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BOOKS

Reading with Robert Siegel: Proust and the Jews In This Hour: Heschel’s Writings in Nazi Germany and London Exile review by Carlin Romano The World of Aufbau: Hitler’s Refugees in America review by Jenna Weissman Joselit

103 CARTOON CONTEST 104 SPICE BOX

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The prolific feminist activist and literary icon has written everything from prophetic sci-fi novels to poetry to prayers. At 83, she is still furiously writing, but has had to give up marching. And as readers of her poems know, she loves to grow vegetables.

We ask Jewish thinkers, educators, writers and artists including Judith Shulevitz, Daniel Libeskind, Dara Horn, Ruth Wisse, Yossi Klein Halevi, Edward Hirsch, Wendy Shalit and others for recommendations. Except for the Five Books of Moses, there’s little agreement.

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F ROM THE E D I TOR | NA DINE EP S T E I N

What to Do About Sick Civil Discourse Syndrome

“I did everything I could in my life to be immune to hatred, because hatred is a cancer.”—Elie Wiesel

I first noticed what I’ve termed Sick Civil Discourse Syndrome (SCDS) on a digital platform around 2007, when my Moment inbox was flooded by hundreds of hateful emails insisting that then-presidential candidate Barack “Hussein” Obama was a Muslim and/or born in Kenya. Some of the emails appeared to be part of coordinated campaigns. A little more than ten years later, healthy civil discourse is withering, in part because of the combustive mix of politics and digital communication. The ease with which otherwise seemingly civilized humans act out in the isolation of the internet is astonishing: People on the right and left throw out feral comments and misinformation—willfully or otherwise—use dismissive and judgmental language, and mistake snark and sarcasm for wit and wisdom. Worse, SCDS has leapt beyond email and social media to infect written and spoken discourse, both private and public, creating a pandemic that needs to be addressed. It is easy to throw up our hands, blame someone else (Mark Zuckerberg), something else (algorithms, huge corporations, the government, over-zealous free-market

proponents) or the unfortunate confluence of human nature and technology, for this sad state of affairs. There is truth in all of this—we may need, for example, to break up tech companies and/or rethink how they function. But even so, we can begin by taking action ourselves to tame the Wild West of the web. As tech writer Clive Thompson says in his book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, the engineers and designers who invented the web were introverts who didn’t foresee the dark ways their platforms would be used. I don’t know whether they could have, but now we know, and there’s no time to waste. We can change our behavior to protect the health of virtual civil discourse. There is plenty of precedent in the nonvirtual world: Debate—developed in ancient Greece and India, then in Enlightenment England—gives form to argument; Robert’s Rules of Order provides structure for political discussion; journalistic norms help frame the conversation about current affairs; and standards for all kinds of behavior—from love to warfare—lead to a veneer of civility and, sometimes, to societal transformation. These structures and standards don’t always work, but together they have given civilization the space to grow. Jewish thought, too, builds civil disagreement into the system: The Talmudic model, for example, allows rabbis to comment on and argue about religious ideas. Even on the web, some users have already succeeded in carving out small spaces such as moderated groups and forums where civility reigns. It’s time to launch a campaign to take control of how we personally interact with virtual technology, particularly when it comes to politics. One component is to follow a set of guidelines, which many of us know but don’t adhere to. I offer some here: ■ Never use language that is impolite or pejorative, such as “you are/he is an idiot” or “you are/she is a witch.” Don’t fool yourself into thinking any strain of meanness is constructive. There is no such thing as tough love on the internet. ■ Don’t engage reactively. Take yourself offline before you respond or, even better, sleep on it. If you do react, “unlike,” unshare, edit or apologize—it’s better than nothing. And don’t say everything you

think. Social media stimulates us to say too much, too often. ■ Select sources that you know you can rely on. Never share content without being sure of its accuracy, and set the bar for accuracy very high. Listen to the questions in your own mind. Fact-check assertions and find primary sources. If you can’t, consult a reputable fact-checking site. ■ Back up political comments with a source, or better yet, three. That way people can judge your sources for themselves. Make sure you read the articles and information you post carefully. ■ Pay attention to whom you connect with. Judge character just as you would in person. If you are concerned about someone’s social media behavior, unfriend or disconnect. You don’t need to say why. And don’t respond to calls to action or campaigns unless you are sure who generated them. ■ Choose and maintain social media relationships beyond your bubble to learn how others view the world. Observe and evaluate their sources as you do your own. ■ Remember that algorithms curate what you see to show you what you already like. To counter this, unplug from social media and seek out independent media sources. ■ Be aware that manipulators of all kinds lurk on the internet. Learn to spot them and stay away, and never link to or download anything you are not sure of. Make passwords tough to crack. Rules are but one strategy. Currently, extreme views are rewarded by more clicks. Instead, we need to recognize thoughtfulness, nuance and true creativity. Meanwhile, we should all be thinking about ways to create a positive incentive system that can help improve web behavior on a larger scale. None of these strategies will stop bad or illegal actors from finding new ways to manipulate us. But as in the old game of telephone, we don’t have to pass it on, and our refusal to play along will decrease their leverage. With greater awareness, we will become better at recognizing negative influencers, grow more aware of our own weaknesses and help stop SCDS from spreading. And we will slow the advance of misinformation—and hate—that has led to so much polarization and deadly violence.

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THE CONVERSATION

TO DAY THERE IS MO RE ACCEPTANCE O F JEWS WHO DON’T LO O K L I KE EVERYONE EL SE. I T IS ALSO EASI ER TO CREATE YO UR OWN JEWIS H CO MMU N IT Y. T HAT’S A B I G DI FFERENCE B ETW EEN ME AND MY G RA N DMOTH ER.

A MOMENT OF HOPE INNOCENCE LOST It is very sad to realize the loss of innocence we are experiencing now with our current political environment in the U.S. and in Israel. In “From the Editor” (Spring 2019), Nadine Epstein expressed great disappointment in the tone of letters the magazine is receiving, and this saddens me, too. Moment’s carefully constructed issues always offer a great array of opinions and civility to readers, particularly at a time when Jews are struggling with such large issues. Moment still offers hope. Thank you for that. Linda Gallanter San Francisco, CA NOT ONE-SIDED My wife subscribed to Moment last year, but I’m the one who is really reading it. I love this magazine! I truly do not understand why there are people who think you’re way too one-sided. I find all of your articles thoughtful, articulate, nuanced and full of content that really makes me think. I read everything, cover-to-cover, and I plan on re-subscribing every year. Thank you. Daniel Schlossberg Cleveland Heights, OH

TO JOIN THE CONVERSATION: • RESPOND AT MOMENTMAG.COM • TWEET @MOMENTMAGAZINE • COMMENT ON FACEBOOK • EMAIL EDITOR@MOMENTMAG.COM • SEND A LETTER TO THE EDITOR Moment Magazine 4115 Wisconsin Avenue NW Suite LL10 Washington, DC 20016 Please include your hometown, state, email and phone number. Moment reserves the right to edit letters for clarity and space. 6

GEORGE SOROS A THREAT TO ISRAEL By casting the issue as the vilification of George Soros (“Soros: A Small Sacrifice for Netanyahu,” Spring 2019), Moment misses the broader story: the vilification of Israel by post-nationalist forces in Western Europe and the United States. This, and not “Adelson donates more” comparisons, is the context within which readers should evaluate Soros’s funding of self-proclaimed civil society organizations within Israel and throughout the West. Viewed through this lens, the assertion that Israel’s proposed NGO law targeted organizations “out of sync with government policy,” or the unchallenged remark of Soros’s handler that the financier “challenged oppressive powers to support the

underdog,” elide the more complicated, more urgent and ultimately far more interesting issue of how Jewish nationalism adapts to a globalizing world. How should Israel defend itself against the ideological onslaught of those who—under the guise of developing civil society—invest Palestinians with unique symbolic value, and whose warnings of rabid nationalism begin and end with Zionism? Soros is certainly correct that excessive nationalism can pose a genuine and at times even lethal threat to minority rights. But a more forthright and detailed exploration of what civil society advocacy—whether in Tel Aviv or on many American university campuses—can mean when it comes to Israel would have lent nuance to your discussion of George Soros and of those who oppose his interventions in Israeli democracy. Michael Jay Friedman Burke, VA A MISUNDERSTOOD MENSCH George Soros should be honored for the enemies he has collected over the years. They are dictatorial leaders and bullies who can’t tolerate criticism or challenges to their power. It’s amazing that Soros’s grants to dissenters have been seen as serious threats to the survival of repressive regimes. One would have thought he was funding weapons when he was only funding Xerox machines. If Soros were a Catholic, he would be recommended for sainthood, but he would not like that. It might make him look like the beneficiary of spiritual extremism. I have known him for more than a quartercentury. He is extremely non-extremist, a gentle, kind and a good man trying to leave the world better off. How could anyone construe that as a dark conspiracy? Pure projection from their own souls, of the basest kind. They should look to themselves for the darkness they fear. Mary Breasted Smyth Tamworth, NH INEVITABLE ENEMIES A very interesting article about a widely misunderstood person whose formative years as a student of Karl Popper have

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been the driving force behind his actions ever since. I now understand why he has so many enemies who discredit him: an influential, intelligent, extremely wealthy person who has an unshaken belief in open societies and true democracy, and who regards nationalism (Zionism included) as the cause of many of society’s ills, is bound to create enemies who will stop at nothing to discredit him. Tony Marshall Madrid, Spain DEMOCRACY DEFENDER Excellent article. A thorough and detailed attempt to present Soros’s views and philanthropic work to promote pluralism and democratic institutions. It is important to explain and make it absolutely clear that those who vilify Soros do so in order to promote their own interests and deflect public scrutiny away from corruption and malgovernance. For the sake of open society and the preservation of democratic institutions, Soros must vigorously and publicly defend his work and his ideas. J. Benson via momentmag.com AGAINST OUR BELIEFS We are returning this magazine to you. Unfortunately, the personal bias manifest in the majority of your articles is fully antithetical to our religious beliefs. Your publication is a grave disappointment, especially dedicating 8-10 pages to George Soros. It is fully heartbreaking that you highlight individuals and their beliefs that are counter (oppositional) to Torah learnings, the blueprint of every Jew’s creation and mission. Gail and Jeffrey Peltzer Brooklyn, NY MILLENNIAL JUDAISM ‘HOW ARE YOU JEWISH?’ I was struck by your symposium asking millennials if their Judaism is different from their parents’ (Spring 2019). My siblings and I were raised by my African American grandmother who converted to Judaism in the 1970s because she felt Judaism gave her more complete answers. Growing up, she was always looking for a Jewish community for our family, and I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. When I would walk into a synagogue, people would always say, “How are you Jewish?”

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which became really annoying, and I started to say back, “How are you Jewish?” And they would give me a look. Finally, when I was in middle school, we found a Sephardic synagogue in Philadelphia, where there were other African American families and more ethnic diversity, and the rabbi and the community were more open and welcoming. Today there is more acceptance of Jews who don’t look like everyone else. It is also easier to create your own Jewish community. That’s a big difference between me and my grandmother. My husband and I have chosen to raise our family in Jersey City, which we love, and although there isn’t a large Jewish community here, I am working to create one. I am thankful there are more resources available to us than there were to previous generations and that in this age of social media, it is easier to connect people. Hali J. Epstein Jersey City, NJ MAKING PROGRESS I’m much older than the millennials, but my Judaism is also different from my 8

parents’. Conservative Judaism when I was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s was just one step away from Orthodoxy, in that men and women sat together. In 1976, when women were accepted as equals (about time!), I became the first bat mitzvah in my Philadelphia synagogue at the age of 46. That opened a huge door for women, and even for older men, to become bar/bat mitzvah. Now I’m called upon frequently to be the cohen at services at the Conservative synagogue I joined 18 years ago when I moved back to my hometown. Marilyn Kagan Providence, RI LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN WHO’S THE BIGOT? In her column (“Jews of Color Are Us,” Spring 2019), Ms. Pogrebin writes, “White nationalism found to be spreading in the Orthodox Jewish community. A Hasidic mob attacks a black Jewish bar mitzvah teacher carrying a Torah.” Slow down. First, I live in an Orthodox

Jewish community, and I have no idea what you’re talking about regarding “white nationalism.” That’s abject nonsense. Second, Hasidic Jews in New York have been much more frequent targets of hate crimes by blacks than they have been perpetrators of hate crimes. In the case of the alleged “Hasidic mob,” the individual in question would not have been considered a Jew (not an Orthodox convert), was carrying a Torah, and was not from the neighborhood. He wasn’t in Hasidic clothing, so a bit of suspicion might be understandable—and, for the record, he wasn’t “attacked”; I read his account (oh, yeah, he’s also a pro-Palestinian activist, so I’d be suspicious of him, too). Finally, allow me to add that—unlike Ms. Pogrebin—neither I nor any of the Orthodox Jews in my synagogue—would greet a properly attired visitor of any race with a question about his or her “church.” Don’t project your bigotry onto others. David Frost Silver Spring, MD JEWS OF MANY HUES Thanks, Ms. Pogrebin, for writing this column. As the saying goes, Jews come in many hues. And there are no DNA markers for Jewishness. Roger Price Evanston, IL LOST FOODS PICKLED TONGUE & MORE Thanks for a great article (“The Foods of Passovers Past,” Spring 2019). When I moved to L.A. from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1964, my in-laws lived in Hollywood. My mother-in-law would take the bus downtown before Pesach to buy fresh fish, then skin and chop it up herself, and make gefilte fish. She continued to do this until well into her 70s, at which point her son (my husband) said to me if you want us to continue having gefilte fish for Pesach, you better start making it. I am 82 and still make it every Pesach. The most I ever made was 80 balls one year when we hosted about 35 people. I also make chremslach, which my grandmother, mother and motherin-law also all made. My daughters know how to make the chremslach as well and usually help me now, but none of them will even think about making the fish! Another standard at our Pesach table has

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danhotels

Dan Hotels Israel been pickled tongue, and for sure the girls wouldn’t consider making it—or eating it! Sandra Kussin Northridge, CA MATZAH ROLLS & JELLY SLICES My grandmother would make banana cake and sponge cake, neither of which would be eaten by my own grandkids. The shortening of choice was chicken schmaltz, rendered over the year from big hens. Who has seen a hen at the butcher? Chicken soup contained eierlach or immature eggs from the aforementioned hens. What became of the matzah rolls my grandmother made? A version is in the Jennie Grossinger cookbook. The sugar-coated jelly slices are gone, good riddance, and have been replaced by all things chocolate, a delight that was never part of our Pesach. Elaine Miller Great Neck, NY STEWED DRIED FRUIT I’m not sure I’d call this a favorite, but every childhood holiday meal would have to end with compote—stewed dried fruit— which always included prunes. I liked it well enough but have never felt strongly enough to make it as an adult (unlike, say, matzah brie for lunch, which is essential). I’ve also never had it anywhere else. Felice Whittum Boston, MA

Where pleasure is a way of life

Thrilling destinations – Endless sunshine – Gorgeous beaches Discover the unique pleasures of a Dan Hotel vacation. Whether it’s the legendary King David in Jerusalem or resort hotels on the Mediterranean or on the Red Sea, every Dan hotel is a landmark destination that reflects the spirit of its surroundings. And thanks to our wide range of locations, the options are endless for enjoying the beauty, history and diversity of Israel.

The Dan Tel Aviv New Executive rooms overlooking the mediterranean sea FOR INFORMATION & RESERVATIONS Email: incoming@danhotels.com ISRAEL: "Call Dan" Reservation Center: 972-3-5202552 USA: For Information Tel: (212) 752-6120, Toll Free: 1-800-223-7773-4 For Reservations: 1-800-223-7775

CORRECTION In the story “An Israel Without Hate: An Exclusive Moment Interview With Ehud Barak” (Spring 2019), the photo of Ehud Barak with George W. Bush on page 34 includes not Barbara Bush, as labeled, but rather, Laura Bush.

H AV E Y O U S E E N M O M E N T ’ S ANTI-SEMITISM MONITOR? T H E A N T I - S E M I T I S M M O N I TO R TRACKS ANTI-SEMITIC INCIDENTS AROUND THE WORLD B Y C O U N T R Y A N D D AT E . M O M E N T M A G . C O M /A N T I SEMITISM-MONITOR-2019

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HIGHLIGHTS FROM MOMENTMAG .COM

The Girl in the Blue Sweater A SURVIVOR, A SEDER, A 75-YEAR-OLD SWEATER An elegant lady of 95 walked into my friend’s Upper West Side apartment on the second night of Passover. She had an aristocratic air. All eyes were on her, coiffed in auburn waves, wearing strings of pearls above a vibrant sapphire blue sweater. “What a beautiful sweater!” I told her. She was quick to tell me she wears it every Passover. The sweater also came with a story. Little did I know that Helena’s story—a tale of persecution, survival and liberation— echoed the story of Passover. Fortunately, both have happy endings. The story starts in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1924, when Helena Weinstock Weinrauch was born to a pianist mother and an engineer father. The family moved to Poland a few years later when her father accepted a position offered by the Polish government. For the next decade, life was good and they prospered. But all that changed in 1939. After a brief occupation by the Germans, the Russians arrived. Well-to-do people, suspected capitalists, were threatened with exile to Siberia. Helena’s parents and older sister were forced into hiding. But 16-yearold Helena stayed to get her diploma while

HELENA’S STORY—A TALE OF PERSECUTION, SURVIVAL AND LIBERATION—ECHOED THE STORY OF PASSOVER. working part-time in an office. She’d get up at 5 a.m. to wait in a food line, go to work and then to school until 9 p.m. A year later her parents returned and the Weinstocks were reunited, though it would be short-lived. The Nazis marched back in and restrictions on Jews got harsher. 10

One day, while Helena was at work, 300 Jewish families were rounded up—including her parents and older sister. Helena never saw them again. It was her boss who became her savior, risking his life to get her counterfeit German papers. According to her new documents, she was a purebred Aryan woman,with a fiancé fighting on the German front. With a new identity, she left for Krakow and the home of her boss’s friends. To them, she was simply a pretty, young German girl. They even included her in a social event, where she

found herself nervously dancing in the arms of a Nazi officer—a dance that would later save her life. But her German disguise didn’t last long. Hurrying down a street one morning, she was recognized by a former classmate who turned her in to the Gestapo. And so began a terrifying chapter. The Gestapo, desperate to know the source of her fake papers, beat and tortured her almost to death. But she didn’t yield, and soon faced a firing squad. Fate intervened when the Nazi officer she had danced with recognized her on the firing line and halted the execution. Humiliated that he had been deceived by this Jewish girl, he condemned

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her to what he believed was a life worse than death—a concentration camp. She was sent to Plaszow, an interim stop before Auschwitz. Her life was spared once again from a second firing squad. A young Jewish policeman, indebted to her for helping his sister, arrived just in time to save her. In the winter of 1945, the Germans evacuated Auschwitz, forcing prisoners on the infamous Death March to BergenBelsen. It was three weeks of walking 500 miles in below-freezing temperatures, wearing only a camp uniform. There was one blanket for four people. “I tore the blanket into fours and covered my feet,” Helena explained. She was one of the lucky ones who survived the brutal walk— though barely. When the British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, Helena was mistaken for dead until an officer realized her 60-pound body was still warm. The British put Helena on a Red Cross relief ship bound for a hospital near Stockholm in Sigtuna, Sweden. “I

will never forget the Swedish people as long as I live,” Helena commented. “They took in 6,000 survivors and cared for us selflessly. They restored my faith in humanity.” In the hospital, Helena met another Auschwitz survivor, Ann Rothman, a master knitter. In the Lodz ghetto, Ann had knitted dresses, skirts and sweaters for the wives of German officers. Her knitting needles saved her life. In the hospital, Ann continued to knit for the nurses, doctors and fellow patients. For Helena, Ann created a vibrant sapphire blue sweater that 75 years later dazzled everyone at the seder table. Helena recalled, “Ann told me, ‘Although we have no home, no family, no money, we still have Pesach and the memory of our families.’ Then Ann handed me this blue sweater that she had just finished.” The price: Helena must wear it on Pesach. “Instead of afikomen treats or chocolates, I got a sweater!” Helena laughs. She has worn it every Passover since. The sweater accompanied Helena to

New York in 1947, a trip sponsored by her uncle. She and Ann, also now in New York, remain lifelong friends. Helena married Joseph Weinrauch and, with their daughter, settled on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Unfortunately, she lost both her husband and daughter and now lives alone. Helena volunteers for the blind and lectures in schools about hatred and bigotry. At 87 she started ballroom dancing, which has become her passion. “As long as I can walk, I’ll dance,” she vows. Her real secret for staying young, Helena says, is indulging in cheese, eggs and dark chocolate. “After starving for years, I promised myself that if I survived, I’d eat whatever I wanted,” she said. Aglow in her sapphire blue sweater that seder night, Helena reached for a piece of dark chocolate almond bark and beamed at the table. Ninety-five years old, and everyone was in love with her. Dayenu. —Gail P. Dubov To see more photos of Helena Weinstock Weinrauch, go to momentmag.com/the-girl-inthe-blue-sweater

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SPONSORED CONTENT

Kurz told those in attendance. In addition to remembering its past, Austria is also leading the fight against anti-Semitism both at home and throughout Europe. In November 2018, Chancellor Kurz hosted the high-level conference “Europe Beyond Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism – Securing Jewish Life in Europe” to commemorate the 80 years since the November pogroms when the Nazis burned synagogues, desecrated cemeteries, trashed Jewish businesses, looted homes and killed many Jews. In the context of the conference, the Chancellor mentioned three areas where Austria is currently successfully combatting anti-Semitism: strict legislation against anti-Semitism, education in schools and security for the Jewish community. “We have a small but vibrant Jewish community in Austria that needs to be protected. The security situation in Austria is better than in other countries but one can never do enough,” said Kurz. Following this historic conference, Chancellor Kurz, serving as Presidency of the European Council, led the charge for the first ever adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antiSemitism by the heads of state and government of the 28 EU member states. “Chancellor Kurz has admirably made anti-Semitism an EU priority. The EU has taken a historic step toward fighting all forms of hatred targeting Jews,” said Daniel Schwammenthal, Director of the AJC Transatlantic Institute, the Brusselsbased arm of the global Jewish advocacy organization, the American Jewish Committee. During his keynote speech at the AJC Transatlantic Institute in Brussels in March 2019, Chancellor Kurz reemphasized Austria’s firm commitment to the security of Israel and the Jewish people and stated: “As I look back on the horrible crimes of the Shoah, I feel grief and guilt on behalf of my nation. As I look at our tomorrow, I feel opti-

“ AS I LOOK BACK ON THE HORRIBLE CRIMES OF THE SHOAH, I FEEL GRIEF AND GUILT ON BEHALF OF MY NATION. AS I LOOK AT OUR TOMORROW, I FEEL OPTIMISM AND A BRIGHT FUTURE TOGETHER. " —AUSTRIAN FEDERAL CHANCELLOR SEBASTIAN KURZ

mism. In spite of all the challenges, EU-Israel relations and Jewish life in Europe have a bright future.” More recently, Chancellor Kurz spoke on May 8th 2019, commemorating the liberation from Nazi terror in 1945, underlining that remembrance must be followed by concrete action. Austria has a special responsibility in the fight against anti-Semitism and in safeguarding Jewish life in Europe, Israel and the rest of the world. In this context, Austria has been cooperating actively with Yad Vashem over the past decades. Since the year 2000, around 800 Austrian teachers participated in seminars and courses at the memorial to improve the curricula of Austrian students. Last year, the Austrian

Above: Austrian Federal Chancellor Kurz welcomed Rabbi Arthur Schneier (Park East Synagogue), Moshe Kantor (President, European Jewish Congress), Oskar Deutsch (President, Jewish Community Vienna) and David Harris (CEO, American Jewish Committee) at the conference “Europe Beyond anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism—Securing Jewish Life in Europe.”

federal government contributed one million euros to the construction of the Shoah Heritage Campus at Yad Vashem, which will include stateof-the art conservation and storage facilities, and also signed an agreement with Yad Vashem which grants access to the Austrian State Archives and the Mauthausen Memorial. “For only if Jews can live without restriction in peace and security can ‘never forget’ become ‘never again,” said Chancellor Kurz.

