RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Just Being (Jewish)

Here's my latest R-C column, about Facebook (of all things....)

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Dec. 22, 2008

ROME (JTA) -- Not long ago, a Facebook friend of mine wrote that she had had a great time at a Shabbat dinner even if there had been "a wee bit much talk" of religion.

"Why all this American obsession with Jewish identity?" she wrote on her profile page on the social networking site. "Just BE!"

Her comment got me thinking.

Defining Jewish identity, refining Jewish identity, reclaiming Jewish identity, reinforcing Jewish identity -- these seem indeed to be constant concerns among many Jews, and not just in the United States.

"Jewish identity" has been the subject of endless conferences, surveys, books, articles, analyses and movies -- not to mention comedy routines. A Google search for "Jewish identity" gave me 573,000 matches!

What impact, I wondered, does this all have on who we are -- or at least on who we say we are?

I decided to carry out an unscientific study to find out -- a very unscientific study.

My methodology was simple: I used Facebook to see how Jews, or at least Jews I know, define themselves in terms of religious identity.

For those unfamiliar with Facebook, a site that has 120 million users around the world, its software permits you to connect with lists of "friends" who are in turn linked with friends' lists of their own.

Upon joining you create a profile, including information you want to make public about your age, sex, location, profession, personal views and even your sexual preference. You pick and choose what you want to post. Some people post only their name; others provide the whole megillah.

One of the choices is to state your "religious views." You can choose whether or not to post anything at all about your religious beliefs and, if you opt to post, you choose how you want to define yourself; there is a blank space you can fill in with whatever you want to say.

For my study, I simply checked how my Facebook friends I know to be Jewish chose to respond.

I have more than 200 Facebook friends, and as it turns out, the overwhelming majority are Jewish. They include several rabbis, a cantor, klezmer musicians, Jewish scholars and leaders or staff members of Jewish organizations, as well as friends and family who have nothing to do with the Jewish institutional world.

About half of them chose not to fill in the "religious views" blank. Some clearly wanted to keep their religious beliefs personal; for others it was unimportant to define them. For others still, filling in the blank would have been redundant.

"It would be stating the very obvious," Herschel Gluck, an Orthodox rabbi who for more than 20 years has done Jewish outreach work in East-Central Europe, told me in an e-mail.

All of his other postings on Facebook, he noted, including pictures that show him in a long beard and black hat, made his religious identity clear.

"EVERYTHING is naturally and unashamedly proudly Jewish!" he said.

Of my more than 80 Jewish Facebook friends who did choose to state their religious views, only a minority went the standard route. Barely a dozen wrote simply "Jewish," and only another dozen or so identified themselves as some traditional formulation of Reform, Conservative or Orthodox.

The others produced a cornucopia of qualifiers, inventions, political statements and imaginative shadings that demonstrated a vast and colorful spectrum encompassing the widest range of belief, observance and nuanced sense of self.

They include: Jewish atheist; Absolute atheist; I love being Jewish; The Golden Rule; Incoherent; That's between me and my imaginary friend; It's all good; Eclectic; Panoramic; Anything I Can Cling To; Ignostic; Resolutely Secularly Jewish; Neo-tribalist, neo-pagan of Zion; "Still haven't found it" Jewish; Spiritual Jewgayism; Whirling Dervish; Rationalist; Jewishjewishjewish; I can see a church from my window; Jewish but not obsessive; All; Post Pigeon-Holistic; Waiting for UFOs to Take Me to Hawaii.

Some of these are frivolous or funny; others tweak stereotypes. Most, though, even if outlandish, are at heart thoughtful expressions of complex contemporary IDs that go far beyond the usual definitions of who (or what) is a Jew.

One friend summed it all up by stating his religious views as follows: "A simple Jew (who am I kidding? Is there such a thing????).

I asked a few of my friends why they chose to define their views as they did. The klezmer musician and filmmaker Yale Strom, for example, called himself a "Yiddish pagan."

"Yiddish is the tongue I relate to most as in my second tongue," he said in an e-mail. "My pagan beliefs come from me not believing in a typical omnipotent god figure sitting on a throne but a more amorphous one as in 'Mother nature.' "

Strom said he felt connected to Mother Nature, "as did the Baal Shem Tov who lived in the forests, studied the plants and was a known herbalist among the Jews and non-Jews."

"I am not an atheist," he added, "because I know there is something greater than myself -- or there better be or we are all doomed -- in fact there has to be, why else be born, put into this life?"

Bruno Bitter, in his early 30s, coordinates a popular Jewish blog and online community in Budapest. He described his religious views as "opiate of the few."

Why that?

"Marx wrote that 'Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes,' " he told me. "This is often referred to as 'religion is the opiate of the masses' in English. But the Jewish religion is for no 'masses,' as we are a small minority."

In Philadelphia, meanwhile, Michael Seifert, a retired technical writer, described himself as "Secular Humanist Jewish."

"I call myself a secular humanist because I put my faith in civic, political, charitable, and educational institutions not affiliated with any religions and follow the teachings of the Western humanist tradition, which emphasizes the rights of man and the dignity of the individual," Seifert told me.

"Oh yes," he added. "I was born Jewish, so I have certain traditions and beliefs that come from my Jewish upbringing and education, as well as a birthright and familial alliances with Jewish people."

Two of Seifert's siblings are also Facebook friends of mine -- one, a musician, calls himself a "spiritualist," and the other, a professor, is "indifferent."

Members of my own extended family described themselves as "Jewish of the Reform and secular sort," or "Jewish-ish," or simply wrote "yes" after the words "religious views."

Myself? I chose not to say anything.

If anyone wants to know, they can ask.

Read Story on JTA site

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Living Like Anne Frank?

At the Golden Rose cafe, L'viv, Ukraine, October 2008. Photo (c) R. E. Gruber

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Living Like Anne Frank?

Nov. 19, 2008

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

ROME (JTA)—An online accommodation agency I came across recently used one of the most tasteless slogans I’ve ever seen to advertise a holiday rental in Amsterdam.

"Amsterdam Stay Apartments present the Anne Frank apartment," read a banner across the top of the apartment’s Web page. "Live like Anne Frank during your Amsterdam stay," it promised, "with the keys to your own roof attic apartment.

"Live like Anne Frank?"

What on earth could these people have been thinking? The apartment, said the Web page, occupies the top floor of a building "just opposite the Anne Frank house" in a "lively and picturesque area known for its restaurants, night life, specialty shops and cultural attractions."

A converted garret with a steeply sloping ceiling, it comes complete with high speed Internet, a private terrace and a full supply of bed linen. Though "ideal for two," it can sleep up to four.

"Live like Anne Frank?"

The Web page made her sound like some bohemian celebrity, not a teenage diarist who for two long years hid with her family and friends in a cramped "secret annex" until they were betrayed to the Germans and shipped off to Nazi death camps.

Anne died in Bergen Belsen at the age of 15. The Anne Frank House is now a museum that draws as many as a million visitors a year. The "secret annex" has been preserved, and exhibits tell the tragic story that unfolded in that hidden space.

"Live like Anne Frank?"

What does it mean, this transformation of World War II terror into a market-driven synonym for trendy charm? Is it just another form of "Shoah business?" Or has Anne’s name become a talisman so abstract and disembodied that it can be cut and pasted and used without reference to the totality of its meaning? You know—Anne Frank, a pretty young girl living tucked away in a cozy attic apartment, sweetly dreaming of movie stars and confiding in her diary.

"Live like Anne Frank?"

"Commercializing Holocaust suffering (or stoicism or heroism)—through ignorance or malice—cannot be condoned," my brother, Sam Gruber, the president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, wrote in an angry response to the apartment ad.

"Even when done in a way that is meant to celebrate the victim, such exploitation actually belittles her," he wrote. "Maybe the apartment owner figured if Broadway, Hollywood and publishers around the world could make money selling their version of Anne Frank, ‘Why not me, too?’ After all, the Anne Frank House is a big Amsterdam tourist destination. Why shouldn’t the neighbors cash in?"

Actually, Anne Frank does enjoy protection, and by the time you read this column, the "Anne Frank Apartment" Web page already may have changed its wording or even be off-line.

I informed a friend at the Anne Frank House about the ad and he assured me that the Anne Frank Foundation, which oversees the museum, would be taking action. The foundation has legal control over the Anne Frank name, he explained. No one can name anything Anne Frank without its permission.

"This is to prevent Anne Frank from being used for commercial or touristic purposes," he told me. "Otherwise we would have the whole neighborhood filled with Anne Frank cafes and the like."

For many years I’ve written about how abstract ideas of Jews and Jewish culture can become commercialized commodities in European countries where few if any Jews live today. Clearly there is a correlation between the attempt to use Anne Frank to rent an apartment and the ways that Jews, Jewish symbols and Jewish stereotypes are used in other types of Jewish-themed tourist promotion.

This is particularly evident in Eastern and Central Europe, where a growing number of "Jewish-style" cafes project an increasingly standardized ambience of kugel, candlesticks, klezmer and kitsch.

I’m not as squeamish about the phenomenon as some people I know, but I do wince at the excesses. Lately I have found myself wincing more and more. Maybe it’s because there are more excesses to wince at—or maybe because the excesses are becoming, well, so excessive.

It’s complicated, though. There are still charming Jewish-style cafes, where the atmosphere is understated and attitudes are sincere. In Krakow, the proprietors of one cafe, the Klezmer Hois, even use their profits to finance a Jewish publishing house and well-stocked Jewish bookstore.

More and more, however, I see "Jewish" becoming a brand, where codified accessories and sometimes toxic cliche provide the parameters. There’s a little chain of "Anatewka" restaurants in Lodz. The Ariel cafe in Krakow sells refrigerator magnets of caricature Jewish heads. A big image of a Jew counting money stands outside the Tsimmes restaurant in Kiev.

The most recent example is a new Jewish cafe in the derelict old Jewish quarter of Lviv, Ukraine. The cafe overlooks the ruins of the Golden Rose synagogue at the edge of a vacant space where one of the city’s other main synagogues once stood.

As a cafe it is not unpleasant; its decor includes dark wood and pre-war photos that bear witness to the world destroyed. As part of its gimmickry, however, patrons are encouraged to don black hats equipped with long, fake peyes (earlocks). And no prices are written on the menu—customers are supposed to "bargain," like Jews, over what they should pay.

It’s creepy, but as I said, it’s complicated. Jews themselves often use these very same caricatures in playful reference or self-ironic self-identification. (Think Heebster, JDub, HeBrew the Chosen Beer.)

I visited the cafe with a group of Jews from Israel, North America and several European countries. Nearly all of us professed discomfort but, in a slightly schizophrenic moment, we also almost all tried on the hats.

(Ruth Ellen Gruber’s books include "National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe," "Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere)," and "Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe." She blogs on Jewish heritage issues at http://jewish-heritage-travel.blogspot.com/.)




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New Ruthless Cosmopolitan column: Jewish Spaces and Places

My new Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is online -- a bit late because of the Jewish holidays...


RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN
Places and spaces: Exploring
what makes up the Jewish tapestry

Ruth Ellen Gruber

Avner Gruber, the first cousin once removed of Ruth Ellen Gruber, visits a Jewish cemetery in Hamburg, Germany.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

ROME (JTA) – We’ve all played the “Jewish geography” game – you know, questioning someone we’ve only just met in order to discover common Jewish connections, friends or even family.

