Martini Judaism

For me, it is the second half of her subtitle: what to do about it. Kwall’s final chapter, “A Self-Help Blueprint for American Jews,” proposes a foundation of shared commitments around which a broad Jewish center might gather. Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish democratic state. The legitimacy of criticizing its government. Opposition to antisemitism wherever it appears. Condemnation of terrorism, including violence by Jewish extremists. Sympathy for innocent Palestinians. A two-state solution as an aspiration. She outlined these principles in a recent presentation at Yeshiva University. There is plenty there to argue about. Try bringing those principles to your next Shabbat dinner. But that, I think, is where the book becomes most useful. It gives us something concrete to discuss—and asks us to examine our own habits as participants in that discussion. Can we describe another Jew’s convictions in terms that she would recognize? Can we hear criticism without assuming betrayal? Can we acknowledge suffering without treating compassion as a concession? Learning a second Jewish language requires practice. Shared study. Personal relationships. Time spent in Jewish communities whose assumptions differ from our own. The tribes are here to stay. The work is to keep them talking—and to give them reasons to care about one another’s future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the most important story in Judaism? You might think that it is the Exodus from Egypt. Or, even, perhaps, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.  Nope.  The most important story in Judaism is not in the Torah -- though, if it were, it would be somewhere towards the beginning of this week's Torah portion. I am talking about the story about how Abraham, at the age of thirteen, broke his father's idols -- and simultaneously invented monotheism. (Abraham was a gifted child, of course).  Jewish history is the history of iconoclasts, and lately, no one is doing it better than Dara Horn -- novelist, and penetrating observer of contemporary Jewish life.  Not only an observer -- a critic who holds nothing back -- with a rare talent for giving titles to her books that are, well, iconoclastic. What can you say about a book that proclaims People Love Dead Jews -- and her new book, equally provocatively titled -- The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living.  Yes (gulp): she actually uses that phrase "final solution" in the title.  Dara has much to say in this new book, but here is my favorite takeaway. It's about antisemitism -- a subject that is on the mind and on the lips of every Jew I know. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For years I believed that the phrase "made in the image of God" had become a pious slogan Jews slap on almost every issue -- a phrase in danger of becoming a cliche. In an article in Commentary, and in my book Tikkun Ha'Am/Repairing Our People: Israel and the Crisis of Liberal Judaism, I asked out loud: have we overused that phrase? Do we even know what it means? I can now say, with confidence, that we know what it means -- thanks to Tomer Persico, who teaches at the Shalom Hartman Institute and who is the author of In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1977, a man named Frank Collin announced that he planned to march his fellow neo-Nazis through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb where roughly one in ten residents had survived the death camps. Chicago had already blocked him from marching there, and his history of violence and property damage offered the city an easy “no.” PS. Frank Collin was the son of a German Jewish Holocaust survivor. The ACLU took his case anyway, on First Amendment grounds, and Skokie became the defining American test of whether even the most hateful speech deserves protection. That fight did not end in 1978. It resurfaced in Charlottesville in 2017, where marchers carrying torches chanted “Jews will not replace us” under the same constitutional canopy that had once shielded Collin. And it has resurfaced again, right now, on college campuses, where students and administrators are still arguing over what speech the law should protect and what speech should count as harassment. Skokie did not settle anything. It just wrote the opening chapter. I learned about Collin, and much more, from James Loeffler, a historian at Johns Hopkins and the author of a new book called Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America. I spoke with him for this week's Martini Judaism podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rabbi Jeff Marx has written a new book, Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I, and he does something almost nobody has tried before. He tells the story behind the charge that Jews deliberately set fires in order to collect insurance money – “Jewish lightning.” In fact, there were real Jewish arsonists who operated in American cities for roughly sixty years, and Jeff tells those stories. He begins with the 1867 "Jew risks" affair, when major fire insurance companies instructed their agents to deny policies to Jews outright. He follows the stereotype through three decades of trade-press obsession, into vaudeville sketches and silent films, and into real criminal networks of torches, public adjusters, and fire brokers. So, yes: there were actual Jewish arsonists. But, they were extremely few in proportion to the population -- approximately 200 individuals, or roughly one one-thousandth of one percent of New York City’s population. Despite this tiny number, their cases became front-page news and were syndicated across the United States. But, then again, there were also Italian, Greek, and Black Americans. The fact that Jewish suspects were framed through ethnicity while others were not raised a central question for the book: why did Jewish arson cases become the basis for a broader ethnic stereotype? We talk about why he chose arson over the more familiar stories of Jewish bootlegging and gambling; about the progression from caricatures, stereotypes, and most dangerously, antisemitic narratives which emerge when stereotypes depict Jews as malevolent conspirators, echoing European tropes of Jews plotting