I promised myself that I would not think too hard about You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Robert Smigel and Adam Sandler’s comedy film this summer. But alas, reading about the story of Yiftach in the haftorah reading this past shabbat, I couldn’t help but think of the context of Zohan within the context of Jewish legendery strong men: biblical, Diaspora, and modern Zionist. (For those who haven’t seen the film yet, go see it. There are a few minor spoilers below.)

Zohan fits well within a pantheon of fantastic He-Man stories of the bible beginning with a fugitive young Moshe (Moses) defending Midianite women and ending perhaps with Moshe “Muki” Betser’s largely successful IDF hostage-rescure mission at Entebbe. Zohan is a “Golden Boy,” capable of near miraculous feats of perfect timing, detail, dexterity, strength and endurance. In the Torah, as in other Mediterranean mythologies, the source of Zohan’s talents would have been identified early on as Divine; that Zohan’s are not, points to the story being couched within a modern and secular worldview.

Zohan is really a new take on the story of long-haired Israelite strong man, Shimshon (Samson), and his clever Philistine lover and hair cutter, Delilah. Just to make sure you don’t miss the parallel, Robert Smigel named Zohan’s Palestinian love interest Dalia (played by Emmanuel Chriqui).

The connecting motif is hair. For Samson, hair represents his Nazirite status and by extension, his divinely given strength. This is a critical point since in his story both Samson and the Philistines make the mistake of perceiving his hair as the actual source of his strength, while in reality it is just an outward, if sacred, symbol. In Zohan, this understanding is implicit, since Zohan’s strength isn’t his curly Jewfro (or much discussed giant bush of genital hair). Rather, Zohan’s strength is his passion to fulfill his dream of self-becoming (a hair dresser). This is impressed in the film so many times when he tells the Paul Mitchell hair salon, and afterwards, to Dalia that he’s ready to cut hair in his salon, not because he has any prior experience but because he has the passion and desire to do so. For Samson, his strength is ultimately given to the selfless call to war and ultimately, martyrdom. Zohan’s sacrifice of what his mother calls his “safe career” as a macho war hero for his “faygele” dream of becoming a hair dresser turns this theme of sacrifice on its head. It is through his striving to realize his personal dream that Zohan discovers, achieves, and in the end help to safeguard a place on earth where Israelis and Palestinian Arabs can live together in peace and love.

Just as Jonah learned, Zohan can’t really run away from his calling; he is a born leader, a defender of his people, and his past does catch up with him. But significantly, Zohan has given up on Israel as the place where his dreams can be realized. And this is why You Don’t Mess With the Zohan has been called post-Zionist. The film speaks to the frustrated desire of many Israeli Jews to make peace with their neighbors and get on with the fulfillment of the Zionist dream to achieve self-determination within a land of their own. However, the peace that must sustain the reality of this self-determination is shown to be shallow and fleeting. The leisure of Zohan’s parade through Tel Aviv’s beachfront, through its myriad of beautiful hedonistic people, is shown to be just so fragile and fleeting. Without warning, an IDF helicopter comes to break the peace of his ocean side BBQ.

But in America, the dream of simple success trumps all nationalist and ethnic division. And here we see the difference in worldviews between Zohan and the Hebrew Hammer (2003). Only a few months ago, for the first time, five years late I watched Jonathan Kesselman and Adam Goldberg’s Hebrew Hammer . Here was a film that speaks to a diaspora Jewish identity struggling with assimilation and acculturation. Just as with the Zohan’s unapologetic clownish macho sabra-ness, the Hebrew Hammer has no interest in arguing with stereotypes. The Hammer appropriates guilt and angst into a rubric of traits that include badass decidedly non-Orthodox Jewish tattoos and pre-marital sex. In embracing tattoos and sex, the Hebrew Hammer not only presents an alternative take on Jewish identity, it arguably reflects the reality of not a few proudly Jewish hipsters.

The difference between Zohan and Hammer, however, is in the attitude towards America as either an immigrant’s dream or as the continuing challenge of diaspora Jewish identity. As a first generation immigrant, Zohan is self-confident in his identity as an Israeli Jew. As a fourth or fifth generation descendant of European Jewish immigrants the Hammer represents the insecurity of diaspora Jewry as the angry defender of a cultural world under attack. If buffoonish and over the top, Goldberg’s Hammer and Sandler’s Zohan are archetypes (if not role models) for relating to Jewish identity in the US. While the Hammer took some plenty of identity from religious Judaism, it took none from Israeli secularism, and the reverse is true for Zohan. The difference points to real divisions in Jewish diaspora and Israeli Jewish ethnocultural identities.