In doing so, we are mapping out our experiences, delineating a sort of Jewish topography of interlinking backgrounds, histories and far-flung mishpocha.

Somehow I feel a sense of profound satisfaction when I discover an unexpected link with a stranger. It’s like a gift, an almost magical sense of communion with the densely woven tapestry of Jewish life – or at least with an individual or a place that helps make up that tapestry.

The idea of Jewish topography and the spaces and places – physical and metaphysical – in which Jews live, dream and interact forms the basis of a fascinating new book.

“Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place” (Ashgate Publishing House, 2008) is a collection of essays by a score of international scholars who participated in a six-year research project at the University of Potsdam in Germany.

Called Makom, or “place” in Hebrew, the project aimed to explore the relevance of space and place in Jewish life and culture.

In my own writing, I have dealt frequently with “Jewish space” in the way that the Paris-based historian Diana Pinto framed it. She coined the term in the 1990s to describe the place occupied by Jews, Jewish culture and Jewish memory within mainstream European society, regardless of the size or activity of the local Jewish population.

“There is a Jewish space in Europe that will exist even in the absence of Jews,” she said. “The ‘Jewish thing’ is becoming universal.”

Pinto’s thesis was a spark for my own explorations of the often intense relationship between non-Jews and Jewish culture in Europe. I coined the term “virtually Jewish” to describe how non-Jews often “fill” Europe’s Jewish space with their own ideas and operations.

“Jewish Topographies” takes a much different approach.

It regards Jewish space from within the Jewish world rather than from the virtually Jewish perspective of outside interaction. It sees Jewish spaces as actual environments that are shaped by Jews, where Jewish life may be rooted and where Jewish activities go on.

“Jewish things” happen there and often, in turn, define the identity of the physical places where they are happening.

One of the goals of the project, the book’s editors write, was to counteract stereotypes that long have conveyed “the pervasive impression that the Jewish experience – except the Israeli one – is one of profound displacement, lacking not only a proper territory but also a substantial spatiality or attachment to place.”

They mean stereotypes such as the description of Jews as the “People of the Book” and of the book itself as the Jews’ “portable homeland,” not to mention the widespread cliche of the “wandering Jew.”

I must admit that I myself actually fulfill some of these stereotypes. I have lived in seven or eight countries, and even now I spend a good deal of time on the road. Yet I generally feel comfortable wherever I am, usually wishing I could stay longer in almost every place I visit.

Rarely do I feel “homesick,” yet I have deep attachments to place and certain places. Despite living overseas most of my life, the United States, in all its grandeur, remains my homeland.

And perhaps it’s a variant of the Jewish geography game that I do feel a special affinity for the landscapes, climate, food and even architecture in East-Central Europe, from where my ancestors came.

“Jewish Topographies” goes far beyond geography. Its chapters examine very different, and sometimes unusual, places where Jewish experience is strongly linked, physically or emotionally, to specific environments.

Most deal with concrete settings: Jews defiantly (and astonishingly) cultivating gardens in the midst of World War II ghettos. Jews hiking and kayaking through the pre-war Polish countryside to gain connection with the land in which they live. The architectural and spatial symbolism of the eruv in contemporary Germany. The impact of what Jews eat, and the creation of definable Jewish “foodscapes.” A “map” of the new alternative Jewish subcultures that have emerged recently in Budapest.

The book also includes an epilogue that expands the concept of Jewish space into areas that only recently opened up for exploration. Called “Virtual Jewish Topography,” it chronicles the creation and growth of Judaism in the online cyberworld known as Second Life, starting with the creation of Beth Israel, the first Second Life synagogue, in August 2006.

Its author, Julian Voloj, tells a fascinating story of avatars, screen names and self-selected identities as he charts the development of synagogues, Jewish institutions, Jewish cultural activities and Jewish neighborhoods – even anti-Semitic incidents – in a world that in a sense is real but also quite imaginary.

“How does one describe a place that does not ‘really’ exist and that can be changed by a simple mouse click?” he writes. “And how does one describe a culture in transition?”

I’ve known the German-born Voloj for several years. He is a writer, photographer and former Jewish student leader who now works for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. We’re Facebook friends and generally stay in touch online. But in addition to his expertise in novel Jewish topographies, he’s also adept at playing classic “Jewish geography.”

Indeed, I was pleased to learn not long ago that Voloj’s grandmother turns out to be a close friend in Hamburg of my own first cousin once removed.

(Ruth Ellen Gruber’s books include “National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe,” “Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere),” and “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.")

READ THE FULL ARTICLE on the JTA site

My IHT Article on Chopin in Warsaw

Here's a link to my latest piece in the International Herald Tribune, on preparations for Fryderyk Chopin's bicentennial.


(Bus stop ad for a Warsaw Chopin Festival, Sept. 2008. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber)



Poland prepares for Chopin's bicentennial

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Published: October 13, 2008


WARSAW: Plans are well under way for a year of celebrations to mark the upcoming bicentennial of one of Poland's favorite native sons - Frédéric, known here as Fryderyk, Chopin.

The Polish Sejm, or Parliament, has declared 2010 the Year of Fryderyk Chopin, and special concerts, recitals, conferences and other events will honor the great Romantic composer, who was born near Warsaw in 1810.

The prestigious International Chopin Competition for pianists will mark its 16th edition in October 2010. Held every five years, the competition draws scores of young musicians from all over the world. In addition, Warsaw's Chopin Museum, with the world's largest collection of Chopin documents and other artifacts, will undergo a total redesign, modernization and expansion.

