JustASC

My (fourth) annual year-in-review poem is here:

In last year’s recapping of two-thousand-and-eight

(a lame bit of rapping and my third one to date),

I had the chutzpa to wish yours and mine

a much better year in two-thousand-and-nine.

 

Who knew I’d be pining for those days of yore,

Before I knew just what was in store,

From warfare in Gaza and rabbis in trouble,

And the lasting effects of the real estate bubble.

Wait — there’s more.

And if you care to compare my effort to the Forward‘s, see here.

I’ve been criticized, mocked, scorned — and that’s just by family members. But wished out of existence, along with my livelihood? Never, until this:

The New Jersey Jewish News doesn’t deserve to exist, as far as I’m concerned. If it goes under and Jersey Jews must instead read the NJ-themed page of the NY Jewish Week or a “local news” feed from the Forward, well, so be it.

That comes from Jewschool blogger “Kung Fu Jew,” in an otherwise trenchant and provocative critique of the “alter kackers” in the Jewish press by a self-proclaimed “younger folk.” I’d like to say I wasn’t hurt, but I sorta was, especially since I’ve always been a fan of Jewschool and have given it a shoutout in a few columns and blog posts. And KFJ identifies him/herself as someone who ran New Voices magazine a few years ago. I’ve been a supporter of New Voices, teaching workshops at their conventions and attending a recent fundraiser. So yeah, I’m a little hurt.

And I also like to think I’ve made the NJJN a venue for some of the content KFJ pines for, to whit:  articles that treat intermarriage as a reality, not a “challenge”; articles that challenge Israeli politicians and policies; articles that “cover the fringe” where somebody has defined Jewishness in a new or interesting way; investigative journalism into the Organized Jewish Community; and themes beyond the Jewish community, including genocides elsewhere and other religions.

(I’m not even sure why KFJ singled us out — I didn’t participate in the AJPA conference call that is the occasion for the blog post.)

And KFJ is right that “Jewish newspapers can’t accomplish lots of that” — or can’t accomplish that to the degree that KFJ would like to see. But it’s not “because most of them are not newspapers, they’re newsletters for the very Jewish ‘powers that be’ that Jewish media should watchdog.” It’s because — and this may be hard for KFJ to accept — not every reader expects the same things out of Jewish media that KFJ does.

Which brings me to the “New Jersey Jewish News doesn’t deserve to exist” thing. Let’s say we’re as lame as KFJ thinks we are. Let’s say we never report “on the fringe,” or invite young people to contribute, or do investigations (which we and many others like us do, but never mind). For many of our readers, the local Jewish paper remains a lifeline for info about their friends and neighbors, about their local institutions, about the wider Jewish world brought to them via JTA or our local perspectives on national and international events. It’s where they like to be heard, in letters pages and the oped pages. They too might like the sort of boundary-breaking conversations KFJ is talking about. but that’s not all they want.

True, this may be a generational thing. And that as far as younger readers are concerned, we’re a lost cause. That’s too bad, but it’s also the way of the world. Network television had a long run, as did the vinyl record album, and the paperback book. A new generation may not turn to them, but that doesn’t invalidate the original exercise.

Sorry to say, KFJ, in 20 years time you and your comrades-in-blogs will be scorned and ‘buked by Jews a generation younger, who will titter at your “edgy” opinons and “fringe” ideas. And, like me, you’ll read and listen to these folks and try to figure out ways to join their conversation, and invite them to yours, without tearing down what has worked for you.

But you’ll also see value in continuing  to serve your own generation and those older — and recognize the young person’s mistaken belief  (and here I do sound like an alter kaker) that the world’s birth coincided with their own.

[UPDATE: Jewschoolers respond in the comments section below.]

Damn: Ragtime is closing,

A lot of talented people out of work.

Wow: Google “Jew and “New Jersey” and you never know what you’ll find:

[Jill] Lauren, who grew up in Livingston and studied acting at New York University, was in the last place a Jewish American princess belongs: in Brunei — a Muslim monarchy on the north coast of Borneo in Southeast Asia — and in a harem….

