A blog / Abe blog / Abe Log

My blog is now on Jpost.com

2011-11-28T06:44:00.000-08:00

Check out my blog, "Brand of the Jews", on The Jerusalem Post's site...

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/brand-jews

Larry David: The Shlemiel as Modern Hero

2011-08-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

Not since Sacha Baron Cohen duped Israeli Yossi Alpher and Palestinian Ghassam Khalib, into confusing Hamas with hummus in “Bruno”, has a Jewish comedian had as much fun taking on the great divide in Middle East affairs.

This summer Larry David, who stars as himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, ridiculed the gulf between Palestinians and Jews with his “Palestinian Chicken” episode.

By pouring his brand of high anxiety comedy into the boiling boulibase of Israeli/Palestinian affairs, David carries on a great tradition of Jewish comedians

Cohen and David are part of an illustrious people (Jews) who have been able to mockingly point the finger at themselves and their haters, all while making the world laugh. From Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler” in “The Producers” to Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Throw The Jew Down The Well”, Jews have an ability to mock their enemies by pretending to be them, while cleverly displaying their own personal foibles.

As part of this prominent contingent, Larry David allegorically pokes fun at the recent dispute in Lower Manhattan over a mosque being built near the site of Ground Zero.

David concocts his fictional Palestinian restaurant, “named Al-Abbas” (sounds like Mahmoud Abbas) with chicken that’s so good LD says, “You know what? They should send this chicken over to Israel. Yeah, for the peace process. They'd take down all those settlements in the morning.”

(I suppose he means Jews would lay down their weapons in exchange for a pulke!)

It’s so finger lickin’ good and popular that in the episode, the owners of Al-Abbas plan to open a second restaurant, this time next to a Jewish deli. Such close border proximity is too bold a maneuver and sets off Larry’s entourage of Jewish pals to participate in a protest planned outside the new eatery.

But of course, it wouldn’t be “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or HBO without twisting in an “As The Bagel Turns,” sexual theme. While at Al-Abbas, Larry finds a Palestinian woman there very attractive and even says to his friend and agent Jeff, “You're always attracted to someone who doesn't want you, right? Well, here you have someone who not only doesn't want you, but doesn't even acknowledge your right to exist.... That's a turn-on.”

By noodling his perceived non-existence into a strength, Larry seductively takes her (to the astonishment of his friend, re-born Jew Marty Funkhouser) for a roll in the sack.

In the end, we find our non-hero haplessly walking down the middle of an alley between the supporters of the new restaurant—including the sensual Palestinian woman (offering herself to him on one side); and his Jewish friends shouting epithets at the Arabs, but enticing him to their side on the other.

It’s a Chaplinesque moment—the simpleton alone, maneuvering between opposing forces.

Just as Woody Allen before him, Larry David has become the face of the Jews. Like Michelangelo’s G0d touching Adam’s hand on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, David was given Allen’s doppelganger in the 2009 comedy “Whatever Works” as the misanthropic Boris Yelnikoff.

By challenging the political and social status quo, David has become the latest epitome of what Ruth Wisse termed, “The Shlemiel as Modern Hero.”

Magneto is my Hero

2011-06-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

The child watches as his parents cross into the gates of death at a Nazi concentration camp. The bars close separating him from them. Then suddenly, in a fit of emotion, Erik outstretches his arms attempting to bend open and break the gate with his unique and secret gift.

In the new movie “X-Men: First Class”, we go back in comic book lore to learn how a young boy, Erik Lehnsherr, grew up to become the metal moving Magneto.

Witnessing this show of super power is the evil Sebastian Shaw, played by Kevin Bacon, a Josef Mengele-like character, who wishes to experiment with and exploit young Erik’s gift. In a following scene, Shaw threatens and then shoots Erik’s mother in front of the boy, all because Erik refuses to do a circus trick and move a Nazi coin with his powers. That coin will come in handy later.

Cut to the early 1960s and we see Erik, all grown up, with numbers tattooed on his arm. He’s become a Nazi-hunter seeking out vengeance for the murder of his mother and his people. (In a twist of casting fate, the actor who portrays him was also in “Inglorious Basterds,” another fantasy film that swore vengeance against Nazis.)

Not until he meets his chum and eventual rival, Charles Xavier, does he hone his rage (somewhat) and control his unbridled force.

Created in the early 60s, the duality between Xavier and Magneto have been compared to the two-sides of the same coin that are MLK and Malcolm X. JTA’s Ami Eden has made the case for years that they resemble Rabbi Meir Kahane and Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg.

But the makers of this latest film do more than endow Magneto with manipulative powers over metal. The sympathetic character manipulates us too. He wins over the audiences’ heart throughout (unless you side with Shaw who is out to destroy humanity.)

The break point comes when missiles from Soviet and U.S. ships are launched at an island and at the mutant X-men, as the superpowers seeks to annihilate those who are different (yes, the mutants are all together now on one tiny piece of land), does Erik stop them, turn them around and aim them back at the U.S. & Soviet fleets. He even utters the words, “Never Again.”

Unlike other comics, Marvel’s creators relished in ambiguity. Their characters were not drawn in black and white. It’s also why, in the end of the film, we’re left cold when our hero becomes the anti-hero and Magneto allies with a hot devil and dons his own horns. Has he gone rogue? Or, is he still to be admired?
Simcha Weinstein’s book “Up, Up And Oy Vey!” explains it was Jewish writer Chris Claremont who gave Magneto the back-story we’re now witnessing on the big screen. Claremont writes, “Once I found a point of departure for Magneto, all the rest fell into place, because it allowed me to turn him into a tragic figure who wants to save his People.”

In some of Claremont’s work, he has Magneto be a double agent for Mossad – hunting Nazi war criminals for the CIA then secretly turning them over to Israel for trial. In “Days of Future Past”, he has mutants rounded up and put in camps throughout the US.

What this prequel provides in background, it also hints at what’s to come for the mutant X-Men. Humans will seek them out, hunting them in the hopes of destroying their race.

Back to that coin. If you were given the opportunity to avenge a family member’s death by Mengele knowing (seeing) what he did, what would you do? Thought so. Yes, not everyone in Nazi Germany was a Mengele. But how many of them were witnesses to what happened? How many people throughout the world today would willingly stand there and see it all take place again?

Nakba Nonsense

2011-05-22T20:17:00.000-07:00

Just as Israel is physically surrounded by hostile regimes, one can’t open a website, turn a news page or flip a channel without it getting attacked in the media.

While Israel was being infiltrated by angry mobs crossing into its territory on May 15th in “Nakba” protests (Nakba, or calamity in Arabic, when Israel was reborn) from across the Syrian, Lebanon and Gaza borders, it’s publicly criticized by Jewish intellectuals, writers aligned with left-leaning politics and high-profile celebrities.

This month, in a reversal of misfortune, Tony-Award winning playwright Tony Kushner, who was at first barred from receiving an honorary degree from CUNY due to his stance on Israel is now set get one. Yet, in his letter of protest to the CUNY board, he writes, “I believe that the historical record shows, incontrovertibly, that the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes as part of the creation of the state of Israel was ethnic cleansing.”

It’s not just from outside the perimeter of Israel, that it’s equated with terminology usually reserved for the most abhorrent regimes. From within Israel, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy writes, “Were Israel a little more confident…all schools in Israel, Jewish and Arab alike, would today mark Nakba Day.”

One is reminded of Akiva’s saying, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” For a non-Jewish outsider to look in they must wonder, “Why support Israel when even the Jews are so vehemently critical?” Indeed, being critical of Israel is one thing, but portraying Israel’s birth as a “Nakba” is a dangerous misreading of history as CAMERA points out.

Yet like so many Big Lies, it’s believed when repeated over and over again. What’s omitted is that in 1948 a Palestinian state could have been fulfilled, but instead Palestinian Arabs rejected it and Israel was attacked. As historian Benny Morris notes, “the Palestinian Arab leaders, headed by the exiled chief and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and ally of Hitler, Hajj Amin al Husayni, rejected partition and launched a three-day general strike, accompanied by a wave of anti-Jewish terrorism in the cities and on the roads.”

Another lie by omission is how nothing is ever mentioned about the disaster suffered by the Jews expelled from Arab states, and especially from Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. As Professor Ada Aharoni of the World Jewish Congress points out; Egypt’s Jewish community comprised 90,000 Jews in 1948. Today, only 38 Jews live there. Yet, the Arabs (who prefer to call themselves Palestinians) who live in Israel today constitute 20% of the population.

The noose of hostility surrounding Israel is further exacerbated by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas when he created an alliance with Iran-backed Hamas, a terrorist group that refuses to accept Israel’s existence and has fired over 328 rockets and mortars at Israel’s civilians according to The Israel Project. In September, he’ll seek unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State in front of the UN. Yet were Abbas to have his way, the so-called right of return would bring an estimated 4.8 million Palestinian refugees and descendants to Israel. The result of such an action would ensure an ethnic cleansing—of Jews in Israel.

I suggest that the “Nakba” protests have nothing to do with the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but are in reality in existential opposition of Israel as a Jewish State—in any form.

But why believe the pro-Israel press and Jewish organizations dedicated to understanding the truth behind the news? Just tune into Al Aqsa TV and you will find Yunis al Astal, a member of the Palestinian Authority parliament, spelling out his organization’s vision for the genocidal annihilation of the Jewish people. In a television interview last week Al Astal described the ingathering of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel in terms of a divine plan that would give the Arabs “the honor” of annihilating “the evil of this gang.”

Better yet, read your history of the Jews and then ask, “Do we still have to wonder what is actually being planned?”

Demystifying Eichmann

2011-05-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

Tuesday May 17, 2011

Finally, on the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann trial, historian Deborah Lipstadt has taken an analytical approach, demystifying this seminal moment in 20th century court history with her book, "The Eichmann Trial."

For fifty-years, the term, “banality of evil” has been part of the political and cultural lexicon, due to Hannah Arendt’s famous book describing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”

Now through scrupulous research, Lipstadt’s insightful book reveals facts that had been overlooked and exposes opinions that became lore.

No stranger to either the subject of the Holocaust (she was a consultant on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), or court trials related to it, (she successfully won her case against Holocaust denier David Irving and authored a book on the subject, “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier.”) Her new book describes the capture, trial and worldwide response to it; the latter with a particular focus on Arendt.

In laying the groundwork in her introduction, while she draws comparisons to her own trial and Eichmann’s, their main commonality being a deeply rooted anti-Semitism, she is careful to make distinctions. In the Eichmann trial the Nazi was the defendant and survivors were called as witnesses to testify. In her own trial, the burden of proof was on her.

Importantly, her greatest contribution is in proving that Eichmann was not the “order-taker” he claimed and that Arendt portrayed him as, but that he was responsible to “ensure that the freight cars should be used to their maximum capacity.” Additionally she reveals transcripts not used in the trial to show that in Hungary, even in the face of Allied bombardment of rail stations, he resolved to “still march” the Jews to the lower Austrian border.

Equally significant is her exposure of Arendt’s detached, phenomenological approach to the trial where it was, “the transformation of seemingly normal people into killers” that intrigued her. Beyond emotional detachment, Lipstadt also points out how Arendt was in fact physically absent for several weeks of the trial vacationing in Basel.

Beyond this, another of the more significant changes that the trial stylistically bore was the term, “Holocaust.” She writes, it was “cemented into the lexicon of the non-Hebrew-speaking population.”

On that note, while the media in 1961 had nowhere near the lightning speed and utter ubiquity it possesses today, the term “Holocaust” had been on the front pages of newspapers and created a focus and attention previously unseen.

The trial also provided worldwide interest in a new field of study giving birth to countless academic institutions now offering genocide and Holocaust studies.

But perhaps the most profound effect was…

“…as a result of the trial, the story of the Holocaust, though it had previously been told, discussed, and commemorated, was heard anew, in a profoundly different way, and not just in Israel but in many parts of the Jewish and non-Jewish world. The telling may not have been entirely new, but the hearing was.”

On this, her book comes at a crucial time, when through the lens of the internet and 'Do-It-Yourself ' media reporting, fact and fiction frequently blur. Lipstadt summons a razor sharp perspective, clearly and incisively delineating the two and setting the historical record straight.

Politicians who are playing at celebrity are playing with fire

2011-04-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

Politicians who are playing at celebrity are playing with fire

Babel Bites

2011-03-25T07:08:00.000-07:00

This month a global survey conducted by the BBC found Israel to be one of the most negatively viewed countries in the world. In fact, Israel was the fourth most negatively viewed country, just ahead of Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

The survey encompassed 27 countries with over 28,000 people interviewed of which 49% (essentially one-half) viewed Israel negatively.

Question: With all of the many pro-Israel organizations promoting it, a virtual alphabet of initials from the ADL – ZOA, how is it that such a perception can exist?

From a marketing angle, I believe there is a duality at play. One is an on the ground physical space that exists – a reality. The other is an idea – a metaphysical notion of what Israel stands for in the mind.

On the ground, the Middle East is a geographical conundrum. To cede land to the Palestinians, as Israel did in Gaza, is to have Hamas’s rockets rain down on homes. Conversely, to fight back and to try and eradicate the threat is to be perceived as the aggressor.

The same exercise took place in the North against Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon War. In fact, over the past 30-years, from 1982 in The First Lebanon War, to the First Intifada in ‘87 and the second in 2000 to Operation Cast Lead 2008-‘09, each time Israel tries to wrestle its way out of the net laid by its enemies, it gets further entangled in the trap set by them.

Translated on the airwaves, in the more metaphysical media space, the news gets reported through a distorted and often slanted lens as David vs. Goliath. Only in this version, Israel is Goliath.

Perceptually, it looks like this: Palestinians throw rocks, Israel shoots guns. Hamas sends crude rockets, so Israel flies powerful F-16s.

Unfortunately, perception isn’t reality. Ergo, we have a communications problem.

Yet again, with the many organizations that strive to enlighten, defend and communicate Israel’s story, it’s difficult to match words and facts against propagandistic imagery. But with too many facts vying for attention, with so many organizations and various, though well-intentioned agendas, a Tower of Babel ensues.

What Israel needs is a unified communications strategy.

In ancient Chinese wisdom, with a crisis, often comes an opportunity.

Currently, with an Arab world in turmoil illustrating the instability of the neighborhood where Israel lives, the world once again sees how vast and populace, not to mention how volatile those countries are. The world can perceive how Israel is completely and utterly surrounded by tyrannical regimes, many of which seek its destruction.

For Israel to be defined by the Palestinian’s cause is to miss the wider picture of a region of adversaries.

In marketing, when a brand is lost (and in this case I’m talking about the metaphysical Israel) go back to its heritage. Israel needs to be perceived on the airwaves, as what it is on the ground – a David.

One story. Not hundreds.

David was not without fault, but he was also a warrior, a musician and a poet. Similarly, Israel is not perfect, but strives to be righteous, is culturally rich and diverse. David’s reign signified the formation of a coherent Jewish kingdom centered in Jerusalem. And with God's help, David was victorious over his people's enemies.

One note of caution – branding is forever and needs to be differentiated from the day-to-day micro-conflicts and dramas in the news cycle. Fortunately this very idea is part of the rich history, heritage and long legacy of Israel as told through the Bible. It is authentic.

It’s also a story that is not only told in the Jewish bible, but is all encompassing and iconic, recounted by Jews, Christians and yes, even Muslims.

Void Of Horror

2011-02-24T12:39:00.000-08:00

Void Of Horror

In the era of AMC’s “Mad Men” and in 1965, Harold Pinter wrote “The Homecoming” his Tony Award winning masterpiece, which just had a run at Center Stage here in Baltimore.

A Jewish/British playwright, Pinter, who also won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was an actor, poet and left-leaning political activist. His early plays, were able to wrench and capture the ontological void of the vast nowhere land from his predecessor Samuel Beckett and place it within realistic settings.

He infused their spare, unadorned locales of ordinariness (his play “The Room” takes place in a one-room apartment) with characters drawn by jagged razors, so sharply carved they glide before they cut. Even the proscenium at Center Stage was framed like a picture, beckoning the audience to observe the slit like voyeurs.

Enter Ruth, a name with significant lineage in the Jewish canon and no accident either. Like the biblical Ruth who is brought to her husband’s people, this Ruth accompanies her husband, a professor of philosophy, into his childhood home occupied by his father, two brothers and an uncle, while getting to know all of them in the biblical sense.

In the end, Pinter has Ruth, the object of desire, coil around and transform the house that the men built, into one that she rules. The lads revolve around her like orbs to the Sun.

For anyone who watches “Mad Men” knows, the women of that era are constantly treated like servants or worse, tarts. NOW was only founded a year later in ‘66.

Equally then, while women were still second-class citizens, Jews were an invisible minority.

Perhaps out of fear, or pragmatism, like many artists and writers of his day, Pinter doesn’t make much of his Jewishness in any overt way. One can assume, that Max and his kin are Jewish the same way Arthur Miller’s Loman family in “Death of a Salesman” is Jewish.

Fast forward to today, where names like Tony Kushner and David Mamet have their characters make no bones about their identity. Movies and books by Jews, about Jews are for everyone. Likewise, more women are in the American workforce these days than men.

Men, who have created more hot wars, cold wars and conflicts during their reign should be happy, no grateful, that at this point, when one twitch of a finger can annihilate us all, women may have been sent to rescue us.

Flip open your smartphone to the flipside of a time-warped world and from Iran to Egypt, we’re witnessing ‘60s riots in real time where woman are oppressed and Jews mostly despised.

Can this new awakening of freedom, from a world previously cutoff from progress triumph? Or, will the freedom of speech and to assemble, to go to the theatre and see Pinter plays, be snuffed? (Pause).

Pinter’s early plays were apolitical. He even said, “I'm not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically. I'm not conscious of any social function.” Yet, their menacing pauses can be as terrifying as a scream from Gehenna.

In his later life and in the midst of our divisive culture, much of Pinter’s political activism rained controversy down on him. Yet know, as an officer in PEN and with fellow playwright Miller, he travelled on a mission to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers.

In fact, up until he died, stricken by cancer in 2008, and in the last decade of his life, he devoted himself to causes he believed in and rarely wrote plays.

Just as women had to be wallflowers and Jews needed to be unseen, his greatest plays left unsaid (perhaps in those frightening pauses) much of what he later saw as wrong with the world, as madness.

“Al Jaffee’s Mad Life: A Biography” - Book Review / Jewish Times

2011-02-07T12:45:00.000-08:00

Since the new millennia and the rise of blockbuster movies like “Spiderman”, “Ironman” and “Hulk”, numerous books have been written about the invention of the comic book and how Jews were largely the creative force behind the pop-culture phenomenon. But right alongside, and when the sensation really hit its apex in the 1960s and 70s, MAD Magazine lent an added satirical slant to a cartoon culture and a world seemingly gone mad. It became a must-read for millions.

“Mad Life” is the story of Al Jaffee, the iconic cartoonist and prolific contributor to Mad, who at 89 is still at it (55-years and counting) with the pub. But aside from his zany drawings (he created the famous fold-in) and clever wit, his biography is a fascinating read because it’s so unique.

Born in 1921 in Savannah, GA to Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, his mother longingly up and yanked Al and his three brothers back to Lithuania. Speaking no Yiddish, nor a word of Lithuanian and with no electricity or plumbing, the boys were in culture shock. Then, after a year there, their father rescued them and brought them back to the US, only for them to be taken by mom once again.

But in 1933, with the Nazi threat looming, their father sensed the impending danger and saved them, leaving behind their mother, who no doubt perished in the Holocaust.

But while the lads were away in the old country, their father kept sending young Al and his brothers, cartoon funnies from the Savannah newspaper and the boys would treasure and duplicate them.

This cross-Atlantic linkage had a profound influence on Al’s art and he eventually got accepted to the new High School of Music and Art, where he met up with his future MAD colleagues, Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman (Kurtzman would be the original mastermind behind MAD.)

The award winning and authorized biographer, Mary-Lou Weisman, writes, “given his artistic gift, Al’s mad childhood seems to have led him inevitably to satire and to MAD.”

Running alongside Weisman’s portrayal, the book is filled with colorful drawings by Al that build on the narrative infusing color and joy into his harsh, madcap life.

Promised Lands - Book Review / Jewish Times

2011-02-07T12:41:00.000-08:00

For those asking the proverbial question, “Where are the next crop of great Jewish writers?” the answer is within the pages of this book.

Derek Rubin is to be applauded for assembling a group of highly talented, fiction writers, who’ve each contributed their unique voice to the proposed theme of Promised Land and how that idea, in his words, “continues to shape the collective consciousness of contemporary American Jews.”

Archetypically, Promised Land is a notion wide enough to encompass a vast array of interpretations by each of these creative authors, yet it also offers them a starting place from which to invent their imaginary tale.

While some of the writers are more famous than others, all of them express, a variation on a universal theme and provide a “mosaic” on it.

First in the line-up, Dara Horn knocks it out of the village in her piece “Shtetl World”, where she concocts a theme park in Western Massachusetts based on the now vanished setting of an Eastern European shtetl. Masterfully, she’s able to infuse irony within the confines of what is a haunting environment.

In another section of the book, the land of Israel provides a subject to ruminate on and in Joan Legant’s hands, she analyzes the healing nature it offers a woman who defended herself from a brutal attack.

Toward the end, the theme widens to encompass the illusory and physically unobtainable idea of Promised Land. In Jonathan Rosen’s “The True World” a reporter goes off on a quest to interview a deceased Saul Bellow, traveling first to a ghoulish Ellis Island and then onto the netherworld where he encounters the late Henry Roth who serves as his guide.

Importantly, in a category largely dominated by men for the past sixty-years, this collection exemplifies the significant rise women have attained, with thirteen of the twenty-three voices being female writers.

Mr. Rubin, like his previous book, “On Who We Are: On Being and (Not Being) a Jewish American Writer”, provides us a substantial compilation that signifies and reflects the moment and zeitgeist of our generation.

Letting Go Of Philip Roth

2010-11-17T10:49:00.000-08:00

Letting Go Of Philip Roth

Letting Go Of Philip Roth
Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

He is the last of the triumvirate standing. Bernard Malamud departed first back in 1986. Then, Saul Bellow passed in 2005. Along with Philip Roth, they were, as Bellow mockingly referred to all three of them, “The Hart, Shaffner & Marx of literature,” as if because they were all Jewish, they’d been clumped together in a haberdashery.

Since the birth of the new millennia, while Mr. Roth has vigorously written at a textual tear and his most prolific, penning a series of short, powerfully compact books, the stories stored in them have all been obsessed with death.

This month, and with his 31st book “Nemesis,” about a terrifying polio outbreak that threatens wartime Newark, N.J., Mr. Roth takes that grave subject beyond anything he’s done up until this point.

In 2001, he had David Kepesh (once the man who became a breast), a 70-year-old professor and critic, panicked about death and growing old.

By mid-decade in 2006, his short novel “Everyman” begins at the funeral of its protagonist, an old advertising executive. In “Exit Ghost” (2007), Mr. Roth writes his last book about his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman (“The Ghost Writer”) — in a sense finishing him off. Soon after, in “Indignation” (2008) he travels back in time to 1951, where we find out the narrator is dead and relaying his story from the beyond. Then, in 2009, he writes “The Humbling” about a leading stage actor who kills himself with a shotgun.

Now, at the age of 77, is Mr. Roth trying to tell us something?

It cannot be ignored that Mr. Roth, who has always been an author obsessed with identity, is a post-modern writer and one whose fiction mirrors and explores the relationship between the work and the writer.

While his Zuckerman books are about the travails of an author, he internalizes even further in others, such as “Operation Shylock” (1993), where he has, as a doppelganger, the novelist Philip Roth travel to Israel to attend the trial of accused Nazi war criminal, John Demjanjuk, while an impersonator, going by the name Philip Roth, hijacks his identity.

Commenting on his narrative style in “Deception” (1990), he observes, “I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction. … Let them decide what it is or isn’t.” Critics who’ve observed this Rothian hall of mirrors have called his technique metafiction.

If we are to follow his post-modern pathway of prose, where Mr. Roth’s message is typed within the pages of his medium, then we need to also ask … Will the eventual passing of Mr. Roth (that he seems to be foreshadowing, if not bellowing) signify a broader marker separating a generation? Are we at a seam in generations, where old media is dying along with old writers and new forms of media are the way by which contemporary writers will write?

Commenting in 2009, during an interview with Tina Brown of The Daily Beast, Mr. Roth considered the future of literature by stating his belief that within 25 years, the reading of novels will be regarded as a “cultic” activity:

“I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range. ...”

Likewise, his take on digital books as replacing printed copy, Mr. Roth opines:

“The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. … Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”

If we follow his Jeremiad, by sounding the death knell of both the medium of books and the messenger himself, Mr. Roth’s latest and perhaps most devastating piece of work since 1997’s “American Pastoral” not only gives us a metaphor about the death of his protagonist — he pens us a plague.

Not since the heroic rise and fall of Seymour “Swede” Levov, whom Mr. Roth built up into one of his most beloved characters, a star athlete and gallant All-American in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Pastoral” (1997), do our hearts get torn asunder by Mr. Roth’s tender account.

“Nemesis” revolves around a young playground director named Bucky Cantor during the war year of 1944 on the streets of the Jewish Weequahic section in Newark during a polio outbreak. Mr. Roth endears us to young Bucky by portraying his caring manner with children and the amazing sway he has over them, only to steal it all away with a ravaging scourge.

After Mr. Roth’s recent decade of self-destructive story lines presaging his own eventual demise, he has now gone beyond self-annihilation to a broader, wider obliteration of a whole population with “Nemesis.” Death doesn’t just seek out the elderly individual, but an entire landscape of the future — children.

Beyond his individual characters’ struggles and travails, Mr. Roth is known to confront the zeitgeist. As the last of the triumvirate standing, he is like Lear, railing against more than just old age. Is this same terrain also the literary landscape that’s becoming ever more incomprehensible due to an explosion of media options, with an unfathomable number of garbled, incoherent messages thundering their tweets and text but in the end do not signify literature?

What is the future of Jewish literature, after Mr. Roth?

Derek Rubin, whose book “Who We Are On Being (And Not Being) a Jewish American Writer,” has examined, through a number of famous authors’ essays, the future of their genre. He believes, “Having achieved ‘everything,’ Roth perhaps now finds himself longing for something else.”

Mr. Rubin will come out with a new book in October by Brandeis University Press that will contain new, unpublished short stories by a number of Jewish writers. It is titled “Promised Lands — New Jewish American Fiction On Longing And Belonging.”

For Mr. Rubin, the idea of longing “has often shaped Jewish understanding of the ideal of the Promised Land.” He writes, “There have been periods in history when the Jews of the Diaspora have found themselves in such hopeless circumstances that they have felt that they would never be able to reach the Promised Land, whether real or metaphorical.”

This is what Mr. Roth has done with “Nemesis” and has been doing with much of his historical fiction; he goes back to a seemingly idyllic time, and uncovers a deeper, wrenching underbelly within it.

Mr. Rubin writes, “Roth inhabits this critical no-man’s land from which he has a clear view of the Jewish post-immigrant world of his parents and of contemporary American society. Owing to the strange overlapping of generational experience, he was there to witness up close all the dilemmas, the insecurities, the confusion, indeed the hypocrisy, but also the comedy attendant on the post-immigrant experience without actually being a part of it.”

As an example of this, he recounts Mr. Roth’s essay “My Life As A Boy,” in which he talks about growing up in the 1930s and ’40s. It wasn’t Judaism but baseball that was his “religion.” As it turns out, the boys in “Nemesis” and on Bucky’s playground in 1944 play baseball.

