Leonard Cohen in Jerusalem

Fittingly for "the little Jew who wrote the Bible," tickets to Leonard Cohen's September 24 concert in Tel Aviv sold out in less than 24 hours last Sunday. (Cohen's proposed concert in Ramallah was cancelled, on the other hand, because of pressure from a Palestinian group who couldn't stomach the idea of him playing in Israel also.)

I recently wrote a piece for Zeek about Leonard Cohen's novels, which preceded his better known career as a singer-songwriter. In addition to re-reading the novels, I also read, for the first time, the excellent biography of Cohen by Ira Nadel (I also once reported on a lecture Nadel gave on Cohen at McGill, back in the day). It's well known that Cohen trouped around Sinai in 1973, entertaining Israeli soldiers during the Yom Kippur War, but he performed in Israel on less dramatic occassions as well. One of my favourite anecdotes from Nadel's book is about a concert in Jerusalem in 1972, during the Songs of Love and Hate Tour:

In Jerusalem at the Yad Eliahu Sports Palace, there was pandemonium when Cohen stopped mid-performance and left the stage, agitated and in tears, saying that he could not go on and that the money should be refunded to the audience. Drugs and the pressure of performing the final concert of the tour in the holy city of Jerusalem had contributed to his state. In the dressing room a distraught Cohen rejected the pleas of his musicians and manager to return to the stage. Several Israeli promoters, overhearing the conversation, walked out to the crowd and conveyed the news: Cohen would not be performing and they would receive their money back. The young audience responded by singing the Hebrew song, “Zim Shalom” (“We Bring You Peace”). Backstage, Cohen suddenly decided he needed a shave; rummaging in his guitar case for his razor, he spied an envelope with some acid from years ago. He turned to his band and inquired: “Should we not try some?” “Why Not?” They answered. And “like the Eucharist,” Cohen has said, “I ripped open the envelope and handed out small portions to each band member.” A quick shave, a cigarette, and then out to the stage to receive a tumultuous welcome. The LSD took effect as he started to play and he saw the crowd unite into the grand image of “the Ancient of Days” from Daniel’s dream in the Old Testament. This image, “the Ancient of Days” who had witnessed all history, asked him “Is this All, this performing on the stage?” Deliver or go home was the admonition. At that moment, Cohen had been singing “So Long, Marianne” intensely and a vision of Marianne appeared to him. He began to cry and, to hide his tears, turned to the band – only to discover that they, too, were in tears.

Somehow I doubt that the upcoming show in Tel Aviv will be quite like that. Those were the days, I guess. Read More......

R.B. Kitaj on Art and Israel

I have a new review in Zeek of Aaron Rosen's book Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj. Rosen's project, overall, is to explicate the ways in which Jewish painters drew on the predominantly Christian history of Western art to create more-or-less Jewish paintings, a task at which he is successful within the limited scope he sets for himself.

Aside from Rosen's own book, writing the review gave me the opportunity to read two books by one of his subjects, the American Jewish painter R.B. Kitaj. These were his First Diasporist Manifesto of 1989 and his Second Diasporist Manifesto, which was published just prior to his death in 2007. Though both books bear the title "Manifesto," neither are that, exactly, at least not in the traditional sense. Rather, both are loose collections of thoughts and quotations, more valuable for the window they provide into the artist's mind than for any really big ideas, though they both further Kitaj's project of a "diasporist" school of painting. Though Kitaj constantly defines and redefines this idea throughout both books, he describes it most memorably in this impressively worded, if slightly impenetrable paragraph from the first manifesto:

The compelling destiny of dispersion is one’s own and describes my Diasporism, which describes and explains my parable-pictures, their dissolutions, repressions, associations, referrals and sometime difficulty, their text-obsessions, their play of differences, their autobiographical heresies, their skeptical dispositions, their assimilationist modernisms, fragmentation and confusions, their secular blasphemies, their longing allegiance to the exact art-past which corresponds to the historical moments when Jews became free to pursue a life in art (I mean from the late nineteenth century on).

