Thanksgivukkah

If you've been online at all this month, you can't have missed reading about Thanksgivukkah -- the newly-minted holiday located at the freak intersection of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah this Nov. 28.

Last year, Jonathan Mizrahi, a quantum physicist in Albuquerque, did the math and demonstrated (with graphs!) that the coincidence of Hanukkah on the lunar Hebrew calender and Thanksgiving on the solar Gregorian calendar is so rare that it will not happen again until the year 79,811 — and then only if the Jewish calendar is not somehow reset to ensure that Passover remains a springtime holiday. (yes, the Hebrew calendar is slipping, as this Jewschool post explains, in some detail).

It's all sort of silly, with a Facebook page dedicated to the faux holiday and widely-publicized foodie celebrations across the country creating Thanksgivukkah menus -- pumpkin-filled sufganiot in L.A., latke-encrusted turkey cutlets in San Francisco, and online recipes for kasha with smoked turkey, butternut squash in bourbon (Haaretz), latkes with cranberry applesauce, Maneschewitz-brined roast turkey, challah-apple stuffing, and roasted brussels sprouts with pastrami and pickled red onion. (Buzzfeed.com).

The most Thanksgivukkah-est city ever is Boston, where marketing specialist Dana Gitell first coined the term (if you need proof, just visit thanksgivukkahboston.com); Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has promised to proclaim Nov. 28 “Thanksgivukkah Day" throughout the city.

New England Jews can claim some interesting parallels between the the Pilgrims who settled their part of the country and the Maccabees -- both were, after all, activitists willing to risk their lives for religious freedom. Kol HaLev Education Director Robyn Novick pointed me in the direction of Deanna Mirsky's "The Truth About Pilgrims and Maccabees," which argues while the Plymouth Pilgrims didn't celebrate Hanukkah, they certainly knew about the Maccabees because the Pilgrims as dedicated scholars of Hebrew and Judaica. Mirsky asks us to think beyond turkey and cranberries this Thanksgiving: "Ask 'Mi yemalel?' ('Who can recount the brave deeds of Israel?'). And answer: 'They could and did at Plymouth.'"

Is there something more serious than humor and hype hiding behind this giddy explosion of culinary, scholarly and entrepreneurial energy? (Did I mention the kid who raised money on Kickstarter to produce a turkey-shaped hanukkiah called the menurkey?)

I'm thinking that there is, if only because the excitement which has bubbled up spontaneously around a more-or-less random mash-up of Jewish and American cultural narratives feels real. Joking aside, there's a reason Thanksgivukkah has fueled the imagination of Jewish America: it's because it expresses our legitimate pleasure in the good forturne of being a Jew in America, the one place in the Diaspora  -- and arguably in the entire Jewish world -- where, it is relatively safe -- OK, even a blessing! --  to be Jewish.

I'll say it:  The U.S. is still one of the best places in the world to be if you're a Jew-- otherwise, we'd all be lining up on the runway to make aliyah, and we're not.  And yet, it's no longer really OK to express this degree of unambivalent pleasure in being an American Jew. We're all supposed to want to end the diaspora and go "home" to a place the vast majority of us haven't come from, urged on by an unfortunate trend  in the larger Jewish world to characterize American Jews as cowards who lack the commitment to live as Jews in the place where it's really tough to be Jewish -- in Israel.

For generations, the de facto meme of Yiddish and Jewish-American song and literature was the celebration of American as the goldene medina (the golden country, though perhaps it never turned out to be golden in exactly the way one imagined back in the shtetl). In recent decades, however, songs of the golden streets of America have been drowned out by a different tune -- the cultural myth of the State of Israel as the only true apotheosis of modern Jewish life.

I'm not trying to be controversial, really. All I'm suggesting, is that the wildfire popularity of Thanksgivukkah among American Jews reveals our secret wish to be allowed to be American, to take a break from "Next year in Jerusalem" and celebrate the the fact that right here, right now -- and for some of us, going back several generations -- the land of the Pilgrims has been pretty good to us.

Read more...

Prof. Gates: A surprising, unlikely arrest suspect

Gates in a photo in the Harvard Crimson, 2002

Skip Gates' arrest 7/21/09

Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates is not a man you'd expect to be in the middle of a confrontation with police, let alone the old-fashioned, unreconstructed "race war" which the wingnuts in the white blogosphere keep predicting.

