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Katamon Singles in the Mist, the Counter to Today’s Hook-Up Culture

In Jewish Culture, Judaism and Society, Spring 2012 on July 18, 2012 at 8:21 pm

By Jennine Grasso

Srugim may seem like a strange name for a television show. However, those of us lucky enough to be familiar with the program know that it’s more than the Hebrew word for “knitted.” It’s an Israeli television series about the dating scene in Jerusalem in the Katamon “swamp,” an area full of Orthodox singles seemingly left out from the family-centric culture of observant Judaism. The cast of characters include archetypal women: the hopeless romantic Yifat, the almost-reformist Hodaya, and the feminist Reut. The men are Nati, the roguish bachelor, and Amir, the responsible divorcee. As they’re all pushing thirty, these characters go on an endless number of dates either arranged online, planned by friends, or or through speed dating sessions all with the goal of finding “The One.” Think the Jewish version of Friends, with more existential quandaries. The show documents the difficulties of being single and Orthodox, supplemented with humorous pop culture references that are relevant even in America. Srugim episodes parody the drama of reality television shows, such as The Bachelorette, and bring common phrases like “Soup Nazi” into their conversations in Hebrew. The core connection between men and women occurs during Shabbat, a time when both sexes can come together and celebrate another week’s day of rest.

The series’ focus on Orthodox Jewish culture isn’t its only engaging aspect. Its emphasis on the individual connection and respect between two people in any relationship—long or short-term—is very refreshing. The show emphasizes an alternative lifestyle. Nowadays, especially in college, there is more leeway with the terms of commitment in the dating scene. Many relationships are founded more on mutual convenience than mutual connection. The real issue, however, is not the institution or the people themselves, but rather the influence of the hook-up culture. Our cavalier attitudes toward intimate relationships permeate into many aspects of our lives. They can be traced into our dances, popular song lyrics, even our insults. The key problem with hook-up culture is not the sexual freedom it encourages, but instead the demeaning image of women and men as sexual objects that it promotes. Despite the fact that the cast may seem foreign to us, the show speaks to a secular American audience because of its modern and realistic portrayals of men and women struggling with the same desires for individual affection.

By Savyonne Steindler

True, the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle is a little extreme for our secular sensibilities. After all, the practice of shomer negiya, which many of the characters live by, doesn’t allow men and women to touch each other at all. However, respect of one’s partner is essential to a relationship, considering the ultimate goal is marriage. As college students, not all of us immediately aspire to such a commitment, but we can still value the series for striving to show relationships based on personal rather than physical connections. This series portrays the battles between physical desire and religious peace of mind in different ways, primarily through the difficulty of defining one’s personal identity within Orthodox Judaism.

Hodaya, a rabbi’s daughter rebelling against her religious upbringing, embodies this internal struggle. In one episode, she pretends to be married and goes to the mikveh, or ritual bath, to purify herself before sleeping with her boyfriend. However, after her purification, she can’t bring herself to follow through with her decision. The conflict between her feelings of responsibility to G-d and her own desire for sexual freedom impede her. Yifat, Hodaya’s roommate, has to determine how far she wants to go with the no-touching barrier, as it limits her dating options to only Orthodox men who follow similar practices. Nati, Amir’s friend, has a shocking realization when one of his Orthodox friends passes away, as it makes him aware of the possibility of dying a virgin. Even Amir, the responsible character, feels guilty because he sleeps with his ex-wife to make up for the lack of affection in his life as a bachelor. The show emphasizes the subjectivity of boundaries in this struggle, both in religion and in dating. Individual choice counteracts the pressure to conform to strictly religious lifestyles. On the other end of the spectrum, the power derived from resiting hook-up culture’s influence comes not only from a refusal to participate in it, but from a recognition of the way it features in our lives.

By Karin Gold

Although we may not be able to relate to the characters of Srugim on a religious level, they are similarly torn between cultural pressure and what they determine to be right. In both secular American and Orthodox Jewish contexts, the need for human affection is key. The cast of characters are knitted together with ties that are stronger than their Orthodox Jewish and single lifestyles: their common need for the most fundamental of our five senses, the sense of touch. The show acknowledges this desire by centering on the struggle between faith and sexuality. Srugim portrays neither aspect as exclusively “right.” Instead, it advocates the method of combining both in order to find personal happiness. The people with the most mature personalities on the show, Amir, Hodaya, and Yifat, are conscious of the influences of others in relation to their religion. Nati and Reut, on the other hand, still struggle to realize their own feelings and differentiate their opinions from the people around them.

Srugim’s characters’ honest perseverance in their struggles with their cultural norms can also teach us about defining norms in our own lives. Isn’t it time we allowed ourselves some more leeway in our definition of the “right” relationship? Before the countercultural revolution of the sixties, people were condemned for being too free in their sexuality. In our supposedly open-minded generation, we still have the same prejudices against those with opposing beliefs, but now they are directed towards those with more conservative dating practices. Let’s truly realize the power of our tolerance and accept those we disagree with. Forgo the Top 20 songs for one night, and break out the soup crackers and gefilte fish to see if we can really change the world with a hilarious Israeli television show. It’s definitely worth a shot.

View of Tel-Aviv

Published on page 44 of the Spring 2012 issue of Leviathan.

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Finding My Religion: Matthew’s Story

In Jewish Culture, Judaism and Society, Spring 2012 on July 18, 2012 at 7:42 pm

By Aaron Giannini

“Cover your eyes this time, then say it.” At this point, not only had I messed up the ritual of wrapping myself in tefillin, I apparently hadn’t even recited the shema correctly. I closed my eyes, put my hand in front of my face, and waited for further instruction. “The word is shema: listen. It’s not just about speaking the words; it’s about hearing them. Your sight gives you a limited window into what’s really happening in the world around you. Close your eyes and hear, allow yourself to be present, then say the words when you’re ready.” When I ultimately recited the prayer, I wasn’t sure to whom I was speaking. To myself? To God? Was I just humoring a friend, or was I wrapping myself in leather and saying the ancient words in an attempt to share even a fraction of a religious experience with him?

