Foer days late to the most important story of all time

So here's something I'd wanted to write about for a Jewish publication, but was very much beaten to the punch, which... I'd sort of figured would happen, because, I mean, this story. It's now yesterday's news, but the personal Weblog is yesterday's genre.

What follows, to be clear, is not the article that might have been. Rather, it's the free-from-constraints WWPD version. This is the very definition of my beat, in a way that no other story past or present possibly could be.

Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer. By now we all know this much: He got the byline, she the pantsless fashion spread in that T Magazine story from over the weekend. It was kind of like that Margot Robbie profile, except, I think, much worse. With the Robbie one, I'd thought it was a bit silly that the standard feminist complaint was that this woman famous primarily for being gorgeous wasn't being asked more intellectual or substantive questions. After all, isn't a better feminist complaint why the women in magazines being asked questions, period, tend to be ones about whom the salient (known) facts are such things as "26," "blonde," "sufficiently good at acting," and "looks good in a bathing suit"? Meanwhile... yes, Portman is beautiful (ahem, understatement), but the reason she's being profiled is because she directed a highbrow foreign film. (Clarification UPDATE: the *profile* is a pretentious/flirtatious musing on Jewish identity and alternate side of the street parking regulations that has been aggregated and parodied all over the place at this point.) But we're still in the world of male-gaze female pantslessness.

The Foer-Portman article, though, presented itself as more sophisticated. This is even alluded to in the profile, which isn't a profile but a back-and-forth email exchange (but intended for publication) between two colleague-type friends (and more on that in a moment). At one point Foer writes (and note that this needs to be specified in a piece given only his byline, ahem): "[...] we weren’t going to be in the same place for long enough to allow for a traditional profile — me observing you at the farmer’s market, etc., which would have felt ridiculous, anyway [...]" Ridiculous why? Because they already knew each other, or because standard-issue celebrity profiling is for peasants?

And then there's the gossip angle, which is too fascinating, and which sheds light on a reason, other than logistics, why the profile may have had to be via email, rather than at the café where the starlet orders and picks at the proverbial cheeseburger (but not real one, in this case, because of the famous vegetarianism of the parties in question).

Anyway. I read Foer's recent short story in the New Yorker. And it was... fine. But it was also a predictable return to that thing in Jewish literature where "Jew" equals a Jewish man; where penises and that ever-fascinating-to-men question about them (cut or uncut?) is the metaphor; and where female characters couldn't possibly play into any of the psychodrama. Not to be all, Philip Roth did it and did it better and so did Arnon Grunberg so why bother, but... Roth and Grunberg did it better, and even if I weren't a Jewish woman myself, I'd be ready for stories about Jewishness that weren't entirely about the concerns of - to use an of-the-moment but in this case entirely needed specification - cisgender men.

Portman, meanwhile, is the subject of longtime fascination here at WWPD. If you're a petite, dark-haired, pale-skinned Jewish woman who's read at least one book not assigned in school, and who has at any point in her life given off that vibe that says, 'Please, men of a certain type, write me pretentious emails' (a vibe that is, let it be known, entirely consistent with "RBF" in day-to-day interactions), you are that type. (There are plenty of us; allow me to shed all intellectual credibility and note that we're what Patti Stanger refers to as "spinners.") But as much as I am that type, I'm also not that. I'm not about to be hired to be the face of a perfume, or to pose in a thousand-dollar sweater and little else. Which is a way of saying that yes it annoys me, as a feminist, that she's pantsless and not given a byline, and yes it gets to me that Jewish literature is to this day such a (kosher-) sausage-fest. But there's also the whole thing of how Natalie Portman is Natalie Portman and I am not.

Where Would Phoebe Go?: On the jet-setting lifestyle

Normally, to campus and back, and to various Toronto coffee shops. Next week, however, it's off to Paris and Rehovot, via New York. No, I'm not going on some sort of simulated French-Jewish aliyah tour, although I see why it might seem that way. All that's happening is, my husband has some conferences, and - as happens on the rare occasions when doing so is feasible - I'm going to tag along. Speaking of tags, I still need to get a Canadian flag one for my luggage.

I remember, when on research trips to Paris, being really miffed when people thought (or when I thought they thought) I was on vacation. In retrospect, the time I spent living there, where my only work responsibility was writing a dissertation, was a bit vacation-ish, at least compared with this past year, during which I taught full-time at a university; coordinated one of those courses; wrote regularly for a publication; and, aaah, wrote a book manuscript. Yes, all of that happened in the past year. I didn't really have weekends, or much in the way of evenings off. So you know what? I'm going to say, in full, unabashed delight, that this trip to Paris counts as a vacation. Yes, I'll likely do some work, but I'll also do a spot of croissant/shoe/book/clothes-shopping, or as much as the dismal euro-CAD exchange rate permits. And I'll have to see whether I now sound French-Canadian; if I get a chilly reception in shoe-and-croissant emporia, I won't know whether it's the old-new European anti-Semitism or the fact that I now may use the 'wrong' kind of French.

Rehovot, meanwhile, I know next to nothing about. Apparently there's really good hummus, some of which I'd like right now, please. (Maybe there's good Middle Eastern food in Toronto, but ingredient-wise, it doesn't seem possible.) It's also apparently 107 degrees these days, which, with it dipping to 37 today in Toronto, I'm having trouble even imagining. My plan is to go into Tel Aviv a bunch, assuming that's not incredibly complicated, and enjoy that which is non-Canadian (warm weather, a beach, amazing vegetables, and those sweet iced blended coffees...). Also to see Jerusalem, but in the way that doesn't involve swooping in and out, as I did on a tour when I was 8 (which I sadly remember none of) and, at 23, on Birthright (which I remember bits of, including the fact that I spent the group's big night out in Jerusalem in the hotel room, talking on the phone to my non-Birthright-eligible now-husband). Not quite sure what to do there, nor whether I own skirts long enough for it, but it seems ridiculous to be so close by and not have a look.