Read his Wikipedia entry, which rightly describes Gates as a "public intellectual."

The foremost scholar of African-American literature in the U.S., his career has been studded with achievements: he was the first African-American Mellon Fellow; he was the recipient of a MacArthur ("Genius") Award; he revived scholarly and public interest in long-lost slave narratives and began a movement to preserve and archive literary artifacts of African-American life; he's built African-American studies departments at major universities and guided the careers of the specialty's most prominent teachers and scholars.


His hallmark has been his subtle and sophisticated explications of race in America and, in particular, in academia:

"Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and maintains that it is 'ridiculous' to think that only blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. He argues, 'It can't be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,'^[1] adding, 'It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth.'" ^([4] (Wikipedia)

Physically, Gates is a small man, dapper, witty, and likable. In public intellectual debate, he typically exemplifies the triumph of reasonable discussion and humor over dogmatism and piety.

You can see what he's like if you you watch the PBS miniseries he co-produced and hosted, African American Lives (2006) and African American Lives 2 (2008). (Gates learns through genealogical research and DNA testing that his ancestry is half white-European and also that he is descended from an Irish king called Niall of the Nine Hostages and from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.)

In a graduate seminar I sat in on when he taught at Cornell, there were among us two students named Phil, one white, one African-American. On the first day, he turns to one of them and says, "I bet in all your classes you're always though of as 'Black Phil.' Well in here," he turns toward the other Phil with a smile, "you're going to be thought of as 'White Phil' and he's going to be just 'Phil.'" It was subtle, it was funny and everybody loved it, in particular White Phil for whom, I imagine, this acknowledgement of racial dynamics was a relief.

I'm sure that there are times when Skip Gates can be as nasty, grumpy, petulant and selfish as the next academic superstar. Especially when he's jet-lagged and locked out of his house. And one of his neighbors calls the police because she thinks he's breaking into his own house (good community watchdogging, but it's too bad she doesn't recognize her neighbors on sight.)

For the vast majority of us who only read about the incident -- i.e. everyone who wasn't there -- it's absurd to cast this single incident as a barometer of racial tensions in this country.

The online response to the incident from bloggers and anonymous posters on major newspapers' sites has been revealing, the NYTimes reports:

Many of the commentators identify themselves by race. Their remarks — raw, heartfelt, confused, and some perhaps offensive — are a remarkable snapshot of how people are viewing the same event through a racial lens.

One online response I find particularly baffling is white people recounting of their own stories of police hostility and harassment as proof that the incident had nothing to do with race. Since they were falsely arrested and are white, they argue, false arrest is a universal American experience (um, scary, very scary) with no racial implications. Thus, they claim, by bringing race into the issue, Gates, and in turn President Obama, "played the race card," by which they mean that they spuriously brought race into an issue with divisive and demogogic intent.

"I believe Gates was disorderly and he is making this a racist issue. I find blacks far more racist than whites and will never miss a chance to play the race card." — "Pip", Reader Comments, The Boston Globe July 21, 2009, reported in WikiNews

"I hate the race card just as much as anyone else..."-- "bill," a Boston Globe reader who went on to say that he did think Gates was the victim of racial profiling. July 21, 2009, reported in WikiNews

As a white person, I find these white people incredibly scary. They're akin to Holocaust deniers -- how, in the face of so much empirical documentation and moving personal testimony, can they claim that race isn't a genuinely ever-present issue in the lives of African-Americans?

They're like the people in that old diversity-training joke who say that we (our company, our country, our country club, etc.) had no problems with discrimination until they (Jews, people of color, queers, etc.) showed up. Or, as a commenter to The Washington Post named ravitchn wrote:

“O’Bama [sic] he has gone too far in being black; we whites will never trust him again.”

The underlying assumptions about race in that statement are just f*cked on so many levels.

What's really shocking is the endless supply of incredibly racist comments posted anonymously -- and preserved for posterity -- on the websites of every major newspaper in the country. (The Plain Dealer's are atrocious.)

Why are some white people so afraid talking about race out loud, preferring to type out furtive insults at the tail end of any article about an African-American?

And why do we (other white people, people of color, journalists, newspaper advertisers, any other interested party) let them get away with it? But's that's a post for another day.

