PALESTINIANS, AND A.S.A., COMMIT CHRISTMAS TRAVESTIES; BUT SCHOLEM ALEICHEM, & THE REAL TEVYA, KNEW BETTER

 Contents:         

Jesus of Palestine?: Clifford D. May, National Review, Jan. 2, 2014 — The members of the American Studies Association care deeply about historical truth, which is why they protested so strenuously when, over Christmas, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas called Jesus “a Palestinian messenger.”

Book Review: The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem by Jeremy Dauber: Frederick Raphael, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 20, 2013 — Sholem Aleichem, perhaps the greatest, certainly the most popular, Yiddish writer, was born Sholem Rabinovich in the small town of Pereyaslav, near Kiev, in 1859, two years before Czar Alexander II liberated Russia's millions of serfs and made it seem possible that his country might evolve into a liberal European state.

The Jewish Mark Twain: William Deresiewicz, The Atlantic, Dec. 22, 2013 —  Dracula, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe: it takes a special kind of greatness for a literary character to achieve autonomy from his creator.

At Mahane Yehuda Outdoor Market, a Window Into Jerusalem’s Hungry Soul: William Booth, Washington Post,  Dec. 27, 2013— There are many windows, some clear, some hazy, into the soul of this holy city, but one of the best ways to see the real Jerusalem is to shop in the old food market, Mahane Yehuda, known to everyone as the shuk.

On Topic Links

New Year’s Resolution: Dry Bones Blog, Jan. 3, 2014

‘Troycott’ Facebook Campaign Opposing ASA Anti-Israel Boycott Gains Traction: JNS, Jan. 3, 2014

In Israel, a Dream Made Real: Ari Shavit, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 29, 2014

Fragment Containing Ancient 'Tekhelet' Dye Discovered Near Dead Sea: Judy Maltz, Ha’aretz, Dec. 30, 2013

JESUS OF PALESTINE?                                                                  

Clifford D. May   

National Review, Jan. 2, 2014                                                                                                                                        

The members of the American Studies Association care deeply about historical truth, which is why they protested so strenuously when, over Christmas, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas called Jesus “a Palestinian messenger.” Actually, they didn’t. Why not? Perhaps the 5,000 members of the ASA — an old if not venerable “academic organization” — are so busy boycotting Israeli educational institutions that they have no time to object to propagandistic falsifications of history — in this case, the denial of the Jewish past in the Middle East as a not-so-subtle way of threatening the Jewish future in the region.

As war is too important to leave to generals, so scholarship is too important to leave to professors — or at least to the sizeable cohort that prioritizes moral posturing and trendy political activism over such mundane concerns as research, learning, and teaching. So let’s quickly review the historical record, with which ASA members may be unfamiliar — and which, we may assume, Abbas distorts out of enmity rather than ignorance.

In 130 A.D., about a century after the crucifixion of Jesus, there was a Jewish rebellion against Roman imperialism. Successful it was not. Simon Sebag Montefiore, in his masterful tome Jerusalem: The Biography writes that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in battles with Roman forces and “so many Jews were enslaved that at the Hebron slave market they fetched less than a horse.” The Roman emperor, Hadrian, was not satisfied. He determined to wipe “Judaea off the map, deliberately renaming it Palaestina, after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines.” And who were the Philistines? They were “Sea People, who originated in the Aegean” and sailed to the eastern Mediterranean, where they “conquered the coast of Canaan.” In other words, Jesus was born a century before the region was renamed Palestine. That makes calling him a Palestinian akin to calling a 15th-century Algonquin a New Englander. And Jesus was certainly no Philistine. Based on all the evidence, he was a Jew born into an already ancient Jewish community.

It was not until the seventh century that warriors from the Arabian Peninsula, adherents of a new religion known as Islam, conquered Palestine and many other lands — creating an empire as large as Rome’s had been at its height. Over the centuries that followed, one foreign conqueror after another — e.g. Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Crusaders, Mamluks — ruled Palestine. The territory never became an independent country. Nor did it even become a separate province under the centuries of Ottoman rule that ended with the collapse of that empire/caliphate after World War I. In 1922, the League of Nations confirmed the Mandate for Palestine, authorizing Britain to rule the territories that would later be known as Jordan, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.

