Moment Magazine, Summer 2021

special summer double edition

the

jokes issue the battle over

israel’s supreme court

featuring

jason alexander sarah silverman calvin trillin richard kind judy gold ruth r. wisse and others!

PLUS! “meatballs cursed by jews,” schlep, evil, taxes & more

SPRING ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

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Moment Magazine is known for its award-winning journalism, first-rate cultural and literary criticism and signature “Big Questions”—all from an independent Jewish perspective. Founded by Leonard Fein and Elie Wiesel in 1975, it has been led by Nadine Epstein since 2004. Moment is published under the auspices of the nonprofit Center for Creative Change and is home to projects such as the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest and the MomentBooks imprint. To learn more about Moment and its work, visit momentmag.com.

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MOMENT MAGAZINE ADVISORY BOARD

DEPUTY EDITOR

Epstein Sarah Breger OPINION & BOOKS EDITOR Amy E. Schwartz

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ARTS AND ARTICLES EDITOR

Diane M. Bolz Robert Siegel

SPECIAL LITERARY CONTRIBUTOR

Dan Freedman, Terry E. Grant, Diane Heiman, George E. Johnson, Eileen Lavine, Wesley G. Pippert, Francie Weinman Schwartz, Laurence Wolff MANAGING EDITOR Ellen Wexler ASSOCIATE EDITOR Lilly Gelman POETRY EDITOR Jody Bolz ISRAEL EDITOR Eetta Prince-Gibson EUROPE EDITOR Liam Hoare FILM CRITIC Dina Gold CRITIC-AT-LARGE Carlin Romano DESIGN Marissa Vonesh DESIGN FELLOW Erjon Ajazi ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Tanya George DIRECTOR OF MARKETING Ellen Meltzer DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY AFFAIRS Debbie Sann DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS Pat Lewis SENIOR EDITORS

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SUMMER ISSUE 2021

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Johnna Miller Raskin DIGITAL PROJECTS Ross Bishton CONSUMER MARKETING Nicole Bowman SPECIAL PROJECTS DIRECTOR Suzanne Borden SPECIAL PROJECTS ASSISTANT Brianna Burdetsky COPY EDITOR Sue Driesen TRAVEL COORDINATOR Aviva Meyer ACCOUNTANT Jackie Leffyear BOOKKEEPER Debra McWhirter WEBSITE AllStar Tech Solutions INTERNS Abigail Bender, Tricia Crimmins, Michelle Naim CONTRIBUTORS Marshall Breger, Geraldine Brooks, Max Brooks, Susan Coll, Marilyn Cooper, Marc Fisher, Glenn Frankel, Konstanty Gebert, Ari Goldman, Gershom Gorenberg, Dara Horn, Clifford May, Ruby Namdar, Joan Nathan, Fania Oz-Salzberger, Mark I. Pinsky, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Sarah Posner, Naomi Ragen, Suzanne F. Singer, Abraham D. Sofaer MOMENT INSTITUTE FELLOWS

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summer double issue 2021 30

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30 features

departments

30

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From the Editor

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The Conversation

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I N V E S T I G AT I O N

High Court in the Hot Seat Is Israel’s Supreme Court the defender of Israel’s democracy or the force that is destroying it? The fierce battle raging over the Court is similar to the debate over the American Supreme Court—and linked to it as well.

by Eetta Prince-Gibson

Sight unseen, the author and his husband buy a home in Savannah, Georgia once owned by a prominent Confederate Jew. His quest to learn more about its history unearths a family tragedy and an unexpected connection.

by Jason K. Friedman

44 What’s Your Favorite

Jewish Joke—and Why? Jewish jokes do more than make you groan or laugh— they illuminate the depths of the Jewish psyche. We talk with joke tellers, writers and scholars including Jason Alexander, Judy Gold, Richard Kind, Sarah Silverman, Calvin Trillin and Ruth R. Wisse. interviews by Moment staff

A Secret Identity Revealed

All he had to give his daughter was imagination.

by Omer Friedlander

Talk of the Table

78

Literary Moment

Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski review by Carlin Romano

Moment Debate

Is there a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich? Benjamin M. Friedman vs Harvey S. Rosen interviews by Amy E. Schwartz

24

76

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe review by Robert Siegel

Fanaticism is Israel’s worst enemy

by Fania Oz-Salzberger

M O M E N T- K A R M A F I C T I O N

Jewish Word

“Meatballs Cursed by Jews”

by Hélène Jawhara Piñer

Why white evangelicals remain vaccine skeptics

by Sarah Posner

21

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

Opinion

Can classics departments save us?

by Amy E. Schwartz

Until he was 12, Allan Gerson was Abe Blumstein.

That’s when the son of Holocaust survivors discovered that he was living in the United States under a false name and with fake documents.

by Allan Gerson

28

The schlep from Yiddish to English

by Tricia Crimmins

Did Biden pass his first Israel test?

by Shmuel Rosner

18

Poem

A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg

by Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper review by Samuel Heilman Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture by Annelise Heinz review by Rachel B. Gross

Ask the Rabbis

Does absolute evil exist, and if so, what does it look like today?

87

Caption Contest

88

Spice Box

MARISSA VONESH / WIKIMEDIA

70

MEMOIR

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27

“The Season When My Life Turned”

by Jessica Greenbaum

E S S AY

Searching for Solomon Cohen

A MOMENT BIG QUESTION

64

The miracle that is Jewish jokes

by Nadine Epstein

Cartoon by Ben Schwartz

Moment(s)

The truth behind violins with six-pointed stars, a farewell from Israeli president Reuven Rivlin, a chat with Mayim Bialik and more

SUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

3

from the editor

THE MIRACLE THAT IS JEWISH JOKES

CAROL GUZY

B

elieve it or not, I grew up in a Jewish family that didn’t tell jokes. There were puns and wordplay aplenty, but no jokes, Jewish or otherwise. I found the few that I read or heard elsewhere cringe-worthy, and I didn’t want anything to do with them. Later, when I dabbled in stand-up, I was on the fence about combining humor with “Jewish.” Jewish jokes, well, they just didn’t speak to me.

All that has changed with this issue.

Focusing our Big Question on jokes turned out to be a meditation on Jewish religion, history and culture. On the surface, asking joke tellers, writers and scholars what their favorite Jewish joke is may seem like a Small Question. But jokes touch deep currents in Jewish life, or at least in large parts of it, with themes such as guilt, persecution, fear, anti-Semitism, inequality of the sexes, sex, porn, intelligence, superiority, mothers, mothers-inlaw, priests, ministers, rabbis, marriage.

And did I say sex?

Our quest opened my eyes to the miracle that is Jewish jokes. That’s because our Big Question is more than your average joke collection. It explores why a joke is funny and why it’s meaningful.

The whys are what captivate me. Served up with whys, Jewish jokes open a window into Jewish behavior, indeed, human behavior. I can now hear the rhythms and 4

SPRING ISSUE 2021

reverberations of Jewish jokes in language in ways I didn’t before. I better appreciate that every joke, however long or short, is a story, and I can understand stories.

My personal favorites often have kernels of folk wisdom. Here’s an abbreviated version of a joke I recently happened upon in the Jewish Humor group on Facebook: A Jewish mother tells her future daughterin-law the five secrets to a happy marriage.

1) You need a man who is hardworking and considerate and helps you around the house. 2) You need a man who makes you laugh. 3) You need a man who does not lie and whom you can count on. 4) You need a man who will spoil you with gifts. The fifth, says the future mother-in-law, is the most important of them all. “None of these four men can know about each other.” This joke is dated and one-gender-sided, but it still makes me laugh. Plus, it offers insight into relationships.

Some of the jokes presented in this issue are far more provocative and grimace-inducing than this one, and most are for mature audiences only. And despite our best efforts to interview people who are not typical, the jokes themselves mostly hail from the hugely influential and dominant strain of Ashkenazi Yiddish humor that long ago became one with American humor. But not all. Along with jokes told or written by the likes of Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman and Jerry Seinfeld, there are Israeli jokes and Mexican jokes. There are ones from the Talmud and others that have recently come into being on Twitter.

Of course, we also include plenty of nourishing topical matter to partake of at your own speed, as you bask in the sunshine at the beach, finally mask-free. Our annual J. Zel Lurie investigative journalism story (Zel was the first editor of Hadassah Magazine and a legend in his time) is on Israel’s Supreme Court. This story has its origins in a conversation I had with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shortly before her death. She was concerned about attacks on the Israeli Supreme Court and suggested that we take a look. Israel editor Eetta Prince-Gibson does just that, talking to people on both sides of the fierce debate raging over the Court, a debate similar to the one in the U.S. and deeply connected

BY NADINE EPSTEIN to it as well. Columnists Shmuel Rosner and Fania Oz-Salzberger weigh in on the recent Israel-Gaza flare-up, while Sarah Posner observes how mixed messages sent to white evangelical Christians are hindering vaccine compliance. Opinion editor Amy E. Schwartz gives a Jewish perspective on a decision to shut down the classics department at Howard University, a historic Black university in Washington, DC. In Literary Moment, Robert Siegel weighs in on a new book detailing the history of the Sackler family and its long fall from grace.

As usual, we step back into history to widen the angle. We publish an excerpt from a brilliant memoir by the late Allan Gerson. Disclaimer: Allan was a dear friend with a huge presence, big laugh, restless curiosity, oversized intellect—a multitalented man—and I read his manuscript in its early stages. The moment when Allan discovered at age 12 that he was not who he thought he was—and that he was living in the United States under a false name and with fake documents—was permanently imprinted in his psyche. It stayed with him as he prosecuted Nazi war criminals and filed suits against Lockerbie and 9/11 terrorists. In this issue, the past also intersects with the life of Jason K. Friedman, a previous winner of our Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Fiction Contest. In his compelling essay, “Searching for Solomon Cohen,” the saga begins when he and his husband buy a condo in the Solomon Cohen House in Savannah, Georgia, sight unseen, a purchase that leads to an unexpected personal connection.

We also explore the etymology and evolution of the word “schlep,” try to solve the mystery of a medieval Egyptian recipe called “meatballs cursed by Jews,” talk to our rabbis about whether there is such a thing as absolute evil, debate the morality of taxing the rich, chat with Mayim Bialik

SERVED UP WITH WHYS, JEWISH JOKES OPEN A WINDOW INTO JEWISH BEHAVIOR, INDEED, HUMAN BEHAVIOR.

“In an era when fact-free rants and racist slurs poison our national discourse, authentic journalism is more valuable than ever, yet harder to achieve. Moment does it in every issue. Its calm, well-informed voice of reason is a national treasure and an act of faith and courage.”

— Glenn Frankel, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author.

SUPPORT MOMENT’S AWARD-WINNING WORK EXPLORING JEWISH ART & CULTURE NURTURING JEWISH LITERATURE FIGHTING ANTI-SEMITISM and discuss the future of Israel with outgoing Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

There’s fiction too. Young Israeli writer Omer Friedlander’s “The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land” won first place in our 2020 Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest. “This story resurrects the traditional diasporic-Jewish character of the Luftmensch, the ‘air person,’ whose entire existence and livelihood is suspended in the air,” writes 2020 contest judge Ruby Namdar, the author of The Ruined House. A celebratory literary evening is in the works. Meanwhile, submit your own story to the 2021 contest at momentmag.com/karma-fiction by June 30. If you prefer to submit short nonfiction, send an idea to momentmag.com/beshert.

In between issues, don’t forget to check out momentmag.com for more stories and upcoming MomentLive! events. When your eyes get tired, you can listen to audio versions of Moment stories. And now there is something new. Visit our new Moment Gallery, which expands the conversation through art at themomentgallery.com.

Have a great summer!

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SUMMER ISSUE 2021

AN OPTIMIST’S TAKE Your spring issue addressing community today (“What Is Community Today?”

Spring 2021) could not have arrived at a timelier moment. The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington has been on a quest for the past year and a half to answer similar questions: “How do we accelerate strengthening Jewish life and community in Greater Washington?

What does it mean to create a community of belonging?” These queries were made even more urgent by the vulnerabilities and inequities laid bare by the pandemic.

Our journey thus far has in many ways been as important as the destination. In our shared pursuit of a vibrant Jewish future, we continue to forge deep interpersonal and inter-organizational connections. We are reconciling the tension between forging a shared sense of purpose and honoring and celebrating the diversity of needs, opinions, identities and aspirations that define the Jewish people.

The shift in how we work—away from silos and divisions and toward trusting partnerships—has been palpable.

Volunteers, professionals and leaders have looked beyond their own agendas, put faith in one another, and taken risks to better serve our community. And still today, as we move off of our screens, people are actively working to reach beyond their traditional separations and form meaningful, productive relationships.

Witnessing this leaves me optimistic about the future we now have the opportunity to co-create.

Gil Preuss, CEO The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington Washington, DC TRANSCENDING TRIBALISM I enjoyed reading the community issue.

I appreciated what Patrick Deneen said about how part of the appeal or nostalgia for college is living in a bona fide community. I agree 100 percent. While you

could not pay me to be 18-21 again, I miss how easy it was to meet people and find shared interests.

I also appreciated Lonnie Bunch and Susan Neiman for talking about how universal values and community can go together to find unity and purpose— without resorting to tribalism. How does a person go from not being part of a group to being part of it? We have to be willing to go through the challenging process of going from stranger to acquaintance/ally to friend/comrade, confronting our fears, stereotypes and ideas of self as we transition.

Finding community is a trial-and-error process in life. America is a lonely place for all of us—this is an individualist culture more than a communal culture, and we all have our scars of loneliness to prove it. Later in life, I have been asking these questions more and am now more interested in joining with others—it’s one of the reasons I’m working on converting to Judaism.

I would like to see a follow-up issue where you talk to community leaders who have succeeded in creating and building community. We need to learn from everyone, not just published authors and famous thought leaders, but people from all over—from rural areas, from people without college degrees, from all corners and walks of life who still have a sense of belonging.

Abby Fox Alexandria, VA THE BIRTH OF A POEM I am a relatively new subscriber to Moment and am delighted with the depth and breadth of the thoughtful writing you publish. Reading your most recent issue that focused on community, I got a special bonus: inspiration for a poem.

Every year in late spring, I gather up notes that I’ve written throughout the year in preparation for reading a new poem I’ve written at the conclusion of our small conservative synagogue

Congregation Shaarey Tikvah’s annual meeting. This year’s poem, “They Carry the Fire with Them,” inspired by the thoughtful words in Moment, took me to a different place. I thought not only of fire but also of “water returning / fathoming the cost...of what was lost, / then forging a new memory / of lives entwined / once again.” As I write this letter of thanks to Moment, I am looking forward to attending my first (still masked and socially distanced) in-person service. How good to have community!

Martin Kohn Shaker Heights, OH SHRINKING SYNAGOGUES I was glued to the array of responses. I might suggest two missing themes. First, since social grouping has an evolutionary basis to enhance personal and species survival, the groups that are formed are ethically neutral but share the same foundation. A street gang and a hospital are both communities, one for the benefit of members and one for the benefit of others by the participants.

Second, kehillah [“congregation”] has lost ground. Synagogues cannot run as Ponzi schemes that rely on new members replacing those who drop out. The commentators did not acknowledge attrition very well.

Richard Plotzker Wilmington, DE COMMUNITY AS AN IDEAL I think of community as a value we hold in high regard and have yet to see realized.

What we do know are the many ways it can be subverted and betrayed. We know its pitfalls and roadblocks. At times like now, we see its difficulties more clearly.

But how to realize it remains a mystery.

Community is a promise, like love, that draws us to its fulfillment despite the difficulties. When people have found themselves in community, and then lost it somehow, that loss, like grief, can persist and curtail subsequent efforts. Still,

No charitable gift has a greater impact on the lives of Israelis.

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loss alone cannot defeat the ideal of community that we, as a human and spiritual species, will always carry with us.

Doris Fine Berkeley, CA COMMUNITY IS CONNECTION Community is a connection between people. It could be your family and friends, or the people you connect with through work or play. If you are lucky, the contact can be in person. These people matter to you, and you want to stay connected. We find community through our interests, passions and activities. We get involved with new people by working together toward a common goal. Some acquaintances evolve into lasting friendships, and as we age, we keep in touch with the people with whom we continue to have shared values and goals and with whom we enjoy having contact.

Cheryl Feit West Bloomfield, MI COMMUNITY MEANS HELPING Community is a fundamental concept in Judaism that I feel is being lost today.

For me, it means going the extra mile for 8

SUMMER ISSUE 2021

those who need it without being asked by other members of the community— whether it is going to a shiva service or bringing food to a deceased person’s family, or volunteering to help a member in need who has returned from the hospital or driving someone to shul who otherwise couldn’t attend. There are a thousand ways to express community— it’s caring for others in their time of need and helping the synagogue or community function. People today have been too busy. When you have to start calling people to help, it becomes a chore.

Maybe the gradual return to engaging with others will allow people to understand the need to do for others in need.

Rabbi Michal Mendelsohn Naperville, IL

A CONFEDERATION FOR ISRAEL? WISHFUL THINKING Confederation cannot work as long as the Palestinian leadership and radical factions want the destruction of Israel (“A ‘Confederation’ for Israel?” Spring 2021). It took two generations of wandering in the desert before the Jews were allowed to populate the land of Israel. It

took that long for the physical memory of slavery and a repressive life in Egypt to be erased from practice. Similarly, it will take the equivalent of two generations once the Palestinians accept that Israel will not go away. No amount of liberal wishful thinking will change reality. It is indeed unfortunate that the Palestinian leadership has rejected the opportunity to have a country of their own so many times.

Jeff Zucker Edmonton, Alberta, Canada WHAT ABOUT JORDAN? There are too many difficulties for a confederation between Israel and the Palestinian entity to be successful.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia all point to the impossibility of confederations working when people with different traditions and social status try to unite. But all the arguments that Letty Cottin Pogrebin makes for a confederation between Israel and the Palestinians apply to a greater extent to a confederation between Jordan and the Palestinians. The negatives for an Israeli-Palestinian confederation include

a huge economic difference between the two entities. They aren’t equal economic entities, so it would be inevitable that they wouldn’t be equal political entities. A two-state solution seems the best option.

The relationship between Israel and the newly established Palestinian state can be as close as the one between Canada and the United States or as cold as the one between North and South Korea. It will be up to the Palestinians to decide what type of relationship they want.

Jay Stonehill Chicago, IL

CANCEL CULTURE DIALOGUE AND ATONEMENT Lilly Gelman demonstrates that Jewish history offers valuable tools with which to navigate the complexities surrounding cancel culture today (“What Is Cancel Culture—and What Does Judaism Say About It?” Spring 2021). The need to distinguish between matters one deems abhorrent and those one finds merely erroneous is nicely reflected in the idea of herem (“excommunication”) on the one hand and the inclusive nature of Talmudic debate on the other.

A sophisticated Jewish approach to troubling acts and rhetoric is crucial today as we craft an effective response to anti-Semitism. Jew hatred that stems from deep and intentional malice and acts of violence must be met with harsh sanction. However, when anti-Semitism stems from disinformation, misinformation or ignorance, the most effective response is outreach, education and dialogue.

Even in the case of odious acts or rhetoric against our community, the concept of kapara (“atonement”)—deeply rooted in Jewish thought and practice— is instructive. When a desire to learn is demonstrated, accompanied by sincere regret and tangible measures to repair past harm, we ought not lock the gates of repentance.

Ari M. Gordon Bronx, NY

THE HORSERADISH CHRONICLES HOOHAH HORSERADISH The only way my Brooklyn grandfa-

ther conducted a seder was in Hebrew, from start to finish (“The Horseradish Chronicles,” Spring 2021). It didn’t matter that his family didn’t understand what he was saying or what it signified.

This custom could prove deadly when the seder included bored little children and nonbeliever adults, but one of my grandfather’s seders set in motion a family tradition that continues today.

The evening perked up when the eating began. When the horseradish maror was passed, my uncle and my father let out whoops.“Hoohah!” they said, and everyone laughed. “Hoohah! Hoohah!” the kids repeated. From that moment forward, the condiment was known in our household as “hoohah horseradish.”

Today at our family seders, a fair amount is in English, everyone takes part, and “hoohah horseradish” plays a prominent role. Over the years, a macho ritual has grown whereby some of the males try to see who can tolerate the greatest amount of horseradish for their bite of

maror. They turn red, cough, cry and eventually, when they can breathe again, voice something akin to “Hoohah!”

Susan Naidoff Holliday Takoma Park, MD TEARS IN MY EYES Thanks so much for your most enjoyable article about horseradish. It brought tears to my eyes. My husband, Paul z”l, and his brother, Joe z”l, loved their horseradish all year but especially on Passover. One year, Paul decided that he wanted to see what it would be like to make his own horseradish. He got a large root and proceeded to grate it. As he did so, his eyes cried, and his nose ran. No one could come near that horseradish. When he finished, he said, “That’s the last time I’m making horseradish.” Paul and Joe had the horseradish on the Hillel sandwich and, as if that wasn’t enough, with the gefilte fish, and they both cried.

Sheila Morris Tinton Falls, NJ

SPONSORED CONTENT

Sophie Scholl and the White RoSe icon of resistance to the nazi regime and her relevance today Introduction by Emily Haber, German Ambassador to the United States

This year, on May 9, Sophie Scholl of the White Rose resistance group would have turned 100 years old. At only 21, the young woman died at the hands of a relentless and barbaric Nazi regime that she chose to resist.

We want to tell her story because the values for which she and the other White Rose members gave their lives are today the fabric that unites us as free and democratic nations across the globe.

Germany often prides itself on being a country of “poets and thinkers.”

The Age of Enlightenment ushered in ideals such as personal liberty, constitutional governance, and separation of church and state for nations across Europe and the American colonies.

Rose will not leave you in peace!”, as the White Rose members wrote in 1942. But their desperate calls to resist the Nazi tyranny went unheard.

Few others dared to act, far too few.

The German people were eventually liberated from the Nazis, not by their own actions but through the sacrifice of the Allied forces.

Now that Germany is unified, living in peace and liberty for decades, some might take democracy for granted. I recently read a German newspaper article about a lecture on Sophie Scholl. Leaving the auditorium, the journalist observed a young woman saying: “Remembrance is important, but I doubt our democracy can ever be threatened like this again.”

Yet, despite this supposed enlightenment, it was the German people who elected Hitler’s NSDAP as the strongest party in parliament.

It was the German people who failed to resist when the Nazis seized total power. The majority of the people remained indifferent or silent, even in light of a genocide and a war that cost tens of millions of lives.

A dangerous mistake: History proves that freedom, liberty, and universal human rights can never be taken for granted.

“We will not remain silent. We are your guilty conscience. The White

Wherever we can, we should support democratic and peaceful opposition

While our societies define these rights as inalienable, they are still outright denied in far too many places.

Advancing and protecting human rights is our ongoing responsibility, both at home and internationally.

in danger of being silenced, advocates of women’s rights and racial equality, LGBTQ activists fighting for the freedom to live and love the way they are, and those struggling for their right to believe in their own God – or not to believe in any god.

Whenever individuals or ideologies undermine or abuse our core values, whenever they call for hatred and violence or infringe on the dignity of another human being, we must stand up together and take action.

Former German president Richard von Weizsäcker aptly captured the White Rose legacy when he said: “Each person is responsible for what he does and for what he allows to happen. In the darkest moment of the 20th century, the White Rose demonstrated this truth.”

Let us reflect on this legacy, as we look at Sophie Scholl’s short but extraordinary and inspiring life.

the human Being Behind the icon: the 100th anniversary of the Birth of Sophie Scholl

by Maren Gottschalk

Munich, February 18, 1943.

A stack of white leaflets falls from the banister of the second floor in the atrium of the university. Dozens swirl down onto the atrium floor. The leaflets read: “On behalf of all German youth, we demand that Adolf Hitler’s state give back the personal freedom, the precious commodity of the Germans, which he has so cowardly swindled from us.”

It is the 21-year-old student Sophie Scholl who flings the stack of leaflets over the banister. She will later say it was stupidity that sprung from a spontaneous impulse. When the university janitor walks into the atrium and the leaflets rain down on him, he rushes up the stairs, grabs hold of Sophie and her brother, and forces them to come with him to the administration office. There, he immediately calls the Gestapo.

Four days later, the brother and sister

© George (Jürgen) Wittenstein / akg-images From left to right: Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst. Munich, 1942.

Scholl are executed along with their friend Christoph Probst.

Today, this famous image of leaflets raining down has become a symbol of the resistance against the National Socialist regime, and Sophie Scholl, whose tragic end is heralded by this moment, has become an icon. She is among the most renowned Nazi resistance fighters. Schools, streets, and squares are named after her. She has long since surpassed her brother Hans in popularity, as well as the other members of the resistance group we now call the White Rose. Why is that?

And who was Sophie Scholl?

She is born on May 9, 1921, in the small town of Forchtenberg in Hohenlohe, a region now belonging

“Such a fine sunny day, and I have to go....But what does my life matter if thousands were stirred and woken up through our actions.” courtesy of the Hartnagel family

– Sophie Scholl (22 February1943)

to Baden-Württemberg. Her father is mayor there and her mother, a former district nurse, cares for their brood of six children. Sophie is described as being self-assured, cheerful, and warm-hearted – a girl who likes to play with dolls and is among the best in school.

In 1930, the Scholls move to Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, and, again two years later, to Ulm, where the father opens a practice as a tax consultant. Robert Scholl is politically minded and, like his wife, a pacifist.

When the National Socialists come to power in 1933, the parents would like to keep their children from joining the Hitler Youth, but fail. After Inge, Hans, and Elisabeth, Sophie also joins the organization, becoming a member of its Young Girls’ League in 1934 and, soon thereafter, a group leader.

People who knew her say Sophie was enthusiastic, even fanatical, but also romantic. Evenings, she and her friends would sit around the campfire singing heroic ballads and reading stories aloud. She is also not a typical docile Hitler Youth girl with braids, but a tomboy with hair cut short

who likes to run wild and feel her own energy.

When the Nazis set fire to the synagogues across Germany on November 9, 1938, and pogroms are carried out against the Jews, including those in Ulm, Sophie says nothing about these events in the two letters she writes the next day. She even praises her girlfriend Lisa for dutifully carrying out the “service” of the “Hitler Youth girls.” Biographers have long puzzled over this. Her father, Robert Scholl, has Jewish clients, whom he supports in various ways.

Where is Sophie’s compassion? There is, however, a fellow classmate who recounts that Sophie is outraged over the treatment of the rabbi in Ulm. And Inge Scholl, Sophie’s eldest sister, recounts after the war that Sophie was indignant when her Jewish friends were not allowed to join the Hitler Youth. There was skepticism over this story, but it has since been validated by one of Sophie’s former classmates.

Anneliese Dorzback née Wallersteiner recalls that Sophie even wanted to start her “own club” with her, which, of course, was not allowed.

At 16, Sophie falls in love with the career soldier Fritz Hartnagel, who is four years her senior. The relationship,

which lasts until her death, time and again is rocked by crises, because Sophie fluctuates between the desire for intimacy and the need for distance. In particular, the outbreak of the war in 1939 causes estrangement between Fritz and Sophie, who sees no justification for war. “I just can’t grasp how people are now being put in perpetual mortal danger by other people. I will never grasp it and I find it appalling. Don’t say, it is for the Fatherland,” she writes to Fritz.

After graduating from school, Sophie completes an apprenticeship to become a preschool teacher and thereafter has to perform six months of mandatory Reich Labor Service and then another six months of auxiliary war service. This year will change Sophie. She learns of the crimes committed by the Wehrmacht and the murder of disabled and chronically ill people committed by the Nazi state. At the same time, she is emboldened through extensive reading of theology and philosophy books to oppose the dictatorship.

Then, one day, anonymously copied texts critical of the Nazis, written by Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, turn up in the Scholl family’s mailbox. This is perhaps what spurs

“...since Poland was conquered, 300,000 Jews have been murdered in that country in the most bestial manner.

Here we see the most hideous crime against human dignity, a crime unparalleled in the entire history of humanity. The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep, enabling and emboldening these fascist criminals to continue killing...Each man wants to be cleared of his complicity...but he cannot be acquitted; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!”

- Second leaflet of the White Rose (June 1942)

A fascimile of the first leaflet of the White Rose, courtesy of the White Rose Foundation, Munich

her brother Hans and Sophie to plan their own leaflet campaign.

In May 1942, Sophie enrolls in the philosophy and biology programs at the University of Munich. Hans is already studying medicine there, and Sophie becomes part of his circle of friends. Around this time, she asks Fritz Hartnagel for money and help to procure a duplicating machine. She gets the money, but not the device.

When a friend passes an anonymous leaflet written by the White Rose to her in June or July, she immediately grasps that her brother Hans is behind it. She recognizes the ideas and quotes shared in conversations with their circle of friends: “Is it not true that every honest German today is ashamed of his government, and who among us can guess the degree of shame that will come to us and our children once the veil has been lifted and the most horrific crimes infinitely exceeding all measure are revealed?”

The first four flyers titled Leaflets of the White Rose are drafted by Hans Scholl and his friend Alexander Schmorell in the basement of the Schmorell villa in May and June 1942. One hundred copies of each of them are made and sent out.

They appeal to the Germans’ sense of moral responsibility and call for passive resistance against the criminal regime. Based on today’s research, the White Rose is also the only resistance group during the Nazi era to publicly decry the murder of the Jews, as elucidated in the second leaflet.

Does Sophie already know about the leaflet effort beforehand? It is conceivable, but cannot be proven.

In late July, Hans and Alexander are sent as medics to the front in Russia, and Sophie makes another effort on her own, this time in Ulm. She asks a friend to purchase a duplicating machine and gives him the money for it. But the device is never used.

Finally, in winter 1942, the group known today as the White Rose is formed: apart from Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell, Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and the philosophy professor Kurt Huber also are now members.

In January 1943, Hans drafts a fifth leaflet, 6,000-9,000 copies of which are

taken to various cities and distributed there. Sophie is involved in the entire process: she manages the money; buys paper, envelopes, and stamps; types addresses; and takes more than 2,000 leaflets to Augsburg. Her brother does not want her along on his three nighttime graffiti campaigns when he, Alex, and Willi paint anti-Nazi slogans on the walls of houses in Munich. So she sets out on her own during the day, leaving leaflets in phone booths and on parked cars.

Swayed by the dramatic defeat at Stalingrad, Professor Huber drafts a sixth leaflet which appeals directly to the students of Munich University.

This leaflet will ultimately doom the group. On February 18, 1943, Sophie and Hans Scholl are discovered distributing it and are arrested. Once they realize it is useless to deny their actions, they take full blame and downplay the involvement of their friends. Nevertheless, all six members of the White Rose inner circle are sentenced to death and executed.

Some of their friends receive heavy prison sentences. Sophie Scholl shows her courage and mettle in the Gestapo interrogation: “I still believe that I did the best that I could do for my nation, especially now. I therefore do not regret my actions…”

That stance has secured her the respect and admiration of people to this day.

She and the White Rose have come to stand for conscience in revolt, human dignity, peace, and the call for freedom in a dictatorship. As the only woman in the group, Sophie Scholl is paid special tribute in biographies and films. For this reason, her story rises above those of her cohorts, although she would be the last one to place herself at the center of attention. Her place is at the side of her friends, not in front and not behind them.

