Hurrah for completely anarchical minds!
The Khazars at mealtime.

A description by the "cranky 10th-century Armenian historian Movses Dasxuranci, from History of the Caucasian Albanians":

bestial, gold-loving tribes of hairy men.... an ugly, insolent, broadfaced, eyelashless mob in the shape of women with flowing hair....demented in their satanically deluded tree-worshipping errors in accordance with their northern dull-witted stupidity, addicted to their fictitious and deceptive religion....There we observed them on their couches like rows of heavily laden camels. Each had a bowl full of the flesh of unclean animals, and dishes containing salt water into which they dipped their food, and brimming silver cups and beakers chased with gold which had been taken from the plunder from Tiflis. They also had drinking horns and gourd-shaped utensils from which they lapped their broth and similar greasy, congealed, unwashed abominations. Two or three of them to one cup, they greedily and bestially poured neat wine into their insatiable bellies which had the appearance of bloated goatskins..... Possessing completely anarchical minds, they stumble into every sort of error, beating drums and whistling over corpses, inflicting bloody sabre and dagger cuts on their cheeks and limbs, and engaging naked in sword fights – oh hellish sight! – at the graves, man against man and troop against troop, all stripped for battle..... They danced their dances with obscene acts, sunk in benighted filth and deprived of the sight of the light of the creator.... They were also incontinent sexually, and in accordance with their heathen, barbarous customs they married their father's wife, shared one wife between two brothers, and married several women.

(Funny, I don't remember Yehuda HaLevi including a scene like that.)

From Idiocentrism, a/k/a John J. Emerson, formerly known as the ubiquitous commenter Zizka. Via Language Hat.

An EPYC web site

The next time someone wants to learn about Eastern European Jews, their lives, towns, and the language and culture they created, I'm sending them here.

(This doesn't mean that the site is error free. For example, one page about "internal bilingualism" -- the complementary use of Hebrew and Yiddish in traditional Ashkenazic culture -- displays the covers of two translations of Tolstoy's "War and Peace," one in Hebrew, Milkhama ve-shalom, and one in Yiddish, Milkhome un sholem. The two images are mixed up, though. Something else puzzled me: at the top of the site, the Hebrew title reads Tokhnit khinukhit lelimud tarbut yehudit. Why not tarbut yidish or yidit?)

Thanksgiving leftovers
and Denver relations.

There were traditional family greetings: the opening gambit of my lawyer-philosopher uncle that he had (yet again) found a great proof for the non-existence of God (nice try!); discussions of poetry with the other uncle who was there (who also, in jovial greeting, pumped my baby's hand many times, pump-handle style, to her great amusement); my daughter's discovery of the fun that can be had with a pair of grandparents.

There were traditional activities done in non-traditional ways: a Shabbos spent at two shuls (Friday night at this shul, at whose previous incarnation my Mom and Dad were married -- it labels itself as traditional but seems to be moving ever-rightward, or, with the mechitzah height, upward; Shabbos morning with the Reconstructionists, the shul my grandmother attends).

There were activities afforded by opportunity: two Scotch-on-the-rocks at my aunt and uncle's place, part of my graduate-student mental-health regimen. (I suppose the only true guarantor of graduate-student mental health would be a fifth of Scotch, neat. But I digress.)

There was the brined turkey. I had read about brined turkeys but never yet consumed one, which I did in Denver with gusto, brio, and relish. (Not to mention panache and afan. And ganas.)

On the airplane from snowy Denver to chilly New York City, I gnawed at the turkey leftovers in satisfied fashion while our daughter slept. The woman on my left murmured, "Your baby's so good!" That was before Blanca woke up and fussed for the last forty-five minutes of the flight. Repeat after me, ma'am: Keyn eynore. Keyn eynore.

A Vigil to Protest the Darfur Genocide

Candlelight Vigil to Protest the Ongoing Genocide in Darfur

Monday, December 13, 6:30pm

Washington Square Park, NYC (Fountain Plaza)

This multi-denominational event is co-sponsored by the students of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, NYU Law Students for Human Rights, the Darfur Rehabilitation Project and the American Anti-Slavery Group's New York Chapter.

Let's talk about . . . pipelines, baby

Let's talk about you and me
Let's talk about all the good things
And the bad things
That can be
Let's talk about pipelines.
Let's talk about pipelines!

Those interested in the continuing saga of The Thirsty Chasidim Of South Orange County should hie their way to an on-line chat (now concluded, but read the transcript) at the Times Herald Record, where Chris McKenna, their crack reporter on the story and all things Satmar, fielded questions from readers. It turns out that the good people of Kiryas Joel do pay taxes after all! (And no, they don't have horns.)

Yuschenko and the Jews

Who did the Ukrainian Jews vote for?

Beats me. This nicely detailed JPost article gives context and background, but the facts don't lead to any clear conclusion. (1) A large chunk of people won't say who they voted for. (2) The young Jews, those tending more to Western Europe, might plausibly have voted for Yuschenko. (3) The older Jews, those preferring stability, might plausibly have voted for Yanukovitch. In conclusion, who knows? The most interesting point in the article is buried in the last paragraph: "Only 3,106 out of nearly 40,000 eligible Ukrainian voters in Israel cast their ballots." First of all, the turnout's low, but that's not what caught my eye. Forty thousand? That's all the Ukrainian Jews there are in Israel? There have to be more than that, don't there, if a million-plus Jews have immigrated to Israel in the past ten to fifteen years? I guess they don't care enough to register to vote in Ukraine.

Question two: is Yuschenko an anti-Semite? Beats me. The JPost article mentions the worry of some Ukrainian Jews that in the past he "has allied himself with politicians openly expressing anti-Semitic views." In another incident mentioned in the press, a leading Ukrainian newspaper, Silski Visti, published the slanderous, anti-Semitic claim that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews joined the S.S. during the German invasion of 1941. Yuschenko joined with other Ukrainian politicians opposing government efforts to shut down the newspaper.

On the other hand, Yuschenko visited a Ukrainian Jewish group before the election and promised to combat anti-Semitism. And who's to say how many anti-Semites his opponent, Yanukovitch, has associated with?

Another troublesome aspect of contemporary Ukrainian anti-Semitism is its anti-Israel roots (shared by a number of liberal politicians in Western Europe). From the article linked to above about the anti-Semitic Ukrainian newspaper:

The wave of anti-Semitic agitation in the Ukrainian media began in 2002 with the publication of defamatory articles in the magazine Personnel, published by the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management, a university-like institution offering leadership training to 35,000 students on more than 10 campuses across the country.

Although the school's board includes such respected figures as former President Leonid Kravchuk and former Foreign Minister Boris Tarasyuk, its academic leaders have taken a strongly anti-Western political line, fostering close ties with Russia and the Islamic world. The academy's president, Georgi Schokin, has addressed three conferences in Saudi Arabia, and the American anti-Semite David Duke has appeared at three of the school's conferences in Kiev.

The Interregional Academy, which financed Silski Visti's publication of Yaremenko's article as a paid advertisement, has published his books and aggressively promoted his writings.

What this has to do with any anti-Semitism from Yuschenko himself -- again, I don't know.

I asked the opinion of a writer from the Forverts, who pointed out that opposing Jewish oligarchs (who have supported Kuchma and Yanukovitch) is not necessarily the same thing as anti-Semitism.

Update: Jonathan Edelstein, over at The Head Heeb, has followed up on this issue with his customary thoroughness. The accusations of anti-Semitism on Yuschenko's part seem more and more to be unfounded. Also worth reading is the editorial in this week's Forward, reminding us why the Ukraine is important to Jewish history yet not often remembered by name, and why Ukrainian nationalism is not something that Jews should uncritically embrace.

Consequential imagination

Nor are rigour and precision enemies of the imagination, any more than they are in mathematics. Rather, they increase the demands on the imagination, not least by forcing one to imagine examples with exactly the right structure to challenge a generalization; cloudiness will not suffice. They make imagination consequential in a way in which it is not in their absence.

Some words meant to apply to philosophy, but equally applicable to poetry, epidemiology, or any endeavor of the mind. From the essay "Must Do Better," by the philosopher Timothy Williamson. (Via the euphoniously named Glaikit Feartie.)

A Tour of Jewtown
Backsliding from my blog silence only after a few days. But I couldn't resist...

Nelly Rosario on hip-hop Hasids and other Willie phenomena.

Me Against The Thesis: Round Zillion

I am not allowing myself any non-dissertational thoughts (well, davening. And eating. And the more-or-less daily more-or-less blat of Gemore. And poetry. But not blogging!) until Thanksgiving.

