November 9, 2007

Michael Chabon’s Amazing (Jewish) Adventures

Leave a Comment / News, Tommywood / Tom Teicholz

On the occasion of the first annual “Celebration of Jewish Books” at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, the Jewish Journal asked me to engage Michael Chabon in a (brief) conversation about the Jewish flavor of his work.
Herewith the results:

Novelist Michael Chabon has an agent, Steven Barclay, who handles his speaking engagements and who scheduled my interview with Chabon for 8:15 a.m. on the morning of Halloween. When I asked Barclay what self-respecting writer does interviews at 8:15 a.m., he said: “A very busy one.”

Point well taken.

Chabon, whose first novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” was written as his master’s thesis at UC Irvine, and who currently lives in Berkeley with his wife, writer Ayelet Waldman, and their four kids, will come to Los Angeles on Sunday, Nov. 11, as part of the inaugural Celebration of Jewish Books at American Jewish University (formerly the University of Judaism).

Chabon’s novels also include “Wonder Boys” (which became a Curtis Hanson film with Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire), as well as the Pultizer Prize-winning “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” which tells the story of a comic-creating duo set in the 1930s and ’40s, during the golden age of comics and, not coincidentally, the time of the Holocaust. His recent works include “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” a murder mystery that imagines an alternative history in which after a failed creation of the State of Israel, many Jews create a homeland in Alaska, and the just-published “Gentlemen of the Road,” a swashbuckling epic of 10th century Khazari Jews in Central Asia, which Chabon originally wanted to title, “Jews With Swords.”

Chabon is that rare writer who can provide delight in his embrace of culture both high and low, and whose work is enjoyed for the beauty of his sentences, the wordplay he engages in and the ambition of his novels. At the same time, although his novels consistently feature Jewish characters, he is rarely characterized as a “Jewish” novelist. Given his appearance at the Celebration of Jewish Books, I set out to discuss the Jewish nature of his work. The following conversation has been edited for narrative coherence (words in brackets are mine, not Chabon’s).

Tom Teicholz: Sometimes when I read the questions I’m going to ask, such as, ‘So what it is with you and the Jews?’ I feel like I’m writing for Der Sturmer instead of The Jewish Journal. But that is my first question. Your books seem to be getting increasingly more Jewish or more filled with Jewish characters.

Michael Chabon: That’s a good way of putting it.

TT: Do you notice this as well? Is it conscious? Does it have anything to do with raising four kids?

MC: I think the answer is ‘yes’ to all of those questions. It’s both conscious — certainly I notice it — it is both conscious and unconscious.

TT: Are you surprised by it?

MC: Not anymore. It feels very natural and inevitable. I definitely crept in through the back door in terms of including Jewish characters and Jewish themes and subject matter in my work. It was always present. If you go back and you look at my first book [‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’], you can see it there, as well; the gangsters in my first novel are Jewish gangsters.

But in terms of being not only conscious but subconscious about it, I think that is a development that’s probably tied in ways I don’t even understand to the experience of having children and making a family and finding a way of creating a Jewish home that felt honest and comfortable and true to me and to my wife, but that also felt meaningful and authentic.

TT: I find that living in California is very much about trying and being able to create your own way.

MC: Absolutely, I agree completely.

TT: It applies to Judaism, and it applies to you — you are someone who is creating your own worlds in your books.

MC: Yes, definitely. We just came through the experience on Saturday — my oldest child, my daughter, Sophie, had her bat mitzvah.

TT: Gosh — mazel tov.

MC: Thank you. It was wonderful. And we very much did it ourselves. It was an independent bat mitzvah. She studied independently with a teacher, a lay teacher, who then led the service, along with my daughter; my sister-in-law, who’s a cantor, sang, and I made the siddur myself.

So we’re definitely part of that overall experience (and certainly not just by any means Jewish experience) [that is] part of the California ethos to find your own way to do things — whether it’s spiritual things or creative things or putting Thai barbecue chicken on a pizza.

TT: Your subject matter has gone from Jewish gangsters and gay protagonists (‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’) to drunken pot-smoking, failed novelists (‘Wonder Boys’) to comic books (‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &Clay’) to Yiddish policemen (‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’) and now Jews with swords (‘Gentlemen of the Road’). It almost seems as if you’re tempting fate to find what would be by definition a less commercial subject and then make it charming.

MC: I guess the best way to explain it is I have a lot of ideas and a lot of different things occur to me in the course of my working life. Certain ideas just seem to lodge in my brain. I find myself thinking about them for so long that I finally realize that the reason I keep thinking about them is that I’m meant to write about it. At that point, I just go for it, and I don’t give any thought at all to who’s going to want to read this or is there anyone actually interested in this subject at all besides me.