About the Author Maren Gottschalk was born in Leverkusen, Germany. She studied history and politics at the University of Munich, where she received her Ph.D. Today, Gottschalk works as a journalist for German public radio. She is also an award-winning author of novels, children’s books, and biographies, including two on Sophie Scholl.

ScAn here for a video on Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

Members of the White Rose resistance movement (left to right): Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and Kurt Huber Picture credits (from left to right): dpa (1, 2); The Archive of the University Munich (UAM) (3, 4); Bavarian State Archive (5); private/Prof. W. Huber (6)

perspectives OPINION SHMUEL ROSNER

DID BIDEN PASS HIS FIRST ISRAEL TEST? Response to the recent confrontation between Israel and Hamas reminds us of what’s ‘normal.’

WHITE HOUSE FLICKR / ADAM SCHULTZ

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ack to normal can be a blessing— as it is for a vaccinated public after COVID-19. Back to normal can be a curse—as in a return to political polarization following a short moment of national unity during a war. Or back to normal can be confusing, as it is for Israel’s relationship with President Joe Biden after four years of Donald Trump and eight years of Barack Obama.

In May, Israel fought a short and fierce battle against Hamas in Gaza, following Hamas’s decision to launch rockets on civilians all over the country. The excuse for this cycle of violence is not as important as some observers made it seem. Hamas saw an opportunity—an expected controversial decision by the Supreme Court to confirm Jewish ownership of houses in East Jerusalem in which Palestinian families reside— and used it as a pretext for flexing its muscles. Israel might have erred in handling this situation, but if it had not, Hamas would have searched for a window of opportunity and eventually launched a barrage of rockets. If not this year, then next year. If not to “defend Jerusalem,” then to defend something else.

For Israel, this short round of violence was a reminder that Hamas is still in Gaza—and also that Trump is no longer the American president. Up until Gaza, the change in the White House did not feel concrete to most Israelis. Yes, they knew and were somewhat concerned that the U.S. was talking to Iran again about a nuclear deal. But generally, Biden was out of sight and out of mind. His plan, clearly, was to deal with things other than Israel. He did not invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit him, appoint a special envoy to the Middle East, initiate a peace plan or negotiations or even send an ambassador to Jerusalem.

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Hamas decided to test him. It forced him to show his cards. Over four years of Trump, the organization had seemed careful—maybe deterred by the great damage caused in the previous Israeli operation, Protective Edge, or maybe because Hamas knew that, under Trump, Israel was likely to get full American support for whatever war plan it deemed fit. Risking retaliation with Trump in the White House was dangerous.

Risking retaliation with Biden in the White House was worth a test.

It was an interesting test to watch. And the result is—well, back to normal. Normal, that is, in the way America reacts to cycles of violence between Israel and its enemies.

What is normalcy? Let’s define it, somewhat vaguely, as the range of responses to Arab-Israeli violent eruptions seen from the Clinton administration through the second Bush administration. That range considers Israel as a close ally; accepts Israel’s need to defend its citizens; recognizes that this need cannot be fulfilled unless Israel is free to use force; recognizes also that the root cause of the conflict is Arab refusal to accept a Jewish Israel as a legitimate entity in the region; tries to balance all these concepts against the need to save human lives, and is somewhat suspicious about Israel’s long-term strategy concerning the fate of the Palestinians.

The last two presidents’ attitudes did not fall within this normal range. Obama wanted to have some distance from Israel.

He was also more suspicious about Israel’s motivations and actions than most if not all previous presidents. Trump, on the other hand, bought Israel’s narrative of the conflict and its consequences. His peace plan went far beyond any previous president’s in its willingness to accept Israel’s demands.

Many Israelis saw Obama as a menace, while viewing Trump as something resembling a messiah.

Enter Biden. What were his actions during the May violence? He postponed a UN Security Council meeting and rejected a resolution that would have denounced Israel as the villain. He did not criticize Israel in public, and when a ceasefire began, he declared that “until the region says unequivocally they acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state, there will be no peace.” Biden also demanded that Israel be cautious. He was displeased with some of its operational moves and called Netanyahu time and again to clarify that there is no blank check for a war as long and as bloody as Israel wishes it to be.

When a week passed and Israel was still bombing, Biden made his call for a ceasefire public. Netanyahu rejected the call, but Biden swallowed his pride and waited. Soon after, Israel stopped shooting.

Was that a good way to handle a delicate situation? It was certainly the normal American way. Jerusalem—frustrated by Obama, spoiled by Trump—got the message. Biden intends to move the needle of relations back to where it was under most presidents. If Israel does not become too greedy, that should be good enough.

Shmuel Rosner is a senior fellow at The Jewish People Policy Institute and a news analyst at Kan News TV.

OPINION AMY E. SCHWARTZ

THE FIGHTS THAT BIND A common reading list won’t unite us, but it can get us on the same page.

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glutton for punishment, I recently slogged my way through all 316 online comments attached to a New York Times piece in which two Howard University officials, Brandon Hogan and Jacoby Adeshei Carter, defended themselves against the accusation by Cornel West and Jeremy Tate in The Washington Post that their decision to eliminate Howard University’s classics department to save money was a “spiritual catastrophe.”

It took hours, but I couldn’t help myself. There’s no more revealing question about a community, any community, than what books everybody in the community is expected to read. Fights about required reading lists are reliable headliners in the culture wars and have been for decades.

Think of the 1980s, when universities were struggling to add female and minority voices to their survey courses, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson ignited a national conservative backlash over Stanford University’s eminently reasonable reforms in that direction by showing up to lead students in chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go.”

The Jewish community has pursued its own canon wars, most recently a dust-up over whether a collection of important recent voices in a “new canon” should include men with #MeToo offenses on their record. But a community with a common reading list, however contested, has a tremendous advantage over a community without one. The warring factions of an increasingly polarized Jewish community should take note.

That, at least, was the conclusion with which I emerged from my prolonged immersion in the comment section. Passions ran high for what might seem a fairly specialized question—whether students at a

preeminent historically Black university, such as Howard, should have the option to major in the study of Plato and Aristotle.

Derision rained down on the administrators’ argument that maintaining a classics major is just too expensive a luxury and that Howard students can still get all the classics they need in updated and diversified philosophy courses featuring, say, “Plato, Locke and Angela Davis.” Some professors, not satisfied with defending Aristotle, quoted him in the original Greek.

Most supporters of the classics major harked back to a better time—unspecified—when all college students and indeed all educated people in society read and grappled with the same texts, problematic or not. But no one mentioned why this was a good thing. Was it that obvious? I found myself thinking of a question I’d been asked at a Zoom talk about a book that Moment published earlier this year, drawn from our long-running “Ask the Rabbis” column, which poses a question in every issue to ten rabbis from ten different denominations.

The rabbis in the book disagree, of course, on nearly every question, from “Does Jewish law forbid racism?” to “Are Jews still expecting a Messiah?” That’s the point: Jewish tradition is noted for zestful argument and, historically, has not been damaged by it. I was surprised to be asked during the question period, “Is there anything the rabbis agree on?

What are the common beliefs that make them all Jews?”

I had to think. Belief in God? Nope.

The Reform movement considers “ethical monotheism” the core of Jewish heritage, but in our book, rabbis of at least one denomination, the Humanists, adamantly insist they don’t believe in a supernatural deity. Kosher laws, Shabbat observance, the existence of an afterlife? More dis-

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JEWISH TRADITION IS KNOWN FOR ZESTFUL ARGUMENTS agreement. I finally answered, “I think what they have in common is the book.”

Not our little book, of course, but the book, or books—the shared treasure of Torah, Bible, Talmud and commentary.

With that text in common, disagreements may be fierce, or go on indefinitely, but argument remains possible. Just as Martin Luther King Jr. quoted the Bible and the Constitution to force Americans to reckon with how far short they’d fallen of their own founding ideals, rabbis who disagree fervently on identity, practice or doctrine can peaceably argue over the meaning of a quote they both know.

Would a common reading list save American politics? It’s not really true that when the whole country watched Walter Cronkite, we were one nation; even the best news source leaves out multitudes.

But books are different. Surely, if Americans grew up studying and arguing over some common books—Plato, Aristotle or the Federalist Papers—we’d improve on the ghastly non-dialogue of today, in which each man sulks under the vine and fig tree of his very own information ecosystem.

I emerged from my comment spree more depressed than usual over the prospects for American political discourse and, paradoxically, more optimistic over the equivalent prospects in the Jewish community, despite widely noted polarization and the tendency of Jews—like Americans generally—to get their news from increasingly disparate newspapers and news feeds. We may disagree on everything—religion, politics, the news.

But to disagree about a book—to have a book to disagree about—now that’s a tie that binds.

Amy E. Schwartz is Moment’s opinion and book editor.

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PERSPECTIVES OPINION SARAH POSNER

WOULD JESUS GET THE VACCINE? Some white evangelicals are not so sure.

DONKEYHOTEY

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n March, Franklin Graham, the culture warrior evangelist and vociferous defender of former President Donald Trump, urged Christians to get the COVID-19 vaccine. He was certain, he told ABC News, that his late father Billy Graham, the éminence grise of American evangelicalism, would have embraced it. “Anytime there was a vaccine or something that could help protect you, he was an advocate for [it], he took it,” Graham said. More dramatically, Graham added that Jesus himself would have gotten the COVID-19 vaccine.

Given that multiple polls have shown white evangelicals to have higher rates of vaccine refusal and hesitancy than the general population, such a messianic imprimatur might be seen as the essential endorsement needed to propel this community onto the path toward herd immunity—or at least sufficient vaccination levels to stamp out transmission chains. But evangelicals still lag far behind other religious demographics in vaccine acceptance. According to an April poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, 28 percent of white evangelicals are “vaccine hesitant,” and another 26 percent say they will not get a vaccine—the highest rate of refusal among religious groups, compared to white Catholics at 8 percent, Jews at 5 percent and the religiously unaffiliated at 12 percent.

Other religious subgroups, including some Hasidic Jews, also have rejected the COVID-19 vaccine. But white evangelicals make up 15-20 percent of the U.S. population and play an outsized role in elections and Republican politics. Their anti-vaccine views have broader epidemiological and political repercussions.

Persuading evangelicals to embrace the vaccine, it turns out, is harder than putting Franklin Graham in front of a microphone.

Unlike at the peak of his father’s career, a single person no longer holds sway over a cacophonous evangelical world. Decades of 16

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Christian television, coupled with social media, have produced an explosion of preachers, revivalists, self-proclaimed prophets, faith healers and conspiracy theorists. And because former President Donald Trump maintained a very low bar to entry into his evangelical inner circle, his presidency catapulted minor players into major influencers.

In this freewheeling evangelical marketplace, these self-made influencers have been rewarded for fomenting fear and sowing doubt about initiatives taken on by scientists and governmental officials, even targeting the government as “anti-Christian.” So while some evangelical powerhouses like Graham, Trump-confidant Pastor Robert Jeffress and representatives of Focus on the Family have promoted the vaccine, consumers of evangelical media are barraged by countervailing messages, many of which tap into their long-standing grievances and fears.

After Graham’s pro-vaccine statement, Jim Garlow, an evangelical pastor who runs Well Versed, a nonprofit that “teaches biblical principles of governance to governmental leaders,” sent an email to his followers questioning the wisdom of evangelical leaders who were urging people to get vaccinated. Referring to the vaccine as the “governmental shot,” Garlow raised doubts about its efficacy and the government’s motivations, questioning why hydroxychloroquine, a drug falsely touted by Trump and others as a miracle COVID-19 cure, “was not allowed.” Garlow concluded that we should “let people decide for themselves” whether to get vaccinated, but he dropped enough questions to leave an uninformed reader suspicious of vaccine safety and efficacy. Similarly, Eric Metaxas, a popular evangelical pundit and pro-Trump provocateur, tweeted that he would not be getting a COVID-19 vaccine. “I have no objection to others getting it,” Metaxas added. “But it’s not for everyone. There are too many questions. Don’t get it ‘just because.’ THINK.”

Franklin Graham

The mishmash of anti-vaccine messages stems from the same distrust that has made white evangelicals susceptible to other conspiracy theories, including QAnon. For decades, evangelicals have consumed messages about the end times, including that Christians will be persecuted as the anti-Christ seeks to impose a “one-world government,” which will include forcing people to wear “the mark of the beast.” Vaccines in general have long been reviled as one such “mark of the beast.” Many evangelicals have been told their belief in God and Jesus’ healing powers will protect them from illness. And as QAnon appealed to people to “do the research” to discover the “truth” about a “deep state,” some evangelicals and their political allies have used a similar tactic about vaccines.

After Senator Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who has promoted COVID -19 conspiracies and election fraud lies, told Fox News that getting the vaccine was a “rightto-choose” issue, Intercessors for America, an evangelical activist group, called it “his common sense, reasonable approach to the COVID vaccine.”

Throughout the pandemic, dozens of evangelical churches have sued government officials, claiming that restrictions limiting large gatherings infringed on their religious freedom, and there have been several documented outbreaks at churches that refused to comply with restrictions.

Now that the vaccine is here, you might think there would be a pervasive embrace of this life-saving miracle. But many evangelicals have been fed anti-government, anti-science propaganda for so long that it’s all too easy for charlatans and self-promoters to convince them they’re savvy sleuths of the “truth” by distrusting the science on which their lives literally depend. And so the culture wars march on.

Sarah Posner is the author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump.

OPINION FANIA OZ-SALZBERGER

CAN HOPE SURVIVE THE LATEST ISRAEL-GAZA ‘ROUND’?

Even with a new government, the harm to Israel-Arab coexistence is real.

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odern Hebrew, especially military and political jargon, tends to reflect the state of the nation. Thus, Israel no longer fights “wars” or launches “operations” in Gaza. The buzzword is now sevev, meaning a “round”— and in the case of Gaza, yet another round—of seemingly endless clashes.

The word sevev belongs to a vocabulary of despair. It is also related to the biblical verb sovev in that great biblical hymn to futility, Ecclesiastes. In Robert Alter’s excellent translation, “Round and round goes the wind, and on its rounds the wind returns”(1:6). In the same spirit, many observers saw the Israel-Gaza clash of mid-May 2021 as a cyclical force of nature. There is nothing new under the sun.

Wrong. This time there was a novelty.

The ill wind that sent Gazan rockets to Israel and Israeli bombs to Gaza in May blew directly from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence, wrecking Jewish-Arab coexistence within Israel along the way. And it may have led to his ultimate undoing.

To be fair to Netanyahu, he likely did not intend another “round,” let alone the targeting of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But he encouraged both police and right-wing Jewish extremists to provoke East Jerusalem Palestinians, which in turn upended the delicate coexistence of Jews and Arabs in Israel’s mixed cities, brought violence to the streets and a barrage of racist obscenities to the social networks and culminated in a Gaza “round” that, unlike its predecessors, was not done on the initiative of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. It was an unintended consequence of Netanyahu’s bid to derail the anti-Likud “coalition of change” that his three rivals, Yair Lapid, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett, were on the verge of signing. Some degree of Jewish-Arab tension was crucial for Net-

anyahu’s survival, to pull Bennett and perhaps Sa’ar back into the Likud fold, but they spotted the trap. For the sole purpose of extending his premiership, then, Netanyahu made an enemy of all Palestinians, uniting a broad demographic of extremists and silencing the myriad moderates.

A cease-fire was negotiated and, as I write, Netanyahu’s long regime may finally be over. But the Gaza “round” still produced two kinds of losers: the innocents and the moderates. These include every non-involved civilian and every child in Gaza and thousands of women and men within Israel who supported solidarity, trust and neighborliness among Jews and Arabs. Unlike in previous “rounds”— that awful word again—this time Jewish extremists and their Arab counterparts unraveled fabrics of coexistence that had quietly flourished for decades.

For years, anti-Netanyahu protesters were accused of targeting him “personally.” For me, this “round” was personal, too.

My mother, at 81, having lived through ten wars, had to run to the shelter three times a night while missiles exploded over Tel Aviv. My son, an educator, saw his hard work with Jewish and Arab youngsters partially destroyed. My family witnessed the collapse of fragile cohabitation even in our own idyllic southern Carmel, with Arab ruffians hurling rocks at drivers and halting traffic on two major roads.

Is all hope for coexistence gone? No. In the middle of the “round,” my husband Eli and I, with our son Nadav and 300 other Jews and Arabs, stood in a major road junction between our town and the neighboring Arab village of Fureidis, giving flowers to hundreds of drivers. I saw an Arab bus driver moved to tears when Nadav handed him a flower. People joined us from Fureidis, smiling and shaking hands.

As word spread, the two mayors followed.

The same thing happened in at least six different spots around the country. And in

many hospitals, the Jewish-Arab medical teams, bless them, took group videos of friendship and solidarity.

For years, we have been saying that things here might have to get worse before they get better. Perhaps, says Eli, we have now reached the lowest point. But history is not a pendulum. It is made of human decisions. We Israelis may succeed in changing our government, but we must keep striving to change what is far more

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MODERATION IS MORAL MULTITASKING, CARING FOR YOUR OWN PEOPLE AND FOR OTHER PEOPLE TOO. difficult, many of our own hearts. Moderate Palestinians everywhere need courage, persistence and support. We also need U.S. President Joe Biden and the rest of the international community’s responsible adults to step in.

Fanaticism, my late father said, is the worst enemy of human freedom. Let me add a definition of moderation: It is the capacity for moral multitasking, caring for your own people and for other people too. Some of my son’s teenage pupils, Jews and Arabs alike, are already regrouping to work for coexistence. So here we are, clinging to hope on Mount Carmel and wishing for some Solomonic wisdom to shine once again from Jerusalem.

Fania Oz-Salzberger is an Israeli historian and essayist and a professor at the University of Haifa.

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Is there a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich?

YES Is there a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich? Yes. Not as an abstract principle, true any time, but I approve of the tax and spending program proposed

by President Biden, and I’m prepared to defend it on moral grounds. The president has been very specific about what programs the revenues are to be used for.

They’re expensive but worthwhile, and likely to benefit the economy and foster a more equal society—not only the physical infrastructure proposals, but others such as universal preschool education and the availability of daycare to allow women of all incomes to participate in the labor force. We could simply borrow, that is, finance the additional spending, thus adding to government indebtedness— but that’s not a good idea. And in light of income trends over the past half-century, it’s highly appropriate to turn to the top 1 percent or so of taxpayers to finance these programs.

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831, the first thing he noticed was what he called “equality of condition” among American citizens. He didn’t mean everybody was equal in every way, including wealth, but he saw a kind of equality of status as a citizen. He came from France, a country with a hereditary nobility, and this equality struck him as so new that he highlighted it in the first sentence of his book.

I think the widening economic inequality in the United States over the past half-century or so is reaching proportions where it threatens this basic equality of condition. Tocqueville put his finger on something deeply moral that he admired about the U.S., and it’s now at risk.

How far can inequality go before we’ve destroyed that quality in American life?

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In light of income trends, it’s highly appropriate to turn to the top 1 percent of taxpayers to finance Biden’s programs.

BENJAMIN M. FRIEDMAN Nobody knows. But if we keep following the current trend, with more and more income and wealth accruing to a narrow slice of families at the very top, we are at serious risk of losing it. I think that would be wrong in moral terms.

There’s also a moral argument in a different sense about the role of money in politics. That’s now gone well beyond anything the Founding Fathers—or, quite recently, we—could have imagined.

We’re the country that pioneered one citizen, one vote. There are other factors, such as the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. But we now have individuals in both parties who could pick up the entire cost of a presidential campaign and never even miss the money. That’s beyond anything that anybody ever had in mind in construing the political nature of the American republic.

Can tax rates be so high that they are inherently morally wrong? As with inequality, there must be some limit, although here too nobody knows what it is. Taxation at the level President Biden is proposing does not strike me as confiscatory, or as even approaching that limit. We currently tax top-level incomes at a much lower rate than we did a few decades ago.

Also, it’s more complicated than just the rate. People in the top bracket often earn much of their income in forms that are taxed at lower rates, such as capital gains or carried interest.

It’s the Warren Buffett problem—why does Buffett pay, according to him, a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary pays? There’s serious economic research showing that this reduction in the tax rate at the very top is

a big contributor to the widening wealth inequality we’ve seen.

Will it help to increase compliance through more aggressive tax collection?

As a moral matter, you want everybody to comply. As a practical matter, compliance requires enforcement, which is expensive.

Will enhanced enforcement consume more resources than it will generate? The Biden administration claims that spending billions of dollars on increased compliance will generate a large multiple of the amount spent. This isn’t an area I work on, and so I don’t know if that estimate is plausible or not.

Is there a Jewish view on taxes?

The most obvious is the Temple tithe.

Throughout biblical times, back to the Tabernacle in the desert, everybody participated in financing the Temple. I don’t think there’s a view in Judaism rejecting economic inequality per se; the issue is how to deal with the consequences of inequality. It’s simply understood, for example, that some people will be landowners and some will be poor workers, but there are many laws in Vayikra and Devarim, and in the Talmud too, about economic relations. You don’t trim the edges of the field—you leave that for the poor. The same for grapes that fall to the ground. And you can’t let the sun set without paying your workers their daily wage.

Benjamin M. Friedman is professor of political economy and former chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University.

His books include Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.

moment debate

NO

Is there a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich? No. I don’t see any reason to tax the rich per se, and it’s not clear to me that it’s a moral thing to do.

I see no particular virtue in ganging up on a group of people just because they have money.

Anyway, the question distracts us from the basic issue: “What’s the goal of taxation, and what kind of taxes will help achieve it?” The goal should be to enhance growth, but also to distribute the burden of taxes fairly. A tax system will boost growth if it distorts people’s decisions about work, investment, savings and risk-taking as little as possible. Fairness is in the eye of the beholder. While critically important, it’s a value judgment.

The focus should be on the best tradeoff between growth and fairness, not on hammering the rich.

Regardless of your politics, you should care about growth. Think of the Bernie Sanders agenda: free daycare, free college, paid leave, etc. You need money for those programs, and you get it from a high-growth economy, one in which people make economic decisions on the basis of fundamentals, not to dodge taxes.

To avoid taxes, a corporation can always invest less, hire fewer people or just locate somewhere else. And even if you have your heart set on screwing corporations, you should do it efficiently by broadening the tax base—for instance, by telling corporations they can’t deduct interest anymore—rather than by raising the tax rate. That would arguably make the system fairer, and you’d get more money.

Can taxes be so high that they are inherently morally wrong? I wouldn’t

“

I see no particular virtue in ganging up on a group of people just because they have money.

HARVEY S. ROSEN

put it that way. But at some point, if rates get too high, revenue goes down. That’s the infamous Laffer curve. If you’re raising taxes on some person or activity so much that it actually reduces tax receipts, it means you hate that person or activity so much you’re willing to sacrifice all the progressive goodies you could fund with more money—more education, more abortion clinics, whatever—just to hurt them.

During the Obama campaign, a reporter asked the candidate what he would say to people who argue that raising the capital gains tax will actually reduce revenue. I was sure Obama would challenge the premise, but instead he said, essentially, “I think we have to spread the wealth around.” In other words, he embraced the notion of punishing the wealthy even if it would mean less revenue for the Treasury. Is that a moral way to conduct taxation?

Even rich people are still members of the community. Is it good to tax their income at such a high rate that you have less money to spend on beneficial programs? It doesn’t sound moral to me.

Will it help to increase compliance through more aggressive tax collection? I’ll raise my hand and call bullshit on that. When I was working in the Treasury Department, I learned about the “tax gap”: the difference between the amount of money you collect in taxes and the amount you would collect if compliance were perfect. Every administration, Democratic or Republican, says, in effect, “Give us $50 billion more for the IRS, and the money will come rolling in!” I was in

charge of the Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis, and my staff researched this and found that a good chunk of that money is simply not collectable. It’s owed by people who have gone bankrupt, or disappeared, or who just don’t have the cash. You just can’t get it. I had to tell the Secretary that increasing IRS funding wouldn’t bring in buckets of money. It was very deflating. Years have passed since then, and I haven’t studied the tax gap recently, but I’d be surprised if it’s much different.

Is there a Jewish view on taxes? On page one of my introductory textbook on Public Finance, I have a long quotation from First Samuel. It’s the story about how the Israelite tribes wanted to have a king. They said to Samuel the prophet, “Give us a king!

Everyone else has a king!” And Samuel said, no, that’s an awful idea, because if you have a king, he’ll want an army and palaces, and he’ll come to you for money, and it will be a burden on you.

(Samuel eventually relented, and sadly, the consequences were exactly what he predicted!) This scenario perfectly encapsulates the subject matter of Public Finance. Governments spend money, but it has to come from burdensome taxes.

Centuries have passed, mixed feelings about government remain, and much of the controversy still centers around its taxing behavior.

Harvey S. Rosen was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H. W. Bush. He is professor emeritus of economics and business policy at Princeton University.

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moment debate rebuttals should the first amendment apply to social media?

In our previous debate, Moment asked if the First Amendment should apply to social media. Jed Rubenfeld, a constitutional scholar who has advised parties on possible litigation against Google and Facebook, said yes; Paul M. Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and coauthor of False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim That Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives, said no. Here, they respond to each other’s arguments.

Read the original debate at momentmag.com/momentdebate-should-the-first-amendment-apply-to-social-media Moment’s Twitter followers weigh in. The majority said yes.

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jed rubenfeld: yes aul Barrett’s practical concerns about

applying the First Amendment online are well-taken, but constitutional law demands this result in certain cases. Under well-established doctrine, it is state action when government officials induce, significantly encourage, coerce or jointly participate in a private party’s conduct. That’s exactly what’s happening today. Government is working with and pressuring the social media behemoths to block speech it disfavors, and that’s unconstitutional. As the

J

libel. But if we’re talking about speech the Constitution does protect, when did we become so afraid of the freedom of speech? The answer is not censorship.

How about putting users in control instead? Give users an icon they can click on to opt into content moderation. That would honor both individual choice and the Constitution.

Jed Rubenfeld, a constitutional scholar, has advised parties on possible litigation against Google and Facebook.

paul barrett: no ed Rubenfeld makes a number of

important points, including his warning about the danger of so much power over expression being exercised by a small number of Silicon Valley corporations. But his prescription of applying the First Amendment to Facebook and Twitter, as if they were arms of the government, strikes me as impractical in at least a couple of respects. First, how would we go about recategorizing these companies as government bodies? Would only Facebook, Twitter and YouTube be prohibited from moderating content on

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Supreme Court has said, it is “axiomatic” that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” I’m not arguing for new doctrine. I’m simply arguing for well-established principles to be applied.

Would social media be overrun with toxic content if the First Amendment were honored online? There’s a century of cases identifying speech the Constitution does not protect—for example, incitement, threats, obscenity and

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their platforms? What about Instagram and TikTok? Who is making these fateful decisions and based on what criteria?

My second concern is what would happen on the platforms if most content moderation suddenly ceased. I’m pretty sure Facebook et al. would be overrun by toxic content that couldn’t be removed if the First Amendment applied: abusive hate speech, provably false misinformation of civic significance (such as lies about COVID-19 prevention and cures) and conspiracy theories that erode public trust in democratic institutions (such as free and fair elections and the peaceful

transfer of power). Is that the social media we want? No. I would preserve the First Amendment’s explicit and long-honored application only to the government and possibly seek to diminish the scale and influence of the social media companies by means of other legal tools, including federal and state antitrust laws.

Paul M. Barrett is deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and coauthor with J. Grant Sims of False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim That Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives.

ask the rabbis Does Absolute Evil Exist, and If So, What Does It Look Like Today? proliferation of outright lies and their costly consequences for the economic and physical well-being of entire communities. This form of evil is of the worst sort, since it is deceptively camouflaged by rhetoric disguised as humanitarian concern and compassion. Even the serpent in the Garden of Eden could not match the evil of draping the wool over the eyes of an entire population and allowing it to slip-slide into passive naiveté. Dishonesty and deception have time and again caused the fall of great civilizations.

Rabbi Gershon Winkler Walking Stick Foundation Monument, CO

humanist

Talking about moral absolutes is a challenge. It’s especially tricky in the modern era, when everything is up for discussion.

But are some things beyond argument? independent

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COURTESY OF THE MET

Evil was introduced the moment God looked at Creation and “saw that it was good!” For the existence of good implies the existence of evil, just as big implies

small and cold implies hot. Everything implies its opposite. So, yes, absolute evil exists, no less than absolute good.

Today, absolute evil flourishes in clever guises: for instance, distorted versions of social equality, or the officially sanctioned

As a humanist, I don’t believe in absolute anything. Nor do I see evil as a metaphysical reality that is somehow outside our own actions. Only behavior can be judged as good or evil. Motivations are irrelevant.

Hitler is considered the embodiment of evil, so let’s apply this to him. Was he driven by evil? Not according to him or his followers. As difficult as it is for us to understand, they believed he was doing good. I don’t think it matters. He and his followers allowed their beliefs to silence their empathy and moral senses. They turned off their consciences.

There certainly exist a small number of people whose brains are damaged so that they have little or no empathy and no path to moral decision-making. But most evildoers think they’re doing the right thing. They’re not partaking in some metaphysical realm of “pure evil.”

They’re surrendering their consciences to damaging dogmas and ideologies.

Fortunately, as a social species, humankind comes equipped with the ability to oppose evil by doing good.

Doing so requires us to examine what motivates our behaviors, to reject any beliefs that foster hate and harm and to actively engage our sense of right and

wrong. In other words, it demands that we develop our consciences.

reconstructionist

Rabbi Jeffrey L. Falick Birmingham Temple Congregation for Humanistic Judaism Farmington Hills, MI

In the words of Lady Blanche Balfour, as quoted by Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem: “Lord, preserve us from the dangers of metaphysical hair-splitting and unnecessary brooding on the origin of evil.” Indeed, philosophers and theologians have often split hairs on this question. And yet we continue to ask it because the pain and suffering that result from evil are all too real. And for Jews living after the Holocaust, the reality of absolute evil lives deep in our psyches.

For me the insights of Jewish mysticism provide a helpful framework for understanding evil. According to Gershom Scholem, “the nature of evil [in Kabbalah] is therefore the separation and isolation of those things that should be united.” Symbolically, this is represented as the separation between the “tree of life” and the “tree of knowledge.” Everything we do, create and believe as humans who reside within the sphere of “tree of knowledge” must also be connected to the sphere of “tree of life.” When the spheres are radically disconnected, there is the potential for evil. Another way of expressing this is that evil exists where there is absolutely no empathy and no teshuvah. We see such evil where people who are under the absolute power of others are severely harmed in body, psyche and soul. This includes the torture of those held in captivity as well as the severe abuse and exploitation of children and other vulnerable beings such as animals. When we see the connection between our souls and the souls of other beings, as well as the divine soul, the potential for evil is diminished.

renewal Our rabbis condemned relatively few individuals as completely unworthy.

Only three kings of ancient Israel and four prominent commoners are identified by name as having no place in the World to Come.

Almost 2,000 years later, we surely have many more eligible candidates. Evil today looks much like evil in the past—we know it when we experience or witness murderous, malicious, dominance-seeking behavior. The traditional Jewish notion is that each individual faces a constant choice between an internal yetzer ha-tov (good inclination) and yetzer ha-ra (evil inclination). Interestingly, modern neuroscience echoes this in describing the constant interaction between our frontal cortex (do the right thing) and our amygdala (fear! danger! lash out!).

