April 7, 2012 | 10:29 am

Why Is Peter Beinart’s Book About Israel Different From All Other Books?

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Of Peter Beinart’s much-attacked book, “The Crisis of Zionism” (Times Books, $26), I am compelled to ask: Why is this book different from all other books about the politics of Israel and the Zionist movement?

Beinart’s book has been ably covered in these pages by several of my colleagues at The Jewish Journal, but the book is so compelling that, frankly, I am sufficiently provoked by the book itself to have my say, too.

Over the last year or so, I have reviewed three other books whose authors, like Beinart, courageously ask questions about the challenges that Israel is facing, both in its own democracy and in dealing with the aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs. None of them attracted a fraction of the attention that Beinart now commands.

All of the other authors — J-Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami in “A New Voice for Israel,” Hirsh Goodman in “The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival” and Gershom Gorenberg in “The Unmaking of Israel” — asked the same tough questions that are so concerning to Beinart and came up with many of the same unsettling answers.  Only Peter Beinart, however, has sparked such a firestorm in the media and the Jewish community.

One reason is that Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic, seems to know how to make himself heard.  He trailed his coat provocatively in the pages of The New York Review of Books in 2010 and thus prompted his critics to attack the ideas in his book long before you could actually buy and read a copy.

Above all, however, Beinart did something that none of the others dared to do — he openly calls for American Jews to participate in a boycott aimed at Jewish enterprises located in the West Bank.  The so-called “Zionist B.D.S.” — the acronym refers to “boycott, divest, sanction” — is meant to pressure Israel into ending Jewish settlement in the occupied territories by resorting to the same economic weapon that the United States is deploying to pressure Iran into ending its nuclear weapons program.

Even his sympathetic readers cannot quite endorse Beinart’s book, although they are willing to credit him for a certain measure of courage in speaking his ideas aloud.

“Although I doubt a ‘Zionist boycott’ is the right tactic, ‘The Crisis of Zionism’ is a remarkably articulate and compelling statement about what has gone haywire in Israeli politics and at the top of some American Jewish organizational leadership,” writes Don Futterman in Haaretz. “Refusing to accept the settler map, calling for an honest debate, on both sides of the Atlantic, about the occupation, and demanding accountability of ourselves - these are Jewish and Zionist acts of the highest order, the acts of ‘free people’ who have left the slave mentality of bondage behind.”

Beinart certainly knows that a call for a Jewish boycott is a poke in the eye, not just to the settler movement in Israel but to the Jewish people around the world.  To be sure, Israel is now forced to confront one of the fundamental flaws in the Zionist idea — Palestine was never “a people without a land for a land without a people,” and no one has a good solution to the problem of Arab-Jewish co-existence. But Beinart is far too smart to believe that any significant number of Jews in America will use the checkbook as a weapon against their fellow Jews in Israel.

Indeed, Jews who live in security and prosperity in the United States are — or should be — reluctant to dictate to Jews who live under the threat of annihilation in Israel how they should deal with the dangers that beset them.  We may share Beinart’s conviction that the occupation of the West Bank is ultimately an existential threat to Israeli democracy — it is also Goodman’s belief, and Gorenberg’s, and Ben-Ami’s — but, after all, the rockets are falling on Ashdod, Beersheba and Eilat rather than Dupont Circle, Union Square or Westwood Village.

Israel will survive Beinart’s book, which suggests that all of the anxiety directed at his book is overstated.  A more subtle point is also true — Beinart only subverts himself by calling on American Jews to boycott Israel.  He may sell more copies by charging his book with such an explosive idea, but he is unlikely to convert even his like-minded readers to his own way of thinking.

Of course, I think he knew it all along.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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April 1, 2012 | 8:14 am

“The Last Romanov” Debuts at Fairfax and Third

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Dora Levy Mossanen

For fans of Dora Levy Mossanen, author of the provocative historical novels “Harem” and “Courtesan,” a much-anticipated day has finally arrived — the official publication date of “The Last Romanov” (Sourcebooks, $14.99), yet another example of her gift at conjuring up the enchantments of the past.