There are also plenty of other gems that Kitaj throws out in the general hodge-podge of ideas. One of the most striking, also from the first manifesto, is his fatalistic judgement of Israel and the Zionist project:

This morbid period grew to seem to fit the span of my own life, from the year of my birth in Ohio (and Hitler’s rise), to the present daily refulgence of Jew-hatred with its focus on Israel and its promise of yet another bloody Jewish dispersion. Strong as she seems (?), Israel, (which someone called a state born from a historical encounter with doomsday) has been too small, imperiled, unlucky and often poorly run to avoid the kind of awful suppression of Arab people which has led to a hated Diaspora for the Palestinians and God knows what in store for Israel. They both need separate homes. The idea of a bi-national state in Palestine can only happen in a month of Sundays, draped in blood. As humans go, it’s hopeless.

Though markedly less cheery, this characterization of the predicament of both Israel and the Palestinians seems similar to that recently offered by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren in his interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, which you can read here. Read More......

A Late Take on Waltz With Bashir

Waltz With Bashir is not even close to news, but when it screened for the first time in Winnipeg in late May, I took to opportunity to air my thoughts in the pages of the Winnipeg Jewish Post. After the Jump.


Waltz With Bashir Flies Above the Fray

It’s sad but inevitable that a movie about Israel – and certainly a movie about an Israeli war – will become a conversational flytrap for just about every issue relating to the Middle East, and Waltz With Bashir is no exception. But even if the animated docu-drama by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman has not escaped controversy, it has accomplished an even more impressive feat: keeping its artistic coattails free from the clutching hands of political provocateurs.

The film depicts Folman’s experiences during the First Lebanon War in 1982, culminating in the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps. After having a drink with an old army friend one rainy, windswept night, Folman realizes that he can remember almost nothing from the war. Troubled by his lack of memory, he seeks out anyone who might have been with him and who can help him remember, and the film incorporates the experiences of Folman’s interviewees along with his own returning memories.

In terms of its formal innovations, Waltz With Bashir is groundbreaking. It is described as the first full-length animated documentary, an unusual concept since animation doesn’t really document anything, even when it represents real events. In this case, however, the experiences portrayed are largely psychological and the original techniques of animator Yoni Goodman bring them stunningly, viscerally to life. In the opening scene a pack of 26 snarling dogs pound down Tel-Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard under a sulfur yellow sky, knocking over café tables and frightening pedestrians to the pulsing electro-classical score of German composer Max Richter. The dogs are only a dream, and just one of the many frighteningly surreal hallucinations that are mixed with interviews and real events as the movie questions the relationship between memory, imagination, and actual fact.

In this case, the most important facts are those surrounding the infamous Sabra and Shatila Massacre, whose death toll is still in dispute. Though the Lebanese Phalangist militia did the actual killing, Israel still bears responsibility for enabling the atrocity. How much responsibility, however, is a question with an answer difficult to pin down. The conclusion of the government-appointed Kahan Commission, that Israel was “indirectly responsible,” does little to clarify the issue, and neither does Folman’s film. Perhaps the nature of such real but ambiguous guilt is impossible to define in more precise language, and the struggle to come to terms with it is what forms the crux of Folman’s artistic endeavor.

As if in testament to the film’s integrity, both ends of the Middle East debate have criticized it, and many people just can’t seem to figure out which side the movie is on. Gideon Levy, a left-wing journalist for Haaretz, condemned the film as “infuriating, disturbing, outrageous and deceptive,” and called it “an act of fraud and deceit, intended to allow us to pat ourselves on the back, to tell us and the world how lovely we are.” Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, translator and essayist Hillel Halkin wrote in Commentary magazine that though Waltz with Bashir is, “emotionally powerful” it is also “intellectually shallow” and “flagrantly irresponsible” for portraying the events of the war without providing any kind of historical or political background.