But there are some differences from the past. We have vastly expanded our notions of whose lives matter and greatly reduced our tolerance for evil. And we are savvier about how evil comes about: how traumatic brain injuries and abuse at an early age can impede the development of the frontal cortex and prevent people from being able to choose right over wrong; how religions and cultures can foster an “us vs. them” attitude, and how hormones can intensify those attitudes in the brain. Responsibility for evil rests not just on the individual but on the society that either nurtures or harms its children, that broadcasts messages of compassion to its young folk or incites them to hatred, that upholds or undercuts human dignity in the workplace and public sphere. More than ever we can appreciate why the Yom Kippur recitation of evil acts is a communal confession.

Rabbi Gilah Langner Congregation Kol Ami Arlington, VA 22

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Rabbi Caryn Broitman Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center Vineyard Haven, MA

reform After more than a year floating in the ark with his family and all the animals, Noah emerges and builds an altar in honor of Adonai. Upon receiving the gifts of the altar, the Torah recounts, “Adonai thought: Never again will I bring doom upon the world on account of what peo-

ple do, since the human mind inclines to evil from youth onward…” (Genesis 8:21). This verse tells us that although the human mind inclines toward evil—and may actually lead toward evil deeds or behaviors—we are not inherently evil.

Absolute evil does not exist. Rather, human beings have free will.

So, if we have the inclination to do good or evil, then why would someone choose evil? That is a much harder question to answer. Our sources say the evil inclination is the root of our creativity, ambition to succeed and sex drive. Yet those who succumb to their evil inclination may lose their moral compass, turning away from God. This is why so much of the Torah and Jewish tradition contain the structures, commandments and instructions that will lead us toward choosing goodness, justice and righteousness.

Rabbi Dr. Laura Novak Winer Fresno, CA

conservative This question can be addressed conceptually or practically. I think it wise to leave the conceptual side to the philosophers.

Rabbis have to address practical issues. I would ask: “Are there people so absolutely evil that they are irredeemable?”

Jewish tradition has long debated this question. We are taught that God will forgive us for all of our sins, if only we repent.

And yet something inside us may tell us that some people’s sins are so egregious that they should never be forgiven. This perspective can be harmful to all parties involved. As a rabbi I believe my role is to open my heart and match din, judgment, with hesed, kindness or compassion, to create a path toward teshuvah, repentance. The very idea of teshuvah insists that human beings are capable of repenting. People have the capacity to change, if they are so inclined. Teshuvah can help guide the penitent through the journey of full repentance and atonement.

The prophet Isaiah reminds us: “For this to Me is like the waters of Noah: As I swore that the waters of Noah Nevermore would flood the earth, So I swear that I will not

Be angry with you or rebuke you.

For the mountains may move And the hills be shaken, But my loyalty shall never move from you, Nor my Covenant of friendship be shaken Said the Lord, who takes you back in love.”

(Isaiah 54:9-10) Rabbi Amy Wallk Katz Temple Beth El Springfield, MA

modern orthodox After the Shoah, we know that absolute evil exists, not as an independent force (like a Satan) but as a system created and carried out by human beings.

After the Shoah, I hesitate to use this label too freely, lest I cheapen it and undermine the taboo.

Yet upon consideration, where Hamas wants to commit genocide on Jewry, where its adherents primarily target civilians, where they elevate suicide and life-undermining terror as good things, they are close to absolute evil. The Chinese genocide of the Uighurs and the Myanmar military’s throttling of society through killing and intimidation are up there, too. The quiet grinding down of life and dignity in Russia

by Vladimir Putin gives me many of the same vibes.

All of us need to consciously review the globe, identify incipient evil and fight it as much as we can.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg J.J. Greenberg Center for Jewish Life/Hadar Institute New York, NY

orthodox I’m not sure absolute evil exists, but two insights can help us at least approach the concept. One, from the world of mussar, or ethics, says that before Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree—that is, before man’s separation from God—we could see good and evil clearly and they did represent absolutes. But after the tree, there would always be a murkiness: Everything in our experience would have good and evil intermingled.

The kabbalists teach that there are 49

“ALTHOUGH THE HUMAN MIND INCLINES TOWARD EVIL, WE ARE NOT INHERENTLY EVIL.” levels of holiness, culminating in a 50th level, the highest, which is largely inaccessible to human beings. Likewise, there are 49 levels of degradation, but some kabbalists say that unlike with holiness, there is no 50th level, because without some spark of the presence of God, nothing could exist.

Putting these two ideas together, and envisioning absolute evil as a sort of asymptote—where you can get infinitely close to a certain point but never reach it—I would say absolute evil would have to be completely devoid of God’s presence or consciousness or of any possible saving grace.

You would have to imagine acts of truly despicable and wanton cruelty of human beings toward other human beings, held as such by virtually all of mankind at the time when they are committed. Some gang wars might qualify, or some actions by governments against their own people. Maybe ISIS, though some people argue that even ISIS acted partly out of some warped belief in God. (That’s been debunked—most ISIS members weren’t religious.) But people who think that absolute evil is voting Republican or voting Democratic are hyperventilating.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein Cross-Currents Los Angeles, CA

neo-sephardic Absolute or close to absolute evil does exist, and although it might wear different clothes, it has remained essentially the same since the dawn of human civilization. The root of all evil is the lack of empathy. Indifference to the emotions, needs and suffering of others could lead to violent crimes, torture, enslavement, wars, corruption and more.

J.K. Rowling captured this concept in her novels when she pitted Lord Voldemort against Harry Potter. One was incapable not only of loving but of understanding how people love, while the other was the boy who survived because of his mother’s love.

We cannot defeat or annihilate absolute evil, but we can chip away at its power by teaching ourselves and others to love. The

Torah tells us to love others as we love ourselves. We have to appreciate and acknowledge our special place in the world and our unique talents, yet those should not drive us to arrogance and a sense of superiority. Rather, we should strive to realize our potential and be the best we can in order to help others do the same. We must find what we have in common and not what sets us apart, and we should be able to say, every single day, that we contributed to making this world a little better.

Rabbi Haim Ovadia Torah VeAhava Potomac, MD

chabad I was just five years old when I came home to discover that my mother had been assaulted and murdered in our Crown Heights home. Since that moment, when I came face to face with evil of the worst kind, I have grappled with it. How could I move forward after experiencing the human cruelty that tore my innocent life apart?

To write large chunks of our world off as absolute evil may be tempting, as it means walking away without even attempting to uplift it. But what purpose does that leave for us, G-d’s ambassadors for good in His world?

As I matured, I gained perspective and took comfort in the Hasidic teaching that virtually nothing in this world is entirely evil or good. We are thus given the opportunity, and indeed the obligation, to uplift everything we encounter by uncovering and elevating the sparks of G-dliness that are at the core of everything G-d creates.

As empowering and enlightening as that is, I acknowledge that the painful and traumatic loss of my mother was caused by evil that continues to bring pain and suffering to so many, and I pine for the day when the Almighty will remove evil from the world—with the coming of Moshiach, and may it be soon.

Rabbi Avraham Lapine Chabad-Lubavitch at University of Missouri Columbia, MO SUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

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moment(s)

THE STARS OF DAVID THAT AREN’T

MARISSA VONESH

T

Violins decorated with mother-of-pearl six-pointed stars have gained popularity and value with claims of Jewish or Holocaust origins. Are these claims true?

he violins pop up on eBay from time to time, described as “very rare” or “priceless.” One recent listing states that the violin for sale was “played by prisoners in the Nazi death camps of WWII” and was acquired from a man who himself had bought it “from a Jewish violinist [who] was among those arrested in the Holocaust in 1942s [sic].” A seller from Florida described the violin he was marketing as “Good for Klezmer band, Warsaw, Eastern Europe, Yiddish, Israel, historic violin, Judaica. Great piece of musical history.”

The listings don’t back up these claims with traditional provenance information, such as the names of previous owners or the history of the instrument. Instead, what the sellers point to as evidence of the violins’ connection to the Holocaust or previous Jewish owners is a mother-of-pearl hexagon shape inlaid on the body of the instruments.

In many cases, sellers simply label these “Stars of David” or “Jewish stars” and use them to claim a Jewish connection.

Violin curators, provenance specialists and historians disagree. “I’ve never seen 24

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evidence that associates violins decorated with mother-of-pearl six-pointed stars with Jewish musicians, either historically or in the Nazi ghettos and camps,” says Bret Werb, musicologist and recorded sound curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. For the past eight years, the museum has been approached by multiple members of the public offering to sell these types of violins or soliciting advice on appraising their historical or monetary value. The museum has rejected all offers to add these violins to the institution’s significant music collection.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a growing desire to rediscover, study and play music once banned by the Nazis as well as music written and performed, or sung, in the camps and ghettos during the Holocaust. That, in turn, has increased interest in these star-decorated violins. As a result, sellers are demanding markedly inflated prices. In the past year alone, one such violin was offered at a starting price of $1,850 and another at $5,000. These are extraordinary valuations for instruments originally produced for the lower

end of the violin market, where prices typically hit $100 to $300. But then, of course, such descriptions inevitably tug on the heartstrings of those searching for, and wishing to rescue, part of Europe’s lost Jewish heritage.

IN THE PAST YEAR ALONE, ONE SUCH VIOLIN WAS OFFERED AT $1,850 AND ANOTHER AT $5,000.

The problem is that while the six-pointed star has come to be intimately linked in people’s minds to Jews, research shows that these designs on violins were never considered “Stars of David” by the craftsmen who made them, nor by the wholesalers and retailers marketing them from the late 1800s to 1920s.

Read the entire investigation at momentmag.com/violins-stars-of-david

BY DINA GOLD

PRESIDENT REUVEN RIVLIN’S PARTING WORDS Reuven Rivlin was elected president of Israel by the Knesset in June 2014 and will complete his seven-year term in July. Rivlin was born in Jerusalem, where his family has lived since 1809. The president’s political career began in the Knesset in 1988 as a member of the Likud party, and he served as speaker of the Knesset for eight years.

Now at the end of his term, he speaks out about societal divisions in Israel—and what needs to be done to strengthen its sense of community.

majority of Israelis are both Zionist and secular to one in which we have four main groups of relatively equal size. This is what I referred to as the “four tribes” of Israel. In 2015, I called for an honest evaluation of the situation: “We need to look bravely at this reality…out of a deep commitment to find the answers to these questions, out of a readiness to draw together all the tribes of Israel, with a shared vision of Israeli hope.”

Since then, we have turned that “vision of Israeli hope” into Israeli Hope, or in Hebrew, Tikvah Israelit, the flagship program of my term in office and our response to the challenges that we face in this new reality.

Tikvah Israelit works in five key areas— schools, academia, sports, local government and employment—to bring the four tribes of Israeli society together in meaningful and constructive partnerships.

Creating partnerships between communities that have been largely separate from

Read more at momentmag.com/ reuven-rivlin-interview

WIKIMEDIA

In 2015, early in your term as president, you gave a speech in which you lamented the divisions of Israeli society into four population sectors, or “tribes”—secular Jewish, religious Jewish, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish and Arab—each of which had a “totally different outlook regarding the basic values and desired character of the State of Israel.” You spoke of your vision of four “pillars” that would strengthen the social cohesion in Israel.

Do you still hold to this vision and think it is possible to achieve? At the beginning of my presidency, I spoke of a far-reaching transformation in Israeli society. I said that it was neither trivial nor was it something we could avoid. But I also noted that we should be wary of speaking in apocalyptic terms, or of casually referring to one group or another as a danger.

The simple truth is that we have gone from being a society in which a sizable

each other is a process that requires time and patience. Each group needs to know that its fundamental identity is not under threat, but that it will be protected and valued as part of the broader fabric of society. Only if our own identity is secure can we reach out to others and get to know them. I believe, too, that shared responsibility remains a key element of this new view of Israeli civic society. If we are all partners, we all bear responsibility for the success and the future of the country—our country. No one group is more or less responsible for ensuring our safety and security, for ensuring our economic resilience, for setting and maintaining the moral or ethical standards we aspire to or the cultural and ethnic sources we draw from.

But we still face significant barriers to such partnership. Unless and until we address the question of equality, Israeli society will continue to be divided. Over the course of my own lifetime—I was born ten years before the State of Israel was established—we have created a state that is nothing less than a miracle. We can rightly be proud of our status as a world leader in technology and innovation, with outstanding achievements that truly make the world a better place. But we must not let that blind us to another reality, in which structural gaps—whether in budgets, infrastructures or allocation of land—between some Israelis and others are significant and persistent. Only when the aspirations and talents of every young Israeli, not their ethnic or social origins, are allowed to determine the course of their lives can we build a shared future.

The result of this process is not just the end of sectarianism, although that would be reward enough. We must aspire to more—to forge a new Israeliness of diversity and cultural richness, of partnership and shared responsibility, where our differences inspire our humanity and sensitivity. If we truly believe that we were not doomed to live together, but rather, destined to do so, I believe we can make this vision a reality.

INTERVIEW BY LAURENCE WOLFF SUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

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MOMENT(S)

ELIE WIESEL CARVING COMES TO THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL

MAYIM BIALIK

She’s back—though was she ever really gone?

I WASHINGTON NATIONAL CATHEDRAL / WIKIMEDIA

t feels as if Mayim Bialik is everywhere. She is talking about mental health on her new podcast, “The Breakdown with Mayim Bialik”; she is giving parenting advice on kveller.com or in one of her many books; she is in the omnipresent reruns of The Big Bang Theory, playing scientist Amy Farrah Fowler, and in her new Fox show Call Me Kat, where she plays the owner of a Louisville cat café. Most recently, she has been a guest host of Jeopardy! Moment’s Sarah Breger speaks with the actress-neuroscientist-author on her experience as an observant Jew in Hollywood, the origins of Jewish humor and more.

A stone carving of the head of Moment cofounder, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel has been installed at the Washington National Cathedral Human Rights Porch in Washington, DC. It honors Wiesel’s legacy as a lifelong human rights defender dedicated to combating indifference and intolerance. Carved in place by Cathedral stone carver Sean Callahan, it joins the likenesses of, among others, Rosa Parks (top) and Mother Teresa (middle). The Cathedral’s Human Rights Porch is dedicated to individuals who have taken significant, profound and life-changing actions in the fight for human rights, social justice, civil rights and the welfare of other human beings. Visit the carving in person or online at cathedral.org/eliewiesel.

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Do you think Jewish humor is distinct?

Do you bring it into your own work?

I don’t just think that Jewish humor is distinct; I know that it is! I don’t know that I can distinguish my humor as a Jew from my talent as a comedian, since being Jewish and my style of comedy are just a part of me. A lot of it depends on the writing, and I think my Call Me Kat character has many things about her that have the rhythmic nature of Jewish humor. We have a dialogue coach on our show, Ren Bell, who has studied Yiddish theater. It helps to work with him on the script since he knows so much about my

POEM JESSICA GREENBAUM natural Jewish sensibility and phrasing and has ways to massage it appropriately for a public audience. I should note that my first language is Yiddish, and I grew up with a tremendous amount of Yiddish woven into my English. That plays into my sense of humor; it changes the rhythms I speak in and even some of my grammar.

Does being an observant Jew in Hollywood make you feel like an outlier? Have things changed over time—or do you find yourself explaining Sukkot over and over again? I am definitely an outlier in many ways, and my observance is strange to a lot of people, even Jews. I am still explaining Sukkot over and over again and likely will continue to do so.

the season when my life turned I have been the first person awake in my house every morning of my life (except decades ago when the babies were babies) and one morning on my way to make coffee I felt like a sleeping passenger in a car making a wide u-turn because my life had invisibly changed direction; I saw that in my kitchen the only things that seemed a little alive and whose manufacture had not injured any living being or the earth the only ones were the carved wooden spoon one daughter made in camp dimpled just as we are the squat clay pitcher made by the other complete with looped handle and wide enough to pinch the sea salt from it and the sugar bowl remaining

“I TRY TO PRESENT A RELATABLE SIDE OF ME THAT I HOPE CAN BE HELPFUL TO OTHERS. MY JEWISH SENSIBILITY TELLS ME THAT THE WORK IS NOT MINE TO COMPLETE, BUT NEITHER AM I FREE TO ABANDON IT.”

from my great-grandparents’ farm in the Catskills cream-colored circled with a broad green stripe its metal cover hinged in the middle to be folded back as was the fashion in the mountains.

And after the turn I stopped needing the kitchen to greet me in the morning as a clean slate with everything from dinner washed and put away; now

On your YouTube channel, you have been talking about certain topics— divorce, body image, eating disorders—before many others were. Why do you choose to address issues sometimes seen as taboo? My general rule is I only share things if I have a different perspective on them than people usually hear or if I feel I could help people. I don’t believe that every celebrity needs to vomit everything in their head onto the internet, but I do try to present a relatable side of me that I hope can be helpful to others.

My Jewish sensibility tells me that the work is not mine to complete, but neither am I free to abandon it.

Read more at momentmag.com/mayim-bialik-is-backthough-was-she-ever-really-gone INTERVIEW BY SARAH BREGER

when I pass the table to make coffee— the morning still dark through the windows the Shabbat glasses with red shadows at each well’s bottom the silverware at angles alongside the salt pitcher the empty can of seltzer on its side and the sugar bowl open with a few spilled grains next to the box of teas— I’m gladdened by this pentimento of who spoke or laughed or drank who told the next story or asked the question which then unspooled our thoughts from their cupboards within cupboards who allowed for silence— because arriving at the day from this direction— all the sweet and salt life stirred in us— I see it will be cleared away soon enough Jessica Greenbaum’s most recent book of poems is Spilled and Gone. She is the coeditor of the first poetry Haggadah, the Mishkan HaSeder.

jewish word What a Schlep!

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n 2008, a group of Jewish Democratic political operatives had an idea: If young Jewish voters traveled to Florida, they could convince their hesitant grandparents to vote for Barack Obama, thus ensuring a win in the vital swing state. The team dubbed the get-out-the-vote effort “The Great Schlep” and chose comedian Sarah Silverman as the face of the campaign. Her promotional video became a viral sensation. Viewers picked up on the connotations and humor of “schlep” without needing even a baseline understanding of Yiddish.

“The Great Schlep” used “schlep” in its noun form, defined as “a long, laborious, tedious journey,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But when “schlep” first appeared in the American lexicon in 1911, it functioned as a verb, a stand-in for the verbs “to drag” or “to haul,” according to Merriam Webster. This is how it turns up in James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, where the sun “trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load.”

“Schlep,” however, isn’t exactly synonymous with “tedious journey,” “drag” or “haul.” “‘Schlep’ adds that element of struggling, of taking something that doesn’t quite want to be taken,” says Yiddish scholar and creator of the Yiddish Cultural Dictionary Dovid Katz. Thus, the object that one schleps might be too heavy or too difficult to carry, or it could be that the person who is burdened with the journey ahead just doesn’t feel like making the trip. “Schlep” also has humorous, self-deprecating undertones. “All Yiddish words that start with schl-”(or shl-, a phonetic base in Yiddish, like schmooze and schvitz) “are potential words for making fun and having fun,” says Katz.

Evolving from the Middle High German sleppen and the Middle Low German slepen, “schlep” found its way into Yiddish before implanting itself in the English language.

When it came to America in the early 20th century, “schlep didn’t have a great English 28

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equivalent,” says Sarah Bunin Benor, author and founder of the Jewish English Lexicon, a project that collects data on Jewish spoken language. But when it took root here, she says, its usage changed. In Yiddish, “schlep” requires a direct object, as in the transitive “I schlepped myself all the way to the DMV.” In English, it transformed into the more resonant intransitive, as in, “I schlepped to the DMV.” Benor says there’s nothing unusual about such a shift in a word’s usage between two languages. “Any language is always changing,” she says. “That’s the sign of its health.” The word’s spelling evolved as well. While Yiddish speakers and scholars such as Benor and Katz write it phonetically as shlep, 20th-century English language lexicographers spelled it the German way, hence the added ‘c.’

Whichever spelling you choose, “schlep” is certainly one of the most popular Yiddish words to have entered English.

People love it because it sounds like what it is. The word, in fact, is so common that many English speakers don’t realize they are using a term from another language.

It is one of those Yiddish words that have spread through English like a virus: Use “schlep” in conversation and people who aren’t familiar with it “catch” it and then use it with their friends, who “catch” it too.

“Those overlapping networks lead to a Yiddish word becoming part of mainstream American English,” says Benor.

“Schlep” is also omnipresent in popular culture. Benor points out that in the 1950s and 1960s, Jewish comedians such as Allan Sherman used Yiddish words like “schlep” in their stand-up sets, where another meaning of the word also caught on—a “schlep” or “a schlepper.” A “schlep” is a person who is always struggling with “one thing or another,” says Katz. In the 19th century, calling someone a “schlep” or a “schlepper” was an insult denoting lower-class status.

But, he says, a “schlep” is not a bad person.

“It’s not a dishonest person, it’s not a lazy

person. It’s a person not blessed with professional success who has to keep struggling to make a living.” By 1971, the “schlep” was so embedded in American culture that a character named Schleprock was featured in a Flintstones spin-off, The Pebbles and BammBamm Show. Suffering from chronic bad luck, Schleprock would say his signature line “Oh wowsy, wowsy, woe, woe is me!” as he stumbled from one fiasco to another.

While “schlepper” has fallen out of vogue, “schlep” in its noun and verb forms remains as popular as ever. In 2014, “schlep” was featured in an Elite Daily parody advertisement. “Looking for the next best app to pick you up that’s not a Lyft or an Uber?” begins the video, which has nearly 700,000 views. “Introducing Schlep, the first on-demand car service that uses Jewish geography navigation.” Chaos ensues as Jewish mothers pick up customers who become frustrated when they are forced to decline offers for food, a jacket or to be set up with drivers’ marriageable daughters. A quick Google search reveals a long list of real-life companies that incorporate “schlep” into their names, from game manufacturers to engineering firms to delivery service platforms. Perhaps the longest schlep of all has been the etymological journey of this lowly Yiddish word.

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HIGH COURT

IN THE

HOT SEAT

Is Israel’s Supreme Court the lifeblood of Israel’s democracy or a force set on derailing Israel’s Jewish future?

by EETTA

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until his recent election to the Knesset as part of the Religious Zionist party, which is known for its ultranationalist platform. A strong proponent of the settlement movement, Rothman was named by the Israeli financial daily The Marker as one of Israel’s 100 most influential people in 2020.

His office, too, is filled with books, prominent among them numerous copies of The Ruling Party of Bagatz: How Israel Became a Legalocracy, the book he published last year in which he claims that Israel’s Supreme Court judges “rule the country against the will of the people and ignore Jewish values.” Like Beinisch, he speaks articulately, almost in paragraphs, as he cites rapid-fire references from numerous legal, religious and philosophical sources.

“We must remake the Court, and I will do everything I can to make sure that we do, for the good of Israel and the Jewish people,” he tells me, raising his voice and gesturing broadly. Rothman too expresses concern about Israel’s future, insisting that “to save Israeli democracy, we must change the Israeli Supreme Court.”

My conversations with Beinisch and Rothman, which feel as if they could have taken place in alternate universes instead of merely in different cities, encapsulate the fierce debate Israel is embroiled in over its Supreme Court. It is a debate that will sound familiar to American ears, a debate with two visions of democracy—one based on the rule of law, the other on majority

rule. True, its contours, as well as the Israeli judicial and government structure, are vastly different, but the two countries’ culture wars are eerily similar—and connected.

At stake in the clashing views about the Court are the fundamental core values that define Israel’s soul.

he story of the Israeli Supreme Court starts long before the Jewish state was established in 1948, with the dual and often-dueling influences of Ottoman and British Mandate law. The new nation inherited DNA from both, and its difficult birth included a declaration of independence without an accompanying constitution. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in the annals of nation building (the United States is truly exceptional in this case). Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Israel’s other founders had more pressing battles to fight than one over a constitution. They ended up creating a Supreme Court that had to coexist and deal with Jewish, Muslim, Christian and other religious courts while functioning as a Western legal system. As a result, Israel’s judicial system was born with built-in tensions between religious and civil authority, and handicapped by the lack of a constitution that could have helped clarify the relationship between the branches of government.

Like the Supreme Court in the Unit-

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am more worried than I have ever been about the future of Israel,” says attorney Dorit Beinisch, former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, as well known in Israel as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in the United States. I am visiting Beinisch’s home in Tel Aviv, and we are sitting in her small office, which is comfortably overstuffed with a large desk, hundreds of books in different languages and dozens of photographs, mostly of her family.

Beinisch was appointed to the Israeli Supreme Court in 1995, and in September 2006 she was sworn in as its first female president—the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Chief Justice—a position she held until her mandatory retirement at age 70 in 2012. Now 79, Beinisch speaks firmly and deliberately, as eloquent in our meeting as she was on the bench. After a career she describes as “promoting Israeli democracy through the law,” Beinisch is as busy as ever, fending off growing attacks on the Court that threaten its power.

A few days later, I visit another attorney, Simcha Rothman, in his law office in Jerusalem, which also serves as headquarters for the Movement for Governability and Democracy, an NGO that is lobbying to increase the number of politicians on the committee that selects justices. Rothman, 40, served as legal counsel to that group

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ed States, Israel’s Supreme Court is the highest court of appeal for civil, criminal and administrative cases. But thanks to its British genes, the Court’s judges also serve as a High Court of Justice, which hears petitions for judicial review of decisions and actions of public authorities. The High Court of Justice or Beit Mishpat Gavo’ah L’Tzedek, also known by its acronym bagatz, may, for example, issue orders to release people who have been illegally detained or imprisoned and order state and local authorities to act or refrain from acting against an individual or a group. Although it has almost no way to enforce its rulings, the High Court can also instruct the Jewish, Muslim and Christian courts to rule according to civil, rather than religious, law—for example, in the distribution of property in the event of divorce.

Many of Israel’s founders believed that Israel would at some point adopt a constitution. In the country’s first decades, it wasn’t a priority: Israel was consumed by feeding and sheltering new immigrants and fighting wars and, unified under the leadership of the Labor Party, the Court was widely respected. But as decades wore on, little progress was made on the constitution front. The objection to a constitution, explains attorney Gil Bringer, a founding member of the Israel Law and Liberty Forum, an Israeli organization that models itself on the U.S. Federalist Society, has consistently come primarily from religious parties, who have fervently opposed any document that could be viewed as being more authoritative or legitimate than Jewish law. And throughout Israel’s history, the religious and, especially in recent decades, the ultra-religious parties have wielded enough political power in coalition governments to block all efforts to produce such a document.

nter the hugely influential Aharon Barak. Barak, who earned a doctorate in law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was the dean of its law faculty from 1974 to 1975, served as attorney general of Israel until 1978, when he was appointed to

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the Court. Barak became president of the Court in 1995 and served until he reached mandatory retirement in 2006, when he was replaced by Beinisch. His distinguished career included participation in the Camp David peace negotiations with Egypt, during which then-President Jimmy Carter, impressed by him, jokingly offered him a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Blessed with extraordinary intellect, charisma, oratorical skills and political savvy, at age 38 he was, and remains, the youngest person ever to receive the Israel Prize, Israel’s highest civilian honor.

Barak was born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1936 as Europe and its Jews were about to go up in flames. He and his family

AT STAKE IN THE CLASHING VIEWS ABOUT THE COURT ARE THE FUNDAMENTAL CORE VALUES THAT DEFINE ISRAEL'S SOUL.

survived the Holocaust in hiding, finally immigrating to Israel in 1947. In talks and lectures, Barak has often said his judicial career was shaped by his parents, who instilled in him a search for knowledge, and a German soldier, who helped him and his family survive and inspired his quest for justice and dignity. Now 84, the famed jurist did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story. He is venerated by Israel’s liberals, who view him as a sort of founding father of Israeli human rights. At the same time, he is vilified by the conservative right, who accuse him of conducting a “constitutional revolution without a constitution.” All agree, however, that under Barak’s leadership, the Court became more influential in Israeli politics and society.

That shift began in the Knesset, not

the Court. To make up for the lack of a constitution, Israel’s parliament enacted a series of what it called Basic Laws. The first nine, passed between 1958 and 1988, dealt primarily with structural issues, such as the powers of governing bodies, the role of the president and the parameters of the national budget. Then, in 1992, the Knesset passed Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, the first law related to human and civil rights by forbidding infringement upon a person’s dignity, life, body or property. This was followed, in 1994, by Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation, which prohibits restrictions on a person’s right to practice any vocation.

Following the passage of these laws, Israel’s Supreme Court adopted a number of steps that increased its reach and influence. By interpreting Basic Laws very broadly, the Court assumed the power to strike down new legislation that contradicted any Basic Law. Some legal observers have compared this process to the United States’ famous 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, which established the principle of judicial review of statutes and gave the Supreme Court the power to strike down laws and government actions that violate the U.S. Constitution.

The Israeli Court also expanded who had the right to “stand” before it, in other words, to petition it to take a case. Originally, and as is still the case in most Western democracies, only someone who had been directly harmed by a government action could petition the court for redress. But in the 1990s, Israel’s High Court adopted new “user-friendly” definitions, which for the first time allowed it to entertain a petition from anyone— whether or not they were a citizen or even a resident of Israel, including Palestinians from the West Bank—if they believed they had been unjustly affected by a decision made by the government, a public body or a civil servant. (These same user-friendly definitions also made the cost to petition the Court minimal.) In essence, the Court created a work-around for the lack of a constitutional provision for equality and increased the emphasis on individual rights.

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From left: Simcha Rothman, Dorit Beinisch and Aharon Barak.

srael’s growing civil rights movement and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) quickly realized that the expansion of standing provided an opportunity to petition the Court to promote civil equality.

One of the first cases involved a young IDF soldier, Alice Miller. Miller wanted to fly planes in the Israeli Air Force but was not allowed to take the qualification exams required for acceptance into the pilots’ training course because it was open only to men.

So in 1994, the Israel Women’s Network and the Association of Civil Rights in Israel brought a petition on behalf of the IDF soldier, contending that since the law requires both men and women to serve in the armed forces, her gender should be irrelevant to her military service. The Court agreed with Miller and ruled that she be given the opportunity to take the tests. (Miller took the tests and failed, but dozens of women have since taken these tests, and several have become pilots.)

More NGOs followed suit, forcing the Court to take on issues that began to push it to the forefront of societal change. But starting in the late 1980s, dramatic shifts were underway in Israel. Liberalism was on the wane: Russian immigrant voters helped bring new conservative governments to power; a talented young politician, Benjamin Netanyahu, became the dominant force, and the power of the ultra-Orthodox as brokers grew. Ethno-nationalist and religious values began to replace those of minority protections, gender equality and the strengthening of civil society, which the Court generally upheld. The right felt that it was winning the elections, but the Court was constraining its political agenda.

This created what Adam Shinar, asso-

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ciate professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, refers to as a “perfect storm” that thrust the Court front and center on Israel’s political and social stage. Of course, says Shinar, right-wing and conservative individuals and organizations also had, and have, the right to turn to the Court. “But they didn’t, and rarely do today, because to the right, the collective is still most important, and individual and human rights—and therefore the Court— are viewed as the province of the left.”

Indeed, like many on the right, MK Rothman insists that the Court is politically biased. “The judges cannot accept that the right has repeatedly won the elections,” he says. “So they use the courts to control the politicians and promote their agenda.”

