Jews And Jerusalem

If I often invite you to dinner, does that give you part ownership of my house?
If you gave me a housewarming gift, may you prevent me from selling the house?
If we grew up together in a home we once shared, must I ask you consent before making decisions that affect me more than you?
These metaphors are overly simple, but sometimes that’s the best way to make a point.
Israel’s duly elected, though highly unpopular prime minister, Ehud Omert, has decided that parts of Jerusalem most Israelis shun and no American Jews ever visit should be part of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.
Treason, say American Jews. Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people. We all have a say in it’s future and no Israeli leader has the right to re-divide it against the wishes of Jews around the world.
“No Israeli government has the unilateral or unfettered right to negotiate anything on behalf of the Jews when it comes to the eternal Jewish verities or heritage, such as our capital,” writes Jeff Ballabon in opinion piece distributed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “As such, Olmert's statements were not merely disappointing to Jewish sensibilities, they were dangerous to Jewish interests.”
It’s true enough that Jews outside Israel have a say in the future of Jerusalem. But they do not have a vote.
The burdens of protecting, defending and maintaining Jerusalem are not shared proportionately by Jews inside and outside Israel. A proportionate vote on its future, therefore, would be ridiculous and unfair.
It is, of course, Israeli troops and police from all over the country who put their lives on the line to maintain the attachment of Arab areas of Jerusalem to the Jewish neighborhoods. It is, of course, residents of Jerusalem and other areas of Israel whose tax dollars pay for the upkeep and security of the city.
Diaspora Jews, and Americans in particular, play a crucial role by lobbying their governments for political support and sending millions of dollars in philanthropic aid to help the people, institutions and infrastructure of Jerusalem. That political support’s effects can be seen in legislation passed by Congress such as the one requiring the U.S. embassy to be moved from Tel Aviv To Jerusalem, which asserts a sense of the American people that this disputed land is indeed Israel’s capital (even though two presidents have now ignored it.)
But however important is that political and financial support, it is cheaper than blood.
It is not just Israel’s soldiers who spill their blood for Jerusalem, but ordinary civilians, including women and children, who suffer the consequences of the peace process. The outcome of negotiations, or lack of negotiations, too often means an outbreak of violence. Sometimes those killed and maimed are visiting Diaspora Jews, but the vast majority of them are Israelis.
Ehud Olmert has contradicted himself by first telling the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations at a dinner that he wouldn’t think of making a decision on Jerusalem while ignoring the feelings of Diaspora Jews, and then setting out on a path to do just that. "The government of Israel has a sovereign right to negotiate anything on behalf of Israel,” he said before the Annapolis peace conference, in response to American Jewish critics.
His mistake was in making the first statement, not the second and politics and leadership are all about dealing with the latest reality and correcting mistakes.
I have no intention of ever visiting Abu Dis or any of the Arab neighborhoods now on the negotiating table, no matter whose sovereignty they are under, since I generally am not welcome there and have no one to visit.
Yet I am still pained with ceding more of an already miniscule country to another authority, especially one that still can’t put the word coexistence into its lexicon. The eventual Israel will be a jigsaw land with difficult borders and constant threat of attack, as the people of southern Israel are already facing from Gaza-based rocket launchers. Our years of suffering in the exile have earned us better than that.
Giving up part of Jerusalem may well be a major blunder, just as many feel the disengagement from Gaza has now proven to be. But it’s the mistake of Israelis to make.
If we are unhappy about it, we should write our letters and make our statements, while accepting the reality that guests and friends aren’t on equal footing with owners and defenders.

'Knocked Up' Feminism

Seen the movie “Knocked Up?” Me too.
Notice the protest sign around star Katherine Heigl’s neck while she was filming it? Me neither.
That’s why it strikes me as fascinating that, with the movie now cleaning up in video stores after a very successful theater run, the "Grey's Anatomy" star is now trashing the film as sexist.
“It paints the women as shrew, as humorless and uptight and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys,” Heigl tells Vanity Fair this month. “Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience but it was hard for me to love the movie.”
The millions she made off the movie, then, allowed her to relegate those concerns about the script to only two percent of her consciousness.
This is not to say the points she made are not legtimate. It just seems unseemly, though, to take the studio’s money to film a movie called “Knocked Up” only to come up with a feminist critique of it afterward. Kind of like taking a furrier's money for a day's work and then at 5 o'clock running outside to join a PETA protest.
With her comments, Heigl’s obviously angling for more serious, thoughtful roles than“Knocked Up.” Shouldn’t be difficult. Hollywood has plenty of movies about vacuous, self-important people trying to come across as deep. It’s their stock and trade.
And by the way, I didn’t think the men in “Knocked Up” came across as goofy and lovable (fun loving, I’ll give you.) They were just as empty and vacuous as the women.

