other countries, ballots not bullets will rule.” These days, I only say the first sentence. I mourn that the ugly demons Donald Trump stirred—and the extreme Left’s menacing response—prevents me from giving my usual prediction of a tranquil Election Day and a peaceful power transition.
Beyond being disappointed, I’m scared.
Tevi Troy responds:
This is unusual, but Gil is wrong about one thing: There is no vast right-wing conspiracy decoder ring. Or if there is, I don’t have one, and Dan has not shown me his. And while I know he takes great comfort in his “moderate’s freedom” and the ability to criticize both sides, I think conservatives deserve credit for their willingness to criticize the GOP candidate this cycle at a time when liberals and Democrats too often overlook the flaws of their standard-bearer.In fact, one of the things that I find most comforting in this election is the degree to which many of the smartest and most able conservative thinkers have been unwilling to get on board with Donald Trump. I don’t see the same degree of self-criticism from the Left. Hillary gets to skate by on her many problematic issues. Even Bernie Sanders, who ran a spirited campaign against her, refused to engage on the email issue when it was clearly an issue on which she was deservedly vulnerable.
I remember in the early 1990s, my late mentor, Ben Wattenberg—an LBJ White House aide and Scoop Jackson Democrat, for the record—used to write that Democrats, when forming a firing squad, do so in a circle. There are no circles on the Democratic firing squads anymore, just a straight line pointing at the GOP. Republicans are the ones who seem to be forming the circles. But when Ben was making his observation following the 1988 election, the Democrats were in the midst of a period of self-criticism. Now Republicans are likely about to enter a similar period of self-reflection, and in that context, a circular firing squad, while ugly, may lead to the re-examination that the party needs in order to right itself, both politically and intellectually.
So while I am dismayed by what’s going on in the current election, and not happy with either of our choices, I do have some faith in the conservative movement’s willingness and ability to have the honest and robust discussions necessary to figure out the way forward. Call this the freedom of members of an intellectual movement rather than party operatives. We are free to think how we like and have no obligation to refrain from criticism of the party.
This vision centered around the freedom to disagree is reminiscent to me of the many robust arguments we had over our Shabbat table growing up. One time I brought home a female friend who left the table crying because she thought we were all yelling at that nice old man who was our grandfather. Well, Grandpa was indeed a nice man, but he also liked a good argument, and he trained his grandsons to follow suit. Perhaps similar training in the crucible of argument at other Shabbat tables is why many conservative Jews have been loud Trump critics.
Going forward, conservatives need to stay true to our principles. One of those principles is freedom. I hope that in the future the Republican Party can find a standard-bearer who celebrates freedom—including the freedom to disagree—and is one who the conservative movement can proudly get behind. This election has not brought it.
***
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Gil Troy and Tevi Troy both write, teach, and speak about American history and modern Jewish identity. Gil is professor of history at McGill University. His latest book is The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s. Tevi is the former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and White House aide. His latest book is Shall We Wake the President: Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office.
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BOOK REVIEWS / ADAM KIRSCH
At Home in History, and Nowhere Else Saul Friedländer’s ‘small masterpiece in the literature of the Holocaust’If there is such a thing as an archetypal 20th-century Jewish life, Saul Friedländer has led it. All three of the central Jewish experiences of the era left their mark on him: the Holocaust, which he survived as a young boy; the founding of Israel, where he moved in 1948; and the rise of Jewish life in America, where he now lives, after retiring from teaching at UCLA. No wonder that a man so shaped and pressed by history became a historian. Friedländer is one of the world’s leading scholars of the Holocaust, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Nazi Germany and the Jews,among many other works. But what does it mean to write the history of events that are, in fact, part of one’s own personal memory? What does a life like Friedländer’s feel like from the inside?
These are the questions he set out to answer in his most personal book, When Memory Comes, a short, sparely written memoir first published in 1978. It has now been released in a new edition, by Other Press, to accompany a newly published second volume of Friedländer’s memoirs, Where Memory Leads. Taken together, these books form a primary document of modern Jewish history—a contribution to the study of the past that uses the tools not of the historian, but of the autobiographer. A scholar attempts to ascertain details and facts, and synthesize them into a complete narrative. A memoirist, however, knows that what matters most about the past, the way it felt, is always elusive, partial, reconstructed rather than recollected. Friedländer’s title tellingly reverses the formula he uses in the epigraph to When Memory Comes, taken from the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink: “When knowledge comes, memory comes too, little by little. Knowledge and memory are one and the same thing.” For Friedländer, it is memory that comes first, bringing a kind of imperfect knowledge in its train.
Friedländer’s early life, as he describes it in Where Memory Leads, followed the pattern of many Central European Jews born at what he calls “the worst possible moment”—in 1932, just months before Hitler took power. “Everyone in our house felt German,” he recalls, and he was called Paul—a Christian name, and a sign of the family’s seemingly complete assimilation into the culture of German-speaking Prague, where they lived. (Later, after he moved to Israel, he would change it to Saul, thus reversing the process that turned the first-century Jew Saul into the Christian saint, Paul.) Like all children, he believed his world to be normal because it was the only world he knew: “The way of life of the Jews in the Prague of my childhood was perhaps futile and ‘rootless,’ seen from a historical viewpoint. Yet this way of life was ours, the one we treasured, and there is no point in pretending otherwise.”
This way of life came to a sudden end in March 1939, when Hitler seized the rump state of Czechoslovakia for the Third Reich. As Jews, Friedländer’s parents knew they had to flee, though they dissembled this fact for their young son: “I was told that we were leaving Prague because the Germans had occupied Czechoslovakia and because we were Czech.” The family ended up, like many Jewish refugees from Hitler, in Paris, which at the time seemed like a haven. Yet as Friedländer shows, the trauma of dislocation and exile was inescapable, even before the worst came. One of his most painful memories of this period comes from the months he spent at a Jewish boarding school, where he was bullied and beaten up by the other students because he did not speak Yiddish or wear a kippah. He was, they taunted, a “goy”—an unspeakably bitter irony, and one that echoes through Friedländer’s later account of his complex, ambivalent relationship with Jewishness.
After the fall of France in 1940, the Friedländers fled to a small town called Neris, but soon they were no longer safe even there. Paul’s parents took a last, desperate step: They had their son baptized as a Catholic and entrusted him to the care of a severe, conservative Catholic school. In his reserved style, Friedländer conveys the utter desolation and misery he felt at being separated from his parents, which led him, at the age of just 10, to attempt to drown himself. He would never see them again: As he learned much later, they were captured while attempting to cross the border into Switzerland and deported to Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Paul-Henri, as he was now known, embraced Catholicism with the ardor of a preadolescent. The contradiction of his situation was flagrant: Here was a Jewish boy being hidden by Catholics who embraced the anti-Semitic Vichy regime and admired Marshal Petain.
Yet at least Friedländer had found a kind of home; and then he lost this one too, after the war, when he was released into the custody of a local Jewish guardian. By the age of 16, when he started at a prestigious lycee in Paris, Friedländer had been through more shock, dislocation, and loss than most people experience in a lifetime. It was as a reaction to all this, he makes clear, that he embraced Zionism. Only in Israel could he find anything like a secure home: “I did not become a Zionist by way of a renewal of contact with buried emotional layers, but rather as a result of logical argument, of a simple line of reasoning that nonetheless in those days seemed to me to be a compelling one.”
In 1948, as the War of Independence raged, Friedländer determined to join the Jewish state at any price. Although he knew little about intra-Zionist politics, he lied about his age and joined Betar, the youth group associated with the Irgun, the right-wing terrorist organization. Fatefully, the ship he boarded to leave Europe was none other than the Altalena. Students of Israeli history will recognize the name: Packed with Irgun fighters and weaponry, the ship was seen as a threat by the new government of David Ben-Gurion and was not allowed to dock. Friedländer left the ship with most of the passengers before it got embroiled in a gun battle with the IDF and was sunk outside Tel Aviv. For years afterward, Friedländer writes, any Israeli who learned that he had been on board the Altalena looked at him with suspicion.
This story, with its stranger-than-fiction twists and unspeakable emotional devastation, is told in When Memory Comes with a kind of quiet amazement, as though Friedländer himself doesn’t know exactly what to make of it. The scars of his childhood, he makes clear, never left him: He was prone to panic attacks, emotionally withdrawn, and phobic. The narrative that unfolds in the book is regularly punctuated by scenes from the then-present, where Friedländer is writing it in Jerusalem in 1977, and so we know that, in spite of everything, he survived, even thrived—he married, had children, became an eminent professor. Yet Friedländer makes very clear that he is not writing a story with a happy ending, much less a Zionist fable about redemption through aliyah. Instead, writing just as Israel was beginning peace talks with Sadat’s Egypt, Friedländer looks around him and is gravely suspicious of the country he lives in—a Jewish state occupying Palestinian land, prey to what he sees as extreme nationalism. Walking the streets of Tel Aviv, he writes, “aroused in me a feeling of malaise …and somewhere awakened in me profound misgivings that, perhaps, went to the very heart of things.”
When Memory Comes is a small masterpiece in the literature of the Holocaust. Its new sequel, Where Memory Leads, is a more conventional kind of memoir because it deals with a more normal, adult life, but it displays the same probing intelligence at work. The book follows the course of Friedländer’s life from 1948, when he arrived in Israel, down to the present; and it makes clear that while Friedländer was an Israeli, he retained an emotional and often physical distance from his adopted country. After spending five years in Israel and doing work in an army intelligence unit—an experience he passes over almost completely—Friedländer returned to Paris for graduate study. He went on to work as a secretary to Nahum Goldmann, the Zionist leader, which involved frequent travel between Jerusalem and New York. He got his doctorate in Geneva and spent part of every year there, even after he occupied a chair at Hebrew University and later at Tel Aviv University. And in the last part of his career he moved to Los Angeles, to teach at UCLA—a place about as far removed from Israel and Europe as you could get, spiritually and geographically.
Friedländer has an interesting store of anecdotes about the people and places he encountered—mainly scholars, from Gershom Scholem to Ernest Nolte—and he traces the growth, over decades, of his scholarly understanding of the Holocaust. He also notes that he played a vocal role on the Israeli left, participating (or trying to) in dialogues with Palestinians, and criticizing the West Bank settlements from the very beginning. He is dismayed by the vicious and thoughtless anti-Israelism that now pervades academia, yet he is also highly critical of what Israel has become: “If the present trend is not reversed…then, metaphorically speaking, regarding the values Israel once held dear, regarding the survival of an Israeli democracy, there is nothing more to say than God help us.” Yet throughout all his peregrinations, geographic and political, Friedländer always returns to the central fact that his is a Jewish story: “If anyone were to ask me what I consider my core identity, beyond any cultural imprint, something I would never be willing to deny or give up, I would answer without the least hesitation: I am a Jew, albeit one without any religious or tradition-related attachments, yet indelibly marked by the Shoah. Ultimately, I am nothing else.”
***
You can help support Tablet’s unique brand of Jewish journalism. Click here to donate today.
Adam Kirsch is the director of the MA program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature.
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UNITED STATES / ARMIN ROSEN
These are the questions he set out to answer in his most personal book, When Memory Comes, a short, sparely written memoir first published in 1978. It has now been released in a new edition, by Other Press, to accompany a newly published second volume of Friedländer’s memoirs, Where Memory Leads. Taken together, these books form a primary document of modern Jewish history—a contribution to the study of the past that uses the tools not of the historian, but of the autobiographer. A scholar attempts to ascertain details and facts, and synthesize them into a complete narrative. A memoirist, however, knows that what matters most about the past, the way it felt, is always elusive, partial, reconstructed rather than recollected. Friedländer’s title tellingly reverses the formula he uses in the epigraph to When Memory Comes, taken from the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink: “When knowledge comes, memory comes too, little by little. Knowledge and memory are one and the same thing.” For Friedländer, it is memory that comes first, bringing a kind of imperfect knowledge in its train.
Friedländer’s early life, as he describes it in Where Memory Leads, followed the pattern of many Central European Jews born at what he calls “the worst possible moment”—in 1932, just months before Hitler took power. “Everyone in our house felt German,” he recalls, and he was called Paul—a Christian name, and a sign of the family’s seemingly complete assimilation into the culture of German-speaking Prague, where they lived. (Later, after he moved to Israel, he would change it to Saul, thus reversing the process that turned the first-century Jew Saul into the Christian saint, Paul.) Like all children, he believed his world to be normal because it was the only world he knew: “The way of life of the Jews in the Prague of my childhood was perhaps futile and ‘rootless,’ seen from a historical viewpoint. Yet this way of life was ours, the one we treasured, and there is no point in pretending otherwise.”
This way of life came to a sudden end in March 1939, when Hitler seized the rump state of Czechoslovakia for the Third Reich. As Jews, Friedländer’s parents knew they had to flee, though they dissembled this fact for their young son: “I was told that we were leaving Prague because the Germans had occupied Czechoslovakia and because we were Czech.” The family ended up, like many Jewish refugees from Hitler, in Paris, which at the time seemed like a haven. Yet as Friedländer shows, the trauma of dislocation and exile was inescapable, even before the worst came. One of his most painful memories of this period comes from the months he spent at a Jewish boarding school, where he was bullied and beaten up by the other students because he did not speak Yiddish or wear a kippah. He was, they taunted, a “goy”—an unspeakably bitter irony, and one that echoes through Friedländer’s later account of his complex, ambivalent relationship with Jewishness.
After the fall of France in 1940, the Friedländers fled to a small town called Neris, but soon they were no longer safe even there. Paul’s parents took a last, desperate step: They had their son baptized as a Catholic and entrusted him to the care of a severe, conservative Catholic school. In his reserved style, Friedländer conveys the utter desolation and misery he felt at being separated from his parents, which led him, at the age of just 10, to attempt to drown himself. He would never see them again: As he learned much later, they were captured while attempting to cross the border into Switzerland and deported to Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Paul-Henri, as he was now known, embraced Catholicism with the ardor of a preadolescent. The contradiction of his situation was flagrant: Here was a Jewish boy being hidden by Catholics who embraced the anti-Semitic Vichy regime and admired Marshal Petain.
Yet at least Friedländer had found a kind of home; and then he lost this one too, after the war, when he was released into the custody of a local Jewish guardian. By the age of 16, when he started at a prestigious lycee in Paris, Friedländer had been through more shock, dislocation, and loss than most people experience in a lifetime. It was as a reaction to all this, he makes clear, that he embraced Zionism. Only in Israel could he find anything like a secure home: “I did not become a Zionist by way of a renewal of contact with buried emotional layers, but rather as a result of logical argument, of a simple line of reasoning that nonetheless in those days seemed to me to be a compelling one.”
In 1948, as the War of Independence raged, Friedländer determined to join the Jewish state at any price. Although he knew little about intra-Zionist politics, he lied about his age and joined Betar, the youth group associated with the Irgun, the right-wing terrorist organization. Fatefully, the ship he boarded to leave Europe was none other than the Altalena. Students of Israeli history will recognize the name: Packed with Irgun fighters and weaponry, the ship was seen as a threat by the new government of David Ben-Gurion and was not allowed to dock. Friedländer left the ship with most of the passengers before it got embroiled in a gun battle with the IDF and was sunk outside Tel Aviv. For years afterward, Friedländer writes, any Israeli who learned that he had been on board the Altalena looked at him with suspicion.
This story, with its stranger-than-fiction twists and unspeakable emotional devastation, is told in When Memory Comes with a kind of quiet amazement, as though Friedländer himself doesn’t know exactly what to make of it. The scars of his childhood, he makes clear, never left him: He was prone to panic attacks, emotionally withdrawn, and phobic. The narrative that unfolds in the book is regularly punctuated by scenes from the then-present, where Friedländer is writing it in Jerusalem in 1977, and so we know that, in spite of everything, he survived, even thrived—he married, had children, became an eminent professor. Yet Friedländer makes very clear that he is not writing a story with a happy ending, much less a Zionist fable about redemption through aliyah. Instead, writing just as Israel was beginning peace talks with Sadat’s Egypt, Friedländer looks around him and is gravely suspicious of the country he lives in—a Jewish state occupying Palestinian land, prey to what he sees as extreme nationalism. Walking the streets of Tel Aviv, he writes, “aroused in me a feeling of malaise …and somewhere awakened in me profound misgivings that, perhaps, went to the very heart of things.”
When Memory Comes is a small masterpiece in the literature of the Holocaust. Its new sequel, Where Memory Leads, is a more conventional kind of memoir because it deals with a more normal, adult life, but it displays the same probing intelligence at work. The book follows the course of Friedländer’s life from 1948, when he arrived in Israel, down to the present; and it makes clear that while Friedländer was an Israeli, he retained an emotional and often physical distance from his adopted country. After spending five years in Israel and doing work in an army intelligence unit—an experience he passes over almost completely—Friedländer returned to Paris for graduate study. He went on to work as a secretary to Nahum Goldmann, the Zionist leader, which involved frequent travel between Jerusalem and New York. He got his doctorate in Geneva and spent part of every year there, even after he occupied a chair at Hebrew University and later at Tel Aviv University. And in the last part of his career he moved to Los Angeles, to teach at UCLA—a place about as far removed from Israel and Europe as you could get, spiritually and geographically.
Friedländer has an interesting store of anecdotes about the people and places he encountered—mainly scholars, from Gershom Scholem to Ernest Nolte—and he traces the growth, over decades, of his scholarly understanding of the Holocaust. He also notes that he played a vocal role on the Israeli left, participating (or trying to) in dialogues with Palestinians, and criticizing the West Bank settlements from the very beginning. He is dismayed by the vicious and thoughtless anti-Israelism that now pervades academia, yet he is also highly critical of what Israel has become: “If the present trend is not reversed…then, metaphorically speaking, regarding the values Israel once held dear, regarding the survival of an Israeli democracy, there is nothing more to say than God help us.” Yet throughout all his peregrinations, geographic and political, Friedländer always returns to the central fact that his is a Jewish story: “If anyone were to ask me what I consider my core identity, beyond any cultural imprint, something I would never be willing to deny or give up, I would answer without the least hesitation: I am a Jew, albeit one without any religious or tradition-related attachments, yet indelibly marked by the Shoah. Ultimately, I am nothing else.”
***
You can help support Tablet’s unique brand of Jewish journalism. Click here to donate today.
Adam Kirsch is the director of the MA program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature.
-------
UNITED STATES / ARMIN ROSEN
Trump’s Jews The Republican presidential candidate has Jewish family members and friends. Here’s who they are.It’s been decades since a major party presidential candidate had a harder case to make to American Jewish voters than Donald Trump. Trump has supported policies that sit uneasily with American Jews, and shown what some deem to be an alarming tolerance for anti-Semitic supporters and even a tone-deaf enthusiasm for some of their iconography. At the same time, Trump is the father of an Orthodox Jew and counts Jews among his closest advisers and supporters. Few other serious presidential candidates have had as up-close or as personal an experience with Jews or Judaism.
That familiarity isn’t going to make it any easier for him to build on the 30 percent of the Jewish vote that Mitt Romney received in 2012. During the primary season, Trump distinguished himself from his rivals through taking maximalist stances on immigration enforcement, particularly relating to Muslims and refugees from the Syrian civil war. American Jews are not only politically liberal, but they are also sensitive to the dangers that vulnerable minority populations face both inside the United States and beyond. For some Jews, Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States recalled earlier American movements to limit Jewish immigration or to scapegoat American Jews for the country’s social and political ills.
And then there’s the steady pattern of anti-Semitism-related incidents that have somehow involved the Trump campaign, a trend that continues to this day. There was Trump’s hesitance to reject the support of anti-Semitic former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke; his failure to condemn supporters who had been sending anti-Semitic death threats to journalist Julia Ioffe after she published a profile of Melania Trump in GQ; his habit of re-tweeting white supremacists; and his use of the slogan “America First,” which has an anti-Semitic provenance. Most recently, there was his promulgation of an anti-Semitic anti-Hillary Clinton image that originated in a white nationalist web forum. At the very least, Trump has not appeared to be all that reflective about his campaign’s success in attracting vocally anti-Semitic supporters.
On the other hand, Trump has an intimate familiarity with Jewish practice and Jewish life. His daughter, Ivanka, converted to Orthodox Judaism in 2009; if elected, Trump would be the first president to be the parent and grand-parent of observant Jews. Ivanka’s husband, real-estate magnate Jared Kushner, is an Orthodox Jew and one of Trump’s top advisers. The Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer and general counsel are both observant Jews, and Trump has the support of perhaps the single most important political donor in the American Jewish world—Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Though he is a deeply repellent political figure to many American Jews, Trump can plausibly claim that Jews and Judaism are closer to the center of his life and work than they are for his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s favored Jews have a seemingly limitless confidence in their benefactor’s personal qualities. The Trump they know is decisive, serious, tolerant, and generous, and they’ve formed their impressions out of years or even decades of personal experience with the man. Despite this special access, their belief in Trump himself—which is often independent of any deep ideological kinship—helps demystify exactly why the real-estate developer, who is so blatantly and viscerally unpalatable to tens of millions of Americans, appeals to tens of millions of others.
The Trump Jews also hint at some of Trumpworld’s defining organizational tendencies. With the possible exception of Sheldon Adelson, every one of the major Trump Jews has known Trump for years, is personally friends with Trump, or is connected to his family through marriage. One of Trump’s Jews is known to be a registered Democrat. One of them was a leading Democratic donor who has a tortured history with one of Trump’s most dedicated surrogates.
Trump’s Jews reflect the importance of personal loyalty within Trump’s political and moral universe—as well as a certain degree of diversity in ideology and background among the people who have come to believe in him the most. They can be divided into three circles of influence, which, save for the candidate’s daughter Ivanka, don’t overlap all that much: the loyalists of the Trump Organization; the moneyed political world around candidate Trump; and the candidate’s family. Of those circles, it seems fair to say that the Trump organization people have been with Trump the longest, while his family possesses the most direct influence with the candidate.