Again, Beinisch comes to the Court’s defense. “The Court doesn’t make political decisions, but the decisions may have political implications,” she says, adding that in a polarized Israel, many rulings land in a “minefield.” She argues that Court decisions are based on universally accepted legal principles of justice, consensual values and binding international conventions.

“Judges commit themselves to universal values. In the Second Intifada, when terrorists were blowing up buses all over the country, our children rode those buses, too.

We judges were also frightened and angry.

But we made decisions according to law, not according to our feelings—even with regard to the rights of terrorists.”

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eligious zionists such as Rothman and their political allies say they are sick and tired of hearing about international legal conventions. They would like to see the Jewish state bound to Jewish principles. The ultra-OrthoSUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

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These moves caught the attention of none other than Robert Bork, the influential American jurist who served as U.S. solicitor general in the 1970s and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the 1980s, and whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected in 1987. Bork, an opponent of so-called judicial activism, promoted originalist theory, which views the U.S. Constitution’s original meaning as fixed.

Writing in 2007 in Azure, a now-defunct Israeli conservative magazine, Bork observed, “Barak’s court can turn ordinary legislation into a constitution, force it on the nation, and then announce that it can prevent any democratic amendment. In this, Barak surely establishes a world record for juristic hubris.”

Bork set the tone for Israeli critics of Barak—and put forth the idea that Barak himself was to blame. Indeed, Barak’s opponents accuse him of unbridled activism. This kind of talk disturbs Beinisch.

Looking back, she says that these processes were not revolutionary and should not be attributed solely to Barak. Israeli courts, she explains, deliberately learn and take examples from other courts, and apply them to Israeli reality. Thus, well before Barak even assumed the bench, Israel’s courts were influenced by American jurisprudence, such as the decisions made by the liberal Warren court in the 1950s and 1960s and the rulings by the Canadian courts that focused on multiculturalism. “By the 1990s, there was a clear zeitgeist in Israel that recognized the state’s responsibility to protect the individual, and especially the weaker individuals in our society, and the court reflected this,” Beinisch says. “This was an evolutionary, not a revolutionary process.”

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The Israeli Supreme Court building in Jerusalem.

dox community, for example, has objected to the Court’s interventions in matters such as universal exemptions for yeshiva students from compulsory military service (which the Court has ruled against); issues of property division in divorce (which the Court ruled should be made according to civil definitions of equality rather than Jewish law) and other matters. Another group at odds with the Court are working-class Mizrahi Jews descended from people who emigrated from Iran, North Africa and other Arabic-speaking countries two and three generations ago.

Some still live in the down-and-out neighborhoods of South Tel Aviv alongside Africans who came to Israel to escape the wars in Eritrea, Darfur and Sudan, and many of them have participated in anti-immigration demonstrations calling for the deportation of Israel’s 30,000 asylum seekers. They are frustrated that the Court has not allowed the state to deport these asylum seekers, because, in response to petitions by human rights groups, it has ruled that expelling the immigrants violates international law.

As in other countries, “there are those who perceive liberalism and the emphasis on the rights of the individual as an attack on their core identity, which is based on collectivism and a sense of belonging,” says Nissim Mizrahi, professor and former chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. This internal struggle over identity is reflected in politics. “When it comes to the hierarchy of the two terms ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic,’ the left-center bloc would like to see ‘democratic’ as a type of ID card for the State of Israel, which they envision as a modern Western state…with a Jewish complexion,” says Mizrahi. “The rightwing bloc attaches far greater importance to the ‘Jewish’ component, and believes 34

that defense of the state’s Jewish identity is paramount.”

Nowhere is this struggle as obvious as in the battle over the latest Basic Law. The Nation-State of the Jewish People law, popularly known as the “Nation-State Law,” was passed in 2018 with a narrow majority of 62 of the 120 members of the Knesset.

Its passage set off a furor among liberals in Israel and elsewhere because it anchored, for the first time, Israel’s status as “the national home of the Jewish people.” Among its 11 clauses, it said that the “right to exercise self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” established Hebrew as Israel’s official language and downgraded the linguistic status of Arabic.

Supporters of the law claim that it is merely a declarative statement about the Jewish character and Jewish majority in the State of Israel. But NGOs such as Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the left-leaning Meretz Party see the law as running counter to the principles outlined in earlier Basic Laws. They argue that it makes no mention of civil equality for all of Israel’s citizens and degrades the standing of Israel’s non-Jewish minority groups.

They brought numerous petitions to nullify the law to the Court, and in December 2020, the Court agreed to hear them. This enraged the law’s supporters and placed the Court in an unprecedented position. Since the Court has ruled that Basic Laws have constitutional status, if it invalidates the Nation-State Law, it would in effect be saying that the Court has the last word regarding the contents of the “constitution.” On the other hand, the petitioners note, if it does not strike down the law, the Supreme Court will turn Israel into the only democratic country in the world without the equivalent

of constitutional protections that formally provide for the equality for all.

The Court, however, has not made a decision, and it is unclear when it will do so.

This highlights another difference between the U.S. and Israeli high courts. The American Supreme Court typically releases decisions by the end of each term, but Israel’s Court can take years to hand down rulings, or issue them with little advance notice.

Since the Court is not bound to explain why it publishes its decisions when it does, it is also open to criticism that the timing of its decisions is politically motivated.

This is what happened in March, when, in the thick of the most recent Israeli election campaign, the Court ruled on a long-awaited decision about non-Orthodox conversions. It instructed the interior ministry to register as citizens a group of petitioners who had undergone non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism in Israel.

The petitioners, including the Israel Religious Action Center, the advocacy arm of the Reform Movement in Israel, view the decision as a significant advancement in the fight for recognition of the non-Orthodox denominations of Judaism. The Orthodox, especially the ultra-Orthodox, view the decision as an affront to the very identity of the Jewish state. Arye Deri, leader of the ultra-religious Shas movement, accused the Court of handing down its decision in order to influence the elections and pledged to fight the ruling so that “only conversion according to halacha [Jewish law] will be recognized in the State of Israel.”

The petition was first brought to the Court nearly 16 years ago, when the interior ministry refused to grant citizenship under the Law of Return to 11 temporary residents who had been converted in Israel by Reform and Conservative rabbis.

Throughout this time, the government repeatedly asked for continuances, until the Court lost patience. Still, the Court was cautious in its reach. Its decision did not strike down any existing legislation, and it actually affects fewer than a dozen people annually. Further, the Court explicitly invited the Knesset to rewrite existing legislation concerning non-Orthodox conversions, so as to remove the lack of clarity that led to the case in the first place.

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convince them that any critique of him or his decisions is undemocratic.”

Netanyahu has had plenty of help in his campaign to diminish the Court, including some very vocal Knesset allies. Knesset member Motti Yogev from the Jewish Home Party suggested several years ago that the people should “bulldoze the Supreme Court down.” Another Knesset member, Moshe Gafni, head of the ultra-Orthodox Degel Hatorah Party, fumed during a recent interview on Israeli radio, “We must immediately put an end to the Supreme Court Justices’ unlimited power.”

Yet another, MK Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party, has promised that “the next government’s tasks will be to reform the High Court’s thuggish, unauthorized rampage to determine Israel’s values.”

"JUDGES MAKE DECISIONS ACCORDING TO LAW, NOT ACCORDING TO FEELINGS—EVEN WITH REGARD TO THE RIGHTS OF TERRORISTS." The threat is not just rhetorical. A group of Knesset members have attempted to enact an “Override Law,” which would allow the Knesset to overturn a decision by the High Court of Justice to invalidate a law with a 61-Knesset-member majority. This would effectively void the judicial review of all the laws passed by the Knesset and turn High Court of Justice rulings into nothing more than recommendations. The proposal was rejected by the Knesset in a 71-5 vote in August. And while it is unlikely to pass under a new, more diverse coalition, MKs Rothman and Smotrich have promised to continue their campaign to change the court and to influence the public discourse, even if their party is not in the new government. Furthermore, MK Ayelet Shaked,

a former minister of justice, whose party, Yamina, will be part of the government, is determined to change the judicial selection process. Currently, judges are appointed by the president of Israel from names submitted by the judicial selection committee.

This committee has nine members: three Supreme Court judges (including the president of the Supreme Court), two cabinet ministers (one of them being the minister of justice), two Knesset members and two representatives of the Israel Bar Association.

Appointing Supreme Court judges requires seven of the nine committee members.

Currently four members of the committee are politicians and those who think that the Court has too much power want to add more. They argue that the politicians who are elected reflect the will of the pepole, while appointed judges do not. The political balance of the court is already organically shifting: One justice, Menachem (Manny) Mazuz, considered a liberal, recently voluntarily retired from the Court, and others are reaching their retirement age.

Even if these efforts are not enacted into law in the near future, Beinisch is worried. “The continued agitation against the Court will influence public opinion,” she warns. “If the powers of the court are cut back, and if the changes to the judicial selection committee are put into effect, democracy in Israel will have no one to defend it and, I fear, Israel will cease to be a democracy. ” Furthermore, she says, “There are well-funded, politically well-connected organizations that are determined to destroy Israel’s Supreme Court.” The Movement for Governability and Democracy is not the only one. Most prominent is the Kohelet Policy Forum. In 2019 Kohelet helped establish the Israel Law and Liberty Forum, whose American counterpart, the Federalist Society, is widely credited with promoting at least six of the nine justices currently on the U.S. Supreme Court, including Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Kohelet and the Israel Law and Liberty Forum take credit for successfully lobbying on behalf of the Nation-State Law as well as for promoting some of the more conservative judges to be recently appointed to Israeli

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olitically the most influential critic of Israel’s Supreme Court has been Benjamin Netanyahu. The nation’s longest-serving prime minister has been trying to weaken the Court since at least his first term in the 1990s, decades before corruption charges were leveled against him. But throughout his investigation and trial— for alleged breach of trust, accepting bribes and fraud—he made delegitimization of the entire legal system part of his political strategy to engage his conservative, right-wing core constituency.

Repeatedly, he has called the case against him a “witch hunt by the left-wing parties, the media, the state prosecutors and the courts.”

In actuality, Israel’s Supreme Court has tiptoed around Netanyahu’s case and trial, which is taking place before a three-judge panel in the Jerusalem District Court, a mid-level jurisdiction. And in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled, as it has before, that Netanyahu could continue in his position as then-prime minister despite the legal proceedings against him.

Indeed, in this regard, the Court was subjected to rare criticism from the left and support from the right. “The left thought that since they couldn’t get rid of Netanyahu in the polls, they would use the courts,” says MK Rothman. “At least in this case, the Court ruled according to the law, and not according to its political preferences.”

That Netanyahu set up the Court as an enemy must be viewed within the context of Israel’s increasingly populist politics, similar to that of countries such as Hungary, Brazil, Turkey and Poland, where democracy is regarded as the rule of the majority, says law professor Shinar.

“Throughout the world, as the populist right wing consolidates its power, it makes every effort to remove islands of resistance, such as culture, the media, academia and the courts.”

Netanyahu’s approach, he says, has been no different. “The leader makes every effort to present himself as the authentic voice of the people and to

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Searching Solomon Cohen for

The purchase of a home in Savannah opens the door into Jewish Confederate history—and unearths a family tragedy and an unexpected connection.

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wn a piece of history! This was what the listing for the “Solomon Cohen House,” built in 1875, urged prospective buyers to do. The townhouse was in the historic district of Savannah, Georgia, a city where I grew up but no longer lived. Savannah is full of famous mansions. There’s the Davenport House, the Green-Meldrim House, the Owens-Thomas House. But the Solomon Cohen House? I’d never heard of it or him, although I got a kick out of the fact that naming a house after a Jew was considered a selling point.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Jews arrived in the new colony of Georgia on the second boat from London and have been there ever since.

I went to a Hebrew day school through sixth grade, and all of my closest friends were Jewish. When my eighth-grade class took the train to New York, my first time out of the South, the first thing I saw in Penn Station was a group of Hasidim, and I was amazed there were so many Jews outside of Georgia.

I was further jolted out of my naiveté when I went north for college. I hadn’t intended to escape the South, but that’s what I ended up doing, fleeing from the good son that I was, and from a small stifling place where everyone knew me better than I knew myself, or thought they did.

I hadn’t lived in the South since. But now, 30 years later, I’d gone back in search of a foothold in my past.

whether or not it was historically

when i walked into our new apartment

for the first time, my optimistic nature diverted my eye from the dingy beige walls and cheap cabinets to the big goldframed mirror angled over the mantelpiece, which added a note of glitz to the place’s austere elegance, the brass chandelier doing its part too. At some point during my first stay, I opened a drawer in a kitchen cabinet and found a sheet of paper printed with information about the house and the man after whom the listing agent had named it.

although i’d never heard of solo-

Cohen before, I soon learned you can’t explore the terrain of 19th-century Southern Jews or Civil War-era America and be more than a step or two away from Cohen and his family.

Born in Georgetown, South Carolina in 1802, Solomon became a Savannah politician and Georgia’s first Jewish state senator, serving also as district attorney and postmaster. As a highly successful lawyer, banker, real estate developer and all-around businessman, whose various enterprises included hiring out slaves, he turns up in kvelling histories of Confederate Jews, anti-Semitic tracts and everything in between. He appears Zelig-like in the lives of much more famous people. His wife, Miriam, was the niece of Philadelphia philanthropist and Jewish-Sunday-school founder Rebecca Gratz, famous too for her beauty and probably the best-known Jewish woman of the 19th century.

Solomon was the de facto Southern publisher and distributor of the works of the writer about whom Miriam and Rebecca were most enthusiastic, Grace Aguilar, a prolific author of novels, poems and fiery works on Jewish spirituality. Solomon was related to Eugenia Levy Phillips, a native South Carolinian mon

Built for Solomon Cohen, alderman and postmaster of Savannah. He was the brother of cotton merchant Octavus Cohen…. Given his extensive real estate holdings, Cohen must have had extensive business interests….. [His son, Gratz,] enlisted in the CSA and was killed in the Battle of Bentonville in the closing months of the war…

The paper I’d found turned out to be the product of an enterprising writing team responsible for a series of picture books about Civil War Savannah. But for now, standing on the linoleum mat in the odd-shaped kitchen of my 140-yearold apartment, I realized that the mirror and the chandelier weren’t the only things I’d been bequeathed. This was a house that came with a story—and a family tragedy.

Modern-day 116 West Liberty St., Savannah, GA—the Solomon Cohen House.

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ELIZABETH HOFER

significant, the Solomon Cohen House certainly was elegant, at least in pictures—I couldn’t recall ever having noticed it when I was growing up. It was on Liberty, one of the main east-west streets, whose median is planted with magnolia and live oak festooned with Spanish moss.

The townhouse, No. 116, with a huge red door and windows crowned by Greek Revival pediments, appeared to be composed of perfectly stacked blocks of white stone.

The listing was for the condominium one flight up from the parlor level, and the pictures showed heart pine floors

just waiting to be sanded and fireplaces in the bedrooms and living room in need of nothing but a good coat of paint.

From the other side of the country I asked our real estate agent to check the place out for us. He sent us a video he’d made as he walked through the apartment, narrating in the most objective— and diplomatic—terms possible.

I called him and asked what he really thought.

“Well,” he said, “it’d be great for a weekend rental, but I wouldn’t want to spend too much time there.”

But I knew I would. With a little TLC, it was going to be a perfect home away from home. My husband and I put in an offer on the place sight unseen.

Text with a family portrait describes Solomon as, among other things, a defender of slavery. who spied for the Confederacy from her home in Washington, DC, and he turns up in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Memoirs as a “rich lawyer.” He frequently spoke at the Georgia Historical Society, whose current Savannah headquarters, completed in 1876, a year after his death, stands at the northwest corner of Forsyth Park, with its great lawns and wedding-picture-ready fountain. One afternoon I made the five-minute walk there from my block of Liberty Street. I really just wanted to find out what I could about my new home and the man who built it. In the building’s high-vaulted library, I opened a folder containing the handwritten text of a 24-page eulogy that Solomon had delivered at the society; a speech by him titled “A Discourse on the formation of the Constitution of the United States delivered as an Introductory to a course of Lectures of the Georgia Historical Society”; and correspondence from the Confederate States of America to Solomon in his capacity as postmaster, with such juicy bits as, “In reply to your letter of the 5th inst.—I have to state that you were not allowed the whole amount claimed for postage on dead letters returned to the Department in the 1st quarter 1863, because the bills were not received from the Finance Bureau.”

It wasn’t the most auspicious start.

I asked the archivist if the society had a folder on Solomon’s son, Gratz. I wasn’t hopeful. In the few mentions of him in books over the years, Gratz appears briefly and as little more than a type—a handsome martyr for the Confederacy.

I was surprised when she came back with a greater haul than for his father— not a folder, but rather two old books.

One was bound in dark brown leather, its spine intact except for the fraying top third. The word “Autographs” was imprinted on the cover in a fancy gold font, the stems of the letters sprouting leaves, and on the book’s blank pages, friends 38

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had left Gratz good wishes, including bits of verse. The other book was Gratz’s journal, covering his years at the University of Virginia, 1862 through 1864, where he was the first Jewish student.

The journal’s spine had been mostly eaten away, but its green-marbled cover and thick-ruled pages had held up through the years. I sat at the long wooden table trying to make out the maddening, faded scrawl, and soon I felt myself falling into someone else’s consciousness, separated from my own by 150 years and yet strangely familiar.

The traditional diary entries, rich in themselves, were interspersed with Gratz’s own poetry, heavily influenced by the English Romantics, whom I’ve appreciated ever since my moody adolescent days. And there was of course the link to my house.

But what kept me reading, what caused me to connect with Gratz Cohen—that I didn’t really understand, not yet.

savannah’s mickve israel synagogue

was founded in 1735, only two years after English settlers established the city itself. It is the third-oldest congregation in the United States and, with its Gothic Revival architecture, has a distinctive presence on one of the historic district’s most beautiful squares. The last time I’d been inside was for my niece’s bat mitzvah five years before, and now I’d come back to learn what I could about Solomon Cohen, who served for years as the Temple’s president, and his family. My guides through the synagogue’s archives were a married couple who were members of the congregation and the kinds of amateur local historians whose love of the place they live in expresses itself in a desire to learn everything about it.

I’d never been up to the synagogue’s sweet one-room museum, where a studio portrait of the Solomon Cohen family— Solomon, Miriam, and their kids, Gratz,

Belle and Miriam—appears with text describing Solomon as, among other things, a “defender of slavery.” This impressed me, not just because it was true, but also because most of the books I’d found on Southern Jews were strictly boosterish, praising their successes in business and their assimilation into gentile society.

My guides brought me boxes of treasures from the Temple’s antebellum archive, and I passed a happy afternoon combing through them for clues.

I didn’t find much that was relevant to my research, though I did happen on my great-grandfather’s diploma from Hebrew Union College.

There was one thing my guides wanted to know. If I ended up writing something about Solomon Cohen, how was I going to handle the slavery issue?

It had come as depressing news to me that Jews owned slaves. In Savannah, they did so proportionately to their wealth, though Solomon was an unusually large urban slaveholder, with the 15 slaves he hired out in addition to the 8 who worked in his home. Enslaved people could be contracted out, for short or long terms, to private or public employers, and enslaved artisans such as carpenters or coopers might even be allowed to live on their own and keep a small portion of their earnings.

The South has always been a hospitable place for Jews. Of course, as is true everywhere, anti-Semitism is a constant, its most notorious eruption being the lynching of Leo Frank, the Atlanta pencil-factory director falsely accused, in 1913, of strangling a 13-year-old non-Jewish female employee. (He was ultimately pardoned.) But in the mid-19th century, Solomon Cohen’s example showed how far Jews could rise in the South’s power structure if they played by its rules.

At a meeting called by the mayor of Savannah to address the spurious Damascus “blood libel” affair of 1840, Solomon, relatively new in town but already a leader,

1.

4.

5.

2.

3.

1. Young Cohen family, 1850s. From left; Gratz, mother Miriam, father Solomon, sisters Belle (far right) and Miriam (Mamie). 2. Early photograph of Savannah, GA. 3. Mickve Israel synagogue from an 1871 lithograph.

4. Portrait of Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully, 1831.

5. A letter from Gratz Cohen to his father during the war.

He signs the letter “your loving son, Gratz.”

CREDIT: GEORGIA ENCYLOPEDIA, THE AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY, WILSON LIBRARY, JEROME NELSON WILSON / LIBRARY OF CONGRESS COURTESY, GEORGIA ARCHIVES, VANISHING GEORGIA COLLECTION, CTM229 / CTM 227

The

salient

fact about

Jews

in the South was their skin color

Not

their

religion.

Left: Carte-de-visite of Gratz Cohen during the Civil War, most likely taken in Charleston when Cohen was an aide with the rank of captain on the staff of General George P. Harrison Jr. Right: Confederate soldiers at Fort McAllister, outside of Savannah.

COURTESY OF THE COLLECTION OF ROBERT MARCUS / LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

expressed thanks “to the Christians of this community for their generous sympathy.”

A few years later, in an anonymous piece, which Solomon almost certainly penned, in The Occident, the country’s first Jewish periodical, he praised his Christian neighbors for their “spirit of charity.” As a tireless defender of slavery and states’ rights, Solomon rarely was the object of anti-Semitism. The salient fact about Jews in the South was their skin color, not their religion. In fact, their religious devotion worked in their favor in the Bible Belt.

And “slave ownership,” as the scholar Mark I. Greenberg has written, “helped solidify Jews’ racial status.” In other words, it was a way of becoming white.

In Solomon’s case, his dogged upholding of the establishment helped him rise to the top of it. In November 1865, 156 years before Jon Ossoff took office as Georgia’s first Jewish senator, Solomon became the first Jew whom Georgia elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He was the top vote-getter in the state’s First Congressional District, which includes Savannah.

The election wasn’t close: Solomon racked up more than seven times as many votes as his nearest competitor. Community and public service ran in the family. His grandfather had emigrated from London in 1750 to become the founding rabbi of Charleston, South Carolina’s Beth Elohim synagogue, an unpaid position, and earned his living as a shopkeeper. Solomon’s father was a public servant in South Caro-

lina, and now Solomon himself was about to ascend to the Congress of the United States of America.

but while it was the solomon cohen

House that I’d bought into, it was Gratz Cohen who truly captured my imagination. Over the next four years, I’d travel the South in a quest to piece together his story.

Solomon and Gratz Cohen are separated from us by a century and a half, but their relationship is classic, the father all sense to the son’s sensibility. The practical businessman father and the idealistic romantic son: Solomon was initially skeptical of secession while Gratz was

all in. The conservative progenitor and the radical offspring: As Mickve Israel president, Solomon only grudgingly acceded to his congregation’s wishes to move from Orthodox to Reform, and even then he kept certain restrictions in place, whereas Gratz could sound like a Jewish Luther, railing against the “lifeless forms” of Orthodox Judaism.

Gratz’s maternal great-aunt Rebecca Gratz prized him for the compassion he’d shown since he was a child. Founder of benevolent institutions for Jews and non-Jews alike, Rebecca traveled in cultured circles that included artist Thomas Sully, who painted two portraits of her, and Washington Irving, whose friend Sir Walter Scott is said to have taken her name and used her as a model for the beautiful, true-to-her-faith Jewish heroine of Ivanhoe. Rebecca raised Gratz’s mother, Miriam, following the death of her mother, and in letters continued to dispense advice to Miriam after she moved South to marry Solomon.

Rebecca Gratz first met Gratz Cohen when he was just shy of three and Miriam brought him and his new baby sister to Philadelphia for a visit. Rebecca cherished his “innocent prattle” and begged Miriam for cute anecdotes. Back in Savannah, Gratz sent kisses, pressing his lips to the edges of his mother’s letters to her aunt. In correspondence, it’s delightful to watch this serious and important woman, who so often takes a pedagogical tone, be reduced to simple adoration. Solomon sent her a package of grits, for which Rebecca thanked him and remarked: “I’ll think of little Gratz who enjoys it so much. Tell Gratz his kiss came very safely and was very sweet.”

When Gratz cried at the death of a bird, at the age of four and a half, Miriam panicked and turned to her aunt for advice.

Rebecca replied as the voice of reason: We must try to regulate dear Gratz’s sensibility without hurting those feelings so promising of future good. When rightly directed & under proper control, the child who weeps at the death of a bird will be kinder of animals and benevolent from natural impulses, which you will know how to cultivate.

Benevolence and kindness—these were the qualities that so drew Rebecca to Gratz. She wasn’t about to discourage them. “I hope Gratz won’t become a soldier,” she wrote Miriam a decade later, after war broke out. “He is too young and delicate for a soldier’s life.”

He was too young to join up without his father’s permission, but Solomon had been giving Gratz leave to do reckless things since he was six years old and wanted to explore the city, then a bustling and often lawless cotton boomtown, on his own. Such adventures must have confirmed to Solomon that his oversensitive boy was toughening up. To Rebecca, Solomon admitted quite openly that he would “rather love his memory” than that the boy have “one drop of coward blood.”

But Gratz’s first stint at war, a languorous summer at Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River 15 miles from town, showed that, as Rebecca knew, he was indeed not cut out for it. Some disability— probably flat feet—that had caused him to wear a special boot and leg brace as a child now prevented him from doing sentry duty; it was torture for him simply to stand up. But he had Miriam send him his books downriver—mathematics, Greek, Latin, German, French—and his fellow soldiers “petted” him “as ‘la fille du regiment’ was described to have been,” Gratz reported to his mother, comparing himself to the tomboy heroine of Donizetti’s opera, the orphan girl who becomes the mascot of the French regiment that adopts her.

In the winter of 1861 to 1862, Gratz did join a Confederate military unit whose mission was to defend the Georgia coast, which was rapidly falling into Union hands, though you would never know he’d even left home from his melancholy memories of the period a year later when he was snugly ensconced in a room on the Lawn for his first year at the University of Virginia. “A romance of excitement”— that’s how Gratz remembered the military adventure. He’d gone to war with his “valet,” Solomon’s slave Louis, with whom Gratz had grown up, and now that he was 500 miles from home and could recollect his memories in tranquility, he felt free in his diary’s first entry to convey the experiSUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

41

Gratz insisted he wanted to live-but he seemed to be doing everything in his power to die. ence’s true meaning. Louis had run away, perhaps taking advantage of the chaos of war that his master took him into, and now that first taste of action was tinged with bitterness:

Last winter was indeed a little romance of excitement, of much pleasure, but its recollection is mingled with so much pain and can never be recalled without a sigh. Louis. Your name has stamped its self on my Life. In the doctrine of Counterparts my poor ebony Idol, you were mine and every event of that bright little life of mine last winter had entwined you with it.

Gratz memorialized Louis in poetry as well, in one instance lamenting the disappearance of a “faithful servant” who accompanied him to war.

enrolling at the university of virginia,

beginning with the 1862 to 1863 academic year, was Gratz’s way of accepting his fate as a scholar—and reckoning with his feelings. In Charlottesville, he forged intimate bonds with fellow students, and resisted the attentions of the young women he met at social engagements in town.

“When young hearts blend together, and desires tend to the same point, those are the days of Damon & Pythias,” he wrote of his halcyon days in that all-male academic setting. But when faced with his own desires, his mood turned dark. Seeing a friend’s attachment to him, Gratz wrote, “May he never feel as I have felt but remain pure, innocent & guileless as now.” And in a journal entry that never fails to bring tears to my eyes, so strongly does it conjure the self-loathing I myself felt as a gay adolescent, Gratz called down a curse upon himself that “will drag my soul to ever lasting hell,” while he insisted “I can not be totally depraved, it is not in the nature of my being—but virtues, good deeds, prayer, expiation & repentance avail nothing. On my brow is written ‘lost.’”

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But if being a student far from home let Gratz explore the range of his emotions and in effect become himself, it was also a way to sit out the fight. He followed the war news closely and like most of the dwindling student body, bright sons of the region’s aristocracy, he was an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. He even sought out, unsuccessfully, minor military action in the Charlottesville area. But he clung to his disability exemption with growing desperation as war closed in all around him.

Again and again he was hauled before a medical examining board, whose members he considered “a parcel of foolish young men.” Gratz had high-ranking friends, military men and fathers of eligible daughters, intercede for him. But as the war dragged on into its third year and the Confederate army’s disadvantage in numbers grew, the options for a young Southern white man, even a disabled one, to avoid conscription were narrowing.

Gratz returned home for the summer after his second year at Charlottesville and never went back to the university. In Savannah he served as acting secretary of a medical board like the one he’d scorned in Charlottesville. Writing reports was a job to which Gratz was suited, and he could do it seated, far from whizzing bullets.

For perhaps the first time in two years, he didn’t feel conflicted about the way he was doing, or not doing, the war. He wrote Emma Mordecai, a literary aunt in Richmond, Virginia, that “[t]he position is a very pleasant one & is a sort of diversion for me, would that I could do more but since I can not, it is well to remember the lines of the poet, ‘Man can not make but may enoble [sic] fate—by nobly bearing it.’”

And then suddenly, midway through Sherman’s siege of Savannah, Gratz departed on the path of war as an aide-decamp to General George P. Harrison Jr. It was a position Solomon had secured

for his son. “Upon the fall of Savannah,” according to the obituary by his relative Samuel Yates Levy, Gratz “no longer placed any restraint upon his wishes,” as if he’d been desperate to go to war all along. In addition to the problems with his feet, Gratz had been suffering for months from typhoid fever, another in a list of antique-sounding ailments, including neuralgia and “torpor of the liver,” that had plagued him much of his life. To Emma, a Confederate sympathizer who became his last confidante, he wrote, “At one time I thought I would never be well again—constantly sick. I almost hoped for death rather than become a burthen to those I love. I am now better, tho’ still feeble, pale & very thin. Friends would pass me by without recognizing me they say I am so changed.”

Gratz Cohen wanted to defend his homeland and family, especially his beloved mother and sisters, against the Union army. Of course he did. But it seems to me—distanced in time but privy to the passions he set down in letters, diary entries and poems—that what he really wanted was to be changed. In Virginia he’d gone with a group of young women to attend a military review where some of his fellow students paraded, returned now from war. In his journal he noted, with a twinge of envy, that “the handsome refined boys were rough sun burnt soldiers” and were “hardly recognizable now to the friends of their younger days.”

Sickness had made Gratz unrecognizable to his Savannah friends, but the change he craved was one that could only be suggested by the battered looks of his Virginia classmates. The masculinity that Solomon tried to cultivate in his son—here was Gratz’s chance to prove it once and for all. Savannah was pleasant, but the passionate friendships he’d experienced in Virginia were long gone, and so what, after all, was he leaving behind?

In the letters he wrote from the bat-

Above: The first flag of independence raised in the South, by the citizens of Savannah, GA, November 1860.

three weeks before General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Gratz was 20 years old. It was a death foretold by his friends and relatives, and he must have seen it coming himself. According to the two secondhand accounts of his last moments, he died either immediately after giving a report in his general’s tent or while leading the charge on the field. But in a letter I found in the archives of a former rice plantation an hour’s drive down the coast from Savannah, a somewhat less heroic end emerges. Gratz went to war with Frank O’Driscoll, a neighbor he grew up with, and while Frank didn’t witness the event, he rushed to his friend’s body “very soon after the fatal ball was shed.” And when he showed up at the Raleigh doorstep of Margaret and George Mordecai, Gratz’s aunt Emma’s brother, who’d offered him sanctuary in his palatial home if he needed it, Frank brought along with him not just Gratz’s effects but the truth of

how he died. Margaret would report to Emma that Frank had told them that “his noble young friend was shot & entering the back of the head it is supposed in the confusion of battle it was by our own people, so Mr. O’D said for he added Gratz was facing the enemy.”

