With eighty degree days and no sign of chill in sight, Thanksgiving seemed a far-off option in a country that is more familiar with religious Pilgrims than the sort that settled New England. But left to some homesick Americans with a penchant for good wine, the holiday can turn into much more than the one celebrated in the good ole US of A--the one preceded by a large parade and capped off with black Friday.

Twelve Americans and one Israeli gathered in a lovely apartment in Jerusalem as the weekend began in the holy land. Two poets, four rabbis in waiting, a computer engineer, a photographer, a teacher and a few visitors began the evening, not with the carving of a bird or the giving of thanks, but with the popping of some bubbly. The notion of this meal was not to follow the dictates of tradition but rather to create something new: five courses, each paired with a specific wine, and lemon sorbet to cleanse our palettes in between.

The first course, appetizers enjoyed before setting down at the table, included veggie antipasto and veggie chopped liver. They were accompanied by a bottle of Cava and a bottle of Brut. These were my favorite wines--cold, sparkling, the perfect start to a fascinating meal.

Everyone found their seat, finished off their Cava and moved onto the second course. In an effort to not leave tradition completely in the dark, one of the guests prepared a honey sage cornbread--in my opinion, a modern American classic. Sweet, savory, amazing. This was served with a carrot soufflé--the recipe of a guest's aunt and the perfect retake on the sweet potato marshmellow combination that often graces Thanksgiving tables. As we were now seated at the table, the cries of "Pimp your dish" began--a chorus that followed us through the night and necessitated that the cook give the origins and secrets of his or her recipe. This course was served with Chenin Blanc.

Before moving on to course three, we were served lemon sorbet to make sure our palates were clean and prepared to best enjoy what came next. The third course included a stuffing recipe out of Long Island and a gourmet macaroni and cheese. The mac and cheese truly shamed Kraft--big shells covered in mozzarella, cheddar, and gruyere with tomato slices for color. Sauvignon Blanc, a few rounds of Johnny Appleseed, more sorbet and on to course four.

The fourth course was the real meat of the meal, minus the meat. Salmon done in a cumin rub, sour cream mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli and homemade cranberry sauce. Any other night, this would be the entire meal. On this Thanksgiving, this and some Tempranillo equaled just the fourth course.

With all of the savory food dispensed, we moved on to the best and most important course--dessert. Pumpkin cheesecake bars, chocolate pecan pie, pumpkin pie, dark chocolate truffles and Malbec to boot.

I walked in knowing only the hosts and two other people. I walked out with a handful of new friends, a full belly and real inspiration--this was not a Thanksgiving without thought or hope. This group of temporary expats really redefined the notion of Thanksgiving for me; each course was given its time, its wine and its appreciation. There were true thanks given at this meal--for the food in front of us, for friends new and old, and for the ability to celebrate the holiday despite our proximity to New England. 

G-d told me to go on tour with a punk band called CAN!!CAN.

No shit, I wish I were making this up.

I'd love to wake up in the morning, eat a bagel, go to work in a cubicle Office Space style and fly under the radar for the rest of my life. But I can't. As The Blues Brothers said, "we're on a mission from G-d".

It came to me like a flash in the dark; like a warm feeling in my stomach after eating hot tomato soup on a cold day. I need to go on tour with my band. I need to sing about spirituality, G-d's love for humanity, tikkun olam, olam haba and all the things that drove me crazy-in-love with my creator.

And I needed to do it through indie punk, hipster metal and noise pop. 

So I started messaging some friends; frum-punks, hippiedox kids, tattooed Reform rejects...anyone who would listen to what I was trying to do. 

It worked out. My tour is being guided by the great people at Shemspeed, Artists4Israel, ModernTribe.com, Frumsatire.com, HeebnVegan, Bahay Shalom, Birthright Israel - Next, PresenTense...you name it! And I get to work with some awesome cats like Y-Love, Matthue Roth, Diwon, DeScribe, Stereo Sinai, Juez, Darshan and others.

The greatest thing that ever happened to me was waking up and realizing that my life was no longer about me anymore. Luckily, G-d saw it fit that the one thing I'm good at, playing in a rock band, is the thing he needed me to do the most.

I'm one lucky guy. Shalom...and I better see you guys rocking out with your cocks out!

TH Aug 13 Louisville, KY @ Derby City Espresso

F Aug 14 Louisville, KY @ Adath Jeshurun Synagogue Patrick A Dvar Torah!!

SN Aug 16 Chicago @ Empty Bottle sponsored by Birthright Israel, PresenTense, Shemspeed

M Aug 17 Indianapolis, IN @ The Vollrath

T Aug 18 Teaneck, NJ @ Shemspeed Summer Music Festival - Mexicali Live

W Aug 19 Baltimore, MD @ Sidebar

TH Aug 20 Philadelphia, PA @ Shemspeed Summer Music Festival -The Raven Lounge

F Aug 21 Providence, RI @ AS220

S Aug 22 Trenton, NJ @ Millhill Basement 

SN Aug 23 Amityville, NY @ Broadway

M Aug 24 Asbury Park, NJ @ The Saint

TH Aug 27 NYC @ Shemspeed Music Festival - The Bellhouse

F Aug 28 Hickory, NC @ Drips Coffee House 

 

www.punktorah.com

www.myspace.com/cancanband 

This article in the Jerusalem Post highlights the not-so-surprising lack of interest in the GA conference (huge gathering of Federation professionals from the States) by Israelis and well, the philanthropic American Jews are cranky about it. In the article, GA attendees claim that Israelis have a lot to learn from American Jewry about Jewish life and education. Frankly, my fellow Americans are laughably misguided.

