JustASC

Ron Rosenbaum’s essay urging Jon Stewart to change his name back to Leibowitz is pretty cutting edge — for 1972. Here’s a taste:

Stewart is just so 20th-century, a relic of that dark age when Jews in show biz changed their names because they feared “real Americans” wouldn’t accept the originals….

[O]n a more serious note, it would represent the end of a shabby, antiquated era, pronouncing that aspect of anti-Semitism now (hopefully) dead and gone. It might even make it easier for young comedians, actors, and rock stars to resist the temptation to try to “pass.”

His essay comes out in a week that features the premier of Funny People, directed by Judd Apatow, and starring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, and Jason Schwartzman. SNL’s hottest star is Andy Samberg. Starring in Quentin Tarantino’s new movie is Samm Levine. The stars of two of the most popular sitcoms of the past 15 years were Jerry Seinfeld and David Schwimmer.

Who is it who is trying to “pass,” exactly?

This is the trailer for the new Coen Brothers film, A Serious Man, a black comedy set in the Jewish Minneapolis neighborhood of their late ’60s youth. With the possible exception of The Big Lebowski, I’m wary of the Coens’ forays into straight comedy, which can be way too arch (see Intolerable Cruelty) or intolerably cruel (Fargo almost lost me when they played the all-too-real-seeming hostage scenes for laughs). And for all their wit with a camera, they seem fairly tone-deaf when the laughs are supposed to be intentional.

The trailer itself offers a queasy mix of violence and arch yuks, but I’m still looking forward to seeing what they do with the period and Jewish themes.

I recently stumbled across Wandering Home by environmental writer Bill McKibben, and was drawn to it for its lovely evocation of the Lake Champlain landscapes where I spent many of my summers growing up.

The brief book compares favorably with John McPhee’s “The Pine Barrens” in its scope and depth. Wonderful nature writing, inspiring mini-profiles of the do-gooders he arranges to meet along the way, and an important discussion of the stakes in the environmental debate. I know the pull the region has on a person, and McKibben captures it wonderfully well.

But there is also something smug about his love of the place — reminiscent of the way writer Michael Lewis got in trouble for a rhapsodic essay about his wife’s lovely behind. McKibben has houses on the Vermont and New York sides, a way to pay for them both, and all this untrammelled wilderness as his backyard. How many of the rest of us could hope to duplicate his lifestyle, his access to nature, the benefits he accrues from wilderness? The Adirondacks are a land of natural plenty, for sure, but also a region of scarcity — scarce housing, scarce jobs, and severe (and essential) limits on development. McKibben comes off as the last guy to get into the club before the door was closed — and who calls you to boast about how great it is inside.

I’m not sure what the rest of us can take away from this, except our envy and an intense desire to return to the place for a visit.

P.S. The book is part of the “Crown Journeys” sereis, in which famed writers write about walks they take in favorite cities and countries. I’m looking forward to reading some of the others.

Page Six reports that author Michael Chabon has issues with circumcision. They have quotes from his memoir, “Manhood for Amateurs” :

“Mutilation [is] the only honest name for this raw act that my wife and I have twice invited men with knives to come into our house and perform, in the presence of all our friends and family, with a nice buffet and Weekend Cake from Just Desserts…

“We have been through all of the standard arguments — hygiene, cancer prevention, psychological fitness, the Zero Mostel tradition . . . and found they are all debatable at best.”

For his sons, Chabon “shopped around the mohel market” for someone who’d use anesthetic, but that “did not really detract from the fundamental brutality of the business.”

Let’s face it: he’s right. Circumcision is brutal and raw. But not that brutal, and not that raw. In most cases, it’s a clip and a snip, the baby cries for a few seconds, and soon falls asleep in someone’s arms. It’s not mutilation, in the sense that the original organ continues to function as nature intended, and it’s not emotionally scarring, otherwise you’d have millions of men walking around with deep neuroses and unresolved anger (wait, let me amend that. Let’s just say it’s no more emotionally scarring than growing up in a Jewish home in the first place).