***
THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION
Jason Greenblatt
That familiarity isn’t going to make it any easier for him to build on the 30 percent of the Jewish vote that Mitt Romney received in 2012. During the primary season, Trump distinguished himself from his rivals through taking maximalist stances on immigration enforcement, particularly relating to Muslims and refugees from the Syrian civil war. American Jews are not only politically liberal, but they are also sensitive to the dangers that vulnerable minority populations face both inside the United States and beyond. For some Jews, Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States recalled earlier American movements to limit Jewish immigration or to scapegoat American Jews for the country’s social and political ills.
And then there’s the steady pattern of anti-Semitism-related incidents that have somehow involved the Trump campaign, a trend that continues to this day. There was Trump’s hesitance to reject the support of anti-Semitic former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke; his failure to condemn supporters who had been sending anti-Semitic death threats to journalist Julia Ioffe after she published a profile of Melania Trump in GQ; his habit of re-tweeting white supremacists; and his use of the slogan “America First,” which has an anti-Semitic provenance. Most recently, there was his promulgation of an anti-Semitic anti-Hillary Clinton image that originated in a white nationalist web forum. At the very least, Trump has not appeared to be all that reflective about his campaign’s success in attracting vocally anti-Semitic supporters.
On the other hand, Trump has an intimate familiarity with Jewish practice and Jewish life. His daughter, Ivanka, converted to Orthodox Judaism in 2009; if elected, Trump would be the first president to be the parent and grand-parent of observant Jews. Ivanka’s husband, real-estate magnate Jared Kushner, is an Orthodox Jew and one of Trump’s top advisers. The Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer and general counsel are both observant Jews, and Trump has the support of perhaps the single most important political donor in the American Jewish world—Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Though he is a deeply repellent political figure to many American Jews, Trump can plausibly claim that Jews and Judaism are closer to the center of his life and work than they are for his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s favored Jews have a seemingly limitless confidence in their benefactor’s personal qualities. The Trump they know is decisive, serious, tolerant, and generous, and they’ve formed their impressions out of years or even decades of personal experience with the man. Despite this special access, their belief in Trump himself—which is often independent of any deep ideological kinship—helps demystify exactly why the real-estate developer, who is so blatantly and viscerally unpalatable to tens of millions of Americans, appeals to tens of millions of others.
The Trump Jews also hint at some of Trumpworld’s defining organizational tendencies. With the possible exception of Sheldon Adelson, every one of the major Trump Jews has known Trump for years, is personally friends with Trump, or is connected to his family through marriage. One of Trump’s Jews is known to be a registered Democrat. One of them was a leading Democratic donor who has a tortured history with one of Trump’s most dedicated surrogates.
Trump’s Jews reflect the importance of personal loyalty within Trump’s political and moral universe—as well as a certain degree of diversity in ideology and background among the people who have come to believe in him the most. They can be divided into three circles of influence, which, save for the candidate’s daughter Ivanka, don’t overlap all that much: the loyalists of the Trump Organization; the moneyed political world around candidate Trump; and the candidate’s family. Of those circles, it seems fair to say that the Trump organization people have been with Trump the longest, while his family possesses the most direct influence with the candidate.
***
THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION
Jason Greenblatt
Just four months months ago, Jason Greenblatt was the Trump Organization’s general counsel and one of the company’s top in-house legal officers. Today, Greenblatt, who has worked for Trump since the mid-1990s, is one of the candidate’s top advisers on Israel and Jewish affairs and the campaign’s primary liaison to the Jewish community. When The Forward declared a 24-hour moratorium on Trump-related coverage on June 20, to protest Trump supporters’ online bullying of journalists, Greenblatt wrote the campaign’s response. And when controversy erupted over Trump’s use of an image of Hillary Clinton that had originated on a white nationalist web forum, Greenblatt defended the candidate in the Washington Post, citing his own experiences with Trump. “The clearest refutation of the claim of anti-Semitism, or the claim that Mr. Trump is someone who encourages, condones or panders to anti-Semitic behavior, is his lifelong embrace of the Jewish people and his record of staunch support for Jewish causes and Israel,” Greenblatt wrote.Greenblatt, who is an Orthodox Jew, told Tablet that Trump has never made an issue of his Sabbath observance, letting him break for Shabbat during in-progress real-estate negotiations and accommodating his family’s Sabbath observance during visits to Mar-a-Lago. In Greenblatt’s view, any perceptions of anti-Semitism among Trump or his supporters are the result of distorted media narratives and not any anti-Jewish bigotry that’s endemic to the campaign. “That unease is misguided and misplaced,” Greenblatt says of Jewish nervousness toward Trump’s alleged dalliances with anti-Semitism. “I hope that people will figure that out. I think truthfully it’s the responsibility of everybody to figure it out.”
Greenblatt had never worked in politics until Trump made him a campaign adviser, and he has no formal background in Middle East policy. “I’m not a political guy,” he explained. “I’m only involved in politics now because of who I work for.” His motivation in his new line of work, he said, stems largely from his confidence in Trump’s personal qualities, which Greenblatt has witnessed up close for over two decades. “You’re not just working for a giant organization,” Greenblatt says of the experience of working at Trump Tower, “you’re working for a human being. At a bank, or an investment bank, a law firm, you’re working with a bunch of people who work for a nameless, faceless organization. Here, you are working for a large company, but Donald is the guy.”
David M. Friedman
Friedman, a bankruptcy attorney who first began working for Trump roughly 15 years ago and who represented Trump during bankruptcy proceedings related to Trump-branded business ventures in Atlantic City, is the real-estate developer’s other top-ranking Israel adviser, along with Greenblatt. Haaretz named him as “the lead candidate” to be Trump’s ambassador to Israel. A former columnist for the right-wing Israeli website Arutz Sheva, Friedman is highly skeptical of the two-state solution. He is president of the American Friends of Bet-El, which is a West Bank settlement that sits just north of Ramallah and that is unlikely to remain under Israeli control in the event of a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority.Friedman, who has organized philanthropies in Israel and owns a home in the country, told Tablet that he believes that the legality of the settlements is still an open issue: “When Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama say settlements are illegal, that’s hardly a neutral position, especially given the fact that the legality of the settlements is highly debatable,” he said.
As a two-state solution skeptic and a supporter of one of the more politically thorny West Bank settlements, Friedman fits the profile of someone who might be concerned over the possibility of the United States taking a more “neutral” approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, something that Trump repeatedly advocatedduring the primary campaign. But Friedman believes that Trump’s endorsement of “neutrality” was anything but a slight against Israel. In his view, “neutrality” just meant brokering peace discussions without imposing preconditions on either side.
“To the extent that he thought there’s an opportunity to do some good, he’s only going to get involved if he thinks he can be helpful,” said Friedman of a future President Trump’s approach to the peace process. “He’s not going to be involved just to satisfy his ego, which is what Kerry and Obama were doing over the last year.” When asked whether he worried that he might be helping to elect the man who could negotiate Israel’s evacuation of Bet El under a final peace agreement, Friedman said, “I don’t have that concern because I just don’t think it’s a realistic outcome in the current environment.”
Like Greenblatt, Friedman does not think that the Trump campaign has become a locus of anti-Semitism. He believes that media coverage of anti-Semites’ support for Trump ignores the existence of left-wing anti-Semitism, and its alleged proximity to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“What do the Black Lives Matter people really think about Jews? What does the far left really think about the Jewish people? How much would you trust somebody who’s chanting a slogan about murdering police officers? Can you really think that the BDS movement is just a political movement or do you really think that it’s an anti-Semitic movement?” asked Friedman, when I spoke to him in late June. “Now, I for one think it’s an anti-Semitic movement, and I think the far left is just as anti-Semitic if not more so as the far right. But for some reason, whether it’s Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, they seem to get a pass on their support from the far left without anybody’s accusing them of harboring anti-Semitism within their campaign.”
Michael Cohen
Trump’s special counsel and executive vice president wasn’t able to vote for his boss in New York’s April 19 Republican primary—Cohen is a registered democrat. A decade as Trump’s primary spokesperson, gatekeeper, and personal lawyer have put him at the center of Republican presidential politics.Cohen, whom ABC news once described as Trump’s “pitbull,” speaks in a sharp New York brogue, and has something of a prickly reputation, as is arguably appropriate for someone acting as a first line of defense for such a controversial public figure. It’s a perception that Cohen apparently relishes: “If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” he told ABC in 2011. “If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck, and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”
This approach has occasionally gotten Cohen’s candidate in trouble—early in the campaign, Cohen threatened to ruin the life of Daily Beast reporter Tim Mak if he wrote about Trump ex-wife Ivana’s 1989 accusation that Trump had “violated” her during sex, which she stated in a deposition related to their early-1990s divorce. In conversations with Mak, Cohen repeatedly claimed that legally there is no such thing as spousal rape. Trump stuck by Cohen throughout the ensuing controversy.
When reached by phone and email this week, Cohen emphasized Trump’s “close connection to the Jewish people,” noting that his father, the real-estate developer Fred Trump, “was also highly recognized and praised by the Brooklyn/Queens Jewish communities.” Cohen took strong exception to linkages between his boss and anti-Semitism. “Nothing angers me more than the disgraceful liberal medias’ blatant mischaracterization of Mr. Trump as a racist,” Cohen wrote by email. “As the child of a Holocaust survivor, racism was never permitted in our home and I would never work for someone with those tendencies. Would a racist attend both of my children’s Bat and Bar Mitzvahs? Would he make a Jew an executive at his company and task that person to protect him, his company, and children? Anyone who believes for even a split second that this is true is too ignorant to engage in conversation. He is a great man and will live up to his mantra of making America great again!”
As Cohen explains, Trump also has simple, utterly non-bigoted criteria for evaluating people. “Mr. Trump treats all people exactly the same regardless of race, religion, creed or color,” he wrote. “Complete the task to his satisfaction and you are praised. Fail the task, well … you know what happens.”
THE FAMILY
Ivanka Trump
The 34-year-old daughter of Ivana and Donald Trump is one of the Trump campaign’s most important centers of power. Ivanka was reportedly the driving force behind the removal of former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski last month. Ivanka was said to be “very impressive” during her individual meetings with senators after Donald Trump’s awkward and occasionally hostile sit-down with congressional Republicans on July 7, a meeting that reportedly included a “tense exchange” between Trump and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake. As the New York Timesreported in April, Ivanka holds “an exalted position in the family, in their company, and even in the campaign,” serving as a trusted adviser and a “surrogate political spouse,” in light of Melania Trump’s aversion to the campaign trail. On the business side, Ivanka has negotiated the Trump Organization’s acquisition of a luxury golf resort in Miami and its renovation of the Old Post Office complex near the White House.Ivanka converted to Orthodox Judaism in 2009 under the guidance of influential Orthodox Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, before marrying the real-estate developer Jared Kushner. According to both Michael Cohen and Jason Greenblatt, Ivanka is a Sabbath observer; Cohen says she keeps “glatt kosher.” While Donald Trump has never undertaken any business projects in Israel, David Friedman told Tablet that he accompanied Ivanka to Israel “a few years ago” to “look at some hotel properties” (although “nothing tangible” came of the trip).
Ivanka almost never talks about her conversion to Judaism in public, but she briefly touched on the subject during a 2015 interview with Vogue. “It’s been such a great life decision for me,” she said of her conversion. “I am very modern, but I’m also a very traditional person, and I think that’s an interesting juxtaposition in how I was raised as well. I really find that with Judaism, it creates an amazing blueprint for family connectivity.”
Jared Kushner
When the now-35-year-old son of Charles Kushner married Ivanka Trump in 2006, he probably had little idea that the union would eventually turn him into one of the top players in American politics. According to a July New York Times report, Kushner is one of Trump’s closest advisers and serves as a de-facto campaign manager, brokering high-level meetings and mapping out damage control strategies after incidents like the Hillary Clinton-Jewish star tweet. He reportedly authored much of Trump’s well-received AIPAC speech from this past April, the first of the campaign in which the Republican candidate spoke with the aid of a teleprompter. Kushner is also the owner and publisher of the New York Observer, which endorsed Trump before the New York primary in April, in an editorial with the unforgettably frank opening: “Donald Trump is the father-in-law of the Observer’s publisher. That is not a reason to endorse him. Giving millions of disillusioned Americans a renewed sense of purpose and opportunity is.”The opening lines hint at the tensions embodied in Kushner’s role within the campaign. Kushner is the young, clean-cut face of one of the New York area’s most notorious real-estate clans—someone who could make the Forbes 40-under-40 list and close $2 billion in transactions in 2014 alone, despite his family’s well-documented troubles. At the same time, he’s connected by marriage to what many would already view as an inherently sordid enterprise, namely Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
This tension burst into the open on July 5, when Dana Schwartz, a writer with the New York Observer, used the website of Kushner’s paper to criticize her boss for defending Trump against charges of anti-Semitism, and attaching himself to a presidential candidate who had galvanized legions of Jew-haters. On July 6, Kushner used the Observer to argue that “my father-in-law is not an anti-Semite,” using his family’s history in the Holocaust and his relatives’ survival of the 1941 massacre at the Novogroduk ghetto, to deflect criticism of Trump after the Hillary-Clinton “sheriff star” incident earlier that week.
Kushner’s defense of his father-in-law didn’t sit well with members of Kushner’s own family. According to Politico, one of Kushner’s cousins took to Facebook to chastise him for using his family’s Holocaust history to argue for the innocuousness of an allegedly anti-Semitic image.
Through it all, Kushner has reportedly tried to steer the Trump campaign in a more restrained and respectable direction. He was reportedly involved in the June decision to dismiss Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s volatile former campaign manager. After his firing, Lewandowski said that Kushner was partly responsible for Trump’s Facebook page, which is one of the campaign’s more disciplined messaging organs.
Charles Kushner
The father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law was a tri-state area real-estate titan and one of the most important Democratic donors in the country. He landed in prison as the result of nearly Shakespearean levels of intrafamilial deceit—and because of the efforts of a federal prosecutor and present-day Trump superfan named Chris Christie.In 2004, Kushner was investigated for hiding violations of federal limits on campaign contributions, a probe that Christie oversaw while he was the U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Kushner then hired a prostitute in order to blackmail one of the case’s key witnesses, whose wife then informed investigators of Kushner’s attempts at obstruction of justice. To make matters worse, the witness and target of the blackmail attempt was Kushner’s brother-in-law, and it was Kushner’s sister, Esther, who exposed his plot to the feds. The campaign finance investigation stemmed from a dispute between Kushner and his brother Murray, a major New Jersey Republican donor and one of Chris Christie’s most important boosters.
Charles Kushner served 14 months in prison but remained a major philanthropic donor in northeast Jewish circles. In 2015, he donated $100,000 to Trump’s Make America Great Again PAC. Fifteen years earlier, he had been the largest individual donor to Hillary Clinton’s senate campaign.
THE DONORS
Steven Mnuchin
Trump’s national fundraising chairman belongs to a group that would seem to be especially unfriendly to the developer’s presidential run: Goldman Sachs alumni. Mnuchin, who now runs his own hedge fund, spent 19 years at the investment bank, where he served as chief information officer between 1999 and his departure in 2002 (Trump used Heidi Cruz’s Goldman Sachs connections to accuse her husband, Ted Cruz, of being in thrall to the financial giant). Mnuchin’s friendship with Donald Trump appears to be his overriding concern here, as he told the New York Times in May: “I was there at the beginning when he decided to run for president, and I’ve been a supporter and quiet adviser behind the scenes to him,” Mnuchin said.The personal affinity might come from Mnuchin’s colorful business dealings, which mirror Trump’s own craving for celebrity. Mnuchin was briefly co-chair of the now-defunct production company Relativity Media and has helped finance a number of major films, earning executive producer credits on Mad Max: Fury Road, American Sniper, and The Lego Movie. But Mnuchin also shares another similarity with Trump: namely, accusations of engaging in morally unsavory business dealings.
In 2010, Mnuchin was sued by a bankruptcy trustee for allegedly making $3.2 million off of Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme. Mnuchin was also chairman of OneWest bank during the height of the foreclosure crisis, overseeing one of the most trigger-happy lenders in the country: OneWest “routinely jumped to foreclosure rather than pursue options to keep borrowers in their homes; used fabricated and “robo-signed” documents to secure the evictions; and had a particular talent for dispossessing the homes of senior citizens and people of color,” according to a New Republic reportfrom this past May.
Public records suggest Mnuchin, who is a former Obama and Clinton donor, hasn’t been all that successful in convincing Republican funders to support Trump’s campaign. Trump’s presidential run raised only $3 million in May, compared to the $72 million Mitt Romney raised in June of 2012.
Sheldon Adelson
The owner of the Sands Casino in Las Vegas was one of the biggest swing voters of the Republican presidential primary. Despite reports that he was leaning toward supporting Marco Rubio—and reports that his wife, Miriam, preferred Ted Cruz—Adelson, who is worthsome $26.5 billion and spent over $150 million in political donations during the 2012 cycle alone, did not side with any of Donald Trump’s primary opponents. That didn’t stop Trump from tweeting that “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet.”Unlike much of the rest of the anti-Trump wing of the party, Adelson has come around to the reality of a Trump candidacy. On May 13, Adelson published an opinion piece in the Washington Post endorsing his fellow casino owner that made curiously little mention of Adelson’s signature issue: Israel. Adelson is also the owner of the free daily Israeli newspaper Yisrael Ha’Yom, which has been attempting to improve Trump’s image in that country.
Adelson is lukewarm on the two-state solution and broke with AIPAC in 2008 over the organization’s support for the peace process. While Adelson might be outside the American mainstream in his coldness toward a negotiated two-state outcome, his views are widely supported within Republican circles: Unlike its Democratic counterpart, this year’s Republican platform does not endorse the existence of a Palestinian state.
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Armin Rosen is a New York-based writer. He has written for The Atlantic, City Journal, andWorld Affairs Journal, and was recently a senior reporter for Business Insider.
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Can a Divided America Heal? The Bible offers some perspective on the reprecussions of a triumph of bravado, and a citizenship at odds by Erica BrownMany churches are holding a prayer service for healing today, to bring people together with humility and contrition over election-related bad behaviors, to try through faith to bring people together who have sparred mightily. The Episcopal Church of the First Ascension in Cartersville, Georgia will hold one at 12:15, if you’re interested. Alternatively, you can go to the “Unity Service of Healing for Our Nation” at the Avondale Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina at noon. The Rev. Mark D. Wilkinson of St. Aiden’s in Virginia Beach will be preaching at his healing service. Virginia is not only for lovers. It’s for pray-ers, too. Wilkinson wants us to go back to being good neighbors, better friends, empathic congregants. “I think it’s incredibly important to go back to treating each other with some sense of dignity,” he has said. Maybe noon is the popular hour because the hangover after the all-night drinking stupor, brought about by the Trump victory, needs time to wear off.But can healing take place so quickly when the fragmentation is so deep? I wonder. What will rabbis be doing across the country in their sermons this Shabbat? Will they, too, lead healing services? If I were a rabbi, I would teach II Chronicles 10 because this election cycle was biblical in its hubris and in the possibility it presents for redemption.
Here’s the basic plot. After King Solomon died, his son Rehaboam took his seat on the throne. Rehaboam would then reign for 17 years, have 18 wives, and 60 concubines. (That’s nothing compared to his father, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines.) Rehaboam had 28 sons and 60 daughters. He also had a very rough leadership start. One of Solomon’s ministers, Jeraboam, wanted a change in the kingdom and approached the new king with a committee (because if it’s Jewish, it needs a committee). They respectfully asked him to lighten the punishing work load that Solomon placed upon the people. For Solomon’s ambitious building plans of Temple and palace, he burdened the people with great labor. The people wanted a break: “Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but now lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke he put on us, and we will serve you” (II Chronicles 10:4).
Rehaboam asked for time. He wanted three days to think about his response, which would ultimately determine what kind of leader he wanted to be. This seems wise and thoughtful. He took the case to his father’s advisers, the old guard, to seek their considerable wisdom. They counselled Rehaboam to follow the people. Lighten the load. “How would you advise me to answer these people?” he asked. They replied, “If you will be kind to these people and please them and give them a favorable answer, they will always be your servants” (10:6-7). Lead with compassion and you will be rewarded with steady followship.
But Rehaboam then made a tragic error. He sought the counsel of his peers as well. These young, brash friends, full of machismo and arrogance, gave him different advice. Reject the peoples’ pleas. Stress your power: “If my father hit you with whips, I will hit you with scorpions,” they said. Ouch. “Now tell them, ‘My finger is thicker than my father’s loins’” (10:10). We hear the bravado and the sexual innuendo in these words. Politics for Rehaboam and his friends was not about influence; it was about power, the power to corrupt, to exploit, to diminish, and to demean.
Three days passed, and the committee came back. No surprise, Rehaboam used the language of his rag-tag band. He spoke of scorpions and loins. The people left dejected, but instead of simply accepting more of the king’s dominance, they fought power with their own limited power. The king hired a task-master—and like in an earlier version of a young Jewish man who killed an Egyptian task-master beating a slave—the people fought back. “King Rehaboam sent out Adoniram, who was in charge of forced labor, yet the Israelites stoned him to death. King Rehaboam, however, managed to get into his chariot and escape to Jerusalem. So Israel has been in rebellion against the house of David to this day” (10:18-19).
The people got the last word. They killed their tormentor to access their freedom. Rehaboam escaped, frightened of the mutiny that his bravado generated. When people feel highly charged and their needs are grossly neglected, they sometimes resort to violence.
