Celebrity kippa-wearer #2

Date: December 9, 2001.

Location: Kikar Zion, Jerusalem.

Occasion: Hanukkah in the Holy Land / terror solidarity trip.

Analysis: This is actually quite moving. We've got Pataki, Sharon, Giuliani and Rav Lau, with the middle men (no pun intended) engaging in a touching embrace as Pataki looks rather stern and Rav Lau looks suspiciously like Santa Claus. In any event, the charm (or irony) here is that Giuliani--like Dr. Clintonovich--is wearing a natural-looking s'rugie, while our distinguished former P.M. dons what appears to be a bar mitzvah guest yarmulke. It's a meaningful picture, all the same, replete with happiness, good cheer and perhaps a few extra percentage points in the Upper West Side. Ho ho ho.

Score: 10/10. Just because I love Giuliani.

Celebrity kippa-wearer #1

Date: October 2004.

Location: B'nai Torah Congregation, Boca Raton.

Occasion: Stumping for candidate Kerry.

Analysis: I mean, come on -- look at him! First, he's wearing a kippa s'ruga, as opposed to those silly polyester camping tents we tend to give those of our guests who we'd like to stand out. Second, he's got The Flag behind him. Third, he's quite clearly standing in front of an aron. Finally, he's holding his glasses just so. He looks like the kindly neighborhood professor who gives occasional Shabbat talks on the history of the Marranos or how Iggeret ha-Sh'mad has been interpreted over the ages or some such thing.

Score: 10/10. I'd welcome Dr. Clintonovich to my shul anytime.

One of the greatest Hillulei Hashem to come our way in a long time

So, I'm sitting in my apartment flipping through channels earlier this evening, trying desperately to find some productive way to procrastinate, when I see what seems to resemble the skyline of the Old City at twilight. Sure enough, that's what it is. I'm trying to remember what channel this is and whether I have any idea what I'm watching when the A&E logo shows up on the bottom-right of the screen, followed by a title I had to read twice: "Red Light Districts."

Over the course of the next twenty or so minutes, I went through all five of Kübler-Ross's stages of mourning, save the last.

For the first few seconds, I was in denial. "Maybe we're talking about 'red light' as in emergency. Maybe this is about terror or international crises." Nope. It was what it was, a rundown of Israel's burgeoning sex trade industry, casting the light of American cable television on one of Israel's ugliest and most shameful aspects.

Within minutes, I was seized with anger. "What the hell is wrong with that country?" I asked myself. Somehow, David Ben-Gurion's assertion that we'd know "we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew" rang all too true.

Soon, I was bargaining. "Let them only show the lighter side of Israeli prostitution," I told myself, knowing full well that no such thing exists. And, as if in answer, the program went from bad to worse, with scenes of virtually naked women writhing on some stage in Tel Aviv, images of women being solicited by the drivers of old Subarus and a tour of a ditch filled with what must have been hundreds of used rubbers, in which a young woman had been found dead a week earlier. We were told the heartbreaking story of a young woman brought to Israel from Russia, who said she knew what she was being brought to do but whose friends thought they were coming to be dancers.

Inevitably, I sank into depression. Where have we gone wrong? How is it that in the land of the Jews, the Jewish, democractic state, human beings are being traded and treated as metaltelin -- mere objects -- over which other humans can exercise ugly proprietorship for a matter of shekalim? How is it that the people who brought the world ethical enlightenment as an or la-goyim are now importing young women to satisfy the basest of their desires? How is it that a land endowed with sanctity and beauty is allowing itself to be so crassly defiled?

I stopped short of acceptance. Thank G-d, we have organizations like the Israel Women's Network, which has encouraged and supported the work of the Knesset Committee of Inquiry established to deal with the issue. Thank G-d, we have activist parliamentarians like MK Zahava Gal-On, with whom I disagree on pretty much everything, but whose activism on this issue is a tribute--albeit a sad one--to Israel.

What remains is for us to take a long, hard look at ourselves and ponder how we can help these women extract themselves from their predicament and rehabilitate their lives while, at the same time, extracting ourselves from our collective descent into moral decadence and rehabilitating a society that has tolerated this practice for far too long.

Coming soon...

Celebrity kippa-wearers.

You're gonna love the way they look. I guarantee it.

Paradise Whenever

It's been a while since I last posted, for a variety of reasons (notable among them a holiday I like to call Paskha--erm--Passover), but I thought this would be an appropriate time to raise an issue that's become blessedly passe', but that still merits some discussion.

I refer, of course, to the film Paradise Now.

It's the heartwarming tale of two Palestinian best buddies -- Amin and Khaled -- who, due to the hopelessness wrought by the Occupation, decide to become suicide bombers. Buoyed by the adulation of their handlers, they conceal their plans of martyrdom from their families and friends until---ah, I won't spoil it for you, but feel free to spoil it all by yourself, if you so desire.

Now, as you are likely aware--assuming you've been on the planet over the past few months--Paradise Now has met with unbridled enthusiasm everywhere it's been screened, with the notable exceptions of Israel and the Palestinian-administered territories. On January 16, it won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. The film was also nominated for an Academy Award and was considered a frontrunner for the foreign language Oscar, but wound up losing to South African film Tsotsi.

I had occasion to view the film twice this past week, and I'm not yet sure what to make of it. I have, however, been able to sort out my thoughts to a degree sufficient to a thorough debunking of what I'll call "The Top Five Myths Surrounding Paradise Now."

MYTH NUMBER ONE: It's a great film.

