Foreign minister, an office that doesn't really mean much

But Beinart never mentions that Lieberman’s party won only 12.5 percent of the vote.

Right-o! Only 12.5 percent. Because that's . . . wait a minute! That's a significant proportion of the population! Voting for a racist demagogue! (Sorry! A "populist.")

More (if you care) here. From the always entertaining Commentary.

The government of Israel mourns Sutzkever...not so much

Jeremy Dauber wrote a lovely piece for TNR (the print version only, it seems) about Sutzkever, though he skipped lightly over the problematic relationship between Israel and Yiddish:

To be the Yiddish poet of the State of Israel, winner of the Israel Prize and institutionally supported by no less than the Histadrut and Zalman Shazar, is no mean accomplishment, at a time when a commitment to “the negation of the Diaspora” and the negation of its mother tongue were standard procedure.

Nice use of the past tense, that ("were standard procedure," indeed). One would be more sanguine about the title "Yiddish poet of the State of Israel" if the State of Israel - or even the city of Tel Aviv - had bothered to send someone to the poet's funeral.

Future reasons for interrogation by the crack Western Wall egal-women arrest team

1. Tzitzit while ovarian.
2. Female etrogging.
3. Giving tzedakah while under the influence of X chromosomes.
4. Studying Torah . . . while female!
5. The tallit was too cute.
6. Singing. Singing is just bad. All singers should be arrested a priori.
7. Mitzvot are disruptive in general to the status quo. All the more so when done by women.
8. Arrest them all! Let Ovadiah Yosef sort them out.

Nofrat Frenkel in and out of the spotlight

I appreciate the piece by Nofrat Frenkel in the Forward, but it is hard to square with what was said in her name on a Conservative e-mail list I subscribe to:

Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 10:47 AM
[Shefa] Women of the Wall (WoW)

On Shabbat I spoke with Nofrat Frenkel and she asked to clarify:

1) She was not arrested. She was detained for questioning.

2) She did nothing that is not regularly done at WoW service. She has no idea what caused the police to suddenly intervene.

3) She would like the issue to drop out of the spotlight, so the police close the case without a trial and her (future) license to practice medicine is not jeopardized.

A good week to all,

I suppose it wouldn't be the first time that someone in the spotlight, for reasons not of her own choosing, is unsure whether she wants to be there.

Avraham Burg: chauffeured hypocrite
And partial prophet.

Yes, Burg is a paragon of self-righteousness ("so attached to Zionism," wrote a commentator in Haaretz, "that he drove around with a chauffeur paid for by the Sochnut years after he left its employ"), but he makes many thought-provoking points about problems afflicting Zionism. (English here.)

NB: I don't at all agree with his misguided political analogies, and I don't think Israeli society is basically violent. But I do think Zionism suffers from weaknesses, and few other Zionists (or ex-Zionists) besides Burg are pointing these out with such uncompromising clarity.

Defining the WikiJew
The ethnoreligious identity that anyone can edit: an article of mine in this week's Forward.

Who is a Jew? Let’s see what Wikipedia says about it. Or, rather, what the Wikipedias say, since the online encyclopedia is available in more than 100 languages. The answer to our question in English neither offends nor omits anyone: “[A] follower of Judaism, or [a member] of the Jewish people, an ethno-religious group descended from the ancient Israelites and from converts who joined their religion. The term also includes those who have undergone an officially recognized formal process of conversion to Judaism.” The Hebrew version (“Jews are an ethnic group of Semitic origin, in which membership is based on the Jewish religion”) is clearer, with a refreshing Israeli directness, but one will look in vain for the word “convert” — it isn’t mentioned in the article. And in Yiddish: “A Jew is a person who belongs to the Jewish people.” QED.

The English Wikipedia includes more than a million articles, and the Hebrew version about 45,000. Yiddish Wikipedia includes a little more than 2,000 articles, which makes it bigger than its counterpart in Tajik but smaller than Limburgian. So comparisons between these versions are not entirely fair.

Even so, the differences are illuminating. The English Wikipedia is a collaboration of thousands. Entries on non-trivial topics generally converge to a quasi-official style, with any unconventional stand revised out of existence. For its part, Hebrew is a Jewish language — but as far as Wikipedia (and modern Israel) are concerned, it is a national language, unceremoniously banishing to the sidelines the cozy bits of culture that Diaspora Jews hold dear. “Kugel” has no entry of its own, but languishes in the general entry “Pastries,” rubbing elbows awkwardly with “lasagna” and “pie.” Click on “Period of the Exile” in the Hebrew article “Jewish People” and you will be urged to (in Wikipedia-speak) “Edit ‘Period of the Exile.’” In other words, there’s nothing there.

