Bar Mitzvah Research Articles

Terrifying Memory: An Interview with Carey Perloff

Terrifying Memory: An Interview with Carey Perloff

Hebraisms in the Speech of Georgian Jews Repatriated to Israel

Georgian Jews, as a rule, speak the same language as their co-territorial non-Jews. However, sometimes they use Aramaic and Hebrew elements in their speech.  Hebraisms used by the Georgian Jews who emigrated to Israel in the 1970s can be divided into two groups: old/archaic Hebrew influences and modern Hebrew influences. Old/archaic Hebrew, also referred to as Biblical Hebrew, is rich in religious terminology the use of which has always been peculiar to the Jewish speech varieties. However, one some changes can be discerned in the usage of some terms. It means that Georgian Jews used different Hebraisms while living in Georgia (e. g. თეფილინის დადება tepilinis dadeba, ფესახე Pesach) that were replaced by other Hebraisms after the repatriation to Israel (ბარ მიცვა A bar mitzvah, პასექი Pesach). The source for the Hebraisms that were coined after the repatriation is Israeli Hebrew. In the 1970s, most of the Jews could not speak Hebrew but lexical units commonly used in everyday speech were replaced Hebrew words (e. g. სადგური station, სასურსათო მაღაზია grocery shop, etc.), especially in cases when there was no Georgian equivalent (იპოთეკა mortgage, ანაბარი deposit, etc.).

Simon, maître d'école par Alain Gaba

Reviewed by: Simon, maître d'école par Alain Gaba Kate M. Bonin Gaba, Alain. Simon, maître d'école. L'Harmattan, 2022. ISBN 978-2-14-027334-6. Pp. 139. This novel begins with interesting themes of homecoming and loss. The year is 1947: the hero, seven-year-old, Parisian-born Simon, has just lost his mother to illness, and his Jewish grandparents to Auschwitz. His grandfather refused to go into hiding, instead putting his trust in French values: "[Il] ne pouvait pas penser que son pays d'adoption, la France, le pays des Droits de l'Homme, ne les protegérait pas" (14). Simon, in contrast, survived the war by being fostered among a family of Catholic farmers in rural Touraine. Post-war, Simon's father, the newly-widowed Robert, returns from harrowing imprisonment (POW? STO?) to admit he is unprepared to parent the son he has never even met. Simon is re-placed back on the farm with his foster family. The subsequent years he passes among them are figured as hardworking but idyllic—although Simon maintains almost no contact with his Jewish family and is bewildered at a cousin's bar mitzvah. "Un vrai petit goy, en fait", the cousin concludes disdainfully (42). Readers might expect the novel to center around issues of belonging and estrangement, as Simon grows up in the long shadow of World War II. Will Simon and his traumatized father reunite? Will Simon reconnect with his Jewish heritage, or remain committed to a laicized, republican "Frenchness"? Readers who find these questions compelling will be disappointed. What began as a postwar Bildungsroman turns into a roman à thèse focusing entirely on issues of pedagogy, as Simon fulfills his childhood promise to become an instituteur. Whole chapters are dedicated to the elaboration of revolutionary teaching theories which decenter textbooks and rote memorization in favor of more experimental, self-guided learning. Moreover, the revolution which Simon embraces is not just pedagogic, but also plays out "sur un front politique et social pour la défense des libertés démocratiques" (90). The consumerism and rural exodus of the Trente Glorieuses are challenged as May 68 looms on the horizon. However, fictional Simon's friends and family—even Simon himself—become overshadowed within the novel by a laundry list of real-life international teachers and innovators whom Simon admires, including Paulo Freire, Maria Montessori, Célestin Freinet, and Melvil Dewey (inventor of the Dewey Decimal system; this last inclusion might raise readers' eyebrows, due to his well-documented anti-Semitism, which the novel does not address). The last words of the novel belong not to Simon, but to the pop singer Léo Ferré. Simon's own final intervention is a poem written in honor of his upbringing "dans une ferme du beau pays de France," praising his foster parents, and declaring "Les travaux de la ferme se sont inscrits en moi" (127). Readers may well feel sympathetic towards pedagogic innovations that seek to decolonize the curriculum, shaking up prescriptive norms that maintain the socioeconomic status quo. That said, it is disappointing that the values inscribed in the protagonist's deepest sense of selfhood appear to be an unacknowledged palimpsest, subsuming (effacing?) his connection to anything other than a narrowly framed French universalism. [End Page 235] Kate M. Bonin Arcadia University (PA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Jewish Cultural Studies by Simon J. Bronner