In the case of the latest one, it sort of all came to me at once one day when I took my kids to the Santa Cruz Beach boardwalk, and I had my notebook with me. I spent the day waiting while they rode on the rides — sitting on benches and taking notes for this strange adventure story set among the Khazars.

After that day was over, I put the notebook away, and I had other things I needed to do.

I kept thinking about those two guys, and when The New York Times called and offered me a chance to write a serialized novel about three years later, the first thing that popped into my mind were the notes I had taken that summer day three years before. And I found this desire to do it was just as intense as it was that day.

TT: How did you stumble onto the Khazars?

MC: I just must have read about it. I was always interested in Jewish history, generally. As a kid, I had books of strange and surprising facts from Jewish history. I think most Jews are interested in the subject of the lost Jews of history and various surprising groups of Jews: The mountain Jews of Central Asia and the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng and the Jews of India and African Jews, and all those odd pockets of the world where you find Jews.

That’s a perennial subject of fascination and has been, going back to the Khazars themselves. I just shared in the greater fascination that Jews tend to have for these strange lost races of Jews throughout time.

***

To share your fascination with Michael Chabon, travel this Sunday, Nov. 11, to American Jewish University.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he’s an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

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Subpoenas in AIPAC trial could reveal U.S. secrets

Leave a Comment / Worldwide / Ron Kampeas, JTA

Subpoenas issued to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and other top Bush administration officials could end up shedding unprecedented light on the Bush administration’s inner workings and the government’s dealings with the pro-Israel lobby.

In an unusually broad ruling Nov. 2 in the classified information case against two ex-officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a federal judge allowed the defense to subpoena 15 administration officials over the objections of the Bush administration.

In addition to Rice and Hadley, the list also includes Elliot Abrams, deputy national security adviser who is also the administration’s top policy official on the Middle East; Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state; Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense, and Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense.

U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, Va., not only ruled as relevant government conversations with the two defendants — Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s former foreign policy boss, and Keith Weissman, his deputy and the lobby’s top Iran analyst — but also discussions that involved only U.S. officials.

In addition, Ellis said the conversations between officials and other AIPAC representatives were in play. Such conversations are bound to reveal how AIPAC has been used as an instrument by one faction in government to influence or head off another, especially in the fight over how hard a line to take against Iran.

Defense lawyers were elated with the ruling.

“For over two years we have been explaining that our clients’ conduct was lawful and completely consistent with how the U.S. government dealt with AIPAC and other foreign policy groups,” said Rosen’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, in a statement issued also on behalf of Weissman’s lawyer, John Nassikas.

The attorneys each work at top-flight Washington firms: Lowell at McDermott, Will and Emery and Nassikas at Arent Fox.

“We are gratified that the judge has agreed that the defense has the right to prove these points by calling the secretary of state and all of these other government officials as our witnesses,” Lowell said. “We look forward to the trial of this case.”

The government may still oppose the subpoenas, but Ellis warned that this could endanger its case.

“The government’s refusal to comply with a subpoena in these circumstances may result in dismissal or a lesser sanction,” the judge wrote.

Rosen and Weissman were charged under a never-used statute in the 1917 Espionage Act that criminalizes the receipt and dissemination of classified information by civilians. Free-speech advocates, press groups and lobbyists are closely watching the case.

The defendants have long argued that conversations outlined in the August 2005 indictment were routine and part of the government’s unofficial practice of using the pro-Israel lobby to convey information to Israel, the press, other nations or even other branches of government.

Ellis in his ruling agreed that the defense was attempting to make a valid argument.

“Defendants are entitled to show that, to them, there was simply no difference between the meetings for which they are not charged and those for which they are charged,” Ellis wrote, “and that they believed that the meetings charged in the indictment were simply further examples of the government’s use of AIPAC as a diplomatic back channel.”

Another five officials were left off the list for reasons Ellis kept classified. Defense sources said it was not clear if Ellis had ruled them out absolutely and that defense lawyers would seek his guidance on the matter.

The government did not raise objections to the four subpoenas for officials who were identified in the indictment. One of those officials, Lawrence Franklin, an Iran analyst at the Pentagon, has pleaded guilty to leaking classified information and was sentenced to more than 12 years; he has not begun his sentence. Another, David Satterfield, is now Rice’s top adviser on Iraq issues.

The core of the indictment centers on a sting operation in the summer of 2004, when Franklin leaked to Weissman false information purporting that Iranian forces planned to kill Israeli agents in Kurdistan. Rosen and Weissman allegedly relayed the information to Israeli diplomats and journalists, and tried to pass it on to Abrams.

