Your votes are in and the verdict is clear: “Shave it off Greenberg. You look like Satan trying to seduce a ‘68 Mustang fastback at a used car lot off San Fernando Road.” So I did.
You’ll notice the facial scruff is longer than the upper-lip shadow, and my “Jeff Kent pornstache” is gone for now. But it will be back in Movember. And I hope those of you who can will join me.
I’m not Rodney Dangerfield, but I’ll admit that from my friends I get no respect. It took me a few painful teenage years to learn how to get people to laugh with me and not at me, or at least how to convince myself otherwise. My wife, God bless her, embraces this tradition and has been known to laugh at me a few times before.
Most recently—not truly, but for the sake of this post—she got a good chuckle out of call I received from the Christian Science Monitor, a paper that gets lots of respect and whose staff pushed me into third place in the American Academy of Religion’s 2008 newswriting contest for smaller publications.
See, I had blogged about the increasing number of African Americans converting to Judaism, and when reporter Patrik Jonsson, the Monitor’s Atlanta bureau chief, stumbled across my post, he phoned me as an expert source.
“Because you’re the expert on black Jews?” my wife snickered. “You’re neither.”
She was right: No matter how much I try to shove my identity into an ethnically Jewish mold, my skin is white as Poland is cold. Even in the summer. Regarding both.
So I spoke carefully with Jonsson, and when necessary I directed him to better voices: Gary Tobin of the Institute for Jewish Community and Research; Lacey Schwartz, the black-and-white renaissance woman behind “Outside the Box;” and Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, Uganda’s first.
The article ran today, and each “expert” makes an appearance, except Sizomu, whose countrymen are referenced. Jonsson used a comment I made about Jews being known only for inreach, not outreach, and I now have proof of another interview in which I didn’t embarrass myself. The most interesting part of Jonsson’s story, though, was his lede:
Like many of the growing numbers of Protestant blacks in America and Africa converting to Judaism, Elisheva Chaim grew up believing she had a “Jewish soul.”
As a black woman and a Baptist in the South, that was a peculiar, somewhat troubling realization. But when she turned her doubts about Christianity into a search for answers, the truth became evident: She had to go deeper than the Old Testament. She had to convert.
“It’s odd to see black people convert to Judaism, and even Jewish people look at me strangely, I’m not going to lie,” says Ms. Chaim “But once everybody sees that I can recite the prayers in Hebrew, their attitudes change.”
If my last name was Chaim, I would have thought precisely that moniker was primary indicator of a “Jewish soul.” The name comes from the Hebrew root “chai,” meaning “life.”
*Updated: Forgot to mention that I told Jonsson when we spoke that I thought there was really no connection between blacks converting to Judaism and the presidential election. This, however, was the subhead: “Conversions to Judaism among African-Americans are growing in a way that could affect the presidential election.” JTA’s Ami Eden agreed today that the article “doesn’t come close to backing up the ambitious claim.”
Suddenly, I’m an expert on black Jews* Read More »
One afternoon in 1989, Ricky Leigh Mensh hid out in his car in a parking garage in Bethesda, Md., paranoid after a five-day cocaine and booze spree.
“I had experienced so many consequences as a result of my addictions,” Mensh, now 48 — and 19 years sober — said as he prepared to debut his syndicated “Recovery Radio Live” program on KLSX 97.1 Free FM this week. “I had been in and out of jail, broken bones while drunk, broken my nose several times in bar fights — even had developed gout. I had become so paranoid after 13 years of using that I would lock myself in my townhouse and not come out for days.”
Mensh had not slept for five days on that afternoon in 1989 when he realized he was “a cadaver waiting to happen” and phoned his grandmother from a pay phone for help. Forty-eight hours after that “moment of clarity,” he said, he checked into a rehabilitation center and has been sober since.
He went on to become a prominent music industry executive and a voting member of the Grammy Awards — and now he is hoping to offer addicts moments of clarity similar to his own with his “Recovery” program, which premiered locally this week and will continue to air Saturdays from 11 p.m. to midnight on KLSX.
“The show is designed to feel like a 12-step recovery meeting on the air,” Mensh said from his home base in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. “Our primary goal is to reach out to those who are still [using], as well as to people in recovery, their friends, families and co-workers.”
