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

Kibbutzniks On Mars

 Plenty of fictional energy has been devoted to what might have happened if a modern Jewish state were established somewhere other than the Middle East: Michael Chabon has examined Alaska and Ben Katchor upstate New York. But what if some enterprising Jews left Planet Earth entirely?

In his new novel Martian Sands, available as an e-book, Israeli-born Lavie Tidhar's imagines "New Israel" and its kibbutzniks on Mars. They share citizenship of the Red Planet with descendants of other earthlings, who survive on the waterless surface under a biodome. Tidhar weaves an elaborate backstory to explain the economics and culture of the planet: in this society, New Israel rules, and "old" Israeli political heavyweights like Ben-Gurion and Meir are fabricated by a simulacra shop and recycled by Martian constituents. Meanwhile, a man named after a movie star travels back in time to instruct FDR to not go to war in the Pacific, and instead to focus his energy on liberating Jews from the Nazis.

Steampunk, cinematic, and occasionally disorienting in the manner of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—where we share the characters’ surprise and wonder—Martian Sands ultimately makes us ask: if we had the technology to change the course of history, would we use it?

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

"Moo. Please No Murder Me" - and Other Torah Commentaries

 So begins "The Song of the Red Cow," one of 54 strange and delightful Torah commentaries in Unscrolled, a motley collection of essays, memoirs, cartoons, and shticks. Each is as unique as the poor red heifer, who we come to see as young, beautiful, unblemished…and tragically doomed.

Unorthodox? For sure, in both senses of the word. No straight commentary here. For example, see Aaron's defensive take on the sin of the golden calf: "For starters, it was not a calf. It was more like a pig." Or check out Murray, God's tailor, lamenting the colorful priestly garments: "Crazy ostentatious. The taste level…is fresh off the boat." Then there's Moses' father-in-law, who's drawn wearing a Jethro Tull T-shirt, and counsels Moshe to "stop wasting your time with small-time crap. Delegate!" Not to mention their clever solution to building the Tabernacle in land-starved midtown Manhattan. ("Think vertical.")

The book is a product of Reboot, a national network of young, creative Jews. They're making sure you never look at the weekly Torah portion the same.

- Marc Davis for Jewniverse

The Tumultuous Life and Nuanced Work of Israel’s Greatest Children’s Book Writer

After tragedy, Dvora Omer found flaws, beauty in the nation’s founding figures, turning them into literary heroes

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet
There are many different ways to be dumb about literature. When you’re in high school, the men and women who teach it to you—sometimes passionate and sweet, too often underpaid, insecure, and sour—insist that your primary task as a reader is to decipher the hidden meanings that the author weaved throughout the text like a serial killer leaving behind clues to taunt his weary pursuers. When you’re in college, the men and women who teach it to you—also underpaid, also probably sour—turn their attention from text to author, wrestling the creative spirit down to the therapist’s couch and squeezing it until, anguished, it is ready to cry uncle, or, more likely, mother. Both approaches are vile and joyless, but when it comes to Dvora Omer—the great Israeli writer of novels for young adults who passed away earlier this year—they seem inevitable: More than those of any other writer I can think of, Omer’s life and work are best understood as threads of the same tale, an epic poem of sacrifice and betrayal on which all Israeli children were reared.

Omer was born in a northern kibbutz in 1932, and her parents divorced when she was an infant, her father moving to another kibbutz and marrying another woman. He would visit his firstborn infrequently, once every few months, each visit culminating in the little girl sobbing and begging him to stay. He never did. Then, Omer’s mother died when the future literary lioness was only 11 years old. At the time, she was told that her mother was unhappy and had shot herself. At the funeral, Dvora was ordered to stop crying, as weakness was unbecoming of true and tough kibbutzniks. If that wasn’t enough, Galia, her caretaker at the kibbutz, disappeared shortly thereafter, leaving Omer all alone.

She took to writing, making up fantastical tales in which everyone was happy and no one was dead. Her teachers told her that her stories were horrible, often adding that she had no talent and urging her to abandon her literary ambitions for more useful tasks like cooking or cleaning. Omer, however, persevered: In 1959, after a stint as a teacher, she published her first book, The Pages of Tamar, a novel in diary form detailing the everyday life of a perfectly normal girl from a perfectly normal family living in a fictitious kibbutz. It was a hit. Tamar and her tightly knit clan were for Israelis what the Ingalls family had been for Americans—a shamelessly romanticized and utterly charming account of frontier life that was both an operatic celebration of the nation’s founding pioneers and an intimate portrayal of daily life in harsh conditions.
 
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Firestorm Over Canada's 'Guys Only' Prof

By Renee Ghert-Zand for The Jewish Daily Forward
If you’ve been anywhere near a Canadian newspaper or news website in the last week, then you’ll know that a scandal involving author and English professor David Gilmour has been dominating the headlines. The dustup is in response to remarks Gilmour made discounting Canadian, women and minority writers.
I asked some Canadian Jewish writers and literature professors for their takes on the controversy, which has not only taken up many column inches, but also led Gilmour’s fellow academics to distance themselves from him, and students to stage protests.

But before we get to the commentary, here is a summary of what led to the brouhaha.

Gilmour’s remarks came in a short, informal interview with a writer named Emily M. Keeler for Random House’s Hazlitt literary blog. According to the transcript of the conversation, Gilmour, an award-winning author who has been teaching (as a non-tenured lecturer) undergraduate courses in modern short fiction at the University of Toronto, is willing only to teach “stuff I love.” This apparently means Russian and American literature (“I just haven’t encountered any Canadian writers yet that I love enough to teach”) by middle-aged white men like him.
When the interviewer pressed him to explain why he doesn’t teach works by women writers, he answered, “When I was given this job I said I would teach only the people that I truly, truly love. And, unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Um. Except for Virginia Woolf.” Then he went on to complain about Woolf being too sophisticated for his students.

It seems common for Gilmour to be questioned about his reading lists. “Usually at the beginning of the semester someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I’m good at is guys.”

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Amos Oz, 74 Years Old and a National Treasure, Still Dreams of Life on the Kibbutz

In a wide-ranging conversation, Israel’s greatest novelist talks about working the land, making art, and Natalie Portman

By Vox Tablet

There’s no other living Israeli author who is as well known around the world as Amos Oz. Inside Israel, he’s one of the country’s most respected cultural figures. Oz has lived a tumultuous life. When he was 10 years old, he witnessed the founding of the Jewish state. When he was 12 years old, his mother committed suicide. When he was 15, he joined a kibbutz and changed his last name to Oz, Hebrew for “strength.” He eventually left the kibbutz for the desert because of his son’s asthma, but as he tells Vox Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin, he still dreams of kibbutz life at least once a week. In his newest short story collection, Between Friends, he revisits the early years of the kibbutz, when the collective farms were still a wild Israeli ideological experiment. Estrin sat with Amos Oz in his home in Tel Aviv for a far-ranging discussion about the new book, his love of Hebrew, his predictions for Israel’s future, and a bit of celebrity gossip. [Running time: 27:45.]

Click here to listen.