My review of “The Last Romanov” will run later this week in The Jewish Journal, but I can tell you now where I will be at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 3, 2012. That’s when Dora will unveil her new book at the Barnes & Noble in The Grove at Farmers Market, 189 Grove Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90036.

As the title of her new book suggests, “The Last Romanov” is set in the court of the last Tsar of All Russia — a place of opulence, decadence and historical consequence — but the story that unfolds in its pages actually shifts back and forth across the span of the 20th century.  We may think we know how the story of the Romanovs ended, but Dora works her characteristic magic to dazzle and amaze us.

“A master story teller at the height of her game,” enthuses another historical novelist of my acquaintance, Robin Maxwell, author of “The Secret Dairy of Anne Boleyn.” “Dora Levy Mossanen weaves history and magic into a riveting page-turner.”

Light refreshments and lively conversion are promised for the book launch at Barnes & Noble.  Readers of The Jewish Journal, of course, already know that Dora is a literate and discerning book reviewer. Readers of her novels know that she is a beguiling story-teller.  And those who have been privileged to meet the author in person know that she is an elegant and arresting speaker, too.

See you soon at the corner of Fairfax and Third!

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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March 14, 2012 | 9:18 am

Why the Death of the Britannica Print Edition Doesn’t Matter

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

A venerable print edition of the Britannica.

The Encyclopedia Britannica is going out of print after 244 years.  Only 4,000 copies of the last print edition remain in the warehouse — thirty-two volumes that weigh 129 pounds —and you can have a set for $1395.  Once the inventory is gone, you will have to go to the Web to use the venerable old Britannica.

No one is much surprised or unsettled by the news. Even the Britannica website refers to the event as nothing more than “just another historical data point.” I haven’t opened the print edition of the Britannica that takes up two full shelves in my library since I signed up for the online service years ago.  Indeed, the very first electronic book I ever bought was a dictionary, the second was the Encyclopedia Britannica, and these are still the only two e-books I actually use.

The life-or-death issue for Encyclopedia Britannica — and it’s a grave issue — is Wikipedia.  When I need a citation or a fact-check, I always use the Britannica because the mob-written pages of Wikipedia still carry a bad odor among journalists and scholars.  You will not find Wikipedia in any of the endnotes of the books I’ve written, but you will find more than a few facts from the Encyclopedia Britannica.

But it’s also true that I visit Wikipedia every day, and often many times each day, to a get an overview of a subject or an event or personality.  The same is true of every working journalist I know.  Only after I’ve consulted Wikipedia do I drill down to the citable sources, sometimes including the Britannica. That’s the selling point the Britannica has always relied on: “Britannica won’t be able to be as large [as Wikipedia],” a Britannica executive told the New York Times, “but it will always be factually correct.”

Wikipedia is written by a motley crew of aficionados who care passionately about a particular subject, which both good and bad.  The good thing is that Wikipedia contributors are deeply moved by the subjects about which they write, and no detail is too abstruse or too trivial to include in their entries.  The bad thing, of course, is that they answer to no higher authority except “the Wiki” — that is, the nameless and faceless community of Wikipedia users who are empowered to enter the database and change what they regard as factual errors. Sometimes the Darwinian approach to fact-checking works, sometimes not.  Even Wikipedia itself will sometimes issue a plea for the Wiki to do some work on one of the posted articles. My own Wikipedia entry, for example, has a few errors that no one has yet corrected, not even me!

Of course, the proposition that Wikipedia is prone to error and Encyclopedia Britannica is not is itself subject to debate.  Errors are inevitable in any database, of course, and I have found errors in both sources.  But the fact that the Britannica has an in-house editorial staff and a roster of distinguished contributors — and Wikipedia doesn’t — explains why the Britannica is citable and Wikipedia is not.

But the real drawback to the Britannica is its limited scope, and that explains why we will always be drawn to Wikipedia. Today I searched for the name of a man whose biography I have written — an early but mostly overlooked figure in the Jewish armed resistance to Nazi Germany — and I found him mentioned only once in the Encyclopedia Britannica database, and only in an article on another subject.  Wikipedia, by contrast, has a long, detailed and illustrated article on the same person.  While I haven’t cited Wikipedia in my book, I cannot cite the Enclopedia Britannica for the simple reason that there is nothing there to cite.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.

