Remember the lyrics to George and Ira Gershwin’s wonderful 1937 song, “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off?” You know, the ones that go like this:
Flickr/Jessica and Lon Binder, FoodMayhem.com
You like potato and I like potahto
You like tomato and I like tomahto
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto,
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Both celebrating and poking fun at the range of accents and spellings that characterized interwar America, the Gershwins’ droll linguistic perspective came to mind this week amid a flap within the Jewish community about the proper way to invoke the Yiddish word for dumpling, otherwise familiar to many as a ‘kneydl.’ Or is it a ‘knaidel?’
When it became known, courtesy of a smartly written article by Joseph Berger on the front page of the New York Times, that the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee had rendered the word ‘knaidel,’ those who preferred an alternative orthography weighed in.
Before long, the blogosphere was cluttered with variant spellings — and much more. In short order, what had begun as a light-hearted, human interest story metamorphosed into impassioned screeds about the integrity of Yiddish, the importance of cultural literacy and the legacy of East European Jewry. No one, it seemed, was prepared to call the whole thing off or, for that matter, to give it a pass.
Nor should they. At a time when Yiddish has become, in Jeffrey Shandler’s words, a “postvernacular language,” whose speakers range from Hasidim in Brooklyn to the Hispanic countermen at appetizing stores such as Russ & Daughters on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the Dominican doorman at my Upper West Side apartment building who, come Friday afternoon, wishes me a “gut Shabbes,” there’s every reason to think long and hard about its fate.
At once funny and poignant, cause for laughing out loud and for wringing one’s hands in despair, this latest orthographic contretemps reminds us what’s at stake when it comes to the languages we speak and those we don’t.
The decision of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies in New York, one of the mighty engines of American Jewish philanthropy, to pull the plug on the Six Points Fellowship, one of the most creative Jewish organizations around, isn’t just bad news for the artists among us. It’s bad news for the entire American Jewish community.
I’m sure that Federation had its reasons and that, as is its wont, the organization arrived at its decision after considerable to-ing and fro-ing.
Six Points fellow Kristen Smiarowski's Sleep, Staring, Well
There’s no beating around the bush: I feel very strongly about this issue. If American Jewish life is not only to endure but, more critically still, to flourish, the arts and other forms of cultural expression must be its lifeblood.
Too many people at Federation and elsewhere within American Jewry’s organizational structure are inclined to see Jewish culture as an ornament or as an occasional pleasure, a detour or a distraction from other, more pressing, needs. More disturbingly still, the powers-that-be are all too often inclined to set Jewish artistic and cultural expression on its own axis, to render it an independent and parallel universe, rather than one whose fortunes are inextricably bound up with that of the larger Jewish community.
But Jewish cultural arts are anything but incidental or autonomous. They form a cultural eco-system that is as generative, vital and integral to the ongoing well-being of the American Jewish community as its synagogues, social welfare and civic groups and its Israel engagement initiatives.
Those who inhabit this eco-system are a varied lot. Some are actively engaged in preserving the past and its patrimony. Others are excited by the complexities of the present day, while still others, with an eye toward the future, make a point of turning things inside out and upside down.
Whatever they do and however they do, the digital and visual artists, actors, composers, musicians, film-makers, dancers, choreographers, playwrights and writers among us keep American Jewish life humming and in circulation.
Marco Uccellini, Giacobo Basevi Cervetto and M. Mani are by no means household names, but if Pro Musica Hebraica had its way, they would be. Jewish musicians and composers who came of age in 17th and 18th century Europe, they contributed mightily to the repertoire of Baroque music, extending its range, enlarging its sound and holding out the possibility of finding common ground through melody, rhythm and song.
Baroque Ensemble Visits School. Flickr/Flavio~
Although history has not been kind to Messrs. Mani, Uccellini and Cerveto and their respective musical contributions, two contemporary organizations, Pro Musica Hebraica and the Apollo Ensemble, have had great success of late in redressing the situation. Working together, they have sought, as Robyn Krauthammer, the chief executive officer of Pro Musica Hebraica, put it so eloquently, to “free this music from time.”
Last Monday night, May 13th, the Apollo Ensemble performed at the Kennedy Center, bringing this member of the audience to tears more than once. The group’s bravura musicianship had something to do with my heightened emotional state, as did the beauty of the music. Digital projections of the musical compositions, some bearing the cameo-like stamp of the Etz-Hayim Library, also tugged at my heart-strings, while the incisive program notes composed by Professor James Loeffler of the University of Virginia made me want to learn more.
But what really struck me — and hard — was the sense that this particular concert was itself a composition of layers, whose structure was built on the multiple strands that make up the Jewish experience: Creative energy, loss, rediscovery, preservation, translation, reinterpretation and the prospect of renewal.