Mensh acts as the show’s brash, charismatic host and says he studied past and present recovery shows while developing his unique format. His polished but personable program includes interviews with medical experts, such as Dr. Drew Pinsky (“Celebrity Rehab”); celebrity recovering addicts like bassist Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue; drug-related comedy bits; music inspired by addiction and treatment (think Aerosmith’s “What It Takes”); conference-calling listeners to share stories; and scholarship giveaways to the C.A.R.E. 30-day treatment program in North Palm Beach, Fla. (the regular price tag: $22,000).
Pinsky has lauded the show as “the embodiment of recovery” and as a powerful example of the way the media can be used to transmit the message of recovery.
On the air, Mensh often shares parts of his own story, which began as he grew up in and around Washington, D.C., attending his maternal grandparents’ Orthodox synagogue.
“But unfortunately, my mother married not one but two violent men,” he said of his father and former stepfather; beatings and severe emotional abuse were de rigueur. Two days after Mensh graduated high school, he found his suitcase packed in the living room along with a note that read, “Get the f— out.”
He fled to the efficiency apartment he had already rented for the summer and was showering the next morning when a roommate offered him a lit bong through the shower curtain.
“I took my first hit, and it filled the black hole inside of me that all addicts feel,” he recalled. “It set me free from all my anger, and made me feel more comfortable in my own skin.”
Over the next 13 years, Mensh snorted cocaine (sometimes off the turntables at his disc jockey gigs), added acid and Quaaludes to the mix, and imbibed to the point that he blacked out, only to awaken in a ditch or a stranger’s car or bed. Although he managed to hold down radio jobs and even to found several profitable businesses during those years, his disease eventually spiraled out of control. In 1989, Mensh’s therapist, who had also treated John Belushi, told him that the only difference between Mensh and the late comedian was that Belushi “was dead, and you aren’t yet.”
His first day of sobriety was March 25, 1989.
Cut to August 2007, when Mensh — who by then had been voted one of the 30 most influential people in music by Source magazine — was mortified by a tabloid TV show about celebrity addicts such as Britney Spears.
“The shows were ridiculing these people, whom I see as sick, as fodder for their revenue,” he recalled. He also perceived that stars like Spears were using (or encouraged to use) “recovery” as a way to gain publicity for their latest albums or films.
“The tabloid media was bastardizing our beloved 12-step programs, and I wanted to do something to portray them in a positive light,” he said.
The result was “Recovery Radio,” which got its start on a Palm Beach station and is now in multiple markets. The show is expanding to include other kinds of addictions (on Super Bowl Sunday, the topic was gambling, for example). And plans are in the works to do live shows from Los Angeles — such as broadcasting from a 12-step meeting in a federal prison — and in other cities.
“As a Jew, it’s important to me to reach out to other Jews,” Mensh said. He cites the perception within the Jewish community that Jews don’t tend to be addicts, which “made me feel like even more of a schmuck while I was in rehab. There’s also the idea that Jews are too smart to abuse drugs and alcohol, which is part of the B.S. I told myself to keep me in denial while I was using.”
“We want to reach out to people who are still sick and suffering, whomever they may be,” he added.
A Mensh on the radiowaves to recovery Read More »
Israel is in mourning today after yesterday’s exchange of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev for notorious PLO terrorist Samir Kuntar, four other terrorists and the bodies of 199 Hezbollah fighters who had died during the 2006 war with Israel. The deal was brokered by a U.N. mediator between Israel and the Iranian-backed Shiite Islamic Terrorist group Hezbollah based in Southern Lebanon. Kuntar is one of four militants who in April of 1979 came to Israel’s northern shore and murdered an Israel man and his two-year old daughter—for this crime he was sentenced to prisoner for four life-terms and was the longest-serving Arab prisoner in Israel.
Kuntar’s unmerciful crimes and the decision to exchange him in this deal has no doubt been especially heart-wrenching for Israel because of the high price paid to for these soldiers bodies. Yet the larger crime in this exchange was perpetrated by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah and the demonic monsters running the current Iranian regime. Since the 2006 war, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has been playing a sick and twisted game of psychological torture with the Israeli public by threatening to kill the Goldwasser and Regev (who we now know were dead) if his murderous thugs were we not released from Israeli prisons. Nasrallah knows very well that we as Jews value life and will go to great lengths to secure a prisoners release as well as give our dead a proper burial—and he played that card very well in this instance. Only a cruel and truly evil individual with a depraved heart would toy with people’s human emotions to advance a political agenda.
