Lessons From The “Come Home to Israel” Ads for a Liberal Jewish Zionist Elite

I confess that when I first read Jeffrey Goldberg’s post about the ham-handed advertisements produced by Israel’s Absorption Ministry imploring Israelis to “come home” I went right along with his sense of outrage and insult. I fulminated on my Facebook page. I egged on the outrage of others on their Facebook pages. I cheered the official letter of complaint from the Jewish Federations of North America. I saw in the ads a representation of years of insults large and small made by Israelis to the value of Jewish life in the diaspora and our understanding of the Israeli reality. I thought the artless execution and saccharine structure of the ads paralleled a similarly unsophisticated and condescending Israeli sense of superiority to the laflafim in the galut.  I obsessed over the similarity between my facial hair and the facial hair of the boyfriend who knew-not of Yom HaZikaron. I’m not going to recount point by point the commercials, because that has been done better elsewhere.

Did you notice how every sentence in that paragraph began with the word “I”?

Now that the ads have been pulled by the Netenyahu government, it turns out that really they served as a kind of Rorschach test.

I know this based on the responses of several Israeli friends and colleagues who provided intelligent and contrasting Israeli interpretations of the ads. Anton Goodman, the shaliach here in Washington, takes Jeffrey Goldberg to task for suggesting that the Ministry should be luring Israelis back home by dangling the country’s low unemployment, good weather and proximity to maternal guilt:

His suggestion is as offensive to me as an Israeli as he finds the adverts to be. To suggest that choosing to live in Israel is about standard of living or weather is a cheapening of Zionist ideology. The Ministry of Absorption chose messaging that touches on national, collective narratives. Come back to Israel, say the adverts, because only there can you speak the national language of Hebrew, take part in national remembrance days and celebrate Jewish holidays as a pinnacle of national culture. The choice of Chanukah as the Jewish holiday showcased also adds depth, as Chanukah is the national holiday of the Zionist movement, having been imbued with significance of sovereignty, bravery and pioneerism from Herzl, Ahad Ha’Am and Bialik until today. We cannot celebrate Chanukah in America as we do in Israel.

And of course Anton is correct. Even the dreydls are different in Israel: first of all they call them sivyvon; and more significantly, there’s a one-letter difference on the tops that turns “A Great Miracle Happened There” into “A Great Miracle Happened Here.”

Robbie Gringras, writing for Makom and on his new independent blog Questions of a Questioning Zionist first does an excellent breakdown of the commercials to see what they are really saying to Israelis, and then goes on to point out the real dilemmas faced by that ex-pat community in America.

But much of the critique I’ve so far seen of the advert goes further. The advert is somehow seen as proof that “it is impossible for Jews to remain Jewish in America”. So of course anecdotally the commercial is thoroughly unfair, but statistically it is spot on. Of all Jews in America, Israeli ex-pats have the greatest trouble identifying with their local Jewish communities. Several Federations are making huge efforts to reach out to Israelis in their midst precisely because they have recognized there is a problem. In particular secular Israelis find it very hard to parlay their secular Israeli identity into the strictly Protestant-Jewish-religious terms of the American community (see the debate explored by James Hyman and Yonatan Ariel).

Andrew Shapiro Katz writing on Facebook also points to the significant evolution in discouraging emigration that ads present:

They want to make “Aliyah” as popular as possible and “Yerida” as unpopular as possible.

But, they want to do it in a way that doesn’t speak critically of the individual Israelis who choose to live in North America. As the video says, “They will always be Israeli.” It doesn’t talk about their not being around for reserve duty, or the “brain drain” after their heavily subsidized university educations, or the negative effect on Israeli society of the loss of their secular-liberalism. After all, they have all likely paid their dues, and few of their peers in Israel begrudge their pursuit of economic opportunity. The ads seem to go out of their way not to demonize or stigmatize “yordim.”

But it was Andrew’s observation about who was most upset about the ad that struck me as significant:

They have clearly touched a nerve, especially among what I at least would term the liberal Jewish Zionist elite – those who are deeply committed to Israel and the Jewish people and work either professionally or in a lay capacity on their behalf. Most of this group is in North America, but some lives in Israel. And I count myself as one of its members.

And then it dawned on me, I am one of the liberal Jewish Zionist elite — and I think the “liberal” part is not gratuitous. As part of that elite I feel I have a role to play in any and all conversations regarding Israel’s destiny. Certainly, sometimes my voice counts more than others (I don’t live there and my children don’t serve in the IDF), but as part of that liberal elite I feel I have the right and obligation to speak-up when I agree or disagree with the direction of the Israeli government, its culture or position in the world. But there is growing polarization in Israel and the diaspora about who can speak for Israel — and certain members of this liberal Jewish Zionist elite have found their place in the conversation challenged both by staunch defenders of Israel in North America who have announced the impossibility of liberal Zionism and by anti-democratic legislation in the Israel Knesset.

To relate that back to the Ministry of Absorption videos, here we have a semi-viral video that seems to posit the impossibility of an informed, passionately Zionist American (possibly goateed) partner for an Israeli. Our greatest fear is not that Israelis don’t want to date us or raise families with us in North America — it’s that we have no place in a relationship with Israel.

And I get it. The advertisement isn’t about me. Leave it to a member of the Liberal Zionist Elite to make it all about themselves. It’s about getting Israelis to come home without judging them for the reasons they may have left. That explanation works for me. But beyond the 30-second video, when the Sabra has returned to Netanya or Tel Aviv or Haifa; what happens to the liberal Jewish Zionist?

I Read the Longest Book on the Smallest Screen

At first I was doing it, because it sounded cute to say it, “I’m reading the longest book I could think of, on the smallest screen that I own.” Those would be Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which was serialized and then re-written and published whole in 1869; and my Blackberry Bold 9650 with its 480 x 360 pixel display. In paperback the novel runs about 1024 pages and weighs about 1.4 pounds. At a font size I found readable (the largest size), I was able to see about 18 words at a time on the average screen. I thought it would be the literary equivalent of digging the Panama Canal with a teaspoon. And I did it.

And here’s the really surprising news. I think not only that reading War and Peace on  Kindle for Blackberry is a very doable, but I submit it may be the very best way to read this epic novel for a certain kind of reader. Please notice that I did qualify that last statement — I’m not saying that you haven’t read this novel until you’ve consumed it in 18 word bites. Nor am I saying that a paper copy or even an electronic copy on a more sophisticated platform, wouldn’t have considerable advantages. particularly when it comes to note-taking, bookmarking and highlighting. What I am saying is that for the pure experience of getting through an enormous novel that my whole life I’ve been too intimidated by to even pick up — Kindle for Blackberry was a revelation.

The first advantages are those that belong to ebooks generally. It’s much easier to carry around a door stopper like War and Peace in e-form. You don’t look like a pompous ass on the metro with your book cover of a high-falutin Russian novel announcing to the world that your shit don’t stink. This point is particularly important to me. I am terribly self-conscious of what my fellow commuters make of my reading choices. Present something too light-weight, too-Dan Brown-ish and it tells people you’re not important enough to be reading something that really matters. Err in the other direction by sporting a novel that contains multiple patronymics and you look like an undergrad or unemployed.

But there are some specific joys to reading on the Blackberry. The first of which is its structural insistence that you focus on the sentence you’re reading. You can’t scan down the page to see what happens next. You can’t be distracted by the prior sentence. It’s like how they teach some LD kids to read with index cards covering everything on the page but the line they’re currently reading. It is the most “in-the-moment” reading experience you can have. Your brain can focus exclusively on the 18 words in-front of you before moving on to the next 18. I found that despite the proliferation of characters with multiple names I was actually retaining who-was-who much better than I normally do. You would think this would slow down the reading experience, but honestly I didn’t notice myself reading at an appreciably slower pace. It took me about a month to read the book, which is about as much time as it would take me to read an epic of that size normally.

Next is the advantage of being able to read in meetings and look like you’re just checking email on your Blackberry — not that I would ever do that.

As for the book itself, it shouldn’t come as surprise, but War and Peace is a classic for a reason. Once you learn to tell your Rostovs apart from your Bezhukovs and your Bolkonskis from your Kuragins from your Denisovs from your Dolokhovs the plot basically boils down to stories from the front lines and the romantic imbroglios that occur in-between battles. The one that occupies the majority of the novel is between Prince Andrei and Countess Natasha. There’s also Pierre’s ill-fated marriage to Helene, who would have been right at-home in a 19th Century version of Real Housewives of Petersburg. A lot of time is spent on Count Nicholas Rostov’s love for his cousin Sonya, but eventually Nick decides he’s just not that into her and ends up with Princess Mary (who is Prince Andrei’s sister, who yes, is in-love with Nicholas’ sister Natasha. But Andrei dies in the war and in the end Pierre marries Natasha after his wife Helene overdoses. Turns out it’s a small Russian Empire after all).

The War part concerns the Napoleonic wars that were fought between 1805 and 1812. There’s the Battle of Austerlitz in the beginning, the battle in the middle when the Russians and French are allied, and finally Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, capture of and retreat from Moscow.  Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War and so the details in battle scenes are particularly vivid. It is evident that Tolstoy believes that war is hell, that Generals are good for little more than jockeying for political favor and that the common soldier is an object of noble pity. He heaps much abuse on the notion of Napoleon’s “genius” and seems particularly invested in defending the reputation of the Russian Commander-in-Chief Kutuzov, who seems like a lovably guileless curmudgeon whose chief attribute was his inclination not to make things worse than they needed to be.

In this way Tolstoy switches between the story of the “great men” of the wars — Napoleon, the Czar, various generals and diplomats; and the “regular” people (if Russian Princes and Counts are your idea of “regular”). During the retreat from Moscow, Pierre, who is a prisoner of the French comes to a true appreciation of the peasantry and makes a sort of spiritual breakthrough in the deprivation of captivity.

If there’s anything to complain about from the experience of reading War and Peace on my Blackberry, I would have to say that I miss the ability to take margin notes and that the bookmark function was less than reliable. I know this is less of an issue on the more comprehensive e-readers, but as I’ve been writing-up this post I’ve had to rely more on my memory of the novel and it would have been nice to be able to re-read a few select parts that I had marked in-advance.

But overall, I am impressed enough with the Blackberry for Kindle experience that I’m starting Moby Dick tonight!

Back From Sabbatical (or how I served on a Federal Jury for a six week criminal trial)

I haven’t been to work on a regular basis for almost two months. Really since just before New Year’s. I took a few days off between Christmas and New Years, like most people, and then came to work January 3rd. I reminded my boss that I was called for Federal Jury Duty on January 11th and that I’d see her on the 12th, because really, who would pick me for a jury?

I should have known better. Actually, I should have just read the jury summons letter which laid out a few facts pretty clearly:

1. The date: January 11th was the second Tuesday after New Years. In the past I’d been called for jury duty on Fridays or the week before Christmas when no trial is actually going to begin. The 2nd Tuesday after New Years is precisely when you schedule a trial to begin when you don’t want any prolonged holidays in your way.
2. My juror number was 0007. That’s a good number if you’re in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but a bad omen for jury service. It meant I was at the very front of the line to get put on a panel.
3. The letter said I was being called for a trial that could “last eight weeks.” Now I did pretty well on the reading comprehension portion of the SAT, but for some reason when I read that sentence I understood that the trial could “last eight weeks” in the same way that pretty much every erectile dysfunction medication advertised on television “could” cause “heart attack, stroke or death.” Yeah, it could, but what are the odds of that or an erection lasting more than four hours? Same goes for a trial lasting eight weeks. What are the odds, really?

I showed up at the courthouse in Gree*nbelt on the appointed morning with plenty of time, and there was already a large crowd assembled. In fact, there were a lot of people. So many people, that I figured that the odds of me landing on a 12-person jury panel just based on the sheer number of possible jurors had to be pretty small. In my prior jury duty experiences I hadn’t even made it out of the waiting room. When they began playing a video about “what to expect while on jury duty” that included several actors I knew from the Washington theater scene in their mid-to-late 90s hairdos, I was reassured that this wouldn’t be too different.

Unfortunately, instead of being left alone to read my book, I was quickly placed at the front of a line (#0007) and marched up to the courtroom of Judge Roger T1*tus. This was the first disappointment, because one of the other judges in Greenbelt is the uncle of one of my old college friends, and I was counting on being able to escape jury duty with a few colorful anecdotes about Nephew Jesse’s trips to the local Indian reservation casino and the time he cornered the market on soda in his dorm and jacked-up the price.

They had us sit in the courtroom’s audience seats while the attorneys stared at us. I was in the front row, practically nose to nose with one of the defense attorneys who kept meticulous notes on what she was seeing in the faces of the prospective jury. At one point we were asked whether we had any relatives who were lawyers and I dutiful got up and mentioned that my father, brother, father-in-law and uncle were all attorneys. I added for good measure that my sister was in law school and my cousin was an assistant District Attorney in Manhattan. Then I sat down and waited to be excused.

Instead, after a few hours of waiting I was invited into the jury box and given a new label, “Juror #3″ (a promotion!) and told that we would be together for 6-8 weeks. Opening arguments began at 9 am the next day.

What can I say about the trial? In the end it only lasted six weeks. A total of 23 days in the courthouse — we lost one day to snow and the trial didn’t meet on Mondays so the judge could attend to other matters. The case included three defendants on trial, and an additional defendant connected to the case but receiving a separate trial for reasons that were not revealed to us until afterward. Each defendant was charged with 15 counts of wire fraud, 1 count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 1 count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. There was  an 18th count of perjury against one of the defendants. In the end that’s 52 separate counts that we had to decide on.

The case concerned a Ponzi scheme that was based out of Prince George*s County but eventually spread all over the country. The deal was that people were being convinced to buy or refinance their homes to get $50,000 – $100,000 of cash out of the loan and turn the money over to a company called Metr0 Drea*m H0m*es (also went by the name P0S Dre*am H0m*es). The money would be used by MDH to purchase ATMs, video screens to display advertising and something called a “Touch and Buy” (essentially a vending machine for pre-paid calling and debit cards). The income generated from those machines would be used to pay the investor’s mortgage at an accelerated rate so that the entire loan would be paid off in 5-7 years. Except, that there were no ATMs, no paid advertising on the video screens, no significant income coming from the Touch and Buys. The only money being used to pay mortgages was new investor money to pay the old investor obligations. It was an affinity scheme that catered mostly to upper-middle class African Americans who had the good credit necessary to obtain the financing. The organization had a charity arm that gave away thousands of dollars in high-profile ceremonies in order to woo new investors with the apparent success its generosity evidenced. The operation used the language and culture of African American churches to bestow a kind of divine glow on what was essentially a shell game. The whole thing came crashing down when the Washington Post blew the lid on the scheme in August of 2007. Hundreds of people lost their homes, went into foreclosure and declared personal bankruptcy. Retirees went back to work. As victim after victim was put on the stand it was just sad.

But wire fraud is an incredibly technical crime to prove, so in addition to the moving testimony about the scam and its effects, were hours and hours of looking at canceled checks, bank statements, deposit slips and FedWire transaction sheets. It was clear early on that An*drew W1ll1ams, the mastermind of the scheme, was a total shit and deserved to go to jail for a very long time. Unfortunately, Andy W1ll1ams was being tried in a separate trial and we had to determine to what extent three lesser figures: the CFO, the company president and the chief marketing officer were involved the scheme. Were they just another of the victims taken in by Andy W1ll1ams’ snake-oil show? Or were they knowing participants in a fraud?

In the end, we convicted the CFO, the President and the Chief Marketing Officer on all counts. We concluded that even if they didn’t know the operation was a fraud to begin with, there was compelling evidence that they learned the truth early enough to erase any reasonable doubt. Oddly enough, the CFO represented himself in the trial and ended up introducing the piece of evidence that convinced us of his and his co-defendants’ guilt. It was a report he prepared for Andy W1ll1ams before he began working for him, basically laying out that the operation could easily be called a scam unless it was majorly reorganized. He then became the CFO and while some of the administrative elements of the organization were streamlined, the scheme basically operated in the same way as before, with new investor money being used to pay old investor obligations. Then in an amazing act of hubris, the CFO lied about that very fact in court and got himself a bonus charge of perjury. It was all very sobering.

I will say that I really enjoyed my fellow jurors. It was an amazing group consisting of every type of person including an HVAC technician, an HR director for a major hospital, a civilian engineer for the Navy, a teacher’s assistant, a social worker, a government lawyer, a retired union electrician, a church administrator and a personal trainer — just to name a few. We laughed a lot, shared food and good conversation. There really wasn’t a person who got on my nerves, even after six weeks together. That was kind of a miracle.

In the end, we took the deliberations very seriously, going over all the evidence and examining every reasonable doubt raised by the defense as well as several of our own before coming to a verdict at the end of the second day.

Now I have to go back to work — I haven’t really stopped, just adjusted my hours and done a lot more work over the phone and from home in the evenings. But still, I’m going back to my routine. It will take some getting used to.

So that ends the sabbatical I never expected to take. It’s given me a renewed faith in our system of justice (and an additional skepticism about the banks that approved ridiculous loans that made both the scam and our current recession possible). I really admire Judge T1tus and thought he did a great job with the trial. He came back to the jury room after the verdict to thank us and answered some of our questions, including why we hadn’t seen certain major players in the scheme (they had plead guilty and pleaded the fifth). While I wouldn’t want to do another six week trial (and don’t necessarily recommend it to you), I would encourage people not to run away from jury duty. It is part of maintaining a civil society and it does feel good to know you did your part.

