December 7, 2007 | 3:51 am

Don’t step on Jelvis’ ‘Blue Suede Yarmulke’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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The Forward Q&A returned this week with an interview with “Jelvis,” or at least one of the many Jewish Elvis impersonators. (Seriously?)

Given what we now know about Elvis’s ancestry — with his matrilineal great-great-grandmother having been Jewish — isn’t it a bit redundant to say you’re the Jewish Elvis?

I think redundancy is good in rock ’n’ roll and in the arts. If you find something that works, you just beat it to death. And in this case it’s already dead.

            So you think he’s dead?

Well, he’s like Jesus. He keeps coming back for more. Jelvis certainly isn’t dead. He carries on the gospel.

 

Yes, being Jelvis is one of comedian Willard Morgan shticks. The Jewish Journal this week also has a short piece on the same Jelvis.

Jews impersonating Elvis is nothing new. Andy Kaufman was one of the first to gain national exposure for his Elvis act while “The King” was still alive. It’s said Kaufman’s act was Elvis’ favorite. We also have Shmelvis, Elvis Smelvis and Neil Diamond.

So do we really need a Jelvis?

Morgan seems to think so.

“It’s just part of my crusade, finding that when I put on the suit with the Jewish star ... people love the iconic image of Elvis ... and that when I see a Japanese Elvis or a Mexican Elvis, I can see that the spirit of the man crossed racial and religious barriers,” Morgan said.

Bridging the gap between rhythm and Jews, Jelvis’ songs include “Don’t Step on My Blue Suede Yarmulke,” “Little Schicksa’s” and “Heartburn Hotel.” And because his work lies more in Jewish interpretation than impersonation, Morgan explains that he is more of an Elvis interpreter than an Elvis impersonator.

Morgan said that when you assume the character of Elvis, you are totally put at ease due to The King’s charismatic and nonchalant nature. Perhaps a white, sequined jumpsuit might be the perfect treatment to combat Jewish neuroses.

December 6, 2007 | 2:54 pm

Holy adult circumcision, Abraham!

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

At your typical bris, the guest of honor arrives on a white pillow. He’s not exactly in fighting condition: 8 days old, spreadeagled, diaperless, still adjusting to non-liquid environments.

He cries throughout the procedure—cries as he’s prayed over, cries as he’s spritzed by the disinfectant, keeps crying as he’s cut by the mohel—and then, bandaged, balmed and resting on his stomach, he suddenly stops crying and goes to sleep.

Dmitry’s is not your typical bris. First off, no tears. Also, no relatives, no diaper, no white pillow. His parents don’t even know he’s here. Dmitry is laid out on a table, hands resting behind his head, shorts at his ankles, talking about life in Soviet Ukraine while Rabbi A. Romi Cohn prepares to slice away his foreskin. With a 1.5-inch needle pricking the base of his penis and a shot of lidocaine diffusing into the vicinity of his dorsal penile nerve, Dmitri, 33, stares up at the ceiling and says to no one in particular, “I’ve wanted to do this for the longest time. To be a Jew, you know, you have to go through with it.”

This snippet is from Heeb. Read on to learn about the anti-circumcision movement in Judaism, and to see what would provoke a grown men to go under the knife. (In Dmitry’s case, it’s a firm belief in Torah and a childhood in the Soviet Union.)

Under Stalin, parents could be arrested, their children placed in foster homes and mohels sentenced to labor camps for trying to arrange one in secret—and to this day most Jewish men born into the former U.S.S.R. don’t get cut. According to Biblical law, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew, but an uncircumcised male stands outside the Hebrew nation’s covenant with God—a covenant sealed when Abraham, at the age of 99, cut off his own foreskin and that of every male member of his household.

“There is no greater commandment in Torah,” says Rabbi A. Romi Cohn, chief mohel for the Jewish outreach program Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe (F.R.E.E.). “Six hundred and thirteen commandments and that is the most important one.”

Joshua also was obedient in this way, making a flint knife and re-circumcising the Israelites before they entered Caanan. In the United States, circumcision was once almost a given for centuries. But in 2004, not even 60 percent of American baby boys went sans foreskin. There have been all kinds of conflicting reports about circumcision’s health value or lack there of.

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December 6, 2007 | 12:14 pm

Raising your dog Jewish

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Two years ago, both my late childhood dogs died. It was a sad month for my family. Those dogs were members of the Greenberg tribe, and we knew they were gone for good.

The grief we experienced at the loss of such little loved ones made it all the more interesting to learn about the unenviable place dogs traditionally held in Jewish culture.

