A blog / Abe blog / Abe Log

My blog is now on Jpost.com

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 06:44:00 -0800

Check out my blog, "Brand of the Jews", on The Jerusalem Post's site...

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/brand-jews

Larry David: The Shlemiel as Modern Hero

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:49:00 -0700

Not since Sacha Baron Cohen duped Israeli Yossi Alpher and Palestinian Ghassam Khalib, into confusing Hamas with hummus in “Bruno”, has a Jewish comedian had as much fun taking on the great divide in Middle East affairs.

This summer Larry David, who stars as himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, ridiculed the gulf between Palestinians and Jews with his “Palestinian Chicken” episode.

By pouring his brand of high anxiety comedy into the boiling boulibase of Israeli/Palestinian affairs, David carries on a great tradition of Jewish comedians

Cohen and David are part of an illustrious people (Jews) who have been able to mockingly point the finger at themselves and their haters, all while making the world laugh. From Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler” in “The Producers” to Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Throw The Jew Down The Well”, Jews have an ability to mock their enemies by pretending to be them, while cleverly displaying their own personal foibles.

As part of this prominent contingent, Larry David allegorically pokes fun at the recent dispute in Lower Manhattan over a mosque being built near the site of Ground Zero.

David concocts his fictional Palestinian restaurant, “named Al-Abbas” (sounds like Mahmoud Abbas) with chicken that’s so good LD says, “You know what? They should send this chicken over to Israel. Yeah, for the peace process. They'd take down all those settlements in the morning.”

(I suppose he means Jews would lay down their weapons in exchange for a pulke!)

It’s so finger lickin’ good and popular that in the episode, the owners of Al-Abbas plan to open a second restaurant, this time next to a Jewish deli. Such close border proximity is too bold a maneuver and sets off Larry’s entourage of Jewish pals to participate in a protest planned outside the new eatery.

But of course, it wouldn’t be “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or HBO without twisting in an “As The Bagel Turns,” sexual theme. While at Al-Abbas, Larry finds a Palestinian woman there very attractive and even says to his friend and agent Jeff, “You're always attracted to someone who doesn't want you, right? Well, here you have someone who not only doesn't want you, but doesn't even acknowledge your right to exist.... That's a turn-on.”

By noodling his perceived non-existence into a strength, Larry seductively takes her (to the astonishment of his friend, re-born Jew Marty Funkhouser) for a roll in the sack.

In the end, we find our non-hero haplessly walking down the middle of an alley between the supporters of the new restaurant—including the sensual Palestinian woman (offering herself to him on one side); and his Jewish friends shouting epithets at the Arabs, but enticing him to their side on the other.

It’s a Chaplinesque moment—the simpleton alone, maneuvering between opposing forces.

Just as Woody Allen before him, Larry David has become the face of the Jews. Like Michelangelo’s G0d touching Adam’s hand on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, David was given Allen’s doppelganger in the 2009 comedy “Whatever Works” as the misanthropic Boris Yelnikoff.

By challenging the political and social status quo, David has become the latest epitome of what Ruth Wisse termed, “The Shlemiel as Modern Hero.”

Magneto is my Hero

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 17:31:00 -0700

The child watches as his parents cross into the gates of death at a Nazi concentration camp. The bars close separating him from them. Then suddenly, in a fit of emotion, Erik outstretches his arms attempting to bend open and break the gate with his unique and secret gift.

In the new movie “X-Men: First Class”, we go back in comic book lore to learn how a young boy, Erik Lehnsherr, grew up to become the metal moving Magneto.

Witnessing this show of super power is the evil Sebastian Shaw, played by Kevin Bacon, a Josef Mengele-like character, who wishes to experiment with and exploit young Erik’s gift. In a following scene, Shaw threatens and then shoots Erik’s mother in front of the boy, all because Erik refuses to do a circus trick and move a Nazi coin with his powers. That coin will come in handy later.

Cut to the early 1960s and we see Erik, all grown up, with numbers tattooed on his arm. He’s become a Nazi-hunter seeking out vengeance for the murder of his mother and his people. (In a twist of casting fate, the actor who portrays him was also in “Inglorious Basterds,” another fantasy film that swore vengeance against Nazis.)

Not until he meets his chum and eventual rival, Charles Xavier, does he hone his rage (somewhat) and control his unbridled force.

Created in the early 60s, the duality between Xavier and Magneto have been compared to the two-sides of the same coin that are MLK and Malcolm X. JTA’s Ami Eden has made the case for years that they resemble Rabbi Meir Kahane and Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg.

But the makers of this latest film do more than endow Magneto with manipulative powers over metal. The sympathetic character manipulates us too. He wins over the audiences’ heart throughout (unless you side with Shaw who is out to destroy humanity.)

The break point comes when missiles from Soviet and U.S. ships are launched at an island and at the mutant X-men, as the superpowers seeks to annihilate those who are different (yes, the mutants are all together now on one tiny piece of land), does Erik stop them, turn them around and aim them back at the U.S. & Soviet fleets. He even utters the words, “Never Again.”

Unlike other comics, Marvel’s creators relished in ambiguity. Their characters were not drawn in black and white. It’s also why, in the end of the film, we’re left cold when our hero becomes the anti-hero and Magneto allies with a hot devil and dons his own horns. Has he gone rogue? Or, is he still to be admired?
Simcha Weinstein’s book “Up, Up And Oy Vey!” explains it was Jewish writer Chris Claremont who gave Magneto the back-story we’re now witnessing on the big screen. Claremont writes, “Once I found a point of departure for Magneto, all the rest fell into place, because it allowed me to turn him into a tragic figure who wants to save his People.”

In some of Claremont’s work, he has Magneto be a double agent for Mossad – hunting Nazi war criminals for the CIA then secretly turning them over to Israel for trial. In “Days of Future Past”, he has mutants rounded up and put in camps throughout the US.

What this prequel provides in background, it also hints at what’s to come for the mutant X-Men. Humans will seek them out, hunting them in the hopes of destroying their race.

Back to that coin. If you were given the opportunity to avenge a family member’s death by Mengele knowing (seeing) what he did, what would you do? Thought so. Yes, not everyone in Nazi Germany was a Mengele. But how many of them were witnesses to what happened? How many people throughout the world today would willingly stand there and see it all take place again?

Nakba Nonsense

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Sun, 22 May 2011 20:17:00 -0700

Just as Israel is physically surrounded by hostile regimes, one can’t open a website, turn a news page or flip a channel without it getting attacked in the media.

While Israel was being infiltrated by angry mobs crossing into its territory on May 15th in “Nakba” protests (Nakba, or calamity in Arabic, when Israel was reborn) from across the Syrian, Lebanon and Gaza borders, it’s publicly criticized by Jewish intellectuals, writers aligned with left-leaning politics and high-profile celebrities.

This month, in a reversal of misfortune, Tony-Award winning playwright Tony Kushner, who was at first barred from receiving an honorary degree from CUNY due to his stance on Israel is now set get one. Yet, in his letter of protest to the CUNY board, he writes, “I believe that the historical record shows, incontrovertibly, that the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes as part of the creation of the state of Israel was ethnic cleansing.”

It’s not just from outside the perimeter of Israel, that it’s equated with terminology usually reserved for the most abhorrent regimes. From within Israel, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy writes, “Were Israel a little more confident…all schools in Israel, Jewish and Arab alike, would today mark Nakba Day.”

One is reminded of Akiva’s saying, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” For a non-Jewish outsider to look in they must wonder, “Why support Israel when even the Jews are so vehemently critical?” Indeed, being critical of Israel is one thing, but portraying Israel’s birth as a “Nakba” is a dangerous misreading of history as CAMERA points out.

Yet like so many Big Lies, it’s believed when repeated over and over again. What’s omitted is that in 1948 a Palestinian state could have been fulfilled, but instead Palestinian Arabs rejected it and Israel was attacked. As historian Benny Morris notes, “the Palestinian Arab leaders, headed by the exiled chief and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and ally of Hitler, Hajj Amin al Husayni, rejected partition and launched a three-day general strike, accompanied by a wave of anti-Jewish terrorism in the cities and on the roads.”

Another lie by omission is how nothing is ever mentioned about the disaster suffered by the Jews expelled from Arab states, and especially from Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. As Professor Ada Aharoni of the World Jewish Congress points out; Egypt’s Jewish community comprised 90,000 Jews in 1948. Today, only 38 Jews live there. Yet, the Arabs (who prefer to call themselves Palestinians) who live in Israel today constitute 20% of the population.

The noose of hostility surrounding Israel is further exacerbated by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas when he created an alliance with Iran-backed Hamas, a terrorist group that refuses to accept Israel’s existence and has fired over 328 rockets and mortars at Israel’s civilians according to The Israel Project. In September, he’ll seek unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State in front of the UN. Yet were Abbas to have his way, the so-called right of return would bring an estimated 4.8 million Palestinian refugees and descendants to Israel. The result of such an action would ensure an ethnic cleansing—of Jews in Israel.

I suggest that the “Nakba” protests have nothing to do with the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but are in reality in existential opposition of Israel as a Jewish State—in any form.

But why believe the pro-Israel press and Jewish organizations dedicated to understanding the truth behind the news? Just tune into Al Aqsa TV and you will find Yunis al Astal, a member of the Palestinian Authority parliament, spelling out his organization’s vision for the genocidal annihilation of the Jewish people. In a television interview last week Al Astal described the ingathering of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel in terms of a divine plan that would give the Arabs “the honor” of annihilating “the evil of this gang.”

Better yet, read your history of the Jews and then ask, “Do we still have to wonder what is actually being planned?”

Demystifying Eichmann

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Sun, 22 May 2011 20:14:00 -0700

Tuesday May 17, 2011

Finally, on the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann trial, historian Deborah Lipstadt has taken an analytical approach, demystifying this seminal moment in 20th century court history with her book, "The Eichmann Trial."

For fifty-years, the term, “banality of evil” has been part of the political and cultural lexicon, due to Hannah Arendt’s famous book describing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”

Now through scrupulous research, Lipstadt’s insightful book reveals facts that had been overlooked and exposes opinions that became lore.

No stranger to either the subject of the Holocaust (she was a consultant on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), or court trials related to it, (she successfully won her case against Holocaust denier David Irving and authored a book on the subject, “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier.”) Her new book describes the capture, trial and worldwide response to it; the latter with a particular focus on Arendt.

In laying the groundwork in her introduction, while she draws comparisons to her own trial and Eichmann’s, their main commonality being a deeply rooted anti-Semitism, she is careful to make distinctions. In the Eichmann trial the Nazi was the defendant and survivors were called as witnesses to testify. In her own trial, the burden of proof was on her.

