February 23, 2012 | 2:02 pm

Denial Ain’t Just a River in Egypt

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Dr. Kirsten Grimstad

Today I read that the Chinese city of Nanjing — better known in America as Nanking — severed its sister-city relationship with Nagoya, Japan, because the mayor of Nagoya expressed doubts that the atrocities known as the Rape of Nanking actually happened.

A few days ago, the French Senate passed a law to criminalize the denial of “officially recognized genocides,” including the mass murder of Armenians during World War I, which prompted outrage in Turkey, where the Armenian genocide is officially denied.

And I recently discovered that my review of Peter Longerich’s important new biography of Heinrich Himmler has been denounced by a revisionist website whose sympathies lay wholly with Nazi Germany.

All of these unsettling examples of historical denial were on my mind when my friend and colleague, poet and book publicist extraordinaire Kim Dower, called my attention to an upcoming event featuring Dr. Kirsten Grimstad.

Grimstad will present a multi-media lecture titled “Mourning and Memory-Work in Berlin Today” at Beth Chayim Chadashim on March 13. It’s an opportunity to hear a first-hand report on the struggle of contemporary Germans to make sense of the Holocaust, which remains the prime example of historical amnesia even if it is hardly the only one.

Grimstad is Professor and Co-Chair of the B.A. in Liberal Studies Program at Antioch University, but she is perhaps best known as a founding editor of Chrysallis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture, a ground-breaking journal that was published out of the late and lamented Los Angeles Women’s Building.

Her talk at Beth Chayim Chadashim is rooted in the six-month sabbatical that she spent in Berlin, where she studied the efforts of contemporary Germans “to accept social responsibility for the crimes of their ancestors.”  She draws a direct linkage between the Holocaust and other genocides that have been minimized or denied by revisionists around the world.

“Germany’s long-overdue efforts to establish historical accountability and to reconcile the past by working through its traumatic history,” she explains, “have widespread ramifications in our world today as societies face their own legacies of atrocity and genocide — Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, among others.”

It’s significant that Grimstad wants to draw attention to some of the less remembered victims of Nazi terror, including gays and lesbians who were “not acknowledge as a victim group for many years and were not eligible for restitution offered to other victim groups.”

Tragically, we are still obliged to keep the memory of genocide alive — not only the Holocaust, but also the atrocities that took place in Nanking and the killing fields of Turkey — in spite of those insist on forgetting them, explaining them away, or denying them altogether.  Kirsten Grimstad stands in the vanguard of the effort to do so.

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

February 22, 2012 | 12:53 pm

A Scholar Who Can Really Shake Things Up

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Prof. Timothy Snyder

The study of history may strike some readers as a sedate subject. Now and then, however, an historian comes along who can really shake things up.  Timothy Snyder is one such scholar, and I am excited to announce that we will all be afforded an opportunity to meet Snyder in person when he appears as part of the ALOUD series at the Los Angeles Central Library on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, at 7:00 p.m.

Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, boldly reframed the conventional narrative of the Second World War and the Holocaust in “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” a landmark book that reminds us of the crucial but often overlooked role of Poland and Eastern Europe in that tragic era.  When I reviewed “Bloodlands” in The Jewish Journal, Snyder’s provocative take on the Holocaust sparked a lively debate among our readers.

Snyder’s latest work is “Thinking the Twentieth Century” (Penguin, $35), but his role in the book is a bit unusual.  The primary author is the late historian Tony Judt, an influential mover and shaker who did some impressive reframing of his own, and the byline is given as “Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder.”

But the byline conceals a poignant story.  At 62, Judt was stricken with a degenerative neurological disorder while working on “Thinking the Twentieth Century,” and it was clear that he would be unable to complete the book.  Snyder came to his rescue by recasting the book as a conversation between the two scholars — a conversation that amounts to an impressive intellectual achievement but also a touching encounter between two good friends at the end of one man’s life.

“I washed my hands in very hot water,” Snyder writes of their daily work sessions, which took place in Judt’s New York apartment during the final stage of his illness. “Tony suffered terribly from colds in his condition, and I wanted to be able to grasp his hand.”

What is preserved in the book that Judt and Snyder created together is a unique encounter between two lively and provocative minds, “a contemplation of the limitations (and capacity for renewal) of political ideas,” as Snyder puts it, “and of the moral failures (and duties) of intellectuals in politics.”  Like the earlier work of both men, “Thinking the Twentieth Century” casts a new light on what we are tempted to regard as familiar terrain and allows us to see things that have been hidden from us until now.

Timothy Snyder will be featured in the ALOUD series at the Los Angeles Central Library, 630 W. Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071, at 7:00 p.m. on March 6, and it will be my honor and pleasure to serve as his interlocutor.  Precisely because I have already read “Thinking the Twentieth Century,”  I can promise that Snyder’s remarks will be spirited and perhaps a bit unsettling.

I am proud that the two of us will share a stage, but thanks to Snyder’s extraordinary friendship and colleagueship with Tony Judt, his late co-author will be there in spirit, too.

For more information and reservations about the event, visit the website of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

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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February 14, 2012 | 3:04 pm

Leon Wieseltier on the Dangers of Radical Jews

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic

“In Judaism,” writes Leon Wieseltier in the February 16, 2012, issue of The New Republic, “commentary has always been the most common expression of originality.”

I have been reading Wieseltier’s commentary in The New Republic for more years than either of us would be happy to acknowledge in public. He is the literary editor of TNR, which explains why the so-called “back of the book” is always so rich and compelling. (I have a vested interest here, of course; my son, Adam, is a senior editor of TNR, and that’s where his own literary commentary can be found.) But Wieseltier himself holds forth on cultural, political and diplomatic matters in the “Washington Diarist” column that appears on the last page of each issue, and that’s the first place I go when each new issue arrives at our house.

His latest piece, titled “Fevers,” addresses the latest scandals among the haredim in Israel, where an eight-year-old girl was spat upon by a gang of ultra-Orthodox men because her Modern Orthodox garb was insufficiently modest, and where a distinguished doctor whose book was being honored by the Ministry of Health was not allowed to participate in the ceremony because she is a woman: “[S]he was instructed that she could not sit with her husband,” he reminds us, “and a male colleague would accept her prize for her because women were forbidden from the stage.”

It is not only scandalous but downright heartbreaking that such things happen in a country where Golda Meier served as prime minister during the Yom Kippur War and, perhaps more to the point, where women are called upon every day to serve in the armed forces.  Wieseltier blames the “odious misogyny of the ultra-Orthodox” for the shanda we now behold; he faults the “excrescences of Benjamin Netanyahu’s base” for injecting them into Israeli politics; and he calls Netanyahu to account because “the prime minister has not translated personal disgust into political disgust.”

The same sense of outrage can be found in several books that I recently reviewed in The Jewish Journal, including Gershom Gorenberg’s “The Unmaking of Israel” and Hirsh Goodman’s “The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival.” But Wieseltier makes the point with both wit and punch.  He points out, for example, that one haredi propagandist puts the Jewish population of the world at one million because he is willing to count only those Jews who share his rigid beliefs and practices.  “Our worst enemies,” writes Wieseltier, “never eliminated so many of us.”

Wieseltier is a knowledgeable and even a scholarly Jew, but he insists, along with Gorenberg and Goodman, that nothing less than the survival of democracy in Israel is at stake.

“The debate must not be about the place of women, or unbelievers, in Judaism,” he concludes. “The debate must be about the place of Judaism in Israel.  No rabbis have the authority to settle that question.  The secular space that defines a democratic polity exceeds their hoary reach. That is the blessed rupture that they will never undo. It cannot be argued or spat away.”

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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February 2, 2012 | 6:16 pm

When the Stars Are in Alignment Above North Vermont Avenue

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Skylight Books and the entry to the Skylight Theatre

When it comes to arts and letters in Los Angeles, an exceptionally bright spot can be found on a short stretch of Vermont Avenue just a bit north of Hollywood Boulevard.

We went there on a recent Saturday night with our dear friend, Raye Birk, to see a performance of “Hermetically Sealed,” a new play by Kathryn Graf that is being presented at the Skylight Theatre by the Milton Katselas Theatre Company under the direction of Joel Polis.  The short walk from the parking lot to the theatre reminded me that a short stretch of North Vermont Avenue affords more than one pleasure for the senses as well as the mind.

First we passed the sidewalk tables at Figaro, a bustling French bistro that would not look out of place in Paris (or, for that matter, Greenwich Village).  Then we glimpsed the window displays at Skylight Books, one of the best-loved independent bookstores in Southern California and a beacon of light for readers who want to hold a book in their own two hands before buying it and, now and then, see a touring author with their own two eyes.

Tucked away behind Skylight Books is the storied performance space called the Skylight Theatre.  That’s where we once saw Raye Birk in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” directed by Milton Katselas, who passed away in 2008 but is still revered as an acting coach, author (“Dreams Into Action” and “Acting Class”) and a stage and film director.

Katselas, in fact, is the nexus for much of what is happening on that stretch of North Vermont.  He was one of the original co-owners of Skylight Books, and current co-owner and general manager Kerry Slattery credits Katselas as “the instrumental party in getting the bookstore going after Chatterton’s closed in the same location.”

Then, too, he is recalled in the name of the Katselas Theatre Company, the production company associated with the acting school at the Beverly Hills Playhouse where Katselas taught for many years. Its mission is to develop and introduce new plays, a role that Katselas himself played throughout his own career, and the Skylight Theatre is the venue where many of these plays are staged.

“Hermetically Sealed,” the company’s latest production, is a stunning evening of theatre that tells the story of a troubled family in a small American town — a story of madness, sexual scandal, and family dysfunction that is also surprising funny.  Like the rest of the audience, we were laughing out loud when our hearts were not breaking at the tender but troubled relationship between a fifteen year-old-boy named Conor (played by Nicholas Podany) and his mother (played by Gigi Bermingham).

Thanks to producing artistic director Gary Grossmann, we were able to snag front-row seats and sat six feet away from young Nicholas Podany during the performance.  The whole company is accomplished — and I was especially impressed by the set decoration, where every detail that catches the eye of the audience contributes something to the performance and the play itself —  but Podany was a stand-out. He’s an exceptionally appealing young actor, poised and sensitive, always in command of a demanding and impactful role.  I expect that we will be seeing much more of him in the years ahead.

Our evening reminded me that a bricks-and-mortar store like Skylight Books can be more than a place to buy books.  When the stars are in alignment, a bookstore can illuminate a whole block and even a whole city.

“Hermetically Sealed” runs at the Skylight Theatre through February 12.  For information, visit the website of the Katselas Theatre Company.

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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