Discussing the 2008 film Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist for Nextbook, Stuart Klawans noted a discrepancy between the way the film was advertised and what it actually contains. “The promotional campaign for Nick & Norah mostly wants to sell you on indie rock, downtown Manhattan glamour, and a couple of actors who are extremely cute, in an approachable way,” he wrote. “Their eventual union, of course, is a foregone conclusion. What you won’t know in advance is the nature of the critical moment.”

He means the scene, set in the recording studio owned by Norah Silverberg’s father, in which she initiates her first sexual encounter with Nick O’Leary by invoking theological doctrine. “That reminds me of this part of Judaism that I really like. It’s called Tikkun Olam. It says that the world is broken into pieces and it’s everybody’s job to find them and put them back together again.” Although the slice on this come-on is treacherous, Nick has no trouble returning serve. “Well maybe we’re the pieces, you know, maybe we’re not supposed to find the pieces, maybe we are the pieces.”

Some commentators on Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist praised its willingness to showcase the heroine’s ethnic identity, even if it tempered the Jewishness of the book on which it was based. Others, like Claire E. Gross, faulted the film for making details that are integral to the original story seem too random. “Norah’s mentions of an upcoming year at Brown seem closer to bragging than worry, her concern that she can’t orgasm is voiced once in passing and then quickly dismissed, and her sudden, stilted explanation of Tikkun Olam. . . is an even greater non sequitur than her Jewish identity itself. Why bother?”

The same might be said for the 2009 picture Adventureland. Although it feels like one of the many coming-of-age stories that focus on the end of high school – director Rob Mottola’s 2007 smash Superbad was a classic of the genre – the protagonist, James Infinite Playlist TrailerBrennan, is actually a recent college graduate who has been forced to take a summer job at a local amusement park rather than travel to Europe like his privileged former classmate. The work is tedious, but brings him into contact with other overqualified “carnies,” including Em Lewin, an attractive young woman who eventually becomes his love interest.

Midway through the film, we learn that Em is Jewish and then get to see her rally to the defense of another Jewish carny who has been dumped because he isn’t Catholic. Like the intellectual foreplay in the recording studio from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, the outburst comes out-of-the-blue, making it seem like shorthand for character development that the film fails to deliver. Again, the question “Why bother?” is hard to suppress.

Certainly, there’s a way in which the Jewishness of major characters in these films reflects a broader trend in contemporary Hollywood, typified by the work of Judd Apatow, that has given us characters who are demonstrably not WASPs, but are also not stereotyped on the basis of their race or religion. One of Nick’s bandmates is both Asian and gay, yet not reducible to either. While his sexual preference plays a role in the film’s plot, it isn’t simply raw material for making the audience laugh.

And yet most of these films are trying hard to do just that, often by deliberately pushing the buttons of those with an investment in appearing “politically correct.” It’s a delicate balancing act, which succeeds more in some areas – the representation of race and religion – than it does in others – the representation of gender. But the shortcomings of this new aesthetic shouldn’t provoke us, to paraphrase a scene from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, to throw our chewing gum out with the toilet bowl full of vomit into which it has been ingloriously expelled.

In other words, there are reasons to bother thinking hard about the representation of collective identity in these pictures and, more specifically, the simultaneously understated yet prominent role they let Jewishness play. First and foremost, the very fact that they can inspire the question “Why bother?” is a clear indication that they represent real progress, however fitfully realized, on the pathway to a world in which we can be judged by the content of our character without having to whitewash our pasts in the process.

Less obviously, the fact that films like Adventureland and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist depict ethnicity in a sidelong fashion while focusing most of their attention on the power of music to bring people together indicates that they might have something profound to tell us about the function of religion today.

