Martini Judaism

For me, it is the second half of her subtitle: what to do about it.

Kwall’s final chapter, “A Self-Help Blueprint for American Jews,” proposes a foundation of shared commitments around which a broad Jewish center might gather. Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish democratic state. The legitimacy of criticizing its government. Opposition to antisemitism wherever it appears. Condemnation of terrorism, including violence by Jewish extremists. Sympathy for innocent Palestinians. A two-state solution as an aspiration. She outlined these principles in a recent presentation at Yeshiva University.

There is plenty there to argue about. Try bringing those principles to your next Shabbat dinner.

But that, I think, is where the book becomes most useful. It gives us something concrete to discuss—and asks us to examine our own habits as participants in that discussion. Can we describe another Jew’s convictions in terms that she would recognize? Can we hear criticism without assuming betrayal? Can we acknowledge suffering without treating compassion as a concession?

Learning a second Jewish language requires practice. Shared study. Personal relationships. Time spent in Jewish communities whose assumptions differ from our own.

The tribes are here to stay. The work is to keep them talking—and to give them reasons to care about one another’s future.
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What is the most important story in Judaism?

You might think that it is the Exodus from Egypt. Or, even, perhaps, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

Nope.

The most important story in Judaism is not in the Torah -- though, if it were, it would be somewhere towards the beginning of this week's Torah portion.

I am talking about the story about how Abraham, at the age of thirteen, broke his father's idols -- and simultaneously invented monotheism. (Abraham was a gifted child, of course).

Jewish history is the history of iconoclasts, and lately, no one is doing it better than Dara Horn -- novelist, and penetrating observer of contemporary Jewish life.

Not only an observer -- a critic who holds nothing back -- with a rare talent for giving titles to her books that are, well, iconoclastic. What can you say about a book that proclaims People Love Dead Jews -- and her new book, equally provocatively titled -- The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living.

Yes (gulp): she actually uses that phrase "final solution" in the title.

Dara has much to say in this new book, but here is my favorite takeaway.

It's about antisemitism -- a subject that is on the mind and on the lips of every Jew I know.
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For years I believed that the phrase "made in the image of God" had become a pious slogan Jews slap on almost every issue -- a phrase in danger of becoming a cliche. In an article in Commentary, and in my book Tikkun Ha'Am/Repairing Our People: Israel and the Crisis of Liberal Judaism, I asked out loud: have we overused that phrase? Do we even know what it means?

I can now say, with confidence, that we know what it means -- thanks to Tomer Persico, who teaches at the Shalom Hartman Institute and who is the author of In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea.
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In 1977, a man named Frank Collin announced that he planned to march his fellow neo-Nazis through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb where roughly one in ten residents had survived the death camps. Chicago had already blocked him from marching there, and his history of violence and property damage offered the city an easy “no.”

PS. Frank Collin was the son of a German Jewish Holocaust survivor.

The ACLU took his case anyway, on First Amendment grounds, and Skokie became the defining American test of whether even the most hateful speech deserves protection.

That fight did not end in 1978. It resurfaced in Charlottesville in 2017, where marchers carrying torches chanted “Jews will not replace us” under the same constitutional canopy that had once shielded Collin.

And it has resurfaced again, right now, on college campuses, where students and administrators are still arguing over what speech the law should protect and what speech should count as harassment.

Skokie did not settle anything. It just wrote the opening chapter.

I learned about Collin, and much more, from James Loeffler, a historian at Johns Hopkins and the author of a new book called Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America. I spoke with him for this week's Martini Judaism podcast.
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Rabbi Jeff Marx has written a new book, Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I, and he does something almost nobody has tried before. He tells the story behind the charge that Jews deliberately set fires in order to collect insurance money – “Jewish lightning.”

In fact, there were real Jewish arsonists who operated in American cities for roughly sixty years, and Jeff tells those stories. He begins with the 1867 "Jew risks" affair, when major fire insurance companies instructed their agents to deny policies to Jews outright. He follows the stereotype through three decades of trade-press obsession, into vaudeville sketches and silent films, and into real criminal networks of torches, public adjusters, and fire brokers.

So, yes: there were actual Jewish arsonists. But, they were extremely few in proportion to the population -- approximately 200 individuals, or roughly one one-thousandth of one percent of New York City’s population. Despite this tiny number, their cases became front-page news and were syndicated across the United States.

But, then again, there were also Italian, Greek, and Black Americans. The fact that Jewish suspects were framed through ethnicity while others were not raised a central question for the book: why did Jewish arson cases become the basis for a broader ethnic stereotype?

We talk about why he chose arson over the more familiar stories of Jewish bootlegging and gambling; about the progression from caricatures, stereotypes, and most dangerously, antisemitic narratives which emerge when stereotypes depict Jews as malevolent conspirators, echoing European tropes of Jews plotting harm; and about what it meant to write this history with his own parents watching over the dedication page, with their own whispers of -- you guessed it -- shanda.
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