July 27, 2011 | 6:38 pm

A Make-Over for the Mad Monk

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Grigory Rasputin: Mad Monk or Friend of the Jews?

Almost every day, I am privileged to hear from authors who call my attention to their newly-published books.  But none of them claimed my attention quite as forcefully as Delin Colón, author of “Rasputin and the Jews: A Reversal of History.”

First, she is the great-great-grandniece of Aron Simanovitch, a Jewish man who served as the secretary to Grigory Rasputin himself. Second, she makes the audacious argument that the so-called “Mad Monk” was, in fact, “a healer, humanitarian, equal rights activist and man of God” as well as a benefactor of the Jewish people and a champion of oppressed women.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Rasputin, the priest who was spiritual advisor to the last tsar and tsarina of Russia, was a charismatic seducer who exercised an uncanny and unwholesome influence on the monarchs.  He is commonly depicted as an illiterate who loved to imbibe and refused to bathe, a compulsive ruiner of virgins who used his hypnotic powers and the privileges of the priesthood to carry out his seductions.

His moral crimes aside, however, it was his reputed interference in matters of state that prompted a gang of Russian aristocrats to murder him.  Rasputin was famously hard to kill — he survived a massive dose of poison, several gunshots, and a brutal beating before finally drowning when his battered body was sunk in the Neva, or so goes the stories that have long been told about him.

Colón rejects “the outrageous rumors perpetrated by a bigoted, small-minded, self-absorbed society,” including the “debauchery, sins, or crimes” that were commonly charged against him.  She is wholly uninterested in the Grand Guignol that accompanied his murder. She is more interested in what Rasputin did in life.

“The people Rasputin helped – the underdogs of society, the Jews, peasants, and poverty-stricken were not in a position to speak up or even to be believed,” she insists. “The long perpetuated image of Rasputin is of a man who committed evil for the sake of evil alone.  Naturally, the largely anti-Semitic aristocracy would think it evil to champion the cause of the oppressed Russian peasants and especially the Jews.”

Among her sources is the memoir of her own distant relative, Rasputin’s personal secretary, and she concedes that his account has been impugned by historians “due to the inclusion in his memoirs of bizarre court gossip and exaggeration of his own importance in the court.”  But she insists that his regard for Rasputin is supported by the historical record, and she makes an earnest and plausible case in the pages of her book that he was not the monster that his enemies made him out to be.

Russian history provides us with enough real monsters to make even the storybook version of Rasputin seem like nothing more than a villain out of melodrama. According to Colón, however, he was not even that.

Copies of “Rasputin and the Jews” are available for purchase at Amazon.com

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve.

July 21, 2011 | 6:14 pm

From Pike to Greenberg to Koufax - Great Jewish Sports Heroes

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Jews and Baseball: Sandy Koufax on the mound.

One of my fondest childhood memories are the baseball games that my grandfather and I watched on the public diamond in La Cienega Park. The players were Jews, and so were the fans.  Perhaps that’s why I still think of baseball as a sport with a special resonance for Jews. After all, even if we don’t remember the first Jewish professional ballplayer — his name was Lipman Pike — who in the NBA or the NFL can stir the Jewish soul like Hank Greenberg or Sandy Koufax?

Something of the same point is made in “Jews and Baseball” by Burton A. Boxerman and Benita W. Boxerman (McFarland, $45.00 per volume) (www.mcfarlandpub.com, 800-253-2187), a handsome hardcover series in two volumes, both of which are full of history and memory, and both of which are richly and appropriately ornamented with stats, color commentary, and lots of evocative photographs.  Volume 1 is subtitled “Entering the American Mainstream, 1871-1948” and, as if to emphasize the pivotal role that Greenberg played in the national sport, Volume 2 is subtitled “The Post-Greenberg Years, 1949-2008.”

Martin Abramowitz, who contributes a foreword to Volume 1, argues that baseball was nothing less than a machine for turning greenhorns into Americans, and my own grandfather – who arrived in Brooklyn from Bobruisk via Palestine, Cairo and Gallipoli — was an example of precisely that phenomenon.

“The Jews who paid to watch, or who hovered around radios, bars, and sports pages as fans of the game, were absorbing America, being absorbed by America, and contributing to America,” writes Abramowitz. “It’s no surprise that Solomon Schechter, the long-time chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the leader of Conservative Judaism, told his students that if they wanted to be successful as rabbis, they needed to understand baseball!”

The Boxermans remind us that the total number of Jewish major leaguers has been no more than roughly 160, and they represent less than one percent of all major league players since 1871.  By contrast, the Jewish community has represented between two and three percent of the American population. But these athletes — and the far more numerous Jewish owners, managers, coaches, executives, union leaders, sportswriters, broadcasters, statisticians,  and umpires — represent something unique and important about the Jewish experience in America.

“Jews gave to baseball not only the great love for the game,” they conclude, “but also a number of good and a few great players, the World Series, innovative statistics, equal rights for players, and even the music for baseball’s national anthem.”

Koufax and Greenberg are only two of the many of the Jewish players who are featured in these books, but they are deservedly singled out as superstars.  Greenberg, the authors insist, “was, without a doubt, the greatest Jewish baseball player during the first century of baseball,” and they quote Alan Dershowitz for the proposition that he was “the most important American Jew of the 1930s.” While both Greenberg and Koufax famously refused to play ball on Yom Kippur, but the authors insist that Greenberg took the greater risk when he did so back in the 30s, which is exactly what Dershowitz is referring to.

The Boxermans have achieved something especially noteworthy with “Jews and Baseball.” We’ve all heard the joke about the shortest book in the world — “Great Jewish Sports Heroes.”  Now we know that there’s enough to say about Jews in the great American game to take up two books!

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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July 18, 2011 | 5:46 pm

So Passes the Glory of the World

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Long ago, one of the charms of State Street in Santa Barbara was Earthling Books, one of those warm and welcoming bookstores that were the glory of bookselling not so long ago.  But Earthling was choked out of existence when Borders moved into a former bank building not far away, and the same thing happened to Sisterhood Bookstore on Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles when a Borders store opened directly across the street.

Conspiracy theorists held that Borders searched out neighborhoods where vigorous independents were doing business and sited their new stores with the intent to drawing away their customers and thereby doing away with them.  Patrons of the Earthling and Sisterhood could certainly have been forgiven for suspecting such predatory practices.

Now, however, Borders is the prey and not the predator.  After struggling to save what they could in bankruptcy, the company has given up the fight and announced its plans to close the remaining 399 stores across the country.

No single villain can be singled out for the failure of what was once a leading national bookstore chain.  In a sense, what killed Earthling and Sisterhood also killed Borders — the decline of bricks-and-mortar retailing in general and the collapse of retail outlets for media products in particular.  Just as the record store is now obsolete because it’s easier to buy digital music online, the bookstore is endangered by both the e-book and the online book retailers who sell print, audio and electronic books.

Those of us who still love bookstores are not wholly without places to go, but it is certainly getting harder and harder to find them. For us, no e-book will ever replace the tactile pleasure of a printed book, and no amount of browsing at Amazon.com will ever provide the sense of place and the social connectedness that the Earthling (and Borders, too) offered us. Nor will these pleasures ever come back to us in quite the same way. Indeed, the final agony of Borders seems to prove that we are past the tipping point. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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