We’re sitting in the lobby of a Georgetown hotel, and Brog is a bit jet-lagged after just returning from a trip to Israel, where he escorted a group of 600 evangelicals. For many of them it was their first trip to the Holy Land. “Even as a Jew,” says Brog, “I can appreciate the excitement in the eyes of my Christian friends as they trace the trajectory of Jesus’s life.”

Brog’s evangelicals meet Israel’s leaders, like President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Brog’s cousin and Israel’s most decorated soldier. “He was one of my heroes even before I knew we were related,” explains the 43-year-old lawyer who looks more like a mid-career Christian Slater than his cousin, the military hero.

While escorting evangelicals through the landmarks of their faith, Brog introduces his charges to the modern Middle East. The Galilee, where Jesus lived and worked, is where Hezbollah rains rockets down on the villages from which Jesus recruited his disciples; Jerusalem, where he died for man’s sins, is protected by a security barrier against the suicidal designs of the enemies of God’s chosen people. And for evangelicals, even as the Jews rejected Jesus, God never rejected the Jews, who remain God’s chosen people.

The Biblical verse that inspires American evangelicals’ love for the Jews, the nation that gave them their savior, is Genesis 12:3:  “I will bless them that bless thee,” God told Abraham, “and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Their philo-Semitism is a reversal of the millennia-old Christian tradition of replacement theology, or the belief that God’s covenant with the Jews was superseded by his covenant with the church through Jesus Christ. Central to this understanding is the interpretation of the word “Israel.” “Evangelicals read the Bible literally,” says Brog. “If you take Israel to mean Christ’s church, then this can be used as an example of God rejecting the Jews. But if you believe Israel means the Jews, then the Bible becomes a Zionist book.”

The fact that sacred history is alive to evangelicals can make them powerful advocates for the modern state of Israel. Their witness extends beyond the congregations, small churches, and mega-cathedrals spread throughout the country and now reaches all the way to Washington, D.C., where Brog shows them how to put their philo-Semitism to practical use. “When they come up to meet with their congressmen or senators,” says Brog, “we share with them the details of timely legislation like the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act.” That is to say, they show them how to support it.

And it is because evangelicals read the Bible literally that their political language describing Israel’s trials is of a different weight and timbre. For the U.S. policy establishment, the question is whether Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats against the Jewish state may be a rhetorical ploy or a boastful appraisal of Iranian military capability. For evangelicals, there is no question that Ahmadinejad has identified himself as the latest in the long line of the hunters—murderers of Jews—and that he must be stopped by any means necessary.

So, why are American Jews suspicious of Israel’s new best friends? It is both because of and despite the fact that, as Brog says, “for most of our history, Jews have had a very lonely walk.”

“Two thousand years of history suggests that Christian religious fervor is not necessarily a good thing for Jews,” says Walter Russell Mead, a fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations who is working on a book about American support for Israel. “If the public culture of the U.S. is more ostentatiously and visibly Christian, I am not surprised that Jews get a little nervous.”

And yet as Mead has explained in a recent series of posts on his blog on the American Interest website, it is hardly news that most Americans stand strongly with Israel—regardless of the feelings of the elites. “Public opinion is moving even more in a pro-Israel direction,” Mead told me over the phone. “While the American elites drift the other way.” This increased polarization between the American public and the elites on the question of Israel, Mead believes, is what’s behind the Israel Lobby phenomenon, or the notion that powerful forces behind the scenes are driving U.S. policy in a direction contrary to the interests and wishes of American taxpayers.

“If you’re a university professor at an average east coast college, most of your gentile colleagues are not very sympathetic to Israel. Support for Israel is fading away with everyone you know, except for Jews,” Mead explains. Since we all tend to universalize from our own experience, he suggests, “it seems that ‘everybody’ changed their minds on Israel”—making it hard for university professors to understand why Israel continues to attract support in Congress. What they miss is the fact that the professoriate’s stance on Israel is highly atypical of the way that the rest of the country feels. “Occam’s razor says you don’t need to posit an occult force to explain why Americans support Israel,” Mead says.

In fact, American support for Zionism predates not only the current-day state of Israel, but also the founding of the United States. The early settlers of this country gave their children Hebrew names and imagined they were founding a city on a hill, the New Jerusalem. Still, as Peter Grose explained in his 1984 book Israel in the Mind of America, “It was the idealized Jew of scripture, rather than contemporary reality, that inspired early America.” England was the actual engine of Christian Zionism where, as Barbara Tuchman documents in her Bible and Sword, major figures across the centuries including David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill argued for a restoration of the Jews to their biblical homeland. It wasn’t until after World War II that Americans took over the leadership of the Christian Zionist movement.

“The British couldn’t juggle a relationship with both the Arabs and Zionists,” says Mead. “Their experience of trying to run the Balfour mandate is what soured many of the Brits on Zionism, and as a weak power they were dependent on Arab sentiment to hold their position. The United States realized that we could do things the Brits couldn’t, like triangulate. The Arab-Israeli straddle is not the only one we do. We managed the Franco-German straddle, and we had the same experience with Greece and Turkey.”

Still, the descendants of those early American Christians who, for instance, gave Yale University a Hebrew motto in the 17th century, were not thrilled by the Zionist project 300 years later. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the mainline Protestant churches dispatched missionaries to the Holy Land, where, after finding little success in converting Jews and Muslims, they began to preach America’s civic religion of democracy and liberty. In the Middle East, a doctrine that would elide confessional difference was an attractive alternative to minorities seeking equal footing with the region’s Sunni Muslim majority. Arab nationalism bound Christians together with their Muslim countrymen in a new, nonreligious identity premised on their, ostensibly, shared history and language.

In helping to foster Arab nationalism, American missionaries played a large role in promoting what was to become the ideological underpinnings of the first wave of anti-Zionism. Given their past sympathies with the Arab nationalist project and antipathy to the Jewish one, it is no wonder that mainline churches in America are more likely to promote boycotts of Israel rather than support the Jewish state.

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and Israel’s goodwill ambassador to the Evangelical movement, understood back in the ’80s that the evangelical movement was a powerful political as well as cultural force. In spite of stiff opposition from the American Jewish community, he reached out to these unlikely partners.

“When I first brought Jerry Falwell to a synagogue in Chicago 30 years ago,” Eckstein told me in a phone call, “I had my head handed to me. He was not just a lightning rod, but he was seen as the enemy incarnate. At the time, the Jewish community looked to the right for anti-Semitism, not to the left. Jews were traditionally liberal Democrats. So, the Jewish community was scared and anxious, and the first question they asked when they saw Falwell on cover of Time magazine was, ‘Is this good or bad for the Jews?’ Their sense was that it was bad.”

Rabbi Eckstein pointed out that just as you don’t agree with your friends about everything, the Jewish community didn’t have to agree with the evangelicals on every concern—especially issues like abortion, prayer in school, and more recently gay marriage—just to have a fruitful relationship on Israel.

“At a time when you had Methodists supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Pat Robertson was saying we need to stand with Israel, the Jewish community was caught in a situation. They realized that Israel needs friends, and that mainline Christians can’t be relied on, and here is this growing movement that stands with Israel.” In time, as Eckstein explains, the same Jewish organizations that once shunned him for his outreach to evangelicals came to see him as a godsend. “Five or six years ago Hadassah wouldn’t take an ad from us, and now we fund one of their projects.”

Nonetheless, even Eckstein couldn’t have entirely foreseen a situation in which evangelical support would appear to be essential to the survival of the Jewish state. “I didn’t realize 35 years ago that Israel and the Jewish people would be so needy for friends, so alone facing this existential threat and that the ones who would come to stand by them would be these evangelical Christians.”

Brog was similarly caught by surprise when he was working on the Hill as Senator Arlen Specter’s chief of staff. “Whenever there was a terror attack in Israel, it wasn’t Jews from Philadelphia who were calling in large numbers to express their concern, but Christians from the middle of Pennsylvania.”

Eventually Brog teamed up with John Hagee, pastor of the CornerStone Church in San Antonio, Texas, CEO of John Hagee Ministries, and founder of CUFI. Hagee has been a lightning rod for political controversy, most recently during the 2008 presidential campaign when John McCain first accepted and then rejected Hagee’s support—after the minister was believed to have made anti-Semitic remarks. “Pastor Hagee has spent 30 years of his life defending Israel,” Brog explains. “His whole ministry is about teaching people it’s not enough to love the Jews of the Bible but time to start loving the Jews across the street.”

Hagee’s mistake was in stepping into a theological tradition as old as man’s sense of the divine —theodicy, or explaining the ways of God to men. Hagee reasoned that according to God’s plan the purpose of Hitler’s genocide was to return the remnants of world Jewry back to Israel. “For Christians like Pastor Hagee,” says Brog, “and for Orthodox Jews, God is omnipotent. So, the theological dilemma they must wrestle with is why didn’t this omnipotent creator stop the Holocaust?”

Of course, it’s God plan for the Holy Land that has so many Jews concerned about evangelical support. Since the restoration of the Jews is in some accounts a precondition of Christ’s second coming, it’s argued that the evangelicals see the Jews merely as disposable pieces on a cosmic chessboard.

“Evangelical support for Israel is founded not on a prophecy, but on a promise,” says Malcolm Hedding, executive director of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. The South African-born Hedding, who was held in a South African state security court in the ’80s for his opposition to the apartheid regime, is a formidable physical presence, even on the phone. “It is not about trying to use Jews as prophetic pawns,” says Hedding. “It is the promise God made to Abraham that the Jewish people would receive the land of Canaan for the sake of world redemption. The Jewish people became servants of the lord, in order to bring an understanding of revelation of God and his redemptive purpose to the world. Evangelicals defend their right to live in peace and security in land of Canaan, support that comes out of a sense of gratitude for what we’ve received.”

The end of times is in God’s mind, and perhaps man’s future. In the meantime, for the evangelicals, anyway, there is the gratitude that Hedding speaks of—a gratitude that is characteristically absent from Western secular societies that trace their roots only as far back as the Enlightenment and whose spokesmen often stigmatize the State of Israel as an atavistic holdover whose existence runs contrary to the tenets upon which our latest version of modernity was founded. American evangelicals believe that what Christians received from the Jews is nothing less than the foundations of our civilization, which begins not with Voltaire or Jefferson, but with the conviction spelled out in the Hebrew Bible that man is created in God’s image. The same tradition that inspired our Founding Fathers to create a republic in which all men were held to be created equal also inspired the Jews to create a state, supported by evangelical Christians. Their gratitude should not be taken lightly.

***

Elisa Albert, “When You Say You’re a Jew,” from the collection How This Night Is Different?

“Services?” Debra says, waiting for that moment when it becomes clear to the woman that she should envelop Debra in some sort of embrace. “Shabbat?” She fingers the phrase book but knows that nothing in it will be of any help. It is broken down into five sections: Conversation, Food, Transportation, Hospitality, Emergencies. There are things she wants, to communicate that are not included in these basics. Were there a Religion-Seeking section, perhaps things would be easier. “I have come for Shabbat services,” Debra would say. “I am a Jew.” And then, ritually, defensively, to explain her visage: “My mother converted.” Then she would flip over to the Food section: “What’s for dinner?”

The woman crosses her arms over her chest. They face off in monolingual obtuseness.

Okay, Debra thinks. It is Friday night; there must be Shabbat services. There are certain immutable rules involved with religion. Just because she is in a borderline second-world country (bastard child of Europe)—a place where she had, the day before, for complete lack of alternative, cuisine, been forced to eat tripe, for fuck’s sake—does not mean that she should feel stupid for having shown up, unannounced, at Lisbon’s only synagogue, sans a way back, at dusk on Shabbat. A Jew could do that, find a home anywhere in the world with other Jews. Wasn’t that the point of the entire freakin’ deal? Covenant, whatever?

***

Shalom Auslander,  Foreskin’s Lament

It was one thing to use the pay phone on Sabbath—doctors did it all the time. But getting into a car? Going to the mall? That was pretty serious. —Violating the Sabbath, I heard Rabbi Blowfeld say, —was like violating all 613 commandments. Moses had committed one sin in his whole life, and because of it, God killed him before he could reach the Promised Land. One sin. Sarah laughed—she chuckled— and, knowing that one day she would, God had made her barren.

I stood in the vestibule of the synagogue, waiting for my taxi, and wondered how God might punish me for 613 sins. Would He make me barren? Was there a Promised Land I would never reach? Maybe God had already punished me and I didn’t know it. Maybe He had killed my family. Maybe He burned down the house while I was walking here. Hadn’t I heard sirens earlier? Did killers break in after I had left? Were they in my house right now? Maybe they were tying my family up at this very moment, guns pressed to the side of their heads, and maybe God was waiting to see what I would do—if I left right now, He would make the kidnappers leave. But the moment I got in the cab. He would…

I jumped as the cabdriver leaned on his horn. I grabbed my bag, ran outside, dove into the backseat, and slammed the car door shut behind me.

Bam, 613 sins.

***

David Bezmozgis, “Minyan,” from the collection Natasha

Three Russians who didn’t understand Hebrew sat in the back of the synagogue. One was missing an arm. Two Polish Jews sat in front of them. One had his place by the partition so that he could stretch his bad leg, the other kept his walker near for emergency trips to the washroom. I was between them and the front row where my grandfather sat with two other men. Herschel, a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, sat beside my grandfather, and Itzik, a taxi driver from Odessa, sat beside Herschel. Zalman was at a small table beside the ark. On the other side of the partition were half a dozen women. There was no rabbi and so the responsibilities for the service were divided between Zalman, my grandfather, and Herschel. The task of lifting the heavy scrolls fell to me, as I was the only one with the strength to do it. The Saturday morning services started at nine and lasted for three hours. Most of the old Jews came because they were drawn by the nostalgia for ancient cadences, I came because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews. In each case, the motivation was not tradition but history.