Examining this duality between the historically real and the imagined, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, in a review of “American Pastoral,” recalls …

“Back in 1960, Philip Roth gave a speech in which he argued that American life was becoming so surreal, so stupefying, so maddening, that it had ceased to be a manageable subject for novelists. He argued that real life, the life out of newspaper headlines, was outdoing the imagination of novelists, and that fiction writers were in fact abandoning the effort to grapple with ‘the grander social and political phenomena of our times’ and were turning instead ‘to the construction of wholly imaginary worlds, and to a celebration of the self.’ ”

Fifty years later, just as he had here, Mr. Roth’s declaration to Tina Brown is as germane as ever, though magnified with the lens of time, as newspaper headlines have grown into an exponential number of media outlets blaring the death of the newspaper.

As Mr. Roth has concerned himself with death and dying and we await a Jewish writer of his stature to appear on the scene, there’s also been an amazing surge on the Internet of Jewish websites focused on Jewish literature and culture, many with hip names like Jewcy, Zeek, Heeb and Nextbook’s Tablet. They each have a strong literary sensibility, but with an edgy take on contemporary Judaism.

The editorial director of Nextbook/Shocken is Jonathan Rosen, who created the Jewish Encounter series and is the author of “The Talmud and the Internet.” As it turns out, he also has the distinction of writing the very last story in Mr. Rubin’s “Promised Lands” called “The True World,” which has an unnamed protagonist travel by boat to the beyond in order to interview a deceased Saul Bellow.

Contemplating the world beyond and the viability of getting there, by an author who has written about the Internet and its relationship to Talmud, I asked Mr. Rosen what he was aiming for in that story. He replied in talmudic fashion not with answers, but with questions, “What is the promised land in that story? The afterlife? Is it literature itself? The promised land of America … all these ideas coalesced in my head.”

Indeed, this vast unknown, uncharted world that we are able to tap into, that is the Internet, opens up whole new worlds to us. Is Mr. Rosen suggesting there’s a way to do that today? “I don’t think the Internet leads you into a metaphysical world, but in the Talmud, the living talk to the dead and all these texts are mingled together and what is an actual story is hard to separate.”

As it relates to fiction, Mr. Rosen, who is also a published novelist (“Eve’s Apple,” “Joy Comes in the Morning”), says, “The dialogic nature of the novel, the multiplicity of voices you can employ, allows one a more honest open relationship to all the fragments.” For Mr. Roth, according to Mr. Rosen, “is in some sense a posthumous writer already, and has drawn inspiration from that intuition. He has a novel narrated by a dead man, and ‘The Ghost Writer’ plays with the question of how in order to write about life you must absent yourself from it. All writers, in that sense, are posthumous. In ‘Zuckerman Unbound,’ the hero has written a scandalously carnal novel [‘Carnovsky’] like ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ but is himself a lost soul and, increasingly, a lost body.”

When Philip Roth burst on the scene in the late ’50s, websites like Tablet and Zeek certainly weren’t around, but there were literary critics that sang his praises and as Mr. Rosen points out, “There was a generation of writers as concerned as critics, with the writers, with themes and subjects that these novelists were concerned with. Saul Bellow was born in 1915 and so was Alfred Kazin. Irving Howe reviewed Roth’s collection of stories at the time and on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.”

There was also a generation of writers, artists and musicians who were creating a renaissance in American letters and popular culture. From Allen Ginsberg, who had completed his poem “Kaddish” in 1959 (the same year “Goodbye Columbus” was published), and Nabokov’s controversial “Lolita,” to jazz musician Miles Davis who had recorded “Kind of Blue,” one of the best-selling jazz records of all time. Mr. Roth arrived on the doorstep of the 1960s, an era of artistic exuberance.

By the end of that decade and with “Portnoy’s Complaint” in 1969, Mr. Roth outraged many of those same critics, who called his book vulgar and Mr. Roth a self-hating Jew.

Unfortunately, for some, that label still sticks, though if you ask them what of Mr. Roth’s they’ve read lately, they may reply, “Goodbye Columbus.”

By turning a critical eye on his tribe and blending fact and fiction, “Portnoy’s Complaint” did not endear him to critics or to Jews.

In a 1972 essay in Commentary titled “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Howe famously tore into Roth, “What the book speaks for is a yearning to undo the fate of birth; there is no wish to do the Jews any harm. … Portnoy is simply crying out to be left alone, to be released from the claims of distinctiveness and the burdens of the past, so that, out of his own nothingness, he may create himself as a ‘human being.’ ”

Roth did re-create himself with that book and even told The Paris Review in 1984, “Portnoy wasn’t a character for me, he was an explosion.” Ironically, the self, which Howe talked about, was to be the focus of Roth’s next several novels, after “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and spanning two decades.

For Howe, Mr. Roth closed an era of Jewish literature based on what he called the “post-immigrant Jewish experience” and a world he wrote about with sensitivity in “World Of Our Fathers.” His pessimism toward any new, revitalized Jewish literary re-awakening is even referred to as the Howe Doctrine. “Will there remain a thick enough sediment of felt life to enable a new outburst of writing about American Jews?” Howe asked. Howe, who died in 1993, wasn’t able to see and experience the amazing output from Jewish writers of many varieties and how young people today are experiencing them.

For professor Evelyn Avery, who teaches courses in Jewish literature at Towson University, the question of where Jewish literature is headed and who is leading the way is met with optimism.

“I am very affirmative and very pleased with the direction it’s going,” she says. “I see a movement toward Judaism and in particular religious writing and themes and particularly women writers such as Allegra Goodman and Dara Horn who have been affected by their heritage and weave it into their art.

“There’s a vibrancy and a lot of variations of Jewish writers.” For example, Pearl Abraham, who in her first book turns her back on her traditional Chasidic life. But by the end of her second, it ends with the protagonist going to Israel. Then in her third book, ‘The Seventh Beggar,’ there was a respect for that Chasidic world and she was much more positive about being a religious Jew.”

Dr. Avery also includes in her course the works she considers classics and that hold up — novels by Malamud and Bellow and the short stories in Mr. Roth’s “Goodbye Columbus,” which she says the students respond to very well.

According to Dr. Avery, while the direction literature is taking pleases her, in our constantly plugged in and always on world, “many students can misuse technology as a tool to learn about these writers.” She says, “There’s a consensus among the faculty that the advances in technology can impose problems when students are scrolling, texting and on their cell phones.”

Ironically, Dr. Avery’s observations are not lost on one of today’s most celebrated and clever Jewish writers, who has recently come out with a dystopian satire “Super Sad True Love Story,” where books are extinct and people use their apparats (an iPhone on steroids) to point at anyone and obtain their credit score or perform an instant background check and perceive their desirability for sex.

While Gary Shteyngart places his story in a future setting, he smartly embeds so many believable aspects into it, one can’t help but recognize their ubiquity in our constantly turned on world.

Another celebrated Jewish writer, who is also known to rankle the establishment and is an advocate for returning fiction to a focus on story by way of genre fiction, is Michael Chabon.

Mr. Chabon, who grew up in Columbia, won the Pulitzer Prize at the beginning of the millennia for “The Amazing Adventures Of Cavalier & Clay.” His wish is to return entertainment back into novels, and he takes issue with those who seek to belittle it.

“The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it [entertainment] is not to disparage or repudiate,” he said, “but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences. …”

Like Michael Chabon, Laura Lippman spent part of her youth growing up in the planned city of Columbia. Along with Mr. Chabon, she, too, is a champion of genre fiction and her mysteries featuring Tess Monaghan have won the Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, Nero, Gumshoe and Shamus awards.

A few years ago, when Ms. Lippman spoke at Bolton Street Synagogue in Baltimore along with her husband, David Simon, I asked her who her hero was, and she replied (unaided) Philip Roth.

Ms. Lippman said of Mr. Roth: “I learned a lot from Roth about POV, not so much in the technical sense, but in watching him place his imagination behind people quite unlike himself.”

As for Mr. Chabon’s efforts to bring fiction back in the direction of entertainment, she says, “Fiction needs to go where readers want to follow. I’m not saying it has to be excessively popular, or cater to the lowest common denominator. But fiction centers on stories.”

Mr. Chabon’s arrival and his desire for content to possess the attributes of entertainment also comes during a decade when the means by which we read have aligned with how we read. After all, Nooks, Kindles and especially iPads are clearly entertainment devices that merge reading and multi-media; learning and fun; work and play.

In July, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, announced that his customers now buy more digital books made for the Kindle than they do hardcovers. Equally, Barnes and Noble is up for sale as bricks and mortar bookstores are being outdone by e-books.

Even college students like Dr. Avery’s will soon be accessing those once expensive, clunky textbooks through Inkling, which claims to be “the world’s first end-to-end platform for mobile learning content.” It will make textbooks available on Apple’s iPad for $2.99 per chapter and it will also make full use of iPad’s color, video and touch screen.

However, like youth, iPads are not to be wasted on the young. Bloomberg’s Businessweek reported that the iPad’s intuitive interface makes it appealing to senior citizens as their source for news and entertainment.

Consequently as the medium of technology shows no signs of pausing, even for an older demographic, one of the most august message providers of Jewish news, The Forward, which began publishing in 1897, is also adapting.

In a Sept. 2 letter from the publisher, it became a “membership organization”: “… just as the immigrant community sustained the Yiddish Forward since after its founding, in 1897, we’re inviting our friends and readers to support us today. … Today, the cutting edge has moved away from websites to the broader universe of digital media: mobile apps, iTunes, podcasts, YouTube channels, Tweets and whatever will follow. … but the most important transition is not technological. It’s generational.”

Speaking about the shifting media landscape with Dan Friedman, arts and culture editor at The Forward and a founding member at Zeek, he says, “While different publishers are at different places in the curve, all publishing enterprises have to keep abreast of the latest. They’ll have to have an iPhone app, iPad app, and you want to make sure there’s multimedia on your website.”

As for the changes taking place, Mr. Friedman says it’s a reflection of the demographics. “The Jewish community doesn’t look like it did 20 years ago — a predominantly suburban, Conservative, JTS-led movement of Jews doesn’t exist anymore. The children of those suburbs are not interested in being those types of Jews.”

According to Mr. Friedman, unlike the era that Bellow and early Roth were writing in, “There’s a form of pluralism that did not exist in the few decades post-war. The Conservative movement has broken down, as has the suburbs, as the location has broken down. You see it in the culture. There are a lot of people that are engaged culturally with the project of Judaism in all sorts of different parts of our history in ways that are much more forward looking.”

The era when Bellow, Malamud and Mr. Roth were clumped together was reflective of a closer-knit Jewish culture.

Literature today, like the medium of the Internet with its vast diversity that allows us the ability to go divide into our own cultural and political cocoons, is a balkanized Diaspora — but, nevertheless, a very productive one.

Asked to give his take on the future of Jewish writers, Mr. Friedman, as an editor who gets a large quantity of books across his desk to be reviewed, says, “Our rate of cultural production is not slowing.”

While The Forward is morphing, and has created alliances with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz and with Zeek Media, the irreverent Jewish periodical Heeb magazine announced, just a few days prior, that it was suspending the print edition and going online only.

According to Arye Dworken, creative director at Heeb, “It’s not a surrender. It’s more like a pause.”

He also laments, “Our media industry is a self-perpetuating death. We keep talking about the death of media and eventually it’s going to happen because we keep on talking about it.”

It is a strangely McLuhan-esque paradigm that we’ve converged upon. Mr. Roth, a post-modern writer, who has used as his subject matter an author like himself, and has killed him several times over the past decade and right when technology seems to be closing the book on physical books, now creates one that encompasses not just a single death, but a deadly pestilence.

One could say he’s been writing this same book all his life, for even in his short story “Epstein,” contained in his first book “Goodbye Columbus,” Herbie, a young son, died of polio at age 11.

In “The Ghost Writer,” at one point Amy Bellette says to Nathan Zuckerman that Lonoff (whom she imagines talking to from beyond the grave) told her, “Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of a literary era.”

Mr. Roth’s books may take on a different form in the future. One day they may become ephemeral bytes, transmitted from a cloud beyond. It will always be his stories that will breathe life onto the page.

They’ll keel us over with laughter and tear us apart with grief and, somehow, he and writers like him will be immortalized by living in all of us … forever.

Shylock's Israel

2010-11-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

Sunday Nov 07, 2010

Israel, the Jew

By Abe Novick

After a successful run in NYC’s Central Park this past summer and a film version released earlier in the decade, Al Pacino will again revive his
role as the notorious money-lending Jew on Broadway in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” (opens Nov. 7th)

Apart from having a major movie star provide a scenery eating performance, it’s a play that speaks to our time. For just as the world condemns Israel by assigning blame every time it responds in self-defense, so Shylock is mischaracterized in the eyes of Venetians. Just as the UN brands itself an objective forum for debate, so Portia disguises herself, masking her true identity in the courtroom.

Shakespeare’s Shylock is perhaps one of The Bard’s most complex characters, having been interpreted as both an evil villain on the one had
and a more sympathetic (though not without teeth), victim on the other.

In the midst of Venetian society, Shylock stubbornly wants/demands his pound of flesh. He wants what was agreed to. This obsessive need for Old Testament justice in the midst of a forgiving Christian culture is what undoes him in the end. Yet, Shakespeare also infuses him with humanity, by having him sympathetically reason with us in this now immortal speech.

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; … If you prick us, do we not bleed?…And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."

The resemblance in that speech to Israel is uncanny.

Indeed in today’s world, Israel could be an understudy for Shylock. The theatrical medium of 1596 (where citizens got their news as entertainment) still plays in the 24/7, infotainment, slanted-stage, media age of 2010.

But beyond the warped news lens and on the actual physical ground, Israel is isolated by its neighbors as if it were in a ghetto, literally walled off as Shylock is, unwelcome by the surrounding community and yet successful.

In his book, The Case For Israel, Alan Dershowitz concludes, “In order to assess the status of Israel in the international community, it may be useful to look at the Middle East’s only democracy as “the Jew” among nations.

Having been banned from other professions, Jews during the middle ages were limited to money lending or “usury” as a means of income. Yet in this castigated profession, they provided their Christian neighbors with needed capital to grow and prosper. Likewise, as Dershowitz points out, while Israel is a small country with an eye on defending itself, it has done more to benefit its Arab citizens working within its borders by providing economic opportunities.

Israel has continuously extended a hand in peace to its Arab neighbors and is doing so once again. But Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently said he would not even recognize Israel as a Jewish State.

In an early moment in the film version, a spiteful Antonio, played by Jeremy Irons, spits on Shylock as if he were subhuman, only to enter into
a bargain with him later on.

Without recognition as a Jewish state, without being seen for what you are, without the sense of shared humanity with the same eyes, hands and blood, how can Israel enter into a bargain?

During Shakespeare’s time, there were no Jews in England. They had been expelled in 1290. Rather, Jews were identified mainly by folklore passed down from sermons, dramas and ignorance. The Jew was depicted as the devil in countless Passion Plays and guilty of crucifying Jesus.

Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League consistently reports throughout the Arab world, where there are only a few Jews, canards such as the blood libel and denial of the Holocaust. Following the flotilla incident, Jews and Israelis were depicted as "blood-thirsty monsters, or as sharks".

With all its drawbacks, Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” is a complex, multi-dimensional story. While Israel also has shortcomings, in order for it to be dealt with, it should not be made in Shylock’s words, “a soft and dull-eyed fool, To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield…”

For peace to become a reality, the false perceptions of Jews and Israel as an enemy state, as vermin to be eradicated and as a nefarious villain only out for its pound of flesh, needs to end once and for all and before a realistic, long-term peace agreement can be staged.

Abe Novick is a writer in Baltimore. His work can be found at: www.abenovick.com

The Fog of Guffaw

2010-10-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

This month, media reporting on media reached an all-time crescendo, with a scherzo interjecting the old canard about Jews running the show.

We had comedian Stephen Colbert, who plays a fake newscaster who is genuinely liberal but pretends to be staunchly conservative,on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” He seeks to ridicule Fox News (which claims to be “Fair and Balanced,” but alas, that’s why his irony works).

Before a congressional hearing and in character but under the guise of being legit (it sounds like an oxymoron … but it’s what we’re dealing with), Mr. Colbert, in jaw-dropping testimony, promoted some pretty horrendous shtick.

Not since Groucho Marx stood before and insulted the leaders of Freedonia in “Duck Soup” has a comedian revealed the underlying, absurd elements of a government.

The Congress sat there and naively, politely listened (while cameras rolled) as if they’re supposed to take this demonstration seriously.

The entire mockery then got tossed into the blender of banter occupying several days of otherwise worthy news and commentary. When fake news reports on real news, it makes for satire. But when real news reports on fake news, it dilutes the seriousness of the real thing.

Lending further distortion, I learned about this stunt on Facebook, which showed a clip from YouTube that lifted it off C-Span. This is a McLuhan-esque realm, where media and message collide.

While such lenses make for a hall of warped mirrors, somewhere inside them are real issues and real people in pain being affected socially, economically and politically.

Oddly, a lot of Mr. Colbert’s viewers will be lured to witness his live Oct. 30 event in Washington, when he will lead a march titled “Keep Fear Alive.” While real, it’s a faux cause in response to his counterpart Jon Stewart’s “Rally To Restore Sanity,” which is in reaction to Glenn Beck’s August rally to “Restore Honor To America.”

Mr. Beck’s rally was held on the same date and place where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his immortal “I Have A Dream” speech. Because of that and his close identification with the Tea Party, his construct smacked of appropriating hallowed ground.

Surely, in a never-ending cycle, these dueling real-time rallies will garner the same kind of media exposure and frenzy (only exponentially) because of the hyper-real hype.
Not enough? This comedic spectacle coincides with the Jon Stewart/ Rick Sanchez mano-a-mano.

Mr. Sanchez, fired for making comments on Pete Dominick’s satellite radio show, called Mr. Stewart a “bigot.” When told Mr. Stewart was Jewish and a minority “as much as you are,” Mr. Sanchez said, “… to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”

As a country with real problems, we tumble downward into a Carollian wonderland, all because a CNN show host, mad because he was ribbed by a comedian, ended up revealing his true, ugly nature on tape.

Comedy has a way of unmasking it without us realizing it. Mr. Colbert stripped down Congress by making a mockery of it. Mr. Stewart tweaked Mr. Sanchez just enough for him to blurt out what he really thought.

Yet there is no comic relief from this ongoing agitation, only a frustrating, furious intensification.

Abe Novick writes monthly for the Jewish Times on the intersection of American and Jewish culture. His work is at abebuzz.com.

For The Kids

2010-08-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

Torching Fear
August 27, 2010

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

Perched at the front entrance of the Owings Mills JCC on security duty during the Maccabi Experience, I waved in car after car of parents dropping off their children, host families picking up their children and busloads shuttling them back and forth between events.

What struck me was how all of it, all of it, was done for the children. It was all done for the future. What an amazing sight. Anyone who wandered through the JCC was witness to wall-to-wall teens teeming with exuberance and a glow of energy. In turn, their youthful presence provided a reciprocal warm feeling inside anyone over the age of 18 and gave of themselves in any small way.

But then my flight hit some turbulence as the next day’s newspaper landed on my driveway and I wondered about their future and what, ultimately, we’re actually leaving them.

In three bold front page photos, The New York Times ran a story describing the devastation from the floods drowning Pakistan, wildfires consuming Russia and excessive rain in the Midwest moving many in the scientific community closer to a consensus — (as if Baltimore couldn’t tell ’em) — it’s getting warmer.

As Bobby Dylan once sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Still it’s not just the times that are a changin’. “The climate is changing,” concurs Jay Lawrimore of the National Climatic Data Center.

Turning the news page to another part of the blazing forest, there lives a modern day Haman who is ever closer to gaining the capacity to set off and ignite a fire and “wipe Israel off the map.”

I watched as a shaken and distraught Caroline Glick, senior Middle East fellow with The Center for Security Policy, recently spoke about Iran at Moses Montefiore Anshe Emuhah Synagogue. She opened with, “In a very real sense, the Jewish people are in peril today in a way they haven’t been in a very long time.” You can find her hour-long talk on Youtube.

From a global rise in anti-Semitism to the inordinate amount of anti-Israel propaganda aimed at the tiny democracy, they’re sticks and stones when compared to the very real threat of Iran with the bomb.

As John Bolton pointed out, Iran is not the atheistic Soviet Union and this is not the Cold War. Iran is a theocracy that believes their reward will come in the next life. Therefore, life is not what’s sacred, but death is. Iran won’t be contained the same way we’ve done it in the past.

Then there’s the ultimate ponzi scheme - the debt that’s mounting for our children and grandchildren. Without an expanding economy, our debt gets worse and worse. But rather than investing in smart growth, we borrow from China to pay for the oil that we import from the same dictators that hate us and seek to destroy us.

At the opening ceremonies, there was a slide show with the faces of Jewish athletes and artists from years gone by. I wonder now about the world they were born into — a 20th Century filled with war and destruction and yet they persevered.

Somehow, through strength and promise along with the wisdom we manage to pass onto them, our youth will live to celebrate and give back to their children the same kind of bright torch that was lit that first night.

Abe Novick, whose work is at abenovick.com, writes monthly on the intersection of popular and Jewish culture.

Tikkun Olam @ lightspeed

2010-08-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

If you haven’t dropped off Facebook, Twitter or the Internet yet, due to privacy concerns, then you’ve probably also noticed a profound change in the way they’ve morphed.

What’s taken place is a transition from what I call YouTube to WeTube.

On Facebook for instance, huge groups have formed that, because they have so many “friends,” they’ve had to alter the nomenclature from “friend” to “fan.”

In a matter of only a few days after the flotilla incident, a group on Facebook formed, “The Truth About Israel’s Defensive Actions Against the Flotilla.”

In no time, the group limit overflowed with individuals and other groups piling on and joining the cause.

Rallies and marches were set up all over the world in support of Israel. The “we” came together. In a matter of a couple of days, I was at the Baltimore Zionist district rally in the Inner Harbor.

Photos were taken of the event. Media came and covered it. The photos were then posted back up on Facebook and shared with other larger groups like CAMERA and Stand With Us International.

Clips from YouTube were also linked from rallies all over the world.

No longer was it about just you or me. It became of force for uniting a force of we.

FOR MANY Jewish groups today the idea of tikkun olam plays a significant role. Literally, meaning “world repair,” it connotes social action.

According to My Jewish Learning, it derives from Lurianic Kabbala, a branch of mysticism born out of the work of 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria and the Lurianic account of creation.

The story goes, divine light became contained in vessels, some of which were shattered, scattered and some of the light attached to broken shards possessing evil. The repair that’s needed is gathering the light.

Today, the light speed at which information is carried can be a powerful weapon in the fight against tyranny.

Social media and social action converge to be a force for good. In a matter of moments a wrong can be exposed and a forthright campaign mounted to right it.

But while the speed of light can be a fierce weapon in any fight, what are the obstacles? While technology is racing forward, it conflicts with a slow deliberative governing process. As the world speeds up, the political process doesn’t.

That blockage directly clashes with the profound feeling that when we see something wrong, we want it fixed immediately.

When Iranian protesters took to the streets of Teheran last year, it was broadcast for the entire world to see on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Yet the US government, and President Barack Obama in particular, seemed passive and indecisive at a point when a moral stand was necessary and the right thing to do.

When thousands of rockets poured down on the Negev from Gaza, groups came together on Facebook in support of Baltimore’s sister city of Ashkelon.

But the governing bodies of the US and the UN were restrained in voicing their condemnation. It wasn’t until after withstanding bombardment for years, when Operation Cast Lead was initiated, that they reprimanded Israel.

Obama certainly embodies and personifies the deliberative mind. And it’s important for government to weigh issues, especially given the deadly stakes in today’s heavily armed world.

But as the BP oil spill demonstrates, government can’t operate in constant crisis communications mode or appear at a standstill. It has to get out in front of issues before they turn into disasters broadcast for the entire world to see.

With the Internet and the speed at which information flows, every issue appears like a disaster. If not dealt with swiftly, it can undo an administration.

Look at the past several US presidents.

They each share a similar pattern.

They all led during the escalating age of the Internet and each hit speed bumps (some crashing) soon after winning the presidency.

George Bush I: Once the dust cleared after Desert Storm, we clearly saw how out of touch he was, perhaps best personified by his lack of check-out-counter skills. He seemed a man from the past, as we were moving forward.

Bill Clinton: Got the economy rolling, but we’d grown tired and drained by the constant scandals exacerbated daily on Web sites like The Drudge Report.

George Bush II: After 9/11 he had the highest approval ratings of any president. Yet with no WMDs, Katrina and an economic meltdown as a finale, he left office with the lowest approval ratings of any president.

Obama: Has moved too slowly on every issue from health care and the economy to the oil spill.

The haste with which we call for action, grinds in the gears of a slowmotion government personified by its leaders. Media and technology race ahead at light speed and magnify the sharp, glaring disparity with government, making it harder to contain the broken vessels.

The writer is based in Baltimore and works in communications.

www.abenovick.com

We Tube World

2010-08-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

If you haven’t dropped off Facebook, Twitter or the Internet yet due to privacy concerns, you’ve probably noticed a profound change in the way they’ve morphed.
What’s taken place is a convergence from what I call YouTube to WeTube.

On Facebook for instance, huge groups have formed that, because they have so many “friends,” they’ve had to alter the fan nomenclature from “friend” to “fan.”

Only days after the Gaza-bound flotilla incident, a Facebook group formed — “The Truth About Israel’s Defensive Actions Against The Flotilla.” In no time, the group limit overflowed with individuals and other groups joining the cause. Rallies and marches were set up worldwide in support of Israel. The “we” came together.

Within days, the Baltimore Zionist District had rallied in the Inner Harbor. Photos were taken. Media covered it. Shots were posted on Facebook and shared with larger groups. Clips from YouTube were linked from rallies all over the world.

No longer was it about just you or me. It became a force for uniting — a force of we.

For many Jewish groups today the idea of tikkun olam plays a significant role. Literally meaning “world repair,” it connotes social action. But according to myjewishlearning.com, it derives from Lurianic Kabbalah, a branch of mysticism born out of the work of kabbalist Isaac Luria and his Lurianic account of creation.

As the story goes, Divine Light became contained in vessels, some of which were shattered, scattered and some of the light attached to broken shards possessing evil. The repair that’s needed is gathering the light.

Today, the light speed at which information is carried can be a powerful weapon in the fight against tyranny. Social media and social action converge to be a force for good. In a matter of moments a wrong can be exposed and a forthright campaign mounted to right it.

But while the speed of light can be a fierce weapon in any fight, what are the obstacles? While technology races forward, it conflicts with slow deliberative, governing. As the world speeds up, the political process doesn’t.

That blockage directly clashes with the profound feeling that when we see something wrong, we want it fixed — immediately.

When Iranian protesters took to the streets last year, it was broadcast for the entire world on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Yet our government, and President Obama in particular, seemed passive and indecisive when a moral stand was necessary and the right thing to do.

When thousands of rockets poured down on Southern Israel from Gaza, local groups came together on Facebook in support of our sister city of Ashkelon. But the governing bodies of the United States and the United Nations were restrained in voicing their condemnation. It wasn’t until after withstanding bombardment for years, when Operation Cast Lead was initiated, that they reprimanded Israel.

President Obama certainly embodies and personifies the deliberative mind. And it’s important for government to weigh issues, especially given the deadly stakes in today’s heavily armed world. But as the BP oil spill demonstrates, government can’t operate in constant crisis communications mode or appear at a standstill. It has to get out in front of issues before they turn into disasters broadcast for the entire world to see.

The haste with which we call for action grinds in the gears of a slow-motion government personified by its leaders. Media and technology race ahead at light speed and magnify the sharp disparity with government, making it ever more glaring.

