By tanygeo

The start of one new year necessarily means the end of the old. To say so, however, is to create a dyad of old/new, casting the previous year in the unflattering light of irrelevance and decay. More accurate to say that the new year brings the unknown and change to a continuum of the known and the past. So it is with Zeek. For eighteen months, Zeek has shared this space with Jewcy.com, running our content on the Jewcy server. We came to Jewcy thanks to the visionary offer of Tahl Raz and ...

By tanygeo

The voice on the other end of the phone was completely incredulous, "How could a decent Jewish girl, a rabbi no less! be living out in the middle of nowhere?!"  I had sent a box of the CDs I produce to my distributor on the east coast and they had arrived damaged. "Why can't you send them UPS?" he had sputtered in frustration.  I calmly explained that I lived in the country more than an hour's drive to the closest UPS center, so I sent them via the US Postal service. ...

By tanygeo

As a New Yorker, a Jew and a mother, September is a curious mix of beginnings and endings.  Every year I remember and relive 9/11; every year, I celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the new year; and every year, my kids return to school with new teachers, new classes and sometimes, a new school.  This past week was filled with an almost eerie, concomitant sense of beginnings/endings.  It started when my father called to tell me that the Dow had closed on 9/11 at 9605, the same as ...

By tanygeo

It is a sticky August evening in Garrison, New York. I'm sitting on a park bench at a retreat center with a woman I've only just met. I'm wearing capris, a tank top, and my rainbow kippah. She's wearing a turtleneck and long dress with her hair tucked under a scarf. Our assignment is to teach each other a favorite text from our own holy scriptures. She is a Muslim and I am a Jew. I've chosen Psalm 27, since the month of Elul is fast approaching and it's customary to read the psalm daily ...

By tanygeo

Just in time for the holidays, Zeek editor Jo Ellen Green Kaiser talks to B'nai Jeshurun leader Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein about the declining role of men in congregational Judaism. Born in Buenos Aires in 1954, Marcelo Bronstein was educated in Israel, Argentina and the United States. He holds an MA in Hebrew Letters from Hebrew Union College, where he also received his Rabbinical Ordination. He also holds a MA in Clincal Psychology from Belgrano University, Buenos Aires. In addition ...

By tanygeo

"And the Glitter Is Gone", the final track on Yo La Tengo's rewarding new album Popular Songs, opens with a fade-in, gradually immersing the listener in the pools and eddies of a groove whose source lies somewhere upstream. For someone expecting the well-defined intro of a conventional pop song, the effect is disconcerting. Yet it efficiently communicates a feeling that permeates the whole record: it's not worth starting over.  "If It's True" has a well-defined intro, ...

By tanygeo

Time, we are hearing with increasing frequency, is running out for the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is often attributed to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but whatever the reason, few serious observers disagree that the two-state solution may be a practical impossibility within the days of the Obama era. In fact, though the concern is correct, the perceived reason isn’t. Settlements can be abandoned or dismantled, ...

By tanygeo

"Your life takes precedence." Jacob Lamdan looked up from the heavily used volume of Gemara, the Babylonian Talmud, lying on his desk. "That's it. Your life."  Jay stared across the desk. "I know. It's a famous Gemara, but...." Jay boyishly scratched his hair, the looping brown curls at the top of his forehead yielding to the straightness of the rest of his closely cropped locks. His teacher, sensitive to the nuances of his protegee's voice, looked up from ...

By tanygeo

Following an afternoon of serious Labor Day sale shopping downtown, in which Lili and I each buy the same multi-colored, plaid dress, which is surprising because I am a good nine inches taller than Lili and we tend to have vastly different tastes in clothing, Lili admits to me over an organic salad in the East Village, "I hate it that Judaism took anthropomorphism away.  I mean, it makes more sense for God to be walking around and talking.  It's much more personal."    ...

By tanygeo

At the recent World Congress of Jewish Studies, held in Jerusalem in August, Israeli philosopher Eliezer Schweid gave an impassioned response to a panel on Judaism, Zionism, and the Diaspora. He began by claiming that the election of Barak Obama forever changed America. He did not weigh-in on what he thought of Obama’s policies but implied that whatever happens – to Obama – to his administration, America is now, and forever, a different place. He then extended this jeremiad to Israel, ...

By tanygeo

"Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh," we say to You in prayer, three times over. "Holy, Holy, Holy." And now I find myself before You, at thrice the age of a boy who has had his bar mitzvah. I cannot count the times over all these years that I have awakened and called out to You, still in my bed, that I stand before You, God. I have thanked You for the purity of my soul, for the wonders of my body. I have praised and exalted You, over and over again, in words of my own, in ...

By tanygeo

Criticism of European anti-Semitism always neglects its context. That is, it mistakes its object, frequently construed as being Israel, for being more important than what it has in common with other continental racisms. It is always a criticism of the Jewish right to statehood, to political freedom, never an acknowledgment of a larger prejudicial impulse towards towards persons of Mideast descent, which attaches itself to different European Semitic communities at different ...

By tanygeo

There are scenes in Quentin Tarentino’s new film Inglourious Basterds sure to make your heart race. The film opens with a tour-de-force of tension, in which SS Colonel Hans Landa, superbly played by Christoph Waltz, interrogates a dairy farmer suspected of harboring a Jewish family. At first we admire the farmer, who shows remarkable calm in dealing with his unwelcome guest. But as Landa slowly tightens the screws, our confidence in the farmer lags. We feel for him, but begin searching for ...

By tanygeo

Modern Orthodoxy: to many non-Orthodox Jews, this phrase is simply a contradiction in terms. How, after all, could the belief in divine authorship of the Tanakh be compatible with "modern" ways of looking at the world, "modern theoretical" frameworks through which truth is found, and "modern" life in general? The new film, "The Lonely Man of Faith: The Life and Times of Joseph B. Soloveitchik," reminds us that we have a guide in answering this ...

By tanygeo

Two thousand six hundred years ago, they were laid to rest in their burial cave.  Over the years, family members placed gifts of pottery, silver and gold jewelry, glass bottles, oil lamps and amulets in a repository under a burial bench in the cave.  Meanwhile, in the world of the living, the First Temple stood just a short walk from the tomb. King Josiah was on the throne, and Jeremiah was direly prophesying impending disaster for Jerusalem.  For his trouble, he was thrown ...

By tanygeo

Logging onto Facebook recently, I received an invitation to join an initiative called Grassroots Jews, a project led by a small group of people working together to put on High Holy Day services in north west London this year.  Not within an existing synagogue, not even in partnership with an existing synagogue, but entirely independently.  They are flying in a guest cantor and teacher from Israel – a remarkable Jewish leader, musician and professor of medieval Jewish history at the ...

By tanygeo

Some critics have faulted Rachel Shabi’s We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel's Jews from Arab Lands as one-sided. Shabi neglects the animosity that existed between Jews and Muslims long before 1948, the critics say. She exaggerates how good things were for the Jews of the Orient, they moan. But it seems that Shabi’s detractors might have missed the point. The pivot that Shabi’s work revolves around is, perhaps, easy to miss. It is simple, a delicate foundation for ...

By tanygeo

The other day, I was having lunch with a yoga-teacher friend of mine who, after years of teaching, was beginning to get burned out.  He still enjoyed the daily routine of teaching, and he was continuing to grow in how and what he taught.  But, over the years, his own spiritual practice had evolved to the point where he had come to see his basic work as, well, somewhat vulgar. At the advanced stages of his, my, and most spiritual paths, you see, the point is no longer to have exciting ...

By tanygeo

In the world of politics, especially that of Israeli policy and related activists worldwide, there is a constant effort to demonize the other side. Nowhere is this more evident than in the small cottage industry that has grown up to “monitor� human rights groups. This industry is led by groups like NGO Monitor and UN Watch, and, while their role is certainly needed and acceptable, their tactics often fall well short of civilized political discourse. There is nothing wrong with ...

By tanygeo

It's an open secret amongst my family and friends that I have a thing for rabbis.  I really do.  When a rabbi walks past on the street, or when I bump into one at a Jewish event, my girl friends will giggle and poke me as if we are in junior high school.   I am not particularly picky about age or affiliation either.  Reconstructionist or Orthodox, with sidecurls or without - I'm flexible.  Talk to me about God, and my heart goes pitter-patter. So at a recent wedding when the ...