Ellis dismissed out of hand all of the prosecution’s objections, including whether such subpoenas would interfere with the business of government.

“Inconvenience to public officials in the performance of their official duties is not a basis for infringing a defendant’s Sixth Amendment compulsory process rights,” the judge wrote.

More broadly, Ellis dismissed government contentions that including conversations among government officials or between government officials and other AIPAC staffers amounted to hearsay.

“Such meetings may nonetheless have affected defendants’ states of mind if the contents of those meetings were later communicated to them by other AIPAC employers,” Ellis wrote, allowing all relevant conversations between any AIPAC staffer and a government official to be included.

Ellis added: “Conversations between two or more government officials, even if not communicated to defendants, might be relevant to show that particular government officials authorized the disclosure of nonpublic information to defendants or to AIPAC,” he wrote. “For instance, if defendants can demonstrate that a high-ranking government official authorized his subordinate to disclose NDI,” or national defense information, “to AIPAC employees, such an authorization would be exculpatory to defendants.”

Under this allowance, defense lawyers are free to probe Defense Department officials, including Wolfowitz, who might have sought to head off the State Department’s Iran policy with selective leaks through AIPAC. Wolfowitz and others at the Pentagon toed a considerably harder line on Iran than those at the State Department and would have used AIPAC — also hard-line in how to deal with the Islamic republic — in lobbying Congress and shaping public opinion.

“We are aware of the order authorizing the potential issuance of subpoenas in the Rosen and Weissman case should the case go to trial,” said Gordon Johndroe, the spokesman for Hadley and Abrams. “It is our understanding that no subpoenas have been issued at this time. We cannot comment further because this is an ongoing criminal prosecution.”

AIPAC and the State Department refused comment.

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Unearthing mass graves in Ukraine unveils history

Leave a Comment / Worldwide / Michael J. Jordan

In May, Ukrainian workers laying a gas pipe in a southern village dug into a buried chamber of thousands of Jews killed during the Holocaust.

That same month, a construction crew building a new office complex in western Ukraine burrowed into the corpses of several dozen more Jews.

Stumbling upon such mass graves is not particularly unusual in Eastern Europe.

Less well known is how many more “martyr sites” lie undiscovered and unmarked in fields and forests across the region — wherever mobile Nazi killing units scorched the earth in the so-called “Holocaust of bullets.”

It seems momentum is growing in the search for such sites.

French Catholic priest Patrick Desbois has pinpointed 600 in Ukraine over the past seven years, and says he may find another 1,800 as he moves farther east.

The Killing Sites Project of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem has identified from archives some 700 settlements in Ukraine and 200 in Belarus where Jews likely were massacred.

Even on Polish soil, where it seems every aspect of the six Nazi death camps has been dissected and detailed, the country’s chief rabbi says evidence is mounting that a number of unmarked mass graves remain in the country’s eastern woodlands.

“From time to time we’d hear about them,” Rabbi Michael Schudrich said. “But over the past two to three years, more have come forward…. You begin to realize we may be talking about a much larger number than anyone was talking about previously.”

Marking and memorializing these killing fields makes for far more than a historical footnote. Research may one day alter the 6 million figure of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, as recently opened archives in Eastern Europe enable researchers to fill in the blanks of what had been a virtual black hole in Holocaust research: the genocide of Jews in the Soviet Union.

With archival materials and witness testimonies casting a spotlight on what today is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, eastern Romania and western Russia, scholars soon may be able to record a more accurate death toll from the Holocaust.

Those who still lie buried in unmarked pits may help elucidate.

The primary problem in finding the mass graves is the nature of the killings themselves, which began well before the first gas chamber was operational in Poland in 1942.

When Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union in July 1941, paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen, or “special-duty groups,” trailed behind, systematically cleansing the countryside of Hitler’s “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemies.

The most notorious event occurred at Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev where nearly 34,000 Jews were shot over two days in September 1941.

The Einsatzgruppen’s own records claim responsibility for 1 million deaths; historian Raul Hilberg puts the figure at 1.4 million.

After the Holocaust, relatives who might have memorialized these killing sites were dead themselves or had fled elsewhere.

Then, as the Iron Curtain came down on Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union — which had lost 20 million of its own citizens during the war — ordered that no one ethnic or religious group be singled out for its victimization. Instead the carnage was portrayed as an ideological battle between communism and fascism.

This helps explain why the memorials the Soviets did build often were labeled generically for “Soviet victims of fascism.”

After Stalin launched his anti-Zionist crusade in the early 1950s, the topic of Jewish victimhood became taboo and those probing it ran the risk of imprisonment.