And the Yiddish version? It’s Wikipedia moonshine, brewed by a bunch of bloggers, mostly Hasidic, with too much time on their hands. (I’m among the contributors.) Its entertainment-to-reliability ratio is far and away the highest of the three.

But there’s more to this comparison than clichéd Israel-Diaspora differences. The readers of each language have the benefit of a view denied to the others, so one can triangulate a version that benefits from all. What is Israel, for example? Says the English version, with overtones of propaganda: “The Middle East’s only parliamentary democracy and the nation state of the indigenous people of Eretz Yisrael.” Hebrew: “[A] parliamentary democracy found in the Middle East… defined as a Jewish, democratic state.” Yiddish Wikipedia reminds you first — before you’re even told about the State of Israel — that Yisroel can refer to a Jew, someone not of priestly lineage or a member of the Ten Tribes of the Kingdom of Israel. There is also a separate Yiddish article on what it means for there to be a Jewish state (a subject, as far as this reader can tell, undiscussed in the other Wikipedias).

Or, to take another example of a topic that gets different treatment, what is secular Jewish culture? The indulgent English-language article on the topic is apparently meant to catalog every movie, symphony, novel and TV show that Jews have had a hand in, while “Judaism as Culture” (in Hebrew) is a bare-bones — but useful — comparison of three philosophies of Jewish cultural peoplehood.

Other subjects, though not intrinsically Jewish, might be considered Jewish by association. “Homosexuality in Judaism” (English) is by and large given over to the positions of the three major Jewish movements, with obligatory hat-tips to Orthodox struggles with science, Conservative back-and-forthing and Reform cutting of the Gordian knot. Let us thank Herzl that there is no such article in the Hebrew Wikipedia. Homosexuality in (Israeli) Judaism is, in great measure, what the Jewish state makes of homosexuality. The items on the agenda in the United States are also matters of discussion in Israel. (The Yiddish reader looking up “Homosexuality” in her Wikipedia must first click through a notice that the content is only suitable for adults, before being told flatly that homosexuality “is not a Jewish concept.”)

The reader who uses these Wikipedias for Jewish research realizes that each of them has its particular virtues. The English Wikipedia is broad and detailed. The Hebrew version is relatively solid as a source for basic information on Israeli culture, literary and otherwise. The Yiddish version could be called Charedipedia. If you want the latest information on the Satmar succession struggle, the life history of the rabbis Teitelbaum, or diagrams of Hasidic dynasties, look no further. (Its treatment of religious topics, though fundamentalist, is also informative.)

But, as with any encyclopedia, Wikipedia (for Jewish topics as for anything else) should be used with care: There are large parts of the Jewish world that are ignored, glossed over or misunderstood in its pages. Hebrew Wikipedia knows nothing about the Jews of North America; until very recently, English Wikipedia was ignorant about Yiddish literature (as the Hebrew version still is); and Yiddish Wikipedia says little about nonreligious Jewish creativity, or intellectual endeavor in general. In the final analysis, the response to the user coming upon these deficiencies should not be a list of complaints, but a paraphrase of Hillel’s famous words to the convert: “Go and edit.”

Zackary Sholem Berger is a frequent contributor to the Forward. Wikipedia can change fast; some content referred to here might have changed since the article was written.

Annals of theocracy: special Jerusalem riots edition
Condemnation please?

It is probably too much to ask that Stateside religious Zionists (and I mean the Orthodox variety) distance themselves from this sort of loutish talk:

Israel’s chief rabbinate issued a statement Monday [against a planned gay pride parade in Jerusalem] calling Israel’s homosexuals the “lowest of people."

But it would be nice.

Secular conversion to JudaismOr Israelism?

The Head Heeb discusses the matter.

Jewish geopolitics
Not paradoxical anymore.

I can't think of anything to blog. We're leaving for China next Monday, and I'm occupied with traveler's questions (will my bottles of Passover wine explode in my baggage? will my two-year-old daughter have to translate for us? will I learn to speak only a smattering of Mandarin, in a thick Fujianese accent?).

So I'll throw an article your way by someone who davens and teaches at my shul. I think it's very reminiscent of Michael Walzer's political philosophy.

Israel again [in the modern era] faces political decisions, such as to how to deal with other peoples and/or nations that critically affect their national security. Consider, for example, the following question: Is Israel obligated to construct the security fence, and/or otherwise to pursue policies, so as not to foreclose the possibility that a viable (and peaceful) Palestinian state can emerge in the West Bank? And, whether or not international law, or general moral principles applicable to Israel as a state, would so require, is there some, or any, particularly Jewish value that bears on this
question?