“I fell victim to Stockholm Syndrome,” Lauren writes in her book “Some Girls: My Life in a Harem“ (Plume), out in April. “I knew I was a hooker, but somehow I felt like Cinderella.” Lauren lifts the veil off her secret harem life, sharing vivid and explosive details of her 18 months as a hired party girl, her bizarre affair with the prince, the outrageous shopping sprees and the fighting within the international clique of 40 women who fought for the prince’s affections.”

Even before I read this in the Times, I had intended to heartily recommend “Ragtime,” the Broadway revival based on the E.L. Doctorow novel. I saw it with the family on Thursday. Beautifully staged, with a great cast and rousing score. Nothing you’ll leave humming, if that’s important to you, but like the book it’s a powerful evocation of the social, class and racial currents that flowed together to make the American world as we know it.

My column this week is on the Garrison Keillor flap.

Also on the topic, here’s a nice, gentle rebuke of Keillor from Steve Hunegs, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas:

Keillor in his Christmas commentary is not the Garrison Keillor who in 2004 beautifully narrated “The Danish Solution: Rescue of Jews in Denmark,” which tells the story of the Christian rescue of Danish Jews from the Holocaust.

Keillor in his Christmas commentary is not the Garrison Keillor who recently and graciously hosted on “Prairie Home Companion” the Jewish composer and poet, Ricky Ian Gordon, who is composing the music for the opera “The Garden of Finzi-Continis.” It’ll be an original production of the Minnesota Opera, of the famed novel and movie about the approach of the Holocaust in Italy.

Keillor in his Christmas commentary is not the Garrison Keillor whose “Writer’s Almanac” has often featured Jewish writers and/or themes often, movingly, on the Jewish high holy days.

Menschy how he upbraids Keillor while acknowledging that the column appears to be out of character. In Jewish tradition, “tochacha” (pronounced “tcccchhhhchchch”) is the ability to rebuke somebody without robbing them of their dignity and leaving the door open to repentance.

One more thought on the “coastie” song: In 2008 the Wall Street Journal reported on an influx of “East Coast students” at the University of Indiana. Thanks to a big marketing push at “tony private schools” in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, that year’s freshman clash included 260 kids from the metropolitan area.

The result was “some low-key clashing of cultures,” according to the article. One Ohio sophomore found the Easterners “insular, snobby and egotistical”; a boy from St. Louis complained about girls from New York in “skin-tight black pants who thought they were ‘God’s gift to Earth.’”

What the article didn’t mention, but which was apparent from the last names of many of the kids interviewed, was the religion of the newcomers. Admittedly, my Jewdar is pretty sensitive, but I know a Jewish story when I see it. The “coastie” phenomenon confirmed my hunch at the time that one aspect of the culture clash was the Jewishness, or perceived Jewishness, of the easterners.

JTA reports on how a gag by my pal Larry Yudelson evolved into an extended song-and-dance bit on Conan O’Brien’s show.

…[T]he show’s recent Mormon Christmas send-up actually had its roots in an unusual place: an offline brainstorming session among progressive Jewish bloggers.

The backstory started earlier this month when Tablet magazine published a story on a Chanukah song written by Orrin Hatch, a Mormon Republican senator from Utah. In response, blogger Larry Yudelson posted a query to his fellow Jewschool.com contributors wondering if “there are any special Mormon holidays for which we can return the favor?”

In response, Jewschool managing editor Alana Suskin mused, “Wouldn’t it be off the charts funny to do a [Jewschool] holiday song for Mormons?”

So how did the idea get to Conan?

Occasional Jewschool contributor and full-time “Tonight Show” writer Rob Kutner recognized a funny idea when he saw one. He asked Suskin and was granted permission to pitch the Mormon holiday song idea to the staff of the NBC show.

For their song, Kutner and fellow “Tonight Show” writer Todd Levin went with the simple premise of the average American’s lack of knowledge about Mormonism. Their lyrics absurdly cited Ms. Pacman and the Amish as representatives of the faith (they are not).

