Big Tent Judaism

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Gershom Gorenberg

Thank you, Aliza!

Because Aliza commented recently on my latest post on conversion, I discovered her blog, Memoir of a Jewminicana. As she tells, she’s a first generation of Dominican descent, and an Orthodox convert to Judaism. She writes softly and powerfully about that experience, and I wish a lot of people born as Jews were reading her.

Much of what she blogs is about the dissonance of converting: She loves the faith. The Jews, however, can be terribly unwelcoming. She’s not talking about the kind of Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbinic court judge who’s already ready to reverse your conversion. She’s talking about everyday Jews who can’t get straight that not everyone who’s Jewish grew up in their neighborhood, with their grandmothers’ accents, with their mothers’ advice (what a polite understated word) on what can be talked about at the dinner table, and with their skin color.

Here’s a piece from one recent post, called The Worst Guest in the World:

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Feiglin and Fascism

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Gershom Gorenberg After the Likud primary, I wrote briefly here on the unprecedented power that Moshe Feiglin has gained in that party. My new piece in The American Prospect provides more information on Feiglin, his beliefs, and the danger he poses: Until recently, Feiglin hasn’t hidden his goals. On the Jewish Leadership website, a Hebrew … Read more

The Knesset Loses a Philosopher

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Haim Watzman It’s a ritual that Israel observes before every election. One or more highly-qualified exemplars of what an Israeli parliamentarian lose out in their party primaries or decide, in disgust or exasperation, not to run again. This year’s latest victim is Isaac Ben-Israel, MK for the Kadima Party. In an interview with Ari Shavit … Read more

The Occupation Times: Ofra, Migron, Hebron, Gaza and a Splash of Optimism

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Ofrah is illegal. Not just under international law, like all settlements – but also under Israeli law. The evidence is piling up.

Ofrah, near Ramallah, was the first bridgehead of the Gush Emunim movement in West Bank hills north of Jerusalem. Recently human-rights activists have succeeded in prying information on the settlement from government repositories, relying on the Freedom of Information Act. The evidence shows that most of the settlement is built on land owned by other people.

The latest report was published today by B’Tselem. Using land registry documents, the organization found that most of the land on which the settlement stands is registered as the property of individual Palestinians. Besides that, the settlement lacks any of the basic town planning approval necessary for construction. Built on stolen land, without permits, the comfortable bourgeois neighborhood is in fact a crime made tangible – and a prime example of how the settlement effort has corroded the rule of law.

In 2001,26 years after Ofrah was founded, the next generation of settlers set up the outpost of Migron. As AP’s Matti Friedman reported a few days ago,

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Standing Up for Man’s Right to Cheat

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Haim Watzman

<em> Anastasia in a thoughtful moment</em>
Anastasia in a thoughtful moment

I wasn’t planning to post today but I couldn’t let South Jerusalem’s readers head into the holiday season without alerting them to Anastasia Michaeli, the superwoman who is headed for the Knesset on the Yisrael Beiteinu list led by Avidgor (“the only thing to my right is the wall”) Lieberman.

When it comes to role models for Israel’s young women, you can’t beat Michaeli. A Russian immigrant who has pulled herself up by the straps of her high heels, she’s a tv star, former beauty queen, and a mother of seven. She’ll be the first Knesset member to bring a baby to full term in term and (so the papers say) the first convert to Judaism to serve in that august body.

Michaeli will be the Knesset flagbearer of third-wave feminism. First-wave feminists demanded equal rights and opportunities; second wave feminists stressed female distinctness and pride. Third-wave feminists have taken the bold step of proclaiming that men can do whatever they like; they can trust their women to remain pure. Here’s Michaeli on how every woman should treat her husband:

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Rabbis v. Jewish Tradition: More on the Conversion Crisis

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Gershom Gorenberg

My latest piece on the conversion crisis is on-line, a bit late, at the Hadassah Magazine site. Crisis is too nice a word. What’s really happening is that part of the Israeli state rabbinate has adopted a radical ultra-Orthodox innovation: regarding conversion to Judaism as something that can be annulled.

Yes, folks, I said, radical ultra-Orthodox innovation. That’s not a contradiction in terms; it may be a redundancy. Like other contemporary religious communities that claim to represent old-time religion – salafist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians – ultra-Orthodox Judaism is a creation of modernity. The ultra-Orthodox assault on conversion is just the latest bit of evidence.

So here’s the article:

Nearly two years ago, a Danish-born Israeli woman named Yael and her husband appeared before the rabbinical court in Ashdod to end their marriage. Since the couple had agreed on an amicable divorce, they anticipated a pro forma procedure.

