February 13, 2008

Young Orthodox Jews, especially those who keep a long beard, always seem older than their age, sometimes wiser too. The Concord Monitor last week ran a profile of one of these younger-than-he-seems men, 24-year-old Jason Bedrick (not pictured), who in 2006 became the first Orthodox Jew elected to the New Hampshire State House.

When Jason Bedrick was considering a run for state representative, an incumbent legislator encouraged him to shave his beard. Bedrick refused.

“I said the beard is off-limits, and that’s not the half of it,” Bedrick said.

Bedrick, an Orthodox Jew, said he wouldn’t enter churches. He wouldn’t campaign at the transfer station on Saturdays. And he wouldn’t shake hands with women. His friend said he didn’t know how Bedrick could win.

“To not shake hands with half your constituents, that qualifies me as a disabled politician,” Bedrick said.

When I first started growing a beard—for play not piety—a friend warned me that you can never trust a man with facial hair. I don’t know how Bedrick overcame the odds, but I’d vote for a man who doesn’t own a razor.

Coincidentally, I stumbled across a Website last night for BeardFest 2007, one of the most manly undertakings I’ve seen in a long time. The participants included a few of my high school friends.

(Photo: World Beard and Moustache Championships; Hat tip: GetReligion)

JTA has a bit more info about the great news that the Coen Brothers adapting Michael Chabon’s “Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” The author is, as he told Sugar Bombs, “over the moon.”

Richly conceived and phenomenally detailed, Chabon’s Sitka is home to just the sort of improbable characters that populate Coen brothers films. It is the Coen brothers, after all, who gave the world The Dude, the hero of their 1998 film “The Big Lebowski,” a blissed-out stoner and bowling devotee who finds himself negotiating the return of a bimbo wife from her supposed kidnappers.

And their love of genre films, particularly screwball comedies and film noir, seems perfectly suited to a novel that contains distinct elements of both.

“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” was released to critical acclaim in 2007. But among some Jewish writers, the book created a sense of unease, and even barely suppressed outrage, some of which is sure to resurface when the film is released.

Claiming Chabon was sending a clear anti-Zionist message, Ruth Wisse, a noted Yiddish scholar at Harvard University, demolished the novel in a withering essay in Commentary magazine, calling it a “sustained act of provocation,” among other denigrations; Commentary’s editor-in-waiting John Podhoretz and journalist Samuel Freedman offered similar criticisms of the novel. A decidedly less scholarly view was expressed in a New York Post story, headlined “Novelist’s Ugly View of Jews.”

One can only imagine what these critics will have to say once the Coen brothers, with their Jewish fluency and twisted sense of humor, get their hands on Chabon’s prose.

The upcoming film is being produced by Scott Rudin, who reportedly bought the rights to the book five years ago, before it was even completed, and the film is not expected before mid-2009. But industry skeptics are rightly wary. The film version of one of Chabon’s earlier novels, the award-winning “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” has been reported to be in the works for years, with direction by another famous Jewish filmmaker, Sydney Pollack.

But regardless of whether the film version of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” ever sees the light of day, the news alone has been enough to set the blogosphere on fire with overheated speculation.

“This is the greatest fit ever,” one Israel-based blogger heaved. “I can’t picture any other director tackling this book and doing it right. What a great fit. Yiddish Noir!!!”

In an interview last November, Chabon discussed with me the accusations that he was not only an anti-Zionist but an anti-Semite.

The Muhammad cartoon controversy is back. Denmark’s leading newspapers today reprinted the most offensive of the 12 cartoons that led to deadly rioting in the Muslim world two years ago. The sketch shows the Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, the fuse lit. It was reprinted a day after three men were arrested for allegedly conspiring to murder the man who drew it.

We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper will always defend,” said the Copenhagen-based Berlingske Tidende.

Religion, he feels, is the main source of his strength, and because he realizes not everybody shares that feeling today, he sometimes refers to “the challenge of being in the minority in the world.” … “I don’t try to be overbearing in what I believe, but, given a chance, I will express my beliefs.”

If I told you that line was in reference to a star athlete, I wouldn’t imagine you could guess whom. A number of sports stars, and journeymen, come to mind when I think of faith and basketball or baseball or football. And afflicted–minority syndrome is increasingly popular with my fellow American Christians today.

But, surprisingly, I came across those lines last night in John McPhee’s “A Sense of Where You Are,” the profile he wrote more than 40 years ago of basketball great Bill Bradley, a white man of not-so-humble means who was educated at Princeton, the citadel of the American Presbytery. Hardly a typical minority.

This can’t be. It just doesn’t jibe with everything we’ve been told: Hillary Clinton is the Democratic favorite among white evangelicals? They split the Christian vote on Super Tuesday, but this Zogby poll from the primaries shows Clinton is way ahead with evangelicals and points to other religious voting patterns of note.

What we do know is that Hillary is doing better among evangelicals than she is among Protestants in general. And that’s a surprise, especially since most pundits have assumed that Obama, not Clinton, is the evangelical favorite on the Democratic side.

The reality, it seems to me, is that who is supporting Hillary really doesn’t matter. Barack Obama has the momentum, steamrollering last night. And Clinton seemed to be cooked.

Though, yesterday I saw this headline accompanying Clinton’s portrait on the homepage of Slate: “Is She Doomed?” The article offered a surprisingly upbeat analysis for Clinton’s camp:

The best news for Hillary Clinton’s campaign may be that it’s headed over a cliff. In a campaign season where conventional wisdom has been so wrong so often, she can take heart that the current view among the political class is that Obama is marching unstoppably toward the nomination.

Obama has won the last five contests by wide margins and looks on course to win all three primaries on Tuesday. The Clinton campaign predicted this would be a good period for Obama and that they could take this in stride, but their nonchalance crumbled when Clinton replaced her campaign manager this week. (We’re winning; time to fire the quarterback!) Obama is also ahead of Clinton for the first time in a national poll and outperforms Clinton in head-to-head matchups with likely opponent John McCain. Obama has more money, can raise it easily, and still draws those blockbuster crowds. (He should travel with his own overflow room since they are so often required at the venues he uses.)

But all is not lost for those who support Hillary Clinton.

Here’s why, John Dickerson argues: Clinton has secured the key voting blocs, being the front-runner in such a rollercoaster campaign is a recipe for losing, and, if the race comes down to the 796 superdelegates, well, maybe they’ll favor Clinton’s insider credentials. Then again:

In a race where so much that seemed certain has not been, any struggling candidate can find a reason to persevere, especially perhaps a candidate who was once seen as inevitable. Of course the race’s switchbacks have now become such a predictable part of conventional wisdom that it may be time now for the undulations to stop and for momentum to start playing a role again. In that case, Clinton is doomed.