Nevertheless, members of the Extraordinary Soviet Commission to Investigate the Crimes of the Nazi Occupiers were quite meticulous in documenting the Nazis’ vast crimes, Western researchers say, and their evidence was used in court to convict alleged collaborators.

Yet while Germany became a treasure trove for Holocaust research, the Soviet Union remained closed.

Only in recent years have researchers begun to reveal the stories Soviet archives have to tell.

“Political developments in the past 20 years have enabled us to focus on an area of the Holocaust that may not have been prioritized enough,” said Philip Carmel, international relations director for the Brussels-based Conference of European Rabbis, which is pursuing an ambitious project of its own to document the Jewish cemeteries of Europe.

One of the more critical breakthroughs in researching the unmarked graves came when the vast Soviet archives on the subject were copied and transferred to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. When cross-referenced with other sources for reliability, these once-sealed archives illuminate a trail for researchers to follow and unravel the mystery of missing bodies.

A windfall of material also came from the International Tracing Service’s secret Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen, Germany, which recently transferred its millions of images of concentration camp survivors to the museum in Washington.

Buffered by this research, the mass graves movement appears to be gathering speed.

Desbois soldiers on with his small but methodical project. Schudrich says the Polish Jewish community soon will be reaching out to non-Jewish Poles to help locate the last remaining mass graves.

The director of Yad Vashem’s Killing Sites project, David Bankier, says he and his colleagues plan to start field research next year in Ukraine.

“Why is this important? It’s important for the Jews who live in these countries,” said Bankier, who heads Yad Vashem’s International Institute of Holocaust Research. “They would like to have a gravestone on the site where their family members were assassinated. And these are the only cemeteries for them.”

But even if these graves are discovered and marked, what next?

With few or no Jews remaining in these areas to preserve and protect them, untended sites may become vandalism or looting targets.

Some marked sites already have been spotted with bits of bone lying about. Experts suspect looters went excavating for gold, jewels and other valuables.

Marking these sites “kind of identifies for them where to dig, so rather than be helpful, it does the reverse,” said Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

“If you create a memorial, have a ceremony, then go back to Israel or the United States, the concern is what happens to that site. You haven’t completed the task.”

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Writers, schmiters

Leave a Comment / Cartoons / Steve Greenberg

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Progressives should join Jews on Iran strategy

Leave a Comment / Opinion / Andrew Lachman

Iran’s nuclear ambitions have emerged not only as a foreign policy issue but recently have become an American political issue, as well.

In response to the news offensive
by the neoconservative movement and the Bush administration threatening military action against Iran and without backing any real new diplomatic initiatives, the new progressives have made opposing pre-emptive military action against Iran by the United States a major issue.

There is a perception among progressives and liberals that these neoconservatives are marching us toward another war.

According to Newsweek, Iran has eclipsed Iraq as the primary issue of concern of MoveOn.org membership. Democratic presidential candidate, former Sen. John Edwards, accused Sen. Hillary Clinton of supporting the neoconservative line because of her vote for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, which supported making Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist organization.”

Much of this angst comes from a distrust of neoconservatives, who recklessly pushed for attacking Iraq because of its elusive “weapons of mass destruction,” many of whom are now beating the drums for military action against Iran. (I could argue that Iran would not be as powerful as it is today were it not for our policies in Iraq, but that is a discussion for another time). Noted neocons such as Norman Podhertz and Daniel Pipes, each of whom led the charge into Iraq, have openly advocated military action against Iran without mentioning where the resources would come from (the U.S. military is already stretched perilously thin fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan).

To support their calls for military action, these neocons have cited the threat of Iran getting a nuclear weapon, as well as their support of destabilizing Shiite militias in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Some also have noted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejads’ threats to “wipe Israel off the map” as another example of how Iran has sought to destabilize the region and increase its hegemony in the Middle East.

While their concerns about Iran may be well founded, bipartisan and public support of the neocons’ proposed solutions is not there. Democratic pro-Israel hawks, such as Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys), have called military action against Iran “unadvisable and untenable,” stating that military action without genuine diplomacy or congressional authorization would dissolve what little good will the United States has left after the debacle in Iraq.

House Foreign Relations Committee chairman Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) has suggested a combination of sanctions and diplomatic solutions, authoring legislation to expand sanctions against the Iranian military, while proposing an international nuclear fuel consortium to control the use of nuclear fuels by Third World nations and to prevent nuclear proliferation. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee also supports sanctions over military action, and there is a general perception that Iraq has stretched our military readiness to its limit.

