Culture and Ideas

The Truth About Dave — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

I think it was my senior year in high school in which my friend Dave first discovered the truth. And since I was his best friend, he was determined to impart the truth to me as well.

It was a cover story in Time magazine, I’m pretty sure, that set Dave off. It was a big spread about the Shroud of Turin, a cloth that many Christians believe bears an image of the crucified Jesus. New research, the magazine reported, proved that the cloth and the image indeed dated from the first century AD.

illustration by Avi Katz

“Wow,” said Dave, putting down the magazine and digging into the chocolate ice cream I’d dished out to him in my family’s kitchen. “We all gotta become Christians now!”

“Ha,” I said. Dave had, after all, been in my Hebrew school car pool. His Mom made a mean kugel and his older sister was going out with the son of the military attaché at the Israeli embassy.

“I’m serious,” said Dave. “It says here that it’s Jesus on the shroud. That means you have to believe in him.”

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Team Niot Update

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Haim Watzman Here’s a brief update on what’s going on with Team Niot, the project to help learning disabled students that my family and I are setting up in memory of my son Niot. We are working on the project in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Education, an organization that runs Dror, … Read more

Plane Story — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman 

    illustration by Avi Katz

“The air is unexpectedly cool and damp for early September when I emerge from Terminal 3 and cross over to the AirTrain. I’m alone and there are no human sounds, only the roar of traffic on the highway. Even that is muted as the elevator door shuts.”

I look up from 60C on my Delta flight from JFK to TLV. A pudgy young guy in a white shirt and a beard is standing over me.

“I’ve got the window,” he says apologetically.

I snap my laptop shut and squiggle out of my aisle seat.

“Sorry,” he says. “You were writing something.”

“It’s ok,” I say as he squeezes past me with a hat box and a large plastic bag full of cookies. He places them on 60B.

“I saw at the desk that no one’s sitting here,” he explains. He points at the computer. “Work?”

“Yes,” I say. “A story. I have a column in a magazine and the deadline is coming up. I’m just trying to get it started before takeoff.”

“Well, don’t let me bother you. By the way, I’m Yehuda.”

“Haim,” I say. “Thanks. Actually, I’m not sure if I want to write it.”

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Visitor at Cambous — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman 

    illustration by Avi Katz

We passed him as we trudged up an earthen path in search of a Bronze Age site north of Montpellier in southern France. He had wispy hair and the soft contours of a man grandchildren love to cling to, but the steady stride of a good walker. Giving us a sideways glance, he walked past us under the oak branches that roofed the trail. But when my daughter, Mizmor, crouched down and exclaimed, in Hebrew, about a patch of wild thyme, he turned back in his tracks.

“So you, too, are seeking your roots?”

Mizmor and I looked at each other and the other members of our party.

“We came to see the ancient village,” I said.

“Oh yes. Down there. You’re just two minutes away. But it’s closed.”

“Closed? But I thought it’s just some ruins out in the open.”

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Slouching Toward Sodom — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

painting by James TissotAnd the Lord appeared to me by the sycamores of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv as I sat at the door to my tent in the heat of the day, and I raised my eyes and looked, and lo, three men stood by me. And when I saw them, I ran out to meet them from the tent door and bowed down to the earth to be frisked, for they were surrounded by mean-looking buzz-cut security men with little thingies in their ears.

And I said, “My Lord Bibi, if now I have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, even though I didn’t vote for you and never will. Let now a little water be fetched from the kiosk over there and wash your feet because those black Oxfords are really the wrong thing to be wearing on the Mediterranean coast on such a sweltering day.”

Lord Bibi consulted with his companions, the Lord High Treasurer and Philosopher-King-in-Waiting and Mr. Daddy Landbucks.

“We can stand,” Lord Bibi said. “We don’t have much time as we have other engagements to the east. We just came by to offer our sympathies and to say that we’ve been trying for years to lower housing prices but have been frustrated by the monstrous bureaucracy deeded to us by our Bolshevik predecessors.”

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Understanding Religion, Ethnicity, and Identity-Tamar El-Or’s “Reserved Seats”

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Haim Watzman

The tent protesters who’ve shaken the complacence of the Israeli leadership these last few weeks combine, as most protest movements do, radicalism with reaction. That is, they call for sweeping changes in Israeli society and government, but they also hark back to a mythical golden time when, they believe, Israeli society was kinder and more egalitarian, and when Israel’s citizens felt stronger bonds to and responsibility for each other. In this sense, they seek not only to remake Israeli politics, but also to restructure—or renew—Israeli identity.

Amnon Illuz. On Looker. 2005
Yet Israeli identity has always been fluid and divided. A society so diverse in its ethnic origins, religious/philosophical beliefs, and political creeds could hardly be otherwise. In particular, the identity of the country’s Mizrahim—those Israelis whose roots lie in the Islamic world—has never ceased to metamorphose.

One of the best books on the complex nature of this identity to be published in Israel in recent years was Reserved Seats (Meqomot Shemurim) by Tamar El-Or, an anthropologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Like the best works of anthropology, it almost reads like a novel. El-Or spent five years at the beginning of the 2000s doing field work in Pardes Katz, a Mizrahi neighborhood in Bnei Beraq, a Tel Aviv suburb. She attended classes, got to know a group of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) women, and sought to comprehend families in which religious practice and Jewish identity varies from negligible to ultra-Orthodox and in which ethnic Mizrahi identity alternately separates and connects women from their Ashkenazi counterparts.

