Dispatch

Serious Business: Gay and Jewish in BerlinOn the day of Gay Pride Berlin, known locally as Christopher Street Day, I was invited by the rabbi of the city's newest congregation to speak during services. So instead of the rabbi’s weekly speech about the Torah portion, the 60 or so people at the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue got to hear about the gays. Berlin takes Gay Pride seriously. Berlin also takes its Jews seriously. The two made for an exhausting Shabbat. The Oranienburger Strasse synagogue represents both the horrors of German Jewry’s past and the ...

I saw a huge contrast between the rich and the poor everywhere I went in India, but it was most pronounced in Delhi, where the Plaza Hotel bar rivals any in Los Angeles and little children with bloodied arms bang on car windows begging for coins. “The blood’s fake, I know it is,” insisted one of the American wedding guests.“Well, I fucking hope so,” I said to myself. The carpool lane: Kids in DelhiI didn’t stay in the city long, but four days was enough to get me off my bearings. We arrived late at night, en masse, on a private bus from Jaipur. The hotel where we first disembarked was wickedly overpriced ...

My serenity and sobriety ended abruptly when we boarded the train to Jaipur. The trip took ten hours. Jeff and I calculated our average speed to be hovering around 20 miles per hour. At least we smoked the cows. Perhaps I didn’t yet tell you about the cows. There are cows everywhere. Sure, everyone knows that Hindus consider cows sacred. But sacred is relative. Nobody eats the cows, but nobody feeds them either. One of the most common tableaus is a cow munching on a pile of trash. Second to that might be a cow munching on a poster pasted to the wall. Not a lot of vitamins in those posters, I imagine, nor in the glue. Poor buggers. So you’ve got a lot of sickly looking cows wandering around just trying to make it to their next Bollywood release. But back to the city. Jaipur is beautiful. It’s called the Pink City because of the pinkish-orangey wash that covers many of the old stucco buildings. Jaipur was once a feudal state and the lords ...

I started with an Iyengar yoga class at the giant ashram down the road. The teacher was not a smiling bearded Indian yogi, but a tiny, angular, frowning American woman. Karin O’Bannon was all business. Rumor had it she was in her 70s but it was quite clear she could kick your ass. She was like the Debbie Allen of India. There was no fucking around in Karin’s class. On the waterfront: Many ashrams have shrines along the Ganges“Someone tell her to spread her legs wider,” she barked, pointing at me. One of her assistants mimed to me to spread my legs. I was too scared to point out that I ...

KarmaI realized I probably wasn’t going to find enlightenment in India about four days into my trip. I was drinking chai in the restaurant of the Shiva Hotel before a yoga class, talking with Iryse, a snarky Belgian woman who I’d just met. We chatted briefly about the weather, where we came from, and real estate prices in our respective cities, and then she asked me if I believed in Karma. Hmm. “I don’t not believe in Karma,” I said. “But I can’t say I believe in it either.” Iryse told me that she was in a car accident months back. Part of the reason she came to the holy city of Rishikesh was to figure out if there were healing Karmic forces at work. I cringed.

Judeo-Arabic American Joseph Braude sends us his fourth dispatch from the Middle East. Doha, Qatar — If blame for domestic violence rests in part with neighbors who sit idly by, then the slaughter of 400,000-and-counting Darfuri African Muslims in Sudan is a pan-Arab disgrace. Governments throughout this region have turned a blind eye to atrocities perpetrated by Janjaweed Arab horseback raiders, Sudan’s Ku Klux Klan. Two Arab states in particular, Egypt and the Gulf emirate of Qatar, have done even worse: They have provided diplomatic cover for the genocidal junta in Khartoum that arms and equips the Janjaweed. When, by contrast, a man stands up in either country and struggles against the deafening Arab silence on Darfur, he follows in the tradition of Gentiles who rescued Jews from the Holocaust—the “righteous among the ...

