"Bushy-brow fatigue"

-The strong brow trend has come and gone, which means the time is ripe for the NYT to discover it. As someone whose eyebrows simply don't do the caterpillar thing, my thinking is that, by accepting them as they are (which is to say, shaping slightly, but not striving for the illusion of thickness), I'm simply anticipating what ITG is already referring to as "bushy-brow fatigue." I am, as always, a step ahead of the trend. Which is why I will not be going to Doris Day (!) the dermatologist for eyebrow-enhancing medicine. The near-unused eyebrow pencil was plenty to throw at the now-non-problem.

-HMYF (hipsters make your food), your day, like that of the bushy brow, is done. The newish Viennese coffee shop in town has no hipster shabbiness whatsoever. It's full-on elegant, like if you order tea (which I will have to do sometime), it comes in a white-and-gold porcelain tea set. And it's just so much better than all the hipster-lite establishments, none of which have managed to have decent coffee, food, and atmosphere. And then... There are two much-celebrated farm-to-table places in town, neither of which is even a third as good as Little Sheep, the Edison outpost of what seems to be a very international hot-pot chain. You get to Little Sheep and while you wait for your table (and it's quite a wait), they have a video up promoting their corporation, complete with scenes of the marketing department meeting to discuss how to promote the company, as well as ones of the factory (?) where everything's standardized. HMYF can be a proxy for quality in an otherwise barren landscape, but it can only ever be so good. Whereas really good strudel, hot-pot, bulgogi, oyako don, bagels, pizza-by-the-slice, pain au chocolat... And this isn't even, clearly, a "white" vs. "non-white" issue, except under the OITNB/"white lady" definition of "white" in which "white" stands in for bland-and-yuppie.

-Considering a shimmery cream eyeshadow. Yes? No? Anyone with thoughts on the RMS line?

Mideast, Midwest

A brief interruption in my afternoon to respond, in vague terms, to something I've seen floating around online in various capacities: The proper response to a hate crime directed at Jews in Kansas City is not - I repeat, not - a discussion of Israel. Not of Zionism, not of the justification-or-not for a Jewish state, not of specific Israeli policies. Not of civil marriage or lack thereof in Israel. Ugh. WWPD-ing this so as to avoid potentially more time-draining Facebook discussions.

To refrain from using this recent crime as a point of departure for that conversation isn't, obviously, to say that Israel isn't flawed. In fact, this approach is entirely consistent with believing that Israel is the most flawed country to ever exist, should never have been founded, etc. The problem with this line of thought isn't that it's excessively critical of Israel, it's that a neo-Nazi white supremacist trying to kill Jews outside of Israel has zilch to do with Israel.

It's some mix of wacky and dehumanizing to treat an attack on American Jews as some kind of political statement about the Middle East, particularly given that what we're so plainly looking at here isn't a well-meaning pro-Palestinian activist gone violent, but an old-timey racist anti-Semite who expresses his anti-Semitism in the language of the day, which includes but isn't limited to "criticism of Israel." Say the attacks had been at Muslim establishments. Would that be appropriate impetus to launch a discussion of Iran or Saudi Arabia? I'd like to think that we'd readily understand that the issue was racism/xenophobia/intolerance, and not start turning to the victimized group in question and nitpicking the failings of some of its members.

Perhaps, given the method of choice, we might consider that this crime has something to do with gun culture in the country where this crime has taken place. I'm quite prepared to believe that the availability of guns, and not rampant anti-Semitism in pockets of Missouri's elderly population, is the real story here. Maybe we want to look into that, and not what Israel could change about its policies for the purpose of calming down revved up anti-Semites in the southern Midwest.

Further honing the idiosyncratic WWPD definition of Zionism

The standard pro-Israel line has been the following two-part argument:

1) Israel is indistinguishable from, say, Sweden. A liberal Western country just like us! Or as like us as Europe. Skeptical non-Jewish Westerners should support Israel because it's this little country with our values, plopped in the middle of not-our-values-ville.

2) Israel is unfairly singled out, when if you look at what goes in in developing-world dictatorships, it's far worse than what goes on in Israel.

And, as commenter Caryatis points out in so many words, these things don't add up. If Israel is Sweden, well, Sweden's a mess. If, meanwhile, Israel's North Korea, those 'only democracy in the Middle East' claims start to seem ridiculous.

The reality is more that Israel's a hybrid - part Western liberal democracy, part postcolonial-experiment state. It would almost have to be. Obviously, Israel began as a country founded by people from Europe, some of whom tried to sell the idea as a civilizing mission, which doesn't sound very PC today, and indeed, gives us the (anachronistic!) impression that early Zionists were GWB-era neoconservatives.

But to look at Israel as a colonialist enterprise - to look at the Jews who started the country as a bunch of white Western and Central Europeans who just up and decided to start an outpost of Westernness in brown people's lands, ignores a key detail. Namely that regardless of how an Ashkenazi Jew generally reads in the U.S. today, Jews in 19th or early 20th century Europe most certainly were not undifferentiated white people. (Remember 'race is a construct,' my fellow overly-educated sorts?) They were people who had been told for generations that they came from Palestine, that they were, no matter how many generations in whichever European country, foreigners.

So! Does this make Israel colonial (i.e. like the U.S.) or post-colonial (i.e. like Algeria post-independence)? It makes it the result of a postcolonial problem (an oppressed people in need of a land, ideally the one everyone seemed to think they came from originally) whose solution was colonial. It was meant to appeal to an audience - of Jews and Christians - who saw setting up a new country in the Middle East as a viable solution to this problem.

But back to Caryatis's point. Yes, the refrain that Israel's Western keeps getting repeated, and no, it's not especially helpful for those looking to defend Israel. Not because Israel isn't in many ways quite 'Western', but because its troubles (both the state's bad behavior and the continued bigotry it faces from abroad) are more postcolonial.

Boycott the boycott with a seltzer

Ugh, the SodaStream debate. While every single thing in your home, with the possible exception of a bunch of farmers market kale, was produced unethically, you should apparently single out the seltzer-maker, because it may or may not be Bloodthirsty Zionist to own one. Which trumps which - that it's from the West Bank, or that the company employs Palestinians? I could see how there'd be no discussion at all if this were "employs" in the sense of a Bangladesh garment factory, but this is not so straightforward.

And yet every lifestyle article about it seems to have gotten the same round-up of sound bytes from one side, and so this gets categorized as yet another ethical fashion issue. As the such issue, because an iffy product from Evil Jewish Israel is of course worse than a $3 tank top people who aren't Jews and have nothing to do with any Jews died to bring to a mall near you.

Which is the problem each and every time. I personally don't know whether I buy the 'it gives Palestinians jobs' argument. But I'm also not prepared to single out Israel as the country whose products deserve extra scrutiny. And no, this is not about my great enjoyment of the seltzer in question for the past several years.

Your friends, your politics

The anti-same-sex-marriage-from-the-left arguments keep on popping up (along with passionate arguments about whether it is sheep-like or a nice gesture to replace one's profile picture with an equal sign, but these I don't find so interesting) on the ol' newsfeed. This, most recently. And somehow, reading this latest installment, it occurred to me what this reminded me of: anti-Zionism from within the Jewish community.

In both cases, what happens is, communities do - should! - determine for themselves what it is they want. LGBT rights shouldn't mean marriage just because straight people think that's how it goes, nor should pro-Jewish mean pro-Israel just because non-Jews not too educated on the issue assume The Jews everywhere want what's best for Likud. Internal debates are important.

But! Those who argue internally and only internally can lose sight of the broader debates about the issues that pertain to their community. With Israel, if you're only ever arguing with fellow Jews to your political right on this topic, you can miss the extent to which 'plight of the Palestinians' is, from certain non-Jewish quarters, code for anti-Semitism; unrelated to sorting out the actual problems facing any actual Palestinians, and; I should add, entirely compatible with anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bigotry. Similarly, if you're only ever discussing same-sex marriage in friendly environments where nobody doubts the humanity of gays and lesbians, perhaps only in spaces where everyone is him/herself gay or lesbian, you may naturally minimize the significance of hatred to the broader debate on this issue.

So what happens, in extreme cases, is the famous extreme-left meets extreme-right. While I am far from the first to mention that phenomenon, I haven't seen this particular explanation for how it comes about anywhere else.

How pastiness came to Palestine

Can philosophy - as opposed to blogging, or Facebook status updates - fix the Middle East? Philosopher Joseph Levine's op-ed gives it a go, taking various dubious premises, submitting them to calm, logical analysis, and coming up with an answer that's pretty much obvious: "There is an unavoidable conflict between being a Jewish state and a democratic state." Well, yes. No one who thinks seriously about this issue hasn't grappled with it. Why would it be anti-Semitic to point it out? Sheesh.

What's to be done about that conflict, though, isn't remotely obvious. If you believe Israel-as-a-Jewish-state and Israel-as-a-democracy are both important (or that a one-state solution would be nice on paper but disastrous for everyone involved), it's impossible to end the conversation with a declaration that "Jewish" and "democratic" are in conflict, so. It's fine if Levine doesn't believe the "Jewish" angle has any moral justification, but it would be nice if he saw why others do and then argued against that.

Before I proceed, the usual disclaimer: this post is not a call for rants on the general topic of Israel. So, no tangents promoting a one-state solution or a Greater Israel, no knee-jerk recitation of a speech you've prepared for whenever anything having to do with the region comes up.

So, Levine's op-ed. So far, so reasonable:

The key to the interpretation is found in the crucial four words that are often tacked on to the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” — namely, “… as a Jewish state.” As I understand it, the principle that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state has three parts: first, that Jews, as a collective, constitute a people in the sense that they possess a right to self-determination; second, that a people’s right to self-determination entails the right to erect a state of their own, a state that is their particular people’s state; and finally, that for the Jewish people the geographical area of the former Mandatory Palestine, their ancestral homeland, is the proper place for them to exercise this right to self-determination.

Levine says he will focus on the second - whether self-determination means a right to a state - but pauses for a moment on the first:

However, I do think that it’s worth noting the historical irony in insisting that it is anti-Semitic to deny that Jews constitute a people. The 18th and 19th centuries were the period of Jewish “emancipation” in Western Europe, when the ghetto walls were torn down and Jews were granted the full rights of citizenship in the states within which they resided. The anti-Semitic forces in those days, those opposing emancipation, were associated not with denying Jewish peoplehood but with emphatically insisting on it!

I'm not sure if this reveals ignorance of or indifference to the history of modern, pre-Holocaust anti-Semitism, but I read it, reread it, and couldn't make sense of it. (A commenter, whose take isn't quite the same as mine, points out something similar.) Opponents of emancipation in 1790, 1820, weren't "anti-Semitic," exactly, as there wasn't "anti-Semitism" until the late nineteenth century. Were they anti-Jewish? Yes, typically, but so were those who favored emancipation, who (please do read my exciting dissertation) wanted Jews to intermarry so as to rid France (apologies for not covering all of Europe) of the dreaded Jewish diseases and general ickiness.

Then, however, when anti-Semitism-proper did arise, anti-Semites were awfully set on the idea that Jews were a people, and not just any people, but foreigners from Palestine. Jews had long heard that they'd be accepted if only they assimilated. Then, all of a sudden (and in France, it was quite sudden! 1880-ish) the message became that they would be all the more hated if they did assimilate, and that the least objectionable Jews were the ones who didn't try to integrate into mainstream (or, worse, elite) society. If this is baffling to those of us studying this shift from here in 2013, imagine how it was to experience it.

While French Jews did not by and large respond to this turn of events with rah-rah Zionism, there was a certain amount of, 'well, whatever we do, we'll be hated, so we may as well stop trying to deny our distinctiveness.' Across Europe, Jews who very much had embraced emancipation began to find that they were being defined as a people, and a people from Palestine. Once you're constantly hearing that you are foreign, and from Palestine, an "Oriental," not a European, maybe this impacts how you see yourself? Maybe you'd prefer to be just French, but in the face of anti-Semitism, solidarity with other Jews seems like the only ethical option? Zionism didn't come from Jews spontaneously deciding that they were a people. It didn't entirely come from anti-Semitism (and obviously this blogging does not get into pre-Herzl Zionism or non-Zionist Jewish nationalism or the pre-Zionist Jewish presence in Palestine, on account of this is not a Jewish-studies textbook but a blog post) but that sure played a role.

And... once a certain threshold of Jews embraced Zionism, once Zionism got itself a state, then yes, the anti-Semitic contingent, which had been asking pasty European Jews to go back to Palestine, began faulting Jews for having done just that. To say that some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic is not to say that it all is. Why should that be so complicated? It does get murky, because sometimes entirely valid and much-needed criticisms are inspired by not-so-savory agendas. But it's pointless to say that because the plight of the Palestinians is a pet cause of many anti-Semites, the plight in question doesn't exist or need to be addressed. However, I do not have the exact borders for the ideal solution to this crisis at the ready, so in the interest of not pretending to solve the crisis from the comfort of WWPD, allow me to proceed...

What's problematic (anti-Semitic? eh) is to willfully ignore - if you know it - the whole go-back-to-Palestine part of modern Jewish history. To willfully ignore how sincerely Western European Jews wanted to be and indeed were French, German, etc., and how this came to feel difficult if not impossible even before the Holocaust. It's not anti-Semitic to look at the situation that currently exists and think, gee, it is weird that a so-called democracy defines itself religiously. I know this history, identify as a Zionist, and think this all the time. The problem comes when people fail to see the connection between modern Western anti-Semitism and Zionism, or when they view it as 'the Holocaust makes Jews think they can get away with anything.' Late-19th-century anti-Semitism was fundamentally about telling European Jews that they weren't European. If one loses track of this, one does indeed begin to wonder what all these European Jews - white folk! (ah, but not to their contemporaries) - were doing in the Middle East of all places, if not gratuitously colonizing.

And this is how it came to pass that modern, pasty Jews (not, of course, that modern-day Israeli Jews are all that pasty) came to believe their effectively had to be a Jewish state in Palestine of all non-pasty places.

Does this mean everything the current Israeli government does is admirable? No. Does it mean "Jewish" trumps "democratic"? Not necessarily. What it does mean is that "Jewish" isn't random chauvinism to be brushed aside effortlessly. It needs to be, if nothing else, addressed.

Almost done, I promise, but had to address this as well:

This fundamental point exposes the fallacy behind the common analogy, drawn by defenders of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, between Israel’s right to be Jewish and France’s right to be French. The appropriate analogy would instead be between France’s right to be French (in the civic sense) and Israel’s right to be Israeli.

I'm sure it would be news to France's citizens and residents of North African, Jewish, or other 'immigrant' origin that France only feels itself to have a right to exist as a civically French state, but that everyone of every background is, on the ground, equally welcome. France doesn't need to be all 'we're a French state for French people, and yes we mean ethnically' because France is so confident in its ethnic-Frenchness. Not in the fact that all French citizens are ethnically French - in fact, plenty are not. In the fact that "French" is both a nationality and an ethnicity. Yes, it's contested, but I believe the word 'hegemony' might fit in here somewhere. What is French history, what is a French house of worship, what is a French holiday, what is French hair, what is a French food, etc. A French France is such an on-the-ground established fact that France has the luxury of saying it's just a nation, not an ethnicity, while in practice being both. Israel... does not have this luxury.

Now, maybe no state should, and there's your answer. But not really, because as long as others do, the justification for one Jewish state - however reduced in size - exists.

"'The Jewish womb belongs to the Jewish people'"

Sometimes a story fits so perfectly with a WWPD tag that it simply demands a post, even if it's a difficult one to write, and one that leaves me with more questions than answers. 

Roni Abramson writes in Haaretz (behind a quasi-paywall) about the difficulties of getting an abortion in Israel. Not because Jewish law is especially strict in this regard, but because More Jewish Babies. The Holocaust, Jewish men marrying out... if you're a Jewish woman with Jewish-woman-parts, what you do with those parts is of great interest to a great many people who aren't you or your family. Abramson describes her own ordeal, as well as a sign she saw at a rally that read, “'The Jewish womb belongs to the Jewish people.'” Gosh. As an owner of one of said wombs, I'm going to have to say no, it does not. (Ross Douthat already claimed all American wombs for the American people. Dibs and all that.) 

Despite a professed interest in Jewish natalism, I hadn't known the details of Israeli abortion law - all I'd known was that Israel places a high priority on fertility. Impossible to link to, but also in my head as I write this post: heaps and heaps and heaps of anecdotal evidence. 

While I personally didn't need convincing, I fear that the specifics of Abramson's story, though, may not win over the unconvinced:

Of all the examinations and personal questions I had to endure about the status of my relationship and the quality of the condoms I bought, the meeting that stands out the most is the one with a social worker. The pleasant woman who chose the most giving profession on earth tossed questions at me from an official form. She could not understand why a healthy, educated young woman of 24 would not want to continue her pregnancy. 

“Why do you want to have an abortion?” she asked in astonishment. “Because even though I want to keep on living with my partner and have children with him eventually, I’m still studying for my bachelor’s degree and working part-time, so I don’t see any way I can raise this baby.” Surprised at my honesty, she asked what my partner thought. “He feels the same way I do,” I answered. “We want to live together without children at this stage in our lives.”

Maybe it's that I've been reading about the perils of thinking one can always have a baby "eventually," but as much as I agree with Abramson that she was treated terribly, and that nothing good can come of society outlawing abortion in these circumstances, this is a case where I see the right but - and here, the perils of overshare, the temptation it brings to judge individual cases as opposed to societal trends - find myself wondering if this is really the case that best gets the point across. If you do want kids, and with your current partner, and so does said partner, but at 27 (say) rather than 24... I suppose where I'm going with this is, there are reasons other than More Jewish Babies, other than an abortion-is-murder stance, that someone might question the wisdom of this particular woman's decision. Especially given that (as is my understanding? has this changed in recent years?) Israel has more of a social-safety net.

