September 3, 2008 | 7:29 pm

Rapture Ready—reviewing a book without a movie

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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I never would have guessed I would become a writer who obsessively ordered books on Amazon and actually enjoyed reading. In high school, I routinely chose books for English courses that had been made into film. “The Outsiders,” “All the President’s Men”—these were the books I “read” and opined on in film book reports.

So it is with a glimmer of honor and a dollop of redemption that I landed a short—200-word tiny—book review in the Dallas Morning News last month. It’s not entirely original; with permission I cribbed a chunk from this post in May about the wacky world of Christian pop culture. But, hey, it’s a start.

Here’s how I begin my review of Daniel Radosh’s “Rapture Ready!”:

Talk about being a stranger in a very strange land.

Mr. Radosh’s journey took him inside the International Christian Retail Show, the Holy Land Experience and the mind of born-again actor Stephen Baldwin; placed him uncomfortably in the mob calling for Christ’s crucifixion in Arkansas’ Great Passion Play; and enlightened him to the rising popularity of the Christian sex industry and righteous, drug-free raves that include “DJ-led worship.”

You can read the remaining 100-or-so words here.

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June 17, 2008 | 2:15 pm

Rick Warren, fascism and ‘The Family’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m currently reading “The Family,” Jeff Sharlet’s new book about the shadowy and incredibly influential organization behind the National Prayer Breakfast. Sharlet, who is Jewish, was, quite oddly, invited into The Family’s fundamentalist fold a few years back, from which he produced this Harper’s exposé. (The book is a scary read that expands heavily on that article, and which I’ll be reviewing for The Jewish Journal.)

Sharlet describes the organization’s theology as built upon Jesus the strongman and revolutionary, not the savior and street preacher. What seems to trouble him most is how this organization and its friends, which include many members of Congress and foreign leaders, often those with less than stellar human-rights records, combine religion with capitalism, fundamentalism with power. For example, this conversation between Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., and The Family’s longtime leader Doug Coe:

God’s law and our laws should be identical. “People separate it out,” he warned Tiahrt. “‘Oh, okay, I got religion, that’s private.’ As if Jesus doesn’t know anything about building highways or Social Security. We gotta take Jesus out of the religious wrapping.”

“All right, how do we do that?” Tiahrt asked.

“A covenant,” Doug Coe answered. The congressman half smiled as if caught between confessing ignorance and pretending he knew what Doug Coe was talking about. “Like the Mafia,” Coe clarified. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt’s face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. “See, for them it’s honor,” Coe said. “For us, it’s Jesus.”

Doug Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, bin Laden.” The Family possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.

“That’s what you get with a covenant,” said Doug Coe. “Jesus plus nothing.”

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May 26, 2008 | 10:05 am

Summer reading: ‘No god but God’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

At the used book store this weekend, I stumbled across Reza Aslan’s “No god but God,” a book I have wanted to read, and not simply because it sounds like the slogan I used to use for this blog (“There is no god blog but The God Blog”).

I neglected to buy it, settling only for a tattered $3 copy of Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle”—how blasphemous, I know—but when I got home, I decided to search Google for reviews of Aslan’s book. The first I came across was not, in fact, a review but a portion of the prologue at The Guardian’s site. I was instantly sucked in, particularly by what Aslan didn’t avoid saying:

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May 19, 2008 | 1:49 pm

U.S. prez says Islam ‘fanatic and fraudulent’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Not that president. But give me a second to mention this week’s paper first.

I like The Jewish Journal‘s cover for Israel@60 because it shows some of the diversity of Israeli society. Inside is the thickest issue we’ve published since at least High Holy Days, and quite a few notable bylines—Avraham Burg, Yossi Klein Halevi and, my favorite, Tom Tugend.

There also is an article titled, “Israeli Heart, Jewish Soul,” written by Michael Oren,, author of the bestseller “Six Days of War.” Oren’s most recent book is “Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to Present,” and I’ve been working through it for the past month and marked up countless pages to blog about. Here’s one nugget, surprising for what it reveals about Americans’ early view of Muslims, and for who’s saying it.

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May 14, 2008 | 9:05 am

Inside the wacky world of Christian pop culture

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

At my high school graduation party, a friend who was not a Christian walked up and commented on the music playing over the outdoor speakers at my parents’ house.

“Why is it,” he asked, “that Christian bands always have the best musicians?”

I was a bit perplexed: The tunes he was hearing belonged to Midtown, a pop-punk quartet whose members, as far as I knew, were not Christian.

I also disagreed with my friend’s assessment. I mean, I was a big fan of MxPx and Slick Shoes ... but the best musicians? Hardly. (For evidence, listen to”Rappin for Jesus” by Stephen Wiley.)

Until a few years ago, Christian bands occasionally would have a radio hit or two—dc Talk and Jars of Clay had their moment, as did Sixpence None the Richer—and then disappear back into oblivion.

Switchfoot, whose CD a friend of mine picked up in a South Dakota pawn shop during our 2001 road trip around the country (that’s a different, longer story), seems to have bucked that trend. Being heard on TV promos and Star 98.7, or whatever the pop rock station is in your town, for years to follow, Switchfoot has been one of the lucky few who have broken through without significantly changing their message, though I would argue they too have watered it down and published one really bad album.

This music is part of the bigger, “parallel universe of Christian pop culture,” as Daniel Radosh dubs the industry in his new book “Rapture Ready!” (Radosh’s list of the top 10 Christian songs begins with Larry Norman‘s “Why Don’t You Look Into Jesus?”)

“Rapture Ready!” details the exploits of a secular New York Jew on a quest to the center of evangelical culture. Radosh visits the International Christian Retail Show, the Holy Land Experience and Stephen Baldwin World; serves as part of the mob calling for Christ’s crucifixion in Arkansas’ Great Passion Play; and goes backstage with Bibleman, AKA “Batman for Jesus.” I’ll forgive Radosh for avoiding VeggieTales night at a minor league baseball stadium and the giants who break burning stacks of bricks in Jesus’ name.

Radosh intersperses Christian camp with more sober accounts of economics and theology. Chapter 4 focuses on the Bible-publishing business and originally appeared in The New Yorker, and Chapter 5, which, believe it or not, appeared in Playboy, is about pre-millenialism and the “Left Behind” phenomenon.

“In the end,” Brian McLaren, author of “A New Kind of Christian,” proclaims on the book jacket, “he offers evaluations and insights that might be considered downright prophetic, and compassionate too. No evangelical insider could have done as good a job as Daniel Radosh.”

He’s definitely more sensitive to things he finds strange than Matt Taibbi. The book has been well-reviewed by Relevant magazine and The Forward, among others. I read through a chunk of it last night and, for some reason, found the style quite similar to A.J. Jacobs’ in “The Year of Living Biblically.” (Jacobs, possibly not by coincidence, also wrote a review for the book jacket.)

In the intro, Radosh explains that Christian culture is no laughing matter, at least not from a business perspective: It is a $7 billion a year industry.

“At some point,” Hanna Rosin wrote for Slate.com, “Radosh asks the obvious question”:

Didn’t Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple? In other words, isn’t there something wrong with so thoroughly commercializing all aspects of faith? For this, the Christian pop-culture industry has a ready answer. Evangelizing and commercializing have much in common. In the “spiritual marketplace” (as it’s called), Christianity is a brand that seeks to dominate. Like Coke, it wants to hold onto its followers and also win over new converts. As with advertisers, the most important audience is young people and teenagers, who are generally brand loyalists. Hence, Bibleman and Christian rock are the spiritual equivalent of New Coke. Christian trinkets—a WWJD bracelet, a “God is my DJ” T-shirt—function more like Coca-Cola T-shirts or those cute stuffed polar bears. They telegraph to the community that the wearer is a proud Christian and that this is a cool thing to be—which should, in theory, invite eager curiosity.

This is significant because, according to research by The Barna Group, 61 percent of twentysomethings were “spiritually active” teens but have since lost their religion. Christians leaders see culture as the new channel through which to reach the lost and distracted. Radosh writes:

A less reliable statistic—but one that has galvanized pastors who believe it reflects what they see in the pews—is that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of today’s Christian teens will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults.

“Less reliable” is far too generous. That factoid is pure fiction. But, nonetheless, Christian culture can increase the fervency of the faithful, something I saw countless times as a teen at P.O.D. and Dogwood concerts (the latter for which I actually skipped my senior prom). They may not be the best musicians, but their message often carries more weight than typical Christian influencers.

As Radosh relays in the first few words of the book when describing a concert on a rural Kansas airfield:

A lanky teenager made his way out of the crow and ran to where his friends were waiting on the periphery, sweat smearing his thick black eyeliner. “Awesome performance.” He grinned broadly. “They prayed like three times in a twenty-minute set.”

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May 8, 2008 | 1:07 pm

Long Beach professor justifies anti-Semitism

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I do not think Jews are living in 1938 Germany. But it really has seemed lately liked I’ve transitioned to the anti-Semitism beat. Besides posting several items on the topic during the past few days, I spent last night at UC Irvine, listening to a speech from Norman Finkelstein, who has certainly been called an anti-Semite, and that followed two weeks of researching and writing a profile of Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach whose books have been compared to “Mein Kampf.”

In the above video, which is 41 minutes long, MacDonald appears on the TV program “Current Issues,” hosted by Palestinian American Hesham Tillawi. The focus of their conversation is the negative influence and clannish behavior of Jews. At the 17-minute mark, MacDonald describes his opinions, detailed in a three-volume series and subsequent essays that can be found at kevinmacdonald.net, as “rational” anti-Semitism.

MacDonald once served as an expert witness for Holocaust-denier David Irving, and many of his theories of Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” are controversial. The least palatable are that Judaism has a built in eugenics program—the study of Talmud, which, he claims, stemmed the reproduction of dumber members of the Tribe—and that anti-Semitism, even Nazism, were gentile responses to Jewish success.

He’s been on the faculty of Cal State Long Beach 23 years now, having achieved full tenure in 1994. But the university is under increasing pressure from some of MacDonald’s colleagues and outside organizations to denounce his writings, which, obviously, have very little to do with child psychology and, to his credit, have been kept out of the classroom.

Under the headline, “The Professor Anti-Semites Love,” MacDonald carries this week’s cover for The Jewish Journal. It’s a long profile—from his childhood in Oshkosh to the origins of his research to the contents of his books and the battle against him—so I’ll just mention now the biggest problem MacDonald has had: his anti-Semitic admirers.

As a warning, there will be some very vulgar language from someone who would like to see the fulfillment of the Final Solution:

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April 24, 2008 | 4:14 pm

Gonzo journalist goes on Christian retreat; says ‘Jesus made me puke’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Rolling Stone‘s gonzo political reporter, Matt Taibbi, who has been called a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson (over and over again), has a new book about his “tales from the evangelical front lines.” Taibbi is a great reporter and a fantastic writer, but he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would be inducted into GetReligion’s hall of fame. Not with writing like this.

“The Great Derangement,” his cynically named book, does, however, offer a number of interesting windows into life in the Rev. John Hagee’s “apocalyptic mega-ministry.” It is with Hagee’s Cornerstone Church that Taibbi attends a weekend retreat through which he tells his tale.

So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an “Encounter Weekend” — three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the “joy” of “knowing the truth” and “being set free.” That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television — great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don’t get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there’s a ready-for-prime-time stage act — toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won’t scare the advertisers — and then there’s the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the Caligula director’s cut and too drunk late at night to chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom. Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn’t know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.

Taibbi, of course, fails to remain inconspicuous. How could he after fabricating his “wound”—a concept, which Taibbi calls “schlock biblical Freudianism,” from John Eldredge’s “Wild at Heart”—as being the abused son of an alcoholic circus clown?

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April 11, 2008 | 1:01 pm

Jews, power and the Palestinian refugee crisis

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

At the Hillel Summit in Washington last month, I listened to Ruth R. Wisse, a Harvard professor of Yiddish and author of “Jews and Power,” deliver a passionate 40-minute lecture on why American Jews should stand up for that imperiled sliver of Mediterranean coast we have been fortunate enough, for almost 60 years now, to call Israel.