French Jews, French tips UPDATED

-Have questions about French Jewry? I have thoughts. A short version, and a long one; a mid-length one is in the works. Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, an obscure research topic proves to have broader significance once in however-many news cycles.

-And back to your regularly-scheduled deep thoughts: Philip Galanes seems awfully confident "that hair dye and eighth grade do not mix." He OKs dress-up that involves a wig, but tells a letter-writer to turn his or her 13-year-old daughter's interest in going blonde into a discussion "about depictions of women in society."

I know it's very much the thing to be outraged whenever girls' parents allow them to express traditional femininity, and all self-expression-through-appearance apparently counts as such. We're supposed to lament the era when gender roles and the desire to primp and all that sort of thing managed to hold off until 16 (or 30?). When young boys and girls alike played in the dirt, explored in the woods, built those proverbial forts that so epitomize the ideal childhood. Why can't kids just be kids?

(I see that I repeat myself, but I really do think part of this is the concept of "virgin hair" - as if something sexual and adult happens when hair color is changed. Which... no. It's just hair, and however you dye it, it grows back your natural color.)

While I do see the skepticism surrounding a world in which young children feel entitled to expensive beauty treatments (and professional hair dye, at least, is a splurge, she writes, having just splurged on some), eighth grade seems exactly the right time to be experimenting with at-home Manic Panic, weird nail polish, etc. If not then, when? There's this brief blip of time when you're old enough to want to do such things, but too young to need to look office-appropriate.

Maybe, then, the issue is helicopter parenting. It seems inconceivable today - but didn't in my day - that kids might be bleaching or dyeing their hair unsupervised. These days it would almost have to be at a salon. And salon means the resulting look will be a tasteful, pretty look rather than the kind a 13-year-old could very well have in mind.

UPDATE

Re: helicopter parenting, there's quite the thread here, of commenters recalling their own "free range" childhoods. (So. Many. Forts.) What's frustrating about the comments is that they're each one presented as scrappiness oneupmanship, rather than as examples of how life just was, quite recently. ('My mother let me blow-torch the creme brulee as a toddler!' 'Oh yeah! Mine let me ride a motorcycle without a helmet while in utero!' I paraphrase but slightly.)

There's a huge divide, but it's not about seatbelts or curfews. It's not about today's parents being more fearful than earlier ones. It's about smartphones. It used to be impossible for parents to know what their kids were up to much of the time - even the kids whose parents tried to construct a panopticon out of guilt. Today, everything's documented, and everyone can be in touch at all times. It's become irresponsible not to use one of these devices. A constantly-monitored childhood was always the fantasy of some parents (we all had those classmates...), but is now the default.

In ascending order of seriousness

-Because all roads lead to Sunrise Mart, I now have nigari tofu coagulant. In liquid form, because that was what they had. Not sure what that'll mean for the recipe, but this is on.

Only the essentials. (Wall of DeCecco not pictured.)

-NJ Transit has basically given up for the summer. They seem to have put all their resources into keeping the train refrigerator-cold, and exactly none into such things as having trains match up with other trains, or arrive at something like the time indicated. I think this may be my first time experiencing "As a New Jersey taxpayer..." thoughts, but there it is.

-I don't do Middle East on social media. (By which I mean, Facebook or Twitter.) I observe. I read what friends and journalists and such post, and am definitely getting a wide range of at the very least Jewish opinion, ranging from the Israel-was-a-bad-idea-in-the-first-place perspective (yes, there are Jews who think this - maybe worth noting if you're hoisting up a placard against The Jews) to it's-all-Hamas's-fault (gosh, not all, but even if that were the case, these deaths are plenty upsetting), and, thank goodness, lots in between. I do plan to write on this at some point, but not in 140-character bursts. I don't think my views on this lend themselves to sound bytes (I do go on), and my reaction to the situation is more sadness than outrage, and it's the latter that's expected in such forums. If you're not outraged, you can't possibly care, or something. If I did enter a thread, I could probably summon some outrage, although depending whose thread, it could be in any which direction. (Well, not any.) And I'm not an amateur military strategist, which is the other approach that seems to lend itself to social-media weighing-in on such topics.

But I did pass along the Tablet stories about the French synagogue attacks, because that's sort of my beat, and because... ugh. One way to think of it: Let's say you believe Israel is 100% in the wrong, and get all Godwin about it. How does that justify attacks on French Jews? Ah, but they may support Israel! They may have family there! Think for a moment about where this logic leads. Oh right: stuff like internment camps. Was Japan on the right side of WWII? Not so much. Did that justify internment of Japanese-Americans? No, it did not. And no, it's not a perfect analogy obviously, for so many reasons, but I think the connection is clear.

The "quenelle," and the "socialism of fools"

The official WWPD definition of anti-Semitism, paraphrased from previous official WWPD definitions of the same: An anti-oppression movement in defense of the many victims of the all-mighty Jew. That is, at any rate, how anti-Semites (left and right, white and non-white) themselves see things. It's impossible to have any kind of conversation about anti-Semitism without keeping this definition in mind. Because it can get confusing. Sometimes - often! - a wrong anti-Semites are pointing out (income inequality, high rents, bad choices on the part of Israeli officials) is real. The issue is that they're attributing this wrong to The Jews - ignoring the involvement of non-Jews, as well as the many, many, many Jews who don't control anything.