Many of us woke up today to a different America. All across this country, we find voters, who felt angry and disenfranchised, today proudly claiming victory in a fight colored by bravado, by a mean-spirited, hate-filled campaign. They feel heard. Trump’s America promises a different landscape, not the liberal elite one that his supporters feel has controlled the country for too long. The people, just as in Rehoboam’s day, ultimately triumphed. But in our story, the king had to run away because he used his power inappropriately.
I think about Donald Trump’s first days of leadership. I wonder, President-elect, who will your advisers be? Only you can decide if you will continue the bold swagger of power or opt for the civilizing influence of persuasion. This country’s deep political divide requires more than reaching across the aisle. It’s almost like reaching across the universe. Raw power appeals to people who feel powerless. It appealed to Rehaboam. But the Bible always advocates a referendum, so to speak, on human power. It contains story after story of power gone awry with the hope that someone is listening, that someone will privilege influence over power. It’s a return to the politics of respect that will ultimately heal us.
Healing is not only about bringing people together who are in pain. It’s about changing the binary discourse of hate and control that created the suffering in the first place. As citizens, we may not have political power, but we have the power to heal ourselves and each other and this country.
Let a new day begin.
Previous: The Case for Hope
Dr Erica Brown is an Associate Professor at George Washington University and the director of its Mayberg Center for Jewish Education and Leadership.
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A Former Soviet Jew’s Political Journey How I went from a Reagan supporter to feeling despondent over Trump and my children’s future by Maxim D. ShrayerI went to bed last night wondering what Chekhov, my favorite Russian writer and a supreme student of vulgarity, might say about this election. At 4 a.m. I woke up and saw in the news that a bad premonition had been transmogrified into a travesty of form. I woke up my wife, shared the wild news of the Republican win, then tossed in bed for an hour and finally fell back asleep as my daughters were just waking up. I had an absurdly vatic dream: I found myself back in Russia, in Leningrad, in a huge apartment on the Petrograd Side of the city, standing with close friends and their grown children, gnashing sunflower seeds and spitting the shells onto a luxurious Oriental rug. When my 9-year-old daughter ran into the bedroom, she asked my wife: “Is it true that we’ll have to leave the country?” My Philadelphia-born wife, herself the daughter of Jewish immigrants, assured our child that “even though papa is an immigrant, he’s a naturalized citizen,” and nothing threatened us as of today.That’s how the morning began. My daughters dressed in black. I took them to school and drove to a nearby Toyota dealership for an oil change. Sipping weak coffee, I sat in the waiting area, surrounded by grim Bostonians. I was thinking of what had happened, and of the first time when American elections had touched a chord in me.
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1984, Moscow.
I was a freshman at Moscow University. My parents and I had been refuseniks for over five years, and my father was soon to enter the worst spiral of persecution by the Soviet authorities. Exodus from Russia was constantly on our minds. Among our American acquaintances was an historian of the 19th century Russia, a Jewish professor from an East Coast university, who was doing research in Soviet archives. On that November day he came to see us directly after having voted at the U.S. embassy.
“For Reagan?” I asked with hope in my voice.
“No, for Mondale,” the American scholar answered softly. At the time I understood very little about American life; I imagined Mondale as a left-winger, and regarded the actor Reagan as a sworn enemy of the Soviet bloc and a defender of human rights.
At the time I linked President Reagan unequivocally with anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism, and appreciated him because of his support of the cause of Soviet Jews. Issues of Reagan’s domestic politics had been of no interest to me as my family struggled for our right to leave the USSR. I don’t think this could have been otherwise at the time, given the country in which I was living and my family’s ideological confrontation with its regime. My political recalibration began in 1987-1988. Soon after coming to America I became aware of an enduring stereotype of a Jewish-Soviet immigrant who votes Republican and abhors Democratic candidates. But I also encountered plenty of Russian-American Jews who felt, as I did increasingly, that voting was not only a matter of politics and ideology but also a matter of taste, an aesthetic choice.
In 1988 I witnessed my first American election. I was now a Brown University student, an immigrant with over a year of American living under my belt. My friend and roommate Chris, a Sacramentan and romantic anarchist, was passionately rooting for Dukakis. Together we watched the election night coverage. I was still a “stateless shadow” (to borrow Nabokov’s phrase) and couldn’t vote, but I remember two simultaneous sensations: a slight stirring of irritation when Dukakis discussed his family’s immigrant background, and knowing with my gut that the political rhetoric of the elder Bush was unacceptable.
Almost 30 years have gone by. I’ve become a U.S. citizen and voted in all the elections, starting in 1996, when Clinton defeated Dole. All these years I’ve voted for Democratic candidates, not only owing to the call of heart and mind but because the Democratic candidates agreed with my taste, with my sense of aesthetic decorum. Or was it because I envisioned Republican presidential candidates as members of some other circle of people, a society to which I didn’t belong for a number of biographical and personal reasons? They all seemed strangers to me—the Yale cowboy George W., the traumatized American soldier McCain, the Mormon illusionist Romney.
I won’t lie to you: Every time, when a Republican nominee would emerge and a new election campaign would start, I thought of a possible Republican victory as a defeat of my Russian and Jewish ideals and predilections. But never before has a Republican candidate’s victory appeared to me as a coup of ugliness—a Bosch painting, in which everything gross triumphs, and everything fine is vanquished and punished. To me as a Jewish-Russian immigrant this is a traumatic event.
Now, this previously unimaginable, topsy-turvy aesthetic outcome has become our new reality. I don’t want to say that die-hard reactionaries have won. This is not a victory, it’s some unthinkable apotheosis of philistinism. How can I shield my children from this spreading threat of public crudeness? From an effigy with colored hair and vocabulary of a tacky third-grader?
That’s all. My car is ready, it’s time to go. A blessed autumn here in New England. And American roads have not yet been blocked by tractor patrols.
Maxim D. Shrayer is a professor at Boston College and the author, most recently, of Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, and the editor of Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories by David Shrayer-Petrov. Shrayer lives in Brookline, Mass., with his family and in summer directs the South Chatham Writers’ Workshop on Cape Cod.
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US President Barack Obama walks to the residence after delivering remarks on airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) targets in Syria from the White House South Lawn September 23, 2014 in Washington, DC. During his remarks, Obama said ‘We’re going to do what is necessary to take the fight to this terrorist group. (Photo: Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
Over the past five-and-a-half years, the Obama White House has used the Syria echo chamber it created in the American press and on social media to defend and advance the president’s policy of nonintervention against the Assad regime. After the White House’s attempt to negotiate a deal to cooperate militarily with Russia in Syria fell apart last month, one of the administration’s most experienced Syria echo-chamber hands—Steven Simon—sprang into action.
To help readers understand how this inside baseball is played, I have annotated a recent article that Simon, a former National Security Council official in the Obama White House and now a supposedly impartial analyst, published, together with Jonathan Stevenson, in The New York Times. The genre of Simon’s current piece could be described as “policy advice to the new president.”
In the past, Simon has written articles making the White House’s case in different genres, such as the “time for a new Syria policy” genre, which I explained here, which validates current Obama policy in the guise of “rethinking” it, and then proposes a supposedly “new” approach—which will invariably prove to be the next step in the current policy. As Obama’s term comes to a close, the goal of the echo chamberists is for the next president to continue with Obama’s Syria policy.
Some of the talking points Simon lays out here for the administration’s pet think-tankers and bloggers to follow are familiar, such as “it’s too late for the United States to do anything.” But they’ve been updated with new ones, like “any military action now risks a major war with Russia”—a line that is delivered with the heavy condescension that is typical of the genre. Simon also tackles some specific concerns raised by pesky do-gooders and editorialists, such as the question of a no-fly zone. For those who have trouble reading, these exact same White House talking points were repeated by White House National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes in a podcast interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker, which lately has made a practice of echoing Syria pieces that the administration places first in the Times.
In both cases, the takeaway is clear: Obama’s Syria policy is the best among a set of bad options, and the only sensible course of action for Americans concerned by the five-and-a-half-year-long slaughter is to keep cooperating with the Russians and forget any ideas about arming rebels or going after Assad.
To read a detailed annotation of the Simon piece, click here.
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Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.
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Gal Gadot Is Pregnant (Again), Giving Us the Post-Election Beam of Light We All Need Wondrous news from Wonder Woman by Rachel ShukertYou guys, we need a distraction today, right? God knows I do. On Facebook, one weirdo I refused to go out with in 8th grade ranted to me about how the Clintons are murderers (who have also, apparently, robbed him of his ability to understand basic spelling or the concept of homophones), while others have touted with glee our new president-elect Donald Trump. Gulp. So, we need something positive and sunny and uncontroversial that we can all get behind, right? Ok, I got you.Gal Gadot, the newly minted Wonder Woman by way of Tel Aviv—actually Rosh HaAyin but whatever, everything in Israel is basically 15 minutes away from everything else—is having a brand-new Wonderbaby! That’s right! She and her husband, Israeli real estate developer Yaron Versano, announced via Instagram(where all such announcement shall henceforth be made) that they are currently expecting their second child. Hurray! The year 2017, while possibly also the year our republic ends, plunging us into a race war and possible dystopian genocide, will also boast a bumper crop of new babies from Tablet favorites. Don’t forget, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis are pregnant too. So there’s that; there are lots of new little Jewish glamour princes and princesses coming down the pike. Life goes on.
Which is really the whole point. No matter how bad things get in the weeks to come, or the four years to come, or the eight years to come, now that that shadowy cabal led by George Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein, has been overtaken, giving credence to the likes of Curt Schilling and the KKK, whose platform became an actual platform on the coattails of Trump’s rhetoric—
—No, no. No, no, no. I said I wasn’t going to do this. I promised myself I’d calm down if Mr. Trump became Mr. President-elect. I promised myself I’d quell my fears of a blond man wanting to control what I can and cannot do with my body, kick out immigrants, overturn gay marriage. I promised myself I wouldn’t freak if Trump won, putting into jeopardy any sort of social progress that itself came years and years too late.
OK, back to the babies and silver living. There’s something a little bit reassuring about the idea that the sun will come up and we will all still eat breakfast and our car leases will stand and we’ll still be able to use hard currency (although if I said I hadn’t delayed adding to my investment portfolio until the election results are in, I’d be lying.) And babies, the ultimate act of optimism, will still be born. It’s up to us to make sure their lives will be worth living. But they’ll live them nonetheless. And on that happy note, mazel tov, Wonder Baby! To many, many, many more.
Gal Gadot Don’t Need No Men
First Image of Gal Gadot’s ‘Wonder Woman’ Released
Rachel Shukert, a Tablet Magazine columnist on pop culture, is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great. Starstruck, the first in a series of three novels, is new from Random House. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.
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Why women saying kaddish have trouble finding a place to pray; how picking mushrooms became a tradition for Russian Jewish immigrants; more from Tablet Magazine of New York, New York, United States "The Case for Hope" for Wednesday, November 9, 2016A Time To Mourn Without a Place to Pray
TALIA BLOCH When I wanted to say kaddish for my mother, I found that my options as a woman were limited—and less than welcomingI was standing in a pen, like a holding pen for livestock, or so it sometimes felt. I was in an office building in Lower Manhattan in a small area of a large conference room sectioned-off by a black, fabric folding wall reaching three-quarters to the ceiling. The folding wall was a mechitzah separating the space into a men’s and women’s side for a mincha minyan, or afternoon prayer service, to which I had come to say kaddish for my mother.
The men’s side was spacious. It had two or three large tables, several dozen chairs, and a row of windows along one wall. On our side, there were no chairs or tables, and the folding wall curved around, cutting off access to the windows. The 10 or so women praying stood in staggered fashion, trying to give one another room in the cramped space.
It had been almost 11 months since my mother passed away, approaching the end of the mourning period, and I had visited my share of synagogues and minyanim.
Men have written extensively about their experiences observing the kaddish ritual. In books and articles, they have delved into the origins of the custom and mulled over its beauty and tedium. They have explored the sorrows, rage, frustrations, and comfort that can accompany the year of mourning. Yet, as a woman saying kaddish, I quickly found that instead of being able to immerse myself in this ritual, these precious moments were overshadowed by feelings of self-consciousness and discomfort just because I was a woman trying to honor her mother as a Jew.
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Immediately following the burial of a parent, a child is immersed in an 11-month mourning period that begins with the seven days of “sitting” shiva and progresses through stages of lesser intensity as the months pass. Throughout this period, the mourner daily recites the kaddish, or more precisely, the Mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer that requires a communal service. When my mother died suddenly in June of last year, I knew I would be reciting kaddish for her, if not every day, then as often as I could. Although not Orthodox, I grew up in a fairly traditional Jewish home, observing a certain amount of Jewish practice and belonging to both Conservative and Orthodox congregations. Some two decades prior, I had watched as my father recited kaddish daily after his own mother passed away.
So on the evening of the Monday that I got up from sitting shiva, I went to services at the Conservative synagogue nearest my home in Brooklyn, which, at the time, had a weekday minyan, but one that still adhered to Orthodox protocol of counting only men toward the quorum of 10 adults required for reciting communal prayers. My husband came along, as much for moral support as to help make the quorum. But when we arrived, we found just three men—the synagogue sexton, my husband, and another man—and one elderly woman. The congregation very rarely got a quorum on weekdays, the sexton told my husband, especially during the summer.
Not to worry, I thought. Given the number and variety of places for Jewish worship in New York City, finding a place to recite kaddish would be as easy as looking up the congregations nearest home and work and checking their daily schedules. And this would have been the case—had I been a man.
Several nights later, I visited an Orthodox congregation one neighborhood over. I was the only woman there. Again my husband came with me, and when it came time to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, I listened from behind the mechitzah as the rabbi asked my husband whether he would be reciting the prayer for me. When my husband replied that I would be saying kaddish myself, the rabbi practically started shouting the prayer in unison with me. Is he trying to help me out in case I don’t know the words, I wondered as I struggled to hold my own, or is he just trying to drown out my voice?
The kaddish does not speak of the dead. Rather, it is an ancient hymn sanctifying God and the divine name. The bereaved affirms faith in God’s ways despite the loss just experienced. Tradition also holds that if an offspring of the deceased leads the community in praising God, this will merit the soul of the departed, ensuring that he or she will achieve salvation. This is why the Mourner’s Kaddish—as well as other versions of the kaddish, of which there are several—may only be recited as part of public prayer. Because women have no role or only a very limited role in public prayer in most Orthodox communities, a woman reciting the kaddish is a matter of controversy. At play are issues of modesty (a woman’s voice is seen as a possible distraction to men during prayer) and whether reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish does, in fact, rise to the status of leading public prayer. While a number of Orthodox congregations permit a woman to recite the kaddish, and some permit it if a man is doing so as well, many don’t allow it at all.
My own synagogue, a Modern Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn, does permit women to say kaddish, and that is where I often went for the Sabbath. But this synagogue had no quorum for daily services, and moreover, it was too far for me to attend on a daily basis.
Liberal branches of Judaism, meanwhile, allow women to participate in public prayer. Yet, there I found the possibilities for attending daily services much more limited and no congregation was close enough to home or work—nor, as a rule, are there liberal independent weekday prayer groups that meet outside of synagogues.
Around my home, therefore, my options for saying kaddish daily turned out to be next to none. Ever hopeful, I looked to possibilities near work—which is how I found myself 11 months later behind that black folding wall in Lower Manhattan. I was grateful that this minyan made provisions for women to pray and that there were women who attended. Yet I was, with one exception, the only woman who ever used her voice during prayer and who said the Mourner’s Kaddish out loud as the men on the other side were reciting it.
Over the months that I had attended services with this group and several others around the city, I found my thoughts consumed more with the uncomfortable experiences of social exclusion than with those of mourning. I may have been thinking of the last time I saw my mother alive or about the week she died when I set out from the office to go to a minyan down the street, but by the time I had taken my place among the worshippers, too often I was caught up in the sorts of feelings one has at a party where you sense you are not wanted or don’t belong.
There was the awkward silence and averted eyes, each time as I waited for the elevator with a group of men—all going to the same minyan. Or the minyan that preferred to know ahead of time if I, as “the woman,” was going to be there.
There was the time when a mechitzah was not yet set up, and as the women moved the panels back and forth, attempting to get them into place, a man stepped over from behind the other side and declared with irritated sarcasm, “Why don’t you just put it where you want it and tell us where to stand,” as if this were not what men were doing to women all the time.
Or the time when the service ended without a Mourner’s Kaddish, because, apparently, no man needed to recite the prayer and the fact that a woman “on the other side” needed to do so was not even a thought.
There was the minyan that, although relatively welcoming—some of the men spoke to me and one even said he was glad to have me join them—had no mechitzah up, so they hastily created one from a tall filing cabinet. Happy enough to oblige, I took my place in the makeshift nook between the wall and the filing cabinet, dropped my things onto a chair that I had squeezed into the space, and waited for services to begin. Just as prayers started, a young man ran over and pushed a chair a few feet in front of me, as if he were closing the gate behind the sheep after they had been led into the pen for the night. Was he afraid I might run out? What else could I do but laugh?
What, I wondered, was so dangerous or infecting about me as a woman that I had to be treated as something to be contained? It was not the mechitzah that I was objecting to; my own shul has one. It was the way it was so often used. It was the way we women had to make ourselves small and silent, even when we just wanted to recite a simple prayer for the dead. Exactly what commandment, I wondered, was a man fulfilling when he drowned out the voice of a woman grieving for her mother? What does this say about the Jewish community? And since Jewish law is said to be grounded in divine will, can this really reflect the intent of a benevolent deity?
There were exceptions, of course—my Brooklyn shul being one of them. A shul in Manhattan’s Garment District was another. These places brought true meaning to the traditional farewell of those leaving a shiva house: “May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” And there are other such congregations in New York, especially on the Upper West Side. Too often, however, I ended up feeling like some sort of interloper, as if I were making a statement by reciting the kaddish, when, in fact, I wasn’t trying to make a statement at all. Even under the best of circumstances, at services where a woman reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish was perfectly acceptable, I felt a bit self-conscious standing among friends or strangers and raising my voice. Grief is private; the kaddish is not.
As the months passed, I became aware that reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish was not just a way to honor my mother, an Israeli-American and a proud and committed Jew. It was also a way to stay close to the days and moments just after her death, and, by extension, a way to remain close to the time before she died—the days, weeks, and months when she was still alive. This, for me, was perhaps the greatest solace that the kaddish conferred. Yet among the greater congregation of Israel, I often felt isolated or tolerated at best, rather than “comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”
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Talia Bloch is a writer and poet living in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Forward, The Jerusalem Report, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.
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FOOD / MAXIM D. SHRAYER
Picking Mushrooms in America: A Jewish Immigrant Tradition Every fall, Russian Jewish families go foraging for culinary treasure on Cape CodEvery fall, hordes of mysterious visitors descend upon Cape Cod from Boston and Providence and as far away as New Jersey and Philadelphia. They aren’t the garden variety of tourists; they are seekers of fungi. Some of them come for the day; others stay for the weekend. The locals refer to these visitors on a mission as “Russians,” but in reality, the vast majority of them are ex-Soviet Jews and their descendants. They drive down Route 6 in the direction of Provincetown. Once they reach Wellfleet and Truro, they begin to disperse around the nearby forests and hillocks. Some of the most hard-core mushroom foragers stay on the freeway until the outskirts of P-town, whereupon they veer off to the north, heading for the Municipal Airport and Race Point. There, amid the moss-covered dunes crested with crooked pines, the hunters—baskets in hands, blades of pocket knives glittering in the morning sun—find their mushroom abodes and pick, pick, pick. This is the time of year, starting around the third week of September, when Facebook is abuzz with reports of foraging expeditions and photos of Jewish-Russian children holding gigantic red-capped mushrooms with gray-speckled stems and spongy undersides. Some of the immigrant mushroom lovers deliberately reveal the location (so as to foster competition), while others suppress it (so as not to attract copy-foragers). Depending on how warm and wet the conditions remain in the fall, the mushroom bacchanalia here can last through the beginning of November.
Along Route 6 between Truro and Eastham, the Audubon Society has put up signs saying “Please don’t pick up mushrooms,” because it apparently disturbs the habitat of the local bird species. The pleas are mainly directed at the mushroom tourists, and they might as well have been printed in Russian, not that it would matter to the ex-Soviet foragers, who are well-versed in the art of dissimulation and the craft of mushroom hunting. For the ex-Soviet immigrants, gathering (and eating) mushrooms is a sport, a pastime, and a passion. The writer Lara Vapnyar told me that mushroom-picking was sviatoe (“sacrosanct”), and her husband, Boris Lokshin, who writes about film, nodded in agreement. Vapnyar and Lokshin visited our family on the Cape three years ago in the summer, two months before the unofficial start of the mushroom season, and they were already planning their annual autumn pilgrimage. The Odessa-born virtuoso clarinetist Julian Milkis, a disciple of Benny Goodman, recently posted a photograph of himself sitting at a long dining room table all covered in mushrooms he had gathered with the émigré historian Yuri Feltishinsky. A few weeks ago, my father’s first cousin, a native of Leningrad, said he collected “125 mushrooms” in the dunes of P-town (we take his word for it).
What does one do with so many mushrooms? One can cook them fresh, but also preserve mushrooms in various ways, which include dehumidifying and freezing them whole; quartering the mushrooms, bringing them to boil, draining them and then freezing them in Ziploc bags; and air-drying them on strings. And, of course, there are different ways of pickling and curing mushrooms, with various agents, of which salt, dill blossoms, and garlic are indispensible. My top three mushroom dishes are: mushroom soup with barley and carrots, served with a dollop of sour cream and chopped dill; mushrooms sautéed with onions, cooked in a cream sauce and served over potatoes or noodles; and pickled mushrooms (especially as a vodka chaser). There are also wild-mushroom pâté and risotto, but I personally stick to Russian (Soviet) culinary heritage.