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ALL IMAGES: Â© WILLIAM CLAXTON, LLC, COURTESY OF DEMONT PHOTO MANAGEMENT & FAHEY/KLEIN GALLERY LOS ANGELES

VISUAL MOMENT | CAFTANS, MINISKIRTS & PANTSUITS

Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich’s Bold Vision

“ I T W A S A B O U T C H A N G I N G C U LT U R E THROUGHOUT S O C I E T Y. . . I T W A S NOT JUST FREEING F O R T H E B O D Y. I T FREED THE SPIRIT AS WELL.”

udolph “Rudi” Gernreich was one of the most prominent fashion designers of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. His revolutionary designs and avant-garde collections embodied his vision of fashion as a liberating force that defied conventional ideas of beauty, identity and gender. “Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich,” on view through September 1 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, is the first exhibition to focus on the social and cultural impact of the influential designer’s body of work. The show features more than 80 ensembles, including his iconic topless swimsuit, microminis, thongs, unisex clothing and pantsuits for women—innovations that redefined style and brought him international renown. Also on display are original sketches, letters, photographs, historical footage of fashion shows and oral histories from friends and colleagues. The exhibition presents a comprehensive view of the designer’s life and work and illustrates how his bold designs continue to influence fashion today. Born in 1922 to a wealthy Viennese Jewish family, Gernreich was eight when his father, Siegmund Gernreich, committed suicide. Remaining in Vienna with his mother, Elisabeth Muller Gernreich, the youth sketched and studied fabrics at his aunt Hedwig Muller’s dress shop. At age 12, he was invited by a prominent Austrian designer to apprentice in London, but his mother felt he was too young and declined the opportunity. When Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, mother and son fled to the United States. They settled in Los Angeles, where 16-year-old Rudi, who spoke no English, began marketing his mother’s pastries door to door. His first actual job was in

the morgue at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where he prepared bodies for autopsy. He later credited that experience with giving him an intimate understanding of the human body. Gernreich’s personal history—as a Jew and a gay man— had a profound influence on his work. “After fleeing Nazi oppression as a teen,” says Skirball exhibition curator Bethany Montagano, “Gernreich encountered discrimination again. He would eventually find safe haven in the performing arts world

Opposite: Model and frequent collaborator Peggy Moffitt shows off Gernreich’s boldly patterned, printed silk caftan in the fall of 1967. Intended to abstract the body and promote comfort, the caftan was a key component of the designer’s “Unisex” collection. Bare or flat feet were a signature feature of Gernreich’s presentation. Above: Gernreich at his Santa Monica Boulevard office in West Hollywood in 1966. “The whole concept of women’s fashion changed during the marvelous ’60s,” he reflected in 1981. “Women learned about freedom of movement in both their inner and outer clothing.” SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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Above left: Model Peggy Moffitt, noted for her distinctive hairstyles, dons a mod 1968 resort minidress ensemble designed by Gernreich, whose fashions were the first to include such innovative elements as cutouts, plastic and vinyl. Above right: This avant-guard trompe l’oeil outfit was part of Gernreich’s 1971 resort collection. Rudi “borrowed from the future, if that is possible,” said his friend, artist Ed Ruscha.

and gay rights movement. These early preneur Hattie Carnegie of New York. experiences fueled his commitment to He also collaborated on projects with promoting a truer expression of self and companies such as I. Magnin Los Angeles. designing clothes that proclaimed, ‘You In 1952 he partnered with clothing manare what you decide you want to be,’” as ufacturer and fellow Viennese immigrant the designer himself put it. Walter Bass to produce designs that would Gernreich went on to study at both Los help influence the look of California Angeles City College and the Art Center sportswear. Gernreich’s colorful, fresh, School, and in 1942 he joined the Lester youthful outfits and dynamic graphics Horton Dance Theater, which was known appealed to buyers and magazine editors for its theatrical style. “Dancing made me alike and provided a welcome counteraware of what clothes did to the rest of point to the staid influence of European the body,” Gernreich said of his time with couture. In the early 1950s, women came the Dance Theater. In 1950 he became from all over the U.S. to see and buy a founding member of the Mattachine Gernreich’s latest, most “far-out” designs Society, a gay rights organization. at the Jax Boutique in Beverly Hills. Gernreich’s first jobs in the fashion Gernreich sought to create forwardindustry were with Hollywood costume thinking designs. He wanted to celebrate designer Edith Head and fashion entre- the body rather than suppress it. He had 28

begun deconstructing swimsuits as early as 1952, creating knit swimwear that allowed women to swim unencumbered. Commissioned by Look magazine in 1964 and dubbed the “monokini,” his topless swimsuit exemplified his dedication to comfort and cemented his place in fashion history. Removing all interior structures, he allowed the body to assume its natural shape, challenging the 1950s ideal of rigid construction and a tightly cinched waist. His “No-bra” bra—wireless and formless—debuted in October 1964 and quickly became a bestseller. By 1965, an estimated three million “No-bras” had been sold nationwide, and their popularity soon spread abroad. Defying strongly held conservative ideas about a woman’s body, however, had its price. Critics in

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the Soviet Union claimed that the monokini signaled the end of morality in the United States. Some countries outlawed it. The Pope banned it, and at least two American women were arrested wearing it. Gernreich’s response: “I wanted to make a statement of freedom, not sexuality.” Unity, functionality and comfort were key to Gernreich’s designs. He used sheer fabrics as well as leather and vinyl, and experimented with unconventional materials, incorporating large exposed zippers, plastic and metal springs and repurposing elements such as dog leashes as belts. His distinctive patterns and bright colors made his designs easily recognizable. He also ensured his clothing was reasonably priced, selling his fashions at mid-range retail chain Montgomery Ward. Contrary to high-fashion tradition, he preferred flat feet and had his models go barefoot or dressed them in low-heeled or flat shoes. Gernreich’s work, however, was not only about clothes. He took on a number of social issues of the day, creating fashions that referenced student protests, growing racial tensions and the Vietnam War. “Fashion is not expected to be a social message. A designer is not expected to say something other than ‘Here is another dress,’” he explained. “But I would not be in this if that were Gernreich and Moffitt model the designer’s “Marlene Dietrich” white-satin pantsuit ensemble in the only thing required of me.” 1964. “Gernreich’s work is more pertinent today than ever,” says Skirball Director Robert Kirschner. As feminism expanded in the 1960s “Body positivity and gender fluidity are topics very much of the moment.” and ’70s, Gernreich offered women liberating fashion choices that overturned tained, “than to try to escape it by hid- the Equal Rights Amendment, contesting long-held expectations of how a woman ing in the past.” With the introduction the stigma of mental illness and workshould look and dress. His brash fash- of his Unisex Collection in 1970, the ing for the election of the first African ions thus became symbolic of women’s designer brought his vision of the future American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom liberation. Forever testing boundaries, to life. Stripping away gender markers, Bradley. He sought new creative projects he designed his own unique take on the he created garments that could be worn as well, experimenting in housewares, framiniskirt, bringing the hemline up to 12 interchangeably by anyone. His jump- grances and gourmet soups. In early 1985, inches above the knee with his “micro- suits and caftans abstracted the body and he was diagnosed with lung cancer and mini” and completing the look with tights, posed questions about gender fluidity. “I passed away a few months later at age 62. leggings and undershorts, helping to cre- see Unisex as a total statement about the “At the Skirball, where we are guided ate a “mod” aesthetic. His tailored pant- equality of men and women,” he declared by the Jewish tradition of welcoming suits introduced the idea of androgyny in 1970. “Their different sexual natures the stranger,” says curator Montagano, into conventional fashion, and his revolu- no longer need the social support of dif- “we are inspired by how Gernreich did tionary thong underwear quickly became ferences of dress. Unisex reveals nature... just that: his apparel welcomed everya staple of contemporary dress, paving It doesn’t hide or confuse it.” one into the fold—regardless of race, the way for the designs of today. Although he closed his company in religion, gender, sexuality, and body Gernreich often expressed frustration 1968, Gernreich continued to design type—broadening the scope of who is with the fashion industry. “It’s a much womenswear. He also found time for ‘fashionable.’ It is a message that resomore positive act to face today,” he main- social advocacy, supporting the fight for nates to this day.”—Diane M. Bolz SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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JEWISH WORD | ORIGINS OF A TERM AND IDEOLOGY

Is Everyone a White Supremacist?

urn on the news, read the paper, pseudo-scientist from New York, pub- Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.” check Twitter, and chances are lished his book White Supremacy and These efforts, Petrella says, “helped bring that you will quickly come across Negro Subordination. “Van Evrie put the the terms into popular discourse as a crisomeone—from a mass shooter term ‘white supremacy’ on the map, and tique,” but led them to fall out of favor. Even to the president of the United States— his intention was to naturalize black sub- people who adhered to the ideology, or some being described as a “white supremacist.” ordination and white supremacy,” says variant of it, stopped using the terms, says The term, historically used to describe an Christopher Petrella, who teaches at the ADL’s Pitcavage. Complained former adherent to the ideology of white suprem- American University’s Antiracist Research Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke in a acy, is now thrown around so often that it and Policy Center. His philosophy was 2006 podcast, “I’m often called in the media, no longer is always clear what it means. promoted by men such as Thomas Dixon it’s like a part of my name, white supremacist. The term “white supremacy” began Jr., whose novel was the source material I’m not one. I don’t want white people to be appearing in the early 1800s, according to for the 1915 blockbuster film The Birth of supreme...But I do think we have a right to The Oxford English Dictionary. Early citations a Nation, and Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, preserve our own culture, own heritage in are found in books such as Emancipation: a Harvard-trained historian and author of our own country.” Duke and others began Or Practical Advice to British Slave-holders the popular The Rising Tide of Color Against to refer to themselves by more palatable and Thirty Years in India, as well as from names: white separatist, nationalist, “racial “The First Annual Report of the Edinburgh realist” or—more recently—the “alt-right.” Society for Promoting the Mitigation and Yet usage of “white supremacy” and FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, THIS Ultimate Abolition of Negro Slavery,” which “white supremacist” has surged in the U.S. describes conditions in the Carribbean in recent years, reflecting the rekindling IS A TERRIBLE FAD. British colonies: “Now…we arrive at the of anti-immigrant, anti-minority and truth of the matter and find that the whip is anti-Semitic sentiments and the backlash WITH THE EXCEPTION of the very essence of the system,” the report against them. The term really caught fire reads, “and that the right to use it is the funafter the deadly Charlottesville rally in OF ACTUAL NEO-NAZIS AND damental charter of white supremacy.” August 2017. A few months later, protest“White supremacy” soon made its way ers interrrupted a speech by Secretary A FEW OTHERS, THERE to the United States, says Mark Pitcavage, of Education Betsy DeVos at Harvard, a senior research fellow at the Antiaccusing her of being a white supremacist. ISN’T ANYONE IN AMERICA Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Liberal writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates “Whites living in the South before the Civil have repeatedly called President Trump WHO’S TRYING TO PROMOTE War felt pressure to respond to abolitiona white supremacist. Both Trump and his ism,” says Pitcavage. “They came up with a staff have rejected this claim: In the afterTHE IDEA THAT WHITES ARE series of arguments justifying white domimath of the New Zealand mosque masnation in the South through the institution sacre, acting White House Chief of Staff INHERENTLY SUPERIOR. of slavery. In that context, they used the Mick Mulvaney said: “The president is term ‘white supremacy’ positively, to sugnot a white supremacist. I’m not sure how gest that it was natural law and the way many times we have to say that.” things should be.” In 1856, for example, White World-Supremacy. “What people like “For what it’s worth, this is a terrible fad,” Kansas settler Jefferson Buford, in a widely Dixon and Stoddard did,” Petrella says, wrote Kevin Drum in Mother Jones in 2017 publicized appeal to have the territory “was to replace the scientific argument for on the tendency to label everyone a white admitted into the Union as a slave state, white supremacy with a cultural argument supremacist. “With the exception of actual asked if Kansans were “prepared to surren- that whites are in some way culturally neo-Nazis and a few others, there isn’t anyder white supremacy in the South.” superior to other groups, and that idea is one in America who’s trying to promote The Confederacy was defeated but not still very much absorbed in America today.” the idea that whites are inherently superior the ideology, says Mark Potok, former senior In the 1960s, the civil rights and Black to blacks or Latinos. Conversely, there are fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center Power movements took aim at this thinking. loads of Americans who display signs of and editor of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report. In his 1962 New Yorker essay “Letter From overt racism—or unconscious bias or racial But white supremacy took on a new element a Region in My Mind,” James Baldwin insensitivity or resentment over loss of staof victimization. “Supporters of this ideol- described the “great force and cunning” tus—in varying degrees.” ogy in the late 19th and early 20th century needed to challenge the “indifferent forSPLC’s Potok says the overuse of the started developing the argument that white tress of white supremacy.” The following terms erodes their gravity and is giving supremacy is being lost, that [whites] are year, his friend Malcolm X declared “the a pass to real white supremacists. “The being swamped—and that people who have end of white supremacy.” Later, African- white supremacist movement itself is still no right to it are taking what we had away.” American feminist and activist bell hooks ugly and dangerous—and it should be In 1867, John Van Evrie, a notorious (sic) coined the phrase, “Imperialist White- called by its name.”—Anis Modi

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ASK THE RABBIS | RACISM

Does Jewish Law Forbid Racism?

JON KRAUSE/ISPOT

“JUDAISM’S FOUNDATIONAL STORY IS ABOUT GOD’S TAKING THE SIDE OF THE VICTIMS OF RACISM AND ECONOMIC OPPRESSION.”

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DOES JEWISH LAW FORBID RACISM?

INDEPENDENT

Neither Jewish law, lore nor history addresses race in any way that can be construed as problematic. In fact, the ancestor of the Jewish people, Shem son of Noah, is described by the midrash as having been black (Pirkei D’Rebbe Eliezer, beginning of Chapter 24). The most fundamental teachings of Judaism clearly dismiss racism altogether, such as “You shall love the stranger like yourself” (Leviticus 19:34), or the reminder in Genesis that all of us—regardless of race, color or belief system—were born of the same mom and dad: Adam and Eve. “Why did God create swarms of bees, prides of lions, herds of deer, schools of fish, and flocks of birds, and only one human couple? So that no one can say to another ‘My ancestry is superior to yours’” (Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5). Rabbi Gershon Winkler Walking Stick Foundation Fontana, CA

HUMANIST

The question of Jewish law and racism cannot be separated from that of antiSemitism. Distrust and hatred of Jews played an important role in the attitudes that Jews formed about others. With our history of suffering, we should not be surprised that our literature (law and lore) records feelings of animosity toward others and even outsized claims of Jewish superiority. Even so, any expressions of hostility sit right alongside higher moral expectations. The Torah repeatedly urges us to engage our empathy, commanding us 36 times to show our concern for strangers among us. Our creation myths and midrash remind us of the common origin of all human beings. Jewish tradition is old and broad enough to include contradictory teachings; some condone bigotry and racism, others promote solicitude for all people. As Humanistic Jews, we are always delighted to encounter the more enlightened passages and practices. Yet they are not the source of our beliefs. A commitment to furthering human dignity and universal human rights stands at the center of our ethical concerns irrespective of Jewish attitudes from the past. Rabbi Jeffrey L. Falick Birmingham Temple Congregation for Humanistic Judaism Farmington Hills, MI

RENEWAL

second only to Pharaoh, he ate by himself, “for the Egyptians could not dine with the I don’t think racism is a term recognized Hebrews, since that would be abhorrent in Jewish law, although a few remarks in to the Egyptians” (Gen. 43:32). It was Jewish tradition about people of color racism that led to such brutal oppreshave been understood in disparaging ways. sion by Pharaoh that God broke through More essentially, the Torah insists that we nature and history to hear the Israelites’ treat both neighbors and strangers with cries. Judaism teaches that God is on the ahavah, love—a recognition that we are in side of those who struggle for freedom; relationship with one another. Jewish law the Torah’s great principle is that every forbids reminding converts to Judaism human being is created in the image of of their earlier background; we might God. These are the principles on which all extrapolate from that to a prohibition on, of Judaism rests. Jewish law is and should for example, asking Jews of color in shul be an expression of those principles, and whether they are actually Jewish, which therefore I believe that racism is absoseems to go on all the time. lutely against Jewish law. The larger question is how Jewish Rabbi Caryn Broitman tradition bids us view the relationship Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center between Jews and non-Jews, which can Vineyard Haven, MA sometimes take on a “racist” or essentialist disparagement of the other. We have in our background both glorious universalist sentiments and virulent hostility to nonThe Talmud teaches that all people are Jews. In that we are no different from other descendants of a single person so that no religions or cultures; the urge to define person can say, “My ancestor is greater “us vs. them” is, ironically, one of the most than yours.” This foundational belief in universal principles of humankind. The the equality of all humanity was estabcontradiction plays out in two books of lished in the opening chapters of the the Bible—Ezra, which advances a quasiTorah. Regardless of whether we believe racial opposition to the non-Jews living in this creation story, its position as one of the land of Israel after the Exile, and Ruth, the very first lessons of the Torah gives it which makes the case for a much more posa place of high priority: All human beings itive view of non-Jews. Nothing keeps one are created equal. This belief in equality safe from “othering” except perpetual vigicompels action in response to discriminalance and a constant choosing of our yetzer tion, racism and racial injustice. ha-tov or good inclination (unity) over our In the Reform movement, the work of yetzer ha-ra or evil inclination (separation). racial justice reaches back before the civil Rabbi Gilah Langner rights movement. We have an obligation Congregation Kol Ami to learn about racial diversity, confront Arlington, VA our implicit biases, challenge the deep systemic and cultural sources of those biases and address the racial disparities that plague our society. To create racial justice In 1963 the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in America, we must look deeply into and convened a conference on “Religion and change our own beliefs about our neighRace.” The second speaker was Rabbi bors. And we must change the systems and Abraham Joshua Heschel, who suggested structures that perpetuate racial injustices. that perhaps the conference should This is not easy work to do. It is our sacred have been called “Religion or Race,” for obligation. true religion and racism are antithetical. Rabbi Dr. Laura Novak Winer Racism is a “treacherous denial of the exis- Fresno, CA tence of God,” he said. Judaism’s foundational story is about God’s taking the side of the victims of racism and economic oppression. “At the The Torah teaches the equality of all first Conference on Religion and Race,” human beings created in the image of God Heschel began his speech, “the main (Genesis 1:27) and is positive toward nonparticipants were Pharaoh and Moses.” Israelites. Rabbinic literature similarly Egyptians were racist: Though Joseph was contains numerous positive statements

REFORM

RECONSTRUCTIONIST

CONSERVATIVE

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about gentiles. We can’t deny that there are passages in rabbinic literature, kabbalah and medieval philosophical works that depict gentiles as inferior to Jews and sometimes even as less than human. Some can be explained as normal reactions to the cruel treatment of Jews by non-Jews, be it the Roman Empire, the Church or others. Some, however, go far beyond that, positing an exclusivist theology. In the 21st century, though, there is only one correct answer to this question: Yes. Leviticus 19 begins, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” The halachic authority Nachmanides (1174-1270) says this means Jews must obey not just the letter but the spirit of the law. The spirit of Torah is clearly conveyed in Genesis 1:27: If all humanity is made in God’s image, then clearly any kind of prejudice or racism is forbidden. Nachmanides introduces the phrase naval b’rshut ha-Torah—being despicable within the permitted boundaries of Torah. Loosely defined, this means that being holy means not engaging in disgusting behaviors that are not specifically forbidden but are not right either. Rabbi Amy Wallk Katz Temple Beth El Springfield, MA

MODERN ORTHODOX

The Talmud makes clear that every human, as an image of God, is endowed with three intrinsic dignities: infinite value, equality and uniqueness (Sanhedrin 37a). This completely demolishes racism. However, over millennia of gentile persecution, a lot of antagonism crept into Jewish attitudes. Thus, one rabbi in the Talmud lashes out, “You [Jews] are called Adam [that is, the image of God] but idolaters/gentiles are not.” Considering ongoing Christian and Islamic denigration of Jews as less than human, such backlash is understandable. In modern times, though, great rabbis such as Rav Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook in Israel and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik in the United States reaffirmed the universal dignity of all people. Still, narrow-minded, socially isolated fundamentalist Orthodox rabbis often seize upon past texts of anger and rejection and seek to apply them to gentiles today. Recently, Channel 13 in Israel broadcast videotapes revealing that important rabbis at a pre-army Mechina (training program) openly endorsed racism. They claimed

that racial theory proved Jewish superiority. They justified permanent annexation of the West Bank on the grounds that the Arabs are an inferior race and would welcome being subservient to Jews. Such comments are especially disgusting coming after the Holocaust and the evidence that racism leads to hatred and genocide. The prophet’s cry “We have one father: One God created all of us” (Malachi 2:10) rebukes such vicious attitudes. Sadly, Orthodoxy has a lot of work to do to root out racist and anti-other attitudes in its religious leadership and culture. Rabbi Yitzhak Greenberg Riverdale, NY

ORTHODOX

If I had to make a strong halachic argument for some provision attached to one of the preexisting categories of the Torah forbidding racism, I’d be hard pressed. I don’t think I could make the halachic guidelines that plastic. Rabbi Shlomo Luria, nearly 500 years ago, argued that with the exception of great moral deficiencies like murder, stealing and deception, the Torah mostly describes behavior between Jews and relies on secular law for the rest. So it’s not so surprising that there’s no outright prohibition against being a bigot. Nonetheless, I think racism violates some important meta-principles of the Torah, particularly the thinking of Maimonides, for whom there is a 614th commandment, Thou Shalt Not Be an Idiot. Racism is objectionable for two reasons. One is that it’s just stupid. We are taught as Jews to notice differences rather than group things together. Racism is by its nature a failure to take note of the great differences between people within a group, and as such it is intensely antiJewish. Second, in practice, it creates a chillul hashem, a desecration of God’s name, when people who are charged with keeping God’s word alive ignore those fundamental distinctions in their dealings with other people. Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein CrossCurrents Los Angeles, CA

SEPHARDIC

To ask if Jewish law forbids racism is to ask if you have ever read the first chapter of Genesis. In it, the Torah presents the

most revolutionary idea of ancient times, which, judging by the xenophobia, racism and bigotry that are still prevalent, remains one many cannot easily digest. That idea is contained in two Hebrew words: B’tselem Elohim, the image of God, and it is very carefully inserted into the larger context of the creation story: “Elohim created man in His image, male and female He created them” (1:27). The Torah emphasizes that the image of God is a concept embedded in men and women equally. The idea is reinforced in Genesis 5:2: “Male and female He created them, and He blessed them, and He named them Adam.” The woman is Adam—created in the image of God—just as the man is. The message of these verses is much greater than equality between men and women. It is about the equality of all humankind. The binary difference between men and women is one’s first instinctive reaction upon seeing a human being (the inability to clearly define a non-binary person is probably the reason why there is so much bigotry towards them). By equating men and women, the Torah states that the image of God is not expressed physically. Racism is therefore a rejection of the very foundation of the Torah. This is not to say, however, that there are no racist Jews. Rabbi Haim Ovadia Potomac, MD

CHABAD

As per the Torah, I am a creationist, and thus for me the answer is yes. If we agree that G-d is everything, then He is every color. Anything less would be a limitation, and He is unlimited. One is antiSemitic not when one dislikes someone Jewish, but when one dislikes them merely because they are Jewish. Likewise, disliking someone of another race because of something they did is one thing; judging them or treating them poorly merely because of their race is racism, upon which the Torah frowns. People of any color may convert to Judaism if they choose to accept the Torah and its guidelines for life. If you believe G-d created and sustains the world and everything in it, then there is no place for hate or discrimination merely because of skin color. Rabbi Levi Shemtov Vice President, American Friends of Lubavitch Washington, DC SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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Marge Piercy AT H O M E W I T H

THE

‘RADICAL

ROGUE’

IS AS RELEVANT AS EVER BY AMY E. SCHWARTZ

arge Piercy doesn’t live that far off the beaten track—it’s only Cape Cod, after all—but it feels remote, especially in the offseason. The poet, novelist and longtime feminist activist, who’s now 83, has lived in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, since the 1970s. ELLEN WEXLER Flying there to see her in a 10-seat puddle jumper BY is like visiting a guru on a mountaintop. You land in Provincetown, at an airport so cozy that

the departure lounge offers a stack of board games, and then drive a half hour to a house tucked far back from the road, among pine and oak woods, on the edge of a freshwater marsh. From the front, the brown-shingled house looks small. Greenery swallows it up: Bushes climb a steep slope to the porch, a great pine tree hugs the roof. More green peeks from inside the broad windows, their sills jammed with plants. The gardens

are, Piercy likes to say, “profuse”: Stoneflagged paths wind through the trees, past hosta plants with giant, nodding, fairy-tale leaves. Inside, the house rambles, from a cozy downstairs kitchen (ceramics, still more plants, two black cats) to a lightfilled, wood-framed upstairs living room so filled with art that one painting (of more leaves) is mounted on the ceiling. “I designed it,” Piercy says of the house. “I built it, and every time I published a

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book, I added a room. I stopped when I had enough rooms.” The caveat’s helpful, since she’s published, to date, 17 novels and 19 books of poetry, plus assorted plays and memoirs, and is still going strong. (Another novel is with her agent.) Although Piercy looks exactly as she does in every author’s picture going back to her 30s—the curtain of black hair, the apple cheeks and impish dark eyes—she has trouble getting around these days. Her back and replacement knees bother her, she tells me, and she walks with a cane, so I don’t have the

ing with the stories of forgotten women. There’s the technologically advanced but environmentally wrecked future of the 1991 science fiction classic He, She and It, in which multinational corporations, or “multis,” build domes over their enclaves to protect the elites from a climate gone amok, while the masses scrape an existence in the “Glop,” the gang-ridden megalopolis, and a woman in one of the last free towns falls passionately in love with the cyborg she’s helping to program. You could wander through many more rooms, more land-

I IMAGINE THE DIFFERENT ROOMS OPENING OUT OF THE DIFFERENT WORLDS OF HER MANY VOLUMES OF PROSE AND POETRY, EACH WITH ITS DISTINCTIVE VISION. heart to ask for a proper tour. But I imagine the different rooms opening out of the different worlds of her many volumes of prose and poetry, each with its distinctive vision: the bitterly contested kitchens and bedrooms in early feminist novels such as Small Changes (1973), in which a generation of women saw their own struggles mirrored as they searched for non-traditional relationships and identities; the harsh New York City mental hospital ward in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), from which the incarcerated protagonist, Connie, makes disembodied journeys to two possible futures, one an egalitarian agrarian utopia, one an urban dystopian nightmare. There are the rich historical landscapes of Gone to Soldiers (1987), Piercy’s World War II epic, and City of Darkness, City of Light (1996), her novel of the French Revolution, both books teem36

scapes, and still not capture the breadth of Piercy’s vision and career. Instead, we end up in the kitchen, where Piercy shows off her “prophet plaque,” a framed certificate from the Reconstructionist Movement’s Shalom Center that awards her the Brit HaDorot, or Covenant of the Generations, and invokes the prophet Elijah, who will “turn the hearts of the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the parents, lest [God] smite the earth with utter destruction.” The link to Elijah seems appropriate for a writer whose poetry has enriched Jewish liturgy and whose work delves repeatedly into the relationships within families— particularly mothers and daughters— while spiraling outward to address the fate of the world. Piercy’s life seems low-key today, but the remoteness is misleading. Waves

of new visibility radiating out from the explosions of the Women’s March and #MeToo have lifted other longtime feminist icons to prominence; but while her contemporaries Margaret Atwood and the late Ursula K. Le Guin have been embraced and lionized by a new generation, Piercy has remained a constant presence, not just in literature but in many people’s lives. Her books are widely taught as feminist and science fiction classics, and her poems and blessings have entered the cultural bloodstream—what might even be called the common prayer language of a certain strain of liberal Judaism. They’re heard at weddings, funerals, namings; they hang on refrigerators. When I studied creative writing in college, her poem about creativity, “For the young who want to,” was thumbtacked to many a department bulletin board. That poem hints at the work ethic that may partly explain her prolific output: Talent is what they say you have after the novel is published and favorably reviewed. Beforehand what you have is a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting. Work is what you have done after the play is produced and the audience claps. Before that friends keep asking when you are planning to go out and get a job… Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. Nowadays, Piercy writes four days a week, reads poetry on college campuses and maintains a full schedule of local political activism, mainly on environmental issues. “Writing is the core of my life,” she told an interviewer in 2010, “but there’s always a lot else going on.” With her husband, Ira Wood—who appears frequently in her poems as “Woody”— she organizes anti-nuclear protests and speaks and writes on the issues of gentrification and development that grip the outer Cape. “I’m fully engaged,” she says. “I just can’t march anymore. I can’t walk that far.”

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OPENING PHOTO AND THIS PG: IRA WOOD

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Above: Piercy’s home is full of cats. Her grandmother used to tell her that her cat, Blackie, ate with a knife and a fork when guests weren’t around.

iercy has done her share of marching. Her work as a poet and novelist has always been tied up with activism—feminism, antiwar, antiracism, abortion rights. She grew up poor in Detroit, in a rough, mostly black neighborhood— the only place, she says, that Jews could buy homes at the time—in an “asbestos shack” that figures in many of her poems. Her Orthodox Jewish grandmother lived with the family half the year and gave the young Marge her deep connection with Jewish ritual. Her non-Jewish father scorned religion and tyrannized her mother, who struggled to manage her rebellious daughter. “A good woman appeared to me/indistinguishable from a dead one/except that she worked all the time,” Piercy wrote later in the poem “My mother’s body.”

Along with Jewish identity came a strong sense of solidarity with other victims of prejudice. “Jews and blacks were always lumped together when I grew up,”

“JEWS AND BLACKS WERE ALWAYS LUMPED TOGETHER WHEN I GREW UP,” PIERCY SAYS. “I DIDN’T GROW UP ‘WHITE.’ JEWS WEREN’T WHITE.” Piercy says. “I didn’t grow up ‘white.’ Jews weren’t white. My first boyfriend was black. I didn’t find out I was white until we spent time in Baltimore and I went to a segregated high school. I can’t express how weird it was. Then I just figured they didn’t know I was Jewish.” Piercy became a voracious reader after a fever confined her to bed rest at age eight. She read for escape, and she started writing fiction and poetry at age 15—right after the death of her grandmother, who had also been the family storyteller. “I was very close to her,” Piercy says. “Then, a girl I was also close

to died of a heroin overdose. Her pimp had her on heroin, and she died, and I was furious at everything. At around the same time, my parents had finally saved enough money to buy a brick house, and the shack we’d lived in was sold to a black doctor. The white neighbors on one side were furious about that, so they poisoned my cat. He died horribly. And all these things started me really seriously writing, because the contrast between how things were supposed to be, Dick and Jane and Spot, and the way the television depicted things was just so different from what I saw.”