Spin all you want; Tech-savvy folks no longer buy old advertising tricks Read more: Spin all you want; Tech-savvy folks no longer buy old advertising

2010-07-09T19:07:00.000-07:00

We’ve entered the age of action. No longer will ads, PR and spin be the sole savior to swoop down and rescue a fallen hero, sports figure, CEO or brand.

In a bygone era, advertising could clean up most any mess. But today, all the PR kings and all the ad hucksters couldn’t put BP together again.

The camera doesn’t lie. But what’s changed today is everyone has a camera. Everyone is a potential reporter and photojournalist.

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen the media’s downshift due to advertising’s Balkanized, post-apocalyptic diaspora, transformed by a new millennia, with millions of motivated mavens ready to post their perspicacious point of views.

Ten years ago, not long after the dot-com bubble burst and names like Pets.com vaporized into the ethereal pet cemetery netherworld of bygone brands, the efficacy of advertising was deemed as doomed to go with them.

Even the great Al Ries, marketing guru and author of several brilliant books and the man who coined the term “positioning,” eulogized advertising in his 2002, “The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR.” In it, he wrote, “Publicity provides the credentials that create the credibility in the advertising.”

In other words, until a brand has some cred, simply advertising it doesn’t do the trick. For example, if you get a sales call from a business without a reputation, no matter how good its product or service, are you going to buy it? Most likely you’ll hang up, turn the page, hit delete.

Fast-forward to today, when news and publicity are no longer generated down a one-way street, when citizens are armed with camera phones and text is a verb, where their scoop on your dirt is posted in a nano-second on YouTube, we’re seeing a further erosion — the decline of PR and the rise of real action.

Most typically, one of the first tools of crisis communications is to combat negative press with a counter punch by leveraging the stature of a CEO in ads and in front of news media. BP spent millions to lift its image, with full-page ads in major newspapers and TV commercials.

But the public wasn’t buying it. They didn’t want ads. They wanted action and BP’s Tony Hayward’s words were KO’d by the perpetual, live-action footage emanating from deep under the sea. Bottom line: Slick ads and spokespeople are no match for an oil slick.

In a constantly on world, with ever-present cameras, reality will win where manufactured moments won’t. People have little time and no patience for spin, can spot it and sense its presence in an instant. They want and clamor for what’s real, authentic and true.

It’s no coincidence that a sober desire for so-called Reality TV arose during the same tumultuous, tide-altering and highly caffeinated decade when traditional forms of media were swept away.

Advertisements, spin and salespeople are like a big monster to be avoided with TiVo. People don’t want talk. They want actions from politicians, corporations and media.

It’s not enough to say you’re going to be open and transparent, as BP has done. Because if you’re not doing everything in your power to be truthful, even before you say a word, you’ll be dead in the water.

Age of Action

2010-07-09T19:04:00.000-07:00

We’ve entered the age of action. No longer will ads, PR and spin be a savior to swoop down and rescue a fallen hero, sports figure, CEO or brand.

In a bygone era, advertising could clean up almost any mess.

But today, all the PR kings and all the advertising hucksters couldn’t put BP together again.

Today (like every other day) the camera doesn’t lie. But what’s changed today is — everyone has a camera. Everyone is a potential reporter, ad exec and PR pro.

In the last decade, we’ve seen the downshift from advertising’s Balkanized, post-apocalyptic Diaspora, transformed in a new millennia by thousands of media mavens ready to post their perspicacious POVs.

Ten years ago, not long after the dot-com bubble burst and names like Pets.com vaporized into the ethereal pet cemetery netherworld of bygone brands, the efficacy of advertising was deemed as doomed to go with them.

Even the great Al Ries, marketing guru, author of several brilliant books and the man who coined the term “positioning,” eulogized advertising in his 2002 “The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR.” He wrote, “Publicity provides the credentials that create the credibility in the advertising.”

In other words, until a brand has some cred, no one’s going to pay it any mind. If you get a phone call from a Jewish organization you never heard of, no matter how worthy their cause, are you going to write them a check? Buy their product? Most likely, you’ll hang up, turn the page, hit delete.

Fast-forward to today, when news is no longer generated down a one-way street, when citizens are armed with camera phones and text is a verb, where their scoop is posted in a nanosecond; we’re seeing a further erosion — the fall of PR and the rise of real action (docu-action).

Three recent examples demonstrate the point:

• Zionism 2.0 — Israel’s boarding on the flotilla was shot and posted all over the Internet for the world to see, moments after the raid took place. Had it not been for the lightning speed of streaming video, the gruesome images of beatings, stabbings and a soldier tossed over a railing, no one would have believed it. Even with the video, Israel had its skeptics (as it always does). But without it, our side would have been helpless. The lesson: Being armed with a camera is more powerful than any weapon.

• The Face That Launched A Thousand Hits — Had it not been for Rabbi David Nesenoff’s penetrating lens, Helen Thomas would still be planted in the front row of the White House press room. His stark video clip was able to see into her heart of darkness, piercing the hardened 89-year-old exterior, and expose her for what she truly was — an ugly anti-Semite.

• Slick Ads Are No Match For An Oil Slick — Most typically, one of the first tools of crisis communications is to combat negative press with a counter-punch by leveraging the stature of a CEO in ads and in front of news media. BP spent millions to lift its image, with full-page ads in major newspapers and TV commercials. But the public wasn’t buying it. They didn’t want ads. They wanted action and BP CEO Tony Hayward’s words were KO’d by the perpetual, live-action footage emanating from under the sea.

It’s not enough to say you’re going to be open and transparent, as BP has done. Because if you’re not doing everything in your power to be truthful, even before you say a word, you’ll be dead in the water.

Abe Novick writes monthly for the Baltimore Jewish Times.

Ephemeral Enemy

2010-05-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

In his loaf of lechem-sized novel of the CIA, “Harlot’s Ghost”, Norman Mailer traces the undercover upbringing of his young cold warrior and recruit Harry Hubbard through the spy vs. spy world of espionage. In one memorable section, while learning the ways of subterfuge and duplicity, Harry must associate colors with numbers. When he sees a red wall, behind a gray table with an orange lamp, it represents 586.

For anyone else, the colors and furniture arrangement would mean nothing. But to a spy, it could be the code to any number of potentially ominous outcomes.

What appears as nothing particularly significant to an ordinary person, actually has incredible stakes to code-breakers, CIA and Mossad.

Fast forward sixty-years and the same Cold War concept applies to today as the very essence of modern terrorism is to cloak evil behind a mask, whether Islam, Palestine or some warped version of a universal ideal like freedom. In reality, those notions are only ephemeral shrouds to cravenly hide the deeper-seeded hatred toward Jews and the west.

Striking at its cultural heart, known for its populous Jewish citizenry, where the lights of western commercial marquees emblazon the sightlines of Broadway, the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad came within a hair’s breadth of a show stopper, stabbing right through it.

Young Faisal is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan. But his bomb-making training reveals his affiliation with Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The latter is the same group that attacked a Jewish Center in Mumbai. Meanwhile, the former plotted to attack the Danish Newspaper in Copenhagen for running the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad

While running around the cross-streets of 45th and Broadway in an Islamic Jihad get-up would’ve surely tipped off the street vendors, Shahzad’s disquise was an Americanized persona - the perfect veil. How cunning.

The modus operendi of this cowardly ilk is “hiding”. Now train your camera telescopically. When and if Iran actually attempts a nuclear attack on Israel, it won’t be from a missile launched from within their borders. They are far too spineless. They’ll hide behind one of their proxies such as Hezbollah. It won’t be a rocket for all of the world to see and trace its vapor cloud, but via a tunnel underground.

Iran is the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Why would their successful precedent change? Were Iran to acquire a nuclear device, their means of delivery targeted upon Israel would remain the same.

Why would Iran claim responsibility and risk immense retaliation and utter obliteration, instead of igniting their lethal device through some third or fourth party?

When the US Marine barracks in Lebanon were bombed in 1983 and 241 US servicemen were killed Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. It’s suspected that actually Hezbollah, who in turn received help from the Islamic Republic of Iran, were responsible.

But I ask you, whom did we attack in response?

Likewise since then, Iran has transferred sophisticated short-range rockets to both Hezbollah and Hamas. Both terrorist groups have used them to kill Israeli civilians in past wars.

Due to the very nature of these and other craven acts, the enemy hides cowering behind a cloak of anonymity knowing that Israel and the United States won’t risk an all out international war to exact revenge. Their modus operendi is too ephemeral and more often than not, ghostlike, they slip away.

Mailer captured the Cold War not with an epic about massive warheads pointed across oceans, but revealed it through the hidden world of the CIA.

Finding Faisal’s Pathfinder was fortunate. Capturing him was shrewd. But taken on a larger scale, today’s counter-terrorism efforts should look for what’s concealed right in front of them. Appearance and reality are by definition, paradoxically in conflict.

Inglorious Zionests

2010-04-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

Adolf Eichmann was captured fifty-years ago, on May 11th 1960 outside of Buenos Aires. Eleven days later he was on Israel’s soil and on May 23rd Prime Minister David Ben Gurion stood at the podium of the Knesset and announced to a hushed crowd his news.

Eichmann’s capture reignited the world’s outrage over the Holocaust. Up until that time, many desired to move on. After all, Israel had plenty of new and more immediate problems.

As Yom HaShoah folds into Yom HaAtzmaut and we turn from commemoration to celebration, I’m struck by the transition in outlook that took place from Israel’s statehood to the young country’s heroic marvel.

Notably, there’s a similar transition in cultural attitude that’s taking place today.

In the past twenty years, we’ve evolved from films like Schindler’s List to movies like Defiance and Inglorious Basterds. Jewish characterizations have morphed from victims to strong rugged combatants in the face of threats from Nazisnow they face evil head on with brawny bravura.

Arguably too, many American’s reference point for Jewish identification is Israel. And today it stands as a source of strength - economically, militarily and according to Gallup, American’s support of Israel ranks 63% - higher than after ‘67 and just one point below its high after the Gulf War.

Still, one can’t miss the skewed news reports and factually misleading editorials blaming Israel for the ills that plague that region.

President Obama’s misdirected pressure on Israel, especially given Iran’s nuclear ambitions that each day comes closer to actuality, is of utmost concern. It presents an existential threat to Israel through either itself or one of its terrorist proxies and destabilizes the entire region.

But what if, in this postmodern world, where the line between fiction and fact splice together seamlessly (Tarantino literally has film burn Hitler and his cronies to death), the story of Eichmann’s capture and a true wish-fulfillment fantasy made real, were to be revived?

Put yourself in the director’s chair and wonder if you will, what if Mossad captured Osama bin Laden? Imagine what that would do. Who in this country could claim to be anti-Zionist then? In one fell swoop it would be an end-run around placating the Obama administration, by directly appealing to the American people and a world constituency demonstrating a vigilant determination to seek justice.

Osama is a mass murderer who on countless occasions has vowed to destroy Israel. He and his group are not only responsible for 9/11 and the murder of Danny Pearl, but al Qaida carried out a suicide attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya killing 12 people, including three Israelis and wounding 80. Israel would be justified.

In this revenge fantasy (“Inglorious Zionests”), Israel’s Herculean labor would gain so much good will, an attack on Iranian nuclear installations would not only be cleared for take-off, they’d be escorted. It would change everything.

The stunned silence that greeted Ben Gurion, would be replicated upon Netanyahu by onlookers, many not knowing if it’s live or Memorex.

If it sounds too much like a cinematic whimsy, revisit the Eichmann capture and then tell me I’m dreaming. Read Neal Bascomb’s 2009 nail-biting, historical account of the operation in Hunting Eichmann. What stands out is the resolve, the fortitude and the grit. When Israel captured Eichmann, it broke the rules. When Mossad entered Argentina, it didn’t ask permission. It went in undercover. When El Al’s Britannia secretly whisked the war criminal away, it was through an illusory cloud of mystery.

What’s amazing about the story, is how so many things could have gone wrong jeopardizing the entire operation, but because of the determination of a handful of leaders, including Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, Mossad Chief, Isser Harel and others they persevered.

In 2010, we still hunt them. John Demjanjuk on trial in Munich is 89 years-old and stands accused of aiding the murder of 27,900 Dutch Jews in Sobibor. Last month, 88 year-old, Heinrich Boere was given the maximum sentence by a German court for murdering three Dutch civilians as part of a Nazi hit squad.

But what happens when they are gone? There will still be evil in the world and our focus should be aimed at the new Eichmanns. Our lens should not be lost, but readjusted.

Jihad Jane & Friends

2010-03-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

While the name Jihad Jane may sound like some warped Hannah Barbara cartoon character, she’s quite real and has been accused of plotting to murder an actual cartoonist, Swedish artist Lars Vilks.

You may recall his name from 2007 when he produced a drawing of Muhammad with a dog’s body. His case also follows the same controversial pattern that erupted back in 2005, when a Danish newspaper printed 12 cartoons of Muhammad. One in particular garnered a firestorm in which the Prophet is wrapped in a bomb-shaped turban. That sketch was the match which actually ignited the burning of Western embassies in a number of Muslim countries.

But the latent combustion was never quite doused out, as the heat from blond bomber, Jihad Jane (Colleen LaRose) who was arrested last year and lived outside Philly, PA now seems to have caught onto a second all-American looking femme fatale - Jamie Paulin-Ramirez from Colorado.
Ramirez was one of seven suspects arrested in Ireland just this month.

Neither quite fit the stereotypical bill, looking more like they fell out of a Dick & Jane story, than an Al Jezeera newsreel. According to her mom, Ramirez was a straight-A nursing student before abruptly hightailing it off on an assassination outing and ditching the Rockies.

Just as these same cartoonists alter depictions of Muhammad, is there not irony in the fact that Jihad Jane and her cohort shatter our image of what a terrorist looks like? Depending on who is doing the viewing both of these alterations are a shock to the familiar senses.

But as the ladies were out for blood, according to an Associated Press interview, Vilks was not interested in offending Muslims with his art, but aimed to show he could make provocative art about any topic he wanted, “There is nothing so holy you can’t offend it,” he claimed.

Commenting on their apple pie looks, a US Justice Department official said the case “shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance.”

Unhappy and discontent with their looks and adding more distortion to the story, the blond gals went in for a makeover, donning Islamic garb including headscarves and a hijab.

Undeniably, appearances can deceive and in both cases, it’s what’s underneath that counts. Their motive reveals their mask.

In 1930’s Nazi Germany, the newspaper, Der Sturmer (The Attacker) depicted Jews as sub-human with cartoons and caricatures. The intent was to create a fear and loathing of Jews. Some may wonder, where does the expressive artist’s line end and the creepy one begin?

After all, both utilize aesthetic techniques to illustrate a point. But one has to penetrate the page to get at the culprit. It becomes less about the art and more about the artisan. Just as advertising can show beautiful imagery, is it art or is it commerce?

"Propaganda tries to force a doctrine on the whole people... Propaganda works on the general public from the standpoint of an idea and makes them ripe for the victory of this idea." Adolf Hitler wrote these words in his book Mein Kampf (1926), in which he first advocated the use of propaganda to spread the ideals of National Socialism

Currently, those words are on display at the US Holocaust Museum where they are showing Nazi propaganda to shed light on this subject. And in our own blurred world of “reality tv” it comes at the perfect time as we can’t always tell what’s a real threat and what’s not.

For example, is depicting Jews as mice in Nazi Germany offensive? In 1992 Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel, “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale which recounted his father’s ordeal as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust.

Or what about R. Crumb (he’s not Jewish) who last year came out with “The Book of Genesis” published as a graphic novel. In the NY Times review in reference to Crumb’s G-d, it stated, “He is a profoundly — almost grotesquely — human-looking deity, very much the sort of being in whose image vulgar humankind could realistically come forth.”

I am not reading about any death threats aimed at him. Perhaps it’s because Jews have a sense of humor and are used to it? From Philip Roth to Mel Brooks, Jews have taken it on the chin and laughed about it louder than anyone else.

Or maybe it’s because we just understand and can see through the page and we get that their intent is not ugly – though unfortunately, some people’s reactions are.

The Magic Mountain

2010-02-25T16:13:00.000-08:00

All Fall Down

February 26, 2010

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
— Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain”

In 1924, between the wars, Thomas Mann published one of that century’s three great novels, “The Magic Mountain.” Along with James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance Of Things Past,” it stands alongside those other peaks of literary enormity and beauty.

Mann’s mountain, high up in the Alps, was a metaphor for Europe where at the top and in Davos was the sanatorium, presciently representing the illness that was to soon befall the continent.

One can’t help but think of that — Sontagian illness as metaphor — as the World Economic Forum recently met in Davos. As The New York Times, reported, “If there was one takeaway from the annual gathering of business and political leaders … it was this: trust in governments, corporations and above all banks has become as elusive as sure footing on the icy streets of this Alpine resort.”

Indeed while faith is a matter of the heart, one can muddle through life without it (see: atheism). But trust seems essential to this world. We trust the driver on the other side of the freeway is not suicidal. We trust Iran won’t carry through with its insane promises because it will be obliterated in return. And we trust our currency will not become cheap wallpaper.

When that trust disappears, we devolve. Like a contagion that infects us, we become an ailing society.

But no sooner after the Swiss confab ended, it was revealed that Greece, the very epicenter of Western civilization and rational thought, was on the brink and threatening a domino effect, taking with it other euro currency-based economies.

Then the threatening tremors trailed back to Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs, the same banking institution that personifies the problem with trust discussed in Davos.

Last week it was reported that Goldman helped Greece obscure billions in debt. “In dozens of deals across the continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books,” according to The New York Times.

It remains to be seen once again: Will what happens in Europe, stay in Europe? Or will this new contagion spread, now that we are all linked and all a part of that craggy, mountainous range.

At the time of Mann’s writing, Europe was still the king of the mountain. When all of that centrality came crashing down avalanche style with the next war, only wreckage was in its wake. Having rebuilt, Germany is again the powerhouse at its peak, all eyes looking to it to rescue Greece and lift the continent out of its slide.

How ironic that the cause of that first calamity, which closed the age of reason and enlightenment, is now positioned to make a decision and contemplate the notion, in a talmudic sense (predicating it upon a country), “Whoever saves a life, it’s considered as if he saved an entire world.”

Does it work in reverse, as we enter a new era of being LinkedIn, Tweeted and “friended” on Facebook by those once oceans apart? Is it also just self-preservation and when one hurts, we all are endangered? The answer, somewhere in between, was sung and dedicated to Haiti at the opening of the 2010 Olympics with the revived “We Are The World.”

But if we choose to be tied together, whether by commerce, energy dependence or something higher, we can rise together or else when one falls off a cliff, as Europe is finding out again, we can all fall.

Play Nation

2010-01-23T06:02:00.000-08:00

Play nation

Jan. 20, 2010
ABE NOVICK , THE JERUSALEM POST

The block letters are like colorful playthings on Google's home page. They look like candy. They're shaped like toys.

But as Google grows ever more ubiquitous and as it enters into additional areas beyond search with its acquisition of YouTube, and now mobile communications with its new Nexus One, those playful letters stand as a larger cultural marker - the fusion between work and play.

Similar to the eroding divisions between church and state, editorial and advertising, technology has melded work and play together. And, just as there are ethical concerns to consider in the first two long-standing categorical divisions, there are also ones to consider in this latest union. Is this meta-merger a good or a bad thing?

Consider first, work was usually something that was deemed real, while play was often thought of as something imagined. Work was once done mainly with the hands, play done with the mind.

But technology has morphed away from industries where we make real stuff to manufacturing information. And when we do make hardware (stuff we can hold in our hands), it's geared to carry chimerical bytes of that ephemeral information.

Nowadays and compounded with this phenomenon is the explosion of mobile technology, the imagined and the real world of work and play that have converged, are constantly within reach.

Wired recently called the last decade "The Mobile Decade": "People got increasingly plugged into an always-on, totally portable, always-connected existence." Gadgetry ranged from 2001's original iPod to 2009's Kindle 2.

For most of the previous century, it was left to Hollywood to create and export movies and entertainment around the world starting as far back as 1895 eventually culminating to become one of the US's largest export businesses. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, between 1986 and 2005, foreign sales of US motion picture and video products rose from $1.91 billion to $10.4 billion (in 2005 dollars) - an increase of 444 percent.

BUT TODAY, because it's no longer a one-way boulevard and YouTube and social media and mobile communications allow anyone and everyone to freely upload and export entertainment, that number is off the charts and is next to impossible to quantify.

The same technology that is used to transmit and watch movies and entertainment are the exact same devices that carry the images of protest from Iran and more recently the devastation and destruction in Haiti via Twitter and YouTube.

Even the side-armed stalwart to the business traveler, the Blackberry, attached at the hip like a road warrior's armament, is advertised on television with a version of The Beatles, "All You Need Is Love," a song once sung signifying countercultural values - the very antithesis of money and commerce. Now the playfulness of flower power has become intimately linked to the transactions of a global economy.

Moreover, the lead business stories in the last month have been about NBC's bouncing comedian/entertainer Jay Leno's show back to 11:35 p.m. and whether celebrity golfer Tiger Woods should still be a spokesman for corporations.

What was once a purely entertainment story has been subsumed by the business of entertainment. All the while in the consumer's mind, work and play collide, creating a new reality while supplanting distinctions that once existed.

Ethereal celebrities become equated with the businesses they represent and then suffer a messy divorce, while once and future politicians become celebrity journalists delivering the news and spin that was previously aimed directly at them.

What are the existential ramifications of life lived on this new stratum? Is it purely a matter for the individual to make the distinction? Or has work and play become ever more indistinguishable?

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard used the allegory of a map so large and detailed and laid over the territory it represents that it becomes the real and precedes the territory. It is what he calls the hyperreal.

But while there's a truth woven into the allegory, his metaphor ignores the harsh facts on the ground. Critical of his take, Susan Sontag in one of her later books, Regarding the Pain of Others, pointed out, "It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world." Sontag's criticism is more apt than ever, given the non-stop news footage coming out of Haiti these days.

But what neither of them has lived to see is the enormous proliferation of lenses to view what fast become historical events and that create a global hall of mirrors. Likewise, as seen and heard through the same devices that are bringing songs and movies, the world of work and play converge closer together and the newest medium's message will impact the way truth and lie are distinguished.

In the end, while Google's childlike colors evoke play, the world they open us up to can often be more like the one seen through a glass darkly.

The writer is based in Baltimore and works in communications. www.abenovick.com

Celebrigods

2009-12-24T06:06:00.000-08:00

Unimpressed with celebrigods

Dec. 19, 2009
Abe Novick , THE JERUSALEM POST

In January, of 2009, and with the aid of in vitro fertilization, "Octomom," a.k.a Nadya Suleman, gained international attention when she gave birth to octuplets. Aided by science, she became an overnight celebrity and a worldwide sensation. Like a global traffic accident, we all slowed down to view this quasi-virgin birth.

Now as the year closes, Tiger Woods, a superstar and truly amazing sports celebrity, literally and figuratively crashed, while dragging with him his own brand and doing insurmountable damage to a number of orbital ones (Nike, Gillette, Accenture) that revolved around his persona.

It was also the year when names of politicians who claimed the moral high-ground, John Edwards and Mark Sanford, fell down from their perch.

Like Octomom, ordinary people who desired celebrity crashed through the gates of the White House, while others unhinged themselves from grounded reality (see balloon boy's dad) as they sought and entered the eternal world of fame.

LOCATED BETWEEN these two strata of manufactured earth and heaven, exists another dimension, a mythical creation generated by a mediasphere, where they'll live on in cyberspace for eternity, locked by their 15 minutes, to wander in a modern day Gehenna.

This clash of titanic proportions is a direct descendent of ancient mythology.

Today's celebrity gods, who live on a Mount Olympus in media, have a lineage that extends as far back as Zeus, who would spy a fair mortal, swoop down and have his way with her.

Tiger's trysts with mere earthly courtesans will be told and retold for as long as those ancient Homeric legends. Only now and forever they live in captured digitized bytes.

Like the Greek gods, that represented sea, war, harvest, what have you, Tiger has been heroically aligned as the embodiment of the particular products he sponsors.

Seen through the Wayback machine, the ancient struggle between hucksters of myth and those who want to be left in peace on earth is the story of Hanukka.

It is the story of a collision between Hellenism (a statue of Zeus was erected by the Syrian Greeks in the Temple) and its many gods, and the one singular Judaic God. And for a shining moment, the Jews, led by Judah Maccabee, were victorious in their resistance.

In the centuries to come, while gods and idols would continue to be worshiped, Judaism and its offshoot Christianity would disperse throughout the world, ultimately redefining the notion of God.

But as those two paths of Judaism and Christianity diverged, you won't find an individual who possesses the attribute of being both a mortal and a god in Judaism. Yet Hanukka's calendrical cousin does have God and a mortal comingling.

When John Lennon, who died 29 years ago this past month, claimed The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, the leader of the greatest celebrity band of the 1960s was knockin' a little too hard on heaven's door.

The very concept of Jesus is that he was a man and a god. Born from a virgin mother, his father was God.

Since then, no other man, god or celebrity has had the lasting influence, the durable brand recognition, symbolically represented by the cross than that of Jesus. That '70s show wasn't called Jesus Christ Superstar for nothing.

Jews who don't buy into this idea are consistent with their forbears who rejected the notion of God taking human form as described by the Greeks and later the Romans (the same guys who ultimately crucified Jesus.)

So as we sit here during the Christmas season, surrounded with unavoidable Christmas kitsch looking back on the past year, now an unwrapped present with its content strewn out, we can take pride in our culture's long battle with advertised idols, its own consistent core brand belief and its adherence to something higher.

At the same time, we need a sober reality check, because in 2010, the stories, the legends, the myths, like the show, will go on.

Jewgle

2009-11-28T18:06:00.000-08:00

Between reading about the media’s apocalyptic, tide-altering times with “The Chaos Scenario - Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, The Choice for Business is Stark: Listen or Perish” and “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It”, I needed a safe harbor and shelter from the harsh bookish storm.

I found the brackish eddy alongside our port while on a school visit to the Baltimore Museum of Industry beside Key Highway not far from the venerable Domino Sugar plant.

Amongst the ruins of long lost labor was memorabilia with names like Allied Signal, Head and our most recently poorly departed Black & Decker, whose HQs will be exiting north next.

At the museum, children learned about the stuff we once made in this great land and how here in Baltimore we had a hand in much of it, from Henry Ford’s assembly line to printing on movable type by printing press.

Decidedly, if our harbor is ever to again be a beacon to the world, we need to plan and dam quickly for what’s to come, because this new tide of change is no longer just coming, but is already causing us to bail.

Sure, there have been monumental shifts due to innovations and inventions before, but never with the same degree of momentum surging over the gunwales.

If Noah’s flood took forty days and forty nights, the current speed of today’s change is a tsunami and will leave much of what we’ve relied on buried with the tide.

Recall Perchik’s prognostication, “A revolution is coming” in Fiddler On The Roof. I don’t have to tell you how that one turned out.

But when you are in the eye of a storm it’s difficult to know you are in one.

So take a look at Bob Garfield’s Jeremiad, “The Chaos Scenario” where he writes, “Traditional media are in a stage of dire retrenchment as prelude to a complete collapse. Newspapers, magazines and especially TV as we currently know them are fundamentally doomed…”

Or read Ken Auletta’s “Googled”, where he compares this era to other times of historic change whether the wheel, Guttenberg or even electricity and points out that what’s made this one different, is the velocity. “It took telephones seventy-one years to penetrate 50% of American homes, electricity fifty years and TV three decades. The Internet reached more than 50 percent of Americans in a mere decade.” Today that number is over 80%.

So we’ve seen how fast this sea can come in, yet it’s the speed by which it ebbs that’s most devastating. Witness how quickly investments can be cut in half, how quickly dwellings we thought we owned can enter foreclosure and how many businesses that once called Baltimore home can fast become candidates for entry into the Museum of Lost Labor.