After services everyone went to the common room for a kiddush. Zalman brought a bottle of kosher sweet wine and a honey cake. The Russian man with one arm contributed a mickey of cheap vodka. It takes only one arm to pour and only one arm to drink. Thank God, he said, this is one thing where it is no disadvantage to be a one-armed man.

One of the women distributed the wine in small paper cups and also circulated a dish with the slices of cake. When everyone had drunk their wine and munched their cake, they wished one another a gut Shabbos and wandered alone or in small groups back to their particular lives.

***

Nathan Englander, from the title story of the collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

“You are pure,” Dov Binyamin said to the back of his wife, who—heightening his frustration—slept facing the wall.

“I am impure.”

“This is not true, Chava Bayla. It’s an impossibility. And I know myself the last time you went to the ritual bath. A woman does not have her thing—”

“Her thing?” Chava said. She laughed, as if she had caught him in a lie, and turned to face the room.

“A woman doesn’t menstruate for so long without even a single week of clean days. And a wife does not for so long ignore her husband. It is Shabbos, a double mitzvah tonight—an obligation to make love.”

Chava Bayla turned back again to face her wall. She tightened her arms around herself as if in an embrace.

“You are my wife!” Dov Binyamin said.

“That was God’s choice, not mine. I might also have been put on this earth as a bar of soap or a kugel. Better,” she said, “better it should have been one of those.”

***

Tova Mirvis, The Outside World

Their shul in Laurelwood was the largest of five. In the past ten years, it had expanded twice. A capital campaign was under way to raise money for yet another expansion, though there was no space left on this lot for one more inch of building. They already stretched to the curb. The parking lot had long ago been turned into the youth wing.

The men came first, filling the main section of the shul. The women came later. When shul was more than half over, it became the mommy hour. Hoping to arrive at the end of services, they walked slowly, laden with double strollers. The walkway that led to the front door had been transformed into a parking lot of Peg Peregos.

In the sanctuary, children roamed the aisles, while the men and women whispered in their respective sections. They spent so much time at shul that they knew how to make themselves at home. The service was like a show they had seen before. They knew all the words. They knew exactly what would happen. Sometimes they paid attention. Other times the prayers became the background noise to their whispered conversation.

***

Lev Raphael, “Another Life,” from the collection Secret Anniversaries of the Heart

Even at services, alone with the other men, trying to stay deep in prayer; his thoughts sometimes wandered: to a barefoot guy in cutoffs hosing down his car across the street, who’d glanced at him one morning as Nat entered the building; or two wide-backed, tanned bikers damp with sweat and exhaustion shouting to each other as they cut down the street; or even Italian looking Clark, who helped run the minyan, Clark whose weight lifting had left him as bulging and tight as a tufted leather sofa. Nat’s private gallery. He felt then lonelier than ever, tracing the path of his unquenched thirst for men, to be a man (was that different? the same?) back to childhood. When he had not felt this way? And what would it be like never to look at men but only see them: pure registration without excitement, interest, pain? He was always feeling helpless, like turning a corner in town and almost bumping into a guy in sweatpants with those seductive gray folds, whose belly seemed harder, flatter over the shifting, jock-rounded crotch, or watching someone’s tight, jutting ass in the locker room at the gym as he bent over to pull up his shorts.

Still, he could lose himself in prayer often enough, long enough. And then his sister, Brenda, finishing her Ph.D. at State, began to join him at services after he’d learned the cantillation for reading the Torah. With her, he felt more anchored, sure this might be an answer if only he waited. Brenda wasn’t pleased with sitting on the women’s side at first, but she respected what he’d learned, or at least all the weeks of practicing at her apartment with a tape recording, chanting to himself there because It drove neighbors at the dorm crazy. And he was pleased that his pretty sister drew attention from the men, as if her presence made him less of a shadow or a blank, less suspiciously alone. With Brenda at services, he felt he could be normal—or seem that way—and sometimes it was easier to concentrate. Thoughts of men were not so intense; she was like a powerful signal jamming pirate broadcasts.

***

Jonathan Rosen, Joy Comes in the Morning

That night was Shabbat. Deborah felt almost drugged as she stood up on the bimah of Temple Emunah in front of the congregation. The peaceful blue rug and the giant vases of white and yellow flowers, the rainbow light from the stained-glass windows as the sun set through the western exposure, the organ tones rising from their high, hidden pipes, the congregants dressed and expectant and spread out like a sea before her, usually filled Deborah with peaceful joy. But she felt like someone in a dream, naked and conspicuous and out of place. What was she doing up there? What was anyone doing there?

But that was her voice singing, “You shall love the Lord your God,” and that was her head bowed, adoring the “ever-living God.” And now Rabbi Zwieback was blessing the congregation, his stubby cloven like hooves, raised in benediction. She lifted her own hands mechanically. Cantor Baumwald sang “Shabbat Shalom” and it was over.

***

Philip Roth, “Defender of the Faith,” from Goodbye Columbus

I turned to Grossbart. “It’s five after seven. What time are services?”

“Shul,” he said, smiling, “is in ten minutes. I want you to meet Mickey Halpern, This is Nathan Marx, our sergeant.”

The third boy hopped forward. “Private Michael Halpern.” He saluted.

“Salute officers, Halpern,” I said. The boy dropped his hand, and, on its way down, in his nervousness, checked to see if his shirt pockets were buttoned.

“Shall I march them over, sir?” Grossbart asked. “Or are you coming along?”

From behind Grossbart, Fishbein piped up. “Afterward, they’re having refreshments. A ladies’ auxiliary from St. Louis, the rabbi told us last week.”

“The chaplain,” Halpern whispered.

“You’re welcome to come along,” Grossbart said.

To avoid his plea, I looked away, and saw, in the windows of the barracks, a cloud of faces staring out at the four of us. “Hurry along, Grossbart,” I said.

“O.K., then,” he said. He turned to the others. “Double time, march!”

They started off, but ten feet away Grossbart spun around, and, running backward, called to me, “Good shabbus, sir!” And then the three of them were swallowed into the Missouri dusk.

***

Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Wager,” from A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories

The Friday evening meal was over, but the candles were still burning in the silver candlesticks. A cricket chirped behind the stove, and the wick in the lamp made a slight sucking sound as it drew up the kerosene. On the covered table stood a crystal decanter with wine and a silver benediction cup, an engraving of the Wailing Wall upon it; near them lay a bread knife with a mother-of-pearl handle and a challah napkin, embroidered in golden thread.

The master of the house, still young, had blue eyes and a small yellow beard. His Sabbath caftan was not made of satin, as was the custom with the Hasidim, but of silk. He also wore a crisp collar around his neck and a ribbon that served as a tie. The mistress wore a dress with a design of arabesques and a blond wig adorned with combs. She had the face of a young girl: round, without a wrinkle, with a small nose and light-colored eyes.

Outside, the snow lay in great drifts, gleaming under the full moon. The frost was forever trying to paint a tree, a flower, a palm leaf, or a bush upon the windowpanes, but in the warmth of the room the patterns quickly melted away.

At the same time, however, the 17th century is also known, especially in England, as a time of intense religious passion and a new fascination with the Bible. As Nelson remarks, historians have called that period “the Biblical century,” and Hobbes and Locke both discuss the Bible in detail. The major reason for this new interest was, of course, the rise of Protestant Christianity, which taught that God’s will could be known only through the Bible and not through any church or priest. It became crucial, then, to read the Bible in its original form, undistorted by commentary and translation—that is, to read it in Hebrew.

As Nelson shows, it was not unheard of for Christians to study Hebrew before the 17th century. In particular, missionaries would “use Hebrew texts in order to refute Judaism and advance the cause of Jewish conversion.” But the 17th century saw what Nelson calls the “great flowering” of “Christian Hebraism,” as non-Jewish scholars began to study the Tanakh, and even the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries, at universities in Holland and England. The invention of printing, too, played an important role by giving non-Jews access to rabbinical texts for the first time. (The first printed Talmud was produced in 1520-23 by a Christian printer in Italy.)

Nelson argues that it was not a coincidence that Englishmen began to show an interest in republican government, redistribution of wealth, and religious toleration at just the same moment that they were learning more about Judaism than ever before. Rather, they were led to these new, seemingly secular ideas by their research into the laws and government of ancient Israel, as documented in the Bible and interpreted by the rabbis over centuries. “Christians began to regard the Hebrew Bible,” Nelson writes, “as a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of Israel.” In a sense, then, traditional Jewish ideas—as interpreted, and misinterpreted, by Christian scholars—lie at the very origin of modern politics.

The Hebrew Republic traces a biblical and rabbinic genealogy for several important political concepts that, on their face, would seem to be strictly modern and secular. The first is what Nelson calls “republican exclusivism”—the idea that a republic, in which the people govern themselves, is the only valid form of government. Greek and Roman political theory always treated the republic as just one of several possible options for good government, alongside the equally legitimate monarchy and aristocracy. Why, in the 17th century, did Englishmen begin to argue that kings could never be acceptable rulers, that all sovereignty had to flow from the people?

The standard, secular explanation would turn to Hobbes and Locke, who thought of the state as the product of a social contract in which the people delegate their powers to a ruler for the common good. Nelson shows, however, that the debate on this subject in the 17th century revolved around the example of ancient Israel—in particular, on the passage in I Samuel when the Israelites demand that Samuel give them a king, “to judge us like all the nations.” When Samuel tells God about this, God is clearly displeased: “They have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” Samuel goes on to list all the abuses a king will commit—from conscripting men into his army to seizing land and cattle for taxes—before giving in to the people’s request and anointing Saul.

Of course, Christian readers had always known about this passage. What changed during the “Hebrew Renaissance,” Nelson shows, was that they now had access to the debates about kingship in the Talmud and the commentaries. Particularly influential was the discussion of monarchy in Devarim Rabbah, a collection of midrashic commentaries on Deuteronomy translated into Latin in 1625. “The Rabbis say: God said unto Israel: ‘I planned that you should be free from kings,’ ” the midrash begins, going on to cite a wide variety of verses and commentators:

Rabbi Simon said in the name of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi: Whosoever puts his trust in the Holy One, blessed be He, is privileged to become like unto Him. Whence this? As it is said, “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose trust the Lord is” (Jeremiah 17:7). But whosoever puts his trust in idolatry condemns himself to become like [the idols]. Whence this? As it is written, “They that make them shall be like unto them” (Psalms 115:8).

This midrash, Nelson shows through some impressive textual analysis (in Hebrew, Latin, and English), helped inspire English republicans to the radical new claim that kingship was inherently sinful, because it was a form of idolatry. It was cited by John Milton in his attack on the English monarchy, and it influenced several passages of Paradise Lost. Republican theorists like James Harrington and Algernon Sidney drew on the same rabbinic sources. Even Thomas Paine, defending the American Revolution in Common Sense, was echoing Devarim Rabbah.

Another key text in this debate was Deuteronomy 17:14, where Moses, looking forward to the time when the Israelites have conquered the land of Canaan, says: “When thou art come unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee … and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me.” This, at least, is how the King James Bible translated it. But the Talmud records a debate about whether the Hebrew word “ve-amarta” should be understood as a description—“you will say”—or an imperative: “you shall say.” If the former, then Moses is simply predicting that the Israelites will demand a king; if the latter, he is ordering them to demand a king. Amazingly, Nelson shows, this Talmudic dispute became very well-known among English Christians, to the point that Harrington could refer to it knowingly in an anti-monarchist tract: “The one party will have the law to be positive, the other contingent and with a mark of detestation upon it.” Harrington even cites Gersonides and Maimonides in his discussion.

Nelson’s second and third chapters pursue a similar strategy, showing how Christian readings of Hebrew texts influenced other major political debates. Until the 17th century, even political thinkers who supported a republic had been absolutely opposed to the redistribution of wealth by the government. They were influenced in this, Nelson shows in another passage of wonderful scholarship, by their understanding of Roman history. According to ancient historians, the downfall of the Roman Republic had been caused by the introduction of a law that redistributed lands from wealthy aristocrats to the poor. The lex agraria, as the law was known, stood as a warning to future generations that the state must not be allowed to interfere with private property.

But the Hebraists, turning from Rome to Israel, noticed that the Biblical Jubilee—which held that every 50 years all land must be returned to its original owner—was itself a kind of lex agraria, designed to prevent any one person from amassing too much land. They pored over the minute explanations of the property code in the Talmud, especially in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah. And they concluded that if the laws of Israel were given by God himself, then they must trump even the example of Rome; redistribution of wealth must be God’s will.

So, Harrington, in the imaginary model society he called Oceana, called for all estates beyond a certain size to be confiscated by the state. His reason, he explained, was that he was following “the fabric of the commonwealth of ancient Israel,” which was “made by an infallible legislator, even God himself.” As late as 1795, Nelson finds an American minister (Perez Fobes of Boston) sermonizing on “the wisdom of God in the appointment of a jubilee, as an essential article in the Jewish policy. This, it is probable, was the great palladium of liberty to that people.” Once again, a seemingly modern principle—redistribution of wealth by the government in the name of social equality—is shown to have Jewish roots.

It is possible that Nelson somewhat overstates the influence that these Jewish sources and examples had on 17th-century thinkers. Did modern thought about government really come from the Bible, or—as seems more plausible—did reformers like Harrington look to ancient Jewish sources to justify their modern ideas, borne of their experiences in war and revolution? As Nelson himself acknowledges, “the encounter between Protestant theorists and Hebrew sources did not take place in a vacuum.” No doubt specialists will be debating the arguments of The Hebrew Republic for some time to come—which is a testimony to Eric Nelson’s profound and original book.