A lavishly illustrated new guidebook called "Chopin's Poland" was already published this year. It leads visitors to dozens of sites in Warsaw and elsewhere around the country where the composer lived, ate, studied, performed, visited or even partied.


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Ray Benson Wins 2008 Les Paul Award

Just a coda to my profile of Ray Benson I posted the other day.... Ray has just been awarded the TEC Awards-2008 Les Paul Award presented by the Mix Foundation for Excellence in Audio.

Named for one of the industry's most revered personalities, the Les Paul Award was created in 1991 to honor individuals or institutions that have set the highest standards of excellence in the creative application of recording technology.

Previous winners include Paul McCartney, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Al Kooper, Steve Miller and other leading names in (mainly) rock and pop music.

The Awards announcement says Ray "is the ultimate modern multi-hyphenate—bandleader-singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist-producer-studio owner-engineer-businessman-raconteur-father-real tall guy. The last one came naturally; the rest he’s had to work at, and he’s good at all of them!"

Mazel Tov, Ray!

A Jewish singer towers over country western scene

This isn't a Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, but I'm posting it anyway....





(Ray Benson onstage in Craponne. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber.)


By Ruth Ellen Gruber Published: 09/26/2008

CRAPONNE SUR ARZON, France (JTA) -- Think Jews and country music and you'll probably come up with Kinky Friedman, the cigar-chomping frontman of the iconoclastic Texas Jewboys, who is also a humorist, mystery novelist and failed but flamboyant candidate for Texas governor.

The real Jewish king of country music, however, is Ray Benson, the nine-time Grammy-winning leader of the country western swing band Asleep at the Wheel.

At 6-foot-7, Ray Benson has been described as a "Jewish giant" and "the biggest Jew in country."

He literally and figuratively towers over the stage in a Stetson and fancy tooled boots, with a grizzled beard and long, thinning hair pulled back in a pony tail.

"I saw miles and miles of Texas, all the stars up in the sky," he sings in his deep, mellow baritone. "I saw miles and miles of Texas, gonna live here 'til I die."

Now 57, Benson was born in Philadelphia but has lived in Austin for 35 years. He talks with a twang, plays golf with Willie Nelson, has recorded more than 30 albums and was named Texas Musician of the Year in 2004.

By his own estimate, he is the only Jewish singing star in the country western scene.

"Kinky's not a country western singer -- he's Kinky!" Benson laughed during a conversation with JTA this summer at the annual Country Rendez-vous festival in south-central France, where Asleep at the Wheel wound up a five-nation European tour.

Unlike Friedman, however, who makes playing with stereotypes part of his in-your-face persona, Benson has -- until now -- kept his religious identity out of the limelight.

"I didn't want to be known as a Jewish country western singer; I wanted to be known as a country western singer who happens to be Jewish," he said.

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For more pictures of Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel at Craponne, click HERE

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: My Senior Prom and the Six-Day War

Here's my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column....suitable for use for the upcoming High Holy Days....





By Ruth Ellen Gruber (published 09/04/2008)

COLUMBUS, Ohio (JTA) – The High Holidays are a time for self-assessment, for looking back and preparing for the future.

A trip to Ohio this summer gave me the opportunity to look back over nearly a lifetime and consider some of the pathways that have brought me to the present.

The catalyst came near Columbus, when a distinguished-looking university professor greeted me at the door of his neat, Tudor-style house. He had metal-framed glasses, a salt-and-pepper moustache and still dark but thinning hair. Had I come across him anywhere else, he would have registered as a stranger.

But this was my old friend Richard, a high school classmate and Hebrew school companion – the boy, in fact, who had taken me to the senior prom.

We hadn’t seen each other in 40 years. Until a brief e-mail exchange two or three years ago, we hadn’t even been in touch during that time.

Such, however, is the enduring fascination of the road not taken that I made it a point to stop and reconnect between a lecture I gave at the American Jewish Committee in Cincinnati and a weekend with relatives in Akron.

We baby boomers sometimes seem obsessed with getting in touch with our past, or at least with reminders of our past. Just think of the oldies radio stations, the movie remakes of the TV shows of our childhood and the popularity of Web sites such as classmates.com.

I moved away from my childhood neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia soon after high school, and since then I’ve scarcely had contact with any of my classmates. Moving to Europe after college made the break even more complete.

Still, I’ve always been more curious about how my high school friends turned out than about what happened to people I knew in college.

Partly, I think, this is because we were all so unformed in high school. We weren’t quite blank slates, but we were utterly poised to go in any direction.

Richard ushered me in and introduced me to his wife of 30 years. Conveniently, she had a meeting to attend and left us to catch up. We did what one does in such reunions: First we adjusted visually to our middle-aged selves, adding and subtracting pounds, hair, wrinkles and other telltale signs of life experience, then we settled down to talk.

We filled each other in on the decades of our adulthood, and we reminisced about our teenage years.
Richard occasionally made a gesture that leaped so vividly across the decades that I almost saw the boy, not the man.

Then, as one does now, we logged on to Google; we spent several hours searching for our old friends. One had taken over his father’s company and became president of his synagogue. Several run their own businesses. One performs in a local rock band. One is a professor at New York University.

They live scattered across the United States and in more than one foreign country. A few, we knew, had passed away. Some, we were surprised to see, had no Web presence at all.

We took out the high school yearbook and there we all were: the boys in their white shirts and ties, the girls in their dark sweaters and pearls – yes, pearls.

It was the first time I had looked at the yearbook for a long time. We were the Class of ‘67, and we went to school in heady times – the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the Summer of Love – but amazingly, none of this was reflected in the book’s pictures or text.

What’s more, our high school graduation coincided almost exactly with the Six-Day War.