Oh, and if you do end up on the wrong side of the law, never ever ever represent yourself.

Report on Summer Reading

One of the reasons I am sad about the end of summer is that it is a time of year that I get a lot of reading done. Time to read and summertime are synonymous in my mind. And this has been a particularly good summer for reading. So on this Labor Day, I report on a few of the books I’ve enjoyed since Memorial Day…

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Goldstein
The rare book that incorporates serious philosophy into a work of fiction. Of course, this isn’t terribly difficult if your main character is an academic whose book on the psychology of religion has become a surprise best-seller, earning him recognition in Newsweek as the “atheist with a soul”  (think: a less grumpy, more Jewish version of Christopher Hitchens).  All of the characters in the book have a belief approaching the level of religiosity in something: game theory, radical life-extension, mathematics or, of course, love. It is to Goldstein’s credit, that the loosely plotted story, which sort of ambles rather than unfolds, remains so engaging all the way through. Another nice touch is the Appendix, which includes the titular 36 arguments as well as their counter-arguments. I like works that take an honest look at faith without getting all gauzy — if that makes any sense. Goldstein takes religion seriously, but not religiously. I wish more people would.

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman
I’m not a Jane Austen guy. It’s a huge demerit against any claims I might make to being a literate adult. Even when it has gotten souped-up with zombies and sea monsters, I haven’t made the time to read any of it. However, I have read and enjoyed a lot of Allegra Goodman’s work and it always gets compared to Jane Austen. I’ll have to take their word for it.  The Cookbook Collector is a wonderful portrait of a moment in time, the tail-end of the internet boom and a constellation of characters whose fortunes (literal and metaphorical) rise and fall with dizzying speed. At the center are two sisters: one a innovator and wildly rich CEO of an internet start-up and the other a perpetual grad student who is happiest wrapped-up in the rare-book collection of her aloof boss. Betrayal, love, lost identity and a resolution that takes place, as one would expect, at the wedding reception of an unlikely marriage are just part of what make Allegra Goodman such a joy to read. Her books are about something — call it the way we live or fail to live. The well-intended mistakes we make that have unforeseen, grave consequences are dispensed to characters large and small with little regard for fairness or justice. It’s a recognizable universe.

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides
This book profoundly affected me — not so much for the thriller aspects of its narrative of James Early Ray’s escape from prison, ultimately successful assassination of MLK Jr and flight from justice; but for the vagaries of fate that delivered Dr. King to the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. Sides paints a picture of a King in crisis, struggling to maintain his non-violent movement amid the rise of black power and the decline of black ghettos where civil rights have proved meaningless without economic empowerment. Add to that the local drama of a sanitation workers strike and provide as the main antagonist an assimilated Southern Jew, recently converted to Christianity who refuses to budge. It is a setup worthy of a Greek tragedy as hubris run amok brings down a great man, who had he not died, might have lived to see his greatness diminished by a country spiraling down into the death rattle of the 60s, soon to be decidedly conquered by Nixon’s silent majority.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
One part dystopian novel of a future America beset by debt and dismissive of anything not young, hot and sexy and one part the tale of two children of immigrants who never cease to be dominated by the hopes and dreams of others; Shteyngart’s novel was so much better than either half of that description might lead you to expect. Embedded in this story about a society dominated by surfaces, is a true love of tangible things that provide meaning: books (with actual and sometimes smelly paper), neighborhoods with decaying buildings and infirm inhabitants, foods found only in a childhood home. It is as much about the memory of the present currently slipping away from us (how we waste it!) as the disturbing future Shteyngart (an admitted sci-fi geek) relishes describing in macabre and absurd detail.

Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us by Steve Almond
If this book has a flaw in its premise, it is that a book by and for music fanatics is ultimately doomed to a lukewarm embrace because by presenting himself as THE authority in fandom, the author inevitably, alienates, or at best denigrates, the target audience. And there is an element of the know-it-all with a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes and theories in this book that can’t help but grate. But Almond is so freaking funny that any reader with the slightest amount of generosity will be taken in, relax  and comprehend that the author knows EXACTLY how insufferable he can sound. His deconstruction of Toto’s crap-classic “Africa” is worth the price of purchase alone. If you’re leery, the book comes with its own “bitchin’ soundtrack,” which you can listen to on his website.

Honorable Mentions
These are some other books I’ve read and enjoyed, but am too lazy to provide real write-ups. They’re all good reads:

The 188th Crybaby Brigade: A Skinny Jewish Kid from Chicago Fights Hezbollah–A Memoir by Joel Chasnoff
Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Muller
Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture by Thomas Chatterton Williams
A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction by Ruth Franklin
The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polakow-Suransky
The Magicians: A Novel by Lev Grossman
The Ask: A Novel by Sam Lipsyte

Things to do at BlogHer When You’re Dead (Weight)

I accompanied Melissa up to New York this past weekend. She was attending BlogHer. I wasn’t. I didn’t announce being there with her because a) I wasn’t attending Blogher, just along for the ride; and b) I don’t like broadcasting to the world via Twitter or Facebook or other methods on teh interwebs when we’re both out-of-town because I prefer to keep my home unburgled. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t fun to exist on the fringes of BlogHer—it was great getting a moment to see Jodi, Sarah, Cecily, Calliope and to even share a few meals with Lori (and meet Sheri). I was arm candy at a party in honor of Flotsam‘s book and got to meet Amalah and Jason—and have the quintessential DC-conversation in New York with him about how we commute to work; and then had an unexpectedly intense if brief conversation with Linda about the ways we rationalize why one person survives a trauma—be it illness or violence—while others do not. I didn’t spend any real time at the conference, but from the catalog of encounters above it is easy to see why the people who spend the whole three or four days there come out so overwhelmed.

What did I do? I got my culture on.