For her part Basha Puah fulminated against their lot with every breath she took, cursing her husband’s irrepressible spirits, though she was herself galvanized by the ghetto’s raucous atmosphere. Despite her violated sense of entitlement, which she never ceased from registering with God and Salo, she was an enterprising woman. By the time their celebrity had expired, she had managed to parlay nothing into a couple of turnips and eggs, which she peddled in the Franciszkanska Street market—battling the other wives over coveted locations—for the price of another couple of turnips and eggs. Then a day came when she sold an egg at a profit and used the surplus capital to increase her inventory. Eventually, by shrewd reinvestment in the produce the peasant farmers sold wholesale from the wallow of their wagon-yard, she established a modest pushcart business; she sold vegetables and eggs whose freshness her husband extended by storing them in the icehouse overnight. In a matter of weeks her market stall was a going concern, and full of admiration for his eruptive wife’s industry, Salo helped her as best he could, though it meant that he seldom slept. He carted merchandise from the wholesalers to the marketplace and shlepped to and from the bakery the boolkies Basha Puah rolled at home and left to rise like inflating airships on top of the neighborhood oven. For gratitude Salo received his wife’s habitual grousing that he was always underfoot. She also chafed at his solicitude with regard to her inconvenient condition, which she refused to let hamper her labors or leaven her poisonous tongue.

Then the twins were born and Basha Puah cursed the incontinence of her own womb, which she threatened, if her husband did not cease his mawkish cooing and fawning over the infants, to stitch shut. She savaged the mustachioed midwife for her complicity and Salo for having saddled them with more mouths to feed. Euphoric nonetheless, Salo bankrupted his expanded family by laying in schnapps and spongecake and inviting every ganef and teamster in their putrid trough of a street to witness the circumcision. He named the boys, in the face of his wife’s indifference, Yachneh and Yoyneh after his ill-fated father.

Even as she carried them dangling from either udder to her market stall, Basha Puah excoriated the twins for their rapacious appetites. “Fressers, you suck like leeches and bite like asps!” Rascals that no one ever bothered to distinguish from each other, they were running wild in the unpaved alleys of the Balut before they were weaned. Early on they learned to ignore their mother’s threats and jeremiads, or rather—following their father’s blithe example—to be amused and even tickled by the lash of her tongue. From the first they were conspicuous for their cheek among the swarms of marauding ghetto urchins; they were foremost in teasing the blowsy whores who graced the windows and doorways of Žvdowska Street, and in tormenting the mendicant amputees till their flaring tempers enabled them to sprout latent limbs and give chase. From hanging about the slaughterhouses and tanneries, they brought home new varieties of noxious odors, and vile language that rivaled even their mother’s. They rode the obsolete mill wheels and were baptized in the seething river that bubbled with acids like a sorcerer’s retort. Basha Puah charged her husband to discipline the young savages, but in his eyes the boys, high-spirited and reckless, did no real harm. Besides, when did he have the time to be more than a benign spectator to the progress of his sons, whom (like everyone else) he’d never troubled to try and tell apart? He did attempt, for the sake of form, to see to it that they attended a local cheder, but the old melamed Yankl Halitotsis was unable to keep them (or their peers, for that matter) confined to an airless study house during the day. They were forgiven their truancy by their father, who harbored his own unpleasant memories of the village kloiz. To placate his wife, however, Salo assured her that, when they were old enough to appreciate him, he would introduce the twins to the Boibiczer Prodigy, whose aura had a moral effect on any Jew that beheld him. Basha Puah called him every manner of fool, then accused him of being a wanton beast as well for making her pregnant again.

“How did this happen?” she demanded to know. “When are we in bed, the two of us, at the same time?”

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of The Frozen Rabbi. Or, to get each day’s installment of The Frozen Rabbi in your inbox, sign up for the Tablet Magazine Daily Digest, and tell your friends.

• The Monsey, N.Y., Beit Din investigating Rabbi Leib Tropper filed a civil suit to get him removed from one yeshiva’s bank accounts. [FailedMessiah]

• A Republican research document, apparently geared toward winning over Ohio’s (not insubstantial) Jewish community, is titled, “Buck-Oy State” and in one place reads, “Ohio Dems Are All Verklempt Thanks to Obama’s Meshugeh Health Care Experiment.” [Ben Smith]

• Paul Krugman notes that Israel’s central bank has, with great success, intervened in its currency in the way America fears China will intervene with its own. [The Conscience of a Liberal]

• Researchers want access to sealed records that, they say, prove that the Catholic Church aided Adolf Eichmann’s escape to Argentina. [JPost]

• Gawker takes down Dan Senor, the Jewish former Bush speechwriter who is considering a run for Kirsten Gillibrand’s Senate seat in New York. [Gawker]

While bioethicists say this is perfectly kosher—“reciprocal altruism” is the apparently not-oxymoronic term—the plan has come under fire for allegedly discriminating against some ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe they are religiously barred from being donors. (Never mind that they’re not, assuming the organs are being used to save a life and not for profit.) Specifically, Rabbi Yosef Sholom Elyashiv’s 100,000 Israeli followers believe they are not allowed to donate their organs until after cardiac death (at which point the organs are dead, too). In case you were wondering, yes, they are allowed to accept donated organs.

The Knesset has passed a law enacting this whole thing. Implementation, however, is up to the health minister … there is no health minister currently, so instead it is up to the deputy health minister … the deputy health minister is—of course—an Elyashiv follower. So, we’ll see.

Does Radical New Way To Boost Organ Donation Discriminate Against Ultra-Orthodox Jews? [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]
Earlier: Israel’s New Organ Donor Policies

• Al-Mabhouh’s death was supposed to look like a heart attack—the door’s inner latch was set; the room was tidy; he was found splayed on the floor with no immediately visible marks—and was almost mistaken for one, until one doctor spied something fishy in his blood.

• The muscle relaxant the assassins used was probably supposed to do the job by itself—in high enough doses, it mimics cardiac arrest within 15 minutes. The fact that al-Mabhouh was also suffocated by a pillow suggests, says one investigator, that the assassins “were panicking for one reason or another.”

• The Dubai police employed sophisticated facial recognition software to the video of the assassins.

• The doors to almost all rooms at the hotel at which al-Mabhouh was staying are visible from the central atrium.

• Authorities believe one of the assassins knew al-Mabhouh—hence, there was no evidence of forced entry.

• Authorities are now taking a fresh look at the 2001 death of Palestinian activist Faisal Husseini in Kuwait in light of the al-Mabhouh revelations.

The article implicitly assumes that because al-Mabhouh’s death has definitively been established as murder, and almost as definitively established as Mossad-backed, then it failed. But one could also argue that the Mossad—which has not (and surely will not) either confirmed nor denied involvement—gains some benefit from having the world think it is able to do this. Anyway, if an operation that achieved its primary mission and resulted in zero apprehensions is a failure, then success must be very sweet indeed.

How Dubai Unraveled a Homicide, Frame By Frame [LAT]
Related: Murder in Dubai

The state senator represents Montgomery County, the tony suburb north-northwest of Washington, D.C. I don’t know about elsewhere, but as a MoCo native myself, I can tell you that the (many many) Jews there have pretty little to fear beyond not being able to get a Saturday 8 pm reservation at a decent Bethesda restaurant, and I don’t see how guns could help that.

Anti-Semitic Flier Takes Aim at Md. Lawmakers for their Gun Bill [AP/Baltimore Sun]

Basically, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have done extensive research (no, but really) into both fictional creatures and the laws of kashrut to determine whether 34 imaginary animals are kosher or not. Only seven are, including the biblical Behemoth, Leviathan, and Ziz. (Jewcy took a look at a few of these as well a couple months ago.)

Oh, and if you want to learn a bit more about mythical animals from Jewish folklore—presumably they are more likely not to be trayf, right?—Tablet Magazine had the skinny on several last Halloween.

It’s the Monster Manual With Manischewitz [i09]

Related: The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals [Jewcy]
A Very Hebrew Halloween [Tablet Magazine]

The whole matter is important enough—proximity talks! peace in the Middle East! the U.S.-Israeli relationship! Hillary Clinton reprimanding Netanyahu for 45 frickin’ minutes!—that the whole thing deserves its own Monday morning mega-round-up. So:

• AIPAC called on the Obama administration to “defuse” tensions with Israel: “The administration should make a conscious effort to move away from public demands and unilateral deadlines.” [Press Release/Ben Smith]

• Not one of Netanyahu’s 30 ministers—including members of the center-left Labor Party—supported a total settlement freeze, including in East Jerusalem. [JPost]

• Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told other Israeli diplomats that the U.S.-Israeli relationship has reached its lowest level in 35 years. [Haaretz]

• On Meet the Press, top Obama political adviser David Axelrod described the announcement as an “affront” and an “insult.” [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak said it was “not intentional, but was nonetheless unnecessary and damaging.” [Ynet]

• The U.S. State Department formally summoned and reprimanded Oren. [Ynet]

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell is headed to the region this week, and Netanyahu is headed to Washington, D.C., at the beginning of next for the AIPAC summit. President Barack Obama actually will be around while Bibi is there. [Laura Rozen]

• Influential columnist Thomas L. Friedman laments that Biden didn’t leave Israel immediately after the announcement, though not before relaying the following message to Israel:

Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality. Call us when you’re serious. We need to focus on building our country. [NYT]

• U.S. officials continued to criticize Israeli building in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized again for the construction announcement’s timing while maintaining support for the settlements. My 10 am post will have much more. [LAT]

• While the main victors in France’s regional elections were leftist parties, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ultra-right National Front won a higher-than-expected 12 percent. Among other provocations, Le Pen has minimized the Holocaust. [JPost]

• The IDF chief-of-staff is in Turkey on a fence-mending visit. [Haaretz]

• Even as U.S. officials assert no tolerance for Iranian nuclear weapons, America has already, quietly, initiated containment policies. [NYT]

• The 2010 NCAA basketball tournament bracket was announced. Maccabi USA Head Coach Bruce Pearl’s Tennessee Volunteers drew a six seed and will play San Diego State Thursday evening. [ESPN]

They were wed on the roadside beneath the tattered canopy of Salo’s prayer shawl by a beggared Galitzianer rabbi in exchange for a glimpse of the Boibiczer Prodigy, of whom the rabbi had heard rumors in his travels. He’d heard that the Prodigy was encased in an immense blue sapphire, and was duly disappointed. For a witness there was the rabbi’s dolt of a son, and in the absence of a goblet they made do with Salo’s mother’s silver thimble, which the groom stomped into the brittle mud with his heel. Nights on the road, the newlyweds slept wherever they could: on the splintered floor of an abandoned tollhouse, in the rafters of a sawmill with an ice-locked water wheel, and once, when they were stranded between shtetlakh, in the open wagon beside the cold casket, where they clung to each other desperate for warmth. And although Salo’s termagant bride never left off upbraiding him—“From one degradation into yet another you thrust me!”—she was pregnant by the time they reached Lodz.

The city, which he’d journeyed so long and endured so much to reach, had assumed a golden aspect in Salo’s mind. But the swarming Jewish district, called the Balut, rather than populated by saints, was a home to ragpickers, organ grinders, professional cripples, prostitutes, and thieves, to say nothing of the legion of slogging automata employed in the silk mills and dye houses that bordered the banks of the sulfurous Warta River. The smoke from the factories hung a mauve miasma over the city, collecting in the twisting lanes of the Balut, whose citizens wore its permanent fetor in the folds of their clothes. Their working children, like human bobbins unspooling, trailed home sticky threads from the cocooneries, their pockets spilling caterpillars that continued to spin fantastic Jacob’s Ladders in the attics of their dilapidated abodes. Slush steamed in the arcaded streets from the excrement of horses and the blood of the slaughtered animals that hung in shop windows or lay cloven and splayed across merchants’ stalls. Malodorous sink that the ghetto was, however, you couldn’t have proved it by Salo Frostbissen, who exulted in its carnival atmosphere, an attitude that incensed his wife all the more.

Nor was she impressed that Salo’s reputation had preceded their arrival in the Jewish quarter, where a number of pious souls had gathered hopefully about the horseless wagon. They touched their prayer shawls to the rebbe’s box, then kissed them as if the casket were a portable shrine, declaring that Salo’s having survived the journey with the rebbe intact was a miracle, proof of the tzaddik’s powers even at rest. Basha Puah, who had abused her husband throughout their travels for the bootlessness of his burden, let alone the added insult of having enlisted her assistance in conveying it, had thus far refused even to look inside the casket. Of a practical turn of mind, however, she was not above suggesting that those who wanted to take a gander might pay for the privilege. But Salo’s stubbled head was a little turned by his hero’s welcome, and while he feared that overexposure might diminish the rebbe’s sanctity, he nevertheless revealed Eliezer ben Zephyr to anyone who asked. The dividends came in any case: Zalman Pisgat, proprietor of the turreted brick icehouse in Franciszkanska Street (beside which Yosl’s was nothing, a hole-in-a-hill) requested the honor of installing the Prodigy in the bosom of his business; meanwhile the charitable members of the Refugees’ Aid Society promised to locate some “cozy little nest” for the newlyweds. For a time it seemed that the orphaned bride and groom would be treated as dignitaries, the toast of the ghetto, and Salo, still caked in the shmutz of the road, basked in their triumphant entry into Lodz: It was the storybook finale to a great adventure. But as the misery of the quarter was in no way mitigated by his advent, and its citizens’ short spans of attention were recalled to their daily woes, the son of the King of Cholera and his refrigerated tzaddik were soon forgotten, Salo’s notoriety failing to survive his first week in Lodz.