For years after that, the term “Palestinian” was more frequently used to refer to the region’s Jews than its Arabs. For example, the Palestine Post was founded in 1932 by a former editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (The newspaper became the Jerusalem Post in 1950.) Jewish musicians organized the Palestine Symphony Orchestra in 1936. (Its name was changed to the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra twelve years later.) During World War II, the “Palestine Regiment” of the British Army had both Jewish and Arab battalions, with more of the former than the latter. Perhaps most significantly, U.N. Resolution 181, passed in 1947, referred to the founding of a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State” — and looked forward to peace and amicable relations “between the two Palestinian peoples.” Only in the 1960s, with the rise of Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization, did the term “Palestinian” begin to exclude Palestinian Jews. Many who employ the term also exclude those Palestinian Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship — about 20 percent of Israel’s current population.

How large, by comparison, will the Jewish minority be in the Palestinian state that Abbas envisions? Zero percent — Jews will not be tolerated. The PA president has made that quite clear. And Hamas, which rules Gaza, has intentions toward Israelis that can only be described as genocidal. The ASA has objected to none of this. Nor are they fretting about the fact that the Christian population of the West Bank and Gaza has been plummeting. Indeed, Christians are being persecuted and “cleansed” throughout much of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, by stark contrast, Israel’s Christian community continues to grow and strengthen.

It is within this context that Abbas has been negotiating with Israel — doing so, apparently, only because President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry insist, and in exchange for tangible benefits — e.g., the release of scores of terrorists imprisoned in Israel. To be fair, Abbas must wonder how anyone could seriously expect him to make peace with Israel at this moment. He knows that Iran intends to have a nuclear-weapons capability. He almost certainly doubts Obama’s determination to prevent that. He understands that if sanctions are lifted and Iran can again sell oil at world-market prices, its economy is likely to boom. Iran’s rulers will then use their new weapons and wealth to establish hegemony over the region. They would not look kindly on any Muslim leader who had recently grasped an Israeli hand. They would, however, find common ground with a Palestinian leader who had attempted to erase Israel from history. That would be consistent with their more ambitious goal: to follow Hadrian’s example and erase Israel from the map…

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 BOOK REVIEW: THE WORLDS OF

SHOLEM ALEICHEM BY JEREMY DAUBER                                   

Frederick Raphael                                               

Wall Street Journal, Dec. 20, 2013

Sholem Aleichem, perhaps the greatest, certainly the most popular, Yiddish writer, was born Sholem Rabinovich in the small town of Pereyaslav, near Kiev, in 1859, two years before Czar Alexander II liberated Russia's millions of serfs and made it seem possible that his country might evolve into a liberal European state. Ivan Turgenev, as humane a novelist as ever caught hell from all sides, said that the Russian peasant was "the worst conservative of all, caring nothing for liberal ideas." As the revolutionary nihilist Bazarov remarks, in Turgenev's masterpiece, "Fathers and Sons" (1862), "the people believe that when it thunders, the prophet Elijah is riding across the sky with his chariot." This didn't, of course, inhibit them from indulging in widespread pogroms, regularly orchestrated from above, at the expense of their beleaguered Jewish neighbors who waited, at every Seder supper, for Elijah to come and join their party.

In practice, life changed very little for Russia's liberated serfs and even less for the five million Jews in the 400,000 square miles of the "Pale of Settlement," from which they could move only if they were doctors or graduates—a very small number of exceptional Jews were admitted to Russian universities—or had the chutzpah to lead an undercover life in the big cities. By taking the pseudonym Sholem Aleichem (a traditional Yiddish greeting), Our Hero, as Jeremy Dauber persists in calling him in his chatty new biography, took on the role of cheerleader for the often wretchedly poor Jews who lived in hundreds of shtetls spread across the flat plains of rural Russia and the Ukraine. Where the serfs had been regarded by their overlords as "baptized property," the shtetl dwellers—confined to isolated communities of rarely more than a few thousand—were subject to self-important rabbis and parochial pieties (often, like that requiring Jewish brides to shave their heads, of questionable antiquity). They were also in thrall to corrupt Russian officials and the dread of prolonged conscription in the czar's army, from which only luck or bribery could exempt them.