So: wish me luck!

*Your Host's head disappears and the manhole shuts down tight.*

More driving on Shabbat

Last year, I wrote about the responsum of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (the law committee of the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly) which permitted driving to the synagogue on Shabbat as a method to combat the ignorance and non-observance then prevalent (in the opinion of the authors) among American Jews. My opinion, then as now, is that the teshuvah was halachically well-justified and understandable at the time, but events have not borne out the authors' approach.

A few months ago, Avi of Am Echad, in a comment which I just saw now, mentioned that he had scanned in and posted on his Web site the contents of the Spring, 2004, issue of Conservative Judaism, which includes a discussion of the teshuvah. Thanks, Avi!

So go and learn.

Miscellany!

This post will hearken back to the early days of traditional blogging which I never participated in: snatches of colorful life experience scrawled hurriedly with a chunk of blackened stick, in between chaws of campfire-warmed mutton thigh. How simple we were then! How uncorrupted!

* * *

On Shabbos, I heard a representative from Ukraine talk about Project Kesher, a group of Jewish women in the former Soviet Union furthering Jewish education, promoting women's health, and fighting anti-Semitism and domestic abuse. (A propos of nothing, one of the testimonials on the home page makes reference to Birobidzhan: "My grandfather was a revolutionary sent to Siberia . . . I see the need to organize the Jewish community. I hope to be a revolutionary of another kind." I would bet the speaker's grandfather was sent to Birobidzhan against his will.)

At kiddush, I suggested to one of the speakers that some women's health researchers (e.g. breast-cancer epidemiologists) might enthusiastically welcome access to an Eastern European cohort of mostly Ashkenazic Jewish women. Although there are an awful lot of studies of breast cancer among American Ashkenazim (see here for a review of BRCA1 -- the "breast cancer gene" -- and its influence on public health [I hope the link works; you might have to be part of the Medical Library Cabal]), in an admittedly cursory search, I only found one such study among Russian Ashkenazi women. As you can see from the abstract, it was more a small-scale genetic typing project than a large-scale epidemiologic study. (Warning: Jargon-heavy excerpt follows.)

We have screened index cases from 25 Russian breast/ovarian cancer families for germ-line mutations in all coding exons of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. In addition we tested 22 patients with breast cancer diagnosed before age 40 without family history and 6 patients with bilateral breast cancer. The frequency of families with germline mutations in BRCA was 16% (4/25). One BRCA1 mutation, 5382insC, was found in three families. The results of present study, and those of a separate study of 19 breast-ovarian cancer families, suggest that BRCA1 5382insC is a founder mutation in the Russian population. Three BRCA2 mutations were found in patients with breast cancer without family history: two in young patients and one in patients with bilateral breast cancer. Four novel BRCA2 mutations were identified. (Tereschenko IV et al. Human Mutation 2002;19(2):184.)

Anyway, if any breast-cancer epidemiologists are reading this, first: hi! Second, maybe you'd like to take a look at this cohort.

Postscript: I know, it's not a cohort, just a group of Russian Jewish women. But someone could make a cohort out of it.

* * *

On Saturday night we (me, my wife, and a blogger friend visiting from out of town) made the acquaintance of a fresh-faced idiot, a veteran of the Great War. Our new friend, appearing on stage at the Theater for the New Audience, is no other than the hero of Jaroslav Hašek's unfinished comic novel Good Soldier Švejk (1923). (Since the novel itself was never finished, I don't feel bad admitting that I picked it up and never finished it. Not because it wasn't entertaining; my attention span is just undergrown.) Though the first act sags a little, the play is by turns witty, funny, stupid, profound, moving, and whimsical. You should go see it.

Would you like to see the little hat on the "s" again? Šure thing!

Postscript: Of course, Švejk (or one of his translators) has a blog.

* * *

I have to go keep finishing my thesis. Back later.

* * *

I'm back!

How do you like the sound of this merry little tune? Psychiatry, obstetrics/gynecology, neurology, surgery, medicine, pediatrics, advanced medicine, ambulatory care, critical care medicine. Those are the rotations I will be starting, God willing, in January, assuming I successfully defend my thesis next month.

Perhaps I might blog in the future about the spicy & engaging elements of medical education. Or perhaps not.

* * *

I should mention in passing two more reviews of mine, in the on-line version of Verse magazine, of a couple of poetry journals: Skanky Possum #10 and Fence 7.1.

Arcana and Actualities

The art of poetry is the art of knowing language and people equally well. It is an art whose focus is in two directions at once: toward the inert technical arcana of syllables and sounds and syntax and metaphor as well as toward the animated actualities of human nature and human expectation. The knowledge of the way a reader will react when a technical something is done to him is what controls the poet's manipulation of his technique. To do something to the reader is the end of poetry: a poem is less a notation on a page or a sequence of uttered sounds than a shaped or measured formal effect that impinges upon a reader or hearer. The reality of the poem is its impingement. [. . .] No element of the poem is more basic--and I mean physical--in its effect upon the reader than the metrical element, and perhaps no technical triumphs reveal more readily than the metrical the poet's sympathy with that universal human nature--conceived as a system of physiological and psychological uniformity--which exists outside his own, and to which the fullest understanding of his own is the key. The poet whose metrical effects actually work upon a reader reveals that he has attained an understanding of what man in general is like. It is thus possible to suggest that a great metrical achievement is more than the mark of a good technician: it is something like the signature of a great man.

from Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form

Honesty underground

What MTA subway drivers used to say when the train had to stop for some reason:

We apologize for the unavoidable delay.

What they say now:

We apologize for the delay.

We are not wrong

The New Republic has two post-mortems of Tuesday's anti-liberal revolution worth reading and quoting. One, though anonymous, is written (I confidently aver) in the hyper-literary, sometimes tortured style of Leon Wieseltier, though it does at times manage to stumble over eloquence on its way to the heights of purple prose:

There is honor, moreover, in a certain kind of loss. In our distracted and accelerated and gamed society, with its religion of winning, we sometimes forget this. But the many millions of Americans who believe that the tax code should be more fair; and that one of the ends of government is to bother itself about its neediest and least fortunate citizens; and that the morality of the market is not all the morality that a society requires; and that the Bible is not the basis of a democratic political order, or of our political order; and that robust stem-cell research, and science more generally, is a primary social good; and that gay marriage is a question of equality and not the beginning of the end of civilization; and that American troops must not be sent to war ignorantly or dogmatically, or without the means to win; and that the good reputation of the United States in the world is one of its most powerful historical instruments--the many millions of Americans who believe these things are not wrong. They are merely not a majority. But they are a very large minority.

The other is by TNR's editor, Peter Beinart:

[C]ultural sensitivity is one thing; principle is another. In their attempts to win rural voters, Democrats have already essentially abandoned gun control. That doesn't keep me up at night. But gay marriage is different. The fact that it is widely unpopular cannot obscure the fact that it is morally momentous and morally right. Liberals once lost elections for supporting civil rights as well and now look back on those losses as badges of honor. Eventually, since young people are far more tolerant of homosexuality than their parents, gay marriage will stop hurting Democrats at the polls. Until then, the party should try to win elections on other issues--and look forward to the day when conservatives apologize for trying to deny yet another group of Americans their full human rights.

Postscript: I've read in some liberal blogs (this suggestion is usually made by right-wing commenters, but let's take it in good faith) that we should embrace federalism in the service of gay marriage and other causes we hold dear. Let New York, Massachusetts, and the Blue Brethren move forward, and Wyoming will . . .catch up, or something. ("Heterosexuality forever!" at the courthouse door?) A historian friend, "DRF," made the following comment, which is worth posting separately:

I'm going to tackle the issue of a new federalism that was raised by elf and Zack. I, too, have been wondering if we are headed for a new federalism on social issues, and I'm not yet certain about how I feel about that, if indeed we are. But I adamantly disagree that antebellum federalism on slavery was a bad thing. It's true that antebellum federalism meant that there was a period of two generations (roughly, 1802-1865) in which slavery wa illegal in most circumstances in the states north of the Mason-Dixon line and legal in the states south of it. But the alternative to this was NOT to make slavery illegal throughout the U.S. If the framers of the Constitution had attempted to resolve the issue of slavery at a national level in 1787, the result would have been either (a) no federal union at all; or (b) the continuing legality of slavery throughout the U.S. And if slavery had remained legal throughout the U.S. in the early 19c, I doubt that northerners would have gathered the courage to push effectively for its abolition at a national level. Many northerners who opposed slavery in the slavery 1780s and 1790s were nevertheless anxious about the prospect of living in a multi-racial society; specifically, many feared that a large-scale "race war" would break out if slavery ended abruptly without a national plan for shipping ex-slaves back to Africa. When numerous states abolished slavery within their borders and managed to create peaceful (albeit segregated) multi-racial societies, those who witnessed the process gathered the moral courage and political confidence to push for an end to slavery elsewhere. On balance, then, I would argue that diversity in states' social legislation has often been a liberalizing influence, whether or not it's "fair" in the short run.

