Kesher Talk

NYC lgf outing #2. The eminence gris of the New York lgf contingent (who posts under the name Free Radical) has a gift of picking up interesting people. He goes to some libertarian party that Asparagirl had emailed everyone on the list about (it was the night of the snowstorm and I wimped out), never manages to meet Asparagirl but strikes up a conversation with a young libertarian from Azerbaijan who is currently an intern with the Foundation for Economic Education, and will move to DC in Jan to intern at the Cato Institute. Tural is nominally Muslim but grew up non-religious under the Soviet Union.

FR invites him along to our 2nd lgf dinner at a kosher Indian restaurant on Sunday evening, also attended by FR's college-age daughter, her best friend, Davesax (a bit pale and puffy with a winter cold), yours truly, Amy, Someone, and several other lgf readers. Greatly missed from the first dinner are Bigbad, Throbert, and Velvet Elvis (not to mention our ambassador from Melbourne, Australia, who has since returned to the antipodes after many adventures).

We ask Tural how he became a libertarian and he says he started with The Law by Frederick Bastiat and went on to Henry Hazlitt and Ludwig von Mises. The classics. We ask him about Jews and Islam in Azerbaijan. Most of the Jews, who lived peacefully alongside their Muslim neighbors, moved to Israel after its founding. They were well-regarded, thought of as smart but stingy (amazing how that stereotype won't die, considering how much philanthropy Jews perform all over the globe).

About halfway through dinner a young guy in a kippa and jeans with 7yr old daughter in tow stops by. He and FR are both on a Bob Dylan listserv, FR with his usual fearless hospitality has invited him to the dinner, and they are meeting for the first time. He is part of the newly revived lower East Side Orthodox community which is restoring and repopulating the old historic shuls of the neighborhood. neither he nor Tural have ever heard of lgf, and we all take turns explaining what a blog is and why this one has inspired us to get together.

Great wine, food, and conversation flow for several hours, after which some of us pile into FR's car (a car! In Manhattan!) and tool down to Tribeca to a concert at the Knitting Factory to commemorate two victims of the Hebrew U bombing, Marla Bennett and Ben Blutstein, who had been studying at Pardes, a wonderful interdenominational co-ed yeshiva in Jerusalem (more about the meaning of "pardes" in Jewish tradition), to become day-school teachers who would transmit the learning and love of Judaism to the next generation. Fittingly, the concert is both a memorial and a benefit to raise money for two scholarships to Pardes to "replace" two gifted young shaliachs of Judaism who can never be replaced.

The concert is sold out and the Knit is crowded and hot. Amy and her friend Barbara settle themselves upstairs while FR, offspring, and I disappear into the dark downstairs crowd of dreads, beards, princess frizz dos, jcrew peasant blouses, wool watch caps, street vendor Indian jewelry, knit kippas, parkas and knee boots. I recognize a few Hadar and T&V regulars, the StorahTelling impresario, and the junior rabbi from BJ.

Ben and Marla are remembered to us by a stack of beautiful full-color pamphlets in the lounge, containing their own writings and remembrances by their friends and teachers, and by moving hespeds from a classmate and from the Rosh Yeshiva of Pardes, Rav Daniel Landes, both of whom have flown in from Israel for the concert. Several of Marla's and Ben's relatives are also here from San Diego, CA and Harrisburg, PA, but do not speak.

We are entertained for several hours by (in order of appearance) a nameless reggae-flavored band from promoter Aaron Bisman's label JDub Records, a cute little Jewish baby-dyke rapper with backwards cap and baggy t-shirt, Jewish worldbeat virtuosos Pharoah's Daughter (Basya obsesses about the soundcheck and the fact that everyone keeps yakking through her set), and haimish Klezmatics founder and jazz trumpeter Frank London's Hasidic New Wave with Yakar Rythmns, a Senegalese drum troupe. In other words, a typical evening at the Knit; posters remind us that Jewsapalooza starts in 2 weeks. We leave halfway through HNW's set - progressive jazz wears quickly on us uptown and Jersey squares who have to go to work on Monday.

UPDATE: Charles gave me a link - thanks, Charles! Then some trolls infested the comment section and I got a bit pissed. I didn't know Ben or Marla and only within the past few months have I met anyone who knew them. Most of the Pardes crowd is young and I'm not (although I have been told I'm "young at heart" - I prefer to think of myself as a lively thinking curious mature adult; "young" people don't have a monopoly on those qualities). But when I read their writings and those of their friends, I wish I had known them and I miss them. Their lives stand for something very different from the snide dismissive contempt and hysterical invective that often infects the supposedly "anti-idiotarian" blogosphere.

posted by Judith @ 12/09/2002 09:24:29 PM