Iran’s government and Hezbollah follow a radical fundamentalist form of Shiite Islam that does not value life, encourages martyrdom and uses civilians as mere pawns to advance their vile objectives of trying to get the rest of the free world to follow their backward beliefs as well as repressive ways of life. They do not care how many lives are destroyed or the amount of chaos they unleash upon the world…just as long as it advances their power and religious goals. This radical form of Shiite Islam is very simple—“follow our way of life or die” and this message is clearly set forth in the Iranian government’s constitution whose objective it is to spread their wick religious beliefs worldwide by means of jihad and war. And for those who don’t believe Hezbollah and Iran are linked, think again! Since Hezbollah was founded by Iran’s clerical leaders and is fully funded by the Iranian government, the terrorist group is part and parcel of the government.
Now my question to Senator Barack Obama and other liked minded politicians is, how on earth can you even sit down and negotiate with these wicked monsters who have no sense of humanity? How do you expect such animals to keep their word? If these dangerous individuals do not understand the basic logic of humanity but only care about bringing the arrival of their “messiah” through a nuclear holocaust, what do you plan on gaining through talks with them? And lastly, what do you plan on negotiating about with these immoral creatures who only want to destroy America, Israel and the free world? What would such U.S. officials say;…”excuse me Ayatollah XYZ, could you guys stop enriching Uranium for nuclear weapons if we give you some economic incentives?” Or would they say; “uhmmm, Mr. Ayatollah ABC, would you please stop funding Shiite militias and terrorists who are killing American troops in Iraq?” HOW UTTERLY RIDICULOUS! Negotiations, reason and logic just don’t register with the demonic Iranian government leaders. If you don’t believe me, just ask any Iranian Jew or other Iranian religious minority that escaped the hands of these Iranian clerics and now live in the U.S. These Iranian minority ex-pats will truly shed light on the deep rooted evil of Iran’s regime and the heinous crimes against humanity they have committed against on their own population which is a Muslim majority. Right now Iran is among the largest importers of construction cranes in the world… the cranes are not used by the regime for construction but to hang in public those individuals who do not obey their ridiculous law and accept their brutal rule!
If this is how they treat their own people, god knows what they would have in mind for outsiders! Perhaps the best solution to dealing with the Iranian regime is to clamp down hard on them economically. The life line that is keeping Iran’s leaders in power is their income from oil that is exported and foreign investment in their countries. The international community must unite and impose back breaking sanctions on Iran to the point where their already weakened economy collapses. Since Iran does not refine it’s own oil, perhaps the gulf states who do handle it’s oil refining can stop doing so…all of these actions would no doubt bring the country to a standstill and lead average Iranians who are already opposed to the regime to overthrow it.
By the way, for those who do not know the story of Kuntar’s heinous crimes….he and three other PLO militants made their way in a rubber dinghy from Lebanon to Israel’s northern shore around midnight on April 22, 1979. In a hail of gunfire and exploding grenades, they charged into an apartment building in the coastal city of Nahariya, 5 miles from the Lebanese border, where the Haran family lived. Smadar Haran sought refuge with her 2-year-old daughter, Yael, and a neighbor in a crawl space. Her 28-year-old husband, Danny, grabbed their 4-year-old daughter Einat, hoping to dash outside to an underground bomb shelter, when the attackers burst into their apartment. Father and daughter were herded down to the beach, where their assailants hoped to pack them into the rubber boat and take them as hostages to Lebanon, according to a recently declassified transcript of Kantar’s testimony at his trial, published this week by Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper. But the dinghy had been punctured by gunfire, so the attackers went on a bloody rampage instead. The Israeli court found that Kantar shot Danny Haran in front of his child, then killed her, too. “Kantar went over to Einat Haran and hit her head twice with the butt of his rifle crushing her skull, with the intent of killing her,” read a report from Kantar’s trial.
And now Senator Obama wants to go negotiate with these same depraved monsters heading Iran’s regime that celebrate the release of the baby killer Kuntar! Thank you Senator, now I can sleep better tonight knowing that this is how you intend on protecting America from these same ruthless animals in Iran’s regime who are seeking to destroy us.
Kuntar’s release reveals true evil of Iran’s regime Read More »
A handshake might seem to be a simple, even thoughtless social exchange. But behind the meeting of hands are a lot of neural firings, tactile feedback, control of muscles, depth perception; it’s a ritual that grows out of a long tradition of greetings and social cues.
In his thought-provoking new book, “Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple)” (Hyperion), Jeffrey Kluger, Time magazine senior editor and writer, refracts perceptions of how the world works — and how to make things better — through the prism of complexity science.