Mean Books

Are nasty memoirs and thinly veiled revenge fiction the future of Jewish literature?

If you spit up at God, the old expression warns , it could fall back in your face.
In the case of Shalom Auslander, however, spitting up at God has made him a bestselling author.
Auslander’s memoir, “A Foreskin’s Lament,” is the tale of an Orthodox family’s dysfunction and one man’s rejection of the hypocrisy and strictures of a rigidly observant life. The provocative title refers to his being cast-off and “bloodied” by his experiences.
“My family and I are like oil and water, if oil made water depressed and angry and want to kill itself,” Auslander writes.
No detail of his life is spared the chronicle, from Auslander’s war with God, his longing for his abusive father’s death, his secret binging on non-kosher food, casual drug use and kleptomania to his sexual longings and what sordid findings turn up in a thorough search of his parents private possessions.
The pages drip with contempt for both his parents and God. For it is they, not he, who bear responsibility for his legion of misdeeds, we learn, in one of the biggest evasions of personal responsibility since George W. Bush tried to explain Iraq.
Other kids come from abusive, dysfunctional religious families and manage to stay on the right side of the law. God knows why Auslander was different.
Another best-selling book by a Jewish author that has stirred controversy while flying off the shelves is “My Holocaust” by Tova Reich. Though a fictional account of shady officials running the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum, it happens to evoke events and situations that mirror those of her husband, Walter Reich, who was fired as director of the museum for what he considered a principled stand at odds with his board members.
So scathing is her narration, and so devoid of redeeming value are the central characters, that the book comes off without a sentence of believable dialogue and with situations so bizarre and metaphorical that it plays out like the revenge fantasy of a disgruntled Holocaust museum employee on acid. Particularly grating is the fake European accent of the main character (it would be unfair to call him the protagonist), Maurice Messer, that sounds like how a neo-Nazi might mimick a Holocaust survivor.
Auslander and Reich share a catharsis that accomplishes the opposite of their intent, assuming (perhaps by giving too much credit) that their motive is more than just selling books.
Auslander escaped his tortured childhood family life by replacing it with a loving wife and child. Good for him. Too bad he pays the bills by wearing his pain on his sleeve, the kind of victimhood he seems to loathe when complaining that Jewish holidays are all about suffering. It’s wrong for Jews to make a festival out of Purim, when the Jews escaped mass murder at the hands of a tyrant. But it’s all right for Auslander to parade his sob story before the public for his own self-aggrandizement?
More hypocrisy: Auslander complains that his parents were devastated by the loss of a child that preceded him, lamenting that it affected their ability to function as parents. Why couldn’t they get over it?
And yet his own obsessive later worry that ill will befall his own child as God’s revenge for his misdeeds is enough to send the now-grown up Auslander into therapy. Auslander’s pain has a hechsher. His parents’ is treif.
Reich’s book has been received as a send-up of how Holocaust remembrance, cynically dubbed as “The Shoah business” has become an industry that sacrifices morality on the altar of money and places a higher premium on Jewish suffering than that of myriad other groups that endured their own “holocausts.” But it comes across more as a screed against a venerable institution that, while not above reproach, has sunk nowhere near as deeply as she suggests. It’s all too easy to imagine Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites reading this book with glee. That’s less of an argument against it, however, than the fact that it’s dull and tedious.
Scornful books about Jewish life are nothing new, and Auslander seems to be heavily influenced by precursors such as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. But Jewish literature may be undergoing a phase not unlike network TV in the age of ascendant cable channels. Will publishers increasingly prize shock value over message, torture over triumph and spleen venting over enlightenment?
Let’s hope not. Authors like Reich and Auslander are clearly out to get even. But we are the ones they punish.