Reviewed by: Jewish Cultural Studies by Simon J. Bronner Jacqueline Laznow Simon J. Bronner. Jewish Cultural Studies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. xix + 458 pp. In Jewish Cultural Studies, Simon Bronner summarizes his long and prolific academic trajectory. The book consists of updated versions of his published work with additional new material dealing mainly with the digital world and COVID-19. Bronner focuses on three folklore and ethnographic themes, conceptualization, ritualization, and narration, while interrogating objects, patterns, frames, and practices identified as Jewish in North America. His aim is to discern what makes them Jewish, why, and by whom. By doing so, he draws the boundaries of what he conceptualizes as Jewish cultural studies, a separate but complementary entity to traditional Jewish studies. In addition, Bronner argues that general American cultural studies do not recognize Jews as an ethnic group and points to the struggles of Jewish cultural studies in North America to find its place in academia since the twentieth century. Bronner considers the book an example of what he calls “the Chutzpah of Jewish Cultural Studies” (1). Through case studies and personal narratives, he points to the complexity of defining what Jewish culture is nowadays, raising the need to dare to examine Jewish daily praxis and rituals while considering the local context and the outsider’s gaze. He points to the fact that Jews, outside of Israel, have always been a minority group concerned with the maintenance and representation of their heritage, which makes them a unique cultural group with its own frame of mind. Reference to contemporary Israel as a multicultural Jewish center where folklore and ethnography researchers face different challenges from those faced by American researchers adds some depth to the otherwise American-centered arguments. Nevertheless, the description in chapter 4 of the history of Jewish folklore research, with an emphasis on S. An-sky’s collection of Jewish folktales in early twentieth-century Europe, Dov Noy’s work in Israel, and Haya Bar-Yitzhak’s description of their legacy, lacks reference to any of today’s prominent Israeli folklorists who engage in Jewish cultural studies in Israeli academia. Moreover, from his American and postdiasporic perspective, Bronner states: “In America the tension between tradition and modernity is especially evident” (xiii). This determination is problematic, since in our digital world, well described by the author in chapter 10, Jewish communities mirror each other and appropriate modern traditions and rituals that suit their own cultural context, thus the tension between tradition and modernity affects all Jewish communities. One example of this tension is the debates over mixed-gender prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem between ultra-Orthodox and progressive Jewish streams. Another example is the issue of conversions performed by the Conservative and Reform movements in today’s Argentina despite a historic religious ban from 1927. The book consists of three parts. Part 1 discusses the formation of beliefs and ideas in the academy and in everyday life while pointing to the tangle between opposites: continuity and change, tradition and modernity, and past and future. Bronner argues that in the modern world, keeping and passing on tradition takes place to a great degree at home, while the media help promote traditions and rituals, sometimes altering them. He correctly argues, as many folklorists around [End Page 224] the world have shown, that ethnographic research on home praxis is enlightening. Thus, Bronner conducts an in-depth analysis of the dualities of “House” and “Home” while pointing to the cultural construction of the term “domestic” and the role of the stereotypical Jewish mother in Kitchen Judaism. Finally, he introduces the term: “Livingroom Judaism,” an exposition of Jewish symbols at home (79). Part 2 focuses on the ways rituals have been adapted, created, and imagined in modern Judaism. Bronner points to the traditional role of women in Jewish rituals but does not discuss gender issues in depth nor the leading part North American Jewish women took in breaking religious gender roles, mirrored in all Jewish communities around the world. Interpreting the bar mitzvah as a celebration that connects father and son, he portrays the ritual as a masculine expression of tradition in spite of the actual feminized synagogue. Bronner further...

Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Moskowitz (review)

