Welcome to Arkansas: The entrance to the play Over seven million people have seen the Great Passion Play of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, since its opening in 1969. The play was founded by a Midwestern preacher and politician, Gerald L.K. Smith, whose thrice-failed bid for president promised “the preservation of our Christian faith against the threat of Jew Communism.” It has been re-written several times since Smith’s death in 1976, and I wanted to see if it still reflected its anti-Semitic roots—not only was Smith an avowed foe of “Christ-hating Jews,” but Passion plays as a genre have a troubled history dating back to the Middle Ages. The most interesting way to see the show, I decided, was from the inside. So I volunteered as an extra.

While researching Rapture Ready, my exploration of Christian pop culture, I planned always to identify myself and my intentions honestly. But The Great Passion Play has had some bad experience with the media so I decided, just this once, to go incognito… and just avoid any outright lies. I called the 800 number and asked if there were any openings.

The man who answered seemed disappointed that I hadn’t seen the show. “We usually ask people to be familiar with the play first.”

“I understand,” I said, seeing my opportunity slip away. “but I was really hoping to do this.” And then I heard myself say, “It’s something I felt called to do.”

“Do you have your own sandals?” he asked.

“You the fella from New York?” A man wearing a security badge gripped my hand and led me through a gate into first century Jerusalem. The effect of the set, which stretched the length of two football fields, was stunning: Sand and grit swirled around a dense row of buildings. Jars of clay rested alongside a stone well. It was as if an entire street had been lifted out of time and plopped down at the base of an Arkansas hill.

The guard pointed me backstage to a small, bunker-like dressing room crowded with men and women in period dress sipping Diet Cokes. The room’s matron sized me up for a costume — a pile of rough, earth-toned linen and rope – and introduced me to a big man with a warm, snaggletoothed smile. “My name’s Danny,” he said.

People get ready: Radosh's book“I’m Daniel.”

“Well how about that!”

I liked Danny immediately. He explained that as an extra, my job would be to enhance the illusion of a bustling city, carrying props and making appropriate gesticulations in crowd scenes. I would not have any lines, but then, nobody would, really. All the dialogue in The Great Passion Play is pre-recorded and played through loudspeakers at the front of the seats. Actors lip-synch their dialogue with broad gestures. The audience, 20 feet above the set and at least 400 feet from where most of the action takes place, is too far away to actually hear anything, so Danny could talk me through scenes as we do them. “Some nights I play King Herod,” he said wistfully as I belted my mantle. “Tonight I’m just a traveler, so you can be my assistant or something.”

“OK, your attention please, everybody.” The matron came out from behind her counter. “A few quick announcements. We’re a small group again tonight, so when Jesus comes out, please do not all run over to him. We need to keep the stage populated. If you feel the need to go to Jesus, at least try not to bunch up.” She went on to an issue that was apparently related to the reduced number of volunteer actors. “The office has made an important decision about next season. Starting in the spring, we’ll have Monday nights off too. Now let’s pray.”

A few minutes later I was outside, waiting with Danny at the dark end of an alley for our cue. “We’ll follow the sheep,” said Danny. A couple of giggly children in shepherd costumes slapped each other playfully.

The music began. The kids chased a dozen sheep onto the set and we set off after them. Around us, women fetched water from the well, priests climbed the temple steps, and everyone made way for a man leading a camel. I followed Danny confidently through this chaos to the far side of the stage, where we stepped into the semi-darkness and stopped again. My first scene was over.

While we waited offstage again, a spotlight came up on a palace, where the Sanhedrin, the council of Jewish priests, was holding an urgent discussion.

“What are we to do? This man does many miracles.” The priests waved their arms for attention as their lines played through the loudspeakers.

“If we do not intervene, all men will believe in him!” Considering that the dialogue needed to be recorded only once, you’d think it would have been done by professional actors. This did not seem to be the case.

In the next scene, Danny and I stepped out through a stone arch and were confronted by two teenage centurions in red cloaks and crested helmets. “Halt!” boomed a voice over the loudspeaker. The unamplified soldiers pawed at our satchels. “What do you got in there, drugs?” one asked. We ambled over toward Herod’s palace where we pantomimed a sales pitch for earthenware pots until the king and queen threw oversized wooden shekels at us. “I want a receipt,” the queen joked.

The greatest story ever acted out via loudspeaker: The stage at the Great Passion Play The main action, of course, was taking place elsewhere. But it was difficult to hear the speakers from where we were, so I had very little idea what was going on until Jesus rode in on an ass and everybody ran over to him, just as we had been instructed not to do.

He began grasping outstretched hands like a politician working a rope line. “Did you touch him?” Danny asked me. From his gestures, I gathered this was meant to be in character.

"I couldn’t get close enough.”

Danny nodded. “He’s our best Jesus. We’ve got three, but he’s the one who really looks the part.” The crowd dispersed as Jesus began healing lepers. “That’s a good role,” Danny continued. “He gets a lot of lines.”

As the action moved back to the temple we stayed off to the side, populating the stage. Danny asked me, “So, do you go to church up there in New York?”

“Uh… Yeah, sure.” It’s not exactly a lie, I told myself. We just call it “synagogue.”

“What kind?”

“Nondenominational.” OK, that was a lie, but at least it would end this line of questioning.

“Church of Christ?”

Fuck. I mentally riffled through the books I’d been reading about evangelicalism. If he asked, does it mean he’s Church of Christ? “No… Uh…” Danny smiled kindly waiting for me to go on. And then, just at that moment, Jesus saved me. Not in his usual manner, but by causing a distraction — kicking over tables on the temple steps.

Hey, that lamp-thing in the corner looks familiar: The Sanhedrin, via the Great Passion Play website By my next scene, the tide had turned against Jesus. “Shake your fist or something,” Danny advised. Jesus was paraded past us in chains, and it fell to Danny’s character to turn to a neighbor and deliver the line that would express our growing antipathy toward this false prophet. Raising his arms, Danny caught a buddy’s eye. “I just realized,” he mock shouted, as the loudspeaker blared his actual dialogue. “With the new schedule, not working Monday nights, we’re going to get to see every single NFL game!”

Off stage again, Danny and I watched a guilt-ridden Judas hurl his blood money to the floor. “He’s a pilot for Wal-Mart,” Danny said. “Whenever one of the executives wants to fly somewhere, he’s the guy that takes them. He makes good money doing that.”

“Well he’s making good money here tonight.”

Perhaps for the best, Danny missed my lame thirty-pieces-of-silver joke. “Nah, not so much,” he replied. “He makes maybe twenty, thirty dollars a night. The Christ figures, they make a hundred and twenty.”

“Why do you do it?” I asked.

“Ministry,” he said quickly and earnestly. We looked back at the stage. “And put a little extra money in my pocket,” he added. “Plus we get free tickets to all the shows in Branson.”