The "religious Jewish" voter

What does it mean that a quarter of the Jewish vote went to Bush in Florida and Ohio, and that most of these Jews seem to have been the religious ones? What is it about their religiosity (or their frumkayt, however you'd like to term it) which brought about their vote for Bush? Is it a true reflection, connecting their vote to their religious life? A sociological epiphenomenon? Both?

What should a religious Jew who didn't vote for Bush (don't know any of those around here!) think in the future about the relationship between his politics and his religion? What sort of role should be played by him and those like him? In the Democratic party? the Republican party? Where does the liberal, frum Jew go?

More musings to come.

Jews love a losing cause . . .

. . . so most of them seemed to go Kerry at about the same rate they went for Gore. At least, if you believe the exit polls quoted by this Jerusalem Post article. (These are the same exit polls, mind you, which told us Kerry was going to win. It's them we have to blame!)

But what about the Charedi vote? I have no idea. Here's a fun speculation, though.

Look at the presidential returns from Orange County, New York, where Kiryas Joel is located. In 2000, the county went for Bush/Cheney over Gore/Lieberman by 50% to 46% (total votes: 126,080). This year, though, B/C won out over Kerry/Edwards by 55%-44%. I guess there's probably an awful lot of factors that account for the difference, among them the same factors that made Kerry lose the whole deal, but: this year's vote total in Orange County is 134,966. Increased registration, or the ongoing KJ baby boom? You decide.

Not that Orange County is deciding any statewide election anytime soon. But if it keeps growing?

Postscript: Of course, I need to mention these posts by E.J. Kessler of the Forward, who actually knows what she's talking about. It turns out there was a shift in the Jewish vote to Bush, among the Orthodox in particular.

It's coming from the feel that it ain't exactly real
. . .or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.

It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Hello from Darfur, II
The second of the e-mails my friend Laura wrote from Darfur.

Hello all.... Had a few free minutes so I wanted to say hello. All's well here.

I feel like I've been here for weeks...and it's only just over a week now! I love speaking to people in the camps and hearing their stories -- I've become a bit braver about asking them personal questions about what's happened to them and their families. It's a confusing 'emergency' because you look at people and it doesn't look like they're starving. But they're living in appalling conditions, under constant fear of attack. Actually, the fear varies from camp to camp. Some feel relatively safe. But yesterday we were in a camp up north, where 3 women had been beaten the night before. Men came looking for their husbands, but they had fled. One of our Sudanese staff members said that they then beat the women to try to lure the men back. Even after that experience, the women told me they feel safer in the camp then they would at home.

I think it's even more confusing here, because Sudanese are so amazingly warm and hospitable. They smile and wave almost all the time. The day before yesterday, at the same camp where the women were beaten, we were shooting some video of the...I don't know what word to use to describe them...huts? shacks? Piles of sticks maybe 5 x 5 in which families live without shelter from the sun or rain. (The people who've been there long enough to have registered with [my organization] have been given tarps to cover their homes...but those who've come more recently haven't been registered, so they have nothing.) Siobhan, Dominic and I were waiting in the shade while Jimmy (cameraman) shot. (It's over 100 degrees here every day...40-45 degrees celsius, they keep saying.) As we rose to leave and walk back through the sand to the car, a woman came up to Siobhan holding out a pen. It seems Siobhan had dropped the pen in the sand at some point, and the woman wanted to return it to her. It was unbelievable. One of the moments I think I'll carry with me.

In Haiti, there is so much anger, it's palpable. Here, most people seem to smile and wave. They seem to appreciate my attempts at Arabic -- in fact, the Sudanese staff here are amazingly good teachers! And yet hundreds of thousands of people here were forced to leave their homes, watched their brothers, sons, fathers, husbands taken, beaten or killed, are subsisting on next to nothing (yet I'm told the reason that there hasn't been mass starvation is that those who get rations from aid agencies share them with those relatives or former neighbors who don't, or people with relatives in relatively unaffected areas are being supported at least in part by their families), and are living in the dehumanizing conditions of an IDP (internally displaced person) camp. Anger and frustration are growing. But from my brief visit, it appears that people are maintaining their culture of hospitality.

Obviously, I'm just a visitor to a culture as complex as any other. I'm so aware that I don't even know what I'm not seeing...what's absent from the landscape, what I can't see. Side by side with the smiles and waves I see are men raping women who go out at 2am to gather wood. Who have ridden their horses into villages and taken land and livestock, poisoned the water systems, and killed the men. It may sound dramatic, but it just reminds me of how all humans seem to have such a capacity for evil, for cruelty.

Hello from Darfur, I
The first of a couple of e-mails written by my friend Laura, who was in Darfur a couple of weeks ago with the aid agency she works for.

Hello all, Here I am in El Geneina. I've been in Sudan about 6 days now...in El Geneina for 4. I can't believe it's been so short! Feels like I've been here for weeks.

Darfur is a dry, forbidding land. There's green brush and short trees...and, near the wadis(which are now basically dry) some larger trees. We had a lovely picnic out by a wadi last Friday -- Friday is the day of rest here, so our Sudanese staff were having the traditional celebration the week before Ramadan begins. They invited all of us to come celebrate and feast with them. It was a lovely afternoon...so cool and breezy under the trees (shade is something much in demand here!) and they made an incredible meal.

As for the humanitarian emergency -- I've been trying to get a handle on what I've been seeing. I've visited 2 camps so far. Mornay, to the south of us, which is home to somewhere between 68,000 and 80,000 people (they've been having trouble getting accurate numbers because so many people are still moving), and Ardamata, just outside Geneina, which is a much smaller camp. There are many, many people who've been displaced -- more than 1 million -- but those who are living in the camps don't seem to be in such terrible shape. The malnutrition rates are not terribly high, so, somehow, people who've been on the move for 6 months to a year have had coping mechanisms that have sustained them. I've been trying to investigate this -- it seems the a combination of food stores from last year's harvest and very strong communities that share resources averted a disaster in the initial months. And now there is tons of food aid coming from the outside world. The problem is that now these people are almost entirely dependent on food aid, as their stores have run out. So the situation is quite precarious. If security diminishes, or the food aid dries up, there could be a very serious crisis.

Right now, there seems to be a bit more of a public health/hygiene danger. There has already been Hep E in Mornay, and with so many people concentrated in small spaces, we're focusing on hygiene education and sanitation facilities.

I have spoken to people in both camps, and they've told me terrible stories of having to flee their homes. One woman told me that her two oldest sons were killed when the janjaweed came. She had her youngest, @ age 2 or 3 in her arms as she spoke. All have told me that they have no plans to go home until they believe they will be safe there. And none of them believe they will be safe.

The Sudanese people are amazingly warm...the children run after us (after all whites) shouting 'hwaja' wherever we go, and their mothers walk behind waving hello. I haven't felt any hostility, although I imagine it when I see men in fatigues (police) or janjaweed on their camels. But, in truth, I haven't felt uncomfortable at all. I am, of course, in a very protected environment. Not to mention that sharia law is in place in Sudan, so no one steals anything -- even a pen used and not returned is returned the next day (I'm told that's not always the case, but that's been my experience).

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Once and Future Yiddish Language

My review in the Forward of Dovid Katz's new book.

The people want more negativity!

Here's my review of issue 9 of the poetry journal Skanky Possum, together with comments on my review by a couple of less-than-impressed readers.

Postscript: A friend points out that one commenter shares the first name and initials of the journal's editor, and that the other might be a friend of the first. Hmmm: interesting. Well, read the review (or, better yet, buy the journal that's being reviewed, then read the review) and make your own judgment.

