"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