As an atheist and a skeptic, my reaction to Matthew’s newfound religious views was one of confusion and doubt. The biblical conception of a “God of the Desert” is not an intuitive idea; it must be taught, internalized, and reinforced over time in order to become personally meaningful. At the time, I simply could not understand what could motivate an educated, critical person to accept the traditional Orthodox views of God and the Bible without having grown up in an Orthodox community. It seemed that Matthew had gone on a self-reflective journey, searching for morality and truth in the world, and the Tanakh gave him answers. As someone who feels that Judaism has evolved to become more grounded in culture and genealogical history than in the factual truth of the Bible, I felt the need to pick his brain.

Matthew was raised in a progressive Jewish household, attending Sunday school throughout adolescence and, like many Reform Jews, receiving a parentally motivated Bar Mitzvah at the age of 13. He joined a Jewish youth group in high school not for religious reasons, but for social ones. It was a fraternity of sorts, complete with morally questionable initiations, a code of ethics to swear by, and fierce comradery between its members. While Matthew believed that spirituality existed in the world, he felt no religious connection to Judaism other than the sense of community it instilled in him. He believed the only thing that tied him to his Jewish brethren was the fact that his parents raised him to know the prayers, the songs, and the rituals. Towards the end of high school, however, his perception of Judaism took a dramatic turn. A falling out between himself and his Jewish peers came to redefine the course of his spiritual journey. After a prank gone wrong, in a single night his relationship with his youth group became sour, turning him off from “social Judaism.” Unbeknownst to him, this fallout would mark the beginning of his search for a true spiritual community.

While his experience with his own small Jewish community ended with a feeling of betrayal, he retained his belief in the spirituality inherent in the world. Matthew had always felt that something was “out there,” something omnipotent and beyond his comprehension. If only he could find a way to connect to it, he believed his life could take on new meaning. In college, he explored the Tao Te Ching, and also researched how Islam and Christianity differ from Judaism.  He was not convinced by the Christian idea of transubstantiation, and also found little value in the rigidity of Islam and the abstractness of Taoism. His frustration with the irrationality and perversion of other religions inspired him to take a deeper look into Judaism. He dove into Jewish canonical texts, studying the traditions of his forefathers and the reasoning behind them. His intensified engagement with religion motivated him to go to Israel one summer, an experience that changed his outlook on life and Judaism.

In Israel, Matthew enrolled in a study group that focused on how the Tanakh and its corresponding interpretive literature constitute the forefront of Jewish consciousness. He learned biblical stories and traditional explanations for how they retain their relevance in Jewish daily life. He studied Jewish history, seeing firsthand the place where our ancestors built the temples and passed on the story of our lineage. Having been burned by one Jewish organization in the past, Matthew felt the need to be critical during his stay in the Promised Land. He didn’t break down in divine bliss in front of the Western Wall, but instead studied its significance in the Jewish world and appreciated it all the same. Unlike many visiting Jews, he didn’t hastily begin wearing tzitzit or a yarmulke upon his arrival into a yeshiva environment. He researched what they mean and why they are important aspects of Jewish identity, and only then did he feel comfortable using them as an expression of his connection to the divine. Slowly, Matthew’s experiences in the land of Israel and his newfound religious knowledge gave him a context in which he could understand the traditional Jewish conception of God. The customs that define Orthodox Judaism started to make sense to him. He found himself personally affected by the spirituality and history woven into the words of the Tanakh.

Savyonne Steindler

What I found most fascinating about Matthew’s recent Orthodoxy was the fact that it was not inspired by a single spark of revelation. It was already clear to him that spirituality existed in the world, but his decision to study Torah and live by its teachings arose from research and careful analysis. The more he read, the more he learned, and the more he grew attached to the halakhic lifestyle. He began to attribute the existence of life on Earth to God, drawing on the fact that such a phenomenon is a staggering statistical anomaly. According to Matthew, so too is the survival of the Jewish people, now a flourishing nation despite an exile that lasted for thousands of years—further proof of the divinity of our lineage.

For Matthew, believing in God comes naturally. The world is a spiritual place, and one doesn’t need to be religiously devout to deduce that there are greater forces at play in life than can be understood by our narrow perception of reality. The historical significance of his own religious bloodline, the ancient traditions, and the inspiring words of the Hebrew Bible provide Matthew with a language to speak about the spiritual aspects of life.

Orthodoxy also gives him a community in which he can thrive and discuss God and Jewish identity in terms familiar to all within it.

While belief in the divinity of the world may be intuitive for Matthew, the practice of maintaining his Orthodox lifestyle is a daily struggle. The act of recognizing the holy nature of all aspects of life is essential to what makes him Jewish. He describes the process of blessing wine on shabbos as a symbol of what separates people from animals:

We recognize that the ‘fruit of the vine’ (boray p’rei hagafen) that created the wine, in the end, came from God… We pause, recognize what an honor it is to eat and drink the creations that God made in this world, and we thank God for giving us the knowledge to do this, and even more so, to be here today to participate in this ancient tradition that goes back scores of generations to the time of Moses. This is just a small example of the many traditions and commandments we perform as Jews on a daily basis. Every time we bless God before a meal, wear a talit, wrap tefillin, or read the Torah, we are suppressing our animalistic, barbaric nature, and making sure the intentions of our actions come from a pure source.

For Matthew, this commitment to seeking out spirituality in all aspects of life represents a metaphysical elevation into the realm of God. It can be exhausting, especially for a newcomer, but ultimately he finds that it gives his life depth and meaning in ways that transcend the natural world.