I kept a daily diary back then, and I pulled it out when I returned from Ohio to my home in Italy.
In my entries for that week, brief comments on the war are overshadowed by much more detailed news of final exams, graduation events, visits with friends and teenage romantic musings about boys named Dave and Greg.

“Well, chalk one up for the intelligence of the world – there is war in the Middle East,” I wrote on June 5. That day, according to my diary, there was a power blackout in parts of New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania. When it was over, I reported, our principal came on the PA system to assure the school that it had had “nothing to do with the Middle East situation.”

The next day, after school, I spent hours watching on TV the U.N. Security Council debate on the crisis and the council’s vote on a cease-fire resolution.

“The Israelis made great advances, and the Arab losses [led to] the USSR agreement to cease-fire,” I wrote.

But that seems to have been my last comment on the situation.

June 10, the day the war ended, was a Saturday. I went to a music lesson and later that day, a friend gave me a present – “a pair of sandals and a groovy peasant-style embroidered skirt.”

I didn’t mention the cease-fire – but I still have the skirt.

Richard and I, and our classmates, are graying. And lasting, secure peace in the Middle East remains an elusive dream.

(Ruth Ellen Gruber’s books include “National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe,” “Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere), and “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.”

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Letter from Europe in Hadassah Magazine

Here is a link to my Letter from Europe about the European Day of Jewish Culture, in the current issue of Hadassah Magazine. (The picture above shows the ceremony in Ancona in 2005).

Read the Full Story at the Hadassah web site -- click on the current issue of the magazine, then scroll down.


Letter from Europe:
A Jewish Holiday for Everyone
By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Under the blaze of a hot noonday sun, a Hebrew prayer floated over a crowd of about 200 people gathered near the summit of a rocky cliff high above the Adriatic Sea at the ancient Italian port city of Ancona.

Spread around them were the remains of the city’s centuries-old Jewish cemetery, notable for its squat white tombstones shaped like truncated pillars, some fallen, some tilted over, some standing erect, their beautifully carved Hebrew inscriptions glinting in the sun.

Ancona’s mayor spoke a few words, and the chief rabbi emeritus of Milan, Giuseppe Laras, offered a benediction. Then the Libyan-born Jewish singer Miri am Megh nagi lifted her voice in a haunting Sefardic song.

The ceremony, in September 2005, marked the rededication of the cemetery after a massive restoration project that had stabilized the land, cleared it of brush and enabled it to be opened to the public. That event formed a centerpiece in Italy’s annual observance of the European Day of Jewish Culture, a continent-wide celebration of Jewish tradition that takes place each year on the first Sunday in September—this year on September 7.

Each culture day has a central theme. in 2005, it was cuisine, and after leaving the cem etery, dozens of people sampled specialties from the varied cultural components that make up Italian Jewry—Sefardic and Ashkenazic Jews, post-World War II immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, and Italian Jews whose traditions date back to ancient Roman times. On the menu were baked anchovies with endive, fried eggplant in tomato sauce, fish balls made from salted cod and sweet fritters in honey sauce, all washed down with kosher Ital ian wine.

Now in its ninth year, the European Day of Jewish Culture is by far the most ambitious of a dizzying array of Jewish festivals that annually take place all over Europe.

Begun as a local initiative in the Alsace region of France, Culture Day went international in 1999 and is one of the only such manifestations with a cross-border character. This year the theme is music, and the roster encompasses as many as 800 separate, simultaneous events in 30 countries, from Norway and the United Kingdom to Spain and Italy.

With so much going on in so many places, Cul ture Day is targeted more at locals than tourists. Its aim is to enable the public at large to discover the historical heritage of Judaism and, in doing so, to combat anti-Jewish prejudice.

“Making physical access to places of Jewish interest easy is one way of showing the non-Jewish world that they live side by side with people who are ap proach able, accessible and want their culture to be understood,” said Jonathan Joseph, the London-based president of the European Council of Jewish Com munities. “We want our places of worship admired, just like other religions; we want our history to be understood; we want our relevance to the local cultural scene to be clear.”

Each year, synagogues, cemeteries, ritual baths, Jewish museums and other Jewish sites open to the public, and sem inars, exhibits, lectures, book fairs, art in stallations, concerts, performances, guided tours and more take place, many in localities where Jews no longer have a presence. Organizers estimate that last year’s events attracted as many as 200,000 people across Europe, most not Jewish.

In Norway, this year’s celebrations coincide with the opening of the Oslo Jewish Museum. Kicking off the four-day programming on September 6 will be “A Night of Klezmer Music,” with Scandinavian acts including Urban Tun nélls Klezmerband, Sabbath Hela Veckan and Channe Nuss baum & Klez merfobia.

Great Britain’s schedule encompasses three weeks of events, from open houses at dozens of synagogues throughout the country to walking tours of Jewish neighborhoods to concerts ranging from “Jewish Musicians from the East End” of London to the Liverpool Philharmonic performing George Gersh win’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Culture Day is loosely coordinated by the ECJC, B’nai B’rith Europe and the Red de Juderias de España, a Jewish tourism route linking 15 Spanish cities. On the ground, however, the operation is staffed by volunteers in each country—Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The level of participation in each country is determined by local interest, resources and capabilities.

Italy is one of the most enthusiastic participants. Last year, events in more than 55 towns and cities at tracted 50,000 people—about 15,000 more than the country’s entire Jewish population. This year, even more venues have been added.

“There is a very high level of interest here, more so than in many other countries,” said Sira Fatucci, national coordinator for Culture Day in Italy. This is partly due to Italy’s effective organization and successful pub licizing. Jew ish communities work closely with public and private institutions, and the event receives government support.