By tanygeo

On the second day of Rosh haShanah, the Torah reading tells the story of the binding of Isaac, in which a ram is sacrificed.  The ram's horn or shofar is also a central part of the ritual: the sounds of the shofar are said to call one to repentance.  It is also appropriate to meditate on the ram at the beginning of Elul because the new moon of Elul is the new year of the animals according to Mishnah Rosh haShanah 1:1. "Ten things were created on the eve of the Sabbath at ...

By tanygeo

Over the course of the last two decades, the question of race has come to the forefront of Italian politics. Inspired by waves of immigration from eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa, it is most frequently associated with the anti-immigrant positions of right-wing Italian political parties, such as the Northern League, one of the main parties in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's current governing coalition. Italy's leader is of course not exempt from this discourse, having ...

By tanygeo

We visit gravesites, mark a year's passing, turn in in order to turn out another dimension. We rough our smooth edges.   We visit gravesites, cemented on grass and dirt, cover their tops with rocks, thin bricks line our chest, cavities of past mistakes.   We fail ourselves, calling mistakes failures. We don't just bury past mistakes, we return them, admonished. Failing to breathe   my chest, x-rayed again. Turning, I turn my body before ...

By tanygeo

Pity the poor Jewish mother.  She nurtures and sacrifices, only to have her children abandon her.  They never write, they never call.  But so long as they’re happy! Is this the fate of all Jewish mothers?  Consider the case of Gertrude Berg, who, for a quarter century, was the most beloved Jewish mother in America, but now has faded from the cultural memory.  Berg gained unprecedented fame starring as Molly Goldberg in The Goldbergs, the radio and television comedy program that she ...

By tanygeo

Zeek is pleased to present this excerpt from the forthcoming book, The House of Secrets, an inside look at the mikveh and its rituals, by Varda Polak-Sahm. This section focuses on a henna ceremony practiced mainly by Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. The henna ceremony is traditionally part of the fertility rituals that take place on the eve of a wedding, either in the mikveh or at the bride's home.  The Hebrew word for henna (hina) encompasses the essence of the compact between God and the ...

By tanygeo

In my twenties, I fancied myself a poet.  No one else did.  I labored under the delusion that I was, if not profound, at least mildly interesting.  I was not.  I abandoned all notions of being a poet some time ago, and the world is better for it.  However, like a shocking and unexpected pregnancy (actually, not quite like that - I've had a few of those, too, and poetry is adamantly not like gestation and giving birth, even if poets will insist on making that parallel), a few words, ...

By tanygeo

Once upon a time, Zionism was considered one of the most progressive of causes among American liberals. Support for Zionism was thought to go hand in hand with noble goals such as civil rights and the advancement of freedom, free speech and tolerance, cultural pluralism and the rights of minorities. And the American Zionist movement was led by one of the nation's most powerful, influential and innovative figures, Louis Brandeis. During the years which marked the heyday of his Zionist ...

By tanygeo

Projects like Open Strings are difficult to review. I have been listening to this double album, the latest release from Blur and Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn’s Honest Jon’s label, for twelve hours a day since it arrived in the mail last week. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the remarkable first disc, which presents some of the remarkable music captured for posterity in the years following World War I, when major record labels made a concerted effort to reach markets ...

By tanygeo

I write this with some mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am pleased that my original post on Zeek / New Jewish Thought was taken seriously enough by Diana to provoke her into writing a lengthy, articulate and serious response. However, I am also concerned that readers of Zeek, which in my understanding caters to a largely North American/Israeli readership, might find the exchange between us difficult to translate into local vernacular, if not irrelevant to their national experiences as ...

By tanygeo

When former president Bill Clinton jetted off on a plane to North Korea to obtain the release of the two American women reporters, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who'd been imprisoned there since March, it almost seemed like a modern day wild West story. Brave white man comes charging to the rescue of hapless women taken hostage by the bad guys. Clearly, there had been all sorts of negotiations prior to Clinton's arrival, the terms of which included expressing remorse, admitting to guilt, and ...

By tanygeo

It’s getting harder and harder to discuss any aspect of contemporary culture without explicitly considering its means of distribution. Whether your topic is film, literature or music, the massive changes brought about by over a century's worth of technological innovations have progressively undermined our sense of the boundary between the being of a work, its existence in space and time, and the work that multiplies that being. Does a record produced from bits and pieces of many studio ...