As he explained in an interview, people tend to mistake size for complexity and subtlety for simplicity and often miss seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. He reports in part on the pioneering work of the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank and research center dedicated to the study of complexity led by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
Kluger’s literary agent helped him coin the book’s title, an apt new word for the overlap and interface between simplicity and complexity. They later learned that the name has also been used by companies.
“Simplexity” joins a growing genre of nonfiction books that bridge science, psychology and economics to look at the science of decision making that make economics sexy, as a Time magazine correspondent has said. Also dubbed chic-onomics, the titles include Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational,” Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” and Stephen Dubner’s and Stephen Levitt’s “Freakonomics.”
The inspiration for this book came several years ago, when the author was staring at a fish tank in his apartment. As he writes in the book’s prologue, “We grow hushed at, say, a star, and we shrug at, say, a guppy. And why not? A guppy is cheap, fungible, eminently disposable, a barely conscious clump of proteins that coalesce into a bigger clump.”
For Kluger, the guppy is where the magic lies. It’s a “symphony of systems — circulatory, skeletal, optical, neurological, hematological, metabolic, auditory, respiratory, olfactory, enzymatic, reproductive, biomechanical, behavioral, social. Its systems are assembled from cells; its cells have subsystems; the subsystems have subsystems.”
Similarly, as he explains, a house plant may be more complex than a manufacturing plant.
Writing “Simplexity” changed the way Kluger looks at just about everything. Many of the chapters grew out of issues he covered for Time, including language acquisition, emergency evacuation and health care. He also writes here about the arts, the stock market and the onset of wars. As a writer, he’s particularly skilled in making complex ideas accessible.
Kluger explains that a generation ago, chaos theory was a paradigm-shifting hypothesis about the power of disorder. He believes that a new understanding of how things that are complex are actually simple and vice versa is similarly causing a shift in scientific thinking.
He quotes Chris Wood, a neuroscientist at the Santa Fe Institute, “Ask me why I forgot my keys this morning, and the answer might be simply that my mind was on something else. Ask me about the calcium channels in my brain that drive remembering or forgetting, and you’re asking a much harder question.”
Through many intriguing anecdotes, Kluger demonstrates predictable patterns of human behavior, addressing questions like why it takes so long for a crowd to leave a burning building, how institutions can be similar to a series of nested dolls within dolls, why people aren’t very good at distinguishing between risks likely to kill them from those that are statistical longshots and why a baby is likely to be the best linguist in the room.
In his chapter on global health concerns, titled “Why Are Only 10 Percent of the World’s Medical Resources Used to Treat 90 Percent of Its Ills?” he discusses the effectiveness of many low-cost microsolutions to battling global poverty and disease that are not at all complicated, as governmental agencies might believe.
Kluger emphasizes the importance of teaching behavioral skills on the local level, creating distribution networks for delivery of existing cures or vaccines and establishing micocredit banking institutions to get money directly to the people who need it most.
With the wisdom of flexibility, precision and planning, positive change is truly possible. He mentions an international foundation that bought new and used ambulances, refrigerated trucks and motorcycles for local health agencies in Africa, creating a motorized medical fleet — where none had existed before — servicing great stretches of several countries; they have slashed mortality rates for certain diseases.
“Our deep sense that this is an effort we not only could be making but should be making comes from a place that might, ultimately, be one of the most uncomplicated parts of us: our simple sense of compassion,” he writes.
Kluger doesn’t cover religion but notes that a consideration of the topic might have been an additional chapter in the book.
“Religion is exceedingly complicated as long as it is not used blindly, not as a simple, rigid adherence to doctrine,” he says. “Fanaticism is very simple. No matter how long the text, the fact is if you take it literally, you don’t bring anything to the party.”
“The U.S. Constitution is a marvel of economy. But in 200 years of Supreme Court decisions, simplicity allows for complexity,” he says, pointing out that the Talmud is similarly simple and complex.
Kluger, 54, who covers science and social issues, is the author of several books, including “Apollo 13,” written with astronaut Jim Lovell, upon which the 1995 movie was based; “Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio”; and a novel for young adults, “Nacky Patcher and the Curse of the Dry-Land Boats.”
Writing is a Kluger family tradition. He has Pulitzer Prize winners on both sides of the family: the historian and journalist Richard Kluger is an uncle, and poet Karl Shapiro is a cousin. His three brothers are also writers.
While he has been covering science for Time for many years, Kluger humbly claims that he is unqualified. His own training is in law, although he hasn’t practiced as an attorney.