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Fans of Piercy will observe that she is nothing if not consistent. This origin story (which she tells often) contains every significant element of her later work: religion, violence, feminism, an outraged sympathy for the victims of injustice and, of course, cats. Her grandmother, she says, had a cat named Blackie who had a seat at the seder table; for years, she believed her grandmother’s insistence that when guests weren’t around, Blackie ate with a knife and fork. Cats move sinuously through Piercy’s poetry and prose, including a 2001 memoir titled Sleeping with Cats. In one of her utopias, set in 2137, people have finally evolved far enough to be able to talk with cats. When the cats meet the time-traveling protagonist from the 1970s, who can’t speak with them, they snub her as only cats can. Piercy attended college against steep odds, graduating from the University of Michigan on a scholarship and returning there to join an early chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. With her first husband, a French Holocaust survivor and leftist activist, she protested the Vietnam War before it was a popular stance. The marriage eventually failed: He thought of her writing as a hobby,

and “he wouldn’t really talk to me,” she says. “He always had excuses—‘I can’t talk during the cyclotron run!’” Such husbands make frequent appearances in Piercy’s books; there’s nothing really wrong with them except that they can’t or won’t connect. “I left him,” she says of hers, “and I felt very guilty about it.” Meanwhile, she was publishing novels: Going Down Fast in 1969, about three young artists facing the destruction of their neighborhood by gentrification; Dance the Eagle to Sleep in 1970, about rebellious high schoolers; the breakout Small Changes in 1973, Woman on the Edge of Time in 1976, The High Cost of Living (about a gay love triangle) in 1978. The same decade saw her first six volumes of poetry, a pace she has kept up ever since, with major anthologies appearing in 1982 (Circles on the Water) and 2011 (The Hunger Moon). She didn’t slacken politically, either. With her second husband, she worked in “the movement” in New York in the 1960s, was a precinct captain for JFK—“but I was always a radical rogue, never really a Democrat”—and moved to Cape Cod in part because, she says, repeated gassings at protests had ruined her lungs. It’s one of many stories she

Piercy relaxes with a book—and a cat—in the lightand art-filled living room of the home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, that she shares with her husband.

tells with an unexpected twinkle, an eye for the comic side. “Besides the gas, I had smoked from the time I was a street kid, and I got bronchitis,” she says. “I was being treated free in New York by a movement doctor. One day he said to me, ‘It’s not worth my time to treat you. You’re gonna be dead in two or three years.’ I walked out of there and never smoked another cigarette. But because I’d waited till I got sick to quit, I’m allergic to tobacco smoke. And to be allergic to tobacco smoke in 1970s New York, well—I was so unpopular, people called me a fascist. It wasn’t just movement people. There are poets who hate me to this day because I asked them not to smoke.” In Wellfleet, her lungs healed. With health came another rich vein of creative inspiration—her connection to gardening, animals and the land. And happiness: The second marriage ended in divorce, but in 1982 she married an old friend, Woody, in a rapturous SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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“THIS WORLD IS RUN BY MORE FAT, BALD 70-YEAR-OLD MEN THAN IT IS BY RUNWAY MODELS, BUT I DON’T SEE WOMEN TRYING TO LOOK LIKE FAT 70-YEAR-OLD MEN.” romance that produced much of her most lush and sensual poetry. That decade saw the publication of Stone, Paper, Knife, with poems that trace their relationship, and in 1985 the lyrical My mother’s body, which begins when Piercy suddenly senses the moment of her mother’s death, 1,500 miles away, and is moved to explore the patterns of female influence: “This coat has been handed down, an heirloom/this coat of black hair and ample flesh,/this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin.” Through memory, Piercy’s harsh rejection of everything in her mother’s life ultimately ends in reconciliation: “What you/did not dare in your life you dare in mine.” The life that Piercy and Wood lead in Wellfleet is threaded through her poetry in other ways. Domesticity brings out her wit. Some of her funniest poems are about zucchini and eggplant (“And thus the people every year/in the valley of humid July/did sacrifice themselves/to the long green phallic god”). Others are about homemaking and cooking—although never just. Consider, for instance, the 2015 “Marinade for an Elderly Rabbit: Note on a recipe in a cookbook:” I could use some time in a marinade myself. . . Yes, prepare me a marinade, dear. Soak me in it overnight. Tomorrow you’ll find me far easier to digest. “I’m still a radical,” she says. “I’m 40

not a radical feminist because I’m not a lesbian, although I was bisexual. I guess I gave it up because women didn’t tend to fall in love with me the way men did. They found me too outspoken, or something. But at a certain point I gave it up, and when I got together with Woody, we wanted to be monogamous. I’m monogamous now. But still radical.”

f there’s a single word used most often about Piercy’s poetry, it’s “accessible.” In some academic settings this can be a put-down, of course, but in Piercy’s case it’s merely an acknowledgment of the extraordinary extent to which her poems have been taken up for use in everyday life. “I think poetry ultimately is a more communal activity than fiction,” she wrote in 1999, “but I love both equally.” The 1982 poem “To be of use,” a resonant meditation on the honor of work, is much used at funerals, especially for teachers and union organizers and other activists: It ends, “The pitcher cries for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” It isn’t the only Piercy poem in heavy rotation. The sequence of poems she wrote for her 1982 marriage ceremony with Woody is used widely in weddings. She often tells the story in interviews about the wedding guest who asked her whether her poem “The Chuppah” was part of the Jewish wedding service—

he’d heard it recited at four weddings that year: The chuppah stands on four poles... The marriage stands on four legs... We have made a home together open to the weather of our time. We are mills that turn in the winds of struggle converting fierce energy into bread… A more roguish poem in the same sequence, “Why marry at all?” is also popular: Why register with the state? Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?. . . Why license our bed at the foot like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve? The political, feminist poems may be beloved because, even at their angriest, they can be wickedly funny. The early “What’s That Smell in the Kitchen?” concludes, “Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.” A stinging 1971 poem about body image, “Barbie Doll,” isn’t funny at all, ending in an open casket. (“Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said./ Consummation at last./To every woman a happy ending.”) But Piercy’s own comment on the poem a few years ago was droll: “This world is run by more fat, bald 70-year-old men than it is by runway models, but I don’t see women trying to look like fat 70-year-old men.” More often, the standard misogynist metaphor is neatly vivisected, turned into something more interesting: In “Apple Sauce for Eve,” a take on the Eden story, Eve represents not sin but curiosity. She’s no tragic villain but a bumbler, bound for a wholly human, almost comic disaster: “How many last words/in how many dead languages,” the poet wonders, “would translate into,/But what happens if I, and Whoops!”

iercy came late to organized prayer, despite her early immersion in ritual. “At my grandmother’s funeral, I revolted against Judaism because the rabbi

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turned her into a sort of stock figure, a yiddishe mama,” she says. “But I went back to it years later, when my mother died. I was saying Kaddish for her, because my brother wouldn’t, and realized I didn’t know what I was saying. I couldn’t stand that.” At the age of 50, she took up the study of Hebrew. Then, active in a long-running Wellfleet chavurah she helped found, she was invited to join the committee that rewrote the Reconstructionist prayer book Or Chadash. “The language of the Hebrew is very poetic, but the English of most siddurs is no more inspiring than the directions for setting up a home entertainment system,” she says. “I wanted to create something beautiful, something that was reminiscent of the Hebrew but also could be relatable. It’s very different writing liturgy than it is writing poetry. The images cannot be far-fetched or too original. And it has to have a certain rhythm to it.” A volume called The Art of Blessing the Day appeared in 1999 with her versions of classic prayers such as the Shema, Aleinu and Amidah. Her version of the Ne’ilah prayer for the waning moments of Yom Kippur, published in 2006, reads in part, When I was little I cried out I! I! I! I want, I want. Older, I feel less important, a worker bee in the hive of history, miles of hard labor to make my sweetness.

itting at Piercy’s kitchen table as cats saunter in and out feels serene and timeless. I think about how poetry floats outside history, while novels intersect with it. Perhaps that explains the way Piercy’s novels—particularly the 1976 Woman on the Edge of Time and the prizewinning 1991 He, She and It—have suddenly leapt back into political and cultural relevance. Woman on the Edge of Time was reissued in 2016. It astonished readers not so much because its

vision of the utopian society in 2137 is feminist, sustainable and back-tonature—indeed, in that sense it bears the marks of the 1970s it hails from— but because, prophetically again, it all but abjures the gender binary. Connie, the visitor to this utopia from the 1970s present, at first thinks her guide Luciente is a young man. Eventually she catches on that Luciente is female, though it’s hard to tell, since people dress generically, mate in triads, raise children collectively and use the pronoun “per” for all genders. Once, seeking to “visit” her utopian friends, Connie accidentally enters an alternative dystopic future that appears in one nightmare sequence as shockingly contemporary. In it, the human race lives in towering high-rises amid pollution so thick that only “richies” can see the sun. The lower orders work as surgically enhanced sex slaves. Gloria Steinem, commenting on the reissued novel for an online forum in 2018, observed, “This was written before girls were getting breast implants for 16th birthdays, and before entire villages of women in India were surviving economically by gestating foreign embryos, and before terrorists of all stripes, from those bombing abortion clinics here to those beheading and bombing in Syria, were enshrining the cult of masculinity. I urge you to read Marge Piercy now— while we are still on the edge.” Piercy shrugs these comments off. “It astonishes me that there’s so much interest in [Woman on the Edge of Time] right now. People should be more interested in He, She and It. It’s far more relevant.” Because of artificial intelligence? I ask. “No! Because of global warming and its effect. And politics having become a spectator sport. And the immense and growing power of corporations, and the gulf between the affluent and regular people. The Glop comes closer every year.” She’s got a point. This book, too, is uncannily visionary. (It won the Arthur C. Clarke award for best science fiction in 1993.) It tells the story of Shira Shipman, high-tech employee of one of

the “multis” that have taken over governance in a climate-destroyed, megalopolis-dominated future. Shira divorces her husband, loses custody of their son and returns in despair to her home and her grandmother in Tikva, one of the few “free towns” that retain a precarious independence. The story’s power comes not so much from its setting as from the intricately layered double plot, in which Shira undertakes to train an illegally produced cyborg—an artificial entity with human characteristics, designed as a protective weapon for the settlement—in chapters interleaved with her grandmother’s poetic retelling of the parallel 16th-century tale of the Golem of Prague. Her grandmother, it turns out, also programmed the cyborg, and the stories come together in a moving conclusion that profoundly undermines the notion that technology will let us do whatever we like. Piercy denies having invented these futures. “I saw things happening, that’s all,” she says, echoing her contemporary, Margaret Atwood, who has said of her wildly popular Handmaid’s Tale that she included in it only things that had already happened somewhere in the world. Piercy and Atwood evidently saw some of the same portents in the 1990s; although there are obvious differences in the two writers’ sensibilities—notably Piercy’s Jewish content—their visions overlap, especially in Atwood’s own near-future climate dystopia, the Oryx and Crake trilogy. (The form has so many later imitators that it now has a nickname, “cli-fi.”) Piercy and Atwood were friendly in the 1990s, Piercy says, though they’ve lost touch. “I think she finds me a little peasant-y, and she’s more middle-class than I am in origins and sensibility. But I love her work. Something I wrote about her back then is just now getting collected in some critical anthology, something I wrote because at that point I thought she wasn’t getting enough attention.” She grins. “That got fixed.” I ask Piercy if she’s surprised at how accurately she predicted the future. She says, “I’m sorry about it.” SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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“IT’S VERY DIFFERENT WRITING LITURGY THAN IT IS WRITING POETRY. THE IMAGES CANNOT BE FAR-FETCHED OR TOO ORIGINAL. AND IT HAS TO HAVE A CERTAIN RHYTHM TO IT.”

s the afternoon light begins to slant through the windowsill’s tangle of plants, I rummage through the Piercy books I brought with me for a sentence I want to read to her, a sentence that, it seems to me, could serve as a mission state-

POEM | NATHAN ALTERMAN

ment for all of her novels. When I tell her what I’m looking for, she waves her hands and says impatiently: “Just read it, and I’ll see.” The sentence is from her preface to the 2016 edition of Woman on the Edge of Time: “When I was a child, I first noticed that neither

history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them. I have been at it ever since.” Does she feel as if she has succeeded, I wonder out loud. “Of course not! Nothing is ever fixed,” she retorts. “I set a novel in the French Revolution, because that’s where modern feminism started. And we still haven’t won half the things they were fighting for, the women in the French Revolution. Like equal pay. Like access to health care. Like freedom to act upon our own desires and choices. Basically, women have always worked their asses off. And yet it wasn’t written about. It looked as if women weren’t there. Here, I’ll read something to you.” She flips to a poem, “All that remains,” in The Hunger Moon, her 2011 collection, and reads aloud: A pillar of salt would slowly dissolve in the season of rains, as women

TRA NS L AT ED FROM T HE HEBREW BY DAN BEN- AMOS

ABOUT THE BOY ABRAM

Who was sleeping on the Door-steps of his home in Poland, at the end of the war, being scared sleeping in his own bed. A Town in Poland. The moon is high up, clouds around, At nightfall at his doorstep The boy Abram is sleeping so sound. His mother stands up by him and above, Her feet not touching the ground. She says: “The night is cold and wet Come home, Abram, lie down in your bed.” To her Abram answers: “My mommy, my mother, How can I lie down in my bed like another Child, when there I see you alive 42

And in your heart is a knife?” His father stands up tall and transparent, Gives him a hand, scolding him loud and clear: “Abram come home at once, My son Abram, in a hurry, do you hear?” To him Abram answers: “Daddy, my father, At home I am scared. When I close my eyes I see you asleep, My father, my daddy, And your head is cut off your body.” His little sister stands up, Calling him home with a cry. To her Abram answers: “At home I see you asleep, With the tear of the dead in your eye.”

Seventy nations then stand up and around. They say: “We are upon you, With seventy laws and seventy knives, To drag you home, to drag you alive, To put you in bed To sleep like your father. In his dream Abram shouts: “Daddy, Daddy.” He shouts the name of his mother. She answers: “How lucky I am, The knife in my heart Keeps me from breaking apart.” The night turned silent And the moon cloud covered. In the swords of the lightning God his word to Abram delivered,

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have so often melted from history so many nameless, wife of, daughter of, maidservant of . . . Diving through the letters Into the white light between I seek them out, wife of, daughter of, maidservant of— their silence deafens me. After so much work and writing, after a lifetime of writing novels and poetry, does Piercy herself at least feel heard? “To some degree,” she says. “Not in the mainstream anymore, not in New York. However, every other day I get a letter or an email or something on Facebook about how my work has helped someone. It got them through a divorce. Got them through a disease. Got them through being in prison. Got them through their husband betraying them with their best friend. The other day someone wrote to me, ‘I gave this poem to my fiancé, and we decided to get married.’” The New York Times recently ran a

piece about the prominence of women over 80; indeed, what with Atwood and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one could almost say her generation is having a cultural moment. Piercy declines to be gratified. She’s just as angry, she says, as when she was younger. Some things, she concedes, are not as they were. She has more choices than her mother had, more than her grandmother. She’s written about them repeatedly, but when she talks about them, her anger sounds fresh. “My great-grandmother was murdered in a pogrom. My grandmother had very little choice—you know, to live in the shtetl in the danger of pogroms and in utter poverty, or to run away with my grandfather and raise 11 children in poverty, always one jump ahead of the police or the Pinkerton Guards. My mother had to quit school in 10th grade to become a chambermaid. She had no skills. Basically, her idea was to marry out of it, which she did three

times. She was so miserable with my father, but when he said, ‘Why don’t you leave me?’ she said, ‘What could I do? How could I live?’ I made choices for myself, and I was able to live the life for the most part that I wanted to live.” So she does see some progress? I want to believe she does. I ask her again. “Yes,” she says, “but it didn’t happen. People worked to make a change. If you don’t work for the changes you want, the people in power work for their changes. They call up their Congressman, they call up their bank, they call up the mayor and say, ‘Let’s get rid of these houses. It’s a slum anyhow. There’s no income coming in from it. You know, I could build a casino there. I could build a hotel or a resort or condos, and there’d be much more taxes for the town.’ That’s the lesson: If you don’t work, they work.” Then she shoos me out, nicely, and goes back to work.

To Abram who sleeps On the doorstep of his house.

Those who bless you, Abraham, are blessed Those who curse you, are cursed.

Not a problem that compels ships to the sea, But an ancient voice thundering on high. Not a problem, but the rebirth impulse of the nation Not a problem, but God’s word to Abram.

Saying: Fear not, fear not Abram You will become so great and with might, Go forth Through blood and slaughter at night, To the land that I’ll show you ahead. Go forth through blood and slaughter at night, Like a beast, like a worm or a bird.

“The Refugee Problem” Is the name of this chapter In the history books. But it is not a problem My brave bureaucrats, That tears your folders and wires apart.

Abraham trembled and fell face down, Then left his home, his yard, and his town. The order that shook up Abram the father Tonight is shaking up Abram the younger.

Nathan Alterman (1910-1970) was one of the leading poets of his generation, whose lyrical poetry and songs were very popular in Mandate Palestine and later in Israel. “About The Boy Abram” was published for the first time in the newspaper Davar on April 26, 1946, a week after the journalist Shimon Samet published his essay, “Yaldei Israel be-Polin shel ha-yom” (Jewish children in present-day Poland), in which he reported about his post-war journey to Poland where, upon visiting children, an educator said to him: “And why did you turn your eyes away from the child who fell into a deep sleep sitting on the stairs. He is the child who is not sleeping in a bed, only on stairs, since he saw his parents slaughtered in their bed.” Upon publication “About the Boy Abram” became one of the most popular poems of the period. Dan Ben-Amos is a folklorist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the Graduate Program chair for the Department of Folklore and Folklife. SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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BOOKS TO BE AN EDUCATED JEW

R E CO M M E N DAT I O N S F R O M S I O N A B E N J A M I N | C A P E R S F U N N Y E P E T E R A . G E F F E N | J E R O M E G R O O P M A N

Y O S S I K L E I N H A L E V I | E D W A R D H I R S C H L A W R E N C E A . H O F F M A N | D A R A H O R N E V G E N Y K I S S I N | Y E H U D A K U R T Z E R D A N I E L L I B E S K I N D | B O B M A N K O F F A L L A N N A D L E R | J U D E A P E A R L S H U L A M I T R E I N H A R Z | D A N YA R U T T E N B E R G W E N D Y S H A L I T | J U D I T H S H U L E V I T Z M I C H A E L T W I T T Y | R U T H R . W I S S E E R I C H . Y O F F I E | R I C H A R D Z I M L E R 36

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A MOMENT BIG QUESTION

INTRODUCTION

hen I came to Moment 15 years ago, I wanted to expand my Jewish knowledge and began asking people which books I should read to be an “educated Jew.” I soon found that the list of recommended books varied greatly. At first I was a little

surprised. Weren’t there even five books—beyond the Five Books of Moses that make up the annual Torah cycle—that were considered the essential canon? But I came to understand that there could be no one answer, for embedded in my question were many other questions: What is an educated Jew? What do we mean by educated? Even, what is a Jew? Who is a Jew? What is Judaism? I certainly don’t have the answers. In fact, I believe that there is more than one path to becoming an educated Jew. That’s why I delight in the rich variety of book recommendations you will find on the following pages. We’ve asked rabbis, scholars, educators, writers and artists, not all of whom you would normally hear from on this topic. As I see it, each book is a portal into knowledge; some will beckon to you while others won’t. And while you are unlikely to be able to read all (or most) of them, knowing they are out there is fulfilling in itself. Even if you read just one or two, you will be farther along your path. Rest assured, this is only the first installment of an ongoing project. We will be introducing you to more recommendations in future issues. And, if you don’t see a book that's on your top five list, tell us about it via editor@momentmag.com, on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter at #5JewishBooks.—Nadine Epstein

INTERVIEWS BY DIANE M. BOLZ, SUZANNE BORDEN, SARAH BREGER, NADINE EPSTEIN, DINA GOLD, GEORGE E. JOHNSON, ANIS M O D I , N O A H P H I L L I P S , A M Y E . S C H WA R T Z , F R A N C I E W E I N M A N S C H WA R T Z , E L L E N WEXLER & LAURENCE WOLFF SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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JUDITH SHULEVITZ JUDITH SHULEVITZ IS THE AUTHOR OF THE SABBATH WORLD: GLIMPSES OF A DIFFERENT ORDER OF TIME.

Call It Sleep Henry Roth This story about a Jewish greenhorn childhood on the Lower East Side is the first great Jewish immigrant novel. It’s utterly skinless—Roth’s writing, his voice, his protagonist, are all triumphantly bruised. Roth does not for a moment idealize or romanticize the Jewish immigrant experience. It is also one of the great works of fiction about the mother-son relationship, and in that context, it’s a love letter to Yiddish. Even though we only read his mother’s words when Roth is “translating” her Yiddish, it’s magnificent, a completely different language from the cruder English spoken by the “English-speaking” characters. But ultimately, I love the novel because it’s so raw.

Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi Zakhor is a short book on the relationship between Jewish history and Jewish memory. This book taught me how to read Torah by teaching me what Torah isn’t. It isn’t history, grounded in evidence. It’s not literature insofar as we tend to separate that from history. And it’s not myth, because its characters are very human, very flawed beings—and I include God in that cast of characters. Torah lies at the intersection of those three things, history, literature and myth. Reading Torah is an act of remembering, and our job as readers is to try to understand what is being remembered.

The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week Eviatar Zerubavel The book is by a sociologist who invented a field called the sociology of time. Judaism is said to be a religion of time, a transposition of Temple worship to temporal worship, but Zerubavel forces you to reckon with the deeper meaning. He shows you that different orders of time have different architectural styles, which influence us as powerfully as do different styles of architecture in space. People also don’t realize that the Jews invented the week. The week is a byproduct of Shabbat, and as such, is a fundamentally Jewish unit of time.

The Human Condition Hannah Arendt The fundamental premise of this book is that we are deeply embedded in the materiality of the world and in our time and place. Arendt makes explicit a worldview that the rabbis leave implicit. She speaks the language of Greek and Roman philosophy, but what she’s saying is inescapably Jewish. I'm particularly drawn to her philosophy of work, which closely parallels the rabbinic concept of melachah. The rabbis identify 39 categories of work not to be performed on Shabbat. Arendt, you might say, imposes the form of Western philosophical discourse on a deeply rabbinic understanding of the human condition. I rather doubt that’s what Arendt thought she was doing. But I think it is.

The Gospel of Mark Matthew is generally considered the most Jewish gospel, but I think Mark is the better storyteller, and that’s partly because he knows his Torah. Stylistically, this book of the Gospels is very biblical— it’s terse and moves quickly and creates characters of unplumbable depth. Mark’s Jesus is an abrupt, difficult, uncanny man-god, terrifyingly full of life. There’s a saying that the New Testament is a midrash on the Old. Mark’s Jesus is a midrash on God, who is equally abrupt, unfathomable, and frightening. The Gospel of Mark helped me to grasp the way in which Christianity is a Jewish sect, because Mark portrays so well the first-century Jewish state of mind that fostered the Jesus cult.

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YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI HALEVI'S MOST RECENT BOOK IS LETTERS TO MY PALESTINIAN NEIGHBOR. HE IS CO-DIRECTOR OF THE MUSLIM LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE AT THE SHALOM HARTMAN INSTITUTE.

A Child of the Century Ben Hecht Ben Hecht is, to my mind, one of the most significant Jewish figures of the 20th century. He embodied assimilation, professional success, and then a return to Jewish identity and a powerful if ambivalent relationship with Israel. A Child of the Century is his autobiography, and it tells of his transformation from an assimilated, highly successful Hollywood screenwriter to a Zionist activist in the 1940s. He was among a very small group of American Jews who tried to save the Jews of Europe and came up against a timid American Jewish establishment.

With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps Eliezer Berkovits This is Berkovits’s powerful attempt to create a theology of faith based on the Shoah. It helped me become a believing Jew not despite the Shoah, but because of it. As a result of this book, I saw the Shoah as a cosmic battle in which the forces of evil weren’t only trying to destroy the Jews, but were trying to destroy God through the Jews. It was a war against God, which is very much how Hitler defined it. It made it clear to me that I belong to the side of the Jews who affirmed a world of meaning and purpose.

Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, the Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems Edited by Ben Zion Bokser Rabbi Kook opened the door to Kabbalistic thinking for me. The biggest lesson I got is that God is not static, but dynamic, and we are an essential part of the evolution of the divine. He gave me a way of dealing with the question of how a perfect God could preside over this world. Here you see that the structure of God is precisely about evolving from conditions of imperfection toward perfection. For me, even though Rabbi Kook died before the Shoah, it was a door to a post-Shoah theology. This English reader is a good introduction to Kook’s theology.

The Wild Goats of Ein Gedi Herbert Weiner

Operation Shylock: A Confession Philip Roth

The late Rabbi Herbert Weiner tells of his journey through Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the State of Israel in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was the first book I read that widened the lens of looking at Israel not only as a Jewish state, but as a center of world religions, realizing that Zionism had created a new unprecedented dynamic where we were the majority, and we were in charge of Christian and Muslim minorities. That was a shock to me. I came to realize that Zionism gave us an opportunity that Jews as a persecuted minority under those two religions never had, which was to explore Christianity and Islam as spiritual paths, not as threats.

I think this is the best novel about IsraeliAmerican Jewish relations ever written. It’s hilarious and profound, and Philip Roth at his absolute best. I think it’s very relevant for this moment, even more now than when Roth first wrote it in the 1980s. Roth actually moved from being antiZionist as a young man to developing a much more complicated relationship with Israel. Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld challenged Roth’s anti-Zionism, and it’s all in the book. It’s a fascinating account of an American Jew’s struggle with Israel.

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ERIC H. YOFFIE RABBI ERIC H. YOFFIE IS PRESIDENT EMERITUS OF THE UNION FOR REFORM JUDAISM.

Mishneh Torah Maimonides. Abridged edition in English and Hebrew, edited by Philip Birnbaum. Judaism’s foundation is a vast legal system drawn from the Talmud, which consists of 63 tractates. Maimonides recognized in the 12th century C.E. that the Talmud and its commentaries were far too complex for the average Jew to grasp. He therefore produced a 14-volume work, known as the Mishneh Torah, organizing and summarizing the law in a terse style comprehensible to all. For nearly 1,000 years, the Mishneh Torah has been an excellent place to begin the study of Jewish law, and this one-volume abridgement is my recommended vehicle for starting the journey.

My Promised Land Ari Shavit

A Letter in the Scroll Jonathan Sacks

A brief history of Israel, filled with anecdotes and personal reflections, this volume is a minor masterpiece. The author recounts Israel’s history with love and admiration for the country and its people, but with blistering honesty about its shortcomings. Shavit recounts Palestinian suffering and wants justice for the Palestinian people, but neither disguises nor excuses the moral and political failures of Palestinian leaders. A depressing and hopeful book, My Promised Land manages to be a paean to Zionism, a demand that Israel survive, an acknowledgment of Israel’s dark side and a call for compromise between two longtime rivals, neither with completely clean hands.