Matthew is a critical and passionate person. While I may not agree with the religious conclusions he drew from his spiritual journey, I have come to respect them as part of our greater culture as Jews. He shares a similar outlook on my atheism: “The name ‘Israel’ means ‘to struggle with God,’ which I do as a baal teshuva and which Aaron does as a skeptic…. After all, if God wanted everyone to believe in him, what would be the purpose of God?” His beliefs, like my own, represent the culmination of our millennia-old history. I am happy to say, there is room for both of us under the umbrella of Jewish identity.

Published on page 31 of the Spring 2012 issue of Leviathan.

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On Religion as a Defense Against Psychological Weakness: Rethinking Stereotypes of Baalei Teshuvah

In Jewish Culture, Judaism and Society, Spring 2012 on July 18, 2012 at 7:19 pm

By Savyonne Steindler

The following is an excerpt from Savyonne’s senior thesis in anthropology: “Being a Baal Teshuvah: Religion and Secularism in the Lives of Newly Observant Jews in Washington Heights.” Her paper is grounded in two weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in Washington Heights, New York, one in August of 2011 and the second in December of 2011. Her ethnographic research draws upon 17 interviews with 11 baalei teshuvah (newly Orthodox Jews), participant-observation, and informal discussions. In her thesis, she first examines how religion and secularism are intertwined in the circumstances and tensions baalei teshuvah face, and then proceeds to analyze moments of intervention during which her informants disrupt common scholarly, secular ways of conceptualizing religious peoples. The excerpt below comes from this second part of the paper. She has changed the names of her informants to maintain their anonymity.

During my fieldwork in Washington Heights, I came to realize that some of my preconceived notions about baalei teshuvah, which I had learned both from books and casual conversations, did not resonate with my informants’ life stories. Instead, these assumptions seem to be stereotypes that many secular Jews and FFBs, Jews who are frum (religious) from birth, have internalized. During our interviews, I asked baalei teshuvah if they also felt that there are stereotypes about newly observant Jews and, if so, what are they? Leah Silver, a NYU graduate student in her mid twenties, replied with the following answer:

That baalei teshuvah had really wild and crazy lives before they became observant. People assume that I did drugs, that I slept around. I was the nerdiest child ever. I did none of those things, not to say that it negates anything if I had, but they were all so shocked when they found out how boring my life was pre-religion. They think that they’re ignorant, overenthusiastic, that they became religious to deal with something, like some trauma, to cover something up, like something that relates to having a really wild life or whatever.

Approximately half of the baalei teshuvah I interviewed gave similar responses to my question. These stereotypes of the wildness and instability of the early lives of baalei teshuvah are not wholly representative of the experiences of my informants. Instead, they fit within a larger secular explanation for religion as a defense against some kind of psychological weakness.

The argument that religion is a tool used, either universally or by particular individuals, as a defense against psychological vulnerability is widespread in academic approaches to religion. Talal Asad calls this explanation the Marxist-inspired idea of religion as a “psychological response to an emotional experience” (1986: 12). In a later piece, he contextualizes this view of religion as beginning with Enlightenment ideas that “make it possible to think of religion as a more primitive, a less adult mode of coming to terms with the human condition” (1993: 46). This view of religion extends past Marx and the Enlightenment and is apparent in some anthropological approaches to religion. Melford Spiro (1987), for example, draws on Weber and Freud to describe two psychological functions of religion. Consciously, religion gives meaning to and alleviates adult concerns with suffering. It also acts as a defense mechanism, allowing individuals to unconsciously redirect the potentially dangerous feelings they have towards their parents to the socially acceptable outlet of the “mythicoreligious world” (181-182). Thus, religion masks reality for an individual who is not psychologically equipped to handle it. This view of religion resonates with stereotypes about the pasts of baalei teshuvah, which can be broken into two parts, each indicative of psychological vulnerability: the family trauma of the baalei teshuvah, and the wild period of their early adulthood.

Above, Leah presents the belief that the baal teshuvah uses religion “to deal with something, like some trauma.” In her book on the virtues of modesty, author and baalat teshuvah Wendy Shalit (1999) discusses how this characterization manifested in her childhood, specifically regarding baalot teshuvah, newly observant women. Among her Reform Jewish family and friends, modestyniks (baalot teshuvah) were rumored to be abuseniks. Nonobservant Jews would whisper to one another when they saw a newly observant woman: “She is turning herself into the kind of woman her father could never touch” (5). Shalit felt the gap between this perception and lived experience when she looked at a picture of a happy, newly married religious couple. She compared religious women to the anorexic and bulimic women she met at college and began to feel that perhaps all modestyniks are not abuseniks. I similarly found the stereotype of family trauma in the early lives of baalei teshuvah to be not entirely accurate. Some of my informants did have troubled childhoods. Elliot Levin, a married lawyer in his late twenties, has a physically abusive father. Chava Shloss, a married mother of two, was raised by drug addicts. Both Chava and Leah lost a parent at an early age, and several informants told me their parents had difficult divorces. But if family trauma is the primary explanation for why baalei teshuvah become religious, then Daniel Greenburg, an undergraduate student at Yeshivah University, Abby Weintraub, another NYU graduate student in her mid-twenties, and Joseph Kramer, a man in his thirties who is trained in medicine, should never have become observant at all. Trauma did not characterize their early lives and they are still incredibly close with their families. Joseph even told me that his father is his best friend. As Dafna Stein, a recent college graduate, said to me, “There are people from stable, loving homes who become religious.”

