August 12, 2010 | 8:40 am

Turkey, Then and Now

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

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The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday that Turkey is ignoring U.S. sanctions against Iran, allowing Turkish companies to sell fuel to Tehran.  Their immediate motive is economic.  The Turkish oil refining company Tupras explained, “We get crude oil from them. We don’t get anything from America.”

There may be more to it than that.  The other day, on a Turkish Airlines flight, I leafed through their handsome in-flight magazine and read an interview with the historian Halil Inalcik.  The 94-year-old scholar, who specializes in the Ottoman Empire, explained how he chose that field.

“When I enrolled in Ankara University [in the 1930s] it was fashionable to study Sumerian, Hittite, and Assyrian history.  These were also the fields in which Atatürk took a close interest.  The Ottoman sultans were regarded as despots who shed Turkish blood around the world.  Despite all that I said to myself, the Ottoman Empire made inroads halfway into Europe and ruled the Middle East for six hundred years.  I told myself that I was going to explain the concept, organization, and achievement of Ottoman civilization to the whole world and prove how superior it was.”

Prof. Inalcik pointed to one particular difference from the Europeans:  “Among the Ottomans, to conquer does not mean to destroy or annihilate.  The Ottoman sultan took under his protection everyone who acknowledged his supreme rule.”  The subtext is unmistakable.  It amounts to a rejection of modern, secular, Western values as epitomized by Atatürk, and an embrace of the Islamic civilization of the empire he supplanted.

The magazine also carried a seasonal article about “Ramadan in the Topkapi Palace,” which describes the sultan’s elaborate ritual at the Visit to the Holy Mantle on the 15th of the month.  This was more than a state function.  The sultan of the Ottoman Empire was not only head of government; he also occupied the office of caliph, effectively the leader of the Muslim world from 1517 until the position was abolished by Atatürk four hundred years later.

In recent months Prime Minister Recep Tacip Erdogan has talked more openly about Turkey resuming its historic leadership role among the Muslim states.  So the decision to ignore U.S. sanctions against Iran may be more than a business decision.  It may signal another step by Turkey away from its 20th-century experiment with secular Enlightenment values and towards the glories of its shared history with the Muslim nations of the Middle East.

Bob Goldfarb is president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem.  He also blogs at eJewishPhilanthropy.com, and Tweets about Jews, the arts, and Jewish culture at twitter.com/bobgoldfarb.

 

August 9, 2010 | 1:09 pm

Haredi Stereotypes, Jewish Stereotypes

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

Today’s Independent newspaper in London reports that a group called “the Guardians of Sanctity and Education feared that some temptations would simply prove too much, and deployed an army of snoopers to photograph members of the ultra-orthodox community, also known as Haredi, at a mixed-sex pop concert.”

Here’s how their reporter, Catrina Stewat, describes that community:

“Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox Mea Shearim neighbourhood offers a snapshot of another era. Medieval-style buildings overhang the narrow little alleyways through which black-hatted men with sidelocks hurry, heads bowed and books in hand.  Here, the focus is firmly on religious study. Most ultra-orthodox men enter the yeshiva, studying the Torah until well into their 40s. But not only is it a drain on Israel’s economy; it puts many young men, some of them less spiritually minded, under tremendous pressure to conform.  Their communities have their own buses, where women are relegated to the back, and they stick closely to rigid rules that govern every aspect of their lives. On the Jewish Shabbat, or Sabbath, they are forbidden from driving, operating a light switch and lighting fires, ruling out any barbeques.”

Just last week the Financial Times offered a similar view of haredim as exotics from a lost era:

“Mea Shearim, home to several thousand members of Israel’s ultra-orthodox community—its streets and courtyards offer a poignant trip back to the centres of Jewish life in 19th-century eastern Europe.  Defying the Middle Eastern heat, men still wear the long black robes and fur hats of their ancestors. Strictly observant, they tend to shun the secular workplace, dedicating their lives to religious studies and prayer. Yiddish remains widely spoken. Television, the internet, miniskirts and pop music – all are kept at bay by a rigorous moral code that rejects the values and gadgets of modern society.”