Again, it's not that the wrongs aren't real, or even that individual Jews or Jewish organizations have never actually done whatever it is anti-Semites are accusing them of. It's that the proportion is way off. Bad things done by non-Jews are ignored, while the many Jews having nothing to do with whatever's going on (or, say, being ripped off by the same proverbial landlord, or opposing the same proverbial Israeli policies) somehow don't count as The Jews, and are similarly forgotten.

That's what's weird about anti-Semitism, and why it's so difficult to discuss. Opposing anti-Semitism has a way of seeming like embracing conservatism or, more accurately, some kind of bourgeois status quo opposed by the far-left and far-right alike, because it so often involves taking a stand against someone claiming to represent The Good. And there probably are - as came up in one of the Facebook discussions of the "quenelle" (as you might imagine, a good % of people I know have opinions on this) - a certain number of people embracing anti-anti-Semitism, or pretending to, as a way of maintaining inequality or discriminating against Muslims or who knows. So it's necessary to be precise. Which, to their credit, my friends on the Zionist or anti-anti-Semitic (there's overlap, which I could get into if this post were ten times as long) left fighting the good fight generally are.

The problem is that these are topics that don't lend themselves to nuance. The belief that as long as the broader cause is just, and at least someone Jewish did something wrong, anti-Semitism is acceptable, may have disappeared for approximately five minutes at one point in the second part of the 20th century, but it's now with us to stay.

Urban artists, suburban moms

-Saw the Léger exhibit in Philadelphia. OK, not before a great deal of hemming and hawing ($25 a person!), and a fair amount of panicked driving (the whole bit between exiting the highway and parking near the museum), but still. Glad to have seen it! I like how many/most of the works look (as you can see, I was trained as an art historian), but I also enjoyed the whole rah-rah-cities mood, of the exhibit, but also, it seems, of Léger himself. When I think of the interwar years, I usually think of fear of modernity, with all the sinister things that often implied in those days.

As usually happens when I go to this sort of exhibit, I end up far too drawn to the works of some artist other than the one the show is actually about. In this case, El Lissitzky.

(One day, I'll be able to go to Philadelphia without including a trip to Artisan Boulanger Patissier. Or not. Could a branch maybe open in Princeton? I'd settle for New York. Lucky, lucky Philadelphians.)

-I know I should read the book reviewed here, and I suspect I'll have a different take than the reviewer.

-Arne Duncan's now-notorious "white suburban moms" observation is the latest entry into what I had called "feminism's 'white lady' problem," although it extends beyond feminism. What happens is, remarks/reactions that would otherwise read as straightforwardly misogynist are somehow cleared of that charge once "white" is brought in as a modifier. Then all of a sudden, bashing women seems progressive. It's not women who are vapid and entitled, just white women. As if society's most privileged aren't white men, but their female counterparts.

Because there's a strong case to be made that anti-white "racism" isn't even a thing, given society's power structures, it's easy enough to see nothing wrong with "white lady"-talk. After all, it's not a marginalized group being demeaned, is it? When in fact the problem with "white lady" comments isn't 'anti-white racism', but rather the way that 'white' functions in this context as a cover for anti-woman bigotry. That whole thing where women aren't assertive enough? This ends up being assertiveness-shaming. Not good for white women, but also not good for women generally.

Sephora and secularism

Here's some highly relevant French-Jewish news, in a tangential way: Sephora wants to keep its French stores open on Sundays, which according to Jezebel, a leading resource on the French legal system, violates French labor laws. And the face-value interpretation is of course, does anyone really need Dior tinted moisturizer on a Sunday, like need it? Shouldn't we care more about labor than some white lady's sense of entitlement to 24-7 access to the lip stain of her choice? Can't we all just lead slower, simpler lives? Why not just shop on Saturday and take a walk on Sunday, like Sartre describes in La nausée?

While it's not false that consumers want to buy silly things, and are sometimes petulant when the shop's closed, there's a whole lot more going on here.

Which brings up something I... not necessarily should know but will now have to look into: Why does the Marais, one of Paris's traditionally Jewish neighborhoods, stay open on Sundays? And no, not Judaica shops - all the same boutique-chain retailers as have closed branches everywhere else in the city/country. And I don't believe they're closed on Saturdays (or any other day) to compensate. Evidently because it's a tourist area, but the Jewish angle seems not irrelevant.

More broadly, France has a whole lot of non-Christians, about 600,000 Jews last I heard (or 599,999 since I moved far away from Le Boulanger des Invalides, sniff sniff) and far more Muslims. While secular sorts of Christian origin may maintain the cultural practice of a Sunday sabbath without even thinking about it, and may not see it as religious, keeping one going is a form of discrimination against non-Christians, who may well have their own secular or religious sabbaths, and who may well just generally not enjoy the weekly reminder of the Christian-ness of their allegedly oh-so-secular country. (I'm not speaking for this population, imagining what might offend - Albert Memmi had a whole riff on this topic.) If you're an observant Jew and you work an office job, when can you buy anything? Shops aren't open late, and Saturday's not an option.

Maybe the more fair - but tougher to enforce - thing would be to have a law insisting that workers get at least one day per week off, and if a Muslim or Jewish Sephora salesperson wants to be the, err, Shabbos Goy of high-end cosmetics, so be it. Or maybe it's really so terrible to have a day off that doesn't match up with that of the rest of society that if France's religious and cultural minorities are kind of screwed over, those are the breaks. But the whole 'how charming, a day of rest' approach always strikes me as, yes, missing something.

Bitter baristas, disgraced designers, and unpaid interns

-There exists a blog entirely made up of the nasty thoughts a barista (well, ex-barista) has about his customers (seemingly written in real time). Even the customers who do seemingly innocuous things like order decaf or soy milk. It's not as clever as it could be, but if you're someone who appreciates being judged unfavorably by the person making your cappuccino, you'll get a kick out of it.