“Why be Jewish?” Sacks asks and answers the question in this volume with a scholarly but accessible journey through Judaism’s central beliefs and practices. This short book, written as a wedding gift for his children, provides an excellent survey of Judaism’s spiritual history and moral teachings. Addressed to the modern Jew in search of meaning and composed in a style that is sometimes simple and sometimes soaring, it makes a compelling case that Jewish ritual and commitment provide an anchor of stability, satisfaction and consolation in our often chaotic world.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity Abraham Joshua Heschel Heschel was a man of contradictions. His writings focused on the special spiritual essence of the Jewish people. An ardent Zionist, he rejected the idea that land itself is holy and that nationalism could solve the religious problems of modern Jewry. Obsessed with the encounter between God and human beings, he nonetheless could not imagine a Judaism devoid of a drive for social justice. In this collection of lectures and essays, Heschel offers theological insight, a searing critique of Jewish survivalism, a harsh look at the workings of Jewish communal structures and a prophetic insistence that Jewish spirituality must always be wed to moral action.

To Pray as a Jew Hayim Halevy Donin Prayer matters. In this volume Donin expertly interprets the major prayers, offers a clear and helpful how-to on the rituals of traditional worship and stresses ethical awareness as a component of prayer. But Donin does not address the exciting innovations now developing in the contemporary synagogue. Readers will need to supplement this book by looking elsewhere for guidance on spiritual and community-building prayer experiences that are changing the face of Jewish prayer in the synagogues of North America.

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PETER A. GEFFEN PETER A. GEFFEN IS THE FOUNDER OF THE ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL SCHOOL AND PRESIDENT OF KIVUNIM.

Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron Menachem Klein Klein is a professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He has collected a powerful untold story of the rather elegant and certainly surprising coexistence between Arabs and Jews in pre-state Palestine. The book is filled with stories of Arab-Jewish coexistence that don’t merely challenge the stereotypes we hold, they upend them. Klein fuels our optimism and hopefulness with a different reality than the one we normally see.

Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco Aomar Boum

Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn Noam Pianko

By studying Muslim attitudes toward their Jewish neighbors through four generations, Boum takes the reader into an unexpected world. Here we find a mutually respectful and loving relationship that existed prior to the mass emigration of Morocco’s Jews, mostly to Israel, but also to other countries. The book led to a recognition within Morocco of the need to actively preserve Jewish culture and heritage, even though the community has dwindled from around 250,000 in 1948 to a few thousand today.

Pianko introduces us to three alternative Zionist thinkers prior to Israel’s founding. While ultimately other perspectives prevailed, it is important to become aware of the nuances of earlier Zionist thought. The issues raised by these three men remain with us today, often with corrosive effects upon Israel and the entire Jewish people.

Bedouin Culture in the Bible Clinton Bailey Bailey is acknowledged as the foremost expert on the Bedouin and possesses the only transcribed collection of Bedouin oral tradition in the world. His latest book claims that the original Jewish people were Bedouin, nomadic people of the desert. This book demonstrates the vast expanse of Jewish scholarship and the deep interconnectedness of Jews to other peoples.

The Prophets Abraham Joshua Heschel In this extraordinary work, Heschel explores the Bible’s vast prophetic literature from a thematic point of view. Heschel well understands the power of the word, and he guides us into the lives and thoughts of these transformative human beings in his unique and intellectually stimulating way.

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WENDY SHALIT WENDY SHALIT IS THE AUTHOR OF A RETURN TO MODESTY: DISCOVERING THE LOST VIRTUE AND THE GOOD GIRL REVOLUTION.

Chovo HaLevavos Bahya ibn Paquda

The Sefer Chofetz Chaim Yisrael Meir Kagan

Translated as Duties of the Heart, this is the primary work of the 11th-century rabbi and philosopher Bahya ibn Paquda. As I delved into Judaism, I was often told that “it’s the deed that counts” and that this is what distinguishes Judaism (unlike Christianity, where believing in Jesus supposedly makes everything OK). It turns out that this is a bit of a parody, for although it is true that “the deed shapes the heart”—and if you don’t want to visit your sick grandma, you still should—the most important is ultimately the heart. The author analyzes why we have a tendency to focus on the external, which he says is necessary, but definitely not sufficient.

Sefer Chofetz Chaim was published in 1873. It covers the Torah’s laws of gossip and slander. When does listening to negative information have a constructive purpose, and when is it destructive? Sensitizing ourselves to be careful with the power of speech seems to be more urgent than ever, especially with Facebook and Twitter, where reputations can be so easily destroyed by a mere keystroke. The most easy-to-digest version is Artscroll’s The Chofetz Chaim: A Daily Companion, which is an abridged form of two of the Chofetz Chaim’s masterpieces. My favorite rule is that you’re not allowed to tell a writer that certain people don’t appreciate her work!

The War Against the Jews Lucy S. Dawidowicz

The Thinking Jewish Teenager’s Guide to Life Akiva Tatz

The Illuminated Pirkei Avos The Wolinetz Edition

I have gotten rid of hundreds of books each time I move, but this one has made it every time. To say “Hitler was a madman” is so often the beginning and end of our understanding of the Holocaust, but Dawidowicz, who was a very careful historian, shows how Hitler received the mandate to do what he did. Germany was not a “country going crazy” but rather systematically carrying out a philosophy that started hundreds of years before. The War Against the Jews shows that evil comes in stages, in a logical progression, and that every decision takes us down a certain path.

South African rabbi (and doctor) Akiva Tatz is best known for his book Living Inspired, but I have always favored his book for the younger reader, The Thinking Jewish Teenager’s Guide to Life, especially for inclusion in bar or bat mitzvah gifts. It takes you through nearly every subject matter of significance: happiness, ordeals, defining one’s role in life, and the relationship between the sexes—all with an eye toward a deeper and inspiring reality.

Pirkei Avos, or Ethics of the Fathers, is a section of the Mishnah that can be appreciated on many levels. Even young children enjoy discussing with their parents, “Who is wise?” and “Who is strong?” because the answers are never what they would expect. The Illuminated Pirkei Avos contains not only commentary but also stunning artwork and calligraphy. From my perspective, the most important teaching in Pirkei Avos is “Aseh Lecha Rav,” make for yourself a rav or teacher. We are being taught here that Judaism ultimately is not a religion you can understand from books, but a relationship—with God—and we can only really grasp it via another relationship, with a teacher.

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JEW

EDWARD HIRSCH EDWARD HIRSCH HAS PUBLISHED NINE BOOKS OF POETRY, INCLUDING GABRIEL: A POEM. HE IS PRESIDENT OF THE JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION.

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan Translated by John Felstiner

I and Thou Martin Buber, translated by Walter Kaufmann

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity Abraham Joshua Heschel

Paul Celan is the greatest European poet reckoning with the Holocaust. He is a poet of trauma. He was an exceptional poet of the German language, an heir to Hölderlin and Goethe, who was at war with the German language, a language that made it possible for him to become a poet at all. He couldn’t get over what had happened to his family—and to others. I read Celan in my early 20s, and it had a tremendous impact on me. Unlike most American poets, he understood that he was living inside of history. I loved his gravity. Reading him, I began to formulate the kind of poetry I wanted to write going forward.

This book was first written in 1923 and translated 14 years later. It has always been relevant. What’s meaningful to me is the way that Martin Buber treats Judaism not as a set of fixed rules or even beliefs, but as a dialogue, an ongoing set of relationships. I first encountered I and Thou in my mid-20s, and I began to formulate an idea of poetry itself as a kind of relationship. Buber gave me a roadmap for my idea of poetry itself as an encounter between strangers, between two people who are not physically present to each other. It establishes a relationship between a poet, a poem and a reader.

I read Heschel in my 30s. I was definitely seeking something different from Judaism beyond Leviticus, beyond the rules. I wanted to see how deeply rooted the idea of justice is in Jewish thinking. Heschel provided me with his own Guide for the Perplexed. What I love about Heschel’s essays is his recognition that morality has a grandeur and spirituality has a kind of audacity, and that we are the only ones who can save Judaism from oblivion. It is our responsibility to pass Judaism on from one generation to the next.

World of Our Fathers Irving Howe I wish this book was called A World of Our Fathers and Mothers— that would be a more accurate title. Irving Howe gives us a full portrait of our ancestors, the Eastern European Jews who came to America. We can’t forget American Jewish life started as immigrant life. Howe reminds us of Jewish working class experiences in cities. He shows us the reasons for democratic socialism. I love his loving evocation of Yiddish culture. He reminds us of the Yiddish poets, playwrights and fiction writers who created art out of Jewish life.

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai Edited by Robert Alter Yehuda Amichai is the most humane and compassionate of modern Hebrew poets. He was part of a new generation who brought the vernacular into Hebrew poetry. He intermingled biblical and vernacular Hebrew in ways that are deep and resonant. He had a genius for metaphor. He wrote from the two poles of love and war. But what’s most meaningful about his poetry is the way that he put actual human beings at the center of his art. He’s that rare thing—a postmodern poet with a heart.

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SHULAMIT REINHARZ SHULAMIT REINHARZ IS AN AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR EMERITA OF SOCIOLOGY AT BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY. SHE FOUNDED THE HADASSAH-BRANDEIS INSTITUTE, WOMEN’S STUDIES RESEARCH CENTER AND KNIZNICK GALLERY FOR FEMINIST ART.

Tanakh The Tanakh, made up of the Five Books of Moses, the Prophets and the Writings—which includes the Psalms, the Five Megillot and other important writings—is the basis of the belief system and history of the Jewish people. Without at least some familiarity with this literature, it is difficult to understand anything else. There are countless commentaries on the Tanakh, so the study of the ancient texts can be embellished.

People of the Book: A Novel Geraldine Brooks

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Lucette Lagnado

This novel based on the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah can be read as a sweeping history of European Jewish life from medieval Spain through the Nazi period. The actual Sarajevo Haggadah is the subject of many studies and is on display in Sarajevo. Extensive new research using the latest scientific methods to analyze the paper and the wine and food spilled on the Haggadah has been published recently. The Sarajevo Haggadah is illuminated with beautiful drawings and is a window into the history of Jewish art, a longneglected topic. Since we read the Haggadah every year on Passover, knowing about the Sarajevo version can enhance one’s seder.

This book deals with the Mizrachi Jews of North Africa, as well as the Syrian Jews who moved there. Lagnado’s book reveals the painful gender relations among Jews in 20th century Egypt, issues of socioeconomic class, and the impact of class on the destinations Jews chose when Nasser expelled them: The poor went to Israel and the wealthy to France. Lagnado’s book uncovers aspects of aliyah, the Jewish diaspora, anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli sentiment after 1948 and the extinction of a unique Jewish culture.

Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel Edited by Deborah S. Bernstein Women researchers are the authors of each chapter. The editor recognized that the early immigrants were pioneers of new social forms (e.g. the kibbutz). The book includes chapters on both the First Aliyah (1880-1904) and the glorified Second Aliyah (1904-1914), which included David Ben-Gurion. Members of the First Aliyah established the towns, which members of the Second Aliyah disparaged as bourgeois and dependent on philanthropy. Other chapters cover the arts as well as politics and social ideals.

The Ladies Auxiliary Tova Mirvis Set in Memphis, Mirvis’s novel explores the American version of such eternal Jewish problems as internal community conflict, intermarriage and conversion, and the opposing forces of tradition and change. An (overly) enthusiastic newcomer moves to town and tries to innovate. Gradually, conflict arises between the synagogue’s Ladies Auxiliary and the women’s teenage daughters. “Love one’s neighbor as oneself” is not guiding their behavior. Tova Mirvis is part of a growing group of women writers (including Dara Horn and Rachel Kadish) who are bringing us new ways to think about Jews in America.

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JEROME GROOPMAN JEROME GROOPMAN IS PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE AT HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL AND A STAFF WRITER AT THE NEW YORKER. HE IS THE CO-AUTHOR OF YOUR MEDICAL MIND: HOW TO DECIDE WHAT IS RIGHT FOR YOU.

The Heart of Torah, Volumes 1 and 2 Shai Held This is a wonderful twovolume commentary on the weekly Torah reading. Each week, there are two essays explicating the parsha, and it combines literary analysis with classical sources and studies the psychological dynamics of the reading. Rabbi Held doesn’t shy away from confronting disturbing or problematic texts, looking to understand them within these historical and psychological contexts, and then making them relevant to our modern life.

Sage Advice Pirkei Avot with translation and commentary by Irving (Yitz) Greenberg Pirkei Avot, Ethics of Our Fathers sort of falls into what is called wisdom literature— observations about behavior, morality and what we value. It also incorporates some level of Talmudic disagreement—so that someone who’s looking for insight realizes that there are a multiplicity of viewpoints and opinions which can conflict. The source material in Pirkei Avot is traditional, but it also speaks to universal dilemmas and questions. Rabbi Greenberg’s commentary is very rich. He frames each chapter, giving background and historical context. Even though he is a great scholar, this is written for a general audience.

The JPS Bible Commentary: Ecclesiastes Michael V. Fox Ecclesiastes, Kohelet, is an extremely problematic book. It deals with impermanence, ego and self-aggrandizement. It has a chilling effect in a culture that is highly materialistic like ours. And here is a book supposedly written in the voice of King Solomon who has almost immeasurable riches and access to whatever he wants. Ecclesiastes is one of the most psychological books, and you can tell why the rabbis argued over whether to put it in the canon. But I think it’s a mark of maturity that it exists within the Jewish tradition and is wrestled with on that level. The JPS translation and commentary are in more current language than other editions.

Souls On Fire Elie Wiesel

The Book of Esther

Wiesel's portraits of the early Hasidic masters give a very different viewpoint from how people think of Hasidism today. These were people who were rebelling against what they saw as the suffocating aspects of highly ritualized Judaism. So they were seeking joy in Jewish life, and the fact that wisdom and meaning can be found in everyday life. It didn’t have to be this elite, highly intellectualized rationalism. This book also doesn’t shy away from depression and despair. Some of the great Hasidic masters went through periods of questioning their faith. When you're approaching Judaism, and you realize there are tensions around faith, belief, ritual and practice, that knowledge is very liberating.

The Book of Esther has one of the most brilliant insights into the power and the irrationality of bigotry. In one part of the story Haman is being elevated by King Ahasuerus but then he walks out of the royal palace and sees Mordecai the Jew and all his feeling of importance and pleasure evaporates. This kind of illness, whereby somehow “the other” is seen as such an undermining force that you can’t just be happy with your own portion, is powerfully expressed in the Book of Esther. The book speaks to the current malady which is leading to the resurgence of authoritarianism—a need to find and blame another in some way, or to use others as foils for your own advancement, aggrandizement and inner deficiencies.

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SIONA BENJAMIN SIONA BENJAMIN IS A PAINTER WHO WAS BORN IN BOMBAY. HER WORK REFLECTS HER BACKGROUND OF GROWING UP JEWISH IN A PREDOMINANTLY HINDU AND MUSLIM INDIA.

Bombay: Exploring the Jewish Urban Heritage Shaul Sapir This book tells the his tory of Bombay—now Mumbai—through its Indian Jewish commu nity. Sapir, a professor of historical geography at Hebrew University, presents different Jew ish heritage sites and explains how they have changed over time. It describes the Bagh dadis who arrived in the 19th century to work in textiles or trade and the impact they had on the city. Books like this make people reflect on the importance of re membering multicultural Jews all over the world.

Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish Art and Architecture Ori Z. Soltes

This one-of-a kind book is a comprehen sive encyclopedia of Jewish art from all over the world. Soltes, a professor at George town University, uses the question of what makes art Jewish to guide his examination of thousands of years’ worth of art and archi tecture. Art has always played an important part in influencing cul ture and history, and that is why this book is timely and informa tive.

Dropped from Heaven: Stories Sophie Judah

This collection of quaint stories about Indian Jews—the Bene Israel in particular—is funny, light and very entertaining. They also reveal a glimpse into a culture that is unknown to many even in the Jewish world. The book cov ers more than 100 years of history from colonial India through independence, the creation of Israel and the emigration of the majority of the popu lation to Israel. Sophie Judah is a living trea sure in our Bene Israel community, and her stories are whimsical, truthful and playful all at the same time.

Jews and the Indian National Art Project Kenneth X. Robbins and Marvin Tokayer

This book explores how Jews in India have shaped and de veloped the country’s art. It talks about how art is shaped by many factors and influences. Communities like my Indian Jewish one are little known in the broad expanses of world Jewish culture. This book discusses how Jews in India were influenced by their Indian-ness and how they influenced their surroundings in turn.

Art and Religion in the 21st Century Aaron Rosen

This is a very mul ticultural book that doesn’t focus on Jewish art but show cases Jewish artists and their viewpoints. It shows how much religion influences art and vice versa. This should be read alongside Can Art Aid in Resolving Conflicts? by Noam Lemelshtrich Latar, which examines how art can assist in creating dialogue and bridges across cultures.

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JUDEA PEARL JUDEA PEARL IS A PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND DIRECTOR OF THE COGNITIVE SYSTEM LABORATORY AT UCLA, A MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND PRESIDENT OF THE DANIEL PEARL FOUNDATION, NAMED AFTER HIS SON.

The Bible All our thinking is tied to the metaphors in the stories of the Bible. This is our DNA, we are a people of a story. It is a special kind of story, full of intrigue and adventures, the fallibility of humans and greatness of humans, and that’s what makes it the book of books. All other religions tell us that we are the people of the book, the people of the Bible, and we have abandoned that! It’s a shame, and I think we should go back. Even biblical ethics, of which we are so proud, are enshrined there in the form of stories about human beings like us.

I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl The last words of Daniel Pearl were, “I am Jewish, my father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish. Back in the town of Bnei Brak there is a street named after my great-grandfather, Chaim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town.” So we asked 300 people what it means to them to be Jewish, and 150 of them responded and gave honest answers. Some of them confessed that it wasn’t easy. The answers have a common denominator, which can be read in the essays of Shimon Peres, Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua: Being Jewish today means being happy to feel part of the past, present and future of a collective of individuals who happen to call themselves Jews. That is all peoplehood is.

1948 Benny Morris Israel today is the icon that unites the Jewish people. We Jews spend so much of our energy remembering the Holocaust, and only a fraction of that energy is invested into remembering our redemption—the re-establishment of the State of Israel. Our children do not know about the years that led to the State and the miracle of survival. I talk to students about that particular period and what it meant to the continuity of the Jewish people and how close it was to a second Holocaust. I think 1948 by Benny Morris does a great job of historical documentation of the period, including the feeling of the pulse of the time.

The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow Gil Troy I believe that every American Jew is proud of being a member of a community that helped re-establish Jewish statehood. This book was a great endeavor by Gil Troy, who took Arthur Hertzberg's book The Zionist Idea and modernized it, including in it sections that pertain to our time, and enriched it with some modern insight. We were instrumental in creating the greatest miracle in world history, and the contribution of American Jewry to that endeavor will fill every reader with pride—and we need some pride today.

A Simple Story S. Y. Agnon This is a simple love story, a depiction of life in the Jewish shtetl. Every Jew should know what life was like in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, because most American Jewish families carry the legacy of the shtetl. It is in our uncles' stories, our mothers' singing, our rabbis' inflections. To communicate among ourselves, we need to know their legends, the stories they told each other, their family and community relationships—and all this is in one story. Everybody should understand the experience that was filtered and solidified through centuries of suffering and persecution. The book revolves around a Jewish wedding.

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RICHARD ZIMLER RICHARD ZIMLER IS THE AUTHOR OF THE LAST KABBALIST OF LISBON. HIS NEW NOVEL IS THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LAZARUS.

The Old Testament (Torah) For at least 1,500 years, the Torah has remained one of the most influential works in Western culture. Its stories have been debated and interpreted by dozens of generations of philosophers, mystics, theologians, artists and writers. A working knowledge of Genesis and the Torah’s other books is sure to deepen one’s understanding of the evolution of Western civilization, as well as enhance one’s appreciation for such diverse authors as Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Gershom Scholem In this groundbreaking work (published in 1941), Scholem explores the long-neglected and oft-despised tradition of Kabbalah and makes its goals and techniques—and system of beliefs—accessible to scholars and laypeople alike. Topics range from the use of gematria to create revelatory interpretations of the Torah to the influence of Islam on Jewish mystics. With this single book, Scholem took Kabbalah out of the hands of crackpots and charlatans and turned it into a practice worthy of careful and ongoing study.

Survival in Auschwitz Primo Levi As a well-known Jewish author in Portugal, a country almost devoid of Jews, I’m frequently asked by those trying to understand the Holocaust which author to read first. I always reply Primo Levi. In this, his first major work, he tells of the suffering and horror he experienced in Auschwitz and—with moving detail—describes how he and his fellow prisoners desperately tried to retain their compassion and hope. A footnote (and lesson): Levi’s manuscript was rejected by a number of major Italian publishers before being released by a small press. Its sales over the first few years were meager.

The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud Originally published in 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams introduces Freud’s ideas on dream creation and interpretation. It details the theory that dreams are forms of “wish fulfillment” produced by the unconscious mind. By distinguishing between the narrative elements of a dream and its underlying meaning, Freud rekindled the ancient Hebrew tradition of dream interpretation, as revealed, for instance, in Genesis 41, in which Joseph interprets a dream of the Egyptian Pharaoh and is rewarded by becoming his second-incommand.

I Married a Communist Philip Roth During the latter part of his 50-year career, Philip Roth began to explore the fall from grace of characters who ran afoul of American mores and politics. In I Married a Communist, he brilliantly explores the chilling effect of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade on America’s insecure Jewish community. For those who wish to understand the history of Jewish assimilation in America and the continuing threat posed to Jews (and other minorities) by anti-Semites, xenophobes, neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and racists, this novel is essential reading.

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DANYA RUTTENBERG DANYA RUTTENBERG IS A RABBI AND AUTHOR OF NURTURE THE WOW: FINDING SPIRITUALITY IN THE FRUSTRATION, BOREDOM, TEARS, POOP, DESPERATION, WONDER, AND RADICAL AMAZEMENT OF PARENTING.

There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice Through Jewish Law and Tradition Jill Jacobs There is nothing more crucial to understanding what it is to be a Jew than to understand our obligations in the world in which we live. This book is a thorough, brilliant primer on a number of issues related to setting up a society in accordance with the mandates of Torah and Jewish law. Jacobs takes readers on a journey through the Torah, rabbinic literature and later legal writings to show how our tradition has long demanded just systems and treatment of individuals on issues like poverty, housing, health care, criminal justice, workers' rights and environmental issues.

Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism From a Feminist Perspective Judith Plaskow Though already almost 30 years old, this brilliant, comprehensive work of feminist theology is still the gold standard for surfacing the patriarchal underpinnings of much of Judaism and offering an alternate vision. Taking readers through the rabbinic process of reconstructing Jewish memory through a feminist lens, she shows how our thinking about crucial concepts of God, Torah and Israel have been deeply shaped by gendered understandings, and unpacks what they could yet be. It will have an indelible impact on how you see the tradition.

Mishneh Torah: Laws of the Foundations of Torah and the Laws of Repentance Maimonides Honestly, I’d recommend large swaths of the Mishneh Torah if I could, but in the interests of realistically engaging readers, I’ll start with these two chapters. The former text helps to make sense of the anthropomorphism in Torah and offers a powerful, mature theological understanding; the latter offers a step-by-step guide to taking responsibility for our interpersonal missteps and misdeeds—to owning the harm we’ve caused and working to make it right. The entire Mishneh Torah is available in Hebrew and English online at sefaria.org.

The Jewish Catalog: A Do-It-Yourself Kit Richard Siegel, Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld First published in 1973, this is a fantastic, accessible primer to a number of Jewish topics that, most critically, empowers readers to take the business of creating a Jewish life into their own hands, from the particulars of holiday and kashrut observance to tying tzitzit and making community. A lot of the resources are outdated, but the images are, now, delightfully vintage, and much of the wisdom resonates strongly.

This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation Alan Lew Rabbi Lew (z”l) was my rabbi and had an indelible impact on my own Torah and understanding of the world. This book, his masterpiece, takes readers deep inside the inner, spiritual meaning of the time between Tisha B’Av and Simchat Torah, and how it can be a time of profound personal connection and growth. It both forever changes readers’ experience of that season and offers up new possibilities for engaging with the tradition in a broader way.

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RUTH R. WISSE RUTH R. WISSE IS A PROFESSOR EMERITA OF YIDDISH AT HARVARD AND A DISTINGUISHED SENIOR FELLOW AT THE TIKVAH FUND. HER MOST RECENT BOOK IS NO JOKE: MAKING JEWISH HUMOR.

To answer the question of what reading makes an educated Jew, one would first have to rephrase it. The educated Jew does not “read” but “learns,” or studies the Jewish sources over a lifetime. The words enter consciousness and memory before their meaning is understood. The Jew grows into them and they take on varying degrees of importance depending on his personality or her experience. The most necessary texts in this education are the prayers that accompany Jews from dawn to dusk. Tevye the Dairyman is Sholem Aleichem’s most popular character and one of the best known in modern Jewish literature. Though a villager who lives among gentiles, he wants above all else to be considered an “educated Jew.” To prove it, he spouts quotations and plays around with them, usually for humor, but also for

emphasis—or spite. If you want to know what the educated Jew must know, a good place to look would be to Tevye’s sources—the prayer books, the Pentateuch and the passages of the Bible that are read on Sabbaths and holidays, the Five Megillot, and the Ethics of the Fathers. The point, however, is not how much he knows but how much at home he feels with his knowledge. By the end of the 19th century when Sholem Aleichem created Tevye, he expected even his newly “secular” readers to appreciate what Tevye was doing with his quotations, which meant they would have had to know at least as much as he does. So let’s say that Tevye’s sources provide the baseline of Jewish self-knowledge. (Notice how I’ve managed to sneak the

Tevye stories into this body of education, for good measure.) Over the years when students came to study Yiddish literature at college, some without any Jewish background and some not Jewish, I sometimes suggested they attend Orthodox services to absorb the culture from which Yiddish grew and that it was meant to conserve. This was not intended to entice them into Jewish observance or to shape their view of the subject but as a shortcut to get to the same educated sphere of Jewishness that is implied by your question. Today’s Jewish adults are fortunate if they can read what the traditional cheder child already knew by heart. As a cheerful minimalist, I’d say, let’s begin there.

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BOB MANKOFF BOB MANKOFF IS A CARTOONIST, EDITOR AND AUTHOR. HE IS THE HUMOR AND CARTOON EDITOR AT ESQUIRE AND WAS PREVIOUSLY THE CARTOON EDITOR FOR THE NEW YORKER.

Old Testament We are The People of The Book, so read Part One. God’s early work is uneven but compelling. You can skip the sequel. There’s always a little skeptical realism that comes with being Jewish. Judaism is the only religion where you might believe in God, but you can still keep asking questions and don’t have to believe he’s always right. There’s a healthy dose of skepticism. It’s not like the New Testament that tries to explain everything. It absolutely informs the way I think about things.

The Story of the Jews, Volumes One and Two Simon Schama

No Joke: Making Jewish Humor Ruth Wisse

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious Sigmund Freud

Great on the history of everything Jewish except humor. Note to Schama: Please remedy in Volume Three. In the meantime, that failure can be remedied by my third and fourth picks. You might as well know the history of the Jews. There are references to jokes in there, but he sort of left out the humor part, and I think it’s an important part of being Jewish, how we see the world and how we identify.