It might seem appropriate to ask for leadership to guide us out of this current typhoon, but the whole paradox is that the power is no longer in their hands. It’s in yours and mine.

If you have a digital camera and a computer and these days everyone does, you are a reporter, a photojournalist and an ad exec.

On Youtube you can find a video of a car driving recklessly in a parking lot and suddenly, like one of those Monster Trucks it lands on top of two others. One of the crushed cars was a Hyundai. The next day, Hyundai came out to the same lot and gave the guy who owned the crushed Hyundai a new one. Hyundai filmed their act and posted it to Youtube garnering millions of hits.

What was the other car? No idea. But Hyundai was just named Best Marketer of the Year by Ad Age Magazine.

The irony is there was no ad agency, no television, no newspaper needed. Just you.

Now, pass me an oar.

Abe Novick, whose work is at abenovick.com , writes regularly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES on the intersection of American and Jewish culture.

Chai-Bama

2009-10-22T13:11:00.001-07:00

One year ago, the country and the world were caught up in Barack Obama’s ideas envisioned through words like “hope” and “change.” Today, we are focused instead on President Obama the man.

And Obama the man is everywhere. In fact, no other president has traveled the world as much as he has in the given amount of time he’s been in office.

At the same time, and while many factors are at play — from the ongoing health care debate, to controversy surrounding his Nobel Peace Prize — the president’s approval ratings have fallen with Rasmussen’s Presidential Tracking Poll, showing only 32 percent of the nation’s voters strongly approve of the way he is performing and 40 percent strongly disapprove, giving a Presidential Approval Index rating of minus-8.

Like Icarus’ wings, much of Obama’s magic has melted away. Granted, it is natural for a president to come down to earth after being elected and he has remained aloft longer than many. However, while the campaign used ambitious, metaphysical language to describe their forward thinking outlook, there are no single words today that capture the imagination. Where is the “hope” ? Where is the “change”?

In our celebrity culture, Obama the man has overtaken and eclipsed any message. In a world of celebrities, he’s commoditized as just another celebrity. He is an American idol.

To counter that, he again needs to link his cause beyond himself and to ideas that can be captured in a word.

Because while his oratory skills can soar, they need the language of ideas to carry the people. Within the language of health care for example, are terms like “public option” and “single payer.” Where is the aspiration in lingo like that?

He should borrow a page from Judaism. It does not rely on any one individual. God is not nailed to anything. He is abstract. The Hebrew Bible is adamant that God has no shape or form, so no idol can ever capture God’s essence. The Torah’s essence and its power are unleashed in language and words.

In Deuteronomy’s final chapter, just read on Simchat Torah, when our hero Moses dies we are not told where he’s buried,to avoid turning his place of death into a shrine.

I am afraid that with Obama’s move to shrine-filled Washington, he has taken on the iconic stature of one of the many idols that fill its streets and avenues.

So here’s an iconoclastic notion that could have worked better, and like a lot of winning ideas is really quite simple. In fact, it’s a word that Jews wear around their necks … Chai.

While health care legislation is an enormously complicated issue, it has gotten so weighted-down, laden in Beltway-speak and tangled up in the cavernous halls of Congress, that it would take Robert Langdon from Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” to unravel its mysteries.

Had he launched his health care effort like he did his campaign, not calling it “health care,” but LIFE, he would have been able to take hold of the high ground and keep it.

Just as change had been the word emblazoned on the front of every podium last year, imagine if at every whistle stop LIFE had been the keyword the public saw?

While giving support to a more preventive approach to health care, it also would have provided an aspirational idea that could have fueled the long hard slog through both houses of Congress. Not many politicians have the ability to magically wield such an encompassing word and own it like Obama can.

But given the downward projection he’s heading into as 2010 approaches, his wings are being weighed down by the man, when all they really have to carry is a message.

Abe Novick writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES on the intersection of American and Jewish culture. His work is at abenovick.com .

The Vienna Circle

2009-09-25T09:32:00.001-07:00

In September of 1929, while a gathering storm was hovering in Europe and a worldwide economic crisis was closing in fast, an inlet of intellectual debate based on logic and facts was uniting in Vienna.

The group became known as the Vienna Circle and was made up of philosophers, mathematicians and scientists. A substantial number of its members and those who participated in its discussions were Jewish including; Otto Neurath, Gustav Bergmann, Karl Popper, Hans Hahn, Felix Kaufmann, Friedrich Waismann and, perhaps its most famous, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was raised Catholic but was of Jewish heritage.

It was indeed, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus that had enormous influence over the group with its emphasis on a verifiability principle, (i.e., the meaning of a proposition is identical with the method of verifying it.) The Circle’s overall aim was to infuse a scientific approach into philosophy with the help of modern logic.

As would be expected, there was widespread disagreement on many issues among the vast array of thinkers. Yet their manifesto, largely authored by Neurath and presented exactly 80-years ago, had two essential features. First, its stated world-conception was empiricist (knowledge came from experience). Second, logical analysis, and mainly symbolic logic, was the method to determine clarity of assertions.

This kind of attention to fact-based thinking is sorely needed today.

Over the summer, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented debasement of both logic and empirical fact-based knowledge in the form of Town-meetings where speakers are shouted down, paranoid arguments claiming President Obama is a Fascist or a Communist or just simply not American along with an overall lack of civil discourse culminated in congressmen Joe Wilson’s crescendo “You Lie!” during a Presidential address to the United States Congress.

Writing in the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg laments, “This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment.”

But what’s frightening today is that it no longer rests on the fringe. What we’re seeing is the injection of the rabble’s style into mainstream politics.

More concerning still is Hertzberg’s description could have been made of Europe in 1929. And yes, while 1929 was a long time ago, human nature’s remarkable ability to forget the past is timeless.

To our credit, we put enormous emphasis on teaching facts as evidenced by the propagation of museums dedicated to learning.

But just as important as learning facts are, and they are vital, teaching the principles of logic are just as critical.

How is civil discourse to be instilled without the framework from which to build it? It’s often not until college that a student is introduced to the word “syllogism”. How many school children today are actually taught the fundamental rules of logic?

While holding fast to their thinking, the VC’s ultimate disbandment came with the crush of indisputable fascism. When the Nazi party took power in Germany and irrationalism dominated public discourse, many of its members immigrated to America, where they taught in several universities.

Unfortunately its founder, Moritz Schlick, who was not Jewish, remained in Austria only to be killed in 1936 by a Nazi sympathizer and a student in the University of Vienna. It is said the killer thought he was a Jew.

Far from being snuffed, debate has become a cacophony of shouts emanating from ever growing numbers. In turn, weeding through what is fact and deciphering it from falsehood, has become a full time profession for organizations like CAMERA and Factcheck.org who have dedicated themselves to providing analysis within the Babel-like world of mangled verbiage.

Though the lost world of the Vienna Circle is another remnant of the shattered past, their writings, their influence and the need for their precision and clarity are essential and crucial today.

While their circle may seem like a distant orb, their impact can still resonate.

Where'd the Jews go?

2009-09-03T18:30:00.000-07:00

How TV Jews Moved To Cable

The new Jewish TV ‘homeland’ is on cable.

September 4, 2009

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

It was back in May of this year when the 2009-10 fall television season was unveiled to advertisers in what’s called the “upfronts.” This is the opportunity for the networks to showcase their shows while attempting to gain interest and attract sponsors.

New York Times ad columnist Stuart Elliott wrote a column describing the season that carried the headline, “10 New Sitcoms Meant to Cure the Recession Blues.”

With a banner that contained the word “Sitcoms,” it was in hopeful anticipation that one would find the next “Seinfeld,” or a show like it, with Jewish characters.

After all, with the medium of TV and the content of comedy, there had to be a punch line with a few funny Jews. Or at least one could hope. But reading further, what followed were names like Courteney Cox Arquette in “Cougar Town” and Chevy Chase in “Community” and Kelsey Grammer in “Hank.” Not exactly the making of a minyan.

What’s going on? Where are the Jews?

Surely with the success of shows like “Seinfeld” and “Mad About You” with a character named Paul Buchman and show like “Friends” with Rachel Green and Monica and Ross Geller, all turning Thursdays on NBC into “Must See TV,” the networks weren’t going to abandon us again as they had in the late ’50s with an expulsion that lasted up until “Bridget Loves Bernie”?

Rather than settle back like a remote-less couch potato and accept the disconnect to cultural sustenance that feeds the funny bone, there were three experts in the field of television and media to turn to, who have each written remarkably in-depth books on the subject of the history of Jews on the small screen.

Beginning with Baltimore’s own David Zurawik, author of “The Jews of Prime Time” and the Baltimore Sun’s TV and media critic, the quest was launched to find our lost tribe.

On the way, there was also David Marc, who wrote “Comic Visions, Television Comedy & American Culture,” and Vincent Brook, author of “Something Ain’t Kosher Here, The Rise of the Jewish Sitcom.” Between the three of them and some sachel (Yiddish for common sense), the passageway to piecing together a fall TV guide that’ll lead to a virtual promised land where Jews are entertaining us was in sight. Like many investigations, it’s the search that’s as rewarding as the discovery. (Though this one didn’t take 40 years in the desert.)

In Mr. Zurawik’s book, which came out in 2003, he documents how the same Jewish network TV executives, who were all Jewish, suppressed identifiably Jewish characters. He explains how the phenomenon was encapsulated in the phrase, “Too Jewish,” which was frequently invoked by network bosses to describe their perceptions of Jewish characters on television.

While the term dates back to the early days of TV and “The Goldbergs,” it was used as a label all the way through to 1991, when Brandon Tartikoff, the late president of NBC Entertainment, labeled it in relation to “Seinfeld.’ (He actually did get them to change the name Kessler to Kramer.)

Today, distinctly Jewish characters do occupy a place on television, but they’re not on network TV. Jews there have been homogenized and assimilated into a multicultural bouillabaisse. If you want chicken soup, you have to go to cable and perhaps nowhere is “Too Jewish” exemplified more than on Larry David’s HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

This season on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the cast of “Seinfeld” will come together in what’s sure to be one of the most anticipated and talked-about group reunions since The Beatles broke up.

On a macromedia level — the same way that Jews emigrated from the old country to the new country; the same way Carl Reiner’s Laura and Rob (who were originally conceived as Jewish, based on Reiner’s life as a writer with Sid Caesar) lived in New Rochelle; and the Goldbergs in an episode actually called “Moving Day” moved from New York City to Haverville — today’s Jewish characters have fled from the networks and found a homeland on cable.

For a medium that was once skittish about depicting Jews, it’s like a Bizarro Catskills on cable. Moreover, the same way there once existed media barriers that kept Jews hidden and under the radar of TV detection, now, due to the multiplicity of channels and the ability to segment to specific audiences, walls have opened — but also realigned.

For Mr. Zurawik, the aggressive Jewish satire on cable is a reaction to an unnatural repression. “When the floodgates are open, they responded in an extreme way and it was in-your-face and meant to provoke.

“With any kind of repression it doesn’t flow out naturall, it explodes,” he continued. “Oh, you’re afraid of ‘too Jewish,’ I’ll show you ‘too Jewish!’”

Most of us may not realize it today, but the dam that held us back is as old as the beginning of television. For example, both Jack Benny and George Burns, who had emigrated from radio to television, also had to hide that they were Jewish. While they played themselves in their shows, they both celebrated Christmas on them, too.

Even with a program that would seem like an exception to the rule, like “The Goldbergs” (another radio to TV transition) about a Jewish family in the Bronx, they too had to assimilate, eventually changing the show’s name to the more wholesome and homogenized, “Molly.”

That closeted approach to Jewish identity carried all the way through to 1972, when a blip on the screen materialized and Bernie Steinberg married Bridget Fitzgerald on “Bridget Loves Bernie,” about an intermarried couple. It aired for one season.

Sitting and watching today’s line-up with characters like Jon Stewart, it’s hard to recognize where we had once been. But as Mr. Zurawik sees it, Stewart is a descendant who can say, “Hey, it’s the Jew here.” If he was born even 10 years earlier, he wouldn’t be saying that and one-third of his act would be dead or he wouldn’t be doing it on TV.

Lucky for him, cable has allowed these antics, whereas the networks have put a kibosh on such over-the-top pranksters.

Part of the reason is when that wall came down, others materialized. By having outlandish Jewish comedy on the outer channels of cable, marketers have created a separate space where they can corral particular audiences off and advertisers can appropriately target them with specific messages that will appeal to them.

The term used by advertisers today is “segmentation” and cable is one of the fronts on which to implement it. The Web is another and is even more powerful.

On the flip side, while cable can target with fine cross-hairs, networks still use a big net and continue to haul in more audience share than cable. If cable’s aim is to customize, networks are selling to the masses. To do that more cost effectively, and with a changing demographic, they believe they need to appeal to everyone.

In doing so, one trend we’ve seen for years is what Mr. Brook calls “platoon” shows with casts that resemble a military platoon and are made up of multiple ethnicities. Old shows in this category include “Barney Miller,” “Welcome Back Kotter” and “Taxi.”

Today he refers to them as “neo-platoon,” as they derive from the same structure but are also made of multicultural casts. He describes them as “a tight-knit or fatefully intertwined cohort of ethno-racially intertwined diverse characters with a complex, soap-like narrative structure.” Examples today would be shows like “Heroes” or “Ugly Betty.”

Writing about the changes in demarcated media, Mr. Marc writes in an essay called “Audience Segmentation: The Lonely Crowds,” “For most of the 20th century, the American communications industry worked at building audiences of unprecedented size.” However, he goes on, “cable robbed the medium — and American society — of a functioning electronic gathering point.”

At one point, everyone in America sat around the set on Saturday nights and watched “All In the Family.” It placed No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive years in the 1970s. Everyone knew Archie.

Today, due to the wide array of programming, a typical audience of viewers lives in a Balkanized, post-Diaspora world, rather than a traditional, unified Nielsen family. Mom will be on the computer while Dad is watching the game, one of the kids is surfing the Internet while the other is watching a video game. Multiply that into the millions and you have a picture of current viewership.

Aside from technology, networks have lost those viewers because they’ve lost social significance. Along with their pull, they’ve also lost their edginess. Gone is their observationally satirical and socially critical perspective. That brand of humor moved out of the main metropolis, where most people received their fix of shtick. Today those sharp arrows of televised wit and irreverence get tossed down from a satellite, or they travel down the long, fiery tail of cable on the outer limits of a 500-plus channel universe.

Like the old neighborhood we’d left behind, once the culture that inhabited it left, it lost its moxie. Looking back in time, it wasn’t that long ago that a number of Jewish characters occupied a place on networks beginning in the late ’80s with shows like “Anything But Love,” “Northern Exposure,” “Brooklyn Bridge,” “thirtysomething” and “The Nanny.” Each possessed a clearly identifiable Jewish character with themes woven into them that dealt with Jewish characteristics.

Today, there are only a few Jewish characters lingering on shows like ABC’s “brothers & sisters” (Ken Olin, who played an identifiably Jewish character on “thirtysomething,” is an executive producer) and where Sally Field, (that’s right, the former “Flying Nun”) plays a Jewish matriarch, the widow of a mixed marriage. Then there’s “The Big Bang Theory” on CBS with a stereotypical nebbish named Howard who lives with his mother. There are others, too, but one has to go digging to find them. They simply don’t have the top-of-mind recognition that comes from tapping a societal nerve, the way great shows in the heyday of network sitcoms did.

Form and content meld together as never before in this altered landscape. As Mr. Marc points out in “Comic Visions,” “Television — especially the sitcom — valorized suburbia as democracy’s utopia realized, a place where the white middling classes could live in racial serenity, raising children in an engineered environment…”

Hence McLuhan’s maxim on media, “The medium is the message,” is as true today as it was in 1964 when there were just three networks. The message of the shows today is directly related to the medium by which they get delivered. The form aligns with the current crop of programming — only it’s the reverse of what it was in the ’50s when the Goldbergs left town to join Ozzie and Harriet in the plain-Jane, non-ethnic ’burbs.

On the media, it’s the networks that are now like the white-bread cities, while cable and the Internet provide ethnic identity.

With niche programming, Jewish-themed shows can be segmented off and ghettoized.

The irony is that just as in Molly Berg’s day, when the neighborhoods of New York were clearly demarcated between Chinatown, Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side, every ethnicity left the city in order to lose their identity. Virtually with cable and the Internet today, we’ve again walled ourselves off, albeit with cable’s subscriber fees those walls are tony, virtual-gated communities that mirror Westchester, N.Y., Montgomery County or Caves Valley, Md., rather than duh Bronx.

Furthermore, and again like the medium, the message too reflects this affluence, as Larry David’s Santa Monica, Calif., home in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is a palatial mansion, as is the home of his friends Jeff and Susie Greene. While the setting is serene and affluent, thematically there’s nothing that resembles a “Father Knows Best” atmosphere. The dysfunctional personalities of Larry and Susie, along with Richard Lewis (who plays himself), chew up the vicinity, turning them into crazed enclaves of tsuris.

Adding further ironic perspective to this notion of the more things change the more they stay the same, it was network executives who lifted “The Goldbergs” from radio and placed them onto television. Their thinking was radio would disappear and that television was just radio with pictures.

However, according to historian Marc, “While on radio ethnicity and thick accents played very well, whether ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy,’ ‘The Goldbergs’ or ‘Life With Luigi,’ when all those shows were brought to TV, something that was amusing on radio became grotesque on television. Adding the physical gestures to the aural ones was going over the top.”

Is it any wonder, after years of being held in tow and straitjacketed, that we now wave our arms, curse and go bananas after being freed from the binds of the nets?

Evidently it’s just what the world needed. As trust in traditional media waned, a savvy consumer turned to other sources to rely on news, information and entertainment. While networks and traditional news have lost relevance, during the same period humorists have claimed the stage and the microphone.

The height of this post-modern phenomenon is that, while back in 1964, and an era when Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, now Jon Stewart (a full-fledged Jewish comedian who hosts a fake news show on cable) is able, like Prometheus, to steal the fire away from the news gods of network to become the most trusted man in America, according to aTime magazine poll.

Through a glass darkly, we also witness that same bygone era on yet another cable network, AMC, with its Emmy Award-winning, period drama, “Mad Men,” about the advertising business on New York’s Madison Avenue. The creator, producer and head writer of the show is Matt Weiner, who was born in Baltimore and began his career as a comedy writer on the Fox network.

In another twist, “Mad Men” has a producer who is Jewish and is now pulling the strings at a faux ad agency during an era when ad agencies were notorious culprits for keeping Jews out of their industry.

Likewise, advertisers at the time were far more powerful when it came to programming decisions on television and in the late 1950s were in large part ultimately responsible for turning television into a reflection of their more white/less rye bread envisioned culture. They are the behind-the-scenes culprits who cleansed ethnicity from the networks in the ’50s. Mr. Weiner, to his credit in season one, had shows dealing with anti-Semitism and the tensions that existed during the period by having the Jewish retailers go to the WASP agency in order to remake their department store so it would adapt, conform and appeal to the rising middle class.

By being the puppet master pulling the strings and shaping the entire narrative of “Mad Men,” Mr. Weiner is the ultimate, post-modern auteur behind the scenes. He’s the outsider shaping what the audience sees. And, oh, that’s exactly what the advertising industry does.

Meanwhile, as more and more industries need a public persona, they’ve borrowed heavily from the television model. In politics today, Rahm Emanuel is the White House chief of staff and David Axelrod is President Obama’s main adviser. As an archetype, the Jew behind the scenes dates from television and film today, all the way back to Joseph in Egypt.

In many ways, it’s the fundamental conundrum — the Jew as both insider and outsider — damned if he tries to fit in and treated suspiciously, and damned if he separates, remaining aloof — too good for the hoi polloi.

In a strange, cyclical example of reality and fiction intertwining, recently Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel referred to both Messrs. Axelrod and Emanuel as “self-hating Jews.” (Weeks later, he denied he said it.)

Relationally, the term has been used for television characters, too. In an essay, “Laughing to Keep from Dying: Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show,” Mr. Brook explores the issue of the self-hating Jew. In two episodes from Garry Shandling’s program that ran on cable’s Showtime in the ’90s, the issue of Larry as a self-hating Jew came up.

Ironically, one reason Mr. Brook gives for the occurrence is, “The most potent new source of internecine Jewish self-hatred is Israel itself — post-1967 Israel, that is, of the Palestinian occupation, the Lebanon invasions, the ‘Who is a Jew?’ controversy, and the two intifadas.”

The hall of mirrors continues. In another show about showbiz, the Jewish super agent Ari Gold on HBO’s “Entourage” was inspired by the real life super Hollywood agent and brother of Rahm Emanuel, Ari Emanuel? In real life, Ari Emanuel represents Larry David.

No exploration of breaking the bounds of comedy would be complete without Sarah Silverman, who personifies both the challenge for how far comedy can delve into dangerous territory, while also expanding the limits of the Web and new media as a vehicle for that expression.

She’s had a good year, too. First, she’s nominated for an Emmy (for outstanding lead actress in a comedy) for the title role in “The Sarah Silverman Program” on Comedy Central. Also, she’s the recipient of the Webby Award for Best Actress at the 13th Annual Webby Awards in 2009 (for Best Political Video) called “The Great Schlep,” aimed at Jewish kids and pleading with them to urge grandparents in Florida to vote for Barack Obama.

If networks are for the masses and cable can narrow-cast, then the Web can micro-target. Ms. Silverman and comedians like her who Webcast online have reached audiences that have shied away from traditional forms.

Unlike television and radio that seek out viewers, with search engines like Google the opposite occurs — viewers seek them out.

In talking about the impact of niche programming on the Web with David Rath of GenerateLA, a partner at the media and entertainment company where he creates content across multiple platforms and has worked with Sarah, he commented on how it relates to Jewish content:

“Jews will see more of it than non-Jews and I don’t know if that’s good. There’s something about ‘Seinfeld’ and all these shows that were on broadcast, that forced people to contemplate cultures, ask questions and share ideas and in an age of very targeted consumption, you don’t have that same potential to send broad messages.”

The emphasis on “search” is posing a whole new set of challenges for Jewish programming to reach a mass scale of people. The exposure of “Jewish” culture and identity and the groundbreaking impact television has made on a massive scale will diminish as consumers will only seek out what they are interested in.

For a culture that left the shtetl by crossing the ocean, and ended up living in neighborhoods only to move out to the nicer ones in the ’burbs, one wonders if we’re headed back to where we began. Or, if we ever actually left.

Abe Novick is a regular contributor to the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES writing about the intersection of American and Jewish culture.

Wireless

2009-08-31T11:06:00.000-07:00

It’s become a tradition to go the shore every summer and while staring into the rhythmic surf, with its endless sequence, I’m reminded of the cycle of the Hebrew year, its ongoing pattern and its onward projection.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who was also Jewish, described time not as cut up segments of momentary sensations, but as flow. Because of memory, each wave that passes becomes part of every other.

Like the ocean, on Rosh Hashanah, the last day is connected to the first day.

But how do we reconcile time, when an altered state of reality poses as the past and a present is seen through the lens of an unavoidable media?

That same Sunday, while looking out onto the infinite horizon, a wireless link connected me and held me captive both to an imaginary, bygone world of Baltimore, along with one I thought I left behind.

On AMC’s “Mad Men”, a dapper Don Draper, headed down to Baltimore and the prized London Fog account which was a Baltimore based business.
They even dined at the historic Haussner’s restaurant. Both establishments are now gone with the tide.

Meanwhile in another part of the wireless world, the day’s news from Baltimore was of the contemporary nasty and brutish reality of shootings in the city that bleeds.

Juxtaposed and spliced, the past and the present clashed. The wireless world was whizzing the stuff of The Wire back from the series’ syndicated turf, streaming it in living color.

Once Baltimore had been a city known for providing manufacturing jobs with companies like London Fog. The snappy dressers of Mad Men and
cool veneer they wear, covers what lurks underneath and truly troubles them. The sharkskin lends a protective coating like the sheen layered onto the slick ads they create.

The airbrushed prints, their coifs and clipped speech is camouflage for what lies they labor over in their lives.

Mimetically, Mad Men’s sleek style is all the rage and is depicted in an article and flamboyant spread of Annie Lebovitz’ photos in the current Vanity Fair.

Doubtless, the show about the early 1960s will influence 2009’s Fall Fashion, which is ironic, as now I’ll see people in Baltimore dressing the part, based on a show whose narrative just illustrated how Baltimore, once was the home of London Fog and a locale where ad men were able to manipulate a public into buying their wears.

It’s a contemporary show about a long, lost world, where men who create ads for us to see that world through, will now influence real people living in the same city that’s since lost the manufacturing base the show depicted.

But perhaps, we should be placated in this postmodern pastiche. At least on its surface, it’s not the harsh and violent world many viewers and the world, have come to associate these days with Baltimore.

When Anthony Bourdain recently did a segment on his show for Travel Channel, Baltimore was described as the home of The Wire and a violent world of crime in the heart of the Rust Belt.

Bordain’s skewered view is tainted, not by reality, but by what he knows from fictional television programs projected through the lens of HBO.

While there’s realism in The Wire, Bourdain’s take is indicative of how we base reality off fiction. It’s become the inverted method from which life is consumed and lived. I escaped to the beach to get back to the state of nature, yet couldn’t help being reminded due to the jolting tide of technology drowning us.

Rather than fight the current, we resignedly brought our devices with us.

How does one reconcile one’s past on Rosh Hashanah, in light of our divided lives, which are bifurcated due to fiction’s invasion into reality?

Time will tell. There are two days to dwell on the subject—one for the past to flow into the next day’s future.

Mr. Sammler's Planet Revisted

2009-07-31T18:18:00.000-07:00

Jul. 19, 2009
Abe Novick , THE JERUSALEM POST

To look into space is to look back in time. The starlight we see meeting us here on Earth, from out there, was created light years ago.

Closer to home, peering up at the moon's reflective beam is to gaze on our closest orbital companion in this lonely space and while doing so, we remember our first walk together.

In 1969, while it seemed like the Earth was coming apart due to social and political upheaval, the writer Saul Bellow created what's perhaps his most politically grounded and fantastically unbound novel, aligning the forces taking place on this planet with a future on the moon.

The book, Mr. Sammler's Planet, is about an elderly Holocaust survivor, who after getting an eye knocked out by a Nazi's rifle butt and buried under a pile of human beings is left for dead. Sammler crawls out, leaving his dead wife behind, rebirthing himself and never losing an iota of his dignity as he sallied forth to the future. We then find him, a man from the past replanted in an era of tumultuous unrest, just as we embark on a future toward the moon.

By pitting his elderly Sammler against the tide of the 1960s and the "movement," Bellow lost many friends. He in turn divided himself off from the Left and charted a new course.

Peering back into that time through one lens, and observing what split our culture, is like looking at a distant, faint star today. After all, our president is African-American, women have gained enormous strides and the youth from the '60s are, well, in their 60s.

Through another lens, the old Left has morphed into MoveOn.org, while much of the Right has shifted off the planetary charts. Both sides nevermore magnetically polar opposites.

While 1969 further split a divided country, for one brief shining moment, the residual light of JFK's Camelot captured our attention, our imagination and held us together as we stared in amazement at what was taking place on the lunar landscape.

IT'S STILL hard to fathom, that we were ever there, but after traipsing on the moon, it's like we've fallen and we can't get up.

Upon reflection, to what end was it all aimed?

When Sammler finds a stolen manuscript called "The Future of the Moon," he reads the first line, "How long will this Earth remain the only home of man?" and resignedly reflects, "How long? Oh Lord, you bet! Wasn't it the time - the very hour to go?... To blow this great blue, white, green planet, or to be blown from it." Still in need of repair here on Earth, we come closer to the ultimate question, which we needed to ask then, "Why?"