On Friday I went to visit a colleague at The Jewish Museum and checked out their David Goldblatt exhibit of South African photographs. They were extraordinary both for the beauty of their composition and for the way he communicated the everyday-ness of life under apartheid. I was particularly blown-away by this photo, which was part of the exhibit dedicated to Goldblatt’s study of Afrikaners and reflected the mix of reverence and revulsion he held for them. At first glance, this photo is a charming shot of three children out on a family picnic, with an older child cradling a toddler sucking on a bottle, while a third, middle-child lays sprawled on a blanket. Look with slightly more attention and you see that the eldest child is in-fact holding a (toy?!) gun to the toddler’s forehead and suddenly the prone figure of the middle-child looks more like the imitation of a fresh corpse than a serene napper. All children play with guns, but there is something so disturbing and ironic about this photograph, taken in 1965, at the height of apartheid regime, so reflective of its self-destructive arrogance and so telling of the sickness that had infected its culture.

The next day I met my sister and we spent the morning at MoMA visiting Matisse: Radical Invention 1913—1917. One of the most interesting parts of the exhibit was being able to view four sculptures, each entitled Back (I, II, III & IV) that Matisse created over the course of twenty years. Each version of Back began as a plaster cast of the previous version and then evolved to reflect the different ways of depicting the figure from soft curves to harsh angles, from Cubist sectioning of the figure to a smooth, representational, almost totemic creation that made me think of primitive fertility goddesses. The Art Institute of Chicago (where I hung out during BlogHer09) co-created the show and has a fascinating breakdown of the four Backs on their site. I was blown-away by how one can view over twenty years of artistic development through iterations of a single piece. As a writer, I suppose it would be like having Arthur Miller write Death of a Salesman four different times—except no one would want to hear that, whereas Matisse’s Backs are endlessly fascinating.

After lunch with my sister and brother I met my brother-in-law at the Ziegfield Theater to catch a matinee of Inception. A lot has been blogged about this film both pro and con. I have to say that I come out somewhere in the middle. I loved all the performances in the film and the effects were especially well-done, but the story was too-complicated by half and the cinematic quotes of other films, particularly 2001, were a bit unnecessary. The film seemed most comfortable with its nods towards James Bond films which made its “artier” references seemed contrived (which, lest we forget, true to the film, they were). I’ll give the final word on the movie to my always-hilarious brother-in-law who described the role played by Michael Caine as the part normally portrayed by Sydney Pollack (may he rest in peace).

Saturday I got up intending to walk over to the East Side and catch the subway up to the Met or the Guggenheim (I was undecided as to which). On my way to the 6 train I discovered much to my delight that Park Avenue had been closed from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park. Instead of city traffic there was a steady parade of bicyclists, runners and plain old walkers moving up and down the avenue, enjoying their temporary liberation of a motorized stronghold. So I started walking and before I knew it I was up by Central Park at 72nd Street and then just as suddenly up at the Met, where I didn’t feel like stopping, so I went the next few blocks and rewarded myself for the long walk with a knish from the street vendor parked out front of the Guggenheim.

The Guggenheim’s major exhibit right now is a show called Haunted which examines how contemporary photography uses different methods to “embod[y] a melancholic longing for an unrecuperable past.”  It is a pretty vast show that spirals upward with a broad range of artists — there’s plenty to connect with, along with some stuff that made me shrug my shoulders and say, “whatever.” One piece I found fascinating was a series done by Sarah Anne Johnson called Tree Plantings which both documents through photographs a program where Canadian young adults spend a year re-foresting Manitoba and also captures the ephemeral nature of this profound, identity-forming experience through a series of diorama-like photos that recreate scenes that feel like nostalgia even as they are happening. It reminded me of my post-collegiate year in Israel volunteering on Project Otzma, an experience that was pivotal to my becoming the person I am today, and which though it only occupied 10-months in-time, continues to hold a place of mythological proportions in my memory. The earnestness of her subjects and the raw youth and unbridled strength of their activities is juxtaposed by the naïve recreations of these moments in time that are so crucial to the participants and yet shot-through with nostalgia. You sense the physical isolation in the presence of an overwhelming landscape, the intimacy of the group as a response, and the community, friendships, love affairs and visceral embrace of simple existence that mark an unreplicable moment in time. It is an archetypal experience and yet rendered so personally as to avoid making its portrayal cloying or pat. I loved it.

Parachuting back into the Hilton I couldn’t help but find the similarities to what I imagine some experience from BlogHer (although with so many sponsorships and swag bags the parallels are limited). It is a brief, intense experience, that exposes some to a feeling of intense community and shared purpose and that all-too-soon expels its inhabitants back into a reality where those bonds and their intangible rewards are harder to come-by. Sure, on the one-hand it’s just another conference with everyone looking to play the angles for themselves the best they can. But looking-in from the outside, it is also possible to see the pivotal role this moment plays for some, and how the memories they carry forward will inhabit a central part in a self-made mythology.

So, no, I wasn’t really AT Blogher. But I’ve been there.

My Mother’s Chicken

In honor of the incredible Faye Moskowitz’s 80^th Birthday I was asked to contribute to a collection of essays and stories surrounding food and the only requirement was that you share a recipe. I believe the collected stories were presented to her last night at the annual Washington DCJCC Writers’ Retreat, so now I am safe to post this…

My mother writes to me:

So I have no recipe for chicken marsala – I just make it from memory

Pound the chicken cutlets until they are thin
Dip in seasoned flour and brown in olive oil
Place cutlets in a baking dish
Slice fresh mozzarella cheese and put a slice on each cutlet (this is your memory)
Slice mushrooms and lightly coat with flour mixture
Lightly sauté mushrooms – add more olive oil if needed
With mushrooms still in pan, add a cup of chicken broth, ½ cup white wine and mix until sauce thickens
Pour sauce over cutlets – cover lightly with foil and bake at 350 for ½ hour – longer for thicker cutlets
Remove foil for last few minutes

Photo by 2-Dog-Farm. Used under Creative Commons License.