‘Simplexity’ explains the methods to the madness Read More »
Hollywood attracts hopefuls from the four corners of the earth, but few arrive with as many projects as Israeli producer and director Uri Paster.
Sitting in a French cafe in Westwood, accompanied by his assistant/translator Shlomit Basmat, Paster rattled off four movie and theater projects, and that’s just for 2008.
Unlike many of the starry-eyed newcomers to Tinseltown, Paster comes with a solid record of accomplishments in his native country.
At 24, Paster became the youngest resident director for Habimah, Israel’s national theater, and in the following 12 years won seven Israel Theater Awards. His productions included “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Cry the Beloved Country,” “Lost Among the Stars” and “King of the Jews.”
His real forte is directing musicals, such as “Grease,” “Peter Pan,” “The Wiz” and “Kazablan.”
Four years ago, he branched out into movies and directed “King of Beggars,” which became the first Israeli film to have its world premiere in the United States.
Now, at 46, Paster is ready for his Hollywood close-up.
His first project is the musical film, “Sold Out!” a contemporary take on the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, with a twist. Noah is presented as history’s first stage director, who puts the animals through auditions before they are assigned places on the ark or rejected.
The cast of characters gives new meaning to the word multiethnic, reflecting the roles of Noah’s three sons — Shem, Ham and Japheth — as the forefathers of all mankind.
There are an Algerian musician, Reform rabbi, black rapper, Chasidic tenor, Hungarian stripper, Chinese opera singer, French pop vocalist, Jewish kids and for good measure, a bisexual producer. Everyone, though, speaks English.
The ark itself becomes the setting for a Broadway show, with Noah’s wife as the producer.
Paster wrote the script and the lyrics to songs adapted from popular operas and biblical themes, while Ori Vidislavski did the musical arrangement. Israeli actor Shahar Sorek, who starred in “King of Beggars,” is the co-producer.
Paster said that he has received seed money for “Sold Out!” from the same British and American investors who had backed “King of Beggars.”
In late September, Paster will return to Israel to direct his own play, “Goldenman,” at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv.
The title character is a wealthy New Yorker in his early 60s, who combines the less lovable traits of the protagonists of three Moliere plays — he is stingy, a social climber and a hypochondriac.
The setting of the musical is New York and the songs and dances reflect the 1950s era, said Paster.
Later in the fall, Paster will return to Los Angeles for another movie project, titled,”Elsa Stein,” which goes back in history to the roots of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.
In 1903, a group of Jewish university students from Berlin arrived in Jaffa, lured by the promise by Baron Rothschild to provide land for a settlement in the Galilee.
These Chovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) soon encounter Arab friendship and hostility, Turkish officials, love affairs, high hopes and disillusionment, until, in the end, only Elsa, the title character, sticks it out.
To wind up the year, Paster said he hopes to establish a Jewish Academy for the Art of Musicals as a training ground for Los Angeles teens between the ages of 13 and 18.
The teens would receive instruction in singing, dancing, drama and Hebrew for three months, and then join professional actors in eight performances of the Israeli comedy, “Kunilemel,” in time for Chanukah.
Paster was born and raised in the northern Israeli town of Afula, and when he was 10, his parents took him once a week to a live musical.
“I fell in love with the singers and dancers,” he recalled, “but I was most interested in what was going on behind the scenes, how the show was put together.”
He performed in an entertainment troupe during part of his military service and afterwards studied directing and writing at Tel Aviv University and in London.
Of his current projects, Paster said, “I don’t want to become an American director, but I do want to make modern Jewish movies. I’ve found that American Jews care more deeply about maintaining Jewish culture and understanding the Jewish past than we Israelis.”
For more information, Paster’s e-mail is uripaster@gmail.com.
Prolific Israeli producer-director tries Hollywood Read More »
“Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomatic Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government” by Gregory Levey (Simon & Schuster/Free Press, $24).
Consider the Zionist dream of Jews living as “normal” people in a “normal” country. Then consider Gregory Levey’s hilarious and unexpectedly touching memoir, “Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomatic Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government.” You’ll soon wonder, “What were Herzl and Ben-Gurion smoking?”
“Shut Up” is a sitcom involving weapons of mass destruction. It’s a historic tragedy featuring acne and sheep. It has car-chase scenes better than “The Fast and the Furious.” Yes, it’s Israeli diplomacy dissected — funny bone by funny bone — all by a nice Jewish boy from Toronto.
Levey’s is a classic tale of a fish out of water, a stranger in a strange land, a North American Diaspora “Can I do your taxes?” kind of Jew forced to fend for himself among the Israeli “Hold my Uzi while I take a leak” kind of Jews.