Professor Naomi Chana Explains It All To You

Why the War on Intermarriage is such a bad idea.

yoIn Envisioning the Future of American Jewry, Leaders Emphasize the Past

Leaders of the four major rabbinical seminaries made a rare joint appearance on October 13th at Yale University, on a panel titled “Envisioning the Future of American Judaism.” Though the speakers agreed on the most pressing problems facing the American Jewish community, they did not propose any new approaches – rather, each presented his own movement’s philosophy as framed by the history of the American Jewish community. The event, sponsored by the Program in Judaic Studies and the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, was held in connection with the 350th anniversary of the arrival of Jews in North America.

Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, pointed out that the American Jewish community found success even in its earliest years (ballooning from three thousand Jews in 1790 to almost a quarter million at the end of the 19th century), despite the fact that the first ordained rabbi came to America only in 1840. Thus the layperson plays an outsize role in American Jewish life, bringing to the table her instinctive “doubts about the inherent validity of halachah” and the authority of the rabbi. Furthermore, today’s American Jewish community is thoroughly acculturated, sharing, for example, the mobility of the average American family, which upends traditional ethnic-religious allegiances based on kinship. While the core of the community is healthy, enjoying “a renaissance of the Jewish tradition which has been unprecedented,” the periphery “barely identifies Jewishly.” The role of HUC, concluded Ellenson, is to train rabbis who can both satisfy the core and attract the marginal.

Rabbi Yosef Blau, the Director of Religious Guidance at Yeshiva University and a leader in various modern Orthodox institutions, began with the observation that “a hundred years ago no one would have predicted that Orthodox Jewry would participate” in such a panel. After a summary of Orthodox American Jewish history (crediting Orthodoxy’s post-war resurgence to the day school movement), Blau cataloged the problems of Orthodox Judaism in America, and of modern Orthodoxy in particular: the very diversity of the movement; the attraction of newly observant Jews to ultra-Orthodoxy; the status of women; and the need to strike a “proper balance between tradition and modernity.”

Dr. Ismar Schorsch of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary attempted to “extract the meaning” of the arrival of Jews in America. His main, somewhat strident emphasis was that the Jews “came [to America] as a group,” not merely as a collection of individuals, and that Jewish identity, flowing from the “wellspring of the Torah,” is “in deep conflict with the notion of autonomy and the sovereign self” which holds that “nothing is sacred.” Said Schorsch, “Unaffiliated Jews are not social capital for the Jewish community.” Rather, the goal should be to create more “serious Jews” – otherwise, the organized Jewish community is “at risk.”

Schorsch did not mention the Conservative movement per se in his remarks, the only one of the speakers not to put his own institution front and center. He mentioned only briefly, in response to a later question from the audience, that the movement is often passed over by its own members, who must first tend to the needs of the wider Jewish community.

Perhaps the most programmatic comments were made by Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, president of the youngest rabbinical seminary represented, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (founded in 1968). “We are a small movement with a large agenda,” said Ehrenkrantz; since “Judaism is a product of the Jewish people,” future Jewish leaders must appreciate “the entirety of Jewish experience,” being “non-judgmental, yet exercising good judgment.” “We want people who can care for the entire Jewish community,” he said, “committed to Jewish history and the Jewish people without being triumphal or bigoted.” Ehrenkrantz implied that the Reconstructionist movement, whose ordained rabbis serve various functions in communities across the ideological spectrum, is well-placed to determine the direction of Jewish communal leadership: with “profound tolerance and respect for diversity, innovation, and the capability to develop communities” which give “meaning to the lives of Jews.”

Additional remarks were made by John Butler, a Yale expert in the history of American religions. “Religion in America has a doubtful future,” he began, quoting the consensus of experts in the late 19th century. Ever since the beginning of the modern era, religious leaders in America have worried that religion can’t compete with the attractions of high technology, urbanism, youth culture, and everything else beckoning from outside the walls of the church (or synagogue). According to Butler, they needn’t have worried, and they needn’t worry today. American religion (and Judaism as an exemplar of this tendency) remakes itself in just those ways necessary to succeed in time of transformation: from immigration to urbanization, and from city to suburb. The importance of religion in this year’s presidential election, and its near-absence from, say, French political campaigning, point to religion’s solid place in American public life, and should help to place in context dire rabbinical warnings of Jewish communal collapse.

Also worthy of note is what was not represented on this panel. In the introductory remarks, it was pointed out that a similar Jewish communal meeting of the minds occurred some forty years ago, at a Yale-Harvard-Princeton Hillel colloquium. At that event, however, there was a representative of “humanist Judaism.” The fact that no such representative, or indeed, any voice from outside the Jewish religious establishment, was present at this year’s panel might bespeak either a shrinking of American Jewish intellectual diversity, or (more probably) reveal the roots of the event itself, which was originally planned to inform Yale students interested in ordination about the different programs available. In any case, established, institutional voices are unlikely to propose bold suggestions for solving the Jewish community’s future problems.

Postscript: The new issue of the YU Commentator, Yeshiva University's student newspaper, features the text of Rabbi Blau's prepared remarks, as well as a write-up of the panel itself by Menachem Butler.

Why I haven't been writing about Darfur

Because I have nothing to say, and I can't think of how to help the situation, aside from giving money. (There are appropriate spiritual responses as well, but despite pro-forma, one-off resolutions from various rabbinic groups, I haven't heard of any massive Tehillim rallies on behalf of the Darfurians. I guess only Gush Katif merits a psalm or two.)

Somini Sengupta reports in the Times that, despite a small diplomatic advance (an increase in the number of African Union personnel allowed into Darfur to monitor the ceasefire), the Janjaweed -- the militia responsible for civilian massacres -- operates with impunity, sponsored, aided, and abetted by the Sudanese government.

What can one do? How can one exert pressure?

The indefatigable Nicholas Kristof castigates the so-called international community -- and us:

[W]hat I can't fathom is our own moral choice, our decision to acquiesce in genocide.

We in America could save kids like Abdelrahim and Muhammad. This wouldn't require troops, just a bit of gumption to declare a no-fly zone, to press our Western allies and nearby Arab and African states, to impose an arms embargo and other targeted sanctions, to push a meaningful U.N. resolution even at the risk of a Chinese veto, and to insist upon the deployment of a larger African force.

I do feel responsible, or at least guilty. But I would ask of Kristof: what am I supposed to do to accomplish these things? Carry a sign with the words "I insist upon the deployment of a larger African force"? (Perhaps this last has indeed been accomplished with the increase in AU monitors alluded to in the Sengupta article. But I wouldn't be surprised if the Sudanese government's agreement were in name only.)

I might be able to exercise some (miniscule) pressure through my vote, but here too there doesn't seem to be much to vote about. The New Republic has eloquently urged both Bush and Kerry to show leadership on Darfur (though placing most of the blame at the feet of the current president):

During the [first] debate, Kerry suggested he would be willing to send troops "if it took American forces to some degree to coalesce the African Union." In so doing, he made an important moral and political point. Emphasizing his willingness to intervene in Darfur without U.N. approval would help deflect Bush's criticism that a Kerry presidency would be a slave to international opinion, allowing foreign leaders to determine U.S. national interests and policy agendas. And, by hammering home this message, Kerry would show how absent Bush has been. After all, it is Bush, not Kerry, who is now presiding over 6,000 to 10,000 Darfurian deaths each month. It is up to Bush, as president, to stop the genocide.

Unfortunately, neither candidate has let the word Darfur pass their lips, beyond those brief mentions made in the first debate. Where do we go from here? I have no idea.

My Blog with Hersh Raseyner

An attempt to translate Mayn Krig mit Hersh Raseyner (My Quarrel with Hersh Raseyner), the novella by Khaim Grade. (I know a translation is already available.)

Do you instinctively blame pharmaceutical companies for everything?

Then read this.

Jewes [sic], poetry, more Jews, more poetry . . .
It's the story of my extracurricular life!

1. George Bush and "the Impostor"
From the Exhibition Guide to Jewes in America, an exhibit running through mid-November at the New York Public Library:

GEORGE BUSH (1796-1859)
The Valley of Vision, or, The Dry Bones of Israel Revived
New York: Saxton and Miles, 1844
Dorot Jewish Division

When New York University was founded in 1830 as a nonsectarian, democratic alternative to elitist, Episcopalian Columbia, it hired much the ablest Hebraist in America, Isaac Nordheimer, a former student in Slovakia of Rabbi Moses Schreiber* -- as its inaugural professor of Arabic. It is a paradox that the city's first secular institution of higher learning should have considered it impossible to permit a Jew to teach the Holy Tongue [. . .] But somewhat paradoxical, too, was their choice, as professor of Hebrew, of George Bush. Competent Christian Hebraist as he was, he was known at the time only as the author of the first American book on Islam -- a biography of Muhammad, whom he insisted on refering to throughout as "the Impostor." [. . .] Bush had made his name as a critic of what he considered disreputable movements -- Islam, millenarianism -- but now he emerged as the leading American advocate of a couple of controversial belief systems of more recent vintage: the occult religion of Emanuel Swedenborg and the alternative medicine of Anton Mesmer. He left NYU and spent the remainder of his life ministering to the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in Brooklyn. George Bush's more famous namesakes are the direct descendants of his brother, Timothy.