Both Nick and James make mixes of their favorite songs that play a role in finding a soulmate they can have sex with. There’s a telling scene in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist in which Norah, after scrolling through Nick’s iPod, enthusiastically exclaims that it’s amazing how much her musical taste overlaps with his. Later, they struggle over who will select the songs for their drive through Manhattan in Nick’s Yugo. James and Em bond over shared musical interests in similar fashion. In both cases, it is made very clear that the couples could never come together without the help of their cultural taste preferences. From this perspective, personal history such as where a person attended school, how much money they have, what religion they were born into etc. all function as potential impediments that only music has the power to transcend.

At the same time, though, Norah and Em assert their Jewishness in ways that actually serve their amorous goals. While the possession of compatible musical taste is the precondition for an intimate relationship, it doesn’t quite seem to be enough on its own. The coupling only comes off with the acknowledgment of differences less mutable than one’s digital music library.

The title Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is interesting in this regard. The majority of the story is devoted to two parallel searches, one for a secret concert by the revered indie band Where’s Fluffy? and the other for Norah’s inebriated friend Caroline. At one point, Caroline calls to say she’s hanging out with Jesus. Because we get to see this “Jesus,” smoking a cigarette and looking bored, while Caroline is making this confusing statement concerning her whereabouts, we are fully prepared to appreciate the irony in the comment Norah makes when the phone call is over: “I need to find Jesus.”

And yet, the theme of redemption is taken seriously enough within the film that these words seem like more than a way to get a cheap laugh. The characters in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Adventureland seek salvation in music because it still holds out the possibility of a transcendence that the constraints of daily life otherwise prohibit. “Infinite playlist,” in other words, is a clever way of naming G-d indirectly. No matter how many songs there are in a person's library, there will always be something missing, a lack that exchange with others can remedy to a degree -- Nick and James make mix tapes that turn their recipients on to new sounds -- but never absolutely.

The etymology of the word “religion” clues us in to what’s really going on in these films’ depiction of collective identity. The root lig- – also found in “league” and “ligature” – means “to bind.” Religion is what connects us to each other with bonds that last. In an era in which fundamentalism of all stripes seems bent on severing more links that it enables, music has the potential to serve as religion’s surrogate. But the sharing of songs is what facilitates belief; it isn't belief itself.

Perhaps the deep structure of rock and roll is inseparable from the Christian tradition out of which it emerged. But Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Adventureland suggest that it may be possible to find one’s religion in the music while remaining a Jew. Indeed, Norah’s invocation of Tikkun Olam reminds us that the impulse to redeem the broken world can motivate action without the figure of the messiah ever becoming flesh.

Significantly, although Nick and Norah spend their night trying to find the secret show that Where's Fluffy? is supposed to be playing, they depart the concert before it begins, letting us savor the memory of what it feels like to want something that badly, rather than the inevitable disappointment of realizing that the desired end was merely a substitute for an ending that cultural experience can never provide. 

Four years ago, when Coleman was born, I sometimes attended a mothers’ group in my neighborhood, an obscure corner of the Lower East Side tucked away beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. Like many new mothers in neighborhoods across the country, I had a rather conflicted relationship with this group. On the one hand, I was grateful, in those early days, for a place to go one afternoon per week, and for a group of women who were going through experiences similar to mine (lack of sleep, overwork, you know the drill). But though I made a couple of close friends within the group—friends with whom I’m still close and whose children have become Coleman’s friends, which is intensely wonderful for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint—I often found myself feeling alienated and alone, even as I sat in some nice person’s living room, picking at a cookie and wishing someone would magically airlift a double espresso from the coffee shop down the street. This was partly because, I suppose, I’m suspicious of groups, in general. In this group, as seems to be common, cliques quickly formed, and it sort of irritated me that these closed units of women felt the need to constantly chatter about the outings on which they’d gone together, the music classes in which they’d enrolled their kids together, the things they’d do over the weekend together, and so on, without thinking that this might, perhaps, make others feel excluded. Why go to the mothers’ group at all? Why not, I thought, just hang out together on Wednesdays between three and five, if you’re only going to talk to each other anyway? I tried to steel myself against the stupidity of it all, but couldn’t quite manage it. In other words, I felt like I’d returned to junior high, or maybe even high school (to be slightly kinder). In the years since, I’ve heard many other women complain about similar situations at their local playgrounds or whatnot, and I still can’t quite figure out what makes it so, though that knee-jerk feminist explanation has crossed my mind: That women are somehow raised to be competitive with each other. Even ostensibly liberal women who exclusively feed their kids organic baby food. The other explanation, I suppose, is that women shouldn’t, perhaps, be allowed to focus on their kids as much as do mothers of today, including myself.