This confluence of opinion between the pro-Israel community and progressives should be an opportunity for both sides. However, instead of supporting sanctions or diplomacy, many of these progressives have instead decided to turn the argument into a wholesale opposition to any action against Iran without acknowledging the real threats, making their opposition look as irrational as the neocons’ Rambo approach.

Yet despite the overwhelming opposition to military action, are the progressives doing themselves any favors by opposing any military action without at least acknowledging the threat of Iran?

Many Jewish progressives wrestle with this dichotomy and have struggled to reconcile their opposition to war with the threats that exist. Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org, is Jewish, as is progressive financier George Soros. As of late, MoveOn.org has been notably responsible in dealing with the Iran issue, tempering its message so as to avoid a drumbeat of irresponsible pacifism. Soros has been vocal in opposing the spread of nuclear technology to Iran but has also sought to increase dialogue with Iran through his Soros Open Institute (the Iranian government arrested two staff members, Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh, on charges of spreading Western ideas in Iran). Both Pariser and Soros seem to be searching for a way to oppose the neoconservative message, while acknowledging that Iran must be dealt with.

In order to be effective, progressives need to do more than just shout “no pre-emptive war.” The Jewish community is overwhelmingly supportive of progressive values, is concerned about Iran but also overwhelmingly disagrees with the rest of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda. According to a Pew Research Poll in 2006, 77 percent of U.S. Jews oppose the Iraq War, up from 75 percent in 2005.

Iran is clearly a threat to the region and should it actually develop a nuclear weapon, it would be a threat to the world. Iran’s refusal to let the International Atomic Energy Agency have full access to the country raises the question of its true intent. Further, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard acts as a government within a government, running its own businesses to fund international covert operations in Lebanon and Iraq, with almost no oversight by the government or its implied consent.

Progressives need to reach out to their natural allies in the Jewish community by acknowledging that the threats of nuclear proliferation and international terrorism exist and support the same reasoned, international approach of sanctions and international pressure that has helped bring the North Korean nuclear program under control.

From 1956-1968, progressives and Jews were a powerful alliance in supporting the advancement of civil rights and ending racial discrimination. This combination also was the core of the opposition to the Vietnam War from 1967 to 1973.

This alliance also worked in California to pass AB 221, for which Progressives and Jews bridged the gap to support targeted sanctions against Iran’s oil industry as a means of putting economic pressure on Iran to open up to the world and be responsible. The liberal-leaning Anti-Defamation League and conservative-evangelical Israel-Christian Nexus came together to support the bill.

Progressives should learn a lesson from this approach and step in where the neoconservatives have failed by supporting a responsible opposition to both military action and Iran at the same time. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has followed a similar strategy as he has gone on a world tour, meeting with world leaders to educate them on what is happening in Iran and build a consensus approach. Israel needs to defend itself against Iran, but it knows the price of war, and its leadership has chosen to pursue a consensus approach. After Iraq, Americans now know the price of war, too.

Andrew Lachman is the president of Democrats for Israel Los Angeles and a member of the executive committee of the California Democratic Party.

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Kushmet

Leave a Comment / Audio, Entertainment, Film, Hollywood Jew, Multimedia, Rob Eshman, Theater / Rob Eshman

Last Monday night, I was sitting on stage at American Jewish University interviewing Tony Kushner, talking Life and Judaism and Big Ideas to a man who is arguably America’s greatest living playwright, when, suddenly, the words of what is arguably the world’s cheesiest bubble-gum song popped into my head:

Torn between two lovers/Feeling like a fool/Loving both of you is breaking all the rules.

It didn’t come to me just as punishment for listening to too much AM radio in the ’70s. It was something Kushner said. He called David Mamet a name. I love Mamet, author of “American Buffalo” and “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Speed the Plow.” I love Kushner, author of “Angels in America” and “Homebody/Kabul.”

I would stand in the TKTS line on any freezing windy gray February day in New York for discount tickets to see anything either man has written — who can afford Broadway at face value? — and here I was, hearing one of them groan at the mention of the other.

Not at the artistry. Let me be clear. Because of the politics. Yes, it was not artist versus artist, but, wouldn’t you know it, Jew versus Jew. Mamet’s name came up because I asked Kushner about how it is that Phillip Roth and Arthur Miller bristle at being called “Jewish writers,” whereas Kushner and Mamet both identify strongly, even pugnaciously, as Jewish writers.

“Yeah,” said Kushner. “He’s definitely more pugnacious than me.” But then Kushner sighed. He is, in person, somewhat slight, with a beautiful looping Jewish nose, a high forehead, a chin veering toward weak, and enough curly brown hair to make a man of 51 look almost inappropriately young. What he said next about Mamet came out with almost a touch of despair. “He’s so butch.”

