Primrose Road

While I don't agree with everything it says, this piece on the ethics (moral, religious, and otherwise) of conflating Judaism with unquestioned support of every action Israel takes is worth a read.

Israelis question, debate, and even satirize their government's and military's decisions; why can't an American Jewish man or woman do the same without being labeled "self-hating"? It would be blatantly ridiculous to expect an American to unquestioningly accept all the United States' government's and military's decision, so ...

I've expressed concerns before about an apparent waning of our rich intellectual tradition and why we need to be able to ask questions and discuss them openly.

Via Jewlicious: a Tel Aviv suburb is using DNA to fight dog poop.

Dog owners are being asked to take their dogs to vets who will then submit saliva samples and create a municipal dog DNA database. Then, DNA from un-picked-up dog poop can be matched to dogs and offending owners.

I am waiting for "Law and Order: Israeli Dog Poop Squad."

From The Guardian: Some Haredim in Israel are extremely vocal (and physical) about women following their sect's specific moral and dress codes. For example:

"Signs warning women not to enter if they are wearing trousers, short sleeves or a skirt above the knees, hang in the neighbourhood. One is affixed outside Kreus's two-room house where he lives with his wife and 11 children. 'Every week there's a complaint about the way women dress,' said Kreus.

Extraordinarily, he admitted to slashing the tyres of women who have driven into the neighbourhood who, he said, were indecently dressed. 'There was a mess with the police,' he said. 'Now I'm trying new creative methods, not using violence. Now I make a small hole in their tyres and the air deflates slowly. I'm not destroying their car.'"

The article doesn't do enough to explain that this is one specific sect and that not all Orthodox (and not all ultra-Orthodox, even) Jews engage in these disgusting acts, but, yes, the sect is all-too-vocal about the way secular and slightly-less-observant Israeli women dress:

"He maintained that separation was necessary beyond the boundaries of the neighbourhood. 'Having secular people on the buses is a problem. They go like animals, without clothes. Non-religious girls don't dress properly. They encourage me to sin,' he said.

With the demographics skewed in their favour, government authorities are acquiescing to the growing demands of the ultra-orthodox. The transport ministry, which regulates and funds bus transport through private companies, has allowed operators to provide 'kosher' or 'pure' routes, where women are required to sit at the back and cannot board unless appropriately dressed.

More than a dozen women have filed complaints after being verbally or physically attacked on the buses. 'Sometimes it's an official group but often it's one or two men who start to complain and the other men follow,' said the Israel Religious Action Centre's legal director, Einat Hurvitz. 'The drivers allow them to intimidate the women.' Haredi women also participated in the bullying."

In Israel, these small groups have a (rather loud) political voice, which is one reason why forming coalitions in the Knesset can be so difficult.

In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse divides her exploration of Jews' relationship to power into three interconnected time periods: first, the Biblical era through the European Renaissance; then, the Enlightenment, which brings about liberal democracies that permit Jews to become citizens but unintentionally lead to the rise of pogroms; and finally, the founding of Israel and Israel's development as a military power in the face of Arab challenges to the country's sovereignty. I thought that she offered a number of interesting arguments that complicated the Judaism/Jewish ethnicity/power triangle in Parts 1 and 2; unfortunately, she did not seem to do enough to complicate this relationship in Part 3.

Early on, Wisse notes that Jews' relationship to political power as laid out by the Bible has never been entirely uncomplicated, especially in comparison to the other Abrahamic religions. Writing that "Christian countries may have fought in the name of God, but they did not contemplate fighting by the rules of their savior" (15), she explains why there is no such thing as 'ethnic' Christianity, while the Jews, whose beliefs required them to always follow Torah law to the letter, seemed to constitute their own country-less nation regardless of where they lived. For the Islamic people, there was a stronger perceived relationship between political power and religion because the prophet Muhammad was clearly portrayed as a warrior, religious leader, and political leader who organized his people on both the battlefield and in the city. Moses, meanwhile, was a prophet who gave the people Israel a set of laws but was not involved in actively enforcing them.

Wisse does complicate the present-day issue of Israel-Palestine relations, finding that the Jews mistakenly expected that possessing liberal democratic sovereignty would effectively mean the end of anti-Semitism. She references the mid-twentieth-century Jewish fantasy embodied in the character of Reschid Bey in Theodor Herzl's Altneuland; the character, an "Arab created in the image of a Jew" (165), is grateful that the Jews rescued the Arabs from a life of poverty. What actually happens in the decades after the founding of the state of Israel is that because of the Arab resentment that utopians like Herzl should have predicted, the Jewish state's political power must instead be supplanted by its military power.

Unfortunately, Wisse doesn't do enough (in my view) to critique this form of military power, constructing her argument so that it would seem that militarism was the only way for Israel to go. She's seemingly not bothered by Golda Meir's statement to Anwar Sadat: "We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours" (156); I thought that the extremely disconcerting implications behind this statement would have been worth further exploration.

All in all, Jews and Power offers a well-written political history of the Jewish people, with some interesting insights into the ways in which the advent of liberal democracy led to both new freedoms and new forms of anti-Semitism. Ultimately, however, it does not do enough to question all forms of violence (especially that of the 'eye for an eye' variety) and to suggest that there might be a yet-to-be-discovered "middle ground" in terms of Israeli politics.

Jews and Power: A Nextbook Festival of Ideas, May 18th in NYC.

I plan to attend the Culture, Taste, and Power and Authority and Revolt panels, as long as I can get in (it's first come, first served). This definitely sounds like an exciting event.

::breathes fresh air::

I could have gone to Israel for my birthday this year, but comp-exam-exhaustion made that not-so-feasible. For now, I will share some of my favorite Wacky Holy Land Photos:


In the spirit of the season: SANTA in a flea market booth.


Near the Western Wall: cat eating a potato chip.


One of several photos in my "Plastic Spoons in Roman Ruins" series.


This one captions itself, no?


The goat wants to know if you need cash.


"HaGadol Kova" = The Big Hat. You know, in case anyone ever asks you what they call the Whopper in Israel.


All right, one non-wacky one. Sunset on the Mediterranean Sea, May 2006.