They were installed in cheap lodgings in Zabludeve Street, a windowless cellar habitation that Salo praised for its favorable comparison to his father’s grotto (it was certainly as dank and cold) and his wife cursed for the claustrophobic crypt that it was. Moreover, Zalman Pisgat’s gratitude for having been allowed the mitzvah of preserving the frozen rebbe was also short-lived. He did, however, offer Salo the position of night watchman, though not without strings attached: A portion of Salo’s wages would have to be exacted weekly to compensate for the rebbe’s storage fee. That Salo willingly acquiesced to what amounted to his indenture, that he didn’t toss the block of ice containing the holy man into the river and have done with it, were crimes Basha Puah added to the lengthening list of her husband’s infamies. Salo was himself a little disappointed that his fame had so swiftly subsided, though he chided himself for his vanity. And after a spell in Pisgat’s icehouse, dispersing shadows with a hurricane lamp as he navigated the crystal palisades under the glazed eyes of dead oxen, salmon, and hares, he was again reconciled to old Eliezer’s unending incubation. He was content to spend his nights, between tours of the hyperborean premises, sitting vigil in his role as the saint’s custodian, prepared to wait till hell itself froze over for the rebbe to hatch from his ice chrysalis.

So what if the ghetto was a pesthole in which he and his hatchet-faced bride lacked a pair of groschen to rub together, where they dined on hot water afloat with limp cabbage leaves and relieved themselves in a courtyard privy whose odor brought tears to the eyes? The Balut, in its unsleeping activity, was by Salo’s lights a tonic to all who dwelled therein. And besides, didn’t he enjoy the best of two worlds? By day he was a four-square house-holder who, with his expectant wife, fulfilled the commandment of marriage and multiplication; while at night, in retreat from the roiling streets, he was the solitary guardian of a legend that became more burnished the more it faded into memory.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of The Frozen Rabbi. Or, to get each day’s installment of The Frozen Rabbi in your inbox, sign up for the Tablet Magazine Daily Digest, and tell your friends.

These days I carry EpiPens. I bypass fancy pastries, since they often contain vile marzipan. I don’t eat in Indian restaurants anymore, as bits of cashew and almond often seem to find their way into even ostensibly nut-free dishes. Once, on a cross-country flight, I accidentally bit into a nut in my airline meal and panicked. The flight attendant took me up to the first-class bathroom and taught me how to make myself vomit: She got a saltshaker, filled a teaspoon and said, “Swallow this, fast.” I did as she said. It worked. When I reported back to her, eyes watering, she told me, “All flight attendants over 35 know that trick; airlines used to have mandatory weigh-ins.” How odd that the sexism and sizeism of a bygone era saved my life.

Passover is probably the biggest holiday challenge for folks like me. Many Passover desserts rely on tree nuts for texture and heft. Swanky seder salads invariably have walnuts hidden in them like bombs in The Hurt Locker. And of course there’s charoset, known to the nut-allergic as the Mortar of Doom. So, when I began hosting the seder, I started experimenting with nut-free charoset recipes.

In 2006, I tried a Yemenite variant with figs, dates, wine, fresh ginger, coriander, cayenne pepper, and sesame seeds. (Sephardic Jews and some Ashkenazim—including me—eat seeds and legumes on Passover.) But the charoset it yielded was simultaneously not nuanced enough and too coriander-y. In 2007 I tried an Israeli version with apples, bananas, dates, lemon and orange zest, cinnamon, wine, and honey. But that charoset, as those without nuts frequently become, was an icky-textured glop, and banana-scented baby-food glop is not enticing to anyone. We left it for Elijah, but he didn’t seem interested either. In 2008, to avoid the glop issue, I used big chunks of granny smith apples to provide the crunch other charosets get from nuts. I tossed them with cardamom, Slivovitz, dates, raisins, and cinnamon. Finally, triumph!

But because I am the Lindsey Vonn of nut-free charoset, I was not content to rest on my laurels. So, I continued experimenting. In 2009 I tried mixing Yemenite and Ashkenazi traditions in a version with apples, raisins, dates, wine, pine nuts, cardamom, and cayenne. The pine nuts were too oily and added a greasy mouth-feel to the dish.

This year I’ll be trying two new recipes. One is adapted from the Jews of Curacao; it will have peanuts (I can eat those, because they’re legumes, not tree nuts), brown sugar, dates, raisins, figs, wine, honey, cinnamon, orange, lime, and watermelon and tamarind juices. Yes, it could be completely disgusting. So, to be safe, I’ll also revisit the Great Charoset of 2008, a combo of apples and cardamom.

You might think I’d be advocating for all charoset to be nut-free. Or that I’d attend a seder at other people’s homes only if they promised not to serve the vile indehiscent items. You would be wrong.

Of course I believe infants and toddlers with hardcore food allergies should be kept away from foods that could make them sick. But the rest of us, including school-age children, need to be responsible for our own eating. My parents didn’t make a big deal out of my allergy; they taught me to always find out what I was eating.

Today’s parents, I’m afraid, try to control everything in a child’s environment as if casting a spell at Hogwarts. They succeed in panicking their kid, convincing him that danger is everywhere, and making matters worse for these very few kids who really are that allergic. What’s up with the parents who claim their child is allergic but haven’t had him tested? Or the parents who haven’t done blood tests as well as scratch tests and food challenges? Or who dismiss doctors who tell them their child may have a sensitivity but not a true allergy?

Are there children who are so desperately allergic they can’t be in a room with nuts? Absolutely. Are they common? Doubtful. I say this as someone who is allergic enough to have stopped breathing, lost consciousness, and required intubation. Once, after I made out with my college boyfriend after he’d eaten a walnut brownie in the cafeteria, my lips swelled up so much I looked like Amanda Lepore. Yet I tested only at level 4 (on a scale of 0 to 6) on the blood test that determines just how allergic you are. My doctor said that in over 30 years of practice, he’s never seen a 6. Here’s my proposition: If you can produce test results saying your kid is a 4, you get a nut-free table in the classroom. If your kid is a 5, you get a nut-free school. And if your kid is a 6, you get whatever you want, because that blows. (As an aside: All parents of allergic kids should teach them to be judicious about swapping spit and eating while drunk—it sounds like a joke, but adolescence was when I had to learn new lessons about living with a serious allergy.)

As most parents of young kids know, food allergies have been on the rise for the last two decades. Some immunologists think the “hygiene hypothesis” is responsible, that we’re all so clean and purified and antibioticked and antibacterial-soaped that our immune systems have lost the ability to do their jobs right. Others think a lack of exposure to nut products in early childhood may be the culprit. I’d love to hear from Israelis who were raised on Bamba, the peanut-based Cheetos manqué that’s a childhood staple. Were you shocked when you learned that most American parents would no sooner give a 2-year-old a peanut snack than they would a bag of broken glass drizzled with botulism toxin?

In any case, Passover is a good time to think about how we respond to nut allergies, and not just because of those farkakte flourless hazelnut tortes on every seder table. It’s because this is a holiday about freedom. Our sages ponder the part of the Exodus story in which God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. Was Pharaoh responsible for his own actions? What role does free will have in the story? Can children become actualized, differentiated adults if we don’t give them the tools and chances to control their own lives? The Israelites moved from slavery to freedom; we don’t want children to be slaves to their fears. And we don’t want them not to feel responsible for their own health because everyone else in the community has been handed that responsibility. Ultimately, we all own what we put in our own bodies. If we encourage kids to live in fear or rely entirely on others for protection, aren’t we condemning them to slavery?

I know what it’s like to be scared. For weeks after I nearly died as a young adult, I’d sit quietly outside my superintendent’s apartment after I’d eaten dinner. My heart was pounding. I could feel my throat closing up. I was flushed and having trouble breathing, because I couldn’t be 100 percent sure that I hadn’t accidentally eaten a nut. And a panic attack can look and feel an awful lot like anaphylaxis. And I know what it feels like to worry about your child. My kids, thank God, didn’t inherit my allergy (I had them tested), but Josie has spent several nights in the emergency room with severe asthma, and as a 4-year-old, Maxine wandered out of my in-laws’ backyard and got lost in a neighborhood with a deep ravine. Parenthood is terrifying. I understand wanting to do anything, everything, to protect your child.

But Passover is a celebration of becoming your own master. Don’t we want to offer that gift to our children?

From the Germanophilic perspective of British editor Simon Winder, one of the unfortunate consequences of the Nazi era is that the Reich’s crimes get in the way of contemporary appreciation of German culture’s finer points: you know, “great battles, enormous castles, fairy princesses,” beer and sausage, that sort of thing. No surprise, then, that Winder wraps up his eccentric survey of all things German—Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History (FSG, March)—in 1933, just as Hitler got going, or that he suggests, as one of the book’s British reviewers phrased it, that nothing in the “German character … led inevitably to the catastrophe of 1933–45.”

* * *

A scrupulously historical outlook poses challenges not just to bratwurst fanciers like Winder, of course. A number of German-Jewish philosophers in the early 20th century argued against the prevalence of a secular historicism that undermined belief in a transcendent God and Jewish experience. Newly available in paperback, David Myers’s widely praised 2003 study Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, March) examines the varying ways in which four such minds—Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Isaac Breuer—rejected or adapted the principles of modern historical study.

* * *

Another means of resisting history: rewriting it as genre fiction. In Bitter Seeds (Tor, April), physicist and first-time novelist Ian Tregillis serves up a Third Reich replete with superpowered mutants, squaring off against Brits wielding magic powers of their own. The result? What Publishers Weekly calls a “fun take on WWII” and presumably less taxing reading than Thomas Pynchon’s classic insertion of occultism into the major military conflict of the 20th century, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Given the robust popularity of superhuman Nazis—whether zombies, frozen zombies, female werewolves, or the wacky creations of the SS Paranormal Division—one wonders why butchering plain old Nazis by hand, a la Inglourious Basterds, is no longer sufficient.

* * *

Some authors enthusiastically embrace history, or at least their own personal histories, rather than resisting or transforming them. Debbie Levy and Fern Schumer Chapman, for example, both imagine themselves into their mothers’ childhoods under Hitlerism and as young refugees in the U.S. in two new books aimed at an elementary-school readership. In Levy’s book, The Year of Goodbyes: A True Story of Friendship, Family, and Farewells (Disney/Hyperion, March, 10+) the author responds in verse, and in her mother’s voice, to her mother’s preserved and reproduced diary and autograph album. Chapman likewise writes from her own mother’s perspective in Is It Night or Day? (Melanie Kroupa, March, 10+), a biographical novel describing a Jewish child’s escape, in 1938, from the small town of Stockstadt am Rhein, halfway between Frankfurt and Mannheim, to the safe haven of Chicago.

* * *

Should Jews feel responsible for the inconvenience of it being illegal, to this day, to buy a bottle of wine on Sunday afternoon in New Haven? A little, according to Tablet contributing editor Judith Shulevitz’s The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (Random House, March). The author, a founding editor of the  magazines Lingua Franca and Slate, and the guest of this week’s Vox Tablet podcast, meditates upon the idea of a weekly day of rest and traces the history of the concept from its Jewish origins to its embrace by the Puritans, while exploring her own ambivalent Saturday practices.

* * *

The intensity of Jewish diglossia throughout the centuries has meant that at least for much of history, an educated Jew has always been a translator in some sense—and Jewish critics, from Walter Benjamin to George Steiner, have set the standard for modern considerations of the art. Still, few Jews have attained the prominence as practicing translators that Edith Grossman recently has with her acclaimed renderings into English of Latin American boom novelists including Gabriel García Márquez and, most famously, of Don Quixote. In Why Translation Matters (Yale, March), this daughter of Eastern European immigrants muses on her theory and practice, as well as on all the challenges facing translation in the American literary market.

* * *

Occasionally translation just isn’t practical, or even necessary: The text of Yona Tepper’s picture book for 2– to 5-year-olds, Passing By (Kane Miller, March) has been translated from its original Hebrew into English, but street signs that appear in the illustrations remain in the original Hebrew. (Likewise, in the English edition of Rutu Modan’s excellent graphic novel Exit Wounds, one panel contains an Israeli box of Corn Flakes.) That doesn’t stop Tepper’s charming tale of an inquisitive child, watching traffic on the street and waiting for her father to return home, from being accessible: It simply serves as a reminder of our multilingual world.

• But one experienced observer predicts that such rebukes will be the beginning and end of U.S. response: “for this very busy president, the Arab-Israeli issue now has little to do with his stock at home. Frankly, it isn’t even the most important priority in the region.” [Politico]

• Birthright co-founder Michael Steinhardt has an idea—involving significant reparations as well as resettlement—for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [WSJ]

• A survey found that nearly half of Israeli high-schoolers would refuse to evacuate West Bank settlements as soldiers and believe Israeli Arabs do not merit the same rights as Israeli Jews. [Haaretz]

• A good long look at the Hurva, the grand 300-year-old synagogue in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, which is about to be rededicated after extensive restoration. [WSJ]

• Jon Stewart on Biden’s trip to Israel:

Rachel Corrie, then 23, was killed in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting in Gaza. The facts in dispute concern whether Corrie’s death took place in an active combat zone, and how visible Corrie made herself to the bulldozer’s driver. An Israeli probe cleared the driver and the authorities; the Corries, as well as U.S. authorities, don’t fully buy it. The civil trial is currently going on in Haifa District Court.

Corrie’s Sister to Haaretz: U.S. Encouraged Family to Sue Israel [Haaretz]

Meanwhile, do enjoy Rabins’s take on this week’s Parsha. Gives you a good sense of what her music’s like. And I would challenge you to find a more pleasant way to spend four pre-Shabbat minutes.