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March 2, 2012 | 5:44 pm

EXODUS - THE NOVEL AND THE BOOKSHOP

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Novelist-bookseller Leon Uris and Miss Bookworm

Leon Uris may have been best known as a novelist but he played a crucial role in focusing attention on the Holocaust and Israel in the late 1950s and early 1960s with “Mila 18,” a novel about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and “Exodus,” a saga about the Jewish war of independence that features the blockade-running ship famously known as Exodus 1947.

It turns out that Uris did not only write books — he sold them, too.

Kevin Roderick discovered that Uris opened a bookstore of his own on Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks in the summer of 1960.  In a play on his own literary success, Uris called his store the Exodus Book and Record Shop. Roderick posted a publicity photo of the author-bookseller — along with a fetching young lady dubbed “Miss Bookworm” — at his indispensable website about media and politics in the West, labobserved.com. 

Roderick has undertaken the task of selecting especially interesting and important images from the photo morgues of the now-defunct Valley Times and the Hollywood Citizen-News, and he offers the tantalizing news that the shot of Uris and Miss Bookworm “isn’t one of the better discoveries.” But I found it fascinating.

Kevin Roderick will be displaying a selection of historic Southern California photographs culled from the newspaper collections on Saturday, March 10, at 2:00 p.m. in the Mark Taper Auditorium of the Los Angeles Central Library.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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February 23, 2012 | 1:02 pm

Denial Ain’t Just a River in Egypt

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Dr. Kirsten Grimstad

Today I read that the Chinese city of Nanjing — better known in America as Nanking — severed its sister-city relationship with Nagoya, Japan, because the mayor of Nagoya expressed doubts that the atrocities known as the Rape of Nanking actually happened.

A few days ago, the French Senate passed a law to criminalize the denial of “officially recognized genocides,” including the mass murder of Armenians during World War I, which prompted outrage in Turkey, where the Armenian genocide is officially denied.

And I recently discovered that my review of Peter Longerich’s important new biography of Heinrich Himmler has been denounced by a revisionist website whose sympathies lay wholly with Nazi Germany.

All of these unsettling examples of historical denial were on my mind when my friend and colleague, poet and book publicist extraordinaire Kim Dower, called my attention to an upcoming event featuring Dr. Kirsten Grimstad.

Grimstad will present a multi-media lecture titled “Mourning and Memory-Work in Berlin Today” at Beth Chayim Chadashim on March 13. It’s an opportunity to hear a first-hand report on the struggle of contemporary Germans to make sense of the Holocaust, which remains the prime example of historical amnesia even if it is hardly the only one.

Grimstad is Professor and Co-Chair of the B.A. in Liberal Studies Program at Antioch University, but she is perhaps best known as a founding editor of Chrysallis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture, a ground-breaking journal that was published out of the late and lamented Los Angeles Women’s Building.

Her talk at Beth Chayim Chadashim is rooted in the six-month sabbatical that she spent in Berlin, where she studied the efforts of contemporary Germans “to accept social responsibility for the crimes of their ancestors.”  She draws a direct linkage between the Holocaust and other genocides that have been minimized or denied by revisionists around the world.

“Germany’s long-overdue efforts to establish historical accountability and to reconcile the past by working through its traumatic history,” she explains, “have widespread ramifications in our world today as societies face their own legacies of atrocity and genocide — Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, among others.”

It’s significant that Grimstad wants to draw attention to some of the less remembered victims of Nazi terror, including gays and lesbians who were “not acknowledge as a victim group for many years and were not eligible for restitution offered to other victim groups.”

Tragically, we are still obliged to keep the memory of genocide alive — not only the Holocaust, but also the atrocities that took place in Nanking and the killing fields of Turkey — in spite of those insist on forgetting them, explaining them away, or denying them altogether.  Kirsten Grimstad stands in the vanguard of the effort to do so.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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February 22, 2012 | 11:53 am

A Scholar Who Can Really Shake Things Up

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Prof. Timothy Snyder

The study of history may strike some readers as a sedate subject. Now and then, however, an historian comes along who can really shake things up.  Timothy Snyder is one such scholar, and I am excited to announce that we will all be afforded an opportunity to meet Snyder in person when he appears as part of the ALOUD series at the Los Angeles Central Library on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, at 7:00 p.m.

Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, boldly reframed the conventional narrative of the Second World War and the Holocaust in “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” a landmark book that reminds us of the crucial but often overlooked role of Poland and Eastern Europe in that tragic era.  When I reviewed “Bloodlands” in The Jewish Journal, Snyder’s provocative take on the Holocaust sparked a lively debate among our readers.

Snyder’s latest work is “Thinking the Twentieth Century” (Penguin, $35), but his role in the book is a bit unusual.  The primary author is the late historian Tony Judt, an influential mover and shaker who did some impressive reframing of his own, and the byline is given as “Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder.”

But the byline conceals a poignant story.  At 62, Judt was stricken with a degenerative neurological disorder while working on “Thinking the Twentieth Century,” and it was clear that he would be unable to complete the book.  Snyder came to his rescue by recasting the book as a conversation between the two scholars — a conversation that amounts to an impressive intellectual achievement but also a touching encounter between two good friends at the end of one man’s life.

“I washed my hands in very hot water,” Snyder writes of their daily work sessions, which took place in Judt’s New York apartment during the final stage of his illness. “Tony suffered terribly from colds in his condition, and I wanted to be able to grasp his hand.”

What is preserved in the book that Judt and Snyder created together is a unique encounter between two lively and provocative minds, “a contemplation of the limitations (and capacity for renewal) of political ideas,” as Snyder puts it, “and of the moral failures (and duties) of intellectuals in politics.”  Like the earlier work of both men, “Thinking the Twentieth Century” casts a new light on what we are tempted to regard as familiar terrain and allows us to see things that have been hidden from us until now.

Timothy Snyder will be featured in the ALOUD series at the Los Angeles Central Library, 630 W. Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071, at 7:00 p.m. on March 6, and it will be my honor and pleasure to serve as his interlocutor.  Precisely because I have already read “Thinking the Twentieth Century,”  I can promise that Snyder’s remarks will be spirited and perhaps a bit unsettling.

I am proud that the two of us will share a stage, but thanks to Snyder’s extraordinary friendship and colleagueship with Tony Judt, his late co-author will be there in spirit, too.

For more information and reservations about the event, visit the website of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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February 14, 2012 | 2:04 pm

Leon Wieseltier on the Dangers of Radical Jews

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic

“In Judaism,” writes Leon Wieseltier in the February 16, 2012, issue of The New Republic, “commentary has always been the most common expression of originality.”

I have been reading Wieseltier’s commentary in The New Republic for more years than either of us would be happy to acknowledge in public. He is the literary editor of TNR, which explains why the so-called “back of the book” is always so rich and compelling. (I have a vested interest here, of course; my son, Adam, is a senior editor of TNR, and that’s where his own literary commentary can be found.) But Wieseltier himself holds forth on cultural, political and diplomatic matters in the “Washington Diarist” column that appears on the last page of each issue, and that’s the first place I go when each new issue arrives at our house.

His latest piece, titled “Fevers,” addresses the latest scandals among the haredim in Israel, where an eight-year-old girl was spat upon by a gang of ultra-Orthodox men because her Modern Orthodox garb was insufficiently modest, and where a distinguished doctor whose book was being honored by the Ministry of Health was not allowed to participate in the ceremony because she is a woman: “[S]he was instructed that she could not sit with her husband,” he reminds us, “and a male colleague would accept her prize for her because women were forbidden from the stage.”

It is not only scandalous but downright heartbreaking that such things happen in a country where Golda Meier served as prime minister during the Yom Kippur War and, perhaps more to the point, where women are called upon every day to serve in the armed forces.  Wieseltier blames the “odious misogyny of the ultra-Orthodox” for the shanda we now behold; he faults the “excrescences of Benjamin Netanyahu’s base” for injecting them into Israeli politics; and he calls Netanyahu to account because “the prime minister has not translated personal disgust into political disgust.”