Meanwhile, it's ironic that Gates, a man whose professional achievements include conquering a prevailing academic shibboleth of racial determinism and preserving the multiplicity of African-American idea against reductivism, should be at the starting point of all of this.

Gates looked much like this when he was at Cornell in the mid-80s.

Technorati tags: Henry Louis Gates, Harvard, Barack Obama, online news, racial profiling

Read more...

Easter / Passover Mashups, Part II: Barbie buys matzah

As I wrote in Easter / Passover Mashups, Part I: Passover Peep Panoramas, I've always liked the hands-on craftiness of coloring Easter eggs, and although I don't celebrate Easter, I have been known to put out on my seder table a plate of hard boiled eggs bearing brightly-colored eggs shells.

So naturally I'm a fan of other mashups of seasonal Jewish and Christian cultural vocabularies, like the DIY Tiny Matzah box for Barbie which Hatam Soferet posted on Jewschool.


She writes:

To make your own box of Barbie matzah you will need:

• corrugated cardboard
• ruler
• scissors
• glue
• tape
• pencil
• this scan of a box of matzah (print it at 300dpi)
  

Measure, mark, and cut four pieces of corrugated cardboard 30mm*27mm. Tape them together in a bundle. These are your matzot (hahaha, insert matzah/cardboard joke of choice here).

For the complete directions, you must visit her post.

Hatam Soferet, aka Jen Taylor Friedman by the way, is the creative mind behind Tefillin Barbie. A sofer, she's the first woman known to have written a sefer Torah.

Take a look at her project and what she has to say about being a female sofer. It's all on her website:

"Tefillin Barbie generated an extraordinary amount of feedback. She featured on Jewschool and Jewlicious, on BoingBoing, in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, on Ritualwell, Lilith magazine (Winter '06-'07 issue), New Voices, the London Jewish Chronicle, The Jewish Advocate, the Philadelphia Jewish Voice, the New Jersey Jewish News, the Forward, the Jewish Week..."

Read more...

Easter / Passover Mashups, Part I: Passover Peep Panoramas

A Very Peeps Passover by Nycole Klein and Chris Patton, placed 32nd in the Washington Post's 3rd Annual Peep Show. "Our Peeps have sat down to a traditional Passover Seder, complete with the requisite Passover Haggada (prayer book), Seder plate, candles, matzo and lots of wine. As an added bonus, the Afikomen is hidden somewhere in the room!" says Klein.

've always liked the hands-on craftiness of coloring Easter eggs, and although I don't celebrate Easter, I have been known to put out on my seder table a plate of hard boiled eggs bearing brightly-colored eggs shells.

So naturally I'm a fan of other mashups of seasonal Jewish and Christian cultural vocabularies, like the above panorama of a Pesach dinner attended by Peeps®. (Gives the expression "my peeps" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?)

Peeps®, if you don't know, are bizarre little marshmallow candies traditionally shaped like little yellow chicks and popular at Easter.


According to Wikipedia, theyare made from marshmallow, sugar, gelatin, and carnauba wax, but they have a distinctly unfoodlike texture. In 1999, scientists at Emory University performed experiments on batches of Peeps® to see if they really are indestructable: "They claimed that the eyes of the confectionery 'wouldn't dissolve in anything.'"

Their apparent indestructability and their excessive cuteness challenges people to desecrate them, and so many bricoleurs have tried their hands at making Peeps® dioramas that newspapers now hold annual contests. (These are not to be confused with "Peep Offs," where contestants compete to choke down the greatest number of stale Peeps.)


Writing on Jewschool,feygele called our attention to flickr user stylecouncil1's wonderful Peeps for Passover, a series of photos of the ten plagues as performed by Peeps®.

Chag Sameach Pesach!

Read more...

Seder at the White House / Seder b'beit h'levon

From the White House blog:

"President Obama hosts a traditional Seder dinner in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House on Thursday night, April 9, 2009. Some friends and White House employees and their families joined the Obama family. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)."

NB: to find out who was gathered around the Obama's seder table, see Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet's "Ma Nishtanah in the White House."

Tip o' the kippah to Jill at Writes Like She Talks for pointing out that the Obamas and their guests are using the trusty old Maxwell House Haggadah. Used by millions of American Jews over the years, the free Maxwell House Haggadah began in the early 1920s to promote Maxwell House coffee when it became certified Kosher for Passover.