This was my favorite dinner that my mother would make when I was growing up. I have not eaten it in many years – not since I began keeping kosher and forsook all that combined milk and meat. Intellectually, I have problems with the dictum that milk and meat should apply to poultry at all: the commandment tells us to “not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.” The logic goes that to do so – to literally boil the slaughtered flesh of a premature lamb in the substance it’s mother’s body excretes with the intent to nourish it –would be cruel. I can see their point.

But chickens produce no milk. They do produce eggs in abundance, but there is no similar prohibition against dipping butchered fowl in a yolky-albumen cocktail of its never-to-be-born offspring. Such are the vagaries of kashrut. There is, of course, a lengthy chain of Talmudic logic that gets you from cheeseburgers to chicken parm. I will not trouble you with it here. It is a logic I begrudgingly accept as an article of faith, in part because the logic is so extended and because I doubt faith supported by less serpentine logic would qualify as faith at-all.

It is for that dubious faith that my mother’s Chicken Marsala is now a dish consumed only in my memory where it comes out of the oven piping hot, bathed in brown gravy with stray whorls of mozzarella cheese floating about, tempting you to pluck them out at the expense of singed fingers and scalded tongue. Once cooled and served with a healthy portion of rice pilaf (via Rice-A-Roni), the dish is a perfect combination of the slight crunch of tender chicken, the milky sweetness of gooey cheese and the earthy, savory warmth of that gravy. Honestly, I could drink that gravy and many times I literally licked my plate. If I were a deer, that gravy would be my salt-lick, and the last thought that would go through my mind before the bullet sent it, along with my skull and six-point antlers to the wall of some survivalist supply store would be, “Yum.”

My mother claims that the detail of the cheese on top of the chicken is an invented memory, belonging only to me. Technically, she is correct that traditional Chicken Marsala is prepared without cheese. But if we were to get technical then I would be compelled to note that nowhere in my mother’s recipe does the ingredient Marsala wine appear. And come to think of it, I don’t remember any mushrooms either. That detail doesn’t jibe with a dish that was imprinted on my psyche at an age when I was most certainly not yet reconciled to the view of fungi as fit for human consumption. And looking at the recipe, there is no reason I couldn’t make this dish now and stay within the bounds of kashrut by simply withholding the (possibly fantastical) cheese.

And perhaps some day I will. But I am already bracing myself for the letdown when, inevitably, the alchemy of this childhood dish fails to reactivate. Even if the cheese is a pure fabrication, it stands in-place for the one-way passage that delivers us from childhood and the comforts thereof. I can no more be the little boy licking his plate clean than I can convince the Sanhedrin that dairy and poultry really is kosher. Would that I could do either.

Cross-posted to The Blog at 16th and Q

What You Find in the Basement

Tonight I went down into our basement looking for something. A moment to provide some context — we don’t have a big house and relatively little storage space. I generally don’t accumulate too many things of real sentimental value. To be fair, I would characterize the contents of our storage room as consisting of about 70% Mel’s crap, 25% crap for the kids that we don’t know what to do with (because, who knows, maybe someday we’ll need it again) and 5% my crap. Unfortunately, you have to penetrate the rock-hard shell of all the other crap and drill-down through layers and layers of boxes which envelope the 5% which is my crap in progressively thick strata of white-dwarf like density.

While I was at the very beginning of my excavations, I noticed a box off to my side that housed my crap and had somehow percolated to the surface — sort of like the way, every now and then they find a a fossil of some broken branch of the human family tree, millions of years old under some brush in an Ethiopian Rift Valley riverbed? I thought maybe this was my lucky day, and the box I needed would be found with relatively little effort. As I pried open the lid I saw a familiar, little spackled-red notebook standing on-end on-top of some old newspaper clippings, like it had been piling the papers up in an attempt to climb out of the box. I knew instantly what I was looking at.

A few years ago I was looking for this notebook for an essay I was writing about how we relate to a family history that includes some ancestors who participated in less-than-legal behaviors. In it I recalled a story my grandfather had told me the year before he died about some relation of his who ended-up married to the madame of a brothel in Alaska. I distinctly remember writing the story down in a notebook I carried around with me while we walked through Rittenhouse Square and I even remembered the kind of powdery red color of the notebook. But of course, back then I couldn’t find it, and lacking the details of the story, ended up writing a less whimsical piece about my father’s uncle who was killed for unpaid gambling debts.

Now it is miraculously returned to me, and in celebration of its arrival, I share with you, the story of Morris and Bruno Zirker. I do not vouch for its historical accuracy.

Morris Zirker was my grandfather’s maternal grandfather, which I guess makes him my great-great-grandfather. There are two mentions of Morris’ brother, Bruno Zirker in the online database of the Ellis Island Foundation: one in which he arrives on September 11, 1901 as a 23-year-old single man from Cologne, Germany; and a second in which he arrives from Bremen on August 3, 1905 as a 28-year-old married man with Rosie Zirker. Whether he came to America and then returned home, got married and then came back, or came to America, got married and went back to the old country just for giggles, I can only speculate. My grandfather claimed that Bruno “had a shirt factory in downtown New York that went under.” When that business went bust Bruno joined-up with Morris in Baltimore in 1905 (perhaps with his new bride in-tow) and purchased a “Nickelodeon.” Apparently that endeavor was also unsuccessful, and the day before they closed down the theater, “they let all the black kids in for free.” After that, the brothers stopped being business partners and went their separate ways. Morris died in 1929. Not long after, again the details are sketchy, Bruno gets in-touch with Morris’ widow Ida. He’s in New York with his wife Rosie and they are back from Alaska, where family legend has it, Rose was a madame in a whorehouse. My grandfather, who would have been twelve at the time, remembered that Bruno had tons of money and how unusual that really was in 1929. After some period of time, Bruno and Rose went back to Alaska, never to be heard from again.

I am not sure how literally I can take that story. I have a hunch that to my newly-widowed great-great-grandmother, (as well as my great-grandmother who at that point was separated from her luftmensch husband) Alaska could have easily meant “the Midwest” and “madame in a whorehouse” could have been her creative translation of “hotel clerk.”