The same sense of outrage can be found in several books that I recently reviewed in The Jewish Journal, including Gershom Gorenberg’s “The Unmaking of Israel” and Hirsh Goodman’s “The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival.” But Wieseltier makes the point with both wit and punch.  He points out, for example, that one haredi propagandist puts the Jewish population of the world at one million because he is willing to count only those Jews who share his rigid beliefs and practices.  “Our worst enemies,” writes Wieseltier, “never eliminated so many of us.”

Wieseltier is a knowledgeable and even a scholarly Jew, but he insists, along with Gorenberg and Goodman, that nothing less than the survival of democracy in Israel is at stake.

“The debate must not be about the place of women, or unbelievers, in Judaism,” he concludes. “The debate must be about the place of Judaism in Israel.  No rabbis have the authority to settle that question.  The secular space that defines a democratic polity exceeds their hoary reach. That is the blessed rupture that they will never undo. It cannot be argued or spat away.”

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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February 2, 2012 | 5:16 pm

When the Stars Are in Alignment Above North Vermont Avenue

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Skylight Books and the entry to the Skylight Theatre

When it comes to arts and letters in Los Angeles, an exceptionally bright spot can be found on a short stretch of Vermont Avenue just a bit north of Hollywood Boulevard.

We went there on a recent Saturday night with our dear friend, Raye Birk, to see a performance of “Hermetically Sealed,” a new play by Kathryn Graf that is being presented at the Skylight Theatre by the Milton Katselas Theatre Company under the direction of Joel Polis.  The short walk from the parking lot to the theatre reminded me that a short stretch of North Vermont Avenue affords more than one pleasure for the senses as well as the mind.

First we passed the sidewalk tables at Figaro, a bustling French bistro that would not look out of place in Paris (or, for that matter, Greenwich Village).  Then we glimpsed the window displays at Skylight Books, one of the best-loved independent bookstores in Southern California and a beacon of light for readers who want to hold a book in their own two hands before buying it and, now and then, see a touring author with their own two eyes.

Tucked away behind Skylight Books is the storied performance space called the Skylight Theatre.  That’s where we once saw Raye Birk in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” directed by Milton Katselas, who passed away in 2008 but is still revered as an acting coach, author (“Dreams Into Action” and “Acting Class”) and a stage and film director.

Katselas, in fact, is the nexus for much of what is happening on that stretch of North Vermont.  He was one of the original co-owners of Skylight Books, and current co-owner and general manager Kerry Slattery credits Katselas as “the instrumental party in getting the bookstore going after Chatterton’s closed in the same location.”

Then, too, he is recalled in the name of the Katselas Theatre Company, the production company associated with the acting school at the Beverly Hills Playhouse where Katselas taught for many years. Its mission is to develop and introduce new plays, a role that Katselas himself played throughout his own career, and the Skylight Theatre is the venue where many of these plays are staged.

“Hermetically Sealed,” the company’s latest production, is a stunning evening of theatre that tells the story of a troubled family in a small American town — a story of madness, sexual scandal, and family dysfunction that is also surprising funny.  Like the rest of the audience, we were laughing out loud when our hearts were not breaking at the tender but troubled relationship between a fifteen year-old-boy named Conor (played by Nicholas Podany) and his mother (played by Gigi Bermingham).

Thanks to producing artistic director Gary Grossmann, we were able to snag front-row seats and sat six feet away from young Nicholas Podany during the performance.  The whole company is accomplished — and I was especially impressed by the set decoration, where every detail that catches the eye of the audience contributes something to the performance and the play itself —  but Podany was a stand-out. He’s an exceptionally appealing young actor, poised and sensitive, always in command of a demanding and impactful role.  I expect that we will be seeing much more of him in the years ahead.

Our evening reminded me that a bricks-and-mortar store like Skylight Books can be more than a place to buy books.  When the stars are in alignment, a bookstore can illuminate a whole block and even a whole city.

“Hermetically Sealed” runs at the Skylight Theatre through February 12.  For information, visit the website of the Katselas Theatre Company.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal.  He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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