Buen Shabat, Shabbat Shalom!

 

A fierce supporter of Ladino culture, Sarah Aroeste is a complex personality, besides being a singer she also published one year ago a book featuring Sephardic traditions. Buen Shabat/Shabbat Shalom, illustrated by Ayesha L. Rubio is a good introduction to both children and parents into the world of Sephardic Jews.

Particularly, the book does a good work of introducing the world of Ladino, the language spoken by Jews originary from the Iberian Peninsula. In a very simple and genuine way, the reader is introduced to a couple of words said on Shabbat in addition to a couple of visual details to be added to the general story. It is a very short read but leaves strong memories, especially to children. 

As someone who is trying to learn more about the Ladino culture and heritage, this book was exactly the easiest incentive to want to find out more. Actually, I may have some interesting books related to the Ladino language and culture coming up for review very soon.

Until then, I am glad that my son was so interested by the book that he keeps repeating over and over again Buen Shabat, Buen Shabbat...It´s a big step, I think, towards the celebration and preservation of the Sephardic culture. One baby step at a time.

Rating: 5 stars  

A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

 

Israeli actress and activist Noa Tishby wrote a book in an effort to explain - in a ´simple guide´ - ´the most misunderstood country on earth´. It couldn´t be a better moment for such a book although I am afraid that most of the people who are vituperating against Israel are doing so as a daily job. In those times of crisis we are living, it´s too risky to get unemployed therefore I am not too optimistic that there will be too many that will change their mind.

However, a good deed is always worth the effort, no matter the result. The book - which I had access to in audio format - is smart and easy and contains a lot of general historical information (a short correction is needed maybe, as Rav Ovadia Yosef, of blessed memory who playsed a tremendous role in the creation of the Mizrahi - oriental Jews - identity was actually born in Iraq, not Egypt, where he was active late in life, as the chief of the religious court, the bet din), but also fragments of family history, as Tishby´s originary from a family which counts among its ranks diplomats - her grandfather was the first Israeli diplomat in Africa - and social activists that left more than an imprint on the country´s history. 

Although I was not very happy with the order of the chapters which outline different arguments and fragmets of history of Israel and Zionism in general - described ´as a verb, a work in process´ -, the book is hilarious, informative and outlines a couple of good arguments which are so simple that sometimes it´s hard to understand how people can ignore them. 

Tishby is an Israeli patriot and a pro-Palestinian voice and it is nothing wrong with this. And as far as I know she is not alone. It´s important that in the recent chaos and media manipulations, voice like hers -the audiobook was narrated by the author therefore I can say that she really has a nice voice - are raised because it makes a huge difference. A difference for being able to display normal people who don´t have to feel guilty or accused for loving their country. Their one and only country they have.

Noa Tishby is not a writer or a historian or a politician. She writes in full honesty having in mind the future. A future where I am sure Palestinians and Jews can live together in a land considered one of the most disputed on the planet. The fact that many good news about co-existence and everyday life in Israel, beyond the black-and-white narrative. For instance, did you know that there is a city build by and for Palestinians in the West Bank, Rawabi? This is a place on my visit list for my text trip to Israel. The multi-cultural aspects of Israel, a country who in a bit over two generation was able to assimilate millions of refugees from all over the world, with different backgrounds and languages, is a lesson for everyone, including through her mistakes and failures. 

For the naives and uninformed supporters and sympathisants of the BDS - Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions - Movement, there are a lot of details to make you think twice before supporting them. As a sidenote, the fierce supporter of boycotting Israel - and its high-ed institutions, Omar Barghouti, is a graduate of Tel Aviv University. Apartheid, indeed. I bet that some of their game is to simply manipulate the non-informed average citizen of a Western country, any country, too far away from the Middle East to really take his or her time to check the facts and figures. Among them, artists that were put under pressure to cancel their concerts in Israel. Thanks Gd that Tishby called Mike (the Jagger) and convinced Rolling Stones to go on with their show. History was written, indeed.  

If it´s one think to learn about Israel from this book is that it´s honest and fair to recognize the mistakes and learn from them how to build a better future. Being able to acknowledge one´s mistake it´s a sign of strength and maturity. 

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth - indeed, this is exactly the case - is a book for the curious, open minded, the non-Jew and the Jew curious to understand something about a country and its conflicts. 

Rating: 4 stars

Caught in Catch-67

 

The legacy of the six-day war that was inflicted upon Israel is weighting heavy on the everyday reality of both Israelis and Palestinians living on a highly disputed land. With a deep knowledge of both the Biblical sources as of the geopolitical and political realities on the ground, Dr. Micah Goodman not only reviews extensively the past and its extensions into the present, but also suggests possible future directions.

The Jewish tradition requires sharp inquisitiveness and refusal to acknowledge a given situation until all the possibilities were exhausted. The fact that both the left and the right mindsets within Israel do differ fundamentally is a sign of this state of mind. Their differences does not mean they are wrong - or right - it´s just a fact generated by the differences of perspectives, but also a proof of the many changes underwent by the Jewish thought from the 19th century onwards.

The dynamics of the relationship with the Palestinians is predominated by the heavy historical memories but also on the religious limitations on both sides. It´s a relationship, mentions Goodman, predominated by fear - against Palestinians - and humiliations - of the Palestinians living under the Israeli control. 

But there are facts that willingly or not are frequently omitted from the current discourse on the two state or one state solutions vehiculated in the media. Although a Palestinian state as such never been, there were offers in this respect that were rejected. ´Stateless Palestinians are the victims of their own rejectionism´, and the author gives the example, but unfortunately it does not reflect too much upon the complex structure of the Palestinian establishment. His idea of a hudna - which I´ve heard about a couple of times in the 1990s, of a patial peace agreement which will avoid the Palestinian frustration of not being given, among others, the right of return, should be implemented by state structures and who will do it on the Palestinian side? 

Without a credible partner on the Palestinian side who is working on behalf of the Palestinian people, not on those - especially extraneous agents - aimed to fuel the conflict because it suits their political and religious interests, not Palestinians´ the peace cannot be achieved. Any kind of peace. Therefore, the feelings of humiliation and fear, experienced by both sides will only increase. The people who grew up with fear and the people who grew up experiencing the daily humiliation would not be able to see the light of a common future. 

Reading Catch-67 was a very refreshing experience for me because it sorted out a lot of details and information that - not surprisingly - are rarely mentioned in the evaluation of the latest conflict. It´s one of the most elaborated and elevated outline of the post-1967 crisis that I´ve read lately and I am glad that it happened to get the book while the latest episode was unfolding as it clarified for me a couple of positions as well as possibilities. I am also glad to read that actually there would be some smart solutions, but you need two to tango.

One Word...

 

I watched the movie One Word: Occupation by Nejemye Tenenbaum shortly before the latest war started. It is a 30-Minute long, featuring exclusively one voice, of Gershon Baskin, a journalist and social activitist supporting the dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians.

I was not sure that I would mention this movie on my blogging rantings because very often in the last days I felt that words do not make any sense. No matter what you say or you want to say, there is an outburst of hate that will reduce you to a polite silence. But words do create sense in the middle of the deepest despair, in the same way they can deepen the despair. 

Indeed there is a war, and there will be probably more and people will die and Jews will be hunted again in Europe or elsewhere. There is mentioned in the movie a quote by Moshe Dayan according to which ´Israel must be seen as a mad dog, too dangerous to bother´, but times had changed and the 1967 war tripled the size of Israel in just six days. Things only went further and futher on and things went worse: economically and socially for the Palestinians blocked in Gaza, but also for the Israeli population who is facing the danger of the bombs sent by Hamas, or are part of the system which implements the rule of low in the territories. 

Baskin said that in fact, there are initiatives that may create peace, like the 2003 Geneva Initiative, but there is a need of a proper leadership keen to implement it. The right of fighting terrorists is justified, but there should be find a way towards peace. And here again, I dare to say, it is a matter of leadership. 

Not every current Israeli politician should equal the political intelligence of a Moshe Dayan, and the corruption and lack of common vision of the political leadership is a problem all over the world. But the cartoonish selfish politicians with a taste for luxury are not exactly the kind of leadership that may understand how important is to give up - power included - for the peace of your people.

 

Feeling a Stranger in your Own Country

 

Yascha Mounk was born in Germany in a culturally Jewish family originary from Poland. The official Polish antisemitism within the Communist Party at the end of the 1950s, forced his family to leave Poland and spread all over the world. Belonging to a post-war generation born Jewish but raised Communist and Polish, his family set in Germany, besides the heavy weight of the recent past, because they wanted a professional future. As many immigrants in Germany, they learned the language and contributed to the larger German society.

Yascha Mounk was born here, speaks German with an accent and is vaguely - if ever - involved in the institutional Jewish life. From the legal point of view, Germany is indeed his country, but a country where he does not feel at home and never did. Nowadays an American citizen, he lives and teaches political sciences in New York City.