Leah referred to the second aspect of the stereotype when she said, “People assume that I did drugs, that I slept around.” Joseph referenced a similar idea when he told me the following:

So this is one thing I hear from either nonreligious Jews or just non-Jews … when I explain that, ‘no, this isn’t what I was always like. I didn’t grow up this way. This is a decision I’ve made.’ The reaction is usually something like, ‘Oh well, you must have been bad. Or you must have been doing something really wrong to make you move in this direction,’ which I guess seems like sort of a logical thing to guess, but I really don’t think that’s the case for 99% of baalei teshuvah I know.

According to the assumptions Leah and Joseph describe, baalei teshuvah are people who love extremes; they have been at one extreme—using drugs, partying, having casual sex—and now they have decided to explore the other side of the spectrum and have become devout. Perhaps, in this vein of thought, baalei teshuvah’s supposedly traumatic childhoods first predisposed them to reckless behavior. Like Joseph, I did not find this description of baalei teshuvah at all accurate. In fact, several of my informants were

attracted to observance because they were the exact opposite of the wild person of the stereotype. Leah said she was “the nerdiest child ever” and has done none of the things her FFB friends assume she did. Dafna even left a public university after two months because she was so put off by the partying culture she found there. Furthermore, several of my informants—like Samuel Jacobson, Leah, and Daniel—started becoming observant in high school, before they had much time at all to live scandalous teenage years. The stereotype of the crazy early adulthoods of baalei teshuvah seems even less representative than the stereotype of family trauma.

Both aspects of the stereotype allude to a psychological instability that would invalidate the reasonableness of a baal teshuvah’s decision to become religious. The stereotype implies that if baalei teshuvah are damaged by something from their childhoods or due to reckless behavior, then their choices are not rational. Leah touched on this point when I asked her if she thought that the argument that baalei teshuvah tend to have early experiences of trauma was valid:

Suggestions like that have to be taken with a grain of salt because the underlying assumptions there are that if you weren’t messed up, you’d never do this. We can have a whole other discussion about patronizing attitudes towards religion in academic literature. But that being said, was there trauma in my teenage life? 100%. My mom died when I was nineteen. There were a lot of serious issues going on and religion was definitely part of that. It’s just a really touchy argument and you should be really careful with it because the underlying assumptions behind it are so offensive. Because the assumption is, normal people who don’t have any problems would never have done this and also, the idea is that if it is because of trauma, that somehow invalidates the experience, which I don’t think is necessarily true.

The assumption behind the stereotypes is that religion is abnormal and thus its presence must be explained. There is a similar foundation to Spiro’s view of religion. In justifying why he needs to develop such a nuanced description of the functions of religion, Spiro claims that other approaches “do not explain, for example, why religious doctrines persist even in the face of competing, and often compelling, counter-claims of fact or reason, nor why cognitive dissonance is resolved not by abandoning the doctrines, but rather by resting their truth in faith” (171). The driving axiom behind both the stereotypes about baalei teshuvah and Spiro’s theory is that religion does not belong in the modern world; it is not rational.

Among FFBs, these stereotypes may just speak to “a general fear, kind of xenophobic: we don’t want anyone who’s different, who’s not sort of blue blood,” as Dafna suggested to me. But among nonobservant Jews, these stereotypes may indicate anxieties with secularism, as they do not reflect the realities of experience. In her 2010 article about the conflicting discourses that arise in debates about the head scarf ban in France, Mayanthi Fernando asks: “Could it be, then, that the consternation about ostensible Muslim unfreedom in fact helps to sustain a secular fantasy of personal autonomy, deferring an underlying anxiety about the very interconnectedness of autonomy and authority that continues to haunt the Republic?” (30) Stereotypes about the pasts of baalei teshuvah may similarly reveal “an underlying anxiety” with secular claims to reality. Baalei teshuvah threaten secular conceptions of modernity; they choose religion in the age of reason. Academics and lay people alike attribute the apparent anomaly of intensified religiosity in the secular West to psychological weakness, instead of reevaluating their own beliefs about how religion relates to the categories of secularism and modernity.

Courtesy of Savyonne Steindler

References Cited:

Asad, Talal 1986 The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Washington DC: Georgetown Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Occasional Papers Series.

1993 Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Fernando, Mayanthi 2010 Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the

Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France. American Ethnologist 37(1):19-35. Shalit, Wendy

1999 A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. New York, NY: Touchstone. Spiro, Melford

1987 Collective Representations and Mental Representa tions in Religious Symbol Systems. In Culture and Human Nature. Benjamin Kilborne and L.L. Langness, eds. Pp 161-184. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Published on page 21 of the Spring 2012 issue of Leviathan.

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A Meditation on Muscular Judaism

In Jewish Culture, Judaism and Society, Spring 2012 on July 18, 2012 at 2:51 am

By Ephraim Margolin

The stereotype of Jews as being physically inferior has existed for centuries. The otherness of the Jews, their insistence on being a people who dwells alone [1], and their characteristic refusal to assimilate has engendered a long and storied history of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, much of this virulent anti-Semitism has perpetuated fallacious tropes, such as the existence of a “Jewish nose,” from as early as the 13th century. The advent of science helped legitimize physical anti-Semitism, which deemed Jews effeminate for their fast-style of talking, narrow chests, shorter arms, and flat feet [2].

Yet, the fin de siècle milieu of Eastern Europe, which gave birth to Theodore Herzl and modern Zionism, helped reimagine the Jewish people not as weak, nebbishy, and physically frail, but as healthy, strong, and able [3]. Max Nordau, a Zionist leader and social critic who was co-founder of the World Zionist Organization with Herzl, gave a speech at the 1898 World Zionist Congress in which he used the term muskel-Judenthum, muscular Judaism. He described a new type of Jew: one who is both intellectually and physically fit[4]. According to Nordau, “the victims of anti-Semitism suffered from their own disease, a condition he called Judenot, or Jewish distress. Life in the dirty ghetto had afflicted the Jews with effeminacy and nervousness.”[5]

“In the narrow Jewish streets,” he wrote, “our poor limbs forgot how to move joyfully; in the gloom of the sunless houses our eyes became accustomed to nervous blinking; out of fear of constant persecution the timbre of our voices was extinguished to an anxious whisper”[6]. While Nordau’s acceptance of Jewish stereotypes is incredibly disconcerting and his obsession with perfecting the body was unhealthy, muscular Judaism helped renew the idea that Jews could be whatever they wanted to be and that Zionism was the answer to the Ostjuden’s, Eastern European Jews’, ills.