Why were we, like Icarus, attempting to fly into the heavens? Was it purely because it was there? Or are we finding out now that we may actually be in desperate need of moving?

The part of the world that was torn asunder by war, poverty, race and mankind remains alive and is pulsating. Perhaps, we are just that much more aware of its beat, as we mark, note and scribe all of its throbs today, via some of the same technology that gave us liftoff then. While it has brought us closer together via social media on an iPhone, Blackberry or some such techno-thingi, the speed of light has gotten faster here, as we've abandoned our footprint there.

Just look how a tyrant's oppression on a people is Twittered around the world in an instant (Oh, for Sammler's lens to have seen that!). Gazing back at the end of the novel, Sammler, the Holocaust survivor who lived a misanthropic life eyeing the pain and hardships all around him, abandons his belief in departing Earth and affirmatively learns to value human life here.

But 40 years later, the question remains: Are we to live here forever or blast off at some point to a distant planet when this Earth becomes uninhabitable after we've wrecked it?

As Jews, wanderers, subjects of Exodus and the original text message beamed from above, we should focus our lens and search for the answer still hidden back, deep in our history, while we look out toward the future.

From Borat To Bruno

2009-07-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

Jack Benny
George Burns

Eddie Cantor

George Jessel
Fanny Brice
Milton Berle
Henny Youngman
Phil Silvers
Bert Lahr
The Marx Brothers
Neil Simon
The Three Stooges
Al Jolson
Ed Wynn
Gertrude Berg
Red Buttons
Danny Kaye
Jackie Mason
Alan King

Joan Rivers
Mel Brooks
Lenny Bruce
Mort Sahl
Jack Gilford
Carl Reiner
Jerry Lewis
Woody Allen
Sid Caesar
Mike Nichols
Elaine May
Jerry Stiller
Anne Meara
David Steinberg
Shelley Berman
Albert Brooks
Richard Lewis
Gary Shandling
Al Franken

Rodney Dangerfield
Paul Reiser
David Brenner
Jon Stewart
Ben Stiller
Adam Sandler
Goldie Hawn
Andy Kaufman
Jerry Seinfeld
Shecky Greene
Robert Klein
Don Rickles
Billy Crystal
Bette Midler
Fran Drescher
Roseanne Barr
Sandra Bernhard
Madeline Kahn
Gilda Radner

What other race, religion, culture, ethnicity has a list like this? None.
Sure, there are a handful of successful black comedians who are household names like, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. And they are great comics to be sure. But it’s small latkes comparatively. Truthfully, no other group comes close.

While the roots of Jewish comedy in the twentieth century trail back to the old country, here in this decade there’s a British import by the name of Sacha Baron Cohen who is again taking Jewish comedy into new territory. Who is he and how does his brand of humor fit in, or veer off, from what’s come before?

In speaking with experts in the field of comedy, Sacha Baron Cohen, might have just been Sacha Baron, had it not been for his predecessors.

Within our long, winding tree of laughter, there are demarcative eras, branches of media that carried the message that changed the course of history while influencing politics and pop culture.

Vaudeville transitioned into radio, which then made it’s way to movies and, along with a detour creating a new Jewish Eden in The Borscht Belt, eventually landed onto TV screens. That winding path of comedy throughout the entire 20th century is a genealogy of Jewry. So powerful was it, that in many ways it’s become like religion.

According to Lawrence Epstein, author of The Haunted Smile a book about the story of Jewish Comedians in America, “For the secularized Jewish community, the comedians were especially important as secular rabbis providing both meaning and a way into American society.”

In speaking with Mr. Epstein, I asked if our comedians have been a salvation to more than just us Jews? Are gentiles even aware of what we’ve given to them with this gift of laughter? And, with a names like Sacha Baron Cohen, do they even know we’re Jewish?

“If Jerry Seinfeld had been putting together a radio program in the 1930s, it wouldn’t have been called Seinfeld, his name would have been Jerry Smith” he retorted. But Epstein remarked, “much of gentile awareness came by way of Woody Allen, who in the 1960s deserves a lot of the credit in movies like Take The Money And Run and later in Annie Hall where he’s dressed like a Hassid.”

For Baron Cohen, who is a an observant Jew, his characterizations seem so far from that bygone era when Jews were afraid to admit their Judaism, that he’s actually taken it 180 degrees. Though most Jews are in on the joke, in some of his characterizations he actually portrays an anti-Semite. That trick of the audience being in on his ruse, is a necessary linchpin of his comedy.

Rewind back to the early years of this century on HBO, when his new voice came onto the scene.

In the first season of Da Ali G Show on HBO, Sacha Baron Cohen introduced Bruno to America. Bruno was part of his trio of characters who along with Borat wore a guise while interviewing unsuspecting individuals from politicians and celebrities to ordinary folks. In turn, Cohen would expose their reactions to his outlandish behavior and questions, each time making them look like utter fools.

Now on July 10th, for a much wider audience, he will revive a character known to only cable subscribes and Youtube followers.

To get a sense of his various characters’ shtick, Cohen’s Ali G., for example would pretend to be, as he simply put it on David Lettermen’s Late Show “a twit”.

Cohen’s feigning idiocy is definitely a part of his act. But his description is also about as understated as his Ali G wardrobe. For it takes sheer chutzpah to insert himself into the situations that he does. Fashionwise, Cohen’s Ali G. often dons a bright yellow homeboy sweat suit with wrap around shades and a British inner city attitude. He is the modern day version of Norman Mailer’s The While Negro, i.e., a white hipster who clothed himself in black garb and speaks and gestures like a rap star.

In one of his shows he wangles his way into interviewing former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh. Ali asks him “What is legal? And gets a legit answer. Then asks what is illegal, again, a normal answer. But when he asks with a straight face what is “barely legal” and still gets the same naïve answer back, the audience is in on the joke, while Mr. Thornburgh is caught completely unaware of what he’s gotten himself into. I won’t even get into the bit where Cohen asks him about a “hung” jury, but let’s just say, Cohen might as well play a schoolyard trick and “pants” the poor man. It’s hard to contain laughter, while squirming in sympathetic pain as the chief law enforcement officer gets conned by a comic.

With Cohen’s alter ego gathering so much fame however, came an inability to fool an ever shrinking pool of unsuspecting individuals. Consequently, with Ali G. so famous, he then had to rely on the two other doppelgangers in his repertoire.

One was Borat (the anti-Semite I referenced earlier), who in 2006 became a hit movie with Cohen playing the dope from Kazakhstan and perhaps the most infamous foreign visitor since Tocqueville.

Borat swept the country by storm in his movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. But again, like Ali G, once exposed to the world, Borat became such a recognizable character there was no way Cohen could have again used him successfully. His jig was up.

That leads us to Bruno, who, luckily for Cohen, and for us, was not as overly, err, out.

The character Bruno is an Austrian gay fashion reporter who works for a fake TV station (ÖJRF - revealed once as Österreichischer Jungen-Rundfunk, or in English, Austrian Boys' Broadcasting).

In each of the three faces of Sacha, his guerilla style of comedy lures the unsuspecting victims of his ruse in, often with the intended effect of revealing their own prejudice and darker side.

His same in-your-face technique is similar to the one used by Michael Moore in his movies, most notably Roger & Me, Bowling For Columbine and perhaps his most infamous, Fahrenheit 9/11.

Yet for Cohen, by donning his characters with a disguise and the guise of satire, he’s able to twist his punch just as we’re keeling over in cramps from a belly laugh.

While Moore lures his victims in and let’s them get tangled up in their own contradictions, he plays himself while intending to make a serious political point.

Cohen dressed in peculiar garb, has fun dancing outside the edge of what’s deemed appropriate behavior. While less overt in his approach to politics, it could be argued that because his gags are so outrageous they hide any socially or politically redeeming quality.

Indeed, some think his humor a far cry from anything that could be deemed sophisticated.

According to Ruth Wisse, a Harvard College Professor and Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and author of the classic, The Schlemiel As Modern Hero, “Sacha Baron Cohen’s style is much less of an emphasis on jokes or on verbal repartee and more on slapstick and violence.” Sadly though authoritatively, she remarks, “He relies on a greater vulgarity and coarseness. As the degree of Jewish literacy declines, the literacy of Jewish humor also declines.”

I suppose the same could have been said of other Jewish humorists and certainly was of characters like The Three Stooges. But while Cohen’s humor can and does incite physical violence, it’s very reliant on word play as evidenced by the Dick Thornburgh repartee. The joke however is when his victims misinterpret it. And that phenomenon gets repeated in all too many of his encounters. When he plays a dolt who mangles the language, it’s in order to set the trap for his victims.

In many of the scenes in Bruno, like a chameleon, he blends right into the trendy circumstances, fitting in perfectly, only to then create a scene.

To give you some sense of the character, let’s rewind to an early episode on Da Ali G Show for some of Bruno’s appearances. Take the one where he infiltrates NY Fashion Week and interviews stylists while getting them to say outrageous things like “trailer trash are primitive rubbish people” and laughing that “we take the clothes from the homeless people and sell them while jacking up the price”. While posing with his blond coiffed hair, swooshy stance and microphone he has fashion designers nod and agree “that is the beauty of fashion”. Or, in another interview, he has a male fashionista claim that fashion has saved more lives than doctors. But perhaps the most edgy is when he has a stylist agree “people without fashion sense should be sent on a train to a camp and told ‘bye bye’.”

Cohen, who is an observant Jew, often reveals the horrors in his unsuspecting victims hearts, many of whom probably consider themselves to be “politically correct”, but due to the nature of the bait he lays for them, he is able to have them utter such pronouncements.

Now, by taking his showbag of tricks and opening it up on the big screen, the medium’s ubiquity will become part of the show. Like a modern day Candid Camera with a twenty-first century edginess, the larger the audience he has to expose humanity’s embarrassing elements, the greater impact it has due to its dependency on us all being in on the joke. His medium and his message are symbiotic.

In the upcoming film, Bruno, Cohen travels to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where a riot ensued at a stunt orchestrated by Baron Cohen.

Imagine the reaction when approximately 1500 fans are lured by print and on Craigslist to an event billed as cage fighting, held at a Convention Center and promoting "hot girls", $1 beer and $5 admission. But, instead of hot girls and cage fighting, the acts taking place are homosexual! Lo and behold, the performers in the cage were none other than Bruno (Baron Cohen) under the ironic gimmick, "Straight Dave" and an unknown actor portraying his opponent in the cage.

The crowd truly went nuts throwing chairs and beer and luckily, though risking his life for a laugh, Cohen got out alive. Yes, taking their lives in their hands is what comics do whenever they get up on stage, standing there with nothing between them, a microphone and a one-liner. But Cohen is a daredevil.

Of the earlier long list of Jewish comedians, the one SBC puts me most in mind of isæGroucho.

And long before Baron Cohen made rubes of southerners in Arkansas, one of the most verbally adept and hilarious of any Jewish comics, had his own fun with neighboring Texas.

It’s Marx Brothers lore that during an evening performance of theirs in 1912, (long before their movie career), at the Opera House in Nacogdoches, Texas, the show was interrupted by shouts from outside about a runaway mule. The audience hurried outside to see what was happening, Groucho, angered by the interruption, yelled out "The jackass is the flower of Tex-ass".

Luckily for Groucho, when the audience returned, instead of becoming angry, they laughed and the family then realized they had potential as a comic troupe.

But what some younger readers may not realize is that the era in which the Marx Brothers films ran, was the height of The Great Depression; The Cocoanuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey Business (1931) and on and on. Throughout the hardest of times, Jews were making the country laugh.

Now we’re in the Great Recession and in a summer which is giving us Star Trek, Transformers, Terminator and Wolverine the two dimples on either end of the season’s haunted smile are Woody Allen’s Whatever Works starring his central casting’s stand-in Larry David, and Cohen’s Bruno.

It cannot be ignored either that SBC’s character is not just gay, but flaming and at a time when more and more States are allowing same-sex marriages. We have yet to see what influence, if any, Bruno will have on the debate that’s taking place across the country, but historically humor and Jewish comics in particular, have played a vital role in moving both the political and social scrimmage line.

No doubt comedy and Jewish comedians will have a role to play when it comes to the issue. But it may not be all laughs.

While many refer to the phrase “comic relief”, I often wonder if comedy does just the opposite and in turn, exacerbates. Writing of the schlemiel in her book, Wisse describes this comic stance as “a stage from which to challenge the political and philosophic status quo.”

Likewise according to Epstein, “The Jews have had to come up with a way to deal with the tragedies that punctuated their history.” And what people know from pain and tragedy more? To ask the question is to answer it.

While Jews in the 1930s had to fake a self, by either changing their name or changing their accent, being Jewish at home and non-Jewish in public. For Cohen, by donning all of these various disguises he is taking those same characteristics and mocking them.

According to Epstein, “The very act of faking a self is mocking what the Jews had to do. Cohen’s mocking gentile society and mocking what the gentiles forced the Jews to do. ‘You want to see what it’s like to fake a self…here, I’ll show you’.”

Note too, Cohen’s characters are narrow-minded and prejudiced. By playing them, he’s in essence satirizing bigotry.

It’s exactly what other political Jewish satirists have done, though due to the advancements Jews have made over time, Cohen’s able, unlike The Marx Brothers, to be openly Jewish about it, just like Jon Stewart can.

But if Cohen and other Jewish comedians who poke fun at politics and in turn move the needle of what’s acceptable while affecting political and social change, what about Jews who’ve been politically active, but use satire and comic techniques as instruments of change?

Speaking to one who knew both Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman, I was able to get a hold of the immanent writer on politics and civil liberties, Nat Hentoff on the subject. For Hentoff, “Lenny used words to show people, why they’re so afraid of words. Lenny, like Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory used comedy to point to social issues.” He said, “People talk about free speech, but those people are only for free speech if they believe in the right of people saying things you hate.”

In a more radical fashion, Abbie Hoffman, purposefully used theatrical and comic techniques for political ends, like when he gathered together 50,000 demonstrators in front of the Pentagon and attempted to lift it using psychic energy. He describes in his autobiographical book, Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture, how his cohort Jerry Rubin’s style was “too forceful and rhetorical. It didn’t have the silly element to appeal to the spirit.”

It’s that element, the human element, which great creators of comedy have leveraged most successfully. Hentoff uses the example of the satirist Mark Twain whose book Huckleberry Finn was the most powerful anti-racist book with a great impact.

But if African Americans and Jews were the token oppressed minority and the pool from where most comedians rose during the past century, then gay comedians have and are asserting their role to play today. Two of the most notable gay, Jewish comics today are Jason Stuart and Jaffe Cohen.

Stuart, whose father was a Holocaust survivor and his mother grew up poor and in Brooklyn, explained to me how his father told him at age eight, that no matter what young Stuart experienced, it will never compare to what he’s experienced. For Stuart who again punches home the fact that he was eight, emphasizes the only way he could comprehend what he was talking about was through humor.

I asked them what it’s like when a straight guy, like Sacha Baron Cohen, plays a gay character. Is it at all offensive? Stuart replied, “My only concern is that when you are talking about something that’s not your experience, your poking at it, rather than playing it…you’re doing an impression. But through the years straight men love playing us. More straight men have played gay men, than gay men have.” And he’s right. After all, from Tom Hanks to Al Pacino and, most recently with Sean Penn, straight men have dominated.

For Jaffee, “Being gay is only part of the act. In the age of Obama, we should care less about the differences and more on what we have in common.”

Ultimately, that’s what all of the great comedians have been able to do, whatever their background. By creating a direct connection with their audience they used that very human element, no matter whether it was Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld or Sacha Baron Cohen.

While Cohen may not set out to achieve social change, it will be interesting to see if by inserting himself as a reporter into circumstances where he’s able to expose an ugly side of our humanity, he’ll expose prejudice and enlighten our sensibilities. All that while making us laugh at the same time.

Camp

2009-05-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

Parents: I don’t know about you, but deciding where to send my kids for summer camp had to have been easier for my folks than it’s been for me.

There was the Jewish camp or the very Jewish camp. I started out at the former and ended up at the latter.

Today, there are so many choices it’s not funny.

When I was a kid at camp, there was sailing and fishing and hiking and all kinds of sports and campfires and singing and, yep, more singing. Now there are camps not just for music or for sports, but for particular kinds of music and sports.

It seems that everywhere I turn, some establishment is offering up some kind of camp. Every school’s gotten into the year-round enrollment for kids by calling their summer school “camp.” (Some of us are sending our little ones to the same place they’ve been going all year, but now we’re supposed to call it “camp.”)

I’m sure that other establishments with an entrepreneurial eye will catch on soon enough, too. I’m just waiting for supermarkets to start their own camp. I can see it now. After we drop our kids off at produce, they can learn how to hang off the carriage without falling; or learn how to ice cakes and slice cold cuts and scan items and, of course, for sports, run the aisles.

Every nail salon can have a camp for manicuring, or how about a camp that tilts more ethnic — Taco Bell offering burrito preparation?

When I was a kid, camps built character. Today, we shouldn’t let political correctness get in the way of business and profiteers joining in the camp craze. Why not have camps reflect our society in all its forms?

Let’s see who really has the bucks to fund all the fun at a camp. How about gas station camp — Camp Texaco? Kids can learn how to pump petrol, proper squeegee techniques, check oil and tire pressure, and all with a convenience counter at arm’s length, which offers hot dogs and Krispy Kreme Donuts and drinks right from the soda fountain.

When I was a kid, camp was about playing outside, exercising, swimming and baseball. Today, like everything else in life, camp is so specialized and focused around a few trees that we parents don’t even realize that our kids are missing the forest.

After searching in vain, most of what we find is the race toward specialization, now deemed so necessary to succeed in adult life, papier-maché-ed onto our children’s lives.

As a kid, I probably learned more about life in two months at camp than in the entire school year. A universe of experiences, along with great counselors (heroes I could look up to) and friends with whom I now Facebook, helped give me that gift.

After searching desperately in the back of parenting magazines, now, finally, we hope we discovered the lost land of our own past.

Desperately seeking summer, I’m at the edge of the ground where the spirits of camp past once lived. Hopefully — standing where the long road begins as I wave goodbye while sending them off on their first overnight experience — they will capture the flag that once flew for me.

It will be hard, as in the back of my mind I’ll be sure to hear the immortal lyrics of Allan Sherman’s ditty, “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh. Take me home, oh muddah, fadduh. Take me home.”

Book Review - The Missing Person

2009-05-05T05:39:00.000-07:00

The great Neil Simon once wrote that words with a “k” in it are funny. While I’m quite sure he didn’t have Kafka in mind, it’s surprisingly ironic that the master of existential anguish also displays an amazing degree of humor throughout this, his first major novel which he began working on in 1912.

With a new translation based on a restored text by Mark Harmon and published by Shocken, it’s a work that foreshadowed his later novels, which are filled with a series of strange and psychologically peculiar personal encounters.

Where it differs, is in the protagonist, Karl Rossman. Unlike Joseph K. in The Trial or K in The Castle, Karl possesses an innocent naivety that gives him a picaresque desire to get up, dust himself off and continue onward in his American quest. But Kafka never actually saw America and this rendition is an imagined expedition. Still, it’s a journey that, unlike his other work, ends on a theme of, well, optimism. Interestingly, one of Kafka’s key sources for American culture was Benjamin Franklin’s uplifting, can-do, and spirited autobiography.

Structurally Kafka’s tale is written in long, continuous paragraphs that don’t give the reader a chance to catch their breath. It is this trajectory that lends a sense of existential thrownness that steers Karl forward adding to a spiraling momentum that continuously lands him into one tense scene after another.

No incident demonstrates this more than when he is being forced to become a servant to Brunelda (an obese woman who puts one in mind of Shirley Stoler’s commandant character in Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties.)

Originally titled The Missing Person, Amerika was published posthumously in 1927, three years after the author’s death. But it was his good friend and executor, Max Brod who renamed it, branding it with the ominous “k” letter. That sense of “Kafkaesque” doom is captured in the very first paragraph, when Karl sails into New York harbor and sees the Statue of Liberty brandishing a sword, instead of a torch.

This latest version aims to provide the reader with an original understanding of Kafka, by omitting many of Brod’s alterations by infusing the story with a closer rendition of the original literal title's translation of Der Verschollene or The Man Who Disappeared.

Because the latter chapters are fragmentary, this translation provides a feeling of literary archaeology. And while incomplete, the ending describes Karl’s joy in encountering the Theater of Oklahoma along with a magnificent train ride.

With its wide-open landscape, we envision a new beginning--the perfect setting to start on a new understanding of Mr. Kafka.

Stealing Mom

2009-04-26T20:46:00.000-07:00

Upon returning from a pre-emptive Passover pilgrimage to Mom’s house in Massachusetts, prior to Mother’s Day, it dawned on me how the symbolism of Jewish motherhood has gotten yanked from us over the ages.

Along with so many other notions now inherently part of Christianity and Islam, motherhood, too, got morphed into Mary.

Perhaps it was my own wish fulfillment, but it seemed everywhere I looked in my old hometown, there were statues of Mary with her arms stretched out in adoring fashion. In front of churches, on top of them and amongst the shrubbery in front — she was ubiquitous in the largely Portuguese enclave of southeastern Massachusetts.

How did Mary, a nice Jewish girl, become so dominant a figure by paradoxically embracing motherhood and virginity at the same time?

She’s part of an ongoing pattern. First there was Jesus. He was our guy and then … they stole him.

Then the Sabbath got moved from the seventh day, Saturday, to the numerically dyslexic seventh day of … Sunday.

But taking a Jewish mother, saints that they all are, and, with a strange Midas touch, mass-producing them into plastic ornaments, statues and collectibles is like downloading music for free without attributing the rights to the original artists.

In many forms of Christianity, the venerated symbol of Mary has assumed so much power that she casts a shadow over her son. Right there, it would seem to me we have a direct patent infringement.

And while the impact of a Jewish mother has weighed heavily on sons like myself, their presence in pop culture has dissipated.

Who can still remember Nancy Walker as Rhoda’s mom? Or Mrs. Goldberg? If you can, is there a top-of-mind, contemporary icon of such Q-rated strength today?

Motherhood isn’t just another holiday either. We all understand how Christmas eats Chanukah’s lunch. And the movie isn’t called “Passover Pageant,” but “Easter Parade.” Admit that we’ve come to accept a certain level of defeat while still celebrating our historic victories and making what we have as awesome as possible.

But motherhood is where we need to draw the line.

They say when a brand is lost it should go back to its roots. Some do and are revived (think Apple) and others veer off and don’t (think Cadillac, which combated sagging sales with muscle trucks).

During the Amidah in our shul’s new prayer book (Siddur Eit Ratzon), there is reference to not only our patriarchs, but to Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah as well.

Perhaps if more shuls incorporated this approach and showed our youth that we have some pretty mighty matriarchs of our own, they would realize their song, in its original form, was pretty cool too.

A lot of us today look back at our rich maternal heritage as if staring at a phonograph record wondering, “What is it?” and “How does it work?” It’s time we raised our matriarch’s profiles to their rightful place.

As Mother’s Day approaches, and as a Jewish son whose mom is a plucky 90 and living in the house I grew up in, her oomph has inspired me to hang on and fight for that last piece of Mother Earth we own.

Flying back from our Passover visit, the inescapable linguistic irony wasn’t lost on me; I flew on Easter weekend between Mass. and home to Maryland; after we touched down, my children ran into their mother’s arms.

As a husband who has played Mr. Mom on many occasions and with an economy creating even more of us, perhaps it’s God’s way of giving us a lesson on how the other half lives. Now it’s time to embrace how they live, and love them ever more for it.

Meshugge News

2009-03-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

Last November, once it was apparent that Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin was to live out its life only in re-run history on YouTube, many predicted a dearth of satire. Who were we going to laugh and poke fun at now that W was out of office and McCain and Palin weren’t going to be front and center to throw pies at?

As became evident, when the world turned upside-down and the market split in two, the one throwing pies (and bulls and other toys) turned out to be Jim Cramer, the supposed history guru on CNBC. But in Bizarro-world, the one doggedly reporting the financial mess and holding the press accountable — and Cramer’s feet to the fire — turned out to be comedian/“The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart.

With the fall of once great news icons that focused their lens on corruption and shenanigans (think CBS’s eye), and once great newspapers that dug out the facts to find falsehoods, it’s fallen on comedians to uncover and report the news.

CNBC was/is supposed to be a news network. Granted no one mistook Cramer for a journalist, but how many other news networks have their share of Cramers? This is a small indication of a larger trend. When newsrooms are cut to the bone and investigative reporters are sent packing, whose eye is watching?

Indeed with newsroom staffs set free, comedians like Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, who trails him nightly on Comedy Central, have come to the rescue as journalism and news reporting go AWOL. Through a glass darkly, they’ve become the seers, the truth tellers and another warped lens on the world.

Stewart’s line to Cramer on March 12 encapsulated the irony: “Look, we’re both snake-oil salesmen to a certain extent, but we do label the show as snake oil here. Isn’t there a problem selling snake oil as vitamin tonic?”

Stewart’s show has been called “fake news,” and everyone knows it. Although Cramer’s never was given the adjective “fake,” it’s news wrapped in entertainment. Either way, with a dearth of investigative news reporting, a hungry public seeks out information any way it can, and with news becoming more like entertainment and vice-versa, we were bound to have a smackdown.

By the time this reaches print, the hoopla over the match may be over, which also is indicative of the predicament. Like a fast-changing comic repertory company, with the multiplicity of media options and viewing choices, the public sees it, shares it, laughs and moves on to the next scene change.

In fact, two days after Cramer was eviscerated by Stewart, HBO aired a live broadcast of Will Ferrell in “You’re Welcome America/A Final Night With George W. Bush.”

In this case, the comedian began to set the record straight on the legacy of our 43rd president. As one of the first out of the post-Bush gate with a take on his presidency, Ferrell is likely to have set a course for historians to follow.

Ever since Aristophanes, comedians have held sway over the shape of history. In his “Clouds,” for example, the Greek playwright lampoons Socrates, portraying him as the arch-Sophist who runs educational cult called the “Thinkery.”

Today the Thinkery could be replaced as the Punditocracy, with satirists like Ferrell and Stewart lampooning and shaping our perceptions of the windbags.

The difference, however, is television, Internet and the like are all garbled together, one medium commenting on another in talmudic fashion, leaving us to peel away the onion layers to determine what’s truth and what’s fiction.

To butcher McLuhan’s famous aphorism: The medium is meshugge.

Bagel Flambé

2009-03-02T08:21:00.000-08:00

It all began with a bagel. In my last column I spoke of the inspiration I got from my first class at the Darrell D. Friedman Institute by realizing the connection I had with Judah Maccabee.

Now the bagel is complete. Our class had a siyyum.

Siyyum means completion. However, I was informed by one of my co-fellows in the STAR program that the Hebrew word begins with the letter Samech and ends in a Final Mem. Both are round, circular-like letters — kind of like a bagel. Where do they begin and where do they end?

With an election and inauguration still fresh in our collective conscience, it is indeed a new beginning. After a year of hearing about “change” though, I think we’re ready to say, “Enough of the change, already!” In fact, I could use a little stability. I’d be happy if the stocks would just hold steady.

Yet perhaps an important element we missed, when all of us were ready for change, is that change is constant. That may sound like a cliché, but if we think about it, it’s also inherent in the meaning of siyyum’s circuitous lettering.

In class each morning we read a parshah from Exodus. No other portion of the Torah is more representative of change than Exodus — leaving one world and entering another. Also interesting is that in it God often takes the form of fire.

Now as a former philosophy major and an ad man, too, that wasn’t lost on me. In fact, I came across a book that incorporates both callings — “The Philosophy of Branding.” In chapter one, the focus is on Heraclitus, who was a Pre-Socratic. His greatest perception was that the world is continually in flux, and to demonstrate this he uses a flame as a metaphor. A flame being a “thing,” but not the same thing from moment to moment.

