Do you know what October 27 is?
It’s the 5th anniversary of the Tree of Life shooting. Who will remember?
Hey, sorry I haven’t written anything in a while. The irony—is it irony? the Times wouldn’t let me call it irony, because they almost never let writers use that word, which is probably for the best; we writers so often misuse the word—is that a whole bunch of you have upgraded your subscriptions to “paid” in the last few weeks, a kindness that I should honor by writing more, and better. But I haven’t been able to.
First off, this Friday is the 5th anniversary of the murder of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. For obvious reasons, this will be less discussed than it might have been otherwise. Before the attacks by Hamas on Israel, I made this short video below about my Pittsburgh book; if I’d made this video in the last couple weeks, I would have made other points about antisemitism, hatred, Jewish security, etc. (I also wouldn’t have put in a plug for my book at the end, I don’t think.) As it is, it’s a primer about my book’s arguments:
Let’s name the Pittsburgh victims:
Joyce Fienberg, 75
Richard Gottfried, 65
Rose Mallinger, 97
Jerry Rabinowitz, 66
Cecil, 59, & David Rosenthal, 54
Bernice, 84 & Sylvan Simon, 86
Daniel Stein, 71
Melvin Wax, 88
Irving Younger, 69
News from the vice president’s office
In weirder Tree of Life news, I got an email today, telling me “on background” about the Second Gentleman, Doug Emhoff, meeting with families of Tree of Life victims. Now, as my great erstwhile editor A. always says, “Off-the-record is an agreement”—meaning you can’t tell someone something and quickly say, “By the way, that’s off the record,” and expect them to honor your conditions. They have to agree to your conditions for them to have any moral purchase. Same goes for “on background.”
Well, nobody told Liza Acevedo, head of comms for the Second Gentleman, who bcc’d this to me (and I presume others), without getting my consent to treat it as “on background,” i.e., not to name her, just to call her “a White House official”:
Now, I ask you, why would this bit of banality be submitted, lazily, “on background”? I guess because the Second Gentleman doesn’t want it to look as if he is trying to get publicity for making this condolence call, even though he is. He wants it to look as if he tried to do this quietly, but some White House official leaked it to the press. Which, come to think of it, makes no sense, because if he’s allowing it to be noted that a “White House official” outed him as a big-hearted generous soul, then any moron can conclude the official did so with this permission. “White House officials” don’t go rogue to reveal that the vice president’s husband is a mensch; they only do that on direct orders.
Anyway, good for Doug Emhoff, mensch.
Meanwhile, in Israel . . .
It would be easy but possibly dishonest for me to say that my silence has been due to the terrorist attacks on Israel, and the ensuing war (the one that we keep waiting, anxiously, to begin). Truth be told, I don’t get paralyzed by world events. It helps that I am pretty abstinent with my news consumption. I know less about current events than you would think. I’m not on social media; I haven’t seen dozens of videos that I know some of you have seen. I haven’t seen Jews murdered; I haven’t seen videos of dead bodies, although I have seen pictures. The one video I saw, and it was enough, was of a mother holding her two children to her as she was surrounded by the Hamas terrorists who were taking her hostage. She was crying, and pleading, and saying things in Hebrew I didn’t understand. And clutching her two babies to her chest so, so tightly.
And, well, that was one video too many. I’m not sure what would be served by my watching anything else like that.
So maybe that is why I haven’t been writing. I’m not entirely sure.
Here’s a smattering of what I have been reading on the topic, by folks like David Leonhardt, Sasha Abramsky, Jonathan Chait, and Sam Harris.
The world’s oldest book club
A couple weeks ago, I was honored to be invited by Stephanie and Liel, my old co-hosts on the podcast Unorthodox, to return to the show to offer some thoughts on Simchat Torah, which re-starts the annual cycle of Torah reading. I talked about my theory that the Jews are best conceived not as a religious group, or an ethnicity, or a nation, or a tribe, but as a book club—a millennia-old, intergenerational book club. Have a listen.
Up in the air
I’m on a Delta flight to Los Angeles at the moment, and I’m watching a 2021 concert documentary of Bruce Springsteen and the East Street Band, featuring footage shot mostly in 1979. I’m a medium-big Bruce fan, and it’s his music I like, not him per se, or the whole Garden State mythology. That said, my God he was sexy, in his black jeans and boots and curly pompadour. Has the piece been written that ties him in to the brief 1970s cult of retro ’50s-greaser rockabilly machismo? I’m talking about the intersection of American Graffiti, the Fonz on Happy Days, Sha-na-na (which, don’t forget, played Woodstock and then bestrode the 1970s), and Travolta of Welcome Back, Kotter and Grease. It seems that Springsteen was always bigger than those pop-culture items, and less ersatz, more real. And if you watch him onstage in 1979, you can’t help but see the ways in which he was reincarnating Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis and the Big Bopper. But much sexier; what an ass that guy is shaking.
By the way, Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, is a terrific book.
What I’m reading
Just finished The Smart One, an early novel by Jennifer Close, who wrote the sensational recent novel with the inscrutable (until you read the book) title Marrying the Ketchups. Nobody does dysfunctional Irish families better. Now starting in on Wellness, the new one from Nathan Hill of The Nix. One hundred pages in, it seems like a worthy successor.
I’m hiring
For my new gig as director of open learning at American Jewish University, in Los Angeles (I am telecommuting; I could never leave the New Haven apizza scene), I am working on a series of videos in which I interview interesting people. They’ll roll out soon … but meanwhile, if anybody knows anyone who is a good video (and audio) editor, have them shoot me a note. I need a good stable of folks. I want someone who appreciates the aesthetic of the the Tiny Desk videos and this bit of advertorial, sees how they feel at once both informal—the mood is relaxed and casual—but formally beautiful.
Tender is the night
I’ve been in L.A., and last night I had time to kill and decided to buy a ticket to see Jackson Browne play a show at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre (British spelling theirs, not mine). I really enjoyed the first half, but began to flag at intermission, and then left about 20 minutes into the second set. This means I’ll never know if he played “Doctor My Eyes.” If he did, and I missed it, shame on me. So let’s hope he didn’t, right? Hell, it was probably the encore. I never could have stayed up that late.
Enjoy: