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Cool Jewish postcards.

Reasons to go to Tucson.

Things we should have known about.

A free fancy mikveh in Newton, MA!

We raid shelves

A couple weeks ago, an amazing email invitation arrived:

The Jewish Book Council is opening its offices for an exclusive “Raid the Shelves” night — only for Birthright Israel NEXT, NY alumni. Sift through hundreds of great Jewish books and help yourself to a free armload of the best Jewish literature in town! (limit 5 books per person)

I waited for Elise in the lobby of a high rise in the garment district not long after eating a kasha knish at Zabar’s where I bought Plain Russian Bread #1 for Misha’s parents. Just prior I had gone to see Michael Chabon, promoting his new book at Columbia, read a great essay called “I was Edgar Allan Poe,” which quoted in full Ulalume.

At precisely 6:30 we found ourselves on the 4th floor waiting with a group of similar strangers in front of a double doorway with the words Jewish C….Center etched on the glass. The doors opened and we filed through a hallway that slowed at a registration clipboard and candy strewn table that sat before another set of doors leading to a conference room of tables stacked with fresh laid books. I had expected dusty boxes of donated Jew vs. Jew’s, Roth, and Roth! I was very excited but told Elise I wouldn’t spaz out like I did at the JEC event we went to in March about baking challah.

Inside the room, those at the front of the crowd were already perambulating the tables like at a buffet or comic con with fall coats, backpacks, and briefcases weighing down one hand, while someone asked my name, no, last name. For half an hour no one made eye contact and existential worries were subsumed by more tangible matters, filling new black JBC zipper totes.

I quickly saw there was a ton of inventory, and that rushing was unnecessary as boxes and razor blades lay in wait beneath the tables. My second instinct was to look for the promised refreshments; I found nothing but styrofoam bowls of MnMs, sugar coated fruit chews, Pepperidge Farm party packs, Hershey’s Kisses, Enteman’s Chocolate Chip cookies, snacks that must have just been bought at Duane Reade.

The first thing I said was, “Oh my God. These books are real.” Laid out, nary a cash register in sight, was the front window display of  bookstores down the street: recently and soon to be released books. The books were divided into sections: contemporary Jewish life, Jewish thought, memoir, fiction, politics, Holocaust.

I no longer work at a bookstore or publishing house where free books are thrown out like yellow pages. Now I get books free when friends are about to go to Strand, at cafes with free libraries, and the stoops of Carroll Gardens. (I have yet to corresponded with the powers that be that dispense review copies, though maybe I should do that I like free books so much. So much that I had to cancel my library accounts because I’d bring too many home to read or to store.) Why JBC received some of these titles is obscure, since those that have no Jewish content presumably have a (often unannounced) Jewish character or author.

I was very pleased with the event!  I could have used a little more of a pep rally from a Birthright organizer though I appreciate that there were no name tags (but there was some photography — we were asked to not smile, just act like we’re reading). No one said, ‘Welcome have a great time so good to see you this book’s great no problem sorry hope you like milanos. Would you like to sign up here for an email list so you can start a book club since you’re all taking copies of this book?’ Elise and I talked with Natalie, a Birthright employee at the event, and made some friends who, like us, stood at the radiator trying to whittle down armfuls of books down to five.

I made a friend and gave him my handmade business card, urging him to share it with his friends there, who he knows from their hometown of Albany. I tried to make another friend but something didn’t come across. He was holding a copy of American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent. “Are you a nerd?” I asked. “My girlfriend got it,” he replied.

I tried to infuse some spirit and at one point clapped my hands at the head of the room and said loudly, “This is great,” trying to attract the attention of someone who would break into song and start handing out shakers and musical instruments. No one turned and Elise more quietly inspected some of the product, Dumbfounded: Big Money. Big Hair. Big Problems. Or Why Having It All Isn’t for Sissies by Matt Rothschild.

Near the end of the event I heard one of the young women in charge say to someone, “Take as many as you want…” after a night of urging people to politely acknowledge the idea of 5 book per.