-Galliano-the-Hasid-gate. This is so my beat, but I'm late to it, and have nothing to add other than that it sure is something that Galliano dresses like a Hasidic Jew, and that Abe Foxman has no idea what he's talking about.

-Oh, and then this just happened! My thing about gender and unpaid internships is out there for all to see.

Yom sans kippa

In what appears to be an effort to alienate the much-discussed but let's face it not-so-populous community of European Jews who vote for their country's far-right parties because conservatism or Likud-ness or who knows beats out a desire not to vote for the heirs of Nazism/collaborationism, Marine Le Pen has decided that the yarmulke has no place in the land of the beret. This, because she's not too keen on the veil, and she wants to be consistent. But lest your Catherine Deneuve-ish self be alarmed, no one's asking you to dispose of your Hermès silk: “Anyone can tell the difference between a veil worn for religious reasons and one that is not.” Well obviously. A scarf worn by a white woman - or man! it's France! - is secular.

As for the kippa, it's like the veil but not. There's a feminist case - not one I tend to agree with - that Muslim women cover their heads or faces not as free religious expression, but because a male relative or cleric is forcing them to do so. Whereas there's not much of a case to be made that Jewish mothers are forcing this on their sons, cue the jokes that I myself am not Borscht Belt enough to provide.

Those anti-circumcision Muslims

Over at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin makes an argument I'm having trouble wrapping my head around: that the new wave of interest in banning circumcision in Germany is evidence not only of anti-Jewish and not anti-Muslim sentiment (already a tough case to make, given current demographics and anxieties), but also of an anti-Jewish mood perpetuated by Europe's Muslims. At least I think that's what he's driving at, although I may have gotten lost somewhere around where he segued from Germany to France.

What this kind of argument illustrates is how awkward is to classify pro-Jewish or pro-Israel stances as conservative. Because one images that if circumcision were only practiced by Muslims, and not by Jews, Europe might be celebrated for cracking down on this oh-so-barbaric multiculti ritual. At the same time, because it's not very conservative to root for the marginalized minority in the face of hyphen-less white Christians (culturally Christian or practicing), it's unacceptable to suggest that anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe might actually be less about Islam and more about the fact that 1945 didn't change everything, and there are still plenty of white Europeans not so fond of Jews. Of course, these days that set is generally too busy hating Muslims to have much time to devote to hating Jews.

Eight hours in Strasbourg

Yesterday my husband and I brought a poodle to France. This was by far the most glamorous use of 37 euros - the cost of round-trip for two from Heidelberg to Strasbourg, assuming you're not in a hurry. But the trains themselves - picture a 6 local train, but international - are a cultural experience. On one 40-minute leg of the journey, a boy in late peach-fuzz stage downed three beers in quick succession, at around 10am. A musclebound man on that same train had a huge tattoo down his arm bearing the name of the town the train was bound for - Karlsruhe - as well as a muscle tee bearing a message about how the greatest thing in the world is to be from Karlsruhe. He too had a beer - as did basically everyone we saw before noon. (There's a rule on German trains that you can't throw your beer bottle out the window. Having the beer itself, presumably, is a right not to be messed with.) The drinking seems to taper off after that point, once the more serious drinkers enter an afternoon stupor, only to pick up again late in the evening, when the usual Western tradition of Saturday-night drunkenness begins.

Strasbourg itself was, we learned upon arrival, having a "braderie." Had I known this ahead of time, I might have imagined a quaint, contained antiques market. But there are evidently braderies in Belgium as well, so my husband knew what we were in for. What "braderie" means, to continue in NY-centric terms, is a Third Avenue summer street fair, except rather than covering just a stretch of Third Avenue, it's the entire city center. It was the usual European-market array of cheap harem pants and tube tops, bins of underwear, discount racks in front of high-brow stores marking the end of the soldes, and giant fabric posters of Che Guevara and (the official mainstay) Bob Marley, but none of this was the real draw. That would be the mops. Sellers enthusiastically hawking some kind of special all-purpose mop were found throughout the city, and were doing such an amazing business that we proceeded to spend the afternoon dodging the mops that maybe one in four Strasbourg pedestrians had just purchased. (My cynical theory: the mop-sellers work in cahoots with pickpockets who draw on the crowd enthralled by no-doubt-steeply-discounted mops.) The streets were 34th-Street-level packed, and covered in the kind of organic urban debris a country dog can't get enough of. I have no idea what Strasbourg is like when not in street-fair mode.

Braderie aside, Strasbourg was pretty great. I even managed to fulfill my dream of bringing a poodle into a French department store, taking Bisou into Galeries Lafayette. This is most definitely allowed, given that the escalators include a warning decal indicating - with a surprisingly simple icon - that you must scoop up your lap dog while on them. I browsed a parapharmacie, considering and rejecting the possibility that my impending 29th birthday means I should spend 12 euros on paraben-free anti-aging cream. (Sunscreen from Duane Reade or whatever is probably more effective, although the packaging doesn't compete.)

We ate well (lox and gravlax duo, riesling, cappuccino, apricot clafoutis-type tart), and I had a little bit of French high-street fun. American Vintage! Cos! Which, to whom it may concern, sells things like this, but for much less. I know that one is supposed to find it un-charming that the little shops of Paris that seem like boutiques are actually Paris-wide chains, some of which have since expanded to New York. But I didn't mind seeing those that hadn't yet made it to the States in Strasbourg. Not one bit. I'd almost forgotten about that thing, clothes-shopping, because the highlight in Heidelberg is H&M, and Princeton...

Monoprix!