[. . .]

[. . .] Israel’s claim is not that it itself is a just, liberal state. Rather, Israel’s claim is that a state fostering Judaism (but still protecting the basic rights of all citizens) islegitimate within the context of a pluralistic international order that includes both other states dedicated to pure neutral-liberalism, and other states dedicated to “decent” particularist visions, e.g., to Islam, or to Christianity.

Such a pluralistic vision of the place and role of Israel vis-à-vis other nations has, I submit, very deep Biblical roots. Thus the vision of the end of days at the conclusion of Isaiah Chapter 19 is not a vision of an end to all nationalisms, nor a vision of Israel dominating other nations, but rather a picture of Israel co-existing with Egypt and Assyria:

In that day, Israel shall be a third partner with Egypt and Assyria as a blessing on earth. For the Lord of Hosts will bless them, saying, “Blessed be my people Egypt, my handiwork Assyria, and my very own Israel.”

Ashkenaz in Israel
An ideolo-blog.

Assaf Galay, the charismatic journalist and Yiddishist behind the "Hatenuah lezehut ashkenazit" (The Movement for Ashkenazic Identity), has a Hebrew blog that's well worth reading, though I can't say I agree with its post-Zionist slant.

Culture's bustin' out all over

If you're a student of Arabic, you know how few and far between Arabic blogs are. A free Arabic blog host might be an efficient way to spread democracy (what strength democracy, and of what kind, I dunno. But it can't hurt, I guess!).

Meanwhile, in Israel, Ashkenazic culture, including Yiddish, have been generally denigrated and ignored ever since independence. It doesn't help that the elite are of Ashkenazic heritage. This puts Ashkenazic culture in a double bind: it's relegated to an Nth-class status by Ashkenazim themselves -- remind me to tell you sometime how ill-run and money-wasting the "Yiddish Culture Authority" of Israel is, or how much little spoken Yiddish it promotes -- while becoming associated in the minds of the underclasses with the despised elite. The worst of both worlds.

There's a movement for Ashkenazic identity trying to point out the idiocy of this denigration (known in Hebrew as shlilat-hagolut, which one might translate as Diaspora denial). While I don't support this group's every ideological tendency (they're too "post-Zionist" for my taste), nor do I share their quasi-romantic and -mythological view of Eastern European Jewish culture, I think Ashkenazic culture and Yiddish are necessary elements of an Israel that's representative of a wide spectrum of Judaisms.

Israel and Yiddish

Robert Rosenberg's review in the Forward of Aharon Megged's Foiglman, a novel about a Yiddish poet in Israel, is not bad. The last paragraph, though, cries out for a bit of the old context sauce.

"A poet's homeland is his language," laments Foiglman toward the end of this brief, complex book. But this is too pat. A poet has no homeland: Language is but a small, wooden boat carrying one across the water. Yiddish was shattered beneath the perfect storm of Hitler, Nazism and hatred of the Jews — not by the resurgence of Hebrew, though that rebirth was accompanied by all the contradictory love and hatred of two siblings vying for their parents' love. The poignancy of "Foiglman" lies in its portrait of a castaway hanging onto the bow of that shattered vessel by the skin of his teeth, and the remorse it evokes in us, the onlookers, as we peer helplessly from the safety of shore.

Poignancy? Sure, I can go for that. Unfortunately, though, the truth about the shattering of Yiddish is even more depressing. Though Hitler's blow was determinative ("perfect storm," connoting an act of God, is certainly a strange description of the Final Solution), the post-war decline of Yiddish was aided by Yiddish-hating Jews themselves. None other than the government of Israel participated in the elimination of Yiddish culture. I'm not talking about the assimilation common to all transcultural ("melting pot") nationalisms, but about shuttering of publishing houses, laws designed to discourage Yiddish publishing, and silent acquiescence in gangs' destruction of Yiddish newspaper kiosks.

So the real story is not poignant, but tragic. Poignant is leaving your lover at the train station in Paris. Tragic is the mistakes made by your own people. Tragic is Jewish.

Agnon the Yiddish novelist

It turns out, to no one's surprise, that I'm a book schnook. For some reason, I already feel guilty about not posting a cogent, witty, wide-ranging (i.e. Baraita-style) review of Shmuel Yosef Agnon's A Simple Story. I do have the perfect excuse: I haven't read the book yet, and my copy is still winging its way to me over the great seas separating me and the Holy Land.

