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| October 31, 2005 |
REVIEW: The Tattoo Artist
 You would expect a novel about a Jewish artist fleeing her working class, immigrant background to spend considerable time discussing personal neurosis. You'd expect it to center on New York. What you would absolutely not expect is for it to end up on a South Pacific island for thirty years of sacred tattoo work.
Where does one begin with Jill Ciment's The Tattoo Artist? In the simplest description, it depicts the life of Sara Ehrenreich, a first-generation daughter of Jewish immigrants and a seamstress in the 1920s. When she meets Philip, "an avant-garde artist who hasn't made art in years" and who introduces her to "everything from Dada to Marx ... trayf to absinthe," she finds her escape from a life of hemming pants.
She and Philip, who sees in her an artist he can channel his creative passions into, become all the rage in the New York art world until the Depression shatters it and forces the couple to go in search of Oceanic masks in the Pacific. When the ship that would return them home fails to arrive and World War II breaks out, getting Philip and a horde of islanders killed by Japanese soldiers, Sara finds herself stranded.
Thirty years later, and following her adoption of the sacred art of tattoo (on herself), Sara is discovered by a reporter at Life magazine, she finally returns to a New York that has changed vastly since she left it.
Like I said, where does one begin? The book is haunting, moving, and an anthropological wonder. But such superlatives don't begin to describe how Ciment wields her novel so deftly to explore the nature of love, our self identities, and the impact of art on both. As a cultural analysis, it would perhaps be the stuff of 1970s nature documentaries. As this novel, it's simply breathtaking.
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| October 28, 2005 |
REVIEW: Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
 "Dylan managed to do something that not one of us was able to do: put poetry in rock n' roll and just stand up there like a mensch and sing it."
Those were the words of songwriter Gerry Goffin regarding legendary musician Bob Dylan. Perhaps no other artist more encapsulated their era in music than Dylan. He did more than merely capture the mood and culture of his times; he shaped them. A generation rose up around his music, and a generation spoke with Dylan's voice.
Or perhaps he was simply a brilliant musician who made brilliant music that people liked and that happened to be relevant.
If you're at all curious as to which is more accurate a portrayal of the man and his music, then you need only pick up Greil Marcus' intimately expansive look at Dylan's 1965 recording, Like a Rolling Stone in his book of the same name. If the artist he profiles was able to capture his times in music, then Marcus is equally gifted at capturing the larger cultural landscape and showing how one man and one song sits nestled at the center of it all.
That is, of course, the ultimate value of this book. A dime a dozen are behind-the-scenes books about musicians, albums, movies, TV shows, and whatever else the entertainment industry can spit out. They're interesting, so far as they go, and they usually do not go far. Marcus' book is a different beast entirely.
Like a Rolling Stone is one of those seminal songs in American pop culture, so focusing on its recording is worthy of a book, and Marcus takes time to show us what unfolded in the studio as Dylan and his band crafted what would become grand musical history. Then, as if to show up the entire genre of behind-the-scenes literature, he moves beyond the studio and into the music that influenced Dylan and the music that Dylan influenced.
The devil may reside in the details, but this book's value lies in the context. By showing us the world Dylan was making music in, what cultural forces had led us up to that world, and how Dylan's contribution kept right on leading us into the present, Marcus explains more than just how a song was recorded but how and why it became lodged in our collective psyche. Most of all, he gives us an understanding of why a six-minute song recorded four decades ago remains perpetually relevant and compelling.
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| October 26, 2005 |
REVIEW: Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
 Don't expect Finkelstein's latest book to be very popular with the AIPAC set. Formerly infamous for The Holocaust Industry, Finkelstein indicted those who have wielded the Holocaust as a billy club for their own political and financial interests. More recently he has been feuding with Alan Dershowitz over the Harvard legal scholar's pro-Israel polemic The Case for Israel. It was only a matter of time before the idol-smashing political science professor came out with a book of his own.
That book is Beyond Chutzpah, a reference to yet another Dershowitz tome entitled simply Chutzpah. Considering their long feud and ideological differences, it isn't surprising that their arguments would turn into a point-counterpoint publishing bonanza. Indeed, Finkelstein devotes the latter (and longer) half of his book to refuting The Case for Israel almost point-by-point. Likening Dershowitz's writing to apologetics for Soviet abuses, Finkelstein refutes the image of Israel as upstanding supporters of human rights, citing numerous examples courtesy of a horde of human rights groups to bolster his case.
Dershowitz, for his part, didn't exactly strengthen his case by appealing to the California governor, asking that he use his influence over the University of California system to keep the book from being published. Thankfully, he failed.
Not that the book is an entirely calm and measured approach itself. In a subject as emotionally charged as the Arab-Israeli conflict, it doesn't take long for Finkelstein to drag out the pejoratives. He accuses his opponents of everything from fraud to a lack of "ordinary moral values," which is perhaps harder to argue than the more convincing conclusion, that ideological blinders steeped in ethnic politics keeps many supporters of Israel from seeing its complicity in serious abuses.
All of which is why, as interesting a sideshow as the Finkelstein-Dershowitz pissing match is, the better half of the book is its first half. Here, Finkelstein carries his claims from The Holocaust Industry forward, arguing that supporters of Israel are too quick to use anti-Semitism as a deflection from serious discussion of the conflict. Once again, Finkelstein is bold enough to speak plainly about how the serious threat of anti-Semitism is devalued by its politically-motivated overuse.
Now if only the scholarly warriors on both sides of this divide could lay down their own overused sneering, we might be able to come to some consensus.
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| October 14, 2005 |
Portman's complaint
From the New York Daily News:
Movie star Natalie Portman fasted yesterday for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.
"I really like eating," the 24-year-old beauty tells author Abigail Pogrebin in "Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish," her new book.
"But a couple years ago, one of my friends got really mad at me and it happened on Yom Kippur," Portman confides. "It made me go through the actual atonement list on that day, and the hunger associated with it is really helpful. … You think about how you've wronged your friends and how you should change in the future."
The Israeli-born, Syosset-raised Portman also opines:
"I know what a JAP [Jewish American Princess] is. … I wouldn't want to have stereotypes used in derogatory ways by people outside the Jewish community, but I think it is something from within the community that we need to examine and be self-critical about. … Do [our young people] know or care about the outside world? Do they know or care about things other than having a nice car or a nice purse?"
"I think the major problem today with American Jews is materialism."
"I don't think that any one characteristic should be overemphasized in your real life when you're an actor, because if I play a nun one day, I don't want someone to be thinking when they see me, 'Jew, Jew, Jew.' "
"I have a very close friend who lately has this European, anti-Israel way of thinking, and it's very hard to have conversations with him. … [Being Israeli has] become a much bigger part of my identity in recent years because it's become an issue of survival."
"My dad always makes this stupid joke with my new boyfriend, who is not Jewish. He says, 'It's just a simple operation.' "
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