Some other time, when not trying to fit an entire vacation into an afternoon, when no poodle is involved, I will need to visit all the historic sites (I've been neck-deep in the world of Alsatian Jewry since forever, and did a qualifying-exam list on the Franco-Prussian war). Some trip that does not involve a poodle-specific suitcase, as well as a carrier that looks more appropriate for a golden retriever, I will have to look at the regional-history bookstores. This was not, in other words, a busman's holiday, but maybe that can be for the best.

Sanford and Toulouse

I'd been thinking of the Trayvon Martin and Toulouse cases, how they relate, or don't, in terms of parochialism in emotional response to crime (the "update" here), in terms of anti-Semitism as force of nature rather than variant of bigotry, and in terms of Jews and other groups as intermediaries. When Obama spoke out about how if he had a son, he'd look like Martin, I thought about how if I had a sister, she'd look like one of the girls they kept showing sobbing in Toulouse. I thought, more specifically, about how it's the kind of thing I'd be reluctant to remark on, because it seems so parochial, so exactly what Jews always stand accused of doing. And I'm not even in some kind of position of influence. I also thought that perhaps I'd been wrong, before, when saying that parochial-emotional responses shouldn't ever dictate policy. In a case like the Martin one, you get to see precisely why it can matter (although we must await the whole fallout) to have a black president.

To preempt comments along the lines of, 'but the cases are not analogous,' and just generally to provide an overview, consider the following:

Similarities: Both were, it appears, racially-motivated murders. In both cases, the 'justification' was a broader grievance against Group X, one that it should be obvious in no way excuses the act (the relative rate of violent street crime among young African-American boys and men, and the more questionable aspects of Israel's relationship with the Arab world, respectively), but one that impacts how these unthinkable crimes are reported. Both killers acted in ways that suggest disgruntled-white-dude but are/were themselves members of marginalized groups-of-origin (Latino, Algerian), albeit not the one that was the historic Other of the place where the crime occurred (blacks, Jews, what with slavery and Jim Crow, Dreyfus and the Holocaust).

Differences: Zimmerman lives on, claims - however implausibly - self-defense. Merah, dead, was fairly undeniably a terrorist, and there's no suggestion that he was acting in self-defense, except in that abstract sense of 'defending the Palestinians,' somehow, as a non-Palestinian, in France, some of whose young child victims happened to have dual citizenship with Israel. Zimmerman, though not a police officer, claimed to act in the interests of the state, kind of, and thus has come to represent police brutality. Merah represented, it appears, al Qaeda. Zimmerman's only victim was Martin, making this a story about black teens and young men. Merah's rampage was at its most gruesome once he got to Jews (again, young children), but because he killed adults of other backgrounds first, it becomes easier to describe the final crime as something other than anti-Semitic.

And it's that last bit I kept coming back to: why are sensible people able to understand that from what we know about it, Trayvon Martin's killing was a straightforward example of anti-black racism, but not that a guy going into a Jewish school and killing young children, whatever else was on his agenda, was kind of bigoted against Jews? Why do we keep hearing - even in the Forward - about what the crime means for France's Muslims? Not that anti-Muslim bigotry shouldn't be combatted (much like anti-Latino bigotry at home), but a bunch of Jewish kids were just murdered. Might that merit a moment considering how French Jews are responding?

Before I'd had a chance to think all of this through, Michael C. Moynihan did, for Tablet. Moynihan... says just about what I was going to say, but concludes that what we must do is fight anti-Jewish ideology among Islamist extremists. While this isn't too controversial, it would seem that the issue extends far, far beyond anyone who gives a hoot either way about the Palestinians or Islam.

What it is, more generally, is an issue of Jews being understood as a group people talk about when they really want to be talking about something else, something real. No one sensible disputes that in the U.S., anti-black racism is a key part of our history and present. That is the story, and the Martin affair is hardly a distraction from it. Meanwhile, in France these days, much as in French-colonial Algeria, the story is culturally-Catholic, militantly-secular France versus culturally-North-African, Muslim 'foreigners,' plenty of whom are multigeneration French, but who's counting. With anti-Semitism, we are always asked to look beyond the narrow question of Jews being under attack, and to focus on the real issues - economic, post-colonial, etc. Jews, we're meant to understand implicitly, are pawns. It is always fundamentally misunderstanding a case of Jews being under attack as about Jews. If you want to sound intelligent, bring up some historical or recent event generally thought to be about Jews, and explain how the real stakes had zilch to do with Jews.

All of this leaves the bigger question, namely why, but my dissertation and related tasks await.

"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."

Anti-Semitism as natural disaster

Like some of the paper's other readers, I was struck by the choice of the NYT to conduct man-on-the-street interviews reacting to the Toulouse shootings with Muslims, but not Jews. To report on Islamophobic retaliation that might happen, rather than the response to a murderous anti-Jewish attack that, well, did happen. (One that was itself only 'retaliatory' if you consider French-Jewish children with joint Israeli citizenship representatives of Netanyahu's government.) This choice was not enough to prevent one commenter from asking, "[H]ad this murder been at a Muslim school would it be making front page on the NYTimes and other media?" When it's like, these were multiple murders at a Jewish school, and it's being reported as an anti-Muslim attack.

I know there is a temptation to look at this in terms of the 'new anti-Semitism' that comes out of radical Islam and its supporters/overly tepid critics on the Western left. But as I see it, this is less about a popular belief that Jews fundamentally represent the Israeli government's worst actions and thus deserve to be victims of violent attacks, and more about a much more longstanding sense that anti-Semitism is... natural. Not "natural" as in it's only natural that Jews would elicit hatred, but as in part of the natural world. This is especially true, I think, when it comes to discussions of certain Jews surviving the Holocaust, either as individuals or communities. We so often discuss the Jews who lived through those years hidden away, in an attic or forest, as having almost been hiding out from a storm. A storm, that is, and not a political movement that hardly killed at random.