2. The Bellevue Literary Review

I went to their fall reading Sunday evening. I am pleased to report that it was that rare bird, a reading where everyone was well worth hearing. Particularly impressive was the poet Frances Richey, whose book "The Burning Point" I have requested from the library on the strength of her understated but powerful poems about the current war, her son's military service, her responses to great works of art, and (strangest but most affecting) her recognizing the person of Jesus among men she knew in the 60s. Her poems about war and death, in particular, were moving and thought-provoking without formulaic pacifism or irritating self-righteousness.

3. By the Waters of Manhattan: Talks by/on Jewish Poets

That's the title of a new series that a couple of friends of mine are helping to organize. (Judging from the flier that was handed to me by Bob Rosenthal at shul this past Shabbos, the organizing groups seem to be the Committee on Poetry** and the Educational Alliance's funding project, Jewish Below Fourteenth Street.) In the first event, onThursday, November 4th, at 7, Ed Sanders*** will read his poem entitled "Yiddish-Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side," and also "speak on the milieu, including Alan Ginsberg."

Bob told me that for some strange reason, the group Jewish Below Fourteenth Street did not want the event to be held in a synagogue. (Too many Jews there!) So it's to be held instead at the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 5 Union Square West, 7th floor (above Staples). Free and open to the public. I have a phone number for more information, but I'm reluctant to post it on my oh-so-heavily-trafficked blog. E-mail me for it if you like.

*Schreiber is better known among Jews as the Khsam-Soyfer, the Hungarian-Jewish forerunner of ultra-Orthodoxy. His legacy will not in the least be affected by my referring to him in an upcoming review in the Forward of Dovid Katz's book.
**The Web site of the Allen Ginsberg Trust says that Ginsberg "donated much of his income to the Committee on Poetry, a non-profit organization that he organized to assist struggling artists and writers."
***I have no idea who this is, but I imagine it's this person.

More KJ water wars

From the Times Herald-Record:

KJ TO SUE COUNTY FOR DISCRIMINATION
The Village of Kiryas Joel confirms that it plans to sue Orange County in federal court for discrimination if the county proceeds with a lawsuit against the village's planned water pipeline.

If you don't know what this is all about, read my previous post. And if you read Yiddish, here's even more.

Pray get better, II

There's a new article in the Times on prayer and health. It seems there's a controversy over Federal funding for research examining a connection between the two.

I posted on this matter last year, and I am, of course, skeptical that anything would come of such research. But on the other hand, 2.3 million dollars (the amount quoted in the Times article) is a laughably small amount of money for scientific research. (For the sake of comparison, the FY 2004 budget of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine was about $118 million.)

Furthermore, sometimes extraordinary claims, for which the plausible biological mechanism isn't (yet) known, require judicious open-mindedness when framing the research question. One could do research into prayer and health with only so-so exposure definition and still get worthwhile results regarding the endpoint. In less jargony language: if we defined "prayer" as "any request of a supernatural being," wouldn't it be interesting if a study found a link between prayer and health, if the proper confounders* were controlled for, even if prayer in this instance were not especially well defined?

*A reader (hi, Mike!) asked, on a previous post, what "confounder" means. To abridge a complicated and interesting discussion, a confounder is a variable which is associated with exposure and associated with disease, but is not on the causal pathway between them. For this reason, an analysis that fails to control for a confounder will find a spurious association.

A classic example is a study done a few years ago that purported to show a statistical association between pancreatic cancer and coffee drinking. Unfortunately, it turned out that the controls (non-cases used for comparison) were other patients in the same hospital, without pancreatic cancer, who had been diagnosed with other gastrointestinal diseases. These GI patients were, reasonably enough, counseled to avoid coffee, which looked statistically (since confounding was not controlled for) as if pancreatic-cancer patients drank more coffee.

If that's not clear, someone let me know and I'll try explaining again.

Irrelevant appellations

Can journalists please stop labeling people as Holocaust survivors if this adds nothing to the story?

Roman Rubinstein, Holocaust survivor and Sharei Chesed board member, said that he is fighting to convince his fellow members not to sell [their cash-strapped Conservative synagogue to a "Messianic" congregation]. With a chuckle, he said: "I'm against it because Jesus was a nice guy, but he's not my God."

"Holocaust survivor" is neither a qualification nor an honorific, nor should it become one.

Gals and Geshem

The title of this post is shamelessly stolen from an e-mail by my friend Rebecca Boggs, who is interested in egalitarian alternatives to traditional ritual. Thanks, Becca! (Though I didn't ask. I hope that posting your e-mail on this blog is in the category of zokhin le-odem she-loy befonov: You can do favors for someone without their permission. At least, if they think it's a favor.)

But her e-mail needs an introduction. On Shemini Atzeres, the "eighth day of assembly" which is the concluding day of Sukkos (well, only in some ways, not in others -- let's not get into that here), a special hymn is said, called Geshem ("Rain"). It's a rain prayer, of course, parallel to the Passover hymn for dew called, appropriately enough, Tal ("Dew"). The words of the traditional prayer are beautiful and oblique in ways common to piyutim (liturgical poetry). For the life of me I can't find the traditional Hebrew text on-line. (A translation is here, and an nterpretation is here. Warning on the latter: Tendentious Artscroll Alert.)

The question is: where are the women? Water flows over and under nearly every memorable story in the Bible, and where there's water there are leaders of flocks and leaders of people. Most particularly, Miriam (she of the well!) comes to mind. But Geshem (like Tal) includes no references to our matriarchs.

There are a couple of ways to understand this absence. An Orthodox approach, I suppose(though I'm arguing the opponent's case here), might be that women are private creatures ("the honor of the princess is [to be kept] indoors," or something like that -- yes, I know that that translation is misleading, but this is all for the sake of argument), and so one shouldn't refer to them in public. Their role is behind the scenes. At least, I hope that's the argument, and that there is nothing suspect about the merits of our matriarchs. If any traditional commentator remarks upon the lack of women in these piyyutim, I'd be grateful if someone would let me know.

A more plausible approach, at least to my mind, is that every poet has a reservoir of references available to him or her. When Geshem was written (whenever that was! My Elbogen is packed up), the poet simply did not imagine that women were to be classed with men as figures for poetic evocation. So he didn't. Now it's not a simple matter to change the liturgy, but I think that piyyutim are ripe for directed modification. First of all, they are not, by and large, part of the matbeye she-kavu khakhomim, the "coin of prayer" which (it is held) was instituted by the Rabbis of the Talmud. They are later additions: cherished additions, but add-ons nonetheless. Furthermore, if we can, with suitable awe of Heaven and poetic grandeur*, craft an egalitarian version that is equal to the merit of our matriarchs -- well, why not?

This by way of introduction to an e-mail that Becca received. She had written some knowledgeable friends of hers to ask about egalitarian renderings of Geshem. One of them wrote back as follows:

The best place to go to see where people have done interpretive/alternative liturgy is the website ritualwell.org. I looked for something on Miriam. Mark Frydenberg has posted exactly what you were looking for. There is also a poem by Barbara Holender.

You might also want to check out the book of poems, "Journey into healing" by Sherri Waas Shunfenthal.

Of course, another option, if you don't find what you are looking for, is to write a response to the text that you find challenging/troubling/incomplete.

I found something else on the Web, an egalitarian version of Geshem (in Hebrew, no translation available) written by Rabbi Yoram Mazor of the Movement for Progressive Judaism in Israel. I think it's closer in poetic spirit to the original.

I anticipate modifications of this post as more resources pop up. Please direct me to on-line versions of the original piyut, your own Geshem compositions, translations of the Israeli egal version, etc.

*Insert gratuitous bashing of the literary quality of Sim Shalom translations.