If you still cleave to your memories of the Israel of “Exodus,” the Six-Day War and the Raid on Entebbe, “Shut Up” will shatter those illusions. But Levey strikes with a Nerf hammer. He is no ideologue. He is barely even political. Rather, he is a Jewish Chauncey Gardiner, but a lot funnier and smarter.
Being there, in New York, a 25-year-old Canadian Jewish day school graduate in his second year of law school, Levey applied for a posted internship at the Israeli consulate in New York. He is then offered (because they don’t offer internships) a job as a speechwriter — first at the U.N. Mission and later in the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. Levey’s internship application is motivated less by Zionist zeal, however, than a burning desire to escape the tedium of studying corporate tax law and the like.
Levey’s adventures in speechwriting over the next two and a half years take him from signing-up for a U.N. salsa dancing club, to responding to such weighty accusations that the “occupation” is causing higher levels of acne among Palestinian teenagers, to writing speeches for Prime Minister Sharon in defense of his Disengagement plan for Gaza and more. The intifada boils on, Arafat dies, the barrier and withdrawal from Gaza controversies rage, Hamas comes to power and Sharon goes into a coma. In other words, a typical few years in the life of Israel before its 60th birthday parties begin.
Through Levey’s wide eyes, Israel is a great many things, some wonderful, but “normal” is not one of them. There’s a taxi driver who kicks him out of the taxi because he doesn’t understand a joke; the petty bureaucrat who spits sunflower seed shells on him; the foreign minister who greets him in only underwear; and the spokesman for the prime minister, who gives an interview to CNN while speeding through traffic — via the sidewalks when “necessary” — with ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” playing in the background, slowing only to yell at pedestrians who cross his path.
And people wonder why Israel does not have a better image in the world?
Levey’s experiences are so amusing, the uninitiated might think he made them up. As anyone who has spent considerable time in Israel knows, though, he didn’t need to. Levey’s cast of characters merely exemplifies the saying, “Jews are just like other people — only more so.” And that goes doubly for Israelis. Normal people in a normal country? Feh. Never.
Levey’s parents emigrated from South Africa and cast their lot with Canadians — “polite people who had opinions about nothing,” rather than Israelis — “ill-mannered people who had opinions about everything.”
This culture clash fuels the book’s hilarity, although I doubt most Israelis would see the humor: “So you’re 25, not an Israeli citizen and have to cast Israel’s vote on weapons of mass destruction at the U.N. What’s the big deal? Improvise,” they’d say.
In a strange and serious way, “Shut Up, I’m Talking” is of a piece with the movie “Munich.” It is a critique that Israel is no place for a nice Jewish boy. Perhaps different standards apply to Israelis and Diaspora Jews, or perhaps it is the difference between writing non-fiction and fiction about real events. Unlike “Munich,” though, it’s hard to be offended by Levey. Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner imposed their Westside/ Eastside Diaspora disillusionment onto a Mossad agent risking his life in an important mission for the state. Levey, by contrast, never intended to represent Israel. He is adrift, an everyman treading water, trying only to find meaning and humor in his surreal surroundings. When his Zionist experiment ends, Levey leaves Israel and reflects that he felt he “had finally come home” upon landing in New York. And he’s from Canada. Although sad, somehow, there is a sweetness about it.
Of course, the laughs won’t stop farbissiners from kvetching that “Shut Up” is a shande fur de goyim, an insulting betrayal of Israel. In talking with him, Levey said he wishes perhaps that he featured more instances of the good of Israel, the random acts of kindness, the compassionate one-family feel of the place. Understandably, he did not think it served his narrative; after all, it’s not news when a plane lands safely. Levey also reports that he has received dozens of sympathetic e-mails from Anglo American immigrants in Israel. If the book does not offend that group of people, whom should it offend?
Like every great Jewish joke, “Shut Up” not only makes us laugh at ourselves, but tells us some deeper truth. Taken seriously, “Shut Up” could be a one-man independent government inquiry to fix what’s wrong with Israel’s Foreign Ministry. It could clear the noxious atmosphere at the United Nations. It could inspire Israelis to be more considerate of one another. It might even make Israel an attractive place for nice Jewish boys from North America.
It is a dream Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion would enjoy.
Jon E. Drucker is a nice Jewish boy who practices law in Los Angeles.
