JustASC

J.J,. Goldberg tends to ask some of the most difficult questions about Jewish life, and does so again in an essay on Madoff, in the latest issue of Contact magazine:

When we examine Jewish behavior, we usually focus narrowly on how closely Jews adhere to the community’s ideals. We survey Jewish ritual behavior, but not Jewish economic behavior. We’re afraid that would lead to anti-Semitic stereotyping. Accordingly, Jewish discussions of Madoff include endless talk about how Judaism expects Jews to behave, but we never get around to discussing why Bernie Madoff – or others who have acted egregiously – behaved differently. And so when an incident blows up, we are caught flat-footed, groping for a way to understand.

From the Associated Press:

Eli Raz was peering into a narrow hole in the Dead Sea shore when the earth opened up and swallowed him. Fearing he would never be found alive in the 30-foot- deep pit, he scribbled his will on an old postcard.

After 14 hours a search party pulled him from the hole unhurt, and five years later the 69-year-old geologist is working to save others from a similar fate, leading an effort to map the sinkholes that are spreading on the banks of the fabled saltwater lake.

These underground craters can open up in an instant, sucking in whatever lies above and leaving the surrounding area looking like an earthquake zone.

New York Times crosswords puzzle editor Will Shortz responded to my query — and apparently, Elie Wiesel’s complaint — about a clue that referred to Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir as a “novel.”

This is from the Times puzzle blog:

Editing Crossword Puzzles

Do clues and answers in crossword puzzles really matter? Much of the discussion here at Wordplay is because the answer is yes. I think it’s fair to say they especially matter in New York Times puzzles. Sometimes we quibble about whether the cobbler crust can be on the bottom but sometimes much more important issues are at stake.

The June 17 puzzle included this clue for 47 Across: “Night” novelist. The answer is the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie WIESEL. Several readers objected, including Professor Wiesel himself, who contacted The Times through his Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Novel implies fiction, and for someone constantly dealing with Holocaust denial, this is understandably objectionable.

Is this an error worthy of correction? Perhaps, but the answer is not quite so simple.

The blog quotes the Wikipedia entry on “Night,” which discusses the difficulty some scholars and reviewers have in categorizing the literary genre of “Night” — novel? Memoir? “Nonfiction novel”?

The blog continues:

Still, there is accuracy and then there is avoiding unnecessary conflict. Here’s what Will Shortz had to say: “In retrospect, my feeling is … if Mr. Wiesel says the book is not a novel, then I respect that. I will do my best never to refer to the book as a novel again.”

I’m off to Chicago tomorrow for the annual convention of the American Jewish Press Association. I took the picture at left during my first and only other trip to Chicago — which happened to be last week, for a bar mitzva. Go figure.

I’ll leave you with a Chicago reading recommendation: Crossing California, by Adam Langer.  In his thick 2004 novel, Langer brings a fanatical sense of place and time to a story about teens growing up in the heavily Jewish West Rogers Park neighborhood on the cusp of the Reagan era. I found the unrelenting satire a little exhausting (among the delusional and largely un-self-aware main characters, the only one who is close to being what my 8th-grade English teacher would call “normative” is the only non-Jew, the African-American son of a single mom), but Langer deftly handles the cross-cuts between a few dozen intersecting plots, and how could you not like a novel that includes a would-be Jewish rocker who writes songs like “It’s Not the Meat, it’s the Moshe”?

The book it most brought to mind was Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex,” a similarly ambitious recreation of time and place in a big Midwestern city (Detroit) among a distinct suburban ethnic group (Greeks).

The Zionist Organization of America has high praise for NJ Senator Bob Menendez’ recent speech on Israel. But note how they take it a touch farther than the senator surely intended:

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein, National Chairman of the Board Dr. Michael Goldblatt & Executive Director Gary Ratner said, “We applaud Senator Menendez for making an eloquent speech, based on moral clarity and historical accuracy, that rebuts so many of the hostile presumptions about Israel and Zionism that emerge frequently in public discourse and in the universities.

“ZOA had reason to note that President Barak Obama, in his recent Cairo speech, worryingly echoed some of the fallacies that Senator Menendez has rebutted, in particular, the idea that Israel is some sort of recompense for the Holocaust, paid for by innocent Arabs, thus implying that Jews had no other legitimate claim to independence in the land of Israel.

 ”We would note further that, inasmuch as the Palestinian leadership of the day under Haj Amin el Husseini actively collaborated with Nazism, helped form Bosnian Muslim SS units, assisted deportation to the death camps of Jews and otherwise did their best to prevent Jews escaping the Holocaust, that Palestinian Arabs are in fact implicated in the horrors of Nazism.” [Emphasis added.]

Mark the date: June 18, 2009. The ZOA just declared the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the last battle of World War II.

The Stamford Advocate reports on a bat mitzva gone wild in Norwalk:

Police had to clear an “out of control” bat mitzvah party Saturday night at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum.

Brian Fischer, rental coordinator for the museum, told police the younger guests at the Jewish ceremony, which celebrates a girl’s coming of age, tore out ceiling tiles and a light fixture in the 141-year-old, 62-room mansion. Fischer said he saw several boys and girls engaging in oral sex in the bathrooms, Officer Carleton Giles said.

 

Yikes. And we were upset after our daughter’s bat mitzva beecause we ran out of food.