Reviewed by: Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Moskowitz Dainy Bernstein (bio) Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, by Golan Moskowitz. Stanford UP, 2021. In Wild Visionary, Golan Moskowitz reads Maurice Sendak's works through the Jewish and queer identities of the celebrated children's [End Page 224] author, making a convincing argument for these identities as essential to understanding Sendak's body of work. The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. Each chapter provides a comprehensive overview of one stage of Sendak's life, drawing from a variety of sources to piece together the narrative of the author's life. Since Sendak ordered all his papers destroyed upon his death, Moskowitz relies on newspaper and magazine profiles, published interviews, letters from Sendak surviving in the collections of those he wrote to, and interviews with those who knew Sendak. In addition to Sendak's personal life, each chapter delves into the social and cultural landscapes of the era, providing rich context within which Sendak's work can be understood. Throughout the book, Moskowitz traces queer history, American Jewish history, and the development of American children's literature. The first chapter, narrating Sendak's parents' histories as well as his own childhood, analyzes the effects of growing up in interwar Jewish Brooklyn on the author and artist's work. The chapter discusses the shifting models of childhood in early-twentieth-century America, as well as the shifting models of childhood in European Jewish culture, both of which provided the context for Sendak's upbringing as the child of European Jewish immigrants. The structure of the family and the child's sense of home and safety were affected as the American government and culture attempted to "loosen parent-child bonds in order to cultivate pliable citizens and consumers" (28), and Sendak's parents, like many immigrants, put their hopes for American success on their children. At the same time, relatives newly immigrating to America arrived and kept "Old World" Jewish sensibilities alive in the Sendak household. Moskowitz traces the effects of all these factors on Sendak's work, particularly his grappling with parental figures. The second chapter opens with Sendak's bar mitzvah at age thirteen against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Europe and his parents' worry over relatives and old friends as news of deaths came through via Jewish organizations. In many American Jewish homes, the specter of dead relatives affected the way family was perceived, and children were often viewed as both the continuation of a lost line and a reminder of all those children who did not survive. Moskowitz describes Sendak's tumultuous adolescence and his reconceptualization of the family unit. As his parents mourned dead relatives, their children were put into the position of comforting them, and Sendak's relationship with his brother and sister deepened to near-inappropriate levels. With his queerness becoming undeniable during this same period, Sendak's [End Page 225] ability to understand himself, platonic affection, and romantic affection became troubled. Later in life, Sendak would apologize "for his inability to understand boundaries between himself and those with whom he formed close relationships" (91). Moskowitz draws connections between this period of Sendak's life and his portrayal of sexualized parent-child and sibling relationships. The third chapter follows Sendak from Brooklyn to Manhattan as he begins his adult life and his career as an illustrator. Moskowitz begins with a deep dive into the postwar explosion of American children's literature and the vibrant culture of Jewish children's periodicals, contexts which shaped Sendak's early interaction with the world of publishing, especially as a Jewish artist illustrating Jewish children's books. Sendak became part of the queer Manhattan community, and his sphere grew to include both Jewish and queer friends and mentors who encouraged him to be more confident and embrace his own voice. Layering onto the previous chapters' discussions of Sendak's views of childhood emotion and parent-child relationships, Moskowitz argues here that "[t]hrough a focus on early childhood and his own coming of age, Sendak's creative vision increasingly blared and demanded dignity for queer truths that he could not always speak...

Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition by Helene Meyers (review)

Reviewed by: Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition by Helene Meyers Boaz Hagin Helene Meyers, Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 224 pp. 12 b&w images. Cloth $120. Paperback $34.95. 9781978821897, 9781978821880 How can we discuss Jewish identities in an era that calls for inclusion and diversity but also restricts debate in its polarized online echo chambers, sanitized trigger-free histories, and rigid identity politics that sometimes relegate Jewishness to privileged whiteness? In Movie-Made Jews, Helene Meyers constructs an undogmatic, usable tradition of American Jewish motion pictures that through her often-brilliant readings can become a pluralistic “resource for healing a community riven by religious and political fault lines” (7). Inspired by Laura Mulvey’s landmark feminist work from the 1970s that demonstrated how films reinforced subjectivities, Meyers argues that fiction and documentary films make and remake Jews. This happens through an array of diverse onscreen characters and filmmakers, including ultra-Orthodox Jews, secular Jews, cultural Jews, honorary Jews, the Jewishly literate, and gentiles misidentified as Jews (such as Garry Marshall, whose son grew up suffering from bar mitzvah envy, and Charlie Chaplin). Moreover, following Mulvey, Meyers explores the politics and pleasures of the gaze not only between characters within a film but also from behind the camera and in the audience. Writers, directors, producers, and actors discover and reassess varied ways of being Jewish while researching films, spending time with their subjects as they make documentaries, and meeting Jews and allies when shooting on location. Non-Jewish filmmakers take part in this work, and, in this book, there is no prohibition against the “Jewface” casting of gentile actors as Jewish characters. In addition, analyzing reviews, commentaries, and intertextual allusions, Meyers shows how different audiences decode the films, talk back to them, and ignore or position them as Jewish as well as feminist, queer, and in alliance or tension with other identities, such as Muslims and Blacks. There is meaning in the choice to screen a film at Jewish or other themed film festivals and in frameworks like schools and cultural and religious centers. Jews are made not only within films but also in the cultural work involved in the production and reception of motion pictures. The usable Jewish American tradition that Meyers constructs is one of thought-provoking debate and difficult questions. It acknowledges the important role of Al Jolson’s blackface in The Jazz Singer (1927) and figures like [End Page 259] Woody Allen who have been accused of deplorable acts. It creates a conversation that brings different perspectives into dialogue, and, at one point, amusingly stages a disagreement between the author and “the commonsense Jew” in her head who has a strong Brooklyn accent and thinks the author is “meshugge” (22). It is a tradition that invites us to re-view, re-hear, and re-think films more generously and expansively and find value in the work they do. Meyers is particularly eager to show us the cultural work performed by documentaries and lesser-known micro-budget productions; popular movies too easily dismissed as mere vulgar comedies, sentimental schmaltz, nostalgia, or guilty pleasures; films trapped in the double-bind of not being Jewish enough and being too Jewish; and the earnest work of supposedly privileged Hollywood insiders. The book offers novel insights into some significant earlier films including Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and The Pawnbroker (1964) but mostly focuses on works since the 1970s. Among others, the book discusses The Way We Were (1973) and Crossing Delancey (1988); Jewish works by Allen, the Coen Brothers, Barry Levinson, and Paul Mazursky; and limit cases in which the Jewishness of the protagonists is marginalized in the texts but not necessarily in their reception, like the Ruth Bader Ginsburg 2018 documentary RBG and Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk biopic Milk (2008). Movie-Made Jews does not argue that Jewish representations follow a single historical trajectory and especially not that they “progress” (13). Rather, it is organized in thematic chapters that discuss a selection of films chronologically. The first considers the possibility that antisemitism makes Jews and their allies. The next chapter provocatively suggests that the indirect and coded presence of...