There's no denying that the philanthropic efforts of the Federation system in the States are worthy of praise; as a former member of the American Jewish community at large, I've personally benefited from their assistance and was always amazed that there was a Jewish communal infrastructure with funding and dedicated employees willing to help anyone if they wanted to be 'affiliated' (a favorite buzzword that you should be aware of if you're looking to sweet talk a GA attendee; according to most non-Orthodox American Jews, an affiliated Jew is a Jew that does something with his/her fellow Jews, whether it be joining a youth group, going on a one time trip to Israel, or working out at the JCC instead of a gym with gentiles). GA participants told the JPost that Israelis could learn a lot from them when it comes to Jewish life, especially in relation to things like Jewish education and the concept of Jewish people hood. They claim that Israelis don't learn enough in school about their own country or the Jewish religion; while that may be true, what could Israelis possibly learn from American Jewry about Jewish education?

Perhaps the children of GA attendees go to Jewish day schools and learn about Judaism and Israel in addition to their other subjects-- and that's great. But we aren't talking exclusively about GA attendees; we're talking about American Jews in general. We're talking about some of the most assimilated Jews in the diaspora, most of whom do not attend Jewish day schools and whose Jewish identities revolve around things like an overbearing mother and bagels with lox.

It's true that Israel has a long way to go before it lives up to its designated role as a light unto the nations, but one thing is for certain-- Israelis shouldn't look to American Jews as an example. The generosity of American Jewish philanthropists is a beautiful thing, but it's a separate issue. As for Jewish life, American Jewry is hanging by a thread. Apart from the Orthodox minority, most American Jews interpret their Jewishness as a side note; a way to relate to others based on a shared culture. Despite their fancy schools and summer camps funded by generous GA attendees, most American Jews can't articulate how they feel about Jewish issues and maybe some of them can tell you that they value Jewish people hood, but their words are rarely followed by actions other than spearheading committees that throw ice cream parties with other Jews, with some obvious exceptions.

Sure, Jews in Israel vary in terms of how much they value Judaism and their Jewish identities, and the education system leaves much to be desired-- but Israelis live in the Jewish State, where all of the important Jewish questions are being asked and where they will all be answered. The conflicts between the religious and the secular, the separation and integration of synagogue and state, the five million ways in which Judaism has a presence in Israeli culture-- these, among other things, are the reality of life in Israel and this is what educates Israeli Jews. Jewish education amounts to more than baking challah in school and memorizing key phrases by important rabbis or Jewish philosophers. Simply living in Israel is Jewish education at its finest and if American Jewry is so concerned about the future of Jewish education, it may be time to leave the conference rooms in mid-town Manhattan and start brainstorming farther east.

What's goin' on in the world today?
People fightin', feudin', lootin', it's okay.
Let it go, let it flow, let the good times roll. -- Eminem

The morning roundup of the happenings and lack thereof in all corners of the Universe:

• More Americans are getting days off from work than at any point in the past 14 years. Welcome to the terror dome, Mr. President-Elect.
• Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a 6-cent tax on plastic bags at New York City supermarkets.
• They have elections in Scotland, too.
• Jimmy Carl Black, the longtime drummer of Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, died in Germany.
• Comedian Katt Williams was picked up on gun charges in New York on Thursday.
• Six Algerian inmates at Guantanamo Bay will contest their incarceration in a Federal Court in Washington later this month, in the first such case since the prison was opened following 9/11.
• New York Governor Eliot Spitzer won't face criminal charges in his hooker debacle.
• Hall and Oates are in the news!
• November 26th has been declared "Barack Obama Day" in Kenya. I'm pretty sure this happened when G.W. Bush was elected also, right?
• 70 Saudi Arabian activists are staging a hunger strike to protest their government's incarceration of 'political prisoners.' This should go over well in a country that still stones people to death in public executions. 
• England is the top cocaine consumer in Europe.
• At least 11 people are dead in a US airstrike in Iraq Afghanistan Syria Pakistan.

Our daughter was strangely quiet. Her words usually flow like snowmelt slashing through a canyon. Was she getting sick? My wife kept looking in the rear-view mirror to see if she could figure out was wrong, in the way that parents who drive regularly learn to do.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” Skylar suddenly blurted out. I turned around to look at her. Jaw set, teeth seeking into her lower lip, she looked determined. And angry.

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Well folks, my summer of traveling just ended with a brief visit to my ancestral home of Omaha, Nebraska.  Despite the fact that I was there for ostensibly professional reasons (I was honored to participate in the fantastic annual Omaha Lit Fest, which is turning into quite a major event) the trip was fraught as usual with the ghosts of the past; despite the disconcerting presence of a new American Apparel, it’s still my hometown, and being there, I couldn’t help but reflect on my childhood and adolescence, and for probably the millionth time, what it was like growing up Jewish in a place where being Jewish is still at least semi-weird.

I’ve written extensively about this (it’s so comfortable to revisit postions we’ve already taken, isn’t it?) and I’m not going to go into my personal experience here; if you’re interested, you can read my book.  But being home reminded me of a strange little news item I caught sight of a couple of weeks ago, and have since meant to call to your attention.

Blumberg Family Jewish Community Services is offering Jewish families as much as $50,000 to relocate to Dothan, Alabama—a town of 58,000 known as the Peanut Capital of the World (although I think a few towns in Georgia might dare to differ).  It's a kind of yiddische Homestead Act set smack in the cradle of Dixie, and the terms are simple: the families stay at least five years, become active in the local synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, and the money never has to be repaid.  