Judaism, too, uses the flame, and its symbol for many occasions, from Shabbat to yahrzeit, and even the ner tamid connotes this same notion of continuity — eternal.

So if that’s a symbol of our creed, what does a flame need to survive and to grow and to be strong?

Well, it needs air. All kinds of air. Especially new, fresh air.

But oxygen that’s too pure can be dangerous. Likewise, Judaism needs a blend and needs to have a breath from outside of itself to live and spread and catch.

Can either extreme be dangerous — too pure or not pure enough? Sure. So we must all tend the flame.

What I also learned from the siyyum is, like so many Jewish holidays — from Simchat Torah, when we end and then begin the Torah, or Rosh Hashanah, when we end the year and celebrate the new — is that the beat goes on.

We mark the occasions, but they don’t end there.

And like that flame, built into Judaism is a richness of thinking and knowledge that we offer back to the world for it to soak up its rays.

Likewise, there’s a lesson for America, too. As we go through our economic crisis, there’ll be a tendency to smother ourselves off. But as Tom Friedman has pointed out, we became the wealthiest country in the world not by protectionism or fearing free trade. Rather, we invited the smartest most diverse ideas and people into the U.S. and it is they who fueled our growth.

I feel extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to be a part of the DFI and the STAR program, and I can’t wait to breathe air back into it to help continue the flame.

And so, thank you Cindy Goldstein for agreeing to meet me for a bagel that morning in Mount Washington.

Abe Novick writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES. More of his work is at abenovick.com.

The Defiant Ones

2009-01-28T11:32:00.000-08:00

Recently, while I was seated at a class at the Darrell Friedman Institute for Professional Development, the moderator for the seminar began the class with a list of Jewish heroes from the Bible. She then asked, which one do we relate to?

On the list were Moses and Abraham, as well as Sarah and Leah. But there, way down on the bottom, on the boy’s side, was Judah Maccabee.

Having the lingering scent of Chanukah candles still in my sniffer and, truth be told, it being my favorite Jewish holiday due to the lasting emotional connection of receiving presents as a kid, I said, “Judah.”

When asked why, I said, “Because he’s a fighter.

I didn’t grow up in Baltimore. But in many ways New Bedford, Mass., possesses many similarities to the city that bleeds. Both are gritty seaports with tough, edgy peeps in them. While I grew up with peace signs and Peter, Paul and Mary and one set of friends, the reality of hitting the crumbling neglect of the city’s junior high school, with its discordant set of races and cultures, caused conflict and combat.

Like in a Charles Atlas ad in the back of comic books, I set out to get tough. Many Jewish pals, while they respected my desire, stuck to their books and baseball cards and aimed for Brandeis.

Fast forwarding to the present, and witnessing the conflict in Gaza, which intensified right in the middle of Chanukah, I can relate to an Israel that — like that kid that gets tormented one too many times — says “Enough.”

Israel the nation is like the smart Jewish kid many of us were in junior high, who after getting shoved and beaten up, tries to talk reason with the bullies, but realizes there is only one language they’ll understand. Of course, after bulking up and pulverizing the pesky persecutor, the cowards they truly are turn around and cry to the principal (in this case the U.N.).

Rather than being a victim, as Jews have been for centuries, Israel stands defiant and delves into its Judah Maccabee persona.

I hope my kids never have to receive or inflict the kind of damage done in Gaza. But unlike me, who learned the necessity of strength as a teen, I’ve already enrolled my 6- and 8-year-olds in karate. And it’s never too late to learn. At 47, I’ve started karate, too. (All of us are now blue belts.)

While recently stepping into this fight club, I discovered Krav Maga, a self-defense style originated in Czechoslovakia by a Jew in the 1930s and further developed in Israel

According to a recent article in The Forward, it’s gained widespread popularity due to celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez and Leonardo DiCaprio training with it. And as past articles in the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES have reported, it’s become big in Owings Mills, too.

I knew Jews could be tough, but who knew we had our own martial art?

While movies, comic books and even nations go through various incarnations of hero worship, whether the wisdom of Solomon we seek in Obama or the bravado of Bibi, the current Judeo juggernaut is wrestling with the drama inherent in defiance.

And that’s where all of the past month’s actions, from a global scale to a personal one, from Judah to Judaism, were projected and came together for me. From sitting in the DFI to the Senator movie theater to watch “Defiance,” whether Jews are being hunted in the woods of Belarus or bombed by rockets in Ashkelon, we are at a pivotal moment and how we maneuver will result in us getting hurt or standing victorious.

Krav Maga, by definition, shows no quarter (no mercy) and emphasizes threat neutralization. Carrying the fire of Judah means occasionally having to use it. ••

Abe Novick writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES on the intersection of Jewish and popular culture. More of his work is at abenovick.com

Let It Burn

2008-12-27T02:13:00.000-08:00

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

For many of us having grown up during the decade when the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed” was all the rage, the phrase “Let it burn” may not be as familiar.

But some 60 years before that December in 1969 when the English rock band released its immortal album, George Bernard Shaw shook and rattled the rafters on another London stage.

At the height of Act II, in Shaw’s “Caesar & Cleopatra,” Caesar is informed the great library of Alexandria is burning. Caesar — Shaw’s doppelganger — replies, “Let it burn.”

Why would Shaw, a writer and bibliophile, have his emperor utter such a literary blaspheme? It was a new age and a fresh millennia, and Shaw wanted to dispense with the past and usher in a new era of, you got it, change.

Just as the 1960s were an era when the times were a changin’, putting an end to the past was the leitmotif during Shaw’s Fin de si’ecle.

And while our own millennium has already come and gone, we now have to confront much of the pain we were anesthetized to since Y2K.

The Bush years have been like living in a false reality. The Iraq war was fought on false premises. The environment was ignored because the truth was inconvenient. The real estate bubble, which led to this economic meltdown, was driven by overly inflated home prices that were helped in large measure by credit that wasn’t backed up with any real collateral.

Whole industries once pillars of strength and stability have or are buckling and could cave in further — from Wall Street to Detroit to newsprint.

Consequently, we’ve been met with the question: Do we let them go down or save them? Do we let them burn?

Like an angry mob with torches, most Americans are against bailing out these industries and saying they got what they deserved, polls show. CNN/Opinion Research revealed that 77 percent thought a government bailout of financial institutions rewarded bad behavior. Likewise, 61 percent oppose government assistance to U.S. automakers.

Contemporaneous to this current state of social combustion comes Chanukah — the Festival of Lights. The story couldn’t be more apt.

We don’t snuff their flame, but sing songs as we stare at the melting candles, which represent a cleansing and rededication of the temple. We think back to when Judah ordered the Temple cleansed and a new altar built in place of the polluted one.

Shaw wasn’t nihilistic enough to let his Caesar advocate nothingness in the library’s wake. Rather, when the emperor is asked, “Will you destroy the past?” Caesar replies, “Ay, and build the future with its ruins.”

Chanukah, which comes at the end of a year that many will be only too glad to dispense with, is a time for celebration. And even though we may look around and wonder what there is to celebrate, perhaps the answer is… what lies ahead.

We have a new and vibrant president-elect in this country and the first African-American to ever hold that mantle. In January he’ll be inaugurated and already it looks as if the crowd that will gather for that occasion will rival Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech that spoke not about the past but the future.

So like King, Caesar, Judah and yes, even like the bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll (who endured more change than any other band of brothers and live on today), let’s continue onward in our quest to build and enlighten.

Let’s gather strength from the past, and while it burns and fades away, look to a brighter future.

Remember, we’re not supposed to blow out the candles, but we’re to behold them and, yes, let them burn.

Arise Dark Knight

2008-12-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

Americans have always been pragmatists when it comes to the truth. From John Dewey to John Wayne, we’re a practical people. Our quest for the purity of truth and justice comes into constant conflict with the jagged everyday landscape of compromise.

Now with a newly elected leader, the country seems to be clamoring for the truth. From the economic hardships that lie ahead and the sacrifices we’ll have to make, to what dangers are being cooked up in caves on the Afghani-Pakistani border — we seek straight answers.

But while it’s a cliché to say the truth hurts, the pure truth, while refreshing, not only stings but is dangerous, as so many heroes (super and otherwise) have found out.

So how does one navigate through such terrain — by sticking to principles or adjusting to the temporary topography?

After the financial meltdown, Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson and the Congress told us their rescue plan was needed to save the economy. However, while implementing it, Hank admitted intervention was against his principles. Nevertheless, he and Congress held their nose and we the people went along.

Closer to home, the electorate voted for slots in Maryland. Just a few years ago many, including Democrats, were against slots. They claimed slots were a tax on the poor, would lead to problems with compulsive gambling and create a slew of slots addicts.

But because we are in the midst of a budget shortfall, slots were served up as a remedy. And even though many voters see slots’ deleterious aspects, the ends justified the means. Again, we close our eyes and pull the lever.

Likewise, as we look at the problems facing the Middle East, we will confront this same dilemma.

This past month I had the fortunate opportunity to hear Matthew Levitt, Senior Fellow and director of The Washington’s Institute Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. He was truly knowledgeable and an expert in his field.

Interestingly, during the Q&A session, one audience member asked why the issue of anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab world typically gets framed in the context of politics and not a religious foundation? The question had the ring of truth. The room paused.

Mr. Levitt’s answer was brilliant in its pragmatic nuance. He replied, and I paraphrase, to inject religion into the equation is dangerous, for it will infuse the Arab world with a higher calling aimed at Israel’s destruction and rally the Arab streets.

Sounds pretty scary. On the other hand, isn’t it true that the Arab world’s sentiments toward Israel have a long history of Jew hatred, going back to the mufti’s support of Nazism? So while potentially volatile it is, and has always been, a very real factor.

For example, when the covenants of terrorist groups such as Hamas commit themselves to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people, that’s anti-Semitism. When the Muslim world draws on the classical Christian notions of Jewish stereotypes and fills their children’s heads with perverse images of Jews, that’s religious-inspired hatred.

Is not confronting the issue just as dangerous?

President Bush’s desire to remake the Middle East by bringing democracy to it will be replaced with the realist approach of making that region work as best it can, given the circumstances.

With Iran getting closer to nuclear capabilities and the stakes increasing, it will put greater pressure on an Obama administration to be pragmatic. If we’re not at a global tipping point, we can certainly envision one on the horizon.

Put another way, the boundless flamboyant era of Captain America is over and the earthly tactics of Batman, the Dark Knight, begins.

Abe Novick writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES on the intersection of American culture and Judaism.

Depressing Void

2008-10-29T07:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the New Year. Talk about a cleansing! Anything and everything, whether a 401K, stocks, funds you name it, they all got soaked by the giant wave that swept through and gave a whole new meaning to Tashlikh.

While we cast our sins into the water during Rosh Hashanah, a tsunami hit Wall Street taking with it icons of strength and stability. Meanwhile the ripple effects on Main Street still haven’t fully hit and what’s most disconcerting is wondering, how low is low? Or, as Betty Davis famously quipped, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

No one knows how far down the river our collective sins will have to go until they disappear. But when will we ever see the Dow at 14,000 again?

Of course, we’ve been through burst bubbles before. The difference now is the media sensation gets amplified and because this latest one keeps getting compared to The Great Depression, everywhere you turn, a more profound sense of doom accompanies it.

While the talking heads debated whether we are in a recession, the ticker running underneath was a whole lot less ambiguous. Most everyone was already using the “D” word. What’s worse, every time they’d make the analogy, they’d feed into the cycle of fear. Then they’d follow up, by saying the markets decline is all based on fear. If I said to you, “Don’t think of knives falling from the sky”, what are you going to think of? Exactly.

Granted, none of us under the age of 70 ever thought they’d see such a precipitous dive. That was something that happened back in The Great Depression. These days we have protections against that ever happening again. Right? Well…

As a boy I heard the stories and my generation thought we were immune.

My parents grew up in the Depression (mom’ll be 90 next month) and they always tried to instill in me some sense of its magnitude. They knew something that I never did. They wore the Depression on them like some Jews wear the chai or a mezuzah around their necks. They were scarred by its fearsome force. They lived to tell about it and would tell it to me many times.

Their stories were of saving everything they could and placing a value on whatever they got their hands on; string, candy, a nickel, you name it. To compare their lives with our own is comical. We have so much and if we want more, we charge it.

How this latest episode will turn out, no one knows, but I haven’t heard anyone saying it’s going to be a fast turnaround and recovery.

And when historians look back at this decade it will have, ironically, symbolically, ended where it began.

A few weeks ago I was in lower Manhattan on the site of the World Trade Center and where a gaping hole, from what literally was a meltdown, still rests.

When I lived in Manhattan and would look up at the towers, especially at night, I would see the lights on and get some comfort (sometimes even goosebumps) knowing that the work of capitalism was being conducted around the globe.

Staring into that pit, I had to wonder, why. Not why it happened, but why hardly anything has taken place to fill the void.

Now with that literal crash of the symbols of finance, this past month’s financial meltdown closes the last chapter of Bush’s Presidency.

It is time for a new era. It’s time for us to start building again and on strong, sturdy foundations.

It is time to bury the ephemeral nothingness, the void of the past several years. The void in ideas. The void in competence. The void that’s been like that hole, that abyss where time has stood still.

This desire for change is palpable and that is why Obama will be elected next week.

The God Particle

2008-09-23T11:56:00.000-07:00

My eyes and ears could hardly believe what they were taking in.

On my mother’s new giant flat screen television, the Boston Red Sox were playing ball amidst the stark lights illuminating an otherwise dark New England night.

But beyond the game, something was different. Amongst those millions of mega pixels, I could practically see the butter dripping off the popcorn slipping down the hand of the fan in the 9th row, behind home plate.

Like never before, I could see things I didn’t know possible.

Wandering into another realm, this time one of sound, I heard Mozart on The Bose Wave music system. To my cynical surprise, their ad is true when it reads, “Just plug it in and hear what you’ve been missing.” Sounds that I didn’t know were there on a recording are clear and crisp to the ear.

If knowledge derives from the senses, then indeed, just imagine all that we’ve been missing.

It made me wonder, with technology, could we one day truly hear or see the image, the voice of God? Ever since The Tower of Babel, we’ve attempted to stride closer, toward heaven, but if God’s all around us, maybe we just need a better tuner.

And so, on one small micro-consumer level, I contemplated the amazing detail with which a now common device can peer into reality, splitting it into details so rich and full of vibrant colors, that it practically unveils the metaphysical.

Meanwhile, on another side of the world and buried deep in the ground, is a hole where physicists are also at work, but on a macro-experiment. There they are in search of something dubbed, The God Particle.

The God Particle is what scientists hope the Large Hadron Collider, buried on the border between France and Switzerland, will discover when they let loose beams of protons and smash them against each other re-creating what they believe is the spark that began, well, everything.

Like the Holy Grail, like the Garden of Eden and like the secret to my mother’s fluffy matzo balls, the mystery behind what is known as the Higgs boson (God Particle) is elusive. Likewise, because it is so hard to capture, the Hadron Collider is so massive. The contraption is a 17 mile collider, some 50 to 175 miles in the ground with a cost of somewhere between $5-10 billion.

If discovered, from one collision out of trillions, The God Particle will show itself for a millisecond. Imagine, this enormous monstrosity of mankind’s ingenious know-how, thousands of scientists from countries all over the globe, all for the chance to capture the tiniest of specs, for less than an instant.

Yet, if revealed, we will come to better understand the nature of the universe and see into the farthest reaches of the past, seconds after the Big Bang.

Striving to better understand this quest, I ventured down to the Maryland Science Center, where the Davis Planetarium is showing, Dark Matters. Dark matter is hypothetical matter whose presence can be inferred from its effects on visible matter. Essentially, it’s all the stuff that occupies the universe, like molasses, but is unseen.

While looking up onto the rounded ceiling, references of the Large Hadron Collider were beamed, linking its sub-atomic mission with finding the mystery behind the dark stuff of space.

Then it all began to gel, linking the massive experiment with the minutest of particles and the infinite darkness that holds the universe together and of course, my mom’s, where I caught my own revelatory glimpse of the beyond.

Having watched the Red Sox for years, I never would have known how much I was missing, until I saw it all on her new, big screen TV.

So while we puny humans, sports fans and wannabe astrophysicists search the far reaches of the universe to find meaning, perhaps we’ve unknowingly been staring right at it, without knowing, all this time.

Zen Of Beijing

2008-09-23T11:52:00.000-07:00

Although it’s been 30 years, it’s always stuck with me. Back in the 1978 television miniseries “Holocaust” (our answer to “Roots”), the brother who survived did so because he was stronger. The other, weaker one, played by James Woods, perished.

In some ways, their brotherhood is a microcosm of the ongoing, universal, yin-yang in all Jews — one is Jacob, the other Esau. On the one hand we cherish our bookish, intellectual heritage. On the other, we are exuberant when one of our own excels at strength and endurance.

Watching the Olympics and the amazing athleticism from so many members of our tribe, including Jason Lezak’s triumphant relay finish with fellow Jewish swimmer Garrett Weber-Gale, was inspirational; as are Dara Torres’ medals and kayaker Rami Zur. And along with the aquatically fearsome chevrei, there are fencer Sara Jacobson and distance runner Deena Kastor.
I can’t remember an Olympics with so many Jewish athletes. And while Mark Spitz was a hero for so many of us, he was one guy. Now we practically have a minyan.

But it’s that persistent, sustaining spirit of endurance that fascinates.

In that’ 70s show, Spitz’s 6-pack abs were forever etched in my memory on a poster, not unlike the famous one of Farrah from that same era (you know the one). He and his medals glistened at me, hypnotically tossing me into the pool and the varsity swim team. I would shape myself in his image (OK, I couldn’t grow a mustache), but everyday I’d swim ’ til I couldn’t feel my arms. Like that other ’ 70s bionic icon of strength, Steve Austin, I got better, stronger and faster. And I discovered … swimming is incredibly boring.

What kept me going was more than the strength and endurance, but a Zen-like state, because the repetition is so endless. Back and forth I’d go for two hours, hardly speaking to anyone, aside from an occasional foggy stare through goggles.

Ironically, perhaps that’s part of the Jewish appeal. It’s a lot like prayer. The repetition, persistence and individuality among peers are not unlike a service.

In their book “Swimming in the Sea of Talmud,” Michael Katz and Gershon Schwartz convey that sense of frustration many of us feel when confronted with the vastness that is Judaism, swimming endlessly in search of a better understanding and how it can relate to “me.”
What keeps us going? For many of us with children, they do it. They are our hope, our future scholars and Olympians.

Over the summer, my two children began taking karate. Rather than sitting for an hour waiting for them, I decided to join in. So, at 47, I donned the white belt and began lessons, knowing that to continue onward, like studying Talmud, there was a very long road ahead.

What I’ve learned is that very combination of strength and endurance, combined with a deeper spiritual aspect — that concentrated Zen quality that swimming possesses, but with the cool reward of actually breaking through a hunk of wood and everyone in the room cheering!

I kept asking the black belts if they’d ever had to use karate and they said, “No.” They’ve devoted their lives to a form of self-defense spending countless hours at their craft and never had to whack a hoodlum. What talmudic sea were they swimming toward?

Getting back a little of my old edge, I realized watching the Olympics that the physical endurance of survival allows the spiritual half to blossom — just like in Judaism.

And as with the TV series “Holocaust,” without the strength of the younger Rudi Weiss inside of us, the older bother, Karl Weiss, can’t live on.

Both Jacob and Esau are a necessary and essential part of us.

Abe Novick writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES on the intersection of Judaism and popular culture. More of his work is at abenovick.com

Wall-E’ World

2008-07-27T18:08:00.000-07:00

In recent years, we’ve seen our world destroyed in a wave of dystopian, post-apocalyptic depictions via fiction, documentary and currently computer generated imagery (CGI) with “Wall-E.”

In 2007, the Pulitzer Prize for literature went to “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy’s hauntingly beautiful, but dark as night, novel about a father and son traipsing across a scorched, barren earth.

While readers were raising “The Road” onto the best-seller lists, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was packing theaters. With the simplicity of a power-point production, we saw how humanity was sliding into the sea.

Now with “Wall-E,” Mother Earth has been abandoned by humans, leaving a lone robot to clean up.

Each work, in its own way, presents a bleak vision that hasn’t been seen in pop culture since the Cold War, when doomsday scenarios were a constant, from “Fail Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove” to television’s “The Day After.”

But while threats of nuclear-style Armageddon was the cause célèbre back then, a sense of environmental catastrophe is rampant today, transmitting its potential effects everywhere.

Omnipresently, many corporate brands are rethinking their image as they lay claim to Green. Fashion-wise, green is the new black. And with good reason, as businesses are responding, because environmental sustainability is now one of consumer purchasing behavior’s top influences.

Along those same lines, Hollywood has created “Wall-E,” the first Pixar movie that speaks to both adults and children — each on their own level. While “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” were great fun, I still pretty much saw the same narrative my kids did. In “Wall-E,” while the kindelach enjoyed the light comedy and special effects, I understood its weightier theme of planetary destruction and came away carrying the burden of the future all the while knowing, when they get a little older, they’ll realize the deeper themes.

For a generation born right smack-dab into the 9/11 era, theirs has much to be concerned about.

Alongside the environment, the essential economic structures of our society seem just as precarious. Unstable financial institutions are propped up by the federal government. Once symbolized as icons of strength and stability, personified by the bull and by owning a piece of the rock, pieces of Wall Street are crumbling. Automobiles, the mark of American ingenuity, are veering off the road. And newsprint, woven into the fabric of the Constitution, is getting shredded.

Semantically, eco-sustainability takes on a dual meaning, as it’s both ecological and economic. The two are intertwined.

And, if there is a group of people who know a little something about sustainability, it’s us — the Jews. After all, look at what we’ve endured. Look how we’ve sustained. As a country, America should look to Israel as it embodies that notion, not only in its being, but in its newly created philosophy of going Green.

While Israel is surrounded by countries that are abundant in oil, Israel is not. Indomitably, Israel has taken on a mission to break the oil addiction with electric car recharge stations all over the country. Solar panels on rooftops are everywhere, and pay phones and streetlights are powered by the sun.

Granted, Israel gets a lot of sunlight, but the determination to find a solution to the ecological challenge came from the business community — the economic engine of Israel.

Early on in “Wall-E,” we see the skyline of what we think is an enormous city, possibly any of many inspiring American cityscapes. Upon closer viewing, we come to a different, far more disheartening realization.

Just as our generation avoided nuclear Armageddon, sustainability signifies a new future challenge.

Abe Novick, whose work is at abenovick.com , writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES on the intersection of American and Jewish culture.

Hulk, The Jew

2008-06-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

Years ago, whenever I would ask my summer camp bunkmate Chanan Beizer, expert on all things comic books, who would win in a super hero fight, Hulk or ___, the answer would always be Hulk.

“Spiderman’s webs would be torn to shreds”, he’d reply to my query. “Iron Man would look like he came out of a trash compacter”, he’d retort. And, “Captain America would be wearing his shield on his kepele like your mother’s floppy beach hat.”

After taking in The Incredible Hulk again (some 30 summers later), I was again fondly reminded of the sheer brute strength that the green monster possesses. And, how it’s a universal Jewish allegory, for a misunderstood young geek to long for greater power over his life.

It’s no secret that Hulk, like his fellow comic book cronies were all born of Jewish creators and like the Golem, were molded to protect us. Hulk was born years after Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster created Superman and the superhero genre. He came to life in the 60s and at a time of change for Jews. Israel at that time, already nurtured out of the desert, again had to do battle against an army of Arabs, who were bent on destroying it.

Seeing the latest version of Hulk in today’s context, I couldn’t help wonder how germane the tale still is today.

For much of the world, Israel is The Hulk, because that’s the only side of Israel the world sees. It doesn’t get to see the scientist, Dr. Bruce Banner quietly working, creating Nobel Prize winning experiments and amazing technological breakthroughs for humankind. They see this big green monster, throwing tanks and creating havoc on the screen.

They don’t see the cause that turns Banner into Hulk. They don’t notice that Bruce doesn’t like turning into Hulk and does everything humanly possible to suppress his alter ego and the destructive transformation.

Pesky bullets and tiny rocket launchers have a minimal physical effect on Hulk, just as the stones Arab kids throw have little impact on the IDF. It all looks so harmless, until the giant arises and hurls back with a mightier and greater force, that the provocative aggressors become the victims.

In one scene in the movie, the Army General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, (played by William Hurt) corners Dr. Banner in front of his daughter (Liv Tyler) and launches gas canisters at him saying, “Now she’ll see what he’s like”. Hulk is purposefully provoked to change because he’s being attacked. And once the Hulk appears, the cameras roll and he is to most everyone, including her, a monster.

In the Six-Day War, an event that created a perceptual change in the world’s eyes of Israel, it was surrounded and attacked by Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Ever since Israel won that war and became the victor, the world has not seen Israel in the same light.

It was during that same era, and throughout his time on the pages of Marvel Comics, when the Hulk was created that he too went through a number of character changes. (Did you know that in the first issue, Hulk was grey?)

But from the earliest stories, the Hulk has been concerned with finding sanctuary and quiet. It’s only when incited, does he react emotionally and flare up.

While the Hulk is a comic book character the fact that he, and so many others, from Iron Man and Spidey to the Caped Crusader are still relevant today, outlasting plenty of other genres, speaks volumes to both their influence and relevance as iconic symbols of pop culture.

Their everlasting appeal and annual return at this time of year, helps me to remember that summer so well.

For Chanan and me, those hot months seemed to bake and leaven our teeming teen muscles like the radiated ones in Dr. Bruce Banner, emitting forces previously unknown, as we attained the zenith of physical strength.

Alas, it was 30-years ago.

Gummy Jews

2008-05-29T14:48:00.000-07:00

Special to the Jewish Times

Just as the Jewish state is smooshed in a vise between sides that want to drown it in the sea, the state of Jews in America is pulled like gummy Passover candy in various directions.

Here in the United States, many Jews who typically lean leftward are wary of an Obama presidency. That’s due less to his actual stance on Israel and more by his association with the radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright and rumors that have circulated on the Internet that Obama is a Muslim. Even if we know it to be bogus, a little voice inside is, hmm … suspicious.

On the other hand, with the last eight years of Bush, who was just in Israel (again) and its champion, it’s evident to see how Jews, liberal on most issues, feel uncomfortably conflicted when it comes to supporting Israel.http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/arts/31jews.html?_r=1&emc=eta1&oref=slogin

For them, having lived with President Bush since the millennium, to paraphrase Groucho Marx in “Horse Feathers,” “Whatever Bush is for, we’re against.” So if he’s for Israel, then something’s got to be wrong with supporting Israel. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PY7N4iRgLQ)

I’ll never forget being at Camp Ramah as a 10-year-old, and I had a counselor named Shiah. He was tall and handsome and when I asked who he wanted to be president, he said, “Nixon. He’s a friend to Israel.” Well, when I told my mother as she picked me up on camp’s last day that I was for Nixon, she almost plotzed. Little did I or the world know then what Nixon really thought of Jews.

But in those days, for many Americans Israel was still a David. The amazing success of the Six Day War was fresh and Jerusalem was our shining city on a hill. Kibbutz was a term we still heard and Soviet Jewry was the cause.

Since then, things have gotten a little more complicated. Begin and Sharon invaded Lebanon and suddenly we were no longer the nice guys. College campuses fueled hatred equating the mogen david with the swastika and any sense of moral order and equilibrium came apart. Again, whether it was true or not had little to do with the impression made in the mind. When such symbolism and iconography are branded into the consciousness, it burrows a hole inside and festers.