바 미쯔바(Bar Mitzvah)의 한국교회 적용 가능성 연구

이 연구는 유대인의 성인식인 바 미쯔바가 전유하고 있는 여러 긍정적 함의들의 한국교회로의 적용 가능성에 관련한다. 이 시도는 전쟁, 자연재해, 그리고 바이러스에 의한 전염병, 그 외 국제적으로 발생하고 있는 위험적 요인들에 직면하면서 위축되고 있는 가정과 교회의 역할과 기능을 조금이라도 회복시키는데 기여할 수 있을 것이라는 기대에 기인한다. 예상하지 못했던 전쟁, 자연재해, 전염병, 그리고 폭우, 홍수, 화재, 지진 등과 같은 재난은 인류에게 물리적 고통과 정신적 상처를 주고 있을 뿐만 아니라, 그동안 인류가 자신해왔던 문명과 과학기술을 다시금 성찰하게 하고 있다. 이런 상황에서 선교적 사명이 본질인 교회는 이러한 지구적 위기에 직면하여 그에 대한 정직한 해석과 그에 상응하는 신앙적 실천을 모색할 수 있어야 한다. 지구적 위기 속에서 한국교회는 최근 비대면 예배, 모임의 최소화, 새 신자에 대한 소극적 환영 및 환영의 유예 등에 따른 소극적 목회로 교회뿐만 아니라 교회학교의 폐쇄, 그리고 교회의 역성장을 겪고 있다. 이 시기 교회가 여러 가지 상실로부터 회복되기 위해 어떠한 인식과 태도를 견지하느냐에 따라 그 회복의 속도, 그리고 양과 질의 정도는 달라질 수 있을 것이다. 그러므로 교회는 다시 제 역할과 기능재개를 위한 자기 갱신을 모색해야 한다. 이러한 갱신은 기존의 방식, 태도, 가치에 대해 새롭게 할 것은 새롭게, 여전히 강조해야 할 것은 재차 강조하면서, 그리고 시대와 환경에 따라 적절하게 조절해야 하는 것은 유연하게 수용함으로 이루어질 수 있어야 한다. 이 연구는 현대사회에서 구조적 결손을 겪고 있는 가정과 위축되고 있는 교회학교의 신앙 교육적 기능을 동시에 강화할 수 있는 교육내용으로서 유대인의 성인식, 바 미쯔바의 함의 및 한국교회 내 견신례와의 관련성 연구를 통한 한국교회의 교육적 적용 가능성 모색을 목적으로 한다. 그래서 가정의 자녀에 대한 교육적 기능, 부모 자녀 간 관계성 회복, 그리고 가정과의 단절과 소원을 겪고 있는 교회가 직면하고 있는 목회적 위축과 소극성 극복에 이바지하고자 한다. 이 연구를 위한 방법으로서 연구자는 바 미쯔바 및 교회 내 입교와 관련한 문헌 연구를 통해 논의를 전개해 나갈 것이다.