Frank, who would in time marry Gratz’s sister Belle, had dragged his friend’s body from the battlefield and buried him. A year later, he returned with Solomon to retrieve Gratz’s remains for reinterment in Savannah.

Gratz’s death cracked Solomon Cohen open like an egg, and all the gooey stuff ran out. “Men, mingling with the world,” he wrote Emma, “are forced to suppress feeling, or they would become ridiculous, & this very suppression makes me, at times, fearfully sad.” Miriam could no longer bear being in the house, and so she and Solomon set out on a grand tour of Europe. Solomon had time on his hands.

Neither Georgia’s House delegation nor Continued on page 86

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

tlefield to Emma, whom he placed next to Rebecca Gratz as “my standard of all that’s pure and holy on earth,” Gratz insisted he wanted to live—but he seemed to be doing everything in his power to die. He was full of contradictions. He was no abolitionist, but in his poetry he appealed to “God alike of White & Black” and imagined a world where “the oppressor and / Oppressed shall cease & all be equal and men were drawn together, race with race / Commingled.” He acknowledged Louis, his enslaved valet, as subservient but considered him “half my self.” Gratz fought for the South but felt the region was getting what it deserved, being punished for the unequal distribution of wealth, of which he only became aware on the path of war. Social inequity, he believed, was iniquity, but he felt a reflexive horror when things started to come undone.

He met his end on a North Carolina battlefield on March 19, 1865, just

A MOMENT BIG QUESTION

joke WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE JEWISH

AND WHY?

interviews by

DIANE M. BOLZ, SUZANNE BORDEN, SARAH BREGER,

AMY E. SCHWARTZ, LILLY GELMAN, FRANCIE WEINMAN SCHWARTZ, MICHELLE NAIM, TRICIA CRIMMINS, ELLEN WEXLER, GEORGE E. JOHNSON, LAURENCE WOLFF, DAN FREEDMAN

j 44

SUMMER ISSUE 2021

okes, including the Jewish variety, are a staple of Western civilization. Some Jewish jokes have been around for centuries and are passed from generation to generation; others might have made their first appearance this week. It turns out that even the Talmud is teeming with surprising zingers. Twitter too.

A first-rate Jewish joke—whether told by a Talmudic sage, Sigmund Freud, Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman or your grandmother—does more than make you laugh; it illuminates complex corners of the Jewish psyche, culture and history. That’s why we’ve asked joke tellers, writers and scholars to share their favorite Jewish joke and explain why it’s funny or meaningful. Fair warning: Some jokes in this collection will make you laugh, others will make you groan and grimace, and many are for mature audiences only. All will teach you something. For more jokes and responses, visit momentmag.com/jokes

featuring

JASON ALEXANDER, JOYCE ANTLER, ROZ CHAST, RACHEL CREEGER, JEREMY DAUBER, LEAH FORSTER, JUDY GOLD, YONATAN GRUBER, RICHARD KIND, JESSICA KIRSON, BOB MANKOFF, WILLIAM NOVAK, REBECCA PIERCE, EDDY PORTNOY,

PETER SAGAL, JESS SALOMON, MARK SCHIFF, H. ALAN SCOTT, NOAM SHUSTER-ELIASSI, MICHAL BAR-ASHER SIEGAL, SARAH SILVERMAN, LAUREN SKLAROFF, ILAN STAVANS, LIAT STEIR-LIVNY, SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN, CALVIN TRILLIN, STEVEN WEBER, MICHAEL WEX, RUTH R. WISSE, ALAN ZWEIBEL

SUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

45

Calvin Trillin I don’t really have a favorite Jewish joke. It depends on what I’m reminded of by the joke that preceded it. For instance, if I hear a joke about Jews and priests— Cohen has officially converted to Catholicism after months of study and is invited to address those gathered for Mass. He begins, “Fellow Goyim”...

German and a Jew—making their way across the desert after their car breaks down. The German says “I’m so thirsty. I must have some beer,” and the Frenchman says, “I’m so thirsty. I must have some white wine,” and the Jew says, “I’m so thirsty. I must have diabetes.”

What makes a joke Jewish? Try that punch line spoken by somebody identified as a Presbyterian or an Irishman.

Whoever invented that joke was stating what is often spoken of as one of the origins of humor among a people who have so often faced prejudice: We can turn anything you say about us into something funny. In a joke included in Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, a Jew crossing the street bumps into an anti-Semite. “Swine!” bellows the paskudnyak [nasty or contemptible person].

“Goldberg,” bows the Jew. I have on many occasions sat around swapping Jewish jokes, but I can’t remember the last time I did that with non-Jewish jokes. (I suspect that there are academics turning out scholarly articles with titles such as “Jewish Joke Exchanging as a Form of Bonding.”) If I ever did get involved in a joke-telling session dominated by the sort of secular jokes that begin “This guy walks into a bar” or “There are three guys stranded on a remote island,” I would probably, from force of habit, say— There are three guys—a Frenchman, a 46

SUMMER ISSUE 2021

Jessica Kirson, a comedian, is the producer of Hysterical, a documentary about women in stand-up comedy, and host of the podcasts “Disgusting Hawk” and “Relatively Sane.”

Calvin Trillin is a journalist, humorist and author of 31 books. He is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker as well as The Nation, where he currently serves as Deadline Poet.

Jason Alexander

I might think of the one about two Jews... ...Maish and Benny, who walk by a church whose sign says that anyone who converts will be given $1,000. Maish goes in to check it out. When he returns, Benny says, “Did you get the $1,000?” And Maish says, “Don’t you people ever think of anything but money?”

constantly complaining, and I would be so mortified and embarrassed. But then I would make fun of her, we’d all make fun of each other, and we’d crack up about it. We’re aware of it, that’s the thing. We complain a lot, and we own it.

Jessica Kirson What did the waiter say to the group of Jewish women sitting in a restaurant?

“Hello, is anything okay?”

When I tell this joke, people scream laughing. They all shake their heads like, “Yes, of course.” It really says a lot about our people. In my family, we’ll go to a restaurant—my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother and now me— and we all complain: We complain about the food and the drinks, the heat and the cold. It’s cooked too much, it’s not cooked enough. We have to switch seats all the time, there’s too much of a draft. I have this new joke in my act where I say, “I had lunch with my mother the other day, and she looked up at me and said, ‘I didn’t like this chicken salad.’ And I’m like, ‘It didn’t even come yet.’”

When I was a kid, I used to be so uncomfortable with this kvetching. My grandmother would go to restaurants looking for something to complain about.

She would always be kind to people, say thank you and tip well—but she’d be

A young Jewish boy, being an obedient son, goes to the bakery to deliver a message from his mother to a very busy and very overworked baker. As the baker is working, the boy yells out, “My momma says there was a fly in the raisin bread.”

The baker continues at his task, hardly taking notice. So the boy yells out again, “My momma says there was a fly in the raisin bread.” The baker, wishing to put an end to the nuisance, says, “Fine. So bring me the fly, I’ll give you a raisin.”

To me, this joke—which was a reliable quickie in comedian Myron Cohen’s act—captures so much of Jewishness and Jewish humor. There is the underlying message of, “The big tragedy of your life in this moment may not be the biggest tragedy. Worse things can happen.” It also captures Jewish sechel, or common sense.

And it avoids any capitulation of “I made a mistake” or “I will compensate you for my mistake.” The joke doesn’t go to what we expect, which is that the baker should be horrified that his product and facility are tainted. He should be bending over backward to make amends and retain his customer. Instead, from a people with a history that includes slavery, plagues, pogroms, displacement and the Holocaust,

comes the simple declaration that says, “There are millions of people that hate us, misunderstand us and want to wipe us out and you’re worried about a fly?” Jewish practicality and realism all mushed together in a short joke. Gorgeous.

JUDY GOLD

Jason Alexander is an actor and comedian best known for his role as George Costanza on Seinfeld (1989-1998), for which he won several Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe awards.

michael wex

moving train, very gingerly trying to balance two full cone-shaped paper cups of water without spilling too much onto his suit. He gets back to his seat. The old man hasn’t noticed anything. He’s just sitting there going, “Oy, am I thoisty!” The professor hands the old man the cup. The old man takes the cup, his eyes shining with gratitude, and drains it. Before he can say anything, the professor gives him the other cup, and he drains that too. The professor goes past him to his seat where he’s left his Hegel, picks up the book, opens to the marked page, reads about three words, and the old man goes, “Oy, was I thoisty!”

You can’t tell this joke too fast. It needs some room to stretch.

There’s so much going on here. The tension between the Jewish and the, if not non-Jewish, at least assimilated worldview, the false naïveté on the part of the old man, who knows damn well he’s disturbing an entire train full of peo-

ple, the total deflation of the other guy’s hopes and dreams. He thinks, OK, we have a problem, and the problem is solvable. But he hasn’t dealt with this kind of thing before. He doesn’t understand the old man’s underlying assumption, which is that complaining, kvetching, isn’t simply a response to adverse circumstances or imperfect conditions—which would make logical sense—but is a way of life that has nothing to do with the fulfillment or frustration of desire. And that’s what’s amazing about Yiddish-speaking Jews. They broke the satisfaction barrier! Other people only complain when there’s something to complain about. The old guy in the joke understands you can also express contentment by means of a complaint. So kvetching becomes a way of exerting some control over a hostile universe. I think this joke penetrates to the heart of the Ashkenazi Jewish mindset.

Michael Wex is the author of Born to Kvetch, Rhapsody in Schmaltz and many other books.

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COMEDY CELLAR NYC

A man gets on a train. He’s going from Grand Central Station in New York City to Chicago. It’s a fairly lengthy train trip, which is a good thing, because he’s going there to deliver a lecture on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a book he hasn’t actually opened in the last 15 years. So he gets onto the train, sits down, takes out his copy of The Phenomenology of Spirit, which he’s planning to review on this lengthy train ride, and as he’s doing this an older Jewish man comes in, excuses himself and sits down opposite. For a while everything is fine. The man reads his book. Then, about half an hour outside New York, the old man leans back in his seat and looks up at the ceiling and says “Oy, am I thoisty!” Fifteen seconds later, he does the same thing. And then 15 seconds after that he does it again. The guy with the Hegel book realizes this will go on as long as the other man is thirsty, so he sighs, marks his place in the book, gets up, walks down the corridor all the way to the end of the car where there’s one of those fountain things with Dixie cups, fills one, gets about ten steps back, thinks better of it, turns around, goes back, takes another Dixie cup and fills it too. So he’s walking the aisle of this

Bob Mankoff A Jewish woman in a hospital says to the doctor that she wants to be transferred. The doctor says, “What is it, the food?” She says, “The food is fine. I can’t kvetch.” “Is it the room?” he says.

“No,” she says, “the room is beautiful.

I can’t kvetch.” “What about the staff?

Is there a problem with the staff?” She says, “No. They’re beautiful people.

I can’t kvetch.” “So why do you want to be transferred?” he asks. “I can’t kvetch,” she says.

SIGMUND FREUD

judy gold

WIKIPEDIA

How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: “I’ll sit in the dark.”

It’s such an old Jewish joke, but it just makes me laugh so much. It really encompasses the whole victim martyr syndrome. I can just visualize, “No, no, I’m fine; no, no, let me suffer.” The joke is so guilt-ridden, but it’s because it’s so true.

This idea that we are going to suffer in silence when we’re never silent—what are you talking about? We don’t shut up. I had the ultimate Jewish mother, and I think unfortunately, I am also the 48

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ultimate Jewish mother, and we Jewish mothers know how to get what we need.

When I did my show 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, so many times people would come up to me after the show and say, “I’m Baptist and my mother is exactly like yours.” There is universality to mother guilt. I know that Catholics have perfected it. I think Jewish guilt is based on real trauma, this overprotective “I’ll just wither away here.”

It’s so passive-aggressive, it screams, “Please pay attention to me.” This idea of “Don’t worry about me,” which is the complete opposite of “Please worry about me, please think about me 24 hours a day, please call me every minute of every day.”

Judy Gold, a comedian with stand-up specials on HBO, Comedy Central and LOGO, hosts the podcast “Kill Me Now.” Her latest book is Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble.

What makes this joke funny? I’ll give you the simplest answer first. You laughed.

That’s the empirical part. Second, it is structured as a joke is supposed to be structured. It leads you down a path where it’s going one way and then there’s the surprise at the end, the punch line.

When you learn the punch line, your entire conceptualization of what has happened reverses and there’s a moment of confusion. In the end, it is both logical and illogical, makes sense but it doesn’t make sense. And that tension, that double vision, is relieved by some kind of deeper understanding. In fact, the woman wouldn’t really want to be transferred.

Of course she has to be Jewish for this joke to make any sense. We’re using the word kvetch, right? Kvetch is a Yiddish word that is kind of a right to complain or to take pleasure in complaining. Complaining is a way of coping and existing.

That’s what it says about Jewish life— that being uncomfortable is our comfort zone. You don’t kvetch about horrible things. If the worst thing you’ve got happening is a thing you can kvetch about, then you’re in a good place.

That’s a quintessentially Jewish perspective. When things are going good, we should think about them as a little

bit bad. When things are going badly, we should try to make it a little bit better through jokes. We make sure that we always have some problems, because if we don’t, and I’m making a big generalization, we should create some just so we can keep in shape. That’s the insight.

Jokes like this are very insightful.

Here’s the other reason that this is a Jewish joke. It’s by Jews about Jews, and it is both ridiculing Jews and loving them. There are so many wonderful Jewish jokes and we can say absolutely, we have the best jokes. All the world has humor. We just happen to have the best.

Bob Mankoff is an American cartoonist, editor and author. He was the cartoon editor for The New Yorker for nearly 20 years.

Mexico. It’s neurotic humor. It’s the hypochondriac humor of the person who feels that the earth is shaking and is thinking I’m going to die and this is my last moment.

In Mexico we say that the joke will arrive much faster than the ambulance. If there’s an earthquake in Mexico City, even before the first responders make it, there’s already somebody telling a joke about it. You can see your house on fire or your neighbor being run over, and you will be cracking a joke. Mexican and Jewish jokes are very connected in that they are very speedy.

They show up incredibly fast after some tragedy, with the Jewish twist, and the twist often has to do with how we are being targeted for something or how someone is about to kill us, but we still want to make a joke before we die.

Ilan Stavans is a professor of humanities and Latino culture at Amherst College and host of NPR’s “In Contrast.” Among other things, he writes about humor. He was born in Mexico.

I’ve heard this delicious joke in English and in French but I first heard it in Spanish in Mexico. It’s like a Hasidic story to me. If you’re not going to take control of your own destiny, stop complaining to God. Luck is something you bring to yourself, it doesn’t just happen. I don’t know how this joke started and I don’t know which Mexican Jew adapted it, but I like the fact that God responds in a very Mexican Jewish accent.

You hear a lot of the same type of humor in the United States that you hear in Israel, Canada, France, Argentina, Colombia or

What I love about this joke is that it plucks a well-known character from traditional Jewish humor and inserts him, unexpectedly, into our own era. Shadchan jokes are a mainstay of our people’s humor, and important enough to merit several mentions in Freud’s 1905 study of humor—most of it Jewish—Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. It would be fun to balance this joke with a similarly updated one about another classical Jewish character, the schnorrer. I haven’t found one yet, but I’ll keep looking.

William Novak has written and coauthored some two dozen books, including, most recently, Die Laughing: Killer Jokes for Newly Old Folks. He is the coauthor with Moshe Waldoks of The Big Book of Jewish Humor.

Ilan Stavans The Mexican Jew dies and goes to heaven. And God is waiting there. The Mexican Jew says, “Oh, I never won the lottery. You never allowed me to win it.” He delivers a whole diatribe about not winning the lottery. And God says in Spanish—in a very Mexican Spanish—“Well, you didn’t win the lottery because you never bought a ticket.”

man and his parents have mentioned. The parents are already planning the wedding, but their son seems hesitant. “Is something wrong?” says the shadchan.

“Well, I meant to ask you,” the son says.

“This girl, is she good in bed?” The parents are shocked, but if the shadchan is fazed, he doesn’t show it. “Well,” he replies, “that’s a tough one. Some say yes, some say no.”

William novak A seriously Orthodox family is unhappy that their rebellious and entitled 28-yearold son still isn’t married, so to move things along they bring in a shadchan, a matchmaker. As you’d expect, the shadchan asks the young man a number of questions about himself and the kind of partner he might want to meet, and the son responds as you also might expect: She should be attractive, well-educated, spirited, intelligent, with a good sense of humor, and so on.

Three weeks later the shadchan returns and meets with the boy and his family. He tells them about Rifka, who is beautiful, educated, comes from a wonderful family, is eager to have children, and meets all the other requirements that the young

Susan Rubin Suleiman A prospective bridegroom is taken by the shadchan to the home of a potential bride. The bridegroom takes one look at her and whispers to the shadchan, “Why did you bring me here? She’s old, she’s ugly, she has bad teeth, she squints and she seems to have a limp.” And the shadchan replies, “You don’t need to lower your voice, she’s also deaf.”

In Freud’s study of humor Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, he tells many jokes, including a whole batch about SUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

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There are so many wonderful Jewish jokes and we can say absolutely, we have the best jokes. all the world has humor. we just happen to have the best.

Jewish marriage brokers, or shadchans.

They’re quite hilarious. This one is my favorite. Freud makes some interesting comments about this joke. Its underlying truth, the source of the pleasure that makes us burst out laughing, he says, is how good it feels when someone just blurts out the truth. The shadchan is always depicted in these jokes as a poor man trying to eke out a living by arranging matches, and many of the other jokes are about the kinds of false reasoning he relies on to show the bridegroom how good the match would be—“She has a hump?

Well, you know she won’t be unfaithful!”

In this instance the shadchan succumbs to what Freud calls “automatism,” the way you sometimes just can’t help automatically adding one more item to a list, in this case of the bride’s disadvantages.

Freud says that every joke involves at least three people: the teller of the joke; the person to whom the joke is told, for whom it’s supposed to cause pleasure; and the butt, the person or thing against whom the joke is directed. He argues that in all good jokes, there is an element of hostility, of aggression. The person who “gets” the joke is laughing at somebody or something. In this joke, are we laughing at the marriage broker because he’s such a liar, at the parents, or at the bridegroom who is in a position of finding himself a bride through this degrading means? In a way we’re laughing at the whole system, as Freud says, “the disgracefulness of marriage conducted in this fashion.” Freud doesn’t even mention another possibility, that the butt of the joke is the poor “ugly and old” prospective bride. From that perspective, the joke’s aggression can be seen as directed at the woman, with the prospective bridegroom and the shadchan engaging in male bonding over her flaws.

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It’s clearly a Jewish joke—the word shadchan gives it away. Freud had moved away some distance from his Jewish background, and his relations to it were very complicated. It’s interesting that he never really talks about the Jewishness of the shadchan. This is quite an early work, published in 1905, just a few years after The Interpretation of Dreams. That book also has things in it that are obviously Jewish but that are not treated that way.

He’s writing for an audience that knows what a shadchan is, but he doesn’t really acknowledge this.

Susan Rubin Suleiman is emerita professor of the civilization of France and of comparative literature at Harvard University. Her memoir is Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook.

some of the loveliness of the humor comes from. There’s a problem, there’s pain (even if it’s a minor pain of just a cold room), and this husband waves it away with this illogically logical line.

I think this short joke—I went with the shortest one I could think of—speaks to the largest of questions: What is Jewish comedy doing? Is it helping people? Is it therapeutic? Does it help people cope, with anti-Semitism, with God’s seeming unfulfillment of his covenantal promises?

Or has it somehow reinforced the failures; is it a reminder of how useless all of this is?

Maybe the wife will laugh and go back to sleep; or maybe she’ll be unsatisfied and cold and furious with her husband.

And in some ways that’s exactly what the two choices are in terms of what Jewish comedy may or may not do: alleviating pain with humor, or reminding you of how insufficient the comedy is to alleviate the pain.

It’s got to be a decades-old joke. Maybe today we’re reading this more sensitively than its first listeners did, as a husband who is cruel to his wife, right? But maybe not. I’m not sure that the joke would have worked in the first place if there wasn’t a little bit of a sting to it.

Jeremy Dauber teaches Yiddish and American studies at Columbia University, where he is also the director of the Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies. He is the author of Jewish Comedy: A Serious History.

Jeremy Dauber An old Jewish man and his old Jewish wife are in bed together. The wife says to the husband, “Can you get up and close the window? It’s cold outside.”

And he says, “If I close the window, it’ll be warm outside?”

This sort of comeback says a lot about a certain kind of Jewish comedy—coming to a conclusion that doesn’t really address the main issue at all. Of course, the husband is both right and wrong at the same time, and I think that’s where

Michal bar Asher siegal It is very hard to pick one favorite joke in the Talmud, because the rabbis are

hilarious all the time, even if they don’t always mean to be. What is amazing is that these texts, which are about 1,500 years old, still make me, and my students, laugh! I chose a sequence of three related stories in Tractate Berachot 62a of the Babylonian Talmud, which are really one joke, not only because they are extremely funny, but for what they say about the history of the text and about Jewish life in general.

These stories take on what the whole

rabbinic project is about—the authority rabbis have over students and that their teachings touch on every aspect of life— and they say, let’s examine that project by taking it to the extreme and by using humor. A good joke has to involve the very basic, smelly, sweaty parts of life— peeing, pooping, having sex. The rabbis ask the big question: How far do we go with this idea of following our masters, learning everything, copying our masters in everything? The rabbinic authors know that this way of life can lead to extreme, absurd situations. They don’t shy away from anything and are very open and aware of what they are doing. It is a very rabbinic thing to do.

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal is a professor of Jewish thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud.

sarah silverman What did the Jewish mother say to her porn actress daughter after a gang bang? “You were the best one.”

This is an original written by [the late songwriter] Adam Schlesinger. (He said I could have it, even!) I love it because the Jewishness being made fun of here is that Jewish mothers are so freaking proud of their children, no matter what. I love that.

Sarah Silverman is an actor and comedian. She recently created and hosted the Emmy-nominated Hulu talk series I Love You, America. She currently hosts “The Sarah Silverman Podcast.”

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JEREMY D MARTIN / FLICKR

Rabbi Akiva follows Rabbi Yehoshua into the bathroom, and peeks through the gap in the stall while Rabbi Yehoshua is going to the bathroom. He tells us what he learned. He learned how he should wipe his behind, how one should stand or sit while doing whatever he is doing in the toilet.

Rabbi Akiva is telling this in the study house! Hearing this, his student, Ben Azai, looks at him and says, “How dare you? How could you do this?” And Rabbi Akiva answers back, looking very serious, and says, “This is Torah, and we need to learn it!”

This is followed by a second story where Ben Azai, the one who said, “How dare you!” then says, “You know what, I went and I checked on Rabbi Akiva when he went to the bathroom; I checked and he is doing what he told us he is supposed to do!” Rabbi Yehuda says to him, “How dare you do it! You just said that this is unacceptable!” And Ben Azai says, “Yes, but I learned that this is Torah, and I need to learn it!”

The third story is about Rav Kahana, who goes under the bed of Rav (his teacher) and he hides under the bed while Rav has intercourse with his wife. And he is so surprised by what he hears above his head, that he exclaims, in the middle of the act, “Whoa! That sounds like they’re having a lot of fun!

And I’m very surprised by it.” Rav is so surprised hearing a voice under the bed that he says, “What are you doing here!” Rav Kahana answers him with the punch line: “This is Torah, and I need to learn it!”

SARAH SILVERMAN

ruth R. wisse

WNEZ / COURTESY RACHEL CREEGER

A Jew has converted to Christianity. Very shortly after his conversion, the priest comes around on a Friday to check on him to see how he is doing. He is appalled to see that the man is eating meat. He says, “You have just been converted. You did so, knowing the rules of the church, and here you are so soon after your conversion, already eating meat on a Friday against Catholic law.” And the Jew says, “Oh Father, don’t worry about it. I did exactly what you did!

I sprinkled water over it, and I said, ‘Turkey, turkey, you’re a fish!’”

This joke does not work for contemporary audiences, because even Christians might not know that Catholics were not allowed to eat meat on Friday. But everyone of a certain generation would have gotten that.

The joke for me always starts with the punch line—“Turkey, turkey, you’re a fish!”

This was less anti-Catholic than it sounds. It actually made fun of those who took conversion seriously. The joke belittled, ridiculed and played down the importance of formal conversion. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, thousands of Jews were converting to Christianity in order to be able to enter the university, to be allowed to live in major cities like Kiev and St. Petersburg. There were so many restrictions against Jews that were lifted if you converted that for many it was just, as [the German poet and literary critic Heinrich] Heine said, “the ticket of entry to Western civilization.” The numbers were quite staggering, so there were many such jokes about the inauthenticity of the act.

This joke serves me a little differently.

I use it within Jewish life, within modern life. It’s about the ease with which people are willing to rationalize the fact that they are abandoning principle, articles of faith, leaving important markers of identity. They just substitute one set of values for anoth52

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PETER SAGAL

er! And they say, “Oh, this is Jewish!” For example, what is Judaism? It’s social justice! Tikkun olam! Nowadays people too casually trade in one marker of identity for another. This joke originally was composed to justify deceptions of convenience, in a time of repression and threat. But I use it more to question facile rationalization, justification for the abandonment of what should be preserved.

When I am trying to point out that someone has falsified the rules but pretends innocence, as if nothing serious were at stake, I say, “Oh really, ‘Turkey, turkey, you’re a fish!’” And then the person looks at me, and says, “What is this about?” Aha! Then I have my chance to tell the whole joke, and, if necessary, to explain, which real humor never does. Everybody knows that if you have to explain a joke, the joke is dead. To have to explain that Catholics have to eat fish on Fridays, that would ruin everything. But for my purposes, making my point, it doesn’t really matter if I annihilate the humor. What matters to me is the power of this joke, of this folk creation. If you can use a joke in this way, it diffuses whatever tension there was, and very often it can seal the point you are making, because it is funny. It allows the conversation to continue.

Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University, and currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. Her latest book is No Joke: Making Jewish Humor.

peter sagal A synagogue is having an ongoing dispute that started small, but is now getting completely out of hand. It’s over whether you sit or stand during the Shema. The argument is incredibly bitter. There are people who are not talking to each other. There are people who are threatening to leave the synagogue unless they get their way. Family relationships have been destroyed.

The rabbi doesn’t know what to do, so he finds out that one of the founders of the synagogue, old Mr. Bernstein, is still alive in the Hebrew Home.

He sits on the porch in a wheelchair when the delegations for each viewpoint pay a call. Before the rabbi can complete his opening spiel, one of the partisans bursts forth: “Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Bernstein, isn’t it the tradition in our synagogue that you stand during the Shema, so as to show your respect to God?” After a couple of seconds pass, he just shakes his head slightly and says “No.” So an advocate from the other side says: “So, isn’t the tradition in our synagogue that we always sit

to show our humility before God?” Mr. Bernstein shakes his head and again says “No.” The rabbi and the rest of the delegation look at each other. Finally the rabbi says, “Mr. Bernstein, that can’t be right. It has to be one or the other because the synagogue is tearing itself apart. There are people who hate each other and families that aren’t speaking to each other and we’ve practically got fist fights in the parking lot. We’re just constantly at each other’s throats.”

And old Mr. Bernstein smiles, nods and says, “That’s the tradition!”

This is my favorite Jewish joke because like all good jokes it captures an essential truth: As Jews we are obstreperous by nature. I heard it from my brother, who is a rabbi.

But it’s not exclusive to Jews. Oftentimes there is no right answer. That’s the norm.

As old Mr. Bernstein says, that’s the tradition. And I like that. In a weird way, it’s both depressing and hopeful. I’m getting a little philosophical here, but I just love the idea that we’ve been around all this time, and yet nothing is settled. You’d expect that after thousands of years, everything would be. But in a very real sense, nothing ever gets decided. Except the indecision.

traumatized young rabbi goes to visit his predecessor and asks him, “Rabbi Cohen, I need your advice. What is the custom of our community when we read the Ten Commandments?” Rabbi Cohen replies, “Why do you ask?”

“Well, because yesterday we read the Torah portion containing that important section, and half of the community sat, while half of the community stood, and the ones who were sitting were yelling and screaming at the ones who were standing and the ones who were standing were yelling and screaming at the ones sitting!” “Ah,” replied Rabbi Cohen, “now that’s our custom.”

As a young child growing up in a traditional home, we often spent Shabbat and Jewish holidays with my paternal grandparents. All of the men on that side of the family were funny and after lunch they would gather in the living room, recline on the armchairs and sofa, loosen their belts from the enormous meal and try to competitively out-joke each other. The women would be in the kitchen, chatting, making coffee, clearing up. I would sit on the staircase, listening to the men, desperately wanting to be in the room where

the comedy happened. I’d hear them tell those old Jewish jokes over and over from my seat on the stairs, “She had a hat!”

“I’ll just sit in the dark!” “His brother was worse!” Those stories are the soundtrack of my childhood. They are like family, as they gently, or not so gently, shine a light on the familiar behaviors that are part of our shared psyche.

I love this joke’s punch line, “That’s our custom,” because it’s an exaggeration, but only a slight one! It sounds like something that could happen in any synagogue. In fact, last weekend there was a dispute in mine (about when or if you say the Prayer for Dew) that my husband was still mentioning over our kugel two hours later.

There is something comforting about the way we disagree, and it fascinates me how what sounds like an apocalyptic-level clash of views can blow over in a moment, while a tiny petty grudge can become a broyges [dispute] that lasts through many generations. We know how to put effort into our disagreements; that’s what’s kept us alive.

Rachel Creeger, a comedian, writer and director, is the only Orthodox Jewish woman on the British comedy circuit. She cohosts the podcast, “Jew Talkin’ To Me?”

Peter Sagal is the host of the comedy game show “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me” on NPR.

RACHEL CREEGER

rachel creeger Old Rabbi Cohen retires to a nursing home, and a new young rabbi is employed by the community. On his first Shabbat in his new post, they are about to start reading from the Torah when a huge, heated argument breaks out over whether you should stand or sit during the reading of the Ten Commandments. The following day, the SUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

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yonatan gruber

Mark Schiff

The best Israeli jokes of the past weeks are the memes of the Iron Dome vs. Hamas rockets. Everything you need to know about Israeli humor you can find there. I think it’s really Jewish/Israeli to make fun of fucking rockets while they are flying over our heads. Here are two, but there are many more.

A rabbi, a priest and a Baptist minister are talking about who is the best at what they do. Is it the priest, the minister or the rabbi? So, they decide to separately go into the woods and convert a bear. Whoever is the best at converting a bear is the best at what they do. So, a week later they meet and they ask the priest: “How did it go?” and he says: “It was fantastic! I read to him from the Bible, and Sunday morning he was in the front row of the church.” Then they say to the minister: “How did it go for you?” The minister says, “Fantastic! I found the bear in the woods, I gave him one of my sermons, I took him down to the lake and baptized him and Sunday morning he was in the front row of my church!”

Then they look at the rabbi and he’s in a body cast from head to toe. So they say, “What happened to you?” He goes, “Well, I shouldn’t have started with circumcision.”