Tolstoy in Florida

Last night we saw Ana en el trópico [Anna in the Tropics], a Spanish version of the play which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. The production was sentimental in the best sense: feelingly written and acted, with some soaringly lyrical monologues. I can't write a knowledgeable review, because I didn't understand all of what was said -- ninety percent, but not everything. (My wife can recommend the simultaneous English translation.) We enjoyed ourselves quite a bit; the story enacted parallels between life and literature (the title refers to Anna Karenina, one of the "love stories" read to sultry effect by a new lector in a cigar factory) which are not as directly or emotionally made by other contemporary works. (Depending, of course, on what you think of Reading Lolita in Tehran.)

The Repertorio Español is housed in a small, homey building on 27th Street between 3rd and Lexington. I couldn't help but draw some parallels and contrasts between it and the Folksbine, New York's Yiddish theater.

The most whopping difference, of course, is that the Repertorio is clearly still the theater of a large, Spanish-speaking immigrant population, or at least a population that understands Spanish on the stage and needs the language on ticket stubs, programs and the like. The Folksbine does have some Yiddish speakers and "understanders" at its performances, but never more than a few dozen, and some of the actors themselves are not notable for their proficiency. (I have a friend, who's participating in a reading there, who says that when she tries to speak Yiddish to the rest of the cast she gets blank looks from most of them.) I appreciate the Folksbine and I think Yiddish theater is important, if only to maintain some modicum of cultural self-respect. (I don't think it does anything to "keep Yiddish alive" [i.e. maintain the spoken language], but that's another story.) I do think that a publicly-supported institution that functions as a sort of Yiddish cultural ambassador has a responsibility to include more Yiddish in its organizational apparatus: programs in Yiddish and the like. But that's the ideologue talking.

The other similarity, based on this one data point, is that the plays I've seen at the Folksbine and this play at the Repertorio had in common a felicitous mix of crowd-pleasing music-sex-and-violence with some more lyric stuff for those of a literary bent.

*

Speaking of Spanish, I had an interesting conversation today at lunch with Mercedes Cebrián, a freelancer for La Vanguardia who's writing a piece on New York Yiddish culture. Her blog, Gachas at Tiffany's, is written in a slangy good humor which is fun to read, though (again!) I don't understand every word. ("Gachas" is apparently a homestyle porridge, Spanish kasha, if you like.) Apparently she's going to send me a copy of her book of short stories and poetry [scroll down to the bottom of the page for the review, in Spanish]. I don't understand why it's not posted on her blog for easy purchase . . .

In La Vanguardia's culture supplement for September 22nd, which Mercedes gave me, there's a long article by a Manuel Francisco Reina, a Spanish poet who's about my age, entitled "Poetas en Nueva York" (Poets in New York). It shows how ignorant I am of the New York poetry scene that his thumbnail classifications come as news to me. Francisco Reina writes, somewhat breathlessly, that New York "continues to be the modern Alexandria of arts and letters, the siren that seduces poets on both sides of the Atlantic." (I guess we should hire the babysitter more often so I can go out and get seduced.) He continues: "In contrast to the theoretical impoverishment of European poetry, ethical and aesthetic debate in New York is in enviable health." Two basic currents, say the author, are coexisting and merging in this seductive, sirenic Alexandria of ours.

On the one hand: the new formalists, also called the Missing Measures after the title of a book by the critic and poet Timothy Steele. "The new formalists have a certain Victorian air. . . .Though they are the object of scorn, the fruits of their labor are worthy of praise." Along with Steele, Francisco Reina includes in this group the poet-critics Frederick Turner, Brad Leithauser, and Wade Newman. Its most oustanding poets are, he says, Dana Gioia, Annie Finch, Rhina Espaillat, Honor Moore, and Nikki Giovanni.

[Come to think of it, I'm not sure I agree with the classification of all these very different poets in the same group. No, I'm definitely sure I don't agree with it. But I find the overview useful, and think you might too, so I'm blogging it.]

In the other corner, according to the author of the article, the "identity poets," proceeding from the loins of Allen Ginsberg. To quote him at length:

At first glance it's quite evident that, over against the martial order of
neo-formalism, identity poetics purifies the distinct identities of New Yorkers
as if poetry were to be converted into the pulse or blood of the city, as if it
were an independent nation of lyric [. . .]

Robert Duncan has become the father of this movement and an example of a dialogue of supposedly contrary currents. In addition, he paved the way for other trends, such as "ethnic poetry," when he wrote at the end of the sixties: "To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure — all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider we are. " With this proposal, Duncan was decades ahead of what was yet to come.

To repeat: I don't agree with Francisco Reina's dichotomy. I don't think that formalists and identity poets productively carve up, much less exhaust the space of New York poetry. But, like I said, it's useful to see what an outsider thinks. And such classifications serve as a good excuse to think about where I place myself on the spectrum.

(The article also includes an informative section on the Spanish poetry scene in Nueva York, but I don't have time to get into that right now.)

Does God care who we vote for?
A dialogue

Person One. Of course not!

Person Two. But wouldn't it be a disengaged, bloodless God who didn't care who we voted for?

P1. Perhaps God cares who we vote for, but He* doesn't tell us who to vote for.

P2. Of course God tells us who to vote for, but not in so many words. Prophecy is no longer active in this day and age, but we have many other ways of communicating with God -- from the workings of the human mind, to the deliberations of the halachic process, to moral inspiration.

P1. So you're equating your own political decision-making with God's will? That's some powerful chutzpah!

P2. I'm not equating the two -- I'm saying that the process of coming to a political decision, for a religious person, is motivated by the same strivings and understandings which underlie the relationship that one's entire life bears to God.

P1. Huh?

P2. Think of it like this. If you believe in God, and you would prefer to engage in some sort of imitatio Dei, you can't always be a hundred percent sure that you're doing exactly what God wants, for two reasons: one, because it's difficult to ascribe desires to God, those being attributes of people, and two, because even if we accept that God has desires, it doesn't follow that we can even approximate them.

P1. What does that have to do with voting?

P2. Just that it's not implausible to imagine that God would prefer an outcome of history favoring one presidential candidate (let's say) over the other. But, even though it's not implausible, it might not be probable that God actually engages in history in that way. (He might indeed be actively involved in history, just not on the same dimensions, or with attention to the same details, which we might imagine to be most important.) Furthermore, our own political decision making might not correspond to God's.

P1. That seems awfully complicated. Can't we just vote without recourse to God?

P2. Maybe. But just as it would be a bloodless, disengaged God who didn't care who we voted for, it would be a disengaged (or at least sharply compartmentalized) religious person who didn't involve God in her political decision-making.

P1. So who does God want me to vote for?

P2. [Answer stricken to maintain blog's political neutrality.]

*God identified as He for stylistic convenience only.

A New York curiosity

Even though I know nothing about phonology, I enjoy reading phonoloblog. I e-mailed the proprietor with a question that's been bugging me, especially since I'm going to be moving to the Lower East Side sometime during the next few months.

I live in New York City, and there's a street on the Lower East Side called East Broadway. (This is not the same as the more famous Broadway, where "the neon lights are bright," etc.) I have noticed that most native Lower East Siders pronunce the name East BroadWAY, that is, with the accent on the second syllable of Broadway, while they pronounce the name of the Great White Way this way: BROADway, with the accent on the first syllable. Do you have any guesses why this might be so? Thanks.

I got the following prompt response:

Hi Zackary,

The word "broadway" is a two-syllable compound composed of a one-syllable adjective ("broad") and a one-syllable noun ("way"). Compounds like this are always accented on the first syllable in English, and this is one of the ways in which they are distinguished from regular adjective-noun combinations. For example, the phrase "black board" is accented more on the second word "board", and can refer to any board so long as it is black in color. The compound "blackboard", on the other hand, is accented more on the first syllable "black", and refers to a special type of board (the kind that you write on with chalk), and it may be of any color -- there are also green blackboards, for instance.

If the distinction between "East BroadWAY" and "BROADway" by Lower East Siders really is as consistent as you say, these speakers may just be using this as a way to clearly distinguish the two street names in their speech, since one is better known to them and the other is better known to most other people. I would think the extra word "East" would be sufficient to do that, but perhaps not.

That's just a guess. It's an interesting question, and probably one that is best answered by a Lower East Sider.

-- Eric

So how about it? Any LESers past or present want to chip in with agreements, disagreements, or folk etymologies?

*

By the way, I have another piece in the Forward, a short profile of Aaron Lansky on the occasion of his new book.

Pollution and cancer in China

The recent article in the Times is harrowing, starting from its title. But the scientific questions it raises are just as important as the sympathy and disquiet it evokes. There are two issues here. First, what is the relationship between the recent increased pollution in rural China and cancer rates (or death rates due to cancer) in those regions? Secondly, apart from the epidemiologic facts, why are the people interviewed in the article so sure that they have cancer?