Shut up and read this book review Read More »
Whenever Israel has a watershed anniversary, I’m a sucker for commemorative albums and coins. Like Israel, I was born in 1948. Our lives are intertwined.
Israel is my Rorschach. I see myself refracted in our shared growth and maturity. I believe that the existence of Israel makes possible the incredible blossoming of American Jewish culture. The existence of a tiny, faraway country with a Jewish name blooming in the desert upon ancient stones gives us the confidence to create the vibrant American Jewish world in which we are blessed to live. Israel gives us the courage to labor for justice — for ourselves and for others. Without Israel we would be afraid to find our voice and would not feel secure enough to raise it to advocate for others.
How many remember what it was like to be a Jew before there was an Israel? How many remember the sea change in self-image that Jews everywhere experienced after the Six-Day War?
I experienced that change firsthand. My first trip to Israel, as a college junior, landed me at Lod Airport on July 4, 1967. A soldier ran to greet us on the tarmac. Giddy with pride, he asked, “Did you see what we did?” “What are they saying about us in America?” Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, the prophetic song about the yearning for Jerusalem, played on the radio every 15 minutes.
I remember the first Tisha B’Av at the Western Wall in an independent Jewish state in 2,000 years (a Western Wall with no mechitzah) and combing the newly annexed territories with guides as awestruck as we, one of whom was Yoni Netanyahu — the hero of Entebbe.
I remember afternoons in the Old City, drinking coffee with Arab residents, sensing no one could ever own Jerusalem, but that Jerusalem surely owned me.
I remember feeling blessed to be part of Jewish history.
History. It is easy to forget history in the United States, where we assume it stands still. I’ve just come back from Europe where history is not so easily forgotten. I visited Venice’s original ghetto, where people were crammed into such a small place that buildings with six rather than the usual four stories had 6-foot ceilings. Not many Jews live in Venice today.
In Claude Monet’s Giverny, there is the medieval Rue de Juifs — Jews Street, but no Jews. I visited Amsterdam and the Anne Frank House as well as Berlin’s Jewish Museum. These emblems of Jewish history’s ebb and flow recalled Israel’s Beit Hatfutzoth (Diaspora Museum), which traces the Jewish journey from burning Jerusalem in 70 C.E. to today, underscoring that we pass through time and space and should not make assumptions.
At a time when the permanence of pax Americana can no longer be taken for granted, what are the consequences of our assumption of the permanence of the United States as a haven for Jewish safety? The sense of Israel as the homeland for stateless Jews has vanished with the image of the hairy sabra with the rounded hat — carrying a hoe — now replaced by the sabra with a shaved head — carrying a cellphone. But Israel provides us an anchor in history that we didn’t have 60 years ago. Every Jewish psyche, consciously or not, is steadier because of that anchor.
We are 60. What have we learned in progressing from that exuberance on the tarmac at 19, to the more nuanced issues faced at 60?
I have learned the proximity of joy and loss and the ability to embrace paradox holding two seemingly contradictory facts or narratives as one — such as the back-to-back observances of Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzma’ut.
I have learned to fight the corrosive effect of multiple losses on my character and to struggle not to have my vision sullied by assaults to my safe place in the world.
I have learned that finding peace is more important than being right, but that I can’t make peace with someone who doesn’t see me, nor they with me if I don’t see them.
So even when we list our accomplishments at age 60: mother, author, rabbi, psychotherapist … number of Intel chips produced, per-capita books published, patents held, technological and medical super-achievements — these are the questions I ask:
Have we loved enough?
Have we forgiven enough?
Have we learned the lessons of our losses enough?
Have we walked in the shoes of those we have judged?
Do the boundaries that we create keep us safe?
When I was ordained as a rabbi in May, “haRav” was added to my Hebrew name. Rav means “great,” referring to the amount of knowledge a rabbi is supposed to have. But all who study Judaism know that the body of Jewish knowledge is infinite, and Jewish learning is an unending process. So perhaps the most important thing one can learn is humility.
Humility is an opportunity not for despair but for hope. When we admit that there is much we don’t know, we remain open to the unknown. It is the anniversary of the miracle from the unknown that we celebrate when we celebrate a birthday.
Like birth, peace comes from a place we don’t yet know. Humility keeps us open, searching the unknown with curiosity and hope. HaTikvah.
Rabbi Anne Brener is an L.A.-based psychotherapist and spiritual director. She is author of “Mourning & Mitzvah: Walking the Mourner’s Path” (Jewish Lights, 1993 and 2001. She teaches at the Academy for Jewish Religion and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and is on the board of the L.A. Community Mikveh and Education Center. She can be reached at mekamot@aol.com.
