Will Hebrew Save Israel From Destruction? Two Professors Suggest So

Check out my story this week for The Jewish Week. It’s a review of two books, one by Bernard Avishai, the other by Ilan Stavans, both of which explore Hebrew’s centrality to the Jewish state. Avishai’s book “The Hebrew Republic” is the more political of the two, and he comes out throwing punches. That old issue — you can’t be both Jewish and democratic — is his focus. And he’s saying Jews gotta deal with it. If you want to keep Israel Jewish, then at least make Judaism something anyone–Arab, Russian, atheist–can enter. Hebrew, make everyone speak it. That’s his answer. Read more about my take on it here.

Also, keep your eyes peeled for Zadie Smith’s provocative essay in the upcoming issue of the New York Review of Books. (Not yet available online.)  Called “Speaking in Tongues,” the piece analyzes Obama’s ability to speak in several different dialects, and what it says about his, and Western society’s, self-made selves.  Smith, you might know, is a black Briton who went on to Cambridge. The early part of the essay talks about her conscious change in speech.  What’s strange is that she (and most people) get called out for speaking differently to different people.  But isn’t that part of the West’s tale?  It’s just a reflection of our rags-to-riches, up-by-the-bootstraps mentality.  Why hate?

Brother, I’m dying.

The wunderkind, Atul Gawande, writes about what’s wrong with America’s healthcare and how to fix it.  It’s in this week’s New Yorker.  He compares our system to other Western countries’–Britian, Canada, Switzerland (I believe), and France. 

Based on their paths toward universal coverage, he argues that we have to open up the various–and imperfect–government programs we already have to get everyone coverage.  That means opening up the VA system to non-vets, Medicare to people of all ages, and employer-based private coverage to the unemployed.

He attacks visionaries, on the left or right, who want to create a whole new system from scratch. Be pragamatic, he says, and work with what you got.  After all, other byzantine American systems have adapted just fine to monumental change: telephone lines went from analog to digital without tearing down posts.  Ditto for cable. Why not healthcare?

So, Gawande’s watchword is “pragmatism” (Obama!  You listenin’?!  Someone wants a job.) Build on what you got.

Also, read Marcia Angell’s hard-bitten piece from last month’s New York Review of Books.

It’s an overview of how doctors and pharmaceutical companies got us hooked on drugs.  Like Gawande, Angell’s a Harvard Med prof.  But unlike Gawande, who advised the Clinton admin, for better or worse, Angell was the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. That matters.

Oh yes, and one more healthcare piece. It’s in this month’s Harper’s, and may curb Gawande’s enthusiasm. I haven’t read it, at least not yet, but with the title “Sick in the Head: Why America Won’t Get the Healthcare It Needs,” I’m assuming it’s not too cheery.

Jewish Culture or Kitsch?

Recently, I covered the Oyhoo! Music Festival organized by music impresario Michael Dorf. The daytime conference, where producers hobnob with Jewish artists (comics, musicians, choreographers, visual artists), was at City Winery, Dorf’s new yuppie joint.  (It’s his latest incarnation, a yuppie replacement for the Knit, which he sold not long ago and will move in Brooklyn.)

Boring? Perhaps. But I wrote a column based on what I saw over two nights and the folks I talked to during the day. In short, are Jews today, in all their beguiling variety, creating a new culture, like Israelis have, or as Yiddish-speakers once did? Or is it just kitsch, Jews pasting tattered bits of their past onto a commerical, trayf culture?

I opine, you decide.

Heironymous Bosch, Dance!

Martha Clarke, a leading choreographer of our time, recently revived “Garden of Earthly Delights.”  That’s the dance-theater work, debuted in 1984, that made her a star.  Twenty-five years later, it’s made her one again, with glowing reviews in the Times, the New York Observer, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.

I got to interview Martha a month ago, for a story I wrote in The Jewish Week.  Here’s what happened.

Zus and Me: The “Defiance” Guy I Knew

Here’s an essay I wrote for my employee, The Jewish Week.  One of the partisans in the Nazi Jewish resitance group, the Bielskis, and subjects of the new film “Defiance,” is related to me.  Zus, played by Liev Schreiber, is my dad’s uncle. Zus and I used to eat a lot of bagels and lox together.  Read about it here, in an essay that was published in the J-Dub a couple weeks ago.