Importantly, her greatest contribution is in proving that Eichmann was not the “order-taker” he claimed and that Arendt portrayed him as, but that he was responsible to “ensure that the freight cars should be used to their maximum capacity.” Additionally she reveals transcripts not used in the trial to show that in Hungary, even in the face of Allied bombardment of rail stations, he resolved to “still march” the Jews to the lower Austrian border.

Equally significant is her exposure of Arendt’s detached, phenomenological approach to the trial where it was, “the transformation of seemingly normal people into killers” that intrigued her. Beyond emotional detachment, Lipstadt also points out how Arendt was in fact physically absent for several weeks of the trial vacationing in Basel.

Beyond this, another of the more significant changes that the trial stylistically bore was the term, “Holocaust.” She writes, it was “cemented into the lexicon of the non-Hebrew-speaking population.”

On that note, while the media in 1961 had nowhere near the lightning speed and utter ubiquity it possesses today, the term “Holocaust” had been on the front pages of newspapers and created a focus and attention previously unseen.

The trial also provided worldwide interest in a new field of study giving birth to countless academic institutions now offering genocide and Holocaust studies.

But perhaps the most profound effect was…

“…as a result of the trial, the story of the Holocaust, though it had previously been told, discussed, and commemorated, was heard anew, in a profoundly different way, and not just in Israel but in many parts of the Jewish and non-Jewish world. The telling may not have been entirely new, but the hearing was.”

On this, her book comes at a crucial time, when through the lens of the internet and 'Do-It-Yourself ' media reporting, fact and fiction frequently blur. Lipstadt summons a razor sharp perspective, clearly and incisively delineating the two and setting the historical record straight.

Politicians who are playing at celebrity are playing with fire

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:20:00 -0700

Politicians who are playing at celebrity are playing with fire

Babel Bites

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:08:00 -0700

This month a global survey conducted by the BBC found Israel to be one of the most negatively viewed countries in the world. In fact, Israel was the fourth most negatively viewed country, just ahead of Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

The survey encompassed 27 countries with over 28,000 people interviewed of which 49% (essentially one-half) viewed Israel negatively.

Question: With all of the many pro-Israel organizations promoting it, a virtual alphabet of initials from the ADL – ZOA, how is it that such a perception can exist?

From a marketing angle, I believe there is a duality at play. One is an on the ground physical space that exists – a reality. The other is an idea – a metaphysical notion of what Israel stands for in the mind.

On the ground, the Middle East is a geographical conundrum. To cede land to the Palestinians, as Israel did in Gaza, is to have Hamas’s rockets rain down on homes. Conversely, to fight back and to try and eradicate the threat is to be perceived as the aggressor.

The same exercise took place in the North against Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon War. In fact, over the past 30-years, from 1982 in The First Lebanon War, to the First Intifada in ‘87 and the second in 2000 to Operation Cast Lead 2008-‘09, each time Israel tries to wrestle its way out of the net laid by its enemies, it gets further entangled in the trap set by them.

Translated on the airwaves, in the more metaphysical media space, the news gets reported through a distorted and often slanted lens as David vs. Goliath. Only in this version, Israel is Goliath.

Perceptually, it looks like this: Palestinians throw rocks, Israel shoots guns. Hamas sends crude rockets, so Israel flies powerful F-16s.

Unfortunately, perception isn’t reality. Ergo, we have a communications problem.

Yet again, with the many organizations that strive to enlighten, defend and communicate Israel’s story, it’s difficult to match words and facts against propagandistic imagery. But with too many facts vying for attention, with so many organizations and various, though well-intentioned agendas, a Tower of Babel ensues.

What Israel needs is a unified communications strategy.

In ancient Chinese wisdom, with a crisis, often comes an opportunity.

Currently, with an Arab world in turmoil illustrating the instability of the neighborhood where Israel lives, the world once again sees how vast and populace, not to mention how volatile those countries are. The world can perceive how Israel is completely and utterly surrounded by tyrannical regimes, many of which seek its destruction.

For Israel to be defined by the Palestinian’s cause is to miss the wider picture of a region of adversaries.

In marketing, when a brand is lost (and in this case I’m talking about the metaphysical Israel) go back to its heritage. Israel needs to be perceived on the airwaves, as what it is on the ground – a David.

One story. Not hundreds.

David was not without fault, but he was also a warrior, a musician and a poet. Similarly, Israel is not perfect, but strives to be righteous, is culturally rich and diverse. David’s reign signified the formation of a coherent Jewish kingdom centered in Jerusalem. And with God's help, David was victorious over his people's enemies.

One note of caution – branding is forever and needs to be differentiated from the day-to-day micro-conflicts and dramas in the news cycle. Fortunately this very idea is part of the rich history, heritage and long legacy of Israel as told through the Bible. It is authentic.

It’s also a story that is not only told in the Jewish bible, but is all encompassing and iconic, recounted by Jews, Christians and yes, even Muslims.

Void Of Horror

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:39:00 -0800

Void Of Horror

In the era of AMC’s “Mad Men” and in 1965, Harold Pinter wrote “The Homecoming” his Tony Award winning masterpiece, which just had a run at Center Stage here in Baltimore.

A Jewish/British playwright, Pinter, who also won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was an actor, poet and left-leaning political activist. His early plays, were able to wrench and capture the ontological void of the vast nowhere land from his predecessor Samuel Beckett and place it within realistic settings.

He infused their spare, unadorned locales of ordinariness (his play “The Room” takes place in a one-room apartment) with characters drawn by jagged razors, so sharply carved they glide before they cut. Even the proscenium at Center Stage was framed like a picture, beckoning the audience to observe the slit like voyeurs.

Enter Ruth, a name with significant lineage in the Jewish canon and no accident either. Like the biblical Ruth who is brought to her husband’s people, this Ruth accompanies her husband, a professor of philosophy, into his childhood home occupied by his father, two brothers and an uncle, while getting to know all of them in the biblical sense.

In the end, Pinter has Ruth, the object of desire, coil around and transform the house that the men built, into one that she rules. The lads revolve around her like orbs to the Sun.

For anyone who watches “Mad Men” knows, the women of that era are constantly treated like servants or worse, tarts. NOW was only founded a year later in ‘66.

Equally then, while women were still second-class citizens, Jews were an invisible minority.

Perhaps out of fear, or pragmatism, like many artists and writers of his day, Pinter doesn’t make much of his Jewishness in any overt way. One can assume, that Max and his kin are Jewish the same way Arthur Miller’s Loman family in “Death of a Salesman” is Jewish.

Fast forward to today, where names like Tony Kushner and David Mamet have their characters make no bones about their identity. Movies and books by Jews, about Jews are for everyone. Likewise, more women are in the American workforce these days than men.

Men, who have created more hot wars, cold wars and conflicts during their reign should be happy, no grateful, that at this point, when one twitch of a finger can annihilate us all, women may have been sent to rescue us.

Flip open your smartphone to the flipside of a time-warped world and from Iran to Egypt, we’re witnessing ‘60s riots in real time where woman are oppressed and Jews mostly despised.

Can this new awakening of freedom, from a world previously cutoff from progress triumph? Or, will the freedom of speech and to assemble, to go to the theatre and see Pinter plays, be snuffed? (Pause).

Pinter’s early plays were apolitical. He even said, “I'm not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically. I'm not conscious of any social function.” Yet, their menacing pauses can be as terrifying as a scream from Gehenna.

In his later life and in the midst of our divisive culture, much of Pinter’s political activism rained controversy down on him. Yet know, as an officer in PEN and with fellow playwright Miller, he travelled on a mission to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers.

In fact, up until he died, stricken by cancer in 2008, and in the last decade of his life, he devoted himself to causes he believed in and rarely wrote plays.

Just as women had to be wallflowers and Jews needed to be unseen, his greatest plays left unsaid (perhaps in those frightening pauses) much of what he later saw as wrong with the world, as madness.

“Al Jaffee’s Mad Life: A Biography” - Book Review / Jewish Times

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Mon, 7 Feb 2011 12:45:00 -0800

Since the new millennia and the rise of blockbuster movies like “Spiderman”, “Ironman” and “Hulk”, numerous books have been written about the invention of the comic book and how Jews were largely the creative force behind the pop-culture phenomenon. But right alongside, and when the sensation really hit its apex in the 1960s and 70s, MAD Magazine lent an added satirical slant to a cartoon culture and a world seemingly gone mad. It became a must-read for millions.

“Mad Life” is the story of Al Jaffee, the iconic cartoonist and prolific contributor to Mad, who at 89 is still at it (55-years and counting) with the pub. But aside from his zany drawings (he created the famous fold-in) and clever wit, his biography is a fascinating read because it’s so unique.

Born in 1921 in Savannah, GA to Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, his mother longingly up and yanked Al and his three brothers back to Lithuania. Speaking no Yiddish, nor a word of Lithuanian and with no electricity or plumbing, the boys were in culture shock. Then, after a year there, their father rescued them and brought them back to the US, only for them to be taken by mom once again.

But in 1933, with the Nazi threat looming, their father sensed the impending danger and saved them, leaving behind their mother, who no doubt perished in the Holocaust.

But while the lads were away in the old country, their father kept sending young Al and his brothers, cartoon funnies from the Savannah newspaper and the boys would treasure and duplicate them.

This cross-Atlantic linkage had a profound influence on Al’s art and he eventually got accepted to the new High School of Music and Art, where he met up with his future MAD colleagues, Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman (Kurtzman would be the original mastermind behind MAD.)

The award winning and authorized biographer, Mary-Lou Weisman, writes, “given his artistic gift, Al’s mad childhood seems to have led him inevitably to satire and to MAD.”

Running alongside Weisman’s portrayal, the book is filled with colorful drawings by Al that build on the narrative infusing color and joy into his harsh, madcap life.

Promised Lands - Book Review / Jewish Times

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Mon, 7 Feb 2011 12:41:00 -0800

For those asking the proverbial question, “Where are the next crop of great Jewish writers?” the answer is within the pages of this book.

Derek Rubin is to be applauded for assembling a group of highly talented, fiction writers, who’ve each contributed their unique voice to the proposed theme of Promised Land and how that idea, in his words, “continues to shape the collective consciousness of contemporary American Jews.”

Archetypically, Promised Land is a notion wide enough to encompass a vast array of interpretations by each of these creative authors, yet it also offers them a starting place from which to invent their imaginary tale.

While some of the writers are more famous than others, all of them express, a variation on a universal theme and provide a “mosaic” on it.

First in the line-up, Dara Horn knocks it out of the village in her piece “Shtetl World”, where she concocts a theme park in Western Massachusetts based on the now vanished setting of an Eastern European shtetl. Masterfully, she’s able to infuse irony within the confines of what is a haunting environment.

In another section of the book, the land of Israel provides a subject to ruminate on and in Joan Legant’s hands, she analyzes the healing nature it offers a woman who defended herself from a brutal attack.

Toward the end, the theme widens to encompass the illusory and physically unobtainable idea of Promised Land. In Jonathan Rosen’s “The True World” a reporter goes off on a quest to interview a deceased Saul Bellow, traveling first to a ghoulish Ellis Island and then onto the netherworld where he encounters the late Henry Roth who serves as his guide.

Importantly, in a category largely dominated by men for the past sixty-years, this collection exemplifies the significant rise women have attained, with thirteen of the twenty-three voices being female writers.

Mr. Rubin, like his previous book, “On Who We Are: On Being and (Not Being) a Jewish American Writer”, provides us a substantial compilation that signifies and reflects the moment and zeitgeist of our generation.

Letting Go Of Philip Roth

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:49:00 -0800

Letting Go Of Philip Roth

Letting Go Of Philip Roth
Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

He is the last of the triumvirate standing. Bernard Malamud departed first back in 1986. Then, Saul Bellow passed in 2005. Along with Philip Roth, they were, as Bellow mockingly referred to all three of them, “The Hart, Shaffner & Marx of literature,” as if because they were all Jewish, they’d been clumped together in a haberdashery.

Since the birth of the new millennia, while Mr. Roth has vigorously written at a textual tear and his most prolific, penning a series of short, powerfully compact books, the stories stored in them have all been obsessed with death.

This month, and with his 31st book “Nemesis,” about a terrifying polio outbreak that threatens wartime Newark, N.J., Mr. Roth takes that grave subject beyond anything he’s done up until this point.

In 2001, he had David Kepesh (once the man who became a breast), a 70-year-old professor and critic, panicked about death and growing old.

By mid-decade in 2006, his short novel “Everyman” begins at the funeral of its protagonist, an old advertising executive. In “Exit Ghost” (2007), Mr. Roth writes his last book about his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman (“The Ghost Writer”) — in a sense finishing him off. Soon after, in “Indignation” (2008) he travels back in time to 1951, where we find out the narrator is dead and relaying his story from the beyond. Then, in 2009, he writes “The Humbling” about a leading stage actor who kills himself with a shotgun.

Now, at the age of 77, is Mr. Roth trying to tell us something?

It cannot be ignored that Mr. Roth, who has always been an author obsessed with identity, is a post-modern writer and one whose fiction mirrors and explores the relationship between the work and the writer.

While his Zuckerman books are about the travails of an author, he internalizes even further in others, such as “Operation Shylock” (1993), where he has, as a doppelganger, the novelist Philip Roth travel to Israel to attend the trial of accused Nazi war criminal, John Demjanjuk, while an impersonator, going by the name Philip Roth, hijacks his identity.

Commenting on his narrative style in “Deception” (1990), he observes, “I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction. … Let them decide what it is or isn’t.” Critics who’ve observed this Rothian hall of mirrors have called his technique metafiction.

If we are to follow his post-modern pathway of prose, where Mr. Roth’s message is typed within the pages of his medium, then we need to also ask … Will the eventual passing of Mr. Roth (that he seems to be foreshadowing, if not bellowing) signify a broader marker separating a generation? Are we at a seam in generations, where old media is dying along with old writers and new forms of media are the way by which contemporary writers will write?

Commenting in 2009, during an interview with Tina Brown of The Daily Beast, Mr. Roth considered the future of literature by stating his belief that within 25 years, the reading of novels will be regarded as a “cultic” activity:

“I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range. ...”

Likewise, his take on digital books as replacing printed copy, Mr. Roth opines:

“The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. … Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”

If we follow his Jeremiad, by sounding the death knell of both the medium of books and the messenger himself, Mr. Roth’s latest and perhaps most devastating piece of work since 1997’s “American Pastoral” not only gives us a metaphor about the death of his protagonist — he pens us a plague.

Not since the heroic rise and fall of Seymour “Swede” Levov, whom Mr. Roth built up into one of his most beloved characters, a star athlete and gallant All-American in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Pastoral” (1997), do our hearts get torn asunder by Mr. Roth’s tender account.

“Nemesis” revolves around a young playground director named Bucky Cantor during the war year of 1944 on the streets of the Jewish Weequahic section in Newark during a polio outbreak. Mr. Roth endears us to young Bucky by portraying his caring manner with children and the amazing sway he has over them, only to steal it all away with a ravaging scourge.

After Mr. Roth’s recent decade of self-destructive story lines presaging his own eventual demise, he has now gone beyond self-annihilation to a broader, wider obliteration of a whole population with “Nemesis.” Death doesn’t just seek out the elderly individual, but an entire landscape of the future — children.

Beyond his individual characters’ struggles and travails, Mr. Roth is known to confront the zeitgeist. As the last of the triumvirate standing, he is like Lear, railing against more than just old age. Is this same terrain also the literary landscape that’s becoming ever more incomprehensible due to an explosion of media options, with an unfathomable number of garbled, incoherent messages thundering their tweets and text but in the end do not signify literature?

What is the future of Jewish literature, after Mr. Roth?

Derek Rubin, whose book “Who We Are On Being (And Not Being) a Jewish American Writer,” has examined, through a number of famous authors’ essays, the future of their genre. He believes, “Having achieved ‘everything,’ Roth perhaps now finds himself longing for something else.”

Mr. Rubin will come out with a new book in October by Brandeis University Press that will contain new, unpublished short stories by a number of Jewish writers. It is titled “Promised Lands — New Jewish American Fiction On Longing And Belonging.”

For Mr. Rubin, the idea of longing “has often shaped Jewish understanding of the ideal of the Promised Land.” He writes, “There have been periods in history when the Jews of the Diaspora have found themselves in such hopeless circumstances that they have felt that they would never be able to reach the Promised Land, whether real or metaphorical.”

This is what Mr. Roth has done with “Nemesis” and has been doing with much of his historical fiction; he goes back to a seemingly idyllic time, and uncovers a deeper, wrenching underbelly within it.

Mr. Rubin writes, “Roth inhabits this critical no-man’s land from which he has a clear view of the Jewish post-immigrant world of his parents and of contemporary American society. Owing to the strange overlapping of generational experience, he was there to witness up close all the dilemmas, the insecurities, the confusion, indeed the hypocrisy, but also the comedy attendant on the post-immigrant experience without actually being a part of it.”

As an example of this, he recounts Mr. Roth’s essay “My Life As A Boy,” in which he talks about growing up in the 1930s and ’40s. It wasn’t Judaism but baseball that was his “religion.” As it turns out, the boys in “Nemesis” and on Bucky’s playground in 1944 play baseball.

Examining this duality between the historically real and the imagined, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, in a review of “American Pastoral,” recalls …

“Back in 1960, Philip Roth gave a speech in which he argued that American life was becoming so surreal, so stupefying, so maddening, that it had ceased to be a manageable subject for novelists. He argued that real life, the life out of newspaper headlines, was outdoing the imagination of novelists, and that fiction writers were in fact abandoning the effort to grapple with ‘the grander social and political phenomena of our times’ and were turning instead ‘to the construction of wholly imaginary worlds, and to a celebration of the self.’ ”

Fifty years later, just as he had here, Mr. Roth’s declaration to Tina Brown is as germane as ever, though magnified with the lens of time, as newspaper headlines have grown into an exponential number of media outlets blaring the death of the newspaper.

As Mr. Roth has concerned himself with death and dying and we await a Jewish writer of his stature to appear on the scene, there’s also been an amazing surge on the Internet of Jewish websites focused on Jewish literature and culture, many with hip names like Jewcy, Zeek, Heeb and Nextbook’s Tablet. They each have a strong literary sensibility, but with an edgy take on contemporary Judaism.

The editorial director of Nextbook/Shocken is Jonathan Rosen, who created the Jewish Encounter series and is the author of “The Talmud and the Internet.” As it turns out, he also has the distinction of writing the very last story in Mr. Rubin’s “Promised Lands” called “The True World,” which has an unnamed protagonist travel by boat to the beyond in order to interview a deceased Saul Bellow.

Contemplating the world beyond and the viability of getting there, by an author who has written about the Internet and its relationship to Talmud, I asked Mr. Rosen what he was aiming for in that story. He replied in talmudic fashion not with answers, but with questions, “What is the promised land in that story? The afterlife? Is it literature itself? The promised land of America … all these ideas coalesced in my head.”

Indeed, this vast unknown, uncharted world that we are able to tap into, that is the Internet, opens up whole new worlds to us. Is Mr. Rosen suggesting there’s a way to do that today? “I don’t think the Internet leads you into a metaphysical world, but in the Talmud, the living talk to the dead and all these texts are mingled together and what is an actual story is hard to separate.”

As it relates to fiction, Mr. Rosen, who is also a published novelist (“Eve’s Apple,” “Joy Comes in the Morning”), says, “The dialogic nature of the novel, the multiplicity of voices you can employ, allows one a more honest open relationship to all the fragments.” For Mr. Roth, according to Mr. Rosen, “is in some sense a posthumous writer already, and has drawn inspiration from that intuition. He has a novel narrated by a dead man, and ‘The Ghost Writer’ plays with the question of how in order to write about life you must absent yourself from it. All writers, in that sense, are posthumous. In ‘Zuckerman Unbound,’ the hero has written a scandalously carnal novel [‘Carnovsky’] like ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ but is himself a lost soul and, increasingly, a lost body.”

When Philip Roth burst on the scene in the late ’50s, websites like Tablet and Zeek certainly weren’t around, but there were literary critics that sang his praises and as Mr. Rosen points out, “There was a generation of writers as concerned as critics, with the writers, with themes and subjects that these novelists were concerned with. Saul Bellow was born in 1915 and so was Alfred Kazin. Irving Howe reviewed Roth’s collection of stories at the time and on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.”

There was also a generation of writers, artists and musicians who were creating a renaissance in American letters and popular culture. From Allen Ginsberg, who had completed his poem “Kaddish” in 1959 (the same year “Goodbye Columbus” was published), and Nabokov’s controversial “Lolita,” to jazz musician Miles Davis who had recorded “Kind of Blue,” one of the best-selling jazz records of all time. Mr. Roth arrived on the doorstep of the 1960s, an era of artistic exuberance.

By the end of that decade and with “Portnoy’s Complaint” in 1969, Mr. Roth outraged many of those same critics, who called his book vulgar and Mr. Roth a self-hating Jew.

Unfortunately, for some, that label still sticks, though if you ask them what of Mr. Roth’s they’ve read lately, they may reply, “Goodbye Columbus.”

By turning a critical eye on his tribe and blending fact and fiction, “Portnoy’s Complaint” did not endear him to critics or to Jews.