The Independent’s account of modesty enforcers shares the FT’s view of haredim as living anachronisms—which is what many Christian sects used to teach about Jews generally.  Another Christian caricature cast Jews as Pharisees, splitting hairs over the letter of the law rather than seeking its spirit; banning miniskirts and Saturday barbecues in the name of morality falls neatly into that latter narrative.  That these old stereotypes are still casually perpetuated by respected newspapers reveals, albeit unintentionally, the limits of the widely professed British multiculturalism.

Bob Goldfarb is president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem.  He also blogs at eJewishPhilanthropy.com, and Tweets about Jews, the arts, and Jewish culture at twitter.com/bobgoldfarb.

 

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August 6, 2010 | 10:32 am

Author Evgenia Citkowitz and Her Roots

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

This week New Yorker critic Hilton Als hailed Evgenia Citkowitz, author of a book of seven stories and a novella, as “a master of both forms.”  That book, Ether—her first—was published this spring.  The New York Times declared “her voice, particularly her rhythm — half staccato, half headlong rush — is wholly her own. She doesn’t sound like anyone else you’ll have read in a very long while.”

Her life story shows that truth can be stranger than fiction.  Her mother was the writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, who was runner-up for the Booker Prize in 1977.  Her stepfather was the American poet Robert Lowell, Lady Caroline’s third husband.  Caroline’s first marriage was to the artist Lucien Freud, and her second husband—Evgenia Citkowitz’s father—was a Polish-born, Brooklyn-reared Jew: the composer, pianist, critic, and teacher Israel Citkowitz.

Today Israel Citkowitz is so obscure that he doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, but in his youth he was considered a promising composer and was a close friend of Aaron Copland.  His music was included in the landmark Copland-Sessions concerts of 1929, and years later his songs were recorded by new-music champion Bethany Beardslee.  His pupils included the composer Elmer Bernstein.  He was 50 when he married Caroline Blackwood, who was 28 at the time, and they had three daughters.  They divorced in 1972, two years before he died.

On her mother’s side of the family Evgenia Citkowitz’s grandmother was Maureen Constance Guiness, heir to the Guiness brewery fortune.  In 1995 Evgenia and her sister Ivana inherited £15 million from her.  Since 1990 Evgenia has been married to the film actor Julian Sands, who first achieved fame for his starring role in Room With a View (1985).

Intriguing though they are, these lofty connections mean little compared to her talent.  Any debut writer would be proud to get reviews like this one:

“The stories are startlingly original, haunting, and often funny. From a hamster cage in Los Angeles to the bowels of the great houses of London and Long Island, Citkowitz depicts her characters’ frailties and humanity with a mordant humor and tenderness that never diminish their complexity.”

That’s the most important reason to remember the name Evgenia Citkowitz.

Bob Goldfarb is president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem.  He also blogs at eJewishPhilanthropy.com, and Tweets about Jews, the arts, and Jewish culture at twitter.com/bobgoldfarb.

 

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August 5, 2010 | 10:48 am

Another Demographic Time-Bomb

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

Yesterday’s Financial Times painted a dark picture of Israel’s future based on current demographic trends, and not just the ones involving Arabs.  Their article quotes Professor Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University as saying that “the average ultra-Orthodox woman has no fewer than six children.”  It cited a study by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies projecting that “if the changes of the past decade continue, then in 2040 the share of ultra-Orthodox and Israeli-Arab pupils will be 78 per cent of all pupils in Israel’s primary schools.”  And the consequences are not left to the reader’s imagination.

Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s finance minister, doesn’t mince words.  “Without a change now,” he told a conference, “within 10 years the situation will be a catastrophe.”  One professor says, “This amounts to the most serious threat for the existence of the state of Israel in the long run.”  As with any time-bomb, the clock is ticking.  “There is a point of no return, and when we cross it we will not be able to change things democratically – and maybe not at all,” says the Taub Center’s Dan Ben-David.