By now, I don’t suppose there are many people in the world who would liken the groves of academe to an earthly paradise. Too much has been written of late about tensions between faculty and university administrators, student ennui and diminishing resources to hold up the academic enterprise as a paragon of civility.
Alice trying to play croquet with a Flamingo/Wikipedia
Fear of change and the prospect of an uncertain future fuel much of this. But so, too, does the very nature of academic life where, all too often, petty politics rules the roost and decidedly uncollegial behavior is the coin of the realm.
When it comes to accounting for the distinctive culture that is academe, theories abound. Some draw on social psychology, others on economics and still others on history. They clarify matters up to a point.
What’s most helpful, I think, is to summon up thoughts of Alice in Wonderland. Her trip down the rabbit hole has nothing on academic life, whose dizzying, disorienting twists and turns make Alice’s experiences look like a walk in the park.
I try to follow and keep abreast of a lot of things: the news, for starters, as well as fashion and film and arts and culture. But I give baseball and basketball, much less soccer, a pass. You will rarely, if ever, catch me reading the sports section of the New York Times.
Soccer ball. Flickr/Cam-Fu
Jewish sports organizations are nothing new, of course. Prewar Poland, for instance, abounded in Jewish gymnastic groups and clubs that sported the name Maccabee in homage to the physical bravura of the ancient Hasmoneans. One branch of the Maccabees took to skiing, another to motorcycle racing, while the young men of Bialystok, resplendent and confident in white shorts and boldly striped jerseys, struck an insouciant pose in a 1926 photograph that can be found in the illustrated book, Image Before My Eyes.
Closer to home, American Jewish social settlement houses, summer camps and other social reform organizations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also made much of sport. Through an organized program of physical activity, they sought to normalize — and toughen — the male Jewish body, widely thought to be constitutionally weak and inferior.
What makes the London Lions newsworthy, then, is not so much its composition or its agenda so much as its relationship to the body politic. Some wonder whether an all-Jewish soccer team fosters community among its players and fans or weakens the commonweal.
At a time of increasing fragmentation, the exclusive ethnic franchise of the London Lions raises legitimate questions about whether this is a goal worth pursuing. It’s a tough call, but I’d root for the team. It has history on its side.
Within our increasingly futurist orientation, there often seems to be little room for the past. But if this week’s events are any indication, yesteryear casts a very long shadow on contemporary life. Between the flap regarding the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, you’d be hard put to avoid history’s long reach.
In a cemetery in the town of Topczewo, in northeastern Poland, a Catholic gravestone has been primitively carved out of a matzeva. Source: Tablet, credit: Łukasz Baksik
Several days later, the debut of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews made front page news. In the works for several years now, the museum not only chronicles the Polish Jewish experience but also seeks a form of closure. “You can’t put the pieces back together again, but you can build bridges,” explained Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who’s responsible for the core exhibition.
Another arena in which the past intrudes on the present is most painfully and soberly apparent in the stunning photography of Łukasz Baksik, which was featured in this week’s Tablet.
For several years, the Polish photographer traveled throughout Poland with an eye towards finding and photographing Jewish tombstones (matzevot) that had been incorporated into the landscape as building blocks and cobblestones. His work gives a new, and entirely sinister, meaning to the practice of recycling.
In one photograph, a tombstone, turned on its side, is “repurposed” as the cornerstone of a storehouse of farm equipment. In another, fragments of tombstones are patched together, helter-skelter, as the exterior wall of a cowshed. In a third photograph, a Hebrew name or phrase peeks out amid the smooth cobblestones of a neat and tidy town square.
Baksik’s work packs quite a wallop. It unsettles. At first glance, you’re not quite sure what you’re meant to see: An urban street scene, perhaps? A pastoral setting? In the absence of people, these images don’t give you too many helpful hints. But the longer you look at them, the more details accrue, until you realize that what you’re seeing are pieces of the Jewish past. Quite literally.
It’s the fragmentary, elusive nature of things that makes Baksik’s photography so compelling. A visual metaphor for history’s relationship to the present, it reveals an unvarnished reality in which the past makes itself felt in bits and pieces.
Much of what we read about the modern university — the endless faculty squabbles, the pitfalls of digital education, bored undergrads — leave most of us with a giant headache.
GW event announcement.
A case in point is the Frieda Kobernick Fleischman Lecture in Judaic Studies, which is presented annually by GW’s Program in Judaic Studies. A high point of the program’s calendar, this lecture brings to campus celebrated scholars of the Jewish experience to reflect on one or another of its varied manifestations.
