Pogroms

This morning I woke up to an extremely upsetting piece of news on the BBC. Residents in Naples, Italy banded together and burned down Roma encampments outside of town. It seems many Roma have come to Italy from Romania in search of work in the wake of the Schengen Agreement.

This pogrom happened after an Italian woman accused a 16 year old Roma girl of trying to steel her baby. To me this smacks of old-school European prejudices of the blood-libel kind. As a person my heart goes out to the Roma who were chased from their homes. As a European Jew the incident sends chills down my spine and brings to mind aspects of Europe I would rather (but can never) forget.

Apparently there is a larger context of Italian authorities cracking down on illegal immigrants, anti-immigrant rhetoric and other vigilante attacks on immigrants.

I know a lot of people who like to say that Europe has moved beyond this kind of thing. That we live in a brave new world, that we have learned from the past, etc. Unfortunately this is not my perception of which way the wind blows. I see xenophobia on the rise and people retreating into their own narrow-minded little corners.

A sad day to be a human, as usual.

"The Bubble" Post Script

Though I guess I gave Eytan Fox's The Bubble a lukewarm review, I became a bit obsessed with it. I've now watched it maybe two or three times (I know, there is something wrong with me.) It clearly struck some kind of chord in me, even though I still think it was somewhat lacking in a few aspects. I just now saw another film Bent, that is referenced in The Bubble and it somewhat changed my perspective on the latter.

There's a scene in The Bubble where Noam, the Israeli main character, takes Ashraf, his Palestinian lover, to see a play. The play is Bent, a 1979 play by Martin Sherman, about two gay men in a concetration camp in 1930s Germany. One of them wears the customary pink triangle, the other has "made a deal" with the guards to get a yellow star instead, as he thinks he will get treated better as a Jew. In the scene we see in The Bubble Ashraf and Noam watch the main characters in Bent make love through words — without touching — while on a three minute break from penetential labour with a Nazi guard watching over them. Afterwards one of them says to the other "We did it, we made love, fucking guards, fucking camp, we did it, we are human, we exist." That of course is more or less the main point of the impossible love story in The Bubble.
Bent was adapted into a movie in 1997. I'd never heard of the play or the movie before I saw The Bubble but it had me curious as there were a quite few intertextual references to Bent in the movie. I promptly added Bent to my Netflix list and watched it. It turned out to be an extremely depressing and pretty graphic and brutal film, but also — as Noam says in The Bubble one that gives food for thought.The story poses questions about agency and the morality of sacrificing oneself or a loved one one can not help, when faced with such a conundrum.

(A warning to anyone who intends to see either film or play, there are major plot spoliers ahead:)
In its essence Bent is about men trapped in circumstances that brutalize them. The choices, cruelties and dirty deals they have made to survive weighs on their conscience. In the end they chose to exercise the only form of agency they have, first to fall in love have (virtual) sex and forge a human connection, and then, ultimately refuse to participate in the brutality around them through the only means they still have at hand: committing suicide rather than being killed.
There are some obvious parallels to The Bubble and seeing Bent emphasized some aspects of The Bubble that were less clear to me before. Specifically it changed the way I see the ending, where Ashraf blows himself up in an empty Tel Aviv street after his sister has been killed by Israeli soldiers.
Before pushing the detonator, Ashraf looks at Noam and makes the same sign the men in Bent use to signify their love for each other, also the same sign one of the uses before committing suicide by rushing an armed guard rather than be forced at gunpoint to electrocute himself on a fence. Ashraf runs away from Noam into an empty street, but Noam runs to him and they both die together.
Againts the backdrop of Bent the ending looks more like an act of protest againts being trapped in brutalizing circumstances than offensive stereotyping. Of course, it is still not unproblematic, but it certainly changed my perception of what Eytan Fox is trying to say in The Bubble. As always with obscure references, one can ask onself if the film has succeeded when it is necessary to dig out an obscure play in order to fully understand it, but that is another matter.

A Movie Review — "The Bubble"

This is a movie review of Eytan Fox's new film "The Bubble" that I wrote for a magazine. I struggled a bit with what to say about this one. I know Fox based the plot loosely on Romeo and Juliet and so wanted to match the story to that to some extent, which is why the ending looks like it looks. Perhaps he chose the ending he chose because he wanted a metaphor for the mutually damaging and corrosive effects of Palestinian/Israeli violence. Still, I felt like it ended up reminding me a bit too much of the "never trust an Arab" mentality that tends to lurk its head among us Jews from time to time. I still feel iffy about that. Though I like Fox's work (despite the occasional cornball factor) and in many ways it was a highly enjoyable film.

Here's what I wrote:

The Bubble

The title of Eytan Fox's The Bubble refers to the hip young neighborhood in Tel Aviv where most of the film takes place. The idea is, inside it, you'd almost not know there was a conflict going on. The movie opens with Noam (Ohad Knoller) an Israeli record store clerk, on half-hearted reserve duty at a checkpoint. There he meets Ashraf (Yousef Sweid), a young Palestinian guy from Nablus, as they both try to help a Palestinian woman laboring with a dying baby.

Despite this inauspicious start, attraction ensues. Later that night, Ashraf shows up on Noam's doorstep. Cue hot man-on-man lovemaking. Ashraf has nowhere else to go, so Noam moves him into the Tel Aviv apartment he shares with two roommates. The flaky ineffectual nature of the roommates' political statements could grate the most resilient of nerves. (Beach rave against the occupation, anyone?) But, hey, you can't hate them for trying. For a moment it seems Ashraf and Noam might make it. But this is the Middle East, and things go pear-shaped pretty fast.

The Bubble doesn't quite pack the same nuanced punch as Fox's best-known film Yossi and Jagger, a love story about two gay Israeli soldiers (hubba! hubba!). As with the earnest beach-ravers, you want to laud Fox for his righteous attempt, but good intentions don't save The Bubble from occasional swings into formula and stereotype. This is not to say Fox subscribes to Hollywood plot conventions — which would be ill suited to the Middle East anyway.

An Embarassment of Riches

At the top of the list of things I love about New York City, is the fact that it is probably the most Jewish and diversely Jewish place in the world. Except perhaps for Israel. Whatever flavor of Jewiness appeals to you, you can find it here, be it movie screenings and wine-tasting classes with secular Jews at Makor, or sheitel-wearing and talmudic study in Williamsburg. Pick your poison, NYC has it.

Those who remember the old joke about a Jew stranded on a desert island who builds two synagogues — one that he goes to and one that he'll never set foot in — will not be surprised to learn that this cornucopia of Jewish choice extends to shuls. There are neo-chassidic shuls with plenty of song and dance, there are up-tight yekkish reform temples, there are hippie reform temples, there are conservative synagogues that lean to the left and conservative synagogues that lean to the right. There are gay shuls and shuls whose members view gayness as an aberration. There are "halchically egalitarian" shuls, shuls that are staunchly un-egalitarian based on halacha, and shuls that don't give a damn about halacha. Add to that a whole slew of independent minyanim of every conceivable flavor and the choice is pretty overwhelming.

If it weren't for all this choice and the fact that, a couple of years back, I was able to find a lovely Brooklyn shul that is pretty traditional when it comes to liturgy, but completely egalitarian when it comes to ladies participating, I might not have found my way back to loving communal Jewish practice.

Problem being, three years down the line and after one year of actual membership in said shul, I feel, well... what if there is something better out there? What if I and this shul I fell in love with three years ago aren't perfect for each other after all? Perhaps I should try a new place to spend the high holidays this year? There are other fish in the sea, etc.

These doubts I am having about my relationship with my shul are compounded by the fact that the friend who has accompanied me to high holiday services the last two years wants to try something new. Unlike me, who grew up going to an orthodox shul in Stockholm because, well, because there really wasn't a whole lot of shuls to choose from, she grew up going to a big reform temple in Rochester and wants something with a more reformish flavor this year. Me, I might want to try something new, but I also love the orthodox-style chest-beating and emoting and endless repetition of the same prayers that goes on in "my" Brooklyn shul.

As much as I love all this choice, I can't help but feel a bit nostalgic for the Stockholm days when I just took what I was given. My Jewish friends who still live there all seem to go to shul for Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, but they go to one of the three imperfect shuls in Stockholm, complain about them and yet continue going despite their gripes.
Despite three shuls, there is only one Jewish congregation in Stockholm. This congregation strives to incorporate all denominations and please everybody (well, please the orthodox and the conservative at least) and in the process pleases next to no one. Sometimes I miss this. I miss being part of a community that is theologically, socially and politically diverse. A community where Jews of different stripes are forced to work things out because they only have each other. When this doesn't tear us apart I believe it adds something to the community and makes us stronger.

In New York, the temptation is always to seek greener pastures the minute your shul doesn't feel perfect. Thing is, once you start nit-picking and expecting perfection no shul will ever seem perfect. Should I sequester myself and daven alone or with the two people I manage to find whose idea of a perfect service matches mine exactly? That hardly seems like fun either.
Or is this constant splitting off what makes Judaism grow and flourish in a place like New York? Am I just a backwards-minded person. Am I like the escaped animals from the Central Park Zoo in the movie Madagascar who build themselves a cage in the jungle because they can't handle their newfound freedom and the cage reminds them of home?

Oh Sweden...

This is not particularly Jewish, but it is related to the way Sweden, my home country, discusses "foreigners" in the media. The Swedish paper of record Dagens Nyheter (the article is in Swedish, so if you are an English-speaker you'll just have to trust my word on this) runs a small item saying that employer discrimination against immigrants (and children of immigrants) is not a big problem in the Swedish jobmarket. Why not, you ask? Well, the article will tell you because only one out of four employers discriminate against those with foreign backgrounds. Well then, if only 25 percent of employers are xenophobic I guess it's not much of a problem...

In comparison another Swedish paper of record Svenska Dagbladet worried this week that only nine out of ten applicants were accepted to university in Sweden this year. What? 10 percent weren't accepted. Oh the horror!
So there you have it, I'm just going to juxtapose these two articles and leave it at that.

Gunter Grass and his German Guilt Complex

The New Yorker ran Günter Grass's confession that he had been in the Waffen SS, as a teenager during the waning years of World War II. It was a good piece of writing.

Though it fed my paranoid fixation on how all (or most) older Germans were Nazis by either force, choice or momentum, I couldn't help thinking about my own grandfather who was of a similar age — eighteen — fighting around the same time as Grass. As fate and history would have it, my grandfather, a Dutch Jewish refugee fighting in a Dutch brigade in the British Army was wearing a very different uniform than Grass. I only know fragments of my grandfather's life at that time, it is not something he liked to talk about. But the basic narrative, being a young man caught up in history, scared shitless running through a bombed-out Europe, peeing your pants and shooting at whomever you happened to run into is no doubt similar for Jews, Nazis, Allies and Soviets alike.
Of course while my grandfather was advancing across northern France and the Netherlands, Günter Grass was retreating from the advancing Red Army in Central Europe. Are those superficial similarities or are they deep similarities? I generally have a very low tolerance for mitläufer or fellow travelers, all the little passive people who enable dictatorships and genocides across the world, but I'm not sure what to think.



Grass's profound sense of guilt at having been part of not just the German army but of the Waffen SS (and an eager volunteer to boot) comes across loud and clear in the piece. At the same time his very declaration of guilt seems to me like a request for absolution. For each reason he righteously gives the reader why he shouldn't be pardoned, he seems to be asking the reader to say, "Well, you couldn't help it, you were young and everyone was drafted." I'm not interested in condemning Günter Grass but I am also not interested in giving him absolution.

I am fascinated by Germany in general and with Berlin in particular and go there is often as I can. I have good friends there and have to face the fact that I am culturally very Central European. Still when I am there I feel I can never get away from the looming sense of history, from my neurosis regarding my Jewiness in comparison to their Germaness and from the German neuroses, which complement mine all too well and tend to involve hang-ups on German guilt and Jewishness in general.
Perhaps that is part of the attraction.

Günter Grass eloquent but almost compulsive parsing and retelling of traumatic events sixty years in the past remind me all too well of my own upbringing among holocaust survivors of various stripes, only he lives with the burden of guilt, rather than with the other side of that coin.
Grass's obsessive-compulsive confession of guilt reminds me of a German friend of mine, who is my own age and has absolutely no rational reason to feel guilty, but seems to do so nonetheless. My reaction to Grass's essay, reminds me of the way I react when talking to Germans my own age about World War II (because when they find out I am Jewish they will start talking about it sooner or later) I feel their pain, but I am not interested in aiding their psychotherapy — or am I?

Germans and European Jews, it's like we are tied together by this trauma and destined to hobble along together for the forseeable future. Bloody miserable prospect.

On a related note, of course, I always prefer a confession of guilt to pretense of innocence. Kurt Waldheim who passed on to some other place last week, neither admitted to or made penance for the war crimes he very possibly committed, may he be remembered as an a*#hole by all. (Sorry G-d, I know I'm not supposed to rejoice at anyone's death but I can't help myself.)

Medieval Poetry and Why the Levant is F**cked

I rarely read poetry and when I do I don't always like it, but I was quite unexpectedly blown away by some exerpts from a book of Jewish poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain (pre 1492 -- of course) that I found in an article in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. It was some of the most beautiful meditations on diaspora I have ever read and suprisingly prescient. Take this poem, by Ibn Ezra for instance:

[...]
My longing instead is to lay my threshold
near the threshold of learned men:
all I want is to move toward them,
although my iniquity holds me back
among a people that does not know me;
with whom I have no part or ease —
for when I greet them with kisses of peace,
they say I hurt them with my teeth.

So I know I read too much NYRB which I suppose is more for old farts than for young women in their twenties, but whatev, I am an old fart at heart. Incidentally the same issue of NYRB has a good article on the current situation in Lebanon and how it ties in to the mess to the South of there. It is depressing to see the infinite capability for factionalism that is endemic not only to Israeli and Palestinian, but apparently also Lebanese society. I guess the old adage "Two Jews, three opinions" applies to the Lebanese too. — I knew there was a reason Lebanese people call me "cousin" when they find out I'm Jewish.
Who in the world thought slicing up lucrative real estate along the Mediterranean into tiny nations was a good idea? Not sure what the solution is here but ethnic nationalism ain't it, that's for sure. Perhaps we should bring back the Ottoman Empire?