The seder at the White House appears to have been a somber, respectful, traditional seder.

But maybe next year, the Obamas could join the trend and host a more playful, child-oriented seder. Then Sasha and Malia can enjoy acting out the 10 Plagues with plastic frogs, fake blood, sunglasses (darkness) and marshmallows (hail). Like my kids.

Sure, it's goofy. But we had a good time.

And I did set a very nice table, as my mother would have said, with the nice china and tulips from my own garden.

Read more...

This morning's Birkat Hahama (blessing of the sun)

Birkat Hahama is a rarely talked-about (and rarely occurring) blessing that gives thanks for the creation of the world. It occurs every 28 years when, the Talmud says, the sun reaches the same spot in the firmament as when it was created.

In Cleveland, at 6:30 a.m. this morning, Kol HaLev held a The Blessing of the Sun on the grounds of the Mandel Jewish Community Center. I couldn't go, but I hope someone posts photos soon.

In Israel this morning, 50,000 people took part in Birkat Hahama at Jerusalem's Western Wall.

Read more...

Passover song gets whimsical with matzah

Tip of the kippah to Jill at Writes Like She Talks.

Read more...

Facebook Haggadah

How long until Haggadah parodies outnumber serious ones?


My all-time favorite is still Michael Rubiner's Two Minute Haggadah (subtitle: A Passover Service for the Impatient).

But this Facebook Haggadah is good too.  Here are some screen shots:

Read more...

A really big shoe for you... statue honoring man who threw shoes at Bush erected in Saddam's hometown.

File under: Ars longa, vita brevis.

From the Daily News:

Many Iraqis considered it poetic justice when a journalist tossed his shoes at President George W. Bush last month.

Now the bizarre attack has spawned a real life work of art.
A sofa-sized statue of the shoe was unveiled Thursday in Tikrit, the hometown of the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Baghdad-based artist Laith al-Amari described the fiberglass-and-copper work as a tribute to the pride of the Iraqi people.

The statue is inscribed with a poem honoring Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who stunned the world when he whipped off his loafers and hurled them at Bush during a press conference on Dec. 14.

In the Arab world, even showing someone the sole of a shoe is considered a sign of disrespect.

h/t @Mickeleh
("From the "greeted as liberators" division")/

Read more...

Morphing and change: 44 US Presidents - George Washington to Barack Obama

I find this video -- 44 US Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama morphed to the music Boléro by Ravel -- absolutely mesmerizing.


Morphing is, in essence, movement. Paced to the hypnotic beat of Ravel's Bolero, this is a graceful (and thought provoking) example of what is still a relatively new form of of kinetic art. (There's a subsequent version of the same visuals set to Nirvana's Rape Me. Not as successful.)




At first look, the fluid morphing draws attention to features of our presidents' visages hitherto unnoticed (at least by me), (You'll find yourself thinking things like, "My god, his nose was HUGE" and "Well, HE could never have been elected in the age of television").

The video's final message -- "Change can happen" -- refers, of course, to the skin color of our newest president. But oddly enough, I found that the overall trajectory of the video led me to notice the similarities among these faces rather than differences.

For me, the visual differences between the faces of George W. Bush and Barack Obama are far less startling than the differences between, say, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Was there a morph that caught your eye that way?

It's a reminder that human beings tend to oversimplify identity. Yes, skin color is of signal importance in determining racial/cultural identity in America (as Obama's book makes clear). But it's certainly not the only or even the primary visual marker we could focus on.

Speaking genealogically, there are good reasons that Obama might look more like his 43 predecessors than you might expect. Obama and Bush are 11th cousins, sharing common ancestors Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Soole Hinckley of 17th century Massachusetts.

Obama's distant cousins also include Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman, James Madison, Winston Churchill and Robert E. Lee. Scarily enough, Obama and Dick Cheney are 8th cousins, related through Mareen Duvall, a 17th century immigrant from France.

In terms of the visualization of information, morphing has tends to de-emphasize visual difference. If, on the other hand, you want an image that emphasizes Obama's differences from his predecessors, here it is:

P.S. Want to try your hand at morphing? Try the online tool Morphthing.

Technorati tags: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, ethnicity, skin color, morphing, Ravel, Bolero, old-media-new-media, visualizing information, YouTube

Read more...