Perhaps what gets under the skin of the movie’s critics on both the left and the right is the fact that it can’t be held up as an endorsement of their positions; as much as it wreaks havoc with the claims made by their opponents, it wreaks equal havoc with their own assertions. While the film refuses to let Israel off the hook for atrocities committed in Lebanon, it also doesn’t portray Israeli soldiers as the purely savage aggressors they are often made out to be. And despite its graphic depiction of war and Folman’s own characterization of the film as an anti-war statement, many viewers see the film as positive for Israel’s image. Current recognition of past sins doesn’t necessarily atone for them, but the film at least demonstrates that Israel is capable of a self-critical confrontation with its past. For Gideon Levy this may seem “outrageous and deceptive,” but it also may just happen to be true.

Given its substantial artistic achievement, disappointment ran deep when Waltz With Bashir failed to take home the Oscar for best foreign language film. It would have been Israel’s first Academy Award, and Folman had been heavily favoured to win. Despite the disappointment, however, there is little doubt that Waltz With Bashir will remain one of the best-known and best-respected war films of both Israel and the world, politics notwithstanding.

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David Mamet's November (By the WJT)

During my recent time in Winnipeg I did a lot of writing for the Winnipeg Jewish Post and News, none of which is online, because the Jewish Post doesn't have much of a web site to speak of. So I'll be posting a couple of my better pieces (that are less time sensitive) here. As my dad likes to say, he doesn't believe the news until he reads it two weeks later in the Jewish Post. This is more than two weeks later, but nevertheless.

First off, my review of the Winnipeg Jewish Theater's excellent production of David Mamet's excellent play, November. After the Jump.



Winnipeg Jewish Theater Splits Sides with Political Comedy

Whatever the colour of your political stripe, it was hard not to find humour in the Canadian premier of David Mamet’s play, November.

Produced by the Winnipeg Jewish Theater and directed by Michael Nathanson, November ran from April 22 to May 3 at the Berney Theater at the Asper Jewish Community Campus.

Mamet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, director and author, wrote the political satire during the last act of the Bush administration, and the play is clearly a commentary on the pre-Obama malaise of an unpopular executive branch. But Mamet’s wildly impolitic President Charles P. Smith, perfectly pitched by actor Ashley Wright, is no mere caricature of George Dubya. A caricature, yes, but a caricature all his own.

With less than a week left before the election (hence the play’s title), Smith finds himself down in the polls, lacking funds, and facing a dreary return home without even the solace of a presidential library.

“Why? Why? We won the first time Archie. Four scant years. Why have they turned against me now?” asks Smith.

“Because you’ve fucked up everything you’ve touched,” responds his chief adviser Archer Brown, whose role as comedic straight man and proverbial dry stick is played with aplomb by Winnipeg native Arne Macpherson.

Though Smith storms around the oval office like a petulant child, he is nothing if not resourceful (“a little filthy lucre buys a lot of things,” he declares). When asked by a hapless representative of the turkey industry (Glen Thompson) to pardon a pair of turkeys in the traditional Thanksgiving ceremony, Smith hatches a plot: if he doesn’t get paid 200 million dollars, he’ll pardon all of the turkeys, effectively canceling Thanksgiving.

To bring his scheme to fruition, Smith needs the help of his precocious speechwriter, the Jewish-ish Clarice Bernstein (Amy Lee). For her help, however, Bernstein has a price: Smith must marry her and her lesbian partner on live television, a move that would sink his political ambitions, only recently re-kindled by the prospect of an extra 200 million in campaign funds.

While the catch-22 situation is ripe with dramatic possibility, the personal and political issues take a backseat to an antic, character-based comedy. A good chunk of the dialogue consists of half-heard telephone conversations, whose farcical potential reaches its zenith during a particularly offensive exchange between Smith and Mi’kmaq Chief Dwight Grackle (Cory Wojcik), who later shows up in person to exact his revenge.