As for the nice buffet, he’s also got a point. Now most of the brisses I’ve been too are sweet and powerful affairs — there is something intensely emotional and tribal about this primal act being carried out in suburbia, this renewal of Jewish belonging even in otherwise assimilated homes, the air of solemnity and literally carnal joy in which a group of Jews welcomes another one of its own. I always weep (and for some reason flash back to Felix Unger’s cry of  joy when his daughter Edna is born: “There’s a new Unger in the world!” I even got a bit weepy just now).

But, without going into details, let me say that I’ve been at a less fortunate bris, where the operation was a little more complicated and prolonged, and the guests were subjected not to a quick tribal rite but a rather lengthy episode of Nip/Tuck. It had me questioning the public nature of the rite, and the bizarre juxtaposition of blood and bagels.

So I understand the qualms of couples when it comes to bris, and it’s not up to me or anyone else to say whether they should go through with it, or do it in the hospital, or search for a mohel who delivers anesthetics.  By the same token, just don’t judge me or my fellow Jews who maintain the practice, especially by exaggerating the violence of the rite or its long-term effects, or dismissing the health claims, or diminishing the power of the traditions that have kept it alive.

[By the way, I'm not sure what Chabon means by the "Zero Mostel tradition." I know a character in The Producers is named Roger de Bris, and Harry Belafonte plays a circumcised angel opposite Mostel in The Angel Levine.  But is there something I'm missing? (Besides my foreskin?)]

A Washington Post editorial is critical of Obama’s Israel policies:

One of the more striking results of the Obama administration’s first six months is that only one country has worse relations with the United States than it did in January: Israel. The new administration has pushed a reset button with Russia and sent new ambassadors to Syria and Venezuela; it has offered olive branches to Cuba and Burma. But for nearly three months it has been locked in a public confrontation with Israel over Jewish housing construction in Jerusalem and the West Bank. To a less visible extent, the two governments also have differed over policy toward Iran.

JTA was able to post our dispatches on the money-laundering scandal sooner than we could:

Sadness and disbelief engulf Syrian Jewish enclave 

Focus turns to ways norms may reinforce improper conduct

Rabbis’ lawyers blame woes on government mole

The theme of the day: two prominent Israeli journos explain how Obama lost, and can restore, the trust of Israelis.

 First, Yossi Klein Halevi in The New Republic:

On the assumption that the pessimists among us are wrong and the Obama administration isn’t seeking a pretext to create a crisis in American-Israeli relations, here are some suggestions for Washington about how to reassure increasingly anxious Israelis.

Next Aluf Benn of Ha’aretz in a New York Times oped:

Perhaps there are good reasons behind Mr. Obama’s Middle East policy. Perhaps the settlement freeze is in Israel’s best interest. Perhaps the president is truly committed to Israel’s long-term security and well-being. Perhaps his popularity in the Arab street is the missing ingredient of peacemaking.

But until the president talks to us, we won’t know. Next time you’re in the neighborhood, Mr. President, speak to us directly. We will surely listen.

I don’t read or speak Italian, but I consider it a bad sign as a Jew and a New Jerseyan that I can understand every word of this lead paragraph from L’Unione Sarda:

Un giornale lo ha già ribattezzato “Kosher Nostra”: in New Jersey, nella terra dei Sopranos, una quarantina tra politici italo-americani, faccendieri e rabbini sono finiti in manette per corruzione, riciclaggio e perfino traffico di organi.

The Times’ “Room for Debate” blog asked various writers why NJ seems so susceptible to corruption. Here’s Helene Stapinski:

Hudson County, where many of the arrests in New Jersey were made, has a small town feel and mentality. Everybody knows everybody. Lots of people are related to each other. It’s an isolated place, in many ways, so that the politicians who live there really don’t feel connected to the larger world. They feel they operate in a sort of vacuum, where no one will really notice what they do.

Substitute “Deal” for  “Hudson County” and “rabbis” for “politicans,” and you have a pretty good summary of the roots of the allegations within the Syrian-Jewish community — or any insular ethnic grouping.

 That’s “cooperating witness” Solomon Dwek at right.