In a 1972 essay in Commentary titled “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Howe famously tore into Roth, “What the book speaks for is a yearning to undo the fate of birth; there is no wish to do the Jews any harm. … Portnoy is simply crying out to be left alone, to be released from the claims of distinctiveness and the burdens of the past, so that, out of his own nothingness, he may create himself as a ‘human being.’ ”

Roth did re-create himself with that book and even told The Paris Review in 1984, “Portnoy wasn’t a character for me, he was an explosion.” Ironically, the self, which Howe talked about, was to be the focus of Roth’s next several novels, after “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and spanning two decades.

For Howe, Mr. Roth closed an era of Jewish literature based on what he called the “post-immigrant Jewish experience” and a world he wrote about with sensitivity in “World Of Our Fathers.” His pessimism toward any new, revitalized Jewish literary re-awakening is even referred to as the Howe Doctrine. “Will there remain a thick enough sediment of felt life to enable a new outburst of writing about American Jews?” Howe asked. Howe, who died in 1993, wasn’t able to see and experience the amazing output from Jewish writers of many varieties and how young people today are experiencing them.

For professor Evelyn Avery, who teaches courses in Jewish literature at Towson University, the question of where Jewish literature is headed and who is leading the way is met with optimism.

“I am very affirmative and very pleased with the direction it’s going,” she says. “I see a movement toward Judaism and in particular religious writing and themes and particularly women writers such as Allegra Goodman and Dara Horn who have been affected by their heritage and weave it into their art.

“There’s a vibrancy and a lot of variations of Jewish writers.” For example, Pearl Abraham, who in her first book turns her back on her traditional Chasidic life. But by the end of her second, it ends with the protagonist going to Israel. Then in her third book, ‘The Seventh Beggar,’ there was a respect for that Chasidic world and she was much more positive about being a religious Jew.”

Dr. Avery also includes in her course the works she considers classics and that hold up — novels by Malamud and Bellow and the short stories in Mr. Roth’s “Goodbye Columbus,” which she says the students respond to very well.

According to Dr. Avery, while the direction literature is taking pleases her, in our constantly plugged in and always on world, “many students can misuse technology as a tool to learn about these writers.” She says, “There’s a consensus among the faculty that the advances in technology can impose problems when students are scrolling, texting and on their cell phones.”

Ironically, Dr. Avery’s observations are not lost on one of today’s most celebrated and clever Jewish writers, who has recently come out with a dystopian satire “Super Sad True Love Story,” where books are extinct and people use their apparats (an iPhone on steroids) to point at anyone and obtain their credit score or perform an instant background check and perceive their desirability for sex.

While Gary Shteyngart places his story in a future setting, he smartly embeds so many believable aspects into it, one can’t help but recognize their ubiquity in our constantly turned on world.

Another celebrated Jewish writer, who is also known to rankle the establishment and is an advocate for returning fiction to a focus on story by way of genre fiction, is Michael Chabon.

Mr. Chabon, who grew up in Columbia, won the Pulitzer Prize at the beginning of the millennia for “The Amazing Adventures Of Cavalier & Clay.” His wish is to return entertainment back into novels, and he takes issue with those who seek to belittle it.

“The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it [entertainment] is not to disparage or repudiate,” he said, “but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences. …”

Like Michael Chabon, Laura Lippman spent part of her youth growing up in the planned city of Columbia. Along with Mr. Chabon, she, too, is a champion of genre fiction and her mysteries featuring Tess Monaghan have won the Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, Nero, Gumshoe and Shamus awards.

A few years ago, when Ms. Lippman spoke at Bolton Street Synagogue in Baltimore along with her husband, David Simon, I asked her who her hero was, and she replied (unaided) Philip Roth.

Ms. Lippman said of Mr. Roth: “I learned a lot from Roth about POV, not so much in the technical sense, but in watching him place his imagination behind people quite unlike himself.”

As for Mr. Chabon’s efforts to bring fiction back in the direction of entertainment, she says, “Fiction needs to go where readers want to follow. I’m not saying it has to be excessively popular, or cater to the lowest common denominator. But fiction centers on stories.”

Mr. Chabon’s arrival and his desire for content to possess the attributes of entertainment also comes during a decade when the means by which we read have aligned with how we read. After all, Nooks, Kindles and especially iPads are clearly entertainment devices that merge reading and multi-media; learning and fun; work and play.

In July, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, announced that his customers now buy more digital books made for the Kindle than they do hardcovers. Equally, Barnes and Noble is up for sale as bricks and mortar bookstores are being outdone by e-books.

Even college students like Dr. Avery’s will soon be accessing those once expensive, clunky textbooks through Inkling, which claims to be “the world’s first end-to-end platform for mobile learning content.” It will make textbooks available on Apple’s iPad for $2.99 per chapter and it will also make full use of iPad’s color, video and touch screen.

However, like youth, iPads are not to be wasted on the young. Bloomberg’s Businessweek reported that the iPad’s intuitive interface makes it appealing to senior citizens as their source for news and entertainment.

Consequently as the medium of technology shows no signs of pausing, even for an older demographic, one of the most august message providers of Jewish news, The Forward, which began publishing in 1897, is also adapting.

In a Sept. 2 letter from the publisher, it became a “membership organization”: “… just as the immigrant community sustained the Yiddish Forward since after its founding, in 1897, we’re inviting our friends and readers to support us today. … Today, the cutting edge has moved away from websites to the broader universe of digital media: mobile apps, iTunes, podcasts, YouTube channels, Tweets and whatever will follow. … but the most important transition is not technological. It’s generational.”

Speaking about the shifting media landscape with Dan Friedman, arts and culture editor at The Forward and a founding member at Zeek, he says, “While different publishers are at different places in the curve, all publishing enterprises have to keep abreast of the latest. They’ll have to have an iPhone app, iPad app, and you want to make sure there’s multimedia on your website.”

As for the changes taking place, Mr. Friedman says it’s a reflection of the demographics. “The Jewish community doesn’t look like it did 20 years ago — a predominantly suburban, Conservative, JTS-led movement of Jews doesn’t exist anymore. The children of those suburbs are not interested in being those types of Jews.”

According to Mr. Friedman, unlike the era that Bellow and early Roth were writing in, “There’s a form of pluralism that did not exist in the few decades post-war. The Conservative movement has broken down, as has the suburbs, as the location has broken down. You see it in the culture. There are a lot of people that are engaged culturally with the project of Judaism in all sorts of different parts of our history in ways that are much more forward looking.”

The era when Bellow, Malamud and Mr. Roth were clumped together was reflective of a closer-knit Jewish culture.

Literature today, like the medium of the Internet with its vast diversity that allows us the ability to go divide into our own cultural and political cocoons, is a balkanized Diaspora — but, nevertheless, a very productive one.

Asked to give his take on the future of Jewish writers, Mr. Friedman, as an editor who gets a large quantity of books across his desk to be reviewed, says, “Our rate of cultural production is not slowing.”

While The Forward is morphing, and has created alliances with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz and with Zeek Media, the irreverent Jewish periodical Heeb magazine announced, just a few days prior, that it was suspending the print edition and going online only.

According to Arye Dworken, creative director at Heeb, “It’s not a surrender. It’s more like a pause.”

He also laments, “Our media industry is a self-perpetuating death. We keep talking about the death of media and eventually it’s going to happen because we keep on talking about it.”

It is a strangely McLuhan-esque paradigm that we’ve converged upon. Mr. Roth, a post-modern writer, who has used as his subject matter an author like himself, and has killed him several times over the past decade and right when technology seems to be closing the book on physical books, now creates one that encompasses not just a single death, but a deadly pestilence.

One could say he’s been writing this same book all his life, for even in his short story “Epstein,” contained in his first book “Goodbye Columbus,” Herbie, a young son, died of polio at age 11.

In “The Ghost Writer,” at one point Amy Bellette says to Nathan Zuckerman that Lonoff (whom she imagines talking to from beyond the grave) told her, “Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of a literary era.”

Mr. Roth’s books may take on a different form in the future. One day they may become ephemeral bytes, transmitted from a cloud beyond. It will always be his stories that will breathe life onto the page.

They’ll keel us over with laughter and tear us apart with grief and, somehow, he and writers like him will be immortalized by living in all of us … forever.

Shylock's Israel

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Sun, 7 Nov 2010 19:06:00 -0800

Sunday Nov 07, 2010

Israel, the Jew

By Abe Novick

After a successful run in NYC’s Central Park this past summer and a film version released earlier in the decade, Al Pacino will again revive his
role as the notorious money-lending Jew on Broadway in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” (opens Nov. 7th)

Apart from having a major movie star provide a scenery eating performance, it’s a play that speaks to our time. For just as the world condemns Israel by assigning blame every time it responds in self-defense, so Shylock is mischaracterized in the eyes of Venetians. Just as the UN brands itself an objective forum for debate, so Portia disguises herself, masking her true identity in the courtroom.

Shakespeare’s Shylock is perhaps one of The Bard’s most complex characters, having been interpreted as both an evil villain on the one had
and a more sympathetic (though not without teeth), victim on the other.

In the midst of Venetian society, Shylock stubbornly wants/demands his pound of flesh. He wants what was agreed to. This obsessive need for Old Testament justice in the midst of a forgiving Christian culture is what undoes him in the end. Yet, Shakespeare also infuses him with humanity, by having him sympathetically reason with us in this now immortal speech.

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; … If you prick us, do we not bleed?…And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."

The resemblance in that speech to Israel is uncanny.

Indeed in today’s world, Israel could be an understudy for Shylock. The theatrical medium of 1596 (where citizens got their news as entertainment) still plays in the 24/7, infotainment, slanted-stage, media age of 2010.

But beyond the warped news lens and on the actual physical ground, Israel is isolated by its neighbors as if it were in a ghetto, literally walled off as Shylock is, unwelcome by the surrounding community and yet successful.

In his book, The Case For Israel, Alan Dershowitz concludes, “In order to assess the status of Israel in the international community, it may be useful to look at the Middle East’s only democracy as “the Jew” among nations.

Having been banned from other professions, Jews during the middle ages were limited to money lending or “usury” as a means of income. Yet in this castigated profession, they provided their Christian neighbors with needed capital to grow and prosper. Likewise, as Dershowitz points out, while Israel is a small country with an eye on defending itself, it has done more to benefit its Arab citizens working within its borders by providing economic opportunities.

Israel has continuously extended a hand in peace to its Arab neighbors and is doing so once again. But Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently said he would not even recognize Israel as a Jewish State.

In an early moment in the film version, a spiteful Antonio, played by Jeremy Irons, spits on Shylock as if he were subhuman, only to enter into
a bargain with him later on.

Without recognition as a Jewish state, without being seen for what you are, without the sense of shared humanity with the same eyes, hands and blood, how can Israel enter into a bargain?

During Shakespeare’s time, there were no Jews in England. They had been expelled in 1290. Rather, Jews were identified mainly by folklore passed down from sermons, dramas and ignorance. The Jew was depicted as the devil in countless Passion Plays and guilty of crucifying Jesus.

Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League consistently reports throughout the Arab world, where there are only a few Jews, canards such as the blood libel and denial of the Holocaust. Following the flotilla incident, Jews and Israelis were depicted as "blood-thirsty monsters, or as sharks".

With all its drawbacks, Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” is a complex, multi-dimensional story. While Israel also has shortcomings, in order for it to be dealt with, it should not be made in Shylock’s words, “a soft and dull-eyed fool, To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield…”

For peace to become a reality, the false perceptions of Jews and Israel as an enemy state, as vermin to be eradicated and as a nefarious villain only out for its pound of flesh, needs to end once and for all and before a realistic, long-term peace agreement can be staged.

Abe Novick is a writer in Baltimore. His work can be found at: www.abenovick.com

The Fog of Guffaw

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:20:00 -0700

This month, media reporting on media reached an all-time crescendo, with a scherzo interjecting the old canard about Jews running the show.

We had comedian Stephen Colbert, who plays a fake newscaster who is genuinely liberal but pretends to be staunchly conservative,on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” He seeks to ridicule Fox News (which claims to be “Fair and Balanced,” but alas, that’s why his irony works).

Before a congressional hearing and in character but under the guise of being legit (it sounds like an oxymoron … but it’s what we’re dealing with), Mr. Colbert, in jaw-dropping testimony, promoted some pretty horrendous shtick.

Not since Groucho Marx stood before and insulted the leaders of Freedonia in “Duck Soup” has a comedian revealed the underlying, absurd elements of a government.

The Congress sat there and naively, politely listened (while cameras rolled) as if they’re supposed to take this demonstration seriously.

The entire mockery then got tossed into the blender of banter occupying several days of otherwise worthy news and commentary. When fake news reports on real news, it makes for satire. But when real news reports on fake news, it dilutes the seriousness of the real thing.

Lending further distortion, I learned about this stunt on Facebook, which showed a clip from YouTube that lifted it off C-Span. This is a McLuhan-esque realm, where media and message collide.

While such lenses make for a hall of warped mirrors, somewhere inside them are real issues and real people in pain being affected socially, economically and politically.

Oddly, a lot of Mr. Colbert’s viewers will be lured to witness his live Oct. 30 event in Washington, when he will lead a march titled “Keep Fear Alive.” While real, it’s a faux cause in response to his counterpart Jon Stewart’s “Rally To Restore Sanity,” which is in reaction to Glenn Beck’s August rally to “Restore Honor To America.”

Mr. Beck’s rally was held on the same date and place where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his immortal “I Have A Dream” speech. Because of that and his close identification with the Tea Party, his construct smacked of appropriating hallowed ground.

Surely, in a never-ending cycle, these dueling real-time rallies will garner the same kind of media exposure and frenzy (only exponentially) because of the hyper-real hype.
Not enough? This comedic spectacle coincides with the Jon Stewart/ Rick Sanchez mano-a-mano.

Mr. Sanchez, fired for making comments on Pete Dominick’s satellite radio show, called Mr. Stewart a “bigot.” When told Mr. Stewart was Jewish and a minority “as much as you are,” Mr. Sanchez said, “… to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”

As a country with real problems, we tumble downward into a Carollian wonderland, all because a CNN show host, mad because he was ribbed by a comedian, ended up revealing his true, ugly nature on tape.

Comedy has a way of unmasking it without us realizing it. Mr. Colbert stripped down Congress by making a mockery of it. Mr. Stewart tweaked Mr. Sanchez just enough for him to blurt out what he really thought.

Yet there is no comic relief from this ongoing agitation, only a frustrating, furious intensification.

Abe Novick writes monthly for the Jewish Times on the intersection of American and Jewish culture. His work is at abebuzz.com.

For The Kids

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:27:00 -0700

Torching Fear
August 27, 2010

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

Perched at the front entrance of the Owings Mills JCC on security duty during the Maccabi Experience, I waved in car after car of parents dropping off their children, host families picking up their children and busloads shuttling them back and forth between events.

What struck me was how all of it, all of it, was done for the children. It was all done for the future. What an amazing sight. Anyone who wandered through the JCC was witness to wall-to-wall teens teeming with exuberance and a glow of energy. In turn, their youthful presence provided a reciprocal warm feeling inside anyone over the age of 18 and gave of themselves in any small way.

But then my flight hit some turbulence as the next day’s newspaper landed on my driveway and I wondered about their future and what, ultimately, we’re actually leaving them.

In three bold front page photos, The New York Times ran a story describing the devastation from the floods drowning Pakistan, wildfires consuming Russia and excessive rain in the Midwest moving many in the scientific community closer to a consensus — (as if Baltimore couldn’t tell ’em) — it’s getting warmer.

As Bobby Dylan once sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Still it’s not just the times that are a changin’. “The climate is changing,” concurs Jay Lawrimore of the National Climatic Data Center.

Turning the news page to another part of the blazing forest, there lives a modern day Haman who is ever closer to gaining the capacity to set off and ignite a fire and “wipe Israel off the map.”

I watched as a shaken and distraught Caroline Glick, senior Middle East fellow with The Center for Security Policy, recently spoke about Iran at Moses Montefiore Anshe Emuhah Synagogue. She opened with, “In a very real sense, the Jewish people are in peril today in a way they haven’t been in a very long time.” You can find her hour-long talk on Youtube.

From a global rise in anti-Semitism to the inordinate amount of anti-Israel propaganda aimed at the tiny democracy, they’re sticks and stones when compared to the very real threat of Iran with the bomb.

As John Bolton pointed out, Iran is not the atheistic Soviet Union and this is not the Cold War. Iran is a theocracy that believes their reward will come in the next life. Therefore, life is not what’s sacred, but death is. Iran won’t be contained the same way we’ve done it in the past.

Then there’s the ultimate ponzi scheme - the debt that’s mounting for our children and grandchildren. Without an expanding economy, our debt gets worse and worse. But rather than investing in smart growth, we borrow from China to pay for the oil that we import from the same dictators that hate us and seek to destroy us.

At the opening ceremonies, there was a slide show with the faces of Jewish athletes and artists from years gone by. I wonder now about the world they were born into — a 20th Century filled with war and destruction and yet they persevered.

Somehow, through strength and promise along with the wisdom we manage to pass onto them, our youth will live to celebrate and give back to their children the same kind of bright torch that was lit that first night.

Abe Novick, whose work is at abenovick.com, writes monthly on the intersection of popular and Jewish culture.

Tikkun Olam @ lightspeed

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Mon, 2 Aug 2010 20:28:00 -0700

If you haven’t dropped off Facebook, Twitter or the Internet yet, due to privacy concerns, then you’ve probably also noticed a profound change in the way they’ve morphed.

What’s taken place is a transition from what I call YouTube to WeTube.

On Facebook for instance, huge groups have formed that, because they have so many “friends,” they’ve had to alter the nomenclature from “friend” to “fan.”

In a matter of only a few days after the flotilla incident, a group on Facebook formed, “The Truth About Israel’s Defensive Actions Against the Flotilla.”

In no time, the group limit overflowed with individuals and other groups piling on and joining the cause.

Rallies and marches were set up all over the world in support of Israel. The “we” came together. In a matter of a couple of days, I was at the Baltimore Zionist district rally in the Inner Harbor.

Photos were taken of the event. Media came and covered it. The photos were then posted back up on Facebook and shared with other larger groups like CAMERA and Stand With Us International.

Clips from YouTube were also linked from rallies all over the world.

No longer was it about just you or me. It became of force for uniting a force of we.

FOR MANY Jewish groups today the idea of tikkun olam plays a significant role. Literally, meaning “world repair,” it connotes social action.

According to My Jewish Learning, it derives from Lurianic Kabbala, a branch of mysticism born out of the work of 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria and the Lurianic account of creation.

The story goes, divine light became contained in vessels, some of which were shattered, scattered and some of the light attached to broken shards possessing evil. The repair that’s needed is gathering the light.

Today, the light speed at which information is carried can be a powerful weapon in the fight against tyranny.

Social media and social action converge to be a force for good. In a matter of moments a wrong can be exposed and a forthright campaign mounted to right it.

But while the speed of light can be a fierce weapon in any fight, what are the obstacles? While technology is racing forward, it conflicts with a slow deliberative governing process. As the world speeds up, the political process doesn’t.

That blockage directly clashes with the profound feeling that when we see something wrong, we want it fixed immediately.

When Iranian protesters took to the streets of Teheran last year, it was broadcast for the entire world to see on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Yet the US government, and President Barack Obama in particular, seemed passive and indecisive at a point when a moral stand was necessary and the right thing to do.

When thousands of rockets poured down on the Negev from Gaza, groups came together on Facebook in support of Baltimore’s sister city of Ashkelon.

But the governing bodies of the US and the UN were restrained in voicing their condemnation. It wasn’t until after withstanding bombardment for years, when Operation Cast Lead was initiated, that they reprimanded Israel.

Obama certainly embodies and personifies the deliberative mind. And it’s important for government to weigh issues, especially given the deadly stakes in today’s heavily armed world.

But as the BP oil spill demonstrates, government can’t operate in constant crisis communications mode or appear at a standstill. It has to get out in front of issues before they turn into disasters broadcast for the entire world to see.

With the Internet and the speed at which information flows, every issue appears like a disaster. If not dealt with swiftly, it can undo an administration.

Look at the past several US presidents.

They each share a similar pattern.

They all led during the escalating age of the Internet and each hit speed bumps (some crashing) soon after winning the presidency.

George Bush I: Once the dust cleared after Desert Storm, we clearly saw how out of touch he was, perhaps best personified by his lack of check-out-counter skills. He seemed a man from the past, as we were moving forward.

Bill Clinton: Got the economy rolling, but we’d grown tired and drained by the constant scandals exacerbated daily on Web sites like The Drudge Report.

George Bush II: After 9/11 he had the highest approval ratings of any president. Yet with no WMDs, Katrina and an economic meltdown as a finale, he left office with the lowest approval ratings of any president.

Obama: Has moved too slowly on every issue from health care and the economy to the oil spill.

The haste with which we call for action, grinds in the gears of a slowmotion government personified by its leaders. Media and technology race ahead at light speed and magnify the sharp, glaring disparity with government, making it harder to contain the broken vessels.