An elderly friend who likes to pretend he comes from the old country but in fact comes from Detroit tells me that my two dogs make me look, well, goyish. He’s got 3,000 years of Jewish opinion to back him up. Dogs don’t do so well in the Tanakh or in the Talmud. To maintain, as Ecclesiastes does, that a live dog is better than a dead lion doesn’t say much for the dog. To argue, as the rabbis do, that breeding dogs is like breeding swine doesn’t say much for the breeder. It seems that dogs can’t get a break. They are either savage or wild. They drive away the Shekhina; they scare away the needy; they bring blood upon a house. For the tradition, it all comes down to the bark and the bite.

            But the tradition doesn’t know about the modern Jewish dog.

In the rest of this short piece from The Forward, David Kaufman argues that his dogs are in fact Jewish. To start, they are so racked by guilt that they can’t bark or bite.

They are relatively obedient and remarkably stubborn. They show an annoying curiosity, and their skepticism is tempered by an overbearing, even pushy, eagerness. Most important, though, they will wait. My dogs, bless them, are capable of an astonishing patience where it counts. And in this way, they really seem like Jews: They can sustain whole eternities of impossible hope.

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December 6, 2007 | 8:53 am

Mitt Romney’s unremarkable JFK moment *

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Today was the much anticipated day when former Massachussets Gov. Mitt Romney would explain the role of religion in public life and work to diffuse voter apprehension to his Mormon faith.
Here’s video of the speech and some excerpts, which left me fully underwhelmed.

“There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church’s distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.”

Yeah, it’s sort of his JFK moment, and I agree with what he is saying. But when you get down to the substance, it’s just political rhetoric and vagaries.

* Updated: Jeffrey Weiss at the DMN religion blog says Romney is trying to have it both ways by saying he will be true to his Mormon faith and that as long as he serves all Americans, the specific of his religious beliefs are nobody else’s business.

But as I wrote in January, there are distinctives of Mormon doctrine that could have public policy implications. If he chooses to follow them, it won’t be necessary to have a church authority tell him what to do. And if he doesn’t tell us which of those distinctives he considers essential to his faith, how will we know?

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December 6, 2007 | 7:23 am

The massive menorah and the ‘Charlie Brown Christmas tree’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I hate rivaling holiday stories. They are about as cliché as religion reporting gets (Don’t get me started on Chrismukkah.) But at least this one from Long Island has references to both “Peanuts” and “Scrooge,” holiday clichés I’m a bit more fond of.

Residents don’t want to have themselves a merry little Christmas tree. They want a big one. When city officials planted a 7-foot-tall Christmas tree next to a 20-foot-tall menorah in the plaza in front of City Hall, some residents barked. They telephoned City Hall, wrote letters and testified at a public hearing that the tiny tree in the shadow of the huge Hanukkah symbol was an insult to the Christian community.

“What’s up with the giant menorah and the Charlie Brown Christmas tree?” resident Rick Hoffman asked.

City Manager Edwin Eaton said he had looked far and wide — all the way to Canada — for a bigger tree but couldn’t find one.

“This year is going to be kind of a ‘bah, humbug,’ Christmas,” Eaton had said.

Not to worry. There was a Christmas miracle, and the town found a 20-foot blue spruce.

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December 5, 2007 | 4:47 pm

‘Chanukah is not a celebration of multiculturalism or tolerance’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

An Orthodox Jew and “fierce conservative Republican,” screenwriter Robert J. Avrech has never been afraid to bristle the feathers of his liberal Hollywood co-religionists. I don’t always agree with his opinions, but he writes passionately and, here, he’s a bit more romantic about the story of Chanukah than some.

It’s important to recognize that Chanukah is not a celebration of multiculturalism or tolerance. I know that some members of the more liberal branches of Judaism are trying to push the notion of the Maccabees as a bunch of global warming greenies.

This is discourse that is self-parody and certainly has nothing to do with Torah Judaism. It’s fashion run amok, dopey, disposable junk-ideas; here today, gone tomorrow.

The Maccabees were intolerant of the Syrian-Greek society. They despised the cruelty, oppression and Jew-hatred that characterized Greek culture.

The Maccabees raised the banner of revolution for religious freedom, for the primacy of the Torah.

They also went to war against apostate Jews, traitors to G-d and to Judaism. Jews who endured painful surgeries in order to reverse their circumcisions in order to compete naked in the public sports gymnasiums that were celebrated in liberal Greek society.

The Maccabees were zealots who declared total war against assimilationist Jews. Jews who sought to overthrow the authority of the Torah and replace that authority with modern, secular values.

Abhorring the idol worship of Greek culture, the deeply observant and conservative Maccabees despised the elite, “highly educated” secular Jews who collaborated with the ruling Syrian Greeks and who agreed to bow down to idols and indulged in hedonistic public sexual activities.

