Are the Israeli charedim "good for the jews?"

The news that a woman was arrested at the Kotel for wearing a tallit earlier this month was a striking reminder to me of how far ideologically Israel truly is from America. American Jews are called on upon to support Israel politically, financially, and unwaveringly. When we question Israeli policies, we are called blood traitors, self-haters, or Nazi collaborators. However, ultimately the real break between Israel and American Jews may not come from the increasing discomfort on the part of American Jews with the violence and lack of diplomacy that Israeli leaders repeatedly indulge in; rather, it may come from the Orthodox dictators eventually deciding that all of us over here really aren't Jews after all. The question will be, will we still all be asked for money and political support once our birthright is taken away? Will the letterhead be addressed "Dear goyish mamzerim?"

In Israel, it would be literally illegal for me to marry my (born-Catholic) boyfriend. True, he could try to convert, but in Israel as we saw last year in the headlines, his conversion could be retroactively nullifed a decade later by a different Rabbi feuding with his predeccessor. (Thank you, Avraham Sherman!) One minute, you'd be married, with legitimate children, and the next, you're notified that your marriage never happened and your children are bastards. I just don't see Ha-Shem being ok with something like that. If we teach that a convert was born with a Jewish soul, what kind of soul does someone whose conversion was nullified have? Why convert with rules like that? Look up conversion of http://www.failedmessiah.com/ to see just how much of a clusterf--k these haredi rabbis have made.

The rules of religion in Israel are basically set up to exclude people, not just Arabs, but other Jews. If you believe that G-d has bigger things to worry about than gay sex, congrats you're not a real Jew. If you think that a man who has a problem hearing a woman's voice in prayer should maybe just get over it, come back to the Kotel later, or put in ear plugs, well then you're a heretic (really, we're using that word now?).

The sad thing is, the Women of the Wall are not asking for equality in prayer. They only want equal access to the most sacred place in Judaism (next to the Temple Mount, but it's not like any of us are getting over there). They're not storming on to the men's side or treating the Torah with disrespect by reading from it without wearing a tallit or kippah. They wanted to hold a service for women only, making the basic assumption that, unlike haredi men, G-d is not offended by a woman's voice raised in prayer. Many of the comments on http://www.jewlicious.com/ were appalling; calling the women troublemakers and anti-semites, asking about the rights of the men who currently pray on more than two-thirds of the wall and why women can't just be satisfied with knowing that they got it easy from Ha-Shem.

Most American Jews are religious Jews. They may eat clam chowder now and again, but they believe deeply in Judaism and in their identity as part of Am Israel. They go to synagogue fairly often, although many drive to get there. They raise their children as Jews while managing to treat the often non-Jewish father/mother of the same children with respect. Assimilation gives Judaism the chance to take on a broader meaning, not a lesser one. When the Israeli rabbis call these people heretics or goyim, they create a schism right down the community and threaten to remove the meaning of Israel for American Jews. Why support a country that hates your president, that doesn't recognize your marriage, your rabbi, or your children? How can an American Jew reconcile their own love for democracy and equality and then write a check to a nation that allows its bigots to dictate its religious and cultural policy? How can I, a woman who prays to G-d (although not with a tallit or kippah), believe that a country that arrested a devout woman while she was holding a Torah is a fitting nation in the sight of G-d?

I teach Religious School to children who will one day find out that many of them are not considered Jews by the Orthodox community. How do I explain to them, or to my own future children (who will be Jews, but probably illegitimate to some ultra-Orthodox), that they should support a country that does not acknowledge them? How do we raise American supporters of Israel who Israel itself will treat with contempt? American Judaism may have a lot of problems facing it, but it has a sense of morality and justice that the Israeli version seems to have altogether lost sight of.

"excluding" half-Jews

The Jezebel article on half-Jews was unfortunately frustrating, even though I usually like the author quite a lot. I guess the very idea of a self-labeled "half-Jew" decrying their lack of inclusion into Orthodox Judaism seems illogical and deliberately targeting. I get it, Jews stick together, you don't feel included, you think the ethnic identity of half your DNA can excuse you from responsibility over not perpetuating stereotypes, etc.