I have read some Agnon, though not enough. Thus my first installment, in which I will reveal to you the secret to getting the most entertainment out of your Agnon dollar, providing you can read him in Hebrew.

What's that, you ask? Read him in the Ashkenazic accent of your childhood, or, if you didn't have that sort of childhood, learn the accent (like I did) or find someone whose Ashkenazis you can imitate. The fact is that Agnon is the best prose writer in Yiddish of the twentieth century, so you might as well read him with an appropriate inflection.

Agnon wrote in Hebrew! True. But the English word "Hebrew" generalizes a great number of different sorts of language available in traditional Jewish life both yesterday and (perhaps even more so) today. In the big grab-bag "Hebrew," I mean, are found all of the following: Biblical Hebrew (in all its varying strata and literary registers), Rabbinic Hebrew, both early and late, Medieval Hebrew, modern literary and spoken Hebrew (starting around the 19th century), and, most recently, modern Hebrew as spoken in Israel, called "Ivrit."

When I separate "modern Hebrew" from "Ivrit, " I'm trying to make clear that it was possible to write Hebrew, and even to some extent to speak Hebrew, before the founding of the state of Israel. This Hebrew, though a modern language, sounded quite a bit different than modern Israeli Hebrew sounds to us. In the Eastern-European, Yiddish-speaking context, and to a lesser extent today as well, such allusive, literary Hebrew is called loshn-koydesh, or, more academically, Ashkenazic Hebrew. I would argue (though I don't have the time or the expertise to do so here) that Agnon wrote in this very language. (I don't know how Agnon spoke Hebrew in the pre-war-milieu [1935] in which A Simple Story was written.) If one maintains that Yiddish and Ashkenazic Hebrew form a continuous cultural-linguistic system, then it's not too much of a stretch to say that Agnon wrote in Yiddish. In fact, some linguists hold that modern Israeli Hebrew is a "relexification" of modern Yiddish. I'm still not clear what that word means, but I think it refers to some sort of one-to-one replacement of Yiddish words by Hebrew equivalents. I'm no linguist, so I can't judge whether this is true. However, it is the case that a reader of Yiddish -- who can also read Hebrew -- feels completely at home in Agnon. It is a through-the-looking-glass world in which the Yiddish cultural idiom is rendered somehow more monumental and imposing through its Ashkenazic Hebrew transcription.

Ashkenazic Hebrew is a complicated language, and an entire book on the topic, edited by Lewis Glinert, appeared some years ago. Particuarly fascinating is Dovid Katz's article on penultimate stress, one of the markers of Ashkenazic Hebrew -- when, where, and in what contexts it appears. (For example, the first verse of the Bible starts, in Israeli pronunciation, bereyshit bara elohim. The Ashkenazic Hebrew pronunciation might be berey'shis bo'ro eloy'him, or bereyshis' boro' eloyhim', depending on the context; the latter more formal, in communal Torah reading, the former more colloquial, for example, in the context of Torah study.)

These days, Ashkenazic Hebrew is no healthier than Yiddish, sad to say. If you look carefully, though, you can still see traces. There are people who still write loshn-koydesh poetry (including you host), of higher or lower quality. Many of this falls under the category of payet, or religious poetry. Or even closer to the ken of most modern Jews: listen to the way Israelis (and everyone else) sing "Hatikvah": "...Ne'fesh yehu'di homi'ah. Ulefa'atei miz'rach kadi'mah, ay'in letsi'on tsofi'ah." That's right, it's sung with Ashkenazi stresses, though with an Israeli, "Ashkesfard" pronunciation.

So if you can stumble through a page of Agnon in Hebrew, try reading it in Ashkenazis. You might be glad you did!

(Another example of a great writer in modern Ashkenazic Hebrew: Bialik. Even more interesting is the fact that a number of his later poems were specifically written to be read in "Sefardic" (actually "Ashkesfardic") pronunciation. Yet another category of writers, who I hope to talk about at some later date, are those who write in both Yiddish and modern Israeli Hebrew. Perhaps this category's greatest, though hopefully not its last practitioner, was Yosl Birshtein, who died a month ago.)

Postcript: Kobi Haron, who has relatives from the Second Aliyah (and more knowledge about Agnon than I do) informs me that very few Hebrew-speakers in Israel, even in the early days of the twentieth century, actually spoke Hebrew with an Ashkenazi accent. Any other relevant reminiscences out there?

Enentation comments

Tony Judt is not entirely wrong

I am reluctant to write about matters Israeli-Palestinian: first, because of all the incoherent shouting on the right and left; and second, because the mammoth Middle East overshadows other, more subtle questions which are perhaps more important to leading a considered Jewish existence. Occasionally, however, an opportunity for staking out the middle ground presents itself. Thanks to Kesher Talk for providing a link to the relevant material.

Tony Judt's original essay in The New York Review of Books received much hostile press, and I can't say that it was undeserved. In defending himself against his critics, he repeats his main claim, which (as I discuss below) I find wholly false. On the way there, however, he makes some worthwhile points which are not commonly addressed by those who care about Israel. It is a pity that those points can only be made from those on Judt's end of the spectrum.

The core of his argument (as Judt himself states) is this: "This, then, was the core of my argument: it is not the state that is anachronistic (pace Walzer's misreading of me), but the Zionist version of it." I suspect that Walzer's "misreading" (actually quite a plausible reading) was an attempt to find the least objectionable construction of Judt's argument. For if we are meant to take Judt at the face value of this, his newest claim, there is something about the Zionist state which is "anachronistic" enough (read: "immoral enough," for the "anachronistic" state is one which does not conform to modern notions of political right) for the world to be rid of it.

It is theoretically possible (though, of course, quite improbable, and one pales at the thought) that a Zionist state, by the very immorality of its foundations, could cede the right to exist -- just like there have been actual states in history which should not have existed. Judt errs, however, in thinking that Israel, in its present incarnation, is immorally constructed. The important error in his argument is this. Israel is indeed flawed, and deeply so, but not in a more fundamental way than all nation-states are flawed. Michael Walzer, whose thought I am happily biased towards, makes this point in his response to Judt.

Let me explain further. According to Judt, while the European nation-states do indeed discriminate among applicants for citizenship, they do not discriminate in a fundamental way among all those who become citizens. It is only Israel, he writes, which discriminates between citizens based on their ethnic origin.

I don't think this is true. The alarm bells start ringing when one reads his description of the nature of Frenchness, a rush-job at the speed of special pleading ("But if someone is a citizen of, e.g., France, he or she is French and that is all there is to the matter, at least as far as the law is concerned."). As Daniel Boyarin pointed out in a talk of his I attended today, the French view of different minority religious communities is precisely that: a French view, strongly conditioned by Christian ideas of religion as distinct from ethnicity and nationality. For example, in its recent outlawing of "religious symbols" in schools, the French government made a serious category mistake, assuming that yarmulkes and head-scarves for Jews and Muslims serve just the same function as crosses for Christians: religious symbols. This Christian approach in the name of the French government (which does not even realize that its policy is conditioned in such a way) puts the lie to Judt's naive assumptions of a "neutral" Frenchness. Indeed, as Michael Walzer points out, it is only the United States which attempts to create in its political-cultural sphere a "neutral space," not beholden to any particular founding religion.

This is only one, comparatively minor example. The point is that many of the European states do indeed discriminate among their citizens -- and that Israel can do so in the same way, without jeopardizing the fundamental moral nature of its society.

Israel discriminates between Jews and non-Jews in two different ways. The first way, and most troubling, is discrimination not in keeping with any fundamental political values appropriate to a democratic state -- I mean those stated quite clearly in Israel's declaration of independence, according to which citizens are granted rights without regard to race or religion. It is in this category that Judt makes necessary points, for there exist those forces in Israeli society that would discriminate against Arabs in a fundamentally unjust way -- e.g., by denying them the right to live where they choose, through unjust search and seizure, through unjustifiable military persecution of innocents.

Judt is wrong in his assumption that such unjust discrimination is at the very foundation of Israeli society. The vital political culture that includes energetic defenders of and advocates for Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, and the political institutions which guarantee Arab participation, make it clear that such unjustice is the system's imperfection rather than its goal. Judt is right, however, to point them out. As we see in the unreflective Israel cheerleading of Abraham Foxman (who also responds to Judt), there are far too many leaders of the Jewish community who cannot bring themselves even to admit that Israel's political culture is capable of injustice!

There is another way in which Israel discriminates. "Discrimination" is perhaps not the right word for this activity, the characteristic of most nation states and one that Judt wishes to deny. France gives special treatment to French Catholics -- not in granting them a higher class of political privilege, but in granting them the status of majority. Those French who are defined this way, in terms of their culture and nationality (and who can deny that this is what comes to mind when thinkng of "the French"?), are differently treated by the political culture than French Muslims. Similar observations can be made about other European nation-states, including Poland, Spain, Italy.

Israel is founded on democratic, majority-Jewish principles, a nation-state in the tradition of other nation-states. It is also imperfect and capable of injustice. It is disheartening that so few public intellectuals seem able to accomodate these multiple truths.