Jewish-Russian memory still craves living off the land. But is it simply the nourishment or the culinary virtues of mushrooms that draw ex-Soviets to Cape Cod in the fall? Mushrooms and mushrooming are also a revered part of the Soviet immigrant legacy. Just to confirm that it wasn’t only me who felt this way, I queried several people. Our Boston friend Galina Lipton, a pediatric emergency physician, grew up in Gomel in the south of Belarus, where the forests are a veritable shroomadise, and came to America as a teenager. Every year, Galina and her family rent hotel rooms in P-town and spend several days foraging mushrooms. This includes her parents and her husband, Jonathan Lipton, a pediatric neurologist, whose Jewish-Russian mother hails from Shanghai. Jonathan tolerates the mushroom-intensive weekend, but is not a mushroom fanatic like so many “Russians” (read: Russian Jews) in America. For some reason, I remembered Galina using the word “ritual” to refer to mushrooming, and I asked her to elaborate. She emailed: “I think the expression I used was ‘tradition,’ a family tradition. … I guess I could have used the word ‘ritual’ because the things we do during these annual events have become pretty standard and are usually carried out in a certain order—so ritualistic indeed. And magical. Not just the mushrooms, but everything associated with these events … all of it magical.” My mother’s younger sister, a musician, also characterized the whole experience as something volshebnoe(magical), and this seems to be the adjective of choice to describe the activity of mushroom picking. Magical mushrooms on Cape Cod?
Mushroom-loving, I submit, isn’t in one’s genes; it’s an acquired fondness, a special habit. Consider my own story. My wife, Karen, a child of Jewish immigrants from South Africa and Bukovina (by way of South America), likes the flavor of mushrooms but doesn’t like the texture. When she eats mushroom soup or a mushroom pasta dish, she relishes the taste but puts the actual pieces of fungi on my plate. My older daughter, Mira Isabella, who aspires to be an all-American kid, dislikes everything about mushrooms. And my younger daughter, Tatiana Rebecca, the one who acts more Russian and more Jewish than her sister, loves mushrooms. We’ve gone mushrooming as a family, but one must follow one’s natural inclinations. Which is why Tatiana has become my regular mushroom companion and apprentice. While on the Cape, we sometimes go on a local foraging expedition in the woods that separate our neighborhood in South Chatham from the nearby Forest Beach. We usually find some mushrooms along the beach road and in a forest glen overlooking the remains of one of the original Marconi towers. Our very local mushrooms include red, olive-green and yellow russulas with delicate gills. We also find lesser varieties of boletes, all of them with porous undersides: slippery jacks (with slimy caps), matt boletes (with a greenish underside), wood boletes (which develop a violent inky pigmentation upon being cut at the stem), and darker brown peppery boletes (which can be used for flavoring). Every once in a while we come upon a family of birch boletes, so flavorful in soup or stew, but in our local Chatham groves we have yet to find the finest, “noblest” boletes, such as the aspen boletes, which are close in flavor to the royalty of mushrooms, the cep (known in English as penny bun, in Russian as belyi grib, and in Italian as porcino). We haven’t found many ceps on the lower Cape, but we have known forest clearings and hilltops all dotted with their terra-cotta-reddish caps.
Jars with pickled mushrooms. (Photo: Maxim D. Shrayer)
On a recent Saturday morning, which happened to be the last day of Sukkot, Tatiana and I left South Chatham at 8 in the morning and drove down to Truro. It was drizzling, foggy, and as we left Wellfleet behind, we passed a black pickup truck with red lettering across the back. It said “Dorman’s” on the truck, and I immediately thought of my Moscow friend Oleg Dorman, filmmaker and Woody Allen’s Russian translator, and of a new immigrant life he’d secretly started on Cape Cod, probably as a mushroom forager. We turned off Route 6 at an inauspicious spot, parked our station wagon, donned rain boots and rain jackets. For about half a mile we stayed on a rickety path, woven baskets in hands, small paring knives in our baskets. We walked past an abandoned cabin in the direction of a small cranberry bog. Then we saw the first red caps of the day, our first aspen boletes. Tatiana and I played the game of who-spots-the-mushroom-first, and she always won and got to cut the mushrooms, placing the blade close to the wet ground lined with leaves and protected by chainmail shirts of lichens. It took us less than an hour to fill two baskets, and this was more than enough for Karen to make soup, for me to pickle three jars, and also to give some mushrooms to my parents in Boston. My parents were—are—my mushroom teachers.
Talking about teachers, our secret mushroom spot in Truro is not far from where my Yale mentor, Robert Louis Jackson, one of America’s greatest readers of the Russian classics, has a summer house. Jackson’s parents, New Yorkers and descendants of German Jews, bought the place in the 1940s, when it was mostly backcountry with only a few small farms and cottages. It’s now a place favored by the Jewish intelligentsia. Not far from where we go foraging, another former Yale professor used to have a summer place. I’m talking about the late Victor Erlich, son of the Bund leader Henryk (Genrikh) Erhich and of the writer and social activist Sofia Dubnova-Erlich, daughter of the great Jewish-Russian historian Simon Dubnow. It’s a spot rich in Slavic, Jewish, and mushroom traditions, and yet, when I recently asked Jackson if he ever went mushrooming, he vigorously shook his head. “We didn’t. Never got into it,” said Jackson, who is in his 90s and is working on a new Chekhov book. But Jackson did mention a princely family of Georgian émigrés who left Russia after the Revolution, subsequently immigrated to the U.S., had a summer house in Truro, and went mushrooming. For the older generations of American Jews, mushroom hunting was a Russian thing, perhaps with white Russian connotations, and not a Jewish thing.
Is there some Jewish prohibition against, or perhaps some Jewish skepticism toward, mushrooms?
To suggest that mushrooms hold a privileged place in Slavic lands, especially in the historic lands of Russia and of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, is to commit a useful truism. And it’s equally trite and true that a hundred years ago the bulk of the world’s Jews lived in Slavic lands. And yet I have difficulty imagining men in black kaftans and fedoras foraging mushrooms, even though much of the Pale of Settlement, especially in Northern Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, is also the Pale of Fungi. I even have trouble picturing my own grandparents, all born in the Pale in the 1900s and early 1910s, gathering mushrooms as kids or teenagers. Why is that? Is there some Jewish prohibition against, or perhaps some Jewish skepticism toward, mushrooms?
From the Halakhic standpoint, fungi are different from plants because they feed differently (not from soil and sun, but from nutrients in the very top of the topsoil, where decomposition takes place), and also because they multiply differently (by spores, not seeds). There’s some possible discussion of mushrooms in the Hebrew Bible, and Leviticus 13-14 has language referring to mold and mildew, which may also pertain to fungi. But Jews don’t officially become mycologists until the Talmud, which is hardly surprising. A brief tour of Jewish sources reveals that in more than one place the Babylonian Talmud speaks of fungi that grow both above ground and in the ground (pitriyot and kemehim, generic mushrooms and truffles). In Shabbat30b, Rabbi Gamaliel illustrates how “whole cakes” appear overnight from the ground in the Land of Israel and uses the example of mushrooms. And in Berakhot 40b, in connection with abstaining from eating, a distinction is made between fruit of the ground (mushrooms are excluded from this category) and everything that grows on the ground (mushrooms are part of this category). Such a subtle distinction is based on the rabbis’ understanding of fungi as a separate life kingdom, distinct from plants but unlike animals. (A fascinating discussion of mushrooms in religious traditions is found in Moselio Schaechter’s In the Company of Mushrooms). The Jewish blessing before eating a mushroom is different from the one said before eating a fruit (fruit of the tree, bo’rei pri ha-etz) and vegetable (fruit of the ground, bo’rei pri ha-adamah). For mushrooms, the same blessing, shehakol nihiyeh bid’varo, is used as for meat, fish, water, and miscellaneous created products. Maimonides, who knew a great deal about health issues, didn’t advise eating mushrooms. He was correct to recommend that we exercise caution, just as mushroom guides advise the uninitiated not to gather and eat mushrooms without special training. It appears that there’s no Jewish dietary prohibition as such against fungi, and mushrooms are generally considered kosher. And yet, slugs, bugs, and maggots are trayf, and it’s virtually impossible to guarantee the absence of some small being feeding on good mushrooms. Kosher with a twist? This would be a great question for yeshiva students to tackle in the course of learning.
Did Jews not go mushroom hunting in the olden days? Some probably did, or there wouldn’t be references to them in Jewish religious texts. Was mushroom hunting a Jewish tradition in the Slavic lands? I doubt it. For some strange reason, I can’t think of a 19th- or early 20th-century Jewish literary work where mushroom foraging or eating is described. There are, of course, plenty of such scenes in Polish or Russian literature—think of Anna Karenina and the episode in which Levin’s half-brother Koznyshev and Varen’ka go mushroom foraging, and Koznyshev fails to propose. (Let’s leave aside the vexing question of Levin’s Jewish roots.) There also doesn’t seem much of a mushroom trail in Jewish cuisine, save for an occasional recipe for a mushroom kugel or else for buckwheat kasha or pearl barley with onion-fried mushrooms. Given the cult status of mushrooms in Polish or Russian cuisine, and also considering how many Slavic dishes the Ashkenazi Jews have made their own, it’s ponderous that mushrooms have such a marginal status in Eastern European Jewish cooking. In Claudia Roden’s encyclopedic guide, The Book of Jewish Cooking, mushrooms make only a few cameo appearances.
Allow me to introduce a personal testimony and a brief childhood recollection. I doubt very much that my paternal grandmother, the daughter of a Mitnagedic rabbi from Lithuania, went mushrooming in her childhood. But I cannot be sure because I never knew her. But the three grandparents I got to know (and also some of their siblings I’ve met) never shared childhood memories of foraging mushrooms in the former Pale. I don’t believe they had any. My father’s uncle Munia Sharir, who left the ancestral Kamenets-Podolsk in 1924 to become a halutz, left a memoir in both Hebrew and Russian. In the chapters devoted to his Podolian youth, Uncle Munia didn’t touch on mushroom-picking even though his best childhood friend was a local Ukrainian lad and he fashioned himself as something of a socialist-revolutionary eager to live with “the people.” I suspect that for Jews of my grandparents’ generation, mushroom-picking was a habit acquired in the 1920s and ’30s, part of a complex of social activities that came after moving into the mainstream. For many Jews of the former Pale, developing a love for mushroom-picking must have been simultaneously a form of Russianization and Sovietization. At least, this is my tentative explanation for the rise of mushroom-picking among Jews during the Soviet period. My late maternal grandmother, Anna Studnits, who came to America with our whole family in 1987 and lived to be 95, enjoyed collecting and cooking mushrooms. Yet I always felt that with her it was not a childhood love, as it had been for me since as long as remember.
The memories of going mushroom foraging with my parents are golden. It’s the summer of 1969, I’m 2 years old, and we’re renting a hut in the village of Mikhalkovo, some 15 miles west of Moscow. The village and its peasants were once the property of Russian aristocratic families, the Golitsyns and the Yusupovs. The Yusupovs built a luxurious estate, Arkhangel’skoe (“abode of Archangels”), and it’s on the daily strolls across the fields and groves, from the village to the former manor house, that my parents taught me the rules of mushroom foraging. I will never forget the sensation of finding my first mushrooms, the rush, the boundless pleasure of holding a brown-capped creature with a leg, a cap, and myriad tiny hands, each tremulous and alive. It was love at first sight for me, and yet my Soviet memories of mushroom foraging are both good and bad. The good ones mainly come from Estonia, our annual summer vacation spot between 1972 and 1986. Summers by the Baltic Sea; our beloved Pärnu—a Hanseatic seaport turned popular beach resort. My best friend Katya and I are walking home through the old seaside park; we’re always looking for mushrooms. Her grandmother’s Polish blood pulsing through the valves of Jewish traditions, Katya usually beats me at the mushroom hunt. She finds slippery jacks and crème-colored russulas and picks them from the ground, gently with two slender fingers, the way one picks up a wondrous moth or a fragile flower. There are also secluded Nordic forests about an hour’s drive inland, where my parents and I motor once a week to stock up on winter supplies of mushrooms to be dried and taken back to Moscow. Finally, there’s the homestead of our dear friend, the Estonian artist Jüri Arrak, and a nearby, blessed aspen grove with clearings filled to the brim with chanterelles. In Russia, people sometimes called these ornate, bright-orange fungi “Jewish mushrooms,” but to me, they were signs of universal beauty. As refuseniks, my parents and I came to Estonia to get away from the oppressive Soviet living, to disappear for a little while, and mushroom picking was for us a form of escapism.
Back in Moscow, foraging was less magical, laden with memories of dirty suburban and local trains overcrowded with mushroom zealots, for whom all the other Muscovites represented potential rivals. Most mushroom folks who lived in the city claimed to know a spot of their own, first an hour-and-a-half by train, then an hourlong haul across some rugged terrain, and then… Just get up early and bring enough baskets. And I also remember the campus of Hospital No. 52 across the street from where we lived in Moscow: grounds choking with uncollected maple leaves, and patients in pajamas and robes shuffling their heavy feet, filling plastic bags with chernushki (literally: “blackie mushrooms”) and svinushki (literally: “piggy mushrooms”) to hand over to family members during weekend visits. Finally, there was the summer 1986 expedition from Moscow to North Caucasus and the Black Sea, during which we were protein-starved almost all the time and often supplemented the meager rations with local mushrooms.
Foraging mushrooms in Russia was fun when it was a whole experience, not a means of procuring food. I tried to leave the not-so-bright memories behind the turnstile of Soviet passport control in June 1987, while the best memories of mushrooming have remained an active part of my immigrant identity. Or, to put it a bit less personally, as a mainstream Soviet phenomenon, mushroom picking reached the American shores with the rest of the Jewish immigrant baggage. More than a loving tribute to one’s Soviet youth, mushrooming in America is becoming a Jewish tradition because much of what we brought with us is now being added to Jewish American culture. I admit that there is something of a contradiction here, but I also think there’s also some truth to what I’m saying. To put it most bluntly, while in today’s American mainstream Soviet Jews may be thought of as “Russian,” mushroom-picking in America may very well be considered a Jewish family activity. Just drive to lower Cape Cod in late September or early October, find hillocks overgrown, not too thickly, with pines, and carpeted with bright-green moth. And talk to the mushroom foragers you encounter. You will quickly discover that they are mostly ex-Soviet Jews, their children, and their grandchildren who understand Russian but respond in English.
Of course, there are mycological clubs in America, especially here in New England. And, of course, one hears about recent Polish, Czech, or Italian immigrants who have become professional foragers and supply fine New York restaurants with “wild mushrooms” from Maine, New Hampshire, or Massachusetts. Surely there are mushrooms foragers in New England who are not Jewish, but by and large, this is a Jewish-Soviet métier simply because the immigrants from the former USSR are predominantly Jewish. How many Russian-speaking mushroom gatherers flock to Cape Cod on a good October weekend? Several thousand? More? Survey those men and women and children with woven baskets and pocket knives, and probably 95 percent of them will be both Russian speakers and Jews. If I’m wrong, please get in touch with me, and I’ll show you my secret mushroom spot in Truro.
Tatiana Rebecca Shrayer with an aspen bolete. (Photo: Maxim D. Shrayer)
After the most recent weekend of mushrooming on the Cape, I posted a photo of my younger daughter holding a red-capped bolete of biblical proportions. A colleague of my wife’s, also an internal medicine doctor, immediately commented: “Are these edible?” Even today, in our mainstream mushrooms are associated with the common supermarket variety that many Americans call “mushrooms” (that is, button mushrooms, cultivated champignons). For ex-Soviets, it is not a Platonic idea, not mushroom in general, but something alive and replete with specific sensory associations and memories, with physical locales, with colors, aromas, and textures. Here in America, Soviet immigrants have made mushrooming a hallowed preoccupation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the rabbis decided to do something about it.
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On a Sunday morning we were preparing to drive back to Boston with the hope of getting across the bridge before noon. It was Simchat Torah, and in the evening we planned to go to shul, where my wife would play the cello in the band and we would dance with Torah scrolls. The following week I’d be traveling to Russia to speak at a conference on anti-Semitism, and I knew we wouldn’t be returning to the Cape for several weeks. So this was probably it for the mushroom season.
“Humor me,” I said to my daughters. “Let’s take a quick stroll to the nearby woods.”
Tatiana immediately showed enthusiasm for a brief foraging excursion, while Mira dithered, but then agreed to go along. The three of us briskly walked toward the ocean, sun, and pines. Mira was the first to spot a slippery jack under a fir tree. Then Tatiana located a family of russula mushrooms showing red through withered feathery grass.
I was elated to see them find mushrooms. “There you go,” I said in Russian to my American-born daughters, “you’re learning about mushrooms. You’re now part of a tradition.”
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Maxim D. Shrayer is a professor at Boston College and the author, most recently, of Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, and the editor of Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories by David Shrayer-Petrov. Shrayer lives in Brookline, Mass., with his family and in summer directs the South Chatham Writers’ Workshop on Cape Cod.
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WORLD / AMOS N. GUIORA
Along Route 6 between Truro and Eastham, the Audubon Society has put up signs saying “Please don’t pick up mushrooms,” because it apparently disturbs the habitat of the local bird species. The pleas are mainly directed at the mushroom tourists, and they might as well have been printed in Russian, not that it would matter to the ex-Soviet foragers, who are well-versed in the art of dissimulation and the craft of mushroom hunting. For the ex-Soviet immigrants, gathering (and eating) mushrooms is a sport, a pastime, and a passion. The writer Lara Vapnyar told me that mushroom-picking was sviatoe (“sacrosanct”), and her husband, Boris Lokshin, who writes about film, nodded in agreement. Vapnyar and Lokshin visited our family on the Cape three years ago in the summer, two months before the unofficial start of the mushroom season, and they were already planning their annual autumn pilgrimage. The Odessa-born virtuoso clarinetist Julian Milkis, a disciple of Benny Goodman, recently posted a photograph of himself sitting at a long dining room table all covered in mushrooms he had gathered with the émigré historian Yuri Feltishinsky. A few weeks ago, my father’s first cousin, a native of Leningrad, said he collected “125 mushrooms” in the dunes of P-town (we take his word for it).
What does one do with so many mushrooms? One can cook them fresh, but also preserve mushrooms in various ways, which include dehumidifying and freezing them whole; quartering the mushrooms, bringing them to boil, draining them and then freezing them in Ziploc bags; and air-drying them on strings. And, of course, there are different ways of pickling and curing mushrooms, with various agents, of which salt, dill blossoms, and garlic are indispensible. My top three mushroom dishes are: mushroom soup with barley and carrots, served with a dollop of sour cream and chopped dill; mushrooms sautéed with onions, cooked in a cream sauce and served over potatoes or noodles; and pickled mushrooms (especially as a vodka chaser). There are also wild-mushroom pâté and risotto, but I personally stick to Russian (Soviet) culinary heritage.
Jewish-Russian memory still craves living off the land. But is it simply the nourishment or the culinary virtues of mushrooms that draw ex-Soviets to Cape Cod in the fall? Mushrooms and mushrooming are also a revered part of the Soviet immigrant legacy. Just to confirm that it wasn’t only me who felt this way, I queried several people. Our Boston friend Galina Lipton, a pediatric emergency physician, grew up in Gomel in the south of Belarus, where the forests are a veritable shroomadise, and came to America as a teenager. Every year, Galina and her family rent hotel rooms in P-town and spend several days foraging mushrooms. This includes her parents and her husband, Jonathan Lipton, a pediatric neurologist, whose Jewish-Russian mother hails from Shanghai. Jonathan tolerates the mushroom-intensive weekend, but is not a mushroom fanatic like so many “Russians” (read: Russian Jews) in America. For some reason, I remembered Galina using the word “ritual” to refer to mushrooming, and I asked her to elaborate. She emailed: “I think the expression I used was ‘tradition,’ a family tradition. … I guess I could have used the word ‘ritual’ because the things we do during these annual events have become pretty standard and are usually carried out in a certain order—so ritualistic indeed. And magical. Not just the mushrooms, but everything associated with these events … all of it magical.” My mother’s younger sister, a musician, also characterized the whole experience as something volshebnoe(magical), and this seems to be the adjective of choice to describe the activity of mushroom picking. Magical mushrooms on Cape Cod?
Mushroom-loving, I submit, isn’t in one’s genes; it’s an acquired fondness, a special habit. Consider my own story. My wife, Karen, a child of Jewish immigrants from South Africa and Bukovina (by way of South America), likes the flavor of mushrooms but doesn’t like the texture. When she eats mushroom soup or a mushroom pasta dish, she relishes the taste but puts the actual pieces of fungi on my plate. My older daughter, Mira Isabella, who aspires to be an all-American kid, dislikes everything about mushrooms. And my younger daughter, Tatiana Rebecca, the one who acts more Russian and more Jewish than her sister, loves mushrooms. We’ve gone mushrooming as a family, but one must follow one’s natural inclinations. Which is why Tatiana has become my regular mushroom companion and apprentice. While on the Cape, we sometimes go on a local foraging expedition in the woods that separate our neighborhood in South Chatham from the nearby Forest Beach. We usually find some mushrooms along the beach road and in a forest glen overlooking the remains of one of the original Marconi towers. Our very local mushrooms include red, olive-green and yellow russulas with delicate gills. We also find lesser varieties of boletes, all of them with porous undersides: slippery jacks (with slimy caps), matt boletes (with a greenish underside), wood boletes (which develop a violent inky pigmentation upon being cut at the stem), and darker brown peppery boletes (which can be used for flavoring). Every once in a while we come upon a family of birch boletes, so flavorful in soup or stew, but in our local Chatham groves we have yet to find the finest, “noblest” boletes, such as the aspen boletes, which are close in flavor to the royalty of mushrooms, the cep (known in English as penny bun, in Russian as belyi grib, and in Italian as porcino). We haven’t found many ceps on the lower Cape, but we have known forest clearings and hilltops all dotted with their terra-cotta-reddish caps.