Right: Male orgasm Left: Female orgasm

Right: Me explaining to guests directions on how to get from the (city) gate to my house Left: Guests

Here’s another recent joke.

COURTESY YONATAN GRUBER / TAL HEFFETZ

A policeman in Lod (where the riots were) is talking to a Jewish person.

Policeman: “Come with me to the precinct please.”

Jewish person: “Why?! Because I’m Jewish?!”

Policeman: “No, because I’m scared of walking alone.”

As Judaism changes, so have its comic stereotypes. In Israel, over the years, the Jewish stereotype, and the jokes as well, have blended with the Israeli stereotype.

Comic-wise, the Israeli Jew is just an Israeli. Need proof? Go to a random Israeli stand-up show. You won’t hear Jewish jokes. But you’ll hear tons of “Israeli jokes.”

We’re rude, loud, warm, we hate being suckers, think we know better, our wives control us, and we love free stuff. And yes, sometimes we like to complain, but no more than the average goy.

Yonatan Gruber is an Israeli stand-up comedian, screenwriter, improv actor and teacher.

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Picture this person in a full body cast.

That’s funny in itself. He’s a poor schlep.

And then you find out why. A joke is not a joke without a surprise ending.

I see this joke as saying Jews are willing to keep Judaism alive at all costs. For Jews, it’s not just about the words, it’s not just about speaking, it’s about physical action too. Our mitzvahs, for instance. You have to do things: help people, cook for a sick person and don’t forget circumcision!

This is not only a joke, it’s really a short story. Jews don’t just tell jokes. Like Sholem Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer, we are storytellers. As we do with our history and the Oral Law, we pass our stories down through the generations.

Mark Schiff, a stand-up comedian, actor and writer, has had HBO and Showtime specials, appeared on Mad About You and written for Roseanne.

YONATAN GRUBER

JOYCE ANTLER A Jewish girl becomes president and says to her mother, “You’ve got to come to the inauguration, Mom.” The mother says, “All right, I’ll go, I’ll go. What am I going to wear? It’s so cold. Why did you have to become president? What kind of job is that? You’ll have nothing but tsuris.” But she goes to the inauguration, and as her daughter is being sworn in by the chief justice, the mother turns to the senator next to her and says, “You see that girl up there? Her brother’s a doctor.”

This joke embodies all the ambivalence of the Jewish mother herself. It plays on the familiar trope of the worrying, suffering, complaining Jewish mother, and throws in “my-son-the-doctor,” whom she reveres above all else. The mother’s pride in her son, especially because he has reached the apex of Jewish aspirations (a doctor!) blinds her to her daughter’s great achievement. After all, she is the president!

While the daughter’s accomplishment reveals that this is a brand new world, the mother-son adoration suggests otherwise, presenting the useful lesson that despite shifting cultural norms, stereotypes endure and remain central to comedy. You see the juxtaposition of what’s new and what’s old, and it’s funny because it’s contradictory, and you laugh at it precisely because it is familiar. Here you have the Jewish daughter who’s president. How unusual is that?

But you still have the Jewish mother.

I wrote a book on the Jewish mother quite a while ago, and when I went around and talked about it, people would respond as if the Jewish mother caricature still existed, even though the conditions that it describes were really from two generations ago. They don’t apply today. We have so many different kinds of mothers with different characteristics, but this caricature

or the stereotype has endured. I think you can see why there are such things called stereotypes; they’re potent. They remain, despite changes in lifestyle, changes in culture, changes in gender roles.

Joyce Antler is professor emerita of Jewish history and culture, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of You Never Call, You Never Write: A History of the Jewish Mother.

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already heard it, and, by the way, you’re telling it wrong.

EDDY PORTNOY When you tell a peasant a joke, he laughs three times: once when you tell it, once when you explain it, and once when he understands it. When you tell a Polish nobleman a joke, he laughs twice: once when you tell it, and once when you explain it; but he never actually understands it. When you tell a Russian officer a joke, he only laughs once. He’ll never understand it, and if you try to explain it to him, he might put you in jail. When you tell a Jew a joke, he interrupts you to say that he’s

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This joke is very representative of the Jew’s place in society in the Pale of Settlement, the area of the Russian Empire to which the Jews were restricted during the 19th century. The position of the Jew is that he is a completely separate cultural entity. He speaks a different language, Yiddish, and he is a minority.

He is surrounded by the peasantry but often works for the Polish nobles, so he is at their beck and call, even though the nobles don’t have any power anymore. Russian officers are the military administrators, so Jews have to heed their orders too.

This kind of joke was a way to make these three groups that the Jews typically had difficulties with look stupid. When you’re powerless, if you can make your enemy look stupid, that gives you some kind of power. That’s what the joke teller is doing. He is making fun of everyone, himself included. He’s oppressed by all three of these figures in different ways, but he comes out on top. Not only is he smart enough to get the joke, but the other Jew he is telling it to can tell it better.

The next Jew is smarter than the one before—or at least he thinks so.

What I like about the punch line— when you tell a Jew a joke he interrupts you—is the concept of Jews talking to one another, interrupting one another, talking over each other. This is a Jewish conversational phenomenon linguists call cooperative overlapping. On the surface it seems rude, but it’s actually a method of engagement showing interest and appreciation for what the other person is saying, if in somewhat of an odd way. There’s a sense that there’s an informality between Jews, whether they know each other or not, that allows them to interrupt each other and tell each other straight out, “You’re telling this joke wrong.”

Eddy Portnoy is a writer and Yiddish historian.

He is a senior researcher and exhibition curator at YIVO and the author of Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press.

LEAH FORSTER I use this joke in my routine a lot, and you have to imagine that I’m talking like a Hasidic lady: I met this couple and they were shanah rishonah [first year]. I turn to her and ask, “Wow, you guys look so happy, how long have you been together?” The girl turns to her husband and shyly answers, “Well, it feels like two days.” And me being married 25 years, I say, “Yeah, my marriage also feels like two days, Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av.”

Every person who’s been married for a long time can relate to this joke. When we see newlyweds, and how giggly and cute they are, we’re like, “Oh honey, just wait, it’s coming. Your day will come.”

Leah Forster, a comedian who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox community, performs around the world and on her popular Instagram account.

RICHARD KIND A priest, a minister and a rabbi are playing golf. It is the looooongest front nine holes they’ve ever played. Maybe three hours long. They go into the pro shop to complain, and the pro says, “Oh, didn’t you know? The foursome ahead of you are all blind.” The priest says, “Forgive me Father, for I know not whereof I

both the evils and absurdity of supremacy and hate. In the movie, writer-director Taika Waititi, who is Maori and Russian Jewish, plays a satirical and imaginary version of Hitler living inside the head of a 10-year-old German boy named Jojo in the last months of the war.

The joke comes just after Jojo finds Elsa, a Jewish teenager whom his mother (a secret member of the resistance) has hidden inside his house, and is immediately confronted with everything he has been taught to hate and fear by Nazism.

Astounded when Elsa disarms him of both his knife and his sense of Aryan pride, he conjures up his imaginary friend Adolf for comfort. Unable to admit that a Jew could have overpowered a German, Jojo chalks his defeat up to mythical Jewish mind control powers. Pacing toward the camera, Waititi as Hitler exclaims: “Typical! And did you see how fast she moved? Like a little female Jewish Jesse Owens!”

JERRY SEINFELD

speak.” The minister says, “Forgive me Father, there but for the grace of God go I.” And the rabbi says, “What? They couldn’t play at night?”

Richard Kind is an actor and comedian best known for his roles in Mad About You, Spin City and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Early in his career he performed with The Second City in Chicago.

Rebecca Pierce My favorite Jewish joke is a seemingly throwaway line from the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit. And like any other joke, for me it really came down to timing. I first heard it while watching the movie on the planeride back from my grandfather’s funeral, and it cut through the sadness of the day to elicit the kind of belly laugh that only comes when you really need it. I think it made me laugh so hard because it reminded me of my Jewish grandfather’s wry and sardonic sense of humor, a product of the Mel Brooks generation that lived through World War II, and could deftly skewer

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COURTESY LEAH FORSTER / RALPH PH FLICKR

This joke is a story that involves something I love—golf. It also has my favorite structure, the three national or religious representatives. It’s a good joke because it combines a sense of self-awareness with feelings or thoughts that we experience but don’t acknowledge. Jerry Seinfeld is the master of that. Some might call it cynical. Or even selfish. But it isn’t.

It never hurts anyone. Don Rickles was also a master of it. It sounds like it’s mean on the surface, but it actually unites people. And it usually contains wisdom.

The line isn’t in the film’s final script (which Waititi won a historic Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for writing) and was likely improvised, but it stuck with me for how quickly it cut to the deep insecurities of white supremacy merely by observing its fear and fixations. Growing up, my grandfather prepared his Black Jewish granddaughter for a world full of both anti-Semitism and racism with stories that exposed how easily the emptiness of white supremacy can be disproved on an even playing field. I especially loved the story of Jesse Owens, an African-American track star who won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, snatching a propaganda coup from the hands of the Nazis, who hoped to use the events to demonstrate the supremacy of their Aryan ideal. That Owens is the first thing that Jojo’s imagined Führer thinks of when he has to describe something fast is a distillation of one of the themes of the film, that the oppressed hold power over the minds of those who would degrade us. And the line is even funnier coming out of the mouth of the exact kind of person Hitler would have abhorred most, a mixed-race Polynesian

Jew. The joke, just like the Jewish humor my grandfather passed down, is both an art and a survival trait. It’s a reminder that when we laugh at the bigotry and hubris of those who would rob us of our power, we take some of that power back.

Rebecca Pierce is a Black Jewish filmmaker and writer based in San Francisco and a filmmaker-in-residence with the Jewish Film Institute.

Her comedy writing has been produced for the stage and screen by the San Francisco sketch comedy theatre company Killing My Lobster.

roz chast A grandmother and her beloved grandson are at the beach. They’re playing near the shore. Suddenly a giant wave comes and sweeps the boy out to sea.

The grandmother is beside herself with grief. She drops to her knees. She’s weeping and sobbing and implores God to return her little one. Lo and behold, another giant wave comes and deposits him back on the shore, unharmed. The grandmother embraces him and, overwhelmed with gratitude, thanks God over and over and over. Then she pauses, looks up and says to God, “But where’s his little hat?”

I have heard this joke in two ways. One where the grandmother, at the end, sort of shrewishly, accusingly yells at God: “He had a hat.” But I prefer the one where she’s more matter-of-fact. Not yelling or accusing. Just, like...asking.

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JESS SALOMON

Because, you know, there was a hat involved. “Where’s his little hat?” I also like the addition of “little,” which to me makes it funnier. “Little hat” cracks me up for some reason.

The joke says something about the personal relationship that Jews feel with God. My mother used to look out the window of her car when she found a good parking space and say, “Thank you, God.” He is the Father, the Creator of all, the

God of the Old Testament. In Judaism, there aren’t intermediaries such as saints and Jesus, and Mary, and then the Pope and all of that. There is God. But that doesn’t mean that when the little hat goes missing, you don’t notice it.

Roz Chast is a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker where since 1978, she has published more than 800 cartoons. Her latest book is Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York.

Good Jewish jokes combine a sense of self awareness with feelings or thoughts that we experience but don't acknowledge.

Jess Salomon I used to date Gentile women and…I dated this girl, she’d just stare out the window all day long and I’d be like “What’s wrong?” and she’d be like, “You wouldn’t even understand if I told you.”

What the fuck am I supposed to do with that? With my Jewish girlfriend I don’t have to guess what’s wrong. She comes in the room and she’s like “MY STOMACH HURTS!” And then we can move on from there.

Jess Salomon is a Canadian comedian based in New York who has appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

She performs as part of the comedy duo “The El-Salomon’s” with her wife Eman El-Husseini. Their special, Marriage of Convenience, is available on YouTube.

Sophie Tucker was one of the biggest vaudevillians of the 20th century. Until motion pictures eclipsed vaudeville as the dominant form of entertainment in the 1930s, that’s what people did during the day, during their lunch hour, at night. They went to the vaudeville shows. Tucker, whose family emigrated from Russia to Connecticut when she was an infant, became a huge headliner by the 19-teens. And people just loved her. The art of her humor wasn’t just telling the jokes, it was in the way she engaged the audience. She would sit on people’s laps. She got into people’s faces.

Her humor was also wrapped up in music, and her jokes are in the lyrics of her songs. One of her best and funniest songs was “Sophie Tucker for President,” which is all about what it would be like to have a woman for president.

She sings: Sophie Tucker for President / Your candidate for 1952 / On the day that I’m elected / All you gals who’ve been neglected / Will be furnished with a

The premise that the job of the president was to make sure that women are sexually satisfied and empowered is especially funny in the 1950s, the era of Eisenhower and the Kinsey Report.

When Kinsey put out Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, everyone loved the report about men, but no one liked the one about women because it told them that, in fact, women liked to have sex.

This was a time known for traditional gender norms and a real clampdown on talking about female sexuality. So “Sophie Tucker for President,” which was more a gag than a song, is very much the opposite of what was being put out in the 1950s in presidential campaigns.

That made it very funny.

Lauren Sklaroff is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the author of Red Hot Mama: The Life of Sophie Tucker.

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COURTESY JESS SALOMON BY PHIL PROVENCIO

I love this joke from Catholic comedian John Mulaney because it takes a stereotype about Jewish women that’s always been portrayed in a negative way and spins it into a positive. We tell you what’s going on! Who wants to play emotional charades? Life is too short!

Sometimes I’ll make fun of Jewish men for not being able to fix things and people get so sensitive. Jewish men have been making fun of Jewish women for decades for being naggy, but G-d forbid I say, “You know what, Moshe, I think it’s good you’re kosher. I don’t think you could crack a lobster with those lady hands,” and suddenly guess who’s banned in the Catskills? Me. I am. But like John Mulaney, I like this about Jewish men.

Gender is a construct and masculinity is often toxic. It’s a compliment!

lauren sklaroff

lover tried and true…And here is my platform: / When I’m elected I will see to it that we women get our rights / We’ll not only have better days but more enjoyable nights / We’ve been getting the old one-two from all of you politicians / When what we want is great affection and better lovin’ conditions...What you women need is a guy like Clark Gable to call on you every night at 9 / With a big long Kosher salami and a bottle of Manischewitz wine / He’ll take care of your welfare in a manner you’ll adore / And you can call your psychiatrist and tell him you don’t need him anymore...

in Jewish humor in general there's a sense of being an outsider, which is perfect for stand up and for comedians because we have to describe a slice of life that people in the audience aren't familiar with.

h. alan scott I saw my first porno recently. It was a Jewish porno film, one minute of sex and nine minutes of guilt.

SOPHIE TUCKER

Joan Rivers is my personal favorite Jewish comedian of all time, hands down (Judy Gold is my second favorite), and she doesn’t get enough respect. This joke she used to tell embodies her and Jewish humor. It is, I think, so perfect because it is so Jewish. It is based on self-deprecation—having a bit of a laugh at one’s own expense and not taking oneself too seriously. This is such a Jewish quality, even though a lot of times in conversations, Jews can take themselves very seriously.

This characteristic taught me a lot as a comedian and writer.

Here’s another Rivers joke: I was the only Jewish kid in a Catholic neighborhood. They all did Hail Marys, I did Hail Murrays.

That’s funny, too, but to me it’s not necessarily a great Jewish joke because it’s just a play on a bunch of Jewish people being named Murray. The porno guilt one is great and very Jewish because it’s so steeped in overthinking things.

In Jewish humor in general there’s a sense of being an outsider, which is perfect for stand-up and for comedians because we have to describe a slice of life that people in the audience aren’t familiar with. We have to have a different perspective. To me, that’s what makes Jewish comedians so great. That’s what makes gay comedians so great. And that’s what makes female comedians so great. They have different narratives from what we’re used to hearing.

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documentary film Latter Day Jew, which follows his journey as a gay former Mormon who converted to Judaism as he prepares for his bar mitzvah. He cohosts the gay culture podcast “You’re Making It Worse” and the Golden Girls podcast “Out on the Lanai.” He’s also known for his drag alter ego Sadie Pines.

JOAN RIVERS

liat Steir Livny Israeli Jews are especially funny when interpreting their daily lives through Holocaust humor. My favorite is from Israeli Twitter, where someone wrote: “I hear loud knocks on the door. It is either the Gestapo or the pizza delivery with the pizza I ordered.”

This was their way to try to create a buffer between themselves and the horrible place and time. Jewish Israelis use Holocaust jokes to create a buffer between past and present.

Liat Steir-Livny is an associate professor in the Department of Culture at Sapir Academic College. Her books include Is It OK to Laugh About It?, which analyzes Holocaust humor in Israeli culture.

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PIX INX, / BRITANNICA

Twitter in Hebrew is a well-known space for cynics and gallows humor fans. When we grow up in Israel, we learn about the Holocaust from kindergarten. The Holocaust is all around. Holocaust awareness in Israel is unique, because we are a post-traumatic society. We are so afraid of a second Holocaust.

In such a society, Holocaust anxiety and Holocaust remembrance are much deeper than in any other place. Its memory runs in our DNA. This is why I believe that Jewish Israelis need Holocaust humor, satire and parody more than those of us in other places in the world.

People need humor in order to survive their lives. We are the victims, and we laugh about ourselves.

Jokes about the Holocaust began during the Holocaust itself. In the ghettos, in the concentration camps, people used humor as a defense mechanism.

noam shuster Eliassi My mom used to work at the Holocaust Memorial in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

She used to give a lot of group tours.

One of the group members one day asked her, “What is the most devastating document you encountered in Yad Vashem?” She looked at him and said, “My paycheck.”

I love this joke because my mom wrote it.

She is an Iranian Jew who ended up as a tour guide at Yad Vashem after marrying my dad, who is the son of a Holocuast survivor.

This mix of histories in Israeli society allows us to laugh at everything that happens in our lives. It’s what I love about Israeli comedy. Like other groups, we Israelis and Jews

have a tendency to make fun of ourselves. As a collective, we have experienced so many terrible things that we can joke about. And the more extreme the trauma, the greater the capacity for edgier and darker humor.

When I tell Holocaust jokes to non-Jewish audiences, they’re like, “Oh my God! She’s making fun of the Holocaust.” My generation grew up on Holocaust jokes. It’s a mechanism for coping with stories from the Holocaust. Holocaust humor is part of the resilience of the Jewish people. It’s part of the process of overcoming or dealing with trauma. This joke says that life goes on, that people will continue laughing and that there’s always something to laugh about. It says that life is a combination of sorrow and happiness, grief and overcoming.

It’s a huge question in comedy about who can make these kinds of jokes. I’m a Jewish brown woman so I can basically say whatever the fuck I want. But it would be awkward for a Christian white guy to tell a Holocaust joke, unless he is trashing the hell out of white Christianity for doing it to us.

It all depends on the context of the joke. In a way, there’s room for anybody to make jokes

NOAM SHUSTER-ELIASSI

about horrific traumatic events, but they have to find the right angle and acknowledge how they’re positioning themselves.

Noam Shuster-Eliassi is an Israeli comedian and fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. She performs around the globe in Hebrew, English and Arabic. Her comedy explores identity and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

steven weber Years back on Larry King Live, Marlon Brando made the shocking statement that “Hollywood is run by Jews.” In response, outraged Jewish organizations made it snow in April.

For me, what makes this a good joke is where it goes beyond the setup and punch line: It dares to lampoon a potentially offensive—and dangerous—notion that has been behind millennia of anti-Semitism, namely that “Jews control everything!!!”

(Which, if we did, do you think I’d be wearing this moth-eaten cardigan?) To me, it shows a kind of fearlessness that can typify the Jewish outlook: No matter how bad, stupid or challenging the world is, it’s also fundamentally hilarious. Just look at Mel Brooks’s Springtime for Hitler for the ultimate example of this. It’s a Jewish survival mechanism, and after so much practice at survival, it’s one of the best. That, and knowing how to make a fire from navel lint and static electricity.

Steven Weber is a TV actor and comedian best known for his role as Brian Hackett on the sitcom Wings (1990-1997). He appeared in the Broadway production of The Producers.

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alan zweibel A Jewish man moves in next door to Rockefeller. He decorates his house just as Rockefeller does. He does his garden exactly the way Rockefeller does. Buys the same car that Rockefeller does.

And one day Rockefeller goes up to the Jewish man and he says, ‘You think you are as good as me, don’t you?’ And the Jewish guy says, ‘No, I think I’m better.’

Rockefeller says ‘Why?’ And the Jewish guy says, ‘Well, to start with, I don’t live next door to a Jew.’

I think that this is a typical Jewish joke in the sense that we are making fun of ourselves and of the situation that we always find ourselves in. It has bite because it acknowledges that’s the way people feel and says it first. A lot of Jewish humor is the little guy punching up. Tevye is leaving Anatevka and he’s making jokes while the place is smoldering. That’s part of our heritage. We have a mindset that there’s adversity.

How are we going to deal with this?

And I think that humor is what keeps us going. What other choice do we have? If you go through the history of comedy, whether it’s the Marx Brothers, George S. Kaufman, whether it’s Hollywood, TV or the Broadway stage, you see there was a penchant for this kind of humor. We’re the people of the book. We love words and know the power of words, and psychologically, that’s how we make do.

these jokes show a kind of fearlessness that can typify the Jewish outlook: No matter how bad, stupid or challenging the world is, it's also fundamentally hilarious.

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LILACH RAZ / COURTESY ALAN ZWEIBEL

Alan Zweibel is a five-time Emmy Award and Tony Award-winning comedy writer. An original writer for Saturday Night Live, he is author of Laugh Lines: My Life Making Funny People Funnier and cowriter of the screenplay for the film Here Today, starring Billy Crystal and Tiffany Haddish.

secret identity revealed What a child of Holocaust survivors discovered about himself and his family when he was twelve changed how he viewed the people he would prosecute—and sue.

A

llan gerson, a brilliant international

lawyer who died in 2019, spent much of his career representing victims of terrorist attacks and human rights abuses, from the Lockerbie bombing to the 9/11 attacks. Gerson was best known for the creative legal theories he pioneered that allowed the families of such victims to sue foreign governments, seeking damages for their complicity in terrorism. He also served as senior counsel to two U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations and as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration.

His background was as colorful and unusual as his career, which also included writing books, traveling the world to shoot photographs, designing jewelry and running an art gallery. He was born in Samarkand in the former Soviet Union to Polish Jewish refugee parents who had fled the Nazis and come to Samarkand via Siberia. Eventually they reached a displaced persons’ camp in Germany and from there immigrated to the United States, using the names and documents belonging to another family.

After earning degrees from the University of Buffalo, New York University Law School, Yale Law School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Gerson worked at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which sought to identify ex-Nazis and prosecute and then deport them on charges of immigration fraud. That job, and the way it intertwined with his own family history and caused him to wrestle with complex moral issues, is the subject of his gripping memoir, Lies That Matter. This excerpt tells of one revelation in this fascinating life.

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my yiddish name is

“elle.”

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF GERSON FAMILY

That’s what my parents always called me, though my mom used “Ellenu,” adding the lyrical “nu” to denote affection.

My American name was Abraham Blumstein. My parents and my brother Sam were also named Blumstein.

I had no memory of what our surname was in Foehrenwald [the displaced persons camp in Germany], and I had no reason to think there was anything unusual about Blumstein. But there were some oddities about that name. My father’s cousin on Long Island, for whom he worked, had a different last name than my father—he was Morris Gerson. But I never gave it a second thought. I also collected stamps as a kid, and we would get letters from my dad’s brother in Israel. My younger brother, Sam, noticed that the return address had the name “Gerson.” Sam asked my dad why his brother had a different name. My dad blanched but never answered the question. Neither Sam nor I pursued the matter.

When I was about 12 years old, we were at the large Klein’s department store on Union Square. It was winter, and my mom had bought me a scarf—a shalikel, as she called it in Yiddish. As we left Klein’s, we saw a hot dog vendor, sauerkraut spilling from his cart. On spotting my dad, he yelled, “Mottel Gerson!” My dad seemed to panic. He curtly told my brother and me to wait behind while he and my mom spoke to the vendor. Hushed words were exchanged, and then they returned to us, visibly shaken. These were strange occurrences, but they were part of what went into that imaginary box of “Better Not To Know.”

I respected my parents’ secrets, or suspected secrets. I also assumed that I was Abraham Blumstein. But it was not my real identity. It was manufactured. I have no real memory of being told the truth other than that something happened in April 1958 after going on the subway with my parents and getting out at 42nd Street and then going into a lawyer’s office. I had never been in a law office, and I remember looking at the diplomas on the wall and remembering the lawyer’s name: “Kies.” Unknown to me, my parents went to court with the lawyer. I recall sitting by myself, and I saw blue papers that folded in three (they were subpoenas), and I had a sense that this is what you serve people, and I thought—what power.

Everything else is a total blur, except after we got home, I now had to tell people that I had a new name. I was now Allan Gerson.

I recall going to get a haircut, and my barber said, “Abie, how are you doing?”

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I said, “I’m no longer Abie.”

“What do you mean you’re no longer Abie?”

I doubt that I had a good answer for him or for anyone else, and certainly not for my classmates.

When we moved to the Bronx three years earlier from Brooklyn, I was enrolled in the Lubavitcher yeshiva on Allerton Avenue, an Orthodox establishment with strict rules of conduct. It was about a halfhour walk from our apartment, and I was still at the school when my name changed.

I was already something of a misfit in the school. When our teacher had previously asked us where we were from, the other students mentioned different neighborhoods in and around New York.

I said, “The Soviet Union.”

This was Cold War time at its prime.

The other kids were apparently as aghast as they were gleeful, for they all scrawled on the bathroom walls, “Abie is a Commie.”

Now I’d have to explain to my classmates that not only was I not a Commie, I wasn’t even Abie.

In the fall of 1958, I enrolled in DeWitt Clinton High School as Allan Gerson.

I also had a new birthday. Abraham Blumstein was born on July 31,1944, but Allan Gerson was born on June 19, 1945.

My parents and my brother Sam also had their last name changed to Gerson, though Sam got to keep his first name since he was born in Germany and wasn’t impersonating anyone else. I never sought any answers. I knew on some level this had to do with my parents’ history, but I also knew that those matters we did not discuss.

i had inherited my mom’s chronic

diastema, a large space between my upper center teeth, which could be cured by orthodontic devices. But once the braces were installed, they rendered me, under the Surgeon General’s Standards for Fitness for Service in the U.S. Army, disqualified from service because the orthodontic device installed to cure the defect could result in injuries during training.

So, at the age of 25, I was free to do what

I wanted. This took me in the direction of international law. In law school, I had taken a class on the subject with Professor Gidon Gottlieb and was sold on it. And so, in 1970, I enrolled in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Graduate Program for a Masters of Law in International Law. It was a two-year program, and during the second year, I took an internship with Israel’s Ministry of Justice, which led to one of my more interesting assignments.

The Ministry suspected that KGB agents were infiltrating the country with the wave of new Russian immigrants. It came to our attention that a group of Russian émigrés was going to hold a protest at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City; the protest would be over harsh punishments that Russia had meted out against Jewish refuseniks and the severe sentences handed out to a group of Russian Jews who had tried to hijack a Russian plane to take them to Israel.

Ministry officials suspected that the leader of the group was a KGB agent. This leader was also an attractive young woman, so when someone senior in the Ministry suggested that I go to the demonstration and try to meet her and determine her true intentions, I cheerfully agreed.

It didn’t work out as planned. The Jerusalem Municipality foreign press attaché, whose job was to introduce foreign reporters to the protesters, kept intervening between me and the young woman, so I never found out if she worked for the KGB. But my sojourn was still productive.

The name of the attaché was Joan Nathan, and although at the Western Wall we kept getting in each other’s way, we happily overcame our differences when she later visited Yale, where I had enrolled in 1972 in its doctoral program. She was escorting Jerusalem’s deputy mayor on a speaking tour. We married in 1974 and have raised three amazing children.

It was in Israel as well, through a remarkable coincidence, that I learned more about my true identity.

From top: Gerson’s UN identification card with the name “Elik Gerson.” A report card from sixth grade when Gerson still went by Abraham Blumstein. An image of young Gerson, date unknown.

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From left: Gerson and his wife, Joan Nathan, with their eldest child, Daniela. Gerson’s Department of Justice card and Gerson in action working as a lawyer. Early in his career, Gerson made a name for himself as a member of the U.S. Department of Justice team that helped bring Nazi war criminals to justice.

In pursuing my doctoral dissertation on Israel’s administration of the West Bank, I had returned to Israel the following year for research, conducting interviews with most of the mayors of towns and villages on the West Bank. Joan was in Israel while I was there, assisting the renowned filmmaker Charles Guggenheim on a documentary. Both of our projects would soon be complicated by the Yom Kippur War. But just prior to its outbreak, we met for brunch at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. The hotel was a special place: a small, resplendent old Ottoman palace that had been run for generations by a missionary family and was known as an island of neutrality that welcomed patrons of all faiths and nationalities.

All the waiters were Palestinian, and it had a fabulous buffet.

While I was standing in line, I started chatting with an 68

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American woman who was then teaching political science at Hebrew University. She said her name was Naomi Kies, and she was standing there with her father, a lawyer from New York. He was an avuncular sort, on the plump side, exuding the confident warmth of a man who had already accomplished all that he had ever sought.

“Hi, I’m Allan,” I said, reaching out for his hand.

“Saul Kies,” he said, extending his palm.

I blinked as if I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Saul Kies?” I asked slowly.

“Funny, I had an immigration lawyer by

that name when I was about thirteen. I even remember his office: on West 42nd Street up from Grand Central Station, across Fifth Avenue. First time I had ever been in a lawyer’s office.”

“Well, I’m an immigration lawyer,” he said. “And that’s where I had my office.

I’m retired now. What did you say your last name is?”

“I didn’t. But it’s Gerson. I’m Allan Gerson.”

Now it was his turn to squint hard as he looked me over. “Allan, don’t you remember me?” he asked with a strange look.

“Actually, when we met before, you were still little Abe Blumstein.”

I froze, as if caught in the crevice of a time warp. I hadn’t heard that name, Abe Blumstein, for nearly 15 years, and I had no recollection of this man before me, though I remembered his name, his office and the diplomas on the wall.

Seeing how stunned I was, Kies picked up the conversation. He said that my parents had hired him to revert their names, and mine and Sam’s, to what they had been before we immigrated to the United States. We had used a false name, Blumstein, to gain entry, which is illegal, and Kies had to convince a judge to exonerate my parents for immigration fraud.

Kies did so, he told me, by citing “fear of political persecution.” Once the court had granted our family the right to return to our original name—Gerson—someone had to tell me who I really was. According to Kies, he was the one.

“Your father implored me to be the one to tell you on his behalf,” he said. “Surely, you remember.”

My pulse quickened. Wheels of recollection began to whir as if trying to work their way through the fog of memory. I recalled being ushered into an office with a brass nameplate on a heavy wooden door that read “Saul Kies, Esq., Attorney at Law.” Inside, framed diplomas hung on the walls, and subpoenas and briefs, bound in blue covers, some with red ribbons, were stacked on a desk. For all the clarity of that vision, I had zero recall of being told by him or anyone else that the name I had gone by since coming to America— Abraham Blumstein—would be no more,

“actually, when we met before, you were still little abe blumstein.” or that I would be Allan Gerson from then on.

Kies pressed me: “Don’t you remember? I congratulated you on now being free to become bar mitzvah under your real identity. And since under your new, or original, identity, you had extra time to prepare for your bar mitzvah. I knew you were anxious about that.”

He explained the deep risks that our family had confronted. We had lied on our entry visa to gain admission under an assumed name; that allowed us to circumvent U.S. quota restrictions, but it also meant that we could face deportation. My parents, according to Kies, had shown true courage in going to court. “It could have gone the other way,” he said. “You could have been deported.

Don’t you remember me telling you that?”

I stared at him blankly. “I don’t remember any of it,” I said.

But I had no doubt that he was telling me the truth. His precise memory of these long-ago events surely reflected his recognition of the potential trauma of the moment: telling a boy he wasn’t who he thought he was could have been cataclysmic. And maybe it was. Abraham Blumstein was born on July 31, 1944, while Allan Gerson was born on June 19, 1945. In an instant, I was thirteen months younger. Demoted to being an 11-year-old.

That I was given this news on the cusp of my bar mitzvah would have made it all the more unnerving—as if my imminent ascent into manhood had been taken away, like a ladder yanked from under my feet. In time I would learn a bit more about Saul Kies, an immigrant himself who came to America from Latvia in 1922. Active in the Labor Zionist movement, he clearly forged a bond with my parents, who invited him and his wife to my rescheduled bar mitzvah in June 1958. In a typewritten letter that he sent to me, Kies regretfully declined the invitation due to another commitment, but he wrote: “We hope that your bar mitzvah will be an important milestone in your growth as a Jew and as an American.”

In addition to that letter, my parents kept Kies’s invoice for his services: $1,000, in three installments, which was a lot of money for my parents. Reverting our identity to Gerson was clearly important to them, but even after my chance encounter with the lawyer who made it possible, I never asked my parents why. It remained in the “Better Not To Know” box. M

From Lies that Matter by Allan Gerson (New Academia Publishing/ VELLUM 2021) SUMMER DOUBLE 2021 | MOMENT

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THE MAN Who Sold

Air Holy Land IN THE

BY

S

imcha was the man who

sold air from the Holy Land, not to be confused with those unimaginative con artists who sold oil from the Oily Land or water from the Dead Sea. One summer, he tried his luck selling oil; he picked enough olives from public gardens and private lawns to make a few bottles’ worth. As for selling water, he filled up bottles from the tap in the kitchen sink and added plenty of salt to make it authentic, as if it had been siphoned directly from the Dead Sea. These projects all proved too much work, too risky and too costly. Air was everywhere, he didn’t need anybody’s permission to bottle it, and most importantly, it was free.

Like the Mediterranean Cabernet Sauvignon of the Judean Valley, Simcha’s product came in boutique bottled packaging designed for the sophisticated customer with a discerning palate. He made little sticker labels for each bottle with his daughter Lali’s help. On each label, she drew an old, bearded man blowing a gust of wind, apparently a Greek god of some kind she studied in school, but Simcha thought he looked more like the Miser, the owner of the falafel place down the street, who enjoyed quoting biblical verses from Kohelet and sold half a measly pita for a small fortune. Together, Simcha and Lali polished the empty bottles with a rag, placed them side by side in a blue trolley and went out in search of tourists willing to buy air.

With his keen eye and sixth sense—a

Omer Friedlander

tingling sensation in the presence of the very wealthy—Simcha zeroed in on them from all the way across Dizengoff Street, window-shopping. Two middle-aged American tourists, Jewish of course, and proudly patriotic with their “I heart Israel” shirts, probably with plans to marry their daughter off to an El Al pilot. Simcha got closer, innocently pulling his trolley along. He could tell they were rich by the shine of their teeth. The husband’s wallet practically bulged out of his back pocket, plump as a peach. The man was red-faced, sweat pooled under his arms and made his turkey neck shine. The young wife, petite and dressed impeccably in white linen, was star-struck by a golden necklace in the window, playing with the diamond ring on her finger. Her hair, like the necklace, was golden. Although Simcha knew that her hair was not really spun of solid gold, it did give her a certain advantage. If in dire need she could cut off her hair and sell it to the highest bidder.

Simcha pulled his trolley along in the tourists’ direction, empty bottles clanking and clinking as he went, while Lali came over from the other end of the street, wearing her adorable dress spotted with starfish and sea snails, holding Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed cat, in her arms. Simcha reached the tourists, who were peering at the glittering display in the front store window of Zehava’s Jewelry and Judaica: silver goblets and mezuzahs, pearl necklaces, blueberry-size diamond earrings sitting snugly in a green velvet case. Lali stopped in front of Simcha, admiring the bottles of air

arranged in the blue trolley, while Moshe Dayan, curled up in her arms, groomed his grey fur, licking his forepaw with his quick, scratchy tongue.

“Mister sir,” Lali said, in the English they had practiced, “what do you have there?”

“Oh this? I’m only selling air.”

“Air? Why would anyone buy air?”

“This isn’t just any air. It’s very special.

I’ll tell you a secret.”

Lali leaned in, and her father whispered gibberish in her ear. The tourists stopped and were staring now, dumbstruck by the interaction.

“I want ten of them!” Lali said.

THE FIRST-PLACE WINNER OF THE 2020 MOMENT MAGAZINE-KARMA FOUNDATION SHORT FICTION CONTEST Founded in 2000, the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction contest was created to recognize authors of Jewish short fiction. The 2020 stories were judged

by Israeli-American author Ruby Namdar. Moment Magazine and the Karma Foundation are grateful to all of the writers who took the time to submit their stories. The 2021 contest deadline is June 30. Visit momentmag.com/fiction to learn more about the contest and the date of the annual literary event featuring all the winners and Namdar.

moment fiction “Ten? You couldn’t afford even one, my dear.”

“I can sell my cat, Moshe Dayan. Please.”

“This cat? He only has one eye. How much could he possibly be worth?”

The tourists looked mortified. The golden-haired wife clicked her tongue in disapproval as if it was unkind to remind the cat that he only had one eye. “Visually challenged feline is the correct term,” Simcha imagined her saying at an annual dinner for the charitable foundation she set up in support of dim-sighted kittens. The rich couple stopped to stare and now came the final blow. Lali went over to the tourists, the visually challenged feline in her arms, stared at her shoes and gave her speech.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “I offer you my cat, Moshe Dayan, to purchase. He may only have one eye, but he doesn’t break things often. He is named after the famous Israeli war hero, who lost his eye in the struggle for our nation’s freedom.”

“We can’t buy your cat, honey,” the American lady said. “It wouldn’t be right.”

Lali hid her face in the cat’s fur.

“What’s in them anyway?” The American man said.

“Oh, in these?” Simcha said. “Nothing.

Only air.”

“Then, why does she want them so bad?” the husband said. “How much are you charging?”

“Fifty shekels per bottle, for the usual customer. For the girl, I will give a very special discount, 50 percent off! Now, only twenty-five shekels per bottle.”

The wife looked at her husband, raising one eyebrow like a golden bow. The husband looked annoyed, drumming his fat fingers on his thighs. It’s nothing, she mouthed. The husband looked at his wife, and Simcha imagined him trying to calculate the cost of refusing to buy the bottles of air. Would they fight for the rest of their holiday? Would she give him the silent treatment and act as if he did not exist?

Would she leave him for a younger Israeli man who ran ultra-marathons and worked in tech, a man who bought bottles of air on a whim, just because, without thinking twice, because money meant nothing to him? The husband sighed, nodded wearily, 72

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accepting his fate with modest bravery.

“How many bottles would you like, honey?” the wife asked.

L

ali stayed with simcha in his tiny

apartment on Bugrashov Street on Fridays, and that was only because her mother wanted to get drunk in a dimly lit bar downtown, in Florentin, where it was too dark for the men to see her wrinkles and sagging skin. Simcha’s ex-wife got custody for six days, while he only got one. She worked at a beauty parlor on Ben Yehuda Street, which wasn’t exactly Wall Street, but the judge wouldn’t listen. Apparently, Simcha wasn’t as financially stable. It’s all castles in the air how you make a living, said the judge, waving an arthritic hand, casually proclaiming his sentence of doom.

On Fridays, after selling bottles of air to American tourists, Simcha took Lali to Katsanelson’s ice-cream factory and they picked out the misshapen popsicles, the mistakes in production, which were free, and then they went to Independence Park and played with other people’s dogs.

They had their tradition of going out to eat falafel at the Miser’s after a big sale of air and then visiting the Dolphinarium.

The Miser’s Falafel was a tiny place, so small it could fit only the Miser himself.

He hired no other employees since he was too cheap to pay them their wages. Simcha and Lali joined a long line of customers who were waiting for their falafel. The Miser took his time, frying the chickpea balls in his bubbling, sizzling grill, where the oil, possibly as old and bitter as the Miser himself, was never replaced.

“Hey, king of the falafel,” Simcha said, “I want two pitas with falafel, hummus, tehina, pickles, salad and cabbage. Don’t leave out the spicy mango amba sauce!”

“Did you get a haircut?” Lali asked the Miser.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” said the Miser, quoting his favorite passage from Kohelet. His hair did look different, lopsided, shorter on one side as if he had gone to the barber’s and changed his

mind halfway through. There was no way, Simcha thought, that the Miser would ever pay full price for a haircut.

“Can I have one extra falafel?” Lali asked, as she always did. “I’m hungry.”

“All the rivers flow into the sea, and yet the sea is not full.”

“Come on, Miser,” said Simcha. “Give my daughter one extra falafel.”

“What profit has man in all his toil under the sun?” said the Miser. “It will cost you. I have my reputation to consider.”

The Miser had known Lali ever since she was “this big”—he always mimed her size by lowering his hand to the ground— but even so he refused to give her an extra falafel. It was a matter of principle and Simcha respected him for his steadfast miserly ways but cursed him for the very same reason. As usual, Simcha and Lali split the money from the sale of bottled air. He kept half and handed her the other half, which she tucked in a tin box with a peeling castle floating in the clouds on the cover. Her mother didn’t know about the arrangement.

“If your mother asks,” Simcha said, “tell her I gave you some pocket money.”

“Okay,” she said, licking her fingers.

“Your bat mitzvah is coming up,” he said, as he did every time they met.

“No, it’s not. Not for another”—she counted using the fingers on both hands— “seven years.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t start celebrating. Where do you wanna go today?”

They went to the Dolphinarium, as was their tradition. Years ago, the Dolphinarium used to be an aquatic zoo, where people paid to watch dolphins perform tricks, flips and other acrobatic feats in the air.

At the center of the arena was a circular pool, where the dolphin trainers stood on artificial islands, wearing white shirts and serious expressions, and tossed shoals of mackerel, schools of herring and families of sardines for the dolphins to catch in the air. The crowds would come and applaud the talented dolphins, but pretty soon it became unfashionable because the animal rights groups protested every day by the entrance. Parents stopped coming and bringing their kids, who started seeing the cruel side to the enterprise, and the

Dolphinarium was shut down and transformed into a nightclub. The club—which kept the enormous pool at the center, as well as the arena-like structure, and played electronic dance music until dawn—was destroyed in a suicide bombing years ago, during the Second Intifada, before Lali was even born, but everyone still called the wreckage the Dolphinarium.

Simcha and Lali would go watch invisible dolphins do their tricks, which was the best and cheapest entertainment around. There was a secret way into the Dolphinarium, if you followed the wave-breaker boulders towards Yaffo, and slipped through a hole in the fence, you could climb onto the graffiti-littered remains of the arena. The pool, which had been long dry, was painted with all kinds of sea creatures—lionfish, zebrafish, catfish. Every combination of a fish and another animal was represented.

Even combinations of inanimate objects and fish were there, like swordfish and hammer-sharks. The bottom was cracked and dusty, scattered with plaster debris, and the seats of the arena that surrounded the pool on all sides were long gone, too.

Simcha and Lali sat in their reserved seats, on the ground, at the center of the empty pool, where their voices carried and echoed in the empty space.

“Look at that one!” Lali said, clapping her hands. “It’s so fast!”

“What a fantastic swimmer, top-notch.”

“Nice flip!” Lali said.

“Would you stop feeding the dolphins, sir?” Simcha said. “That peanut snack is not healthy at all!”

“Don’t stick your head in its mouth!”

Lali said.

“I wish I had a tail like that,” Simcha said.

The sun sank lower and lower in the sky, painting the cream-colored clouds shades of rosewater, just like malabi, Lali’s favorite

Simcha and Lali split the money from the sale of bottled air. He kept half and handed her the other half, which she tucked in a tin box with a peeling castle floating in the clouds on the cover. Her mother didn't know about the arrangement. dessert. The attraction of an empty arena, so dazzling and full of hidden promise in the daytime, slowly faded as it grew darker.

Lali got sleepy, her head rested on Simcha’s shoulder, and the dolphins around them were invisible once more. Pretty soon, she would be too old for this and he would have to take her to see real dolphins in real aquariums. The arena was completely deserted, except for a seagull that perched on a rusted metal beam. It flapped its wings and left, too. Simcha scooped Lali up and hung her over his shoulder, like a sack of potatoes, and they made their way home.

After he returned Lali to her mother, Simcha sat in the living room staring at the pile of unpaid bills on the table. Letter upon letter upon letter, all with red warnings, towering to an impossible height.

The electricity and water were going to be shut off soon. He couldn’t have Lali sleep in here when it happened, it would be too terrible. No hot water for a shower, no television. She would be miserable. She would tell her mother and then he would never see her again. The judge would grant her mother full custody. He could just picture the courtroom. And what exactly is your occupation, sir? the lawyer would ask him. Are you a salesman? I am a sommelier of air, he would reply grandly, specializing in oxygen from the Holy Land. Everyone in the room would laugh, and Lali would be taken away. He’d never see her again.

She would forget who he was, pass by him on the street without a second glance, as if

he were completely invisible, like one of the dolphins in the Dolphinarium.

He sat on the stoop of his house, on the first floor of his apartment building, with the trolley of empty bottles. Jews and gentiles passed by, and he played a game of Duck, duck, goy! When he got bored, he called out to potential customers, trying to sell his air. Selling the freshest air, straight from the Holy Land, step right up and get your air, you won’t regret it! It’s flying off the shelves right now. Who doesn’t need air? Don’t miss this opportunity to get two for the price of one! Air, everyone, air! Someone walked by and shouted, we’re breathing it for free, you donkey! It wasn’t any use. Without his daughter, he was nothing. He couldn’t even sell air to the most gullible American tourist.

That Friday, he arranged to meet Lali at the reception room of the Hilton, wearing his only suit, a bright flamingo-pink color.

Lali dressed up in her Audrey Hepburn costume from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, another favorite of theirs. When she entered the hotel, wearing a faux fur shawl, satin dress, doll shoes and a plastic tiara, he bowed and kissed her hand, calling her My Lady.

The hotel served a buffet lunch of pancakes doused in golden syrup, mountains of raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, plums in ice, honey dripping off the comb, clusters of granola and cut almonds, overnight oats and century-old wine, rhubarb and apricot crumbles with scoops of vanilla ice cream, feta cheese and cream cheese,

PRAISE FOR THE MAN WHO SOLD AIR IN THE HOLY LAND

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land is a wonderfully crafted, touching story about a failed father whose only way to sustain his young daughter is by means of his overdeveloped imagination. The story resurrects the traditional diasporic-Jewish character of the Luftmensch, the “air person,” whose entire existence and livelihood are suspended in the air. In a creative twist of irony, the writer chose to place that Luftmensch in Israel, the old-new homeland that was supposed to negate the uprooted diasporic existence and solve “the Jewish problem” by returning the Jews to the ground, culturally as well as financially. The story is distinguished by its magical, bittersweet tone; cinematic qualities and fine balance between humor, sorrow and compassion.

moment fiction coffee, tea, grapefruit juice and a metertall, edible white-chocolate centerpiece in the shape of the Wailing Wall, complete with tiny marzipan figurines of praying Haredim. They heaped their plates and ate it all, speaking in their assumed roles. Pass the marmalade, darling. Delightful crumpets! Have you tasted this scrumptious Scandinavian smoked salmon, My Lady?

Simcha waved the waiter over. He was a tall man with silver hair parted to the side, dressed in a dark-velvet suit jacket, a blueand-white flag pinned to his lapel. Simcha always found it hilarious and grotesque when Israelis dressed up. There should be a law against it. Unless they were professional actors or perpetrating an elaborate scheme that required a disguise, it was ridiculous and downright offensive for Israelis to wear anything but flip-flops and swimming shorts. They weren’t fooling anybody. The waiter looked like some kind of sabra version of the mythological British butler.

“Jeeves, old chap, we’d like one malabi, two spoons,” Simcha said. “We want all the toppings, and don’t skimp out on the rosewater!”

The milk pudding malabi came in a little glass cup, topped with sickly sweet rosewater and sugar syrup, heaped with pistachios, crumbled peanuts and flakes of coconut. Simcha and Lali clinked spoons, like honorable adversaries, and battled for dominance over the dessert. It was gone in thirty seconds. Lali licked her lips, bright red from the rosewater. When the time came to pay, Simcha told the waiter to put it on his room tab, and drew a number in the air, three-oh-one.

“I’m afraid we don’t do that, sir,” he said.

“I seem to have misplaced my wallet. If you would be so kind to put it on my room tab, I will make sure to take care of it.”

“That’s not possible, sir. We take cash or card.”

“Come on,” Simcha said. “Just this once.

Do it for the girl.”

“Sorry, sir. That’s not our policy.”

“Damn it! Just do it.” Simcha slammed his hand down on the table. He wiped the sweat from his brow.

“Daddy, here,” Lali said. She placed the tin box on the table, with the peeling castle in the clouds on the cover. Inside was her 74

SUMMER ISSUE 2021

share of the profit from selling air to the American tourists last week.

Simcha got up from his chair, grabbed the waiter by his velvet collar. “Are you going to let me, a grown man, take money from my own daughter?” He let his hands hang there. Then, he patted the waiter’s chest, once, twice. “I’m sorry, so sorry.”

He sniffed. They paid using the money in Lali’s tin box and left the hotel.

The next week, and the one after that, Lali’s mother refused to bring her over, perhaps because she heard some version of what had happened at the hotel. She probably thought he was using their daughter to make a profit. He could hear her self-righteous voice in his head. “Simcha, you should be ashamed of yourself. This is the last time you treat our daughter like a walking ATM card.” But it was just a game, a bit of play-acting that Lali loved and it never really hurt anybody. Simcha spent his time sleeping on the couch and hatching plans that he never acted upon. One plan was to steal Lali in the middle of the night, to hitchhike to the airport and board a flight to Zanzibar as stowaways in the cargo section. He could picture them flying through the air in the plane’s belly, with all the dogs barking in their cages nearby.

They would open a few oversize suitcases and eventually find a delicious meal that someone had managed to sneak past security. They would eat someone’s homemade roast and potatoes, give the scraps to the dogs, who were whining and howling like crazy. They would live on a remote island, eating coconuts and training monkeys to fish for them. They would grill the fish and use their bones to pick their teeth, leaving the scaly skin for the monkeys, forming a perfectly self-sufficient society.

The next week, when Lali still hadn’t come, he headed to the Dolphinarium on his own. The arena was gone. The construction crew’s trucks had come by and

demolished whatever remained, completely erasing it, as if it never existed at all. All that was left were a few blocks of stone and plaster, fragments of the painted pool. He picked up one of the pieces from the pool, on which a small, green fish was chasing after a scrap of kelp, and put it in his pocket. He felt like that fish, lost in the big sea, always chasing after scraps, getting tossed here and there by the waves, pushed to the side by the great white sharks and beluga whales, watching his small kelp daughter drift away from him. It was almost like the plot of that movie Finding Nemo, except that fish lived in an anemone. He imagined taking that one piece of painted rock he had found and multiplying it, using it to build a castle in the air, hovering right over Sheinkin Street, at the heart of Tel Aviv. The castle would be made up of hundreds of thousands of painted tiles, with all the sea creatures in the world, and in the middle of the living room would be a huge aquarium with stingrays and dolphins. Lali would have her very own room and a waterbed, and he would teach her to love sushi.

When Simcha returned home, there was a notice on his door telling him he had been evicted for not paying rent for months. Inside his apartment, his closet was overturned, clothes hung out of drawers. His bottles of air were gone. He stumbled outside to Bugrashov and saw that his furniture and belongings were tossed all over the street. His trolley was being hauled off by two teenagers, one of them sat inside it while the other pulled. A man with crumbs in his beard was trying on one of Simcha’s jeans jackets. He saw his bottles of air shattered in the green dumpster behind the terrible kosher Chinese fusion restaurant that served Kung Pao latkes, Peking kugel and General Tso’s knish. Once, he ordered their famous Fortune Cookie

When Simcha returned home, there was a notice on his door telling him he had been evicted for not paying rent for months.

Inside his apartment, his closet was overturned, clothes hung out of drawers. His bottles of air were gone.

Hamantaschen, and the note inside read: Don’t worry about money. The best things in life are free.

Simcha sat on the steps of his former home as people wandered by and took what they wished. In his pocket, he still had the piece of painted rock. A kid in baggy jeans and an oversize T-shirt rolled by slowly on his skateboard, looking oh-so-cool eating a slice of pizza and flicking his long, blonde hair back to get his bangs out of his eyes. Simcha asked him if he ever considered donating his hair to charity, and the kid gave him the finger. In the afternoon, Lali came by on her way back from school and sat next to him on the steps. Ever since the Second Intifada bus bombings years ago, he made sure Lali always walked home, never took public transportation. It was the one thing Simcha and his ex-wife agreed upon. Lali took off her ocean-themed school bag, which had pictures of octopi, whales, crabs and seahorses on it, and sighed, sounding older and wiser than her years.

“Why is all your stuff on the street?” she asked.

“I’m having a yard sale.”

“Cool! Can I buy anything?”

“Sure. What would you like?”

“How about this shoebox?” She held up a washed-out piece of cardboard from the street, which wasn’t even his.

“That’s too precious,” he winked at her.

“I’m not sure I want to part with it, actually.”

Lali brought him back to her house on Ahad Ha’am Street. Her mother was still at the beauty parlor. Simcha searched for his face in the photographs hanging on the walls and resting on cabinets and bedsides, but he wasn’t in any of them. Moshe Dayan was sleeping in an armchair in front of the television, one eye closed. The fishing channel was on. The floors were clean, the lights worked in every room, the shower didn’t have any hair in it, and the water from the tap was so hot it scalded his hand.

“Mom won’t be home for another hour,” she said. “When Moshe Dayan is alone, I always put the fishing channel on.

It calms him down.”

Simcha and Lali sat in her room on the soft, blue carpet. Stickers of sea creatures

were plastered all over her closet, and her bed frame was shaped like a wave. They listened to her sea-sounds playlist, which she put on every night before going to bed. The whooshing of the waves calmed Simcha. He placed the painted rock in the palm of her hand.

“Have you seen any dolphins around?” he said.

“A few.”

“Your bat mitzvah is coming up.”

Lali did not answer him. She was playing with the painted rock, making it swim across the carpet. “Where are you going to sleep, Daddy?”

“What do you mean? Anywhere. The Hilton, the Dolphinarium, a castle in the air. I have beds everywhere.”

“No, really,” she stopped playing and looked at him seriously, her forehead creased with worry.

Simcha wondered, for the first time, if, when they sold bottles of air to tourists, she was the one humoring him, rather

than the other way around. He told her that there were plenty of things that he could do to make money to buy a new house, where they could be together.

They could both join the circus and perform as a duo, jump through hoops of fire and glide through the air, held by invisible ropes. They could build a farm and raise chickens, paint their eggs golden and sell them for a fortune. They could collect strangely shaped rocks and sell them as rubble from the moon. They could break open oysters and take their pearls. They could train parrots to talk like the dead at funerals, for those loved ones who had missed the final conversation. They would say things like, “you were always my favorite son,” or “I kept a secret portion of the estate for you,” or even, “I forgive you.” He kept talking and talking, even though he knew that she had stopped listening anyway, and soon, she would stop believing him, just like he had stopped believing himself. M

OMER FRIEDLANDER Born in Jerusalem in 1994, Omer Friedlander grew up in Tel Aviv. His short story collection, The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, and his novel, The Glass Golem, are both forthcoming from Random House. He is a Starworks Fellow in Fiction at New York University. His work has been awarded first place in the Sonora Review Contest, the Baltimore Review Winter Contest and the Tom Howard/ John H. Reid Contest.

WANT MORE FICTION? Check out Moment’s new exclusive e-book, Good Karma.

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SUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

75

talk of the table

HÉLÈNE JAWHARA PINER / COURTESY OF THE MET

MEATBALLS CURSED BY JEWS

A

mong the pages of a medieval Middle Eastern cookbook lies a 600-year-old recipe with a title equal parts perplexing and alarming: “Meatballs Cursed

by Jews.” I stumbled upon this recipe when I was a doctoral student researching the diet of 13th-century Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. I was looking for recipes that explicitly mentioned the word “Jewish” in the title, and after reviewing the cookbooks of the West under Muslim rule, I became interested in 76

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the cookbooks of the Muslim East. And that’s when this surprising recipe title caught my eye.

The cookbook in question was the Kitab wasf al-at’ima al-mu’tada (which translates to “Description of Familiar Foods”). Written in Cairo, Egypt, the oldest known copy of the book dates back to 1373 and contains 420 recipes. It is one among many Eastern Muslim cookbooks of the Middle Ages—but it is the only one to include a dish that explicitly mentions Jews. Makabib la’nuha al-Yahud, or “Meatballs Cursed by Jews,” can be made

with any red meat, along with pistachios, cinnamon, parsley, mint, celery and eggs.

The meatballs are small—I suggest the size of a walnut—and are to be fried on each side for three minutes.

The cookbook is anonymous; no details about the authors, including their religion, are mentioned. Whoever they were, they provided no context for this baffling recipe title. We do not know why meatballs would be cursed, what such a curse might entail, or why Jews would be the ones doing the cursing.

Without answers to these questions, I

set about looking for other clues. During the period the cookbook was written, Egypt was ruled by Mameluk Muslims, who wanted to safeguard the purity of their faith. The existence of 14th-century Jewish communities in Egypt is well established, although the precise number is unknown. It is, however, known that during that time, Jews were arriving from the Muslim West, mainly from Spain; Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher, also known as the Rambam, was one of those migrants.

But why would the authors of “Meatballs Cursed by Jews” choose to call out Jews in this recipe title? We don’t know their background—could they have been Jewish? But obviously they must have had some sort of interest in Jewish culture and culinary habits. We also do not know what “cursed” means in this context. The name may have simply been a way to emphasize Jews’ unique culinary laws, or maybe Jews wanted to distinguish themselves from cultures that prepared their meatballs differently. Maybe “cursed” even recalls some sort of disastrous event, such as disease or poisoning, involving this dish.

The recipe’s directions provide a few hints: First, the recipe says that the red meat should be boiled and tenderized, and then the veins must be removed.

This instruction is interesting because after meat is boiled, it should no longer contain blood—but we are still told to remove the veins, a step that perhaps alludes to kashrut, the system of Jewish dietary laws. On the other hand, both Jews and Muslims are prohibited from consuming blood, so we don’t know for sure which religious dietary restrictions this step is meant to accommodate.

The next piece of the puzzle appears 400 years later, in the 18th-century copy of the same cookbook. In this later copy, the meatball recipe is still there, but the title has changed; the term “Cursed” has disappeared. Instead of “Meatballs Cursed by Jews,” the recipe is called Makabib al-Yahud, or “Meatballs of the Jews.” As might be expected, the cookbook leaves the title change unexplained.

There are several other differences

MEATBALLS CURSED BY JEWS Recipe included in Hélène Jawhara Piñer’s new cookbook, Sephardi: Cooking the History Time: 45 minutes Makes 25

ingredients

Depiction of a servant preparing medicine from honey from a popular medieval cookbook. Published in Baghdad in 1224.

between the two editions. While the 14th-century edition directs us to remove the veins from the meat before grinding, the 18th-century edition instead says to remove the tendons. With this change, it seems likely that the recipe is written with the laws of kashrut in mind, since eating the sciatic nerve is forbidden. And while the original recipe calls for red meat, often used in meatball recipes in Eastern cookbooks, the newer recipe calls for lean meat, often specified in Jewish recipes. Another early Muslim cookbook, the Kitab altabih (which translates as simply “The Cookbook”), dates back to 13th-century Spain and includes six recipes that use the word “Jewish,” all of which are made with partridges, chicken or lamb, all lean meats.

While so much about this recipe is unknown, there’s one thing we can be sure of: “Meatballs Cursed by Jews” are delicious. They are easy to make in advance, as they stay soft and juicy, and can be served in a small bowl or on skewers for a buffet.

These meatballs also can be easily shared, making them perfect for Shabbat and other special occasions.

BY HÉLÈNE JAWHARA PIÑER

1

pound ground lean meat (i.e., chicken)

2

tablespoons finely ground pistachios

1/4

teaspoon cinnamon

1/4

teaspoon black pepper

1/2

teaspoon salt

1/3

cup chopped parsley

10

chopped mint leaves

10

chopped celery leaves

1

egg, beaten

1/4

cup bread crumbs (optional)

1/2

cup neutral oil

2

teaspoon sesame oil (for frying)

instructions

1. If not already ground, take the lean meat and pound it to tenderize. Grind it finely in a chopper.

2. Chop the pistachios and add them to the meat. Mix. Add the cinnamon and the black pepper.

3. Mix with a spoon and add the salt.

Chop the parsley, mint and the celery leaves. Add them to the meat.

4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg. Mix it with the meat. Refrigerate for 10 minutes.

5. Pour the oil(s) into a frying pan and heat over medium heat.

6. Take the meat mixture and form small, walnut-size balls. You can roll them in breadcrumbs if you want. Fry them for 3 minutes without moving them. Then, turn them over and cook for another 3 minutes until golden.

7. Serve and enjoy.

literary moment

BOOK REVIEW ROBERT SIEGEL

GREED, DRUGS AND PHILANTHROPY

ANNA SHVETS

I

n this time of corrective unnamings—to remove traces of admiration or gratitude for the morally reevaluated—the names of unrepentant slaveholders, Confederate generals, contemporary sexual predators and other assorted wrongdoers have been erased or proposed for erasure from college dorms, military bases, city streets and more.

In that effort, the Sackler family presents unusual complications. First, they are not a single wrongdoer but a clan: three psychiatrist brothers born to a Jewish immigrant family of modest means, their multiple wives, ex-wives, children and at least one grandchild. Second, their wrongdoing involved so many accomplices as to deplete the national eraser supply. Third, the name Sackler became widely known not when they made their money but when they gave a good deal of it away to philanthropy. It is as though people knew of only the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller University, not Henry Ford

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or John D. Rockefeller. The Sacklers’ philanthropy won them not just names on buildings but honorary academic degrees and even honorary knighthoods.

Two generations of the Sackler family made billions advertising and marketing pharmaceuticals, working the intersection of medicine and commerce. Along the way, they took advantage of physicians who pocketed speaking fees in exchange for vouching for the safety of drugs that were potentially unsafe; federal regulators who coddled them and their enterprises (and in one notable case went on to a lucrative career with them after a discreet interval); and a legal system that, on everything from patents to bankruptcy, tilted every litigious playing field their way. They enjoyed the services of high-priced, well-placed advocates such as the pre-Trumpified Rudolph Giuliani, Washington superlawyer Clark Gifford and litigator and sometime prosecutor Mary Jo White.