A brief, incomplete survey of the epidemiologic literature (oh, let me come clean here: I just went to Medline, typed in "China+epidemiology+pollution," and read a bunch of abstracts. It's Google for epidemiologists!) indicates both rather more and less than is pointed to in the Times. The rural residents complain of gastric and other GI cancers, and the available literature (much of which is, not surprisingly, available only in translated abstracts of Chinese-language articles) points to increased rates of esophageal cancer after exposure to polluted water. (I should note that the tricky part of epidemiology is figuring out the contribution of many different factors. "Correlation does not imply causation" might be tattooed on the body of every epidemiologist.)But there are also a number of articles which point to a broader array of deleterious effects, from nasopharyngeal cancer to hepatitis B infection (which can lead to primary liver cancer). A few studies, as well as the Times article, mention what would seem to be a more acute endpoint: frank toxicity due to astronomical levels of various toxins, effluents, and general nasty chemicals in well- and riverwater.

The Times article implies that the rise in cancer rates due to pollution is a recent phenomenon, of the past couple of decades. I think this is true in a sense, but the sense was corrupted due to necessary abridgment for journalistic purposes. The course of events probably goes something like this: over the past few decades, maybe since the economic liberalization that was allowed during the 70s and 80s (my Chinese history is weak, but I think this is right), industrial activity has produced and allowed widespread pollution. This pollution has indeed led to increased cancer among rural Chinese -- but only because rural Chinese are living longer (due to improved nutrition and hygiene) and are thus able to develop cancer during their additional lifespan. In these polluted rural areas, it's only over the past decade or so that these cancer cases have reached a critical mass that can't be ignored.

Another possibility is that these diseases among rural Chinese, though probably to be laid at the feet of polluters (and the Chinese public-health establishment, necessarily weakened by totalitarianism -- cf. the recent SARS mess), are also caused by simple toxicity due to the ingestion of a high concentration of pollutants.

This is just rank speculation, of course, but it's speculation that I would bet Chinese public-health workers and epidemiologists have to engage in, to decide whether cancer is, in fact, pandemic in rural China and what to do about it (besides, obviously, cracking down on pollution).

* * *

It's not clear from the article in the Times that the people interviewed do in fact have cancer. (They are horribly ill, but it's not apparent from what.) I think that in some cases they might be extrapolating from changing causes of death among people they know. As the Chinese get richer, their causes of death may shift from infectious diseases (with which many rural Chinese may already be acquainted) to the so-called "diseases of affluence" -- heart disease, stroke, and cancer. As it turns out, the Chinese Red Cross recently released a study of widespread ill-health among urban Chinese. [Strangely enough, the study isn't mentioned on the CRC's Web site. Maybe it's on the Chinese site -- can anyone tell me?]

* * *

China's the most populous country in the world, with huge populations that are urban, rural, urbanizing, or migrating from city to country. I hope China deals with its public health problems in a way that will serve as a model for other systems.

Put the tsedek in tzedakah

My friend Mike Wenthe, a faithful reader of and sharp commenter on this blog, sends along a Darfur appeal:

Leslie Brisman, professor of English and a friend of ours, sent out a charity appeal in lieu of his usual Rosh ha-Shanah card, and I immediately thought of your series of posts about the situation in Darfur and the potential for your website to get the word out about relief efforts. Here's a quotation from Leslie's letter:

"Declarations are important. But is acknowledging genocide fulfilling our obligation to witness, to act in the spirit of 'Never Again!'? Who is doing something about this? Save the Children is there, has been there and is going to keep working in North, West, and South Darfur.

The organization has now launched an appeal for $4.6m to further its food, security, nutrition, health, child protection, water, and sanitation activities."

Leslie then says that he's appealing to 100 friends in hopes of getting at least 36 responses ("the traditional minimum, in Jewish tradition, to 'save the world,'" he writes). He's asked us to send checks to him, made out to Save the Children, before Yom Kippur if possible. Why do I tell you this? Because you're the only other person I know personally who has been talking about Darfur, believe it or not! And it may be that you, too, could send out a call for another group of lamed-vavniks to put the tsedek in tsedakah during these High Holy Days.

Besides Save the Children, there are a number of other organizations doing work in Sudan, or aiding other groups' work, including the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief and Concern. Anyone interested in contributing to Leslie's fund, please write me and I'll furnish you with his address.

And, with that, let me wish a gut gebentsht yor -- a wonderful 5765 to all regular readers, occasional guests, and misdirected Googlers! May you all be posted in the blog of life.

A hive of bloggers buzzing

A refreshing realization: the blogosphere can be as self-important as any other medium.

Putting words in his mouth

My latest for the Forward: Letting Loose the Golem on Society's Dilemmas.

How do you say "American" in Jewish?
It's Arrival Day, everybody! Unpack your luggage!

American Jewry is a many-layered thing. Even limiting myself to prescriptivism and staying away from historical prediction, I could still talk about any number of issues that are burning a hole in my tallis: tracing a route between assimilation and fundamentalism; Jewish poverty and public health; what sort of Jewish school I hope against hope will exist by the time my daughter's old enough to attend.

Today, though, I'll finish up by talking about Jewish languages.

Ashkenazic Jewry (of which most American Jews are descendants) has through its long history been characterized by what's been variously termed "internal bilingualism" (Weinreich) or trilingualism (Dovid Katz) - Yiddish as the vernacular, and both Yiddish and Hebrew/Aramaic as written (and to some extent spoken) languages.

Such diglossia is a thing of the past for American Jews. The Chasidim and us wacky Yiddishists aside, American Jews speak, read, and write only English. (Immigrants from Israel are a special case.) This is not surprising -- such language shift happened long ago in Western Europe, and (some argue) was in full swing in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

What's relevant to American Jews in particular is that the language to which most of us have assimilated is -- English. We speak the world's most widespread language, and, thus, the world's most widespread Jewish language. (Two Jews meeting on the street who know only that the other is Jewish, but not what language she speaks, would understand each other most reliably in English.)

What does this mean for us? Recall what I posted earlier from Michael Walzer on pluralism in America -- political allegiance is shared, while cultural specificity is manifold. I think the same model can and should be applied to us American Jews. English is our own much as it is the world's language, but it is not by any stretch our only language. It is in the best interests of the English speaking world to make it possible for smaller languages to continue to exist. Similarly, the Anglophone, American Jewish establishment should see that it is in our best interest as Jews to preserve a linguistic-cultural mix that has been our content and context since our earliest days.

This mix is difficult to specify, and it must, of course, change with the priorities of the community. But a mix should always be available. (This is something that was suggested by Amnon Ophir, the principal of Prozdor when I was teaching there. For various reasons he was not able to follow up on it.) American Jews should be able to receive education in a Jewish literary or spoken language, whether it be loshn-koydesh, Ivrit, Yiddish, Ladino, or some other tongue. Such availability should not depend on ideological stance or political fashion: if I want to learn any Jewish language, I should not be told (or signalled by the absence of institutional funding) that other languges are more appropriate for study. Of course, most will want to study loshn-koydesh or Ivrit, but who knows what sorts of broadening a greater spectrum might foster?

Apartment for sale!

ONE BEDROOM CO-OP FOR SALE IN GRAMERCY AREA
215 E 24 St, Manhattan

$349K--$632.04 maintenance
Open house: Sunday, September 12, 12-3
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Great light; Juliet balconies; floor-to-ceiling windows; great closets; hardwood floors; remodeled kitchen; raised living room; dishwasher; 24-hour doorman; elevator; roof deck; laundry on every floor; bike storage area; potential for further storage in basement; no dogs

The seller reserves the right to accept or reject any offers. Floorplan available on request.

What Jewish culture is: a modest proposal

There have been a number of posts on this blog about Jewish culture -- it's high time we try to define it. (Yet another topic that's relevant in the run-up to Arrival Day 2004.)

0.1. Jews are those who define themselves as such.

0.2. Culture encompasses any product meant to inform, entertain, inspire, horrify, etc.

1.0. Jewish culture is culture produced by a Jew or meant predominantly for Jews.

Corollary 1. Not everything created by those of Jewish parentage, or those who others recognize as Jewish, is necessarily Jewish culture.

Corollary 2. Not everything created in a Jewish millieu, or in a Jewish state, is necessarily Jewish culture. For example, not every cultural product of the State of Israel is Jewish merely by virtue of being Israeli.