For Jews to dissent from Orthodoxy was to risk anathema. One of Sholem Aleichem's earliest stories is of a Hasid who rips a Haskala (enlightenment) journal to pieces and then burns it. The truth was often nastier still: The writer Y.Y. Linetski was forced by his family to divorce his wife and then marry a deaf and mentally handicapped girl who couldn't be led astray by his blasphemous ideas. The young Sholem emancipated himself by winning a scholarship to a good Russian school and became well-read in European literature. Graduation qualified him for the post of tutor to 13-year-old Olga, the daughter of Elimelekh Loyeff, a wealthy landowner and a generous benefactor of Jews and gentiles. When the romance between Sholem and Olga was revealed to Loyeff—after a visiting cousin honored the old Yiddish saying, "a guest for a while sees a mile"—the handsome seducer was fired and departed to make his fortune in Kiev. When he failed, he enrolled himself as a rabbi of the despised bureaucratic order made responsible, by czarist authorities, for ensuring that communities respected whatever oppressive laws were imposed on them. Meanwhile, Olga proved to be a young woman of resolute character and refused all other suitors. A few years later, the couple were reunited and their union blessed by the amiable Loyeff.

Sholem published his first book when he was 27, although he didn't have to earn his living by his pen until he had blown the fortune that passed to him upon the death of his father-in-law. Sholem's physical appearance (blond hair, blue eyes, fair skin), as well as his gift for mimicry, made it easy for him to pass from one social milieu to another. His folksy style entertained a wide spread of Yiddish-speaking readers, in Russia and Poland, who had enough trouble without having their noses rubbed in fictional miseries. In his personal life, however, Sholem did everything he could to escape the limited life that he sentimentalized in his stories, above all in the recurrent character of Tevye, the dairyman, who made his first appearance in 1895 and whose folk-wisdom honored his author's motto: "Just to spite them, there's going to be laughter."

Sholem himself left Russia in 1905, following a wave of pogroms, for Geneva and New York City; he would die there in 1916, having spent the intervening decade as an itinerant exile in Europe. While his career is vividly presented in "The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem," in bookkeeping detail, Mr. Dauber pays uncritical attention to the work. He accepts Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg's view that, "at the end of the 19th century, Yiddish found itself . . . in the position of creative youthfulness that English enjoyed during the Elizabethan Age . . . [Sholem's] diversity, inventiveness, and range of expression might very well be said to be Shakespearean." On the other hand, the citizens of Shakespeare's "sceptr'd isle" had a flourishing confidence that contrasts, sadly, with the degradation of Russia's Jews, whose repeated prayer was: "God Save the czar . . . and keep him far from us!"

Before Sholem Aleichem, humor and irony had never figured in Yiddish or Hebrew literature. Yiddish-speakers merely took furtive pleasure in the Russians' inability to know what was being said. Sholem's characters could not resist mocking even the nice shabas goy Fyodor in his emblematic fictional village of Kasilrevke. While Sholem indulged his readers with tales of how Jews could outwit their persecutors, he was also determined to purge Yiddish writing of the melodrama that he pilloried in his story of a mock trial of Shomer, a hugely successful purveyor of pulp fiction, whom Sholem convicted of gross Schlockery, although in extenuating circumstances.

After the Shoah, Tevye played the definitive role of Jew-for-export. In the hit Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, he was edifyingly Americanized. It's said that, while the show was in rehearsal, its director, Jerome Robbins, even tried to stop Zero Mostel from kissing the mezuza on the doorpost when he went in and out of his house. The next time he reached the threshold, Mostel crossed himself instead. Robbins then gave in. Singing along with "If I Were a Rich Man," New York audiences could both rejoice in their own redemption from the Yiddish-speaking world and savor its schmaltzy re-creation. As in much nostalgia, there may well have been a tincture of "good riddance" in their reactions…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –ed.]

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THE JEWISH MARK TWAIN

William Deresiewicz

The Atlantic, Dec. 22, 2013

Dracula, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe: it takes a special kind of greatness for a literary character to achieve autonomy from his creator. Like those “folk songs” that are actually the products of a single pen (“This Land Is Your Land,” say), such figures come to seem as if they’d sprung directly from the popular imagination, effacing their originators altogether. Everyone has heard of Frankenstein; not many know who Mary Shelley is.