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Boxing of Parts — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

The summer of my crush on Muffy was a summer of disparate parts (I had read a poem by Henry Reed). There were no centers to hold (we did Yeats in 20th-century lit class). I had just finished my junior year at Duke University and I was part of a quaternity (I had read Jung’s memoir in a course on intellectual history). There were four of us, Lorie, Muffy, me, and then Andy. Or maybe it was me, Muffy, Andy, and then Lorie. Or Lorie, Muffy, Andy, and then me. There were four of us and the connections were unclear.

What I mean is that Lorie was the odd one out because she was the team leader. Or I was the shadow because I was the Jew. Later Andy was the dark one. But who knows, there were so many ghosts among us.

photograph by George Foster
I am in what was once the parlor of a tumbledown and drafty wood-slat house on a hill above Campus Drive. The soft summer drizzle feels like a fine bead curtain. We have the boxing of parts. The parts are in thick-walled plastic bags but the bags have holes. We know this because the scent of formaldehyde pervades this house where a family once lived, perhaps with two pigtailed girls in sundresses fighting over a jump rope and a big brother laughing at them from a window. Father is off teaching chemistry at the women’s college and Mother is receiving Reverend Caruthers in the parlor while our nearsighted Lucy kneads biscuits next to the hot oven. Now the parlor is full of parts. The parts are in plastic bags and the plastic bags are in large rectangular Tupperware boxes and the boxes are on metal shelving that runs along the parlor walls and down the middle and they are covered in dust and ratshit. Muffy is over in the next aisle with Andy and I am in love with Muffy and outside the drizzle feels like a bead curtain and I am wearing plastic surgical gloves and cradling a chunk of pickled human liver in my hand. There is a Jewish girl who likes me but if she likes me there must be something wrong with her. I am a Jew and the parts do not fit together.

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New at South Jerusalem: The Archive of the Making and Unmaking of Israel

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Gershom Gorenberg In service to our readers and to researchers, I’ve started creating a new online archive of historical documents – this one of historical documents that I found in the process of researching my new book, The Unmaking of Israel. First up: the missing epilogue of the Irgun history of its armed struggle against … Read more

Piano Lesson — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

I am impressed. You play like a Jew, Felix. What I mean by that is that you have Johann Sebastian Bach in your heart as well as in your fingertips. Please don’t tell your mother I said this. She would be upset to hear that she has not succeeded in bleaching Israel out of you. How mortified she would be if, in the middle of an intellectual evening here in this very parlor, von Humboldt were to apply his magnifying glass to you and say: “Aha! A fine specimen of Mendelssohnius Judaeas!”

What’s that? Speak up! And please do not call me Aunt Sara. Approximating family relationships is like slurring a gruppetto. I am and will always be your Great Aunt Sara. If you wish, you may, in the grand company that gathers so frequently in this room, be even more precise and refer to me as “Great Aunt Sara Itzig Levy.” And you may add, if asked, “Yes, the daughter of Daniel Itzig and Miriam Wulff, intimates of the illustrious philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, she who studied keyboard with Friedmann Bach, Johann Sebastian’s oldest son, and who has kept the sweet music of the elder Bach alive in her salon through decades of public indifference.” That will do.

And wipe that smirk off your face. There is nothing more unattractive than the smirk of a seventeen-year old boy.

Oh yes, at your age you know it all. Music is universal. How can the notes emerging from a pianoforte be Jewish, you ask? Felix, you know nothing at all. Remember that I told you this today, in Berlin, in July 1826, because some years from now you will realize how true it was of you when you were young.

Listen to me. And stop cracking your knuckles. You will ruin your joints. This piece you have played so beautifully for me this morning, the Partita No. 5 in G Major, can only be played properly, in our falscherleuchtung age, this time of false enlightenment, by a person of Jewish sensibility. Please do not interrupt me. At your age you are to listen to your elders first. After you listen you may disagree, you may do whatever you want. But first you must listen.

Sebastian Bach was a devout Lutheran, true, but he wrote Jewish music.

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Bruno Bombs, Students Shine at Cinema South

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Haim Watzman

The Sapir College faculty member who introduced Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch, screened at this year’s Cinema South Festival in Sderot, said that Dumont seeks in his films to understand the intricacies and intimacies of religious faith. Hadewijch is a technically fine, formally intriguing film, one in which it is clear that the director has given great thought to each shot and frame. But for a film about faith it is curiously soulless.

The story is about a girl named Celine, who has, as a pre-novice at a convent, taken the religious name Hadewijch, after a medieval visionary who wrote of her passion for Jesus. Her superiors, worried at her over-asceticism, send her back to her huge, ornate, and loveless home. For a convent girl, she has surprisingly few compunctions about allowing herself to be picked up in a café by a low-life from the projects whose devout Muslim brother convinces her to take part in a terror operation. Throughout her preparations, and in the film’s coda, in which Celine seems somehow to have survived the explosion, she insists that her only great love is for Jesus. We see that love, but we do not feel it.

The next day’s screening of Dumont’s Flanders left me with the same sense that Dumont’s carefully planned exteriors do not connect with the interiors of his characters.

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