Einweihungszeremonien als Übergangsriten in jüdischer Aufklärung und Reformbewegung. Drei Fallbeispiele

The opening of the Jewish Wilhelm School in Breslau (Wroclaw) in 1791 was celebrated with a large public ceremony, which was attended not only by the newly admitted pupils, their parents and teachers, but also by high state officials and well-known scholars. Similar large-scale and publicly announced celebrations took place in 1810, when the first German Reform synagogue, the so-called Jacobs Temple, was solemnly inaugurated in Seesen. Two years before this event, the Westphalian Consistory of Israelites in Kassel had been opened also with a public celebration. Both institutions now held “confirmations,” which replaced the traditional bar mitzvah. The admission to the Wilhelm School in Breslau and the participation in the Reform services in Seesen and Kassel meant for the Jewish pupils and “confirmands” not only the transition into another phase of life. These entries also marked the transition from traditional Judaism to a Judaism of modernity. Accordingly, these newly created institutions were primarily concerned with forming entirely ‘new humans’. The Breslau School aimed at a balanced perfection of the intellect, emotions and morality of its pupils. Analogously, the worship services and confirmations in Seesen and Kassel were directed toward “thinking, feeling, and acting religiously”. Drawing on the descriptions of the opening ceremonies and the inauguration speeches in Breslau, Kassel and Seesen, the rites of transition, the terminology associated with the transition and the conceptual content of the envisaged new type of education and instruction are outlined.

Sculpting Time: Sara Rudner in Her Studio

Sculpting Time: Sara Rudner in Her Studio

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Unlisted

Unlisted

Jewish Conversion Theory: Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews"

Previous research on Philip Roth's short story "The Conversion of the Jews" (1958) has focused on the protagonist Ozzie's personal struggle with Judaism as he prepares for his Bar Mitzvah. However, during these lessons, Ozzie asks provocative questions that challenge the foundation of Judaism. Roth confronts the reader with two interpretations of Judaism: a canonical one, personified by Rabbi Binder, and Ozzie's more radical approach. Operating outside of clearly defined theological parameters, Ozzie's naïve attitude opens Judaism to fresh, non-Jewish interpretations and asks such provocative questions as whether a conversion to Christianity can be an answer for modern Jewish Americans. Although Ozzie chooses Christianity as a myopic solution for his identity struggle, Roth knows that conversion is not really an option. In search of an American Judaism that fits Jewish Americans, this study, like Ozzie himself, will meet at the crossroads of theological doctrine and literary criticism.

The Mamboniks by Lex Gillespie

Reviewed by: The Mamboniks by Lex Gillespie Hannah Kosstrin (bio) The Mamboniks, directed by Lex Gillespie, Malecón Films, 2019, https://themamboniks.com/ In the 1950s, the mambo was all the rage in New York City. The Afro-Cuban music form and dance practice attracted participants from across cultural and class strata. Star musicians such as Tito Puente and Celia Cruz performed with big bands in dancehalls, including New York's Palladium Ballroom on 53rd and Broadway. These musicians played to eager, full crowds of people mixing swing dance's virtuosic tricks with polyrhythmic hip swivels while their feet tapped out patterns driven by clave sticks. Mambo drew an intercultural crowd of practitioners, especially American Jews. These "mamboniks" (emphasis on the first syllable), self-described mambo lovers, are the focus of Lex Gillespie's feature-length documentary The Mamboniks. The film traces a handful of these dancers' histories practicing mambo from their time as young people to their current experiences as retirees. By shuttling back and forth between New York, Miami, and Havana, and between the 1950s and the present day, the film gives a sense of the transnational circulation of mambo (and mamboniks) as well as its intersecting diasporic contexts between the Jewish, African American, Italian, and Latinx communities in the United States. Meeting the cast of characters gives a lived sense for the 1950s mambo scene. Spinning between Greenwich Village stoops, Jewish delis, hair salons, Miami/South Beach, Coconut Creek's Gold Coast Ballroom, and Havana's Tropicana nightclub, practitioners recount their 1950s world of mambo by visiting and narrating old haunts. The film gives a sense of mambo's longevity through these mamboniks' embodied histories. The mamboniks' experiences dancing and playing music, then at the Palladium Ballroom and now at the Gold Coast Ballroom, fosters their memories of their own lived histories by using their bodily practices to connect to their past. Gillespie situates the mambo craze within the historical context of the United States' relationship with Cuba in the 1950s. Cuba was a popular postwar Caribbean destination for American tourists before [End Page 313] Fidel Castro's rise to power in 1959. The US embargo on Cuba following the 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion confrontation between the US and Soviet Union severed ties between the United States and Cuba. Cutting this contact stemmed the flow of Cuban material culture into the US. Mamboniks remember the difficulty trying to hear Cuban short-wave radio stations in New York to which they previously tuned. After the embargo, according to dancer and musician Joe Marchese, "The Cuban music just stopped coming here." He recalls driving down to Key West, Florida, tape recorder in hand, to record Cuban radio from there. The combination of the Cuban embargo, the rise of rock and roll, and the 1966 closing of the Palladium Ballroom, the mamboniks explain, greatly decreased the practice of American mambo. Yet, Gillespie also highlights how the intercultural mixing of the Jewish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and African American communities in the Palladium offered a respite from antisemitism and racism outside its walls, alongside the nascent American Civil Rights Movement. This is an important area of inquiry that is ripe for further investigation. The Mamboniks shows how the mambo, in turn, became a deeply embedded postwar Jewish cultural practice in New York. Many of the mamboniks anecdotally draw connections between the rhythms of klezmer and mambo as a way to explain Jewish practitioners' attraction to mambo rhythms in music and dance, but the connection seems broader than that since klezmer and mambo are otherwise musically distinct. The mambo became ubiquitous in New York-based Jewish culture in the 1950s. Mambo bands played weddings and bar mitzvahs, and swing dance nights at the 92nd Street Young Men's/Young Women's Hebrew Association (YM/YWHA) on the Upper East Side turned into mambo nights when Tito Puente entered the scene. Mambo also traveled through Jewish channels between Cuba, Florida, and New York. Jewish families vacationing in Miami Beach luxuriated in Cuban music and dance by way of hotels featuring mambo lessons and dance nights; these vacationers brought their interests back to New York. Significantly, Jewish social life in the Catskills mountains...