Here is the history of Jewish humor that Schama left out. Let’s see if he cribs any of it for Volume Three.

The insular Eastern European Jewish world is long gone, but these jokes are so perfectly formed that they will be told as long as jokes are told. Even when this book was published in 1905, Jewish humor was viewed as an essential part of Jewish culture by Jews and non-Jews alike. Jewish humor is central to my work, and it shares something with other types of humor, but it also involves ambiguity, contradiction and intense crazy logic. Jewish humor has a poignant aspect. What’s the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist? The optimist says “Things couldn’t get worse,” and a pessimist says they could!

Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler For the jokes. I could’ve made this serious. Mein Kampf— never forget. But jokes aside, I really think it’s good to be aware of these things because the anti-Semitism that was at the root of this evil still exists.

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LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN RABBI LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN IS PROFESSOR OF LITURGY, WORSHIP AND RITUAL AT HEBREW UNION COLLEGE IN NEW YORK, AND A CO-FOUNDER OF SYNAGOGUE 2000.

Babylonian Talmud

JPS Commentary Bible

If I were alone on a desert island and had just one single work of the Jewish mind and soul to take with me, it would be the Babylonian Talmud. Judaism as we know it is utterly unthinkable without the Talmud. The older I get, the more I appreciate it, admire it—and actually love it. For those unable to follow it in its original (almost everyone), we now have the Artscroll version with its translation and commentary. I increasingly define Judaism as a running conversation about the human condition. The very form of Talmudic argumentation within the text, and then across generations via marginal commentary, epitomizes the Jewish conversation at its best.

The Bible, but only with commentary, because reading the Bible “straight” is a certain route to misunderstanding, apathy, alienation or worse. The Talmud (my first choice) is riddled with the taste of traditional commentary, but modern Jews also ought to know a scientific view of Torah. Even now, after factoring in the realms of more recent scholarly discovery, I find the Jewish Publication Society Commentary Bible filled to the brim with matter for the mind.

The Course of Modern Jewish History Howard M. Sachar

Principles of the Jewish Faith Louis Jacobs

What modern Jews need above all is a great once-over on specifically modern Jewish history. Sachar’s The Course of Modern Jewish History is not the latest account—it was written in 1958—so it lacks more recent scholarly insight, but it remains an authoritative classic and is practically a page turner.

Jacobs wrote some 50 books and would have been named England’s chief rabbi had the Jewish fundamentalists of the time not blocked him. His very best book is this one, a sparkling discussion of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith, as they have been reflected in Jewish thought over the years. The full gamut of traditional Jewish belief is all here, explained cogently for non-experts to follow clearly.

Choices in Modern Jewish Thought (2nd edition) Eugene B. Borowitz Borowitz is to modernity what Jacobs is to our rabbinic and medieval heritage. Virtually single-handedly, he founded the field of modern Jewish theology for Jews who were primarily ethnic and didn’t know we had any theology. Martin Buber? Mordecai Kaplan? Abraham Heschel? Leo Baeck? The early Zionists? Holocaust theology? They are all here, and the second edition adds chapters on modern mysticism, postmodern thought and feminism as well.

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CAPERS FUNNYE CAPERS FUNNYE IS RABBI OF BETH SHALOM B’NAI ZAKEN ETHIOPIAN HEBREW CONGREGATION IN CHICAGO AND THE FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN MEMBER OF THE CHICAGO BOARD OF RABBIS.

To Be a Jew Hayim Halevy Donin

To Pray as a Jew Hayim Halevy Donin

What Is a Jew? Morris N. Kertzer

Fragile Branches James R. Ross

Rabbi Donin’s books provide a very meaningful foundation for people who are expressing interest in Judaism. He opens by telling us that Jews tend to look like people in other parts of the world—Jews from Ethiopia look like Ethiopians—so for those converting into the faith, they can understand that looking different does not mean that one cannot be Jewish.

To Pray as a Jew gives us a framework, a guide to prayer during a synagogue service. By reading it, you learn how to become comfortable within a synagogue, what’s happening in particular parts of the service, what is the meaning behind wearing a tallit or a kippah. It explains, for instance, why some synagogues don’t have mixed seating.

Rabbi Kertzer breaks down what it means to be a Jew. My congregation has a lot of people who are former Christians and former Muslims. We try to give them books that will provide them with a broad range of information on Judaism.

I want people to realize that Jewish communities exist in different parts of the world. Fragile Branches looks at Jewish communities from around the world, starting with the Abayudaya community in Uganda and examining the growth of Jewish communities in Africa in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, as well as in Latin American and Central American countries, and how they had their Judaism stripped from them during the Inquisition and then found their way home.

Black Judaism: Story of an American Movement James Landing James Landing does a thorough job of covering different segments within the African American community and their introduction to Judaism, and chronicling the history of several of these distinctive communities around the country, such as the Hebrew Israelites in Harlem and the community started by Prophet William Saunders Crowdy. There are not that many books about Judaism in the African American community, and Black Judaism goes into depth talking about these different congregations that formed over a century ago, many of which continue to flourish to this day.

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ALLAN NADLER ALLAN NADLER IS A RABBI AND PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND WAS THE DIRECTOR OF THE JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAM AT DREW UNIVERSITY.

Tanakh It is the foundation, the stone from which all of Jewish religious, national, historical and belletristic literature has been hewed for more than the past two millennia. Still, assigning all 25 books of Hebrew Scriptures would be daunting and, arguably, unrealistic and even unnecessary. These are what I consider the six most essential biblical books: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms and Esther.

Siddur: The Jewish Daily and Sabbath Prayer Book The Siddur has been the most widely read and recited book by the greatest number of Jews since the early post-biblical era. Its liturgical content encapsulates the most common beliefs, fears and aspirations of the Jews, as individuals and as the people of Israel. There are many versions with English translations, but I would insist that any Jew who cannot read and understand the Hebrew original—more generally, who does not know basic classical Hebrew—can in no way be considered Jewishly educated.

A Maimonides Reader Edited by Isadore Twersky The Mishneh Torah, Maimonides’ Code, is the greatest work of Jewish Law ever produced, but it is a daunting 14-volume work. By far, the best anthology is A Maimonides Reader. Isadore Twersky’s classic is also a good place to start the study of halacha (Jewish law) and pre-modern Jewish philosophy.

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Gershom Scholem

The Modern Jewish Canon Ruth R. Wisse

This remains the single most important work on the history of the mystical tradition in Judaism. Despite the mounds of more recent scholarly revisions of Scholem’s pioneering research, this classic collection of landmark essays still provides the best road map to a very recondite tradition, with its essential, enduring portraits of the most important schools of Jewish mysticism, from the early Kabbalah through its “last phase,” namely, Hasidism.

This is the single best overview of the classics of modern Jewish literature, culture and thought and an ideal place to begin understanding the Jews and Judaism of the modern era. A single, uniquely insightful and discriminating text serves as the ideal springboard for future reading toward that goal of being a Jewishly educated Jew.

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YEHUDA KURTZER YEHUDA KURTZER, PRESIDENT OF THE SHALOM HARTMAN INSTITUTE OF NORTH AMERICA, IS THE AUTHOR OF SHUVA: THE FUTURE OF THE JEWISH PAST.

Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

Genesis: The Beginning of Desire Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

This is a wonderful introduction into why Jews are fixated on our history, why we have told our stories continually, and what has changed in modernity about how we relate to our past. Yerushalmi was chronicling the way that Jews told their story for generations. Now all the historians who are writing the Jewish story are influenced by the way he thought about these issues.

Zornberg brings psychoanalysis, psychology and what we know about the human brain and spirit to bear on these stories. She does as effective a job as any to make our classic books relevant for today. Sometimes you have books that you read and sometimes you have books that you study. Hers is a book that you study, so you don’t really read it all at once. You make notations, you follow the footnotes, and then you go back to study it. I think that’s part of how Jews read.

A Living Covenant David Hartman

Like Dreamers Yossi Klein Halevi

Hartman’s book is so resonant because he is holding up to our faces the truly enormous challenges of modernity. He has a really devout commitment to heritage, tradition and faith and asks, how do I keep hold of the tradition even as the Enlightenment, Emancipation and modernity make me think differently about what it means to be a human being? He covers prayer, spirituality, faith and ethics. I love the way he uses traditional texts so that you’re reading Talmud but actually confronting the dilemmas of modernity.

Yossi Klein Halevi’s book is a long read, but it’s a beautiful, incredible story. One of the things that’s so compelling is that he loves his protagonists, his characters, so much that it’s hard not to identify with them regardless of their politics. You’re not going to learn everything you need to know about Israel, but you can’t help coming away more curious.

A Different Night: The Family Participation Haggadah Noam Zion and David Dishon This is a wild card. First of all, the Haggadah is the most reproduced Jewish book there is, so you’ve got to keep reading the Haggadah to be an educated Jew. But this book is designed around the pedagogy of the Haggadah. You’re not supposed to read the Haggadah every year from beginning to end. You’re supposed to bring new readings each year. You want to read new poetry and essays and write new ones. Zion and Dishon beautifully model for us how this can be done.

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FIVE

M U ST- R E A D

BOOKS

DARA HORN DARA HORN IS THE AUTHOR OF FIVE NOVELS AND A TWO-TIME WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD. HER MOST RECENT NOVEL IS ETERNAL LIFE.

Well, I’m going to have to go with the five books of Moses. I don’t think there is any meaning to Judaism without the Torah. That’s not even a religious statement. Whether you understand it in a religious way, in a historical way, as how we have defined ourselves as a people, as the story we are passing down between generations, as a gift that our people have given the world—all of those things are true, and none of them means anything unless you actually read the book. That is a challenge that modern readers need to meet. Luckily there are many people—and in fact thousands of years’ worth of people— who are here to help you along the way. As you read the Torah over and over again, you see that the book doesn’t change, but you do. Because of that, it’s different every time you read it. Reading the story of the binding of Isaac as a child is different from reading it as a parent. Everything about the way you understand the text is different. Many people are surprised when they encounter the texts as an adult— this is a radical revolutionary document. This is about overthrowing a

social order and creating a new one, a vision of how a society can be. I think that any person with an open mind is going to be challenged by it. It’s a book for thinking people. Reading and reinterpreting the book is the religion. By being a reader, you are participating in that tradition Because of that, this is an eternally open book. What makes the Torah the Torah is not just the text itself but the thousands of years of conversations about what it might mean. This fact that those conversations are still continuing means that every reader gets to participate in them. There are a million ways to engage with the Torah. This is not a book you’re supposed to read sitting by yourself. In fact, the whole idea of reading by yourself is very recent in Judaism. Almost all the modern Hebrew and Yiddish writers have some story of how they come out of the yeshiva world, and then they go to a secular library in a modern European city, and they are stunned because everyone’s sitting quietly, reading books. They’ve never seen someone

read silently. The whole idea of reading to yourself is not part of Judaism. You’re always reading in dialogue in a community or in dialogue with other people. What’s the most amazing to me is, it’s very unusual in ancient literature to have characters who change. If you look at somebody like Odysseus, he goes off, fights the Trojan War, he comes back 20 years later, and he’s the same guy as when he left. The same wife is still waiting for him. But that’s not true for these biblical figures who start in one place and end up somewhere totally different. They emphasize this idea of restoration, this idea of change. If you look at somebody like Jacob who starts out as this person who’s cheating his brother and tricking his blind father, you see how he changes as he gets older, and how he reconciles with his brother. It’s this amazing and realistic story of the way people change over time. These people are so familiar. They only become more familiar as you become older.

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DANIEL LIBESKIND DANIEL LIBESKIND IS AN ARCHITECT. HIS PROJECTS INCLUDE THE JEWISH MUSEUM BERLIN, THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM IN SAN FRANCISCO AND HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS IN AMSTERDAM AND OTTAWA.

“Before the Law” in Parables and Paradoxes Franz Kafka

“Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies” in The Street of Crocodiles Bruno Schulz

The parable “Before the Law” expresses the Jewish idea of the individual. It raises the fundamental question of “What is the law?” and what it means to be before it. Of course there are a number of other writings by Kafka essential to the Jewish identity. I would recommend In the Penal Colony and The Metamorphosis. Even though these books were written before the Shoah, they provide the clearest accounts of its meaning.

This text presents an archetypal view of the Jewish imagination and its consequences. It captures the Jewish ability to go from the very small to the very large and vice versa. It gives the reader a quick insight into the enormous body of work connected to Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah.

All Five Volumes of Theodor Herzl’s Diary The diary shows how the idea of Israel was an invention—a revelation— of an artist, not a politician. Herzl, who admired aristocratic Prussians and who was far from the Jewish tradition as an assimilated Jew, discovered the need for a Jewish nation as a writer. His diary is a literary work surpassing the diaries of Dostoyevsky or the science fiction of Jules Verne. At the time, Herzl’s idea was considered ludicrous by the Rothschilds and other eminent bankers, but he somehow was able to singlehandedly appeal to the Kaiser, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the Czar and the British parliament, and with his dream created “the Jewish People.”

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings Jorge Luis Borges

Operation Shylock: A Confession Philip Roth

Many of Borges’s short stories provide insight into the Jewish mind. They are deeply rooted in the most profound aspects of Judaism. Together they offer a compendium of Jewish education. The story entitled “The Aleph” gives one the experience of what the function of Hebrew letters are in Jewish culture.

Using a double narrator—Roth and his doppelganger—and the struggle between them, the novel examines the dilemma that Israel presents to the Jewish mind. It also addresses the distinction between the fiction of life and the reality of art.

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FIVE

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BOOKS

EVGENY KISSIN EVGENY KISSIN IS A RUSSIAN-BORN PIANIST KNOWN FOR HIS INTERPRETATIONS OF CHOPIN, SCHUMANN, LISZT, BRAHMS AND RACHMANINOFF. HE ALSO PERFORMS AND RECORDS YIDDISH POETRY.

The Tanakh with Rashi’s commentaries To be an educated Jew, it’s not enough to read just the text of the Tanakh [The Five Books of Moses, Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings)] without any commentaries, because many places in it look absurd to the modern reader, and when one reads them, one becomes at a loss as to how generations of Jews up to our times could believe in them. It’s necessary to read Rashi’s commentaries in order to understand how Jews have been understanding the Torah during the last millennium.

The Zohar The Kabbalah was an integral part of the Jewish worldview for many centuries, so to be a well-educated Jew one needs to know the book of Zohar. The Zohar is a group of books including commentary on the mystical aspects of the Torah and scriptural interpretations as well as material on mysticism, mythical cosmogony and mystical psychology.

History of the Jews Paul Johnson Obviously, to be a well-educated Jew one needs to know Jewish history, and Paul Johnson’s book on it is wonderful and particularly important, as it was written by a non-Jew, but very objectively and with lots of sympathy for the Jews. It surveys 4,000 years and traces the impact of Jewish genius and imagination on the world.

Hebrew Masterpieces

Yiddish Masterpieces

To be a well-educated Jew one needs to know the literature of our people. That's why it’s necessary to read Hebrew and Yiddish classics. So for my fourth book I would create a collection of masterpieces of Hebrew literature that would include the writings of Avraham Mapu, Haim Nahman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Yehuda Burla, S.Y. Agnon, Yehuda Amichai, Ephraim Kishon, Aharon Appelfeld, A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz.

The fifth book would be my Yiddish literature compilation. In it there would be the following writers: Mendele Mocher Sforim, I.L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, S. Ansky (his play The Dybbuk), Sholem Asch, Joseph Opatoshu, David Bergelson, Pinchus Kahanovich (known as Der Nister), H. Leivick, David Hofstein, Jacob Glatstein, Peretz Markish, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chaim Grade and Abraham Sutzkever.

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MICHAEL TWITTY MICHAEL TWITTY IS A WRITER AND FOOD HISTORIAN. HIS BOOKS INCLUDE THE COOKING GENE: A JOURNEY THROUGH AFRICAN AMERICAN CULINARY HISTORY IN THE OLD SOUTH.

jill hammer

THE JEWISH

Book of Days

A Companion for All Seasons

Jill Hammer Y

The Jewish Moral Virtues Eugene B. Borowitz and Frances Schwartz

The Earth is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe Abraham Joshua Heschel

Five Books Of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah Ellen Frankel

The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons Jill Hammer

This is a work of modern musar, ethical teachings, and shows the reader the practical ways in which basic Jewish values can be applied to everyday life. Judaism is a tradition in which belief or disbelief doesn’t really excuse you from ethical practice and moral behavior, so this is an incredible guide to central Jewish values.

Although it is centered on one part of the diaspora, this book is pure poetry and gets to the lived spirit of Judaism through a particular lens. It is a work of prose extolling the beauty of the mindset of Eastern European Jews before the Shoah, demonstrating how they imbued lives of degradation with dignity and spiritual splendor.

One of many important books that show the impact of women and the special blend of scholarship and imagination that is Midrash. The voices of prominent women in Torah and Midrash come together to comment on their lives, womanhood and the nature of Judaism.

This book puts emphasis on the sacred role of time in Jewish life and how each day in the Jewish calendar has a particular spiritual and philosophical importance. Each day reveals the colorful folklore and spiritual potential surrounding the seasons and ritual cycle.

Judaisms: A TwentyFirst-Century Introduction to Jews and Jewish Identities Aaron J. Hahn Tapper This is a contemporary, up-to-date and forward-looking survey of Jewish history, identity, geography and cultural issues. It is a very comprehensive view that covers all the bases.

S TAY T U N E D F O R M O R E B O O K R E C O M M E N DAT I O N S IN AN UPCOMING ISSUE OF MOMENT MAGAZINE!

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Adventures with

BOB DYLAN

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BOBBY & LOUIE AT HERZL CAMP,1957

Bobby on the Roof

COURTESY OF LOUIE KEMP

It was at summer camp in northern Wisconsin in 1953 that I first met Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing. He was 12 years old and he had a guitar. He would go around telling everybody that he was going to be a rock-and-roll star. I was 11 and I believed him. Even at that tender age, I could see that most of the other kids weren’t really buying it. None of them would say so to his face, but I could hear them making comments and laughing behind his back, and it bugged me. Why didn’t they see what I saw? Maybe I was the most gullible kid at Herzl Camp, or maybe it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Maybe a little bit of both. Ultimately, of course, it didn’t matter whether the other kids bought into Bobby’s dream, or whether I did. The only thing that mattered was that Bobby believed in it. And that’s why it came true. Don’t get me wrong. Bobby was very popular with the other kids, especially the girls. This was due in part to his natural charm, but also to his talent. He was not just the kid with the guitar—he could play the thing. He was a maverick and a freethinker, always fun to be with, challenging, and sometimes very disruptive. When the counselors came up with a good idea for an activity, Bobby came up with a better one. He was a prankster who liked to stir things up. Add to that a hip, edgy

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BOBBY AT C

AMP, 1956

“Why’d you do that?” I whined, looksense of humor and a surprisingly wellhoned ability to be provocative, and ing up at him. “So nobody else ever will,” he said. that was Bobby. He always knew when a Our lessons continued from there, dose of sarcasm was called for, or when a little bit of ruckus was needed—and I covering the techniques, skills, and was down with all of it. Bobby was my style of boxing. He taught me how to coordinate my feet and hands, dance kind of guy! Bobby and I teamed up with a third kid in our cabin, Larry Kegan, Seeing Bobby on the roof in who, like Bobby, was talented and full performance mode, like deeply into music. He was also a natural-born hell-raiser. Larry was a maestro at Carnegie Hall, fun and passionate, but, as the boxconvinced me that nothing could, ing champ at Herzl, I was the prowould or should ever stop him. tector of our little band. I’d been well prepared for the role by my father, Abe, an old Golden Glover who handed me my first pair of gloves in our backyard when I was nine and said, “Put these on. around my opponent, and use a straight I’m going to teach you to box.” When left jab to set up a powerful right. I I’d done as I was told, he said, “OK, now picked it all up naturally and it turned out I was pretty strong and pretty fast put your hands up. Ready?” “Yes...” I managed, and then— on my feet. If Muhammad Ali could BOOM—he hit me in the kisser so hard float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, Louie Kemp could dance like Michael he knocked me down.

Jackson and hit like a frozen mackerel. After about a year of training, Dad told me I was ready to protect myself. “I don’t ever want to see you start a fight,” he told me, “but if anybody starts up with you, show them what you can do. And I want you to carry on the family tradition of sticking up for the little guy against any bully who comes along.” “OK, Dad,” I said. And that’s exactly what I’ve done ever since. Maybe you’re getting an inkling of why the three of us were every counselor’s worst nightmare—not quite juvenile delinquents, but close enough—and proud of it. One night, Bobby, Larry and I were feeling kind of restless; we couldn’t sleep. So, we started hatching a plan for dealing with our archenemies, the kids in the next cabin. In our notso-humble opinion, these kids were just too perfect. They never broke the rules, never got into any kind of trouble. Something had to be done about them. Continues on page 74

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FROM JEWISH TO CHRISTIAN AND BACK AN INTERVIEW WITH LOUIE KEMP BY NADINE EPSTEIN

BOB WAS LO UIE’S BEST MAN

BOB & LOUIE AT LOUIE’S WEDDING,1983

louie Kemp and Bobby Zimmerman met as kids at a Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin and became lifelong friends. Bobby went on to fame and fortune as Bob Dylan, becoming a music icon of his generation, and Louie as an entrepreneur who made it big producing imitation crab. Along the way Louie managed Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and shared a house with him in Los Angeles. In their late 30s, both men turned to religion, Dylan to Christianity and Kemp to Orthodox Judaism. In a conversation with Moment editor-in-chief Nadine Epstein about his new book, Dylan & Me: Fifty Years of Adventures (written with author and musician Kinky Friedman), Kemp recounts how he helped his friend deepen his understanding of Jewish texts and re-embrace Judaism. How did you get to know Dylan? Bobby was born in Duluth like me, same hospital as me. But then his family moved north to Hibbing, in the sticks. So, he grew up in a town 75 miles away. But we used to be together every summer at camp, and because my town was bigger and there was more action in my town, he’d come down and stay with me after camp. What was your Jewish education like? We went for five years to a Jewish camp, Herzl, and they kept kosher there,

they kept Shabbos, an Orthodox rabbi ran the camp. But we didn’t have what you would call formal Jewish education. We were well prepared for our bar mitzvahs, but back in those days, the whole thing was to get up and read in Hebrew and make a good showing. They didn’t teach you the underlying meaning of what you were reading. In fact, I can still read Hebrew but I don’t know what the words mean. I think it was the same thing with Bobby. Few of the kids of my generation, unless they grew up Orthodox, which very few did, SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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LOUIE AND JOAN BAEZ

had a real Jewish education. We knew we were Jewish, we had Jewish pride, but we never studied Torah or Gemara or any of that stuff, so we really didn’t know the underlying meaning of Torah and Judaism. Yet you say Bob was always very Jewish. What do you mean? Growing up in Hibbing, a blue-collar mining town, had an impact on Bob. The people there worked hard and often made a decent wage. But there weren’t a lot of possibilities for growth and advancement. Perhaps what had an even greater impact on his worldview was his Jewish upbringing. Every Jewish kid celebrating Passover knew the story of our people’s enslavement in Egypt. During Hanukkah we lit our menorahs in commemoration of our ancestors, the Maccabees, and their fight for religious freedom. We were taught about the Spanish Inquisition and the pogroms in Eastern Europe that accounted for many of our grandparents’ escape to 72

BOB & PEGGY, ON THE 1975-76 ROLLING THUNDER TOUR

America. As teenagers, we were struck by the reality of what had occurred not much more than a decade earlier in Europe, the Holocaust. In 1960 the movie Exodus, starring Paul Newman as a brave member of the Haganah attempting to lead a group of his people to freedom in Palestine, was released. I remember coming out of the Granada Theater on Superior Street in downtown Duluth furious, in a rage. I began pounding on a parking meter as my girlfriend, a Norwegian girl named Lee, tried to calm me down. “Louie,” she said, “it’s just a movie.” It was not just a movie to me. The injustices done to these poor survivors sickened me; it sickened many of us. Supporting the underdog is virtually second nature to Jews, as we have so often been in that position ourselves. We seem to have a sixth sense when it comes to persecution, discrimination and injustice, and many of us have devoted our lives to battling these things. There’s no question in my mind that Bob’s drive to

write songs that mattered was born, at least in part, from his roots as a Jew. In your mid-to-late 30s both of you turned to religion. Why? We were looking for something more meaningful to fill in those empty feelings we had. He’d obviously been very successful on every level of Western society, and I’d been reasonably successful as well, but I know in my case I felt there must be more to life than just that. And I think he felt the same way. What led you to become more Jewishly observant and Dylan to explore Christianity instead of Judaism? I looked for deeper meaning within Judaism and I found it with Rabbi Manis Friedman, and was able to meet the needs of my spiritual yearning that way. Bob didn’t. He had a friend who took him to a New Testament Bible class. So that was his first introduction to learning Bible, but it happened to be the New Testament. If I had taken Bob

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BOB & LOUIE ON BOB’S BIRTHDAY, 1975

to a Torah class before that, that never would have happened. Not long after, the two of you ended up living together in a house in Los Angeles. How did that happen? Bob was divorced at the time. His main house was in Malibu, but he used to come into town a lot, so he rented a house in L.A. because it was an hour drive. I was renting a condo in Westwood, and he used to come visit me there. So he says to me one day, “I rented this house and I got plenty of room. Come stay with me.” So I moved in in 1980. And for about three years we lived there together, until I got married in 1983. What was it like living together, with both of you traveling in different religious directions? It was a very interesting dynamic. He’d be in one room studying the New Testament, and I’d be in the other room studying the Torah. And then we’d meet in the kitchen and we would try to teach or persuade the other one about what we were reading and what we were learning. He was teaching me about what he was learning, and I was teaching him what I was learning, and there was contradictory information there.

He’d be in one room studying the New Testament, and I’d be in the other room studying the Torah. And then we’d meet in the kitchen and we would try to teach or persuade the other one.

Did you argue about Jesus? Yes, Jesus would come up for sure. Through the process of study, he thought Jesus came to die for the sins of man, he was the son of God, and he was part of the Trinity, the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. That is part of the New Testament. As I say in the book, I saw Jesus as a rabbi, teacher and another Jewish boy who’d made good. We had a lot of conversations about that, and obviously we weren’t on the same page there. He was being taught one thing and I was being taught another thing. And it was after a few of these conversations that I realized that he had been studying longer than me. He was more knowledgeable. I didn’t have counterarguments for a lot of his arguments. As a Jew, I just knew what I felt and knew, but I didn’t have historical reference points. Now I have some, of course. But then, I didn’t.

So what did you do? I went in another room one day, after one of these discussions because I thought I was out-gunned, and I called Rabbi Friedman in Minnesota. I said, “Rabbi, I’ve got a friend who’s studying the New Testament and we have these deep discussions, and I’m not equipped to counter the points that he brings up. Could you do me a favor, if I bring you to L.A., will you meet with him?” I didn’t tell him who my friend was. He said, “Sure, if you want me to. I’ll be happy to.” So he came out? I flew him out the next week. But before I did that, I said, “Bob, my rabbi is going to be coming to L.A. next week.” Of course he wasn’t, but I was going to bring him. “Would you like to meet with him?” He said, “Yeah, sure, bring him over to the house.” I brought him out. And they got along good. Bob liked him. That was the beginning of the process. Later, I brought in other rabbis for him to study with and other observant Jews who were friends of mine and who were cool guys who I thought he’d relate to, and he did. Bob started to study Torah and Talmud and met with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the whole works. SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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BOB AT HIS SON’S BAR MITZVAH AT THE WESTERN WALL, 1983

And that’s how I got him out. It took a while, but I got him out.