The Hasmoneans batttled to win the independence of the state of Israel from foreign oppression. They yearned to purify the holy Jewish Temple from foreign worship, and they fought savage wars to unite Jerusalem.

Sound familiar?

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December 5, 2007 | 12:12 pm

Christians approaching zero in PA-run parts of Holy Land

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The ever-dwindling Christian communities living in Palestinian-run territories in the West Bank and Gaza are likely to dissipate completely within the next 15 years as a result of increasing Muslim persecution and maltreatment, an Israeli scholar said Monday.

“The systematic persecution of Christian Arabs living in Palestinian areas is being met with nearly total silence by the international community, human rights activists, the media and NGOs,” said Justus Reid Weiner, an international human rights lawyer in an address at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, where he serves as a scholar in residence.

He cited Muslim harassment and persecution as the main cause of the “acute human rights crisis” facing Christian Arabs, and predicted that unless governments or institutions step in to remedy the situation - such as with job opportunities - there will be no more Christian communities living in the Palestinians territories within 15 years, with only a few Western Christians and top clergymen left in the area.

“Christian leaders are being forced to abandon their followers to the forces of radical Islam,” Weiner said.

The rest of the article from the Jerusalem Post is here. A Christian exodus has been a constant fear in not just Gaza and the West Bank but also Lebanon. (This to go with the fact that the Jordan River has become too toxic for baptisms.) Two years ago, the LA Times reported that Christians were becoming a scarce site in of Bethlehem, the West Bank town with a special meaning to Christians this Advent.

(Mayor Hanna) Nasser, 68, who is Catholic and displays a photograph of himself shaking hands with Pope John Paul II, gestured toward the church and considered a gloomy future for Palestinian Christians, most of whom are Greek Orthodox. “I’m afraid we’ll come and see nothing but stones here—the stones of the churches, but no people,” he said.

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December 5, 2007 | 11:06 am

World Series of Dreidel spin-off

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Chanukah started last night. But a Sacramento synagogue got the party started early with the inaugural World Series of Dreidel (a “chai stakes dreidel tournament”) last weekend. Hear about it at NPR.org. Here’s what the creator of the event had to say:

A lot of synagogues have poker tournaments and bingo nights, and we’ve had our own gambling game for 1,000 years. Why not use that?

The name of the tournament seems a bit superfluous. Unlike the World Series of Poker or even the American-dubbed baseball World Series, the dreidel spin-off had a sparse attendance and only lasted a few hours. (I have a hard time believing it drew anyone from outside the Delta.)

Anyway, the segment ends with competitors singing the dreidel song. If you know it, sing along.

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December 5, 2007 | 8:23 am

Why do people go to church?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In an unusually themed post for his science blog, Jonah Lehrer says it is because people want to be part of a larger community, to have a social network and feel like they are in life together. Is he right? How significant a role does social cohesion play in where we choose to worship?

From the Frontal Lobe:

PZ attacks religious beliefs with his usual angry panache:

Religion is a bad thing. It encourages people to believe in things that are not true. It really is as simple as that; we’d be better off if people valued truth over comfortable delusions.

  Unlike most Americans, I don’t believe in angels, the devil or the possibility of eternal salvation. I think Armageddon has more to do with nuclear proliferation than the Book of Revelations. But attacking the ideas of religion fails to address the real value of religion. People don’t go to church because they want to read the same old fantastical stories again and again. Even the Sermon on the Mount gets old after a few recitations. They go to church (or temple or the mosque or whatever) because they want to be part of a community.

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December 4, 2007 | 6:12 pm

Hitchens: ‘To Hell with Hanukkah’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Atheist Christopher Hitchens is again railing against Hanukkah:

But at this time of year, any holy foolishness is permitted. And so we have a semiofficial celebration of Hanukkah, complete with menorah, to celebrate not the ignition of a light but the imposition of theocratic darkness.

Jewish orthodoxy possesses the interesting feature of naming and combating the idea of the apikoros or “Epicurean”—the intellectual renegade who prefers Athens to Jerusalem and the schools of philosophy to the grim old routines of the Torah. About a century and a half before the alleged birth of the supposed Jesus of Nazareth (another event that receives semiofficial recognition at this time of the year), the Greek or Epicurean style had begun to gain immense ground among the Jews of Syria and Palestine. The Seleucid Empire, an inheritance of Alexander the Great—Alexander still being a popular name among Jews—had weaned many people away from the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the belief in a special relationship with God, and the other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith. I quote Rabbi Michael Lerner, an allegedly liberal spokesman for Judaism who nonetheless knows what he hates:

Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes.

