JustASC

My column this week: an ode to the bungalow colony:

The bungalow colony was essentially a family camp, where parents and kids grooved on the informal, the emotional, and the communal. It was a Jewish bubble, isolated from the pressures of the suburban worlds we inhabited 10 months out of the year. (When we bring back the secular bungalow colony, I’d like to enforce the One Telephone rule. Leave your BlackBerrys at the front office.) You can take the Jew out of the city, but you can make a Jew in the country. And I am speaking figuratively here, although who knows what some fresh mountain air and tiny cabins might do for the Jewish fertility rate.

The search for a greener burial has yielded this new technique, called “promession,” from Sweden:

The dearly departed are first supercooled in liquid nitrogen to about minus 196°C, then shattered into very small pieces on a vibration table. “….

Next a vacuum is used to evaporate moisture while a metal separator, traditionally used by the food processing industry to remove stray foreign objects from meat products, shuffles aside fillings, crowns, titanium hips, and so on. (You can put that sandwich down now.) Finally, the vaguely pink crumbs are deposited in a large box made of corn or potato starch.

Surviving family members bury the box in shallow topsoil and plant a tree or shrub on top.

What is the ecological footprint of all these industrial-seeming processes, anyway? The Walrus, which reported the new technique, discusses the ecological drawbacks of current funerary practices: Chemically embalmed bodies buried in graves dug by internal combustion machines in perpetually landscaped cemeteries; or cremation performed in a cloud of propane gas and noxious fumes.

Maybe the Jewish way is the greenest: no embalming, no cremation, no “promessing,” just a simple shroud and a plain pine box.

Following the Wendy’s extravaganza (see this and this), yet another company is using our offices to film a commercial, this one for a midwestern department store chain I never heard of.

One day historians will wonder why the most photographed backdrops for 2009 television commercials were the Pacific Coast Highway, Monument Valley National Park, and our lunchroom.

Two alternative — or perhaps complementary — views on Obama and the Jews from The Jewish Week. Asking Jews how they feel about Obama and Israel is a bit like the blind man and the elephant – it depends on which Jews you ask.

First, editor Gary Rosenblatt:

Leaders of American Jewish organizations note an unease among mainstream supporters of Israel and Jewish causes – we’re not talking about marginal “Obama is a Muslim” critics here – who say they voted for and admire Barack Obama and support many of his policies, but feel he is being overly critical of Israel and too soft on the Palestinians and on an Iranian regime bent on developing nuclear weapons that could end up aimed at the Jewish state.

As one leader put it: “Moderate people come up to me and ask, ‘Should I be worried?’

Next, Jewish Week reporter Jim Besser:

Jewish leaders see nothing but concern among their colleagues and among the pro-Israel activist core. But there’s no evidence that concern has trickled down to the broader Jewish electorate

Also, that broader electorate isn’t much interested in or supportive of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and it’s probably not overly enamored of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Go through an Orthodox neighborhood in New York, and almost everybody has friends and relatives living in settlements; go to a suburban Reform shul in Chicago, and you’ll find few.

I remain convinced Obama administration officials have an unusually sophisticated understanding of these political realities.

They realize they can push Israel on settlements pretty hard, as long as they wrap their pressure in strong statements of support for Israel and a vibrant U.S.-Israel relationship, without much risk of a backlash…

A Stage for Social Ego to Battle Anguished Id

–  Headline for a New York Times appreciation of the late choreographer Pina Bausch

This is the kind of New York Times headline that makes me both a/ gratified that there’s an institution willing to engage in this sort of rarified conversation on a daily basis and b/ eager to punch an English major in the face.

My column this week is an interview with Ruth Messinger, the president of AJWS, who had asked to see me about the previous column I had written about her speech to graduates of the Jewish Theological Seminary. In the speech, Messinger, whose organization provides humanitarian assistance to the developing world, urged the seminary graduates to apply their Jewish learning “to help those most in need, both at home and abroad.” My column, I thought, was mostly admiring of her call to action, although toward the end I suggested she had gone too far in favoring universal (okay, non-Jewish) causes over challenges closer to home.

It was the last point that she thought needed clarification. We spoke in the midtown offices of AJWS for over an hour, throughout most of which Messinger held the floor and emphasized the points she felt I had either overlooked or mischaracterized in her JTS speech.

Below is a transcript of most of our conversation, conducted in the presence of Joshua Berkman of the organization’s press department.

Read the transcript after the jump.

(more…)

Everytime this guy writes a book or gives an interview, I get calls asking if he is me.

So for the record: If you owe money to someone named Andrew Carroll, send it to me c/o the New Jersey Jewish News.