There is no religious angle on this one, but I thought of a number of funny captions when this issue arrived in the mail a week late (a few days too late for me to participate in the New Yorker’s contest). Please submit your captions in the comments below. Winner will get a book off my desk. Again, I’ll get us started.
God Blog caption contest #2 Read More »
Because this was happening a short taxi ride from the White House, I half expected someone from Dick Cheney’s office to burst in at any moment, grab the
microphone and proclaim the conference kaput, dissolved like an inconvenient parliament.
“I think this may be the best day of my life,” Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at the opening of the 2008 Leaders-to-Leaders Conference she convened last week, along with the country’s state and county public health officials. The agenda: To build a bottom-up coalition to change how America deals with health, to shift our focus from health care to healthiness and to the bigger social factors that determine our national healthiness.
Over two days, I heard so many encouraging ideas from the conference stage that didn’t reflexively demonize public policy-making as nanny-statism that, well, as I said, the whole thing left me looking nervously over my shoulder for political-correctness enforcers from The Cato Institute or The Heritage Foundation.
As one speaker after another pointed out, America today ranks first among industrial nations in terms of how much we spend on health care, but last in terms of how healthy we are as a country. Pick any national metric of healthiness — life expectancy, infant mortality, birth weight, chronic diseases incidence — and America’s comparative performance is in the cellar. It’s true even when you adjust for European populations’ relative homogeneity: if you only count white Americans, we are still the low man on the healthiness totem pole.
We Americans spend more than 90 percent of our health dollars on health care (on doctors, hospitals, insurance, machines, pharmaceuticals and the like), but it turns out that only 10 percent of how healthy we are as a nation is determined by what those health care dollars buy.
How can that be? What could possibly determine whether America is among the industrial world’s healthiest nations, if not the thing we’re all clamoring for: universal heath insurance? The answer — and this isn’t a political opinion, it’s an epidemiological finding — lies in the social determinants of our physical condition. Determinants like income, class, education, racism, the availability of public transportation, land-use policy, environmental policy, participation in the political process and a host of other factors that don’t depend on our genetic makeup or our propensity to take personal responsibility for diet and exercise. Determinants that flow not from luck or individual choices, but from laws, regulations and priorities set at all levels of government and in the private sector as well. (If you want an alarming eyeful about this, check out the new California Newsreel documentary “Unnatural Causes.”)
The way we currently think about health in America — about health care, that is — is completely understandable. We all want access to the best possible health care for our parents, our kids and ourselves, and we want it to be affordable, and we want plenty of choices. What’s astonishing is that even if we covered all the uninsured’s health care, we would still likely rank at the bottom of industrial countries for healthiness. The major causes of our country’s healthiness or unhealthiness are all upstream of the things that send us to doctors and hospitals and pharmacies. The causes are poverty, and stress, and the amount of control and autonomy we have at our jobs, and whether there are showers there, and what they put in the vending machines. The causes are access to early childhood education, and to day care, and whether schools are built near asthma-breeding freeways. They are whether your neighborhood offers public libraries and public transportation and walking trails, or public dumps and liquor stores and fast food franchises.
“I had a colonoscopy the other week,” the CDC’s Dr. Gerberding told the 400 public health officials, business leaders and nonprofits she was hoping would sign on to a “healthiest nation alliance.” “Actually,” she added, “I was billed for two colonoscopies, though I’m sure I only had one.”
Clearly she’s not unaware of the madness of our present health care system. No one facing a family medical crisis wants anything but the best possible treatment at that moment. No one should lack access to quality health care. But prevention is even more important to the country as a whole than treatment is, and the free market alone hasn’t and won’t deliver the level of prevention we need.
To me, the underlying reason America has fallen so far behind in the healthiest nation race is the exhausted dogmas that have dominated public discourse for something like 30 years — Horatio Algerism, social Darwinism, the magic of the marketplace, deregulation is good, government is bad, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and devil take the hindmost.
We now know what America looks like when those kinds of ideas rule, and not only in the health sector. I’m glad that, at long last, public officials are finding their voice to express politically transgressive thoughts, like the idea that income inequity and racism are bad for America’s healthiness.
I just hope that the Ayn Rand Society doesn’t get on their case.
Marty Kaplan is director of the USC Annenberg School’s Norman Lear Center, where some work is supported by the CDC. His column appears weekly in this space. He can be reached at martyk@jewishjournal.com.