These doomsday predictions follow reporter Tobias Buck’s description of haredim in Mea Shearim.  “Men still wear the long black robes and fur hats of their ancestors,” he observed.  “Yiddish remains widely spoken. Strictly observant, they tend to shun the secular workplace, dedicating their lives to religious studies and prayer. Television, the internet, miniskirts and pop music – all are kept at bay by a rigorous moral code that rejects the values and gadgets of modern society.”

Those tropes—they dress differently, they speak a different language, they keep to themselves, they reject the dominant culture—used to be applied to Jews generally.  One subtext was that Jews would be better off if they behaved more like everybody else.  For today’s American Jews—the vast majority of whom are assimilated in their clothing, language, and culture—the separateness of the haredim can also seem to be the source of the problem.  Some secular Israelis would agree.

The actual problem is that government subsidies for haredi men who learn rather than work, and their exemption from Army service, create economic distortions.  If there are incentives not to acquire a secular education, participate in the work force, or help defend the country, there will naturally be lower education, less employment, and a weaker army.  Like Congressional earmarks for pet projects in agriculture, public works, or homeland security, these incentives are the product of negotiations in the political process (as the FT article acknowledges).  And like other earmarks, they divert resources from the public good to benefit a narrow constituency.

The communal lifestyle of the haredim is beside the point; the decision by the Knesset to subsidize that lifestyle is the real issue.  There’s no need to single out superficial particulars of haredi practice to conclude that it’s not in the public interest to perpetuate enormous transfer payments from productive citizens to these less productive ones.  People who recognize the benefits of diversity, and who object to the marginalization of the Other, might be expected to defend the distinctive practices of a religious and cultural minority like haredim even while opposing the subsidies.  But that rarely happens.  To paraphrase George Orwell, some groups are more Other than others.

If it’s in Israel’s interest to achieve higher levels of employment, education, and military service, as it surely is, the Knesset will need to cut the incentives that lead citizens to make other choices.  That is no easier than stopping pork-barrel spending in the U.S. government, however.  And demonizing the haredi parties who block such reform is no more productive than demonizing senators like Iowa’s Tom Harkin for managing to send $132,700,000 in Congressional appropriations to his home state last year.  The pragmatic solution is legislation crafted so that a majority of Knesset members will vote for reform.  There’s no substitute for a political response to a political problem.

Bob Goldfarb is president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem.  He also blogs at eJewishPhilanthropy.com, and Tweets about Jews, the arts, and Jewish culture at twitter.com/bobgoldfarb.

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August 1, 2010 | 11:44 am

Jewish Burkas and Muslim Underwear

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

One of the less predictable fashion trends in Israel is the adoption of the burka by some haredi women.  This is not new: it was first reported in Haaretz in 2007, in an article headlined “This Isn’t Kabul: It’s Beit Shemesh.”  From Beit Shemesh it has spread to several other towns as a more complete means of safeguarding women’s sexual modesty.

The rabbinate is now responding.  London’s Jewish Chronicle reported last week that “The Eda Charedit rabbinic organisation will soon release a statement condemning the practice of the Beit Shemesh women, Shlomo Pappenheim, a senior member of the management committees, said.”  The paper describes the organization as “the religious body admired by the most religiously hard-line elements in Israel - even the Neturei Karta anti-Zionist sect.”

The London Telegraph says that the edict will declare “burka wearing a sexual fetish that is as promiscuous as wearing too little.”  It quotes Rabbi Pappenheim as saying, “There is a real danger that by exaggerating, you are doing the opposite of what is intended [resulting in] severe transgressions in sexual matters.”

Meanwhile, Hamas authorities in Gaza, according to the Jerusalem Post, have “banned shops from displaying women’s underwear in their windows, saying it offends public morality.”  This is the latest development in Hamas’s efforts “to restore public morals in Palestinian society,” including a ban on women riding on motor scooters behind men and a prohibition of women smoking tobacco through a hookah in public.

Maybe we do live in two different worlds.

Bob Goldfarb is the president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem and a regular columnist for eJewishPhilanthropy.com.  His Twitter feed on Jews, the arts, and Jewish culture can be found at Twitter.com/bobgoldfarb.

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