Such is the case with Tevye, the jocular giant of Yiddish literature. With his trio of marriageable daughters and his eternal little town of Anatevka, his largeness and simplicity, he seems to come to us directly from the pages of a folktale. You’d almost have to be a Yiddishist to recognize the name of his creator, Sholem Aleichem. Yet once he was a giant, too: the voice of Eastern European Jewry by universal acclamation; the creator, Jeremy Dauber tells us in his new biography, of modern Jewish literature as well as modern Jewish humor; the man to whom the author of Huckleberry Finn replied, upon being introduced to “the Jewish Mark Twain,” “please tell him that I am the American Sholem Aleichem.” His death in 1916 was the occasion of the largest public funeral New York had ever witnessed.

On the other hand, Sholem Aleichem was not exactly Sholem Aleichem (just as Mark Twain was not exactly Mark Twain). He was Sholem Rabinovich, born in Pereyaslav, near Kiev, in 1859. The pseudonym is a familiar greeting, roughly equivalent to “how do you do?”: friendly, haimish, demotic, just like the persona that it designates. As for Tevye—well, that’s a story too. Like every mythic figure, he’s been shaped and reshaped in the telling, adapted to the needs of successive artists and audiences. The icon who has circled the globe at the center of Fiddler on the Roof, the personification of shtetl nostalgia, at one with “tradition” and his arcadian community, is very different from the complex, ironic, ambivalent character that Sholem Aleichem built up, story by episodic story, over the course of more than 20 years, in intimate contact with his Yiddish-speaking readership… 

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –ed.]

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AT MAHANE YEHUDA OUTDOOR MARKET,

A WINDOW INTO JERUSALEM’S HUNGRY SOUL                             

William Booth                                                                                        Washington Post, Dec. 27, 2013

There are many windows, some clear, some hazy, into the soul of this holy city, but one of the best ways to see the real Jerusalem is to shop in the old food market, Mahane Yehuda, known to everyone as the shuk. What was once a noisy, jostling market of hagglers warring over vats of peppery olives and sacks of plump dates, sniffing pickled herring and poking their fingers into hillocks of za’atar spice, is now the same noisy, jostling market — but all gussied up. Hygienic, tamed, but definitely not dull.

The shuk (which means open-air market in both Arabic and Hebrew) is now a foodie destination, God help it, with five hip bars, some the size of a walk-in closet in Malibu, serving Palestinian microbrews and boutique vodkas (Israel is filled with Russian Jewish immigrants, a few of them still quite thirsty). In addition to the traditional cafes dishing Middle Eastern and Jewish cuisine, there are joints selling fish and chips, tofu burgers and Indian vegetarian, plus an Italian place around the corner that serves bruschetta with sardines that’s worth the one-hour drive from Tel Aviv. The entrance to the market might as well have a sign at the entrance reading: “Look at you! You’re skin and bones. Eat!”

Students of the shuk date its current gentrification to a daring stroke by Eli Mizrachi, who opened a popular cafe here in 2002, at the height of the second Palestinian uprising and the suicide attacks it brought to the central city.

Mizrachi’s family had owned a dried-fruit-and-nuts stall in the market for many years; he is now chairman of the market’s board of directors. He thought that the shuk’s traditional clientele was aging and that the place needed young people and some night life. So he opened Cafe Mizrachi, now managed by his daughter Moran, who trained as a pastry chef at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. He partnered with Shaanan Streett, a hip-hop artist with the popular group Hadag Nachash, to reopen the old Casino de Paris, once an officers’ club and bordello for the British, now a restaurant-bar-salon serving tapas and Palestinian beer. Television chef personality Anthony Bourdain showed up at the shuk this year for the second season of his CNN food and travel show, “Parts Unknown.” He wandered the market with famed London-based chefs Yotam Ottolenghi, an Israeli Jew, and his Arab-Israeli business partner Sami Tamimi, co-authors of the best-selling cookbook “Jerusalem.”