Really, it's rather sh'vach (a Yiddishism; I apply them liberally; be forewarned). Mostly, the film is somewhat crude and rather shallow. It's rife with stereotypes (the Israeli soldier, the Palestinian terrorist) and woefully lacking in its depictions. One could almost imagine that nothing happens in the Palestinian-administered territories that does not somehow affect the two bombers. The filmmaker provides us with little more than thumbnail sketches of life in Israel and the territories: Nablus is a mound of ruins; Tel Aviv is full of girls in bikinis. Israeli buses are always filled to capacity with soldiers. Etc. etc. etc.

The complexity of the characters seems artificial, the storyline is faulty (with far too many loose beginnings and ends) and the dialogue frequently lapses into stiltedness. The filmmaker--who, despite his protestations to the contrary, quite clearly means to advance a certain political agenda--goes about doing his thing with heavy-handedness and leaves precious little to the imagination (except for those parts that don't fit well into his storyline; see below).

I was able to discern two points to the film's cinematographic merit, both of which pertained to its physical depictions. First, the settlers portrayed in the film are remarkably lifelike (though I can't recall the last time I saw a settler child wearing a bonnet or whatever it was that adorned her little head), and the director is to be congratulated for pulling that off (I'm always amused by the uniform depictions of religious Jews as wearing kapotas and wide-brimmed black hats). Second, the landscape is absolutely beautiful, though this is a tribute to Israel and has very little to do with the filmmaker's merits.

MYTH NUMBER TWO: It glorifies suicide bombers.

I'm not entirely certain what such a thing would look like, but it ain't here. There's not much that's glorified in this film. There's lots of rubble and plenty of misery, but not much glory.

What the film does, however, do is sterilize suicide bombing. The bombers don perfectly-tailored black suits and ties -- "Tarantino style," in the words of Israeli screenwriter Irit Linor -- over their suicide belts, making the whole thing seem like a Brooks Brothers commercial gone awry and nothing at all like an act of mass murder. The film concludes (WARNING: IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW HOW IT CONCLUDES, DON'T READ THIS) with a closeup of Amin's eyes fading suddenly into a white screen, as if having your body shattered by the impact of a human bomb detonating next to you feels something like floating around in a cloud. Absent is the twisted, blackened metal; the severed heads; the rib cages riddled with nails; the pools of blood. Never once is reference made to the fact that people die in these bombings and that their families and friends are left to identify their bodies and mourn their loss. Paradise Now presents the viewer with the properly dressed suicide bomber and the pristine suicide bombing -- a combination that makes for an "operation" (indeed, that's what it's called in the movie) executed with near-surgical cleanliness.

To anyone who's been affected by a suicide attack, such a depiction may be far more painful than the prospect of glorification. At least the latter acknowledges the horror of the act and the pain wrought on the family. Here, there's no pain because there's no death; the suicide bombing is purely an act of self-sacrifice and only the bomber--and, perhaps, the suit--suffer.

MYTH NUMBER THREE: It may be anti-Israeli, but it certainly isn't anti-Semitic.

Nope, it's anti-Semitic alright. Generally speaking, it's not the overt anti-Semitism of someone like, say, a David Duke or a Ken Livingstone. It's more like the suave, genteel anti-Semitism of that high school teacher who used to refer to "those people on [fill in name of street in given city's banking district]."

The film is rife with anti-Semitic imagery. It opens with the ugly, bearded, curly-haired visage of a soldier at a checkpoint. It continues with references to the Jewish Israeli driver who's willing to help the Amin and Khaled reach their target--and would, by extension, be willing to do virtually anything--because he's being paid to do so. At another point, a Palestinian cab driver slips in comments reminiscent of the ugliest blood libels -- in this case pertaining to a nefarious Jewish plot to affect Palestinian sperm counts by poisoning their water. The claim is never refuted. Particularly cynical is a scene in which the two bombers sit down to enjoy a final meal in the company of their terrorist compatriots. The scene unfolds in wide lens format, and we see the men sit around a long table in a creepy reenactment of Da Vinci's Last Supper. Implicit is the Jews' responsibility for the bombers' sad predicament and for their impending martyrdom.

Interestingly, though, the filmmaker goes to great lengths to avoid saying the word "Jew" anywhere in the film. In conversations and even in the bombers' farewell videos, the term "the occupation" is used in lieu of "the Jews"--a rather clear deviation from actual practice--as if the screenwriter expects the audience to come to the appropriate conclusions on their own without putting his sentiments to stark scrutiny.

MYTH NUMBER FOUR: It's clever and crafty.

Not really. At certain points, the crudeness of it all is almost mindboggling. We sit through streams of propaganda conveyed in the form of careful soliloquies, as if a few pages of Hamas talking points accidentally slipped into the screenplay and nobody noticed. We hear of such cruel (and fictional) Israeli practices as presenting an elderly man with the choice of which of his legs is to be smashed and which kept intact and filling Palestinian drinking water with spermicides. Add to this the blood libels, ugly stereotypes and the point becomes almost impossible to avoid. This film puts its hostility towards Israel out there; very little is expected of the viewer. In creativity it merits a very low score.

MYTH NUMBER FIVE: It's the worst thing to happen to Israel since... I dunno, Munich?

Really, it's not that bad. I suppose I may be giving people more credit than they're due, but I suspect a large portion of the viewers will be able to see through this crud and discern that what they're watching is not, in fact, a documentary but a work of fiction aimed at presenting a particular political perspective at the expense of both realism and evenhandedness. The hostility is too overt, the omissions too glaring for the serious viewer to come to any other conclusion. One can only hope the film inspires those who view it to discover the truth for themselves and correct the egregious disservice to peace and understanding done by Paradise Now.