You can listen to the lecture here.

Wisse’s talk was moving, and I had wanted to read her book, so I picked a copy up on the way out and worked through it on my flight back. (It’s 184 pages and a very quick read.) In “Jews and Power,” Wisse makes a point that she repeated during her speech—that Arab countries, not Israel, are responsible for the Palestinian refugee crisis. From pages 140-141:

Palestinian Arabs are to be pitied with the tens of millions of refugees of the twentieth century. But Palestinians are doubly unfortunate because theirs is the only such displacement that is prolonged for political advantage. Originally, the Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1948 were a relatively small and easily assimilable group, moving often no more than several miles among people who spoke their language and shared their religion and culture. Leaving aside the refugees of the two world wars, as well as Jews driven from Arab lands in numbers equal to the Arabs who fled from Israel, the two massive conflicts that framed Israel’s War of Independence—India’s war over the creation of Pakistan in 1947 and the Korean War of 1950-53—produced more than 20 million refugees between them, yet most of those refugees were reabsorbed within a generation. Only in the Arab case did a coalition of rulers, with millions of square miles and great wealth at their disposal, foster and cultivate the state of emergency as a means of sustaining a casus belli.

Look no further for an example of such politicking than the life and times of Yasser Arafat, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and common crook. The consequences, of course, have been significant and seemingly incessant.

Less than a week after I returned, I came across this article, and this image, in the New York Times:

GAZA — In the Katib Wilayat mosque one recent Friday, the imam was discussing the wiliness of the Jew.

“Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.”

At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.

Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.

Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.

Hardly an eye-opener—in fact, a bit surprising in its gee-whiz tone—this article reiterated what we already know. But it made me think of Ruth Wisse, whose latest book, without question controversial with the Jewish left, begins its final chapter (page 173) by discussing the contradictions of Jewish power:

Just as no Jewish initiative could have solved the German problem that culminated in Nazism, no Israeli initiative could correct “what went wrong” in Arab societies. Jews could only hope to enhance their own security through the avoidance of fatal mistakes and nudge the Arab world to greater maturity by making it clear that Israel was in the region to stay.

The second—internal—problem that could not be alleviated by the creation of Israel alone was the relation of Jews to political power. Zionist thinkers had expected sovereignty to result in political normalization without being able to anticipate the role that a tiny Jewish state might play in the international struggle for power. In trying to withstand the Arab assualt, Israelis, Jews, and concerned third parties tripped again and again over the same issue of power that had impeded the development of Jewish political history to begin with. If historians once mistook the absence of sovereignty to mean that Jews stood outside politics, modern students of the problem too often assumed that the resumption of sovereignty guaranteed political parity between Israel and the nations. Jews were said to have reversed their political fortunes once they began governing themselves and an Arab minority in a country of their own. Equating “statehood” with “power,” the new experts confused Zionism’s potential with its achievement, as if the acquired option of Jewish self-defense had erased Arab advantages in numbers, resources, and land.

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April 7, 2008 | 12:17 pm

Lessons from ‘Gentlemen of the Road’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The working title for Michael Chabon‘s latest novel, “Gentlemen of the Road,” was “Jews With Swords.” It is a hilarious saga of two Jews who couldn’t look less alike—a willowy Frank and a giant African—as they fight and out-think their way through the Khazar Empire, a land ruled by Jews after a mass conversion.

I finished this book while sitting in an airport, having just returned from Las Vegas. And though I thoroughly enjoyed the 196-page story, I found the afterword, in which Chabon discusses the oddity of a former literary snob writing about Jews with swords, even better.

This incongruity of writer and work suggests, of course, that classic variant of the adventure story (found in works as diverse as Don Quixote and Romancing the Stone) in which a devoted reader or author of the stuff is granted the opportunity (or obliged) to live out an adventure “in real life.” And it is seen in this light that the association of Jews with swords, of Jews with adventure, may seem paradoxically less incongruous. In relation of the Jews to the land of their origin, in the ever-extending, ever-thinning cord, braided from the freedom of the wanderer and the bondage of exile, that binds a Jew to his Home, we can make out the unmistakable signature of adventure. The story of Jews centers around—one might almost say stars—the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and back again. For better and worse it has been one long adventure—a five-thousand-year Odyssey—from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure. This long, long tradition of Jewish adventure may look a bit light on the Conans or D’Artagnans; our greatest heroes less obviously suited to exploits of derring-do and arms. But maybe that ill-suitedness only makes Jews all the more ripe to feature in (or to write) this kind of tale. Or maybe it is time to take a look backward at that tradition, as I have attempted to do here, and find some shadowy kingdom where a self-respecting Jewish adventurer would not be caught dead without his sword or his battle-ax.

And if you still think there’s something funny in the idea of Jews with swords, look at yourself, right now: sitting in your seat on a jet airplane, let’s say, in your unearthly orange polyester and neoprene shoes, listening to digital music, crawling across the sky from Charlotte to Las Vegas, and hoping to lose yourself—your home, your certainties, the borders and barriers of your life—by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin. People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh.

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February 13, 2008 | 8:32 am

A godly athlete on sharing his faith

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Religion, he feels, is the main source of his strength, and because he realizes not everybody shares that feeling today, he sometimes refers to “the challenge of being in the minority in the world.” ... “I don’t try to be overbearing in what I believe, but, given a chance, I will express my beliefs.”

If I told you that line was in reference to a star athlete, I wouldn’t imagine you could guess whom. A number of sports stars, and journeymen, come to mind when I think of faith and basketball or baseball or football. And afflicted-minority syndrome is increasingly popular with my fellow American Christians today.

But, surprisingly, I came across those lines last night in John McPhee’s “A Sense of Where You Are,” the profile he wrote more than 40 years ago of basketball great Bill Bradley, a white man of not-so-humble means who was educated at Princeton, the citadel of the American Presbytery. Hardly a typical minority.

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December 14, 2007 | 3:16 pm

My interview with author Michael Chabon

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This was cool. God Blog readers know I enjoy the writings of Michael Chabon, and last month I got to interview him after the Celebration of Jewish Books at the American Jewish University. JTN put it on their Web site a few weeks ago, but we just got it up on YouTube for your embedded enjoyment.

I asked Chabon about his “frozen chosen” hit “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” about being called an anti-Semite and about being comfortable as a geek.

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December 13, 2007 | 4:26 pm

The art of intuition

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last month, I sat down for a Q&A with Jonah Lehrer, who’s made quite a splash—if an expert on the intersection of art and neuroscience can do so—with his first book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist.” The book was well-reviewed, and the LA Times just listed it one of the 25 best non-fiction books of the year. Here’s the first chapter.

To me, what makes Lehrer’s thesis so profound is it’s simplicity: We expect artists to explain in words and pictures human experiences long before science has caught up. But his understanding of the two, and his ability to weave them together, makes for a good read, even if a review in The Jewish Journal thought it was boringly obvious.

Here’s the beginning of my interview:

Jewish Journal: In your book, you are particular to refer to these works of art as intuitions, not predictions. Why?

Jonah Lehrer: [Art] is very different from science, which does try to predict the results of experiments—you generate hypotheses, you have control variables. These artists were very rigorous in their own sense. They were very sensitive observers of experience, but they weren’t trying to predict. They were trying to look at their experience, and introspect on it, and intuit on that. We tend to disregard experience and say, “Oh, that is just wishy-washy stuff.” These artists demonstrate that you can learn important things just by paying attention.

JJ: Toward the end of the book, you write, ‘You don’t even exist.’

JL: That is one of these surreal ideas of neuroscience, which is that there is no cell that represents you, there is no discreet circuit from which you emerge. You are just a distributed parallel processor. You’ve got all these neurons doing their thing and you emerge somehow simultaneously from this helter-skelter of activity.

At the same time, it’s not very meaningful to say that is all we are. Clearly we are self-conscious creatures. We feel like so much more, and there is a mystery there which science won’t be able to solve: How the water of the brain becomes the wine of the mind…. That is the question that art is uniquely able to interrogate and try to solve.

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