Either way, I am glad to have this lost story, this tale from my grandfather whom I miss every time I look at my son’s hands, that look so much alike across generations.

Oh, what was I actually looking for in the basement? An old copy of FinalDraft scriptwriting software that I was going to see if I could load onto my Mac. Why? Because it had been awhile since I had done any writing for myself, and I thought maybe that would get me started.

Only Losers Think Everyone Should Win: Thoughts on Competition from a Graduate of the Billy Martin School of Sportsmanship

Melissa and I were watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics the other night when an ad came on the television, that said something to the effect of, “Right now, everyone’s tied.*” Melissa approved of the ad. I did not. And we began talking a little bit about how this was reflective of our different views on competition. She likes the idea that for a moment everyone’s tied. Nobody has lost. We’re all here for the warm-and-fuzzies of participating in the Olympics. While that emotion is certainly a nice one, it just doesn’t ring true to me and I suspect for any of the athletes participating in the Games. Every single one of them came to win — even the guy who is fated to come in twenty-fifth in a field of twenty-five believes somewhere in his gut that he could come out of nowhere and shock the world (his brain knows better). I think the concept of “everyone’s tied” only works as being representative of the hope the everyone, even the Moroccan skier, could be a winner.

But this raised the larger question of how to talk to the kids about competition. I was a very competitive kid. Like, waaaay too competitive when I really got into it. When I was 10 or 11 I got called-out for tagging up at third base before the ball had been caught and I flipped-out to such a degree that even Billy Martin would have been saying, “Whoa, calm down there kid, just a Little League game.” Even writing about it now, I get mad, because I had led-off the inning with a triple and I know, and I mean KNOW FOR A CERTAINTY, that I tagged up properly. That, plus the teenage umpire had a brother on the other team and I think that might have influenced the call. It’s been over twenty-five years and I’m still pissed.

Part of growing-up (and a hard part at-that) has been learning how to positively channel that competitive energy without going over the edge to the dark side. I’ve tried a couple of different approaches. One was to completely remove myself from those situations where I get too competitive. I don’t play video games, I don’t play racquetball or tennis because eventually I’ll get so into-it, that I’ll forget I was supposed to be having fun. Or, if I participate I have to consciously not care about winning — which usually means I lose, also no fun (plus the people you’re playing against can usually tell, and that’s no fun for them either). I’ve yet to really be able to reach what should be my goal, to try my hardest and be happy with that.

So, I admit that I am perhaps not the best role model for my kids when it comes to competition. I’d like to be as zen about it as Melissa seems to be, but I think that the desire to compete and win is an irrepressible evolutionary trait of men (and many women). Every time I think, “Maybe now I’m old enough and wise enough and mellow enough not to lose myself too much in a game” (particularly a physical one) I find that eventually, my temper and grumpy sportsmanship surfaces. Just recently I lost my temper playing Wii Fit Rhythm Parade. Let me repeat that: I lost my temper playing a game in which my Mii was dressed like a drum major marching to a beat. I thought I did pretty good by only lightly tossing the Wii remote when it was done, but apparently I didn’t toss it as lightly as I intended. Sorry ’bout that, Mel.

But here’s the thing — it wasn’t my parents who either through intent or neglect made me this way. In fact, they were usually pretty horrified by my behavior when I would go all Lou Pinella on some poor 15-year-old who only thought he was helping-out when he agreed to umpire his brother’s Little League game (NEAR-SIGHTED, CROSS-EYED MORON!). So, does anything I have to say really have any chance of influencing how my kids behave in the thick of competition? I hope so. I can already see some of myself in the Wolvog’s fits when he gets frustrated at a game.

And the Olympics is probably the best example of how to conduct oneself with intensity in-competition and grace in-defeat. So we’ll be watching with the kids and maybe they’ll pick-up on the fact that when you try your hardest and still lose, you can do so with pride and learn from your loss. But I also fear that they’ll pick-up on the truth that winning can be a drug, and when you’re longing for it, you are capable of behaving in ways that you won’t always be proud of. It’s a lesson I’m still trying to teach myself. Because I truly do believe that how you play really is more important than if you win or lose…

But I still think the concept of everyone being tied is kind of lame.

This is what he said.  Click here to find out what she said.

* If you know what ad I’m talking about please email me (notforprofitdad [at] gmail dot-com) because it is driving me crazy that I can’t remember and I’ve wasted way too much time on YouTube trying in vain to find it.

My Kids Love Me So Much They Hate Me a Little

I have great kids. They are smart and funny, kind and caring. They can immerse themselves in their own imaginary worlds for endless hours of creative play merging Lego’s, Playmobil, Hotwheels and My Little Pony. They can amaze Melissa with their intuition and ability to help out when she needs it most. The three of them develop a rhythm to their days and weeks that is somehow both orderly and zany.

And then I get home from work and they freak-out like ninjas on crystal meth.

We’re going through a phase. Mel tells me it is a phase. Or at least I hope it is a phase. Typical day:

I get up before the kids. Shave. Shower. Caffeinate. Usually around the time I am ready to leave for work they wake up. If they wake up early enough I give each of them a cuddle before I go. This is when the trouble begins. I come into the room and I’m like a piece of bloody meat thrown into a shark tank. The Wolvog and the Chickienob bolt out of bed and shoot towards me — whoever arrives first grabs my leg with one arm and invariably throws a “good-morning “elbow in their sibling’s face. Tears ensue. To prevent this I have taken to setting in advance who gets the first cuddle on alternating days — a decent solution, if only I could remember from day-to-day whose turn it is. This method works best if I enter the room forcefully and announce who gets the first cuddle before they can launch themselves on an intercept course. Fifty percent of the time it works. The other fifty percent one of the following occurs:

a) I screw up whose turn it is (they never forget) and the (rightly) aggrieved party throws a fit. When I backtrack to the award the proper recipient the cuddle, the other child feels (rightly) screwed and throws a fit.
b) I correctly announce whose turn it is, but one of the kids, probably still smarting from the time when I told them it was their cuddle and then backtracked and said it wasn’t, freaks out and throws a fit.
c) They accept the determined cuddling order, but hover over each other in such an obnoxious way that hostilities ensue. Elbows are thrown. Tears are shed.