Friends are just friends, and you do what you think is good for your friend.

How long did it take? I probably brought Rabbi Friedman out in February or March of 1981. It was a gradual process, but within two years it was done. It came in increments.

This didn’t hurt your friendship? No, no, of course not. No, we got closer through it, I think. We were on the same page. We were always pretty much on the same page but when he took that deviation, I had to get him back and I did. Not only did I get him back to where he was before all this happened, he went much farther in Judaism through the process of studying.

So he stopped being a Christian? Well, he was always Jewish. In his mind I think he never thought he wasn’t Jewish, but in my mind he was like a Jewish person who appreciated Jesus. I still think he has some kind of historical appreciation for him, but he got deeply involved in studying Torah and Gemara and keeping Jewish customs and holidays. Did he ever thank you? Or talk about it with you? He didn’t have to thank me, our relationship wasn’t like that. 74

Where are you today on the Jewish religious spectrum? And where is he today? I can only speak for myself. I’m a Modern Orthodox observant Jew. I can’t tell you where Bob is. Traditionally, he’s always gone to High Holiday services, seders and all that. But I know he’s Jewish.

After hours of plotting, scheming and bullshitting, we decided on a clandestine, nighttime attack on the enemy cabin. It’s easy to see now that this wasn’t a very sophisticated or well-thought-out effort, but it seemed like a great idea at the time. In the dead of the night, we made our move. Armed with nothing but three cans of the counselor’s pilfered shaving cream, we sneaked into the enemy cabin, where the forces of good all appeared to be sleeping. We crept stealthily from bunk to bunk, discharging dollops of shaving cream upon the heads of the entire horde. The only hard part for me was trying not to burst into peals of laughter every time I stole a glance at Bobby. He was very meticulous about his shaving cream placement, and quite artistic in his designs—the natural-born van Gogh of Barbasol. The objects of our efforts slept through the whole thing. Having completed our mission, we split as fast as hell back to our cabin, jumped into our bunks, and composed ourselves as best we could into the image of three innocent kids lost in dreamland. Of course it wasn’t long before our whole bunk was jolted awake by the sound of shouting and the flicker of flashlights outside our screened windows. Sure enough, dark figures were headed in our direction. We three knuckleheads went back to feigning sleep, praying that the Angel of Death would pass over our cabin. This, alas, was not to be. The shaving cream had barely dried on the foreheads of our whiny little foes when the counselors made a beeline for the likely culprits: us. As our bunkmates looked on silently, our captors marched us out of the cabin and along a dirt road that led into the woods. When I finally got up the nerve to steal a glance at Bobby, I could see that his signature smirk was intact. That cheered me up a little, in spite of the cold and the mosquitos the size of silver dollars that kept dive-bombing us. When we’d gone on for what seemed like miles (but was probably just a few hundred yards), the counselors told us to sit down on some logs, and they started building a bonfire. Were they planning to burn us at the stake? As they were

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busy gathering up kindling, the three of us looked at each other...we weren’t taking any chances. Without exchanging a word, we took off into the darkness like three little Jewish bats out of hell. It wasn’t long before we came upon one of the counselors’ cars parked by the side of the road. The Lord was with us; the keys were in the ignition. Without giving it a second thought, I slid behind the wheel, Bobby jumped into shotgun position, and Larry—always the jock—vaulted into the backseat just as I gunned her out of there in a cloud of dust. I had to be the best eleven-year-old wheelman in the state. “Stop...STOP! You little monsters, get back here!” was all we could hear as the counselors—probably not more than teens themselves—got smaller and smaller in the rearview. Bobby was laughing, which made me laugh, which in turn made Larry laugh. Larry had a beautiful laugh; it almost sounded like he was singing. Herzl Camp disappeared in an instant, and we found ourselves on a dark stretch of deserted highway. The laughter sputtered out, and Larry and I exchanged worried glances in the rearview as I slowed the car to 30 and tried to think. Was it possible that our little shavingcream raid had somehow transformed itself into Grand Theft Auto? I stole a glimpse at Bobby and found him looking straight ahead with a determined expression on his face that seemed to say, Let’s keep driving forever. Eventually, of course, we turned back to face the music and found ourselves in front of a very angry rabbi who threatened to send us home the next day. Luckily for us, he was one of those rare, generous souls who believe in second chances...sometimes even third chances. In retrospect, I am very glad he didn’t make good on his threat, as it would have deprived me of some of my fondest memories of childhood. Many years later, when the subject came up, Bob summed up that riotous summer with a rhetorical question: “Can you imagine,” he mused, “if there had been 400 campers like the three of us?”

The following summer, back at Herzl with my pals, I witnessed an event that could vie for a legit place in American musical history: the 1954 version of the camp’s “talent night.” It was, to the best of my knowledge, the first public performance by the prototypical Bob Dylan. Quite often over that summer, I’d joined small groups of kids in the activities room as they’d gather around Bobby to listen to him play his guitar or pound the keys of the old piano and sing Jerry Lee Lewis-style. Some days, he’d play some Little Richard. But “talent night” was special. It was the night when the entire camp—more than 400 kids, plus rabbis, counselors and staff— would assemble to witness the best skits, magic acts and musical numbers we could muster. It would be Bobby’s largest and most attentive audience to date. Perhaps it would provide a hint of what the future held. Bobby and Larry had decided to perform together, with Bobby on piano. As they looked out at a sea of camp whites, their all-black outfits provided a sharp, rather sinister contrast. There was also some question about the appropriateness of the song they’d selected. Was it really suitable to sing a hard-driving blues number for kids as young as eight or nine? I, of course, loved it. The tune was called “Annie,” and included lyrics as follows:

two friends and I generally lacked. Bobby took the place of Shlomo, the music director. Though he’d often beaten the poor old piano to death with impromptu performances inside the activities room, Bobby had never played his guitar on top of the building. Now, seven years before Fiddler on the Roof would open on Broadway, he proceeded to do just that. All day long, silhouetted against the sun, Bobby played every rock and blues song anybody had ever heard of, and lots that we hadn’t. Larry and I kept him supplied with water and requests as, all day long, kids would stop by to listen in the courtyard below. Seeing Bobby on the roof in full performance mode, like a maestro at Carnegie Hall, convinced me that nothing could, would or should ever stop him. He was our fiddler on the roof and would become the indelible image of the last days of our childhood. Bobby didn’t look anything like the vapidly handsome blond pop stars of the day; he looked like a skinny little Jewish kid who’d never be anybody’s bet to conquer the world. But that’s exactly what he would do.

Annie had a baby, can’t work no more Annie talks to the baby instead of me Annie walks with the baby instead of me Annie sleeps with the baby instead of me... It wasn’t exactly “Kumbaya.” When confronted about his choice of material, Bobby responded tersely and typically: “They’re squares,” he said. In any case, the boy who would be Dylan had made his debut, and—trust me on this—he’d nailed it. Another performance I remember fondly took place on a warm afternoon a few summers later, in 1957. This was the traditional day when the campers took on the roles of the counselors. The idea was to teach us responsibility, leadership and cooperation—all qualities that my

Excerpted from Dylan & Me: 50 Years of Adventures, by Louie Kemp with Kinky Friedman (WestRose Publishing). Available on Amazon.

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MOMENT FICTION

GOLDFADER

IN FULL

PHOTO: CAMILO JOSÉ VERGARA

hat was Morty Goldfader doing in the Bronx? In candlelit joints up and down the flanks of Manhattan, the boys of 181st Street asked themselves about their pal. First, they laid out the facts. Sixty-eight years breathing, widower of five years, retiree of one—the ratios weren’t newsworthy—Mortimer Lewis Goldfader had traded his castle in Scarsdale for an apartment in University Heights. He called it his “second act”—he was consulting for an assisted living facility in Highcrest and wanted to be near his new gig. The boys didn’t buy it. “It’s a repetition compulsion,” said Norman Grunbaum, a Freudian. “He’s revisiting the primal scene of trauma. And the way his mother used to smack him around, there’s plenty of it to keep him busy.” Chickie Leventhal thought it was noblesse oblige gone wrong. “Look, my firm writes a fat check to the United Way every year. I do hundreds of hours pro bono. Just last month, I defended some livery cab drivers against their nogoodnik boss. I don’t need to live in the shit to be a stand-up guy. I look just fine in my mirror on 5th Avenue.” Their wives thought Goldfader was brave. “Brave?” said Alfred Kaplan, the real estate broker. “It’s brave to take a job you don’t need instead of kicking back somewhere

warm? It’s brave to put your life on the In the 1940s, this meant repairing line at 70, when the cemetery’s already mechanical signals and switches, mainmowing your plot? Yeah, for you, from taining rails and ties, installing wooden Woodmere, it’s brave. But if you were gap filler, clearing the tracks of snow born where we were, it’s anything but. and debris. All day Avram danced above Jerome Avenue like Nijinsky, futzing It’s the work of an imbecile. It’s nuts.” Goldfader didn’t understand what with cranks and gearboxes and risking all the excitement was about. When his fatal electrocution to provide for Morty friends rang him up, he made a pragmatic and his brother. Goldfader’s mother, case: “What do I need a big house in meanwhile, did sewing work out of Westchester for? Junie’s buried five years, their apartment. Leah was cheaper than the kids are settled, the thing cost a for- the tailors on the Grand Concourse; tune to heat. We bought in under a mil- she preferred the challenge of modern French dresses but wouldn’t turn lion—the work it needed—and sold up her nose at challah covers or it for five. The asking price. I set B Y an embellished tallit for a bar up trusts for the children and mitzvah. Her kitchen had the I still have enough for a rainy JED feeling of a seraglio—sultry, day. Now I’m paying $800 PHILLIP shadowy, overrun by fulla month for a one-bedroom, COHEN fl eshed women, with steam two-bath on Davidson Avenue. rising from the sink and fabWhere the fishmonger used to rics streaming from clotheslines be. You remember? Tell Mama: overhead. Every night of the week, Get your nova from Naphtali. I take the bus to work. Pleasant ride; doorstep to Sabbath no different, Leah Goldfader desk in ten, fifteen minutes. While you’re could be found humming over her sucking exhaust on the FDR or squishing machine, the treadle rattling like the El, her muscular fingers pressing and turninto the 4 train.” His buddies still couldn’t square it. ing the cloth. The veins on the backs of What would his poor father say? Pale, her hands were kinky like a stock-index hairy-handed Avram Goldfader, his jaw graph; her fingertips were burnished and throat raspberried with razor burn, with calluses. Grade-school Goldfader had toiled as a track worker for the joked that she could rob a bank and get Interborough Rapid Transit Authority. away with it—she’d leave no fingerprints.

THE FIRST-PLACE WINNER OF THE 2018 MOMENT MAGAZINE-KARMA FOUNDATION SHORT FICTION CONTEST SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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The Goldfaders, like the Grunbaums shame. Accounting for the thousands of level, bordered by dense juniper. and Leventhals and Kaplans, like the patients, doctors and students across the Thanksgivings, the Goldfader kids and rest of the hard-up yiddishkeit of the NYU system was heavy duty enough. their cousins played six-on-six football West Bronx, struggled so that their chilHis wife was the civil servant in the between two shaggy willow trees. On dren could make good. Study and keep family, anyway. She’d fared better in the New Year’s Day, if the weather had your mouth shut, they said, and you’ll be appointee racket. When June felt the been cold enough, the family skated on royalty in New York. Just remember your agita that turned out to be stomach can- a nearby pond. humble tate/mame when you’re drinking cer, she was chief judge for the Southern In the eyes of his old friends—who’d in the sunset from Riverside Drive. The District. Goldfader had met her at an made gains themselves and become cenGoldfader boys, alongside scores of NYU gala, through his brother; at the tral players in finance, medicine, acadutiful sons and daughters across the time she was Abe Fortas’s ace clerk. deme—Goldfader’s allotment of time on five boroughs, did as they were told. Leaning conspiratorially over the laden Earth had been well spent. He’d been They gave the truth to their parents’ table, June Isikoff was thin to the point a good earner. His kids were launched. prophecies. Morty’s younger brother, of brittleness and had a witch’s bump in He had his height, his looks, his hair, his one example, graduated Brandeis and the nose, but she argued circles around health. The guy was set up for a graceful NYU law and now chaired a Wall Street Alex and told dirty jokes. Her smile was exit. Everyone assumed he’d spend his firm. His base was seven figures, plus a clever, but also warm. She had the entire twilight years in Miami, wearing pleated rainmaker’s share of profits. His due— table in stitches. chinos and Panama hats, chaperoning a he was the exclusive representative of At the start of their courtship, Junie was litter of grandchildren down to the beach, Kazakhstan’s national oil company. The lighting a Yahrzeit candle for Junie once Kazakhs, suspicious of Jews, overlooked a year. But instead he’d left Langone and He’d thrown over his last name because the contracts he taken a job with a no-name place in the devised secured them billions. Also Bronx; he’d sold his house on Wykagyl his life in boxbecause he was an impressive guy. He Pond—favorite rest stop of migratory seat America spoke Russian and French with flubirds—to move into a hovel above a for a diminished ency. He wore custom Italian suits and check casher; he’d thrown over his life in wide silk ties. He was groomed daily box-seat America for a diminished exisexistence in the by a live-in attendant: The pewter hair tence in the ghetto of his youth. ghetto of his was slicked back with pomade and the Yes, Morty Goldfader was a hot youth. beard, spotted like a composition book topic among the risen Jewish boys of cover, was kept short. He’d even mar181st Street. ried a shikse from Park Avenue named Kelly. They owned a townhouse in the The Goldfader children, on the other East 70s that once belonged to a UN hand, were sympathetic. Aaron, Isabel, secretary-general. enthusiastic over Goldfader’s broad shoul- Jane, Hannah—they were socialists; they So in Alexander Goldfader, the assim- ders, his wheat-green eyes and the sliver didn’t believe in living excessively. In ilationist dream had been fully realized. of space between his front teeth. She told this they took after their grandparents, Not that the older brother had under- him he looked like a real-deal Polish peas- who’d read The Nation and New Masses achieved—Morty’s success, too, was ant. Goldfader, for his part, adored June’s and been acquaintances of Irving Howe. tremendous. After Columbia’s College mouth. It was plum-colored, pouty; the Goldfader had sounded them out about and Mailman School, he’d worked lips swelled outward like a horn bell. All his plans, mostly because he needed their at Cornell-Weill and then Langone day in court the mouth sounded off, then say-so on the stockpile of juvenile gear Medical Center, ultimately as its chief yielded softly to him at night. in the attic. It turned out they were susfinancial officer. He was a sought-after He proposed to her twice; she ceptible to the nostalgic element as well. authority on hospital administration accepted the encore. They raised four Ask them about a mangled action figure and wrote editorials for the Times. He children in a mansion in Scarsdale. or a bald-headed doll—last survivors was cautious on reform, recognizing There was water damage in the base- of Junie’s sporadic purges—and all you that most doctors overprescribed for ment, but that was a nonfactor. The heard was, “Don’t toss it! It’s a collector’s safety’s sake, not to pad bills or screw house was built into the surrounding item. Send it to me.” Goldfader couldn’t policyholders. Rumors persisted that foliage—moppish forsythias, pines, imagine these figurines being worth the he’d be tapped for a federal post—in changeling deciduous trees—villa-style, postage, what with their broken mechawhatever administration: His poli- with an intimidating stone facade and nisms and sticky joints, but he mailed tics were a soup—but he never made small, half-moon windows designed them anyway. He indulged his children’s it past the long list. That was no great for archers. The backyard was vast, cockamamie memories, and they, in turn, 78

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enabled his. “I think it’s a great idea, Pops. Goldfader’s second act included a sec- tral booking. As a mother, Junie wanted You shouldn’t be in that big house alone. ond love. His secret girlfriend, a 45-year- the officer’s badge, but it was dangerous You need to be around people—street old assistant from Langone named Ana for her to seek retribution. New York is life. You need to be able to walk to get Contras, lived a few blocks over from a cop-crazy town—the NYPD is loathed something to eat,” said Hannah, the his Davidson Avenue apartment. day-to-day but loved in the abstract; baby. “But are you sure about the Bronx? an appeals court judge with federal I know you want to be close to work, but “He’s so fucking stupid, Morty, I want sights couldn’t be perceived as anti-law do you think you’ll be okay?” to wring his scrawny neck.” enforcement. So Junie settled for fastHannah asked him this from her loft in Ana was on the phone. Goldfader had tracking Aaron’s acquittal and release. He Williamsburg, which had been covered- been watching the Yanks get drubbed was out on Centre Street in less than an wagon territory when Goldfader was by the Royals—the Royals!—when she hour. At home, he held this against her. growing up—the Hasidic frontier. But she called. For the first few seconds all he Why hadn’t she taken the pig’s head off? was right: The Bronx had not been reha- could hear through the speaker were The cop had broken the law: He’d used bilitated in the Brooklyn fashion. Even in brassy Spanish curses and a distant plain- unnecessary force; he’d brutalized her University Heights, whose Hall of Fame tive voice saying, Okay, Mamí, okay. Then son. Aaron accused her of spinelessness presented the busts of great Americans in Ana told him that her son, Edwin, had and fascist leanings. He’d rather have a marble pantheon, there were still aban- been arrested for jumping a turnstile. rotted and been a martyr than a mama’s doned lots everywhere—some lush with “Conception gives him an unlimited boy. Of course, Aaron knew exactly why unchecked weeds; others arid and cindery. MetroCard. But he wants to be a thug his mother couldn’t call the commisThe restaurants announced themselves as now. He wants to show off for his crew. sioner, but that didn’t stop him from such, not wanting to be mistaken in the Where were they when he was being making her miserable. In fact, for much melée of delis, supermarkets, greengrocers, handcuffed? I get a call at work: Mamí, of his young adulthood, that seemed his convenience stores, one-stops and smoke I’m sorry, I need to tell you something. I calling—to guilt his mom and cause tears. shops. Jobless men spent their days holler- have to leave the office early to pick He’d combust, say something nasty and ing at acquaintances or conducting traffic him up, because since he’s underage, unforgivable and all out of proportion, with a rolled-up El Diario. Participants in the police will only release him to his and The Honorable June Ellen Isikoff, the informal economy drove thumping legal guardian. They bring him out to legal star and notorious bench toughie, Honda coupes with free-spinning rims. me, and he doesn’t have shoelaces or a would cry like a wretch and want to send The primary sidewalk fragrances were belt. They took them from him when him away. In the midst of these blowouts, decomposing fast food, cigarette smoke they put him in the cell. He looked like Goldfader could usually coax an apology and motor oil—the last courtesy of the a bum, Morty—a dirty bum. I should’ve from Aaron by asking, How could you tell auto-body shops under the El. The crime left him there. Teach him a lesson.” her that you don’t love her? The person who rate was treble Scarsdale’s. Goldfader couldn’t help himself: gave you life? This would soften him. Even But Goldfader wasn’t worried. He had “Nothing like a few blisters to keep him the most committed radical remembered an older man’s territorial confidence. He flying straight.” snuggling into his mother’s lap and twirlalso maintained that the neighborhood “You’re joking right now?” ing her hair around his finger. was the same as it had been—same kids Edwin was 16, which, thought But June wasn’t always the dartboard, being shunted off to school in hand- Goldfader, was probably a normal age let it be said. Goldfader, neutral party me-down clothes, same swollen-faced to start testing yourself against the and peacemaker, saw the battles from parents slogging down the hill to the law. Morty himself had shoplifted and both sides. Junie would nag—Aaron subway—only now it was Spanish instead busted windows in his aspiring urchin was her firstborn, after all—then freeze of Galician, Russian, Polish. It was just a days; all the boys had. He was lucky him out when he didn’t do what she matter of substitution: The bakeries had enough never to have been caught, wanted. Goldfader would never admit been replaced by bodegas; the kosher though. Imagine if he had been! Avram it, but he sometimes felt a vicarious delis had become greasy spoons; the syna- would’ve pitched him into the airshaft thrill when Aaron wounded his mother. gogues had been converted into churches. without a second thought. For he too got the business from June. (Haphazardly—Stars of David still rose His son had been arrested once. How She was a brilliant woman. He was no from the frontispieces.) In Goldfader’s old was Aaron then? He’d been in high match for her. analysis, the contemporary inhabitants school, that was for sure. Aaron had He was no match for Ana, either, if of the West Bronx were strivers just like mouthed off to a cop at an anti-war he were being honest. She was a piece Avram and Leah. They were too busy hus- demonstration, figuring his mom was a of work of an entirely different variety. tling to bother with an AK like him. judge, he knew his rights and what could Goldfader had known her by sight and Of course there was another reason this pig do? Well, this pig slugged him, sound for years before they exchanged he was so sanguine about his new digs. cuffed him and hauled him down to cen- a word. She was a presence around the SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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office—a firecracker. Unafraid of her and now he’s breaking the law.” superiors, she would bawl out her boss, “So what are you going to do?” Jim Wright, when he didn’t act on her “Ground him until he goes away to colcounsel. A perennial nice guy and push- lege and give his Playstation to Goodwill.” over, Jim would apologize and ask her Goldfader heard a booming Fine. He to brief him again. He probably enjoyed could tell Ana had opened Edwin’s door the attention. Ana Contras was an just to pronounce his sentence. attractive woman. Full in the legs and “You want me to talk to him?” butt, slight in the waist and shoulders, “What good is that going to do?” she had a submarine-shaped nose and “I don’t know. I could provide a male large dark eyes. She kept her black hair perspective…” in a ponytail; when she sped around the “Oh, because you’re a man you have office, bars of light whipped along her some secret information?” scalp. Langone was a sexless place—in “Maybe ‘male’ isn’t what I meant. hospitals, a disenchanted view of the ‘Outside’ perspective. A person who’s body prevails—but Goldfader would older, who’s been around.” idly observe her figure and think to “How do you know he’ll listen to you?” himself that out there in the world was “I raised four nutso kids; I know a few some lucky guy. things.” Later, when news of June’s cancer “Not as much as you think.” began to circulate and his colleagues But Ana agreed to give it a try. pledged their support and Ana, unex- Goldfader had work tomorrow; Edwin, pectedly, sent him a long email about school. They arranged for the boy to her mother’s fatal besiegement by come over for dinner. lymphoma—when Goldfader and Ana Not for nothing had Goldfader construck up the friendship that, after June tinued to admire the Highcrest Center died, became a quiet office romance— building, even all these months. There Goldfader discovered that Ana’s only was a reason it’d been landmarked. For guy was Edwin. The recidivist father most of its existence, 936 Highcrest had been divorced before the son Avenue had been known as the Bronx was old enough to recognize him; the Home for Friendless Children, and it mother hadn’t remarried or produced a looked every bit a Victorian orphanage, sibling. Prior to Goldfader—and even from the spirally ironwork grills and after, really—Ana’s life was her son. austere grey façade to the ornate keyWhich meant that when it came to stones and terracotta mansard roof. Ana’s stiff discipline, Edwin was on his And in some sense, Goldfader supown. Goldfader didn’t envy the kid his posed, the place was still providing situation. He knew from strict moth- shelter to the friendless. It had been ers. Leah would bean him with news- abandoned for years when it was bought papers, ladles, rulers, books—whatever by a nonprofit and transformed into a was handy. A love tap, she used to say, nursing home devoted to HIV-positive inspecting a bruise she’d raised. But at and AIDS-afflicted residents. The facilleast he’d had a sibling around to absorb ity had since distinguished itself for some punishment. the quality of its traditional care and Well, showing solidarity with the its receptivity to alternative medicine. oppressed sons of heroic mothers, Its president, Karen Hawthorne, was Goldfader suggested Ana cut Edwin a major figure in the holistic world, a some slack. shill for the integration of Eastern and “Slack? He gets away with murder! He Western methods. Goldfader thought wants a later curfew? Okay, midnight it is. she had some crank qualities, but He wants to drink a beer at his uncle’s there was no denying that Highcrest’s house? Just one, mijo. All I ask is that he patients had responded favorably to stay out of trouble and make good grades. therapies like acupuncture and guided His last report card had more Bs than As, meditation. After a decade as president, 80

though, Hawthorne had had her fill of the “Bronx project” and wanted to move on. She’d solicited Goldfader’s advice a year ago about how best to position Highcrest for a merger with a larger hospital. At the time he’d just retired from Langone and was out of his mind with boredom. Highcrest’s proximity to Ana’s apartment also wasn’t lost on him. He offered his services as a consultant, at a reduced rate commensurate with a nonprofit’s budget. Hawthorne agreed. So now Goldfader spent three days a week at a table in the staff lounge. He reviewed financials, D.O.H. inspection reports, personnel lists and salaries, residents’ charts. He called his former peers at Montefiore and BronxLebanon to gauge interest in a purchase. He chatted with the residents, some of whom had taken to calling him “Morty G.” On occasion he had lunch with the executive director, Mike Soloway, to discuss staffing and equipment issues. Today, since it was mild and bright out, they ventured into the neighborhood to try a new taco place. As they settled themselves at a table by the front window, Soloway said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you: What kind of watch is that?” “It’s a Franck Muller.” Goldfader held out his wrist so they could both see the watch face. The white numerals were stretched and bowed like reflections in a funhouse mirror; the mat was a faded shade of pink. “Swiss watch, though it always reminds me of the Paris Metro signs. Something about the numbers. It was an anniversary gift from my wife.” He could’ve been more specific, but Goldfader wanted to spare Soloway the awkwardness. The watch anniversary hadn’t been his and June’s last, but it was the last one they’d celebrated. “Expensive? If you don’t mind me asking…” “They can be. It depends what model you get. This is a middle-of-the-road one. I’ve seen it go anywhere from seven to ten.” “You’re kidding. And you wear it every day. Just around.” “Why not? It’s not a Rolex—no one knows what it is.”