But maybe that's precisely what makes this the right story to use to make this point. If we learned of a woman carrying a fetus with major, life-threatening deformities, or one that resulted from rape or incest, or if the "woman" was a 16-year-old girl, or a grown woman without a partner/support system, we might conclude, individual circumstances trump More Jewish Babies, assuming we were on the MJB bandwagon, which, of course, we are not. But here, it's a clear-cut case of choice. Abramson knew what was right for her, and as much as the reader might find this not the best reason to get an abortion, it's not about the reader, but the woman who would or would not be carrying this pregnancy to term. Only Abramson could know what was right for her, and it shouldn't have had to fall on her to articulate why she wanted an abortion in a way that some panel (or Haaretz reader!) found sympathetic. It comes down to something every woman at a given time knows - if she's prepared to give birth to (and likely raise) a child at that point or not, something that quite possibly can't be explained sufficiently to others whose uterus it is not.

In other words, even if some will find Abramson's reasons "decadent," the deciding vote, womb-wise, goes not to the party with the best argument, but to the one whose womb it is.

OK, so I'll blog about Israel

First off, before proceeding, let me insist upon my lack of expertise when it comes to the play-by-play appropriateness of individual Israeli and Palestinian leadership decisions. Is Israel using disproportionate force, and if so, what would proportionate consist of? Do I have the miracle answer re: borders, meter by meter? There are, I promise, others writing about this.

But I do have thoughts on some of the bigger-picture issues. Specifically, the way this conversation tends to go within the Jewish community. I find that there are two stances, both born of a certain kind of parochialism (and for what I wish were the last time, everyone's parochial, not just/particularly Jews), that dominate. 

The first is the better-known - the think-of-the-Israelis stance. This is not - contrary to popular opinion - a belief that Israel can do no wrong, that Likud's the answer to anything. But these would be the Jews who, upon reading the latest Mideast news, think immediately of the Israelis under attack. Some then go on to think about the conflict in bigger terms - coming to any number of conclusions - and some not. It's totally parochial, and totally normal. As long as it's accompanied by an understanding that all life has value, which it almost invariably is, it's just the way of the world. If you're Italian-American and something horrible goes down in Italy, you're more shaken up than if the same had happened in Poland. That's just how it goes.

The second is the stance sometimes mistakenly referred to as Jewish self-hatred. These are the Jews who first feel responsibility or shame as Jews for what goes on. Their thoughts immediately turn to sorting out just what Israel's done wrong now. To Ending the Occupation. They see this in terms of a moral imperative to condemn injustices committed by/committed in the name of Jews.

Both 'sides,' as it were, tend to want give or take the same resolution to the crisis: two states. Neither tends to be pro-settlements. That's not where the difference lies. I have friends in both categories, and don't I know it these days from Facebook. (There are also nutty far-right and far-left Jews, who want Greater Israel or, conversely, an end to the Jewish state. These are fringe positions.)

Anyway. The second group-of-reasonables brings in a critical eye, which can't but be praised, but argues as if this debate is solely an internal Jewish one, as if their central opposition consists of Jews more rah-rah-Israel than they are. That may be who they're encountering in their day to day lives, so they see this as what they're up against. They have a tendency to forget the scale of this debate, and the extent to which many with no personal connection to Israel are utterly obsessed with this conflict, and generally not so sympathetic to Israel - to the Israeli government, or to Israelis, or to the very idea of Israel.

It's not, in other words, that they have it in for Israel, or are these traitors to their people. It's that they somewhat naively assume that everyone talking about the conflict is doing so in good faith, forgetting how much of the energy surrounding the topic comes from - to put it bluntly - anti-Semitism. Yes, there's plenty to criticize about Israeli policy, wrt Arabs and all the religious-Jewish stuff I'm not going to touch in this post. But if you're some random dude or dudette in Sweden or Vermont or whatever, not especially plugged into current events, neither Jewish nor Arab nor Muslim, and this is your cause, how exactly did that come to be? There's a heck of a lot going on in the world. Why this?

This, in my semi-informed opinion, is really important for liberal-leaning Jewish Zionists to work through. One must speak out if the state of Israel's doing something wrong, but one must be wary of the dangers of affiliating with Team Aha-Israel's-At-It-Again-Those-Bloodthirsty-You-Know-Whats. 

WWPD reads the news (on her phone, while half-asleep on NJ Transit)

Just because it's not on WWPD doesn't mean I'm not following it. I too am watching the Middle East fall apart, and am not sure whether the Zionist stance - my Zionist stance - is to support Israel in defending itself or to wonder, big-picture, whether the current situation helps or hurts the goal of a two-state plan. Knowledgable people I respect are saying very different things on this. (Ideological diversity, a change from the recent days of "X and two more friends 'like' Mitt Romney.") I have no answers, and have come to the conclusion that this tragic mess isn't going to be solved on this blog, or likely any.

And yes, of course, the Real Housewives of Tampa. Here I'll weigh in from two angles, one silly and one serious.

The silly:

-Following L'Affaire Petraeus from the perspective of a grad student: I especially like the Daily Mail approach - that Broadwell's real sin was being a crummy grad student, and having not (yet?) finished her PhD. This might be reassuring to those of us who run a 30 minute mile, never served in the military, have not raised two kids while a student, but who, at least, are kind of OK at grad school.

-That's the thing with 19th century dissertation topics, right? On the one hand, I'll never be on the "Daily Show" talking about my research. On the other, it is physically impossible for me to have an affair with any of my subjects.