If there is time before I leave, we move onto breakfast, but not before arguing over who gets to hold my hand with the wedding ring as we go downstairs. If there isn’t time before I leave, someone will throw a fit that they wanted Daddy to give them breakfast. I do or do not give them breakfast, hand out hugs and kisses, and attempt to escape from the Chickienob’s joking-but-not-so-much-a-joke grip as she robotically chants, “It’s the Daddy-trapper. Trapping Daddies.” Sometimes howling and beating of chests accompany me as I walk out the door.

And then I leave and according to Mel, everything goes back to normal. They stop throwing tantrums and get on with their day.

“It’s totally for your benefit,” she tells me.  They pull all sorts of crap with me that they don’t try with her. I wasn’t sure I truly believed it was as simple as that until this encounter the other day:

The kids have to eat a vegetable with their meal. Usually it’s carrots. This was a battle for a long time with the Wolvog, but he has grown to accept and even enjoy his carrots. Except when I give them to him. He insists that I cut them up into smaller slivers for him. When Mel is feeding the kids she doesn’t indulge the Wolvog in this game. He eats his carrots as they are given to him. I however, have been obliging him in this because, frankly I just want him to eat the damn carrots. But the other day, after several morning tantrums and a lunch that he drew-out endlessly and the carrots were still uneaten and he announced that he would not eat them unless I cut them for him, I called his bluff.

“You never have them cut when I’m not home,” I announced in my best J’Accuse!

He looked at me with round, innocent eyes full of love and confusion and said, “But you ARE home.”

And this is the plight of the dad: to be loved so much you’re a little bit hated for not being around enough. Was I this way with my dad? I don’t remember it that way. My dad was loving, but also a little remote and when he had to work, he had to work. I understood not to try and compete with that. I’m not sure what I’m doing that’s different but I have created a different expectation in my kids, and it is sometimes like a knife in my chest. It also gives me some sympathy for the stereotypically emotionally remote fathers of yore — why be an involved dad when you can only do it on a limited time frame?

But I don’t want to be emotionally remote. I love being in my kids’ lives and putting them first whenever that is an option. And every parent has to accept that they’ll have to act as a punching bag for their kids as they struggle to figure out the imperfect choices we have to make in life.

If only I could consistently remember whose turn it was for the first cuddle in the morning…

Super Bowl XLIV: Good Game, Crap Ads

Watching a Super Bowl in which you have no real rooting interest in either team brings out some interesting emotions nonetheless. I know most of the country was pulling for New Orleans, and for good reason. Americans like a good underdog, and while the Saints’ championship won’t restore the Ninth Ward, it does lift the spirit. So like everyone else, I was satisfied with their victory, and happier still that it was such a good game. The Saints were the better prepared team and they won the game — it was thrilling to see.

A couple of thoughts:

I think the gratuitous hating on Peyton Manning is bullshit. All the guy does is prepare extremely well, play by the rules and enjoy an extraordinary level of success. He’s the straight A student we all hated in high school because they were just too perfect. But hey, I’m not in high school anymore and when a guy is very good at his job I have no problem acknowledging that. I don’t need to see him cry when he loses. Those calling to “Make Peyton Cry” need to try going to work tomorrow with 50,000 people shouting in their ear for them to cry and see how well they do. There are enough creeps in the NFL and professional sports that we don’t need to waste our energy wishing ill on someone because his competence lends him an air of arrogance on the field. As far as I know, he doesn’t beat up women, hasn’t organized any pit bull fighting rings and doesn’t shoot his gun off in the middle of a nightclub just ’cause he thinks he’s that big a man. The Saints’ victory is a good enough story without the schadenfreude of Manning’s fuck-ups towards the end of the game.

Drew Brees is a class act. You know what my favorite moment of the game was? It was after the game when Brees was holding his little kid. Great photo op. But you know what made it better? His son had headphones on to block out the noise. I’ve got a son who freaks out at loud noises too. I don’t know if it was Mama Brees or Papa Brees who thought to do that, but it was a genius solution. More than that it showed that they weren’t using the kid as a prop, but had put some thought into what would make him most comfortable.  From one dad to another, I say “well done.”

The commercials were the worst they have ever been. When did portraying men as castrated wusses become a way to move product? What’s next? Some guy just whips it out on camera and says “If you don’t buy our portable tv it means your shlong is probably smaller than mine!” Granted that’s the subtext of just about every commercial, but at least there’s usually some art involved. And by the way, if Flo TV is so manly, why did they name it after a woman’s menses? And really, two dudes kissing (badly) was somehow over the line in the context of the rest of this crap?

No more dino rock at halftime. Seriously, The Who performance was painful and embarrassing to watch. They were such a great band — past tense being the operative modifier in that statement. Now they are a shadow of their former selves. Having them up there was the musical equivalent of having to watch Joe Namath in 2010, run a 40-yard dash. I say bring back Up With People before you tarnish the legacy of any other classic rock band.

I don’t give a shit about Tim Tebow’s mom. Seriously. Has there ever been so much made out of so little? Focus on the Family managed to make the pro-choice crowd sound like a bunch of whiners for an ad that you wouldn’t have understood unless you were fully read-up on the issue. Next time Focus buys ad time on the Super Bowl, NARAL should pony-up the dough and put their own ad up. UPDATED: Mel told me that the Tebow ad that ran was not the Tebow ad that was supposed to run, so my reaction of “what’s the big deal” is a little off-base. Still, I believe in the market place of free ideas, and I think that I’d rather have articulate responses to political ads on the Super Bowl than censored ads. I know there have been a lot of posts dedicated to this topic so I won’t say much more than that…and I still don’t give a shit about Tim Tebow’s mom.

But hey, at least it was a great game.