Sometimes, while I was scooting around the hardwood floor of a shiny new apartment, trying to make sure Coleman didn’t inadvertently reset some stranger’s Tivo, I felt like a secret agent, a spy, sent to report back to HQ about the foibles of modern parenting. All around me, women would be talking about sleep training, and eliminating petroleum products (goodbye, A&D ointment), and spacing out vaccines, and the sugar content of YoBaby, and which nannies ignored their kids in the park (much pity was reserved for the parents of said kids), and a million other things that I basically didn’t think about at all. And in a way, I was a spy: I was (am) a writer. At that point, I was working frenetically on my novel—whenever Coleman slept, at the weekend, etc.—while doing some writing for magazines, as I’d done for years, and editing features for an online magazine called Nextbook (more on this in a moment). But somehow my work life seemed unreal and strange to many of the other mothers I met. One woman, when I explained that Nextbook allowed me to work at home, said, “Oh, so basically you get paid to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s nice.” Er, no.

The reason I bring all this up is because perhaps the strangest thing I encountered at the meetings of that group—stranger even allowing a baby to cry in his crib for an extended period of time in order to learn how to fall asleep on his own, stranger than the habit of writing down the contents of every single one of a baby’s diapers (!)—was an insistence that having a baby eliminated a woman’s ability to read. “I haven’t read a book since I had So-and-so,” the women, or many of them, constantly said. “I pick something up and then I just fall asleep.” One woman said she could make it through the whole paper each morning—which I found, and still find, deeply impressive, since I tend to fade out around the “Business” section—but couldn’t commit to actual books, because her time was so interrupted. Whenever I mentioned a book I’d read—generally as part of a conversation with a college friend of mine who’d moved to the neighborhood—someone was, apparently, legally bound to good-naturedly call out, “How can you read? I just can’t read anymore.” That’s weird, I thought, the first time it happened. And then it kept happening.

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One of my favorite poets, Sharon Dolin, has four poems up at Nextbook. The first, "Let Me Thrum (6 a.m.)" is a wonderful fresh and new version of "Nishmat Kol Hai," the poem of nature extolling God that we read every Shabbat morning.

What makes Dolin's work stand out for me is her exquisite ear, her ability to create a poem that would sound like music even if you did not know English, and whose sounds are intimately woven into her meaning. It's on full display in this poem, where the early morning poet both hears and observes:

antennae'd and furred
all sing all shirr all rub and buzz
and fling their call to You
in song-light as the mist still clings

Contrast those twittering consonants with the hollow, ominouis vowels in one of my favorites, "Regret," (not at Nextbook, but you can read it here):

Here's another sin you're sunk within
owl-necked looking back
to where you might have been

The set of poems on display on Nextbook take us through the day, into the evening light, when she asks:

O God
May I still see
in the violet hour

Dolin helps us see-and hear it..

[Cross-posted from South Jerusalem]

Darwin As Monkey: historical, and rife with metaphorical implications, tooJewcy’s own Peter Bebergal has a nice long article over at Nextbook about the religious ramifications of Creationism, and anything that limits the Bible to literalism. His point, basically, is that besides the dangerous negative effect that creationism has on science and people’s understanding of the world, it also limits the Bible to a historical account of the world, instead of a story with limitless metaphorical possibilities and implications. Creationism disallows some of the deeper and more transcendent understandings of the Bible.