Samuel N. Rosenberg (1936–2020)

Samuel N. Rosenberg (1936–2020) Christopher Callahan Samuel Nathan Rosenberg was born January 19, 1936 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Israel and Etta Friedland Rosenberg, and the brother of Alex Rosenberg and Sylvia Rosenberg Fogelman. He died on June 30, 2020 at his home in Bloomington, Indiana, at the age of 84. Sam seems to have been destined for the Academy from his earliest years. He was an avid reader even before primary school and began learning French in the first grade, later taking first prize in a city-wide competition for excellence in French. Multilingualism came naturally to him: exposed to Yiddish from infancy, pressed into learning Hebrew for his bar mitzvah, and constantly pursuing French, his command of the most refined stylistic registers in French received plaudits in mid-life from no less erudite a scholar than Michel Zink of the Collège de France (and now of the Académie française). He pursued French Studies, along with Italian and Latin, at Columbia College, receiving his A.B. in 1957 with "Highest Honors, Distinction in French"—noted in English, despite the Latin text of the rest of the diploma! While at Columbia, he worked at WKCR, the campus radio station, and his "mellifluous FM dj voice" made a lasting impression on everyone who met him. Click for larger view View full resolution Sam in 1962. Courtesy estate of Samuel N. Rosenberg. His insatiable curiosity was matched by a strong sense of ethics. Colleagues have since described him as "a champion of human rights and empathetic to a fault," qualities for which he was well-known by everyone he worked with. Indeed, he is described by his collaborators as "the ultimate gentleman—affable, courteous, distinguished—and an unstinting mentor." Equally erudite and [End Page 355] humble, he was gifted with "an incomparable sense of generosity and camaraderie." Click for larger view View full resolution Sam in 2016. Photo by Chris Callahan. Sam's decision to pursue his doctoral work at Johns Hopkins was doubtless influenced by the migration to Hopkins of his mentor Dr. Nathan Edelman, who had become chair of Romance Languages there the previous year. Once enrolled, he met his most formative—and formidable—mentor in Dr. Anna Granville Hatcher, who directed his dissertation. Sam later recalled her course in Old Provençal, taken in his first semester at Hopkins, as a baptism by fire, which nonetheless gave him a methodology for dissecting ancient languages in the minutest detail and a holistic grasp of both the source literary text and its cultural context. Sam went on to impart this approach to philology to his own students and to live it in the collaborative, interdisciplinary scholarship which marked his career. As Sam was drawn to both historical and modern grammar and stylistics, his dissertation focused on modern French syntax because, in Sam's words, "Miss Hatcher explained that Miss Pope [From Latin to Old French] had said it all"; with time he realized that wasn't the case, but more on that below. His dissertation research was facilitated by a Fulbright to study in Paris in 1960–1961. He described his great fortune at being able to stay in the apartment, situated Place de Furstemberg in the St. Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, of the celebrated composer/pianist Alexander Tcherepnin and his wife, Ming, also a concert pianist. Sam's arrival and the Tcherepnins' departure overlapped by one week, during which evenings filled with music, wine, and scintillating conversation stretched into the wee hours. In 1962, Sam took a lectureship at Indiana University, earning the rank of Assistant Professor in 1965 upon receipt of his Ph.D. [End Page 356] in Romance Philology. His dissertation, Modern French 'ce': The Neuter Pronoun in Adjectival Predication, published in 1970, was in fact not his first book-length work. Two years earlier, he had offered the English-speaking world a translation of Antoine Meillet's groundbreaking The Indo-European Dialects, a publication which both signaled his ongoing interest in historical linguistics and opened for him a scholarly path in translation; he remained active in both of these fields for the rest of his life. Sam's training and...