On Friday night, we went to Belgrano—Buenos Aires’ answer toGet Over Yourself: New York not the source of EVERY innovation in Jewish life the Upper West Side—for Kabbalat Shabbat services at Comunitad Bet El. How geeky Jewish is that! I wanted to visit the place that revolutionized Friday evening services at synagogues throughout the Americas, and even in Israel. Yes, for once, Jewish cultural capital flowed in the other direction, and Buenos Aires taught New ...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Yesterday, at 2pm, I was nearly arrested for taking a picture of a synagogue. Just two hours later I plugged into a nascent group of Yiddish scholars who are reviving the language in the same way as happened in the States 10-15 years ago. I’ll let you figure out which is the best, which the worst. Gregg and I decided to walk through the old Ashkenazi immigrant Jewish neighborhood, Once, which houses three premiere pieces of Buenos Aires Jewish architecture—the huge old Ashkenazi synagogue, the old Sephardic synagogue, and AMIA, the Jewish cultural center that was blown up in 1994 and has since been rebuilt. Once now serves as the home of black-hat, ultra-Orthodox Buenos Aires Jewry. We took the subway a few stops to the neighborhood and emerged in Shmattaville. For those of you who have a hard time with Yiddish-inflected English, a shmatta is ...

Last night, a torrid downpour cooled off the hot-tempered evening rush hour before we headed out for dinner with German (pronounced Herman) Vaisman, the founder of Keshet, one of two lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires. You know a city’s Jewish community is vibrant when it has not one but two gay Jewish organizations. I know German through my participation in two sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping global mafias—the gay one and the Jewish one. Granted, these mafias do not generally extort money or leave horse heads in people’s beds (at least not that I know of), but they do form a network of mutual, communal interdependence among those who identify a certain way. Wherever I travel, I know that I’ll have some form of community by networking with one of these two groups—or, as with this trip, both. In ...

It’s easy to spot a Jewish place in central Buenos Aires. I learned that this morning, when my husband and I walked by the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum. Visiting the museum was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did want to see it from the outside. How would a Holocaust museum present itself inJust Look for the Barricades: Author's photo of Buenos Aires Holocaust museum this city’s classic turn-of-the-century landscape? The museum is on a busy street in central Buenos Aires, and halfway down the block, not seeing anything obviously museum-like, I ...

I’m sipping coffee looking out the window of the apartment I’ve rented here in Buenos Aires. A moment ago I forgot where I was. My French doors open onto a balcony overlooking a busy street in Recoleta, the beautiful and bustling part of town that was designed, like much of Buenos Aires, to look like Paris. From my window I see stores called “Rouge” and “Cuisine et Vins.” Forgive me for losing my sense of time and place, but Buenos Aires encourages that, even prides itself on it: “We are like Europe in Latin America.” A colleague of mine who is a professor of Latin American history put it this way: “Buenos Aires has the energy of Paris and New York with the style of Italy.” Or as my landlady insisted, “Unlike the rest of Latin America, you can drink the water ...

In his third dispatch from the Middle East, Judeo-Arabic American Joseph Braude reports on the travails of the Arabian peninsula's only Jewish community. Manama, Bahrain — The Jewish community in this micro-kingdom of 35 islands in the Arabian Gulf was never more than a few hundred strong. Now there are 30 left. One is an advisor to the king, a second is in linBefore the Storm: Jewish Bahraini family, 1940e for an important ...

The day I stop by Kuwait’s High Institute of Musical Arts, veiled Kuwaiti women and men in white dishdashas shuffle in and out of the austere, echoey front foyer, clutching their instruments. The conservatory occupies a nondescript, one-story building tucked away between an Islamic charitable trust and a chicken rotissomat in the coastal suburb of Salmiya. Its obscurity is appropriate. For every 3,000 Islamic seminaries in the Arab Middle East today, there is one institute of music—an outrageous imbalance for the part of the world where melody was born. I’ve come to the conservatory to learn more about the musical history of the Muslim

“Il’an Abuk!” curses a mother of four, veiled in black, in Kuwaiti dialect. She’s eager to board the plane, but her tiniest is still fumbling with the visor of his Homer Simpson baseball cap—much the way his bearded father fusses over his own regulation red-and-white checkered headdress, or shimagh. Boys will be boys, but their concern to be chic is slowing down the whole clan, and mom looks fed up. To me, these sights and sounds feel like family, even though I’m the childless, American Jewish economy-class passenger who boards alone at the end. I’m no stranger to the raucous Emirates Airlines non-stop flight from New York to Dubai, which I’ve been flying on and off since the ’90s to get to various connecting destinations in the neighborhood. I once lived in Dubai as a graduate student for the better part of an academic year; and as a telecoms consultant in a prior career, I used to commute ...