Jews in the South are nothing new, and historically, were in some ways more visible and prominent than their co-religionists in the North.  The oldest continual Jewish community in the United States is in Charleston, South Carolina, where a group Portuguese Jews first settled 300 years ago.  Judah Benjamin, Secretary of State of the short-lived Confederate States of America was a Jew (a fact conveniently forgotten by so many of today’s good ol’ boys who proudly emblazon the Stars and Bars on the sides of their pick-up trucks and semi-automatic weapons); and during my stopover in the Memphis airport on my way back to New York, I counted as many yarmulkes as one might see in, if not New York, than certainly Chicago. 

Today, more Jews than ever—almost 400,000—are making their homes in the South, but they tend to be Northern transplants clustered in urban areas like Atlanta and Birmingham (rather than in the kinds of towns we Yankees are used to viewing in sepia toned movies, accompanied by haunting shots of live oaks draped in Spanish moss and the sound of somebody throatily humming the word “Jesus” over and over again off screen—a sure sign in the language of film that something bad, sinister, and racially tinged is about to happen.)  As a result, small-town synagogues are closing, and once close-knit communities have dissolved.  In the article I read, a woman named Thelma Nomberg, who grew up in nearby Ozark and was the only Jewish student in the region’s public schools in the 1940’s put it simply: “We are dying.”

This is undoubtedly true and painful to the men and women watching their communities wither and disappear, and the Blumberg organization is to be commended for their attempt to recognize and revitalize the history and heritage of the Jewish South.

That said, I can’t help but feel that the city elders of Dothan, who have expressed enthusiasm about the plan, have slightly different motives here.  

As someone who grew up in a rural state (admittedly not Southern, but a population of 58,000 is practically a megalopolis for some parts of Nebraska), I feel I can safely say that the death of small town America is hardly an exclusively Jewish problem.  Jews may have disappeared from small towns, but so have people.  As big-box retailers curtail and eventually murder local businesses, as factories shut down, as opportunities grow ever scarcer, talented and ambitious young people take flight, seeking their fortunes elsewhere, and never come back. 

They call it the brain drain.  Left behind are the elderly and those with few other options. To survive, such towns (and I’m not speaking of Dothan in particular, but depressed areas in general), require new residents with the skills and energy to attract business rather than drive it away, and in some cases, radically remake the fabric of the community. In the Midwest, a new influx of Latino immigrants has helped to correct some of the imbalance, bringing new vitality to stagnant areas, but in the conservative South where xenophobic fervor tends to run high, this option is perhaps seen as less tenable.  

You need a middle class?  Bring in the Jews.  Any student of Jewish history might feel a faint quiver of recognition.

In the twelfth century, when Jews were massacred and eventually expelled from England and France, the Polish prince Boleslaus III had an idea: why not invite them to Poland?  He was struggling to transform his country into a mercantile culture, Jews were educated and good with money and needed a place to live.  At the time, Lithuania, which comprised much of Poland was still officially a pagan state (it would remain so until 1386, when Poland offered its crown to the Lithuanian Grand Duke, and was the last country in Europe to Christianize); there would be no significant religious obstacle from its people.  Rich in resources and underdeveloped, Poland was ready and waiting for the beleaguered and brainy Hebrews.  

Casimir the Great: good for the jewsAs they say in Fiddler on the Roof, it was a perfect match.  Over the next two hundred years, Jews flooded into Poland, almost exclusively forming the middle class—a liaison between the agrarian peasants and the cultured aristocracy.  The odd flare-up of anti-Semitic violence certainly occurred, but compared to the horrors Jews had endured in Crusades-mad Western Europe, these hardly seemed reason for pause.  In 1264, Boleslaus the Pious issued the Statute of Kalisz, which officially granted all Jews the freedom of worship, travel, and most importantly, trade.  Poland became the center of Jewish life in Europe, culminating under the beloved proto-liberal Casimir the Great (1303-1370) who expanded Jewish rights and protection to such an extent that he was known as “Casimir, King of the Serfs and Jews.”  

Unfortunately, if you’ll remember, it went downhill, or we’d all be speaking Polish right now.  

Thus far, Dothan has not proved nearly as attractive to urban Jews as medieval Poland, and unless the approximately seventeen gentiles in Great Neck lose their minds and start a riot against the Silvermans next door, this seems unlikely.  But the Jews who have settled in Dothan seem to find an extremely hospitable place.  As Rabbi Lynne Goldsmith of Temple Emanu-El points out: “The Northeast has a very warped perception of what the South is all about….the South is a wonderful place to be.  The people are warm and friendly.  There’s very little traffic, and best of all, there’s no snow.”

Let’s just hope she’s singing the same tune 500 years from now.

The latte paradox: Coffee wakes you up, but living in a monoculture puts you to sleepThe encroaching domination of Starbucks took a minor blow today -- yay! XM Radio and the coffee monolith have dissolved their partnership, which had apparently been less advantageous for the growing satellite radio company than they'd expected. So: gone forever is the creepiness of being able to tune into what was basically the coffee chain's artfully crafted Muzak from any XM-equipped radio. Now all we have to worry about, in terms of cultural vanilla-latteization, are the coffee chain's music label and their incredibly influential featured-book program. Yeah, only those things.

It's OK. There are Europeans who think America is the world.

 

 

   This is a post about English soccer – but before all you Americans scroll down to something else, let may say it is also about identity and globalisation, capitalism and the decline of the nation-state.    

OK, still here? Right, England has entered one of its periodic crises after the national soccer team failed to qualify for next summer’s European Championships. The qualification process ensures that the top 16 nations in Europe gather together in Switzerland and Austria next year for a big tournament which is second only to the World Cup in terms of interest and status. England, who invented ‘Association Football’ aren’t among those 16 after finishing behind Croatia and Russia and on the same points as that powerhouse of European soccer –Israel. (I don’t need to explain to you why Israel have  play in Europe rather than in competition with the other Middle Easter countries which they would almost certainly win).    