harm; and about what it meant to write this history with his own parents watching over the dedication page, with their own whispers of -- you guessed it -- shanda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It turns out that every corner of progressive culture has a price of admission, and Jews are finding it progressively more difficult to pick up that tab. Add feminism to the list. That's the case Kara Jesella makes in her new book, "Feminist Antisemitism: An Intellectual History," which I discussed with her on my podcast. Jesella majored in women's studies at Vassar College, where her real education in Jewish feminism came from her college rabbi, she told me. She spent years as a journalist before going back to school for a Ph.D. in performance studies at New York University. She finished that doctorate in 2021 — the same day that she watched former classmates post infographics calling Jews colonizers. And Oct. 7, 2023, she says, is when she stopped being patient about any of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

View Zionism from one angle, and it is Theodor Herzl, seeking to rescue the Jews of Europe. From another, it is seeking to resurrect Jewish culture. From another, it is a spiritual connection to the Land; from yet another, a socialist utopia. The images change, depending on where you are, and where we are at this moment of history.   That is the subject of my podcast with Nadine Epstein, editor-in-chief of Moment magazine, and Gil Troy, the historian and Zionist educator. Several months ago, Epstein wrote a lead essay that argued, in some detail, that we should retire the word “Zionism” because 136 years of accumulated meanings can no longer clarify anything. Troy had the opposite instinct: we don’t destroy a word just because those who hate it — and its supporters who have distorted it — have made it more challenging.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Author and musician Daniel Rachel has written a new, disturbing and quite overdue book, "This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich." And I interviewed him about it for my podcast.  The book documents something that has been hiding in plain sight for more than 60 years. As Rachel writes: For over seventy-five years, musicians have been drawn to the language and provocative imagery of Nazism, fascinated by its power, menace and underlying sexuality. They have flirted with the theatrical spectacle of the Third Reich, displayed the swastika, flaunted memorabilia, worn Nazi uniforms and marveled at the grandiose rallies of 1930s Germany. Decades ago, Woody Guthrie had a guitar with the words inscribed on it: "This machine kills fascists." We never thought that future rock stars might have guitars that could say they celebrate fascists. The worst part is the rock music industrial complex industry spent seven decades simply looking the other way. And so did the audiences, including me.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have done my share of traveling in Europe, and when I am there, I visit cathedrals. Most are majestic, and they are filled with Christian art that would take a decent docent a decade to unpack for me. I have never been to Brussels, though I would like to visit. And when I am there, I expect to make a special trip to the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula. That is the subject of Flora Cassen's new book, "Stained Glass: A Reflective History of Antisemitism." The cathedral is, by all accounts, a masterpiece. Built between the 13th and 15th centuries, it rises above the old town on its own little hill, and when the lights hit the stonework at night, it looks like lace carved out of sky. But I imagine myself stepping inside. I would look intensely and intentionally at the stained-glass windows — the ones donated by Belgium’s first two kings in the 19th century. And inside that beautiful space, an erudite guide might tell a story about a Jew who, in 1370, was accused of torturing Communion wafers.  It is an expression of one of the libels that tormented Jews during the Middle Ages — one of the most bizarre — the host desecration libel. It resulted in six Jews burned at the stake and the rest expelled from the city. And there it is. In the windows. In the tapestries. In the chapel. In the capital of the European Union. Today.  Flora's book is itself a modern medieval tapestry — of Jewish and European history and family memoir, the story of a 15th-century Jewish woman named Beatrice de Luna — also known as Dona Gracia — and the story of Flora’s own grandmother, Pola, who fled the Nazi occupation of Belgium through the Congo.  So, why does this book matter, and why do you need to read it? It is because of what you already know. Antisemitism is rising — on university campuses, in social media feeds, even in food co-ops in Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I reflect on my rabbinical career, I realize I have spent nearly a third of it south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Yes, that includes about 10 years in South Florida — and lest you see South Florida as a mere extension of Long Island, when I moved to Miami in 1981, it still had traces of an old Southern Jewish community. I enjoyed my time in the South. I found the people gracious, the communities strong, and I did good work there. However, I never fully grasped Southern Jewish sociology. I famously and infamously missed social cues. I never fully understood what it meant to be a Jew in the South. If only I had sat at the feet of Nick Lemann, with whom I had a conversation for our podcast.  His new book, "Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries," is the story of his German Jewish family, who journeyed from a small village in the Rhine Valley to the sugar plantations of Louisiana and into the elegant, complicated world of New Orleans high society. They prospered. They assimilated. They sent their children to Harvard. They built beautiful homes under live oaks and hosted cocktail parties with silver trays and crustless duck sandwiches. And yet, even at the height of their success, a quiet awareness lingered: Acceptance was real, but never complete. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices