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Oy, my aching feet

By Lisa Hostein · October 2, 2008

I wonder if the London Review of Books knew how timely its review of a new book, Jews and Shoes, would be - coming out during Rosh Hashanah, when we spend hours on our feet at shul, and before Yom Kippur, when we barely get to sit at all. The review of the book, a collection of essays edited by Edna Nahshon, provides a fascinating read on the various links between Jews and shoes - from Freud to flat-footedness to the Wandering Jew, with this introduction:

I supposed that a book called Jews and Shoes was going to be either a bumper book of Jewish jokes about schlepping and cobbling, or a severe cultural studies analysis of the nature and symbolic value of footwear in Jewish society through the ages. Aside from a mention of how Ferragamo got his start by popularising the strappy shoe for Hollywood lovelies after being commissioned by Cecil B. DeMille to make 12,000 sandals for the original 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, there is nothing to be found on high-end modern footwear. Jews and Shoes turns out indeed to be largely about schlepping and cobbling, but is entirely devoid of jokes.

The reviewer, however, displays a bit of ignorance when she starts out by saying she knows of no significant, modern-day Jewish shoe designer. Maybe Stuart Weitzman should send her a special High Holiday pair that will hold up well for Kol Nidre.

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Take that, New York Jew!

By Ben Harris · September 29, 2008

Here’s an article you’re unlikely to find in the JTA. New York magazine’s 40th anniversary edition has published an elegy for the New York Jew that should provide more than enough fodder for some lively Rosh Hashanah dinner table conversations.

Writer David Samuels is both proud and chagrined by the rise and fall of the NYJ from the pinnacle of New York society.

First, the heights:

Future historians will record that the Jews replaced the old Protestant elite, who had run the city off and on since the eighteenth century until their power was finally shattered by the cultural metamorphosis of 1968, followed by the financial collapse of 1974. John Lindsay, New York’s last Wasp mayor, presided over a city falling into bankruptcy and seemingly irreconcilable racial and class tensions. Academics and residents agreed that New York City was dead—a mid-century idea on which the clock had finally run out. Lindsay’s successor, Abe Beame, was the first Jewish mayor of a city where Jews would assume the leading positions of political, economic, and cultural power.

But lest we get too proud, Samuels warns that the era of Jewish supremacy in New York is ending. In a turn that could be regarded as either flagrantly anti-Semitic or as caution against the perils of assimilation, Sameuls makes this observation:

New York may now be a center of global finance, but it is difficult to locate any equivalent, specifically Jewish, genius in the arts today. The collision of Jewish specificity and postmodernity will continue to give off sparks, no doubt, but the story of Jewish cultural life in New York City over the last 40 years is a story of triumph, then decline. If the rest of the world liked Jews better as victims and outsiders, it is possible—if great art, music, and literature is what you care about—that they may have had a point. As the barriers to Jewish acceptance fell away, so did our connection to shared communal values and the traditions of intellectual work that formed the common cultural inheritance of our grandparents.

New York Jews circa 2008 are wealthy white people whose protestations of outsiderness inspire blank stares or impatient eye rolling.

And this:

There is something ineffably sad and utterly American about the communal progression from tribal Judaism to a vague and watered-down idea of “Jewishness.” It’s like watching a family sell the old farmhouse to buy a drywall palace in the suburbs with twice the square footage and shiny new appliances.

And finally, this takedown of the entirety of the Jewish communal apparatus:

But the success of Lubavitch may equally be understood as a mark of a larger collapse: The Lubavitchers have succeeded by filling the spiritual and institutional void left by the disintegration of the traditional infrastructure of Jewish life in New York City. The modern Orthodox community, with its arid pseudo-intellectualism and high-priced schools, is an unlikely wellspring of Jewish revival. Reform and Conservative Judaism look increasingly like relics of the nineteenth and twentieth centures, respectively. It’s an open secret in the Jewish community that the galaxy of Manhattan-based Jewish organizations with impressive-sounding names like the World Jewish Congress exist for the most part only on paper.

Shana tova, indeed.

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High Holy Dazed

By Ben Harris · September 26, 2008

The Jewish Channel is producing a VH1-style series about the High Holidays. You know the drill – a bunch of media types whose names you sort of recognize talk smack about something. Yeah, I don’t watch them either.

Anyway, there are a coupla clips on their site. I’ve watched them all (yes, my job rules) and hereby declare this one the best:

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Philip Roth goes back to school

By Ben Harris · September 16, 2008

The first wave of reviews of Philip Roth’s newest novel, “Indignation,” are out this week. The book – which tells the story of the son of a New Jersey kosher butcher who flees to a Midwestern college to escape his neurotic father – clearly covers some well-worn Rothian territory. But the reviews are largely deferential, as befits to the only living writer ever to be canonized by the Library of America.

Below is a quick roundup of the latest. Also worth checking are Q&As with Roth from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.

• Jonathan Rosen (Slate): “I can’t help feeling that Roth is having a Judeo-Christian nightmare, possibly intensified by the rise of evangelical Christianity in America, which turns precious Rothian fluids into human stains. Or that he has discovered that since American culture has Jewish genes, there is for him no escape from the yoke of the Law.”


• Tim Rutten (L.A. Times):  “ ... an irritating, puzzling and fascinating bundle of mistakes, miscalculations and self-indulgences.”


• Louis Bayard (Salon) : “‘Indignation’ is almost comically well-titled: It’s an angry little morality play about the harm men can do.”