And this outlook continues to be the way anti-Semitic acts are treated. If it's generally thought that Jews overreact to anti-Semitism (and I ask you to locate the marginalized group that doesn't complain vocally when attacked), it's not so much because we don't think Jews are still hated. (This, longtime readers, is what I used to think it was.) It's more that we see Jew-hatred as just a part of life, and find it baffling and irritating that Jews make a fuss about what is, after all, beyond human control.

Toulouse school shooting UPDATED

Yes, following this. And, other than that it's incredibly upsetting, I don't have much to say at this point. Whether the killer was Muslim and using French-Jewish school-children as a stand-in for Israel; a white-supremacist; or a nut aware that anything to do with Jews and violence gets attention, it's obviously too soon to say. I'd advise against coming to conclusions along the lines of, this is what Jews get for living somewhere as anti-Semitic as France (when, if your goal is not having your children shot to death at school, it's really the U.S. you'd want to avoid), as well as, this is really just about Israel, and if Israel only behaved itself, this sort of thing wouldn't happen (wrong because this didn't even happen in Israel, and because this sort of thing most certainly did happen in France before 1967 and 1948). In other words, I'd avoid explanations... at all, at this point, but especially ones that pretend that "the Jews" somehow bring such things upon themselves.

I'll weigh in again once more info. emerges, but that's about it thus far, from the French news as well.

UPDATE

So, a couple things about the response thus far. Much has been made of the fact that someone who may have been the same shooter also killed French black and Arab paratroopers, and that this did not get the same attention, thus proving a) Judeo-centrism in the Jewy Jewy media, and/or b) a racist indifference to crimes where the victims are non-white.

When it might be relevant a) that murders of young schoolchildren, and that would be three of the four Jewish victims, get more attention, all things equal, than murders of adults ("The suspect pursued his last victim, an 8-year-old girl, into the concrete courtyard, seizing and stopping her by her hair, said Ms. Yardeni, who viewed surveillance footage of the killing."), and b) that French Jews - as a photo accompanying the NYT piece suggests, although this is of course more complicated than complexion - are not all that white. Race is a construct, and indeed as constructed in France, the equivalent of the U.S.'s "whiteness" is looking ethnically French: pale skin, light brown or dark blond hair, certain facial features. French Jews, many of whom are of North African origin, with of course some exceptions, do not.

Now, one might counter that in the U.S., where Jews tend to be Ashkenazi, and where "white" basically means not in one of the categories officially considered of-color, most Jews are white, ergo, American media respond in horror when victims are or seem "white" by American standards. To which I'd counter a) that if Jews are "white" in the U.S., so too, often enough, are Arabs (which isn't to say there isn't anti-Arab bigotry, again, these things are complicated), and b) that however Jews are viewed in the U.S., if we are to believe that a neo-Nazi, white-supremacist sort chose Arab, black, and Jewish victims, by the standards of the place where the crimes occurred, all of the victims come from groups that would fall into the category of visible minorities.

But back to the marginally less awkward question of parochialism in response to tragedy. It would seem a natural enough human impulse - not necessarily a calculated, political move - to be more upset when a small-scale tragedy strikes closer to you than when a greater one does further away. This sort of thinking shouldn't, of course, determine policy, but as a reaction to share privately, or an emotional outburst on a newspaper comments page, what can you do? But the important thing to remember, in this case, is that the tendency to respond more to tragedies that hit close to home is not a uniquely Jewish trait. We should not confuse the fact that non-Jews are and for ever so long have been disproportionately obsessed with Jews, with the altogether normal fact that Jews pay attention to Jews. Everyone pays attention to their own kind.

"If liberalism is the religion of secularized American Jews, is it possible that illiberalism will become the religion of greater numbers of secularized French Jews?"

I of course read historian Robert Zaretsky's article about the rightward shift of French Jewry with great interest. Zaretsky makes a key point, noting that French Jews today come from different parts of the world than do American Jews, have different histories and cultural traditions, and thus vote differently. If you're voting for Sarkozy for a convoluted mix of reasons it would require a class on French colonialism in North Africa to understand, you're not in quite the same situation as an Ashkenazi-American Commentary/Weekly Standard reader.

Zaretsky looks at how French Jews differ from American ones, but not at how Sarkozy differs from, for example, Santorum. And the difference there is huge. What I kept waiting to see, and never did, was something about the role of religion in all of this. The right, in the States, is all about Christianity. Even American Jews who aren't that socially liberal, who aren't that concerned with social issues, can't help but notice that social conservatives are laying on the this-is-a-Christian-country rather thick. The "Real America" rhetoric has a nifty way of canceling out any (mistaken, in my opinion that I will not further go into in this post, but that I've gone into elsewhere) sense that it's better for Israel to vote Republican.

With France... I know we're accustomed to thinking of the extreme-right as the home of anti-Semitism, but the reality is somewhat more complicated. I suspect that even many American-Jewish Republicans would be horrified to imagine European Jews voting for their countries' right-wing parties, because, you know, Nazis. These same folks would probably be horrified to imagine that Jews live in Europe, period. And if this all sounds straw-mannish, it's because I'm not citing individual conversations that arise whenever I tell people I study French.

If there's good reason for French Jews to be wary of the right, it's not as if the left has an unblemished record, good-for-the-Jews-wise. Anti-Semitism in France originated on the left (mid-19th-C socialists not lurving those Rothschilds, and not understanding until the Dreyfus Affair, if ever, that hating Jews-as-such wasn't the answer), and the particular anti-Semitism everyone has in mind - the strains that led up to Vichy - had roots all over the place. If you're French and voting for a political strain that kinda-sorta comes out of the Resistance, but that is also center-right, you're not exactly casting your vote for neo-Nazism.