Jars with pickled mushrooms. (Photo: Maxim D. Shrayer)
On a recent Saturday morning, which happened to be the last day of Sukkot, Tatiana and I left South Chatham at 8 in the morning and drove down to Truro. It was drizzling, foggy, and as we left Wellfleet behind, we passed a black pickup truck with red lettering across the back. It said “Dorman’s” on the truck, and I immediately thought of my Moscow friend Oleg Dorman, filmmaker and Woody Allen’s Russian translator, and of a new immigrant life he’d secretly started on Cape Cod, probably as a mushroom forager. We turned off Route 6 at an inauspicious spot, parked our station wagon, donned rain boots and rain jackets. For about half a mile we stayed on a rickety path, woven baskets in hands, small paring knives in our baskets. We walked past an abandoned cabin in the direction of a small cranberry bog. Then we saw the first red caps of the day, our first aspen boletes. Tatiana and I played the game of who-spots-the-mushroom-first, and she always won and got to cut the mushrooms, placing the blade close to the wet ground lined with leaves and protected by chainmail shirts of lichens. It took us less than an hour to fill two baskets, and this was more than enough for Karen to make soup, for me to pickle three jars, and also to give some mushrooms to my parents in Boston. My parents were—are—my mushroom teachers.
Talking about teachers, our secret mushroom spot in Truro is not far from where my Yale mentor, Robert Louis Jackson, one of America’s greatest readers of the Russian classics, has a summer house. Jackson’s parents, New Yorkers and descendants of German Jews, bought the place in the 1940s, when it was mostly backcountry with only a few small farms and cottages. It’s now a place favored by the Jewish intelligentsia. Not far from where we go foraging, another former Yale professor used to have a summer place. I’m talking about the late Victor Erlich, son of the Bund leader Henryk (Genrikh) Erhich and of the writer and social activist Sofia Dubnova-Erlich, daughter of the great Jewish-Russian historian Simon Dubnow. It’s a spot rich in Slavic, Jewish, and mushroom traditions, and yet, when I recently asked Jackson if he ever went mushrooming, he vigorously shook his head. “We didn’t. Never got into it,” said Jackson, who is in his 90s and is working on a new Chekhov book. But Jackson did mention a princely family of Georgian émigrés who left Russia after the Revolution, subsequently immigrated to the U.S., had a summer house in Truro, and went mushrooming. For the older generations of American Jews, mushroom hunting was a Russian thing, perhaps with white Russian connotations, and not a Jewish thing.
Is there some Jewish prohibition against, or perhaps some Jewish skepticism toward, mushrooms?
To suggest that mushrooms hold a privileged place in Slavic lands, especially in the historic lands of Russia and of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, is to commit a useful truism. And it’s equally trite and true that a hundred years ago the bulk of the world’s Jews lived in Slavic lands. And yet I have difficulty imagining men in black kaftans and fedoras foraging mushrooms, even though much of the Pale of Settlement, especially in Northern Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, is also the Pale of Fungi. I even have trouble picturing my own grandparents, all born in the Pale in the 1900s and early 1910s, gathering mushrooms as kids or teenagers. Why is that? Is there some Jewish prohibition against, or perhaps some Jewish skepticism toward, mushrooms?
From the Halakhic standpoint, fungi are different from plants because they feed differently (not from soil and sun, but from nutrients in the very top of the topsoil, where decomposition takes place), and also because they multiply differently (by spores, not seeds). There’s some possible discussion of mushrooms in the Hebrew Bible, and Leviticus 13-14 has language referring to mold and mildew, which may also pertain to fungi. But Jews don’t officially become mycologists until the Talmud, which is hardly surprising. A brief tour of Jewish sources reveals that in more than one place the Babylonian Talmud speaks of fungi that grow both above ground and in the ground (pitriyot and kemehim, generic mushrooms and truffles). In Shabbat30b, Rabbi Gamaliel illustrates how “whole cakes” appear overnight from the ground in the Land of Israel and uses the example of mushrooms. And in Berakhot 40b, in connection with abstaining from eating, a distinction is made between fruit of the ground (mushrooms are excluded from this category) and everything that grows on the ground (mushrooms are part of this category). Such a subtle distinction is based on the rabbis’ understanding of fungi as a separate life kingdom, distinct from plants but unlike animals. (A fascinating discussion of mushrooms in religious traditions is found in Moselio Schaechter’s In the Company of Mushrooms). The Jewish blessing before eating a mushroom is different from the one said before eating a fruit (fruit of the tree, bo’rei pri ha-etz) and vegetable (fruit of the ground, bo’rei pri ha-adamah). For mushrooms, the same blessing, shehakol nihiyeh bid’varo, is used as for meat, fish, water, and miscellaneous created products. Maimonides, who knew a great deal about health issues, didn’t advise eating mushrooms. He was correct to recommend that we exercise caution, just as mushroom guides advise the uninitiated not to gather and eat mushrooms without special training. It appears that there’s no Jewish dietary prohibition as such against fungi, and mushrooms are generally considered kosher. And yet, slugs, bugs, and maggots are trayf, and it’s virtually impossible to guarantee the absence of some small being feeding on good mushrooms. Kosher with a twist? This would be a great question for yeshiva students to tackle in the course of learning.
Did Jews not go mushroom hunting in the olden days? Some probably did, or there wouldn’t be references to them in Jewish religious texts. Was mushroom hunting a Jewish tradition in the Slavic lands? I doubt it. For some strange reason, I can’t think of a 19th- or early 20th-century Jewish literary work where mushroom foraging or eating is described. There are, of course, plenty of such scenes in Polish or Russian literature—think of Anna Karenina and the episode in which Levin’s half-brother Koznyshev and Varen’ka go mushroom foraging, and Koznyshev fails to propose. (Let’s leave aside the vexing question of Levin’s Jewish roots.) There also doesn’t seem much of a mushroom trail in Jewish cuisine, save for an occasional recipe for a mushroom kugel or else for buckwheat kasha or pearl barley with onion-fried mushrooms. Given the cult status of mushrooms in Polish or Russian cuisine, and also considering how many Slavic dishes the Ashkenazi Jews have made their own, it’s ponderous that mushrooms have such a marginal status in Eastern European Jewish cooking. In Claudia Roden’s encyclopedic guide, The Book of Jewish Cooking, mushrooms make only a few cameo appearances.
Allow me to introduce a personal testimony and a brief childhood recollection. I doubt very much that my paternal grandmother, the daughter of a Mitnagedic rabbi from Lithuania, went mushrooming in her childhood. But I cannot be sure because I never knew her. But the three grandparents I got to know (and also some of their siblings I’ve met) never shared childhood memories of foraging mushrooms in the former Pale. I don’t believe they had any. My father’s uncle Munia Sharir, who left the ancestral Kamenets-Podolsk in 1924 to become a halutz, left a memoir in both Hebrew and Russian. In the chapters devoted to his Podolian youth, Uncle Munia didn’t touch on mushroom-picking even though his best childhood friend was a local Ukrainian lad and he fashioned himself as something of a socialist-revolutionary eager to live with “the people.” I suspect that for Jews of my grandparents’ generation, mushroom-picking was a habit acquired in the 1920s and ’30s, part of a complex of social activities that came after moving into the mainstream. For many Jews of the former Pale, developing a love for mushroom-picking must have been simultaneously a form of Russianization and Sovietization. At least, this is my tentative explanation for the rise of mushroom-picking among Jews during the Soviet period. My late maternal grandmother, Anna Studnits, who came to America with our whole family in 1987 and lived to be 95, enjoyed collecting and cooking mushrooms. Yet I always felt that with her it was not a childhood love, as it had been for me since as long as remember.
The memories of going mushroom foraging with my parents are golden. It’s the summer of 1969, I’m 2 years old, and we’re renting a hut in the village of Mikhalkovo, some 15 miles west of Moscow. The village and its peasants were once the property of Russian aristocratic families, the Golitsyns and the Yusupovs. The Yusupovs built a luxurious estate, Arkhangel’skoe (“abode of Archangels”), and it’s on the daily strolls across the fields and groves, from the village to the former manor house, that my parents taught me the rules of mushroom foraging. I will never forget the sensation of finding my first mushrooms, the rush, the boundless pleasure of holding a brown-capped creature with a leg, a cap, and myriad tiny hands, each tremulous and alive. It was love at first sight for me, and yet my Soviet memories of mushroom foraging are both good and bad. The good ones mainly come from Estonia, our annual summer vacation spot between 1972 and 1986. Summers by the Baltic Sea; our beloved Pärnu—a Hanseatic seaport turned popular beach resort. My best friend Katya and I are walking home through the old seaside park; we’re always looking for mushrooms. Her grandmother’s Polish blood pulsing through the valves of Jewish traditions, Katya usually beats me at the mushroom hunt. She finds slippery jacks and crème-colored russulas and picks them from the ground, gently with two slender fingers, the way one picks up a wondrous moth or a fragile flower. There are also secluded Nordic forests about an hour’s drive inland, where my parents and I motor once a week to stock up on winter supplies of mushrooms to be dried and taken back to Moscow. Finally, there’s the homestead of our dear friend, the Estonian artist Jüri Arrak, and a nearby, blessed aspen grove with clearings filled to the brim with chanterelles. In Russia, people sometimes called these ornate, bright-orange fungi “Jewish mushrooms,” but to me, they were signs of universal beauty. As refuseniks, my parents and I came to Estonia to get away from the oppressive Soviet living, to disappear for a little while, and mushroom picking was for us a form of escapism.
Back in Moscow, foraging was less magical, laden with memories of dirty suburban and local trains overcrowded with mushroom zealots, for whom all the other Muscovites represented potential rivals. Most mushroom folks who lived in the city claimed to know a spot of their own, first an hour-and-a-half by train, then an hourlong haul across some rugged terrain, and then… Just get up early and bring enough baskets. And I also remember the campus of Hospital No. 52 across the street from where we lived in Moscow: grounds choking with uncollected maple leaves, and patients in pajamas and robes shuffling their heavy feet, filling plastic bags with chernushki (literally: “blackie mushrooms”) and svinushki (literally: “piggy mushrooms”) to hand over to family members during weekend visits. Finally, there was the summer 1986 expedition from Moscow to North Caucasus and the Black Sea, during which we were protein-starved almost all the time and often supplemented the meager rations with local mushrooms.
Foraging mushrooms in Russia was fun when it was a whole experience, not a means of procuring food. I tried to leave the not-so-bright memories behind the turnstile of Soviet passport control in June 1987, while the best memories of mushrooming have remained an active part of my immigrant identity. Or, to put it a bit less personally, as a mainstream Soviet phenomenon, mushroom picking reached the American shores with the rest of the Jewish immigrant baggage. More than a loving tribute to one’s Soviet youth, mushrooming in America is becoming a Jewish tradition because much of what we brought with us is now being added to Jewish American culture. I admit that there is something of a contradiction here, but I also think there’s also some truth to what I’m saying. To put it most bluntly, while in today’s American mainstream Soviet Jews may be thought of as “Russian,” mushroom-picking in America may very well be considered a Jewish family activity. Just drive to lower Cape Cod in late September or early October, find hillocks overgrown, not too thickly, with pines, and carpeted with bright-green moth. And talk to the mushroom foragers you encounter. You will quickly discover that they are mostly ex-Soviet Jews, their children, and their grandchildren who understand Russian but respond in English.
Of course, there are mycological clubs in America, especially here in New England. And, of course, one hears about recent Polish, Czech, or Italian immigrants who have become professional foragers and supply fine New York restaurants with “wild mushrooms” from Maine, New Hampshire, or Massachusetts. Surely there are mushrooms foragers in New England who are not Jewish, but by and large, this is a Jewish-Soviet métier simply because the immigrants from the former USSR are predominantly Jewish. How many Russian-speaking mushroom gatherers flock to Cape Cod on a good October weekend? Several thousand? More? Survey those men and women and children with woven baskets and pocket knives, and probably 95 percent of them will be both Russian speakers and Jews. If I’m wrong, please get in touch with me, and I’ll show you my secret mushroom spot in Truro.
After the most recent weekend of mushrooming on the Cape, I posted a photo of my younger daughter holding a red-capped bolete of biblical proportions. A colleague of my wife’s, also an internal medicine doctor, immediately commented: “Are these edible?” Even today, in our mainstream mushrooms are associated with the common supermarket variety that many Americans call “mushrooms” (that is, button mushrooms, cultivated champignons). For ex-Soviets, it is not a Platonic idea, not mushroom in general, but something alive and replete with specific sensory associations and memories, with physical locales, with colors, aromas, and textures. Here in America, Soviet immigrants have made mushrooming a hallowed preoccupation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the rabbis decided to do something about it.
***
On a Sunday morning we were preparing to drive back to Boston with the hope of getting across the bridge before noon. It was Simchat Torah, and in the evening we planned to go to shul, where my wife would play the cello in the band and we would dance with Torah scrolls. The following week I’d be traveling to Russia to speak at a conference on anti-Semitism, and I knew we wouldn’t be returning to the Cape for several weeks. So this was probably it for the mushroom season.
“Humor me,” I said to my daughters. “Let’s take a quick stroll to the nearby woods.”
Tatiana immediately showed enthusiasm for a brief foraging excursion, while Mira dithered, but then agreed to go along. The three of us briskly walked toward the ocean, sun, and pines. Mira was the first to spot a slippery jack under a fir tree. Then Tatiana located a family of russula mushrooms showing red through withered feathery grass.
I was elated to see them find mushrooms. “There you go,” I said in Russian to my American-born daughters, “you’re learning about mushrooms. You’re now part of a tradition.”
***
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Maxim D. Shrayer is a professor at Boston College and the author, most recently, of Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, and the editor of Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories by David Shrayer-Petrov. Shrayer lives in Brookline, Mass., with his family and in summer directs the South Chatham Writers’ Workshop on Cape Cod.
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WORLD / AMOS N. GUIORA
‘Kristallnacht’: The Legal Status of the Bystander On this night 78 years ago, Germans stood by as Jewish businesses and synagogues were burned, tens of thousands of Jews were arrested, and nearly a hundred were killed. Shouldn’t doing nothing about it be criminal?
I am child of the Holocaust. Both of my parents are Holocaust survivors. This essay seeks to answer three questions essential to my understanding of the Holocaust, the bystander, and my understanding of duty owed to another individual.
Those questions are: What do we learn from the Holocaust in general, in particular from Kristallnacht, regarding the bystander? What is the responsibility of the individual in the face of unmitigated racism and hatred? What is the most appropriate application of the painful lessons that can be learned from the tragic events of Nov. 9-10, 1938?
On November 7, 1938, a Jewish youth named Herschel Grynszpan shot the German diplomat Ernst Vom Rath in Paris. Grynszpan’s family, Polish Jews living in Germany, were ordered to be expelled by the Nazi regime and transferred to refugee camps whose conditions were dire. Vom Rath died of his wounds on Nov. 9; word reached Hitler shortly thereafter while attending a dinner commemorating the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Upon hearing the news, Hitler left the dinner; speaking on his behalf Goebbels, in essence, called for a pogrom directed against Jews. The expression “spontaneously planned” has been used by historians to describe the unfolding of the events of the next two days.
Within hours of Goebbels’ words, more than 1,000 synagogues were set on fire or destroyed; in 24 hours 91 Jews were killed; and over 30,000 Jewish men aged 16 to 60 were sent to concentration camps where they were tormented and tortured for a number of months. More than 1,000 of those arrested met their deaths in the camps. Rampant looting and extreme violence in a hateful atmosphere marked Kristallnacht, along with arrests, destruction of physical property, physical abuse, and humiliation in more than 1,000 cities, towns, and villages in Germany and Austria.
According to the London Times, “No Foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings … assaults on defenceless and innocent people which disgraced that country yesterday.” As “hundreds of thousands danced in wild frenzy while millions watched approvingly,” Church leaders remained similarly silent.
According to Professor Frank Bajohr:
In the course of my lifetime, I have—like many others—been faced with the dilemma of whether to involve myself when others are in need of assistance. Similar to others, I have made right and wrong decisions; the former are not worthy of discussion, the latter weigh on my conscience.
Once I chose not to assist a homeless adult who was the subject of ugly bullying by a college student; my inaction was inexcusable for I stood but two feet from the incident and could have either prevented it, or at least mitigated its consequences. On a second occasion, I was present at a restaurant when an individual, at the next table, was engaged in an ugly anti-Semitic diatribe. I chose to ignore it.
Regardless of the causes of the bystander’s failure to act, the consequences of inaction can be tragic. The pages of history are filled with painful examples. Extremism benefits from the decision by many to look the other way. Passivity is a human reaction I find unfathomable and unacceptable. I ask three questions: What duty is owed? To whom is a duty owed? And, is a duty owed to one identified as the “enemy”?
***
Yet the crux of the dilemma I seek to address, and hopefully resolve, is not a personal or moral question but rather the nature of an individual’s legal obligation when another individual is in distress, vulnerable and in harm’s way. The Holocaust in general and events in particular including Kristallnacht, the Death Marches, deportations, and thousands of concentration camps, many located in the midst of civilian populations, significantly shape my conviction that creation of a legal standard regarding the bystander is essential.
History shows relying on both a moral compass and impetus with respect to the “right thing to do” is insufficient. The Righteous Among the Nations movingly honored at Yad Vashem offer proof of the willingness of individuals to act bravely in risking life and limb. However, the thousands who sought to aid their fellow man pale in comparison to the millions who turned their backs in the face of both potential and clear harm to others. It is for that reason that I propose imposition of a legal duty to act; relying on moral imperative is simply insufficient.
From the two incidents above, I have learned to be understanding of non-action: After all, if I, who fully understand the consequences of non-involvement, can choose not to act then I must, at least, be sympathetic to others who similarly decide on a “safe course.” However, choosing a “safe course” cannot justify failure to act; history has, unequivocally, repeatedly shown this.
In other words, in accordance with the legal standard I am proposing, the failure to intervene to protect an innocent homeless individual would be deemed a crime, subject to police investigation and prosecutorial discretion. Regarding the anti-Semitism at the restaurant? Ugly, yes, but as it did not morph into incitement, or violence, the speech was protected. In the context of the legal architecture I propose, my silence was not a crime. Should I have said something? As the “should” question suggests the “right thing to do” discussion, each individual can ascertain what is the ethical course of action.
These incidents reflect the spectrum of human interaction and conduct. They pose significant dilemmas for the bystander; proposing culpability predicated on a legal obligation seeks to minimize the gray zone regarding when law mandates action. In other words, duty to care needs to be a legal obligation.
It is imperative to establish legal standards because relying on human nature has proven insufficient. Kristallnacht highlights that human nature is not to save the vulnerable but rather to look the other way or join the mob.
I am convinced that the articulation and implementation of a legal duty to act are essential, particularly in this contemporary age marked by extremism, violence, and hatred. To ignore that reality is to, conceivably, set the stage for, yet again, unimaginable violence against those who are helpless.
In focusing on Kristallnacht, I hope to convince of the need to create legal architecture whereby the duty to care is a legal obligation.
***
Kristallnacht must be viewed as the bitter prelude to the Holocaust. In the words of Herman Goering, “I would not want to be a Jew in Germany.”
According to the historian Martin Gilbert, “Kristallnacht was the culmination of more than five years and nine months of systematic discrimination and persecution.” Jews who comprised less than 1 percent of Germany’s pre-WWII population were singled out by the Nazi regime as the “enemy.”
The exclusion of Jews was largely met by passivity from the population at large whereas former colleagues and neighbors took advantage of the situation to their benefit. Professor Raul Hilberg refers to such individuals as beneficiaries, distinct from bystanders.
It is a matter of debate among historians whether the Jewish population fully appreciated the significance regarding the change in their circumstances; it is clear that the overwhelming majority did not recognize the horrific fate that awaited them. That, however, does not excuse the complicity of the bystander.
Gilbert tells us that during those two days—Nov. 9 and 10, 1938—“hundreds of thousands danced in wild frenzy while millions watched approvingly.” In other words, there were “eyewitnesses in every corner of the Reich” as ordinary German citizens either directly participated in or passively condoned a horrific orgy of violence against Jews, their property, and their synagogues. The condoning, much less participating in unrestrained violence against German Jews by non-Jewish Germans is the essence of tolerating intolerance; it is an absolute violation of the social compact and vividly highlights the extraordinary danger to the vulnerable in the face of bystander passivity.
***
Kristallnacht did not occur in a vacuum. The Nazi regime’s relentless emphasis on racial policy focusing on the improvement of race and racial hygiene targeting habitual criminals, the handicapped, homosexuals, and gypsies—much less Jews—was implemented through a variety of means including sterilization and eugenics. Hitler’s demonization of the Jews resulted in their delegitimization, if not dehumanization as they were, clearly, consistently and loudly defined as “enemies of the German state.”
Antisemitic graffiti after Kristallnacht: “Jews are bloodsuckers,” Germany. (Yad Vashem)
The Nazification of society required systematic synchronization of all institutions in accordance with Nazi ideology demanding absolute loyalty to the regime and the Fuhrer. The norm, as articulated—primarily by Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, and Heydrich—was that Jews endangered “the very survival of Germany and of the Aryan world.” Erasing the shame of the Treaty of Versailles was of paramount importance if not unadulterated obsession.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism was intoxicating, hysterical, and remarkably effective; his speeches were electric, charismatic, and unsophisticated. The themes were consistent: Jews were to be blamed for Germany’s defeat in WWI for Germany’s failed experiment with democracy in the aftermath of WWI and for Germany’s failed economy. The concepts reflected basic principles of fascism, nationalism, and racism; Hitler would return Germany to its glorious roots.
