First, pull on your asbestos gloves before handling this somewhat misanthropic essay on philo-semitism.
Until now, Christians have been very interested in Judaism because it's where their faith came from, but they have never cared much for living, breathing Jews. On the other hand, Jews have never been particularly interested in Christianity because the "New" Testament is a barnacle on the ark of the Bible, but we've always been very interested in Christians, mostly because we want to know if they're going to kill us. Now the dynamic is turned askew. Most Jews, except for those in cultish enclaves ranging from Brooklyn's chasidim to Berkeley's new-age navel-gazers, are no longer very interested in Judaism and have left Bible study to the gentiles, while Christians can't get enough of Jews.There's lots more, and I like it a lot.
Then there's a bit about the films of Julius Garfinkle (Hollywood knew him as John Garfield) and a tribute to recently deceased poet Kenneth Koch.
Linked with such New York School poets as John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, Koch once said in an interview with British poet-critic David Kennedy:The brothers Joab Jonadav Keki — called J.J. by his friends — and Gershom Fizomu are leaders of the Ugandan Abayudaya Jews, and run a school outside Mbale, Uganda, that is open to students of all faiths and both genders. (The Abayudaya began in 1919 when their leader decided that Christian missionaries were misreading the Bible and led his followers to practice Old Testament law. Later Jewish visitors taught them about modern Judaism and last year a Conservative rabbinical court formally converted half of them.) The brothers have cut a CD of Hebrew songs with East African beats, and Keki, also a coffee farmer, ran for office locally in spite of Muslim opposition.There was a certain amount of humor in all our work. It seemed to me that here I was in my 20s and life seemed to me so exciting and full of girls and gardens and steamships and drinks and tennis games and countries and cathedrals.... I mean, it seemed absurd to be writing these drabs, depressed little poems. I knew there were things like death and poverty and injustice, but they weren't everything.
New York, Pennsylvania, and California are all thumbing their noses as divest-from-Israel campaigns.
"The divestment movement is not gaining ground. If anything, we are finding that people are rallying around investing in Israel," said a spokesman for State of Israel Bonds, Raphael Rothstein. Rothstein said 2002 was a banner year for his organization, which sold $1.3 billion in bonds. "We sold South Carolina, where there are very few Jews, $5 million. Illinois bought $10 million....We have close to two dozen states buying bonds. We've had very good support from states, labor unions and pension funds."Nice to hear.
And there is a three-part series on the cuisine of the Golden Age of Spain. You know, that brief time when Muslims and Jews got along. After the Spanish took over, their Inquisition used food customs as evidence of secret Jewish practices among conversos.
One Inquisition list of Jewish food practices, quoted by David Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson in A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews (St. Martin's, 1999), reads in part:If you like historical and ethnic foodways and/or like to cook, you will drool over these recipes and their stories.cooking on the said Fridays such food as is required for the Saturdays and on the latter eating the meat thus cooked on Fridays as is the manner of the Jews;... cleansing or causing meat to be cleansed, cutting away from it all fat or grease and cutting away the nerve or sinew from the leg;... not eating pork, hare, rabbit, strangled birds, conger-eel, cuttle-fish, nor eels or other scaleless fish, as laid down in the Jewish law; and upon the death of parents... eating... such things as boiled eggs, olives, and other viands...
Did you know that there are words common to both Hebrew and Swahili? Because both languages have been influenced by Arabic.
Swahili itself is not a Semitic language. . . . it has become the lingua franca of much of east Africa and the official tongue of Kenya and Tanzania. The reason for this is that its original speakers were heavily concentrated along Africa's east coast, whose ports were the commercial hub for the interior. Because of this, too, they had intensive contact over the centuries with Arab traders from Egypt, Yemen and Aden, from whom they absorbed a large Arabic vocabulary. The word "Swahili" in fact comes from the Arabic swahili, "of the [coastal] plains."it turns out that the centuries of Jewish residence in Poland lent some Yiddish words to Polish.
Mainly because it accompanied the far-flung expansion of Islam, Arabic probably vies with English as the language that has most influenced the vocabulary of other languages. From Indonesia to Spain, numerous languages — among them Turkish, Persian and Urdu — have borrowed huge numbers of Arabic words.
Hebrew mah.loket, "disagreement" or "dispute," which gives us Yiddish makhloykes, turns up in Polish both as machlojke (the Polish "j" is pronounced like a "y") and machloje, a machlojke being a little machloje. The existence of these two variants demonstrates that they were used by Polish Christians who had no knowledge of Yiddish and who took the ke of makhloykes to be the Polish diminutive rather than part of the original word.And many other examples are given.
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