What Happens When Primo Levi Meets Galileo?

“Falling Bodies,” a new chamber-drama by Jonathan Levi, founder of Granta.  It debuted in New York’s Rubin Art Museum last week.  Read my story about it, published in The Jewish Week on 1/07/09, here.

Title VII loses its legs

The NYT leads with the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision restricting employees ability to sue their employers based on discrimination. Plaintiffs now have no more than 180 days to file a complaint after a deemed insufficient, discriminatory pay-raise is given.

Problem is, many critics say, including Justice Ruth Ginsburg who made the unusually aggressive move and read her dissent from the bench, that the ruling, which defines more clearly a law called Title VII, part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, doesn’t give employees enough time to accumulate evidence of discrimination. Who knows? Maybe if a woman receives a lesser pay raise than her male counterpart, she was doing a poorer job. But wouldn’t she need this to happen a few times — over a few years — for her to decide that the lesser pay really was sexist?

Too bad, the SupCourt says. T-minus 180 days after only the first pay raise discrepancy. Then, deal.

Critics also claim the ruling denies basic realities of the workplace. Namely, employees don’t readily discuss salaries among one another, so once someone finds out that their pay is, perhaps, reduced because of race, religion, or gender discrimination, it may already be too late.

Good criticism, all. But the Supreme Court is dealing with a real problem. Between 2001 and 2006, the Times story writes up high, there were nearly 40,000 worker discrimination suits filed across the country. Surely discrimination is a problem, but you really think all those cases are valid? Not me.

Still, the Supremes obviously chose the case that they did for a reason. The plaintiff, a female manager at a Goodyear tire plant in Georgia, filed her first suit with an Atlanta court in 1998. Her claims were based off of pay discrimination from the early 1980s.

That 15-year-or-so gap made it all to easy for the Supreme Court to make its ruling. If it’s not obvious, it’s at least reasonable for judges to be wary of cases brought 15 years after the fact.

Oddly, the Court’s ruling may have the opposite effect that the majority justices hope for. If workers now even suspect discrimination, they might jump at the bid knowing that they only have 180 days to do so. If courts around the country see an uptick in discrimination charges, we’ll know who to thank.

In other news, the Journal leads its newsbox with the kidnapping of five Britions who were standing guard in front of the Iraq Finance Ministry. (It’s worth noting that the Supreme Court decision isn’t the obvious lead among the country’s leading papers.) The Washington Post goes with Bush’s choice of former diplomat, trade envoy and current exec at Goldman Sacks Robert B. Zoellick to lead the World Bank, in light of Wolfowitz’s resignation. For USA Today, it’s mention of the last two-month period in Iraq being the deadliest for U.S. troops. And, finally, the LA Times leads with the increased delay in retirement for old folks, skittish, it appears, that social security and health care benefits might run out before they do. (Thanks, Slate, for doing my homework. As always.)

Who’s to blame for the Palestinians’ health crisis?

What this question implies, of course, is that there indeed is a health crisis in the Palestinian territories. And perhaps that is the most important lesson to come out of this exchange in the soon-to-be published June 14th issue of the New York Review of Books.

(The referenced article stems from a controversial piece published in the NYRB by Richard Horton. Horton’s the highly visible British physician and editor of the Lancet, a leading British medical journal made (in)famous for its death toll estimate in the current Iraq war, which placed the number around 600,000 Iraqi civilians killed. The United Nations, relied on statistics taken from Iraq’s health ministry as of January 2007, and placed the number at 34,000. Obvousily, there are politics involved.)

Back to the exchange: it positions Israel’s P.R. guy, Yair Amikam, from their Ministry of Health against Horton, who essentially re-iterates the points he made in his original article.

(An aside: Horton’s on a publishing role…he also had a great review of Jerome Groopman’s well-recieved book “How Doctors Think” in the last issue of the NYRB. That makes three NYRB’s in a row!)