The regime benefited from the passivity of the Church. As Professor Friedlander writes: “During the decisive days … no bishop, no church dignitary, no synod made any open declaration against the persecution of the Jews in Germany.” In the words of Berlin Bishop Otto Dibelius in a confidential Easter missive to provincial pastors: “One cannot ignore that Jewry has played a leading role in all the destructive manifestations of modern civilization.”
According to Professor Friedlander, the Confessing Church, of which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a leading light, primarily expressed support for non-Aryan Christians and not to Germany’s beleaguered Jewish community. Jews were, literally and figuratively, systematically squeezed out of the social contract. Their unmitigated vulnerability manifests the consequences of society identifying a particular group as the “other” with no duty owed to mitigate the inevitable disaster that awaited members of the group who were, it must be recalled, German citizens.
The measures directly contributed to the aforementioned effort to exclude Jews from the social fabric and reflected the regimes brutality and harshness. The population’s general passivity directly contributed to the successful implementation of the measures below. Re-articulated: The majority of Germans “acquiesced”; the Churches “kept their distance”; and the laws suggest that arbitrary terror was replaced by a “permanent framework of discrimination.”
On March 5, 1933, the Nazis obtained a majority in the Reichstag in accordance resulting from a coalition formed with the German National People’s Party. Shortly thereafter the first concentration camp was established when Himmler officially inaugurated Dachau on March 20, 1938.
On April 1, 1933, a boycott of Jewish shops was ordered by the regime; the boycott largely failed because of the population’s passivity that, according to Friedlander, did not “show hostility to the ‘enemies of the people’ party agitators had expected.” The boycott was proceeded by enactment of the Enabling Act, which granted full legislative and executive powers to the chancellor; in its immediate wake SA forcibly closed shops and attacked and killed Jews.
On April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service 2 was passed; according to Paragraph 3:
Civilian servants of non-Aryan origin are to retire … anyone descended from non-Aryan, particularly Jewish, parents or grandparents. It suffices if one parent or grandparents is non-Aryan.
On April 11, 1933, Jewish attorneys were excluded from the Bar; on April 25, 1933, the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities was passed, which limited enrollment of new Jewish students to 1.5 percent of new applicants with the overall number of Jewish students not to exceed 5 percent. In September 1933 Jews were forbidden to own farms and to engage in agriculture and in October 1933 Jews were barred from belonging to journalist associations and from positions of newspaper editor.
In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were announced at the annual party rally in Nuremberg. The “laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of ‘German or related blood.’ Ancillary ordinances to the laws disenfranchised Jews and deprived them of most political rights.” The Nuremberg Laws established fundamental distinctions between citizens of the Third Reich who were entitled to full political and civil rights and subjects who were deprived of those rights.
In the aftermath of Kristallnacht legislation the “First Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life” was enacted that banned Jews from all remaining occupations and called for dismissing those still employed without any compensation. This measure was intended to complete the process of Aryanization.
By 1939, “remaining Jews in Germany had been completely marginalized, isolated and deprived of their main means of earning a living”. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht Hitler began discussing the physical annihilation of Jews; it is for that reason that Kristallnacht is appropriately termed the bitter prelude to the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism, as traditionally understood, was about to be replaced by the ideology of the pogrom as manifested on Nov. 9-10, 1938.
***
The Holocaust magnifies and painfully illustrates the price of passivity. Bystanders suggest a stepping back from making a constructive contribution to mainstream society and facilitating, to varying degrees, harm to otherwise innocent individuals. In other words, a bystander sees yet chooses to ignore. That is the essence of the bystander.
I propose creating three distinct bystander-victim paradigms: 1) Anonymous Bystander, Faceless Victim; 2) Neighbors; 3) Desensitized Bystander, Disenfranchised Victim. In my book, the first theme will be examined through the lens of Death Marches (November 1944-May 1945); the second theme will be examined through the lens of the deportation of Dutch Jewry and the third theme will be examined through the lens of the deportation of Hungarian Jewry.
It has been suggested that the primacy of the bystander’s obligation to self and family outweighs duty and responsibility to the other. In addition, the decision—oftentimes quickly made—to scurry on, thereby deliberately ignoring the needs of others, has been repeatedly offered as reflecting the reality of human interaction, or more correctly of human “non” interaction.
What is particularly problematic in the effort to create a legal standard addressing this issue is determining the degree to which the state can impose a “positive” duty on members of society. Nuance is essential to a full discussion regarding the bystander; different circumstances and conditions must be taken into consideration when articulating and implementing a duty to act paradigm. Creating, or allowing, a wide range of exceptions to an agreed upon rule facilitates unwarranted “wiggle room” that, ultimately, provides justification for a lack of intervention and involvement.
The perpetrator bears the greatest degree of culpability for the harm that befalls the victim; however, as the Holocaust clearly demonstrated the complicity of the bystander greatly facilitated the perpetrator’s actions and its consequences. It is that complicity that is at the core of our undertaking; in proposing legal standard that enables prosecution of the bystander the assumption is that there is a need to clearly articulate an enforceable duty to care. That is the essence of the social contract. To not protect the vulnerable and at-risk members of society—regardless of their status, position, and class—is a resounding rejection of the social contract. That, for me, is the critical lesson I propose we take away from Kristallnacht.
***
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Amos N. Guiora is a professor of Law at SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah. His bookComplicity: The Role of the Bystander in the Holocaust is forthcoming in 2017 from Ankerwycke Books.
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FAMILY / ERIC L. MULLER
Those questions are: What do we learn from the Holocaust in general, in particular from Kristallnacht, regarding the bystander? What is the responsibility of the individual in the face of unmitigated racism and hatred? What is the most appropriate application of the painful lessons that can be learned from the tragic events of Nov. 9-10, 1938?
On November 7, 1938, a Jewish youth named Herschel Grynszpan shot the German diplomat Ernst Vom Rath in Paris. Grynszpan’s family, Polish Jews living in Germany, were ordered to be expelled by the Nazi regime and transferred to refugee camps whose conditions were dire. Vom Rath died of his wounds on Nov. 9; word reached Hitler shortly thereafter while attending a dinner commemorating the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Upon hearing the news, Hitler left the dinner; speaking on his behalf Goebbels, in essence, called for a pogrom directed against Jews. The expression “spontaneously planned” has been used by historians to describe the unfolding of the events of the next two days.
Within hours of Goebbels’ words, more than 1,000 synagogues were set on fire or destroyed; in 24 hours 91 Jews were killed; and over 30,000 Jewish men aged 16 to 60 were sent to concentration camps where they were tormented and tortured for a number of months. More than 1,000 of those arrested met their deaths in the camps. Rampant looting and extreme violence in a hateful atmosphere marked Kristallnacht, along with arrests, destruction of physical property, physical abuse, and humiliation in more than 1,000 cities, towns, and villages in Germany and Austria.
According to the London Times, “No Foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings … assaults on defenceless and innocent people which disgraced that country yesterday.” As “hundreds of thousands danced in wild frenzy while millions watched approvingly,” Church leaders remained similarly silent.
According to Professor Frank Bajohr:
the significance of the November Pogrom as a radicalising factor cannot be doubted. The pogroms that were stage-managed after the murder of Ernst vom Rath … marked both the highpoint and the end of mob anti-Semitism. … They destroyed the basis of the economic livelihood of the Jews within a few months.
Over the past few years my scholarship has focused on extremism and intolerance, particularly the limits of tolerating intolerance. I have become increasingly focused on the bystander because of a conviction that standing by, passively, facilitates extremism.
The bystander is an individual who observes another in clear distress but is not the direct cause of the harm. A culpable bystander is one who has the ability to mitigate the harm but chooses not to. Needless to say, the age and ability of the actor must be taken into consideration.In the course of my lifetime, I have—like many others—been faced with the dilemma of whether to involve myself when others are in need of assistance. Similar to others, I have made right and wrong decisions; the former are not worthy of discussion, the latter weigh on my conscience.
Once I chose not to assist a homeless adult who was the subject of ugly bullying by a college student; my inaction was inexcusable for I stood but two feet from the incident and could have either prevented it, or at least mitigated its consequences. On a second occasion, I was present at a restaurant when an individual, at the next table, was engaged in an ugly anti-Semitic diatribe. I chose to ignore it.
Regardless of the causes of the bystander’s failure to act, the consequences of inaction can be tragic. The pages of history are filled with painful examples. Extremism benefits from the decision by many to look the other way. Passivity is a human reaction I find unfathomable and unacceptable. I ask three questions: What duty is owed? To whom is a duty owed? And, is a duty owed to one identified as the “enemy”?
***
Yet the crux of the dilemma I seek to address, and hopefully resolve, is not a personal or moral question but rather the nature of an individual’s legal obligation when another individual is in distress, vulnerable and in harm’s way. The Holocaust in general and events in particular including Kristallnacht, the Death Marches, deportations, and thousands of concentration camps, many located in the midst of civilian populations, significantly shape my conviction that creation of a legal standard regarding the bystander is essential.
History shows relying on both a moral compass and impetus with respect to the “right thing to do” is insufficient. The Righteous Among the Nations movingly honored at Yad Vashem offer proof of the willingness of individuals to act bravely in risking life and limb. However, the thousands who sought to aid their fellow man pale in comparison to the millions who turned their backs in the face of both potential and clear harm to others. It is for that reason that I propose imposition of a legal duty to act; relying on moral imperative is simply insufficient.
From the two incidents above, I have learned to be understanding of non-action: After all, if I, who fully understand the consequences of non-involvement, can choose not to act then I must, at least, be sympathetic to others who similarly decide on a “safe course.” However, choosing a “safe course” cannot justify failure to act; history has, unequivocally, repeatedly shown this.
In other words, in accordance with the legal standard I am proposing, the failure to intervene to protect an innocent homeless individual would be deemed a crime, subject to police investigation and prosecutorial discretion. Regarding the anti-Semitism at the restaurant? Ugly, yes, but as it did not morph into incitement, or violence, the speech was protected. In the context of the legal architecture I propose, my silence was not a crime. Should I have said something? As the “should” question suggests the “right thing to do” discussion, each individual can ascertain what is the ethical course of action.
These incidents reflect the spectrum of human interaction and conduct. They pose significant dilemmas for the bystander; proposing culpability predicated on a legal obligation seeks to minimize the gray zone regarding when law mandates action. In other words, duty to care needs to be a legal obligation.
It is imperative to establish legal standards because relying on human nature has proven insufficient. Kristallnacht highlights that human nature is not to save the vulnerable but rather to look the other way or join the mob.
I am convinced that the articulation and implementation of a legal duty to act are essential, particularly in this contemporary age marked by extremism, violence, and hatred. To ignore that reality is to, conceivably, set the stage for, yet again, unimaginable violence against those who are helpless.
In focusing on Kristallnacht, I hope to convince of the need to create legal architecture whereby the duty to care is a legal obligation.
***
Kristallnacht must be viewed as the bitter prelude to the Holocaust. In the words of Herman Goering, “I would not want to be a Jew in Germany.”
According to the historian Martin Gilbert, “Kristallnacht was the culmination of more than five years and nine months of systematic discrimination and persecution.” Jews who comprised less than 1 percent of Germany’s pre-WWII population were singled out by the Nazi regime as the “enemy.”
The exclusion of Jews was largely met by passivity from the population at large whereas former colleagues and neighbors took advantage of the situation to their benefit. Professor Raul Hilberg refers to such individuals as beneficiaries, distinct from bystanders.
It is a matter of debate among historians whether the Jewish population fully appreciated the significance regarding the change in their circumstances; it is clear that the overwhelming majority did not recognize the horrific fate that awaited them. That, however, does not excuse the complicity of the bystander.
Gilbert tells us that during those two days—Nov. 9 and 10, 1938—“hundreds of thousands danced in wild frenzy while millions watched approvingly.” In other words, there were “eyewitnesses in every corner of the Reich” as ordinary German citizens either directly participated in or passively condoned a horrific orgy of violence against Jews, their property, and their synagogues. The condoning, much less participating in unrestrained violence against German Jews by non-Jewish Germans is the essence of tolerating intolerance; it is an absolute violation of the social compact and vividly highlights the extraordinary danger to the vulnerable in the face of bystander passivity.
***
Kristallnacht did not occur in a vacuum. The Nazi regime’s relentless emphasis on racial policy focusing on the improvement of race and racial hygiene targeting habitual criminals, the handicapped, homosexuals, and gypsies—much less Jews—was implemented through a variety of means including sterilization and eugenics. Hitler’s demonization of the Jews resulted in their delegitimization, if not dehumanization as they were, clearly, consistently and loudly defined as “enemies of the German state.”
Antisemitic graffiti after Kristallnacht: “Jews are bloodsuckers,” Germany. (Yad Vashem)
The Nazification of society required systematic synchronization of all institutions in accordance with Nazi ideology demanding absolute loyalty to the regime and the Fuhrer. The norm, as articulated—primarily by Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, and Heydrich—was that Jews endangered “the very survival of Germany and of the Aryan world.” Erasing the shame of the Treaty of Versailles was of paramount importance if not unadulterated obsession.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism was intoxicating, hysterical, and remarkably effective; his speeches were electric, charismatic, and unsophisticated. The themes were consistent: Jews were to be blamed for Germany’s defeat in WWI for Germany’s failed experiment with democracy in the aftermath of WWI and for Germany’s failed economy. The concepts reflected basic principles of fascism, nationalism, and racism; Hitler would return Germany to its glorious roots.
The regime benefited from the passivity of the Church. As Professor Friedlander writes: “During the decisive days … no bishop, no church dignitary, no synod made any open declaration against the persecution of the Jews in Germany.” In the words of Berlin Bishop Otto Dibelius in a confidential Easter missive to provincial pastors: “One cannot ignore that Jewry has played a leading role in all the destructive manifestations of modern civilization.”
According to Professor Friedlander, the Confessing Church, of which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a leading light, primarily expressed support for non-Aryan Christians and not to Germany’s beleaguered Jewish community. Jews were, literally and figuratively, systematically squeezed out of the social contract. Their unmitigated vulnerability manifests the consequences of society identifying a particular group as the “other” with no duty owed to mitigate the inevitable disaster that awaited members of the group who were, it must be recalled, German citizens.
The measures directly contributed to the aforementioned effort to exclude Jews from the social fabric and reflected the regimes brutality and harshness. The population’s general passivity directly contributed to the successful implementation of the measures below. Re-articulated: The majority of Germans “acquiesced”; the Churches “kept their distance”; and the laws suggest that arbitrary terror was replaced by a “permanent framework of discrimination.”
On March 5, 1933, the Nazis obtained a majority in the Reichstag in accordance resulting from a coalition formed with the German National People’s Party. Shortly thereafter the first concentration camp was established when Himmler officially inaugurated Dachau on March 20, 1938.
On April 1, 1933, a boycott of Jewish shops was ordered by the regime; the boycott largely failed because of the population’s passivity that, according to Friedlander, did not “show hostility to the ‘enemies of the people’ party agitators had expected.” The boycott was proceeded by enactment of the Enabling Act, which granted full legislative and executive powers to the chancellor; in its immediate wake SA forcibly closed shops and attacked and killed Jews.
On April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service 2 was passed; according to Paragraph 3:
Civilian servants of non-Aryan origin are to retire … anyone descended from non-Aryan, particularly Jewish, parents or grandparents. It suffices if one parent or grandparents is non-Aryan.
On April 11, 1933, Jewish attorneys were excluded from the Bar; on April 25, 1933, the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities was passed, which limited enrollment of new Jewish students to 1.5 percent of new applicants with the overall number of Jewish students not to exceed 5 percent. In September 1933 Jews were forbidden to own farms and to engage in agriculture and in October 1933 Jews were barred from belonging to journalist associations and from positions of newspaper editor.
In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were announced at the annual party rally in Nuremberg. The “laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of ‘German or related blood.’ Ancillary ordinances to the laws disenfranchised Jews and deprived them of most political rights.” The Nuremberg Laws established fundamental distinctions between citizens of the Third Reich who were entitled to full political and civil rights and subjects who were deprived of those rights.
In the aftermath of Kristallnacht legislation the “First Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life” was enacted that banned Jews from all remaining occupations and called for dismissing those still employed without any compensation. This measure was intended to complete the process of Aryanization.
By 1939, “remaining Jews in Germany had been completely marginalized, isolated and deprived of their main means of earning a living”. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht Hitler began discussing the physical annihilation of Jews; it is for that reason that Kristallnacht is appropriately termed the bitter prelude to the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism, as traditionally understood, was about to be replaced by the ideology of the pogrom as manifested on Nov. 9-10, 1938.
***
The Holocaust magnifies and painfully illustrates the price of passivity. Bystanders suggest a stepping back from making a constructive contribution to mainstream society and facilitating, to varying degrees, harm to otherwise innocent individuals. In other words, a bystander sees yet chooses to ignore. That is the essence of the bystander.
I propose creating three distinct bystander-victim paradigms: 1) Anonymous Bystander, Faceless Victim; 2) Neighbors; 3) Desensitized Bystander, Disenfranchised Victim. In my book, the first theme will be examined through the lens of Death Marches (November 1944-May 1945); the second theme will be examined through the lens of the deportation of Dutch Jewry and the third theme will be examined through the lens of the deportation of Hungarian Jewry.
It has been suggested that the primacy of the bystander’s obligation to self and family outweighs duty and responsibility to the other. In addition, the decision—oftentimes quickly made—to scurry on, thereby deliberately ignoring the needs of others, has been repeatedly offered as reflecting the reality of human interaction, or more correctly of human “non” interaction.
What is particularly problematic in the effort to create a legal standard addressing this issue is determining the degree to which the state can impose a “positive” duty on members of society. Nuance is essential to a full discussion regarding the bystander; different circumstances and conditions must be taken into consideration when articulating and implementing a duty to act paradigm. Creating, or allowing, a wide range of exceptions to an agreed upon rule facilitates unwarranted “wiggle room” that, ultimately, provides justification for a lack of intervention and involvement.
The perpetrator bears the greatest degree of culpability for the harm that befalls the victim; however, as the Holocaust clearly demonstrated the complicity of the bystander greatly facilitated the perpetrator’s actions and its consequences. It is that complicity that is at the core of our undertaking; in proposing legal standard that enables prosecution of the bystander the assumption is that there is a need to clearly articulate an enforceable duty to care. That is the essence of the social contract. To not protect the vulnerable and at-risk members of society—regardless of their status, position, and class—is a resounding rejection of the social contract. That, for me, is the critical lesson I propose we take away from Kristallnacht.
***
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Amos N. Guiora is a professor of Law at SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah. His bookComplicity: The Role of the Bystander in the Holocaust is forthcoming in 2017 from Ankerwycke Books.
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FAMILY / ERIC L. MULLER
Uncovering My Family’s History—or a Clever Scam—75 Years After Kristallnacht A woman in Germany claimed to have photos that could solve a mystery about my great-uncle’s death. But was she telling the truth?Leopold Müller’s identity card, issued in 1939. (Courtesy of the author)
This is a story of my own foolishness. I got scammed on the Internet. I lost some money—not a fortune, but enough to sting a little. I didn’t offer assistance to a deposed Nigerian government minister or try to collect winnings from a lottery I never entered. I went looking for a movie of my great-uncle Leopold being marched to his death by the Nazis, and someone in Germany took advantage of me.
To start at the beginning is to go back exactly 75 years, to Nov. 9, 1938. That night, the night we now call Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass,” the Gestapo arrested my grandfather Felix at his apartment and hauled him off to Buchenwald. While that was happening in Frankfurt, the window glass was shattering on his brother Leopold’s drygoods shop in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen. Leo was arrested but spared the trip to a concentration camp. They held him in the local jail instead. He emerged a few days later, in time to sell his shop’s inventory to a neighbor who saw an opportunity. They said the sale was of Leo’s own free will, but the buyer paid pfennigs on the Reichsmark, and Leo had to hand over a hefty transaction fee to the Nazi Party’s District Economics Adviser.
My grandfather was released from Buchenwald after a few weeks and fled to Switzerland. Leo stayed behind. Three and a half years later, Leo was dead. It was all quite orderly. He was seized in Bad Kissingen, taken to nearby Würzburg, marched through the streets with 800 other Jews from the region, put on a train, and deported to Poland. I lose the thread of his story as the train leaves the station on April 25, 1942. I am desperate to know whether he was killed on the train trip to the Polish ghetto, or if he died of disease or starvation in the ghetto, or if he was shot on the way to the death camp Sobibor or was gassed there and incinerated. It’s one of those. I’ll never know which.
But I do know what the death march to the train looked like, because the Gestapo took pictures. A photo album of the deportation survived the war and was seized by Allied forces. It was used as evidence at Nuremberg and at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. I’ve examined these photos with a magnifying glass, looking for Leo in the masses. He is not to be seen, but in a couple of the photos you can see a movie camera. Yes, the Nazis actually made a film of their crime. We know that Gestapo officials screened it, but it disappeared and is presumed lost or destroyed.
Fast forward to my foolishness.
After years of gathering the scattered traces of my great-uncle’s life, with some surprising successes, I decided back in June to hunt for the film. Of course it probably burned in a bombing or was destroyed by some nervous German official as the Allies closed in. But things you think would be gone survive somehow. Last year a guy in England found a coded military message from 1944 on the skeleton of a carrier pigeon in his chimney. Maybe this movie is in an old box or a long-unopened suitcase in some German attic.
I can’t go crawling through the attics of Germany. But this summer, it occurred to me that I could use the power of the Internet to ask Germans to go crawling through their attics for me. I made a short video in German, describing Leo’s well-documented deportation and asking people to help me find the missing film. It’s not about assigning blame, I assured them, or seeking reparations. It’s just about finding Leopold, rescuing him from oblivion. I posted the video on YouTube and created an email address to receive suggestions. The video didn’t exactly go viral, but the website of Der Spiegel, a leading German magazine, picked it up. For a couple of weeks, my inbox was filled with sweet but unhelpful suggestions from Germans who were moved by my plea. These soon trickled off, leaving only a steady stream of spam.
