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Being and Jewishness
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
Today's Economic Crisis in Historical Perspective
Democracy and Elections:
More Unfinished 2008 Election Business: Verifiable Vote Counts
Steven Rosenfeld
DrugReporter:
A New Approach to Drugs Would Save New York Hundreds of Millions of Dollars
Gabriel Sayegh
Election 2008:
Franken Lawyer: "We Are Going To Win"
Sam Stein
Environment:
Bank of America Retreats from Financing Destructive Mountaintop Removal Mining
Michael Brune
ForeignPolicy:
Obama Needs to Make a Clean Break on Latin America
Mark Weisbrot
Health and Wellness:
Obama's Health Care Reform Plan Is Based on the Clintons' Failed 1990s Model
Marie Cocco
Hurricane Katrina:
From the Bayou to Baghdad: Mission Not Accomplished
Amy Goodman
Immigration:
Immigrant Rights Signed Away?
Jennifer Lee Koh, Esq.
Media and Technology:
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives
Doron Taussig
Movie Mix:
Love Bites: What Sexy Vampires Tell Us About Our Culture
Sarah Seltzer
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
The Hymen Mystique
Carole Roye
Rights and Liberties:
Ban the Cluster Bomb
Brian Cook
Sex and Relationships:
A Message for Sex Educators: Sex Is Not Dirty
Lorraine Kenny
War on Iraq:
The Dilemma of Foreign Prisoners in Iraq
Ma'ad Fayad
Water:
Corporate Water Abusers Should Not Be Trusted As Stewards of the World's Water
Wenonah Hauter
What does it mean to be a Jew?
Rabbis, scholars, anti-Semites and ordinary people have struggled with this question for centuries. It's still an important issue with political consequences in the state of Israel. The answer is complicated. Judaism can be defined as a religion, a culture, a nation, a race, etc. It depends on who provides the response.
Journalist Abigail Pogrebin decided to find out the new, American way. For her book, Stars Of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish (Broadway Books) , she interviewed 60 Jewish celebrities and asked them about their Jewishness. Their replies varied in depth and quality, but there seemed to be general agreement about one thing: A Jew is anyone who calls him or herself a Jew.
Pogrebin's respondents include prominent Jews from many walks of life, such as Hollywood (Dustin Hoffman, Steven Spielberg, Kyra Sedgwick), the Supreme Court (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer), television (Norman Lear, Aaron Sorkin, Sarah Jessica Parker, William Shatner), journalism (Ellen Goodman, Mike Wallace), fashion (Diane Von Furstenberg, Kenneth Cole), Broadway (Tony Kushner, Neil Simon, Harold Prince), the left and right of politics (Al Franken, Dr. Laura Schlessinger), big business (Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Ronald O. Perelman), public law (Eliot Spitzer, Alan Dershowitz), athletics (Mark Spitz, Shawn Green), and elsewhere.
The most glaring omissions are Jews who rock. There's Beverly Sills, but no Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Randy Newman or many of the dozens of famous Jews who have publicly sang and spoke at times about their views on Jewish self-identity. Who knows, maybe that will be her next book.
While Pogrebin's choice of interviewees may seem odd, what seems more amazing is the fact that she had access to so many important people. She continually notes how busy many of her subjects are during her discussions. Their phones ring, palm pilots beep, secretaries buzz, and such while they chat away about their childhood memories or the taste of food from the past.
Very few actively practice Judaism today, take spouses who share their religious beliefs, and/or raise there children as Jews. Yet they insist they are Jews. If pressed many take what can be called the Jean Paul Sartre defense: I am a Jew because anti-Semites won't let me forget it. (In the French existentialist's tome Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre famously proclaimed Jewish identity was defined by those who hated Jews.) In a post-Holocaust America, no one wants to deny his or heritage because of pride in one's heritage and it would be futile anyway.
Former New York Times critic and current Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl states this idea most bluntly: "You know what makes Jews Jews anymore? The fact that the world won't let us forget. You can say till the cows get home that you're not a Jew, but the world keeps telling you that you are. And that's what makes you a Jew. What makes a black person black? No matter how white your skin is, if you are a black person, the world keeps reminding me that you're black. Ultimately it's others' definition of us that makes us Jews."
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