Danny stood. “Big scene coming up,” he told me. We navigated toward the alley where we would make our next entrance, avoiding the audience’s sight lines. Along the way, we passed three women in their early 20s gossiping happily. “These girls are from Texas,” Danny said as we stopped to say hello. “Daniel here is from New York.”

“New York?” gasped one, laughing. “Get a rope!” From her hasty, “Only joking” I gathered that she was indeed proposing a lynching, and that she thought this was something to joke about. Much later, a non-New Yorker informed me that she was probably parroting a catch phrase from a regional salsa commercial. That might have made a difference.

A palace in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago. Outside, a crowd has gathered. Pontius Pilate steps forward as his soldiers drag a beaten Jesus behind him. “As you can all see, this poor man has been punished severely,” he tells the onlookers. “Therefore it is my desire, in expression of the goodness of Rome, to release him.”

The crowd explodes. “No! No! He must be crucified!”

“But why? Clearly this man has done nothing to deserve death. Therefore, I propose to let him off with a flogging.” Two soldiers tie Jesus to a post and begin lashing him as the crowd screams for blood. When it is over, Pilate stands above him. “Behold your king. He has been flogged, beaten, ridiculed, spit upon. What more can you want?” “He must be crucified!” The crowd shrieks as one. “Crucify him! Still, the compassionate Pilate can not believe his ears. “Crucify him?” “Crucify him!” Pilate calls for a bowl of water. “My hands are clean of this innocent man’s blood. I ask you one last and final time, what would you have me do with him?” “Crucify him!”

Another Great Passion Play attraction: Christ of the Ozarks I don’t know how this scene played in the audience. No doubt the hammy acting, the stiff dialogue, the church-pageant costumes and cornball music all worked mightily against any emotional engagement. But as I stood in the jostling crowd on that dusty set, some strange alchemy took place. There were spectators out there somewhere, but all I could see was inky darkness. The sky, far from any city, was black and dizzy with stars, exactly as it must have been two thousand years ago. All around me, dozens of presumably well-meaning Christians were representing themselves as Jews and acting out a scene that for centuries has been used to justify hatred and oppression.

Not only was I feeling sick about being along for the ride, but I started to have this mad hallucination that I had fallen into some eternal retelling of this story — that I was back at the actual moment of Jesus’s ordeal; or rather, at the moment when whatever in fact happened on that day was first re-experienced as a story of persecution by a Jewish mob. I was under the gaze not merely of a few hundred contemporary Americans but of all past and future generations. I was at a lynchpin of history, and I had choice: be complicit in this grotesque distortion of events — or try to change it.

“Maybe we should reconsider this!” I shouted desperately. “Maybe a flogging is enough!”

Danny laughed. He hadn’t heard that one before. The audience couldn’t hear me, of course, but they could see me. The rest of the cast shouted and shook their fists. From behind me, four Jews emerged with masks over their faces and cudgels in their hands, pushing through the crowd to get in a few more shots at the fallen Jesus.

I waved my arms for them to stop. I turned away, burying my face in my hands. I exaggerated every movement so that even from 400 feet away the audience might see something that they had never witnessed before, never considered: a compassionate Jew who was not willing to accept Jesus as the messiah, but who didn’t want him tortured to death either.

The jeering crowd followed Jesus offstage as he dragged his heavy cross and set off up the hillside to Golgotha of the Ozarks, and I genuinely felt like I’d failed. Danny put a hand out to stop me. “It’s pretty steep up there, and we don’t have insurance for volunteers.”

Watching the end of the drama unfold, I felt glum. My silly gestures hadn’t made the Passion play any less offensive, and as for dispelling the stereotype of cunning, manipulative Jews — I fiddled with the digital recorder I’d hidden in my pocket and tried to count the lies and half-truths that had brought me here. I imagined the look of disappointment on Danny’s face.

But I don’t think I deserved to be lynched.

Excerpted from Rapture Ready! by Daniel Radosh, published by Scribner.

Efrim Menuck fronts the band currently named Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band—a band whose appellation, along with its sound, changes and grows with each new release. Currently, the band is a seven-piece composed of (among other instruments) violins, guitars, and a cello—and group choral chanting. Their newest release, Thirteen Blues for Thirteen Moons, finds the band in a more aggressive, rock-edged mood than usual, supplanting their experimental punk backgrounds (Menuck, along with the band’s violinist and bassist, also play in the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor). Just landed from their European tour, Menuck graciously filled us in on the band’s philosophy, writing habits, and the Facebook invasion of Canada.Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band: chilling in a field

I can't make up my mind whether your music and the imagery of your lyrics and albums reminds me more of old Baptist church spirituals, or old Jewish ones. Is that intentional?

We grab water from both of those rivers, because faith is a lovely thing, even if you don't believe in God. It's partly why the band is named after Mt. Zion—it's the holy mountain in the awful desert that illuminates the choruses of Baptist hymns, dusty klezmer tunes, and 6-minute dubplates. Also, I spent grades one through nine at Hebrew day school, and came home every night to my atheist father, who would try to undo any little thing I’d happened to learn that day.

This means that, somewhere in my little pea-brain, there's a knotted scar where the secular and the godly have fused; means that I tend to see things in terms of good and evil, write large, and means that I believe in congregations, hymns and prayers but not in God, so when I try to put words together to sing on top of this music that we all write together, that jumble just pours out of me, worried and conflicted and messy as hell.

Critics keep talking about your music as protest music, but it seems less like specific issue-oriented protests than protesting the system in general—a nonspecific cry to start over, build anew.

Yeah, for us it's all a raucous blues or joyful punk-rock implosion, but if we had to semaphore our primary complaints and concerns, it'd probably go something like this: The world's a mess, and we're led by murderous thieves who keep dragging us unwillingly ever closer to the gaping precipice.

What's your writing process like? Does one person come up with an idea for a song, or do you all start jamming and then run with it?

Our writing process is slow and backwards. We start with a handful of riffs, and hammer at them for hours on end, until some sort of rough counterpoints start to bloom. Then we break it all into little pieces, strew ’em all over the floor of our jamspace and then put them back together again as best we can. When the whole teetering pile is almost structurally sound, I'll start throwing words at it, and tangles of melody too, to harmonize with us all singing at once.

Then we bring these songs with us on the road and dump them into the laps of whatever audience has blessed us with their kindness and grace on any given night, and repeat that narrative, like long laps on a dimly-lit track, until the song itself is weathered, dented and true.

Is the music scene in Montreal going through a real golden age, or is it just attracting more attention? What's it like up there?

No, it's no golden age in Montreal right now. Skyrocketing rents, an overabundance of Facebook-obsessed university students, and an oversaturation of self-promotional A&R types has led to a state of affairs whereby most gigs glow with the impermanence of a flash-mob instead of any sort of self-sustaining community.

There's still a bunch of tiny, crucial glimmering flames though, and, like in any large city, there's a constant surplus of good people doing good work in the lovely shadows.

Are there a lot of Jews involved in the scene? Is it a coincidence, or did you grow up with other people who were into the same influences as you were?