Minecrafting Bar Mitzvah: Two Rabbis Negotiating and Cultivating Learner-Driven Inclusion through New Media

Abstract In 2013, a boy with special needs used the video game Minecraft to deliver the sermon at his bar mitzvah at a Reform synagogue, an apparently unique ritual phenomenon to this day. Using a narrative inquiry approach, this article examines two rabbis’ negotiations with new media, leading up to, during, and upon reflection after the event. The article explores acceptance, innovation, and validation of new media in religious practice, drawing on Campbell’s (2010) framework for negotiation of new media in religious communities. Clergy biography, philosophy, and institutional context all impact the negotiations with new media. By providing context of a set of factors influencing a particular negotiation and validation of a ritual and educational innovation using new media, the article intends to demonstrate the importance of clergy narrative for understanding new media negotiations in religious settings, and in particular in progressive religious communities

Permission to Narrate a Pandemic in Palestine

Permission to Narrate a Pandemic in Palestine

Richard Alpert (Ram Dass): Harvard psychologist who experimented with psychedelic drugs and became one of America’s most prominent and respected spiritual leaders

Credit: Dassima Kathleen Murphy Nothing in Richard Alpert’s early life could have predicted that he would come to embody the spirit of the psychedelic 1960s. He was born in Boston,...

Thoreau in Pittsburgh: Reflections on Domestic Terrorism

Thoreau in Pittsburgh:Reflections on Domestic Terrorism Joshua David Bellin (bio) I grew up in Squirrel Hill, a five-minute walk from the Tree of Life synagogue. Though I wasn't raised in the Jewish faith—a detail that escaped the spectators who screamed anti-Semitic obscenities at me when I played Pony League baseball games in their neighborhoods—I did have many Jewish friends, and I attended their bar mitzvahs at Tree of Life. Likewise, though I didn't know any of the eleven men and women who were murdered there on Saturday, 27 October 2018, I was in Squirrel Hill when it happened, visiting my father, a nonobservant Jew, at the nursing care facility that used to be called the Jewish Home for the Aged. The building was on lockdown while the standoff with police played out a couple of miles away. The Monday following the shooting, my American literature class met at La Roche University, a small Catholic institution in Pittsburgh's northern suburbs. As it happened, we were scheduled to discuss Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849). But the students were visibly shaken by the mass murder in their community, and we ended up talking about that instead: about their fears, their disbelief, their connections to Squirrel Hill. One woman had attended a wedding at Tree of Life the previous week. She knew congregants who were killed, and she couldn't shake the feeling that, if not for a quirk of fate, she could have been among them. Like most Pittsburgh residents, I've had trouble forgetting that day. As a teacher, there have been moments when my activities pale beside the enormity of what happened at Tree of Life; I've wondered what difference American literature makes in a world where innocent people are slain in houses [End Page 553] of worship. Perhaps because I've been wrestling with such dissonance, I've given considerable thought to the question of Thoreau's relationship to what we now term domestic terrorism. We can easily draw such connections: at the end of a decade that saw Thoreau's increasing antislavery radicalism, he delivered "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (1859), which celebrates the life and martyrdom of the antebellum era's most notorious domestic terrorist.1 Could it be, I've wondered, that the almost unthinkable incongruity of these two events—a terrible act of hatred in my old neighborhood, the study of Thoreau's celebrated statement of political nonviolence in the college classroom's ostensibly safe confines—harbors a deeper affinity? To put it more plainly: was Thoreau a sponsor, an apologist, and a disciple of the homegrown terrorism of his day? To answer such a question, I had to (re)turn to Brown, whom I've long found both fascinating and repellent. I inherited my interest in this controversial figure from my father, a Brown enthusiast whose long life ended roughly a month after the shooting. More than forty years earlier, my dad piled the family into our Buick Skylark convertible and embarked on a meandering voyage through southwestern Pennsylvania in search of a tannery Brown operated. That trip ended in disappointment when, on the barely drivable dirt track that led to the site, we ran over a nail and popped a tire. I've gone on many Brown odysseys of my own since then. In a climate-controlled storage vault in the Massachusetts Historical Society, I stood face to blade with one of the pikes Brown commissioned to arm freed slaves at Harpers Ferry; in a cluttered museum in Charles Town, West Virginia, I surveyed the wagon in which the convicted killer was carried to the site of his execution. With my teenage son, I poked around in the restored Maryland farmhouse where Brown gathered his arms and men before marching on the federal arsenal. Our next trip will be to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where Brown met with Frederick Douglass in an abandoned [End Page 554] quarry and, unable to convince the seasoned orator to join his team, recruited Douglass' much younger companion, fellow escaped slave Shields Green. Green, like Brown, would later be captured at Harpers Ferry and executed.2 In my research...

