Meet Mayor Cohen
Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen's office is in a sun-drenched room overlooking the city's main canal, the Amstel. On table in the center sat four glasses emblazoned with the city's logo, which also adorns the outside of the building, the ID pass I was issued, and a flag that flies from the building's roof. The logo: three red "X"'s. Talk about unsubtle.
Cohen is the fourth Jewish mayor of Amsterdam since the war, though his Wikipedia page identifies his religion as atheist. His paternal grandparents died in Bergen Belsen and Cohen told me there was much talk about the war when he was a child (he was born in 1947).
Cohen is thoroughly secular -- asked about ways in which Judaism informs his sense of self, Cohen couldn't come up with anything -- but unlike some European Jews who preferred to suppress their identity after the war, Cohen says he always knew he was Jewish. With a name like that, it's hard not to.
"Well, of course, there is not a direct relation between the fact that the terrible things which happened to the Jewish community in Amsterdam and the fact that now after this stuff, the war, we have had now four Jewish mayors," Cohen told me. "But it must be a little more than a coincidence."
I pointed out that's a better record than New York. "Well, New York is a descendant of Amsterdam," Cohen replied without missing a beat.
If it weren't for the murder on November 2, 2004 of a filmmaker then little known outside the Netherlands, it's possible most of the world would never have heard of Job Cohen. But Theo Van Gogh's slaying by a Muslim extremist changed all that. Already controversial for his role in the film "Submission," which explored the role of women in Islam, Van Gogh was shot in broad daylight as he pedaled to work along an Amsterdam street. As he lay dying, his throat was slit and a note threatening Western governments and Jews was pinned to his body.
The murder sent shock waves through a city renowned for its tolerance. In its aftermath, Cohen was widely credited with keeping the peace in Amsterdam. Time magazine named Cohen one of its 2005 European heroes for his "inclusive" policies.
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Is Geert Wilders Dividing Muslims and Jews?
You read all about the problems between Jews and Muslims in Europe, and then you actually see it.
At the Felix Meritis tonight, there was a discussion about the question above organized by the Jewish Moroccan Network. At first, I thought that was an organization of Moroccan Jews. But it's actually a partnership organization between Jews and Moroccans living in the Netherlands. Why there isn't a Jewish-Muslim group organizing such a debate is beyond me at the moment.
The conversation was in Dutch, and despite having a capable and patient translator whispering in my ear, my grasp of the substance is a little shaky. But a few things are clear. There is abundant passion on this issue. Voices were raised, hands were waved, sharp words exchanged.
Also, there is far more disagreement within the Jewish community over how to react to the rise of a politician like Wilders than on the Moroccan side. So far as I could tell, some Moroccans understood Wilders' appeal, but no one was supporting him.
It's unclear how many Jews are as well. One participant said no more than ten percent maximum. But this in a continent where virtually no other far right leader can count on any significant Jewish support, so it's not nothing either.
Wilders is an anomaly in Europe, where the rise of far right groups have aroused considerable Jewish angst both domestically and internationally. As far as Jews are concerned though, Wilders is different, and therefore interesting, in two main ways. One, he speaks to a genuine social problem. And two, he is manifestly not anti-Jewish. On the contrary, Wilders is an outspoken defender of Israel who lived in the country for two years as a youth. As a result Wilders has split Jewish opinion in the Netherlands in a way other right-wing leaders have not.
I met a number of Jews tonight who feel real fear but were at least honest enough to acknowledge that fear might not be real. Men with yarmulkes confessed they do not wear them freely on the streets, but they're not sure that the danger that leads them to make real changes in their habits is imagined or not.
I don't know either. But I do know that if I felt that way in a supposedly liberal democracy, I would be outraged -- maybe even enough to vote for a politician who promised to restore things the way they were.
The best line of the evening came from the most outspoken Jewish defender of Wilders to take the microphone. When I cornered him outside in the hallway, he began ticking off the groups that once felt comfortable in the Netherlands and are now the objects of Muslim scorn. Gays used to be able to hold hands and kiss freely in the streets, he said. The Dutch thought it was fine. Who cared? The Muslims. A woman could walk with a short skirt and the Dutch thought it was sexy. Who cared? The Muslims.
Then a Jew walks by wearing a yarmulke. "OK, they thought you were a dirty Jew, but they didn't say it," he said. "Now your ass is getting kicked in certain neighborhoods. By who? The Muslims."
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Vote Now!
Finalists have been picked for TWJ's iPod competition. Click this link to choose where I go next. My editors have winnowed the field to 10 finalists (and I know which one I'm pulling for, but I guess I can't say now, can I?)
Voting it only open to the 30th, so don't be lazy. And tell your friends.
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Amsterdam!
Each time I mentioned to someone that my European adventure was finishing up in Amsterdam, the response has been raised eyebrows. Each time, I found it peculiar.