Parshat Vayakhel from G-dcast.com

More Torah cartoons at www.g-dcast.com

Related: Female Trouble

God help us when she finds out about Brooklyn.

Vulture Is Undressed by ‘The Millionaire Matchmaker’ [Vulture]

Earler: The Scroll on ‘The Millionaire Matchmaker’
Fellas: Heed the Millionaire Matchmaker

Here’s what’s odd. The two Israeli scholars are anti-Zionist. The book in question is called The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule. And the book contains, according to the academic, “a detailed analysis of the ways in which Israel deploys technologies of power and systems of control to maintain its stranglehold over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is a book that concentrates on the illegality of the occupation regime.”

Fellas! The whole “strange bedfellows” thing works best if you let them stay the night!

Boycott and Madness [NOW Lebanon]

In his article, Foxman establishes that the announcement “couldn’t have been worse.” And he says—in apparent revision of what he told Haaretz earlier this week—that he fully understands the administration’s anger.

By the end, we are back in Dog Bites Man territory. Foxman concludes: “Ultimately, Palestinian unwillingness to compromise for peace and to stop the hate are the real obstacles to peace.”

After Biden’s Israel Contretemps, Stepping Back [Huffington Post]

But you want to know where the Jews—say, those in the top 50—are. The short answer is: They’re down.

• The richest Jew, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, fell from fourth to sixth, and from $22.5 billion to … well, to $28 billion, but obviously you’d rather have the higher ranking than the extra $5.5 billion.

• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped further, from 17th to 23rd, and from $16 billion to $18 billion (no way you could trade me six slots for $2 billion).

• Googlers Sergey Brin and Larry Page tied (with others) for 24th at $7.5 billion.

• Microsoft’s Steven Ballmer (Jewish mother!) is 33rd, with $14.5 billion.

• George Soros (35th, $14 billion).

• Michael Dell (37th, $13.5 billion).

• Mikhail Fridman (42nd, $12.7 billion).

• Donald Bren (45th, $12 billion).

• Roman Abramovich (50th, $11.2 billion. His consolation prize is he gets to own Manchester United.)

The World’s Billionaires [Forbes]

• The IDF indicted two soldiers in military court for allegedly getting a Palestinian boy to open a suspected booby-trapped package during last year’s Gaza conflict. [LAT]

• To head off buzzed-about rioting, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered a 48-hour full closure of the West Bank. [Ynet]

• In Saudia Arabia, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Gulf countries will pressure China to support anti-Iran sanctions. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Egypt continues to clamp down on Hamas after sealing its Gaza border. [Haaretz]

• West Bank Palestinians commemorated the 32nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history. [NYT]

So says the Lord God: In the first month, on the first of the month, you shall take a young bull without blemish, and you shall purify the altar. And the priest shall take of the blood of the sin-offering and put it on the doorpost of the House, and on the four corners of the ledge of the altar and on the doorpost of the gate of the Inner Court. And so shall you do on seven [days] in the month, because of mistaken and simple-minded men, and expiate the House.

—Ezekiel 45: 18-20

This week, the human Leibovitz was kind enough to let me have his column and say some things I think you guys need to hear. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m a bull.

And folks, it’s about time we had a nice, long chat. Granted, I’m only a young bull. A young bull without blemish, true, but a young bull nonetheless. And I’m probably not as well-read as some of you—you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is for a bull to get a library card—but I do read the Bible. And in the Bible, there’s a lot of talk about bull sacrifice. This week’s haftorah, for example, begins with the slaughter of one of my kind, a good chap martyred “because of mistaken and simple-minded men.” Can you believe it? Can you imagine how angry that makes me? Well, let me tell you, it’s shenanigans like these that give your species a pretty bad reputation out here in the field.

By now, some of you are probably thinking I’m being unreasonable. After all, you dropped the sacrifice thing a while ago, and except for the Spaniards and their moronic matadors, most of you treat us well enough. Still, I read Ezekiel and my blood boils: The more I think about it, the more I realize that while your kind may have forgone the actual sacrifice, it never got rid of the sacrifice mentality.

The other night, for example, I was watching the Academy Awards. It’s something we animals do every year. We particularly like the In Memoriam section; there’s something thrilling about having outlived all those gorgeous, fit humans. But when Mo’Nique took the stage, everything changed. “I would like to thank the Academy,” she said in her acceptance speech, “for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics.”

I wasn’t sure I understood, so I went to consult with the horses. They’re terrible gossips and know all about celebrity stuff. But even they were confounded. Any way you choose to interpret it, Mo’Nique’s statement can only mean one thing: Had the Academy chosen to give the award for best supporting actress to anyone else, it would have succumbed to some subtle thread of racism and disrespect, Mo’Nique alone being the paragon of thespian greatness. Even when they triumph, mistaken and simple-minded humans still feel that old-time urge to blame everyone else for the circumstances of their life; luckily for us folks, you no longer take it out on us.

Instead, you take it out on one another. Like Elinor Burkett, producer of the Oscar-winner for best documentary short. The film’s director and producer, a smiling, tall gentleman named Roger Ross Williams, walked on the stage and began his heartfelt speech, when Burkett charged out of nowhere, grabbed the microphone, said, “Let the woman talk,” and proceeded with her crazy rant. Let me tell you, even the pigs were shocked. Pull a stunt like this on the farm, and it’s no feed for a week.

What bothers me about Burkett and Mo’Nique has little to do with bad manners or lack of taste. What drives me mad is that even those members of your species who are at the top of the food chain—wealthy, talented, celebrated—are so quick to see their lives as a series of slights, so ready to blame others for everything, so comfortable with conspiracy theories and spite and indignation.

And Hollywood is just the tip of the iceberg. The Republicans in Washington, the governor in Albany, the rambling tea-partiers all over the nation, all screaming the same screed: It’s somebody else’s fault! Somebody else must pay the price!

Used to be you could sprinkle a dash of bull blood and consider yourself purified of your baser instincts and your stupid mistakes. No longer. Best of luck to your species.

Sincerely,

Unblemished Bull

Lipsyte’s satirical novel The Ask, released last week, concerns the transformation of Milo Burke, an overeducated, underemployed wannabe art star, into a truly down-at-the-heels schmo. When we first meet Milo, he is a man in socioeconomic limbo: In early middle age, with a wife and a young son, he has a “good shitty job” in the development office of a so-so university but still dreams of becoming a great painter; he is poorer than he was growing up but of a higher social class than his neighbors in Astoria, Queens. As a result, he has contracted an au courant malady: a case of white liberal guilt exacerbated by the dread that the privilege he loathes himself for is about to be taken away. Milo’s condition deteriorates significantly after he gets fired (for lashing out at a trustafarian art student, natch), only to be rehired on the condition that he can coax a major donation from Purdy Stuart, a former college friend and now a sleazy millionaire who needs him for a job just slightly less compromising than that of a Mafia bagman. All this is quite grim, though hilarious in Lipsyte’s telling, but there’s also a redemptive aspect to the novel that’s easy to overlook. When Milo slips down the class ladder, there is something waiting for him at the bottom: an ethnic identity that had eluded him when he was a just-average hipster. By the end of the book, he is a grade-A shlemiel.

Milo is half-Jewish—on the side that halachically counts—but he primarily identifies, at the outset of his unfortunate journey, as a wannabe art star, which in his world amounts to a demographic category. Newly fired, he spends his days wandering the streets of Astoria and, employing the classic bohemian inversion of “there goes the neighborhood,” worrying that people just like himself will move in and ruin its heartening mixed-income multiculturalism. “They were infiltrating, the freaking me’s,” he thinks on one of his walks. “The me’s were going to wreck everything, hike rents, demand better salads. The me’s were going to drive me away.” Milo’s shame-faced identification as the aggressor keeps his own ethnic affinities at arm’s length. “I never said gypped, or Indian giver, or paddy wagon, or accused anyone of welshing on a bet,” he reflects wistfully on the sincerity of his own liberalism. “I never even called myself a yid with that tribal swagger I envied in others, though I had a right, or half a right, from my mother’s side.”

But once Milo has been knocked from the creative class into a milieu that includes laborers, Iraq veterans, and underworld types, other people start, in effect, calling him a yid, and—through having to contend with the slur—he becomes one. A doltish neighborhood carpenter offers him a deck-building gig and takes the opportunity to pitch him a concept for a reality show, predicting (wrongly), “You seem like the kind of college boy who may be a broke screw-up but is ultimately part of the vast conspiracy of movers and shakers who move and shake our society. Jewish, right?” Meanwhile, Purdy’s shady attorney Lee Moss (“a hardworking shark, a true Jew lawyer” of “the old breed,” Purdy calls him) immediately recognizes Milo as a landsman. “I can tell you’re a no-account putz,” Moss says, “but you and I, we’re on the same side of the fence.” Soon enough, Milo is having paranoid dreams about being insulted by an anti-Semitic Benjamin Franklin and regretting his decision not to have had his son circumcised.

What’s funny about professional shlemiels from Groucho to Woody is their insistent and absurd contrariness in the face of the obvious bounds imposed on them (“I would never join a club that would accept me as a member”). Left by his wife, the anchor of his shaky existence, Milo finally reaches the sublime heights of negation mastered by his comic predecessors. He comes to take a certain pride in his Jewishness if for no reason other than to mock those real and imagined enemies who see him simply as a yid. “Come kill me as a Jew, flog me to death in a desert quarry, bayonet me in the Pale, gas me in your Polish camp, behead me on your camcorder, I still would not believe. To me that was the true test of courage: to not submit to the faith they assume you possess and will kill you for.” It is in this quixotic spirit that Milo ends up, despite himself, what he always kind of wanted to be: an unapologetically bitter, authentically ethnic guy with no more need to worry that he is gentrifying Queens.

With The Ask, Lipsyte surely wins this month’s if not this year’s award for deftest reworking of this tragicomic, supposedly superannuated comic material, but he’s not the only one who still finds it funny. It appears in a different form in the film Greenberg—the latest from director Noah Baumbach, who at 40 is just a year younger than Lipsyte—which comes out in two weeks. Like The Ask, Greenberg is a sharply attuned comedy of social class, though in this case, the shlemiel at its center is Roger Greenberg, a middle-aged, emotionally disturbed scion of a wealthy Los Angeles family (played by Ben Stiller) who has an affair with his brother’s personal assistant (Greta Gerwig). Woody Allen fans will notice nods to Annie Hall in a moment when Stiller becomes momentarily indistinguishable from a crowd of Hasidim, and in Gerwig’s charming but genuinely awkward character who, like Annie, shyly sings at a local nightclub. But beyond these references, there is little overt Jewishness in Greenberg, save for an early scene when Roger’s Semitic looks are mentioned in jest by a fellow guest at a pool party.

“I’m not even … I’m only half,” Roger protests.

“You look full,” the guest says.

“That’s not what I usually get,” Roger says. “People think I look Italian. And since my mom is Protestant I’m actually not Jewish at all.”

The joke’s on Roger—not just in this scene, which ends with his interlocutor mimicking his expressive hand gestures—but in the entire movie, because Baumbach has given his film such an unavoidably Jewish title. This is slightly cruel, given that Roger can’t answer back, but it’s a brilliant deconstruction of the Jewish joke par excellence: Greenberg, one assumes, wouldn’t want to be in a movie that would accept his name as its title.

The shlemiel is alive and not too well, which is just the way he should be.

The peasant screwed up his doughy features thoughtfully; here was a language he understood. “Fifteen zlotys,” he said at length, “and she’s yours.”

It was an astronomical sum, which the peasant was of course aware of, but Salo continued to keep up his end of the bluff. He sucked a tooth and gave the woman a once-over as if to assess her value. Then he was surprised to find that her spindly frame and sour face, furious despite her oppressed situation, engendered in him a mellow throb of desire. Here was a new sensation and, vibrating like a plucked fiddle string, Salo marveled at the range of passions the wide world afforded. He turned his head to spit an imaginary plug of tobacco.

Meanwhile the peasant had begun to eye the weathered casket in the bed of the wagon. Salo followed his glance, anticipating what would come next: how the man would ask to see what was concealed in the box, and Salo would comply to encourage further negotiation, after which the peasant would promptly cross himself and make tracks along with his captive. To avoid this eventuality the young man blurted, “Tell you what I’ll do,” and offered a straight swap. “This fine brood mare for your broken-down hag, what do you say?”

The peasant was caught off guard. He looked first suspiciously at Salo, then swiveled his head from the mare to the woman, as if torn between the audacity of such an offer and a horse-trading impulse he couldn’t resist. “Which is more broke down?” he wanted to know.

“Why, just look at her,” said Salo, beginning to find his stride. “What use can you expect to get from her? A few months, a year at the most, and she’s finished—you’ll dig her grave. Whereas, the mare will probably outlive you.”

The peasant was incredulous. “The nag is more decrepit than the hag! It’s already glue. Besides,” with a simper that invited Salo’s collusion, “women are better for fucking.”

Uncomfortable with this turn in the conversation, Salo nonetheless rallied. “Are you crazy? The woman’s bones will snap like matchsticks, while the mare will bear you a fresh foal every year.” He was himself a little unclear as to the implied paternity of the foals.

“I’m crazy?” The peasant could scarcely believe what he was hearing.

“That’s right,” said Salo. “You would settle for a moment’s pleasure with a tainted female whose pox I can sniff from here”—he was conscious that even in harness the woman was seething—“when you could enjoy the years of prosperity that only a good draft horse can provide?”