The serious:

-The Dan Savage argument, which as far as I know he has yet to make, but others are making it, but anyway, is as follows: 37, 38 years of marriage and one indiscretion, big deal. That's a monogamous marriage succeeding. Monogamish, meanwhile, assumes one of two scenarios: a young, hot couple both of whom have seemingly infinite romantic possibilities, or an older straight couple where it can be safely assumed the woman is no longer interested in sex. But then there's "furious would be an understatement," whose crime, as far as we know, was being 59 years old and not taking reality-TV-star pains to hide it. Regardless of what was going on inside their marriage, it seems obvious, viscerally, that she's been wronged. This is also, I suppose, what I find off-putting about the periodically-floated marriage-as-renewable-contract idea. Isn't part of the appeal of the institution that one can feel relatively confident that one has tenure, as it were, in one's relationship? Not that it's 100% guaranteed to last, vows kept, but that there would have to be an awfully good reason for that not to happen?

"[A] single variant – right-wing Zionism – has come to stand for the whole."

[M]ost Zionists use the term to describe not the expansionist desire to control the entire biblical land of Israel, but the more modest claim that there should be a Jewish national home within historic Palestine. That’s all Zionism amounts to. As to the exact size and shape of that home, prescriptions vary from one Zionist to another. -Jonathan Freedland, via. 

As the kids say, this. Even if you think Israel should be a Jewish city-state composed of Tel Aviv and no more, you are what's known as a Zionist. (If you think one pebble is enough, maybe not?) 


Read the whole thing. That x100 if you're a Zionist who reads this and is reminded, ugh, that's what people think I believe.


Anyway, unlike Freedland, I do use "Zionist." I don't generally modify it with "left-wing," say, because while I'm somewhere on the left of the Zionist spectrum, this would imply less about my views on borders than, I fear, my feelings on Israeli socialism vs. capitalism, which is another issue entirely, and something I think Israelis can sort out for themselves.

Euphemistic Mediterranean couscous

If you're a food writer, especially one with a Jewish name, and you want to write about Israel, be sure to provide a thorough disclaimer about what it all means.

In all seriousness, while I'd prefer no disclaimer being necessary,* I think David Lebovitz's is pretty spot-on, this especially: "The situation in the Middle East is challenging and one that’s not going to be resolved on a food blog. And most likely not by someone who bakes cookies for a living."

I'm not sure a disclaimer will shield him from criticism, though - any acknowledgment of Israel as an actual place people live/are from, as opposed to a faceless-oppressor-of-Palestinians, will be interpreted as an endorsement of Israel's right to exist (which it effectively is - same as he endorsed the right of Ireland, Tunisia, etc., to exist when visiting those countries**), which, in turn, will be equated with an embrace of far-right Zionism (which it most definitely is not). What might shield him from criticism is that food-blog commenters - like fashion-blog commenters - tend toward the sycophantic.

*Everything to do with Israel, and Jews more generally, somehow lends itself to disclaimers. Yes, the food that we know as "Jewish" sure resembles that of whichever countries of origin, and yes, Israeli food is an amalgam of all of those, plus regional influence tilting things more in a Mediterranean direction. But must we harp on how whichever food our grandmothers made wasn't Jewish but Polish? When it was in fact Polish-Jewish, influenced by Polish cuisine, as well as previous stops in that diaspora, as well as Jewish dietary restrictions, ones that would make a great many Polish-full-stop dishes impossible?

This isn't, of course, just about cuisine - witness the American Jews who, if pressed on their heritage, will announce that their great-grandparents were "Polish," and you, if you are me, will find yourself wondering whether either those great-grandparents or their Polish neighbors would have agreed with that assessment. Then again, we don't all have clearly in our minds when each diaspora community settled on the notion of Judaism-as-religion-only, which is to say, on the idea that a Jew could be Polish, Russian, etc., and it's only natural to project from our own understandings, as in, it would be offensive today to refer to 'a Jew residing in the United States and with U.S. citizenship' rather than 'an American Jew.' I don't know, off the top of my head, when that would have switched over in Poland. But I think the broader point holds - it's not so much about Jews being ashamed to admit to being Jewish, as it is about Jews trying to preempt accusations of Judeocentrism, of thinking everything of any interest on this planet came from Jews. We want to assure our interlocutors that we don't claim to have invented the idea of, for example, frying potatoes, or chopping up cucumbers and tomatoes, or otherwise applying simple food preparations to readily available ingredients.

**Thus why countries with bad PR - Greece comes to mind - keep flying out popular food-and-fashion bloggers. It's more difficult to hate a place if it seems real; if it's flatteringly photographed, all the more so.

It's Parochial Tuesday at WWPD

-The NYT had the good sense not to open up for comments its article about how The Jews are demographically inundating New York.

-Sweden had the bad sense to let one of its citizens hold forth on The Jews on Twitter using the @Sweden handle. Or did it? The "rant" (claims Slate) doesn't seem anti-Semitic at all. It's a Swedish woman who doesn't know any Jews (but is named Abrahamsson!), wondering if Jews are a race or religion, and asking why Jews are hated. That's 100% naive, well-meaning Gentile. This woman thinks you can't tell a Swede from a Jew, god bless her. Someone, send her American Pastoral.

-Yossi and Jagger, in happier times.

Fundamental human rights

-The Atlantic had a piece recently by Talia Minsberg about Israel's new skinny-model ban. The comments go in precisely the two directions we'd expect: fury that Israel's being mentioned in a context other than chastising it for being the most evil country ever to exist, and complaints from those with BMIs under 18.5 about how unfair it is that they could not, in theory, work as models in Israel. Never mind that they're probably too short, old, plain, and not in Israel for this to apply to them, and never mind that without government or industry intervention, thus far high-fashion modeling has, for a while now, effectively only been available to those with BMIs under 18.5. (Frame of reference: "A five-foot, seven-inch individual, for example, must weigh at least 118 pounds to work as a model in Israel.") As if there's some kind of fundamental human right to have you or images of yourself held up as beautiful, one that we can ignore when it's an entity other than the state doing the enforcing.

-The great debate over straight women's presence in gay bars has resurfaced once more, now that an L.A. bar - one that evidently features chiseled go-go dancers - banned "straight bachelorette parties." (Presumably lesbian bachelorette parties wouldn't be held there in the first place.) The bar is doing so because - and this is reasonable enough - they think it's offensive to use gay bars as a place to celebrate marriage, when gay marriage is not yet legal across the nation. Reasonable, but quite possibly a noble-sounding pretext to exclude women from the establishment. (Does every straight bachelorette party identify itself as such?)

