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| July 18, 2005 |
Girl talk
Once again, Judaism can't seem to get their hands wrapped around the same slick packaging that Christians implement in their outreach efforts. A year ago, publishing company Thomas Nelson created a self-proclaimed "Bible Zine" for teen girls to get them excited about their religion. The magazine, not surprisingly, was wildly successful and spawned a version geared towards guys. Now Jewish Lights, a publishing company not known for its creative prowess, has just released The JGirl's Guide: The Young Jewish Women's Handbook for Coming of Age. Yes, we realize this is a totally different beast than the aforementioned magazines. But, c'mon people, at least try to make it look hip. The book looks old, discusses overused topics (including how to deal with an unhealthy body image), and has an overall talking down tone. There's zero cool-factor and, unfortunately, won't make a dent in attracting young Jewish women closer to Judaism.
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| July 12, 2005 |
Writer's block
Unfortunately, our fair planet is filled with great ideas with not to great execution. And the literary world is, to much chagrin, no different. This was clearly apparent in the new book Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer.
We agree. It's a cool concept. Gather all the best Jewish literati and have them dissect the various nuances of what it means to be a writer with split dualities. However, the book is clearly fluff, almost appearing as if it was thrown together because of the concept and not the content.
Start with the title: "Who We Are" is a bland and nondescript title along the lines of I Am Jewish -- an entirely random collection of essays loosely tied to Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's dying words. Everyone from Shia LaBeouf to Kerri Strug participated. Yet here, there are so many important writers who, for whatever reason, opted not to join in this venture: Where's Jonathan Safran Foer? Where's Norman Mailer? Where's the great execution of a great idea?
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| July 11, 2005 |
REVIEW: Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper
Laurel Leff's lengthy and well-research indictment of the New York Times wastes little time in getting to the indictment part. The introduction relays a throw away paragraph from a page 4 story in a 1944 edition of the Times in which the Jewish National Committee in Poland estimates a quarter-million Jews will die in the coming weeks and issues a wrenching appeal for help, "perhaps our last voice from the abyss."
 A buried paragraph in a page 4 story.
"The journalists at the New York Times did not respond to that anguished cry - not the London correspondent who filed it, or the cable editor who read it, or the copy reader who edited it, or the night news editor who determined its placement, or the managing editor who signed off on it, or the publisher who had ultimate responsibility for the newspaper in which it appeared," writes Leff in the third paragraph of the book.
Leff continues for another 358 pages (plus appendices and endnotes) outlining just how unresponsive the Times was during the Holocaust. Leff argues, a host of factors caused the most well-known publication in America to downplay (consciously or not) the mass genocide occurring in Europe, and the Times' status as America's premiere newspaper didn't help the story get much play in other publications either.
And as resonating as that story is in and of itself, it has a particular resonance in our current, media-saturated universe where genocides regularly get less attention than they deserve while Paris Hilton's latest escapades make the front page. Leff even says as much, writing "it serves as a case study of how difficult it is for a group the press has identified as 'the other' ... to receive adequate media attention no matter the extent of the catastrophe."
All of which, in addition to Leff's exhaustive research and well-crafted prose, makes Buried by the Times a stand-out in a very crowded field of Holocaust-related titles. There are so many at this point that we often give them little more than a passing glance. What is left to read of such an exhaustively chronicled subject? What more is there to learn?
Plenty, and the best books are the ones that make those lessons explicit to our current world. Leff does that quite successfully here, and we'd be remiss if we didn't make it front page news that you should read it.
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| July 8, 2005 |
REVIEW: Encyclopedia Neurotica
 At first glance, you want to look at Jon Winokur's paean to all things neurotic as light humor, merely a chance to skim the surface of our popular culture's long love affair with the hung-up, the phobic, the disturbed, the anxious, etc. If you're anything like me, that first glance will be more than enough to draw you in, but once you get your hooks into the pages of the Encyclopedia Neurotica, you'll find more than a merely superficial take on the lighter side of neurosis.
Rather brilliantly, Winokur has foraged the far and the wide and come up with a stunningly (if frighteningly) prescient take on our collective mental absurdity. It even manages brisk reading and a dose of fun.
 Take the five-page entry on self-esteem. With considerable brevity, Winokur points out not the individual neurosis of poor self-esteem, but rather society's neurotic obsession with the subject. "Praising children merely to make them feel good regardless of their actual performance sets them up for a rude awakening," writes Winokur. "Telling them they can 'do anything' is a cruel deception because, of course, they can't."
There's a humor in that last line, a dry humor that pervades the book. It's not nearly as funny, however, as the accompanying quote: "Self-esteem is a myth. If everybody grows up with high self-esteem, who's going to dance in our strip clubs?" - Greg Giraldo.
So the book goes on, from two-line entries to tomes of great insight. The entire self section (which includes self-hating Jew, if you were curious) goes on for a dozen pages and focuses as much on lampooning our preoccupation with ourselves as it does illuminating the various self-indulgent neuroses.
As it turns out, those twelve pages are arguably the best microcosm of the book. Winokur keeps finding clever ways to say, "Look at the lighter side of neurosis." Sure, we're all crazy, but that doesn't mean we can't laugh at ourselves. Stop being so serious and maybe we'll all be a little healthier for it.