I have two problems with Bebergal’s critique. The first is that historical events can have metaphorical implications. If the Bible is a literal account of the world’s history, that doesn’t make any of its metaphors any less potent.  It might even lend them some credibility to them. If the world really was overrun by a huge flood, with only one family and a boatload of animals surviving, that would certainly serve to teach us a lesson or two about behavior, reward and punishment, and what it means to be a human entrusted with restarting a frightening venture. Having a generally literal understanding of the Bible doesn’t preclude us from adding commentary, or another level of meaning that can be relevant to our lives.

Second, the Bible is not all stories.  Much of it is a presentation of a legal system, which does certainly have metaphorical implications, but which is also clearly presented as a literal guidebook for life. Here are things we can and cannot eat. People we can and cannot marry. Here are rules for warfare, for farming, and domestic life. These things can be understood metaphorically, but for millennia Jews have understood them to be commandments, not just metaphors designed to get us thinking about the world around us and our place in it.

Understanding the story of creation as a metaphor concerning responsibility, partnership, and ecology is all well and good. But if you understand the commandment ‘Do not murder’ as anything other than what it seems to mean on its face, you’re being intentionally obtuse.

I don’t go in for Creationism or Intelligent Design. I love Judaism and Torah, and I believe in God but I’m embarrassed by the conduct of many religious people in the face of hard science. Like Bebergal I’m looking for something that can jive my religious convictions with Jewish text, but for me it needs to be more than a metaphor.

Asch: Got more than he bargained forThere’s an interesting piece over at Nextbook, about Sholem Asch, the Jewish writer best known for his work on Jesus:

In 1939, at the height of Hitler's power, Asch published The Nazarene, a thick historical novel based on the life of Jesus. If that wasn't enough, Asch went on to pen two other installments; The Apostle, based on the life of Paul, in 1943, followed six years later by Mary.

For Asch's devoted Yiddish-speaking readers, this literary move constituted nothing less than a betrayal, and their anger surely must have deepened as the books catapulted up the American best-seller lists, helped by praise from Alfred Kazin and other New York intellectuals. An inexhaustible writer with a penchant for the melodramatic, Asch was best-known for his sepia-tinged portrayals of shtetl life, serialized, to popular acclaim, in the Forward…

It’s a sad story in many ways, the life of Sholem Asch. In another era, with better timing, he’d have won the Nobel prize, built bridges. Instead, he was pushed out of the fold and into the fray, eventually forced to fear for his life at the hands of “Yiddish Extremists.”  Despite the fact that he devoted the end of his life to Jewish work and died writing a novel about Jacob and Rachel.

But what’s really interesting about this story to me?  The fact that Jews still seem a lot less interested in Asch than Christians. We’re still ignoring him.  Just take a look at the comments that follow the article…

 I first read The Nazarene twenty years ago. I was a born again Christian and quite set in fundamental bible traditions. The Nazarene changed my life. The beauty of the prose along with the deep understanding of Mr. Asch literally stunned me. I have since bought and given away many copies of Mr. Asch's trilogy. The book, Mary, in my opinion, is the most touching in all of literature when it comes to showing maternal love. This book will forever be my favorite and I thank Mr. Asch for his courage to bring his work to me and all of humanity. 

Wow! Pretty powerful stuff.

Check it out and you’ll discover two interesting things:

1- a surprising number of Christians read Nextbook, and

2- few Jews seem to think this story is worth a response. 

Huh!  Isn’t that weird? 

AND if this is at all interesting to you… you probably want to know that Nextbook is hosting  a Jesus conference next  week!  (April 29) 

A Jewish Jesus conferece. Awesome!

The Yid-bit: Technology in the service of faithIt's hard, sometimes, to find ways to fit religion in around work, housecleaning, kids, etc.  If you want to be really observant, you have to re-order everything to accomodate your spiritual life (says Laurel, who found herself helping the Jewcy tech-wizard test her connection last Shabbat).  So it's always nice when you can find little things that make your days more menaingful.  Things that fit nicely in among your secular obligations.

And generally, technology makes things even more complcated, however it may be designed to make life "easier".  But may I suggest a tip!