And if it is a pretext, so what? Do groups of women have a fundamental right to go to gay bars? Maybe, maybe not. Ethically I suppose it would depend on what kind of gay bar it was. No idea where the law stands, not terribly curious, not my concern here. There are plenty of great reasons a gay bar could give to keep some/all women out. Most notably, the purpose of the bar is for men to be among men, which would still be true even if gays could marry across the galaxy.

What is my concern - and I said this the last time this came up - is that critics of women-in-gay-bars keep acting like the only reasons straight women would go to a gay bar are a) to avoid unwanted sexual advances from men, and b) because they think of gay men as fashion accessories or zoo animals. It would seem that the more obvious reason for their interest in these locales is that they're chock-full of individuals of these women's preferred sex. This ogling is not - as Gawker's Louis Peitzman claims - about gay men as novelty items. Some women will enjoy seeing men kissing men, just as the equivalent is true. But this is fundamentally about it being appealing to a heterosexual woman to be in a great big horde of men. But a straight woman - all the more so a self-proclaimed "bachelorette" - surely cares only about handbags, shoes, and avoiding dirty, hair-mussing sex.

A view from the provinces

-Bisou-walk podcast of the morning: Leonard Lopate on the NYU expansion plan. Not entirely the show's fault that there was no pro-plan guest, given that they evidently did contact NYU and not get anyone (too bad they didn't seek out the university's most contrarian grad student), but they did manage to get three guests opposed, presumably going through more than one channel. There are valid criticisms in the mix (what will the expansion be used for?), as well as heaps of nonsense. One of the guests - I think this was the professor - was criticizing NYU for using non-grad-student adjuncts. Fair enough. He then referred to said instructors as - I quote - "unqualified," asking why anyone would go to NYU to be taught by adjuncts. I beg your pardon? This was also the only point in the show that Lopate actually questioned the view of one of his guests, as opposed to offering tepid devil's-advocate statements. Lopate pointed out that some of these adjuncts are amazing teachers, leading this guest to reply, again, a quote, "Some of my best friends are adjuncts."

Missing from the conversation was a sense of what the Village these days is, which is, increasingly, a playground for the rich. And by "rich" I don't mean middle-/upper-middle-class NYU undergrads. I really doubt if that's who's sustaining that stretch of Bleecker Street that's all Marc Jacobs and French-import boutiques. I mean bankers, European socialites, and so forth. And what is the "character" of the neighborhood? Is it the low-rise buildings, composed of $3,000/month (or more these days?) studio apartments? Or is it the historical role of the area as a place where, for example, gay and/or quirky kids flee to from small towns? If it's the latter, it's hard to see how, these days, the Village without NYU would be of much use. If it's the former, then fine, it's so very tragic that college kids and their profs live in unsightly towers.

I mean, it wasn't completely missing. Lopate did bring up the NIMBY question (again, as quasi-counterargument), and mentioned that some of the plan's critics' critics accuse them of elitism. But the counterargument - that some of the area residents live in rent-subsidized apartments - gives just about no picture of what's really going on. Unfortunately, perhaps due in part to the university's own PR fumbling, the narrative that's sticking is that there are on the one hand these old-timey, of-the-people Village-as-village residents, and on the other, a corporate behemoth.

-Commentary does not know the difference between Greater Park Slope and Greater Williamsburg.

The New York Times notes, “The boycott would be largely symbolic, because the co-op carries only a half-dozen or so products imported from Israel, including paprika, olive pesto and vegan marshmallows.” It’s possible if you have not recently been to Brooklyn, that sentence may strike you as absurd.

Unclear what about these ingredients would strike non-Brooklynites as "absurd" - we do have items beyond Wonder Bread out in the provinces - but anyone who thinks the hippie-inflected, practical-shoe-wearing crowd on Union Street is "trendy" is, I suspect, unfamiliar with either the area or the concept.

-I had one of those indefinite amounts of time to kill in the city that demand a visit to Sephora. There, I tried to figure out what "highlighter" makeup is. I'm still unclear. It sounds as if it would be a magic product that makes you look amazing even on days when you're feeling sort of eh, but ended up with a sparkly left hand and a sense that $20-and-up packages of goo with names like "Orgasm" are probably as snake-oil-ish as they seem.

New life goal

Get a picture of myself, furious and finger raised, arguing in defense of Israel in front of an iconic New York supermarket.

"Home"

Ned Resnikoff has set out some WWPD bait. I'm reminded, of course, of how I, a genuine self-identified Zionist, managed to get on the only Birthright trip that wasn't Zionist indoctrination. Yep, still bitter.

But back to Ned's post. He recounts "an afternoon spent at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl, where our tour guide explained to us how Theodore Herzl become the first modern Zionist."

Herzl had originally been a journalist, and it was in that capacity that he covered the century-old French Jew-burning we know as the Dreyfus Affair. Watching Dreyfus be wrongfully convicted simply for being a Jew, our tour guide explained, was what taught Herzl that “the experiment in being both French and Jewish was over.”

That’s a pretty remarkable statement if taken to its logical conclusion. If the experiment of being French and Jewish is over, what does that say for the experiment of being American and Jewish? English and Jewish? Brazilian and Jewish? Are these all doomed to failure, or are they already pretty much over as well?

When Herzl was talking about the incompatibility of being Jewish and French, this was at a specific moment in history when what everyone had long taken for granted - that the best place to be Jewish was France - appeared to have fallen apart. It wasn't just poor Dreyfus, but a massive ideological split in France, with one half of the divide turning hatred of Jews into a political force. There were - a link, for those with JStor access - anti-Semitic riots. It was a pretty big deal.