By tanygeo

Across the street, over the rooftop, in the next building, a young man in blue cooks his single dinner over a tiny flame. Perhaps a student, I saw him once in the marketplace, bent over a wooden tray of lemons from North Africa. Sidling up to him, smitten by his pale green eyes, by the ringlets in his beard, by his dark fingers, curled around a lemon, cradling it in his palm, I began to tremble. Such beauty should not be allowed. Without him noticing me, I followed him to a grain vendor's ...

By tanygeo

With my great-niece, Rayley, perched on my hip, I clamber with my husband and three kids through the three-room log cabin built by my great-great-grandfather, Johann Conrad, in the mid-1800s where my father and his ancestors were born. A 1932 calendar remained on the wall for over twenty years after they moved into the newly built farmhouse a few hundred yards away, and patches of wallpaper from the Depression still are on the walls today. My father had the house restored on the outside ...

By tanygeo

Yoav Shamir's 2009 documentary Defamation is the one must-see film at this years’ San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. This is not to say that it is the most artistically successful of the current festival lineup. Nor is the reason behind this endorsement Defamation's fast-growing reputation, alongside Simone Bitton’s controversial documentary about the late Rachel Corrie, the logically-titled Rachel. Defamation's notoriety stems from the fact that the documentary takes as its ...

By tanygeo

Gregg Drinkwater  of Jewish Mosaic has taken photos of an August 2, 2009 rally in Jerusalem mourning the slaying of two young LGBTQ youth in Tel Aviv. On August 1, a masked murderer entered a Tel Aviv community center and shot randomly, killing Liz Trobishi (16) and Nir Katz (26), may their memories be for a blessing, and wounding ten others. The gunman has not yet been found. Rallies have been held to remember the dead and to protest Jewish homophobia in Tel Aviv and throughout the world. ...

By tanygeo

When word that Brooklyn indie-rock stalwarts Oneida were planning to release a triple album as the second installment in a triptych of LPs, members of their devoted fan base rejoiced. But the announcement also excited interest in circles where the band’s peripatetic songs would otherwise have fallen on deaf ears. The scope of the band’s plan was enough to inspire closer scrutiny. The sheer quantity of popular music available these days, in forms that break the spell of the traditional ...

By tanygeo

Fenno tells me how he got lost in his own village on a visit back to Kenya. When he was a boy, they always avoided the tangled trees where the ancestors worshipped. He has been in Berkeley for twenty three years, his accent eggplant-purple in the creases where skin meets skin, elbows, the folds of the ears, hollows of the nose.   He didn't want to ask directions. They would tell him, Are you so American that you've forgotten? Don't you know the ...

By tanygeo

The recent stream of successful Israeli features—The Band’s Visit, Waltz with Bashir, and Beaufort, to name the most obvious—has significantly raised the bar for Israeli filmmakers. No longer can we consider oursleves satisfied by a well-made, albeit Israeli film. Rather, inclined moviegoers are lead to expect extraordinary cinematic experiences, of the kind that an increasing number of Israeli films simply cannot provide. The best example is  Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor’s brand ...

By tanygeo

In the month of Av falls Tisha b'Av, the ninth of Av, when Jews commemorate the destruction of the first and second Temples. A woman who conceives and bears a male shall be taboo seven days, just as during her menstrual period she shall be taboo.  On the eighth day his flesh shall be circumcised.  Thirty-three days shall she dwell in the blood of her purification; she shall not touch any sacred thing or enter the holy place until the days of her purification are complete.  If she ...

By tanygeo

How do we approach Tisha B'Av? We Jews in the Diaspora are thriving. Day schools and supplementary schools have increasing enrollment, synagogues serve as icons of religious expression and community stability, and summer camps now comprise one of the fastest growing programs across all denominations of Judaism. We have done such a great job growing that on Tisha B'Av we have trouble reliving the pain and anguish that accompanied the destruction of the Temple. When I try to understand ...