 It is 41 years since the England team last won a prize – the 1966 World Cup - which was the only time the tournament was held in England. Unlike most major powers in the game, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Italy etc, England have never actually won away from home turf. But, we invented the game, we have the ‘greatest league in the world’ and most English people really believe they, their clubs, their players and their fans, represent the genuine, authentic heart and soul of the game. 

There is no way of comparing this trauma to anything in US sports – if I must try and tempt you with an analogy – imagine that baseball really went global, there was a World Series befitting of the title and the US didn’t even make the play-offs, finishing behind Honduras and South Korea after losing to Venezuela.       

No country in Europe likes their soccer team to not qualify for the Euro finals but in England, the failure provokes deep reactions which tell us a great deal about the tortured sense of identity in the country.      

 First of there is the sense of entitlement that is lost by actual competition – the English assume their place is at the top table for reasons of tradition and history. But unlike bodies such as the United Nations and The Commonwealth, European soccer is based purely on merit and not on heritage. No-one is silly enough to suggest England should qualify automatically (as they do for the UN Security Council) so the response is a vicious search for blame. As usual, and as in most sports, the coach is the first scapegoat. Steve McLaren was sacked before his bosses had even digested their bacon sandwiches the morning after the defeat to Croatia. Then there are the search for the ‘deeper causes’ of the defeat and here the deep pains of English identity start to emerge.    

One of the most popular ‘root causes’ identified this time around has been foreign players in English football. The Premier League (EPL to those Americans who take an interest) is packed with players from all over the globe and none of the elite teams are coached by Englishmen. Liverpool is owned by Americans and coached by a Spaniard. Chelsea is owned by a Russian and coached by an Israeli. The argument goes that because there are so many foreign players in England – English boys don’t get a chance. The argument is utter nonsense for several reasons - primarily because England had similar disappointments in the seventies and eighties when there were hardly any non-British players in the top league.   

Nonetheless, the argument is based on an essential truth – the ability of England’s Premier League to market itself globally, in a similar fashion to the NBA , has generated a huge amount of income which the clubs have invested in buying up foreign players. The result is a championship which is based on the core values of modern globalized capitalism – it is deregulated, internationalised and the team with the most money available usually wins. Imagine an NFL where a previously unheard of Russian billionaire could buy up, say, the Cleveland Browns, purchase Tom Brady and half the current New England Patriots team along with the best players from all the other teams and win the Superbowl easily every, single, year. You can’t do that in American sports because of the regulations – the draft, the salary cap, the rules on ownership etc  – it is a curious state of affairs but compared to the laissez-faire capitalism of English soccer, American sports are almost socialistic.

The English are pretty happy with this state of affairs for their league – they are sports fans, they support their teams in a tribalistic fashion and so no-one amongst Chelsea’s supporters ever complains about a loss of identity given their club is in Russian hands and they only have a couple of English players in their starting line-up – if the Blues win, the Blues fans are happy. The  problem comes when you get to international competition between nation states where the rules are very different. You can’t trade your citizenship, the coach of the national team can’t buy anyone and it doesn’t matter how much money your organization has – selection is restricted to people who are citizens of the country. National team soccer is the last survivor of the old amateur values – you play for honour and pride – not money. You represent your country and not your employers. You are expecting to give your all for glory and not for the next big contract deal.    

And this is where the global success of the English soccer brand falls down – the results show that the players aren’t really good enough or they haven’t been coached well enough and the normal rules of the market – buy some better players – don’t apply.    

So the England players are blamed for not caring enough and the system is criticised for being out-dated – and there are some valid arguments that I shan’t trouble you with here about what precisely, technically is the problem with homegrown English footballers.     

But the big picture is that soccer, like other sports, is transforming itself and globalizing itself in a way which leaves the old nation state framework looking increasingly like a sideshow. On a week to week basis fans, owners and coaches don’t care about nationality – they want results and entertainment. Most of the time, the English enjoy the chance to watch top international performers either in the Premier League or the Europe-wide Champions League. The pangs of pain only come when cash no longer can talk – when soccer enters a timewarp and we go back to an era when the rules are different. The pain is enhanced because the English like to think they represent the old values of the game when in fact they epitomize the modern transformation of the sport into a global entertainment and marketing industry.   

There are no signs that the trends will change – if anything they are likely to intensify -  and so the English will slowly have to get used to the fact their national team is mediocre but they have the most marketable professional league in the world. And in this respect England will become more American.    

There are no nation-state battles in American football or pro baseball and the Olympic competition in basketball and hockey is a sideshow for anyone who seriously follows the NBA or NHL. Americans are lucky in that so few countries play baseball or football – they can simply enjoy the NFL and MLB without worrying about what the rest of the world is doing. The English are going to have to learn to do that -  not to care about nation-state competition – and that won’t be easy for a people who remain attached to tradition while being at the vanguard of tradition-smashing global, capitalized sport.

 

You Americans and your peculiar ways. Your “World Series” that no-one else is invited to, your wacky efforts at global policing (much appreciated, by the way), your utter inability correctly to pronounce the word “aluminium”, your insistence on using the abbreviation 9/11 that, everywhere else in the world, refers to the ninth of November. I don’t point out these foibles in the spirit of mockery, you understand, but of gentle ribbing, as two old friends might engage in banter during a drunken evening down the pub.

