A couple of weeks ago radio shock-jock Howard Stern had me in stitches as
he made fun of rituals he saw at the Bas Mitzvah for an old friend's
daughter, especially a bit about the "tfillin" his friend wore. Tfillin are
leather straps that men--and only men--braid around their arms in a
carefully prescribed manner and which contain a tiny box at one end. In
this box is miniaturized Jewish scripture. When you are wearing tfillin,
you have to be very careful not to break any rules that are then in force.
The Talmud prescribes:
"On his head - And if he bears a burden on his arm at the place of the
tfillin, which are probably covered and there is no disgrace, then he does
not have to remove the hand-tfillin unless the burden is four kabs, as then
the tfillin are probably being crushed by this."
I wore tfillin briefly. I had just completed my Bar Mitzvah, a rite of
passage for Jewish boys when they reach the age of 13--just as the Bas
Mitzvah serves for girls. The following week my father instructed me to
start going to morning services, "Minyans," where I could now function as a
full-fledged Jewish man. So dutifully I went to morning services for a
week, where the old-timers tutored me in the art of putting tfillin on
properly. Words could not describe the feeling of alienation and
embarrassment I felt as the thongs were wrapped around my arm. Not only
would I now have to get up an hour earlier, I would have to take part in an
absolutely bizarre ritual. I had thought that once I got Bar Mitzvahed that
I could put the dreary synagogue world behind me, just as graduation would
finally end the torture of high school.
So I spoke up to my parents. I refused to go to these morning services and
that was that. In short order, I stopped going to synagogue altogether and
felt totally liberated. My only goal was to be fully assimilated into
American society. The idea of speaking Hebrew or Yiddish and taking part in
these esoteric rituals was disgusting. I read Philip Roth's "Goodbye
Columbus" and identified strongly with all the male characters roughly my
age who were struggling to cut loose from the Eastern European Jewish
identity their parents had brought with them to America.
This is generally the way I have felt for most of my adult life. I do make
certain exceptions. On Saturday night when I lay in bed reading some
Marxist journal or another, I often turn on WMCA, the all religious talk
radio station. I enjoy it for the raw, unfashionable quality of the
conversation, so much in contrast to the bland, commercial junk on the rest
of the radio band or, even worse, TV. On Saturday night, WMCA has all
Jewish programming. I enjoy in particular "Tonya," which consists of a
Chasidic Rabbi commenting in a peculiar mixture of Yiddish speech and song
on obscure passages of the Talmud. I don't understand a word he is saying,
but the sound of his voice--so remote and so antique--enchants me. I also
listen to "Mosiach is in the Air," in which Schmuel Butman finds all sorts
of evidence in numerology to support the immanent coming of the Messiah. I
often wonder if Louis Farrakhan got his inspirations from listening to Butman.
For some reason I don't fully understand, interest in Jewish culture has
been exploding lately. A lot of it is centered at the Knitting Factory in
NY, a famous night club where avant-garde musicians are featured. Jazz
Saxophonist John Zorn has pioneered much of this with his quartet Masada,
which synthesizes Hebrew folk melodies with the harmonic concepts of
Ornette Coleman. Zorn's group often performs with like-minded artists under
the general rubric Radical Jewish Culture. His web page www.tzadik.com has
interesting information on the movement's CD's.
The Knitting Factory also recently initiated a new series of CD's devoted
to this concept. (www.knittingfactory.com) It is called the Jewish
Alternative Movement (JAM). An inaugural CD anthology is titled "A guide
for the perplexed," which contains musical performances by groups like the
Hasidic New Wave ("Men Trinkt Mashke" -- People Drink Whiskey) and a
reading by left-wing performance artist Judith Sloan. In "Denial of the
Fittest." Sloan describes her training as an actor, which involved getting
rid of her Jewish speech inflection. She observes that "Did you ever notice
that actors sound like they come from nowhere?"
Last night the Knitting Factory had a "All Jewish House Party" to kick off
the new CD series. Sloan was there and so was Hasidic New Wave. In
addition, there was a showing of the work of young Jewish film-makers, most
of whom were NYU students. There was one work-in-progress called "Divan"
that has the makings of a masterpiece.
"Divan" is the story of the efforts of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn to
transport a celebrated sofa from Hungary to their neighborhood. The
ornately decorated sofa was used by generations of famous rabbis who
visited the small Jewish town prior to the WWII genocide. The film director
is Pearl Gluck, an NYU student who once was part of the Hasidic group. The
film is not only about the search for a sofa that symbolizes Jewish
identity, it is also about her own grappling with her connections to the
religion she found as confining as I did.
The film takes her to Hungary, where she has been sent to track down the
sofa. She meets up with her relatives, including an older aunt who
abandoned the Hasidic faith in her youth to become a Communist. She is
still a member of the party. The family sits around in the living-room
discussing politics and religion with their American guest. The Communist
says, "There was no anti-Semitism in Hungary." Her son jibes, "Well, of
course, there was no Semitism either."