Months went by. And then, on Sept. 30, an email from a German email address appeared. In grammatical, conversational German, it said: “Hello. We are in possession of 17 original photos of the deportation to Poland. Would you like to buy them? But only if you can guarantee absolute discretion. Thank you!—Susanne.”
I was excited and intrigued. I wrote back to confirm that these were photographs of the deportation in question and that they weren’t simply duplicates of the well-known photos that had been around since the war. Susanne replied: “These are never-before-seen photographs of the deportation from Würzburg to Poland. We’re in possession of a photo album of my grandfather’s. My grandfather was in the Gestapo there. That’s why discretion is so important to me.” She went on to say that the album contained 17 photographs of the April 25 deportation, 26 other pictures having to do with Jews in Würzburg, and 90 other photos of her grandfather’s Gestapo service, all of them inscribed with dates and explanatory notations. “Naturally,” she said, “the photos have only been in the family’s possession, and I inherited them when my grandfather died.”
I found myself perversely overjoyed. It’s odd to be thrilled at discovering pictures of a death march, but when the death march is your great-uncle’s and you’ve been searching for him for years, it’s a big deal. I also knew that whether or not Leo appeared in the pictures, this was an extraordinary historical record. Most of all, I was thrilled that my hunch was right: One simple YouTube plea and German attics were flying open, disgorging their secrets. How many other photo albums were out there? Would the film itself turn up?
I was also a little disgusted. Susanne, the granddaughter of a perpetrator of my great-uncle’s murder, was offering to sell me evidence of the crime. It seemed tone-deaf, mercenary, oblivious to the enormity of my family’s loss and her own grandfather’s guilt. But I didn’t begrudge her the desire to see a little profit from her inheritance.
Our correspondence continued. I assured her that I’d be discreet and asked her whether she had scanned a photograph that she could send me. I also asked her what she wanted for the album.
She wrote back with embarrassment, asking me what “scanned” meant. “Pardon the question but my husband and I are not the youngest and we really don’t know all of the new terms,” she said. Rather than answer my question about a price, she asked if I might possibly have the opportunity to go to Germany to have a look at the album and take it from her.
It was also at this point in our correspondence that Susanne, without my bidding, brought up her discomfort over what the photos showed. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family but what’s to be done about it? It’s awful when you think about what your own grandfather unthinkingly participated in. That’s how it must have been, even though by then he was already pretty high-ranking. But when I remember the stories he used to tell I still get shivers down my spine.”
The word “unthinkingly” sent shivers down mine. Here was the tired, bankrupt narrative of German innocence: Everyone was a little ignorant cog in a big terrible machine, just following orders. I thought this German illusion of innocence had been shattered decades ago, but apparently not, at least for Susanne. I said nothing about this to her, though; I didn’t want to make her regret reaching out to me.
I explained to her what I meant by “scanning”: Could she send me an electronic copy of one of the photos so that I could make sure it was of good quality?
“Unfortunately we haven’t made any copies,” she replied, “and for us it’s not too pleasant to send something having to do with the Holocaust by email. But the photos are all in good condition and of good quality.” She also asked again whether I could come to Germany: “At least that would make it easier to discuss a price,” she said. And then she asked what I planned to do with the photos. Did I want to publish them? “If so,” she said, “that would be OK with us so long as you don’t reveal our names.”
I wrote back. Planning a trip to Germany would be very difficult, I explained. But if I bought the album, I assured her, I would promise not to reveal any names.
“That sounds good,” Susanne replied. “You don’t absolutely have to come to Germany if it won’t work for you. But it would have been interesting to meet someone who has a connection to this. Maybe another time.”
We were now four days and six back-and-forths into our correspondence, and I was still elated. I imagined myself opening the album and spotting Leo in one of the photos. I imagined a trove of primary source materials that I could publish—a coffee table book that readers would pore over and Holocaust scholars would mine for new insights. It was enough to make me want to hop on a plane to pick up the album immediately, so I went back to my calendar and found a long weekend in November when I thought I might be able to make a trip work. I wrote to Susanne, inquiring whether she’d be available that weekend.
“I can’t tell you today what I’ll have going on that weekend,” she replied. “But I can look into how to ship a package to the USA. Or do you have experience with that? DHL or some other company?”
She still hadn’t said anything about a price. But she seemed willing to move ahead without my traveling to Germany, so I decided to go the DHL route. I told her that I’d had good experiences with DHL, and that I’d be happy to pay for the shipping. To supply a little of the personal contact she seemed to want, I attached a photograph of Leo with his dog from before the war and a photo of myself with my wife and daughters. I thought maybe this personal touch would help her feel comfortable going ahead with the transaction.
Susanne replied the next day: “Yes, shipping through DHL will work. Thanks for the pictures. What price do we want to set for the album? You can certainly make an offer!”
This plunged me into uncertainty. Some of it was about obvious things: Was it wise to send money to someone I’d never met, without first seeing what I was buying? How could I put a price on such a priceless historical artifact? I couldn’t exactly hop onto eBay to find out what similar never-before-seen photo albums of Gestapo atrocities have been going for.
Part of my worry came from something else entirely—an ugly, ancient anxiety I did not even know was my own. I felt as though I was being tested: the Jew being asked to set a price. Would I offer too little and prove how cheap we are? Would I offer too much and show how rich we are? I bounced back and forth in my mind, low to high and back again, trying each number on as a defensible expression of the Jewish attitude toward money. I wondered: Is this what Leopold went through when he had to sell his shop’s inventory after Kristallnacht?
I ultimately settled on an offer of 450 euros (about $600) plus shipping costs. Susanne accepted it the next day. “The shipping costs for the package are 17.90 euros,” she said. “Let’s just make it 470 euros including shipping and that’ll be OK for us.” She gave me her name, her street address, and her grandfather’s name, reminding me to keep these all to myself: “It has to stay private that I’m his descendant and that we are the ones who sold you the album.” She gave me all of the necessary wiring information for her account at the German bank Targobank, including the IBAN and Swift numbers. She told me she was going to buy a box at the post office and pack the album up well. She asked what sort of description she should list for the U.S. customs form—“just ‘photo album?’” And again she stressed the need for discretion in the wiring transaction. “It’s important not to write anything about WWII or anything like that. We don’t want our bank to potentially ask us what we sold because the people down there all know us very well.”
And that was that. On Monday, Oct. 7, a week after she first contacted me, I wired her 470 euros. While we waited the couple of days for the transaction to clear, I asked her something I’d forgotten to ask earlier: How exactly had she found me? She explained that it was by chance. She likes to read Der Spiegel online, and a couple of months earlier she had seen the link to the video about my search for the film. She watched it and then she and her husband spent a long time debating whether to write to me because of their worries about disclosure. “But then we decided to go ahead and do it because it might help you learn a little more on the subject of your family,” she said.
On Tuesday, she told me that she planned to send me the album on Saturday when she went to the market, and that she’d let me know when it would reach me.
On Thursday, she confirmed that the money had reached her bank account, and again said she’d ship the album on Saturday.
I wrote her on Saturday afternoon to say that I hoped everything had gone well with the shipment and that I’d appreciate a tracking number so that I could monitor the shipment. Late that night she answered that she had gotten to the post office too late. There was so much going on at the market, she explained, that she hadn’t managed to get the package off. She apologized and said she would take care of it on Monday.
That’s the last I heard from Susanne.
I wrote her on the Monday she was supposed to ship the package and asked her to confirm the shipment and send me the tracking number. No reply. I wrote her twice on Tuesday, morning and evening, with the same question. No reply to either. I wrote her on Thursday that I preferred to believe she was having second thoughts or some sort of problem with her email than that she was defrauding me. I asked her to write back or call me immediately. No reply. On Saturday, still unwilling to admit I’d been had, I sent her one final email:
“I’ve read what you wrote over and over again. It gives the impression of being the truth and not an inducement to fraud. But I haven’t had a word from you in 10 days now. It would surprise and appall me that a German of today could be so staggeringly cruel to the Jewish descen dant of a Holocaust victim. Can it be?”
No reply.
It can.
***
I suppose I could point out a few moments in the story where it doesn’t look like Susanne was a thief. She didn’t pretend to have the thing I was actually looking for (the film). She asked if I could show up for the deal in person. She accepted my opening offer instead of pressing for more. And she kept writing to me for a couple of days after my money hit her bank account.
But the truth is that I put too much of myself into searching for something, believed someone when she said she had it, paid her for it without seeing it, and have nothing to show for it but disappointment and indignation.
I look back now and ask myself where my mistake lay. At the simplest level, it was in trusting someone I met through the Internet, but there’s more to it than that. My mistake was also in believing that my great-uncle Leo’s murder by German hands decades ago would protect me, his descendant, from hurt at German hands today. I thought this sort of cruelty would be outside the bounds of contemplation in German society. That is a mistake my family has made before.
One other possible mistake occurs to me, and that is the search itself. At the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht I continue to look for my great-uncle Leo. I continue to harbor the fantasy that if I can find him in a film or in a photo, it will help me know this man who is unknowable, and that by knowing him I will rescue him from his fate.
Foolishness.
***
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Eric L. Muller is a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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The Case for Hope On my 40th birthday, contemplating life—and the value of compassion—in Trump’s America by Liel LeibovitzI turned 40 today, and I spent the first few hours of my birthday staring at the television screen in disbelief. It is late at night as I write this, and, like many Americans, I am overwhelmed with emotion. I am terrified for what the future holds. I am ashamed that so many of my countrymen opted to elevate a racist, misogynistic bully to the highest office in the land. I weep for America, and I have no idea what I will say to my children when they wake up in the morning and ask how the man who has said so many hateful things about so many of us still managed to win the trust and support of so many others.
I’m a journalist, and so I feel the temptation to come up with stories that explain what right now feels like the end of an era in American history and the beginning of another, much darker chapter. Do we blame the regressive left for galvanizing frustrated working class whites into their own identity politics movement? Do we blame the Republican party for abandoning more or less every single conceivable conservative value in a naked push for power, and transforming itself into the haven of anti-Semites, xenophobes, conspiracy theorists, authoritarians, and other vile bodies? Do we point out to the obvious and considerable role that misogyny played in this putrid political drama, and question what it means to live in a nation that chose a man who had boasted about sexually assaulting women rather than a woman who, for all of her flaws, was a deeply capable, experienced, and responsible candidate?
These are all stories worth pondering, and in the days and weeks and months to come, my colleagues and I are likely to examine each of them in depth. And yet tonight, none of them move me. Tonight, I want to do what us Jews have always done in grim moments and tell myself a different story, my own:
I was thirteen when I first thought seriously about America. I was cowering in a bomb shelter in a suburb of Tel Aviv, and I took great comfort in knowing that this great nation had sent a battery of missiles to help protect me and my family from Saddam Hussein’s aggression. This commitment to liberty is what inspired me, a decade later, to follow in the footsteps of so many immigrants before me and land in New York with no money and no clue and nothing but a wild conviction that if I worked hard and did my best, I could do whatever I wanted to do and be whoever I wanted to be. I put my faith in America, and it rewarded me with a life for which I am deeply grateful. It’s why I have no patience with talk of fleeing it now that Trump has won, and it’s why I pray that President Trump, as odious and objectionable as I may always find him, succeeds in keeping us all safe and prosperous.
But the next four years mustn’t be about him; they must be about us. If we truly believe in this business of repairing the world, if it’s more than an empty platitude, let’s get to work. If you’re wondering what you can do, the answer is simple: open your heart.
You can follow in the footsteps of the thoughtful young college student who reacted to news that a classmate was a notable white supremacist by inviting him over for a Shabbat dinner, and then another and another, until the young man cast off his prejudices and reshaped his life. You can work to build new coalitions with anyone who still wants to build coalitions, and reject the ideologies and platforms erected solely to divide us and keep us apart. You can take the time to volunteer in your own neighborhood or your own town and make sure it grows just a little bit more perfect each day. If history—America’s and Judaism’s alike—has taught us anything, it’s that neither fear nor bigotry can thrive for long when faced with empathy, compassion, and conviction. It’s time for us to rise to the moment, to prove that America is already great because we, its people, a diverse and spirited bunch, will never abandon our commitment to the crazy vision on which this nation was founded, the idea that we each deserve a fair shot at pursuing our happiness. Anything short of that would be a real tragedy.
Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.
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‘Unorthodox’ Is Coming to Toronto on November 17 For a Free Show We’ll be recording live from Beth Tzedec Congregation—RSVP to claim your seat! by UnorthodoxCalling all Jews, gentiles, and Leafs fans residing in the greater Toronto area!
Join us on November 17 at 7:30pm at Beth Tzedec Congregation for a live recording of our Unorthodox podcast with two very special guests: writer David Bezmozgis, and mezzo-soprano, actress, and broadcaster Julie Nesrallah.
The event is free and open to the public, but please do RSVP here to reserve your seat. We’ll also be posting updates on the Facebook event page—invite your friends and post your questions and requests in the comments! If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, we’ll take note.
ICYMI, Unorthodox is our newest podcast—a smart, fresh, fun take on Jewish news and culture posted every Thursday. Hosted by Tablet editor-at-large and Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer, and featuring deputy editor Stephanie Butnick and senior writer Liel Leibovitz, the panel discusses the latest Jewish news, politics, and culture with equal parts seriousness and irreverence. From Amy Schumer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no topic is off limits.
Unorthodox is a smart, fresh, fun weekly take on Jewish news and culture hosted by Mark Oppenheimer and featuring Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leibovitz. You can listen to individual episodes here or subscribe on iTunes. Unorthodox is part of the Panoply podcast network.
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Ascending God’s Mountain: A New York City Marathon Story Blood, sweat, and tears. And prayer. by Armin RosenAs with just about anything New York-related, there’s a Jewish aspect to the city’s annual marathon, the 26-mile river of humanity that gushes through the five boroughs on the first sunday of November.
For over 30 years, Shearith Yisrael, a historic congregation on Central Park West, has organized a minyan for marathon runners near the race’s start line. This year, three pre-race Shachrit services were held in a small tent next to one of the administration buildings at Fort Wadsworth, at the base of the Verrazano Bridge, where the race begins. There were tables of tefillin bags, and photos of services from years when the race fell on Rosh Chodesh, showing Torah readers decked out in their marathon bibs. A fellow racer helped me put on tefillin, something I admittedly hadn’t done for awhile. The service ended with the shir shel yom, the psalm for the day of the week, which, I noticed, includes the line: Mi ya’aleh b’har Adonei? (Who will ascend God’s mountain?) The words brought on a chill of recognition, even the suggestion of tears. Maybe it was talking about the marathon, I thought. This is a totally solipsistic reading, but those words from the Shachrit service would echo through my head for the next five hours, and longer.
“The minyan at the 1986 New York City Marathon, which fell on Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan. (Image courtesy of the author)
The Verrazano is the only link between Staten Island and any of the four other boroughs, making it a necessary part of any five-borough marathon route. Still, while running along its top deck, soaking in the wondrous absurdity of sharing a giant suspension bridge with tens of thousands of other blissed-out people, the symbolism felt unmistakable to me, as if there were deeper messages built into the course: Up here, you run along a ribbon of light, as ethereal and infinite as Rainbow Road in Mario Kart, threading through archways that welcome you to the very heavens, with the city below unmoving and seemingly uninhabited, as if it isn’t even a real place. But soon, you descend into the disillusionment and corruption of the earth below—including your own. The race is not some out-of-body idyl. The adrenaline, and the unreality of those first few miles doesn’t morph the city into a pure, extra-sensory plane. Really, it’s something more like the exact opposite.
But I could fool myself for the first handful of miles. At mile 2, the race turned into a backstreet in Bay Ridge, where the druggy peals of a Spacemen 3 song blasted from an amp on a fire escape. This was a good sign. On 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, I heard gospel choirs and marching bands. I wondered what the 15,000 runners from foreign countries were experiencing right now. In the midst of a presidential election of unsurpassed rancor and nastiness, a runner from Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy or Mexico (to name just a few of the more strongly represented nationalities) would see our streets teeming with life and spontaneity and guarded by smiling cops and firefighters, with runners eased along its route by over 10,000 volunteers. Along Bedford Avenue, home to Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidic community, they’d see something that might not even exist back in their home countries: gleaming facades decked in rows of Hebrew lettering, with Kolel students darting down the street as if there were no marathon at all. Over 26 miles, our visitors would run past everything wonderful about New York and America, and perhaps come away with a sense of a sort of innate national decency that not even our horrifying politics could erase. How ecstatic it all was—at least until the living torture of the high teens, when the race really began.
The middle miles brought portents of the trouble ahead. Runners dodged a flattened rat carcass halfway along the up-grade of the Queensborough Bridge—what was the poor vermin even doing there, so far off the ground? A jumbotron at 1st Ave revealed that it was 1:16 PM, a demystifying and disheartening convergence of marathon-time and actual time. I watched a runner get her feet examined at a medical tent and it made me feel a stab of jealousy. The race enters the Bronx at 125th street, and then leaves the Bronx at 137th street, which feels like negative progress. The 20s yielded my most important discovery from Sunday: Running 26.2 miles is exponentially harder than running, say, 22.5 miles. In terms of mental and physical torment, the distances don’t even rate on the same scale (my final time was 4 hours and 57 minutes, a hobbyist’s time, and good for the 33rd percentile).
By mile 21, I had already come to grips with the reality that the race would never end. This was my life now, step after excruciating step. I had chosen this, and now I was stuck with it, forever. The crowds turned from a help to an annoyance: No, you aren’t “almost there” at mile 20, or even mile 25, for that matter. My experience would be a ceaseless torrent of discomfort, with no gratification in store. Perhaps this was just as well, I realized running uphill along Central Park, somewhere around mile 23.
There are events one looks forward to in life—a holiday or a vacation or a Phish concert, say—that seem to flash by before you can process or even enjoy them, and then disappear into a barely differentiated mass of experience. A marathon is the opposite. You feel all of it; during and after, there’s no doubt that the time and the distance is inflicting something important on you, something that you’re glad to have but that you’ve also definitely had enough of. This surfeit of suffering stands in contrast to the great majority of things, which usually don’t live up to the hype: By the end of mile 24, hobbling through a sharp downhill in Central Park, with the crowds and foliage blurring by and the finish line an entire astronomical unit away, I had achieved a kind of satisfaction. A marathon doesn’t disappoint. You feel all of it.
I started to understanding something else about what I was doing and why I was doing it, as I turned past the Plaza Hotel and onto Central Park South, my legs beginning to return to me. I wasn’t running this to prove that I could do it, but because I knew I could do it. Life is an uncertain enterprise, and it offers relatively few chances to fully live out one’s expectations for oneself. But here, I was actually doing exactly that! Doing it within the artificial and perhaps inevitably meaningless framework of an athletic competition—but doing it nonetheless. In draining my own body and mind, I had traveled to a dreamlike realm of supreme control and fulfillment. Perhaps, I thought, this is why I’d seen so many runners with photos of dead friends and loved ones on their running shirts: The race was proof that certainty and control could be reclaimed even within a cruel and arbitrary state of existence. The race was their small rebuke to reality. It would be mine as well, even without a similar adversity to spur me. Who could climb God’s mountain?, I thought, the line pulsating louder as the end approached. Today, it would be me.
Reality returned with swift vengeance. After crossing the finish line, runners are herded along Central Park’s west loop for over half-mile, with a small army of inquisitive medical spotters surveying the human wreckage for any sign of trouble. At one point, I could feel myself falling backwards, as my line of vision angled about 45 degrees upwards. I caught myself, then chugged a Gatorade. Interesting, I thought. So that’s what fainting is like. File that away for future reference. Everything ached; standing up was a cruelty. Somewhere in the seventies along Central Park West, still an agonizing half a mile from the family and friends waiting for me, I sat down on a bench and thought about how much I had seen, done, and felt for the first time over the previous 5 or 6 hours. I mumbled a “shehehechyanu” under my breath, and for the day’s last time, my eyes welled with tears.
Related: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: To Kill or Not to Kill?
Armin Rosen is a New York-based writer. He has written for The Atlantic, City Journal, andWorld Affairs Journal, and was recently a senior reporter for Business Insider.
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Tablet Magazine
This is a story of my own foolishness. I got scammed on the Internet. I lost some money—not a fortune, but enough to sting a little. I didn’t offer assistance to a deposed Nigerian government minister or try to collect winnings from a lottery I never entered. I went looking for a movie of my great-uncle Leopold being marched to his death by the Nazis, and someone in Germany took advantage of me.
To start at the beginning is to go back exactly 75 years, to Nov. 9, 1938. That night, the night we now call Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass,” the Gestapo arrested my grandfather Felix at his apartment and hauled him off to Buchenwald. While that was happening in Frankfurt, the window glass was shattering on his brother Leopold’s drygoods shop in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen. Leo was arrested but spared the trip to a concentration camp. They held him in the local jail instead. He emerged a few days later, in time to sell his shop’s inventory to a neighbor who saw an opportunity. They said the sale was of Leo’s own free will, but the buyer paid pfennigs on the Reichsmark, and Leo had to hand over a hefty transaction fee to the Nazi Party’s District Economics Adviser.
My grandfather was released from Buchenwald after a few weeks and fled to Switzerland. Leo stayed behind. Three and a half years later, Leo was dead. It was all quite orderly. He was seized in Bad Kissingen, taken to nearby Würzburg, marched through the streets with 800 other Jews from the region, put on a train, and deported to Poland. I lose the thread of his story as the train leaves the station on April 25, 1942. I am desperate to know whether he was killed on the train trip to the Polish ghetto, or if he died of disease or starvation in the ghetto, or if he was shot on the way to the death camp Sobibor or was gassed there and incinerated. It’s one of those. I’ll never know which.