No more Jews than any other scene, I guess; Mt. Zion's got four Jews and three goys, but most of Montreal's Jews took off when the FLQ [the extremist Front de liberation du Québec] started planting mailbox bombs in the early seventies. I spent most of my punk-rock adolescence being the only Jew in the room, so it's nice to feel a little less isolated these days, especially ’round the high holidays.

In "Blindblindblind," you sing, "My the light of our striving still shine." It almost feels like a prayer for something beyond—beyond the album, beyond the band, a kind of creative immortality. How do you want your music to be remembered?

Bad endings can ruin even the best story, so the only thing I know for sure is how I don't want things to end—the world is not a kind place for musicians, and there are very few happy endings in the grand historia de la rock, means that I don't want die poor and alone, nor do I want to be the vain jerk in the diaper stinking up the stage at the retro-festival, and while I hope that our band's stubborn little discography still glimmers with its own hard-won internal logic 30 years from now, I’m more concerned with a more achievable type of permanence. Good friends, a healthy family, and a couple of crucial smudges and footprints across our collective histories sounds more than pretty good to me.

Life that swirls in the scraps of swallows in the early evening,
reaching out red from within the flower,
sprawling lazily along the entire length of the cat,
barking and then listening for a moment to itself within the dog,
fluttering in the gecko's transparent belly,
hiding behind the appearance of separate forms
moving inside the wheat or frozen in a trampled badger's body
on one side of the road
all, all of this -
life that defines itself and deconstructs in philosophers' minds
twisting in the bodies of spring vipers
or whispered by a cold carp,
its mystery glistening in the geometry of spider webs,
endlessly gushing, green, from the earth
or wandering restless in the bodies of storks
all -
rustling in thickets,
strangling the lovely homes with clutching ivy,
steaming through the window from the pots of barley soup,
dispersed in the semen scent of flowering carob
rising in bellies and in poems the length of a cigarette,
Life that exhales now between the ribs
in the heart's harmonica
all of this --
inside you -- blood and bone
inside me
now.

Continue reading...

Israel's Yellow Vented Bulbul: one of ten in the running for national birdIt has recently become a bit of an issue here in Israel that there is no national bird, and so sixty years on, we're finally adopting a bird to symbolize the country. Britain is proud of its little Robin with its red breast, America boasts of its bald Eagle, and Japan celebrates its own aesthetic in the shape of the elegant Crane—now Israel will join the flock.

The scheme to match Israel with her bird representative is the brainchild of Dr. Yossi Leshem, pioneering Israeli ornithologist, senior researcher in the Zoology Department at Tel Aviv University, and Director of the International Centre for the study of Bird Migration in Israel. Leshem is justly proud of the scheme, and explains that “Birds are an essential part of the future of Israel’s landscape and environment. Public awareness will be drawn to Israel’s natural ecosystem and the bird’s habitat.”

Leshem and his co-initiator Dan Alon of the Israel Ornithology Centre, based near the Knesset in Jerusalem, have designed an educational project that gives both schoolchildren in Israel's 4,000 schools (and 9500 nursery schools), and soldiers across all the IDF’s regiments, the chance to acquaint themselves with the birds that have been chosen for the contest. 13 fighter planes from the IAF have been named after birds, and the military is taking an active interest in the project.

In my garden in Jerusalem I am oft woken early to a wonderful trilling that I swear sounds like, “Here’s Gabriel." On Shabbat, it becomes “Swing Gabriel swing,” but none of the experts has as of yet identified it. A blackbird recently built her nest close by, and I often hear her young feeding. It's always a good reminder that we share this environment with such a rich plethora of bird life, all trying to adapt to sharing space with humans.

This past December, over 1000 bird lovers—fondly known in the trade as ‘twitchers’—were offered the chance to draw up a list of 10 species who might fit the bill as Israel's National Bird. Criteria for these 10 include the number of times they are referenced in biblical sources, the color, and the sound of the feathered friend.

Here are the 10 most favored.  To study their glorious plumage in technicolor, check out our photo gallery.

1. The Hoopoe (Duchifat, Heb.)
2. Yellow Tufted Sunbird – (Tsufit). This bird is also known as the Palestine Sunbird, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t become the feathered face of Israel on a stamp…
3. Barn Owl (Tinshemet)
   
4. Lesser Kestrel (Buz Adom)
   
5. Yellow Vented Bulbul (Bulbul)
   
6. Griffin Vulture (Nesher)
   
7. European Goldfinch (Chochit)
   
8. Spur-Winged Plover (Siksak)
   
9. Graceful Warbler (Pashosh)
   
10. White Breasted Kingfisher (Lavan Hazeh)
    

Whether this will just mean another icon for the stamps, or whether the contest and accompanying educational campaigns will result in real environmental and ornithological awareness remains to be seen. Voting ends tomorrow, May 8, and President Peres will announce which of these birds the nation has chosen on May 29th, at a special ceremony in Jerusalem. Israel-focussed environmental website Green Prophet, where I also blog regularly, is running a special online poll here. So if you know your Hoopoe from your Plover, or your Warbler from your Bulbul, get involved and add your vote.

View the gallery of contenders.

Apologist For Islamism?: Well doesn't he look like one? Writing at Pajamas Media, New York Post film critic Kyle Smith gives Jon Favreau's new Iron Man movie 3 out of 4 stars. Which is a pretty generous rating, considering that Smith has discovered that Iron Man and Iron Man --- both the film and the character --- are rooting for our defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else. That's right ladies and gentlemen, the tentacles of the Islamofascist octopus stretch farther than you thought; indeed, they've poisoned the #1 grossing movie in America. Fortunately Smith was able to recognize the threat and sound the alarum --- otherwise Ali Jon al Favreau bin Omar might have succeeded in corroding the will of armchair amateur warriors that's so crucial to maintaining neoconservatives' paranoid cocoon our struggle against Islamic radicalism.

And how did Smith manage this startling deduction? Iron Man is "another America-as-root-of-all-evil message" because at some point along the way, Robert Downey, Jr./Tony Stark/Iron Man, a weapons manufacturer, decides to get out of the biz when he "realizes his products can't be kept out of evil hands." And not to give anything away, but the comic book Iron Man is basically an ally of the US government, and the film in no way makes any radical revision of the character.

That's. It.

Iron Man doesn't even weakly imply that the terrorists are anything but bad guys. It doesn't imply that Americans are anything but good guys. It doesn't imply that US foreign or military policy is in any way objectionable or even flawed; it doesn't imply that US private citizens are involved in objectionable enterprises. It merely suggests that if terrorists were to get hold of weapons that happen to be made by an American, they would do bad things with them.

So apparently, unless you agree that anything made in the USA is so pure, holy, and righteous that it'll repel Islamofascists like garlic on vampires, or perhaps melt them like Nazis in front of the Ark of the Covenant, then you, my friend, lack moral clarity. Don't despair though: There's no shortage of people who have the moral clarity to see that waterboarding isn't torture, and who will be more than happy to set you right.