In that way, the dry wit and constant spotlight on each of us taking ourselves too seriously is a seriously funny read. But in that same way, it's also got a weighty message. I can imagine somebody picking this up off my coffee table and ending up in a debate over how damaging these types of low-grade mental afflictions really are.
It's like Tom Cruise versus the American Psychiatric Association, but less creepy.
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| July 7, 2005 |
The plot thickens
Before legendary graphic novelist Will Eisner passed away in January of this year, he had already left a legacy including the Spirit archives and the recent Fagin the Jew. Apparently following the Tupac route, it seems Eisner has waited until after his death to release his best work. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is, quite possibly, Eisner's piece de resistance. Feverishly working on this most important work in the last month of his life, it was Eisner's hope that his graphic retelling of this outrageous fabrication would reach a mass audience in a way that no academic work ever could. We can only hope he gets his dying wish.
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| July 6, 2005 |
Man oh man
 With all the recent chatter about the gay marriage debate circulating its way through the media, it's good to see a religious and pro-gay argument finally get its time in the spotlight. And that's exactly what you'll get with the newly-published What God Has Joined Together? A Christian Case for Gay Marriage by David G. Meyers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni. While the book leans a little more to the scientific than we would like (it come complete with charts, graphs, and seemingly endless footnotes), it's still an educated and often compelling look at this controversial topic.
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| July 5, 2005 |
REVIEW: Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority
 Desire, you could say, is the ultimate dirty word. Throughout history, whatever the repressive force -- Christianity or communism, feminism or Freud, take your pick -- it has been our human desire that we have shuffled into a closet most. Perhaps we're just afraid of its inordinate power, its base irrationalism and the way it can thrust us in new and daunting directions with ease.
Fair enough, but it remains a subject of both great derision and great exploration. We're petrified of it, so much so we've concocted whole ideologies to clam it up, but we're addicted all the same. Humans we are, and humans we remain.
Robert Polhemus' wide-ranging dissection of politics and literature, art and psychology, even pop culture takes us down yet another nook and cranny of human desire. In this case, Lot's Daughters views much of Western civilization through the eternally taboo Biblical story of a father and his daughters, and well... that whole incest thing.
It's a compelling read not just because it's all a little bit dirty. This is an academic (chair of Stanford's English department) doing an exhaustive (a bit too exhaustive at times) survey of our cultural history by way of a single Biblical narrative. Take that to a marketing department and you'd expect a collective yawn. Being a little bit dirty helps enormously in bringing the reader along for the ride.
But that's hardly the reason this book is so intriguing. Simply put, imagine a collective fantasy that has pervaded our culture, remains locked in our minds, but that we've managed to repress as a society for centuries. It moves us, and we hide it away, like a berated muse kept safely out of sight. Now that is a marketing department's dream.
Polhemus affects his prose well. As he jumps from Ulysses to Shakespeare to psychoanalysis, the paragraphs never lose you and the story never grows old. That's saying something, considering the book carries a rather narrow argument for 397 pages (plus endnotes). That's arguably a bit too long, but we won't fault Polhemus. He remains an academic after all, and more importantly, his writing is clean.
And did we mention the section on Lolita?
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| July 1, 2005 |
REVIEW: Hating Women
Shmuley Boteach, without question the most celebrity-addicted rabbi on the face of the earth, the biggest media-whore to come out of a rabbinical education, has written a book lambasting the media whoring of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton (and others of their ilk). Such is the beauty of American popular culture. We can have the lamentable likes of Mrs. Federline and the lamentable lugs who lament them.
 That Boteach does it in the guise of rescuing women from their own complicity in female degradation, railing both against the men who hate women and the feminist movement that has "worked so hard to turn women into men," is deeply insulting to just about everybody.
It's insulting, because Boteach relies on naivete, painting a picture of women as idealized ennoblers who civilize us tyrannical men. Take this little ditty: "Unlike men who cheat on their wives even if they love them, women only cheat if they are ignored or miserable in their marriages. If they are happy and satisfied, they almost never cheat." Oh, please.
It's insulting, because Boteach peddles a confining vision for women that is quite unnatural. Who wants to live up to being "seraphs of heaven whose gentility ... shone with the light of the divine countenance?" Certainly women deserve veneration, particularly the woman you're in a relationship with, but Boteach puts all women on a pedestal while simultaneously curbing them into a singular role: "These heavenly creatures had emotional softness and comfort to offer that could take away our [i.e. men's] loneliness and pain."
What if a woman doesn't want to take away your pain? What if she'd rather take away another woman's pain? What if she'd rather be hermit? What if she'd rather be a slob? Boteach doesn't appear to believe in such a possibility, or at least he'd clearly disapprove.
It's not just insulting. It's lazy. How easy must it be to mine our culture for coarseness, oversexualized celebrities, and men behaving badly? A college student could easily write a book on that, yet Boteach sweeps in as if a new national crisis has been discovered.
All of which is not to say this isn't a worthwhile book. For all his faults, Boteach isn't bad at starting up an argument and the value in this book is its capacity to challenge men to think about how they see women. It's been said before, but it merits repeating. If men are the ones treating women poorly, then it must be men who join in solving the problem.
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