There are all kinds of Jewish audio sources you can turn to.  There are Jewish resources online.  And you can easily load a little bit of faith/inspiration/culture into your ipod while you're at work today, and give it a listen on the way home.  So that sitting on the train, or in the car, or riding your bike, you can have a little "moment".  A "Yid-bit" if you will.

And I'm not talkiing about a small sampling. There are all kinds of Jews on the airwaves.  From pop-culture icons at the 92nd  St Y (on Audible)  to world-famous authors (on Nextbook).  From Torah study to Kabbalah classes.  From interfaith issues to Shoah testimonials.  Do yourself a favor and runa quick search on itunes, or at audible. And remember that almost anything you hear on the radio these days can be found online for a download.  Often for free!

So now you've got no excuse to avoid learning something.

Hey, if my family in any indication of the norm… Jews give books for Chanukah.

Maybe it’s because books aren’t that much fun, and so it keeps us from becoming too Christmas-y (I mean, we all love books , but when you’re a kid, and you want the Millennium Falcon, or a Cabbage-Patch-Kid… and you get “Chassidic Tales of the Holocaust” and some gelt… it’s a downer!)

But regardless, I grew up in a house of books, and so every year, I look around to buy books for people for Chanukah. My dad gets something super-Jewy, and my sister gets a really good novel, and my brother gets something gift-y and funny.

Using those rough guidelines, I wander around an enormous bookstore the day before Chanukah, trying to find something for everyone.

But this year, I’m not wandering. I’m using NEXTBOOK as my guide, and so I thought I’d link them here, in case you need to do some shopping too.

NEXTBOOK offers reading lists, author interviews (full disclosure, I used to podcast for them) and all kinds of book-centric articles that will help you buy presents for everyone. Just check out the site, find books that sound right for the people on your list, and then open a link in Amazon.

Voila! You’re done with your gift-buying for the year. Meaningful gifts with Jewish angles. Great reads. Get ya some.

I wonder what Jennifer Bleyer's original draft looked like. She seems to be sitting on her hands all throughout this review of a new documentary entitled, Young, Jewish and Left. Like a Michael Moore installment without the production value or camp animation sequence, YJL chronicles the woe-is-me tales of self-described "anarchist" and "radical" Jews who try to keep holy while reconciling their anti-occupation and antiwar politics with all manner of identity theory gobbledygook. I can't tell what's criticism and what's DVD bonus material for P.C.U. in the following extract:

In fact, it seems to be just love that motivates the dozens of young activists featured in Young, Jewish and Left, which functions as a kind of sprawling introduction to the new Jewish lefty scene. Occasional hints of brattiness, moments of condescension, and fuzzily articulated ideas are more than compensated for with humility, heart, and a basic human acknowledgment that we're all in the same boat. ("We" being not just Jews.) The young people depicted here seem to collectively affirm Che Guevara's famous statement that "the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love."

So, good, it begins with love. Then what? For the most part, you get the feeling that this movement (if it can be called a movement) is occupied primarily with opposing Israel, or with queer and transgender issues, or both at once, as in the case of a group called "Faygelehs for a Free Palestine." There are times when it feels like the movie could have narrowed its narrative lens just slightly and been renamed "Young, Jewish and Anti-Occupation" or "Young, Jewish and Queer.

Che Guevara's labor camps are now guided by true feelings of imprisoning Cuban dissidents and homosexuals and AIDS patients, but never you mind that when Faygelehs for Palestine are manning the barricades. Breyer should have heightened the pathos of this whole sodding project. (I don't so much mind the mockery it makes of Judaism as much as I do the one it makes of the Left.) The filmmakers aspire to prove that all politics is not just local, it's solipsistic. Judge for yourself by watching the simpering and self-parodying trailer. (Let's hear more from the Iraqi Jew whose family was expelled by Saddam and who can't quite get her head around the white Zionist imperialism for which the whole of global Jewry is said to stand.)

I'd very much like to know what some beggared Palestinian in the West Bank thinks about about a post-op New York "trans" being shown the door at shul. What's Arabic for "non sequitur"?