Observing the wreckage of Smith's review, Julian Sanchez writes: "What’s intolerable is any hint of ambiguity, any hint of doubt. This is the fragile insistence of a movement that has lost its confidence."

But has the mishmash of neoconservatism, psychopathological vicarious living through soldiers in the field, and apolitical belligerent nationalism that constitute Bush Republicanism ever tolerated a hint of ambiguity or doubt? I distinctly remember the roll call of the Ships of the Decent in 2002, embarking on their Iliadic journey to Baghdad by sacrificing former comrades who voiced doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise to appease Artemis Ahmad Chalabi. (I remember because I was part of that cadre.) And I remember the Glorious Summer of War in 2003, when it was pretty much the same story, except with more smugness and premature triumphalism.

Suppose, at any time from the moment the dust of the towers settled, until... --- what time is it now? --- you suggested that invading sovereign states under conditions of dubious international legitimacy, occupying them in a manner indistinguishable from what someone seeking to stoke a nationalist uprising would have done, and establishing a regime of torture in lieu of a functioning judicial system, weren't the awesomest and decentest ideas ever. In that case, you can be sure some self-righteous scrivener would be only too happy to accuse you of cheering for our defeat.

On the other hand, there is plenty of independent evidence for Julian's claim that the war party has lost its confidence, cf. their apparent determination to run the principal exponent of their ideology for president not on any platform, not for any positive program, not against any presidential candidate, but against a few irrelevant petrified relics of the 60s radical left.

Our next president shouldn’t be a person of faith but a person of doubt. So says Bill Maher, one of the country's most outspoken doubters. His new film, Religulous, directed by Borat’s Larry Charles, follows the irreverent humorist as he travels the globe talking to people about God and religion. Maher and the crew employed self-described guerrilla filming to get their shots (at the Vatican, at the Wailing Wall), and the prospect of watching them in action seems too good (and controversial and potentially offensive) to resist.

While the film didn’t hit its anticipated Easter release, it's currently slated for a June 20 opening. Here’s Maher talking to Larry King about the film.

Lucette Lagnado is this year's recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Her family memoir is reviewed by Tamar Yellin who won last year's prize for fiction. Although only established in 2006, the Sami Rohr Prize has established itself as the pre-eminent prize for Jewish writers not least because it is worth $100,000 for a writer of, in alternating years, Jewish fiction and Jewish non-fiction.

-- Dan Friedman, Zeek Associate Editor

The author: Lagnado Towards the end of Lucette Lagnado's memoir of her family's flight from Cairo to America, she describes the celebration of the Passover seder in her parents' Brooklyn home: the sorting of the rice, the polishing of the silverware, the candlelit search for leaven. Above all comes the retrieval out of the basement, from one of the twenty-six suitcases they brought with them on the boat from Alexandria and which, years later, still remain to be unpacked, of the porcelain dishes, liqueur glasses and tiny spoons with which they taste the haroseth. Yet at the climax of all these preparations, "No matter how loudly we sang, our holiday had become not a celebration of the exodus from Egypt, but the inverse - a longing to return to the place we were supposedly glad to have left."

This is the paradox which sits at the heart of Lagnado's Sami Rohr Prize-winning book, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: the paradox of exile. Jews who have left Egypt, who sing praises to God for having brought them out of Egypt, long to return there. The book is prefaced by a quote from Numbers 11:4-6, where the Children of Israel lament the "cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic" that they ate in slavery (and the book is a homage, as much as anything, to the glories of Levantine and Egyptian food). The Lagnado family's exodus is a fall from grace: no redemption, no Promised Land, but for some of its members, an eternal wandering in the desert.

The subversion of the Exodus is of a piece with the subversion of identity which Lagnado painstakingly anatomises. Early on we learn that her father Leon, the dapper-suited boulevardier of the title, is "both an Arab and a Jew." Raised in Cairo, he is an exile twice over, for his family originally hail from Aleppo, and the Jews of Aleppo are "intensely Jewish, intensely Arab." "‘We are Arab, madame,'" he tells Mrs Kirschner, the social worker in charge of their Americanisation. What's more, in the new land in which he reluctantly finds himself, he intends to remain Arab. These paradoxes of exile are as fundamental to Jewish experience as they are to the nature of Jewish identity.

The memoir offers us an insight into the sheer messiness and confusion of forced migration, something which those who have never experienced it simply cannot comprehend. Forbidden to remove money or valuables from Nasser's Egypt, the wealthy Lagnado family spend the weeks before their departure liquidating their assets and turning them into clothes - one of the few items they are allowed to take with them in bulk. Hence the twenty-six suitcases. Leon is measured up for handmade suits (but no more white ones; they will no longer be appropriate where he is going) and his wife Edith for polka-dot summer dresses she will never wear (it is 1963), while six-year-old Lucette (Loulou), the youngest of their four children, acquires numerous pairs of flannel pyjamas she will surely have outgrown in a year or so; but there is no real logic in these preparations. It isn't clear what they intend to do with the yards of Egyptian cotton and rich brocade with which the suitcases are stuffed. Sell them, perhaps? They never do. The suitcases become a liability, a heavy symbol of all they have lost and the weight of regret they carry. Ultimately, they and all their contents are destroyed in a fire.

In the same way, stranded in Paris, that universal transit point for European refugees, the family vacillates over whether to flee to Israel or America, causing much irritation to the agencies who are trying to aid them. Squeezed into a shabby hotel room with their suitcases, subsisting on handouts, they argue with each other, fall ill, miss appointments, lose interest in their appearance and change their minds. Israel seems the obvious destination, but life there for new immigrants is harsh and primitive, opportunities limited, the boys would be drafted and there is the constant threat of war. Three close relatives who relocated there have died in quick succession. It would take a harsh nature to judge the Lagnados - still in shock from their sudden fall into poverty - for their fears and indecision; exactly the kind of harshness which judges and condemns migrants the world over until this day.

America is no fulfilment of a dream. To the youngsters it is the land of Elvis and Chubby Checker, of "carefree, fun-loving culture" and Hollywood glamour. But it is also a land of apples wrapped in cellophane and plastic flowers, of roses without scent and profound cultural dissonance. "In Egypt, it was easy to be religious and worldly at the same time, but that seemed an impossibility here in America." Loulou learns not to mention that she is from Cairo; at school she pretends she is French. "To be from Egypt meant you were from a primitive country, backward, unsavoury." The children, each in their own way, become Americanised, but Leon never acclimatises. The contradictions between American and Egyptian culture are too wide to straddle: between individualism and community, feminism and patriarchy, freedom and tradition. For Suzette, the strong-minded eldest daughter, America offers the chance to escape her father's restrictive authority. But for Leon himself, it is a rose without scent: "He fixated on the flowers as an emblem of all that was bewildering about his new home and his new country, and all that he missed about his old home and his old country." In Mrs Kirschner's most telling observation, he "regards the immigration as a calamity rather than an opportunity."