The writer is based in Baltimore and works in communications.

www.abenovick.com

We Tube World

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Mon, 2 Aug 2010 20:26:00 -0700

If you haven’t dropped off Facebook, Twitter or the Internet yet due to privacy concerns, you’ve probably noticed a profound change in the way they’ve morphed.
What’s taken place is a convergence from what I call YouTube to WeTube.

On Facebook for instance, huge groups have formed that, because they have so many “friends,” they’ve had to alter the fan nomenclature from “friend” to “fan.”

Only days after the Gaza-bound flotilla incident, a Facebook group formed — “The Truth About Israel’s Defensive Actions Against The Flotilla.” In no time, the group limit overflowed with individuals and other groups joining the cause. Rallies and marches were set up worldwide in support of Israel. The “we” came together.

Within days, the Baltimore Zionist District had rallied in the Inner Harbor. Photos were taken. Media covered it. Shots were posted on Facebook and shared with larger groups. Clips from YouTube were linked from rallies all over the world.

No longer was it about just you or me. It became a force for uniting — a force of we.

For many Jewish groups today the idea of tikkun olam plays a significant role. Literally meaning “world repair,” it connotes social action. But according to myjewishlearning.com, it derives from Lurianic Kabbalah, a branch of mysticism born out of the work of kabbalist Isaac Luria and his Lurianic account of creation.

As the story goes, Divine Light became contained in vessels, some of which were shattered, scattered and some of the light attached to broken shards possessing evil. The repair that’s needed is gathering the light.

Today, the light speed at which information is carried can be a powerful weapon in the fight against tyranny. Social media and social action converge to be a force for good. In a matter of moments a wrong can be exposed and a forthright campaign mounted to right it.

But while the speed of light can be a fierce weapon in any fight, what are the obstacles? While technology races forward, it conflicts with slow deliberative, governing. As the world speeds up, the political process doesn’t.

That blockage directly clashes with the profound feeling that when we see something wrong, we want it fixed — immediately.

When Iranian protesters took to the streets last year, it was broadcast for the entire world on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Yet our government, and President Obama in particular, seemed passive and indecisive when a moral stand was necessary and the right thing to do.

When thousands of rockets poured down on Southern Israel from Gaza, local groups came together on Facebook in support of our sister city of Ashkelon. But the governing bodies of the United States and the United Nations were restrained in voicing their condemnation. It wasn’t until after withstanding bombardment for years, when Operation Cast Lead was initiated, that they reprimanded Israel.

President Obama certainly embodies and personifies the deliberative mind. And it’s important for government to weigh issues, especially given the deadly stakes in today’s heavily armed world. But as the BP oil spill demonstrates, government can’t operate in constant crisis communications mode or appear at a standstill. It has to get out in front of issues before they turn into disasters broadcast for the entire world to see.

The haste with which we call for action grinds in the gears of a slow-motion government personified by its leaders. Media and technology race ahead at light speed and magnify the sharp disparity with government, making it ever more glaring.

Spin all you want; Tech-savvy folks no longer buy old advertising tricks Read more: Spin all you want; Tech-savvy folks no longer buy old advertising

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Fri, 9 Jul 2010 19:07:00 -0700

We’ve entered the age of action. No longer will ads, PR and spin be the sole savior to swoop down and rescue a fallen hero, sports figure, CEO or brand.

In a bygone era, advertising could clean up most any mess. But today, all the PR kings and all the ad hucksters couldn’t put BP together again.

The camera doesn’t lie. But what’s changed today is everyone has a camera. Everyone is a potential reporter and photojournalist.

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen the media’s downshift due to advertising’s Balkanized, post-apocalyptic diaspora, transformed by a new millennia, with millions of motivated mavens ready to post their perspicacious point of views.

Ten years ago, not long after the dot-com bubble burst and names like Pets.com vaporized into the ethereal pet cemetery netherworld of bygone brands, the efficacy of advertising was deemed as doomed to go with them.

Even the great Al Ries, marketing guru and author of several brilliant books and the man who coined the term “positioning,” eulogized advertising in his 2002, “The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR.” In it, he wrote, “Publicity provides the credentials that create the credibility in the advertising.”

In other words, until a brand has some cred, simply advertising it doesn’t do the trick. For example, if you get a sales call from a business without a reputation, no matter how good its product or service, are you going to buy it? Most likely you’ll hang up, turn the page, hit delete.

Fast-forward to today, when news and publicity are no longer generated down a one-way street, when citizens are armed with camera phones and text is a verb, where their scoop on your dirt is posted in a nano-second on YouTube, we’re seeing a further erosion — the decline of PR and the rise of real action.

Most typically, one of the first tools of crisis communications is to combat negative press with a counter punch by leveraging the stature of a CEO in ads and in front of news media. BP spent millions to lift its image, with full-page ads in major newspapers and TV commercials.

But the public wasn’t buying it. They didn’t want ads. They wanted action and BP’s Tony Hayward’s words were KO’d by the perpetual, live-action footage emanating from deep under the sea. Bottom line: Slick ads and spokespeople are no match for an oil slick.

In a constantly on world, with ever-present cameras, reality will win where manufactured moments won’t. People have little time and no patience for spin, can spot it and sense its presence in an instant. They want and clamor for what’s real, authentic and true.

It’s no coincidence that a sober desire for so-called Reality TV arose during the same tumultuous, tide-altering and highly caffeinated decade when traditional forms of media were swept away.

Advertisements, spin and salespeople are like a big monster to be avoided with TiVo. People don’t want talk. They want actions from politicians, corporations and media.

It’s not enough to say you’re going to be open and transparent, as BP has done. Because if you’re not doing everything in your power to be truthful, even before you say a word, you’ll be dead in the water.

Age of Action

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Fri, 9 Jul 2010 19:04:00 -0700

We’ve entered the age of action. No longer will ads, PR and spin be a savior to swoop down and rescue a fallen hero, sports figure, CEO or brand.

In a bygone era, advertising could clean up almost any mess.

But today, all the PR kings and all the advertising hucksters couldn’t put BP together again.

Today (like every other day) the camera doesn’t lie. But what’s changed today is — everyone has a camera. Everyone is a potential reporter, ad exec and PR pro.

In the last decade, we’ve seen the downshift from advertising’s Balkanized, post-apocalyptic Diaspora, transformed in a new millennia by thousands of media mavens ready to post their perspicacious POVs.

Ten years ago, not long after the dot-com bubble burst and names like Pets.com vaporized into the ethereal pet cemetery netherworld of bygone brands, the efficacy of advertising was deemed as doomed to go with them.

Even the great Al Ries, marketing guru, author of several brilliant books and the man who coined the term “positioning,” eulogized advertising in his 2002 “The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR.” He wrote, “Publicity provides the credentials that create the credibility in the advertising.”

In other words, until a brand has some cred, no one’s going to pay it any mind. If you get a phone call from a Jewish organization you never heard of, no matter how worthy their cause, are you going to write them a check? Buy their product? Most likely, you’ll hang up, turn the page, hit delete.

Fast-forward to today, when news is no longer generated down a one-way street, when citizens are armed with camera phones and text is a verb, where their scoop is posted in a nanosecond; we’re seeing a further erosion — the fall of PR and the rise of real action (docu-action).

Three recent examples demonstrate the point:

• Zionism 2.0 — Israel’s boarding on the flotilla was shot and posted all over the Internet for the world to see, moments after the raid took place. Had it not been for the lightning speed of streaming video, the gruesome images of beatings, stabbings and a soldier tossed over a railing, no one would have believed it. Even with the video, Israel had its skeptics (as it always does). But without it, our side would have been helpless. The lesson: Being armed with a camera is more powerful than any weapon.

• The Face That Launched A Thousand Hits — Had it not been for Rabbi David Nesenoff’s penetrating lens, Helen Thomas would still be planted in the front row of the White House press room. His stark video clip was able to see into her heart of darkness, piercing the hardened 89-year-old exterior, and expose her for what she truly was — an ugly anti-Semite.

• Slick Ads Are No Match For An Oil Slick — Most typically, one of the first tools of crisis communications is to combat negative press with a counter-punch by leveraging the stature of a CEO in ads and in front of news media. BP spent millions to lift its image, with full-page ads in major newspapers and TV commercials. But the public wasn’t buying it. They didn’t want ads. They wanted action and BP CEO Tony Hayward’s words were KO’d by the perpetual, live-action footage emanating from under the sea.

It’s not enough to say you’re going to be open and transparent, as BP has done. Because if you’re not doing everything in your power to be truthful, even before you say a word, you’ll be dead in the water.

Abe Novick writes monthly for the Baltimore Jewish Times.

Ephemeral Enemy

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Sun, 30 May 2010 06:01:00 -0700

In his loaf of lechem-sized novel of the CIA, “Harlot’s Ghost”, Norman Mailer traces the undercover upbringing of his young cold warrior and recruit Harry Hubbard through the spy vs. spy world of espionage. In one memorable section, while learning the ways of subterfuge and duplicity, Harry must associate colors with numbers. When he sees a red wall, behind a gray table with an orange lamp, it represents 586.

For anyone else, the colors and furniture arrangement would mean nothing. But to a spy, it could be the code to any number of potentially ominous outcomes.

What appears as nothing particularly significant to an ordinary person, actually has incredible stakes to code-breakers, CIA and Mossad.

Fast forward sixty-years and the same Cold War concept applies to today as the very essence of modern terrorism is to cloak evil behind a mask, whether Islam, Palestine or some warped version of a universal ideal like freedom. In reality, those notions are only ephemeral shrouds to cravenly hide the deeper-seeded hatred toward Jews and the west.

Striking at its cultural heart, known for its populous Jewish citizenry, where the lights of western commercial marquees emblazon the sightlines of Broadway, the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad came within a hair’s breadth of a show stopper, stabbing right through it.

Young Faisal is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan. But his bomb-making training reveals his affiliation with Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The latter is the same group that attacked a Jewish Center in Mumbai. Meanwhile, the former plotted to attack the Danish Newspaper in Copenhagen for running the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad

While running around the cross-streets of 45th and Broadway in an Islamic Jihad get-up would’ve surely tipped off the street vendors, Shahzad’s disquise was an Americanized persona - the perfect veil. How cunning.

The modus operendi of this cowardly ilk is “hiding”. Now train your camera telescopically. When and if Iran actually attempts a nuclear attack on Israel, it won’t be from a missile launched from within their borders. They are far too spineless. They’ll hide behind one of their proxies such as Hezbollah. It won’t be a rocket for all of the world to see and trace its vapor cloud, but via a tunnel underground.

Iran is the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Why would their successful precedent change? Were Iran to acquire a nuclear device, their means of delivery targeted upon Israel would remain the same.