It's of course legit to take issue with political interpretations of Herzl's observation - ones that conflated Dreyfus-era France with Holocaust-era France, present-day France, etc. But when Herzl was making these observations, it was at at the tail end of a time when virtually no one in Western Europe was thinking to question... not only that one could be French and Jewish, but that Paris was the new Jerusalem, the best possible place to be a Jew since antiquity of not ever. In my own research, I haven't found much of a rejection of that notion - much of a proto/quasi-Jewish nationalism - prior to the 1880s, which was also, coincidentally, when modern anti-Semitism emerged in France. That the Affair culminated in Dreyfus's exoneration, reinstatement, and ultimately serving in WWI (no dual loyalties there!) makes the Affair kind of (although I don't entirely agree with the current school on this) a warm-and-fuzzy moment in French-Jewish history. But Herzl, at the time, knew neither that the Affair would work out OK, nor that the anti-Dreyfusard contingent would morph into something called the Vichy regime.

So, Herzl's in the clear, on this at least. What about Ned's tour guide? And is there are pervasive sense in the American-Jewish community that you must see Israel as your "home"? Now that I think of it, there was "home" rhetoric on my Birthright trip as well, but I suppose it's a matter of interpretation. I saw it as how Ireland would be "home" on a trip there for Irish-American youth. Certainly not as a call to 'return.' If you're an Ashkenazi Jew, and your civilization was basically wiped out, or a Mizrachi Jew, and your civilization was relocated to Israel, it's not so outrageous for you to think that the land where your 'kind' has gathered is more your "home" than the geographical home of your ancestors.

And that's really the question - not whether my "home" or Ned's "home" is Israel or the U.S., but whether it's Israel or whichever Diaspora country/countries preceded the U.S. And what connection am I, for one, supposed to feel to present-day Russia or Poland? Do I have family there? If I were to visit there, would I be surrounded by people who look startlingly like me?

I know some who share my ancestry opt for that version of back-to-the-roots, as a way of distancing themselves from Zionism. But I'm talking culture, emotion, not politics. Even if you think plopping a Jewish state onto Palestine was a terrible idea, you're left with the fact that that's where Jews-as-such have gathered. Which I guess puts me - an anti-settlements, open-to-making-Jerusalem-an-international-city sort of Zionist - in the same category as the oh-so-chauvinist Israelis who told Ned that "Israel was my home, whether I knew it or not, and that I basically had no choice in the matter." OK, I'd say that Ned has choice in the matter, in that I wouldn't ask that we compel him to feel one way or another. But I'm also not sure that it's "right-wing Zionism" - let alone treason! - to view Israel as "home."

Valentine's Day assortment

-Seems about right. Perfect poodle-face.

-Did you see "Midnight in Paris," mostly fall for its charm, but feel like maybe something wasn't sitting right? See Richard Rushfeld on "the muse/harpy polarity."

-Yes. No.

-A very good reason to get a car already. (Flan!)

-Always with the kale.

Shabbat Shalom indeed

WWPD would not be WWPD if I did not set aside the latest JStor find for a moment to share with you, my readers, something that hits upon all WWPD themes all at once: women's fashion, male beauty, Israeli secularism, and, of course, public transportation. Via Gawker (which brings us to the slightly-NSFW version here), an Israeli fashion spread and making-of video, inspired by - and aimed at critiquing - the women-on-bus issues happening in ultra-Orthodox areas in Israel and beyond, with women being forced to sit in the back, and all that misogyny. The spread involves a female model in very pretty dresses, surrounded by a pack of lustful, chiseled, ex-IDF-type male models, mostly clean-shaven but in quasi-Hasidic garb, in one case with just the satin coat. Well why the heck not! It's for a good cause!

"Whenever a non-Jew uses the word 'goyim' to describe Jewish attitudes to Gentiles, look out."

A thousand years ago, for a publication that may or may not still exist, I wrote up something about the Walt-Mearsheimer book. You know, the one whose admirers insist that anyone who thinks the work is anti-Semitic clearly never read it. Every last thread, W-M's critics are accused of having devoted insufficient attention to this fine entry into their collective oeuvre. Well, I did read it, and that was the conclusion I came to, from the book itself, as in the actual text contained within. Not from a sense that anything accused of anti-Semitism is automatically guilty. No, from the unequivocally anti-Semitic, classically anti-Semitic, book I sat down and read. I mean, the thing's not Ulysses. It does not include an early scene involving a madeleine, and meander from there.

For reasons I no longer remember, it took more time than expected for this to go to print, and my article received exactly one comment on the site itself: "Wow, this review is on the cutting edge of 10 months ago." Insightful dude was, it turns out, not as clever as all that. It turns out that Walt and Mearsheimer's "lobby" argument hasn't gone anywhere, and has in fact infiltrated the discourse about Jews in America. It only gets more relevant with time.

In Tablet, Adam Kirsch explains:

[I]f The Israel Lobby has not changed American politics, it has had an insidious effect on the way people talk and think about Israel, and about the whole question of Jewish power. The first time I had this suspicion was when reading, of all things, a biography of H.G. Wells. In H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, published in the U.K. in 2010, Michael Sherborne describes how Wells’ contempt for Nazism went along with a dislike for Judaism and Zionism, which he voiced in deliberately offensive terms even as Nazi persecution of Jews reached its peak. “To take on simultaneously the Nazis … and the Jewish lobby may have been foolhardy,” Sherborne writes apropos of Wells in 1938.

The proper academic term for this is "yowza."

Kirsch also might have mentioned that Dan Savage - an otherwise progressive and brilliant sort who seems to have bought hook, line, and sinker the notion that the tiny Jewish minority has quite the grasp on American politics. Granted, Savage uses this as an example of how he wishes things went for America's LGBT minority, but I'm not sure what that changes.

The way the W-M book (that I surely didn't read, because I found it to be incredibly, nauseatingly, anti-Semitic) is written, it alternates between saying 'we of course aren't saying X,' and... saying X. It's sort of as if the expression, 'I'm not an anti-Semite, but' were expanded into book-length form. That's how they get around the accusation. The miracle for them is that most people just kind of nod along to that. But not Kirsch:

Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, fill their book with denials that they are talking about a secret syndicate: “The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy,” they write in the introduction. But the book itself, with its lists of Jewish organizations and journalists, and its tone of moral outrage, works to give exactly this impression.