It is a tragic story, but not unleavened by humour, as for example in the descriptions of the children's first English classes. The teacher holds up a cup. "Cup," she instructs. Then she smashes it. "Broken cup," she informs them. In future lessons she repeats the operation with saucers, plates and glasses, all of which miraculously regenerate next time.

Nostalgia for old Cairo suffuses and floods this book; there is no balm for it, other than the rich and sensuous descriptions that strive to resurrect the city. It is personified in the figure of the father, the man in the white sharkskin suit who in his youth resembled Cary Grant and who is broken and destroyed by exile. Above all, as the title intimates, this is a book about him. Loulou, the child of his old age, accompanies him on his tours about town where, nicknamed "The Captain" because of his impeccable British-accented English, he wheels and deals and makes money, functioning easily in seven different languages, a diamond pin in his tie and a straw boater on his head. (The tarbooshes he once loved are banned by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the hated aristocracy, but he still keeps them; even in Egypt, life is not without its nostalgia.)

"The Captain" is a creature of the night, a long-standing bachelor with a taste for pleasure who marries late in life, and who causes his wife anguish with his continued nightly jaunts to clubs and gambling places. In her vivid descriptions, Loulou, now grown up into Lucette the author, summons him back to life as he was in this period before she knew him, his charm and poise as he strides through the streets of Cairo and the offices where he does business, where as he passes by he will "fish out some bonbons and fling them on every desk along the way, as if he were throwing dice on a gambling table."

He is also deeply religious. "Dieu est grand," he often repeats, at times of great happiness or great stress: a direct translation of the Muslim expression, "Allahu akbar." The phrase increasingly becomes his refuge as he faces physical decline, transformed by an ineluctable process from the svelte boulevardier into a lame old man. Loulou alone can truly accompany him on this journey, lamed as she is by her own mysterious ailment. One of the most poignant images in the book is that of Leon and Loulou vainly seeking medical help through the streets of Cairo: "We made an odd pair as we toured the specialists' offices - a tall, distinguished silver-haired gentleman whose right leg dragged, walking hand in hand with a diminutive girl with long dark hair and dark eyes, who shuffled ever so slightly on her left leg."

It is the account of the father and daughter bond which moved me more than anything, as another child of an exile born to his old age; the peculiar and poignant closeness which can spring up between a small daughter and a parent old enough to be her grandfather. I recognised my own stateless father in the photo of Leon's identity card, with his nationality "à determiner," to be determined (my own father's never was). I was reminded of my dad's perennial love for the simple foods of his childhood, of his habit of walking, walking the streets with me, hand in hand, of "the sense of absolute safety I feel nestled in that favourite spot I've staked out in the nook of his shoulder, au creux de son épaule." I identified, too, with the sense of guilt and betrayal, the yearning sense that one did not do enough to give comfort, and the inevitability of loss.

Lagnado writes in her acknowledgments of "my enigmatic father," and it is clear that Leon is a man of contradictions, tender and fearsome, generous and selfish, passionately devoted to family and to his own pleasure. He is also a patriarch of the old school. She does not soften or try to justify the enigma; it is not possible, any more than it is possible to reconcile once and for all the Cairene she once was with the New Yorker she has become.

What can we learn from this painting?: The marriage portrait of Charlotte von RothschildThe Israel Museum, home of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a fantastic collection of art, has a well-deserved reputation for hosting world-renowned art exhibits. Particularly in the realm of Jewish art -- that is, art created by members of the Jewish community -- the Israel Museum most often provides a vibrant, honest experience. However, its two most recent exhibits, "Looking for Owners: Custody, Research, and Restitution of Art Stolen in France during World War II" and "Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust," leave much to be desired.

"Looking for Owners" features pieces that the Nazis looted specifically from French Jewish communities during the Holocaust, while "Orphaned Art" features works of art looted from other European Jewish communities that were discovered in various hiding places by the Allies after the war. The art in both exhibits was collected by various organizations, professors, and graduate students who did years upon years of research in order to determine the owners of each piece and their countries of origin. An effort to return the uncovered pieces to families with legitimate ownership claims would have been an important endeavor, but instead, the entire project served as means of creating various exhibits to simply display the artwork.

Both exhibits consist of largely unrelated pieces of work that were simply owned (not created) by well-to-do Jews before the war. This alone does not establish a cultural contribution to the world of art by the Jewish community, nor do the works themselves tell us much about the lives of this portion of the Jewish community (upper-class European Jews). Instead, they merely serve as a rather mundane display of the wealth of their owners. The majority of the paintings displayed were either portraits of well-known families, such as the Rothschilds, or mediocre oil paintings of all things gold, shiny, and generally superfluous.

There are still many significant cultural contributions from pre-war Jewish communities that have yet to be salvaged from the remnants of the Holocaust. A people that, since WWII, has established a state and arguably redefined communal resilience, warrants the exhibition of more than a mere display of what was taken from them.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

This is a picture of my dog. I live with her. I do not live with the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates. I do not live with the 1986 New York Mets. I have never been a Communist. I have never voted for a Republican. Just thought you should know.

From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

I am really proud of the fact that I have no idea what a “Birkin bag” is. I assume it is a handbag and that it is not made by the same people who make the sandals. I think that’s "birken" – and I guess I am also proud I don’t know how to spell that....and am too lazy to take the 3.2 seconds to look it up on the computer.

In many respects, this is the equivalent of you not getting the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates reference – which was a team known as “The Family.” They adopted Sister Sledge’s “We are Family” as their theme song and went on to win the World Series with Willie “Pops” Stargell and the pitcher with the baddest-ass looking glasses and delivery in baseball history.

Pitch-perfect: No athlete has ever again achieved such magnificent sunglasses I love that guy.

I am working on a movie right now and it’s about someone who lives in the shadow of his parent’s really bad divorce. Like, even though he is an adult and on his own, it still colors everything he does. And early on he brags to a friend about having never cheated on a girlfriend. (His dad has cheated on all his wives) And the friend tells him that he is an emotional cheater. He gets bored and cheats emotionally, which is basically the same thing.

But it is and it isn’t. Like, there are three levels to an affair:

1. Thinking about it, wanting it, but not acting on it in any way
2. Thinking about it, wanting it, talking about it with the person, but stopping short of physically consummating it.
3. Thinking abut it, wanting it, and doing it. (“It” here referring to frottage.)

They are all affairs and carry consequence, emotional and otherwise, but my strong feeling is #1 and even #2 can be forgiven. We are flawed. And sometimes even #3 can be forgiven – but not really. I mean, people forgive affairs all the time – and maybe if I was writing this from the perspective of a 65-year-old instead of 36, I would be more kind to cheaters. But I kind of think you can’t justify messing around on someone you have made a commitment to. Unless of course, the relationship is already over and it just hasn’t collapsed yet. Then the affair is basically just punctuation. Dirty, dirty punctuation.

I’m not sure any of this equation is relative to nerdlingers talking about it all theoretical and shit on a website.

Now I am realizing that I kind of evaded your question. Do I do this? Well, there was definitely a time in my life when I felt at ease flirting with people, in print and in person, when I was otherwise engaged. I think even when I was actually otherwise engaged. But since I got married, not so much. I wish I could say this is because of gallantry or some other such romantic ideal – and maybe there is a tiny part of it that is driven by that impulse – but I think it has more to do with guilt and the whole Golden Rule thing.

I re-wrote this last part a lot, torn between being totally honest and the realization that upwards of 67 other people may be reading it. I wonder if it’s possible to forget them. Make this a Method exercise. Probably not. Fuckin’ Heisenberg.

Ben

Next: Birkin Bags, Yale Law School, and the perils of hipster Brooklyn

Senator Obama recently took heat for his comments to fundraisers in San Francisco. Those remarks, for some reason, were never interpreted with a bit more cynicism and much less conventional wisdom: why can't we just speculate that Sen. Obama was simply pandering to what a particular, rich, liberal constituency wanted to hear (the rubes don't really believe that... religion and guns are simply symbolic painkillers to stop the sting of the economic Real)? It was the same pandering process that all the candidates have done, and must do, in order to get elected (see also: Senator Clinton and boilermakers; Senator McCain and John Hagee).

Sen. Obama's statements were construed as some sort of lazy (to his opponents on the left... "elitist" to his detractors on the right) allusion to Marx-cum-Gramsci base/superstructure theory masked in Thomas Frank jargon. So the talking points became simple: Obama's an elitist and a Marxist... oh my!

So at the expense of betraying my "Marxist" sympathies (and hopefully some of yours, too!), I had a great time laughing at the news of Miley Cyrus' spread in Vanity Fair. Annie Liebovitz's portrait hit Drudge and at 7am Monday morning Hannah Montana went from "tweenie-bopper" to "tworn-star."

And that's precisely the point where some of that basic, good, old-fashioned Marxist thinking about the "commodity" is helpful and can explain what the hell happened. This dust-up points to the fact that Miley Cyrus' body is a commodity that is controlled by two different sets of interests and agendas: those of Disney and those of her family.

Disney has an interest in making sure Miley Cyrus' body remains "Hannah Montana,"The Opium Of The People franchise par excellence, for as long as possible. I can only imagine the intense and numerous aneurisms felt throughout the Magic Kingdom when they saw this issue of Vanity Fair. They're very aware that this sort of thing happens often in our paparazzi-and-tabloid information age: the slippery slope of slut. Brittney and Lindsay went from bankable faces to disheveled snatch-shots. And now another golden-goose franchise is approaching the point where the Disney execs must awkwardly peek into the abyss and see the advent of their leading lady's libido. Based on recent trends, this can't be good (ahem: paging Jamie Lynn Spears). They must now contemplate the uncomfortable: how do you reconcile this development with the inconvenient truth that the Hannah Montana demographic, statistically speaking, has yet to even have their first period? If you're Disney, you make sure that your lawyers and a battalion of PR reps quash this disaster, ASAP.

On the other hand, the Cyrus family has an interest in maintaining the 15 year-old's body as "Hannah Montana" in the near and intermediate future, but from there they obviously need to be more flexible and shrewd. They must make sure that Ms. Cyrus can still work her moneymaker when this HM gig runs its course. The "Hannah Montana" empire has to make the delicate transition to the "Miley Cyrus" career. And (pace Simpson, Lohan, Spears) that task is a bitch. Yet, since womanhood is inevitable, the Cyrus family handlers made the (mis)calculation that Miley should begin some sort of long-term transition via the lens of the esteemed Annie Liebovitz.

But if you're feeling bad for Miley at this point, you may be expending too much sentiment for her, and not enough for your own kid. After all, the Mouse and Mr. Achy-Breaky-Heart wouldn't be doing any of this if they weren't trying to grab your cash.

Hanna Rosin, writing in Slate, made several points worthy of consideration while explaining her feeling of violation at the sight of Miley's bare back. In particular, though, I want to pay special attention to her remarks on the fact that it is, indeed, a hard call to judge the effects of the content of franchises like High School Musical and Hannah Montana on the attitudes of a/her tween audience. Specifically, her concern is:

Now there are shows we all consider clean: Hannah Montana and High School Musical, for example. And by any watchdog's standards they are: no sex, no exposed flesh, no cursing. This ensures that children as young as 6 or 7 (such as my daughter) will know all about them and love them. She doesn't see anything bad. She just listens to lots of teenagers sing and dance and go on and on about who's dating whom and who's in love and who broke up, etc. They are innocent and knowing at the same time. I can't easily say to her: Don't watch that, you don't want to be like that underage sexpot, do you? Because the actors look as cute and innocent as the Teletubbies. But something about all this sanitized high school chatter leaves me uneasy. Why does a 6-year old need to know so much about dating and breaking up?

Now I recognize that I may be a tad too reactionary and live with a post-Culture Wars hangover, but Hanna's suspicion seems correct. The sanitized, uncomplicated, and relationship-centric storylines of these TV shows are vehicles for mega-advertising dollars. In this case, the tween revenue stream is up for grabs and (surprise, surprise) the content of the shows prepare 8-10 year olds to recognize that adolescence, in general, and dating and breaking-up, in particular, are properly understood as consumer events that they will soon experience. Relationships aren't complicated interactions between human beings (how "silly"), but occasions to buy/wear the right clothes, conform to specific cliques, and spend the ‘rents money on dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and dates to the multiplex.

And let's not forget how these easy, chaste plots are good training for future consumption habits: if you keep the tweens around long enough with HSM and HM, then eventually they'll switch to Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy when melodrama with a character singing her "own" songs just doesn't compare to ABC-approved bands soundtracking the hijinks of those crazy "adults."

All I can do is shudder. Obviously, my response is a consequence of me not having kids. When I do have kids, I'll realize that life's not just abstracted, continual analyses of which commodities are better to support when one is given a limited set of possibilities from which to choose. Additionally, I'll find out, first-hand, how it sucks to have to be a responsible parent and strike a balance between letting your kid stay informed of the pop culture they share with their peers and, at the same time, help them develop a sense of ironic detachment from the incessant attacks from advertisers.

But while I'm able to have the luxury of watching this from the sidelines, I'm content to talk snark at the commodification of Miley Cyrus and the exploitation of the tween demographic. After all, they're targeting 8 year-olds, dude.

Asking the big questions: The ad campaign for Satyagraha It's become a cliché to search for Jewish influences or themes in works by Jewish artist. Generally the effort is one of overzealous interpretation, if not projection. Consider the following, then, not a reading of Philip Glass's Jewish opera Satyagraha, but a Jewish reading of Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha—a work which evokes both the pride and anxiety of contemporary Jewishness.