Again, I digress. Amikam hashes through the hard facts that Horton begrudgingly — barely still — concedes. Namely, the Palestinians have a health crisis (in other words, they have really bad medical care) because the Palestinian Authority doesn’t pay much attention to health care. The Israeli government provided medical aid for some 60,000 Palestinian last year (not much, though, when you consider there’s almost 4 million in Gaza and the West Bank). And, to top it off, the Palestinian Health Authority chose on its own to freeze contacts with the Israeli Ministry of Health when the P.A. promoted the second intifada in 2000.

Horton marshals some of his own distressing facts. After the Lebanon-based Hezbollah kidnapped Corporal Shalit on June 25, 2006 — and Hamas began launching Qassam rockets indiscriminately into Israel — the IDF killed over 300 children. (Speaking in general terms, Amikam calls the civilian casualities of the ’06 Hezbollah-Hamas war “errors.”) Horton cites Israel’s security fence and border restrictions as major obstacles to delivering basic medical supplies to Gaza and the West Bank.

He doesn’t acknowledge that well-guarded borders have saved thousands of Israeli lives, and have thwarted real terrorist threats.

On the health care realities, though, both stand on firm ground. Problem is — and nothing new here — neither author sees the shared responsibility for the problem. Israel’s security measures have begot serious hurdles to elementary Palestinian needs: health care, in this case. And wholly irresponsible, inept, and Janus-faced Palestinian governance has made a nasty situation worse.

Now, I don’t mean to call it even. In this exchange, Horton’s the loser.

He already had me skeptical with his politicization of medical crises with the absurdly high Iraq death count estimate, at 600,000+. (A simple mental guesstimate: 50 deaths per day X 350 days per year X 4 years = 70,000 deaths, roughly.)

Horton falls flat when he writes that Amikam “relies on the hope that most readers of The New York Review will not have visited Gaza and the West Bank.” True, probably.

But then this: “He trusts that non-Israeli and non-Palestinian readers will be skeptical of the deprivation and hardship that visitors repeatedly and consistently report.” False by so many accounts. The NYRB, plainly and unabashedly liberal in its politics, has readers who more often than not agree — or at least read through — its political slants.

I, for one, buy the fact that Palestinians due face a health crisis — and that’s just a part of it. But to then go on and say that, in effect, one can’t know the extent of the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank until one actually goes there, shows a real lack of faith in your readers, and, indeed, your own role as a writer. It brings to mind a recent talk I saw Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic give in New York where he shot down similar arguments made by a few Holocaust survivors.

If “we had to have been there,” what then of all subsequent attempts to understand it [Auschwitz, Hitler, Eichmann, et al.]? What’s the alternative? Disbelief? Forgetting?

You get the point.

So, Horton, if you think you’re going to win your case — and an important one — by aping your readers, sorry. Not happening. Give me the facts. I’ll take it from there.

Revisionism, Israel, and other dirty words

In this week’s New Yorker, the e-i-c David Remnick, writes an important book review of, mainly, Israeli historian Tom Segev’s new book “1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East.”

It’s important, first, because it re-claims the word “revision” from the dirt with which it’s been dredged in recent years. He writes: “In June, 2003, President Bush tried to discredit any critics who dared dispute his artfully twisted intelligence assessments of Iraq by slinging the worst name he could think of: ‘Revisionist historians is what I like to call them.'”

That’s all wrong, Remnick says — and I agree — since the historian’s task is to constantly revise things, to look at old events anew. If it wasn’t, historians today would be in the breadlines. But, of course, that isn’t to say that historians simply upend established historical narratives simply because they’re old; they do it because they could perhaps be better understood in light of present realities or new modes of thinking.

But that’s enough meta-history. The meat-and-potatoes of Remnick’s review — and, rest assured, there will be many, many more about Segev’s new book in the coming weeks — concerns Segev’s thesis that the critical Israeli-Arab war of 1967 could have been avoided. Israel did not pre-emptively strike Syria, Egypt, Jordan, et al. because they were, in reality, facing imminent destruction by those countries, but “for the mistakes, miscommunications, random events, and lethal vanities on both sides.”