Stranger in my Own Country belongs to a recent trend of memoirs written by young Jews living in Germany who are brutally coming at terms with their identity, which can also mean rejecting dramatically the society that never wanted them. 

There are a couple of aspects involved by this process.

On one side, is the nauseating philosemitism which is as pathetic as lacking any substance. It´s a mental automatism, a tic, which in fact does not say anything - good - about how the Germans really feel officially about Jews. Usually expressed in the presence of someone declaring his or her Jewish identity, this attitude does not mean anything but a political statement, empty of a practical meaning. It is just a reflex, not a constant state of mind, and its clearer reflection is the attitude towards refugees. ´In fact, while ordinary Germans now have a multifaceted contradictory attitude towards Jews, many of them express hostility against other kinds of immigrants and foreigners with larger integration issue´. 

On the other side, there is the frontal antisemitism which never actually left - Europe, or Germany and what was latest heard on the streets of Berlin, London or Milan, to name only a few is one of the many proofs in this respect. 

Caught between those extreme attitude, Mounk, as many other Jews living here, born or only immigrants, could not feel at home. Do not have any real reason to consider Germany their home. The wall between they and them and the others and in the end, between humans as such, are becoming higher and higher. A self protection against each other.

The book explains the post-WWII German history - from the West Germany perspective - through facts and historical details. The slow development of the Jewish communities in Germany are explained in the same time with the different incidents and the shift in the field of the mentalities, particularly acknowledging the past in all its complexity and especially context. ´A younger generation of intellectuals, in short, has become willing to talk about the German victims of WWII without feeling the need to put their ancestors´ suffering into context´. A kind of YOLO interpretation of history which irony put aside, is wrong in its simplicity. 

Stranger in my own country is the unhappy ending for an identity search. Actually an identity which is refused for all the wrong reasons. But we are living in a fluid world and identities can be replaced, embelished and re-created. I am glad that in the last ten years so many memoirs written by young German Jews were written. Although the tone is sad and disappointed, those testimonies can create a space for open discussion and, who knows, maybe a medium- and long-term change at the level of mentalities.

The Third Space. Histories of Syrian Jews in Mexico

 

Even after watching Leona, I felt compelled to find out more about Mexico´s Jewish history, particularly related to the Syrian community. A couple of months after, I was offered the opportunity to watch El Tercer Espacio - The Third Place - by the talented documentary film maker Nejemye Tenenbaum featuring the 100-year anniversary of the Mount Sinai Alliance.

There are different generations whose voices are heard in the movie: from the oldest who still remember the hardship of the first generation of immigrants and the stories about the life in Damascus who the youngest ones, dreaming about Miami with no idea - and interest - about where Syria and Damascus are situated.

It is a dialogue between memory, history and identity which is shaped by the interaction with the biggest society. In some cases, one excludes the other, as in the case of those who, for different reasons, more or less religiously or ideologically motivated, simply decided to become part of the big, Mexican - and Christian - society.

The historian in me was very interested to discover stories that I had no idea about, among which the Jewish participation at the Mexican Revolution and the cases when Jews were accused of being spies and executed, their only fault being to be unable to speak the language, therefore to defend against the accusations threwn to them. 

The micro-society of the Mount Sinai Alliance offers a deep view into the social network of that specific Jewish community living in Mexico´s capital city. In just one jour and a half, Nejemye Tenenbaum covered a long list of topics, from the history of the community to its social diversity and the strong communal support. Personally, I would have been curious about the interaction with other Jewish groups as well as the very details of the everyday religious life - for instance, the collective bat mitzvah ceremony with dozens of girls celebrating, looked at me a bit like the Catholic confirmation ceremonies. 

El Tercer Espacio made me even more curious about Jewish life in Mexico, in its wider complexity and diversity. Until then, the information provided in the film is generous enough to help me have a basic idea, although I am mostly missing the puzzle pieces of the entire cultural, political and religious landscape.

The film is available to rent on Vimeo. 

The Dangerous Terror against Jews, in Germany

 

The murderous antisemitic terrorist attack against the synagogue in Halle, Germany, in 2019, in the holiest day of Yom Kippur outraged many people, but for many different reasons. Some - locals, politicians and everyday people probably - because they were reminded of a fact that this time went out of any control. Many, on both sides knew that the incident was just one of the many in a long line of events that were perpetrated every single year since 1945, more than once, all over Germany - be it federal or communist.