The pride came not from "one of our boys done good," although such a sentiment might be excused in this case. When Satyagraha was written in 1979, Glass was still an up-and-comer; he'd only recently made it big, was only a few years away from having been a starving artist, and was still regarded, by many, as part of the avant garde. No longer -- for better or for worse. Satyagraha opened at the Met April 11 after a bombastic ad campaign. “Could an opera put virtue back on its feet?” asked posters around New York City. “Could an opera make us stand up for the truth?”

These questions are as yet unanswered, but the New York Times did call Satyagraha “a work of nobility, seriousness, even purity.” Glass is probably the most widely-heard composer active today, and while some of his later works have begun to seem rather derivative, the Met’s enormous production, brilliantly [re]conceived by Phelim McDermott with sets by Julian Crouch, shines. It reminds us why we loved Glass in the first place: the repetitions are haunting, not tedious; the melodic and conceptual reaches soaring, not pretentious.

Satyagraha tells, in non-linear and largely non-verbal fashion, the story of Gandhi’s struggles on behalf of South Africa’s Indian population. During the course of this twenty-year fight for civil rights, he developed the philosophy and political tactics he would eventually use to liberate India from British colonialism. These tactics went on to inspire Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and other liberators around the world. But in this period, they were still a work in progress, paid for in risk and blood.

Satyagraha juxtaposes symbolic stagings of key episodes in Gandhi's struggle with Sanskrit quotations from the Bhagavad Gita, among the most sacred texts of Hinduism. While to some this may seem an obvious choice, it is actually a curious one, as much of the Gita is about why its hero, Arjuna, must go to battle. It's hardly a nonviolent text.

Puppets for peace: The British staging of the opera Yet it is a text, perhaps above all, about knowing and fulfilling one's holy mission, of virtue in the face of adversity, of duty and moral responsibility. This is why Satyagraha appealed to me as "Jewish": not because of its composer's ethnicity, but because it captures the power of sacred text to inspire sacred action.

Gandhi was, after all, a holy man. In his later life he was an ascetic, fasting regularly and relinquishing all possessions. Like Dr. King, he regularly used not only religious language but religious spirit to motivate and comprehend his work—and to stir up his audience. Satyagraha is an opera about the power of spirit and word to require us to be our best selves -- which is also what Judaism does at its best.

It is a message we need to hear today. Just as Satyagraha's provocative marketing campaign asked us if an opera could inspire us to stand up for truth, we need to ask whether the Torah can inspire us to take a stand for justice, economic fairness, equality, human rights, and peace? Can it move us to oppose appalling injustices in Tibet, Darfur, and around the world?

The questions are not entirely rhetorical. There are those today who think religion is at best a superstition, at worst a force for ill, and should be kept entirely separate from any notion of political engagement. There are others who think that the Jewish religion is mainly about aggrandizing and protecting the Jews. Those of us who disagree, who believe that our Jewishness compels us to fight torture, unnecessary war, environmental irresponsibility, and economic oppression by our own elected officials, may be inspired by Satyagraha even if we don't speak a word of Sanskrit.

(Indeed, since few audience members do, the opera inspires by musical and visual gestures, like the sight of a hundred lanterns being lifted in protest, or remarkable outsized puppets symbolizing collective action against greed.)

At the same time as Satyagraha evoked this pride in the possibilities of a prophetic tradition, it evoked in me a feeling of shame. It's impossible to watch hordes of second-class citizens standing up for their rights against an occupying regime and not think of Israel and Palestine. To be sure, the opera never draws that connection -- it is explicit in linking Gandhi and King, and some of the new production's imagery suggests Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but nowhere does it reference the Israel/Arab conflict. Yet to my eyes and ears, the parallels were unavoidable.

Behind the scenes: Set elements backstage (photo via the New York Times) This is not because the Palestinians are in the same position as the Indians (or black Africans) in South Africa, or that Israel is a colonial power. They are not. But the contours of popular struggle against a better-armed adversary are unmistakable.

Let us grant that there may be many differences. Yasser Arafat never was Mahatma Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela for that matter. The Palestinians were not a nation in the same way as India or Tibet is. And of course, Israel's safety is at stake in a way that Britain's and China's never have been, and violent, rejectionist Palestinian factions enjoy considerable power. Let us grant all of these distinctions. There are still the brute facts of checkpoints, separation barriers, closures, and settlements. There are still the day-to-day realities of people living under occupation.

If we grant all these differences, we may well end up with a political program not so different from that of the current Israeli government. Yet at the very least, the brute facts demand that such a program be pursued ambivalently, even regretfully—not with the sort of reflexive, defensive cheerleading one finds in many Jewish quarters today. If indeed these policies are necessary, then our own support of them must be tinged with the awareness that every day, they place the Jewish state on the wrong side of justice. Perhaps these "costs" are justified by a higher good—but let's not pretend that they don't exist.

This was the ambivalence I felt watching Satyagraha, the title of which means "truth-force." One of the blessings and curses of Separation-Wall Israel is that the Palestinian crisis is more invisible than ever to visitors. We can stay at the Dan Pearl, visit holy sites, and once again promenade down pedestrian malls with comparatively little fear of violence. But if we take our sacred texts as seriously as Gandhi did, they must remind us of the costs of our freedom -- in this case, costs borne largely by people who do not enjoy the benefits.

Hopefully I have been clear that neither I nor Satyagraha advocate a particular policy position. But in reminding me the beauty of religious consciousness, Satyagraha also reminded me of the responsibility it demands.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and if you’re like most of us, you’ve already seen Schindler’s List, Escape From Sobibor, and Life is Beautiful. You read Number the Stars and Anne Frank’s diary in middle school, and you know the basics from the Nuremberg laws and the Warsaw ghetto to Bergen-Belsen and Terezin. Here are some books and movies with distinctively different ways of looking at the events of World War II, and the way they still affect us today.