“And then, of course,” she added, “the Jewish patrimo ny in Italy encompasses a uniquely rich and varied ar ray of treasures, like nowhere else.”

These range from Roman-era sites such as the Jew ish catacombs in Rome and the synagogue ruins at Ostia An tica to the med ieval mikve in Siracusa to opulent Baroque synagogues in the Piedmont region to the historic ghetto and centuries-old cemetery in Venice.

But in other countries, the story is different. Given funding and logistics problems, only a few token Culture Day events take place elsewhere, while in some areas, the one-day-a-year mo d el has been outpaced by other local initiatives.

“You can’t offer the same things every year,” said Maros Borsky, who heads a Jewish research center in Bratislava, the Slovak capital. “Fewer people are coming, and some museums, for ex­ample, are reluctant to get involved—they don’t want to open without charging an entrance fee. In a lot of places, people are organizing local days of Jewish culture and other events on their own.”

The norwegian jewish singer Bente Kahan said her own per­formance schedule is so extensive that Cul ture Day has little special relevance. Based in Wroclaw, Poland, Kahan heads a foundation there to re store the city’s historic synagogue and teach residents about Jewish heritage and tradition as well as the Holo­caust.

“My way of teaching is through music and performance,” Kahan said. “We will probably have a concert on the European Day of Jewish Culture, but in fact we do things all the time... school performances in the fall, films in the summer, concerts.”

Teaching a non-Jewish public about Jewish heritage is a way to instill a con nection to emerging issues of identity and history. “We are living in symbiosis,” she said.

Against this background, Culture Day coordinators are refocusing their priorities. They are concerned that the novelty of the day may be waning, with Jewish culture becoming just one of numerous heritages competing for attention—and funding.

“None of us could have predicted that the program would spread so far,” said Assumpcio Hosta, secretary general of the Red de Juderias. “Can it keep expanding? I don’t think so.”

“In general, I wish the day of ‘Jewish culture’ would instead focus on ‘Jewish life,’” said Italian musicologist Francesco Spagnolo, who is scheduled to give talks on this year’s theme in Florence, Padua and Livor no.

“I hope that by focusing on music this time, the European Day of Jew ish Culture will contribute to painting a clearer picture of cultural ex changes between Jews and non-Jews,” said Spagnolo, who currently heads research at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. “Hopefully, this will go beyond the usual stereotypes: celebrating the culture of ‘dead Jews’ versus being hostile to actual Jews, includ ing Israel and the Israelis.”

Samuel D. Gruber—Syracuse, New York-based president of the Inter na tional Survey of Jewish Mon u ments—agrees that Culture Day in its present form may have run its course. But, he said, over the years it has served an important purpose and be come a stimulus for related endeavors.

“People use Culture Day to reassess the local angle and the grass-roots potential,” he said. “Jewish heritage is becoming part of the local con stel la tion of monuments to visit—not be cause they are Jewish, but be cause they are part of the local heritage. Americans tend to know Prague, Krakow, Budapest, but there’s a wealth of other fascinating Jewish places out there.”

(Gruber, who is the author’s brother, posts updates on synagogue resto rations, cemetery clean-ups, mu seum openings and Jew ish cul tural events on his organization’s Web site.)

In 2006, as part of their attempt to revamp Culture Day’s focus, or­gan iz ers created the Eu ropean As sociation for the Preser va tion and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage.

Its stated aim is to break out of the one-day-only model and use the ex perience of the past nine years to expand into more deeply grounded proj ects that could maintain momentum and have a year-round impact.

These include an ambitious, transborder European Route of Jewish Her i tage aimed at forming Jewish itineraries that will link the countries that to date have participated in the Euro pean Day of Jewish Culture. This project, however, has yet to gain much trac­tion, despite being recognized in 2005 by the Council of Europe as a Major Cultural Route.

“What we are trying to do is to co ordinate activities of the individual countries involved,” said Hosta. “The AEJP wants to offer a platform to en courage contacts among them, promote the national routes, publicize their experiences and enable the various people involved to learn from one another.”

In fact, several regional Jewish her itage routes already exist, at least as concepts or suggested itineraries.

The most notable—and successful—is the Red de Juderias in Spain, with recommended stops in Avila, Barcelona, Tudela and 12 additional towns. Others include a Hasidic route that will encompass more than a score of towns in southeastern Poland, including Chelm, Jaroslaw and Lesko, currently being formulated by the Warsaw-based Foundation for the Preservation of Polish Jewish Heritage.

In Bratislava, Borsky says that a European Route of Jewish Heritage has potential. City officials, he believes, would be more willing to support an endeavor open to tourists year round than a one-day festival for locals.

Meanwhile, Borsky is working lo cally to create a Slovak Jewish Her i tage Route. To date, it includes synagogues in Bratislava and six other towns, along with several branches of the state-run Jewish Museum and the unique, subterranean burial complex in Bratislava where the influential 19th- century sage Rabbi Moshe Schreiber, known as the Chatam Sofer, is buried.

Borsky has placed plaques at these sites; he has printed illustrated brochures and is promoting them on his Web site, which also includes an expanding database of Jewish heritage. He is also preparing educational programs for schools.

As an architectural historian and active member of the city’s tiny Jewish community, he feels it a “moral duty” to protect and promote Jewish heritage in his country.

“Synagogues are part of townscapes,” he said. “If they are restored, they will add to the quality of life for local residents.

“Jewish heritage,” Borsky continued, “is not something we are keeping just for ourselves now; we save it for fu ture generations who might much more appreciate both these buildings and the complexity of these towns.”

Ruth Ellen Gruber is an American writer living in Europe. Her books include Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe (National Geographic).