“I can’t say I care,” Smith sprays into the receiver. “You know why? Because I can’t be convicted of crimes. I can resign tomorrow and my Vice-President . . . what’s his name? Will pardon me for crimes yet uninvented. Yes, while you, ‘Tonto,’ are on a plane to nowhere. And I hope your second wife gets eaten by a walrus.”

Mamet, who has co-authored a Torah commentary with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, doesn’t spare the Jews either as he cracks the whip of his wit.

“Look: You people got along without a country for 2,000 years. You’re gonna be fine!” exclaims Smith in response to reports of an Iranian missile launch.

Fans of Mamet’s work will recognize the play’s so-called “Mamet speak”: cuttingly intelligent, expletive filled, rhetorically high-flying yet slangy dialogue that gallops along at a breakneck pace. Such writing naturally lends itself to bombast and exaggeration, and as audience laughter attests, the WTJ cast did a fine job of being over-the-top without going over the edge.

But there are also genuine issues that Mamet forces the audience to consider.

Despite most of Smith’s views, which in a serious context would be repugnant, he retains a lovable quality, and there are certain of his pronouncements that seem lofty, even noble.

“The Wright brothers,” he muses. “Couple guys, sitting round the Coffee Corner, Wednesday morning…Some fella, doodlin’ on a napkin…dreaming. He looks up: ‘Hey. I betcha this’ll work’…Who made this country great?...Tinkerers. Like you and me.”

Then again, maybe that’s just the politician in him, and we’re all being taken along for a ride. With such ambiguities Mamet plays on our own sense of values and causes us to question the validity of our own convictions.

If November illustrates any truth, however, that both cynics and believers (not to mention liberals and conservatives) can agree on, it’s that there’s humour in just about everything. And thanks to the WJT, November sure made us laugh.

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Q&A: Henry "Hank" Sapoznik

Henry Sapoznik is a well known figure in klezmer/Yiddish music circles. He's one of the original klemzer "revivalists" and still one of the primary movers and shakers on the scene.

I wrote a profile of Sapoznik for this week's Winnipeg Jewish Post and News, as a preview for his lecture in Winnipeg on May 20. Unfortunately, the Jewish Post has only the most rudimentary website and the article is not online. So instead, I'm posting the interview I did with Sapoznik here.

Suffice to say Sapoznik is an accomplished fellow. He was a member of Kapelye, one of the first 'modern' klezmer bands. He founded KlezKamp and Living Traditions, which together are possibly the most important institution in klezmer music. He's written books, created an award winning series for NPR about Yiddish Radio, produced countless reissues of vintage klezmer, Yiddish and American roots music, and is currently working on a national banjo museum in North Carolina. For more background, you can visit his page at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is currently an artist in residence, or read this other, very thorough interview by Mark Rubin.


EG: Have you been to Winnipeg before?

HS: I played at the Winnipeg Folk Festival in 1981.

EG: So It’s been a while.

HS: It’s been a while.

EG: You’re going to speaking about the role of women in Yiddish popular culture. Why this topic?

HS: This is one of the subjects that I offered to the programmers and they liked this one. It might be unusual because it deals with three different aspects of how Jewish women are represented in Yiddish popular culture. I could have done a dozen other themes but I think this one appealed to them.

EG: Could you give us a little preview of what you’re going to say?

HS: I take three archetypes that were very popular during the heyday of Yiddish popular culture. I take the Yiddishe Mame, I talk about the Yente, and I talk about women cantors, khazentes. Each one of them are explained through period recordings about what these images meant in the Jewish community, how relevant they were, how popular they were, or how long lived, and by listening to original recordings - some of the recordings go back 100 years - people get a real sense of what this meant. With cantors in the 1920s, why would a woman become a cantor, there were no synagogues that would let them be a cantor. So this was a phenomenon that existed on records, on radio, on vaudeville, and in old hotels. We know that there are a lot of women who are cantors today, but this was unrelated to that. So it lets you see where we are today as a community and look at this history and see how it developed.