But I do know what the death march to the train looked like, because the Gestapo took pictures. A photo album of the deportation survived the war and was seized by Allied forces. It was used as evidence at Nuremberg and at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. I’ve examined these photos with a magnifying glass, looking for Leo in the masses. He is not to be seen, but in a couple of the photos you can see a movie camera. Yes, the Nazis actually made a film of their crime. We know that Gestapo officials screened it, but it disappeared and is presumed lost or destroyed.
Fast forward to my foolishness.
After years of gathering the scattered traces of my great-uncle’s life, with some surprising successes, I decided back in June to hunt for the film. Of course it probably burned in a bombing or was destroyed by some nervous German official as the Allies closed in. But things you think would be gone survive somehow. Last year a guy in England found a coded military message from 1944 on the skeleton of a carrier pigeon in his chimney. Maybe this movie is in an old box or a long-unopened suitcase in some German attic.
I can’t go crawling through the attics of Germany. But this summer, it occurred to me that I could use the power of the Internet to ask Germans to go crawling through their attics for me. I made a short video in German, describing Leo’s well-documented deportation and asking people to help me find the missing film. It’s not about assigning blame, I assured them, or seeking reparations. It’s just about finding Leopold, rescuing him from oblivion. I posted the video on YouTube and created an email address to receive suggestions. The video didn’t exactly go viral, but the website of Der Spiegel, a leading German magazine, picked it up. For a couple of weeks, my inbox was filled with sweet but unhelpful suggestions from Germans who were moved by my plea. These soon trickled off, leaving only a steady stream of spam.
Months went by. And then, on Sept. 30, an email from a German email address appeared. In grammatical, conversational German, it said: “Hello. We are in possession of 17 original photos of the deportation to Poland. Would you like to buy them? But only if you can guarantee absolute discretion. Thank you!—Susanne.”
I was excited and intrigued. I wrote back to confirm that these were photographs of the deportation in question and that they weren’t simply duplicates of the well-known photos that had been around since the war. Susanne replied: “These are never-before-seen photographs of the deportation from Würzburg to Poland. We’re in possession of a photo album of my grandfather’s. My grandfather was in the Gestapo there. That’s why discretion is so important to me.” She went on to say that the album contained 17 photographs of the April 25 deportation, 26 other pictures having to do with Jews in Würzburg, and 90 other photos of her grandfather’s Gestapo service, all of them inscribed with dates and explanatory notations. “Naturally,” she said, “the photos have only been in the family’s possession, and I inherited them when my grandfather died.”
I found myself perversely overjoyed. It’s odd to be thrilled at discovering pictures of a death march, but when the death march is your great-uncle’s and you’ve been searching for him for years, it’s a big deal. I also knew that whether or not Leo appeared in the pictures, this was an extraordinary historical record. Most of all, I was thrilled that my hunch was right: One simple YouTube plea and German attics were flying open, disgorging their secrets. How many other photo albums were out there? Would the film itself turn up?
I was also a little disgusted. Susanne, the granddaughter of a perpetrator of my great-uncle’s murder, was offering to sell me evidence of the crime. It seemed tone-deaf, mercenary, oblivious to the enormity of my family’s loss and her own grandfather’s guilt. But I didn’t begrudge her the desire to see a little profit from her inheritance.
Our correspondence continued. I assured her that I’d be discreet and asked her whether she had scanned a photograph that she could send me. I also asked her what she wanted for the album.
She wrote back with embarrassment, asking me what “scanned” meant. “Pardon the question but my husband and I are not the youngest and we really don’t know all of the new terms,” she said. Rather than answer my question about a price, she asked if I might possibly have the opportunity to go to Germany to have a look at the album and take it from her.
It was also at this point in our correspondence that Susanne, without my bidding, brought up her discomfort over what the photos showed. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family but what’s to be done about it? It’s awful when you think about what your own grandfather unthinkingly participated in. That’s how it must have been, even though by then he was already pretty high-ranking. But when I remember the stories he used to tell I still get shivers down my spine.”
The word “unthinkingly” sent shivers down mine. Here was the tired, bankrupt narrative of German innocence: Everyone was a little ignorant cog in a big terrible machine, just following orders. I thought this German illusion of innocence had been shattered decades ago, but apparently not, at least for Susanne. I said nothing about this to her, though; I didn’t want to make her regret reaching out to me.
I explained to her what I meant by “scanning”: Could she send me an electronic copy of one of the photos so that I could make sure it was of good quality?
“Unfortunately we haven’t made any copies,” she replied, “and for us it’s not too pleasant to send something having to do with the Holocaust by email. But the photos are all in good condition and of good quality.” She also asked again whether I could come to Germany: “At least that would make it easier to discuss a price,” she said. And then she asked what I planned to do with the photos. Did I want to publish them? “If so,” she said, “that would be OK with us so long as you don’t reveal our names.”
I wrote back. Planning a trip to Germany would be very difficult, I explained. But if I bought the album, I assured her, I would promise not to reveal any names.
“That sounds good,” Susanne replied. “You don’t absolutely have to come to Germany if it won’t work for you. But it would have been interesting to meet someone who has a connection to this. Maybe another time.”
We were now four days and six back-and-forths into our correspondence, and I was still elated. I imagined myself opening the album and spotting Leo in one of the photos. I imagined a trove of primary source materials that I could publish—a coffee table book that readers would pore over and Holocaust scholars would mine for new insights. It was enough to make me want to hop on a plane to pick up the album immediately, so I went back to my calendar and found a long weekend in November when I thought I might be able to make a trip work. I wrote to Susanne, inquiring whether she’d be available that weekend.
“I can’t tell you today what I’ll have going on that weekend,” she replied. “But I can look into how to ship a package to the USA. Or do you have experience with that? DHL or some other company?”
She still hadn’t said anything about a price. But she seemed willing to move ahead without my traveling to Germany, so I decided to go the DHL route. I told her that I’d had good experiences with DHL, and that I’d be happy to pay for the shipping. To supply a little of the personal contact she seemed to want, I attached a photograph of Leo with his dog from before the war and a photo of myself with my wife and daughters. I thought maybe this personal touch would help her feel comfortable going ahead with the transaction.
Susanne replied the next day: “Yes, shipping through DHL will work. Thanks for the pictures. What price do we want to set for the album? You can certainly make an offer!”
This plunged me into uncertainty. Some of it was about obvious things: Was it wise to send money to someone I’d never met, without first seeing what I was buying? How could I put a price on such a priceless historical artifact? I couldn’t exactly hop onto eBay to find out what similar never-before-seen photo albums of Gestapo atrocities have been going for.
Part of my worry came from something else entirely—an ugly, ancient anxiety I did not even know was my own. I felt as though I was being tested: the Jew being asked to set a price. Would I offer too little and prove how cheap we are? Would I offer too much and show how rich we are? I bounced back and forth in my mind, low to high and back again, trying each number on as a defensible expression of the Jewish attitude toward money. I wondered: Is this what Leopold went through when he had to sell his shop’s inventory after Kristallnacht?
I ultimately settled on an offer of 450 euros (about $600) plus shipping costs. Susanne accepted it the next day. “The shipping costs for the package are 17.90 euros,” she said. “Let’s just make it 470 euros including shipping and that’ll be OK for us.” She gave me her name, her street address, and her grandfather’s name, reminding me to keep these all to myself: “It has to stay private that I’m his descendant and that we are the ones who sold you the album.” She gave me all of the necessary wiring information for her account at the German bank Targobank, including the IBAN and Swift numbers. She told me she was going to buy a box at the post office and pack the album up well. She asked what sort of description she should list for the U.S. customs form—“just ‘photo album?’” And again she stressed the need for discretion in the wiring transaction. “It’s important not to write anything about WWII or anything like that. We don’t want our bank to potentially ask us what we sold because the people down there all know us very well.”
And that was that. On Monday, Oct. 7, a week after she first contacted me, I wired her 470 euros. While we waited the couple of days for the transaction to clear, I asked her something I’d forgotten to ask earlier: How exactly had she found me? She explained that it was by chance. She likes to read Der Spiegel online, and a couple of months earlier she had seen the link to the video about my search for the film. She watched it and then she and her husband spent a long time debating whether to write to me because of their worries about disclosure. “But then we decided to go ahead and do it because it might help you learn a little more on the subject of your family,” she said.
On Tuesday, she told me that she planned to send me the album on Saturday when she went to the market, and that she’d let me know when it would reach me.
On Thursday, she confirmed that the money had reached her bank account, and again said she’d ship the album on Saturday.
I wrote her on Saturday afternoon to say that I hoped everything had gone well with the shipment and that I’d appreciate a tracking number so that I could monitor the shipment. Late that night she answered that she had gotten to the post office too late. There was so much going on at the market, she explained, that she hadn’t managed to get the package off. She apologized and said she would take care of it on Monday.
That’s the last I heard from Susanne.
I wrote her on the Monday she was supposed to ship the package and asked her to confirm the shipment and send me the tracking number. No reply. I wrote her twice on Tuesday, morning and evening, with the same question. No reply to either. I wrote her on Thursday that I preferred to believe she was having second thoughts or some sort of problem with her email than that she was defrauding me. I asked her to write back or call me immediately. No reply. On Saturday, still unwilling to admit I’d been had, I sent her one final email:
“I’ve read what you wrote over and over again. It gives the impression of being the truth and not an inducement to fraud. But I haven’t had a word from you in 10 days now. It would surprise and appall me that a German of today could be so staggeringly cruel to the Jewish descen dant of a Holocaust victim. Can it be?”
No reply.
It can.
***
I suppose I could point out a few moments in the story where it doesn’t look like Susanne was a thief. She didn’t pretend to have the thing I was actually looking for (the film). She asked if I could show up for the deal in person. She accepted my opening offer instead of pressing for more. And she kept writing to me for a couple of days after my money hit her bank account.
But the truth is that I put too much of myself into searching for something, believed someone when she said she had it, paid her for it without seeing it, and have nothing to show for it but disappointment and indignation.
I look back now and ask myself where my mistake lay. At the simplest level, it was in trusting someone I met through the Internet, but there’s more to it than that. My mistake was also in believing that my great-uncle Leo’s murder by German hands decades ago would protect me, his descendant, from hurt at German hands today. I thought this sort of cruelty would be outside the bounds of contemplation in German society. That is a mistake my family has made before.
One other possible mistake occurs to me, and that is the search itself. At the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht I continue to look for my great-uncle Leo. I continue to harbor the fantasy that if I can find him in a film or in a photo, it will help me know this man who is unknowable, and that by knowing him I will rescue him from his fate.
Foolishness.
***
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Eric L. Muller is a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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The Case for Hope On my 40th birthday, contemplating life—and the value of compassion—in Trump’s America by Liel LeibovitzI turned 40 today, and I spent the first few hours of my birthday staring at the television screen in disbelief. It is late at night as I write this, and, like many Americans, I am overwhelmed with emotion. I am terrified for what the future holds. I am ashamed that so many of my countrymen opted to elevate a racist, misogynistic bully to the highest office in the land. I weep for America, and I have no idea what I will say to my children when they wake up in the morning and ask how the man who has said so many hateful things about so many of us still managed to win the trust and support of so many others.I’m a journalist, and so I feel the temptation to come up with stories that explain what right now feels like the end of an era in American history and the beginning of another, much darker chapter. Do we blame the regressive left for galvanizing frustrated working class whites into their own identity politics movement? Do we blame the Republican party for abandoning more or less every single conceivable conservative value in a naked push for power, and transforming itself into the haven of anti-Semites, xenophobes, conspiracy theorists, authoritarians, and other vile bodies? Do we point out to the obvious and considerable role that misogyny played in this putrid political drama, and question what it means to live in a nation that chose a man who had boasted about sexually assaulting women rather than a woman who, for all of her flaws, was a deeply capable, experienced, and responsible candidate?
These are all stories worth pondering, and in the days and weeks and months to come, my colleagues and I are likely to examine each of them in depth. And yet tonight, none of them move me. Tonight, I want to do what us Jews have always done in grim moments and tell myself a different story, my own:
I was thirteen when I first thought seriously about America. I was cowering in a bomb shelter in a suburb of Tel Aviv, and I took great comfort in knowing that this great nation had sent a battery of missiles to help protect me and my family from Saddam Hussein’s aggression. This commitment to liberty is what inspired me, a decade later, to follow in the footsteps of so many immigrants before me and land in New York with no money and no clue and nothing but a wild conviction that if I worked hard and did my best, I could do whatever I wanted to do and be whoever I wanted to be. I put my faith in America, and it rewarded me with a life for which I am deeply grateful. It’s why I have no patience with talk of fleeing it now that Trump has won, and it’s why I pray that President Trump, as odious and objectionable as I may always find him, succeeds in keeping us all safe and prosperous.
But the next four years mustn’t be about him; they must be about us. If we truly believe in this business of repairing the world, if it’s more than an empty platitude, let’s get to work. If you’re wondering what you can do, the answer is simple: open your heart.
You can follow in the footsteps of the thoughtful young college student who reacted to news that a classmate was a notable white supremacist by inviting him over for a Shabbat dinner, and then another and another, until the young man cast off his prejudices and reshaped his life. You can work to build new coalitions with anyone who still wants to build coalitions, and reject the ideologies and platforms erected solely to divide us and keep us apart. You can take the time to volunteer in your own neighborhood or your own town and make sure it grows just a little bit more perfect each day. If history—America’s and Judaism’s alike—has taught us anything, it’s that neither fear nor bigotry can thrive for long when faced with empathy, compassion, and conviction. It’s time for us to rise to the moment, to prove that America is already great because we, its people, a diverse and spirited bunch, will never abandon our commitment to the crazy vision on which this nation was founded, the idea that we each deserve a fair shot at pursuing our happiness. Anything short of that would be a real tragedy.
Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.
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‘Unorthodox’ Is Coming to Toronto on November 17 For a Free Show We’ll be recording live from Beth Tzedec Congregation—RSVP to claim your seat! by UnorthodoxCalling all Jews, gentiles, and Leafs fans residing in the greater Toronto area!Join us on November 17 at 7:30pm at Beth Tzedec Congregation for a live recording of our Unorthodox podcast with two very special guests: writer David Bezmozgis, and mezzo-soprano, actress, and broadcaster Julie Nesrallah.
The event is free and open to the public, but please do RSVP here to reserve your seat. We’ll also be posting updates on the Facebook event page—invite your friends and post your questions and requests in the comments! If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, we’ll take note.
ICYMI, Unorthodox is our newest podcast—a smart, fresh, fun take on Jewish news and culture posted every Thursday. Hosted by Tablet editor-at-large and Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer, and featuring deputy editor Stephanie Butnick and senior writer Liel Leibovitz, the panel discusses the latest Jewish news, politics, and culture with equal parts seriousness and irreverence. From Amy Schumer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no topic is off limits.
Unorthodox is a smart, fresh, fun weekly take on Jewish news and culture hosted by Mark Oppenheimer and featuring Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leibovitz. You can listen to individual episodes here or subscribe on iTunes. Unorthodox is part of the Panoply podcast network.
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Ascending God’s Mountain: A New York City Marathon Story Blood, sweat, and tears. And prayer. by Armin RosenAs with just about anything New York-related, there’s a Jewish aspect to the city’s annual marathon, the 26-mile river of humanity that gushes through the five boroughs on the first sunday of November.For over 30 years, Shearith Yisrael, a historic congregation on Central Park West, has organized a minyan for marathon runners near the race’s start line. This year, three pre-race Shachrit services were held in a small tent next to one of the administration buildings at Fort Wadsworth, at the base of the Verrazano Bridge, where the race begins. There were tables of tefillin bags, and photos of services from years when the race fell on Rosh Chodesh, showing Torah readers decked out in their marathon bibs. A fellow racer helped me put on tefillin, something I admittedly hadn’t done for awhile. The service ended with the shir shel yom, the psalm for the day of the week, which, I noticed, includes the line: Mi ya’aleh b’har Adonei? (Who will ascend God’s mountain?) The words brought on a chill of recognition, even the suggestion of tears. Maybe it was talking about the marathon, I thought. This is a totally solipsistic reading, but those words from the Shachrit service would echo through my head for the next five hours, and longer.
“The minyan at the 1986 New York City Marathon, which fell on Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan. (Image courtesy of the author)
The Verrazano is the only link between Staten Island and any of the four other boroughs, making it a necessary part of any five-borough marathon route. Still, while running along its top deck, soaking in the wondrous absurdity of sharing a giant suspension bridge with tens of thousands of other blissed-out people, the symbolism felt unmistakable to me, as if there were deeper messages built into the course: Up here, you run along a ribbon of light, as ethereal and infinite as Rainbow Road in Mario Kart, threading through archways that welcome you to the very heavens, with the city below unmoving and seemingly uninhabited, as if it isn’t even a real place. But soon, you descend into the disillusionment and corruption of the earth below—including your own. The race is not some out-of-body idyl. The adrenaline, and the unreality of those first few miles doesn’t morph the city into a pure, extra-sensory plane. Really, it’s something more like the exact opposite.
But I could fool myself for the first handful of miles. At mile 2, the race turned into a backstreet in Bay Ridge, where the druggy peals of a Spacemen 3 song blasted from an amp on a fire escape. This was a good sign. On 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, I heard gospel choirs and marching bands. I wondered what the 15,000 runners from foreign countries were experiencing right now. In the midst of a presidential election of unsurpassed rancor and nastiness, a runner from Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy or Mexico (to name just a few of the more strongly represented nationalities) would see our streets teeming with life and spontaneity and guarded by smiling cops and firefighters, with runners eased along its route by over 10,000 volunteers. Along Bedford Avenue, home to Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidic community, they’d see something that might not even exist back in their home countries: gleaming facades decked in rows of Hebrew lettering, with Kolel students darting down the street as if there were no marathon at all. Over 26 miles, our visitors would run past everything wonderful about New York and America, and perhaps come away with a sense of a sort of innate national decency that not even our horrifying politics could erase. How ecstatic it all was—at least until the living torture of the high teens, when the race really began.
The middle miles brought portents of the trouble ahead. Runners dodged a flattened rat carcass halfway along the up-grade of the Queensborough Bridge—what was the poor vermin even doing there, so far off the ground? A jumbotron at 1st Ave revealed that it was 1:16 PM, a demystifying and disheartening convergence of marathon-time and actual time. I watched a runner get her feet examined at a medical tent and it made me feel a stab of jealousy. The race enters the Bronx at 125th street, and then leaves the Bronx at 137th street, which feels like negative progress. The 20s yielded my most important discovery from Sunday: Running 26.2 miles is exponentially harder than running, say, 22.5 miles. In terms of mental and physical torment, the distances don’t even rate on the same scale (my final time was 4 hours and 57 minutes, a hobbyist’s time, and good for the 33rd percentile).
By mile 21, I had already come to grips with the reality that the race would never end. This was my life now, step after excruciating step. I had chosen this, and now I was stuck with it, forever. The crowds turned from a help to an annoyance: No, you aren’t “almost there” at mile 20, or even mile 25, for that matter. My experience would be a ceaseless torrent of discomfort, with no gratification in store. Perhaps this was just as well, I realized running uphill along Central Park, somewhere around mile 23.
There are events one looks forward to in life—a holiday or a vacation or a Phish concert, say—that seem to flash by before you can process or even enjoy them, and then disappear into a barely differentiated mass of experience. A marathon is the opposite. You feel all of it; during and after, there’s no doubt that the time and the distance is inflicting something important on you, something that you’re glad to have but that you’ve also definitely had enough of. This surfeit of suffering stands in contrast to the great majority of things, which usually don’t live up to the hype: By the end of mile 24, hobbling through a sharp downhill in Central Park, with the crowds and foliage blurring by and the finish line an entire astronomical unit away, I had achieved a kind of satisfaction. A marathon doesn’t disappoint. You feel all of it.
I started to understanding something else about what I was doing and why I was doing it, as I turned past the Plaza Hotel and onto Central Park South, my legs beginning to return to me. I wasn’t running this to prove that I could do it, but because I knew I could do it. Life is an uncertain enterprise, and it offers relatively few chances to fully live out one’s expectations for oneself. But here, I was actually doing exactly that! Doing it within the artificial and perhaps inevitably meaningless framework of an athletic competition—but doing it nonetheless. In draining my own body and mind, I had traveled to a dreamlike realm of supreme control and fulfillment. Perhaps, I thought, this is why I’d seen so many runners with photos of dead friends and loved ones on their running shirts: The race was proof that certainty and control could be reclaimed even within a cruel and arbitrary state of existence. The race was their small rebuke to reality. It would be mine as well, even without a similar adversity to spur me. Who could climb God’s mountain?, I thought, the line pulsating louder as the end approached. Today, it would be me.
Reality returned with swift vengeance. After crossing the finish line, runners are herded along Central Park’s west loop for over half-mile, with a small army of inquisitive medical spotters surveying the human wreckage for any sign of trouble. At one point, I could feel myself falling backwards, as my line of vision angled about 45 degrees upwards. I caught myself, then chugged a Gatorade. Interesting, I thought. So that’s what fainting is like. File that away for future reference. Everything ached; standing up was a cruelty. Somewhere in the seventies along Central Park West, still an agonizing half a mile from the family and friends waiting for me, I sat down on a bench and thought about how much I had seen, done, and felt for the first time over the previous 5 or 6 hours. I mumbled a “shehehechyanu” under my breath, and for the day’s last time, my eyes welled with tears.
Related: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: To Kill or Not to Kill?
Armin Rosen is a New York-based writer. He has written for The Atlantic, City Journal, andWorld Affairs Journal, and was recently a senior reporter for Business Insider.
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