The Language of Babylon

By Michael Weingrad in Mosaic Magazine

Life After Baghdad: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel, 1950-2000 is the newly translated volume of memoirs by the Iraqi-born Israeli scholar of Arab literature Sasson Somekh. It is not nearly as beguiling as its predecessor, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew, which appeared in 2007 in one of the handsome little Gallimard—inspired paperbacks put out by the Jerusalem—based Ibis Editions press. Nevertheless, it is welcome, not only for continuing Somekh's story, but for adding another book to the shelf of those produced by the last generation of Jews to have been born and raised in Iraq.

The Jewish presence in what is today Iraq dates back to the 6th century B.C.E. and stretches through the Middle Ages to modern times. After Baghdad became the seat of the Islamic Caliphate in the 8th century, it developed into the political and spiritual capital of the Jewish world, and its rabbis, intellectuals, merchants, and officials shaped what Judaism would be for centuries afterwards. Jews continued to occupy an important place in the city right up into the modern period. The census in 1917 reported that Baghdad's total population of 200,000 was forty percent Jewish, a larger proportion of the total than in Warsaw, Odessa, Vilna, or any of the famous Jewish centers of Europe. When the British took over the region from the Ottomans after World War I and created the state of Iraq, Jews, already receptive to educational and cultural influences from Europe, were at the vanguard of the heady transformations of an imported modernity that included streetcars, cinema, education for women, and a liberalizing monarchy under the British-installed Faisal I.

Under the new regime, many Jews moved into the middle classes, and some became prominent in finance, banking, and trade. Others contributed to the arts and to modern Arabic literature, poetry, and drama. In the 1920s, a Jew served as the country's minister of finance. Jews wrote the first Iraqi short stories in Arabic, and they produced some of the best-known singers and musicians in Iraq, indeed in the whole of the Arab world.

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Soccer, Like Politics, Is About Corruption, Incompetence, and Obsessing With the Jews

Ravaged by allegations of widespread corruption, FIFA—world soccer’s controlling body—focuses on Israel

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine

There are very few things in this world I love more dearly than the World Cup. Every four years, like a crazed pilgrim to the pitch, I shun all other forms of human engagement, chant the names of Cameroon’s captain or Croatia’s midfielder as if they were life-giving mantras, and howl as the titans of soccer kick, block, and tackle their way into eternal glory.

But not this year.

I’ll still watch the games. I’ll still shout and cheer and curse. But every kick will remind me that what I’m really looking at is the spectacle put forth by a supremely corrupt authority, one that will earn $4 billion this year by sacrificing its own integrity, the principles of sportsmanship, and the sanctity of human life.

In case this sounds overly dramatic, a quick tour of soccer’s sickness is in order. This past weekend, the New York Times uncovered a match-rigging syndicate that fixed 15 games or more ahead of 2010’s tournament in South Africa. Unimprovably named Football 4 U Int’l, the cartel managed to bribe its way into some of soccer’s most sensitive nerve centers, appointing its own referees and then watching with delight as they called handballs that never were and performed other acts of perfidy to ensure the outcome desired by their paymasters.

The revelations struck a nerve with fans and officials alike, suggesting that the beautiful game may be anything but. Still, the corruption of 2012 pales in comparison with that of 2022, the year the cup will be held in Qatar.

To understand just how senseless the decision to give the Arab emirate the privilege of hosting soccer’s premier tournament truly is, all you have to do is set the temperature in your apartment to 122 degrees Fahrenheit and then run around nonstop for an hour and a half. If you’re still sentient, you can stop and reflect on the fact that Qatar has no soccer tradition to speak of and little by way of civil liberties—the sort that ought to be insisted upon as the minimal requirement for hosting an international sporting event—and that its climate and political conditions alike are killing the migrant workers charged with building its shiny new stadiums, with 184 Nepalis having perished last year alone and as many as 4,000 people slated to die by the time the whistle blows on the first match of the tournament, eight years from now.

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A Dear Abby For The Lower East Side

by Ester Bloom for Jewniverse
Liana Finck's new graphic novel A Bintel Brief blends history and imagination to create an experience that is rich, immersive, and satisfying. It begins when a young woman receives a notebook from her grandmother filled with clips of advice columns from the premiere Yiddish-language newspaper The Forward. When she opens the notebook Abraham Cahan himself, editor of the paper and its Miss Lonelyhearts, steps out to take the narrator on an emotional tour of the past.

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The Talmud of Star Trek

by Matthue Roth for Jewniverse

The Talmud says that killing a single person is like destroying the entire world. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Inner Light" (1992), writer Morgan Gendel took the concept literally. Inspired by the Talmudic concept, he crafted an episode in which a thousand-year-old alien artifact stores the memories of an entire civilization and implants it in the mind of the Enterprise's captain, Jean-Luc Picard.