Nordau’s muscular Judaism was a call for the regeneration of the Jewish people through the body. “We want to restore to the flabby Jewish body its lost tone, to make it vigorous and strong, nimble and powerful.”[7] He proclaimed that sport, which “will strengthen us in body and character,” was the panacea to the problems of European Jewry[8].

According to Todd Presner, professor of Jewish studies at UCLA, Nordau’s idea of muscular Judaism “was understood as a call for corporeal and spiritual regeneration” and that “National regeneration [of Zionism] would come through moral and physical rebirth”[9]. If only the Jews of Europe could defend themselves, no longer would they be pushed around. If only they had a homeland, as Nordau imagined. Nordau’s theory found a home with Hakoach Vienna. This sports club was founded in 1909 on Nordau’s ideals of what the modern Jew should be, and offered fencing, soccer, hockey, track and field, wrestling, and swimming for the roughly 180,000 Viennese Jews[10]. Hakoach, which in Hebrew means “The Strength,” was an unmistakable symbol of Jewish nationalism.

Fritz “Beda” Löhner and Ignaz Herman Körner founded the club and oversaw its growth after World War I. Despite Europe’s precarious financial situation at the time, the two benefactors added more sports to the club and built a stadium with a capacity of 28,500 people[11]. The sports club’s most successful team was its soccer team, which regularly competed in the Austrian first division. Hakoach won the league championship in 1925 and was one of the first teams to market itself globally. The team toured England and the United States unabashedly with the Star of David on its blue and white uniforms, drew thousands of Jewish fans, and became the first continental club to defeat an English team. Many of the team’s players also represented the Hungarian and Austrian teams in international competitions. Moreover, Hakoach Vienna’s success and Nordau’s theory were not limited to men. The women’s swim team also achieved astounding success, as documented by the 2004 movie Watermarks. The film tells the team’s story and focuses on Judith Haspel, a record-setting swimmer who refused to represent Austria in the 1936 Olympics because of Nazi Germany’s policy of anti-Semitism. The rise of Nazism and the desertion of many of the club’s star soccer players during the tour of America meant the end of Hakoach, but not the end of Nordau’s theory.

The modern state of Israel embodies Nordau’s concept of muskel-Judenthum. Nordau was a Zionist, and his ideal of the modern Jew was congruous with his vision for a Jewish homeland. Nordau’s image of the new Jews, strong in both mind and body, became an integral part of what it meant to be a member of the Halutzim, Zionist pioneers. The mores of the State of Israel fall directly under Nordau’s vision of Jews as a people able to adequately defend itself as a distinct entity, without the help of anyone else.

While Israel has been the paradigm of muskel-Judenthum, the stereotype of Jews as physically inferior still persists in America. The Jewish man is often portrayed (and portrays himself) in American popular culture as neurotic, nebbishy, and even sex-obsessed. From Alexander Portnoy to Woody Allen to Larry David, the archetype of the modern Jewish American male is far from the muscular and intelligent man Nordau imagined.

However, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association (the SPHA) comes to my mind immediately when I think about Jews in sports. Like Hakoach, the SPHA flaunted its Judaism openly with Hebrew lettering on its jerseys and also like Hakoach, the team was very successful. The SPHA was the dominant team in the American Basketball league, the premier league before the advent of the National Basketball Association. Even still, the stereotypes of Jews and Jewish athletes abounded, often giving rise to anti-Semitic explanations for their success. “The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background,” wrote Paul Gallico, Sports Editor of the New York Daily News and one of the premier sports writers of the 1930s, “is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.”[12]

Growing up in suburban America, completely infected by my father’s love of sports and reading two sports pages every morning, I had very few Jewish athletes to look up to. Like the joke in the movie Airplane! in which a passenger on the plane asks for some light reading and the flight attendant hands her a leaflet entitled “Famous Jewish Sports Legends,” I similarly owned a book called Famous Jewish Athletes (although I will admit that my book was a little thicker). Yet, while the book with its stories about Hank Greenberg, Sandy Kofaux, Dolph Schayes, Nat Holman, Sid Luckman, Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, and Benny Leonard managed to capture my imagination, it failed to hold it. Where were the great Jewish athletes of my day? Sure, we had Jordan Farmar, Omri Casspi, Ryan Braun, and Dmitry Salita, but Tamir Goodman never became the Jewish Jordan. None of them managed to be as successful as their earlier counterparts, or even as visible or self-identified with their Judaism as Tim Tebow, Jeremy Lin, and Manny Pacquiao are with their own form of muscular Christianity. And just as Franklin Foer likes to recount in his book, How Soccer Explains the World, I also loved to guess which professional athletes were members of the tribe. “Funny, Youkilis doesn’t sound Jewish. And Scheyer? Oh yeah, most definitely. Can Amar’e really be Jewish?”

Judaism is inextricably intertwined with sports for many American Jews. The proliferation of JCCs with basketball courts and sports as a means for assimilation has placed Judaism and the sporting world very close to each other. While Nordau’s theory of muscular Judaism is fraught with the potential for misuse and misappropriation, it can hopefully serve as inspiration for today’s Jews to succeed in athletics. By peering into the past feats of Jewish athletes and visualizing the future, we can create a vibrant new understanding of what it means to be a modern Jew and what athletics mean to (American) Jewry.