Jerusalem is trying hard not to be so somber, so obsessed with conflict — and although the shuk is not exactly a peace park, it does draw Jews and Muslims as both vendors and clients. More and more, it also pulls in food tourists. There is an English-language Web site listing market tours and cooking workshops, a Facebook page and a Shuk Bites card with vouchers for tastes of six delicacies from participating vendors for about $25 (99 shekels). Sybil Kaplan, a transplant from Overland Park, Kan., has been leading walks called “Getting to Know the Shuk” for four years. She’s a pint-size super-bubbe (Yiddish for “grandma”) with an oversize handbag and journalist’s street-level knowledge of the market. She knows her shuk. “He sells flowers by the kilo, not by the bunch, and you can’t beat the price. Ten shekels!” Kaplan reported, wading into the scrum one recent morning. Then she whispered: “I don’t know what he puts in the water. I don’t want to know. But his flowers last forever.” In short order, she dispensed some advice: on the closest restrooms, the cleanest butchers, and why you should always buy spices from a sealed jar, never a sack (germs). Kaplan gives directions to destinations by shop stalls rather than street names. “Every street in the shuk has a name,” Kaplan said, “and nobody knows it…when you see a place on the left, at the corner, selling sourdough bread that’s not too sour, which is delicious? You’ve gone too far.”

Also, a revelation for first-timers: “There’s no more haggling in the shuk. That’s over, the price is the price,” she said. She paused and pointed to me, a lone American on the tour. “Except for you.” A little poke in the chest. “Better to shop where there is a sign for the price. Till you learn some Hebrew.” Arriving in the Iraqi quarter of the market, at a stand offering warty bananas, forlorn eggplants and tomatoes nearing retirement, Kaplan made a pronouncement: “Cheapest in the shuk…Sure, he’s a little grumpy,” she said of the vendor. “But what can you do?”

Down the street, elderly gents still play backgammon in the sun and smoke cartons of cigarettes. There’s a hummus place where they yell at you because they can. Their creamy garbanzo bean puree is worth it. Vendor Eli Mamman, from Morocco, wears a paper crown and is known as the halvah king of the shuk; he doles out plastic spoonfuls of the dense sesame confection to his people. Kaplan offered up a little history as she pressed through the throng. The shuk began in the late 19th century, during the Ottoman Empire, on a patch of open ground near the road that leads to the port of Jaffa. The British, when they ruled here, tried to bring modernity to the market, with mixed success. For a time, it was known as the Iraqi market because it was run by Iraqi Jews.

There are about 250 stalls in Mahane Yehuda. The shuk feels less touristy than the more famous bazaars in Cairo, Istanbul, Fez and the Old City of Jerusalem, all of which are centuries older. Vendors aren’t pushy here; clients are. The busiest day at the market is Friday, the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, when shoppers and sellers meet in an orgy of last-minute commerce. On those days, bakers at their ovens can’t quite keep up with the demand for fresh loaves of braided challah. Everyone is eating, sampling almonds, sneaking an extra date, pointing at the cheese wheels and getting a freebie of feta. There’s a line of shoppers holding plastic spoons for a taste of tahini; the juice guy is misting the air with something smelling of lemons and spice. And the lines from the lunch crowd spill out the doors of restaurants and cafes.

On some Fridays, an hour before sundown, a cadre of ultra-Orthodox Jews dressed in black frocks and hats march through, blowing horns and urging vendors to shutter their shops and go home to honor the Sabbath. The market sleeps on Saturdays.                   

CIJR wishes all its friends and supporters Shabbat Shalom!

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New Year’s Resolution: Dry Bones Blog, Jan. 3, 2014

‘Troycott’ Facebook Campaign Opposing ASA Anti-Israel Boycott Gains Traction: JNS, Jan. 3, 2014— A new Facebook campaign by McGill University American History professor Gil Troy, called “Troycott,” has garnered more than 1,100 “likes” in three days, topping the 827 votes of American Studies Association (ASA) members for a boycott of Israel.

In Israel, a Dream Made Real: Ari Shavit, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 29, 2014 — For those observing Israel from afar, the country must seem like an ongoing crisis.

Fragment Containing Ancient 'Tekhelet' Dye Discovered Near Dead Sea: Judy Maltz, Ha’aretz, Dec. 30, 2013 — In a rare discovery, scientists have confirmed that an almost 2,000-year-old piece of fabric found near the Dead Sea contains remnants of the Biblical blue color known as tekhelet.

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