This year’s Fleischman Lecture, which is scheduled to take place on Monday evening, April 15th, at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., features Professor Pierre Birnbaum, one of France’s leading political sociologists and historians. His talk, Sur la table: Food, Identity and the Jews in Modern France, casts a searching eye on the often surprising ways in which gastronomy has as much to do with citizenship as it does with the palate.
Making its way through a dazzling array of sources — menus, official pronouncements, news clips, Jewish communal records, even song — Professor Birnbaum’s presentation promises to enrich our understanding of what it means to be a citizen and, in the process, to reveal the university at its very best.
One of the most exciting — certainly among the most crowded — of exhibitions in New York at the moment is the Met’s “Impressionism, Fashion, & Modernity.” And for good reason. Training its sights on the triangulated relationship among these three mighty cultural forces of the late 19th century, the exhibition opens our eyes to what makes us truly modern: our clothes.
Fashion plate 1880s. Flickr/Sacheverelle
Thanks, though, to the smart and allusive writing on the wall and to the canny juxtapositions between painting and object, which echo and reverberate, we come away with an entirely fresh perspective on late 19th century dress and, more broadly still, on why clothing matters as much as it does. As Anatole France put it, “If I were permitted to choose amidst the jumble of books that will be published a hundred years after my death, do you know which one I would pick? … A fashion magazine in order to see how women will dress a century after my passing. And these rags would tell me more about humanity’s future than philosophers, novelists, preachers, or scholars.”
It’s not just that the bold stripes of a day dress, the sweep of a shawl, the geometry of the bustle and the height of a top hat registered visually among many of the leading Impressionists, resulting in paintings -– say, Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, or Degas’ The Millinery Shop — that have become touchstones of modern art. Or that ready-to-wear came into its own, along with the department store, at this point in time, placing fashion within reach. It’s all this -– and more.
By the time we take our leave of the exhibition, simultaneously wearied and exhilarated, we’ve arrived at a new understanding of the modern self.
What’s striking about the holiday of Pesach isn’t its historicity so much as its contemporaneity. There, I’ve said it.
Moses and Einstein. Flickr/Steve Calcott
While there’s much to be said for each one of these historical phenomena, what really hits home is how the repertoire of Pesach-related objects, activities, and foodstuffs grows and grows and grows.
Several years ago, Moses action figures capable of “articulating” their joints in 16 different directions took pride of place at the holiday table. “This pint sized hero can bring a miraculous new level of excitement to your Seder,” gushed advertisements, suggesting that this most agile of biblical heroes would make for a very good guest, indeed.
Last year, the New American Haggadah was all the rage. Panned or praised, it was the talk of the town. Virtually everyone I knew had one.
This year’s crop includes frogs, flies and locusts — in the shape of nail decals — as well as various and sundry apps that render the seder a virtual experience. The haggadah apps, which are said to provide “interactivity and surprise and layers of information,” are available from iTunes and other online vendors for a nominal fee. As for the decals, which promise to “take your seder to the next level,” you’d better hurry. Amazon has only a few sets left in stock.
Some of us may roll our eyes or scratch our heads at the prospect of a seder at which participants alternatively flutter their fingers or use them to tap, tap, tap away. Others among us might even give voice to dark thoughts about the dissolution of tradition and lament the ways in which novelty seems to have trumped history.
I prefer to look on the bright side. What extends the meaning — the shelf life, so to speak — of this ancient Jewish holiday is its malleability. An exercise in both tradition and innovation, Pesach gives new meaning to the practice of sustainability.
Having had the not-so-good fortune to experience two snowstorms within the course of three days, first in D.C. and then in N.Y., I thoroughly enjoyed the balmy weather I had the good luck to experience over Spring Break while visiting Palo Alto, where I had gone to deliver a series of talks at Stanford.
Flickr/Tom Henderson
But I couldn’t resist the temptation to slow down, to breathe deeply, to eschew the company of my laptop and to absorb the light, the bright and cheery flowers and the palm trees. In this, I was one with Isaac Bashevis Singer who years ago, in a 1948 article in the Jewish Daily Forward, extolled their many virtues. “The palm trees especially made a great impression on me,” he wrote of the time he spent in Miami Beach. They “created a mood in me, and maybe in other people, too.”
I’ve always loved Singer’s botanical observations. But from afar. This time around, in close proximity to palm trees which, the novelist related, “are like trees and not like trees,” I knew exactly what he meant.
There was an awful lot in Palo Alto to dazzle the senses and tickle the imagination, from the beauty of the Stanford campus and the intellectual bravura of its faculty and students to the seeming incongruity of the Palo Alto kollel.
But it was those palm trees that really held me rapt.