EG: Originally you were an American folk musician, not a klezmer musician. How and why did you start playing klezmer?

Well, I was in a yeshiva as a kid, I had an orthodox upbringing, but to get into Jewish music meant having to be directed there. In this case, it was a banjo player with whom I was living and studying in North Carolina, who was puzzled that all of the young people who were coming from the North, coming down South to study with him were all Jews. And he naturally assumed that if they were coming to study with him, Jews must not have had their own music. And that got me thinking about that.

EG: That was Tommy Jarrell?

HS: That was in fact was Tommy Jarrell. It was also Fred Cockerham, but Fred didn’t ask me the question. It’s hard to imagine – I wonder what they would think, if these hillbillies, these non-Jews who barely ever met a Jew, realized how important their lives were to starting a Yiddish music renewal. It’s very unusual.

EG: Today klezmer and Yiddish music have taken off. But what was it like when you started Kapelye in 1979? Did people catch on right away or were they apathetic?

HS: Most of the work and the interest in this in the early days were from people in the folk music scene rather than the Jewish community, so other people who liked traditional music, if they liked bluegrass, or if they like Irish, or if they liked Balkan music, they got what it is was we were trying to do. They understood, even though they never heard this stuff before, they appreciated it. The other thing that happened at that time was the rise of the world music movement, and that started in Europe. I had already been touring there with my old-time music group, the Delaware Water Gap, that I been playing with since '72, so I sort of saw where the world folk music interest was going, and it was going less to folky stuff from the sixties, delta blues and bluegrass and stuff, and was becoming more global, and the klezmer thing fit. It was just tricky finding people to play with. I mean, there weren’t a lot of people. Andy Statman was playing, and the Klezmorim were playing out in California, but that’s it as far as the young guys.

EG: Since that time klezmer seems to have done well. Yiddish on the other hand, is still facing an uphill battle. Does that discourage you at all?

HS: I guess my feeling is, the resources are eminently there. I mean Hebrew, 100 years ago, talk about a language facing an uphill battle. And that was trying to revive a language that had been not a daily language for thousands of years. Here we’re talking about cultural continuity within living memory. What’s so hard about that? The resources are there. The Jewish community, all of the federations and stuff, they have the resources. If they don’t put them - if the money that were put towards making Holocaust memorials were instead applied towards cultural continuity, you wouldn’t be asking me that question.

EG: What do you think the differences are in trying to promote Yiddish in a smaller Jewish community like Winnipeg or Madison, as opposed to a place like New York?

HS: Well it’s a mixure. To a certain extent you bring stuff to the community. You bring the resources. After 25 years of running KlezKamp it’s pretty clear now who those people are in the world who carry this with them, as it represents the best and the brightest people working within Yiddish culture and literature and visual arts and music and linguistics and folklore, in dance, in history. The scholarship is there. There’s an incredible covering of people who are interpreting through the prism of Yiddish culture and it’s high-end stuff. The fact that it doesn’t turn up on the radar screen of mainstream Jewish organizations says more about the bankrupt goals of mainstream Judaism in the field of cultural continuity and Jewish identity. There has been a sea change in Jewish studies programs. Twenty to thirty years ago when it first started it was very Hebrew centered, Israel centered, forward thinking approach to Jewish identity. After 25 years it is now clear that trying to create a monolithic education, a monolithic cultural identity, it’s a useless prototype. It’s abundantly clear that we function in a multi-cultural universe, and trying to say well, Israel, we’ll all speak Hebrew, it’s all one culture - it’s an outmoded approach to Jewish identity. I think what’s happening here now is we’re seeing a new approach to understanding ourselves as Jews by acknowledging the incredible diversity, and the within-reach diversity, of Yiddish culture and the power and the attraction of it to generate itself, to will itself back into existence without the interest or support of mainstream Judaism.