1. Num. 23:9

2. Hoedl, Klaus, Physical Characteristics of the Jews, (Central European University),  http://web.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/pdf/01_hoedl.pdf.

3. Stanislawski, Michael, Zionism and the Fin-de-siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky, (Berkeley: University of California Berkeley, 2001).

4. Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration, n.d.

5. Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin-de-siècle.

6. Foer, Franklin, How Soccer Explains the Jewish Question. How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, (New York: Harper Collins, 2004).

7. Foer, Soccer Explains Jewish Question 69.

8. Foer, Soccer Explains Jewish Question  69.

9. Presner, Muscular Judaism

10. “Hakoah Website,” http://www.hakoah.at/en/textedetail.asp?Block=1&ID=156.

11. “Hakoah Website,” http://www.hakoah.at/en/textedetail.asp?Block=1&ID=156.

12. “The First Basket: A Jewish Basketball Documentary,” http://www.thefirstbasket. com/story.html.

Published on page 15 of the Spring 2012 issue of Leviathan.

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Letter From the Editor

In Jewish Culture, Judaism and Society, Letters from the Editor, Winter 2012 Issue on July 18, 2012 at 2:09 am

After a hectic and controversial year, the Leviathan Staff thought it would be beneficial to revisit the subject of what it means to be Jewish in today’s world. This is in no way a simple question, as the diversity of the Jewish people speaks to the fluidity of our identity. Are we the culmination of our history, inheriting monotheism through our holy lineage? Or are we just fingerprints, products of our ever-changing environment, blips on the cosmic stage? Are we grounded in our past, or is it our obligation to live in the present and look towards the future?

We did not decide on our cover image this quarter without much deliberation. We hope the message is clear: while we may feel overwhelmed as little individuals within our greater communities, as Jews, as Americans, even as Santa Cruz students, we must remember we are greater than the sum of our parts. Some groups overlap, some clash, but if we allow ourselves to learn from a different perspective, what we find is so much more meaningful and surprising than if we choose to remain in uniform ignorance. Our steadfast refusal to admit fault and listen to those who disagree will only result in the division of our collective identity; we must remain conscious of our assumptions. Even when we disagree, there is still room for all of us within the Jewish community. If we maintain these basic humanist standards, we can become empowered by our differences, and the solidarity of our community will not waver. Through active listening and mutual acceptance, not only can we cultivate something beautiful, we can begin to truly know one another.

Our hope is to inspire you not only to accept Jewishness in all its forms, but to actively push your own boundaries. Grapple with ideas that make you uncomfortable. Play the devil’s advocate. Don’t allow yourself to fall victim to your own assumptions, and don’t just hear, but listen. If you disagree with the ideas in this journal, good! And if they make you question, or even make you think, we will have done our job. Enjoy!

 

Aaron Giannini

Editor in Cheif

 

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Dear Abbyraham

In Jewish Culture, Winter 2012 Issue on May 19, 2012 at 9:51 pm

Dear Abbyraham,

I have a diet-related issue. I’ve kept kosher all my life, but a temptation has been building within me that is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

I really want to try bacon. Real bacon, not turkey or soy or whatever other products companies use to imitate bacon. I figure it must be good if they go to such great lengths to make bacon substitutes. Plus, it smells awesome, and every restaurant I walk into has some bacon-enhanced food product (Bacon burgers! Bacon pizza! Bacon fruit salad!) that must be exponentially better than the original because, guess what, it’s got bacon in it. I’ve made mistakes in keeping kosher before; I ate a chile verde burrito from the Dining Hall, and actually enjoyed it until I realized it was pork. I don’t think I’m betraying my Judaism, as these were honest mistakes, albeit delicious ones.

So, here’s my question. If scientists could create a bacon substitute in a lab that tastes exactly like pork-derived bacon, without having to use any part of a pig, could I eat it and still keep kosher? And if recreating bacon without using pork is truly impossible, how bad would it be to indulge in a piece (or two)?

Sincerely,

Goy-Curious.

 

Dear Goy-Curious,

It sounds like you’ve stumbled upon an issue much greater than the bacon question. As a person whose Judaism is defined by the history and traditions of our ancestors, how does one come to terms with the culture and temptations of the modern world? Unlike typical leftist philosophy, conservative Judaism does not view progress as inherently good. The model exemplified by conservatism is that wisdom is correlated with age and tradition, not with evolution. Our ancestors lived in simpler times and created a system to develop a relationship with God that survived for thousands of years in spite of slavery, pogroms, and the Holocaust. Many Jews see the act of keeping with tradition as the only way to maintain their identity. In the Tanakh, God presents physical rules in the form of mitzvot to define one’s Judaism, as opposed to an ideological or metaphysical relationship with a deified ruler. This allows non-religious Judaism to be a cultural practice inherited through one’s genealogy, and not a matter of faith or even of choice. The traditions we honor come from our family and our community, reinforced by generations of fervent believers. Our history becomes part of our identity and as a result the legacy we leave behind serves as an example for Judaism in the future. So, the question remains: in breaking with kosher tradition, are you turning your back on Judaism itself?

One way to answer this question is to deconstruct the nature of this ancient tradition. The cultural significance of kashrut, much like the Jewish customs of circumcision and tefillin, has changed dramatically over the course of history. Starting out as a means of enforcing the humane treatment of animals and the sanitation of food before consumption, kosher laws were once essential for the very survival of the Jewish people. For example, the law to wash one’s hands before eating was developed before the idea of germs. People wouldn’t think twice before working in the dirt all day, using their hands to wipe themselves in the bathroom, and then coming to the dinner table to eat chicken or bread without utensils. This emphasis on hygiene is one reason for the overwhelming survival of (and resultant anti-Semitism towards) Jews during the era of the Bubonic plague. People actually thought the Jews created the plague because they somehow remained immune through their seemingly superstitious rituals of cleanliness and a restricted diet.

