Polish Catholic Brothers and a Village's Unsavory Past

The past might never be dead, but just how deeply can it be buried? That's the question brothers Franek and Jozek grapple with as they uncover the secrets of their rural Polish village 60 years after World War II, in Władysław Pasikowski's controversial film Pokłosie (Aftermath).

Franek returns to Poland from Chicago when he learns that Jozek's wife has left him. In an effort to understand why, Franek discovers that Jozek became a local pariah when he ripped up a road that German occupiers had paved decades earlier—with headstones from a Jewish cemetery.

Franek reluctantly supports Jozek's effort to collect the village's remaining Jewish headstones and erect them in his wheatfield. Villagers who live on formerly Jewish land try to discourage them—most viscerally through defacing their home with a dead dog and anti-Semitic graffiti. As they investigate, the brothers discover that their family's role in the destruction of the village's Jews was greater than they'd thought. The result is an unrelenting, unsentimental interrogation of historical revisionism and the ways grown children try to atone for their fathers – and a fascinating look at contemporary Poland.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

An Israeli Paratrooper's Path to Extremism and Terror Told in 'Like Dreamers'

How Udi Adiv Veered Far Off Zionist Path

By Yossi Klein Halevi for The Jewish Daily Forward

Yossi Klein Halevi’s new book, “Like Dreamers,” is about seven of the paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Their lives spiraled out from that triumphant moment in dramatically different directions, emblematic of a country that has been stretched between the extremes of right and left over the past 40 years. This week’s excerpt, the second to be published by the Forward, focuses on Udi Adiv, one of those paratroopers, who veered sharply to the left in the early 1970s. This is the story of how Adiv, a kibbutznik and son of kibbutz founders, found himself part of an anti-Zionist terrorist group, trained with militants in Damascus, and was even praised for his militancy by Yasser Arafat from the rostrum at the United Nations. Adiv would eventually repudiate his actions, but not before serving 12 years in an Israeli prison.

Udi walked the cobbled streets of Wadi Nisnass, Haifa’s Arab neighborhood near the docks. Burlap sacks with dried chili peppers and fava beans lined the sidewalks. Workmen’s restaurants served hummus for breakfast. Udi was charmed. He belonged here, he felt, more than among the Jews.

Udi was leading a schizophrenic existence. He was enjoying student life at the University of Haifa, Israel’s most integrated Arab-Jewish campus, and he felt as comfortable there as he could in any Israeli institution. He joined the university basketball team and was rarely without at least one girlfriend. But his political life was drawing him farther toward the fringe. When Naif Hawatmeh, leader of a Marxist faction of the PLO, called for incorporating “Israeli progressives” into the Palestinian war against Israel, Udi was elated.

One of Udi’s regular stops in Wadi Nisnass was a Marxist bookshop run by Daoud Turki, an Arab Israeli who had been expelled from Israel’s Communist Party for supporting terrorism. The corner bookshop was so small, there was scarcely room for a table and chairs. In his early forties, Daoud was a self-taught political theorist. He told Udi about the humiliation of growing up under Israeli military rule, which all Arab

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How Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce Changed Judaism Forever

David Kaufman's Book Revisits the Turbulent '60s

By Seth Rogovoy for The Jewish Daily Forward

Jewhooing the Sixties
by David E. Kaufman
Brandeis University Press

The final week of September 1961 proved to be an auspicious one in American Jewish history — or, at least, in the history of Jewish-American celebrities.

Within a matter of just a few days, Sandy Koufax set his first National League strikeout record; comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges; a then-unknown folksinger named Bob Dylan would play an opening set for the Greenbriar Boys at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village that would capture the attention of a reviewer for The New York Times; and a 19-year-old cabaret singer named Barbra Streisand made her off-Broadway debut.

The rest, as they say, is history, as well as the launching pad for David E. Kaufman’s “Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity.” An associate professor of religion, and the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University, Kaufman suggests that the approximately simultaneous rise to fame of these four third-generation American Jews was “a turning point in the history of both American celebrity and Jewish identity.”

He likens them to postwar American Jewish culture’s “Mount Rushmore of fame,” whose achievements would go on to “reshape the image of the American Jew” for both Jew and non-Jew alike.

These four were by no means the first of their kind. One could easily rattle off several lists of Jewish forebears who blazed trails beforehand, including baseball star Hank Greenberg; comedians including Groucho Marx, Jack Benny and George Burns, to name just a few; musical theater stars Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice; and in music, Benny Goodman and Irving Berlin.

But as Kaufman goes to great lengths to argue, this quartet was more transformational than those who came before, both in their personal identity as Jews and in what they represented to Jews and society at large as Jews.

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"The Lottery" & The Jews

"The Lottery" might be the most famous American short story. Written by Shirley Jackson and published in the New Yorker in 1948, it tells of an unnamed American town where, once a year, residents draw slips of paper from a black box, choosing one person to be murdered by the rest of the village.

Jackson, whose writing wrestles with social propriety and discomfort, hated to comment on her own work. When "The Lottery" was first published, The New Yorker was inundated with thousands of letters, many of which expressed readers' confusion. The magazine had never received so much feedback about any short story. Jackson kept mum. Later, however, she confided to a friend that the story was an allegory for anti-Semitism and violence in the modern world. A fascinating detail, considering the year of its publication.

Jackson's interest in anti-Semitism was personal. Her marriage to a Jewish English professor and jazz critic named Stanley Hyman was a subject of great speculation and controversy for both of their families—and, thankfully, inspired great literature.

- Matthue Roth for Jewniverse