By tanygeo

Alongside established writers, Zeek takes special pleasure in featuring up-and-coming Israeli talents whose work has not yet received an American readership. This month's story, from Yoav Avni's first collection Those Strange Americans, speaks to the intractable struggle between young lovers, rather than the political "situation," as the conflict  between Israel and its neighbors is colloquially known in Hebrew. In Avni's hands, jealousy and disbelief twist a Tel Aviv ...

By tanygeo

Keith Kahn-Harris, in his discussion of British Jewish politics (Zeek, June 30th), presents a rather timid community, anxious to maintain cohesion behind its chosen voice, the Board of Deputies of British Jews.  He chooses to present this organisation as the quasi-parliamentary representative voice of British Jewry and shows that the elections to the board from the organisations that pay their rather steep affiliation fees, are seldom openly contested. Kahn-Harris identifies the antipathy ...

By tanygeo

When you first encounter Eprhyme's solo debut album WAYWORDWONDERWILL, out this fall on Modular Moods/Shemspeed, you might mistake his shtick for that of another Matisyahu clone. Along with that famous Hasidic reggae sensation, he might also draw comparisons to other MC's with Jewish roots like Y-Love, Remedy (of Wu-Tang Clan fame) or even the Beastie Boys. While there aren't an abundance of well-known American Jewish rappers, there are still too many for Eprhyme to use his ethnicity as an ...

By tanygeo

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival requires little introduction. Now in its twenty-ninth year, the annual summertime event has turned into the most important global gathering of its kind. Transforming the west coast American city into a temporary stand-in for Berlin or Cannes, albeit a Jewish version, is no small feat. Nor is the festival's distinction for helping serve as the North American starting point for some of Israel and Europe's most significant new Jewish productions. Over the ...

By tanygeo

Sitting at an outdoor café on Broadway with my friend Lori, we are talking about eggs and cholesterol one minute, and in the next we're discussing how, when someone or something disappears from one's life, "You can feel empty," Lori says, "but that emptiness can also be space."  Personally, I need a lot of space.  When I get too many phone calls, too many text messages, too many e-mails, too much communication in general, I start to withdraw, just to put more ...

By tanygeo

“If I say ‘Jewish Art’ to people, even to dear friends, Jewish or not, it’s like saying ‘the world is round’ in 1491. Each new painting sails off where there be monsters.� So wrote American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj in his 1989 book, First Diasporist Manifesto. That kind of stunned incomprehension has mellowed over the years, but it is still a mystery what Jewish art is, or where it comes from. After all, widespread Jewish participation in the visual arts is a relatively recent ...

By tanygeo

Israel is at war again. This time, the frontline is deep within the country’s borders—South Tel Aviv. Home to African refugees, foreign workers, and economically disadvantaged Israelis, South Tel Aviv was once a picture of pluralism and coexistence. Indian, Nepali, Chinese, and Filipino workers gathered in tight clusters, chattering in their mother tongues. Refugees from Darfur, Sudan, and Eritrea lined South Tel Aviv’s parks, their children sharing brightly colored swings and slides ...

By tanygeo

Sacha Baron Cohen's new film, Brüno, has gotten a wary and reserved response from reviewers, and if Brüno is to be judged by its success as a political satire, Baron Cohen is on shaky ground. Jarrett Barrios, the president of Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is representative in criticizing the film for reinforcing negative stereotypes about gay people. Barrios is worried some viewers will fail to see the satire and thus will not "appreciate the film's inarguably positive ...

By tanygeo

Because Beyond the Pale’s impressive new album Postcards comes with no liner notes, no explanation of where the music comes from, it invites listeners to find out for themselves. But that is not an easy task. Some tracks, like the tracks “Magura� and “Extra Spicy� that bookend the record sound like the sort of lighthearted fare one might have heard at Disney World’s Country Bear Jamboree had it been set in a Galician shtetl rather than a mythical American hinterland. But others ...

By tanygeo

In this, the final section of Ilan Stavans' monograph on Borges and the Jews, Stavans reflects on his own relationship with Borges, as one writer to another. This piece thus circles back to the beginning of the monograph, Part I of this series, in which Stavans explored Borges' self-identification as a writer and, oddly, as a Jew. Part II focused on Borges' infatuation with Kabbalah. In Part III, Stavans argued that Borges carefully styled himself as a literary son of Jewish precursors. ...