Why would Iran claim responsibility and risk immense retaliation and utter obliteration, instead of igniting their lethal device through some third or fourth party?

When the US Marine barracks in Lebanon were bombed in 1983 and 241 US servicemen were killed Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. It’s suspected that actually Hezbollah, who in turn received help from the Islamic Republic of Iran, were responsible.

But I ask you, whom did we attack in response?

Likewise since then, Iran has transferred sophisticated short-range rockets to both Hezbollah and Hamas. Both terrorist groups have used them to kill Israeli civilians in past wars.

Due to the very nature of these and other craven acts, the enemy hides cowering behind a cloak of anonymity knowing that Israel and the United States won’t risk an all out international war to exact revenge. Their modus operendi is too ephemeral and more often than not, ghostlike, they slip away.

Mailer captured the Cold War not with an epic about massive warheads pointed across oceans, but revealed it through the hidden world of the CIA.

Finding Faisal’s Pathfinder was fortunate. Capturing him was shrewd. But taken on a larger scale, today’s counter-terrorism efforts should look for what’s concealed right in front of them. Appearance and reality are by definition, paradoxically in conflict.

Inglorious Zionests

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 13:40:00 -0700

Adolf Eichmann was captured fifty-years ago, on May 11th 1960 outside of Buenos Aires. Eleven days later he was on Israel’s soil and on May 23rd Prime Minister David Ben Gurion stood at the podium of the Knesset and announced to a hushed crowd his news.

Eichmann’s capture reignited the world’s outrage over the Holocaust. Up until that time, many desired to move on. After all, Israel had plenty of new and more immediate problems.

As Yom HaShoah folds into Yom HaAtzmaut and we turn from commemoration to celebration, I’m struck by the transition in outlook that took place from Israel’s statehood to the young country’s heroic marvel.

Notably, there’s a similar transition in cultural attitude that’s taking place today.

In the past twenty years, we’ve evolved from films like Schindler’s List to movies like Defiance and Inglorious Basterds. Jewish characterizations have morphed from victims to strong rugged combatants in the face of threats from Nazisnow they face evil head on with brawny bravura.

Arguably too, many American’s reference point for Jewish identification is Israel. And today it stands as a source of strength - economically, militarily and according to Gallup, American’s support of Israel ranks 63% - higher than after ‘67 and just one point below its high after the Gulf War.

Still, one can’t miss the skewed news reports and factually misleading editorials blaming Israel for the ills that plague that region.

President Obama’s misdirected pressure on Israel, especially given Iran’s nuclear ambitions that each day comes closer to actuality, is of utmost concern. It presents an existential threat to Israel through either itself or one of its terrorist proxies and destabilizes the entire region.

But what if, in this postmodern world, where the line between fiction and fact splice together seamlessly (Tarantino literally has film burn Hitler and his cronies to death), the story of Eichmann’s capture and a true wish-fulfillment fantasy made real, were to be revived?

Put yourself in the director’s chair and wonder if you will, what if Mossad captured Osama bin Laden? Imagine what that would do. Who in this country could claim to be anti-Zionist then? In one fell swoop it would be an end-run around placating the Obama administration, by directly appealing to the American people and a world constituency demonstrating a vigilant determination to seek justice.

Osama is a mass murderer who on countless occasions has vowed to destroy Israel. He and his group are not only responsible for 9/11 and the murder of Danny Pearl, but al Qaida carried out a suicide attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya killing 12 people, including three Israelis and wounding 80. Israel would be justified.

In this revenge fantasy (“Inglorious Zionests”), Israel’s Herculean labor would gain so much good will, an attack on Iranian nuclear installations would not only be cleared for take-off, they’d be escorted. It would change everything.

The stunned silence that greeted Ben Gurion, would be replicated upon Netanyahu by onlookers, many not knowing if it’s live or Memorex.

If it sounds too much like a cinematic whimsy, revisit the Eichmann capture and then tell me I’m dreaming. Read Neal Bascomb’s 2009 nail-biting, historical account of the operation in Hunting Eichmann. What stands out is the resolve, the fortitude and the grit. When Israel captured Eichmann, it broke the rules. When Mossad entered Argentina, it didn’t ask permission. It went in undercover. When El Al’s Britannia secretly whisked the war criminal away, it was through an illusory cloud of mystery.

What’s amazing about the story, is how so many things could have gone wrong jeopardizing the entire operation, but because of the determination of a handful of leaders, including Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, Mossad Chief, Isser Harel and others they persevered.

In 2010, we still hunt them. John Demjanjuk on trial in Munich is 89 years-old and stands accused of aiding the murder of 27,900 Dutch Jews in Sobibor. Last month, 88 year-old, Heinrich Boere was given the maximum sentence by a German court for murdering three Dutch civilians as part of a Nazi hit squad.

But what happens when they are gone? There will still be evil in the world and our focus should be aimed at the new Eichmanns. Our lens should not be lost, but readjusted.

Jihad Jane & Friends

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:28:00 -0700

While the name Jihad Jane may sound like some warped Hannah Barbara cartoon character, she’s quite real and has been accused of plotting to murder an actual cartoonist, Swedish artist Lars Vilks.

You may recall his name from 2007 when he produced a drawing of Muhammad with a dog’s body. His case also follows the same controversial pattern that erupted back in 2005, when a Danish newspaper printed 12 cartoons of Muhammad. One in particular garnered a firestorm in which the Prophet is wrapped in a bomb-shaped turban. That sketch was the match which actually ignited the burning of Western embassies in a number of Muslim countries.

But the latent combustion was never quite doused out, as the heat from blond bomber, Jihad Jane (Colleen LaRose) who was arrested last year and lived outside Philly, PA now seems to have caught onto a second all-American looking femme fatale - Jamie Paulin-Ramirez from Colorado.
Ramirez was one of seven suspects arrested in Ireland just this month.

Neither quite fit the stereotypical bill, looking more like they fell out of a Dick & Jane story, than an Al Jezeera newsreel. According to her mom, Ramirez was a straight-A nursing student before abruptly hightailing it off on an assassination outing and ditching the Rockies.

Just as these same cartoonists alter depictions of Muhammad, is there not irony in the fact that Jihad Jane and her cohort shatter our image of what a terrorist looks like? Depending on who is doing the viewing both of these alterations are a shock to the familiar senses.

But as the ladies were out for blood, according to an Associated Press interview, Vilks was not interested in offending Muslims with his art, but aimed to show he could make provocative art about any topic he wanted, “There is nothing so holy you can’t offend it,” he claimed.

Commenting on their apple pie looks, a US Justice Department official said the case “shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance.”

Unhappy and discontent with their looks and adding more distortion to the story, the blond gals went in for a makeover, donning Islamic garb including headscarves and a hijab.

Undeniably, appearances can deceive and in both cases, it’s what’s underneath that counts. Their motive reveals their mask.

In 1930’s Nazi Germany, the newspaper, Der Sturmer (The Attacker) depicted Jews as sub-human with cartoons and caricatures. The intent was to create a fear and loathing of Jews. Some may wonder, where does the expressive artist’s line end and the creepy one begin?

After all, both utilize aesthetic techniques to illustrate a point. But one has to penetrate the page to get at the culprit. It becomes less about the art and more about the artisan. Just as advertising can show beautiful imagery, is it art or is it commerce?

"Propaganda tries to force a doctrine on the whole people... Propaganda works on the general public from the standpoint of an idea and makes them ripe for the victory of this idea." Adolf Hitler wrote these words in his book Mein Kampf (1926), in which he first advocated the use of propaganda to spread the ideals of National Socialism

Currently, those words are on display at the US Holocaust Museum where they are showing Nazi propaganda to shed light on this subject. And in our own blurred world of “reality tv” it comes at the perfect time as we can’t always tell what’s a real threat and what’s not.

For example, is depicting Jews as mice in Nazi Germany offensive? In 1992 Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel, “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale which recounted his father’s ordeal as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust.

Or what about R. Crumb (he’s not Jewish) who last year came out with “The Book of Genesis” published as a graphic novel. In the NY Times review in reference to Crumb’s G-d, it stated, “He is a profoundly — almost grotesquely — human-looking deity, very much the sort of being in whose image vulgar humankind could realistically come forth.”

I am not reading about any death threats aimed at him. Perhaps it’s because Jews have a sense of humor and are used to it? From Philip Roth to Mel Brooks, Jews have taken it on the chin and laughed about it louder than anyone else.

Or maybe it’s because we just understand and can see through the page and we get that their intent is not ugly – though unfortunately, some people’s reactions are.

The Magic Mountain

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:13:00 -0800

All Fall Down

February 26, 2010

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
— Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain”

In 1924, between the wars, Thomas Mann published one of that century’s three great novels, “The Magic Mountain.” Along with James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance Of Things Past,” it stands alongside those other peaks of literary enormity and beauty.

Mann’s mountain, high up in the Alps, was a metaphor for Europe where at the top and in Davos was the sanatorium, presciently representing the illness that was to soon befall the continent.

One can’t help but think of that — Sontagian illness as metaphor — as the World Economic Forum recently met in Davos. As The New York Times, reported, “If there was one takeaway from the annual gathering of business and political leaders … it was this: trust in governments, corporations and above all banks has become as elusive as sure footing on the icy streets of this Alpine resort.”

Indeed while faith is a matter of the heart, one can muddle through life without it (see: atheism). But trust seems essential to this world. We trust the driver on the other side of the freeway is not suicidal. We trust Iran won’t carry through with its insane promises because it will be obliterated in return. And we trust our currency will not become cheap wallpaper.

When that trust disappears, we devolve. Like a contagion that infects us, we become an ailing society.

But no sooner after the Swiss confab ended, it was revealed that Greece, the very epicenter of Western civilization and rational thought, was on the brink and threatening a domino effect, taking with it other euro currency-based economies.

Then the threatening tremors trailed back to Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs, the same banking institution that personifies the problem with trust discussed in Davos.

Last week it was reported that Goldman helped Greece obscure billions in debt. “In dozens of deals across the continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books,” according to The New York Times.

It remains to be seen once again: Will what happens in Europe, stay in Europe? Or will this new contagion spread, now that we are all linked and all a part of that craggy, mountainous range.

At the time of Mann’s writing, Europe was still the king of the mountain. When all of that centrality came crashing down avalanche style with the next war, only wreckage was in its wake. Having rebuilt, Germany is again the powerhouse at its peak, all eyes looking to it to rescue Greece and lift the continent out of its slide.

How ironic that the cause of that first calamity, which closed the age of reason and enlightenment, is now positioned to make a decision and contemplate the notion, in a talmudic sense (predicating it upon a country), “Whoever saves a life, it’s considered as if he saved an entire world.”