The logic then follows: I am a liberal. Many liberals are against Israel. Therefore, I should be against Israel.

But I ask those who contemplate such a view, what happens when “Israel” is replaced with the word “Jew”? In a deft maneuver, that’s happening. It’s no longer just a political attack.

In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg has a cover story entitled, “Is Israel Finished?” In it, he cogently lays out the many-sided conundrums of Israel and how they’ve evolved. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/israel

What I found most disturbing are some choice quotes. Here’s one.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said, “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.”

It’s been said that you can be anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic. But how far can criticism go before it becomes hate? Forcing the paradox, Israel’s enemies manipulate the earlier syllogism.

For American Jews who think Israel is for Israelis and as they’re not Israeli, they can spout all the anti-Israel talk they want without sounding anti-Semitic, there is all the more reason for Israel to proudly re-emphasize itself as a Jewish state — a Jewish state that is also the only democracy in the region.

Subsequently, as the falafel stands and flags celebrating Eretz Yisrael at 60 are stored away, American Jewish leaders need to re-navigate the dynamic, complicated territory in the minds of American Jews for supporting Israel at 70.

The Brand Of The Jews

2008-04-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

In a global era when every waking moment is a brand new brand experience, where we are bombarded with words and logos, from products and services to branded peopleæwhat is the Brand of the Jews?

By that, I don’t simply mean the Mogen David either, (like the one Gilda Radner wore on the backside of her Jewess Jeans in the old SNL spoof.)

Rather what I mean is, that if there were a word, one word, that personifies and elicits Judaism, what would it be?

I wonder because it’s important to understand that in our overloaded, overextended, time-crunched, soundbite, info age, where our mental storage capacity has about as much room as a cramped Lower East Side apartment with five sets of extended relatives living inside it, a word is a branding device that serves as a trigger to a wider world. When we refer to “Jewish”, what word do we want people to associate with it?

What imagery? What emotion? What do we want to yield?

Recently in the world of politics, the Obama campaign looked at the country and realized we were looking for “Change”. He grabbed a hold of its gist and made it his.

Hillary on the other hand, ran on experience and when that wasn’t working tried to borrow “change” but it was too late. Obama claimed it and owned it.

So in this age of verbal singularity and of linguistic oneness where a word can hold so much power, what word comes to mind that embraces Judaism?

It should be obvious as it’s the same one we say every day, and we bind as a sign on our hearts, and on our doorposts, between our eyes and it’s in the Shema. Yes, it’s “One”.

After all we’ve gone through, ever since the Diaspora spread us out on every far flung continent and region of the world, still (and to paraphrase the words of Gertrude Stein), “A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.”

While there are branches that have grown out from the tree, we all stem from the same trunk and we all hold one thing in common, dating back to Abraham—one God.

It’s what unites us.

But because those branches have grown so far and have intertwined with other religions and cultures, sprouting unique offshoots, rather than cut them off, we need to enrich them by realizing and communicating what we all have in common.

Recently, I attended an evening of music and coffee and met some Ugandan Jews who keep the Sabbath, sing Hebrew songs and obey the laws of kashrut. I didn’t even know there were Jews in Uganda. Did you?
But while they were so different culturally, they were still Jews. They even donned embroidered kipot (how’s that for symbolism), woven with vibrant colors of their culture incorporating universal Jewish iconography.

That we were one, under the same tent (ok, it was the roof of a synagogue in Roland Park) was a pretty incredible experience. It also got me thinking about our commonality and what that was and how important it is, if Jews are to remain a relevant force, on a global scale. (Not to harp too much on the Obama phenomenon), but we better find what unites us and makes us, hm…well, one, rather than what divides us as Jews.

Why now? Two reasons. One is simply the need to encapsulate our message to an immediately understood, intuitive level that speaks across continents. Given the inordinate amount of information out there, human beings don’t have the capacity to absorb the complexities of 600+ commandments. We don’t lose ‘em, but we need to create that unique position, that niche that identifies us globally in the mind first.

The second is, the world is flat and we can now communicate with each other on a plain we never could before.

One world. One God. One people.

Real Fiction

2008-03-29T19:44:00.000-07:00

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

By now many of you know the story of Monique De Wael. She’s a Roman Catholic who concocted a false identity “Misha” and made up a phony life where, as a Jewish 6-year-old child in Europe in 1941, she was raised by a pack of wolves.

In her fabricated memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” currently translated into 18 languages with a film already released in Europe, she also kills a German soldier, wanders into and escapes out of the Warsaw Ghetto and across Europe.

Misha’s story is a lie. She is not Jewish and spent the war safely in Brussels. It took years for the truth to be revealed — after she shared her story with so many (including numerous Jewish organizations) willing to believe it. Even Elie Wiesel lent his name to the book.

When confronted this month with the overwhelming evidence, Ms. De Wael announced, “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.” Surviving what?

What’s sad about this episode, but also important to recognize, is that this latest revelation comes when truth and lie are possibly beyond blurring — they’re one. The line, ever so gossamer, has inched so close that, like an Al Gore shoreline, it will be lost.

While we replicate the Holocaust experience in museums and in movies, books and documentaries, remembering history has turned into re-creating history. Projecting our own lens against it, cutting and inserting our own self-identity onto the screen, Zelig-like, we’ve artfully retouched and replaced the older images.

Plato talked about a cave where what we see as prisoners are nothing but shadows on the wall. We take those to be reality, whereas the ultimate truth was only to be reached by reason and dialogue.

But the cave allegory is obsolete; we’re the ones making the shadows and so are in on the illusion. We’re the creators and the consumers. The stories and shadows are fakes because they’re as fraudulent as we are. Everywhere, pop culture is rife with the promotion and creation of new and multiple identities.

It began in the early days of the Internet when everyone could now create multiple screen names. Back when AOL was the main gateway, no one was who they said they were. So anyone (perhaps most everyone) was lying.

But with everyone doing it, it became accepted. In fact, if you actually used your own name or told who you really were, you were embarking on a dangerous path.

Then came blogs, where truth and opinion co-exist without an editor to weed out the bunk. Today, one can even have an avatar, a completely made-up, lifelike figure who can be your alter ego and you can create an entirely false reality in Second Life.

Ostensibly, along with the ease of this form of identity fabrication, where it’s commonplace to steal, hide, falsify and disguise, we’ve manipulated ourselves to the point where our collective history is fraudulent and our memory in jeopardy.

Sadly, the Holocaust, the ultimate line to defend against this encroachment of blur, has fallen into this vat, this Babel of mixed media where everyone who wants to tell a story can and is given the same tools to stir and mix it up.

News journalists, ones who are trained in getting just the facts, are calling on publishers, especially of memoirs, to do a better job of fact checking. But with more and more hard-core investigative reporters being trimmed from the ranks of respected news organizations, I wonder who’s going to be there to protect the truth.

Misha’s story falls into a larger jumble, a hodgepodge and mishmash of quicksand that we’ve gotten ourselves into. Getting out won’t be easy.

Diaspora 2.0

2008-02-22T18:21:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about Judaism, is the direct connection. No middleman. No priest. No son. Just you and God.

And in a wireless world, a world with more and more ways for individuals to post their own self-identities, their inner souls and to create their own programming, having the means to broadcast one’s private id anytime and anyplace, has created another potentially transformative epoch for Judaism.

In the flat world, the Diaspora world, while Web 1.0 widened the sea, Web 2.0 has deepened it. More of us are constantly linked onto the Internet but we’re also now its producers, as well as its consumers. So while the experience has become richer and more far reaching, it’s also more complex.

Question: Is your synagogue wireless? Well, if everyone carries around the Internet in their pocket, does it really matter?

Recently, I was sitting around the Sunday morning kibitz table in the social hall, when I noticed a group of us were all pounding away on our laptops. We were helping each other through the tech jungle, connecting onto one wavelength, while altering the course of typical conversation on another. Amongst ourselves, in a wireless world, do Jews communicate more directly or less?

On another level, while wireless devices are verboten in the sanctuary, it occurred to me that the idea of wireless connectivity inside the sacred hall is implicit. The public, social/tribal aspect and the private/meditative dichotomy makes for the ultimate mirror of a social networking environment. After all, everyone’s in one room, but no one’s talking to each other. We’re all in our own little worlds. And supposedly we’re sending out some kind of frequency. Whether it’s being received by a transponder and reciprocal is another question. But as far as a collective human current, I’m wondering if it’s not that much different than the world technology is creating for our lives outside of shul.

Are we all just little wireless devices sending out a signal?

Ever so conformingly, I never thought I’d become one of themæ one of those guys with the Bluetooth in their ears.

Sure, I’d wear an ear phone with a wire while driving, but hardly anyone ever saw me (aside from my kids in the backseat.) Also, the wire would get all snarled and though I wore it with the best and safest of intentions, it was probably more dangerous trying to keep it untangled and straight.

So I went wireless and now my Blackberry talks to my Bluetooth. I’m a black & blue Jew, but better for it. I’m a convert now--true blue believer, and a much safer one too.

But like a lot of technology, it creeps in and stays attached and has become more like an added appendage. The little doodad is becoming more and more permanent. While wireless in theory, the connection to ones physical being may as well be soldered.

While many of us resist technology on one level, we can’t help but join the ranks of sci-fi Trekkies on another. With more and more people donning the earpieces, it’s like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Each day, another’s wearing one and then another. Soon we’ll all have ‘em.

Here in my town, while all of Baltimore is tuned into a show called The Wire, how many of us are wirelessly watching it on our iPods, Nanos and Apples of various colors, shapes and sizes?

Likewise and on one level, for Jews, we’re all sharing in the same experience. On another, we’re blending the received content with our own unique mix of media.

Profoundly, in many ways that’s what the Talmud is all about; the word of God but with a blend of voices.

Technologically, it’s a long way from where we were just a few years ago. We’re wired on coffee while wireless at the Starbucks watching The Wire.

Now that’s something to kibitz about.

Twisting TV Jews

2008-01-27T19:21:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2008

Twisting TV Jews

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

You don’t have to be a writer these days to appreciate their value when it comes to good, honest television. And you don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate this month’s series on PBS, “Jewish Americans.”

Amidst a writers’ strike that made the Golden Globes spin to a near halt and brought a dearth of new programming, MPT’s reported ratings for “Jewish Americans” are as populous as a boat from the old country pulling into Ellis Island.

But while many Americans have sat around their TVs, watching the story of Jews arriving, struggling and succeeding in this country, many of us may be unaware of what Iran’s state television recently produced.

Countering PBS’ meticulous attention to history, in typical Bizarro World fashion, a show called “Zero Degree Turn,” about the fate of European Jewry, aired in Iran in 2007 and is now threatening to be marketed beyond. It was one of that country’s most expensive and elaborately produced programs ever.

Apparently it was a ratings hit. It told the story of a young Iranian who goes to Paris to study at university before World War II. He becomes involved with a young Jewish woman who fears the growing strength of the Nazis in Germany.

In a sympathetic twist, from a country with a knack for twisting truth, scenes actually showed men, women and children with yellow stars on their clothes forcibly taken out of their homes and loaded into trucks by Nazi soldiers. That’s a little strange coming from a country whose president has denied the Holocaust.

But while the series of 22 installments has already aired, its radioactive effect is still being picked up on blogs and in print, including in The Jerusalem Post just this month.

Not surprisingly, while it actually got some positive reviews for at least admitting the Holocaust took place, it was full of factual errors including propagating the lie that Zionists and Nazis collaborated to provoke Jewish emigration. This theme and an emphasis on the struggle between Zionism and Judaism is worked into the story line. While both are misrepresented, Zionism is positioned (as is often the case in the Arab world) on an equal plane with Nazism.

The director of the series, Hassan Fathi, said about it, “I decided to produce this series in 2002, and in those days the Holocaust was not an issue. Even if one single Jew is killed in German camps, the world should be ashamed. By the same token, if a single Palestinian dies, the world should be ashamed. I sympathize with the Jewish victims of World War II, to the same extent with women and children victims of the war in Palestine.”

Another erroneous problem, lest we forget, is that Zionism was around long before WWII and the Holocaust. To promote the canard that Israel was conceived due to the Holocaust, is to position the Arab world and in particular the Palestinians as the victim. It’s as if Arabs are being punished by having to live with Israel in the midst of their territory, even though they had nothing to do with what happened in Europe.

So as Jews in this country tune in and see their history retold with the effort of dedicated writers, teams of researchers armed with facts and with the aid of historic photos and footage, another side of the world dramatizes their warped story.

And by producing a show with some shades of truth, perhaps just enough to gain some class, some legitimacy, it will be taken seriously by ignorant viewers who’ll watch it as if it’s “Schindler’s List.” Because Ahmadinejad is such a clown, because his claims are so preposterous, perhaps they think a softer, glossy version is what’s needed to spur on a debate.

Lost Compass

2007-12-30T20:01:00.000-08:00

When Mad Mel snapped his cinematic whip in The Passion, Jews cried out about the film’s depiction of their faith. In Gibson’s movie, Jews were distinctly made to look sinister, marked by centuries-old stereotypes including the requisite hooked schnoz.

While many Christians thought the work a thing of beauty, most Jews I knew found Jesus being whipped to carpaccio repulsive and hard to digest.

Cut to: A new holiday movie sparking its own controversy, causing the Catholic League to call for a boycott of The Golden Compass.

The problem they say is the first book in the trilogy on which the film is based, a children’s fantasy called His Dark Materials, is anti-Catholic and promotes atheism. They’re afraid kids’ll get hooked on the series and, like Harry Potter, will devour all the books which eventually reveal God to be a charlatan right before He’s killed.

While the act of deicide would offend most religions, Jews included, the CL’s particular problem is with the depiction of a sinister institution closely resembling the Catholic Church called “the Magisterium.”

On the other side of this argumentative sphere, atheists aren’t happy either, saying Hollywood has caved into pressures from Catholics and watered down the screen version of the book.

To lend further fictional perspective to this cultural maelstrom, the Compass story takes place in an alternate universe. If The Passion was an historical event and was of this world, it was seen through the lens of an Anti-Semite (Mel’s In Vino Veritas moment ended any debate) and got the praise of the Church. But while Compass is a work of fantasy with talking polar bears, it still’s got Church leaders hot under the collar. I’m no Einstein, but on the outrage meter, there needs to be some universal equilibrium between what’s historically inaccurate and what’s make-believe.

The narrative kicking up all the dust is about a 12 year-old girl who goes on an adventure with the help of a golden compass, (a sort of magical Nintendo DS) after she hears about an amazing substance called, well, Dust. When asked a question, the compass tells the truth. (I’m sure both sides in this fight wish they had one.)

What’s interesting about this latest row is, unlike other recent holiday fare of past years, from The Lord of The Rings to The Chronicles of Narnia, Compass’s two-sided controversy and the tension it personifies are indicative of the moment.

Atheism has been re-popularized in the culture with books out by Chris Hitchens, “God Is Not Great” and Richard Dawkins’, “The God Delusion” and a Presidential election with the GOP’s Mitt & Mike ascending the lead on a platform of piety, each claiming they’re more in sync with God.

While Nietzsche claimed God is dead years ago (I thought atheism was so last, last century), today’s Earthly battle has resurfaced due to the collision between east and west and the polarity between Islam and Judeo-Christianity. For Hitchens and other atheists they figure, if all the heavenly talk only leads to killing each other, each claiming they’re side’s the true north, why not do what Gershwin lyricized and let’s call the whole “God” thing off.

The problem is that that model’s only led to nihilism and an impoverished culture in need of something spiritually more meaningful. On the flip side, the divinely apocalyptic crusaders are unable to grasp scientific theory, still mad at Galileo’s heresy.

Like any good philosopher, while gazing at the screen version of The Golden Compass last week, I questioned its meaning and concluded the whole controversy as overblown, deciding both sides are in need of a real compass—one that doesn’t just point blame.

After all, it’s possible to be an atheist but adhere to religious ideals. In other words, atheists can and do have a moral north and God for them can often simply be defined as something that is “higher” to strive toward—something within and not outside of us.

Indeed, the fissure which Compass represents is indicative of a lack of global perspective over religion and a misguided culture that has lost its way, instead relying heavily on opposing extremes, with no center or equanimity.

Mailerstrom

2007-11-21T12:07:00.000-08:00

It was a chilly fall evening on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John The Divine in Manhattan and I was passing out flyers for a New York premiere of a play I was acting in written by the newly elected President of Chekoslovakia, Vaclav Havel.

Inside the walls of the Cathedral was an evening of the who's who of New York, because the guest of honor was Mr. Havel. Accompanying him would be music performed by Paul Simon along with a line of celebrity limos wrapped around the architectural wonder.

As I approached the steps in my worn black leather jacket and unkempt artsy attire, the first person I happened upon, to hand an invite to, was none other than Norman Mailer. It was the early 1990s and already he was carefully hobbling down the steep incline.

Upon my greeting, he was at first gruff and somewhat dismissive, as if I were handing him a menu to a local deli. Then, realizing what I was offering, he softened and became interested in the play. Our conversation wasn’t very long and I told him about it hoping he could make it. He said he would try, but I knew he made his home in Provincetown and given the gait at which he was taking the steps, wasn’t hopeful about holding him a seat.

I say all of this because what was to follow on that night was an evening of paparazzi flashbulbs and swank movie stars shuttled in through the backdoor of the house of prayer. It was a night I was to remember because never before had I seen so many stars from various categories, musicians, actors, writers all strutting by with a swagger and style that was like something out of a dream. They truly glistened with a sheen as if Annie Liebowitz was spraying the air with her magic, airbrushed fairy dust.

At that youthful time in my life, there had been a few books that truly hit me and made an impact like no other. One in particular had as one of its themes, the celebritification of a killer seen through the dark lens of our media culture – The Executioner’s Song.

By coming out some ten years earlier, it pre-saged the cultish following our paparazzi obsessed civilization, would endow the media.

With Executioner, Mailer’s tender prose and simple styling was like looking into a clear western sunset. He allowed us to see and observe something that was normally impossible, prohibitive and off limits. It was a fire that was so powerful and dangerous, yet through him, one could feel Gary Gilmore’s breath.

Having drunk in that night, I remember how it tasted like nectar and how my ears were ringing at the alter of Simon’s guitar. People were aglow in that cavernous house of the spirit as vibes were being channeled, ricocheting off the stone walls.

Mailer had greeted me as I passed into a world beyond belief that night, just as he’d let so many readers into his amazing imagination.

His style of New Journalism had already blurred the line between fact and news and gave the latter half of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary events a perspective that was dangerous, anarchic and sublime from the moonwalk and Vietnam to political conventions to the CIA.

While many of his enchantments were disappointing, when he was on fire he crackled and lit up the page, taking us on a path through an underside of a world not normally seen.

His final literary descent bathed us in Hitler’s wicked gene pool, where readers came face to face with the devil himself. Mailer intended to continue The Castle In The Forest. So how fitting, how mythic of him not to return after descending the lower depths.

Now he’ll always remain for me standing at the gates of that castle, that cathedral, beckoning us to go within.

Coulter Clash

2007-10-25T18:13:00.001-07:00

For the past few months there have been a number public and highly visible Anti-Semitic spectacles where the microphone has been handed over to a mean-spirited clown whereupon nonsensical rhetoric gets uttered followed by listeners scratching their heads wondering why the hate-mongers were ever given a platform in the first place.

To combat this warped reality, writers like me rant about them and end up giving them even more ink than they deserve. Yet, to ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen, to turn away, is morally irresponsible.

Last month it was Ahmadinejad at Columbia. This month’s Coulterclash was between famed ad man and CNBC’s host of The Big Idea, Donny Deutsch and blonde Aryan fire-starter Ann Coulter. What it hopefully revealed once and for all (though I doubt it), is the deeply disturbing vitriol at the heart of the vapid harpy and bloviating bombshell. If you didn’t catch it, it went like this.

DEUTSCH: You said -- your exact words were, "Jews need to be perfected." Those are the words out of your mouth.
COULTER: No, I'm saying that's what a Christian is.
DEUTSCH: But that's what you said -- don't you see how hateful, how anti-Semitic --
COULTER: No!
DEUTSCH: How do you not see? You're an educated woman. How do you not see that?
COULTER: That isn't hateful at all.
DEUTSCH: But that's even a scarier thought

There was a time when such comments would brand one a pariah and an outcast.
Remember Jimmy The Greek? No? Well, that’s because he was tossed out of the NFL ring of gab due to a comment he made back in 1988 (that and he’s been dead for ten years) about the superiority of African-American football players and how they were bred to produce strong offspring dating back to the Civil War. It’s a wonder Coulter isn’t treated the same.

Here’s what’s different. While Coulter is a joke, her ability to draw controversy for statements like the one on Deutsch’s show lands her more ink and ratings so that she becomes like one of those unstoppable monsters from a horror movie, she feeds off of the ammo aimed her way. She’s mastered the media’s own obsession with scream-fests hosted by loudmouths posing as talkshow hosts.

Brazenly, she manipulates this very boomerang effect by knowing the media will echo her words and image, hence giving her even more airtime. While playing into her trap is not the answer, to let her go unscathed is also not only completely unsatisfying, but it sends a signal that her style is acceptable.

I’m reminded of the Army-McCarthy Hearings when the army’s attorney, Joseph Welch says to the Senator, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Ironically, Coulter authored a book praising McCarthy, actually trying to exhume his rep called “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror.” In it she argues that the U.S. Senator was unfairly portrayed by the media and is the deceased person she admires the most. That right there should have given everyone a reason to disown her. But she’s still alive. She keeps on returning!

Finding the right antidote is usually contained within the virus. So take a page out of history and apply it to her.

One of her own, a leading, well respected conservative should have the decency to confront her. No one doubted Welch’s credentials.

Likewise, when Patrick Buchanan uttered extremist Anti-Semitic rhetoric some years back, it was George Will who concluded that Buchanan exhibits a “fascist sensibility”.

Where is the courage in the Conservative press and in the Republican Party?

When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch cut him off and demanded the chairman “call the next witness.” At that point, the gallery erupted in applause.

Likewise, Coulter needs to be laughed at, shamed off the airwaves.

Lady Madonna

2007-10-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

The last time the Madonna was spotted in Jerusalem, time split with a line marking "Before" and "After." Now, splicing Hollywood and the Holy Land together last week, the modern mega pop icon was celebrating Rosh Hashanah with Israeli President Shimon Peres and declaring herself an "ambassador for Judaism."

OK, so this Madonna, unlike the other, is not Jewish. But she is real big on kabbalah, an esoteric corner of learning that like, a slice of Levi’s bread, is wide enough that you shouldn’t have to be Jewish to like it.

But because she’s not stamped kosher, she’s gotten a lot of flack for dipping into a plate of Jewish mysticism that for some is sacred and not just another New Age fad. In fact, rabbis have criticized both her and other celebs’ fascination with the subject, claiming only bona fide students can understand the mysteries. Pouring milk on their meat, she got them kvetching with her song, "Isaac," which they claim is about the 16th-century kabbalist Yitzhak Luria and which she says isn’t.

Say what you will, Madonna has got chutzpah and unlike her younger protégé, Britney, who can’t gain any respect these days, Madonna has remained a lasting figure. While consistently ticking off the religious community, from the time she set foot on the world’s stage, through "Like a Virgin" to recently presenting herself on the cross in concert, she has always danced at the edge of the borderline.

She’s stumbled without totally wiping out, consistently remaining in control of her brand, even while re- inventing it. Her dare has always been part of her act. That thin borderline today is known as the TMZ line and while strutting on it, she’s paradoxically created for herself an iconic status that aspires toward the spiritual.

TMZ, a popular Web site and now nationally syndicated half-hour show on Fox, puts the "oi" in tabloid. It’s the site that publicized Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic tirade, Michael Richards’ onstage meltdown and an up-to-the-minute skinny on a chubby O.J. While more and more celebrities get engulfed in it and drown in the swamp of Hollywood, she’s a survivor.

That show’s host happens to be a Jewish boy, Harvey Levin, who covers the strange fascination we have with fantasyland. On the site he writes, "I know a lot about Hollywood, in no small part because I’ve lived here almost my whole life and I’m pretty much older than dirt." Interesting description, since he peddles it, too. Meanwhile, in the past decade overall production has increased to mud slide levels.

Since the Juice in the Bronco, how far off has mainstream news been from the same feeding trough? O.J. was when it all shifted and the polluted tributary became the contaminated river. You don’t have to read the tabloids to know Rosie’s wacko, Eminem’s a misogynist and Mel’s a psycho. Their stains are all part of the same washload now. Madonna just lifted the underwear out, wore them as outerwear, pranced on the catwalk and made them hip.

Along the way, she’s rocked the books. "The Guinness Book of Records" lists her as the most successful female recording artist ever; she holds the record for the top-grossing concert tour by a female artist and has an estimated net worth of $325 million.

Fame can be nasty, brutish and short. Like our people, she has lasted. And like us, with more branches than a burning bush, stretching in various directions all pointed up, she digs our eretz, recently claiming, "I wouldn’t say studying kabbalah for eight years goes under the category or falls under the category of being a fad or a trend."

While the material girl from Michigan has her feet planted in the mud, she’s also always reached for the stars.

Jewish Flare of New TV Shows

2007-09-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

The new fall television season is filled with mysticism, from stories about angels and the power to bring back the dead with the touch of a hand to a time-traveling hero.

I first read about the upcoming season — which starts the week of Sept. 24 — back in May during what’s called "the upfronts," when networks unveil to advertisers their fall lineup. Picking up The New York Times’ advertising column, Stuart Elliott’s headline, I read "In a Time of High Anxiety, A Sedative of the Occult," and I wondered, "Is there something Jewish behind an upcoming season with such a banner?"

By extending my antennae a bit and reaching out, I picked up the signal from last year’s hit show "Heroes" about a group of people who "thought they were like everyone else ... until they realized they have incredible abilities," such as telepathy, time travel, flight and instantaneous regeneration.

It was then I realized that if Jews were responsible for the heyday of comic book superheroes, such as Superman and Captain America, was this latest crop of prime-time players an outgrowth of that same "hero" worship, and if so, then perhaps there is something Jewish rooted underneath this new season?

While television has long been a medium for science fiction, the genre has come in waves, and we are clearly heading to a different, more supernatural world.

Part of what’s allowing us to get there is technology. Long gone are the days when we were given a choice between "The Munsters" or "The Addams Family" on only three networks. From TiVo to On Demand, television has come light years. Add those forces to cable and satellite and the choices are, well, astronomical.

Out Of The Ordinary

It was cable TV that came out of the gate early this summer. While the networks were gearing up for the fall, it launched a number of new shows. One of them was "Saving Grace."

While the term grace is usually thought of in a Christian context, the word is actually derived from the Hebrew Bible as chesed. Though "Saving Chesed" doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, according to the show’s creator, "Saving Grace" is a show about a woman who talks to an angel.

Creator Nancy Miller explains that the angel, Earl, is non-denominational. "He speaks to Grace in the language she grew up in. Grace came from a Catholic family, so he speaks in the language that she would understand," Ms. Miller said. "As we go on, you’re going to find out that Earl is a last chance angel to a Jewish guy, and speaks from that culture to him. Later on, you’re going to find out that Earl is a last chance angel to someone who is Muslim. So he speaks that language to him."

In addition to the cable stations, the networks also are channeling the spiritual and confronting the eschatological.

On Monday nights, NBC will air a show called "Journeyman" about a San Francisco newspaper reporter who travels through time and gets reunited with his long-lost fiancé who died in a mysterious plane crash. Interestingly, in Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalah, communing with the dead is an act called yichud, and is a ritual that Rabbi Isaac Luria, one of the most influential men in the history of Jewish mysticism who lived during the 16th century, often performed at the grave.