Web Resources
- Bente Kahan Foundation: www.fbk.org.pl
- European Day of Jewish Culture: www.jewisheritage.org
- Foundation for the Preservation of Polish Jewish Heritage: www.fodz.pl
- International Survey of Jewish Monuments: www.isjm.org
- Jewish Heritage in Europe: www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu
- Oslo Jewish Museum: www.jodiskmuseumoslo.com
- Red de Juderias de España: www.redjuderias.org
- Slovak Jewish Heritage: www.slovak-jewish-heritage.org

Creepy....

Mark Rubin sent me the link to a white supremicist (or at any rate, far-right) web site, where people have been discussing my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column on "allosemitism" or the concept of Jews as "others"! The, uh, tenor of the, uh, discourse is much different from that of Jews discussing the concept.

I don't want to provide the link here, but I imagine one could google....

Letter from Baschi: My Pilgrimage to La Pasquarella

This isn't exactly a "Ruthless Cosmopolitan" column, but it fits into the genre -- it's my latest column for The New Leader, about my pilgrimage to a centuries-old shrine in Umbria last spring, and some of the history of the area around it along the Tiber River between Todi and Orvieto.

I've posted the story as a pdf -- the New Leader does not have an interactive web site, alas....

"Other Europeans" videos

In my most recent "Ruthless Cosmopolitan" column, I wrote about the "Other Europeans" project and the symposium I took part in in Weimar, Germany.

Mark Rubin has posted some videos showing early rehearsals of the Klezmer and Roma bands involved in the project, which is sponsored by the Yiddish Summer Weimar, the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and the KlezMORE Festival in Vienna. Mark plays tuba and bass in the Yiddish band.

His videos shed fascinating light on the creative process as the two bands prepare similar but different/different but similar performance repertoire based on mainly Moldovan sources.

I'm posting a couple of them below, but you can access them all through Mark's youtube channel (click the link above). He has also posted various other clips from Yiddish Summer Weimar.

Thanks, Mark!

Ruthless Cosmopolitan: That Certain Jewish Something

Does a 'certain Jewish something' really set Jews apart?

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

WEIMAR, Germany (JTA) – I learned a new word this summer – “allosemitism.”

Coined by a Polish-Jewish literary critic named Artur Sandauer, the term describes a concept with which I am quite familiar – the idea of Jews as the perpetual “other.”

Allosemitism can embrace both positive and negative feelings toward Jews – everything, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, “from love and respect to outright condemnation and genocidal hatred.”

At root is the idea that, good or bad, Jews are different from the non-Jewish mainstream and thus unable to be dealt with in the same way or measured by the same yardstick.

The word cropped up during a recent symposium on Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) cultures that I attended here as part of a project called, significantly, “The Other Europeans.”

It was gratifying to find a term that so aptly describes the ambivalent ways in which Jews are regarded. And it was amazing to me that I hadn’t come across it earlier, considering all my reading and writing on the subject, not to mention my experiences over the past decades as a Jew in Europe.

We all know about anti-Semitism and the historic demonization of Jews. But anti-Semitism can be counterbalanced by an idealization of Jews and Jewish culture that also can be divorced from reality.

“People who think Jews are smarter than everyone else don’t have Jewish relatives,” my brother Frank likes to quip.

The Other Europeans project examines some of these issues by focusing on the relationships between Jewish and Roma cultures, particularly in the realm of music.

The project statement doesn’t use the term “allosemitism.” Instead it describes Jews and Roma as having “transcultural” European identities “in both fact and imagination.”

This, it states, has led to the condemnation of both groups as “rootless,” “parasitic,” “degenerate” and worse, as well as to continuing anti-Semitic and anti-Roma outbursts. At the same time, it notes, “the same transcultural character of Yiddish and Roma music is romanticized and embraced by contemporary ‘world music’ pop culture, which frames it as subversive and transgressive and therefore ‘hip.’ ”

The Other Europeans project is the brainchild of the musician Alan Bern, an American who has been based in Berlin since the 1980s.

It is sponsored by three Jewish culture festivals – the Weimar Yiddish Summer Weeks, which Bern directs; the annual Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, Poland, which this year marked its 20th anniversary; and the KlezMORE Jewish Music Festival in Vienna.

All three present and teach Jewish music and culture to a predominantly non-Jewish public.

Bern, a key figure in the klezmer music revival over the past two decades, is a thoughtful observer of the sometimes uneasy cultural dynamics between Jews and non-Jews in Europe.

“You define culture through interactions,” he told me during one of our many conversations. “What defines something is often the point of view from which you regard it.”

How to define what is “Jewish” provides endless fodder for debate in post-Holocaust, post-communist Europe. Jews are few here now; Jewish communal life, though reviving in some places, is in flux; and Jewish cultural expression is often embraced or even perpetrated by non-Jews.

Strict halachic definition may suffice for the religiously observant. But for Jews and non-Jews alike, that has always told only part of the story. And indeed, as experienced so drastically in the Shoah, definitions of what, or who, is Jewish often come from the outside.

Is there, as the concept of allosemitism implies, a “certain Jewish something” that does so set Jews apart?

The Jewish Museum in Munich has mounted an exhibit this summer actually called “That Certain Jewish Something.” It takes a creative and rather provocative approach to explore the intangibles that can imbue objects, situations and even individuals with a sense of Jewishness.

The museum called on the public to bring in an object the people felt had “a certain Jewish something” about it with a written statement about why they had chosen that item. More than 120 people, most of them non-Jewish or with only distant Jewish roots, answered the call. All the objects were delivered on one day, June 22, and then arranged in display cases with the stories behind them.