To be sure, Segev isn’t the first to paint a more complex, and less apocalyptic view, of the days and months leading up to the ’67 war — the center-right and highly respected historian Michael Oren said as much in his recent book on the war — but Segev is certainly the most daring. Perhaps, Remnick accepts, to a fault: “Segev, by design, ignores the Arab political situation and seems reluctant to credit the Israelis with a legitimate sense of threat.”

Conversely, Oren’s “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” published in 2003, also has its flaws. “Oren, a more versatile scholar, has taken great pains to read whatever Arab sources are available (most archives are closed) and is more at home with big power politics, but he tends to scant the negative aspects of victory and conquest.”

Ultimately, though, the causes of war are no less important than its aftermath. And, for a more complete understanding of the ’67 war, Remnick writes, we must look to liberal journalist Gershom Gorenborg’s new-ish book “The Accidental Empire,” which posits a damning assessment of Israel’s post-’67 war settlements. Put side-by-side with Segev’s “1967,” it’s clear that the prophetic rhetoric coming out of Israeli politicians’ and journalists’ pens and mouths made the current problem of the occupied territories inevitable.

Remnick writes that “those early days of postwar euphoria, there were a few prominent Israelis who dared to warn of the moral and political degradation that would come with the occupation.” And with it, “a new kind of Zionist, one that fused faith and nationalism, replaced the old pioneers, the kibbutzniks. … With time, the settlements became a matter of literal concrete facts; flimsy outposts were transformed into suburban bedroom communities with government subsidies and short commutes to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.”

Today, Israel continues to wrestle with what to do about those “concrete facts” — the settlements. Even their one-time champion, Ariel Sharon, balked at their necessity when he began dismantling them in 2005 in Gaza. But, critics of the settlements shouldn’t have utopian dreams. If Israel ever disengages from the West Bank, where the overwhelming majority of the settlements remain (with about 250,000 settlers) — not to mention annexed east Jerusalem, where another 180,000 Israelis now live — they won’t do so completely. Not as long as the Palestinians don’t learn to control their own.

Remnicks concludes: “At the moment, Palestinian support for a two-state solution has plummeted, and the settler movement is, once more, the strongest lobby in the country.”

“The war of 1967 casts a shadow still.” And it’s lesson: “the only thing worse than a great victory is a great defeat.”

Barkley for President

Check out TNR’s lead article today, an interview with Charles Barkley. I’ve had my qualms with Barkley — mainly, I think he’s a little too chummy with the audience. A little too informal. Since I can’t get past his wink-wink bromides, his slap-assing with Kenny Smith and whoever else is on the TNT broadcast program, I never watch him long enough to hear what he actually thinks.

It took this interview, by Isaac Chotiner, a reporter-researcher at TNR, to open my eyes. It’s clear that — if anyone who should read this interview actually does (unlikely, since I don’t think there’s much overlap between the millions who watch TNT and the 60,000 who read TNR) — they’ll put Barkley in the same house they built for Bill Cosby, the dog house. Comments like this:

black people are fucked up. One of the reasons that black people are not going to be successful is because of other black people. We tell black kids that if they make good grades, they are acting white. If they speak well, we tell them that they are acting white. We have a lot of demons in our own closet–in our own family–that we have to address. But first of all, we want black men to be intelligent and articulate and things like that. That’s not acting white. That’s the way it should be. … We become our own worst enemy with random black-on-black crime, teen pregnancy, single-parent homes. You know we cannot blaming white America for our ills. Does racism exist? Of course it does. But, at some point, I have to make sure I am educated. I don’t have ten kids and no job. I am not killing other black people. At some point, you have to grow up.

They don’t make you many friends. But if you read the interview carefully, you’ll see Barkley’s doing exactly what anyone who cares about their community is doing. He’s offering constructive criticism. Sure, Barkley can be blunt. But don’t let the delivery obstruct the message.

There’s a lot more to be said about the poorer parts of the black community in America — namely, it’s hardly all their fault, speaking both historically and presently — but I don’t think it’s going to be the white world that brings them up. It has to come from within. And, given Barkley’s prominence, he’s a good person to start with. Sorry, Bark, you may just become the role model you wish you never were.

Eric