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The Remarkable Career of Ruth Wisse, Yiddish Scholar and Political Firebrand

Harvard Prof's Neo-Con Views Often Stirred Controversy

By Ezra Glinter for The Jewish Daily Forward

On a cold day in late March, I sat in room 103 of Harvard University’s Sever Hall with about 60 undergraduates, listening to Ruth Wisse talk about Avrom Sutzkever. A partisan and a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, Sutzkever was one of the 20th century’s greatest Yiddish poets. The reading that day was of his surrealistic prose poem “Green Aquarium,” which Wisse, a small, gray-haired woman wearing a purple, smocklike jacket, had translated for her master’s thesis in the early 1960s. She explained how Sutzkever used the horrors of the Holocaust as a metaphor for the artistic process — “Walk over words as over a minefield,” he writes near the beginning — and how his conception of poetry as “the only credible alternative to barbarism” countered Theodor Adorno’s dictum, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What she didn’t tell the roomful of undergrads, still sleepy after the recent spring break, is that Sutzkever was the reason she was teaching the class at all.

In fact it was Sutzkever who convinced Wisse, some 55 years earlier, to pursue a career teaching Yiddish literature, and it was his work she turned to when she went to Columbia University to study with Yiddish linguists Max and Uriel Weinreich. In the decades since that encounter Wisse has pioneered the academic study of Yiddish, first at McGill University, where she began her career, and then at Harvard, where she has been the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature for the past two decades. Now, after a half-century in the field, she is retiring from teaching and will finish her contract with the university in June. Although it’s unlikely that Wisse will disappear from public life — her penchant for right-wing political polemic has earned her as great a reputation as her literary work — she can look back on generations of scholars she nurtured as students, and at the development of an academic field she helped create.

I arrived at Harvard the previous afternoon to interview Wisse in her office at 6 Divinity Avenue, a dignified brick building that is home to both the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the university’s Semitic Museum. At 78, Wisse is, in a word, grandmotherly. Colleagues talk about her kindness as a friend, and students about her generosity as a mentor. Aaron Lansky, who studied with Wisse in Montreal before founding the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., told me how she once let a student undergoing personal difficulties stay with her in her home. Novelist Dara Horn recalled being invited to Wisse’s house for the final lecture of a course, only to find Saul Bellow waiting to greet the class at the table. When I met Wisse, she had just returned to Boston on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles, but she talked with me for more than two hours without making me feel like I was overstaying my welcome. When I arrived, I found her looking for me outside her office, worried that I might have gotten lost amid the museum exhibits.

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A Polish Nun Finds Her Jewish Roots

by  Sarah Zarrow for Jewniverse

What happens when a young Polish aspiring nun learns about her Jewish past?

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Mark of Belonging: Why Circumcision Is No Crime

William Galston in Mosaic Magazine

A decade ago, who would have guessed that controversies about male circumcision would roil a number of European countries and achieve some resonance in the United States? But that is what has happened. These events have raised important questions about individual rights, parental authority, religious liberty, and the nature of morality.

The issue of male circumcision reached the front pages of newspapers around the world in June 2012 when a court in Cologne, Germany, ruled that circumcising young boys inflicted grievous bodily harm and that the child’s “fundamental right to bodily integrity” trumped parental rights, despite the fact that the parents were acting in accordance with long-established and fundamental requirements of their religious faith. Although the case that reached the court concerned Muslim parents, its implications for Jews was obvious, and the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany condemned the decision as “an unprecedented and dramatic intrusion on the self-determination of religious communities.” Meeting a month later, Muslim and Jewish leaders issued a joint statement defending circumcision and calling on the German government to take action. Michael Bongardt, a professor of ethics at Berlin’s Free University, contended that “the often very aggressive prejudice against religion as backward, irrational, and opposed to science is increasingly defining popular opinion.” On the other side, a leading criminal-law expert called for a national discussion about “how much religiously motivated violence against children a society is ready to tolerate.” With her country’s troubled past weighing heavily on her, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared, “I do not want Germany to be the only country in the world in which Jews cannot practice their rites.” By December 2012, the Bundestag passed legislation protecting parents’ rights to have young boys circumcised.

The controversy was not confined to Germany. In 2011, doctors in the Netherlands organized against circumcision, denouncing the practice as a “painful and harmful ritual.” Denmark became embroiled in a debate about whether to require medical supervision for all circumcisions or even to prohibit the practice outright. A socialist member of parliament declared that his Red-Green alliance advocated a ban on circumcision, and the Social Liberal Party—a member of Denmark’s ruling coalition—followed suit. One of the country’s most prestigious newspapers published an article describing circumcision as a ritual involving “black-clad men” who torture and mutilate babies. Meanwhile, Norway’s Center Party announced that it opposed circumcision, as did Finland’s third largest party, the populist True Finns. In a statement submitted to Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare, the country’s Pediatric Society called circumcision the “mutilation of a child unable to decide for himself” and advocated abolishing the procedure. In a meeting in Oslo on September 30, 2013, the five Nordic children’s ombudspersons released a joint resolution advocating a ban on nontherapeutic circumcision for underage boys.

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