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Who Am I to Say? (Occasional Advice)

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Dear SoJo,

Very recently, as a lark, my sons and I decided to have our DNA checked. We expected to see vague northern European references and perhaps a surprise or two. When I opened the pdf file with the result (from dnatribes.com), we discovered, with mouths agape, that we are Ashkenazi. That is, the graph showed we are mostly Ashkenazi, almost 100%. (There was some Afghanistan, Iraq, and Turkey thrown in for good measure). I had always been intrigued to see what a DNA test would show and because my friend went for dna testing in chicago and had a wonderful experience, I decided the time had come for me to give it a go too.

This is delightful, of course. And probably not unheard of (see Madeline Albright and Christopher Hitchens). Nonetheless, it’s a confusing state to be in. I was raised in a strict Catholic home and our “German, English, and Irish roots” were all anyone ever alluded to. These results have left my friends asking me “Why don’t you make your family tree?”

As a scholar of archeo-anthropological studies , I am fascinated by migration, wandering hordes, tribal customs and linguistics. But, never in a million years did my mother ever say, “Oh, yes, dear, by the way, we are Ashkenazi Jews, but they converted to Catholicism due to the pogroms.” My mother doesn’t even know what a pogrom is. However, when I gently confronted her the other day with this information, she said “Oh, we sort of knew this.”

Now, my question to you is, and I ask it sincerely, because I am getting a lot of weird answers: What is a Jew?

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Birds on My Mind: “Doves” by C.K. Williams

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Haim Watzman

Photo by Chris Basset
Photo by Chris Basset
People who care about the world around them, about other people, about literature, are frustrated people. Once we get to adulthood, our lives fill up with junk and we never have enough time for the things we consider really important. We never seem to be able to devote enough attention to our lovers, friends, and children, so we never know them as intimately as we by all rights should. Calm contemplation of the landscape around us is a rare luxury; when do we have time to simply observe, simply to listen? And what of the worthwhile books we have never read, and the poems we know and love but have never had the time to commit, as we should, to memory?

C.K. William, a great bard of love askew and the missed opportunity, encapsulates this frustration with no little irritation and a measure of humor in his poem “Doves.” I came across it last week in my progress through Williams’ Collected Poems; it’s from his latest, best book, The Singing.

The poet has woken in the early dawn. He’s lying in bed, trying to focus on the morning light, on the morning’s sounds. But how can he? “So much crap in my head,/So many rubbishy facts,/So many half-baked/theories and opinions,” Williams sighs, like an overtaxed blogger.

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Why Pass on the Trauma? A Conversation with Avraham Burg

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On bloggingheads.tv, I’ve interviewed Avrum Burg about his nearly new book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes.  I say nearly new, because the book came out earlier in Israel, where it was roundly attacked, mostly by people who hadn’t read it but knew precisely what it said. I’m told that this … Read more

Art Parodies Life Parodies Art Parodies Life

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Gershom Gorenberg From the start, the war in Iraq seemed like a gruesome satire of that bitter satire, Wag the Dog: a war invented out of fabrications. When my wife saw a front-page pic this morning of Iraqis holding up a shoe in support of the journalist who hurled his footwear at George W. Bush, … Read more

Ponzi’s Victims

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Gershom Gorenberg

A parable that will lead me to the fall of Bernie Madoff:

My first newspaper job was in the old Jerusalem Post, back when the rag was union-owned, left-of-center, and still one-fourth worthy of being called a newspaper. I wanted to work with words and ideas and politics. I also believed – and still do – in the old fifth-grade civics-lesson mission of a free press. I wouldn’t have considered for a moment being a wordsmith for an ad agency, certainly not one hawking cigarettes, no matter how much more money I could have made. The Jerusalem Post ran front page ads. Some were for cigarettes.

So while I considered journalism a calling, worth more than a big paycheck, I too lived off the scraps from the tables of the tobacco shareholders. I didn’t like it. I could tell myself that were I the boss, I wouldn’t have taken those ads, and that if the cancermongers went broke the next day, the paper would still limp along. But I couldn’t get around the fact that I was a vegetarian living off his uncle the butcher.

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Why I’m Going Green

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Haim Watzman For years I have preached against small parties. Whenever my friends get excited by the latest new and fashionable political movement or the latest political star whose ego-trip involves founding and leading his own party, I’ve warned that a vote cast for a small party is both wasted and wanting. Wasted because, in … Read more