A couple of things, though. One, whatever the haredi Jews in Israel say, the only person who decides whether an American Jew is Jewish or not is that Jew him/herself. If your father is Jewish (like the author and many complaining commenters), any Reform or Reconstructionist congregation in America would love you as a member. I know many Hebrew school teachers whose fathers were not Jewish and yet who consider themselves proud Jews. However, of course, the author of the article is not looking for synagogue membership. In fact, she defines half-Jews as those who either "compromise" by going to Unitarian or Quaker memberships or those who light menorahs in front of Christmas trees and grow up without a "single religion."

Everyone's faith is their own business of course, but I don't see how belonging to a Christian Church and not identifying as Jewish really qualify one as an MOT. I don't get how the author can complain about being excluded from a religion/culture which she indicates no desire to participate in. Is she taking Hebrew lessons? Does she study any Jewish history or current politics? Does she observe any holidays? Does she laugh when those around her, assuming she's Christian, make jokes about Jews? It's not just like being Italian or Irish; Judaism is a commitment to a people and a heritage that is simply not compatible with simultaneously practiced Christianity. When someone with only one Jewish parent makes that commitment, they're not called a "half-Jew." They're simply Jewish, whatever the Orthodox mishpocha thinks about it.

Being Jewish may come with a free Birthright Israel trip (thanks, btw, it was great!), but it also comes with a lot of burdens. In the eyes of much of this country and the world, to be Jewish is never to be completely white, completely American, completely "normal." It is to grow up knowing about the Holocaust, and pogroms, and suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. It is to know that as a Jewish woman, particularly among other secular Jews, your looks are valued on how well you can pass as non-Jewish. There is a reason why so many of the commenters have shiksa mothers; decades after Annie Hall, a WASPy blond is still the ultimate catch for a Jewish man. For many of us, women included, thanks to the openness of American society, passing is still a constant tempation and often a resented fantasy.

I have only respect for those individuals who are born as "half-Jews," and decide to embrace their Jewish identity, willingly tackling all of the above. Those are the people whom I believe the Conservative movement should move to welcome and whom the State of Israel should incorporate under its policy for olim. However, the "half-Jews" of this article, who consider themselves equally "half-Christian," have excluded themselves from the Jewish community. If they ever wish to return, to shoulder their responsibilities as Jews and assume the joy and sorrow inherent in a Jewish identity, we'll be waiting.

Whitney, My Love

I just finished Judith McNaught's "Whitney, My Love" last night and I have to say that I found the experience fairly disturbing. In its favor, the book reads as solid, if unimaginative, prose with good characterizations. It's extremely absorbing as well; I read the first three hundred pages in one sitting. However, finishing the book later that night, I was left with a sense of great insecurity and doubt about love, not the emotions that a romance novel is supposed to elicit. If as Jayne Ann Krentz famously stated, romance novels are ones in which "the answer is always yes," then "Whitney, My Love" might in fact have been ascribed to entirely the wrong genre. More than anything, it seems to dwell on the fragility of love, the instability of romantic relationships which constantly teeter on the brink of hate and lust (here seen as entirely negative). Here, the answer the characters get is not a "yes," but a perpetual "maybe."

This novel can clearly be seen to follow the genre of "oppositional romance" created most famously by Jane Austen in "Pride and Prejudice." Just like P&P, it has a male and female lead who frequently despise each other and yet are manifestly destined to be together. In P&P, the conflict between the two leads provides the main narrative thrust, culiminating in a joyous denouement in which all ambiguity and misinterpretation have been cleared away. "Whitney" seems to wish to imitate this model, and yet the book diverges from it in many significant ways. The type of emotional growth and maturity demonstrated by Darcy and Elizabeth over the course of the novel is lacking here. Whitney might hate the Duke when she originally meets him, but she apparently hates him just as much four hundred pages later when she believes him to have broken their engagement, despite intervening declarations of affection.

Both main characters of the novel are able to go for long stretches of time believing themselves deeply in love with the other and then, upon some mistaken revelation, reverse entirely and deny all previous emotion. They allow the present to cancel out all the past they have built together and that is, or at the very least should be, inexcusable in a romance novel. Here, love lacks all constancy. The characters are repeatedly quick to believe the worst of each other and to act on that misapprehension. Circumstances may align to bring those misunderstandings to a point of clarity and thus facilitate reconciliation, yet the very arbitrary nature of the resolution itself highlights the lack of trust which necessitated its implementation within the narrative.