That background is for WWPD readers, who may not be as neck-deep in all this as I am, although I'll confess to being much more familiar this month with 1840s and perhaps even medieval European Jews than with the contemporary political climate. I'm 150% sure Zaretsky, a professor in this area, knows what I do and far more about the difference between what "left" and "right" mean and have meant in the States vs. France. The question, then, is why he doesn't include that point in his article.

My best guess is that, this being in the Forward, he's looking at this in terms of Jews' historical attraction to the left, coming out of social-justice concerns. He's less interested (not entirely uninterested, but less) in the tendency of some but not other right-wing (and, as I've mentioned, left-wing) traditions to be utterly inhospitable to Jews.

Aside from where the essay appears, there's his closing question: "If liberalism is the religion of secularized American Jews, is it possible that illiberalism will become the religion of greater numbers of secularized French Jews?" This is, I suppose, about a left-right economic divide, in which case Sarkozy and Santorum probably are a bit closer than one might otherwise think.

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!

Feminist traitor here

When I got married recently, at the now-oh-so-young-sounding age of 27, I opted to change my name. My husband expressed no opinion either way, and my mother as well as some friends, as well as one especially opinionated bank employee, objected. It sounds like something very much not done in academia, yet in my (ambitious, I promise) cohort, there's one changed name and one soon-to-change. In other words, no one made me do it, nor was I under overwhelming pressure not to do so.

It's true enough that for women who consider themselves feminists - and I consider myself one - there's no way to explain why you went this route without coming across as defensive at best, hypocritical at worst. But the same is true of everything to do with weddings and marriage - every attempt at a run-down of how a decision (getting legally married to a man, wearing a white dress, wearing an engagement ring, having a big party) was made comes across as, the woman is clearly dealing with two conflicted selves, the Good Feminist and the Closet Bridezilla, and clearly the latter self won out.

For just this reason, my approach thus far has been to not care what others think about it, and thus not to offer explanations. I know my reasons. But in the interest of providing Flavia with another data point, and now that this decision's behind me (so no one thinks I'm putting my name up for bloggy debate), let's all know my reasons:

I wanted to. That was the main reason. So the reasons below are more like why I didn't not want to.

Career-stage, of course, matters, and ancient as I may be, I'm still a student. Whether or not I end up in academia - and that's still the plan - many people I will meet in the course of my career will not even know which name I started out with. As for my other life as a blogger, I generally just go by my first name anyway. If tragedy of tragedies, not knowing my original last name keeps some Googlers away from my Chicago Maroon archives, so be it, but I will use maiden-as-middle for all subsequent writing in which my last name is necessary. But my first name's uncommon enough that I'm still easy enough to track down, but my Facebook and Google+ (is this going to stick?) identities include both names. (Oh, and my name is Google-unique in any of the permutations.) Like Flavia said, women who've "changed" their names kind of end up with this these days by default, even if the court procedure to get the maiden-as-middle officially tagged on (thanks a bunch, New York, for allowing only hyphenation) is too much of a hassle. I suspect this is true even for women who opt to keep their names, that they'll end up getting this lineup of names and having to correct people, the way a straightforward name-swap used to be assumed. At any rate, if your great fear is invisibility, Facebook will take care of that and then some. Friends from middle school won't lose track of you.

Like I said, I consider myself a feminist. And I do see how, given that feminism is largely about rejecting the notion that the most important point in a woman's life - but not a man's - is marriage, anything that reinforces the idea that marriage is a bigger deal for the wife than it is for the husband is - as we say in such discussions - problematic. I also get that saying that there's no problem as long as each woman has a choice isn't sufficient, because the same could be said of dieting unnecessarily or getting loads of cosmetic surgery "for yourself," when even if no law orders this, women often do so because they don't think they have the option of not doing so. For these reasons, I wouldn't claim that it's as feminist to change your name as to keep it. As for whether I lose sleep over this, I suppose I've lost more metaphorical sleep over being a Zionist but not living in Israel. As inconsistencies in my life go, this is a minor one. If you want to get me on the defensive, ask me how I could find Herzl so convincing, yet be typing this in New York.

On that note, my main qualms about name-change were unrelated to feminism. I think if my maiden name had been really identifiably Jewish, I might have felt some political need to hang onto it. But... not so much, Ellis Island took care of that, leaving something vaguely German-sounding in place of the much-cooler Muczadski (among so many possible spellings). Meanwhile, my new name is... actually kind of awesome for someone who studies 19th C French literature, especially when paired with "Madame." This is, I realize, a Francophilic-Zionistic aside of relevance to probably no one else, ever.

But to return to the more general-interest feminist angle, changing my name didn't feel terribly inconsistent to me. Feminism in my own life means earning money and having a career. It means my husband and I both do chores. It means - and this one I'll accept is a bit outside the typical feminist list - having chosen a spouse in part on the basis of looks, and not apologizing for that. It also means not spending excessive amounts of time or energy (and this is of course subjective) fussing about my own looks, in particular not engaging in weight-think. Oh, and birth control was a good invention. These are the first-world, day-to-day feminist issues that I've come to see as important. My new last name has yet to cause me to get one taco rather than two if it's two I want (and it's two I want). By the end of the week, the relevant bureaucracy should be in order, meaning that come the fall, when I'm on fellowship again, neither the paycheck nor the work-itself aspects will be affected. And, again, I suspect it's not going to destroy my career in French that I now have a French last name.