In Brussels last weekend, I met someone who actually lives here, and he told me he gets the same reaction merely for mentioning where he's from. It's a little juvenile, I think. Sure, the city is famous for drugs and sex, but that's hardly all it's famous for. It's not as if JTA would send me to a city merely for its debaucheries, right?
That said, this is my sixth time here. Yes, sixth. The first time was with my parents, when I was 12. Then sometime in college I discovered that if you bought a ticket to Israel on KLM, you were guaranteed a stopover here. Two trips, four stopovers.
Two is also the number of stories I'm pursuing here. One is about the rise of the European right-wing, a story I've been searching for a way into for weeks and finally found in the Netherlands. The other is about a critical documentary about the United Nations by an American Jewish filmmaker that is showing at the International Documentary Film Festival. JTA got me credentials for the festival, so I expect to see a lot of movies in the coming days, which should keep me out of trouble.
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Diamond Darwinism
On my final morning in Antwerp, I went to see Ari Epstein, the deputy CEO of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. The center is the coordinating body for the local diamond community and its offices are located in a 9-story glass building on Hoveniersstraat, ground zero for the Antwerp diamond trade.
After surrendering my ID at the entrance, I was escorted to a conference room on the top floor. The room was low-celinged and decorated in shades of cream: white leather chairs arrayed around the perimeter, a conference table in a nearby alcove, and floor-to-ceiling windows with sweeping views to the west. From the windows, you could see into dozens of diamond offices.
Epstein is an anomaly among Antwerp's Jews. Though Orthodox, he is clean-shaven and sharply dressed. But more significantly, he has something that would hardly raise an eyebrow in any other Jewish community, but which only a tiny fraction of Antwerp's religious community, and virtually none of its diamantaires, has: a law degree.
Epstein sketched out for me what is by now a well-known story. Jews once dominated the Antwerp diamond business. Then the polishing and cutting jobs migrated to lower-wage countries, mostly China and India. Then Indian businessmen started moving in, eroding the Jews' position. A turning point came in 1981, Epstein said, when a crisis in the diamond world caused a significant loss in Jewish wealth. That created an opening for others to come in.
Today, Antwerp remains the diamond capital of the world. The consensus figure is that 80 percent of the world's rough stones pass by the cobblestones 9 floors below where we sat, a stock worth billions. But the days of easy money are long gone, and the Jewish community faces a stark choice: adapt or starve.
"These people are business people," Epstein told me. "There is part of this community that is successful in doing business -- real estate, textiles, shmattes, whatever. These are not losers. These are people that make a living. But the security is out. The fact that I'm born, I'm five, six years old, I know what I'm going to do 12 years from now. That is out. And that is uncomfortable."
In America, the Jewish success story in indistinguishable from academic achievement. Sure there are titans of business and entertainment, but for most American Jews the path to wealth and comfort wove through the university. The stereotype of the American Jew is not a corporate executive or a Hollywood mogul, it's a doctor or lawyer.
In Antwerp, the level of educational attainment among Jews is very low. For one thing, the religious community is roughly half the total here, and spending years in a secular university just isn't done. For another, they never needed to before. Diamond jobs were plentiful and lucrative, and the trade could be learned in a matter of months.
Talking to members of the community, a word you hear a lot is "recycle." It's a poor word choice, but what they mean by it is that people need to find a new use for themselves, a new way to put food on the table. To a certain extent, this is happening, but it's hard to pin down just how widespread it is. Some say the end is nigh. Others say the community is finding its way and will be fine. Some say the years of plenty have made the community lazy. Others say the younger generation is taking to new ventures, like real estate.
But if there's one thing everyone agrees on, it's that the world of Antwerp has changed, and the community is going to have to change with it.
"The Jewish community lost its identity with the diamond industry," Epstein said, growing more animated as our conversation progressed. "In the whole world, the Jewish community works in a lot of different sectors. Here, they were all working for one sector. And that sector changed. And that change confronted our people with challenges. But the challenges that people are facing today are the same challenges that these kind of people face all over the world when we talk income."
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Diamonds are Forever
Actually, they're not. But they are important, indeed crucial, to understanding the Jewish community of Antwerp.
A generation ago, diamond jobs were plentiful and most of them stayed among Antwerp's close-knit Jewish community. It took two or three months to train as a diamond cleaver, and when it was over you could get as much or as little work as you wanted. If you chose the latter option, you could still earn more than the average Belgian and earn enough to support a large family.
Those days are done. In a few days, I'll have a story about just what the loss of those easy jobs have done to the community here, which is among the most unusual I have ever visited, the most obvious difference being the incredibly high percentage of religious Jews, both Orthodox and Hasidic -- or, in the local parlance used to describe both, hareidisch.
You see them everywhere here, and especially along the Schupstraat, the pedestrian thoroughfare that is the heart of the diamond district. They yap in Hebrew and English, steal smokes in the entryways of the various diamond centers, and lunch on kosher food at Hoffy's and Al Ha'aish. The roads leading into the city from the main train station are lined with jewlery shops, and a mezuzah is affixed to the door of nearly every one.
That kind of insularity breeds the deep sort of trust necessary to trade in precious gems. Which is why, if one believes Leonardo Notarbartolo, what happened on the night of February 15, 2003 would represent such a shocking breach, perhaps too shocking to believe.
Notarbartolo was the man behind most most brazen jewel heist in history, one that would make the cast of "Ocean's 11" weep with envy. The story is laid out in suspenseful detail in the March issue of Wired. It's worth the time, trust me. But here's a little something to whet the appetitie.
So he strolled into the Diamond District with a pen poking out of his breast pocket. At a glance, it looked like a simple highlighter, but the cap contained a miniaturized digital camera capable of storing 100 high-resolution images. Photography is strictly limited in the district, but nobody noticed Notarbartolo's pencam.
He began his reconnaissance at the police surveillance booth on the Schupstraat, a street leading into the center of the district. Behind the booth's bulletproof glass, two officers monitored the area. The three main blocks of the district bristled with video cameras: Every inch of street and sky appeared to be under watch. The booth also contained the controls for the retractable steel cylinders that are deployed to prevent vehicular access to the district. As Notarbartolo walked past, he began taking pictures.
He headed toward the Diamond Center itself, a gray, 14-story, fortresslike building on the south end of the district. It had a private security force that operated a nerve center located at the entrance. Access was blocked by metal turnstiles, and visitors were questioned by guards. Notarbartolo flashed his tenant ID card and breezed through. His camera captured crisp images of everything.
He took the elevator, descending two floors underground to a small, claustrophobic room—the vault antechamber. A 3-ton steel vault door dominated the far wall. It alone had six layers of security. There was a combination wheel with numbers from 0 to 99. To enter, four numbers had to be dialed, and the digits could be seen only through a small lens on the top of the wheel. There were 100 million possible combinations.
Power tools wouldn't do the trick. The door was rated to withstand 12 hours of nonstop drilling. Of course, the first vibrations of a drill bit would set off the embedded seismic alarm anyway.
The door was monitored by a pair of abutting metal plates, one on the door itself and one on the wall just to the right. When armed, the plates formed a magnetic field. If the door were opened, the field would break, triggering an alarm. To disarm the field, a code had to be typed into a nearby keypad. Finally, the lock required an almost-impossible-to-duplicate foot-long key.
During business hours, the door was actually left open, leaving only a steel grate to prevent access. But Notarbartolo had no intention of muscling his way in when people were around and then shooting his way out. Any break-in would have to be done at night, after the guards had locked down the vault, emptied the building, and shuttered the entrances with steel roll-gates. During those quiet midnight hours, nobody patrolled the interior—the guards trusted their technological defenses.
Notarbartolo pressed a buzzer on the steel grate. A guard upstairs glanced at the videofeed, recognized Notarbartolo, and remotely unlocked the steel grate. Notarbartolo stepped inside the vault.
It was silent—he was surrounded by thick concrete walls. The place was outfitted with motion, heat, and light detectors. A security camera transmitted his movements to the guard station, and the feed was recorded on videotape. The safe-deposit boxes themselves were made of steel and copper and required a key and combination to open. Each box had 17,576 possible combinations.
Notarbartolo went through the motions of opening and closing his box and then walked out. The vault was one of the hardest targets he'd ever seen.
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Antwerpen
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Brussels Central Station is so unremarkable you could miss it. Even inside, I wasn't sure I had found the right place.
Two hours later I was in Antwerp, and the difference couldn't be starker. Four levels of subterranean platforms emerge into a soaring atrium covering a station built in the typical European style. "Antwerpen" is engraved in gold letters above an ornate facade, which evokes nothing so much as a cathedral of transportation.
I thought: Brussels is function, Antwerp form. The capital of the European Union, whole sections of Brussels are dominated by the soulless, totemic architecture of the nascent European supra-state. Antwerp is the home of something far more passion-inducing: the diamond trade. One is the capital of bureaucracy, the other of romance.
But the metaphor falls away fast. The narrow tributaries around the station drain into the Jewish quarter, a drab hodgepodge of buildings creeping up on tiny sidewalks. Bearded Hasidim scurry about on bicycles, apparently oblivious to the opposition their comrades in Williamsburg mounted to a bike lane through their neighborhood. Most of Antwerp's Jews still derive their income from diamonds, but in defiance of the magnificence of the station, their dwellings betray little of the bling they're responsible for polishing and shipping off to adorn the bodies of the wealthy.
The Jewish presence is palpable here. After spending a weekend with young, mostly secular Jews, seeing so many Jews walking the streets without a second thought is an important corrective. Is there anti-Semitism in Europe? Of course. But Antwerp suggests there's more to it. If every Jew in Copenhagen grew a beard and started wearing a kippah, would they be such a ready target?
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Party Like a Jew
At several points during this weekend's Party Like a Jew event in Brussels, I was asked whether we have anything similar in the U.S. I'm not sure I know. Sure, we have singles weekends which, though I've never been, I imagine follow the same general formula: a decent hotel, some Shabbat spirit, a lecture or two, and a Saturday evening social event. We have Jewish nights at the club meant to bring young members of the tribe together (Jacob Berkman and I sampled these wares once. Okay fine, twice.) And there are organizations that do all sorts of things to raise Jewish pride, awareness, and education among young professionals and students.
But still something felt distinct about PLAJ, an annual shindig organized by the European Center for Jewish Students -- and it wasn't only the intense concentration of impossibly high heels and rectangular eyeglasses in shades that would make Tom Daschle blush.
For one, the event was transnational, drawing participants from dozens of countries (though the U.K. and France, not surprisingly, seemed to have the strongest contingent. Represent.) ECJS seems, intentionally or not, to have created a sort of pan-European Jewish social network. Several people told me they were there mostly to see friends, a number dwarfed only by those who said they were looking for a significant other. In New York, one gets the feeling that everyone has been there before. The faces look familiar, the interactions scripted by the writers of The Office, and I often leave feeling mildly depressed.
In Brussels, everyone -- or most everyone -- seemed genuinely happy, if not relieved, to be in a comfortable Jewish space. In the States, the opposite is often the case: being in a Jewish space is a necessary evil, to be endured only in the quest -- antiquated, ill-understood, and yet enduringly strong -- to find a Jewish mate. But here people were unabashed about their desire to socialize, and more, with other Jews. On the bus to Saturday night's annual ball, held in the cavernous and awfully named Event Lounge, the boys on the bus, many already well on their way to hammered, broke into spontaneous choruses of "Am Yisrael Chai" and other hasidic melodies. That would neeeeeeevvver happen back home.
Some of this is probably due to cultural differences between American and European Jews I'm only vaguely beginning to understand. And some of this is probably due to persistent European anti-Semitism, which, to my horror, I'm fast discovering may be the best predictor of the intensity of Jewish identification in a given country. Again I heard stories about the fear of openly wearing Jewish symbols in supposedly liberal, democratic Europe, and the security over the weekend was modest but palpable. I swear, the only physical human contact I experienced amid the lip-locked couples on the dance floor Saturday was the near strip search performed on me and my video equipment by the security guys at the door.
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Belgian Waffles
They are everything you expect them to be, and then some. Maybe I was just hungry and hadn't eaten anything since the crappy hotel breakfast in Copenhagen before dawn, but from the first bite there was no doubt it was the finest waffle I've ever tasted. It was literally the first thing for sale when I stepped form the train at Brussels Central Station. I took a bite and stepped outside, into clear blue skies and mild temperatures, and for a moment ... I don't know. It was good.
So I'm here for the European Center for Jewish Students Party Like a Jew weekend. I know nothing about the organization, nor what Europeans mean when they announce their intention to party like Jews, but I assure you I will find out. In the meantime, for those of you who think The Wandering Jew is just one massive skirt chase, all I can say is, get ready.
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Prayer Time
On my final morning in Copenhagen, I awoke before the sun -- not such a great feat in Denmark in November, mind you -- and headed for the Great Synagogue for morning services. (Side note: I failed to visit the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest when I was there, the third time I have visited that city and not set foot inside the massive Moorish structure. Nor did I visit the main synagogues in Berlin and Vienna. I have vowed not to miss any more on this trip.)
The Copenhagen synagogue is located just off one of the main shopping streets in the city center, down a small winding lane that is the very definition of charming. Inside, barely a dozen men were gathered beneath the massive vaulted ceiling, painted in blue and gold. From the outside, the building is unremarkable, and easily missable. But the sanctuary is large and regal, its size seeming to magnify the smallness of the number of worshippers.
The service was already well underway and moving along at a good clip when I ducked inside a few minutes after the 7:00 a.m. start time. I received a curt nod from one man engrossed in his prayers, the closest thing that anyone came to greeting me. A younger bearded man wearing a messianic Chabad kippah was present, but otherwise the group was composed entirely of men of late middle age. By 7:35, the service was finished and, this being Denmark, several worshippers strapped on their bicycle helmets and headed out into the cold.
As I moved for the exit, I heard a voice behind me.
"Where are you from?" asked a man who appeared to have some position of authority.
New York City, I told him.
"Will you be here tonight?" he asked.
No, I said, I'm leaving for Belgium this afternoon.
"Well," he replied. "Have a nice trip."
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