Anyway, one of the things that amuses us over here (and by ‘us’ I mean those of us who consider the USA to be a friend, ally and brother nation greatly to be admired, not the pseudo-intellectual, Gauloise-puffing Communists whom you’d no more trust to stand and fight by your side than you would not to shag your wife while you were out of town) is the American belief system that places USA! USA! at the centre of the known universe, no matter what the context. Take this unintentionally hilarious comment from Condi Rice the other day, explaining why Cal Ripken is to be a “Special Sports Envoy” for the State Department:

"Sports is a universal language... Everybody knows that if you can play baseball like Cal Ripken then you're going to... have the world at your feet... So he's going to go out and I'll bet he'll find people who want to be Cal Ripken in Pakistan and people who want to be Cal Ripken in Guatemala and people who want to be Cal Ripken in Europe..."

There are, as has been pointed out elsewhere, a number of levels on which this is horseshit. Leaving aside the inherent absurdity of sending a millionaire sportsman to lecture Pakistani kids on the benefits of a strong work ethic, there’s a bigger problem here. No offence, but the vast, vast majority of us do not have a bloody clue who Cal Ripken is. (I’ve been typing “Carl” for the last couple of minutes and didn’t notice my mistake.) You may doubt this, but I can assure you it is true. The overwhelming mass of humanity had never heard of OJ before he did not murder his ex-wife, or Kobe Bryant before he did not rape that girl. Barry Bonds could walk down any street in Johannesburg, Delhi or Melbourne unnoticed. Ronaldinho or Zidane would be utterly mobbed.

My point is not that American sports are (basketball aside) all but unplayed in other parts of the world (though they're not); it is, rather, to note with interest the mindset that goes with being the biggest and most powerful country in the world, and how different it is from that of other nations. It simply didn’t occur to Condi – an intelligent and well-travelled woman - that she might be talking out of her arse. Why would it? After all, most American celebrities find themselves recognised throughout the world. Angelina and Britney don’t need surnames to identify them in Lahore any more than they do in LA. America’s ‘soft’ power is an awesome, unprecedented global phenomenon; no wonder so many resent it. So the exceptions are all the more striking for being so rare. I wonder how an NFL star feels when he walks through the streets of a major European city and no-one gives him a second look. I wonder if he loves it or, secretly, hates every second.

The British are often accused of behaving like we still ruled the waves, and perhaps on one level it’s true. For my part, I’m pretty sure we know that our place in the world is much diminished; billions of acres of print have been expended on analysing the way our national psyche has changed since the days of Empire, and how we've adapted to our more humble station in life. But once upon a while we were the most powerful nation on Earth, just as you are now, and it shaped our national character irrevocably, just as it continues to shape yours. Once we were knocked off our perch we found it hard to adjust; in many ways, 100 years on, we still do. I hope America is top dog for a long time to come, because none of the alternatives are very palatable; but one day she won’t be, and I wonder how Americans will react to the changed realities of that time.

Still, for real arrogance, we must all, always, defer to our politicians. Rudy Giuliani took solipsism to a whole new level yesterday when he proudly announced to astonished London journalists that he was one of the four or five most famous Americans in the world. I wonder which of the cast of Friends he thinks he slipped in ahead of?

For the first time in my life I feel truly American. Vestiges of rebellious third world sentimentality are not erased but they have become much more rational. I feel an unbridgeable distance from those militants across the globe that I previously felt some sort of pity for. Once I thought that even though their methods were disreputable they were still simply misguided people trying to rectify the injustices of the world. No more. Now, having seen their vision of justice, I am appalled that I ever felt some sort of emotional, sentimental connection with them. So what if it was pity and not alliance? So what? It was connection, and I rue that. If I hate them now then I must hate the part of me that did not hate them before. I don’t understand. Do the expositions of our sacred (as is life) Shariah not leave a mark in their heart? Does not the generous and magnanimous character of our Prophet not ring in these people’s minds? They have lashed out like Nietzsche’s master moralists, but I see no nobility in their actions; no honor in their enunciation.

That was what I wrote at 4:30 p.m., on 9/11/01.

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Fifteen years ago, before the death of irony and cassette tapes, I fell in love with a girl while living on a kibbutz in Israel. At least it felt like love at the time. Like the affair itself, my arrival in Israel was an act of happenstance. I had just dropped out of law school, veering from a path that had been carefully cultivated by my parents since I was in the fifth grade. This semi-rebellious act left me rootless and ready to take on the world. I was looking to travel to any place, so long as it was away from home. Israel was not the only foreign port that beckoned me forth, but it was warm and far away and full of Significance. At the time, it existed for me more as a mythic abstraction than a geographic reality.

The start of the affair: Slacker + international intrigueFor years my father had been keenly focused on this tiny sliver of land, though I never really understood why. As is the case with many American Jews, Israel influenced his voting behavior, his philanthropic choices and even the books he read. Any decision was justifiable so long as it benefited the Holy Land. Thanks to this cultural cover, it was an easier sell to my parents than Telluride or Prague, other favored destinations for clichéd wanderers at the time. But my decision to move to a kibbutz wasn’t motivated by my father’s political myopia. I was just after the Zionist dream of living communally, turning the desert into a garden, and hooking up with adventurous young Scandinavians who volunteered for kibbutz life as a cheap way to extend world tours.

As it turned out, I never had the chance to enjoy that last rite-of-passage. On nearly my first day on the kibbutz, I fell madly in lust with Leah, an outspoken South African with pale blue eyes and lustrous auburn hair. She was fresh off six months of teaching art to Palestinian children in the West Bank, and her Johannesburg accent gave her an exotic, sophisticated air. This was a woman who had spent a year touring Europe as a member of a punk trio after graduating from one of England’s finest boarding schools. Had Graham Greene been asked write a sequel to Slacker, Leah could have been his female protagonist. I was in love with her at first sight—or with the idea of her, which was, frankly, the same thing to me back then.