What feminism hasn't meant, for me, is wheel-reinvention. In other words, I do not lose sleep over the fact that I do not defy gender norms in all areas. I recognize that it's convenient to say the least to identify as the gender you were born. I don't think that my relationship with my husband is something so complex and unique and snowflake-ish that the word "marriage" fails to describe it. I'm lucky that the kind of relationship I wanted is the one society wanted me to have. So the fact that wife-takes-husband's-name is how it generally goes was not in and of itself a reason, for me, to be suspicious of it.

One angle that's often forgotten is that if you keep your name, you're probably keeping your father's name, not your mother's, and any children you have will probably have your husband's name, not yours. My thinking here was, I'm not sticking it to the patriarchy all that much if I keep my father's name and give Theoretical Future Offspring (and poodles count) my husband's. Hyphenation, unless we-as-a-society figure out a new way, just seems like deferring the question to the next generation, often enough with a nicely hyphenated name being swapped for a husband's in due time. (Here, I've got some anecdata.) Part of why younger women may be more likely to change their names is the question of how feminist or not it will feel to have nobly rejected sharing a name with your new family. The younger you are, however professionally ambitious you are, the more likely kids are on the horizon. It's not necessarily about being a future SAHM or a professionally-unanchored ingenue marrying a much-older financier.

Then, setting aside the question of theoretical babies, there's the fact that, in an age of individual spousal choice, there's something to be said with picking a name that represents independence, a part of your life you made for yourself. (I bet there are some men who wish it were more socially acceptable to announce that kind of break with their childhoods.) This continues to be true even if - Marie, I'm getting to your comment - the marriage ends. It's still a record of a part of your life you chose.

And on that cheery note, there's something to be said for behaving in symbolic ways that make a statement about your confidence in your marriage's capacity to withstand the test of time. If you think marriage means, yay, now I don't need to work, now I can get super out-of-shape and stop all pre-existing grooming routines, then yes, you are screwing yourself over until the covenant-marriage types get their way. Now, I certainly don't think keeping your name is announcing that you're not confident in your marriage's future. It doesn't cut both ways. But I suspect that for me, as for other women whose marriages were preceded by a significant premarital monogamy-and-cohabitation stage with the now-husband-then-boyfriend, a name-change is a way of marking a difference between two things that don't really feel that different.

Your daily Francophilic Zionism

"Little Aleph Millepied would be screwed in an Israeli playground."

-A Gawker (not Jezebel, sorry, mistake fixed) commenter, on Ms. P and her fiancé's choice to give their son the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet as a first name, resulting in a unusual name in English, and a potentially comical one in the original, with the not un-comical French last name coming right after. Luckily, should they decide to move there, no one in Israel speaks French.

All over the place

What do Galliano and Sheen, DSK and the I-P conflict, have in common? OMG Jews. That's about all I got out of Stanley Fish's latest. I mean, I always appreciate it when an academic study of representations of Jews and gender in literature reaches a broader audience, and will now have to check out Matthew Biberman's book, so there was that going for it... but otherwise?

-The piece is very much about, here are some tangentially connected thoughts, don't they make you think? There's not really any argument. Is Fish saying anti-Semitism's worse than it once was? That Jews are more powerful than ever before? That time is one, Jewish power and anti-Semitism unchanging facts across place and age?

-Or maybe it's more of a, hey, anti-Semites say Jews are rich and powerful, why, Jews are rich and powerful... just saying.

-We learn of "67 percent of Reform Jewish households in the United States making more than $75,000 a year; only 31 percent of all households hit the same mark." Is this the relevant comparison? Not Reform Jews and whichever demographic of Protestants is equivalent on the one hand, Jews and Christians generally on the other?

-Yes, yes, there are some overlapping key words - "Affaire," "French," "Jewish," and "conspiracy," but DSK=/=Dreyfus. DSK at best did a whole lot like what he was accused of, but might be innocent of the precise crime in question. Dreyfus was a fairly straightforward scapegoat. And, other than Jews concerned with whether there is a Jewish angle, no one in America thinks of DSK as a Jew. He is, like BHL, zee French.

-We have the following quote, in parentheses: "'You can insult any ethnic group and get away with it, except for the Jews.'" Who, exactly, is saying/thinking this? Fish?

-"Those who offer the criticism can never quite be sure that their distaste for Israel’s actions with respect to the Palestinians is entirely innocent of the influence of centuries of vilification." Just... just... what? Obviously, if you've decided I-P is the only issue of any significance in the world, and that Israel=the unequivocal villain, if you're incapable of differentiating between Jews and Israelis, Israelis and the Israeli government... But obviously if you're criticizing something specific (say, Bibi not being all that cooperative with Obama), you're not doing anything remotely sinister.

-What a crap title! I know, I know, these are typically chosen by editors, perhaps even for articles that are really blog posts, but seriously. What exactly does Galliano hurling anti-Semitic epithets at someone who isn't even Jewish have to do with "the Jews"? Was the point to bring charmers like this out of the woodwork? (Also the well-meaning-ish-but-staggeringly-ignorant.)

*********************

Are those stand-mixer things useful, and if so, for what? I didn't think we'd have much use (beyond latkes, that is) for the hand-me-down food processor we got a while back from my parents, but it's now how I make pizza dough, making it the most useful thing ever.

*********************

-Essie "nice is nice" is, well, nice. Lavender-lilac, but not too chalky, as white-based nail polishes often are. Also nice is Laura Mercier Sheer Lip Color in "baby lips." Also Korres mango butter lipstick in "frost pink." I still have some leftover/pent-up primping impulse stemming from my pre-wedding sense that I should care more about such matters, culminating in the frizziest weather imaginable, as well as my hair's decision to turn blond in the front every spring, something I understand women pay for but that does not suit my coloring. Lip and nail color, this can be controlled.