The most successful product of their family-controlled firm, Purdue Pharma,

was OxyContin, the powerful opioid oxycodone in pill form, coated with a substance that slowed the release of the drug and thus made it, according to the Sacklers and their army of sales reps, non-addictive. A subsequent epidemic of addiction to opioids, including OxyContin, put the lie to that spurious claim. Even so, the Sacklers continued to campaign for the use of powerful painkillers—once reserved for patients in the agonizing death throes of cancer—for people suffering from back pain and broken limbs. By the 1990s, American medicine was swinging away from a decades-long aversion to using addictive drugs like morphine for all but their dying patients to an acknowledgment that pain was being undertreated and ought to be recognized as a vital sign. The Sacklers’ campaigning for OxyContin was a sign of the times.

While it was hardly the only opioid unleashed on the market (and on the street), the company’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin and its denial that

addiction was linked to the drug’s potency made Purdue Pharma a proud leader in destigmatizing opioids when that leadership was a cause for pride—and a prime culprit when the rising use of prescription drugs as street drugs became undeniable.

When OxyContin’s coating was toughened to make the pill harder for addicts to crack and cook, many turned to the next best thing, heroin or fentanyl.

Having kept their business within the family, the Sacklers escaped scrutiny from stockholders and outside directors. Secrecy kept their business histories largely unknown to the public, while the name Sackler became very well known for the family’s extensive philanthropy—hence the present wave of unnamings.

The story of the Sacklers, as Patrick Radden Keefe relates it in his superb book Empire of Pain, is primarily about two men: Arthur Sackler and his nephew Richard Sackler. Arthur, born in 1913, was the eldest of the three brothers. The quintessential first-generation American go-getter, Arthur started selling advertising while still in high school and continued doing so in and after medical school. After turning to psychiatry, he managed two careers, physician and medical adman. At Creedmoor, then a sprawling state psychiatric hospital in Queens, New York, he was repelled by the routine resort to electroconvulsive therapy (aka shock treatment) to control patients. He became convinced that mental illness was caused by brain chemistry and that drugs could achieve better results while inflicting less pain. He conducted research with the organic compound histamine that demonstrated as much and permitted many Creedmoor patients to be deinstitutionalized. Arthur Sackler became not merely a psychiatrist but a renowned researcher, a celebrity scientist.

He was also a collector. He began acquiring expensive Asian art in massive quantities, a collection that he donated to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s.

Few people, even those on the receiving end of his philanthropy, seemed to understand or care how exactly he had amassed

his fortune, which was not from his research but through his work running an advertising agency that specialized in drugs.

In the 1960s, one client of that agency, Roche, launched two drugs that each became in turn the most successful prescription drugs on the market, the tranquilizers Librium and Valium. The Roche chemist who invented them received, without complaint, Roche’s standard $1 per patent and, after the drugs’ phenomenal successes had been manifest, two bonuses of $10,000 each. Sackler, in return for advertising the drugs, negotiated a series of sales-based bonuses that amounted to a commission and amassed a fortune. While seldom publicly associated with the drug, he was in fact Arthur Sackler, Valium advertising magnate.

To say he cut corners in business is an understatement. An early ad campaign he ran for one drug displayed the names and addresses of physicians who touted the drug’s use. An enterprising journalist discovered that the doctors were fictitious. Sackler published a newspaper for doctors (for many years without publicly acknowledging his ownership) whose articles promoted the drugs his advertising firm was pushing. He secretly held a stake in his best friend’s ad company, ostensibly his rival. That way, when competing drug companies had competing medicines on the market and the same ad agency could not ethically represent both, Sackler could still profit from both. Worst among his offenses was his persistent denial of claims that Valium was being abused. Drug abuse, according to Sackler, was entirely the fault of the abusers. The drug was innocent.

Keefe quotes him as saying that people who encountered problems with the drug “must have mixed it with alcohol or cocaine.” A syndicated ask-the-doctor column in 1957 offered the reassurance that “tranquilizers were not making us a nation of drug addicts.” The source of that judgment was Dr. Mortimer Sackler, Arthur’s brother and business partner.

By the time Arthur Sackler’s nephew Richard had launched OxyContin in 1995 as head of the family-owned drug company Purdue Pharma, Arthur was dead and

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

By Patrick Radden Keefe Doubleday; 560 pp. ; $32.50

memorialized by museums and universities at home and abroad. The Sackler name was credited with the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s monumental acquisition of the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur and the Smithsonian’s creation of its museum of Asian art. Sackler gifts often credited the brothers or other close family members in addition to himself.

In Keefe’s telling, Richard Sackler, born in 1945, championed OxyContin even more recklessly than his uncle had done for Valium. Once again, the abuse of a dangerous drug was dismissed as a moral failing of the abusers, not a risk posed by the drug itself; most addiction was described as merely “pseudo-addiction.” Sales reps were urged to concentrate on doctors and pharmacies that were high-volume customers, counting on the most irresponsible if not criminal figures

Secrecy kept their business histories unknown to the public, while the name Sackler became very well known for the family’s extensive philanthropy.

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is a problem, whether it’s Arthur Sackler’s or all the Sackler names.”

The elder Sackler’s daughter and his widow (wife number three) argued From fiction to philosophy, and from publicly that the founding Sackler, ancient history to the latest the researcher, collector and philanthropist, bore no responsibility for the show (or Supreme Court “OxySacklers” who succeeded him decision), the JRB and that gifts bearing his name should brings you great continue to do so. The Smithsonian, writers who review however, made the subtle gesture of the Jewish world implicitly demoting its late patron, “rebranding” the Arthur M. Sackler with deep Gallery and its neighbor the Freer knowledge Gallery of Art as the National Museum of and ready Asian Art. (Confession: My own donation wit. to the Freer was to voice that gallery’s tour guide app, “Freer Thinking.”) The Baruch Spinoza and Louvre dropped the name of its Sackler Philip Roth from Summer 2020 Wing, and the Met placed the name of its Sackler Wing (home to the Temple of Dendur) under review.

Visit www.jewishreviewofbooks.com or call 1-877-753-0337.

One may argue in response to his defenders that Arthur Sackler set a swashJewish Culture. Cover to Cover. buckling, sales-before-all tone to the business that merited his posthumous banishment. In fact, when it came to the in their professions to pump more and There is a tragic dimension to the Sackler name, the bottom line was the more OxyContin into the market through Sackler saga. Arthur was a man of immense bottom line. When he, or his family, gave dubious prescriptions. energy, talent and passion, even if seriously to Columbia, Harvard, Tufts, Oxford, the When lawsuits were brought by the deficient in the scruples department. It is Met or the Smithsonian, no one seems to families of OxyContin addicts who died not clear (to me) how exceptional Arthur have done the least due diligence about the of overdoses, as well as by state attorneys Sackler’s relentless flackery was in the fortune reaped from pushing Valium as a general, the Sacklers’ lawyers outplayed heyday of Madison Avenue, or, as they say harmless cure-all, with paid boosters mastheir critics. In a 2007 federal civil case, on the website of the Medical Advertising querading as science-guided physicians, the company was fined $600 million Hall of Fame where he was among the or an ad agency rag masquerading as an for “misdemeanor misbranding.” Keefe inaugural inductees, Medicine Avenue. independent medical newspaper. When quotes Purdue Pharma’s CFO being That such a pantheon even exists implies his successors sniffed at the moral shortoverheard saying privately: “That’s been a normalization of the trade that he had comings of people who became addicted in the bank for years. That’s nothing plied with such great success. Nor is it clear to OxyContin and denied any responto us.” Three faithful family retainers (to me) how so many doctors could prefer sibility for the magnitude of the current copped pleas and after serving sentences the self-righteous and self-serving claims opioid problem, their money and their received millions in payment. No Sackler of sales reps to the evidence of opioid abuse name became toxic, dispelling the aura of admitted to any wrongdoing, none served crowding their local ERs. unassailable virtue conferred by the famtime, and company documents were Was Arthur Sackler worthy of the ily’s generosity. Patrick Radden Keefe has sealed. Ultimately, in an infuriating coda same unnaming as his nephew? The done a huge service by documenting the to the Sackler saga, Keefe reports that author quotes Dean Harris Berman of Sacklers’ behavior, having gotten to much the family—as the sole owners of Purdue Tufts Medical School when his univer- of the family’s internal communications. It Pharma—milked the firm of its assets, sity, pressed by protesters and students, is a disgrace that so few people managed moved the company headquarters to a de-Sacklerized in 2019: “Our students find to look beyond the bottom line when the friendly jurisdiction, declared bankruptcy it objectionable to walk into a building that damage was being done. there and walked away from a growing says Sackler on it…” They found the name, wave of contempt for their clan, legally said Dr. Berman, “incongruous with the Robert Siegel is a special literary contributor and financially unscathed. mission of the school…The Sackler name to Moment.

LITERARY MOMENT

BOOK REVIEW CARLIN ROMANO

A WRITER IRREVERENT EVEN IN DEATH

Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Essays

By Jenny Diski Bloomsbury; 432 pp. $28

Even those familiar with the prolific English novelist and essayist Jenny Diski (1947-2016) don’t think of her as primarily a “Jewish” writer. Diski wrote regularly for the London Review of Books (LRB) and enjoyed a much higher profile in the U.K. than here, although a fair number of her 11 novels and eight previous nonfiction works also found U.S. publishers. The arrival of Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?, a posthumous, just-released collection of her essays, offers a fresh look at a writer whose Jewishness matters from front to back, from first line to last. The essays prove it’s possible for a writerly voice to be both utterly sui generis and yet recognizably Jewish.

Secular Jewish, that is. By turns ironic, sarcastic, unsentimental, argumentative, solipsistic, ingenious, fearless and narcissistic, Diski could also, when engaged with the tradition, become appropriately

somber. Her shorter Jewish-themed pieces connect with her novels to reveal a writer irreverent toward Jewish theology, yet respectful of Jewish suffering.

Diski published more than 200 essays in the London Review of Books alone. The new collection gathers 33 of the best, selected by the review’s longtime editor and owner, Mary-Kay Wilmers, and prefaced by her remembrances. Wilmers gave Diski luxurious space for decades— the assignments purported to be book reviews—and the author returned coruscating, inimitable essays, with the book reviews tucked somewhere inside.

They soar on many unexpected topics: Howard Hughes, Sonia Orwell, spiders, Nietzsche and his sister.

The sensational details of Diski’s biography could fill a streaming miniseries (or several). Her charismatic con-man father abandoned her when she was six and again at age 11. Her unstable mother unraveled in Jenny’s early teens.

Both sexually abused her, and Diski chose not to see her mother after she turned 18.

Diski ended up in and out of foster care. Soon after she turned 14, an American acquaintance raped her. She attempted suicide more than once and was committed to multiple “loony bins.”

Then, in an utterly unique plot twist, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing quasi-adopted her—taking the 15-year-old Diski into her home at the urging of her son Peter, Diski’s classmate. Their relationship evolved into a kind of love-hate imbroglio that lasted decades. Lessing put more than one unflattering portrayal of Diski into her novels, and Diski described Lessing as “the least motherly, least warm person I’ve ever known.”

Given Diski’s volatile history, it’s no wonder that her novels are startling and hard to classify. In Like Mother, a child born without a brain serves as the chief narrator. In the supposedly feminist novel Nothing Natural, the female protagonist invites degrading sadomasochism. Skating to Antarctica combines an actual travelogue about the continent and a Mommie Dearest memoir. Diski’s

final, most idiosyncratic turn was the series of brutally revealing essays she wrote in the LRB after her diagnosis of lung cancer in 2014—a public death march in print that mixed descriptions of her decline with get-even memories of Lessing. The essays became the book In Gratitude, published a week before her death. Its Janus-faced title proved one last instance of Diski’s astringent wit.

In that book, her sardonic tone, the blunt voice of the Jewish non-believer, held fast even as she grappled with her own death. Her chief initial grievance centered on being forced into caving to her greatest enemy: cliché. She’d have to write “another fucking cancer diary” even though she could think of “no novel responses.” That response itself meant she’d “committed [her] first platitude.”

Diski also forbade herself any deathbed leap of faith. She took comfort from Vladimir Nabokov’s notion that “our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” She added: “When I find myself trembling at the prospect of extinction, I can steady myself by thinking of the abyss that I have already experienced.”

Three pieces in this new posthumous collection hint at the range of her Jewish attitudes, from impudent to soberly appreciative of the tragic angle on life imposed by being Jewish. In “The Girl in the Attic,” about a new and unexpurgated edition of Anne Frank’s diary, Diski compares the new text with Otto Frank’s first, sanitized version to put forth an author tougher, flintier, more acerbic than what she sees as the Anne of public imagination. In this reading, Anne emerges as a writer somewhat like Diski herself.

Diski gets there by a characteristically winding train of thought. “I wonder,” the

“I wonder if to be Jewish is to be by definition lonely in the world—not as a result of the history, but on account of the theology.”

SUMMER ISSUE 2021 | MOMENT

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JENNY DISKI

LITERARY MOMENT

essay begins, “if to be Jewish is to be by definition lonely in the world—not as a result of the history, but on account of the theology.” The core problem, she suggests, is the aloofness of the Jewish God, who is “notorious for evading questions directed at him…Too busy with the overall scheme of things, perhaps. He’ll give out ten blanket rules, but won’t tell you why your life seems to be so bloody difficult lately. The problem of the senior executive without the common touch.” Catholics can turn to an array of “undermanagers”—“a saint for almost everything that ails you.” Jews don’t have this option, so they idealize Anne Frank. Her wry conclusion: “Anne Frank is the only Jewish saint.”

In “Did Jesus Walk on Water Because He Couldn’t Swim?,” a playful Diski— ostensibly reviewing a Raphael Patai study titled The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Time—zestfully picks apart the logic of Genesis in light of midrashic explanations. (A famous question: Did fish survive the Flood?

Midrashic answer: God made the waters boiling hot, so the fish perished too.) A third essay, “The Khugistic Sandal,” supposedly a review of a cultural-studies volume called Jews and Shoes, hints at her steely views on Israeli politics.

“Khugistic sandals” were Israeli pioneer shoes, named after the commune that originally produced them, but renamed “Biblical sandals” in the 1930s to reiterate, Diski writes, “the ancestral link between contemporary Jews and the land given by God to Abraham.” Diski complains that the symbolic shoes are “never described as being symbolically on the necks of the Canaanites or the Palestinians. Actually, there’s barely an indication in these essays of there being anyone on the land, though the various aliyahs by Jewish immigrants and the meaning of what they wore on their feet are described in meticulous detail.”

That’s as politically caustic as Diski gets in these essays. Her more common register, best evinced in her novels Only Human (2000) and After These Things (2004), is riffing on the Jewish God and Bible from a location one might 82

SUMMER ISSUE 2021

Jenny Diski in the 1970s.

In an utterly unique plot twist, the Nobel Prizewinning novelist Doris Lessing quasi-adopted her. charitably describe as the British Catskills. (Imagine the troubled Yahweh of Jack Miles’s Pulitzer-winning God: A Biography, jazzed up by Philip Roth or Joseph Heller.) In Only Human, a smart-alecky annotation of Genesis 11-22, the narrator, a frustrated, moody God, perplexed by the behavior of his creatures, competes with Sarai for Abram’s love. In After These Things, Diski continues the biblical tale, creating interior lives for Isaac, Rebekah, Leah, Jacob and Esau. In both books, the women, particularly the long-suffering Sarai, come off far better than the men.

In a feisty Daily Telegraph interview, Diski clarified her goal for both books as secular midrash with a vengeance: “If it’s all right for the rabbis to reinterpret it, it’s all right for me…I wanted to retrieve

the Bible from stupidity, to take it back as an essentially human story.” She once told the Guardian, “I can’t even get close to what they call faith.”

Given the sorrows in both tales, Diski, one might add, also retrieved an essentially Jewish story. In those novels, and in these essays, she remains master of a key element of her secular tradition—keeping eyes wide open for danger coming down the pike. “One thing about being Jewish,” she began an essay for the Guardian, “is we never forget there’s a downside.”

On that score, she spoke from experience.

Carlin Romano, Moment’s critic-at-large, teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

BOOK REVIEW SAMUEL HEILMAN

WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH IN WILLIAMSBURG

A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg

By Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper Yale University Press, 408 pp., $30

How did the Satmar Hasidim come to dominate the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg? And why there?

In this meticulously researched new book, Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper offer a revealing and nuanced portrait of the place where the Satmars, who are today the largest American-based Hasidic group, reconstituted themselves after the Holocaust. From a small “surviving remnant,” as these Holocaust refugees called themselves, they reimagined Williamsburg as a staging area where they would renew and fortify themselves while preparing for the coming of the Messiah.

Founded by Yoelish Teitelbaum in the city of Satu Mare, located in what was then known as the Hungarian “Unterland,” in the years following World War I, Satmar Hasidism was an outgrowth of the more-famous Sigheter dynasty, into which Teitelbaum had been born as the youngest son with few prospects. After

the Holocaust, the remaining community found itself having to relocate to a place that it and many other Hasidic groups had resisted for years—America, the land of promise to many, but to them a trefene medina, an unholy place where Jews might survive but where they were certain Judaism would not.

The authors of this elegantly written book explain how the group ended up making its new home in a “neighborhood named in honor of Jonathan Williams, a grandnephew of Benjamin Franklin who first surveyed its territory in the early 1800s, with streets named after members of the Second Continental Congress” and turned it into their own “Jerusalem of America.” There, they developed a way of life unimaginable to those earlier Puritans, who also had hoped to find a place to worship as they pleased because their home in Europe proved inhospitable to them.

Teitelbaum rejected Zionism, which some considered salvation, as being instead a heretical creation by unbelievers and Jewish rebels. He blamed it for the Holocaust, which he argued was God’s retribution for the sin that the Zionists had placed on the heads of Jewry. Leaving Israel—where he had found safety but no success in rebuilding his movement after Zionist agents helped him escape from Europe—he ended up in Brooklyn, a place he called a province in the “kingdom of grace,” which he now claimed America had become. There, he began to reconstruct his following and wait for the Messiah to bring the redemption and a return to the Holy Land, but only when God saw fit.

Although he believed he could adapt to America without changing the traditional ways that he championed—and although he would do so by creating a cultural “fortress”—nonetheless, as Deutsch and Casper demonstrate beautifully, Satmar Hasidim did in fact change. They learned to make use of government help to sustain their way of life, managing, for example, to get “Hasidim—but not other Jews— added to an official list of ‘disadvantaged minority groups’ that were eligible for federal assistance programs.” They learned to work with other local ethnic

They remained separated by what they believed was their Hasidic wall of virtues. groups politically, even as they stayed separate from them culturally.

While other American Jews moved out of inner-city places such as Williamsburg in the 1960s and 1970s and “became white folks,” as one anthropologist put it, Satmar Hasidim at first rejected key socioeconomic markers associated with whiteness that other Jews had attained—higher education, higher incomes, professionalization, small families, migration to the suburbs. Instead, they had large families, no college, poverty and little if any professionalization. Unlike other Jews, Satmar Hasidim moved into public housing and signed up for welfare. In a wonderful reference, the authors attest to this by quoting the rapper Jay-Z, who, in his memoir Decoded, describes growing up in the housing projects near Williamsburg where there were “strictly blacks and Puerto Ricans, maybe some Dominicans, rough Arabs…[and] pockets of Hasidim.”

For the Satmar Hasidim, Williamsburg at the time was perfect for their needs. They did not want to assimilate to the America around them as their “white” Jewish brothers and sisters had. Living in “pockets” surrounded by inner-city minorities, they believed there was no risk that their members would want to become like the neighbors (even if they learned from them to defend their turf and get government help). They remained separated by what they believed was their Hasidic wall of virtues, their customs, their Yiddish language and their sense of community.

They were correct, at least for a while.

What they did not count on was the gentrification of the area, or the things “in the air” that got past those walls. As Williamsburg attracted creative types and others drawn to its low rents, large lofts, proximity to Manhattan, public transport and (though the authors don’t mention it) the safety of the streets in the nearby Continued on page 85

LITERARY MOMENT

BOOK REVIEW RACHEL B. GROSS

BUILDING COMMUNITY ONE TILE AT A TIME

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture

By Annelise Heinz Oxford; 360 pp.; $34.95

At the Museum at Eldridge Street’s Egg Rolls, Egg Creams and Empanadas street festival—a celebration of Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican communities held each summer (pre-pandemic) on New York’s Lower East Side—groups of Chinese Americans and American Jewish women play mahjong side by side, sometimes pausing to teach younger festivalgoers how to play. The players line up their “hands” of decorated tiles in front of them, then work together to build up a winning square from the tiles.

The distinctive clicks of their tiles are drowned out by the din of klezmer musicians, Chinese dragon dancers, Bomba drummers and exuberant children making crafts, but the parallel games stand out. The players intersperse their play with conversation, but they have an intensity of purpose different from the raucous street festival surrounding them. Annelise Heinz’s new book on the 84

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cultural history of mahjong explains how this game is representative of two of the cultures on display in this festival, why each group takes it seriously and why the two groups play separately rather than together.

Although the book is an academic history, Heinz’s writing is inviting and free of scholarly jargon. It is my favorite kind of historical writing, one that uses a single cultural artifact, the game of mahjong, as a prism to reveal larger social issues—among others, race, class, gender, consumer culture and respectability. For instance, Heinz deftly demonstrates that mahjong helps us interpret the concept of leisure in the 20th-century United States: Who was allowed to be at leisure? Who had to fight to attain leisure? And who had leisure forced upon them?

Mahjong began as one of many gambling games played by Chinese men in the late 19th century. American promoters and travelers brought it to the United States in the 1920s, where it exploded in popularity amid the faddish Orientalism of the decade. While Heinz reminds us that all kinds of people have played mahjong, she focuses on several specific groups that used mahjong to construct their communities: fashionable white women in the 1920s, Chinese immigrants of the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese migrants detained at Angel Island between 1910–1940, Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, and mid-century and postwar American Jewish women.

As Heinz explains, mahjong was particularly well-suited to community-building in part because of the rhythm of the game, which has built-in pauses that encourage conversation.

After each round of play, every 15 to 20 minutes, tiles must be shuffled and stacked, providing a longer break than shuffling a deck of cards. Ruth Unger, the Jewish woman who for three decades served as president of the National Mah Jongg League, remarked, “It’s not that you’ve left [your] problems behind, it’s that everybody has time to think about them and come up with solutions!”

Those interested in American Jewish

history will be drawn to the final chapters of the book, which focus on how Jewish women experienced and changed the game. But Heinz also suggests that we cannot fully understand Jewish women’s mid-century experience of mahjong without understanding its place in U.S. culture earlier in the century. When postwar Jewish housewives carved out time and space for themselves to play mahjong—turning kitchens and other family rooms that were their workplaces into temporary spaces of female leisure— they built, knowingly or unknowingly, on a long history of Americans using mahjong to forge group identities.

Perhaps most powerfully, this background shows how the Orientalist thinking and visual culture of the time— which imagined a generalized East as “feminine, luxurious and backward”— shaped those American Jewish women’s relation to the game. Heinz’s careful attention to the material aspects of mahjong—its production history and the beauty and feel of the tiles, with flowers, Chinese text and other Chinese imagery—helps us understand how images of the exotic East functioned in Americans’ everyday lives. Although Heinz does not do so herself, we might compare Jewish women’s enthusiasm for mahjong to American Jews’ enthusiasm for Chinese food. In both cases, 20th-century American Jews took a Chinese-American product and claimed it as their own with a striking possessiveness. As Ashkenazi

When postwar Jewish housewives carved out time and space for themselves to play mahjong, they built, knowingly or unknowingly, on a long history of Americans using mahjong to forge group identities.

American Jews struggled with mixed feelings about coming to be seen as more “white,” Jewish women signified both their white Americanness and their distinctiveness by playing an Americanized Chinese game.

At a moment when mahjong, like nearly everything else in American life, has come under scrutiny for questions of authenticity and appropriation, Heinz’s careful cultural history is particularly welcome. As Heinz reminds us, searches for “authenticity” in the American imagination have often been tied to items associated with the exotic, the primitive and the past. Measuring the supposed authenticity of any iteration of mahjong—evaluating its origin and essence to determine which group of people “owns” it—is not the most useful way to understand the game.

Rather, Heinz takes a step back, looking carefully at how Americans have seen mahjong as alternately American and foreign, ancient and modern, respectable and dissolute. These telling contradictions reveal lasting trends in how Americans have seen themselves and how they have defined themselves against others.

Heinz resists giving us a single origin story of mahjong. Instead, we see how the game and its cultural meanings changed as mahjong was continually invented and reinvented throughout the 20th century. The game’s association with one group, such as Chinese immigrants, affected its reception by other groups, such as fashionable young women of the 1920s or midcentury Jewish homemakers.

How we spend our time matters. What we do when we are at leisure shapes the kinds of people we are, the stories we tell about who we are and the communities we are a part of. Mahjong: A Cultural History helps us take play seriously, without losing the fun of it.

Rachel B. Gross is assistant professor of Jewish studies at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice.

Continued from 83 Hasidic enclave, it absorbed the culture these “artists,” as the Hasidim called them, carried with them. Along with the cultural threat, the newcomers also offered opportunity—for commercial and residential real estate development. Hasidim who had purchased many of those properties for their own residential expansion were able to take advantage of rising real estate values; although the higher prices made the neighborhood expansion of Hasidic housing too expensive, as they had for other minority groups, they also made many Hasidic landlords and developers quite wealthy. The Satmars had to decide between this substantial new income stream and the dangers of letting a foreign culture infiltrate the literal walls of their self-imposed ghettos. Meanwhile, their other sources of income, the diamond business and the apparel trade, were in decline and moving elsewhere.

This admirable book details each step in these and other events that shaped Satmar life in Williamsburg, carefully describing the ambivalence these changes brought about. Of course, the effort to remain unchanged—an ideological hope—was always doomed. Change, like time and tide, is unstoppable. What gentrification did not bring, and what the Satmar managed to hold at arm’s length—through efforts to keep out television and movies, create their own press, insist on private education and use Yiddish as the lingua franca—ultimately crept in anyway as a result of the internet, smartphones and the Satmars’ need to support their way of life and growing families.

Moreover, the split in the Satmar world over succession (which I wrote about in my book Who Will Lead Us?) has also had a profound impact, creating two parallel and separate sects that follow two rival Satmar leaders. The ongoing spread of Satmars to build new communities in other places has likewise been transformative. Finally, the last year of the pandemic brought a flood of changes in everything from community institutions and collective life to the authority structures within the Hasidic world.

This book is a marvelous way to catch up on what the Satmar Hasidim created in Williamsburg and to better comprehend what is likely to come in the days ahead. There are many fine insights here, intelligent analyses and well-crafted descriptions. The book shows us “how far Hasidic Williamsburg had come from its early days,” as the authors say in their conclusion. While they were waiting for the Messiah, these seekers of a fortress in Brooklyn became increasingly changed.

If the Messiah ever gets to Brooklyn, who knows whether he will recognize them after all.

Samuel Heilman is emeritus professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

His many books include Who Will Lead Us?: The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America.

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Continued from page 35 District and Supreme courts. With an eye to the long term, the Israel Law and Liberty Forum is already training cohorts of young lawyers and jurists, as the Federalist Society does, in the hope that they will transform the entire judicial structure. “The left and center-left treat the Court as if it were the responsible adult in society, but that is only because the current justices are mostly from their own camp,” says Gil Bringer, one of Israel Law and Libery Forum’s founders.

“But the right will still have power and will appoint the judges that will rule according to our views. How will the left feel then about the ‘responsible adult’?”

Kohelet was founded by the U.S.-based Tikvah Fund, a conservative think tank and activist forum, which was established in the 1990s and describes itself as “a philanthropic foundation and ideas institution,” whose goals are to “support the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state” and bring “Jewish thinking and leaders into conversation with Western political, moral, and economic thought.” Kohelet is large-

he multi-pronged and persistent attacks and the changing political zeitgeist have

already taken their toll on the Court.

In the past, the institution enjoyed wide public support from all sectors of society. But in mid-January, a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute revealed that only 42 percent of the Israeli public currently has faith in the judicial system.

It’s critical, says Beinisch, that the Court maintain its respect and legitimacy with the public and the legislative and executive branches no matter which government is in power. “The judges know this, and so they are very careful,” she says. “For example, the Court has never ruled on the legality of the settlements in the West Bank, even though international law sees them as illegal, because there is no consensus on this within Israel.” In essence, the judges recognize the pragmatic need to balance the rule of law with majority views.

Like the physical act of balancing, democracy and its defense require constant calibration. It remains to be seen in which direction Israel will swing. M

of them. (His own home is known as the Stephen Williams House, a Federal-style mansion at the other end of the block, on the corner of Liberty and Barnard. It was there that he raised his family.) My townhouse is at the end of the row of six, and as I walked over to the side, a narrow passage between the free-standing house next door and my building revealed that my townhouse’s eastern wall was made of Savannah grey brick, famous these days for its rough beauty. The bricks range in color from faded gray to dark brown, and in their lack of uniformity lies their contemporary charm. Even when they were new, no two were alike. They were handmade of clay on the Hermitage Plantation, three miles upriver from Savannah. The hands that made them belonged to enslaved people, and if you look closely, you might be able to spot, on some of them, heartbreaking dents made by thumbs.

This look, so popular now, didn’t impress in the 19th century, and I suddenly realized my townhouse was made of brick covered in stucco that had been scored to look like stone, a common practice at the time. Congenitally naïve, I only now noticed that the building’s front, like many of its era in the historic district, was actually an illusion.

That’s what I ended up doing with Solomon Cohen and his family. I looked hard at the façade, not just the one Solomon built to smooth over all those slave-made bricks, but the figurative one he constructed in speeches and letters to pretty up the institution of slavery itself. And I looked behind the heroic cardboard cutout that has been made of Gratz Cohen to find a tortured, sensitive young man whose motives for going to fight were conflicted, and who was, in the end, waging a personal war, the true enemy being himself. M

ly funded by the American Friends of the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Philadelphia, PAbased nonprofit organization with a U.S. tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status. According to The Times of Israel, the American Friends of the Kohelet Policy Forum has received millions of dollars in donations, but it provides no public information about its donors.

On the left, many of the civil society groups that have petitioned the Court in order to move the democratic agenda forward and who are now seeking to overturn the Nation-State Law have also received funding from American and international and governmental groups, such as the New Israel Fund, the Ford Foundation and the European Union. Israel’s right contends that these groups are interfering in Israeli politics, despite the outside influences that have fueled its own rise—and its campaign against the Court.

T

Continued from page 43 its two newly elected senators, including Alexander Stephens, who’d argued that slavery and Black inferiority formed the foundation of the Confederacy he’d served as vice-president, were allowed by the Republican-controlled Congress to take their seats. The Continent must have been a place where Solomon and Miriam could ennoble their son’s death the way they couldn’t back home, at least not yet. In Europe, Solomon, who would outlive Gratz by a decade, noted in his journal, “every step you take is among memorials of the mighty dead.”

i remember the first time i stood

before the building on Liberty Street with a key to my new condo in my pocket, admiring the stacked blocks of white stone picturesquely streaked with historic grime. Solomon Cohen developed the entire row of townhouses on the block, six 86

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