So, this is what I got:

1. Why This World: A biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser
2. The Scenic Route: a novel by Binnie Kirshenbaum which I heard of from Bookslut and enjoyed this weekend thoroughly.
3. Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son by Sholem Aleichem
4. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
5. Essential Pleasures: poetry edited by Robert Pinsky
6. Yiddish Lands: a memoir by David G. Roskies
7. Dancing in the Dark: a cultural history of the great depression by Morris Dickstein
8. B: a novel by Jonathan Baumbach
9. Hovering at a Low Altitude: the collected poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
10. American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent
11. Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish: the HeeB storytelling collection
12. Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question by Eliza Slavet
13. A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs by David Lehman
14. The Jewish Body by Melvin Konner

If you want to borrow any of these books, the answer is yes. Books I didn’t take but were popular include: The Accidental Zionist, How We Decide, You or Someone Like You, Save the Deli, In Cheap We Trust, and Yiddish Swear Words. I heard last year there were cookbooks.  Until next year, I will brainwash myself with poetry.

Thanks JBC and everyone who organized and ran this event. Btw,

The Mission of the Jewish Book Council

is to:

Promote the reading, writing
and publishing of quality
Jewish content books.

Serve as the continental center
for information about the North American
Jewish literary scene.

Serve as the coordinating body
of Jewish literary activity in
North America.

Vote Jewish!!!

hallo @ nyc jews reading haaretz.com

What are the stakes? IDK, but certainly at the very least Jerusalem and New York will run out of Jews and we will never get to rebuild the Second Temple and when Moshiach Schneerson tries to come back he won’t be able to get into Williamsburg or Israel and when we try to roll our bones to Yerushalayim all the rich people who’ve jumped off bridges into the East River because of the Financial Crisis (which will surely increase in severity) will encumber us.

:’(

Shabbat this Week

wrong date.

“Yiddishyiddishyiddishyiddish Yid?”

Today, after dropping off my cousin’s car with Hassan in Sunset Park, and after a series of greener pastures-related poor train decisions, I got off the J/M/Z at Marcy rather than Myrtle because I wanted to walk through South Williamsburg to see what it’s like there on this holiest of Jewish days. I wondered if the holiness would be visible, if I would behold the power of traditions and religious fervor, manifest in raiment, physiognomy, population density, architecture.

Here are some of my observations:

- There seem to be fewer men on the street, but not fewer women, and possibly more groups of unattended children

- Everyone dresses up, but there is either a limited array of dresses available at the store or members of sects tend to dress up in the same fashion – several young girls from different families wore the same dresses, and pairs of women would match each other but not necessarily the pair across the street

- The women seemed unaffected by fasting and continued to walk briskly and engage in animated conversation

Tish, Purim, 5766

- Children are permitted to play on Yom Kippur — a group of boys sat around a table inside a sukkah like members of the Sanhedrin, or perhaps like their fathers attending a tish

- People do not seem especially somber and in fact seem relaxed and happy (other than the  somewhat crazy-looking Hasidic man smoking a cigarette while pacing at the Marcy stop)

As I was leaving the neighborhood and heading for the Bushwick Public Library, I turned toward a particularly active corner, onto which a stream of men was emptying from what must have been a basement synagogue. When I reached the corner, a girl (with dry skin on her cheek right where I get it), pulling a smaller girl along with her, approached me and said what I thought was, “It is a holiday; we need someone to shadow the light.” Assuming my own ignorance of a Yom Kippur tradition, I asked of her to where she needed me to cast a shadow, and she pointed down the street. As I nodded in agreement, struggling to find my shadow in the midday sun, her grandmother approached and said to her something in Yiddish that culminated in “Yid?” Grandma then turned to me, smiled, asked if I’m Jewish and then explained, after I answered, that though they needed someone to “shut off” the light, a Jew couldn’t be asked to do it.

On my way down the street I passed what I assume to be the house in question, in whose window hung a brightly lit golden chandelier.

Synagogue Employees

From Hayyim Schauss’ “The Jewish Festivals” description of the Temple of Herod:

“The other gates are covered with gold plates, but the great eastern gate has no covering, for it is made of costly bronze, that shines even brighter than gold. It is called ‘Nicanor’s Gate,’ after a rich Egyptian Jew who presented it to the Temple as a gift. The golden plates on the other gates are also a gift, from a rich Alexandrian Jew.

Nicanor’s gate is so large that when it is shut every evening twenty men are needed to push together the heavy doors and to shove the bolts and bars into the stone threshold. In all two hundred men are employed in the daily opening and shutting of the gates of the Temple” (page 128).