Ronen Steinke, German journalist by Süddeutsche Zeitung, collected all those facts and figures about attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions perpetrated continuously since 1945. In Terror gegen Juden, this chapter has 89 pages and it ends the book but I was too curious to wait until the end and went a couple of times through all of the incidents. I knew a couple of them, but I was reading about some of them for the first time. My personal experience is not relevant anyway as I´ve spent a bit over a decade here, but think about people having to deal on a daily basis since their birth with a situation that, as the very well documented shows, it actually never changed. The only new aspect is that to the old right and left anti-semitism - with representatives of both wings getting their stages of terrorist training in Palestinian camps in Lebanon or Jordan - is that in the last 10 years or so, there is added a new threat coming from extreme Islamists. Most probably this last development is convenient for those trying to convince the larger public that the refugees brought antisemitism and increased the number of attacks against Jews. In fact, vandalized cemeteries, synagogues on fire, Jewish lives being lost to terrorist attacks were a reality long before that traumatic event. 

The mixture of people who are hating to death Jews in Germany is bizarre, colourful and always toxic. From the communitarian idealists, to eco-fascists, pure neo Nazis - including among the police forces - and Islamists. Those marching and shouting Al Quds events were in fact saying loud what many everyday Germans may strongly believe. The reluctance of taking a firm stance against the BDS movement is based on the fact that actually there is a good slice of the German population which supports the ideas expressed by that movement. 

The book doesn´t address particularly the situation in the communist Germany other than by mentioning the frequent cases of cemetery desecrations, but it does not mean that it was much better, as both the German communists and their STASI allies purposely assumed. The fact that so many right wing ´identitary´ movements are currently nested in Eastern part of the country shows that, no matter where one may look within Germany, the so-called de-nazification - both institutionally and at the level of mentalities - was never a political priority and therefore never fully achieved.

What Ronen Steinke outlines in his book, based on facts and legal realities, is that too little have been done for approaching in a coherent way this constant phenomenon of the post-war Germany. Among which the inconsistent, if any, support of the state for an outstanding security concept of Jewish institutions and synagogues, as well as the lack of a coherent legal approach of attacks aimed at Jews - including the lack of a proper legal definition of antisemitism. 

The book is more than a random reading about post-war antisemitism, but it includes a couple of useful suggestions that I wish to live long enough to see them accomplished at the institutional level, among which harder punishments for antisemitic attacks and hate crimes in general, de-neo-nazification of the police - I dare to say that not only the police is sharing such mindsets, and this is not only the case of Germany -  a legal argumentation of the judiciary that does not offer such a generous space of expression and manifestation to antisemitic perpetrators and last but not least a higher security for the Jewish institutions - educational, religious, social. 

There is so much to say and write on this topic. Way too much. But it´s fantastic to notice a new generation of Jewish writers and scholars and journalists who are not giving up, no matter the reason. 

Learning Yiddish, the old way

 

Yiddish is becoming a lot of attention lately, but please stop assuming that it is a ´dead language´ or that we are experiencing a ´revival´. Yiddish was always here and in the last decades was more than alive and kicking so well. It´s only that the non-religious, often non-Jewish, public is becoming interested in it and I don´t see anything bad in this phenomenon. Only that it´s more appropriate to have the proper historical context about this situation.

In the last months, everyone is talking about the much praised Duolingo Yiddish and hopefully once I will be at the end of the course myself, I will be able to provide my modest point of view. However, there are many other ways in which Yiddish can be learned: by using the classical books and eventually an old notebook and a pen. That´s how I learn most of my languages and I will never get disappointed by my method - which I alternate with other e-formats because it´s good for the learning cause. 

My First Yiddish Word Book published by one of my favorite Jewish edition house, Kar-Ben Publishing is an excellent support for both children, parents, new adepts of the Yiddish language as well as teachers. It has one of the features I always appreciate by a language learning book: it offers the right vocabulary aimed to describe certain situations, organised on topics and with the bare minimum that can be used in various contexts and conversations. You can create your visual cards and create topics of conversations around the various subjects, covering, among others, the seasons, the playground, description of the human body, of the house and some of the rooms, the family etc.

It offers a cute visual support as well, which at least for pre-school and first grade children is very important to keep the attention awake. Another good point of the book is that it provides both the Latin reading of the words, besides the English translation and the Yiddish variant. 

At the end of the reading, one can consider him/herself an Yiddish basic connoisseur and this is more than enough for a steady beginning of learning a language.

Definitely a recommended read to all those who love Yiddish at least as much as I do.

Rating: 5 stars