The resulting, wide-ranging collection, as the museum puts it, provides “a multifaceted view into a very personal and modern picture of Judaism.” Some of the objects are explicitly Jewish: menorahs, an old container for matzah, kitschy shtetl figurines, family silverware marked for meat and dairy, a Ten Commandments paperweight, a comic book called “Shaloman.”

But for many of the items – a flashlight, a rock, a tablecloth, a necklace, books, paintings, an ordinary pair of sneakers – “that certain Jewish something” is revealed only through their meaning to those who selected them.

A set of faded snapshots shows a smiling, bespectacled fellow attending a party in a Mexican costume. The man who brought them in had found the snaps when he moved into a new apartment, and they apparently showed the previous tenant, a Jewish man who had passed away.

An 11-year-old boy brought in a shirt from the Bayern-Munich football team because he had read that the team’s president before World War II had been a Jew.

The ordinary pair of sneakers belonged to a Jewish man. They in fact are a tangible symbol of the force of his faith: He wears them to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, he wrote, as they are made of cloth, not leather, which is prohibited on the holiday.

That allosemitic, “certain Jewish something” is in what they represent, or how they are represented, not in what they actually are.

Read full story on JTA site

Ruthless Cosmopolitan: From Klezmer to Country: Linking the Soundtracks

From Klezmer to Country: Linking the Soundtracks



RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN


By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Editor’s note: The following launches a new column, “Ruthless Cosmopolitan,” by JTA’s veteran European correspondent, Ruth Ellen Gruber.

NASHVILLE (JTA) – An international conference on country music may seem an unlikely place to find someone like me. For nearly two decades, I’ve been known for my writing on Jewish issues. But here I was recently in Music City USA taking part in a gathering of academics and other experts, presenting a paper called “Sturm, Twang and Sauerkraut Cowboys: Country Music and Wild Western Spaces in Europe.”

My paper examined the way American-style country music forms the soundtrack for a colorful and multifaceted “Imaginary Wild West” in Europe. It had nothing to do with Jews or Judaism. Still, the trajectory I took to get here was in fact deeply rooted in my work on Jewish culture, heritage and identity.

How’s that? I’ve been exploring this Imaginary Wild West for several years now, spending time all over Europe at Wild West theme parks, rodeos, saloons, ranches, country music festivals and other events and venues.

I have seen how these places – and the states of mind that go with them – form “Wild Western spaces” inhabited by thousands of Europeans who feel perfectly at home amid the star-spangled Americana. I have seen people in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Poland and other countries dressed like cowboys, trappers or even Native Americans. And I have seen how local European artists singing and writing in their own languages take American country music, transform it and make it their own.

One catalyst for this project was my post-Sept. 11, 2001 desire to explore how Europeans view the United States. But in many ways, my interest grew directly out of the years I’ve spent investigating and interpreting how non-Jews in Europe relate to Jewish culture in countries where, more than half a century after the Holocaust, few Jews live today.

I coined the term “virtually Jewish” to describe how non-Jews adopt, enact and transform elements of Jewish culture and how they use “things Jewish” to create, mold or find their own identities. How they, in fact, help fill what has been described as a “Jewish space” that endures in Europe, even in the absence of actual Jews.

Klezmer music – not country and western – forms the soundtrack to this process, and indeed, klezmer musicians on the Continent today are often non-Jews playing to non-Jewish audiences.

Major differences exist, of course, between the “virtually Jewish” phenomenon and Europe’s Imaginary Wild West. One has to do with a real, traumatic issue: coming to terms with the Holocaust and its still potent and painful legacy. The other is the embrace and elaboration of a collective fantasy and its translation into personal experience.

[photo Gruberheadshot708 align=right max-width=120]

But both phenomena have to do with identity and the ways people embrace or use other cultures to shape their own sense of themselves. Stereotypes and preconceptions play prominent roles in both, too. What is meant or signified by “Jewish” or “Western” or “Native American” or “frontier” can be paramount: concepts or dreams rather than living, breathing realities.

There are few Jews in country music. The best known is Kinky Friedman, the satiric singer/songwriter who led an iconoclastic group called the Texas Jewboys and became famous for his ironic one-liners and flamboyant quest for the Texas governorship.

Given my own interests, I found it fitting that a paper at the Nashville country music conference was dedicated to his work. It aptly described Friedman as a satirist who at the same time was a romantic idealist. Dressed in black cowboy clothes and chomping a stogie, Friedman creates his own virtual world where cliche is often king.

In his best work, though, he cuts through myth, playing with stereotypes in a subversive, sometimes outrageous manner that dangles and discards preconceptions about cowboys, the Wild West, country music – and Jews.

My favorite Friedman song is the extraordinary “Ride’em Jewboy.” The lyrics are exquisite. Friedman uses the familiar, even hackneyed imagery of a Wild West cattle drive – a corral, wild ponies, a campfire, a roundup – to create a elegiac evocation of the Holocaust and the Jewish Diaspora. In effect, he uses collective fantasy to confront real trauma.

“Ride, ride, ride, ride ‘em Jewboy,
Ride ‘em all around the old corral.
I’m with you, I’m with you boy
If I’ve got to ride six million miles.”

Willie Nelson, the western icon whose “heroes have always been cowboys,” recorded a deceptively simple cover version of this song. Sung in Nelson’s unmistakable raspy twang and backed by a harmonica and clip-clopping hoofbeats, it perfectly captures the interplay of history, emotion and dreams.

“I’ve seen five people cry listening to Willie sing ‘Ride ‘Em Jewboy,’ all of them non-Jews,” Friedman once told an interviewer. “He sings it like a cowboy song, with no ax to grind, no agenda.”

Ruth Ellen Gruber’s books include “National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe,” “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe” and “Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere).” A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she has written for The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and many other publications.

Read article at JTA site