• Richard Eder (Boston Globe): “Nobody pyramids a one-damn-thing-after-the-next emotional catastrophe as soaringly as Roth.”


• Robert Allen Papinchak (Seattle Times): “… [an] intrepid novel of self-revelation, demands to be read in one sitting. It’s that good. It’s that audacious. It’s that compelling.”


• Yvonne Zipp (Christian Science Monitor): “… the tragic flounderings of a father and son that seem foreordained to send the boy straight to the fate from which they were intended to save him.”


• Bill Gallo (Rocky Mountain News): “… the much-celebrated and still much-misunderstood novelist Philip Roth cannot seem to shake the elegiac mood that’s engulfed him in the past decade. Perhaps he doesn’t want to.”

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Jews fit to print

By Uriel Heilman · July 28, 2008

Several Jewish-related items appeared over the weekend in The New York Times:

• Former workers at Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meat plant, detailed alleged abuses at the Postville, Iowa plant. Sunday saw competing rallies between activists protesting working conditions at the plant and activists opposed to illegal immigration.
• Gaza is getting its first museum of archeology.
  
• Who’s the Israeli media powerhouse “everyone and nobody knows,” Vivi Nevo?
• Tom Friedman picks up on the undercurrent reported in two recent JTA pieces (here and here) and gushes about Israel’s electric car.
• An Orthodox Jewish couple from Brooklyn prepare to shutter a clothing store on 43rd St. and Fifth Ave., Judy’s Better Dresses, that is more Lower East Side than the fixture it has been for 40-plus years in Midtown Manhattan.

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Borat in Israel?

By Uriel Heilman · July 3, 2008

Sascha Baron Cohen narrates “the running of the Jews” in Borat.

The serious-minded former director of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Yossi Alpher, who also is co-editor of Bitterlemons.org, a Palestinian-Israeli Web site, writes about a close encounter of the Bruno kind in his latest column in the Forward.

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Can Hebrew School Be Cool?

By Ami Eden · June 12, 2008

The Boston Globe reports on one local synagogue’s controversial plan to revitalize its Hebrew school:

Temple Emanuel’s reinvention begins this fall, when sixth- and seventh-graders will be transplanted to Prozdor, a well-regarded supplementary school for teens at Hebrew College in Newton.

“The idea is to take some of the pixie dust from the new Prozdor and sprinkle it on the middle-school kids,” said Jonathan Sarna, a well-known author and lecturer on Jewish life and a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

The Emanuel middle-schoolers will attend Prozdor on Sundays, selecting a Judaic studies or Hebrew language track and a variety of upbeat electives - such as “Jews, Movies and the American Dream,” and “Israeli Top 40.” Under a collaborative program called Makor, the Hebrew word for “source,” they will return to Temple Emanuel on Tuesdays. There, classes taught by clergy will connect students to the synagogue as they approach their bar or bat mitzvah, the Jewish ritual welcome to adulthood.

Marjorie Berkowitz, Prozdor’s director, said the goal is for other interested synagogues to be folded into the Makor program within five years, and for Makor classes to be hosted at sites throughout the region.

News of the pending changes provoked intense anger among the teachers at Temple Emanuel’s Hebrew school, since teaching jobs are being cut. From 20 teaching positions, only 12 will remain, and staffers were told they would have to apply for the jobs to be considered. Several Emanuel teachers declined to be quoted about the controversy, citing concern for their professional reputations.

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Jewish art on the coasts

By Ben Harris · June 4, 2008

June will be exciting for Jewish arts on both coasts.

San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum opens June 8th. JTA’s Sue Fishkoff has already written about its unique mission, and here is an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about architect Daniel Liebeskind’s visit and thoughts on his latest architectural masterpiece.

Meanwhile, in New York City, many Jewish museums are hosting exhibits and concerts, from “Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered,” (at the Jewish Museum through Aug. 3) to “Spirit of Sepharad: From Casbah to Caliphate, a 500 Year Journey” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on June 25.  See the New York Times’ take on these and other New York Jewish arts events this summer

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Jews and Power

By Ben Harris · May 16, 2008

The Jewish culture folks over at Nextbook are putting on the latest installment of their Festivals of Ideas series Sunday in New York. Among the literati lined up to talk about Jews and Power: Cynthia Ozick, Shalom Auslander, Ruth Wisse, and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.

Nowhere on the Web page, however, is it noted the irony of the festival venue – The Times Center, the event space on the ground floor of the gleaming new headquarters of the New York Times. Whether you see the Times as the citadel of American Jewish power or as the symbol of Diaspora Jewish weakness, it’s an interesting choice.

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Hollywood, Heeb-style

By Ami Eden · May 11, 2008

Some highlights from Heeb’s Hollywood issue:

• Award-winning comedian Kristen Schaal wishes she were Jewish.
• Child actor-turned-Hollywood lawyer Jeff B. Cohen, known for his turn as Chunk in The Goonies, offers legal advice.
  
• Up close and personal with Jason Segel, the writer and star of the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
• Whatever happened to all of those Christian blockbuster that were suppose to come, following the success of The Passion of the Christ?


• Meet the two Jewish guys from New Jersey responsible for Harold & Kumar.
• A fashion shoot re-imagines three pioneering Jewish stars from the Silent and Golden eras: Fanny Brice, Molly Picon and Theda Bara.
  

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