	The Reader by Bernhard Schlink: A German teenager has an affair with an older woman and later realizes she was involved in some of the worst Nazi cruelty. Beautifully and simply written (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway) it stays away from the detailed descriptions of Jewish suffering, and instead wonders about the complicity of average Germans, and how to make amends.
	The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman: A fictionalized account of the true story of Jan and Antonina Zabinisky, who hid more than 300 Jews and Polish resisters in the Warsaw Zoo that they ran. I’m only half way through, but the writing is fantastic, and the subtext and commentary about how people, animals, and the way we treat each other is subtle and fascinating.
	The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman: Spiegelman produced what the Wall Street Journal called “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust.” He tells the story of his rocky relationship with his father, Vladek Spiegelman, and intersperses the story of his father’s survival in WW II Europe. Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.
	The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn: Part Memoir part history, the book is the story of Mendelsohn’s journey to find out as much as he could about the six members of his family who died in the Holocaust. Instead of focusing on big numbers and statistics he uses a microscope to look closely at just a few people, and the results are tender and moving. Listen to a Nextbook podcast interview with David Mendelsohn here.
	Somewhere in Germany by Stefanie Zweig: Zweig’s family escaped the Nazis by moving to Kenya, but they return to Germany once the war is over, and the novel, translated by Marlies Comjean, looks at postwar Germany, the anti-Semitism that remains, the difficulties of returning home, and the pain of exile. Otto Frank has a memorable cameo appearance. A gorgeous sequel to Nowhere in Africa (see below).
	The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen: 12-Year-old Hannah travels back in time from a Passover Seder in 1988 to Poland in World War II. As Chaya she is sent to a concentration camp where she learns about growing up and survival in a harrowing and poignant young adult novel. They made a movie with Kirsten Dunst, but the book is much better, and accessible to middle schoolers and adults alike.
	Bent Directed by Sean Mathias: Max, a gay man in Germany at the start of WW II is sent to Dachau, where he pretends to be Jewish, instead of gay, and then falls in love with an openly gay prisoner. An effective look at the way the Holocaust effected other minorities.
	The Counterfeiters Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzsky: The story of a German man, Sally Sorowitsch, in a concentration camp where he’s forced to help the Nazis produce fake foreign currency in order to weaken the Allies’ economy. When a friend and fellow counterfeiter refuses to help the Nazis Sorowitsch is faced with a dilemma that could mean life or death. Winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign film.
	Nowhere in Africa Directed by Caroline Link: Based on the book by Stefanie Zweig, the movie tells the story of Zweig’s family’s departure from Germany on the eve of the Holocaust, and their strange and difficult lives in Kenya, where they enjoy relative safety from the Nazis, but must wonder constantly about the rest of their families. Winner of the Oscar for best foreign film in 2003.
	Forgiving Dr. Mengele Directed by Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh: A documentary about Eva Mozes Kor, who, along with her twin sister Miriam, was used as a guinea pig by Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. In the 80s, Kor persuaded former Nazi doctor, Hans Mnuch, to return to Auschwitz with her to declare that the Holocaust happened. During a press conference at that event Kor said she forgave Munch, and when she was asked if she could forgive Dr. Megele, she said said yes. The movie looks at the ways we forgive, the meaning of forgiveness, and how we look back on a painful history.
	The Rape of Europa Directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham: A documentary narrated by Joan Allen, this film looks at the devastating effects of Nazi art theft during World War II, and the heroic efforts of American military personnel, and American art historians who try to recover and return as much of the lost art as they can.
	Walk on Water Directed by Eytan Fox: An Israeli film about a contemporary Israeli secret service agent tasked with following around the grandchildren of a Nazi war criminals. A beautiful and provocative movie, it looks at everything from what it means to be an Israeli man, to sexuality, to forgiveness.

Towards the end of Joseph Cedar's Beaufort, the first Israeli film nominated for an Academy Award since 1984, an activist opposed to the war in Lebanon excoriates himself on a television talk show for the death of his son, Ziv, a bomb specialist in the Israel Defense Forces.

By having this grieving parent blame himself rather than generals or politicians for what happened to his child, Joseph Cedar makes a distinct ideological gesture, underlining how Israel as a whole is responsible for the continuation of the now sixty-year-old violent status quo. And by placing the responsibility for communicating such a message on the shoulders of a peace advocate, Cedar makes it clear why he believes we ought to take seriously what liberal Israelis like Ziv's father have to say.

In his earlier feature-length films, Time of Favor (2001), and Campfire (2004), as in Beaufort, the New York-born director created studies of Israel's internal struggles so detailed and accurate that they could almost function as academic monographs. Always guided by an identifiable set of political positions, Cedar's commitments consistently structure his narratives, providing a sense of optimism and resolution at every hopeless juncture. In each instance, Joseph Cedar's outlook and artistry are mutually reinforcing, making his stories speak to us that much more strongly. We walk away from his films understanding Israel better because we saw it through his eyes.

I spoke to Cedar at the end of March about Beaufort, and his next project, on which he's already hard at work.

- Joel Schalit, Zeek Media Editor

ZEEK: The last time you and I spoke, you had just decided to make a film about Veit Harlan, the director of the legendary anti-Semitic drama, Jud Suss (1940). In Harlan's film, Jewish businessman Suss Oppenheimer destroys a dukedom and rapes a German girl. What exactly is your film about? I take it that it's a lot bigger than just a biopic.

CEDAR: So far, most of the scenes are about an artistic drive that overrides everything: Harlan's moral sensibilities, his personal loyalties, and his common sense. What he's really out for is to tell a good story. Harlan thinks he understands Suss, he thinks he identifies with him, and he loves the kind of villain he's making. Harlan thinks he understands who this Suss is, but forgets the whole context. That's how he convinces his actors, that's how he convinces his entire crew - and this is a top notch crew - to go along with such a project.

ZEEK: They'd all worked with directors like Fritz Lang, right?

CEDAR: The production designer was Otto Hunte, who did Metropolis. The composer was a man named Zeller, who later worked with Alfred Hitchcock. But everyone (initially) said no. Nobody wanted to work on this film.

ZEEK: How did Harlan win them over?

CEDAR: Harlan was able to convince them because he was giving them his passion. It's not until just prior to the film's release that he finally realizes that he's being manipulated himself. When he realizes that he's done something that he regrets, he can't live with it. He doesn't know what to do. Then, after the war, when he's acquitted (on charges of anti-Semitism), he's just stuck. One of the things Harlan realizes about Suss is that he has nothing to lose. [When Suss is executed] he can finally be who he is. He doesn't have to lie to anyone. He can say what he wants, and not care about the consequences. And Harlan says, ‘I never had that."

ZEEK: That's an extremely complex portrait of the director.

CEDAR: It's still changing, but I found out that that's what most of the film is about. When it's done, we'll see what the film is really about. (Laughter)

Continue reading...

HIS GRANDFATHER'S FACE


And when the man saw that his face was the face of his grandfather

he began speaking to himself out loud

across the generations

and his wife breathing in their wide bed

made her eyes slits

the palm of her hand over them like a tent

to catch sight of him from the distance.

*

I REVEALED TO THE FISH

I told the fish his own silent name.

He formed it with his mouth

till the water read his lips

till the water spread his name all over

steaming into cloud

beating against the shore

drying into nothingness.

And nothingness didn't know how to pronounce the fish's name

though a silent name it was.

*

Continue reading...

Nava Semel's IsraIsland imagines in one of its three sections what would have happened had the historical figure of Major Mordecai Manuel Noah, the most important American Jew in the first half of the nineteenth century, succeeded in creating his planned "city of refuge for the Jews"-- Ararat--on Grand Island, today a suburb of Buffalo. Her ingenious vision of Jewish autonomy on American soil offers an Israeli perspective on the alternate history genre employed most recently by Michael Chabon in his best-selling The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Semel's novel takes as its point of departure the success, rather than the failure, of Noah's Ararat. In this excerpt, Simon, a paparazzi, is assigned to dig up dirt on the Jewish female presidential candidate, a descendant of Major Noah. At the same time, Simon tries to uncover the secret to his lover's ambivalence about the Jewish island state. To learn more about Nava Sem