The commandments of kashrut are not arbitrary. They are reflexive of the time period during which they were written, then perpetuated through study of the Hebrew Bible. The law against the consumption of pork is much like the biblically mandated washing of one’s hands. As a “filthy” creature that eats and sleeps in its own excrement, the risk of contaminating the meat from a pig while preparing or keeping it was extremely high before the introduction of modern standards for hygiene. Hence, no bacon for the ancient Israelites, and none for you either.

If one were to look to the Bible for an answer to the lab-produced “fakin’ bacon” question, one might find that Judaism would frown upon substituting real pork with pork-esque products. A motif within the Bible is abstention not only from what God condemns as unkosher, but anything even associated with the subject of God’s condemnation. For example, God explicitly commands Man to never eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, a demand that Eve interprets to mean she can’t eat or even touch the fruit (Genesis 3:3).  Another example is kashrut’s ban on eating milk and meat together, which stems from God’s commandment to never, “boil a kid [baby goat] in his mother’s milk”

(Exodus 34:26). While the literal text seems to be a statement about the morality of cooking an animal in the milk of its own mother, thousands of years of tradition dictate that Jews should abstain from mixing meat and milk altogether. These human-enforced restrictions that expand on God’s laws serve as a statement about the perfection of God’s word and man’s infinite capacity to misinterpret and push the limits.

I can’t tell you whether or not eating bacon is a betrayal of Jewish history. That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. I can tell you that the meaning of many Jewish customs and laws come not explicitly from the Bible, but from the weight we attribute to them as a people. Judaism is a perfect example of how identity and culture are personal ideas, not defined by rules but by subjective interpretation and the consensus of one’s community. The way we conceptualize ourselves as Jews has constantly changed throughout history. It’s up to you to decide which laws remain a testament to your people, and which are just a product of a civilization that thrived over 2000 years ago. Understand the weight of your decision: the only person who can determine whether or not a BLT is blasphemous is you, but in doing so you also set a precedent for the future of Judaism in your own community. What do you want it to look like? Man, all this talk about bacon is making me hungry. Time to hit up Joe’s.

Published on page 56 of the Winter 2012 issue of Leviathan.

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Poetry

In Jewish Culture, Poetry, Winter 2012 Issue on May 19, 2012 at 5:23 am

By Robin Liepman

Freedom, we grasp for sweetness,

moments of uninhibited bliss,

overcome with this,

overwhelming cosmic kiss,

veil-lifted

trail shifted

paradigm-melting

undogmatic psycho-somatic mind-body motion flowing through our veins,

commotion in our brains, misconceiving the essence of our presence

we call it the present because it’s a gift, so I am grateful

we liberate our voices when we have both courage and opportunity

but suppress our truth all the time

knowing something is festering

something big is happening, but afraid of our own ability to launch into dangerous territory,

of our own power to create the change…

I grew up safe and wondered why this isn’t the case

for all of the human race

in a complacent community living in boxes but void of unity

I now know the need to end the greed

to supersede preexisting tyrannical pyramids of power

to set our voices free like songbirds flying from a collapsing ivory tower,

and discover what we can truly be

when we live without chains in harmony

Picture by Karin Gold

Published on page 23 of the Winter 2012 issue of Leviathan.

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Pearl of Gold, Force of Nature

In Israel, Jewish Culture, Judaism and Society, Personal Interest, Winter 2012 Issue on May 19, 2012 at 4:36 am

By Karin Gold

This past winter break, six days after my birthday, my grandmother passed away. It was December 18th. I got the call around eight in the morning and cried for a good two hours while my dad rushed to buy plane tickets to Israel so we could go to the funeral and say goodbye. We stayed in Israel for two weeks for the funeral and the shiva, the seven-day period of mourning, and flew back to the US by New Year’s Eve. During my short time in Israel, I shuffled through all her old pictures and journals and was reminded of her life, a story I have heard many times. Only now do I realize how much inspiration can be drawn from her journey and her strength.
My grandmother, Pnina Kelem Gold Noiman, was born on November 29th, 1929 in a small town in British-controlled Palestine (later to be known as Tel-Aviv, Israel). Growing up, she was always surrounded by family. Either alongside her twin brother, Shmulik, or her younger brother Yechezkel (Ezekiel), she was never alone, and she liked it that way. Sadly, at the age of twelve, Pnina suffered her first loss. Her mother passed away and she was left as the only woman in a house filled with three men. Due to the tragic reality of her mother’s death, she had to become the mother figure for both of her brothers and quickly assumed the role of housewife.

At the age of fifteen, Pnina made a decision for her family and the Jewish community. She ran away from home and joined what was called the Haganah (Protection). The Haganah was a group of Jewish teenagers and adults who wanted to be part of an army to protect their land from invasion before an organized Zionist military even existed. While she was part of this impromptu organization, her job was to deliver hand grenades and explosives to other units, a job punishable by death by the British forces. After serving for two years in the Haganah, she joined the Palmach, the underground army of the Yishuv (Jewish community), prior to the formation of the state of Israel. Coincidentally, the United Nations voted in favor of the notion to partition the British mandate of Palestine in order to make room to create an Independent Jewish State of Israel on her sixteenth birthday. However, just because the UN voted it into existence, did not mean that the notion was recognized right away. There were still battles to be fought and the very idea of a country to protect.
During her service in the Palmach, Pnina went to Jerusalem in the Orthodox Battalion in 1948. In Jerusalem, specifically in the village of Mekor Chaim, she was part of the protection agency and went undercover for six months. During these six months, no one heard from her or knew her whereabouts. In Jerusalem, one of her jobs was picking up the dead bodies on the street and organizing them for a proper burial. While serving, Pnina was one of the only three girls in the entire Palmach that participated in combat during the war in 1948 and even found herself in face-to-face combat against Sudanese soldiers.