Amazingly, the peasant was beginning to waver, though he stiffened again when Salo began to lay it on a bit too thick, making claims for Bathsheba’s thoroughbred bloodline. In the end, though, the youth moderated his tone, and the yokel, making a great show of reluctance, accepted the deal, handing over the tether in exchange for the reins of the unhitched mare. Once the bargain was struck, however, the peasant began to gloat, saying “Good riddance” to the woman as if he had suckered Salo all along: He had out-Jewed the Jew. Watching the man leading away his father’s gangle-shanked jade, her tail raised like a mophead as she dropped a load in the muck, Salo felt sorry for the animal; her fate would not be a happy one. But life, though harsh, was full of unexpected gifts, and pleased with what he deemed (despite the peasant’s response) a successful transaction, the young man turned to face his prize.

She spat at him, at first actual sputum, then a venomous stream of execrations: “Shtik drek! Gruber yung! I pish in the milk of your mother!” But Salo, as he endeavored to remove the taut noose from around her neck, took no offense. If anything, he felt a pang of nostalgia for the curses his father used to heap on his head.

“A finsternish, may your testicles soon toll your death knell!”

Then even as she continued spewing bile, she took up the traces, without prompting or inquiring as to what the coffin contained, and began to help Salo pull the wagon along the furrowed road. In the name of her martyred family and herself, Basha Puah Bendit Benchwarmer’s, she denounced her rescuer as she did the God of Abraham for his discourteous treatment of Jewish daughters. She lamented her lost dowry—which had consisted of some pewter spoons, a milch cow, and an Elijah’s chair—and reviled the world that had deprived her of her due. Enjoying the music of her waspish tongue, Salo wondered how she might look with a little meat on her bones, though he expected that her raw bones would always shun flesh. But vinegar-pussed harridan that she was, at least a decade older than he, she was still a woman, and having never spent time in the society of women, Salo was greatly excited, his loneliness dispelled.

Warmed though he was by her litany of complaints, the young man begged leave to interrupt. “I respectfully submit,” he said with a bashful formality, “that for the sake of decency we should marry as soon as we can.”

Snarling as she resolved never to forgive him for the humiliation of having been traded for a horse, and for all the future offenses she anticipated in his miserable company, Basha Puah ungraciously accepted Salo’s proposal.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of The Frozen Rabbi. Or, to get each day’s installment of The Frozen Rabbi in your inbox, sign up for the Tablet Magazine Daily Digest, and tell your friends.

• One day after endorsing the Goldstone Report, the E.U. parliament demanded that Hamas immediately release Gilad Shalit, the captured Israeli soldier who also holds French citizenship. [JTA]

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will speak at the annual AIPAC Conference later this month. Should be interesting, given recent events. [Ben Smith]

• An Israeli book called The Confessions of Noa Weber won the award for Best Translated Novel of 2010. [Jewcy]

• Scholar Martin Kramer, who has come under fire for proposing the end of Gaza pro-natal subsidies, argues his case in a “Q&A” with various Hamas interlocutors. [Sandbox]

• Lehavi, an Israeli group that works to get Jews to break up with non-Jewish significant others, has called on Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli to ditch Leonardo DiCaprio. [Gawker]

I am a very recent (like a week ago) convert to Judaism, and as such I am still learning about the culture, customs, people, society, etc. So, it is in the spirit of learning that I ask this question:

Why are the people who responded to this story so angry with it and the author? I read the comments and I understand the commentors think the author is obnoxious and arrogant, but it seems there is another underlying reason for the hostility. Why?

Oh, “Victoria”: consider this your welcome to the club!

Related: Paradise Lost [Tablet Magazine]

Such is the understandable despair setting in. In fact, as Biden leaves the country (he heads for Jordan), the proximity talks will apparently still happen (over the Arab League’s reported protestations). Although, the New York Times reports, disagreements remain even on those: the Palestinians see them as focusing on borders and the like—on the substance of what peace would look like—while the Israelis see their ideal end result as merely putting the two sides in the same room together. The Israelis, in other words, appear more content to take things slowly than the Palestinians do.

Which begs the question: is time on Israel’s side? Demographically, of course not: every day that passes, the Palestinians attain a higher percentage of people between the river and the sea. And politically? Israel’s main supporter, the United States, seems (justifiably) as close to wit’s end as ever. The Jerusalem Post puts it best: Biden’s speech in Tel Aviv today (transcript here), while overwhelmingly about the importance of maintaining America’s and Israel’s close ties, was also “a get-your-act-together lecture from a frustrated parent to a beloved but occasionally errant child.” In private, Biden was apparently much more direct: “This is starting to get dangerous for us,” Biden, long known as a top American friend of Israel’s, told Prime Minister Netanyahu (my bold). “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”

Both the Palestinians and the Israelis have an unfortunate tendency to miss opportunities for peace. But it seems increasingly clear that the Israelis, more than the Palestinians, have fewer of those left.

Analysis: Biden’s Get-Your-Act-Together Lecture [JPost]

The exhibit’s location opens onto the broader question of how Einstein—very possibly the most famous and influential Jew of the 20th century—felt about Israel, both before and after its inception. “Einstein’s relationship to Israel was complex,” the Times’s Ethan Bronner writes. “A self-described universalist, he became a Zionist when he witnessed anti-Semitism in Europe. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, was a key influence on him. Walter Isaacson, who wrote a 2007 biography of Einstein, said by telephone that Einstein wanted Jews to move here but did not back a separate Jewish nation-state until after it was declared in 1948.”

Last year, Tablet Magazine book critic Adam Kirsch pushed back against a book, Einstein on Israel and Zionism, that argued that the great physicist was lukewarm toward the Zionist project at best. Einstein “was an unwavering supporter of the Yishuv, and he spent a great deal of effort making speeches and raising money for Jewish institutions in Palestine,” Kirsch writes. “But he was also a principled cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist, and he was chagrined by the growing antagonism between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.”

Rewrite of Physics by Einstein on Display [NYT]
Related: Relatively Speaking, A Zionist

A group of stunned primary schoolchildren began crying when their teacher told them during a bizarre Holocaust game that they were to be taken away from their families.

The pupils, aged 11, became upset after a number of them were segregated and told they were being sent away or might end up in an orphanage.

The ordeal was meant to give the youngsters at the Lanarkshire school an insight into the horrors faced by Jewish children during World War II. …

One girl said her classmates began crying when Mrs. McGlynn told them she had a letter from the Scottish Executive saying nine children had to be separated from their classmates.

She told the shocked youngsters those who were born in January, February and March had lower IQs than other children, ‘due to lack of sunlight in their mother’s womb’, and that they had to put yellow hats on and be sent to the library.

The mother added: “When I asked why on earth they thought it was appropriate to deliver a role play situation to the children in this way, Mrs Stewart informed me that they didn’t inform the children beforehand.

“This was because they wanted the children to experience an “accurate emotional response” to this scenario in order for it to be reflected in their story writing.

Jeeze.

Primary Schoolchildren in Tears After They Are Told They Will Be Removed From Families as Part of Holocaust ‘Game’ [Daily Mail]

Israel’s interior minister says the announcement’s timing was unfortunate and not intended to offend. Even if that last part is true, it made the Palestinians look stupid for agreeing to the talks (it also made them look like the victims of Israeli bullying); it made it seem that Israel was passive-aggressively expressing unseriousness about the talks; and it made the Americans appear, simply, foolish.

Even so, Biden’s condemnation was notable. One expert put it well to Haaretz: “If Netanyahu is at all serious about talks with the Palestinian Authority, this will be just the beginning of his coalition woes. Meanwhile, the Israeli bilateral relationship with the United States has just become much more difficult. It is hard to remember a time when a senior U.S. official used the word ‘condemn’ to describe the actions of any ally.”

The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and Americans for Peace Now of course sided with Biden. J Street, with typical savvy—J Street’s savvy being the one thing its admirers and detractors seem able to agree about—let Biden do the talking: “J Street joins Vice President Biden in condemning … As Vice President Biden said … We echo Vice President Biden’s call.” The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group seems to be betting that when it actively evangelizes for its positions, it does more alienating than persuading. Instead, it is positioning itself to be there, waiting, when (it believes) the facts on the ground usher Americans, and particularly American Jews, into its camp.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman told Haaretz that the announcement’s timing was poor but that Biden lacked tact: “The condemnation should have been issued by the State Department in Washington. … Biden undermined the central purpose of his trip to Israel—strengthening the friendship and cooperation between Israel and the U.S.” Meanwhile, no mention of the announcement appears on AIPAC’s Website. The silence is conspicuous, but is it wise? Joe Biden is known as a talker, and American Jews can surely hear him, even across a couple continents.

How Did U.S. Groups React to Biden’s Condemnation of Israel? [Haaretz]

Earlier: Biden Bashes Settlement Announcement

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to stick to the proximity talks, even after the construction announcement. [NYT]

• The Arab League secretary-general said Abbas wouldn’t start the talks now, due to the construction announcement. Hrmm. [JPost]

• The E.U. parliament formally supported the Goldstone Report’s findings, to strong Israeli criticism. [Haaretz]

• Consensus among high-level Israelis is shifting away from military action against Iran and toward supporting the Islamic Republic’s homegrown opposition. [WSJ]

• Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived in Saudi Arabia to drum up support for harsh sanctions against Iran. [NYT]

Over the past 150 years, many Westerners have sought spiritual transcendence in India, and quite a few have been accepted and absorbed into Indian culture. The British radical Annie Besant, once one of the world’s most famous atheists, moved to India in the 1890s embracing Theosophy, the grandmother of modern new age movements. She became a major figure in the Indian independence movement and at one point was even elected president of the Indian National Congress. But even by India’s historically flamboyant standards, the spiritual career of the late Mirra Richard—Alfassa’s married name—is astonishing.

By chance, when I showed up in Pondicherry in February, it was the 50th anniversary of Mirra’s founding of the Sri Aurobindo Society, which is devoted to propagating the ideas of her close spiritual collaborator, the Indian freedom fighter-turned-yogi Sri Aurobindo. The society, which is headquartered in Pondicherry, sponsored an exhibition in a pavilion by the beach to commemorate the occasion. The Mother’s empty chair, draped in marigold silk, was part of the display, her old sandals in a glass box at the foot. Visitors, mostly Indian but a few Westerners too, bowed before it.

Though The Mother’s image is everywhere in Pondicherry, it’s not easy for the visitor to learn much that’s concrete about her life; the books for sale all tend toward dreamy, magic-filled hagiography. I got a useful clue, though, when I visited the Aurobindo Ashram in the town’s picturesque French quarter. On a bulletin board, there was a typed declaration from the ashram’s late director of physical education, a position that, I later learned, carried significant influence, because The Mother was serious about exercise. It warned Ashramites about a book called The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. “The distribution and sale of this book must be stopped,” it said. “Attempts must be made to procure and destroy all existing copies of this book, and to stop all future editions and reprints.”

Mirra Alfassa as a child in France, circa 1885.
CREDIT: Courtesy Sri Aurobindo Society

Naturally, I went to track it down. The book, published by Columbia University Press, was actually written by the ashram’s chief archivist, Peter Heehs, but it takes a historical rather than devotional approach, enraging Aurobindo hardliners. Perhaps thanks to the Ashramite’s efforts, it’s not available in India, but you can read large parts of it online. From it, I learned about Alfassa’s early life in Paris in the late years of the 19th century, her art-school education and career as a painter, and her journey through Parisian occultist circles. “As a painter and wife of a painter, Mirra associated with artists, musicians and writers—among them Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Cesar Franck, Anatole France and Emile Zola,” Heehs writes. She reached adulthood in the midst of the Dreyfus affair, so while she was secular, her Judaism must have marked her. Perhaps it influenced her quest for a universal spirituality that could unite all of humanity.

For a while, Mirra was a follower of a mysterious figure named Max Théon (né Bimstein), a Polish Jew who had founded an organization called the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in Algeria, whose precepts may have been based on Kabbalah. So, by the time Mirra met Aurobindo, she was a seasoned spiritual seeker. She ended up in Pondicherry in 1914, when her second husband, a French lawyer named Paul Richard, sought political office there. At the time, the colony was still a part of France—indeed, that’s why Aurobindo made it his home. Before turning to spirituality, the Cambridge-educated Aurobindo had been an Indian freedom fighter and sought safety in French territory when he was wanted by the British.

In 1914, Mirra was 36, “a handsome woman, striking in her heavy makeup and high fashion,” in the words of Jeffery Paine, author of Father India: Westerners Under the Spell of an Ancient Culture. Soon, she and Aurobindo were working together intimately, pursuing a kind of East-West spiritual fusion, and under her organization, the Aurobindo ashram grew larger and more organized. As Mirra and Aurobindo became closer, they began to deify each other. “What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world’s history is not a teaching, not even a revelation, it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme,” she said at one point. Aurobindo, meanwhile, declared that Mirra was an incarnation of divine energy, the universal mother made flesh. In 1926, he gave her spiritual authority over all his disciples. Until he died in 1950, he communicated almost entirely through her.

Her teaching is almost indecipherable unless you’re willing to enter fully into her mental and symbolic world. One key event in her cosmology, for example, is “The Descent of the Supermind,” which is said to have happened on February 29, 1956. This involves a vision in which Mirra, in a “form of living gold, bigger than the universe,” shattered a massive golden door separating the worldly from the divine.

Yet as ethereal as all this sounds, Mirra, who died in 1973, succeeded in making some of her visions strikingly concrete. About eight kilometers outside of Pondicherry is Auroville, a utopian community Mirra founded in 1968 with the aim, as she wrote, of realizing human unity and hastening “the advent of supramental Reality upon earth.” Today, about 2,000 people from around 30 countries live there, spread out between 100 or so settlements with names like Sincerity and Surrender. Almost half are Indians, but there are hundreds of Europeans, around 75 Americans, a couple of dozen Israelis, and handfuls from countries are far-flung as Ethiopia, Japan, and Brazil. It’s separate from the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry—indeed, since The Mother’s death, there have been some ugly legal battles between the two institutions. But she’s worshipped in both places.