As in college and prison, time spent on a kibbutz is catalyzed by severe insularity. Leah and I were together nearly every hour of every day. There were few literal or figurative walls of any kind, so our relationship simply leapt into existence without the incremental steps of courtship. Within three weeks I had moved into her living space, a large cabin at the far end of the volunteers’ compound. Luckily, she had not been assigned a bunkmate, so we pushed two rickety twin beds together and built a makeshift honeymoon suite.

This spontaneity was exactly what I was looking for after the bloodless experience of law school, not to mention my previous relationships. The girlfriend I’d had prior to leaving for Israel wanted nothing more than to settle down and live in a midwestern suburb. Leah was different from the other women I’d been with, most of whom didn’t own electric guitars or the complete works of Hunter S. Thompson. She was uninterested in defining our relationship, and she seemed unburdened by the concept of dating with a specific end goal in mind.

Nice work if you can get it: An avocado fieldThanks to the sub-tropical heat of the Israeli summer, clothes were optional, a situation that was tailor-made (so to speak) for young lovers anxious to explore their “cultural commonalities.” Leah and I formed a community of two, falling into a shared life. Our work took us to different parts of the kibbutz—she toiled in a dog food factory while I had to good fortune to work in the sun-drenched avocado fields—but in our free time we were inseparable. We tended to skip the group social activities in favor of our cozy co-habitation, reading, playing “shesh besh”, and indulging in the kibbutz’s main source of live entertainment: drinking cheap vodka while sitting around a bonfire.

But all was not milk and honey in our enchanted garden. Leah was a diehard proponent of Palestinian liberation, and she felt that any Israeli presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was illegal, immoral and unjustified. She also contended that the military support provided by the United States to Israel made America, and all Americans, complicit.

At first I simply nodded at her passionate pleas without giving them much thought. But eventually the fruits of the political discussions my father had endlessly belabored began to rise to the surface. I started to assert my own views, or at least those that were then popular in The Jerusalem Report. But when I tried to suggest that Palestinian violence had helped create the current situation, or that there were viable scenarios that would allow for the creation of Palestinian state, she would label me a “lie-spouting bourgeois jackass,” which is an argument that was hard to counter intellectually.

My opinions on the complicated subject were irrelevant, really, because my nationality had, in her eyes, pre-determined my complicity. Had she listened to me, she might have learned that although I had been raised to view Israel as the righteous defender of its land, actually being there had broadened my perspective. I didn’t agree entirely with her arguments, but I saw merit in some of them.

Complications in love and war: Israelis protesting the war in Lebanon, May 2006But I was not bothered by the name-calling. As far as thickheaded zealots go, Leah was captivating and cute. In fact, the furious verbal sparring gave our evening liaisons an intense additional jolt. I don’t know how Arafat was in bed, but to do this day I say there is no better aphrodisiac than political disagreement. Still, her inability to see any side but her own made me worry about our long-term compatibility. Compromise is a necessary ingredient in any relationship, whether between mismatched lovers or ethnic factions that have been warring since the biblical age over a landmass the size of Maryland. Extremism, on the other hand, is a dangerous portent, in both love and war. It got to the point where we couldn’t read the newspaper in the same room. The only solution was to avoid the subject of politics altogether.

Avoidance was a skill I had in surplus as a young male, but something about our purposeful lack of communication felt false. How could we be so synched in every aspect but this one? Leah often spoke of “the privileged blindness of Americans,” but I never felt it applied to Americans like me. Perhaps, in truth, I was not as worldly as I imagined myself to be. For all of the open-mindedness I thought my time spent traveling had engendered, was I simply another over-privileged suburbanite with a well-stamped passport and a worn North Face backpack? I was living with a woman to whom my very nationality was an affront. For a person who claimed she preferred to live without borders, Leah had defined ours pretty sharply.

The détente we’d established went on for a few months, until one night when we were camping on a desolate Mediterranean beach. As we cuddled in one large sleeping bag beneath the stars, she said that, as much as she cared for me, she couldn’t be with someone who didn’t share her worldview. I had seen this coming, but it still sent me reeling. I’d been dumped in the past, but usually for reasons that related to my own personal shortcomings. Leah and I were splitting up over a geopolitical morass that the best minds in statesmanship had been unable to solve for several millennia. Like the peace process itself, we had apparently taken the middle road off the table.

Even Bill couldn't have helped: Clinton encourages a peace-process handshakeBreaking up on a kibbutz is impossible. I moved out of her cabin, but we still slept less than fifty feet from each other and ate all our meals in the same cramped cafeteria. Somehow we managed to tap into a wellspring of maturity that allowed us to weather the proximity, establishing a cordial acquaintanceship but avoiding any prolonged interaction. Heartbroken, I took solace in the consistent regimen of workaday kibbutz life, turning myself into the fastest avocado picker in the Middle East. My downtime was spent clutching dog-eared volumes of Rilke, which didn’t help my cause much. Taking the advice of my male bunkmates, I tried to woo several of the Danish volunteers, who were especially receptive to male attention. But I was “Leah’s ex,” and nobody wanted to make time with a marked man.

The ever-popular Leah had no such problems. She was quickly pursued by a soft-spoken Argentine named Luis who also lived on the kibbutz. With his laissez-faire South American attitude, Luis offered her political commiseration, not to mention a long-term commitment. They ended up getting married, making aliyah and becoming permanent members of the kibbutz. As far as I know, they’re still there today. I came back to the States a year later, after long stops in Morocco and Mexico, to begin graduate school.