The audience laughed; it was funny because, to quote Homer Simpson, it’s true.

Mamet is built like a Battle-Bot, he has pecs on his pecs, a close-shaved head and in between writing lines like the opener to his book “The Wicked Son” — “The world hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so.” — he practices jiu-jitsu almost every day — with his rabbi. That’s not just butch, that’s shtarker.

As a fellow artist, Kushner offered nothing but adulation for Mamet’s work. “I’m hugely indebted to him as a playwright. I think Mamet invented a new kind of stage language that everybody in America [has followed]. I certainly couldn’t have written Roy Cohn … had I not listened to Mamet. He’s a big influence. And I say that just gasping in horror at a lot of things he says politically.”

In “The Wicked Son,” Mamet’s non-fiction book of essays about Jews, he takes off after members of Kusher’s beloved New York Upper West Side Secular Left for their collusion with “Israel-indicting bodies,” their “blame the victim mentality” and their “idiotic, immoral cant.”

For Mamet, equivocation or hesitation when it comes to anything but the quick, sharp defense of the Jewish state is a sign of capitulation at best, apostasy at worst.

But Kushner embraces uncertainty. “I have very mixed and complicated feelings about the state of Israel as a Jewish American,” he said on Monday evening, “and I’m furious at being represented as this kind of marginal crazy who’s plotting to destroy the state of Israel. I think everybody harbors their own secret doubts, or at least most of us do, and everybody’s afraid to say them, because the orthodoxy is policed with such violence and vituperation.”

Kushner and director Steven Spielberg endured a wave of criticism from some within the Jewish community who felt their film “Munich” stretched too far in trying to humanize Palestinian terrorists, or in trying to insert moral quandary into the minds of Israelis assigned to kill those terrorists.

I asked Kushner why Mamet, among others, finds his position so unpalatable. “It’s because they’re trying to defend the indefensible,” Kushner said. “It’s trying to uphold the reality you can’t uphold. It’s a cartoon version of Middle Eastern politics that almost no one in the state of Israel recognizes. There’s easily 50 percent of the Israeli population that’s progressive.”

I’m not sure of that number, especially in the wake of the Hamas takeover of Gaza, but Kushner was clearly still feeling the sting of “Munich.”

“I can’t feel neutral about the state of Israel because I’m a Jew,” Kushner said, “and I would like to see Israel survive and prosper. I absolutely don’t believe in single-state solution. I believe in a two-state solution. I’ve never anywhere on earth said I believe Israel should be forced to give up its identity as a Jewish state … that obviously wouldn’t work. It would be the end of Israel.” But Kushner attacked those who disagree with what he considers his more thoughtful approach to Israel’s conflict.

“[Mamet’s] view really almost goes to neighborhood street gang turf war, the people on the hill and the people in the valley. It’s like that Billy Jack anthem. You can’t talk in those terms.”

“I understand we have a history of horrendous persecution and oppression,” Kushner said. “The Holocaust was only 60 years ago. Anti-semitism is everywhere in the world today. It’s scary to be a Jew. You’d be stupid not to be scared. So I get the fear that’s behind it. But, you know, being a minority is hard, because you’re outnumbered. So you have to start asking yourself really grown-up serious questions about how do minorities survive… and there are lots of interesting answers, and one of them is nationalism, and one of them, the one I prefer, is the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, a pluralist democracy.”

And so, my two favorite playwrights find themselves on opposite sides of a longstanding Jewish divide. “All sound creative art is rooted in a ghetto,” the critic Ludwig Lewisohn once wrote. Once out of that ghetto, the roots bifurcate, and we Jews have fashioned two strategies for survival. For the Mamets, salvation lies in toughness and certainty, the People of the Butch. For Kushner, our promise is in compromise and doubt.

“People say the artist has the ability to see the future,” the writer Eric Hoffer once said. “That’s not true. The artist has the ability to see the present.” But what happens when their prophesies collide? I know my answer: you try to live somewhere in between.

To hear of the Kushner interview, click on these files:

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Israel booming but helicopters may be an omen of trouble ahead

Shalom Auslander is my failure

Leave a Comment / Opinion / Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg

A review of Shalom Auslander’s new memoir caught my eye — was this author the curly-haired boy who had been my ninth-grade student at Yeshiva University High

School?

Reading the review confirmed, first, that it was the same person, though now the curls had given way to a contemporary buzz cut, and second, that his writing was to Noah Feldman, another controversial former yeshiva student, what Junior Classics are to Shakespeare.