Pearl Gluck eventually makes her way to the tiny village where the sofa is
kept. The most moving part of the film is her conversation with an older
man, who is the caretaker for the sofa and many other religious relics from
the pre-WWII heyday of the largely Jewish community. He takes her on a tour
of the buildings where Jewish services were held and points out where
dinners were held and where visiting rabbis spoke. He tearfully remarks
that all the people who lived here were murdered, except for a few
survivors like him. He says that it was like wheat being threshed, and
there were a few stalks left like him. It is clear from his discussion with
Pearl that the sofa will remain in Hungary, where it has a connection to
the spiritual past.
On March first, I attended a conference "In Gerangl--In Struggle, Activist
Legacies of the Bund." It was sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research in NY, which was one of the backers of Gluck's film. The
co-sponsors were Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and the Jewish Labor
Bund.
One of the speakers was Paul Buhle, who I had been exchanging email with
for a couple of years, ever since he invited me to write an entry on the
Internet for the new edition of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. We
discovered that we had many political and cultural affinities and it would
be the first time we'd be meeting in person. He was introducing a panel on
"The Bundist Legacy and Contemporary Activism." His remarks dealt with the
role of left-wing Jews in popular culture, one of my favorite topics.
The highlight of the conference, however, was a speech by Motl Zelmanowicz,
a veteran of the Jewish Labor Bund who recounted the struggle against
fascism in the 1930s. He spoke in a stentorian, powerful Yiddish voice and
used the dramatic gestures of the older generation of Trotskyists I had
first encountered in the 1960s. The socialist and labor movements of the
1930s were much more theatrical than they are today.
He was followed later in the day by Abraham Brumberg, an important
historian and political scientist, who had belonged to the Bund youth
group. Brumberg put the Bund into political and historical context. As many
of you are probably familiar with, the Bund and Lenin clashed on their
rights to political autonomy. The Polish and Russian Jews used their status
as an oppressed nationality as an argument to maintain a separate
organization from the Russian Social Democracy, namely the Bund.
This had earned them the reputation of being "bad guys" in official
Marxist-Leninist historiography. As the older I get, the more I realize
that this historiography is full of holes and/or beans. In the particular
case of the Bund, it must be understood that they maintained a militant,
class struggle outlook through their entire history, until the genocide
brought the group to an end. They identified with the "Second and a half
International," as Trotsky derided it. This was international organization
of socialist groups that rejected the reformism of the Second International
but viewed the Comintern as the enemy of independent revolutionary thought.
History judges them to be correct, of course.
The whole question of genocide and cultural survival has been on mind in a
totally different context in recent months as I do my research on the
plight of the American Indian. Like the Jew, the Indian was the victim of
genocide. In the meeting I was to chair for Ward Churchill the other week,
the topic was his new book "A Little Matter of Genocide," which addresses
in one chapter the analogies between the genocide against the Jews and the
American Indian.
I try to imagine what it would be like to be an American Indian today,
where many of my people--the survivors of an American holocaust--were
either unemployed, undereducated, sick or addicted to alcohol or drugs. In
addition to the economic suffering, you are confronted by the slow, steady
erosion of your culture. The insidious television works against the
preservation of Indian languages. The Blackfeet people, for example, face
the extinction of the Pikuni language, which had been spoken for 30,000 years.
I would fight for the economic and cultural survival of my people. There is
also no question that my strong atheistic leanings would come second-place
to the need to preserve the religious traditions as well. All of these
institutions work together to help maintain a national identity.
A similar drive no doubt explains the Zionist enterprise. It is tragic that
such a campaign for economic and cultural survival took place at the
expense of another oppressed nationality. The Jews would have been much
better off after WWII if their struggle for national emancipation had
targeted the German soil instead of the Arab land. If the Zionists had
announced that their goal was to turn Saxony into a homeland for the
Jews--or even Texas or Pennsylvania--then the struggle would have had a
progressive rather than a reactionary dimension.
At the very least, when you approach the struggle of the American Indian
from this vantage-point, their militancy is much better understood. Can you
imagine what you would feel like as a Jew in Germany in the early 1950s if
the football teams adopted Jews as their mascot? What if you had a team
called the Hamburg Jewboys and the symbol was a beak-nosed Jew?
Perhaps the recent awakening in Jewish culture and the left-wing politics
of previous generations will reach a whole new generation of Jews. The
Israeli state has long ceased to act as a pole of attraction. It is high
time that Jews understood that their interests are with people like the
Palestinians and the Blackfeet, rather than the imperialists who fostered
the creation of exclusionary Israel. This would be a return to the genuine
traditions of the Jewish people.
Louis Proyect