"I hate to crush your buzz, but this is NOT a 'post-racist' society": Obama worries, part 2

About 3 weeks ago I wrote a blog post called Why am I so worried that Obama will be assassinated? Should I be? in which I confessed to being unable to stop myself from worrying that Obama might be assassinated.

Over on blogher the post began attracting more readers and comments (13!) from people who shared my worries and wanted to talk about why. Just yesterday *.Lee wrote:

Like many, in my lifetime, I never, ever thought that I would see a black man in the Oval Office. ... I couldn't be more pleased and proud as to what that says about America, but there is the shadow of worry in my heart as well. I didn't think that the country was 'ready' for a woman or a black man as President. I was wrong. ... And no doubt, as the old adage goes, a black man has to work twice as hard to be considered half as good... and no doubt, there will be those who will never be ready, and will never accept this historic event.

The readiness of America is an important issue, because frankly, although America found a way to elect a black President, it hasn't jumped at the chance to take a good clear look at the race issue.

It's a thought I have every time I hear someone gush about how the election was "color-blind" and racism is dead, how this is a brave new world of equal opportunity and love among brothers.


Not where I live. And I'm pretty sure, not where you live, either.

I haven't wanted to dim the afterglow or undermine the enormity of Obama's achievement, but I'm considering making bumper stickers saying, "I hate to crush your buzz, but this is NOT a 'post-racist' society."

I'd be feeling better about race in America if Obama's election didn't feel like such an anomaly.

I'd feel better about the safety of the Obama family if at any time during the 44 years since the Civil Rights Act, we'd seen a steady increase in the number of African-Americans elected to serve in our federal government.

But in fact there have only been three black senators since the post-Reconstruction period -- and one of them was Barack Obama. (His current seat was once held by Carol Mosely Braun, the only African American woman to have served in the senate).

OK, it's partly an issue of demographics. To be elected by a statewide electorate, any African-American candidate needs a lot of white votes. Even in the states with the highest African-American population, black people are still outnumbered by white people by two to one.

But the problem is more than a shortage of numbers. It's a shortage of narratives. Our national imagination is bereft of stories and images of capable, competent African-American in public office. Oh, praiseworthy African-American politicians exist -- it's just that no one has been singing their praises.

Just after Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones died, I tuned into a local NPR station discussion of who might take over her congressional seat and how that might be decided. One caller in particular stuck in my mind, a citizen who had been sought out by WCPN's "The Sound of Ideas" (9/10/08).

"In this entire mix, somehow it is completely forgotten that there are roughly 200,000 voters out in the eastern fringe of the 11th district that are white voters," said Marta Kirsch of Pepper Pike. "What I'm not hearing, not seeing, it has never been broached, is the possibility of nominating a white person for this job. There seems a disequity in that and it's very uncomfortable for me."

Fmr. Rep. Louis Stokes fielded her question with more patience that I would have, pointing out that the unique demographics of Ohio's 11th District make it the only Ohio district to elect ever elect an African-American Congressperson -- the first was Stokes himself, and the second was Tubb Jones, his handpicked successor (Jones succeeded by Marcia Fudge). Otherwise, Stokes said, it is unlikely that any African-Americans would have been elected to Congress from Ohio.

After the show ended I was haunted by the bald-face bias in the caller's complaint. She clearly did not believe that an African-American congressperson would look after the interests of the white minority in his/her district. It wasn't clear whether she thought an African-American congressperson would be unwilling to act on behalf of white constituents or unable.

The ludicrous implication is that white politicans can be trusted to act in the best interest of African-American constituents, but not the converse. If white people perceive Obama as the exception is due entirely to the man's formidable knowledge of government, his intelligence and authority.

Still I'd rather be launching our first African-American First Family, with its 2 little girls, into a much more tolerant and trustworthy world.

Our country desperately needs more images of and stories about competent, intelligent, creative and commanding Africa-Americans -- in government and everywhere else. We need to elect them, and then we need to brag on them.

If a college-educated liberal Democrat has that sort of biased understanding of the impact of race on leadership ability, I shudder to think what her opposite number (poorly educated, conservative and/or Republican?) imagines when she get a mental picture of an African-American leader.

Technorati tags: Barack Obama, Ethnicity, family, Northeast Ohio, social justice-advocacy, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, African American, Louis Stokes, WCPN

Read more...