Corollary 3. Not everything that meets the criteria above for Jewish culture is necessarily Jewish themed, or concerns itself mainly with traditionally Jewish topics.

I don't mean to say that this is the best or even the only plausible definition of Jewish culture. Heck, people might prefer not to define it at all, since (I'm guessing) that might tamper with its indefinable whatness. Me, though, I think it's more helpful to try to stake out our positions on the issue. For example, the definition I suggest here is reasonably conservative, and possibly helpful, when treating 19th and 20th century cultural products: musical compositions, novels, poetry, political treatises, music-hall banter, and the like. Many of these can be traced to individuals, who in turn generally possess some sort of self-identity, Jewish or no. This definition fails when we ask, say, whether CNN is Jewish.

Perhaps I can rephrase. I'm trying to understand what it means when we talk about American Jewish culture. One popular route is to say that all American culture, since it has benefited so substantively from the Jews, is in some sense Jewish. I say, yes, but in a way that's so broad as to be rather unhelpful. Another is to say that Jewish culture necessarily involves Jewish languages or traditionally Jewish themes (Jewish religious texts, halachah, etc.). But I find this too narrow. To take a non-American example, many readers find Kafka to be "intuitively" Jewish (even if they have at best a foggy notion of his own ethnic allegiances).

This definition is not primarily meant to say who's in or who's out, but to help me draw comparisons and contrasts between similar sorts of cultural creations.

Postscript: I corrected a couple of egregious stylistic and factual errors on the basis of some helpful comments.

Soft-drink science

The JAMA site seems to be down, so I can't go read the much-ballyhooed (and disagreed-with) article about the influence of soda on type 2 diabetes. (Not that I particularly want to go read it; how many Nurses Health Study articles can one go through in a lifetime? Plus the hypothesis seems boring.)

Different claims about this research have been made by quarreling bloggers and media types. Without scrolling down to the bottom of this post, can you guess which of these claims are contradictory?

1. Soda is associated with an increased rate of type 2 diabetes.

2. Not all relevant confounders were controlled for in the study in question.

3. The current study contradicts a previous study.

4. The current study was properly conducted according to current standards of epidemiologic practice.

5. Soda should be avoided by those with other risk factors for diabetes.

6. Any number of other unhealthful foods would yield the same risk increase for type 2 diabetes.
7. The risk increase is small.

8. The risk increase is statistically significant.

9. The risk increase does not seem to warrant a broad-based campaign to stop soda drinking.

Do you want to know the answer to the trick question? It's not a surprise: none of these statements are mutually exclusive! In fact, I think all of them are true.

What should the American Jewish community look like?
Thoughts before Arrival Day

In the run-up to Arrival Day 2004, The Head Heeb has been productively speculating about the future of American Jewry. I think it’s also necessary to engage in some exhortation. How should the American Jewish community reframe itself in the next 350 years – or the next 50? Of course the next decades will bring uncontemplated changes, but that’s a truism. No one can foresee the future – even the Biblical prophets did not have that as their main charge. Rather than reacting to unforeseen changes, let’s imagine an American Jewish community we would like to live in.

To that end, I want to address something that’s been missing from Jonathan’s posts: some understanding of how Jews, or any other ethnic-religious group, fit into American society. With such an understanding we can more clearly lay out what we would want our community to look like.

My wife recently got me a copy of Michael Walzer’s What It Means To Be An American, a slim collection of eloquent essays which treats the relationship between our patriotism and civic virtue (national and public) and religious, ethnic, and cultural allegiances. In his essay “Pluralism: A Political Perspective,” first published in 1980, Walzer makes some observations worth quoting at length.

The growth of state power sets the stage for a new kind of pluralist politics. With increasing effect, the state does for all its citizens what the various groups do or try to do for their own adherents. It defends their rights, not only against foreign invasion and domestic violence, but also against persecution, harassment, libel, and discrimination. It celebrates their collective (American) history, establishing national holidays; building monuments, memorials, and museums; supplying educational materials. It acts to sustain their communal life, collecting taxes and providing a host of welfare services. The modern state nationalizes communal activity, and the more energetically it does this, the more taxes it collects, the more services it provides, the harder it becomes for groups to act on their own. State welfare undercuts private philanthropy, much of which was organized within ethnic and religious communities; it makes it harder to sustain private and parochial schools; it erodes the strength of cultural institutions.

All this is justified, and more than justified, by the fact that the various groups were radically unequal in strength and in their ability to provide services for their adherents. Moreover, the social coverage of the ethnic communities was uneven and incomplete. Many Americans never looked for services from any particular group, but turned instead to the state. It is not the case that state officials invaded the spheres of welfare and culture; they were invited in by disadvantaged or hardpressed or assimilated citizens. But now, it is said, pluralism cannot survive unless ethnic groups, as well as individuals, share directly in the benefits of state power. Once again, politics must follow ethnicity, recognizing and supporting communal structures.

What does this mean? First, that the state should defend collective as well as individual rights; second, that the state should expand its official celebrations, to include not only its own history but the history of all the peoples that make up the American people; third, that tax money should be fed into the ethnic communities to help in the financing of bilingual and bicultural education and of group-oriented welfare services. And if all this is to be done, and fairly done, then it is necessary also that ethnic groups be given, as a matter of right, some sort of representation within the state agencies that do it.

[. . .]

America’s immigrant [and religious-cultural: ZB] communities have a radically different character [than their counterparts in other countries]. Each of them has a center of active participants, some of them men and women who have been “born-again,” and a much larger periphery of individuals and families who are little more than occasional recipients of services generated at the center. They are communities without boundaries, shading off into a residual mass of people who think of themselves simply as Americans. Borders and border guards are among the first products of a successful national liberation movement, but ethnic assertiveness has no similar outcome. There is no way for the various groups to prevent or regulate individual crossings. Nor can the state do this without the most radical coercion of individuals. It cannot fix the population of the groups unless it forces each citizen to choose a single ethnic identity and establishes rigid designators among the different identities, of a sort that pluralism by itself has not produced.

[. . .]

The survival and flourishing of such groups depends largely upon the vitality of their centers. If that vitality cannot be sustained, pluralism will prove to be a temporary phenomenon, a way-station on the road to American nationalism. The early pluralists may have been naïve in their calm assurance that ethnic vitality would have an enduring life. But they were surely right to insist that it should not artificially be kept alive, any more than it should be repressed, by state power. On the other hand, there is an argument to be made, against the early pluralists, in favor of providing some sorts of public support for ethnic activity. It is an argument familiar from economic analysis, having to do with the character of ethnicity as a public good.

Individual mobility is the special value but also the characteristic weakness of American pluralism. It makes for loose relations between center and periphery; it generates a world without boundaries. In that world, the vitality of the center is tested by its ability to hold on to peripheral men and women and to shape their self-images and their convictions. These men and women, in turn, live off the strength of the center, which they to not have to pay for either in time or money. They are religious and cultural freeloaders, their lives enhanced by a community they do not actively support and by an identity they need not themselves cultivate. . . . Nor is there anything unjust in their freeloading. The people at the center are not being exploited; they want to hold the periphery. Freeloading of this sort is probably inevitable in a free society.

Some observations on this excerpt of Walzer’s essay. First, it seems unlikely that large-scale government support of ethnic-religious groups, such as the author envisions, will become a reality anytime soon. In the absence of this support, and accepting as plausible Walzer’s account of the “center” and “periphery” of the Jewish community (in our case), we should try to propose an American Jewish communal structure which broadly speaking does the following:

1. Funnel funds away from those Jewish communal services which, as Walzer points out, are better, more consistently, and more equitably provided by Federal, state, or local governments, including anti-discrimination and –defamation organizations; welfare; and education. (Not every school which defines itself as Jewish is equally worthy of Jewish communal support.)

As a corollary, the American Jewish community should try to sharply define the limits of its support of Israel, so that this support is justifiable in broader Jewish terms. That is to say, the American Jewish community should attempt to provide for Israelis services which are not being provided by the Israeli government, or which are not being provided in Jewishly defensible ways.

2. Use communal funds (and, it goes without saying, Jewish intellectual and spiritual creativity of the past and present) to emphasize those Jewish cultural and religious institutions which can reinforce the center while attracting, however intermittently, the periphery.

3. Construct a model of American Jewishness which recognizes that communal Jewish interests will not necessarily overlap, and might at times even contradict, broadly civic interests in the well-being of American society at large.

More on this in a future installment, starting with a stab at the notion of Jewish culture in general and American Jewish culture in particular: what they are and what they are not.