Also, on ABC this fall will be "Pushing Daisies," a show about Ned, a pie maker with a mysterious ability to make the dead live again. The gift is not without its complications, however; if he touches this being a second time, they’ll be dead permanently. If they live for more than 60 seconds, somebody else nearby will die.

While that may sound like a weirdly morbid game show, Ned actually resembles a shaman, again a concept not without Jewish roots. If it seems like a lot of hocus-pocus, according to Rabbi Gershon Winkler, author of several books on the subject of Jewish mysticism, "Shamanism and sorcery are not antithetical to the Hebrew Scriptures."

In his book "Magic of the Ordinary," Rabbi Winkler writes, "The notion of Jewish shamanism may seem like an oxymoron to a lot of people, but it happens to be an integral part of the Jewish tradition that has been suppressed for centuries."

While this may seem foreign to Jews of the 21st century, the reason is that it was associated with devils and demons and suppressed by the Catholic Church.

"Christians considered the Jew as the magician par excellence, a reputation that ultimately turned against them since, as practitioners of the occult, they were regarded by the church as demonic," according to Rabbi Winkler.

In another of his books, "Dybbuk: A Glimpse of the Supernatural in Jewish Tradition," he speaks to the issue of why now we see this trend toward the occult and a resurgence of interest in the supernatural. According to Rabbi Winkler, "A major factor behind modern man’s renewed flirtation with the occult is his quest for meaning in life."

He says: "Trapped, the human creature opts for the achievement of powers outside the realm of the natural world."

TV As Bible

In light of the events of the past six years, as 9/11 poked a hole between East and West, media analysts and television critics have noted the shifts in the wider cultural landscape and have remarked on its reflection through the medium of television.

David Zurawik, author of "The Jews of Prime Time" and television critic at The Sun, says, "The reason it’s happening now is the post-9/11 jitters. There’s this sense that in America we don’t know what’s going on. I think there’s a tremendous uncertainty in this country, a tremendous underlying anxiety. There hasn’t been this kind of anxiety since the Great Depression and World War II."

Interestingly, it was during that very time when the fantastic era of comic books was first created, and the comic book hero was born. I brought up the issue that was still unresolved for me with Mr. Zurawik, though, that 9/11 was six years ago. Why was this new metaphysical phenomenon taking shape on fall TV in 2007?

I then shared with him a book that describes the era we are living in, while depicting the period during the birth of the comic book. About halfway into Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," there’s a passage where things change. Mr. Chabon has one of the main characters, Joe, and the creator of "The Escapist" transform, from fighting the forces of the Iron Chain, in battles that were increasingly grotesque and ornate "grinding Adolf Hitler’s empire into paste," to creating a creature of the Other World.

Mr. Chabon has Joe create Luna Moth, "a creature of the night and of mystic regions where evil worked by means of spells and curses instead of bullets, torpedoes, or shells. Luna fought in the wonderworld against specters and demons."

I wondered aloud, "So as we’ve gone from television shows like ‘24’ and ‘Rescue Me’ to this new season filled with fantasy, are we seeing a similar kind of transformation take place, a tipping point — a metamorphosis?"

I ran this notion and the passage from Mr. Chabon’s book by Mr. Zurawik, and he agreed, summing up the point simply, "For a while, Osama bin Laden was real. Now, he’s a phantom we can’t catch."

That seemed to explain so much. He then added, picking up on the hero idea again, "There’s something otherworldly we have to try to attach ourselves to, for strength or purpose or for a reason to go on, so as not to be defeated."

He likened our time to the Cold War of the ‘50s, a time like today when we lived with anxiety and a threat that wasn’t fully manifested. The show that summed up the era for Mr. Zurawik was none other than "Superman," and the other was "The Lone Ranger," a variation on a theme but with a different genre — the Western. "Together," he said, "they combined the two great frontiers — the Space Age and the frontier."

A former colleague of Mr. Zurawik, Diane Winston, who is now a Knight chair in media and religion at the University of Southern California, lent an additional perspective.

"The popularity of Westerns in [the 1950s] spoke to the Cold War mentality of good guys/bad guys, and the Americans as heroes who were strong and tough and macho in a cowboy way," she said. "We had a more conventional view of religion than today, when we’re much more interested in spirituality."

I asked her about shows like "Heroes" that tap into that sense of both the hero and the otherworldly and have led to this new slew of fall shows that portray humans with extraordinary powers.

"Everyday, people find a new reason to be overwhelmed," Ms. Winston said, "whether it’s the bridge collapsing or talk about earthquakes in California. We live in what feels to be uncertain times, all with the backdrop of 9/11. These things give us a sense of our own mortality and vulnerability.

"When we look to be entertained, we want to be soothed and calmed, we want to see things that make us feel as if people can triumph over death. All these supernatural shows feature heroes who can control what’s going on. They speak to our deepest needs and fears."

I asked Ms. Winston if she sees these stories having deeper roots, mythical ones that go back to the Bible. Her immediate reply was, "I think television is the contemporary equivalent of the Bible. Not that television supersedes the Bible, but at a time when biblical language sounds foreign to us, we find similar stories of heroism, suffering, sacrifice on television, and they are like biblical morality stories."

Indeed, finding pop culture’s pulse in the Bible is, and has been, more prevalent than a lot of us think. For example, you may not think a show about a vampire has much to do with Judaism. But it does on a few levels.

CBS’s "Moonlight" will be about a city-dwelling vampire who attempts to resist his urge to kill and drink the blood of humans, but instead decides to help them. As it turns out, the earliest reference to a vampire is in the Bible. And, of course, one who tries to help people is practicing tikkun olam, repairing the world.

Helping to tie the thread together in these particular shows was something interesting that Rabbi Winkler told me. "There are many stories about the living dead in the Zohar," he said. "As for chesed, it is the ancient act of taking care of the dead. You’re not going to get a ‘thank-you’ from the dead. It’s altruistic, unconditional love."

Why all the interest now with such notions? "The obsession with the occult is a response trying to understand the great mystery of suffering of the innocent," he replied. " ... In our own time, every human being is thirsting for something beyond what is tangible, because everything is becoming too tangible, too instant, too accessible, and the soul is searching for mystery."

Scanning over the television landscape this fall, what’s coming in clearly and noticeably is we are tuning in a new frequency. It’s a channel that’s projecting our collective psyche with shows that are far from reality TV, but instead cable and the networks have aimed their satellite dishes toward a higher orbit, one that’s closer to God, steeped in spirituality and, in many ways, grounded in Judaism.

Abe Novick is a frequent contributor to the Baltimore Jewish Times.

Rescue Me

2007-08-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

While Rudy Giuliani’s image as hero of Gotham gets snuffed by the International Association of Fire Fighters with Democrats all too happy to help douse his flame, the FX’s “Rescue Me” about life in a New York firehouse after 9/11 also has viewers evacuating.

The TV show, now in its fourth season has suffered a Nielson meltdown with Ad Age’s Brian Steinberg saying it’s in need of triage.

That both stories converge now is telling on a few levels.

Rudy’s remark, “I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them.” may have singed him, but it wasn’t fatal. Rather, the back draft from it is just part of the now standard media cycle.

Gaffes get gobbled down so fast and digested into the meat grinder of news they pass through like bland chopped liver. They’re fuel for a few runs around the news track, and then become heartburn. First the faux pas. Then the daily feeding frenzy. Then the endless spin cycle. All are typical of our magnified media endoscope. In time, it will be one more stone that future historians will have to turn over and piece together never able to find the original cause.

Rudy’s bigger misstep is linking himself to W and trying to take ownership of an event that for each of us holds a sacred place. Just as no one individual can own The Holocaust because it is larger than any one person, to brand oneself as the savior of 9/11 is a shaky scaffold to support.

W’s leaned on it so heavily over the past six years that it’s bowing. Using it as a hook to hang your Uncle Sam hat on is, well, old.

As a culture, while we feel an emotional bond with that day, we also feel it was leveraged against us and our sympathy used for a war we’re sick and tired of watching.

It’s the reason shows like “Rescue Me” are flaming out. Rescue me from “Rescue Me”.

It’s the sheer exhaustion with the constant state of alarm we’re in without finding the match that started the whole thing. It feels like we’ve been blown plenty of smoke. But where’s the spark that started it all?
Where is bin Laden? He’s a ghost. An apparition.

Similarly, the TV shows that were so rooted in the ground of 9/11 have evaporated. Gone are shows like “The Nine” and “Vanished” which tapped into a realistic sense of danger.

Replacing them are fantasies based on the metaphysical that picked up from the phenomenon of “Heroes.” I’ll have more to say about them once they start to air, but look for shows this fall like ''Pushing Daisies'' a forensic fairy tale that focuses on Ned, a piemaker with a mysterious ability to make the dead live again and “Journeyman” about a time traveler.

Last year’s hit show “Heroes” depicts various people around the world who discover they possess real superpowers from instantly healing physical injuries to manipulating time in order to travel through it.

But all these shows reflect more than just the state of anxiety that pervades a post 9/11world. They are a backlash against the very shows that picked up on that tension.

The ratings war is picking off the shows that were the first responders to the cultural chasm.

In the arrangement of Aristotle’s treatises, his Metaphysics follow his Physics and are so called as they literally follow, though some have interpreted that to mean they go beyond.

Likewise, if television is any indication of the times, with a season of shows that tap into the metaphysical, perhaps it’s also time pols do the same and move beyond the ground war and continuously trying to lay claim to lower Manhattan.

While we remember the past, the country is tuned into a different frequency, one on a higher, more spiritual level.

Comic Relief

2007-07-30T20:34:00.000-07:00

Captain America is dead and now buried. He was killed earlier this year by a sniper’s bullet on the courthouse steps in New York. He died just as he lived, a hero, when he stepped in front of a bullet that was aimed at him but was going to hit a police officer. He’s now supposedly laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. Or is he?

That Cap has occupied space in our collective pop-culture consciousness for some seventy years is a tribute to humanity’s spiritual quest for something greater than ourselves. Just as Greek gods and biblical heroes were vital to their epoch, Cap and assorted comic book stars have woven into our lives, enveloping us like a super suit.

First created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in December 1940, Cap’s what Gerard Jones in his book, Men of Tomorrow called, “the passion of the immigrant, of the Jew”. Both Simon and Kirby are of course Jewish (Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917, the same year Steve Rogers AKA Captain America was born). In the first issue, even before the U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor, they had Captain America punch Hitler in the jaw. Way to go boys!

That he’s dead now serves as a metaphor. At a time when civil liberties are curtailed and one’s identity is being monitored by the government, never mind an unpopular war in Iraq, his current animators aptly iced him. But as Joe Simon, said in reaction to the news, “It's a hell of a time for him to go. We really need him now.” Doing a little research I learned that he’s actually been reported deceased some dozen times and will probably resurrect again.

In the meantime, all is not lost. Just last night (Thursday) a super mensch made his debut on the Sci Fi Channel. His name is Mr. Mitzvah aka (Ivan Wilzig) and like Cap, uses a shield, but in the form of a Star of David, as he’s described as a direct descendant of the biblical King. His super powers include flight, night vision and super-strength while his vulnerability is Non-kosher foods.

The show is called “Who Wants To Be a Superhero” and is co-produced and hosted by legendary comic creator Stan Lee and picks up on the reality TV trend by with an hour-long weekly competition series.

If all sounds a bit silly and a little too fantastic, it’s nothing new. After all, it’s a story that’s been told, re-told and remolded out of Golem-like clay going back thousands of years to the prophetic, Messianic age.

From Bar Kokhba (not an east village pub, though that’s a great name for one), the leader of a revolt against the Roman Empire in 132 CE to Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson who died in 1994 and who still has followers who believe he will be the messiah and reveal himself, Jews have been in search of heroes for, well…ever. We’ve found ways to either fictitiously create them or truly actualize them by anointing them with god-like powers.

I suppose one reason we do it, is that we find we are constantly in peril. We’ve been able to disguise ourselves blending into every culture on the face of the earth and have assimilated more times and into more cultures than Clark Kent has business suits. Eventually too, we have to reveal who we are. And if for some reason, like supers we have to keep our identity hidden, then our true identities must find a way out in storied manifestations and through actions.

While Captain America might be gone for now, the need for someone to come along and punch out the next Hitler won’t disappear. Last night’s Sci Fi renderings were only the latest in a long line of wishful projections onto an imaginary screen––a screen that we’ve used to both hide behind as well as reveal our true selves.

Color My World

2007-06-27T12:46:00.000-07:00

We live in a consumer culture whose appetite thrives on brands for survival. And if you’ve got a cause, it needs to find its way into the brand stream of our collective conscience. It needs marketing.

These days everything is a brand, from people and places to politicians and products. Causes are no different.

From the moment we awake and turn off our buzzing Sony clocks, to brushing our teeth with Crest to pouring the Kellogg’s…well, you get the picture. Consumers come across over 3000 brand messages a day.

Finding a way above the pack has always been a challenge, but in a glutted world of media overload, how does a brand rise above? One way is to attach itself to a cause that is higher.

If it sounds crass, have a look at the most recent edition of Vanity Fair, now on newsstands. It’s the Africa issue, edited by Bono. Bono’s cause has been third world debt with a focus on Africa. Pictured on the current cover lying in front of me is Alicia Keys whispering in the ear of the supermodel, Iman. It will be one of twenty covers by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz. Photos will also include some of the most famous celebs (brands) around. Like Bono and Iman they’re so famous, they need only one name (Oprah will soon be another.)

To read Bono’s Guest Editor’s Letter is like being punched in the gut in terms of the dire situation that exists (10 million children’s lives will be lost next year to extreme poverty, half in Africa due to HIV/AIDS.) What he’s done, is link that crisis to a brand simply called Red. Red is the color of emergencies. Tied to his cause however, are marketing’s All Stars at their best including corporate partners Amex, Apple, Armani and more. Red lifts their brand and the profits they make leveraging it, goes to fight the world’s ills. Win/Win.

On the other side of the color spectrum of red, every other brand is green. With global warming rising like the tides onto the mainstream surface, due in part to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, so called green marketing is all the rage.

I don’t have to tell you about the plethora of colors adorning wristbands.

For Jewish philanthropic organizations, gaining an understanding of the power behind branding and linking their message with the sway of the other kinda green is key if they are to maneuver their message to the forefront.

Perhaps, had this kind of thing been around in the 1930s and 40s who knows what might have been.

Ironically, advertising as an industry grew out of that era. Today it’s so enmeshed into pop culture that corporate iconography is worn like a badge of honor.

Are there dangers in lending an institution’s prophetic message to the world of profit? You bet. A thin line exists. Carefully managing it is key.

Read Tova Reich’s My Holocaust for a satirical send up of how the philanthropic Holocaust industry “Make Your Cause a Holocaust” gets diluted and exploited and goes haywire from over exposure.

But while most advertising is derivative, taking its cues from pop culture and using them to sell stuff, in a world where advertising needs to be entertainment and important information needs advertising, the lines flow both ways.

Advertising, while a flimsy medium on its own, actually benefits by the weight of the world’s problems but has the pockets sewn in to help sustain it.

Brands, while possessing an ephemeral essence were at one point only figments of some creative director’s imagination. Now however, they live in the same world that we do and they’re here to stay. They’re as tactile as the Apple I’m pounding this out on.

Finding the right way to use them, for the benefit of humankind, is a notion that can go right to the heart of Judaism’s central belief in Tikkun olam. Again, like a brand, a metaphysical notion but grounded in the real world.

Jewlaska

2007-05-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

Glad we Jews don’t dwell in Alaska. I for one have too much chicken fat clogging my hardened arteries from generations of Litvaks who gorged on the Jewish ambrosia preventing the warm flow of blood from my heart down to my toes.

But what if, instead of singing Ha Tikva, we were chanting Ha Sitka? In his new alternate reality novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon charts Alaska as the homeland for the Jews (“Sitka”) instead of Israel and the Chosen have chosen Yiddish as their vernacular.

Rather than winning the 1948 Arab-Israel war, we lost and are given a section of the 49th state. In a revamping of history, after 60 years up there, we now have to give it back in what’s termed a Reversion.

While the real artic is melting, imagining Israel’s defeat sent chills down my spine in the southerly direction of my cold feet. Call me a Zionist, but I’m really just a desert loving, warm and sandy, beach bum with a built in thermostat for Mediterranean temps over the cold Kodiak. (I could never bear watching Northern Exposure even though I liked Rob Morrow’s quirky, comedic style.)

Basking in the late heat of spring, I was cracking the new book open when, around the same time I came across a news item on the JTA (Jewish Telegraph Agency) which equally got my heart beating, eliciting a reverb on my dangling Mogen David. The headline read, “Jews question flying Israeli flag” which details how a number of Jewish organizations, student groups and synagogues are questioning how appropriate it is to display the kahol and lavan.

According to Benj Kamm, a former Hillel Student President at Brown who got quoted in the wire story, “Most people, but not all agreed that the flag was an Israeli nationalist symbol, although people disagreed about to what extent we as a Jewish community were obligated to support Israel, and in what ways.”

Ostensibly, there’s a debate over whether it’s too potent and nationalistic a symbol in its appearance. Does it convey the same emblematic message it once did or are the six points a flashpoint and lightning rod for a hotly divisive issue even among Jews?

Having been a part of similar discussions, I was aware of the banter when it comes to banners. I’m one who favors the presence of the Israeli flag on the bimah. I grew up with it. Literally, looked up to it and cannot imagine what, in a Chabonian world, the Alaskan flag with its eight gold stars and North Star would be like to gaze on.

It’s that “what if” scenario and that altered state which his novel shakes up and dislodges, creating an avalanche of emotions that makes for a heated debate. By crossing the border of reality, I was made to think of what it would be like if there were no Israeli flag to discuss. What if there weren’t one to get wrapped up in and wrangle over? Maybe then, its absence would make our hearts look yonder?

The repeated refrain in the book reads, “These are strange times to be a Jew”; a universal statement transcending time that could be uttered now or at any point in our history. But as a Jew today and with a sense of Eretz Yisrael, such a tectonic shift forced me to reach out and grab hold of something to ground me. Absence of a flag and pole to base me, I’m off kilter. It’s world shattering to my sense of earthly balance.

Yiddish was the language of the Diaspora, a non-territorial lingo with a romantic lilt woven into it. Having practically vanished, it’s finding a revival stitching together diverse textures of Jewish culture throughout the globe. It’s something that, in its absence, paradoxically makes us long for it more.

For those who wish to remove the Israeli flag, perhaps truly imagining no flag is a terrain worth envisioning.

Jew.0

2007-04-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

Recently I flew with my son to grandma’s house. Upon boarding the plane, once the doors were sealed like a tomb and my son was settled in next to me, I noticed Southwest’s magazine Spirit poking out of the seat pocket in front and on the cover was an article that got me thinking.

If the world is flat, are we about to fall off the edge into an unknown universe? The article was about Second Life.

While it’s debatable if Jewish souls live forever in an Olam Ha-Ba (the World to Come), Jews have clearly found a Second Life.

If you’ve haven’t been transported yet, Second Life (SL) is a virtual world which exists on the Internet and according to its website has over 5 million “residents”. Some accounts report that number to be greatly exaggerated as several residents might belong to one person. In the world of second life, residents are avatars or animated characters that embody characteristics of your own choosing.

As God made man in his own image, so man plays God recreating another version (usually more buff than real life or RL.)

Second Life has a synagogue, a yeshiva as well as a Holocaust museum. It also just published its own Jewish Magazine 2Life. Separately, I looked over the first issue which seeks to cover “the multiple Jewish aspects and developments on this virtual platform with news, background reporting and features on a monthly basis.”

I’d previously read some articles about Second Life and even poked around a bit, but flying over the real world and above the clouds at night watching the sunset next to your child is a RL experience that’s hard, if not impossible, to replicate. Okay, avid users would disagree and would remind me that in SL, you don’t even need a plane to fly. The main mode of transportation is teleporting where your avatar can float above like in a Chagall painting.

Staring out the airplane’s window in RL gazing at the lighted cities also got me thinking about the dangers this world offers. It made me wonder if Second Life is a kind of fallout shelter for our society at a time when we’re in need of a place to hide.

It’s no such thing. Second Life is created by humans and retains the same good, bad and ugly aspects.

For example, Reuters, which has a news center in SL (no kidding), reports that weaponry is a booming business. There have also been reports of terrorism and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, which established a virtual HQ, has rioted with Leftist organizations.

While nobody really gets physically hurt, you can lose money and lots of it. SL includes a virtual exchange center, where real dough can be converted into Linden dollars for use on the site and as of this writing $1,744,027 has been spent.

It’s fascinating to observe and wonder why we go to such lengths to dream up such fantastic worlds.

Judaism’s guiding principles are to value this life, as both The Torah and Talmud focus on the purpose of earthly life. SL seems to be an attempt to find the spiritual world. The schism between RL and shadows on the wall is as old as Plato and Aristotle and in fact Tehiyat Hameitim means the Resurrection of the Dead and is a concept that entered Judaism under a Hellenistic influence long after the Torah was completed.

Second Life is no afterlife, but perhaps it’s our all to human attempt at it.

Returning to the place of my birth with my son was a kind of spiritual journey. Not long into the flight home, he took out his Superman book where we played and read all about that other strange visitor from another planet.

That’s when I figured, if a nice Jewish boy from Krypton can find and make a second life here on earth, so can we.

HyperEvil

2007-03-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

Some movies stick with you for days, weeks and sometimes, a lot longer. They can occupy a space in your mind that provokes a sudden chuckle while driving alone in the car. Other times, they reinforce the creepy realization that the world is filled with despicable souls, buttressing the presence of evil in the world.

Lost in the Cineplex this past week, I was caught in evil’s grip. I took in the epic Battle of Thermopylae, between East and West in 300 and the trail of a serial killer in Zodiac.

Both films were based on historical facts. Both are stories that resonate today.

One was a large-scale projection of a gruesome war and a film adaptation of a graphic novel shot against a Bluescreen to duplicate the imagery and style of the original book.

The other, a tighter, more focused lens on the evil of one depraved man, a demon who embodied a killer.

One was the socio-political battle between good and evil on a grand scale. The other, a psychologically twisted mystery, almost unbearable to watch, because it was so real in its depiction.

Both, while just movies, smacked of today’s headlines bringing them that much closer to home (literally, on my driveway.)

At the bus stop where I drop my son off and as I waited on the corner with all the children, I started to describe to a neighborhood mom the effect Zodiac had on me. In one particular scene, the murderer endangers a child. Her reply was, “I can’t watch those kinds of things.” I understood. In the theatre, there were times I had to turn away and not look.

But when I came back home and picked up The Baltimore Sun, my eyes were met with a monster’s and a headline that read, “Killer casts a shadow of violence.” According to The Sun, Lawrence Banks was convicted of shooting to death a friend in Pasadena and then his own son in Baltimore on the same day in 1991. He killed his son because the son and a daughter claimed that Banks had abused them, the daughter sexually and both of them physically.

In 1976, he had been sentenced to 15 years for throwing that daughter, then a 7-month-old, through a glass door during an argument with his wife. Just before Banks went to trial in that case, his wife was found dead in an East Baltimore apartment. Her body was so decomposed that the medical examiner could not determine a cause of death.

Reading this news I was stunned at the malevolence. I had to read it again; to be sure I was soaking it in. Moments earlier, describing what I thought was distant celluloid and so easy to dismiss, seeped back into my doorway.

That was the front page. On the one where movies are listed, I found that
300 has angered Iranians who say the action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran. Remembering what happened a few years ago, after Danish cartoons set off riots throughout the Muslim world, I wondered, given the tension today, how “epic” things could get.

Our world is like one of those overhead projectors we had in high school. We read the news and think reality couldn’t get any worse. Then we layer on top it another sheet of cellophane causing us to see that same image, in a completely different, often more distorted, way.

Earlier this month, the French critic and theorist, Jean Baudrillard died. He theorized a world of hyperreality. Wikipedia defines hyperreality as a world of simulation where illusion is what is real and where a consciousness loses its ability to distinguish reality from fantasy.

Spliced between headlines and movielines, where global conflicts and metro crime are across the aisle, one can’t escape the intersection these parallel worlds pull us down into.

The reel is real and the real is reel.

Iranna

2007-02-24T06:46:00.000-08:00

Combining the hoopla of Anna Nicole with the seriousness of Iran, I came up with ––Iranna.

Like one of Anna Nicole’s spaghetti straps hanging on for dear life, support for Bush’s war is being stretched to its limit. America is ready to snap.

The heavy weight of what was an inflated false reality possessing a serious lack of intelligence, has become a pathetic attempt at propping up a vapid, apparitional illusion.

Observing the deceased starlet pose and preen for the cameras, knowing there was nothing in the way of integrity behind her empty veneer, only brought to light how the war, like she, was manufactured synthetically.

Underneath this garment of death that’s Iraq, has been a tabloid media unwilling or unable to stop itself on the catwalk to perdition.

This was made evident last week on PBS when Frontline’s News War: Secrets, Sources & Spin reported how the press created an echo chamber for an administration intent on war. Courageously, Frontline also collapsed the image of the gallant reporter from revealer of truth to lapdog.

In an online discussion after the program and sponsored by the Washington Post with Producer Raney Aronson, one viewer wrote, “Bob Woodward -- perhaps the most eminent American journalist – was shown in the program last night saying “there was a zero percent chance that there are no WMDs in Iraq.” The MSM (main stream media) journalists like Woodward were so taken in by the Administration that they lost their independence and judgment – perhaps forever.”

That’s a serious disintegration of trust. Yet that response wasn’t the only one expressing such a concern and with a majority of Americans disapproving of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq, the feeling of being duped and mislead by our government is only part of the story. By threading the false line from Al-Qaeda to WMD in the drumbeat of war, the media became the enabler to the fabrication.

Of more serious concern today is how that same media loop, that swirls celebrities like Anna Nicole at us on an endless cycle, is caught pumping out more of the same lines when it comes to Iran.

The run-up to Iraq is back. After reacting to the boy who cried Wolfowitz, a skeptical country––one marred by four years of war, over 3,100 dead soldiers and a burned media––is suspiciously turning its camera gaze on Iran.

Rewinding the tape back, Iraq certainly seemed for many of us an ominous threat. We were still in a daze after being hit, followed by the jingoistic jolt of war’s intoxicating lure.

But now, with the clearer distance of time and analysis to tame us, wrestling with Iran in light of Iraq, has become a far more cautious exercise and one we’re unwilling to race toward even with the gun ready to go off.

Ever so soberly, walking a dangerous line we ask, “What if Ahmadinejad is the real wolf––his casual look only a sheep’s disguise? What if his promises of wiping Israel off the map are not false threats but replicas of Hitler sketches?”

We’ve sewn ourselves into a tough spot.

American’s are in no shape, nor do they have the stomach for a war with Iran. Hawking a sequel, when most of us want to return the original version, we’re caught, frozen in frame.

Cosmetic surgery, like a quickie air-war to take out the nukes may sound revitalizing, like a weekend at Canyon Ranch, but is it really the way to deal with the fundamental problem? (Temporary fix. What’ll it look like after?)

Long-term, like any celeb entering detox, we need to wean ourselves off the oil drug and whip ourselves into ecological shape by getting rid of the flabby dirty pollutants rife in our system.

Anna Nicole was clearly the embodiment of something unreal and phony, yet we couldn’t seem to get enough of her. (No wonder Jewish mothers warned us of latching onto big blonde shiksas!)

Her recurring phantom specter the last two weeks, left me wondering how we ever became wedded to this war through an overblown and puffed up media and why, another romp with the wrong bombshell, should be avoided at all costs.

just getting started

2007-02-05T16:10:00.000-08:00

more to come...hang in there.

First blog

2007-01-28T12:38:00.000-08:00

Hey Kam,

it's ready to go!