A dybbuk, an evil spirit, clings to a man who is struggling to walk.
28 Oct
2012 November-December, Jewish Word

Jewish Word // Dybbuk

A Ghost from Our Past by Sala Levin Fans of the film-making, Minnesota-bred brothers Joel and Ethan Coen were transported back to the old country in the opening scene of the 2009 film A Serious Man. A couple—clad in full shtetl garb—is visited by a man believed to be dead. The woman declares him a dybbuk, a figure unfamiliar to most 21st-century filmgoers, but one quite at home in the horror movies it predates. The word dybbuk is a Yiddishized adaptation of the Hebrew root davek, meaning to cling or to cleave, and the basis of the contemporary Hebrew word for glue. The term first appears in Genesis, where it’s written that a man will “leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall be as one flesh.” Dvekut, in kabbalistic thought, is “a kind of ecstatic state...

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01 Nov
2012 November-December, Arts, Big Questions, Culture

How Does Satire Influence Politics?

The Intersection of Politics and Satire. A Moment Symposium Robert Mankoff Political satire is ridicule dedicated to exposing the difference between appearance and reality in public life. The justification for this mockery, going back to Aristotle, is that by holding bad behavior up to ridicule we might, as it were, “laugh folly out of existence.” Syllogistically, a la Aristotle, it might be put something like this: 1) Politicians behaving badly will be mocked. 2) Politicians don’t like to be mocked. 3) Politicians will stop behaving badly. Now, how did that pan out? More than two millennia later, political folly is still as much with us despite the fact that political satire reaches more of the populace than ever before, as part of the entertainment industry. There’s now a veritable satiric-industrial complex. Furthermore, that populace is no longer just a passive recipient of...

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01 Nov
2012 November-December, Interview, U.S. Politics, Women

The Madeleine Effect

Madeleine Albright became secretary of state in 1997. Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton followed. Has foreign policy become women’s work? There’s a story Madeleine Albright likes to tell. She tells it to reporters, colleagues, students and friends—and halfway through our conversation, she tells it to me. “My youngest granddaughter,” she says, “when she turned seven a couple of years ago, said, ‘So what’s the big deal about Grandma Maddie being secretary of state? Only girls are secretary of state.’” The anecdote, which has become so much a part of Albright’s mythology that nearly everyone recounts it to me, signifies the enormous progress women have made in the past 15 years since Albright became the first female secretary of state and the highest-ranking woman in government in U.S. history. Women’s leadership is now so accepted that it obscures...

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01 Nov
2012 November-December, Food, Talk of the Table

Lox: An American Love Story

by Eileen Lavine When I was growing up on the Upper West Side in the 1930s, Broadway was lined with “appetizing” stores, that—unlike delicatessens, which sold smoked, cured and pickled meats—specialized in fish and dairy. These were shops where we bought pickles, fresh sauerkraut, dried fruits and candies as well as pickled, smoked and salted fish, and especially what we called lox. At the time, this now-iconic Jewish food was skyrocketing in popularity, and appetizing stores opened to meet the demand. Most Americans, even Jews, don’t know that lox was invented in America, not Eastern Europe, explains Gil Marks, author of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. “Salmon was not an Eastern European fish,” although it was familiar to Scandinavians and Germans, including German Jews, he says. While “bagels were Polish and cream cheese was Native American,” Jews...

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01 Nov
2012 November-December, Fiction, Series

Fiction // Roots

by Joan Leegant Hirschman, unwilling to bend, was refusing to participate. A lifelong agnostic, and proud of it, he’d managed for 82 years to not observe a single of his people’s canonical festivals except in its breach, and he had no intention of starting now. It was his father’s way before him, and his father’s father’s, and now it was his. He ate bread on Passover, went to the track on Yom Kippur, and, since childhood, had miraculously avoided the trappings of this one, the relentlessly marketed Jewish Christmas when boys and girls with names like Cohen and Levy were commanded to ignore the country’s love affair with eggnog and fruitcake in favor of oily potato dishes invented by starving peasants in Galicia. Not that the so-called historic origins of the holiday were any better, Hirschman liked...

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01 Nov
2012 November-December, Culture

Test Your Jewish IQ // Comedy edition

Who Said What?   1 | “Age is strictly a case of mind over matter.  If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”   2 | “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.”   3 | “I don’t care if you think I’m racist. I just want you to think I’m thin.”   4 | “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it’s all over much too soon.”   5 | “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.”   6 | “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”   7 | “I have enough money to last me the rest of my life unless I buy something.”   8 | “You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.”   9 | “My wife and I were happy for 20 years. Then we met.”   10 |  “Tragedy is when I cut my...

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01 Nov
2012 November-December, Ask the Rabbis, Latest, Religion

Ask the Rabbis // What Makes Someone a “Real” Rabbi?

INDEPENDENT It is the community more than anything else that makes someone a rabbi. If the community finds a person’s teachings and leadership inspiring and enriching, if that person enhances their spiritual development and their immersion in Jewish life, this qualifies a person as a rabbi more than someone who went to a rabbinical seminary but lacks these qualities. In the old days, you studied not to become a rabbi but simply for the love of Torah; your teacher would determine behind your back whether you were rabbi material or not. When I attended yeshiva in Jerusalem in the late 1960s, the head of the yeshiva kept nudging me to receive smicha , and I kept refusing because I didn’t want to become a rabbi; I had other plans. Years later, I ended up teaching here...

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01 Nov
2012 November-December, International, Opinion

Clifford D. May: The Mirage of the Arab Spring

The Islamist movement could sabotage democratic reforms in the Arab world. We Americans are nice people. We don’t like to see anyone living under tyranny. So when protests broke out against the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, most of us were supportive of the men and women in the streets. The evidence suggests these protests were spontaneous—sparked when a downtrodden Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire. Most of those who took part appear to have been motivated by the frustration that festers among those with little hope of escaping poverty and oppression. Protests spread across the region. Regimes fell in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. In Syria, a civil war is still under way. This upheaval became known as the Arab Spring, an allusion to the Prague Spring of 1968, when Czechoslovakia boldly initiated democratic reforms....

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