 

But away with all that, says Lerner. Let us instead celebrate the Maccabean peasants who wanted to destroy Hellenism and restore what he actually calls “oldtime religion.” His excuse for preferring fundamentalist thuggery to secularism and philosophy is that Hellenism was “imperialistic,” but the Hasmonean regime that resulted from the Maccabean revolt soon became exorbitantly corrupt, vicious, and divided, and encouraged the Roman annexation of Judea. Had it not been for this no-less imperial event, we would never have had to hear of Jesus of Nazareth or his sect—which was a plagiarism from fundamentalist Judaism—and the Jewish people would never have been accused of being deicidal “Christ killers.” Thus, to celebrate Hanukkah is to celebrate not just the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness but also the accidental birth of Judaism’s bastard child in the shape of Christianity.

The amazing thing about Hitchens is how subtle and diplomatic he is in convincing you that “religion poisons everything.”

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December 4, 2007 | 3:57 pm

‘Merry Christmas’ runs contrary to Chanukah

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

No duh, right? Maybe not.

At the grocery store last year, I was surprised by the indignation of a fellow shopper when the clerk wished her “Happy Holidays.” The woman glowered for a moment, then responded, without a hint of merriment, “Merry Christmas.”

Apparently she wasn’t alone. One organization is selling bumper stickers that read, “This is America! And I’m going to say it: Merry Christmas!” and “Merry Christmas! An American Tradition.” (I don’t remember the American part of the Christmas story, but I haven’t re-read Luke 2 yet this year.) Also for sale: “Just Say Merry Christmas” bracelets. (“They’re guaranteed to ward off the evil spirits of the ACLU grinches,” says the ad.)

Ted Olsen writes that there is also a Christian Chanukah story in the 10th chapter of the Gospel of John:

There’s no menorah recorded here, nor a manger. Instead, there is a revolutionary in the temple that Judas Maccabeus had reconsecrated after defeating a massive imperial army, on the day that his victory was remembered. It was a provocative act, and John reports that Jesus’ fellow Jews were provoked. “How long will you keep us in suspense?” they asked. “If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”

Jesus did answer plainly, but he didn’t talk about Judas Maccabeus, Antiochus, Caesar, or Rome. “I did tell you, but you do not believe,” he said. “You do not believe because you are not part of my flock.” After another exchange, Jesus departed “across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing in the early days. Here he stayed.” Where Judas Maccabeus had fought his opponents, Jesus escaped.

The Jewish Hanukkah story is one of triumph over a culture that wanted to force the Jews to assimilate against their will. The Christian Hanukkah story is one that starts with Jesus asking provocative questions, but retreating rather than forcing the issue.

To insist that non-Christians say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” runs against the lessons of both Hanukkah stories.

Who knew? And Happy Holidays. Chanukah begins at sundown.

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December 4, 2007 | 3:37 pm

Chanukah: The Not Christmas

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

When I was growing up, December was for Chanukah. No one I knew celebrated Christmas. And I mean no one.

Obviously, those words are not mine. They belong to my colleague Amy Klein, who was a commentator on NPR this morning. Here’s what she had to say in an essay excerpted from “How to Spell Chanukah and Other Holiday Dilemmas”:

I grew up in Brooklyn, and almost all my relatives, friends, teachers, and even acquaintances were Orthodox Jews.               

Like most families on the block, we placed our menorahs in the front window. We said the blessings, sang Hebrew songs, and played dreidl. We got Chanukah gelt – money, not presents like other kids in my class.

“Presents are for Christmas, not Chanukah,” my father insisted.

That’s how Chanukah was in America, even in the recesses of religious Brooklyn; still defined by what it was not: not Christmas.

And that’s why my move to Israel was so refreshing. In Israel, Rosh Hashanah, Succot, Passover and Chanukah are national holidays. Schools are closed, and often businesses, too.

By early December every kiosk and supermarket presented cardboard boxes of fresh, sumptuous donuts for Chanukah. Sufganiyot, with jelly or crème or caramel or chocolate gushing out like a geyser. Fried, like potato latkes, to celebrate the miracle of the oil that lasted for eight days.

In the center of town a giant electric menorah was lit every night. Throngs of teenagers wandered through the midrachov — the pedestrian cobblestone square — until way past their bedtime. But there was no bedtime because it was Chanukah vacation.

It was so different from America, where, despite all the politically correct inclusiveness, the bland “Seasons Greetings” messages on TV, “holiday” means “Christmas,” and Chanukah is relegated to being Not That Holiday.

Then I moved back to the U.S.

Amy keeps it real, though, with an annual Chanukah party. This year she cautioned that she was downsizing—only 100 invitees. I’ll be there Thursday night, bringing a present and scarfing latkes.

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