Primrose Road

From the Fall 2008 issue of the Nextbook Reader, on Israeli-American-German filmmaker Omer Fast's Spielberg's List:

"The beginning of the film seems like just so much more Holocaust testimony: first-person descriptions of the camps, the smokestacks, the dogs, the hunger, the widely plumbed range of Nazi inhumanity. One might watch this testimony with the same measures of sadness and respect and anger and exhaustion with which most Holocaust testimony, at this point, is taken. "But the film starts to breed some strange incongruities ... The interviewees, it begins to become clear, aren't talking about their experiences in the camps themselves but about their experiences as extras in the film Schindler's List. ... "Where the woman in Poland had actually been at a fake place, the medic in Jerusalem seemed to have been absent from something real: His participation in a real event was a far less emotional experience than her participation in a staged one."

At yesterday's Nextbook Festival of Ideas: Jews and Power, Stephen Greenblatt shared a Shakespeare-authorship anecdote during a talk entitled "Culture, Taste, and Power." It involved one of the Earl of Oxford's descendants making his audience a bit uncomfortable when he labeled William Shakespeare of Stratford a "shyster." The talk should be posted on the Nextbook site within two weeks; I encourage all both of my readers to check it out. I am already fifty pages into novelist / philosopher / academic Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza, in which she holds Spinoza's life and work up against the account presented to her by a history teacher at a Bais Yaakov high school in the late 1960s. Yesterday, Goldstein and Shalom Auslander spoke about power relations within the Jewish community, how oppression today can happen from within, not just from outside, the community. In-community Jewish intellectualism is definitely a breath of fresh air when Jewish-American culture among those in their 20s and 30s often seems (at least to me) dominated by twin philosophies of "any comment critical of / realistic evaluation of Israel means that you're an anti-Semite" and "Jews must necessarily believe in God, and this was always historically so" as well as justalittefascist ultra-Orthodox outreach organizations like Aish who serve up some ultra-right-wingnuttery with their Torah. A favorite excerpt from Goldstein's book thus far, written in the voice of her Orthodox girls' school history teacher:

"It would be a Jew who would make philosophy into one long argument against the existence of God and against the difference between right and wrong, so that philosophy, girls, has been, ever since modernity, the most dangerous subject that you can possibly study."

A post on a blog called "JDaters Anonymous" about JDate's accidentally setting all of their profiles to read "I do not plan on having any children" says more than I could ever say about the state of Jewish culture in my generation. Add to that a Manhattan synagogue's "Budgeting for Social Justice" workshop for men and women in their 20s and 30s, and I wonder how many of our atheist, socialist, Yiddish-speaking bubbes and zaydes are rolling over in their graves right now.