Does it work in reverse, as we enter a new era of being LinkedIn, Tweeted and “friended” on Facebook by those once oceans apart? Is it also just self-preservation and when one hurts, we all are endangered? The answer, somewhere in between, was sung and dedicated to Haiti at the opening of the 2010 Olympics with the revived “We Are The World.”

But if we choose to be tied together, whether by commerce, energy dependence or something higher, we can rise together or else when one falls off a cliff, as Europe is finding out again, we can all fall.

Play Nation

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 06:02:00 -0800

Play nation

Jan. 20, 2010
ABE NOVICK , THE JERUSALEM POST

The block letters are like colorful playthings on Google's home page. They look like candy. They're shaped like toys.

But as Google grows ever more ubiquitous and as it enters into additional areas beyond search with its acquisition of YouTube, and now mobile communications with its new Nexus One, those playful letters stand as a larger cultural marker - the fusion between work and play.

Similar to the eroding divisions between church and state, editorial and advertising, technology has melded work and play together. And, just as there are ethical concerns to consider in the first two long-standing categorical divisions, there are also ones to consider in this latest union. Is this meta-merger a good or a bad thing?

Consider first, work was usually something that was deemed real, while play was often thought of as something imagined. Work was once done mainly with the hands, play done with the mind.

But technology has morphed away from industries where we make real stuff to manufacturing information. And when we do make hardware (stuff we can hold in our hands), it's geared to carry chimerical bytes of that ephemeral information.

Nowadays and compounded with this phenomenon is the explosion of mobile technology, the imagined and the real world of work and play that have converged, are constantly within reach.

Wired recently called the last decade "The Mobile Decade": "People got increasingly plugged into an always-on, totally portable, always-connected existence." Gadgetry ranged from 2001's original iPod to 2009's Kindle 2.

For most of the previous century, it was left to Hollywood to create and export movies and entertainment around the world starting as far back as 1895 eventually culminating to become one of the US's largest export businesses. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, between 1986 and 2005, foreign sales of US motion picture and video products rose from $1.91 billion to $10.4 billion (in 2005 dollars) - an increase of 444 percent.

BUT TODAY, because it's no longer a one-way boulevard and YouTube and social media and mobile communications allow anyone and everyone to freely upload and export entertainment, that number is off the charts and is next to impossible to quantify.

The same technology that is used to transmit and watch movies and entertainment are the exact same devices that carry the images of protest from Iran and more recently the devastation and destruction in Haiti via Twitter and YouTube.

Even the side-armed stalwart to the business traveler, the Blackberry, attached at the hip like a road warrior's armament, is advertised on television with a version of The Beatles, "All You Need Is Love," a song once sung signifying countercultural values - the very antithesis of money and commerce. Now the playfulness of flower power has become intimately linked to the transactions of a global economy.

Moreover, the lead business stories in the last month have been about NBC's bouncing comedian/entertainer Jay Leno's show back to 11:35 p.m. and whether celebrity golfer Tiger Woods should still be a spokesman for corporations.

What was once a purely entertainment story has been subsumed by the business of entertainment. All the while in the consumer's mind, work and play collide, creating a new reality while supplanting distinctions that once existed.

Ethereal celebrities become equated with the businesses they represent and then suffer a messy divorce, while once and future politicians become celebrity journalists delivering the news and spin that was previously aimed directly at them.

What are the existential ramifications of life lived on this new stratum? Is it purely a matter for the individual to make the distinction? Or has work and play become ever more indistinguishable?

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard used the allegory of a map so large and detailed and laid over the territory it represents that it becomes the real and precedes the territory. It is what he calls the hyperreal.

But while there's a truth woven into the allegory, his metaphor ignores the harsh facts on the ground. Critical of his take, Susan Sontag in one of her later books, Regarding the Pain of Others, pointed out, "It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world." Sontag's criticism is more apt than ever, given the non-stop news footage coming out of Haiti these days.

But what neither of them has lived to see is the enormous proliferation of lenses to view what fast become historical events and that create a global hall of mirrors. Likewise, as seen and heard through the same devices that are bringing songs and movies, the world of work and play converge closer together and the newest medium's message will impact the way truth and lie are distinguished.

In the end, while Google's childlike colors evoke play, the world they open us up to can often be more like the one seen through a glass darkly.

The writer is based in Baltimore and works in communications. www.abenovick.com

Celebrigods

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 06:06:00 -0800

Unimpressed with celebrigods

Dec. 19, 2009
Abe Novick , THE JERUSALEM POST

In January, of 2009, and with the aid of in vitro fertilization, "Octomom," a.k.a Nadya Suleman, gained international attention when she gave birth to octuplets. Aided by science, she became an overnight celebrity and a worldwide sensation. Like a global traffic accident, we all slowed down to view this quasi-virgin birth.

Now as the year closes, Tiger Woods, a superstar and truly amazing sports celebrity, literally and figuratively crashed, while dragging with him his own brand and doing insurmountable damage to a number of orbital ones (Nike, Gillette, Accenture) that revolved around his persona.

It was also the year when names of politicians who claimed the moral high-ground, John Edwards and Mark Sanford, fell down from their perch.

Like Octomom, ordinary people who desired celebrity crashed through the gates of the White House, while others unhinged themselves from grounded reality (see balloon boy's dad) as they sought and entered the eternal world of fame.

LOCATED BETWEEN these two strata of manufactured earth and heaven, exists another dimension, a mythical creation generated by a mediasphere, where they'll live on in cyberspace for eternity, locked by their 15 minutes, to wander in a modern day Gehenna.

This clash of titanic proportions is a direct descendent of ancient mythology.

Today's celebrity gods, who live on a Mount Olympus in media, have a lineage that extends as far back as Zeus, who would spy a fair mortal, swoop down and have his way with her.

Tiger's trysts with mere earthly courtesans will be told and retold for as long as those ancient Homeric legends. Only now and forever they live in captured digitized bytes.

Like the Greek gods, that represented sea, war, harvest, what have you, Tiger has been heroically aligned as the embodiment of the particular products he sponsors.

Seen through the Wayback machine, the ancient struggle between hucksters of myth and those who want to be left in peace on earth is the story of Hanukka.

It is the story of a collision between Hellenism (a statue of Zeus was erected by the Syrian Greeks in the Temple) and its many gods, and the one singular Judaic God. And for a shining moment, the Jews, led by Judah Maccabee, were victorious in their resistance.

In the centuries to come, while gods and idols would continue to be worshiped, Judaism and its offshoot Christianity would disperse throughout the world, ultimately redefining the notion of God.

But as those two paths of Judaism and Christianity diverged, you won't find an individual who possesses the attribute of being both a mortal and a god in Judaism. Yet Hanukka's calendrical cousin does have God and a mortal comingling.

When John Lennon, who died 29 years ago this past month, claimed The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, the leader of the greatest celebrity band of the 1960s was knockin' a little too hard on heaven's door.

The very concept of Jesus is that he was a man and a god. Born from a virgin mother, his father was God.

Since then, no other man, god or celebrity has had the lasting influence, the durable brand recognition, symbolically represented by the cross than that of Jesus. That '70s show wasn't called Jesus Christ Superstar for nothing.

Jews who don't buy into this idea are consistent with their forbears who rejected the notion of God taking human form as described by the Greeks and later the Romans (the same guys who ultimately crucified Jesus.)

So as we sit here during the Christmas season, surrounded with unavoidable Christmas kitsch looking back on the past year, now an unwrapped present with its content strewn out, we can take pride in our culture's long battle with advertised idols, its own consistent core brand belief and its adherence to something higher.

At the same time, we need a sober reality check, because in 2010, the stories, the legends, the myths, like the show, will go on.

Jewgle

noreply@blogger.com (abe) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:06:00 -0800

Between reading about the media’s apocalyptic, tide-altering times with “The Chaos Scenario - Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, The Choice for Business is Stark: Listen or Perish” and “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It”, I needed a safe harbor and shelter from the harsh bookish storm.

I found the brackish eddy alongside our port while on a school visit to the Baltimore Museum of Industry beside Key Highway not far from the venerable Domino Sugar plant.

Amongst the ruins of long lost labor was memorabilia with names like Allied Signal, Head and our most recently poorly departed Black & Decker, whose HQs will be exiting north next.

At the museum, children learned about the stuff we once made in this great land and how here in Baltimore we had a hand in much of it, from Henry Ford’s assembly line to printing on movable type by printing press.

Decidedly, if our harbor is ever to again be a beacon to the world, we need to plan and dam quickly for what’s to come, because this new tide of change is no longer just coming, but is already causing us to bail.

Sure, there have been monumental shifts due to innovations and inventions before, but never with the same degree of momentum surging over the gunwales.

If Noah’s flood took forty days and forty nights, the current speed of today’s change is a tsunami and will leave much of what we’ve relied on buried with the tide.

Recall Perchik’s prognostication, “A revolution is coming” in Fiddler On The Roof. I don’t have to tell you how that one turned out.

But when you are in the eye of a storm it’s difficult to know you are in one.

So take a look at Bob Garfield’s Jeremiad, “The Chaos Scenario” where he writes, “Traditional media are in a stage of dire retrenchment as prelude to a complete collapse. Newspapers, magazines and especially TV as we currently know them are fundamentally doomed…”

Or read Ken Auletta’s “Googled”, where he compares this era to other times of historic change whether the wheel, Guttenberg or even electricity and points out that what’s made this one different, is the velocity. “It took telephones seventy-one years to penetrate 50% of American homes, electricity fifty years and TV three decades. The Internet reached more than 50 percent of Americans in a mere decade.” Today that number is over 80%.

So we’ve seen how fast this sea can come in, yet it’s the speed by which it ebbs that’s most devastating. Witness how quickly investments can be cut in half, how quickly dwellings we thought we owned can enter foreclosure and how many businesses that once called Baltimore home can fast become candidates for entry into the Museum of Lost Labor.

It might seem appropriate to ask for leadership to guide us out of this current typhoon, but the whole paradox is that the power is no longer in their hands. It’s in yours and mine.

If you have a digital camera and a computer and these days everyone does, you are a reporter, a photojournalist and an ad exec.

On Youtube you can find a video of a car driving recklessly in a parking lot and suddenly, like one of those Monster Trucks it lands on top of two others. One of the crushed cars was a Hyundai. The next day, Hyundai came out to the same lot and gave the guy who owned the crushed Hyundai a new one. Hyundai filmed their act and posted it to Youtube garnering millions of hits.

What was the other car? No idea. But Hyundai was just named Best Marketer of the Year by Ad Age Magazine.

The irony is there was no ad agency, no television, no newspaper needed. Just you.

Now, pass me an oar.

Abe Novick, whose work is at abenovick.com , writes regularly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES on the intersection of American and Jewish culture.