This thing I'm writing here, it isn't a blog post, per se.

But this is where Kirsch really, really gets at the problem. This is his main argument, and what's worth taking away:

One of the central premises of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is that it takes unusual courage to oppose the Jews, since they use their power to ruthlessly suppress dissent in both the political world and the media.

This! This is what has become socially acceptable in recent years. Anything negative one says about Jews is OK, no, heroic, because after all, it only serves to cancel out their stranglehold. Never mind that not all Jews support the Republican approach when it comes to Israel policy. Never mind that most Jews don't even vote Republican. Never mind that, by this calculus, Jews who go on having the left-leaning politics Jews have always had are in fact heroically sticking it to The Jews. Once this notion is accepted, it becomes impervious to reason.

Here's where the debate after the book went astray. People - W-M's defenders, but also, to some extent, their critics - have acted as though the book's controversial angle was that it dared question the sacred friendship between the U.S. and Israel, thus ruffling feathers, thus shattering a taboo. When in fact, if that had been the point of the book, it's not a book we'd have heard of, unless we were political science majors. Contrary to how they present it, it wouldn't have been the biggest deal in the world to question U.S. Israel policy, if done in a way that didn't seek to explain current policy in terms of basically a massive claw. Maybe a few fringe types still would have cried anti-Semitism, but otherwise? There'd have been a vigorous but level-headed debate in seminar rooms and journals among the Dry Topics Analysis contingent, and a good deal of support among the various Jews - including plenty of, ahem, Zionists - who wonder whether American aid as it currently exists is the best thing for American, but also for Israel, for American Jewry. No, the reason we know about the book is the Jewish-conspiracy angle. But the authors successfully managed to spin their controversy into a 'not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism' story. When, ugh, that's both true and quite beside the point.

"But Israel was like Christmas: something I’d never do."

Last night, midway through my one and only drink of the evening, a gin martini from which I am recovering today, I got into a discussion with a couple friends about the state of liberal Zionism. It was two against one (and despite my contrarian tendencies, I was with the majority) that any self-identification as any kind of Zionist these days means you've announced yourself to be a Newt-loving, universal-health-care-fearing, DADT-repeal-opposing, sweater-vest-wearing, you get the idea. 

My own thinking is, while there are indeed more and less liberal subsets of organized American Zionism, the liberal end of things (J Street comes to mind), especially among younger adults, tends to be more focused on differentiating itself from the AIPAC end of things than on emphasizing why Zionism comes out of left-type ideas, postcolonial-ish, even. Israel, though flawed, is the home of the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. This is kind of important, I'd think, for the message. But liberal Zionism these days is always defensive, about how Zionism isn't necessarily incompatible with being left-of center, about disavowing any connection to a Republican party that, especially lately, is laying on the this-is-a-Christian-country rhetoric rather thick. 

Group shot from last night's First Annual Meeting of the Liberal Zionists, Mid-Atlantic Division.

NYT travel writer Matt Gross appears to have what is both a complex and incredibly common approach to his Jewish identity, and indeed cannot discuss his recent trip to Jerusalem without prefacing it with some "Now ve may perhaps to begin, yes?"-style self-analysis:

As a traveler, I am not a particularly choosy person. I will go pretty much anywhere, anytime. Wander on horseback into the mountains of Kyrgyzstan? Why not? Spend the night in a sketchy Burmese border town? Sure! Eat my way through Bridgeport, Conn.? Loved it. Once, I even spent four consecutive Sunday nights in Geneva — in midwinter — an ordeal to which no rational adventurer would willingly submit. 

In fact, of all the world’s roughly 200 nations, there was only one — besides Afghanistan and Iraq (which my wife has deemed too dangerous) — that I had absolutely zero interest in ever visiting: Israel. 

This surprised friends and mildly annoyed my parents, who had visited quite happily. As a Jew, especially one who travels constantly, I was expected at least to have the Jewish state on my radar, if not to be planning a pilgrimage in the very near future. Tel Aviv, they’d say, has wonderful food! 

But to me, a deeply secular Jew, Israel has always felt less like a country than a politically iffy burden. For decades I’d tried to put as much distance between myself and Judaism as possible, and the idea that I was supposed to feel some connection to my ostensible homeland seemed ridiculous. Give me Montenegro, Chiapas, Iran even. But Israel was like Christmas: something I’d never do.

Readers, resist the (inevitable) urge to psychoanalyze. To bring up terms like "Portnoy's Complaint" or "Jewish self-hatred" or "oy the neurosis." Take note, if you're up for a digression, of this prime piece of evidence for Jewishness-as-non-celebration-of-Christmas. Gross is so ambivalent about his Jewish identity that he, a travel writer for the NYT who can go anywhere and wants to go anywhere, a Jew who's not merely secular but deeply so, refuses Christmas. Those new to questions of Jewish identity, if you can make sense of the stance of this author, you move straight to the advanced class.

But mostly, don't be thrown off by the fact that Gross presents his uneasiness about Israel as something that separates him not only from his parents, but also his own friends - it's very much a thing for American Jews critical-to-the-point-of-skeptical of Israel to present themselves as utterly alone in this regard. That this self-presentation is so common certainly gives the illusion that there's this large and influential group of secular American Jews who are rah-rah Israel, who make life uncomfortable for the lone dissenters. But where is this majority? There's... me, there's David Schraub, and we have some British fellow travelers. The "iffy burden" contingent, meanwhile, is made up of virtually every secular American Jew under, what age shall we give here, 60?

Like a good Birthright participant, albeit not on that program, Gross, we'll be relieved to know, learns that Israel is a real place, with real-life people, who do things like drink beer and listen to music. He even has a "here, we're the WASPs"-type revelation: " Here I was, being seen not as a Jew or as a non-Jew, an American or a tourist, but as a mensch: a good and honorable man."