Then I saw his eponymous Web site, and realized that my initial estimate had been over generous. Self-promotion, biblical inaccuracies, shock value, uber alles. I have no admiration for what my former high school student has done. I can sympathize with his pain growing up, but abuse doesn’t produce pseudo-philosophy of this caliber. Neither does a school.

If Feldman wants acceptance, Auslander wants a book tour and a cheeseburger without the guilt. But shorn of the elaborate gyrations that don’t quite succeed in justifying a lifestyle of pot, pork and pater-bashing, Auslander has hit on a point that troubles every thinking religious person.

It’s a lot easier to believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God than a benevolent one. Bad things do happen to good people — all the time — and the believer spends a great deal of spiritual energy putting aside, and keeping aside, creeping doubts in God’s goodness. When I let it, my mind wanders to my first trip to Israel in 1983, when I was accompanied by my 22-year-old sister, and seriously dated a former classmate from Ramaz. A dozen years later, both women would be dead from cancer, and I would be a rabbi, teaching people that there is a good God and a reason for everything. They would forever be connected in my memory to Effi Chovers, my sister’s classmate at Ramaz, who was killed in 1982, in Operation Peace for the Galilee. But God has His reasons.

In my pastoral work, the instances of suffering are multiplied. A couple, long infertile, finally pregnant, struck with a miscarriage; a congregant’s child afflicted with illness; a wrecked marriage leaving both partners savaged — sometimes the emotional effect feels cumulative, and it is very tempting to point an accusing finger upward. I can walk into a wedding, and feel tears fill my eyes from the knowledge of the silent sorrow of so many families around me. And, of course, looming above my life is the spectre of the Holocaust, in which my father’s whole family perished, and whose icy grip accompanied me growing up.

Part of me wonders: Am I blinded by self-interest to take up the cause of God simply because He is not currently aiming his bow at me? Am I dishonest to preach belief in a good God, when so many around me are suffering? When I help comfort a mourner or ease the pain of another human being, am I God’s partner as I preach, and as I dearly want to believe, or am I cleaning up after Him, saving His creatures from His wrath?

But I am not the first to struggle with these questions. From Abraham to Aher, Jeremiah to Job, the Aish Kodesh to Elie Wiesel, those who have seen and understood more than I, have struggled to keep love in their lexicon. And one of the least-answerable post-Holocaust questions is how so many survivors succeeded in rebuilding not only their lives but their faith. My father (z”l) was one such survivor, but his formula was ineffable, nontransferable, to be emulated, but never duplicated, even by a son. And yet I remember the hours he spent, staring out our apartment window, murmuring niggunim, laden with unshed tears. I never asked him about the inner struggles of those moments. I didn’t have to.

In this area, like dieting, you can only adopt what works for you. For Sherlock Holmes it was the aroma of the rose, wholly unnecessary from an evolutionary point of view, that “proved” the existence of a benevolent God. For others it is a personal experience of miraculous salvation. For me it was a chocolate cake.

It was 1985, and I was back in Israel, at a yeshiva. It was my birthday, and I was unutterably lonely. My mother’s care package, having arrived early, was long-since dismembered, devoured and forgotten. It was my first birthday away from home, and nobody remembered. In my mind, I played the maudlin and the miserable to the hilt. I decided to visit married friends in a nearby neighborhood. Their door was open, but no one was home. On the table stood a homemade cake and a note — “Sorry we couldn’t be here in person. Happy Birthday and many happy returns.” That cake did more than sate my sweet tooth. People like that convince me that God is good.

So, too, does the rabbi whom I call upon to answer questions posed to me that I can’t handle myself. He has yet to tell me how inane my queries really are, or that if I cracked open a Shulchan Aruch, I could find the answers myself. And the people of my community who rallied around us when my wife was on bed rest during a difficult pregnancy, or when I sat shiva. From people like these, I extrapolate to God.

This doesn’t answer my questions. It doesn’t staunch my tears. I don’t sleep better. I don’t justify terrible things when they happen to others, and I don’t know why they don’t happen to me. But I know that just as surely as there is inexplicable evil in the world, there is inexplicable good, as well. It’s something to put on the other side of the scale, something to attribute to a good God.

And while I am awake at night I also ask myself: Should I have baked Auslander a chocolate cake?

Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg serves as rav of Congregation Etz Chaim of Kew Gardens Hills, N.Y., and teaches at the SAR Academy.

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Loving our passion

Leave a Comment / David Suissa / David Suissa

It’s been a rather tense couple of weeks since my good friend and neighbor Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky spoke his mind on the sensitive subject of Jerusalem. His Op-Ed on Oct. 26 caused a firestorm to erupt in the Jewish world, and now, everywhere I go, people are still charged up about it.

And when you consider the stakes, who can blame them?

On one side, you have the incredible, visceral attachment to a holy city that Jews have yearned to reclaim for 1,900 years that represents the heart and soul of the Jewish people. On the other, as Kanefsky laid it out, you have all of that plus the incredible, visceral attachment to the values of “speaking the truth” and “honest self-appraisal.”

It doesn’t stop there. On one side, you also have the conviction that because the enemy is not really interested in peace and couldn’t deliver on it even if it were, any “honest self-appraisal” at this stage only emboldens the enemy and makes a peace agreement even more remote.

Then, on the other side, you have the conviction that Jews must always look at “the complete story” and internalize not just our “rights and demands,” but also our obligations to those we have wronged, as well as “speak the language of compromise and conciliation.”

There’s also division over key facts and assumptions. For example, there’s a debate on whether or not Israel has violated international laws with its reunification of Jerusalem — and, even if it did, whether it necessarily follows that the only way to repair this is to consider splitting Jerusalem. One side argues that because Israel has significantly increased human rights and the respect for all religions since it reunified Jerusalem in 1967, a lot of “repair” has already occurred.

But the other side argues that because the story of Jerusalem has many sides, we should be more honest about this and not push Israel to take the city off the negotiating table.

I can go on, but you get the picture. We have a collision of forces that has touched raw Jewish nerves and put a community on edge. No one should be surprised. This is Jerusalem we’re talking about. If we can’t fight over this, we can’t fight over anything.

I also have strong views on the subject, but I think we should all calm down. I know Rabbi Kanefsky well, and knowing him, I can assure you his intent was never to promote a division of Jerusalem. From what I gather, his intent was to convey that the Jerusalem story is more complicated than it seems, and that his argument is against tying the hands of the Israeli government in any future negotiations. The headline (which, by the way, he didn’t write: “An Orthodox Rabbi’s Plea: Consider Dividing Jerusalem”) was needlessly incendiary. It should have read something like: “Allow Israel to Figure Out Jerusalem.”

Of course, even that is the subject of sharp debate: Since Jerusalem belongs to all of the Jewish people, why shouldn’t all Jews have a say in its future?

The article touched another raw nerve. The Orthodox community is proud of its tradition of keeping a united public front in the face of a hostile and dishonest enemy. As a Sephardic Jew who was raised in an Arab country, I was also taught that when an enemy is out to harm you, they don’t deserve to see your doubts or insecurities. Many non-Orthodox also feel this way, but Rabbi Kanefsky broke an Orthodox taboo by challenging this tradition.

A big problem for me is when the article suggests that all this “honest self-appraisal” among Jews will bring us closer to peace.

That’s a stretch.

As I see it, the inconvenient truth in the Middle East today is that while Israel can deliver peace, its enemy’s leadership cannot. Yet, somehow, we have reached this absurd point where the enemy keeps raising the price of peace even though they don’t even have it to sell.

Why does the price of peace keep going up? Because we’re so desperate to buy it — even if we know it’s a fake. Ironically, the more we offer to pay, the higher the price goes, the further we get from a deal.

When we nobly admit our mistakes and “speak the language of compromise and conciliation,” the enemy, unfortunately, does not respond in kind. In fact, all this does is perpetuate the peace charade and jack up the price of an already fake peace.

As long as Palestinians teach and preach hatred for Jews in their schools, media and mosques, they will have nothing of value to sell to us.

But we do have something valuable to sell to them: real peace. Israel is the one party that can control its army and guarantee peace. Yet, we keep acting like desperate buyers instead of confident sellers. Until we learn to stop being so insecure and start to value what we are offering, Israel should be extremely careful about offering any more concessions.

So, from a spiritual standpoint I might share Rabbi Kanefsky’s faith in confronting our own errors and moral lapses, but when it comes to trying to make a deal with a wily foe, I’m all for watching my mouth — and my back. And I don’t mind telling the Israeli government that.

Having said all that, there’s something more important to me than whether Rabbi Kanefsky and I might have differences on how to approach Israel’s messy problems.

This whole episode reminded me how passionate we are as a people. Sure, we might yell and argue and blow a fuse, but we’re alive! And we care deeply. I’ll take that any day over the “whatever” generation. If anything will keep Judaism alive, it will be this passion.

Rabbi Kanefsky is as passionate a Jew and lover of Israel as I’ve ever met. By lighting up a firestorm of passion in other Jews, he reminded me why I so passionately love my people, even — and sometimes especially — when I disagree with them.

David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine and Meals4Israel.com. He can be reached at dsuissa@olam.org.

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