The Matrimandir, or Temple of the Mother, in Auroville.
CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons

Aurovillians, as they call themselves, are free to build their own houses, though they don’t own them—everything belongs to Auroville. There are fairly basic huts but also big modernist homes—I saw one, in a settlement of mostly French and German families, with a small pool. A few hundred feet away was a café and gallery that I was told served Israeli food, but it was Saturday, and it was closed. Throughout Auroville, there are all sorts of experimental projects going on, many related to sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. It feels like a cross between a commune and the Dharma Initiative.

In the center of the community, both geographically and physically, is a massive spherical gold-plated structure called the Matmandir, or Temple of the Mother. According to Mirra, it is the “symbol of the Divine’s answer to man’s aspiration for perfection.” It looks like some sort of UFO and leaves one agog at Mirra’s spiritual audacity.

She wasn’t the first Jew who sought to remake the world into a place where ethnic and nationalist categories were obsolete. And Auroville, which Mirra imagined as a futuristic city of 50,000 that would transform the world, has obviously fallen short of that goal. Living there, with its strange combination of anarchism and cultish orthodoxy, would probably be a nightmare. Still, its very existence in this obscure, murderously hot place has a touch of the miraculous about it.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.

Meanwhile he starved, though occasionally some sympathetic old baba yaga would scuttle forth from her kennel to spare him a stale pierogen or a potato as soft as a powder puff. These he would dine on for days, storing the leftovers under the burlap in the refrigerated casket to extend their relative freshness. Lightheaded from hunger, Salo sometimes daydreamed: The river he had just been ferried across (for the price of reading scripture aloud to an illiterate ferryman) was the lost Sambatyon, on the other side of which lay the land of the immortal red-headed Jews. Or had he strayed off the map of the known world entirely and crossed the border into Sitra Achra, the kingdom of demons, which was beyond God’s jurisdiction? But even as he indulged them, Salo recognized such notions as merely the shades of dead fancies, lingering vapors of the bubble-brained boy he had been only a short time ago. Moreover, with every meal he missed, a bit more of his vestigial baby fat melted from his bones, and although there were no available mirrors, Salo could feel that he was becoming somebody else: He was a young man transporting a sacred burden through a menacing winter landscape, the hero of his own unfolding story, who had no need of encumbering himself any longer with superstition and grandmothers’ tales.

Sometime during the third week after the departure from his native shtetl, Salo came across a thickset peasant in sheep pelts shambling along the road, clutching one end of a rope that trailed over his shoulder. At the other end of the rope was a noose that circumscribed the neck of a woman whose haggard features—nose protruding like a cucumber from the folds of a ragged shawl—identified her as a suffering Jewess. Salo’s first impulse was to nod deferentially to the peasant and pass by. The journey had taken a toll: His empty belly whistled to rival the flatus of his rattle-boned mare, and his feet ached as if he were trampling glass; to say nothing of how the relentless cold froze his brain. But prey to a stronger urge than self-preservation, Salo addressed the man in the Polish he’d heard since birth, and scarcely recognized his own brash voice.

“What’s that you got there, friend?”

“Are you blind, friend?” said the peasant, giving the salutation a hostile emphasis as he continued to walk on.

At that Salo gripped Bathsheba’s bridle to halt her, and turned to inquire in as diplomatic a tone as he could muster, “Beg pardon, but has no one challenged your right to the woman?”

The peasant abruptly paused and turned about, bristling, his flat face as flushed as a purple onion. “I found her in the village of Plok,” he barked. “She’s mine.”

“Who’s arguing?” said the young man, conciliatory, then gently submitted, “But isn’t she, excuse me, a human being?”

The peasant peered at Salo as if he were a half-wit. “I knew she wasn’t a goat.”

Salo grinned, deciding to try another tack. He cleared his throat and assumed an attitude he thought of as strictly business. “So what’ll you take for her?”

The peasant cocked an ear. “Is she for sale?”

Shrugging what he supposed was a mercantile shrug, Salo replied, “Everything’s for sale, friend.”

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of The Frozen Rabbi. Or, to get each day’s installment of The Frozen Rabbi in your inbox, sign up for the Tablet Magazine Daily Digest, and tell your friends.

“That’s just what I want,” Cohen replied. And so it was upon this almost too-cute distinction—an American synagogue for Jews, as opposed to a Jewish synagogue in America—that Cohen and Wright would build their new Beth Sholom in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, a leafy suburb just north of the congregation’s original home. It was to be nearly the last project of Wright’s life and his only synagogue.

Beth Sholom celebrated its 50th anniversary last year with the opening of a new visitor’s center, a documentary film chronicling the story of its intrepid leader and his architect (see clip below), and a fundraising drive to cover a laundry list of repairs and renovations tentatively scheduled to begin this year. The documentary, An American Synagogue, was written by architect-filmmaker James Sanders and co-directed by Sanders and multimedia designer Alison Cornyn. The pair are currently retooling the film for a television audience; more extensive retooling will be required for the building, which suffers from structural problems that have only worsened in the five decades since its completion.

Wright’s original interview with Cohen actually took place a good while before the 1959 opening—in 1953, in fact. The six intervening years were thick with financial problems, construction delays, and other setbacks, not the least being Wright’s death only a few months before the building’s completion. While he lived, however, his collaboration with Cohen was among the most fruitful of his career, rooted as it was in a shared ambition that the Beth Sholom synagogue should be “a new thing,” as Cohen called it in his first letter to Wright.

“Wright didn’t like the old world mysticism that he associated with Judaism,” says screenwriter Sanders. “He didn’t want to do a Moorish synagogue … and neither did Cohen.” Beth Sholom is certainly not that. A kind of pyramidal teepee, its edges ridged with chrome fins, the structure practically rises straight out of the ground; the sanctuary is a wide, shallow bowl, filled with light from apertures in the vaulted roof above. The most remarkable thing is the floor: Sectioned into geometrical slices, each one set at a different angle from the next, it makes the congregants appear to be cupped “in God’s hands,” as Wright put it. This sense of communal embrace is heightened by the pulpit’s being thrust somewhat into the middle of the room—though not so far as Rabbi Cohen, in his early correspondence with Wright, had suggested.

That remarkable correspondence is at the heart of Sanders and Cornyn’s film. The intellectual partnership that formed between rabbi and architect was so profound that when Wright presented his final plans, he actually credited Cohen as co-designer on the project, an unprecedented act of recognition from the famously megalomaniacal Wright. From the placement of the ark to the symbolism of the building’s decorative scheme, Cohen proved a font of ideas for Wright’s design team at Taliesin, his Wisconsin studio-retreat. The mission on which Cohen and Wright were launched—to find a properly Jewish-American architecture, in a postwar world where America was more and more the center of Judaism—is a theme that Sanders and Cornyn mean to probe even deeper in a revamped version of the film they’re hoping to air on Philadelphia public television.

The original documentary, narrated by Leonard Nimoy, is featured in the new Beth Sholom visitor’s center, designed by Cornyn’s company, Picture Projects, with Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates; but the visitor’s center itself is part of the unfinished work of Cohen and Wright. Their search for an architecture at once modern and Jewish made Beth Sholom—with its open, luminous atmosphere—an emblem for an enlightened and democratic faith. But it came at a price: Leaks, often a problem in Wright buildings, have plagued Beth Sholom for years, dripping down from the glass-and-fiberglass canopy. To fix those leaks, the congregation will need to raise money, and the visitor’s center is one way they’re seeking to attract public attention and contributions.

Other structural flaws need to be addressed as well. “It’s basically a greenhouse,” observes Emily Cooperman, an architecture historian who has done extensive research on behalf of the congregation. Hot in summer, cold in winter, the present Beth Sholom is hardly an environment conducive to worship, especially for older attendees who comprise an ever larger proportion of the congregation. Studies conducted under Cooperman’s supervision will help guide the renovation process as it moves forward—but just as important, notes Alison Cornyn, is that people both in the synagogue and outside it learn its story. “The building really needs to be maintained, but many of the congregants who use it aren’t aware of its significance” to the history of architecture, or the history of American Judaism.

Ian Volner is a Manhattan-based writer, critic, and publicist. He is a regular contributor to the Architectural Record, and his work has also appeared in Bookforum, n+1, and other publications.

An American Synagogue – Frank Lloyd Wright, Rabbi Mortimer J. Cohen and the Making of Beth Sholom from Alison Cornyn on Vimeo.

• There’s a massive battle of the Israeli media titans right now, involving, among others, Sheldon Adelson. [LAT]

• 1980s teenage star Corey Haim, who was born to a Toronto Jewish family, died at 38. [ArtsBeat]

• As to those rumors that the ultra-Orthodox of Monsey, New York, had declared lox un-kosher? “Go ahead, eat lox,” says a report author. “It’s kosher—I just had some.” [The Journal News/Vos Iz Neias?]

• The hidden history of [ ] Jews. In this case, [ ] is Jamaican. [WSJ]

• In honor of his 47th birthday, producer Rick Rubin’s top ten tracks/albums. [Jewcy]

Below: Johnny Cash’s classic, Rubin-produced cover of Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt.”

Those who applauded the Central Conference of American Rabbis task force, which among other things suggested establishing special blessings for interfaith weddings, clearly outnumbered those who condemned it. “Ketzirah” wrote: “As a Jewish woman in an interfaith marriage, I think it’s about damn time. I’ve become more religious since I met my husband and it’s because of his encouragement that I’ve deepened my own faith and practice.” “Laura Baum” agreed: “As a rabbi ordained by the Reform movement, I am thrilled that the movement is now focusing on blessing interfaith relationships. … It is time to stop thinking of intermarriage as only a challenge—it is also a reality and an opportunity.” And Jeremiah says,

It’s about time. How many Jews have been “lost” because they were discouraged from marrying the person they loved, not to mention their children? Every non-Jew is a potential Jew, and non-Jewish spouses who don’t convert are often more involved in synagogue and Jewish life than their Jewish partners. They should have been welcomed long ago.

Of course, there are also plenty who see it differently. Said “Unphased”: “Religion was never designed to be sensitive and welcoming to all without restrictions. … if so it would be nothing more than a chess club where a scarf talis is the team uniform.” And “savtaro” argued: “This is all just too pathetic! What remnants of Judaism will remain? No kippot. No kashrut. No kinship! The Reform will consistently prostitute themselves to stay in business. It’s time for them to admit that they are bankrupt and close the shop.”

There was also some fruitful discussion about how the dynamic is altered depending on which spouse is the non-Jew: the husband, in which case any children are still halakhically Jewish; or the wife, in which case they are not.

And maybe the most quietly profound comment came from “D”:

One can feel the assimilationist rejoice at the expense of tradition rabbinic Judaism. This issue is not that we have come to this point in the discussion, the issue is do we recognize what has been lost. Perhaps an understanding of the directive “maintain Jewish homes” is required.

This is likely a very good thing for our future, but I am sad for our loss.

Meanwhile, I want to thank and applaud everyone for keeping things civil. And I want to encourage further commenting, wherever you see fit—including on Facebook! (If you’re not currently a fan of ours on Facebook, please join up!)

Reform Movement Changes Intermarriage Strategy

The history of Sheikh Jarrah, and specifically of a certain compound in it, is pretty complicated. I’ll let Liel Leibovitz, who wrote about it a few weeks ago, summarize:

in the late 19th century, a small Jewish community settled in the neighborhood, believing, as some Jews do, that the 4.5-acre compound they had purchased was the burial place of Shimon Hatsadik, a great high priest of the Second Temple. Arab violence in the 1920s and 1930s forced the Jews to disperse, and by 1948 none remained in the neighborhood. In 1956, the Jordanians, then East Jerusalem’s sovereigns, settled 28 Palestinian families in the compound. When Israel took over in 1967, these families were sued by the original Jewish owners; in 1982, the Israeli court ruled that the Palestinians were “protected tenants,” but that, as they didn’t own the property, they were required to pay rent to their Jewish landlords. The Palestinians, on their end, refused to accept this premise …

A settler organization named Nahlat Shimon bought the land from its original Jewish owners and renewed the legal campaign to clear the compound of Palestinians. Incredibly, in the summer of 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in Nahlat Shimon’s favor, arguing that since the property was once owned by Jews, the original owners still held the rights to the homes they were forced to abandon decades ago.

The Palestinians were evicted, and a group of Israeli religious nationalists immediately moved in. It is now the subject of weekly, sometimes daily, protests that draw not just the Israeli left but even moderates like novelist David Grossman and intellectual Moshe Halbertal. (There may be a hint of radical chic to these protests, too: “Accessibility is another draw,” the Times notes. “Unlike the relatively remote Palestinian villages where young Israeli leftists and anarchists join local residents and foreigners in protests against Israel’s West Bank barrier, Sheikh Jarrah is a few minutes’ drive from downtown Jerusalem.”)

The more immediate and, given recent events, timely provocation concerns East Jerusalem’s final status. Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem; the Palestinians want East Jerusalem (which falls on their side of the Green Line) to be the capital of their future state. Israeli settlement and construction there is seen, therefore, as an attempt to alter the “facts on the ground” in its favor in advance of final-status negotiations. This is why there was such an uproar, from none other than the U.S. vice president, over yesterday’s announcement of 1600 new Israeli homes in East Jerusalem.

(Israel’s interior minister has apologized for the announcement’s timing, saying there was “no intention of provoking anyone.” He stands by the substance of the announcement, though, which is the main provocation anyway.)

But the Sheikh Jarrah dispute involves a broader question hovering over the entire debate: the question of right of return. And the lesson of Sheikh Jarrah, particularly for Israel, might be: be careful what you wish for.

