September 15, 2010 | 10:50 am

It is No Dream

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

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Imagine a country that bans automobiles from the road for an entire day every year.  Think of the environmental impact—not only the effect on the country’s carbon footprint, but also its influence as a model of how life is possible with a car.

There is such a country—Israel—and the day without cars is Yom Kippur.  This Friday afternoon at around 5:00 automobile traffic will dwindle to zero, leaving the roads a bicyclist’s paradise.  Streets will remain empty until the sirens sound 25 hours later marking the end of the fast day.

A lot of other modern services go offline during Yom Kippur as well.  Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport shuts down entirely, not just for El Al but for all flights.  Radio and television stations go off the air.  Stores and restaurants are closed.  It’s a legal holiday, and these restrictions are the law.

Many perceptions of Israel are based on stereotypes rather than reality, so Americans sometimes imagine that this is a medieval regimen foisted on an unwilling majority by a tyrannical minority of fanatics.  But the benefits of a day free of technology are appreciated by many more people than ritually observant Jews.

Even the stridently secular newspaper Haaretz concedes that Yom Kippur in Israel “has turned from wretched to beloved, to a charming holiday breathlessly awaited each year, so much so that the very quietness stemming from numerous prohibitions, and formerly seen as a product of religious coercion, has turned into [a] much desired phenomenon.”

Besides, Israel is not as secular as Americans often imagine.  A recent survey of Jews over 20 in Israel found self-identified secular Jews are in the minority.  According to the study, “42 percent of the Jewish population characterize themselves as secular.”  Even so, fully 72 percent of all Jews said they had visited a synagogue over the previous year.  And of those who counted themselves among the secular, “26 percent said they had fasted on Yom Kippur, 17 percent build a sukkah and 82 percent regularly conduct a seder at Passover.”  In other words, a lot of so-called secular Jews in Israel behave very differently from secular Jews in the United States.

Alongside the very real resentments of the Israeli rabbinate and its imposition of religion-based stringencies on public life, there is a countervailing attachment by many Israeli Jews to tradition in a personal, subjective way.  That contrasts with the reflexive embrace of rational, universalist ideas that is commonplace among American Jews.  It’s one of the reasons American Jews misunderstand Israel.  Yom Kippur exerts a strong pull on Jewish Israelis beyond its overt religious meaning, which is why there is little resistance to the ban on so many activities that day.

Two American Jews have been suggesting something similar, albeit on a voluntary basis.  Mark DiMassimo and Eric Yaverbaum, in Westchester County near New York City, have founded Offlining, Inc. as a way of encouraging parents to reserve more quality time for their families.  Now they’re encouraging people of any or no religion in the United States to go offline this September 18, which is of course Yom Kippur.  Can it happen here?  If you will it, it is no dream.

Bob Goldfarb, the president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity, also writes regularly for eJewishPhilanthropy.com.  His Twitter feed about Jews, the arts, and Jewish culture can be found at Twitter.com/bobgoldfarb.

August 12, 2010 | 8:40 am

Turkey, Then and Now

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

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.

 

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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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July 30, 2010 | 1:19 pm

Facts on the Ground

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

Symbols are not as important as the things they represent, but sometimes it’s easy to forget that.  Take the current disagreement over the proposal to construct a mosque at the World Trade Center site.  The Anti-Defamation League says it opposes the plan; JStreet favors it.  Of course the deeper issue is not Cordoba House or its planned programming about (among other things) Arab-Jewish relations.  The building is being debated because of what it stands for.

A guest column in todays’s Jerusalem Post takes the opposite approach.  Ari Hart, co-founder of the Orthodox social-justice organization Uri l’Tzedek,  writes about the planned encirclement of the Palestinian village of Walaja by an extension of the separation barrier.  For him it is not a metaphor for some abstract policy question.  It’s about the lives and livelihoods of 2000 human beings.  It’s well worth reading—both because of the issues it raises, and because it is a model of placing human concerns over rhetorical ones.

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July 29, 2010 | 8:58 am

A New Roadmap for the Middle East?

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

The idea of a “two-state solution” for Israel and Palestine has become almost sacrosanct, so much so that it is invoked with the regularity and solemnity of a ritual.  That makes it all the more surprising that a few Israeli politicians have come forward in support of the unthinkable: a single state for Jews and Palestinians.

The conventional wisdom in Israel sees a one-state solution as a demographic time-bomb, with Palestinians soon outnumbering the Jews and the state losing its Jewish character.  From the Palestinian side the one-state idea has sometimes been advanced with the proviso that the new state be avowedly secular, eliminating its Jewish identity by law rather than through population trends.

The new move for a bi-national state would change the rules of the game by excluding Gaza from the mix.  In one stroke 1,500,000 Gazans would be taken out of the demographic calculation, and Hamas would be removed from the bargaining process.  That makes it plausible for Israel to consider a power-sharing arrangement with Palestinians that extends some sort of citizenship to the residents of the West Bank while keeping the country Jewish.

This plan is supported, perhaps surprisingly, by the Speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likkud party.  “It’s preferable for the Palestinians to become citizens of the state than for us to divide the country,” he declared this spring.  Fellow Likkudnik Moshe Arens, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, asked last month in his column in Haaretz, “What would happen if Israeli sovereignty were to be applied to Judea and Samaria, the Palestinian population there being offered Israeli citizenship?”

A weekend article in Haaretz two weeks ago portrays this new idea as coming mostly from the far right wing, and quotes Uri Elitzur of Gush Emunim (the “Bloc of the Faithful”) at great length in favor of it.  But as the writer of the Haaretz article, Noam Sheizaf, observes, “there is another side, too: the impression that the Israeli center, in its addiction to the separation idea, has sloughed off the question of relations with the Arab population, on both sides of the Green Line.”  As an alternative to the increasing separation of Jews and Palestinians, a one-state solution would actively promote the integration of the two populations.

There are also strategic considerations.  Prof. Yehuda Shenhav, author of The Time of the Green Line, told Haaretz, “in their political diagnosis the settlers are right.  I wrote exactly what the right is saying today: the war in Gaza is the model that will be repeated in the future if there is separation.”  In other words, the status quo is untenable because separation will lead to great isolation and hostility on the West Bank.

Speaker Rivlin, in an interview with Haaretz, suggested “One could establish a system in one state in which Judea and Samaria are jointly held. The Jews would vote for a Jewish parliament and the Palestinians for an Arab parliament, and we would create a system in which life is shared. But these are things that will take time.”  Rivlin speaks with particular authority since his family has been in the Land since the early 19th century (a street in downtown Jerusalem is named for one of his forebears).

Whatever the enthusiasm for this notion among Israelis—and so far it seems very limited—there is the unavoidable fact that Palestinians are very unlikely to give up their deeply felt national aspirations any time soon.  Nor is it probable that world opinion will acquiesce to permanent Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.  So this proposal may be useful largely as a thought experiment.  Still, there is a lot to be said for shaking up the status quo with a new idea instead of repeating the old ones again and again.

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

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