The head leads to the heart

I was born into a fairly typical American Jewish family, one that valued social justice and tradition over religion. Nonetheless, I regularly went to synagogue and Hebrew School and in my own way believed in the importance of God and religion. However, by the time of my Bar Mitzvah, I already had serious misgivings about Judaism and the teachings of the Torah. These misgivings arose, in part, out of my careful reading of the Torah, my burgeoning interest in science, and my love of professional wrestling. Why did the Torah claim to be able to cure leprosy by sprinkling a person 7 times with a live dove dipped into the blood of a freshly slain dove? Why did it refer to dolphins as fishes when they were clearly mammals? And, perhaps most importantly, when would my prayers to grow to the size of Andre the Giant be answered?

The Cadillac

fiction PHOTO: CHRIS DEVERS/FLICKR The Cadillac by Sylvie Weil A bar mitzvah brings multiple generations of a family together in celebration, far from the reach of the evil eye. NEW ROCHELLE, 1954 “Say, would you look at those Dagmars! Aren’t they something!” Everyone in the family knows Mounya has just bought himself a Cadillac, but knowing is one thing, and seeing is another. What a sight to behold, it’s a beauty! All that chrome, gleaming in the slanted sunlight of a late afternoon in June. The car is two-toned beige, but beige doesn’t begin to describe it. The bottom half is a warm color, like coffee with milk, and the top is pure cream. Magnificent! What class! Look at the gigantic, curved windshield, just a single piece of glass. And those matching bumpers shaped like missiles, the famous Dagmars, named for the actress whose voluptuous breasts, accentuated by the cone-shaped cups of her brassiere, appear regularly on magazine covers. That Mounya, he doesn’t hold back on anything. The sleek beauty innocently offers herself up to the gaze of all the guests invited to the bar mitzvah of Mounya and Clara’s eldest son. Yesterday, which was Saturday, Michael was called to the Torah for the first time. Such a beautiful, moving occasion, the bar mitzvah of this boy who, having reached the age of thirteen, is now a man in the eyes of Jewish law, a man carrying his paternal grandfather’s name, the grandfather who was assassinated in his Ukrainian village by Petliura’s 30 WLT JULY–AUGUST 2018 Sylvie Weil grew up in Paris and earned her degrees in classics and French literature at the Sorbonne. She is the author of numerous works of literary fiction and memoir, including At Home with André and Simone Weil and also a series of three youngadult novels set in Champagne at the time of the first Crusade. The first of this trilogy, Le mazal d’Elvina, won the Prix Sorcières, one of the most prestigious prizes awarded in France for the best novel for young people. PHOTO© R. ESPINOZA RIOS bandits alongside his youngest son. As the rabbi reminded them all yesterday, this martyred grandfather , before he was killed, asked for enough time to recite the Kaddish for his son. No one’s thinking of that story now. Those who enjoy subjecting themselves to those kinds of memories had plenty of time yesterday at the synagogue. Today is for celebration. Clara’s aunts and uncles, her cousins, all the Shackmans (Mounya’s mother and sister are his only family here) have made the sweltering trip up from Brooklyn to New Rochelle with their car windows down so they could breathe, hair mussed and clothes rumpled by the air, which was unbreathable anyway, nauseatingly hot and muggy. They’ve parked their cars up and down the lawn. The men tug at suit jackets to smooth out the wrinkles, the women pull at dresses stuck to their thighs. They all mop their faces, run combs through their hair. The women touch up their lipstick. They make sure that the check or pen (a gold fountain pen, of course), intended for the Bar Mitzvah Boy, is safe in their purse or suit pocket. For most of them, it’s the first time they’ve set foot in Mounya’s and Clara’s new house. But they hardly even glance at the house. They only have eyes for the Cadillac, with its panoramic windshield , its expanse of chrome . . . and those Dagmars. “Have you seen the interior? Even the steering wheel is two-toned. So classy!” “And air-conditioning! And a radio!” “Has anyone seen Clara’s dress?” the women ask, tired of all the talk about Dagmars, tired of imagining what it would be like to be driven around in a Cadillac , cooled by air-conditioning and lulled by the voice of Frank Sinatra. Tired of knowing that this will never be their fate. Clara’s dress? No one has any idea what it looks like, the dress is a secret. It’s a creation by Aunt Mary Shackman, of course, who for almost thirty years has...