EG: Unlike a lot of other klezmer musicians whose work has focused on pushing the music in new directions, your work has been largely about the archival aspect of the enterprise. What draws you to that side of things?

HS: I have always liked original period music. I just like it. I like old-time music, I like ragtime, I like early show tunes, I just like that sound. I will always play music that sounds like it came from a time and a place. And in a way that gives me a great sense of well being. People who don’t listen carefully to the music think that people who play from within the repertoire are not changing anything. I’m not playing the music anywhere near the way I first heard it. You can’t be a musician, you can’t be a creative person and not want to be true to yourself, put yourself into the process, but you don’t put yourself between the music and the people for whom you’re playing. I play my music from within the music, so I will always go back to the original sound. It’s what Walter Benjamin talked about in “Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He talked about this thing called the aura, which is only present in original works of art, that mass production of art cheapens the communication between the creative thing and the audience. I learned so much of what I know of this music from listening to 78s, from listening to the sound created by the people who grew up doing this stuff. And in every 78 there’s a message - there’s a message to us in each one of these records and they still remain to be discovered, we’re still understanding the wealth of stuff in these old records. These are our teachers, that’s our old country. So if people don’t reference these primary sources, then what they’re reproducing is a secondary, a removed version of this. Duke Ellington said you have to know the rules before you can break them. If people are immersed in a primary musical understanding, and then go and make changes from within the music – well that’s how music functions. But to superimpose change on the music in an inorganic, or an ahistorical way, it’s a novelty. It has no resonance. These are the kind of things that will disappear. They have to.

EG: Besides teaching in Madison and organizing Klezkamp are there any other projects that you’re undertaking at the moment?

HS: The other project is seemingly unrelated. I help run a not-for-profit organization in North Carolina called Piedmont Folk Legacies, and we run an annual festival dedicated to a pioneering recording artists who lived there, his name was Charlie Poole, one of the architects of bluegrass. We are building a national banjo museum in the town of PIedmont, North Carolina . It’s the important and unusual and unique. It’s a museum that talks about American history and musical identity. It’s very, very exciting and meaningful. So, not much Jewish in it, except that Jews played the banjo. That must be the connection. Read More......

Facebook and Journalistic Ethics

Theater critic Alexis Soloski had an article a short while ago in the Guardian, arguing that critics shouldn't become Facebook friends with artists because doing so constitutes a conflict of interest. I strongly disagree. In my opinion, social networking is exactly that - networking. Facebook is essentially the Rolodex of the 21st century. Who is naive enough to believe that being Facebook friends with someone shows that you actually have a close relationship with that person? It could be the case, sure, but by no means necessarily.

It's easy enough for a critic at the Guardian, for whose attention no small number of artists and publicists are no doubt clamouring, to say that Facebook is an obstruction to impartial criticism. But for us small time freelancers, constantly in need of new and interesting artists and works to write about (and that will also be of interest to the publications we wish to write for), Facebook can be an invaluable tool. And what's the worst that will happen if we give a Facebook friend a bad review? They de-friend us? Egads!

So have some pity for the little guy, Soloski, and trust us to distinguish between Facebook friends and the real thing. Read More......

Tribune Pride - Stuff White People Like at Terminal Laughter

John Semley, my friend and former editor-in-arms at the McGill Tribune, has a new interview up at his comedy blog, Terminal Laughter, with former Tribune sports editor Christian Lander about his whole Stuff White People Like blog/book/possible TV show. It's a great interview and a great site, and I urge everyone to go read it.

I had my own article about Lander in the last issue of last year's Tribune (and my own last article for the Trib), which I'm linking to so that it'll come up higher on Google than it does. Either way, it's good to see some Trib alumni do well for themselves. Read More......