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“I guess that’s true; I never heard of it.” Soloway sawed his burrito in two with a plastic knife and squirted hot sauce into an open half. “I think I’d be a little nervous walking around with 10,000 bucks on my wrist, though. Especially around here.” Goldfader snorted. “How long have you been at Highcrest? Have you ever had a problem?” “Not me, no. But that’s because I look Mexican.” Mike Soloway was squat, swarthy, shovel-faced and black-haired. He had a Latino cast, sure, but Goldfader wasn’t convinced that was the reason he hadn’t been hassled. “Well, I don’t particularly,” said Goldfader. “And I haven’t had any trouble. I’ve been living up in University Heights for months now and felt perfectly safe.” “That’s good.” Soloway took a bite of his burrito, chewed, then hung his jaw and began huffing through his mouth. He swallowed and reached for his soda. The ice sloshed against the waxed cup as he drank. “Jesus Christ,” he said, putting down his drink and eyeing the hot sauce bottle. “I just thought that was Tabasco.” Goldfader shook his head and looked out the window. Pale sunlight flashed in the scratches of the plexiglass. A woman walked by pushing a stroller, each leg a walrus, her tiny feet like fins. “Well, I would just say keep your wits about you,” Soloway said. “You never know. People get mugged on Madison Avenue.” “Got it,” said Goldfader, saluting. He took a sip of iced tea. “Anyway, what’s happening with Raimi Parker, on the third floor? I overheard the nurses the other day saying we were short a spirometer.” “It’s fine now.” “You found one?” “No. She died.” Immediately upon returning to the office, Goldfader and Soloway went to the bathroom to wash their hands. This was protocol in a place like Highcrest, where an OI could be a fatal prospect. They were also hospital lifers; they’d had

the importance of disinfection drilled them in middle school. into them by ER docs and surgeons. Lathering his hands from wrist to They were compulsive about bacteria. fingertip, Goldfader practiced what he Goldfader turned on the faucet and let would say to the boy. Listen, I know how the stream heat up. His kids had gotten it is: You want to see what you can get away a lot of comedic mileage out of his atten- with. But let me tell you, whatever glory tion to cleanliness. Whenever he com- you might enjoy sticking it to cops isn’t plained that a restaurant or powder room worth the shit your mom’ll give you. Am wasn’t equipped with a pump dispenser I right? Abstractions like “upstanding of antibacterial soap, they would call citizen” and “contributing member of him “Howie” (as in Hughes); whenever a society” wouldn’t penetrate. Goldfader conversation ended in mutual agreement, had to frame the argument in terms of they asked him to shake on it. Ana. If Edwin had any brains at all— The little pishers, thought Goldfader, and, from what Goldfader understood, rolling up his sleeves and removing his he was no dummy—he’d see that crosswatch. But were they funny! As elemen- ing his mother was a losing proposition. Goldfader rinsed with the steaming water and banged the dryer button with Aaron his elbow to start the air. Once his hands accused were dry, he re-clasped his watch, buttoned his sleeves and walked back to his her of desk to try and sell Highcrest Center.

spinelessness and fascist leanings. He’d rather have rotted and been a martyr than a m a m a ’s b oy.

tary schoolers they had a game: They would dress up in funky colors and formal shoes and pretend to be on American Bandstand. They called themselves the Goldfader Four. In the living room they lip-synced to The Temptations and The Miracles. Then the “managers,” he and June, had to escort them to the kitchen like through an ecstatic crowd, screaming “Keep back! No pictures!” The game ended with a round of Goldfader’s patented egg creams—milk, Fox’s U-Bet, and the pièce de résistance, cream soda instead of seltzer. Would Edwin appreciate the art of a Goldfader Special? No, he was too old already. The Four had stopped drinking

“Hello?” “Mr. Goldfader? It’s Edwin.” “Come on up.” Six on the dot. The kid was punctual at least—though Ana’d probably put the fear of God in him. Goldfader pressed the buzzer, holding it an extra second in case Edwin pushed the door instead of pulled. He took a last look around the apartment. The cleaning lady had come, so his magazines and mail were neatly stacked on the dining table and the fleece afghan lay folded on the backrest of the L-couch. The flat-screen was tuned to the Yankee pregame show. Goldfader waited for the rumble of the elevator doors in the hallway, then opened his own door. Edwin raised his hand shyly and walked toward Goldfader with his head down. He was wearing a Yankees cap off-kilter, a windbreaker over a white T-shirt, stiff beige pants and swollen black high-tops with bobbing tongues. His knees flared sideways with each step, which Goldfader interpreted as a sign of diffidence. “I see you got your laces back,” Goldfader said, moving aside to let Edwin in. Edwin looked at him sidelong with a chastened smile. “Yeah…” “Ever think about tying them?” SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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Still smiling, not sure if he was being messed with, Edwin laughed and said, “Yeah, I do.” It had been Ana’s decision not to tell Edwin the precise nature of her and Goldfader’s relationship. Five years ago, this made sense: June had just died, Goldfader and Ana worked together, Edwin was a child, secretiveness seemed appropriate. But now Goldfader wondered why they hadn’t come clean. The kid must know, instinctually if not consciously. Though he and Ana never slept over at each other’s apartments, she told Edwin who she was out with on Friday and Saturday nights. And now she’d marched him off to see me, thought Goldfader. He and Edwin had only met a handful of times before. The boy had sprouted since their last introduction. He was almost as tall as Goldfader—probably 5’9” with growing left to do. He was lean, light-skinned; in the torso he was slight like his mother. His chin was sharp, and sparse hairs clung to his jaw. “Have a seat over there,” Goldfader said, waving him toward the couch. “You want something to drink? I got bottled water, seltzer, orange juice.” “Um, water, please.” “Water it is. How’s school?” “Fine. I’m ready for it to be summer vacation.” “I hear ya.” Goldfader took two bottles of water from the refrigerator and brought them over to the couch. He tossed one to Edwin, who caught it cleanly and twisted it open. Goldfader sat on the other side of the couch elbow from Edwin. “So, I thought we’d talk a little bit, then order a pizza and watch the game. How does that sound?” Edwin nodded and put his water on the table. “That sounds good.” “Good.” Goldfader turned to look at the TV. The announcer was calling the highlights, such as they were, of last night’s contest. “Boy, do they stink or what? Can’t even beat Kansas City.” “We’ll get ’em back tonight. CC’s pitching.” 82

“Fatboy? I dunno-o.” Shortly after Edwin left—after Edwin laughed. they’d downed an entire large pie and “It’s always the same thing with these talked over the enigma of women and guys,” Goldfader said. “We lay out a ton watched Sabathia take a no-no into of money and then they start breaking the 7th—Goldfader realized his watch down. Or they’re headcases and they was gone. He looked in the dish on his can’t handle pitching in New York. Like bedroom bureau, where his wallet and what’s his face…Igawa.” billfold were neatly stacked. He riffled “Yeah…” through the pockets of the suit he’d “It’s the pressure. Too much scrutiny.” worn earlier. He patted the pockets of Goldfader took a sip of his water. the jeans he was wearing. He checked “So’s your mom giving you a rough the bathroom in his room and the one time?” in the hall. He searched the kitchen and Edwin shrugged. “She said tonight the dining table. He scoured the living was the last time I’d be let out of the room—under the coffee table, between house until I move out of the house.” the couch cushions. Nothing. “She’ll ease up. Just keep saying you’re He stood in the center of his apartsorry and keep your nose clean and it’ll ment pinching his lip. He tried to reconblow over.” struct his afternoon. He’d definitely had “I hope.” the watch when he came home. He “What exactly happened?—when you always left it with the rest of his valuwere arrested?” ables when he changed out of his work Edwin clicked his tongue. “See, that’s clothes. He went back into the bedroom what she doesn’t understand. I wasn’t and checked the dish again, then lowarrested. I was detained. I didn’t even get ered himself to his knees to feel beneath a summons, ’cause I was a minor and it the bureau. No luck. He straightened was a first offense. The cop took me in and put his hands on his hips. This because he didn’t have nothing better to was annoying—he never lost anything. do. He was just bored.” What had he done with it? “All right, then. So what happened And then another possibility occurred when you were detained?” to him. “It was just—my friends skip the fare Kneeling there on the floor, all the time. So I hop the turnstile and Goldfader hashed it out step by step. there’s this cop on the platform I didn’t He considered all the angles. Hadn’t see. He puts the cuffs on me in front Edwin been a long time in the bathof everyone, frisks me and brings me room? Hadn’t Morty been wonderupstairs to the precinct.” ing if the kid was all right just before “You didn’t talk back to him?” he emerged, drying his hands on his “No,” Edwin sulked, crossing his pants? The more Goldfader thought arms. about it, the more obvious it seemed. “All right. Well, then he was just a He felt indignation surge in his chest. prick.” Edwin, looking down at the cof- He couldn’t believe it. That little fee table, smiled. “Most guys’ll let you twerp! That ingrate! A scum-sucking off with a warning. But let me just give gonif! Goldfader raised himself up by you one piece of advice: Never talk back the bureau, slid his cell phone from his to cops. Be polite, be respectful and pocket and texted Ana that he was comthey’ll usually be reasonable. Of course ing over. He didn’t wait for a response. you’re not going to do anything this On the street Goldfader hurried. He knuckleheaded again, right?” passed dog walkers, heaped trash bags, Edwin nodded. the hum of the corner store’s fluorescent “Right. Because next time, your mom lights. He hung a right at the end of the will just kill you.” Goldfader leaned block and climbed the hill toward Ana’s forward and raised the cordless phone apartment. The sidewalk was dimly lit from its dock. “You like pepperoni?” from building security lamps; deep shad-

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ows hung to the cracks in the pavement. and walked a few steps away, glancing Goldfader sputtered. “Oh, you don’t? A Crown Vic trundled by—Goldfader at Edwin over his shoulder. The boy A little criminal like him?” could tell the model just from the sound. dropped down onto the steps and buried “Hey—” That was something about him: he knew his face in the crook of his elbow. Edwin’s “I should’ve known. You’re just thick cars. His kids called him with questions friend looked at Goldfader with fear. as thieves, you two.” about battery life and tire pressure. When “—yes, sorry about that. I need to “What did you say?” Ana asked, June had her patented fender bend- report a burglary; a very expensive squinting. ers, he’d been the one to get them fixed. watch of mine was stolen. I know who “I said maybe you put him up to it. You Because the touch-up guys couldn’t scam did it. Yes…” knew what the watch was worth. You him. Because he could handle himself. “Morty? What’s happening here? knew how much it meant to me. Maybe Ahead Goldfader could see the round Edwin?” you’re just a couple of con men, think sconces of Ana’s building. Two kids sat Goldfader turned. Ana was already I’m an easy target. Am I right?” on the steps in front of the double door. moving toward Edwin, the tock of her Ana’s head shivered in disbelief; her As he came closer, breathing hard, he heels reverberating off the building. eyelids fluttered. Then she stared at the saw that one of them was Edwin. She swiped Edwin’s hat off his head and ground in front of Goldfader. “Miste—Morty, what’s wrong?” said brushed his hair back. Edwin kept his “If that’s what you think, Morty, then the boy, standing. His eyes were mar- face hidden in his arms. there is something seriously wrong bles—dark and glassy. So he’d gotten “What’s wrong, mijo?” She turned to with you. Call the cops, file a report, high to celebrate his score. Goldfader. “What did you do to him?” whatever makes you happy. No one has “My watch,” Goldfader said, holding Goldfader tilted his head away from your fucking watch. Come on, boys.” out his hand. “You give it back, I don’t her. The dispatcher was trying to get his Edwin and his friend rose and stalked call the police.” attention. toward the door; Ana followed with her The corners of Edwin’s mouth began He said into the phone, “Actually, hands on Edwin’s shoulders. to droop. He put his hands to his pants there’s been a mistake. Forget it.” He Goldfader, steaming, watched them pockets. flipped the phone closed and faced her. file into the dingy lobby and climb the “What watch?” He looked down at his “Your reprobate son stole my Franck first flight of stairs. He glared at Ana’s friend. “What watch?” Muller, the watch June gave me.” back—the spread of her blazer around “What do you take me for? Did you “I didn’t, mamí, I swear,” Edwin whim- her hips, the narrowness of her shoulders, think I wouldn’t notice? And after what pered, looking up at her. “I didn’t even the sway of her ponytail all repulsed him. you just put your mother through. I know he had a watch.” He summoned an image of her naked, defended you, tried to help you out; I Ana regarded her son with a frown. the ends of her loosened hair forming a thought maybe there was hope for you. Then she said to Goldfader, “You saw V between her shoulder blades. But obviously I was wrong. A thief! The him take it?” “Who needs a fucking pear, anyway,” worst kind! I want it back. Now.” “No. It was on my dresser before he he said out loud and started home. “Morty, I don’t know what you’re came over; it was gone after he left.” When he got there, Goldfader found talking about,” said Edwin, showing “It couldn’t have fallen behind? You’re the watch. It was in the hall bathroom; it Goldfader his palms. His mouth was sure it was there?” had fallen into the wastebasket between quivering; he was starting to cry. “I don’t “Yes, I looked all over. It was there. the toilet and the sink. He fitted the know nothing about a watch.” Now it’s not.” watch onto his wrist. Then he called the For a second Goldfader faltered. Had Ana was quiet for a moment. She office of his old friend Alfred Kaplan. It he looked hard enough for the watch? stroked Edwin’s head. “I don’t think he was late; Allie didn’t pick up. Goldfader Yes, he had. He’d searched the apart- has it, Morty.” left a message. ment from top to bottom. Edwin had robbed him, Goldfader was sure of it. He kept his wits about him. A New York City native, Jed Phillip Cohen “All right, have it your way.” Goldfader holds degrees from Columbia University, the pulled out his phone and dialed 911. University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ The dispatcher asked for his emergency. Workshop. He has taught writing at the “Yes, hello, I need to report a burglary—” University of Iowa and Duke University, and Edwin grabbed Goldfader’s arm. his fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review. “Please, Morty, I swear I didn’t take any He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, watch. I swear. I don’t have it. I don’t where he is at work on a novel. have it!” Goldfader shook Edwin’s hand off SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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FROM BOOK TO SCREEN

TURNING GREAT BOOKS INTO GREAT MOVIES

”

s the movie as good as the book? Often, the answer to this perennial question is a flat “No.” But sometimes magic happens, and the moving image complements—even transcends—the words on the page. One recent example of this is Call Me by Your Name, the story of a love affair between the teenage Elio and grad student Oliver. The book, by André Aciman, had a small cult following when it was first published in 2007, but it became an international phenomenon in 2017, when the film version starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet was released. Another runaway hit based on a book was Winter’s Bone, a 2010 film directed by Debra Granik, adapted from a novel by Daniel Woodrell. The film portrayed life in the impoverished isolated Missouri Ozark Mountains—and launched the career of actor Jennifer Lawrence. Granik’s follow-up 2018 film, Leave No Trace—a staple of critics’ best films of 2018 lists— was based on My Abandonment, by Peter Rock, and tells the story of a military veteran and his daughter who live off the grid for years in the forests of Portland, Oregon. Moment brought Aciman and Granik together earlier this year to discuss the process of turning great books into great movies at the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest literary evening in New York City. The conversation was moderated by Deputy Editor Sarah Breger. 84

“

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A CONVERSATION WITH ANDRÉ ACIMAN & DEBRA GRANIK

Sarah Breger: André, in a recent Vanity Fair article, you described visiting the set of Call Me by Your Name for the first time, and coming to the realization that writer and filmmaker do more than speak two different languages. You write, “What I do is chisel a statue down to its finest, most elusive details. What a film director does is make the statue move.” What did you mean by that? Aciman: As a writer, you are focused on the language and the

who love dialogue and are dialogue-intensive. There was a big discussion in the 1940s: Are we filming plays or are we making a different kind of art form? That has sparked fiery dialogue in the creation of moving-image stories since then. Debra, when you’re adapting a book into a film, what obligation do you feel to the source text? Granik: With period pieces and historical work, I don’t encoun-

details that you want to convey to the reader. But fundamentally you’re stationary, whereas a film director can’t go into the heads of people, because there’s absolutely no way of doing that unless you’re doing voiceover, which nobody wants to do any longer. In the movie Call Me by Your Name, there were many new things that they had to do in order to capture the emotional content of the novel, but that were not necessarily there in the novel.

ter the pressure from the lived world. With contemporary work, I feel that the story itself is a road map, a template, a creation that brought me to the coordinates. But then when I get to the coordinates, the life of that area is going to inject itself into the story, and the story is going to be augmented by whatever place on the globe that story is set. I feel that I have to make an agreement early on with the author that the story most likely will be altered significantly by the location and the lived world around the story.

Debra, does that resonate with you as a film director?

Do you ever receive pushback from the author?

Granik: As filmmakers, our task is show, don’t tell. Our job is to go to these locations and find the tangible objects that the characters are touching, the processes they have to do to affect the world around them, how the world around them puts obstacles in their way and how they surmount those obstacles. It’s the action more than the language. There are filmmakers

Granik: No. Authors frequently know your prior work and won’t say yes to making the film unless they feel they can see something in your work that might enzymatically go well with what they’ve imagined. They’ve imagined the world, and then I imagine the world from reading their book and reading the words and seeing the movie in my head from the words, and SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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Above: Armie Hammer (left) and Timothée Chalamet (right) in the film Call Me By Your Name, based on the novel by André Aciman.

we compare notes. I ask things I don’t understand like, “Where did that come from? I wasn’t expecting that.” We talk about it. And then I try to be very frank about the parts that I can’t grasp. In this last film, Leave No Trace, the author said, “Try a draft with the way you’re imagining it. You owe it to the process of your own conjuring to play that out and see where it takes you.” André, being on the other side of the equation, what obligation do you think the film director has to stick to the source text? Aciman: None. It took about five years

to find a director who was going to stay with the film and the actors. The actors kept changing, the directors kept changing, the script got written quite a few times. I said, “It’s great you want to make a movie, do what you need to do, I don’t care.” I’ve done my part, which was write the book. In fact, there are some stunning changes. I had written a book about a house on the beach, and the beach was extremely important because they go swimming. It cast a par86

ticular kind of inflection on the story to have a house with a beach right at the foot of the cliff. Production told me, “We looked for houses by the beach, we couldn’t find any or those we liked were not available for filming.” They went from Northern Italy on the West Coast to Sicily to Puglia, and eventually they gave up. They said, “We’re going to do it in a place that’s fundamentally landlocked.” There’s absolutely no sea, no water, nothing, and it’s a beautiful house which I think worked. It makes absolutely no difference. I was extremely flexible. I said, “You want to do what you want to do, you’re the boss. What am I going to do? Compete with James Ivory and tell him what I think?” I did tell him what I thought at one point, and this is the only time I intervened, and they said, “Yes, you’re right, you’re totally right,” and that was it. Can you tell us what that was? Aciman: The father gives a fantastic

speech at the very end of the film. They took the speech as it is in the book, and they put it in the film script. I got some kind of gratification from that. But the son is absolutely not expecting that speech. He’s actually hoping that the father is not going to open up about

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his relationship with Oliver. The father surprises him by saying, “You guys had more than just a nice friendship.” What’s also powerful is that the audience has absolutely no idea where the father is going to go with the speech and doesn’t even know that the father knows or suspects that the two boys were having a relationship. What was happening in the original script is that the parents are having a discussion, “Do you think they’re actually having a relationship?” “Yeah, I think they are.” “There’s that new disease going around and do you think it’s happening?” “Well, I don’t know.” “Do you think we should talk about it to them?” I said, “That’s absolutely not the right thing.” First of all, it’s not in the book, but that doesn’t matter. What I didn’t want was for them to steal the surprise and the suspense that happens when the father says, “You had more than just a friendship.” I wanted that to stand out by itself. In fact, the mother does not know at all, and as she’s driving her son back home, she sees him weeping but she doesn’t say anything. It allows him to suspect that she doesn’t know. By the way, there’s a whole chapter in the book that takes place in Rome. The two boys go to Rome for three days and they have a great deal of fun.

Above: Isaiah Stone, Jennifer Lawrence and Ashlee Thompson in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, based on Daniel Woodrell’s novel.

The director said to me, “We’re going to shorten the scene of Rome.” I said, “That’s fine, I don’t mind.” “Actually, we’re going to shorten it significantly.” I said, “You do what you want to do.” “Actually, we’re going to eliminate it altogether.” I said, “It’s fine with me, stop apologizing.” Leave No Trace actually also differs greatly from the ending of the novel, My Abandonment, that it’s based on. Debra, what led you to that decision? Granik: I tried a lot of drafts that were

much closer to the novel, and I didn’t understand the manner in which the father met his demise in the novel. When I asked the author Peter Rock about it, he said, “Well, that is related to some previous storylines that I’ve carried through my novels.” I pitched my idea and he said, “You should try that. Do a draft in which the father stays alive and the parting that they face has to come through different means.” It’s a big departure from the second half of the novel, but he saw that it was an SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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I THOUGHT THE MOVIE WA S G O I N G T O B E O K AY, WOULD DO FINE, THEN IT WOULD DISAPPEAR AND BE FOUND ON DVD. I DIDN’T EXPECT ANYTHING L I K E W H AT HAPPENED.

organic process, that his novel was the launching of a story that then took a different path. I commend him for being open. When some authors option their book—and the option is a legal document that says you have no obligation to the novel—they take a deep breath and say, “I’ve done my beautiful work. I told my story; it lives as a complete work.” Some even may be curious, “What’s the next incarnation? Let me see.” Or they’ve also conjured characters and now they’re embodied by certain actors. With Winter’s Bone, the author said, “I was in suspense. I’ve lived with this young woman and this man in my head for years. I think I know what they look like.” For him, that was almost suspenseful to see them walking and looking different than he had imagined. Aciman: One of the things that hap-

pened to me, and I’m sure that happened to that author, is that once you see the characters on screen, the characters that you had in your head as an author disappear. So now whenever I think of the character I see Armie Hammer. And I see Timothée Chalamet. I can’t even remember, in my novel does Elio have blond hair or brown hair? It’s all gone. That’s what you guys do. Debra, when you read My Abandonment and Winter’s Bone, what made you want to turn them into film? Granik: In both those novels, the set-

ting was extremely layered and described with a lot of passion. Both authors were from the regions they were writing about. In Winter’s Bone and the Ozarks, Daniel Woodrell plucks contemporary details and uses dialect from his mom’s era. He’s a lover of the dialect of Southern Missouri. That’s very different from the American English I speak. The difference, the methods of survival that he was describing, everything was different from my urban East Coast life. As a visual anthropologist, I’m drawn to how you make your way to what I don’t know. It was very similar with Peter’s novel in the Pacific Northwest. At first, I was nervous, “How do you film in these grand forests and not have your film look like a National Geographic special?” 88

Nature can beguile you because if it’s too pretty, your film is sitting on just the eye candy of prettiness. But this forest is inclement as well as grand and gorgeous. I also love the unusual circumstances in which both authors put their characters. They’re scrappy, resilient characters, which I’m attracted to. For a filmmaker, there’s a lot for them to do. They have to get somewhere; they have to survive. That means there’s existential suspense, which I gravitate toward. André, did you see Call Me by Your Name as a possible movie when you were writing the novel? Aciman: No, I didn’t, I just never

thought that it could be filmed. In retrospect, it was totally interior and how do you film that? There are certain scenes, particularly sexual scenes, that I thought nobody’s ever going to film. When I got a call from someone saying, “I’d like to produce this film.” I said “Yeah, sure, go ahead.” I thought the movie was going to be okay, would do fine, then it would disappear and be found on DVD. I didn’t expect anything like what happened. People write to me and they keep saying the one sentence everybody says: “It changed my life.” I always ask, “How did it change your life?” And nobody can ever answer that question. They just have the sense that the movie has done something to them. Is there a risk today in writing or directing outside of your own experience? And have you faced any pushback from that? Aciman: The risk is minor, but the

pushback is sometimes there. People say to me “You’re married, you have kids, you’re straight,” and I am. They ask, “But why are you writing a gay story?” It’s almost this whole thing of appropriation, and I say, “What gives you the right to access my imagination?” and I won’t even debate it because it’s pointless. There are some people who have complained, but I would say 99 percent of people have never questioned it. Debra, have pushback?

you

received

any

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Granik: I think I impose it on myself.

People say, “Okay, if you’re going to make films that deal with working-class life and you’re a totally bougie person, what basis are you working from?” In filmmaking in general, it’s very much of an issue. I think with writing, it’s not debatable. This is my imagination, this occurred in my mind, I want to be able to put into words what I imagined. I’m not sure why that’s so different in film, but it is. I have admiration for all the people who do reflective filmmaking that’s autobiographical or comes out of their experience. It’s never been something I find easy to do. It’s like the desire to ask what I don’t know feels stronger than trying to do a decent depiction of what I do know. I think it’s kind of like A and B personality types. Are people sometimes afraid to pursue a certain project either in writing or in film because they’re nervous someone’s going to say, “This isn’t what you know”? Granik: I think that’s happening in film. Aciman: Yes, but think of Shakespeare.

I’m sure he never went to Venice, certainly he never went to Denmark. He never killed a woman. People insist they want some kind of verification that what

Above: Thomasin McKenzie (left) and Ben Foster in Leave No Trace, a film based on Peter Rock’s novel, My Abandonment.

you’re doing is right. But if it’s credible enough, if it’s persuasive, you’ve done your job—not necessarily through research, there’s something authentic that the act of writing can produce. That’s good enough, so don’t go and use a litmus test to see the truth factor. It really annoys me when people do that. Granik: But our world did change, so

in terms of Shakespeare, Shylock might want to say, “Hey, that’s not how all Jews are, I want to show some other things...” It is not that any storyteller can’t do a good job by depicting what they don’t know, but where does the person experiencing it get a chance to tell it the way they see it? We are now making room for that. But I think change is uncomfortable. At the same time, I don’t want us to get into a place where you feel like you can’t move. Because I don’t want to write only about what I know firsthand; I am interested in other experiences besides my own. Watch the entire conversation at momentmag.com/karmafiction SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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Dear Readers: When I came to Moment in 2004, almost 30 years after Elie Wiesel and Leonard Fein co-founded ‘the magazine for America’s Jews,’ I believed strongly in the need for it. But I had no idea—none of us did—that the need today would be so much greater, that anti-Semitism would once again rear its ugly head here and abroad. That is why I am asking you to consider including Moment in your estate planning. By making Moment part of your legacy, you are helping to safeguard Jewish thought and culture for future generations. You are also supporting our award-winning independent journalism. Our community deserves and needs the kind of thoughtful and civil reporting Moment provides. Please contact Debbie Sann at 202-363-6422 or dsann@momentmag. com for more information. Thank you so much for your support. Nadine Epstein Editor-in-Chief

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Simple Salads for Summer Nights

t’s summer, and cooking on a hot stove becomes less attractive. As temperatures soar, dinner made up of salads sounds more sensible than ever. Israeli salad may be the first to come to mind. It’s the perfect summer dish, made with Mediterranean sunshine staples like tomato and cucumber, finely diced, together with onion, parsley, pepper, radish, and any other fresh veggie around. The more colorful the better, as each color represents a different nutritional benefit. But the Jewish diaspora has much more to offer when it comes to salads. Fresh, wonder-

ful vegetable combinations have immigrated to Israel with generations of Jews making aliyah from across the world and have won their place on summer-night dinner tables. Take watermelon and salted cheese salad, a combination that Bulgarian Jews brought with them. Traditionally a brined feta-like cheese called sirene is crumbled over or served with chunks of watermelon. Below is a modern take on the combination with the addition of pickled onions, pumpkin seeds and jalapeño. Another popular salad is fattoush, a Levantine salad that uses old and dried pita bread to add volume and texture to

a simple salad, much like the Italian panzanella. The pita is either grilled or fried and soaked in water and crumbled into a salad of tomato, onion and sumac. Matbucha is a favorite Moroccan cooked salad that makes good use of the seasonal abundance of tomatoes. And while you’re by the stove (for the occasional stirring!), make a batch of Moroccan carrot salad as well. Finally, Turkish salad of charred eggplant, tomato and red onion lets you take cooking to the grill. Enjoy it with a slice of good bread and sparkling wine for an alfresco summer meal.—Vered Guttman

Charred Eggplant, Tomato and Red Onion Salad Serves 4 INGREDIENTS

COURTESY OF VERED GUTTMAN

1. Light grill to medium-high heat. When hot, arrange eggplants, tomatoes, onion, serrano peppers and lemon on the grill. Cover for 15-20 minutes until eggplants are completely soft to touch and tomatoes are nicely roasted and their skins are partly charred. Rotate vegetables 4 times. Transfer veggies to tray, let rest for 5 minutes.