Reading this immediately brought to mind a hypothetical conversation circa ‘09 C.E. between a woman and her betrothed who’s employed by the Temple as a Gate Closer.

“Joe, I don’t want to go to services alone, again. It’s so boring.”
“I know, honey. I wish I could go with you. I got to go or  I’m going to be late. Hopefully I can get out early, but I probably can’t.  If I get overtime I’ll buy you something special.”

“For the dinner party we’re having for Sukkot? I need a salad bowl!”

A similar conversation occurs between me and Misha, who works as a sound engineer at a big Manhattan synagogue, whose gates were donated by rich Jews, and especially needs extra workers on the Days of Awe.

*Addendum: Misha says that some synagogues do make efforts to employ a non-Jewish crew.

Deborah Eisenberg becomes newest genius

Deborah Eisenberg just got the MacArthur Genius Award. I saw her once at Wash U read “Some Other, Better Otto” wearing knee high high-heeled boots. She is funny and sly, like Mary Gaitskill but louder and full of cynical laughs.

Afterward I asked a question that she completely ignored about the internet’s effect on her writing. At the end of the hour someone asked about her writing habits and she said mostly it happens in bed and then added, “That can’t be the last thing I say. Someone ask another question.”

I also saw her introduce Zadie Smith and Gary Shteyngart read from Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which made me read the book and her introduction to it (Elise has my copy) which says something to the effect of: future generations are going to wonder about the hearts and souls of those living in this decadent age of immorality, the Bush years, the willfully ignorant years…the way we look back at Nazi Germany and look for an honest account of life on the ground among the non-victims, aka the people that ought to have taken responsibility. She was at the event with her partner, Wallace Shawn, the writer/actor best known as the lisping bepoisoned wiseacre in The Princess Bride.

In honor of her award and to cheer myself I spent some time reading “Twilight of the Superheroes” and illegally dozing in the awesome basement reading room of the Mulberry Street NYPL.

Below are some choice quotations (that remind me of my friends who are Jewish, Elise and Sean):

“But wait. Long ago, panic had sent his grandparents and parents scurrying from murderous Europe, with its death camps and pogroms, to the safe harbor of New York. Panic had kept them going as far as the Midwest, where grueling labor enabled them and eventually their children to lead blessedly ordinary lives. And sooner or later, Nathaniel’s pounding heart was telling him, that same sure-footed guide, panic, would help him retrace his family’s steps all the way back to Manhattan.”

“Nathaniel would wait, an acid pity weakening his bones, while his parents debated worriedly over their choices, as if nobody ever had before or would ever have again the opportunity to eat ice cream.”

Lake Tahoe vs. The Kinneret (Sea of Galilee, Lake Gennesaret)

“The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe by a good deal—it is just about two-thirds as large. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a  rainbow. The dim waters of this pool cannot suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, cannot suggest the grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and smaller as they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far upward, where they join the everlasting snows*. Silence and solitude brood over Tahoe; and silence and solitude brood also over this lake of Gennesaret. But the solitude of the one is as cheerful and fascinating as the solitude of the other is dismal and repellent.” – Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

*alternately, “where the express quad chairlifts roam”

Who buys and sells Nazi war memorabilia?

(other than HRW senior military analyst Marc Garlasco, I mean)

While I refuse to assume that an interest in Nazi memorabilia explains/means anything about Garlasco’s politics, I am curious to know what might be the ideological breakdown of sellers on these sites. It sounds like at least some of those commenting are Nazi sympathizers, and if the ratio is higher than on other sites (like eBay, which doesn’t seem to allow the sale even of boardgames about WWII that feature the swastika as the symbol of the player’s Nazi enemies), buying a nice SS jacket or one of Hitler’s bones might be likened to buying blood diamonds, or, like, cocaine, and would therefore not be very responsible.

Just like your grandaddy's?

Lispector lines from The Stream of Life

“Parambolic–whatever that word means. Parambolic that I am. I can’t sum myself up because it’s impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I’m a chair and two apples. And I don’t add up.” – 60, The Stream of Life, Clarice Lispector

“To such an extent is death only a future event that there are those who can’t stand it and commit suicide. It’s as if life said the following: and there simply wasn’t any following. Only the colon, waiting. We keep this secret in muteness to hide the fact that every instant is fatal. The object-chair interests me. I love objects insofar as they do not love me.” – 70