In his blog, Rabbi Joshua Hammerman wants to know what made this front-page news:

I won’t raise the banner of anti-Semitism, but why focus on a party that happens to occur after a particular religious event as opposed to any other teen party where similar (or worse) things might happen?

News by its nature is defined as deviation from the norm, and the higher your professed norms, the more newsworthy becomes the deviation. When a frat party gets out of hand, it has to REALLY get out of hand to become front page news. If the police were called to a christening, however, and found allegations of vandalism and fellatio, I’m guessing it would make it into the papers as well.

(The fact that the alleged events in this case also took place at a historic site probably boosted its newsworthiness.)

In essence, religion reporting works on the principle of the soft bigotry of high expectations: The assumption is that religion stands for goodness and light, and when a religious figure doesn’t live up to those expectations, it’s a story.

Thus:

In yesterday’s  New York Times crossword puzzle there’s a clue reading ”Night novelist.” The answer is “Wiesel.”

The puzzle thus enters the fray in a long debate about how to characterize Elie Wiesel’s book about Auschwitz. Is it a memoir? A novel? Something else?

As I wrote in 2006:

Wiesel himself was forced to clear the air in an interview with The New York Times. Night “is not a novel at all,” Wiesel said. “All the people I describe were with me there. I object angrily if someone mentions it as a novel.”

And yet, in the past, Wiesel hasn’t helped matters in this regard. In 1972, Hill & Wang packaged Night with two other books, Dawn and The Accident, which Wiesel clearly identified as novels. The set’s cover refers to the works as “Three Tales by Elie Wiesel.” In a later edition of the same volume, Wiesel refers to all three books as “narratives,” although he calls Night a “testimony,” and the other two “commentaries.”

Now it’s true that Wiesel has written novels. But in the case of the puzzle clue, the word “novelist” after the book title suggests the latter is a novel.

In the August 19, 2007 Times paperback best seller list, Night is listed under “nonfiction.”

Does the editor think a correction is in order, or does he stand by the clue? I sent a note to the Times crossword blog to find out.

NJ Sen. Bob Menendez is giving a speech on Israel in the Senate this morning, and in my reading he’s trying to create some distance between himself and the president.

Says Menendez:

 While the Shoah has a central role in Israel’s identity, it is not the reason behind its founding and it is not the main justification for its existence.

That sounds like a direct reference to Obama’s speech, which was criticized by some Jewish groups, including the ADL, for focusing on the Holocaust at the expense of other justifications for Israel’s legitimacy. See Abe Foxman’s oped.

After a lengthy comparison of Hamas perfidy and Israel’s achievements, Menendez  says:

So it’s not just in the interests of Israel to have its full history recognized, it is in the national interests and national security interests of the United States. It is in our interests to fully remember the unbreakable bond that has made us both stronger over the last 61 years, and to make it unmistakable that our commitment is as strong as ever.

Which suggests that perhaps some people (Obama maybe) are forgetting that bond, or that their commitment is not “unmistakable.”

The next line is similar to a Senate letter drafted by AIPAC and signed by many pro-Israel members of Congress on May 1. (The letter read, “The proven best way forward is to work closely and privately together both on areas of agreement and especially on areas of disagreement.). Menendez implicitly criticizes the Obama administration for going public with the dispute over the settlements:

While as a country we will always promote our national interests, and while we might have disagreements with our allies, in this case especially, it is critical to have those disagreements in private.

The following is pretty strong criticism of Obama, it seems to me, especially the last sentence:

We can and must move forward in the peace process, and look for ways to reach agreement between all sides. But we cannot erase the moral distinctions between tyranny and freedom and we must not edit history.

The full text of the speech after the jump: (more…)

David Klinghoffer, the conservative pundit who famously charted his embrace of Orthodoxy after having grown up an adoptee in a Reform home, blogs this week about what he is calling “provincial Orthodoxy” – that is, Orthodox communities thriving away from the major metropolitan areas.

His brief post is an unusually negative protrayal of urban Orthodoxy (coming from an Orthodox Jew, that is):

Most Jews who know anything about Orthodox Judaism associate it with major population centers like New York, Baltimore, Miami, etc. The truth is that almost all the negative stereotypes linked with traditional Judaism stem from such places.

He writes about the “whole alternative universe of Orthodox Judaism” found in Seattle, San Diego, Portland, Sacramento, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh:

[The] Orthodoxy in such places is quite different from what you find in New Jersey, Long Island, and so on. It is thriving and dynamic, accepting and diverse, enthusiastic for tradition in surprising ways, and largely undocumented. It’s also a lot more attractive, at least to me.

Notably, it consists of a very heavy representation of converts and baalei teshuva, Jewish returnees from secularism, rather than FFBs, the frum (religious) from birth….

The hostility and lack of understanding that liberal Jews associate with Orthodoxy isn’t to be found here.

What Klinghoffer is suggesting, of course, is that big city Orthodoxy is a breeding ground for hostility and intra-communal strife. Interesting to hear this coming from an Orthodox Jew.

Joshua Kushner, son of NJ real estate mogul Charles Kushner and brother of New York Observer publisher Jared, is one of three founding partners in a venture that matches university alumni with students in need of financial aid:

The appeal of direct donor-to-student loans, Unithrive’s founders say, is that alumni will have a personal connection to current students: those requesting loans list hometowns, majors and classes they have taken. Alumni can lend to students with whom they feel a bond. They are promised updates three times a year from students they support – not unlike the letters that sponsors of poor children in Africa receive through the Christian Children’s Fund.