2. Using your hands, gently peel eggplants and transfer their pulp into a large bowl. Peel serrano peppers, clean out seeds and transfer to bowl. Chop tomatoes with their charred skins and the onions as well and add to the bowl. Squeeze lemon on top. Drizzle olive oil, add salt and basil leaves and mix. Serve warm. SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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Watermelon, Feta and Pickled Onion Salad Serves 4 INGREDIENTS

1/4 red onion, very thinly sliced into rings | 3 tablespoons cherry vinegar (or white wine vinegar) | 2 tablespoons olive oil 1/2 cup raw shelled pumpkin seeds | Pinch of salt | 6 cups watermelon in bite-size cubes | 8 oz. feta cheese 1 jalapeño, seeded and thinly sliced | 1/4 cup mint leaves, torn DIRECTIONS

1. In a small bowl mix the red onion and the vinegar. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes. 2. In a heavy-bottom pan, heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil over medium-high heat and fry the pumpkin seeds for about 1 minute stirring constantly. Remove from the heat and sprinkle with a little

salt. Transfer to a bowl and let cool. 3. Arrange the watermelon cubes on a platter; then drain the onions from the vinegar and arrange them on top of the watermelon. Crumble the feta on top and sprinkle with the fried pumpkin seeds, jalapeno and mint. Drizzle with the rest of the olive oil and serve.

Fattoush Salad Let the pita bread stand in the open air for a few days, until all the moisture is out. If you’re ready to make the salad, but the pita is still elastic, you can toast it in a low-temperature oven of 250 degrees until it’s dry. Pomegranate syrup is available at Middle Eastern markets and some health food markets. Serves 4. INGREDIENTS

1. Break the dried pita bread into small pieces and put in a bowl. Cut the tomatoes in half and, using your hands, squeeze all the juices and seeds on top of the pita. Keep the tomatoes. Drizzle the lemon juice on top of the pita, add the minced garlic, mix well and set aside. Make sure all the pita pieces are wet. Let stand for 10 minutes. 2. Chop the seedless tomatoes into 1/2 inch cubes and put in a serving 94

bowl. Add cucumber, red onion, mint, serrano pepper (if using) and sumac and mix. Crumble the wet pita bread into the salad. Drizzle with olive oil and pomegranate syrup and mix. Let the salad stand for another 10 minutes; this will allow the pita bread to absorb all the juices from the tomatoes. 3. Add salt, mix, adjust seasoning to taste and serve.

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Moroccan Carrot Salad Serves 6-8 INGREDIENTS

1. Boil salted water in a pot. While you wait, peel carrots and slice to 1/4-inch rounds. Cook carrots in salted water for about 9 minutes, until fork tender. Drain. 2. In a non-stick pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add cumin seeds and mix for a few seconds; add the garlic and hot pepper and mix for another minute. Add turmeric and paprika and

cook for about 30 seconds while stirring; then add the carrots to the pan, stir, and add the salt and the diluted tamarind. Continue cooking for 2 minutes longer while stirring and then remove the pan from the heat. 3. Cover the carrot salad and put in the fridge overnight to enhance the flavors. Mix in the cilantro before serving.

Matbucha Salad Yields 4 cups INGREDIENTS

15 ripe peeled tomatoes or 2 cans (28 ounces) peeled tomatoes in juice | 2/3 cup light olive oil or corn oil, plus more for frying 12 garlic cloves, chopped | 4 serrano peppers (or to taste) 2 tablespoons paprika | 2 teaspoons salt DIRECTIONS

1. Chop tomatoes and keep in a bowl. If youâ€™re using canned tomatoes, use a large knife to cut them inside the can. Set aside. 2. Put oil in a tall, heavy-bottom pot over medium heat. Add garlic and cook until just golden, and add tomatoes at once. Bring to boil, reduce heat to low, cover with lid and cook on low simmer for 2 hours, stirring occasionally. Adjust heat to keep low simmer and make sure the matbucha does not burn at the bottom of the pot. 3. In the meantime, put a little oil in a small pan and fry serrano

peppers on both sides to nicely char the skin. Transfer peppers to a small bowl and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Let peppers cool for 30 minutes, then gently peel their skin, remove their seeds, and chop. 4. After tomatoes have cooked for an hour, mix chopped serrano pepper, paprika and salt into the pot. Let tomatoes cook on low simmer for another 30 minutes, uncovered, or until the mixture is very thick and dark red in color. Adjust salt to taste. 5. Keep in a tight sealed container in the fridge up to 10 days. SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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READING PROUST WITH ROBERT SIEGEL

A Jewish Outsider in Paris

have been thinking about Marcel Proust and the Jews. Several weeks ago, in the doldrums of the second winter of my retirement, the memory of a friend’s question about my plans to keep myself occupied, a question perhaps posed half-facetiously considering the cliché it contained—did I have a plan, such as reading Proust?—came to mind and suddenly struck me as the kind of plan for which winters in retirement are most suitable, and it inspired me to plot my mental escape from that dark and unusually damp season into Belle Epoque France (roughly the period between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914), 4,000-plus pages of it, rendered in Marcel Proust’s prose, which very often consists of sentences packed with similes and digressions within digressions, sentences typically running longer than even this one. So here I am, roughly midway through the seven-volume novel whose title is now translated as In Search of Lost Time (as of this writing I am in volume four, Sodom and Gomorrah), having prolonged the experience by reading books about Proust while advancing through his magnum opus. The narrator of Lost Time is a writer, also named Marcel, whose author makes some critical distinctions between his fictional protagonist and himself. Although Proust was baptized, his mother was Jewish, born into the Weil family of bankers; the Marcel of the novels has no Jewish parent. Proust was gay (to use his preferred word, he was “an invert”); Marcel seems to be one of the few major characters in the novel who is not. Like the real-life Proust, Marcel the fictional adolescent and young adult is a social climber of Himalayan ambition. Having wormed his way into the salons, dinners and galas of the titled aristocracy of Paris, he makes the disappointing observation that, for all their beauty and pedigree, they are a dim lot and narrow-minded to boot. Which brings us to the Jews. In the village where young Marcel’s family spent summer vacations, they would walk in either of two directions, one toward the castle of the noble Guermantes family, the other past the country home of a family friend named Charles Swann. (Swann’s Way is the title of 96

the closet; as for his own view of his family’s origins, Swann gives away nothing. He is the 19th-century Jew-by-genealogy par excellence, who epitomizes the social class that made Paris the jewel of the Western world. He is admitted to the super-exclusive Jockey Club, a measure of acceptance at the time typically barred to Jews not named Rothschild. He is an art collector and expert, a maven to aristocrats whose palace walls and budgets exceed their knowledge of painting. Swann is based on the real-life Charles Haas, a debonair and witty Jew who was embraced in aristocratic circles as one of what Caroline Weber, in her wonderfully informative and entertaining book Proust’s Duchess, calls “a handful of strategically selected outsiders, a group one clubman termed ‘a homeopathic dose of bourgeois.’” Having served Emperor Louis-Napoleon’s government as an adviser on monuments the novel’s first volume; The Guermantes and art, Haas went on to advise such nobles Way is the third.) The Guermantes way was as Mme. Greffulhe, one of the three women the way of the ancient, crumbling but still Weber writes about as a model for Proust’s glamorous social order of the aristocracy, fictional Duchesse de Guermantes. Weber the France of knights-in-armor and bad quotes Greffulhe as saying, “‘I love going to days at the guillotine. Swann’s way was the the Salon de Paris’—the annual exhibition way of recently acquired wealth in com- of French academic art—‘with Haas. He merce and banking, the way of the dynamic, helps me figure out what my opinion is.’” ascendant bourgeoisie. Such were the uses of the mind in the company of the titled. Neither Proust nor What makes the Jewishness of Swann the fictional Marcel has important in Lost Time is the backdrop much positive to say about Jews. The narrator of the great political issue of turn-ofmanages to link the two the-century Paris, the Dreyfus affair. attributes that the author has shorn him of— Swann was a Jew, at least in the terms by Jewish ancestry and sexual orientation—into which Proust probably saw himself as half- a joke about closeted “Sodomites”: “…I have Jewish—by ancestry, not by faith or prac- wanted provisionally to forestall the fatal tice. The Swanns were at least nominally error that would consist, just as a Zionist Catholic but, as one society grande dame movement has been encouraged, in creatsays of him in Proust’s novel, “I know he’s a ing a sodomist movement and in rebuilding convert, and even his parents and grandpar- Sodom. But, no sooner arrived there, and ents before him. But they do say converts the sodomists would be leaving the town so remain more attached to their religion than as to appear not to belong to it, would take anyone else, that it’s all just a pretense. Is a wife, would keep mistresses in other citthat true?” ies, where they would find, moreover, all the In other words, Swann bears the suspi- appropriate amusements.” More pointedly, cion of being a modern-day New Christian, an unambiguously Jewish character in the or converso, which is how I have come to see novel, Marcel’s onetime schoolmate Albert him. We know of his Jewishness because Bloch, is brilliant but uncouth, a caricature others allude to his family background, as of the pushy, ill-mannered Jew of antiif hinting at generations of skeletons in Semitic tropes.

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What makes the Jewishness of Bloch and Swann important in Lost Time is the backdrop of the great political issue of turn-ofthe-century Paris, the Dreyfus affair, the campaign to vindicate an Alsatian Jewish Army captain framed by his gentile comrades for espionage. The aristocrats of the “Guermantes way” are typically proArmy, anti-Dreyfus. Marcel is a convinced Dreyfusard—a believer in the officer’s innocence. So is Bloch. And so is Swann. Toward the end of his life, Swann openly despises the anti-Semites of the aristocracy, but, knowing them well, he cautions the younger and more headstrong Bloch to act discreetly. When the Prince de Guermantes reveals to Swann that he has rethought the case and come out on the side of Dreyfus, Bloch is all for action: “We must ask him to sign our lists….with a name like his, that would have a tremendous effect.” But Swann, tempering the burning conviction of the Israelite with the diplomatic moderation of the man about town, whose habits he had imbibed too deeply to be able this belatedly to shed them, refused to sanction Bloch’s sending the Prince a round-robin to sign, even a seemingly spontaneous one. “He can’t do that, one mustn’t ask for the impossible,” repeated Swann. “Here we have a charming man who has traveled thousands of miles to get to where we are. He can be very useful to us. Were he to sign your list, he would simply be compromising himself with his own people, would be

castigated on our account, would perhaps repent of his confidences and not give us any more.” What was more, Swann withheld his own name. He thought it too Hebraic not to produce the wrong effect. The neo-Dreyfusard Prince is the exception to the rule in his social circles. In fact, when Swann publicly identifies himself with the Dreyfusard cause, the perfect converso encounters a social inquisition in the salons and palaces where the fruits of his aesthetic wisdom hang on the walls. In the eyes of the Duc de Guermantes (the prince’s cousin), Swann’s position on Dreyfus is not just wrong, but disloyal: “…his behavior toward us has been unspeakable. He was taken up by society in the old days… I’d never have believed it of him, him, a discerning gourmet, a positive mind, a collector, a lover of old books, a member of the Jockey Club, a man highly respected on all sides, a connoisseur of good addresses who used to send us the best port you can drink, a dilettante, a family man. Oh, I’ve been badly let down…he shouldn’t have done that, he should have openly disowned the Jews and the condemned man’s supporters.” Like Queen Esther, whom the conversos venerated as a patron saint, Swann ultimately does not disown the Jews. Mind you, In Search of Lost Time is not a book about Jews and Judaism. Swann’s Dreyfusard sympathies are less central to Proust’s story than his other brazen viola-

tion of upper-class mores: He marries his mistress, a former prostitute who is unacceptable in the “best” salons where Swann himself would otherwise be welcome. His marriage is more an act of jealousy than affection, and like his activism in the Dreyfus Affair, it is socially costly. Perhaps Swann’s loyalty to his wife (who, he remarks, wasn’t even his “type”) reflects a natural outsider sentiment, drawn from the same place as his ability to spot the anti-Semite. Although it can be uncomfortable for the contemporary Jewish reader to encounter the anti-Semitism of the French upper classes of more than a century ago, one reads today with the knowledge that the Europe that worshipped its crowned heads was destined for oblivion in the Great War, in which a rehabilitated Alfred Dreyfus served and was promoted to major. As for Swann’s caution about names on petitions, like the youthful Bloch I would probably have been frustrated with him 50 years ago had I persevered with Proust as an undergraduate French major (at the pace of my reading Proust’s labyrinthine sentences in French I would still be at it). But from the vantage point of retirement, Swann’s knowledge of the world and preference for results over sensation strike me as compelling arguments for Swann’s way. Former NPR host Robert Siegel is a special literary contributor to Moment. SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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BOOK REVIEW | CARLIN ROMANO

Before Heschel Became Heschel IN THIS HOUR: HESCHEL’S WRITINGS IN NAZI GERMANY AND LONDON EXILE Abraham Joshua Heschel University of Nebraska Press/JPS 2019, 240 pp, $29.95

At the height of his fame, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) towered as America’s foremost Jewish public intellectual, playing much the role Reinhold Niebuhr took on for America’s Protestants. Indeed, it was Niebuhr himself, later to become Heschel’s best friend, who first brought the emigré Polish scholar to wide public attention with his review of Man Is Not Alone (1951), calling Heschel “the most authentic prophet of religious life in our culture.” Admirers during Heschel’s lifetime praised many aspects of his varied career: his impassioned theological scholarship, ecumenical outreach to other religions and spirited activism for social justice, which included marching with Martin Luther King in Selma, protesting the Vietnam War and igniting the campaign to free Soviet Jews. Judaic scholar Jacob Neusner judged Heschel “the most productive and by far the best theological mind in modern and contemporary Judaism.” Martin Marty, the magisterial scholar of religion, praised Heschel for a body of work “directed not only at the mind but at the heart and the will.” Given Heschel’s dramatic trajectory from Poland to Germany to England and eventually the U.S., his multiple dimensions all made sense. The descendant of generations of esteemed Hasidic rabbis on 98

Was Heschel not systematic enough for the pros, a little too gushy about all the awe, wonder and mystery of God? Wherever one stands on that, In This Hour is unlikely to make much difference to Heschel’s reputation, though it provides a fine occasion to reconsider him more broadly. This collection of Heschel’s writings from his German and English period before coming to the U.S.—a large number appear in English translation for the first time—foreshadows many of the themes Heschel developed with greater literary art in his American years. Among the writings here are Heschel’s articles for the newspaper of Berlin’s Jewish community, a London speech on the idea of Jewish education as the embrace of Spirit, short portraits of eight mishnaic rabbis from Johanan ben Zakkai to Rabbi Hiyya, short essays on prayer, repentance and suffering and his slim volume, originally published in Berlin, on the philosopher Don Yitzhak Abravanel (1437-1509). The latter publication highlights one of the oddities of In This Hour, or at least its title. A reader unfamiliar with Heschel’s writings might assume that the book presents Heschel, the omnipresent 1960s crusader for social justice, excoriating the Nazis back in the 1930s. But the times, of course, did not allow for that. Heschel’s direct commentary on the rise

both sides of his family, Heschel piously mastered classic Jewish texts by his late teens and then headed to Vilna and Berlin to balance his theological training with a secular education. During the 1930s, as Jewish life in Berlin grew dangerous, Heschel still managed to earn his doctorate, publish Jewish scholarship, poetry and journalism and get tapped by Martin Buber to direct the Judisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt. Things darkened considerably once Germany expelled all Polish-passportholding Jews in 1938. Heschel ended up detained for months in a squalid border camp before his Warsaw family intervened to free him. He finally obtained a visa to the U.S. six weeks before the Nazis invaded, but his mother and three of his sisters were killed during the war. Arriving in the U.S. in 1940 and teaching first at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, he gradually recognized that his own devotion to Jewish law meshed poorly with the institution’s Reform ideology. Moving to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the center We see the early stirrings of the future of Conservative lyrical writer who broke out beyond Judaism, Heschel remained there till a purely academic audience. Key to all his death, publishhis thought was the Hasidic joy in ing his landmark a personal relationship with God. books—among them Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man (1955)—and growing more of Nazism is scant in this volume. But Abravanel suffered in the expulsion famous and influential by the year. Today, while many Jewish congregations of the Jews from Iberia, so Heschel’s telland readers continue to discuss his ideas, his ing of his tale in the 1930s certainly stood philosophical star in academe has dimmed, as brave signaling. And the book contains certainly by comparison with such figures the Yiddish poem Heschel published anonas Buber and Gershom Scholem. Is that a ymously in 1933 after watching a Nazi fair judgment by posterity? Is it the occa- bonfire of Jewish books. Yet the volume sional rebuke delivered to university intel- does not contain his 1938 address to the lectuals who get too big for their britches, anti-Nazi Quaker community of Frankfurt, become too publicly famous in their time? his most direct attack during the 1930s on

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Nazism and passive German clergy. In just a few places here, we see the early stirrings of the future lyrical writer who broke out beyond a purely academic audience. To some extent the appeal came from Heschel’s core ideas themselves. Key to all his thought was the Hasidic joy in a personal relationship with God and the fervent belief, as he put it in varying formulations, that “God’s dream is not to be alone,” but “to have mankind as a partner in the drama of continuous creation.” He described his work as “depth theology,” an attempt to probe the “antecedents” of faith, not just its content. Yet how the mature Heschel phrased key matters in Jewish life—the renowned Reform rabbi Balfour Brickner called him “a jeweler of words”—also heightened his influence. The Heschel who wrote, “God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance.” The Heschel who declared that “to speak about God and remain silent on Vietnam is blasphemous.” The Heschel who, when asked if he was an Orthodox, Conservative or Reform Jew, replied that he was not “a noun in search of an adjective.” For readers already deeply familiar with Heschel’s life and work, or curious about his approach to Jewish pedagogy, In This Hour usefully displays his early efforts to articulate a spiritual account of Jewish education, and the commentary by Helen Plotkin is consistently illuminating. For those, however, unfamiliar with the Heschel who strode prophet-like onto the world stage, In This Hour is not the best place to start. What an admirer takes away from reading it is an echo of that immortal apostrophe by Wordsworth, “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour…” For it was in crusading for social justice in the 1960s that Heschel became Heschel. In his last interview in 1972, he explained that writing his two-volume work The Prophets (1962) changed him: “Early in my life, my great love was for learning, studying….I’ve learned from the prophets that I have to be involved in the affairs of man, in the affairs of suffering man.” Some of his most trenchant observations beautifully explained that resolve. “In a free society,” he wrote, “all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, all are responsible.” Another memorable line asserted that “The thought of God and indifference to other people’s suffering are mutually exclusive.” To hear those messages, start with Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (1996),

JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS What will you read next? From a rediscovered story by I. B. Singer, to a symposium on Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible translation, to Stuart Schoffman on the question of Abraham Lincoln’s Jewish roots, not to speak of the latest in fiction, history, and Jewish thought, religion, literature, and politics.

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Continues on page 102 SUMMER ISSUE 2019 / MOMENT

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BOOK REVIEW | JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT

A Newspaper for Homesick Emigrés THE WORLD OF AUFBAU: HITLER’S REFUGEES IN AMERICA By Peter Schrag University of Wisconsin Press 2019, 266 pp, $39.95

Newspapers, especially those that cater to a particular community of readers, tend to be the sources rather than the artifacts of history. They report the news; they don’t often make it. Aufbau, the “hometown paper” of German Jewish refugees in the United States, was something else entirely—more of a lifeline than a chronicle. Over a period of 70 years between 1934 and 2004, but particularly in the mid-20th century, this German-language publication served a distinctive population at a remarkable historical moment: the successive waves of German-speaking refugees from Hitler’s Europe who arrived in New York before, during and after World War II, and whose array of homesick intellectuals, displaced merchants and traumatized survivors indelibly shaped its urban culture and that of the nation. Peter Schrag’s study of Aufbau uses the paper as a prism through which to tell the story of this immigrant group, whose influence, he argues, has not been fully appreciated. Though the story of German Jewish refugees and their impact on American culture may seem familiar to some, the paper itself is less well-known—perhaps, the author muses, because as its readers successfully Americanized and learned English, they stopped needing it, and the next gener-

pull” factors, a combination of negative and positive factors prompting a person from one country to pick up stakes and relocate to another. These immigrants were different: They came to America not out of any affection or admiration for its institutions, which they disdained as brash and common, but because they had been driven from their homeland. Many, Schrag writes, “were torn between a powerful commitment to Americanize themselves as rapidly as possible and Sehnsucht, the intense longing for the old culture and ways.” For those suffering what one called “the searing wound of exile,” one scholar noted later, “New York City was more important as a place of remembering than as a site of new experience.” The paper bore the burden of preserving the readers’ lost culture even as it encouraged them to leave it behind. “In these barbaric days, the German language and German culture must find their home outside Germany,” regular contributor Wilfred Hulse wrote in 1940, reviewing a German-language production of a popular Austrian play by Arthur Schnitzler and Anton Wildgans. The emigrés’ reluctant rather than celebratory relationship to their new home, and their attachment to the language of the enemy, made Americanization even more of a challenge. Aufbau was determined to make clear that its readers were “refugees, not a

ation, brought to America as young children or born here, never read it at all. At first a monthly newsletter of the German-Jewish Club, Aufbau quickly matured as its unfortunate readership poured onto American shores. By 1940, it was a weekly under the editorship of a colorful Berlin-born émigré named Manfred George. Though immigration overall had been sharply restricted by legislation in 1924, between 1933 and 1945 some 130,000 German and Austrian refugees made it to the U.S., most of them Jewish, along with 150,000 from elsewhere in Europe. In the eight years after the war’s end, they were joined by 140,000 Holocaust survivors (known at the time as displaced persons). The paper informed, reassured, comforted and sustained its readers, many of whom arrived not just scarred by events but deeply homesick for German culture. Aufbau enabled German Jews of the The emigrés’ reluctant rather than 1930s and the DPs of the postwar era celebratory relationship to their new home, to find their footand their attachment to the language of ing and rebuild their the enemy, made Americanization even lives in the United States—a process, more of a challenge. noted one of their number as early as 1951, that “took place with a speed and fifth column.” In feature articles and editothoroughness unparalleled in the his- rials, it encouraged German-speaking Jews tory of immigration.” Like many other to speak English, to dress like Americans ethnic newspapers of its time, the paper and to familiarize themselves with Aufbau’s was an agent of Americanization, its very own “ten commandments for new commitment to that process of trans- immigrants,” among them to desist from formation made explicit on its very first speaking German on the street, especially page, where a banner head declared—in on the Upper West Side and in Washington English—“Serving the Interests and the Heights, two Manhattan neighborhoods Americanization of Immigrants.” where significant numbers of German Jews Historians like to speak of “push and resided. Over time they would endow those Continues on page 102

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neighborhoods with a distinct European flavor, traces of which can still be found today. Unlike, say, the Jewish Daily Forward, the newspaper of record among East European, Yiddish-speaking Jews, which sought to mediate and soften the distance between the Old World and the New, Aufbau found itself in the unenviable and unprecedented position of having to document Europe’s destruction. While most American newspapers underplayed or, worse still, ignored the plight of the Jews under the Nazis, Aufbau actively covered the ravages of Nazism and its incessant escalation. Loss as well as longing suffused its pages: loss of status, language, cultural moorings, family, home. Its pages were flooded with news, first of the indignities that awaited Jewish customers back home in Germany and Austria whose barbers refused to cut their hair and whose cobblers refused to fix their shoes, and then, as matters escalated, of impoverishment, deportation, ghettoization and the Final Solution. Tonal shifts between the humdrum and the horrific characterized Aufbau’s pages, much as in the lives of its readers. Advertisements for Wiener Kaffeehaus Éclair, a distinctively Viennese Upper West Side café whose “sweet cakes,” it was said, “can also conjure up sweet memories,” appeared alongside instructions on how to send food packages to the DP camps. Classified notices for jobs as varied as accountants and furriers reared up alongside those for family members gone missing, an assemblage of which were a regular feature under the poignant title “Looking For.” Discussions of Jewish ritual celebrations figured on one page; detailed instructions on how to go about obtaining Wiedergutmachung, or reparations, on another. Obituaries reflecting on lives well lived gave way to excruciating lists of the vanished. The accumulation of detail, which Schrag has painstakingly culled from the paper’s back issues, is stunning. Far more than the narrative that contains them, these particulars underscore the difficulties wartime and postwar Jewish refugees faced in reconciling the dual elements of their identity, or what editor Manfred George called “double vision”: “How German, how Jewish?” Schrag, whose parents arrived in the United States in 1941, has scant interest in analyzing the back story, the goings-on at 2121 Broadway on the Upper West Side, 102

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where Aufbau maintained its offices, or the personalities of the many émigré writers who kept the publication afloat (Hannah Arendt, Stefan Zweig and even Thomas Mann appeared in its pages). Rather, he seeks to bring to life and plant the experiences of his parents’ cohort and neighbors squarely within the larger narrative of U.S. immigration history. True, many members of that community went on to become household names: Arendt, Henry Kissinger, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Max Frankel of The New York Times come readily to mind. What’s more, the refugees’ children, as Commentary magazine noted as early as 1951, “showed an unusual degree of adaptability” by quickly excelling in school (many at George Washington High School in Washington Heights) and subsequently leaving a profound mark on academic and public life. And yet, in Schrag’s estimation, the narrative sweep of this success story has not sufficiently taken hold of the American Jewish imagination. His book seeks to remedy that omission. Fair enough. But relying exclusively on Aufbau to get at that larger story results at times in an airless, if solid, account. Now and again, one yearns for the kind of outside voices and contextual perspectives that enlivened two vivid, absorbing books about great newspapers: Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power (about The New York Times) and Ben Bradlee’s A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (about The Washington Post). Then again, perhaps Schrag believed there was sufficient drama in Aufbau’s headlines and feature stories and the tumultuous history they chronicled without having to resort to tales of office intrigue. A paean to a culture that is no more, The World of Aufbau leaves us with a heightened understanding of and appreciation for how a modest newspaper gallantly assumed the outsized burden of restoring hope and dignity to its deracinated readership, welding its members into what one of their number called a “community of fate” and another aptly characterized as the “right formula for acting as a link among German Jews everywhere.” That’s a lot to ask of any publication, but Aufbau more than lived up to its name. Translated into English, the word means “reconstruction.” Jenna Weissman Joselit is the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic studies and professor of history at The George Washington University.

edited by Susannah Heschel, the philosopher’s daughter and the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth. She provides a thorough, touching introduction to her father’s life and work. That volume contains many of Heschel’s most powerful short pieces, such as “No Time for Neutrality” and “No Religion Is an Island.” In her introduction, Susannah Heschel describes her father as “a unique combination of a Hasidic voice of compassion and mercy, always seeing the goodness in other people, and a prophetic voice of justice, denouncing hypocrisy, self-centeredness, and indifference.” She adds, tellingly for our time, “He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds, he used to tell me when I was a child.” In this hour, he’d be protesting at the U.S.-Mexican border. He’d be testifying before Congress against Saudi Arabia’s U.S.supported war on Yemen. He’d be forming an ecumenical coalition, “Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Venezuela.” He’d be decrying China’s “retraining” camps in Xinjiang. He’d be explaining how all of that simply meant being Jewish in a troubled world. In this hour, he might well be the thinker of the hour. Carlin Romano, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Ursinus College, is the author of America the Philosophical.

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