Photos courtesy of the Gold family

Finally, at the end of the war, she came back to Tel-Aviv and was reunited with her family. In that same year, the first-ever Israeli newspaper came out and Pnina Kelem was on the cover. An extensive article was written about her explaining how she risked her life in order to help create the State of Israel and protect the newly formed country. After the war in 1948, Pnina went to work in the legal department of the IDF and met a man named Benjamin Gold. Now Benjamin, or Benny, as he liked being called, was seeing a lovely girl at the time and was unfortunately quite happy in that relationship. Pnina, as was characteristic of her, managed to worm her way into his life and became his confidant. She listened to all his newly relevant relationship problems with his girlfriend, and comforted him when he was upset. He inevitably fell in love with Pnina and, after breaking it off with his old girlfriend, they were married just two years later. In 1951 they had a son and by 1961 they had a total of three children: Yoram, the oldest, Orna, the middle child and only girl, and Ehud (Udy) the youngest. Benny was a construction worker and an architect and because of his job, the entire family (with exception to Yoram) relocated to the small country of Sierra Leone in Africa and lived there for a year while Benny finished building a water tower in the city of Freetown.
In 1967 they returned to Tel-Aviv to continue their lives in Israel. In 1968, when little Udy was only seven years old, Pnina faced another tragedy when Benny passed away in his sleep from a heart attack at the age of forty-two. This devastating and completely unforeseen event shifted the family dynamic in a very familiar way. Orna, like her mother before her, was forced to assume the role of housewife and disciplinarian while Pnina worked two jobs in order to provide for her family. Finally, after being alone for ten years, Pnina found Moishe Noiman, also a widower and one of the only men who could handle a woman with a fire like hers. He moved in with her after the youngest child was out of the house and they started their 32-year long relationship together. In those thirty-two years she continued to work and in that time became the grandmother of six. Each one of her children had two of their own and, continuing the trend of her family, the children’s genders alternated according to their birth order: boy, girl, boy, girl, etc.
In 2009, Pnina riskily had open-heart surgery at the age of eighty. Luckily she recovered, but because of the surgery, her memory was never the same. Doctors say that after enduring this type of physical trauma, it is possible to develop Alzheimer’s, a condition in which one loses their short-term memory abilities. Because of this degenerative disease, about a year later she barely remembered her own grandchildren and confused her children with one another. In the summer of 2010, right before my eldest cousin’s wedding, our family put her into a home that had an on-call staff to make sure she remembered to eat and continued to function normally. Although she was not happy to go to the home, after a while she did not remember when she had gotten there and simply adapted. Even at eighty-one years old, Pnina Gold was not an easy patient to have. When someone bothered her, she would deliver the following warning‚“If you don’t shut up in the next five minutes, I’m going to go over there and smack you myself!” Unbeknownst to the other loud patients and the staff, she was completely serious. She walked right over to whoever was making the ruckus and smacked them, either with her cane or with her bare hand, just so that they would be quiet. Luckily she was living in Israel, and the hospital staff was not only used to this type of behavior but also unmoved by her threats and her occasional misbehaving. Sometimes they would even send her into other patients’ rooms to keep them in check! It would be safe to say that even with her crazy antics, she displayed her chutzpah everywhere she went. Pnina was definitely what one might call “a woman with balls.”
Once in a while, Pnina had to receive blood transfusions because of her heart condition.

On December 18th, 2011,  she went in to the hospital for a routine transfusion. Things went wrong, as things often do. Her heart was very weak, and she was old. She passed away at the age of eighty-two, leaving behind Moishe, her three children, six grandchildren, and infinite friends. Her funeral was very beautiful. Many came, including the six grandchildren, four of whom lived outside of Israel. Family and friends laid her to rest in a respected cemetery in Israel with a beautiful tombstone picked out by her children.
This woman was my grandmother.

Photo provided by the Gold family

A woman of valor, integrity, kindness, and tremendous chutzpah. I grew up with her playing Rummikub, listening to her stories, and raiding the candy cupboard made only for the grandkids. I grew up getting knitted sweaters every year, the best food anyone could taste, and kisses that pierced my face with  her sharp nose and sharp chin at the same time. I will miss her more than words can describe and so will everyone who knew her. She was my grandmother, my friend, and my hero. Her name, Pnina, literally translates to Pearl. Pearl Gold. And that’s what she was, a pearl of gold. Rare, beautiful, and although malleable, also strong. So here’s to you Savta Pnina, Savta Pina, Savta Ptitim. You were the most interesting, inspiring, and heroic person I have ever met. Much love from the world below, I know you’ll give them hell up there.

Published on page 12 of the Winter 2012 issue of Leviathan.

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My Akedah

In Jewish Culture, Judaism and Society, Poetry, Winter 2012 Issue on May 19, 2012 at 4:36 am

By Savyonne Steindler

 You bound your children to the altar of God
Securing their limbs with tethers of hesitation
Full of piety, you gave a humble nod
And raised your shimmering blade of condemnation

There was no angel of heaven
To stay your eager hand
Your clear resolve would not weaken
You’d fulfill this demand

The Lord on high sinks perplexed
Into His bejeweled throne
Furrowing His brow, quite vexed
That you thought He would condone

On that day you offered up
The heirs to your guilt and grief
God sits too stunned to disrupt
As you pull knife from its sheath

Illustration by Savyonne Steindler

Click to Enlarge

Published on page 16 of the Winter 2012 issue of Leviathan.

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Borscht Belt Boogie

In Fall 1978 Issue, Jewish Culture on May 19, 2012 at 12:21 am

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