And here’s the result.

What was Garrison Keillor thinking exactly? From his Baltimore Sun column on the secularization of Christmas:

If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.

My pal Elli Wohlgelernter is outraged, as is Jeffrey Goldberg.

At first I thought they were over-reacting and didn’t appreciate Keillor’s irony. I suspect he was joking, and after listening to Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion every Saturday night for like 20 years, I’m pretty sure he thinks he was joking. That being said, he did a piss-poor job of it, and if you’re not attuned to his sensibility it sounded not amusingly curmudgeonly, but churlish and nasty.

(Keillor, who often books the Klezmatics during his December shows, tends to incorporate gentle religious stereotypes in his humor, ribbing Lutherans, Catholics and Unitarians. I once heard him joke, more successfully: “To my Jewish friends who volunteer to cover our shifts on Christmas and Easter? Butt out — some of us don’t want to be with our families in the first place.”)

Unless the guy is a closet bigot or off his meds, I think his offense here is not anti-Semitism, but awful execution of a joke. It reminds me of Michael Richards’ racist rant at the night club — he was trying for something funny and edgy, but lost control of the joke … and his career. Interesting to see if Keillor gets any blowback. 

(For an antidote to Keillor, read Michael Feinstein’s sweet oped on ecumenism and the Jews who penned Christmas carols.)

Celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach drives a lot of people crazy — for his apparent hunger for the limelight, for injecting himself and his Torah-meets-Oprah philosphizing into the latest celebrity scandal, or for his disingenuously irreverent marketing of fairly conservative Jewish family values (his latest book is the Kosher Sutra). He also irks other Jewish writers and clergy — and I’m one of them — who would love even a fraction of his audience.

What bugs me, however, is the presumptuous of his enterprise. Part of what makes Rabbi Boteach so prolific is his willingness to put words to paper and paper to printer without the sort of rigorous process of introspection or research that would lead to  real  — what’s the right word? Oh yeah: knowledge.

For example, look at his take on the Tiger Woods affair(s) in the Jewish Journal of Greater L.A. He doesn’t accept the idea that celebs like Woods cheat because they can, or that in their circles, the temptations are many and the constraints are few. Nor does he discuss the range of reasons that might lead a young man with infinite means, infinite fame, and a convenient travel itinerary to stray.

No, Boteach, based on nothing I can see but his own certainty, knows exactly why Tiger Woods — a total stranger to him, apparently — cheated:

In truth, men have affairs not for physical reasons but for emotional ones. They cheat not out of a sense of confidence but out of a state of brokenness. Not out of a sense of how desirable they are but out of a sense of what failures they are. And this is especially true of men like Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton who live in a hyper-competitive environments where they realize that they are only special to the extent that they keep on winning. Men like these are particularly broken, living as they do just one failure away from obscurity. They know that their value as human beings rests entirely in other people’s hands. And they live in permanent and painful insecurity. They constantly question their self-worth and they turn to women both to feel desirable and sexy and to comfort them from their pain.

To which the only thoughtful response must be: How the hell does he know? Did Tiger or Clinton confide in him, the way Michael Jackson apparently did? Does he know anything about Tiger — a famously private person, before the scandal hit — other than what he read in the papers this week? On this he bases a diagnosis?

If Boteach used similarly broad, unfounded generalizations in the context of therapy or counseling a congregant, he’d be committing malpractice.

 A couple of years back, in an essay on the “herd isntinct,” Boteach writes, “The desire to be loved is so strong that most people are prepared to erase their individuality, obliterate their uniqueness, just in order to be accepted.” How is it not erasing Woods’ individuality or uniqueness by presuming, with so little first-hand knowledge, to know what is or is not going on inside the golfer’s head or family? 

In another essay on Jewish values, Boteach wrote:

Practicing humility involves listening to other people’s stories without always having to inject details of your own. Being humble means refraining from judging people and instead seeking out their virtue.

Sounds like good advice. Men like Shmuley ought to heed it.