I’ve thought about Leah a lot in the interceding years, but any feelings of loss have always been buttressed by the fact that we broke up for external, impersonal reasons. It never occurred to me that she had merely used our political differences as a means to let me down gently. Or that my tendency to mythologize certain geographic regions had also extended toward the concept of Love itself. But apparently the same blind passions that keep nations divided prevented me from seeing what was happening right before my very eyes.

Paul Barrett, author of American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, wrote an op-ed for The LA Times describing his experiences as a Jew writing about the Muslim world in America. Throughout his four years of research, Barrett attempted to bring cohesion to the vast array of attitudes regarding American Muslims. His final assertion and a central theme of his book, "American Muslims are anything but monolithic."

Shiite Iraqi immigrants who originally supported the U.S. invasion of their homeland see the world differently from Sunnis who passionately opposed the war. White ex-hippie converts to Sufism, Islam's mystical cousin, have sharply different views from black ex-convict Muslims who embraced the faith behind bars. American Islam is an intricate mixture of devout and secular, moderate and extreme, insular and integrated.

It's true I heard some unsettling notions about American power and who wields it. In Dearborn, Mich., where Arab immigrants began arriving in the 1920s to work in the auto industry, I had a series of long interviews with Imam Husham al-Husainy, a voluble Shiite Iraqi emigre who leads the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center. Initially a backer of the U.S. invasion of his homeland, Al-Husainy had come to believe that the bedlam that has followed had to be intentional — the result of a conspiracy. He explained to me that even as a Jew, I might not understand the extent of Zionism's reach.

At the heart of the conspiracy, he told me, is "the Zionist special group" that opposes "the improvement of the relationship between Christians and Muslims."

"America itself is a victim of a special-interest group that doesn't want it to have a good relationship with the Muslim world," Al-Husainy said. "Bush himself is a victim, I believe."

American Flag with Bald Eagle: Glorious, but still Treyf.

In the news today, a brief story on the ongoing dialogue concerning whether Israel should/will recognize diaspora conversions.  And yes, the good guys are winning, but I can’t believe we’re still having this conversation. 

I mean, it’s not like this affects the law of return or anything, right? It’s just an issue of whether I count as a Jew.  To a country chock full of completely secular Jews who “count”. 

I, as a diaspora Jew who underwent a conservative conversion, find this dialogue to be inane.

NOT because I think that the religious Jews of Israel are wrong in questioning whether American Jews are up to snuff… Truly, we aren’t, if by “snuff” one means “comparable levels of religious observance”.  American Jews are lazy, by and large. Everyone knows that.  But as I’ve already stated, plenty of Israeli Jews could give a shit about religious observance. That’s not at stake. 

This is just about membership cards.  About whether American rabbis have the right to hand them out.

I think its total crap that there’s such huge pressure placed on American Jewry to support, defend, finance, and recognize Israel as “our homeland.”  But then the legitimacy of our American Jewish institutions is questioned by the country we’re being asked to support.

I feel like we’re either part of the club or we aren’t.  If you want our money, our media, our votes of confidence, than you need to accept that we belong in the club.  And we bring with us a wide range of perspectives… 

Even sometimes a southern drawl.

Monica LewinskyIn France, they called me Monica—and boy, was that the joke that wouldn’t quit. They chuckled “Monica” when I walked down the street, winked “Monica” when I picked up a baguette, sniggered “Monica” when I bought a bottle of wine at the corner store. This was back in 1998, the post-college year I spent loafing in Paris, and here’s the weird part: At first I didn’t even know what they were talking about. My name was, and is, Lauren.

“Non, non, Mon-ee-ka!” exclaimed my pal Eric, making a vulgar gesture with his hand and his mouth. Eric was a balding Parisian who waited tables at the restaurant next door to my apartment. We smoked cigarettes together, and if I came in to the restaurant during the late afternoon, he’d give me free bowlfuls of runny rice pudding.

“Mon-ee-ka Levinsky!” Eric said, then looked at me questioningly. “I am saying it right? Tu comprends?”

He was saying it right, but I was not comprending at all. Did the people on the street, at the boulangerie, at the wine shop—did they really think I was Monica Lewinsky? No, that couldn’t be it—as far as the world knew, Monica was sequestered somewhere in DC with her lawyers. So then they must have thought I looked like her—but I didn’t look like Monica any more than I looked like Brigitte Bardot (which is to say, sadly, not at all). So what was it, then, that the French found so Monica-esque about me?

“I hardly resemble Monica Lewinsky,” I informed Eric. “She has long hair. And a teeny nose. And she’s, you know…” I tried to make the international gesture for “chubby,” tracing the outlines of a round woman’s figure in the air with my hands.

“Yes,” Eric said thoughtfully. “But of course,” he added, “she is Jewish, no?”

“Monica?” I blinked. “I guess.”

“So then you see.” He shrugged one of those awful Gallic shrugs and lit a cigarette. “She is Jewish, you are Jewish. You have that Jewish face, that body. Very, sexy. Very beautiful. But it is the face and the body of,”—here a thoughtful exhale of cigarette smoke—“a Jewess.”

When I didn’t respond for several moments, Eric’s expression shifted from worldly to anxious. “I said the wrong thing, heh? The right word is not Jewess? That is a bad word?”

Jewess. It’s certainly better than a hundred other derogatory names you could call a Jew. But still it rankles. The word Jewess brings to my mind heavy locks of thick black hair, long skirts, clinking bracelets, a musky odor. A Jewess sounds juicy and slightly dirty, like a lot of other words that end in the feminine suffix -ess: mistress, seductress, stewardess. Never mind that most of the Jewish women I know are wildly overworked, too stressed to be seductive. Never mind that in their current pop-culture depictions, Jewish women tend to be emasculating shopaholic Princesses bearing Daddy’s AmEx, not shaking tambourines. And never mind that, as far as clinking bracelets and long skirts go—that ain’t the Monica I picture, and it sure as hell isn’t me.