It is almost absurd to imagine, within some post-denouement future, Darcy repudiating Elizabeth after discovering yet another abhorrent relation. Or on the contrary, Elizabeth invalidating her affection upon recieving a cold look or word from her husband. And yet, McNaught allows her leads to do just that, to erase all claims of love based on a rumor, a scrap of paper, an ill-timed letter. And, she does this not just once, but four or five times, building layers of insecurity and doubt upon what the reader is meant to envision as a marriage. For McNaught, love itself, without intervention, does not pervail or survive (particularly for the man); thus, any happy ending is automatically overshadowed by the ephemarality and romantic inauthenticity of that conclusion.

This wouldn't be quite so disturbing if McNaught wasn't percieved as one of the direct and most important literary heirs of Austen and Heyer within the genre. As the first modern writer to take up the mantle of historical regency, her conclusions seem to take on a greater weight, to speak for our era in the face of earlier generations. Yet, what she says speaks only to a cynicism and a blatant distrust of affection which, if valid, should shame us all.

Thoughts on "The History of Love"

I have difficulty deciding if The History of Love functions best as an affirmation or inditement of romantic love. Perhaps, in a particularly disturbing way, it does both. Love is seen as the raison d'etre of many of the adult main characters and yet, it also debilitates and permanently maims them. Alma's mother and Leo Gursky, the two adults most central to the story (ignoring Zvi Lvitinof for the moment), each seem to be unceasingly drowning in their own love. Their emotion has lost its object and yet the emotion itself traps them. By the time Leo Gursky loses his family to the Nazis, he had already lost something of himself that he is simply never capable of getting back. The novel seems to warn of the danger of putting a human being at the center of your world. The characters circle as satellites around a beloved who inevitably disappears; lost, bewildered, they orbit still, unable to replace that center or willing to live independent of it. At one point in their lives, Leo Gursky and Charlotte Singer each created a definition of themselves and their place in the world that had another human at its heart. Now, alone, they live with memories and rob themselves of the possibility of further life. This is wrenchingly romantic, true, but it also a terrible, heartbreaking waste, leaving the reader crying not so much for the lost love as for the lost life.

Thus, the final ambiguity left in Alma's relationship with her friend Misha seems both intentional and salvatory for the reader. She feels herself falling in love and fighting it at the same time. And at least, we don't have to see her fall. Alma is preserved by her indecision, saved for the space of the book, and thus forever in the imagination of the reader, from the descent into love/obsession that haunts her elders. Human life is transitory, human relationships even more so. And yet, for Krause and her characters the ephemerality of every type of relationship only serves to highlight love's centrality. The Holocaust is thus an ideal backdrop for the story. It allows Krause to play with a character madly in love, who has lost every human being capable of stirring emotion within him. His choice to "live" as a hollow satellite of the people he loved from the past seems like an ultimate rejection of life. Leo Gursky has centered his life around loving the dead or unattainable. The reader is torn with the aching, sad waste of such a pursuit, the emptiness vacancy that spans a life stole from the teeth of Hitler's murderers. Among all the dead, he alone has a chance to live and chooses to spend it loving a vacuum. And yet, looking at the issues the opposite way, if love is the most powerful form of remembering, of recreating the vanished beloved, then people like Leo Gursky and Alma's mother are also fighting waste, preserving love despite the destruction of human life.

I don't really have an answer on this. Reading back to the very beginning of the book, it seems that perhaps Nicole Krauss thinks she does. She refers to her husband as her life, the same phrase that Gursky uses for his Alma. So, perhaps, we as readers are meant to embrace the romance and value it over the simultaneous, inseparable emptiness experienced by the characters. Krause has presented a picture of love with loneliness and loss always only briefly held at bay, a love that is a denial of both life and death. Perhaps as Alma wonders, such love is simply too much, as she silently begs her mother, "Love me less."(pg. 43) And yet, neither Alma nor the reader can turn away from it. Maybe the only message we are meant to take away from the book is that no one in life, love, or death, ever really has a choice.

Reading Romance Literature

As an author, Georgette Heyer does not so much fit the genre of Romance Literature, as define it. If Austen holds the ultimate adulatory status, then Heyer comes a distinguished second. Perhaps, as I'm sure many self-proclaimed intellectuals would argue, that is not particularly notable in a field of literature which at its best is patronized by the public and its worse, relentlessly mocked. And, of course, there are some examples of execrable prose and plot among romance novels, the way there are many among any genre. However, romance novels are women's literature and thus inferior to any other form of textual production. In the literary climate of Modern America (as well as every other place/time), women can either write to be read by men or eschew all claims to "literary merit."

Heyer and Austen write for women (though Austen at least has now found a wide-spread, if unwilling, male readership in progressive high school classes). They write about the female experience in society, embracing female characters who seek to preserve their own identityand human integrity by actively pursuing (relatively) safe marriages based on affection and financial security. They write narratives whose trajectories end in happiness and are thus dismissed as "light" and unrealistic. However, in many ways, Heyer and Austen are the most "realistic" of novelists. In an age when Keith Gesson can publish a critically acclaimed book dealing with the ephemeral travails of being a young man in our society and be considered an intellectual writer, there should be no stigma assigned with Heyer or Austen or any other woman writing narratives of young women trying to find themselves. Yes, they associate finding their identities with finding men. However, few young men coming of age do so in a fictional world devoid of women. Perhaps, for male readers of such books (both the involuntary and the potentially nonexistent willing ones), the true unreality comes from these female authors' assertion that it is love for which their characters seek. Sex on the other hand, seems a much more realistic and laudatory goal.

Heyer and Austen write of women trapped in penury, legally owned by their fathers, forced to live lives constrained by the minutiae of social detail. And yet, they are transcendent characters, recasting the inevitable trajectory of their lives into a context of choice and will. Romance novels give both their characters and readers a vision of female intentionality and decision. Still, they never forget to also tender the reassurance that such "unfeminine" agency does not need inevitably to result in a context of loneliness and alienation. Heyer and Austen assert that there are lucky women who find exceptional men who allow them to maintain the integrity of their characters and their agency without sacrificing the love and companionship for which all people, both men and women, yearn. Is that unrealistic? Too idealistic to qualify as the focus of a serious genre of literature? Well maybe...but judging from the amount of readership which romance literature achieves, the intellectual community might eventually want to get around to examining, instead of merely denigrating, such "female" concerns in its literature and scholarship.

The Drama of Narrative and Life in "The Group"

When confronted by a book like Mary McCarthy's The Group, following the lives of eight Vassar graduates, it is perhaps a natural response for the reader to try to identify with individual characters. Perhaps one might see some of Libby in onself, or rather Lakey, or on the contrary, feel a revulsion towards Kay, or Priss or Norine. We see each woman through her own eyes for such a short time and then we are reduced to once again seeing her through the cloudy lens of others' opinion. We wish as readers to judge, to quantify, to feel as if we might sum up a character and shelve her; confronted by eight, perhaps this is the only way to procede. And yet, McCarthy seems to both intuit our impulse and to deny it. She leaves us with each woman's internal humanity, her fright and joy and the sheer drama which each person's life holds for themselves. And then, once we feel that we might just see the soul, the essence, the uniqueness of that woman, McCarthy again drops the curtain. Because of course, every person is the whole world in their own eyes...and something much less to even their friends and lovers, let alone to the general populace.

One might even say that it is to some extent those interactions with others, almost always men, which define these women's life moments as dramatic enough to witness. Thus, Dottie Renfrew is worth looking at while losing her virginity to a man all the readers know is bad news. She willingly forfeits her dramatic, narrative potential when deciding to marry that man Brook from Arizona. In a classic role reversal, Dottie's mother begs her to throw away security for "love," for the one moment of transgressive, rule-breaking passion of Dottie's life. She feels disappointed in Dottie when Dottie refuses, let down by Dottie's very practicality and sense (pg. 229). Dottie has thrown away her chance for drama and centrality in the narrative. She could have married the weak, immoral man and remained a central figure, like Kay. And yet, instead Dottie chooses to close that curtain of reader interest herself. She chooses happiness and security over passion. Perhaps a model person, but certainly not a model character, as McCarthy herself concludes by passing over her for the rest of her book. Apparently, there is no drama, and thus no rasion de lire once a Vassar girl goes to Arizona.