There is a very real basis for supporting the right of Jews to occupy a compound that was built and at one time owned by Jews, no matter the side of the Green Line it falls on. The problem is that if you grant that right, then the only just thing to do would be to grant the right of Palestinians to live in places built and at one time owned by Palestinians, no matter the side of the Green Line those places fall on. And make no mistake: plenty of those places are in pre-’67 Israel.

Says the Times: “Halbertal said he supported Israel’s policy against the right of return for Palestinian refugees—a position meant to ensure a Jewish majority in the Israeli state. But when it comes to Sheikh Jarrah, he added, Israel cannot have it both ways.”

Well, actually, being the far stronger power, Israel can have it both ways (if anything, Sheikh Jarrah proves that, to some extent, it currently does). But then it loses the claim to the moral high ground, which ought to be more important to Zionism than the Samarian, or East Jerusalem, high ground.

An Eviction Stirs Old Ghosts in a Contested City [NYT]
Israel Apologizes as Biden Meets Palestinians [JTA]
Related: Real Estates [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Biden Bashes Settlement Announcement

Among other things, the group noted that Venezuela did not cooperate with the report, which was published under the aegis of the Organization of American States.

The next step for the OAS is the drafting of an Inter-American Convention concerning racism. B’nai B’rith says it is working to get an explicit mention of anti-Semitism in the document.

New OAS Report Finds Anti-Semitism in Venezuela; B’nai B’rith Submits Testimony [B’nai B’rith]
Earlier: Hugo Chávez’s Uses for Anti-Semitism
Related: United by Hate [Boston Review]

Some of us have had a little trouble sleeping lately. Luckily, that wasn’t a problem last night, thanks to a Millionaire Matchmaker episode in which everyone was boring, and no one found love. Memo to Patti: if you promise a hootenanny, give us something we can sing along to!

Instead, we have Tricia and Trevor, a pair designed to create controversy. Tricia Cruz, who says she’s 38, is on the show because she recently walked in on her husband in flagrante on the desk at their office, and she would like to punish him by finding a woman to fall in love with. On national television, no less! But Tricia is no stranger to doing things on TV; as DJ Tina Turbo, she appeared last year on a reality show called Hellbent for Hollywood. Also, she has a standup show called Strip. Whatever! She’s bi-curious!

And she is going to be at a mixer with Trevor Shively, of Leesburg, Indiana, pop. 625, where the 2000 census recorded two black people, neither of whom, Trevor says, he’s ever had a whole conversation with. Trevor is also a fervent Christian, which freaks Patti out. “I am not really a fan of real religious Moral Majority types,” she starts, before getting to the point. “I don’t really get along with Midwest idiots.”

But in the event, Tricia and Trevor pretty much ignore each other. Trevor recently bought a 10,800 square foot house on Tippecanoe Lake, and he has decorated it with a ginormous television, and we can only assume that he knows from watching it that black people and bisexuals live on God’s green earth along with him. Or not! “I don’t know exactly what she was talking about,” Trevor admits after Patti breaks the news about Tricia. “I have never encountered a bi-curious woman before.” He is, apparently, not curious to learn anything further.

Instead, Tricia picks a butch woman named Tyler who has had experience “flipping” women before, but who, after an awkward date at a skating rink, reminds Tricia of what she liked about men in the first place. Which is that they ogle her. Once again, Patti’s been proven right. Which is great, because it means she can go retrieve the hot, hairless Latino dancer dude Tricia overlooked at the mixer.

As for Trevor. Unlike Mateo, last week’s excitable Christian bachelor, Trevor is just the man Chace Crawford would have become if he’d stayed down in Plano. He runs the grain farm his grandfather founded, teaches Sunday school to middle schoolers, and he doesn’t really see any reason to leave the United States of America. He also likes Pizza Hut a lot. Patti decides he’s just a product of his environment, and she will help him find love anyway. “That’s what life’s about and that’s what the United States is about!” she gushes. Yes, this is indeed a country where what Jesus would have done is go on television to ask a wise Jewess to help him find true love.

Trevor’s celebrity crush is Carrie Prejean, who spent a lot of last year lobbying against same-sex marriage legislation. Luckily, Carrie’s off the market, so instead this 26-year-old will settle for Heidi, a blond former 4H-er who wants to raise horses and ride them at her beach house. (Trevor almost chose Maile, a stunning black former pageant competitor from Hawaii who also really likes God, but foiled Patti’s coastal-liberal-elite plot at the last minute by going with his prejudices. Letdown!)

Trevor and Heidi meet at a flower farm, thanks to our friends at 1-800-FLOWERS, and it’s not clear whether what happens next is a date or a Zyrtec ad. They snip some Gerber daises for a while, and then they lunch in the middle of a field. Heidi, who despite the possibility that they may go mudding or truck racing or something, is wearing an extremely short, tight, and low-cut dress, chirps about how much money she will make by starting businesses. ‘Ah-choo!’ She does not want to date people who are judging her on her looks and her money, see. ‘Excuse me.’ Trevor is smitten. He wants to fly her to Indiana! Heidi’s mouth says “sure,” but her watery eyes say, “I am never going back to flyover country, buddy.”

Sure enough, she hasn’t. The Leesburg Times-Union talked to Trevor, who set up a Facebook page to celebrate this whole hoedown, and he says Heidi has not taken him up on his offer. Also, he reveals that he thought it would be good to use Bravo as “a platform to share my faith as a Christian.” Um, is he aware of Bravo’s target demographic?

Next week: a self-absorbed gay man and a stubborn older woman. Can. Not. Wait.

The interesting detail has to do with a New York City-based company called Payoneer, whose prepaid debit cards were reportedly used by many of the 27 (at last count) suspected assassins.

New York City-based … but heavily enmeshed in the world of the Israeli military and intelligence services. Payoneer is run by Yuval Tal, who served in an Israeli “elite combat unit.” An Israeli Air Force pilot was a first-round investor; the venture capital fund that led the following investment round did so under the hand of a military intelligence captain; a further round was led by a fund founded by a former IDF Special Forces man.

To an extent, of course, this is to be expected: when a country has universal conscription, then most entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, like most of everyone else, will have done military service. But these connections clearly tend toward the more covert, mysterious end of the spectrum.

Plus, look, it was—at least in part—the Mossad. It just was. (The Mossad, as always, will neither confirm nor deny involvement.)

New York City’s Assassination Connection [NY Observer]
Related: Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

• British PM Gordon Brown has awarded medals to 27 countrymen who saved Jews from Nazis, calling them “Heroes of the Holocaust.” [Telegraph]

• Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has accused Israeli military police of arresting Palestinian minors, who are accused of throwing stones at settlers, in violent nighttime raids. [AP]

• AIPAC has taken the unusual step of sending every Congress member a “sharply worded letter” demanding an investigation into how $107 billion in federal grants has been awarded to companies that do business in Iran. [JTA]

• Less surprisingly, a poll finds that 74 percent of Israel’s religious Jews believe they are “more moral” than the general public. [Ynet]

It’s a fantastic monument, not only because the fish—its expression resembling that of a teenager rudely awoken from an afternoon nap—looks thoroughly fake, but also because it suggests to the uninitiated traveler that beyond the terminal’s gates lies a world of wonders, strange creatures and all.

In a sense, this is precisely the feeling the Antiguan government is interested in promoting. More than 300,000 tourists, on average, descend on the island’s shores each year, a horde of salmon-hued Brits and beer-battered Germans that both sustains and overwhelms the local population, estimated at 72,000. There’s little the Antiguans can do: Tourism accounts for more than 60 percent of the island’s economy, leaving the locals with no choice but to vigorously market their tiny nation as a magical Caribbean getaway, a sort of real-life Fantasy Island. Along these lines, the fish is a monument to the impossible: St. Bart’s may have the reputation, and Mustique the celebrity appeal, but only in Antigua, the marlin suggests, may the very laws of nature be bent for your amusement.

Last week, my wife Lisa and I flew to Antigua for a weekend to attend the wedding of Mr. B., a hotelier, at his lovely Antiguan resort. Much time was spent pondering what to wear—the groom threatened to beat up and toss out any guest who dared wear a tie—and very little contemplating such minor issues as entry visas. If Israeli citizens needed a visa to visit Antigua, I told myself, Mr. B.’s son-in-law, himself Israeli and my close friend, would surely have let me known.

But no sooner had we landed and admired the oversized fish than an immigration official broke the doleful news: no visa, no entry. Meekly, I removed my baseball cap and shades and said that I had no idea I needed a visa, an idiotic statement that seemed to elicit more pity than disgust. “Well,” said the immigration official, “you do.”

There was no other choice. I invoked Mr. B.’s name. This had the desired effect: Lisa and I were removed from the line, taken to a secluded spot by the nurse’s office, and instructed to wait. Soon, another official, smiling warmly, moseyed over and told us that she’d do whatever she could to help us resolve our little problem as quickly as possible.

Veteran travelers, we refused to succumb to panic. Instead, we pulled out our phones and texted Mr. B.’s daughter, informing her of the snafu. Two minutes later, there she was, beaming, standing by our sides. There was no point in asking how she’d gotten through security, immigration, and all the other barriers that are supposed to stop you from walking right into an airport’s secure detention spot. A few words were exchanged, and it was agreed that I would be released on my own recognizance, passport unstamped, and sent to the Ministry of National Security to settle my affairs.

The Ministry of National Security is located in downtown St. John’s, across the street from a Subway sandwich shop, in a building that looks more suited to botched drug deals than to any official matter of state. The posters on the wall make clear the ministry’s main concern; most of them warn against abduction and modern-day slavery and feature a host of pink figures engaged in subservient activities, from forced intercourse to mopping floors. The ministry’s employees, however, were unperturbed: R&B ballads roared from the tinny speakers of a far-off computer, and most officials, dressed in blue-and-white uniforms, seemed as unburdened as only those entrusted with defending a thoroughly unthreatened Caribbean nation can be.

Accompanied by our friends and Larry, Mr. B.’s lawyer, we located the right official and pleaded our case. The official, a woman in her fifties, was baffled. You were already allowed into the country, she said as she looked at my unstamped passport, you may as well just stay.

Larry, a former LAPD police officer and a man with many connections on the island, asked for a moment alone with the official. A few minutes later, he came out and said quietly that he thought he figured out the entire mess. Antigua, he said, had a diplomatic relationship with Libya. After Israel assassinated a Hamas official in Dubai last month, the Libyans demanded that Israelis no longer be allowed to enter Antigua, or, at the very least, that they be required to pay a hefty fee for a special tourist visa. The Ministry of National Security, he added, was cool with letting me stay, but it was the prime minister’s call, and we needed to report to the prime minister’s office to sort everything out. Unfazed, we said our goodbyes to the lovely folks at National Security, who saw us off by making us promise to convey heartfelt congratulations to Mr. B. on his upcoming nuptials.

On our way to see the prime minister, however, my mind began racing. Here I was, I thought, in paradise, detained for a crime I didn’t commit. All I wanted was a quick vacation, and instead I was forced to account for my country’s follies. I had left Israel behind, emigrated to America, got my Green Card, opted to abandon the perpetual association with the sort of militaristic shenanigans that lose friends and alienate people.  Clichés started swirling in my head: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. You can run, but you can’t hide. You may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with you.

The car stopped. We were parked in front of a one-story office in the midst of a patch of grass, guarded by a single soldier in a green t-shirt and no gun. In front were two enormous stone lions, the sort popular both in China and in chintzy souvenir shops on Manhattan’s 59th Street. It looked, I whispered to Lisa, like a dentist’s office in a Long Island strip mall.

It smelled like one, too, with the unmistakable odor of acrylic monomer, ammonia, and quiet desperation. Magazines were strewn everywhere, mainly an oversized glossy called China Today. It was a thick hint: Chinese government contractors are in charge of most major construction projects in Antigua, as they are in so many developing countries across the globe. Hence the stone lions. A poster on a nearby wall read: “What will come to us will come to us, so quit your worrying!” I took the advice to heart.

A hospitable secretary greeted us, indicating that the Ministry of National Security had already filled her in on the details. We were asked to pay $40 and received a printed receipt. We were officially welcomed to Antigua and allowed to drive on to the resort.

There, in the shadow of palm trees and in the company of some of the island’s most influential men, scotch and talk both flowed. The Mossad, one tough old developer said with a smile, nearly assassinated our vacation plans. Another advised me to try and avoid killing anyone while on the beach. I grinned politely but stared at the umbrella floating in my cocktail; if everyone already saw me as a murderer, I brooded, I might as well enjoy it.

Gradually, however, my ire subsided, drowned in drink and merriment. The weekend was glorious. When I saw the prime minister himself at the wedding, I smiled politely and shook hands. Antigua, after all, let me in. There was no need for a diplomatic incident.

Tanned and thrilled, we flew back home to New York, where two feet of snow were still piled on the ground. The next morning, we talked about our time as personae non grata in paradise. At a distance, the entire story seemed fantastic. Would Antigua really care about the Mossad? Would a mere visa requirement constitute punishment of Israel and its policies? And would any nation, even one as relaxed about its official undertakings as Antigua, really change its rules overnight and fail to notify the rest of the world?

Anxious, I called the consulate general of Antigua in New York and asked to speak with the tourism representative. I told her everything, about my arrival and the prime minister’s office and how everybody on the island, officials and guests alike, suggested that I was the target of an international mishap involving the Libyans. The woman was silent for a few long moments. She knew nothing of the Mossad, she finally said, but was quite certain that Israelis had always required a visa to visit Antigua. But there was no way, she added, that anyone in Antigua would ever allow me in without stamping my passport, Israeli or otherwise.

I thanked her, hung up, and thought of the marlin.