Intrigued, I did a little digging on the subject. First of all, it was no shock that I came face to face with the term in France. The Jewess, or “la Juive” in the native tongue, seemed to be an especially French construction, rife with all the dualities that France shows its own Jewish population. In the literature of Balzac and de Maupassant she was a courtesan, while in de Goncourt she was the buxom model of a Christian painter. Chateaubriand claimed that the Jewess’s beauty was compensation to the accursed, humiliated Jewish man; Alexandre Dumas warned that the wily Jewess could, snake-like, loosen the morals of French society. The Jewess even got her own French opera, Fromental Halévy's La Juive, in which she played, à la The Merchant of Venice, the gorgeous daughter of a tyrannical hook-nosed Jew.

These days, the sexy Jewish woman, both in France and elsewhere, is the subject of a different kind of fascination. To some, she’s a bronzed lady of leisure, tanning in South Beach or shopping at Saks. To others, she’s the whiny, raven-tressed Nanny from the sitcom of the same name. And to still others, she remains the Orientalized Other; if you have the misfortune of visiting a skinhead website you’ll see the nineteenth century Jewess stereotype lives on in all its terrible Alexandre Dumas incarnations. But for most people, the platonic form of the sexy Jewish female is “that woman” from Beverly Hills who sucked on Bill Clinton’s cigar.

Even now, eight years after the Lewinsky scandal, Monica’s impact remains profound. She is the lascivious “portly pepperpot,” a lingering late-night television joke. Certain ultra-Orthodox Jews hail her as a modern-day Queen Esther. Golda Meir doesn’t score a quarter of her name recognition, and Gloria Steinem doesn’t get an eighth. For better or worse, she is the Jewess of our age.

***

“But it does say something about us, doesn’t it?” This was from an acquaintance of mine, a Jewish woman a few years older than me. We were at a café in Manhattan a month after I’d returned from Paris, talking about the newly-released Starr Report, which had been printed in the Times in its full filthy ickiness.

“ ‘According to Ms. Lewinsky,’” she read, “ ‘she performed oral sex on the President; he never performed oral sex on her.’ It’s so typical. Jewish women are such givers. They give and give and give. Even when there’s no hope of receiving.”

“You know, I’m not sure the Starr report is a testament to the Jewish woman’s generosity,” I said, shuffling the Times to a different section.

I headed home unnerved. When I was in Paris, whatever discomfort I had felt about the whole Monica-Lauren vector I had attributed in part to the general discomfort of being an expat. But here, back on home turf—New York City, the Jewish capital of the world!—I still couldn’t shake that feeling of indictment.

It’s not that I was a prude, exactly, but I had always been averse to talking about sex in public. And now I felt like the whole world was talking, not just about Monica’s sex life, but also, by extension, my sex life. All of our sex lives. De Goncourt’s Jewess was reclaiming her place on the public stage, crowding out our own ideas of ourselves.

***

At the end of that summer, the knot tightened. The House Judiciary Committee announced that it would release the tapes of Bill Clinton’s X-rated grand jury testimony on September 21, which just happened to be the first day of Rosh Hashanah—the first day of the year 5759. Was this anti-Semitism at its most insidious? Making our New Year a national smut fest? Why couldn’t the House Judiciary Committee have waited one more day? September 22 would be a very nice day to humiliate the President too.

Desperate for someone to gripe with, I called my mother in New Jersey. A wickedly smart woman, she is usually a reliable source of good old-fashioned Jewish liberal indignation. But all she said was, “Well, I’m glad I’ll be in shul so I don’t have to watch.”

“But Mom!” I sputtered. “Don’t you see? It’s like they’re waiting for all the Jews to be in temple so they can talk behind their backs about what it’s like to fuck one of them!”

“Watch your language,” my mother said. “So will you be joining us for erev Rosh Hashanah services or what? You need your dad to pick you up at the bus station?”

“Mom!” I said, dismayed at her lack of dismay. “Don’t you get it? Monica’s a Jew. They’re airing the testimony on a high holiday. This is totally all about the Jews!”

“Listen to yourself,” my mother chuckled. “You sound like one of those people who boycotts the Times when they write a good review of an Arab movie. Listen, if you could pick up two challahs on your way to the bus station that would be a help.”

Really, who had time for self-definition in the days before Rosh Hashanah? The leaves were changing, the air was cooling, there was poultry to roast and apples to cut up and serve with honey. Kids needed to be picked up from airports and bus stations, and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were preparing to take their places at the holiday table. This was what mattered. This was what was real.

On the day before Rosh Hashanah, most Jewish women I know go to work, hurry home, order someone to set the table, heat up the soup, pour glasses of Manischevitz, pass bowls of chopped liver and candied nuts, serve and eat a big dinner, put on their good suits, go to synagogue, and pray. They do not contemplate how Monica’s blowjob defines perceptions of their sexual identity. Their minds are on bigger things.

Two days after talking to my mother I sat by her side at Rosh Hashanah services. I listened to the rabbi begin his prayers. I listened to the rabbi’s son blow the shofar. I knew that it was time to stop my Monica-mania and my paranoia; it was a new year now. After services, I did not read the paper, nor did I turn on the television. Instead, I took a walk to the local creek. Throwing my bread down the river, I let myself off the hook.

NEXT

GO: Want to hang out with a bunch of Jewesses doing Jewessy stuff? Head over to the launch of Aish New York's women's division on November 12. Aish says that "soulful diva Esther Neistein" will be performing!