The truly dramatic women, with whom we are meant to emotionally connect, tend to be the ones who inhabit constantly emotionally-searing landscapes. In particular, I think Kay and Polly remain the most truly dramatic and ergo the most heavily developed characters of the novel. Kay, whose story bookends the entire novel, seems inevitably destined for despair. Polly in contrast, beginning in poverty seems designed for an equally inevitable, Horatio Alger-ish rise to happiness. These characters are created on a trajectory; it is unclear whether it is their lives that lend themselves to a dramatic narrative or vice versa, but either way, they lack the stagnant security which to McCarthy signals a life lacking in both conflict and significance. When wondering which characters to empathize with and focus on, the reader of The Group might keep in mind the narrative blandness of contentment and the lure of a falling/rising star.

When Will There Be Good News?

I'm somewhat biased, I suppose when it comes to Kate Atkinson's work. I've read and deeply enjoyed both her two previous Jackson Brodie mysteries, as well as her novel, Human Croquet. I came to her newest book, When Will There Be Good News?, with the highest of expectations, especially since I received the book itself as a much-anticipated, though easily predicted, birthday present. And, to a large extent, Atkinson's third mystery does not disappoint. The characterizations are as full and poignant as her previous works, the mystery as involved and intense as that of Case Histories. The return of Louise Munro is, while expected, nonetheless satisfying. In fact, Good News stands out from its predecessors in its sheer humor and in the narrative power of the sixteen year old protagonist which it introduces. Reggie's voice, particularly in the first half of the novel, creates, within the prose, moments of both surprising dignity and almost overwhelming tragedy.

However, my one critique of Atkinson's novel, comes in fact from the sheer accumulation of that tragedy. Death, of course, seems not out of place in a mystery novel. It has been a significant figure in each of the Atkinson novels I have read, both the context and the catalyst for the plot. However, in Good News, Death is not just a frequent visitor, it is an omnipresent shroud encasing not only the characters whom the reader meets, but also those shadowy figures, the unnamed populace who inhabit Atkinson's fictional Britain. Without giving anything away, I think it is safe to say that people die. Lots and lots of people die. In fact, Death is so ubiquitous throughout the novel, one rather wants to applaud the survivors; the everyday, non-protagonist characters whom, in an act of seeming authorial mercy, Atkinson does not kill off.

Such an onslaught of fatality inevitably has a calculated effect on the reader. We too feel as if we are adrift in the world of Louise, Reggie, Jackson, Joanna, etc., in which Death is an element of both unpredictability and an unfortunate statistical probability. There is no order to this world, no guarantees or safeguards, anything can happen to anyone; the shock of that reality permeates the novel. The reader finds herself echoing the title, begging the author for any happiness or crumbs of joy capable of existing, even fleetingly, within such an environment. We connect to this world, or at least I did, for the majority of the book, caught in a fictional nightmare from which we at least have the ability to awaken, grab some food or conversation, and then willingly re-immerse ourselves. The characters do not have the same option to raise their heads from the horrifying world around them.

However, there was a moment near the end of the book in which this engrossing, oppressive formula failed for me. An elderly parent loses an adult child in a horribly unfair way and then commits suicide. Perhaps it is only in context with the rest of the novel, but this moment felt horribly gratuitous to me. In Case Histories, something very similar happens to a father and a teenage child, but in that case, the parent goes on living, is forced to struggle through life for another thirty years or more. That fight, that imposition of continued life upon a character stripped of his human raison d'etre, was for me the most powerful part of Case Histories. Here Atkinson attempts to invoke pathos with the parent's suicide, but, to me, at least, this moment just felt gratuitous and an easy choice for the novelist.

After all, the greater emotional opportunity for the author to explore seems to be in characters living after tragedy, something frequently evoked within the mystery novels of P.D. James and Elizabeth George. James and George never seem to be writing so much about Death, but rather about what happens to the living after loss. Atkinson is as concerned as either with demonstrating the effects which death have on the survivors, but the load she piles on both her characters and readers seems eventually so overwhelming that the novel itself ultimately seems to lose a little of its grasp on reality. In Kate Atkinson's authorial attempts to play God and pass judgment on so very many mortal lives, she seems to miss some of the opportunities to explore the genuine persevering strength of humanity.