I promised myself I wouldn’t think too hard about this film. It’s totally enjoyable if you’re Jewish or Israeli and I’m hopeful that for all the non-Jews I saw this with at the AMC theater in Northern Kentucky it delivered a bit more nuance and sophistication into their understanding of Jews and Arabs. (After all, we can all agree that the real problems in this world are caused by greedy capitalist WASP real estate developers. Right?)

The UK release date for the film is August 18th, so Israeli cinemas can’t be too far behind. I’ll be very curious to hear how Israelis receive the Zohan.

[crossposted to Jewcy]

Tags: cultural identity,golden boy,Zionism
Categories: Film, Mythology and Yiddishkeit
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Yochanan Lavie, who regularly reads and comments over at failedmessiah.com, recently shared this poem inspired in general by the sickness and evil near the root of Aaron Rubashkin’s animal slaughtering and meat processing factory in Postville, Iowa, and specifically by Rubashkin’s use of PR flacks, paid industry “representatives,” and the Orthodox establishment to shill for them.

I’ve reposted Lavie’s poem below.

“Jeer at them” with apologies to William Blake

And did the Rebbe’s feet in recent time
Walk upon Iowa’s fields of green?
And were the illegal Mexicanos
On Iowa’s pleasant pastures screened?

And did the ICE helicoptors
Hover over our well-paid shills?
And was Crown Heights builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my public relations flack!
Bring me my homeless men of Texas!
Bring me my army of wetbacks!
Lie to my critics that afflict us!

I will not cease from PR fights,
I will stick it to the goyishe “Man”
Till we have built Crown Heights
In Iowa’s green and pleasant land.

Adapted from “And did those feet in ancient time” by William Blake from the preface to his epic poem, Milton: a Poem. In 1916, C. Hubert H. Parry composed music for the poem to be sung as a hymn called “Jerusalem” (thus Lavie’s “Jeer at them”). Wikipedia notes,

The term “dark Satanic mills”, which entered the English language from this poem, most often is interpreted as referring to the early industrial revolution and its destruction of nature.^[1] This view has been linked to the fate of the Albion Flour Mills, which was the first major factory in London, built in 1769 by Matthew Boulton and James Watt. It was powered by Watt’s steam engines, and produced 6,000 bushels of flour a week. The factory could have driven independent traditional millers out of business, but it was destroyed, perhaps deliberately, by fire in 1791. London’s independent millers celebrated with placards reading, “Success to the mills of ALBION but no Albion Mills.” ^[2] Opponents referred to the factory as satanic, and accused its owners of adulterating flour and using cheap imports at the expense of British producers. An illustration of the fire published at the time shows a devil squatting on the building.^[3] The mills were a short distance from Blake’s home.

The Romantic movement which Blake helped invoke began in response to the dehumanization of industrialization, environmental devastation wrought by the intense exploitation of nature, and the loss of culture resulting from the alienation of artisans and craftsmen in the production of goods. The purpose of industrialization is to use efficiencies to lower costs, but often enough, industrialized mass production simply shifts costs away from the consumer and industry and onto the workers and the environment. Resources, both natural and human, are ruthlessly exploited resulting in environmental and social ills that ultimately cost more money to rectify than that incurred in the expense of a more humanely produced consumer good.

Lavie focuses on the exploitation of “illegal workers” and “wetbacks” (terms I’d never use) to describe just one corruption within the Rubashkin enterprise. Rubashkin’s business ultimately aims to satisfy Jewish Americans insatiable and unhealthy appetite for (kosher) meat through the mechanism of industrialized mass production. The exploitation of undocumented workers is one method of lowering the costs to the consumer. Unfortunately, lowering costs doesn’t come without a price — the true costs of environmental and social ills caused by pollution and labor abuse are simply passed onto the health and welfare of society and the environment we depend on.

With all the attention on Rubashkin’s disgusting labor practices, it’s also time to remind folks how Rubashkin has regularly sought to lower standards whether it be in food safety, worker safety, humane treatment of animals, and the pollution of the environment.

Might the Rubashkin travesty revive the nascent Jewish movement that aims to place renewed emphasis on Jewish and humane values in the Kosher Food Industry? You can do your part by supporting hekhsher tzedek.

Tags: Evil in our midst,romanticism,William Blake
Categories: Poetry and Yiddishkeit
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Besides working through the problem of what is meant by being asked to worship an invisible, non-verbally communicative superbeing (who is yet imagined to be present, personal, and ready to intervene), my next most-difficult problem when conforming the god of my imagination with the god of Jewish liturgy has always been how to avoid thinking or using gendered pronouns. Feudal appellations such as “Lord” and male pronouns disturb me about as monarchic female terms “Queen” and female pronouns when I’m involved in a meditation that is either trying to connect with something essentially unfathomable, or if fathomable, not yet known well enough to describe with the intimate knowledge that gendered pronouns imply. (On my own, often enough, I avoid these issues all together by imagining god less as a being than as an emergent consciousness, as the Makom, or similar to what Stanslaw Lem describes in his novel Solaris, a maginficent being that with my help is attaining self-awareness.)

In the context of Jewish mysticism, this sentiment might already tag me as a neophyte (correctly) since the majority of my ancestors and the most famous kabbalistic works not only unapologetically gender their god — the use of the dual male/female Gender system is made an essential allegory for describing the Godhead and the relationship between it and the created world. I have bunches more to read here including Elliot R. Wolfson’s Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination, but I’ve read Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess. I am convinced by his thesis that a perceived feminine aspect of god can be traced back from our current neo-hasidic revival of interest in the Shekhina (the Divine Presence) to the medieval kabbalistic Matronit to imaginary depictions of the shekhina in exile in late antiquity following the destruction of the second temple, to biblical depictions of the shekhina and association with cherubim and clouds… and yes, to the Asherah. Patai having made his point, I was left struggling with its relevance for my religious imagination, even entertaining the thought of breaking with this ancient well formulated tradition that uses gender allegories to describe aspects of our god.

Influenced as much by the synthesis of Greek Philosophy and Jewish mysticism (inherent in movement like Sethianism), I’ve been more eager to describe God by what my god is not. The description Ein Sof, or god “without end,” is so much more useful to me than the distraction of gender. If I must think of the philosophical meaning of a cleft in the Godhead in the cosmogonic myth (as I often do), I will think of an illusory division between an unknowable transcendence and an intimately knowable immanence — and refuse to describe transcendence as male aloofness and immanence as female sexuality. I refuse!

I mention this all in passing to Jay Michaelson during a break at the recent New Voices conference in NYC. (I’ve been a fan of Michaelson’s writing since Paul Serici first introduced them to me, so meeting him was a thrill.) Michaelson is thinking about the gender of God taking into account the different gender identities we are only now coming to terms with in Gender and Queer Studies. In reacting to my points, Michaelson was more accepting of a gendered God in mystical experiences. He differentiated between (at least) two different kinds of mystical experiences, one of which, catalyzed by use of an entheogenic plant, would inspire a much more intimate and sexualized experience of divinity. Then he invited me to Nehirim, the shabbat retreat of LGBTQ Jews and their allies, to learn and talk some more. (Despite the suggestion of cosmic serendipity, first meeting Eli K-W also on his way to Nehirim and then to be invited by the organizer himself, I chose not to spend the full registration out of pocket to attend, and instead spent much needed time in reunion with my cousin Una.)

This brings me to introduce Rima Turner, now interning for Nehirim (congrats!). I first met zir* at Jews in the Woods: a bespectacled, diminutive, giant of a spirit whose haftorah reading one Shabbat morning managed to draw down tears from eyes that had for too long been dry. We’ve been in communicating for the past three years, sharing what we’ve learned in our respective wanderings. Rima also invited me to Nehirim, but whatever I missed there I’ll make up in responding to the interesting and personal d’var torah, “Sacred Spaces: The Tabernacle, Women’s Work, and the Body as Sanctuary.” Ze just recently shared zir essay over at Jewish Mosaic, the national (Jewish) center for seuxal and gender diversity.

On Parshat Naso (Numbers 4:21 - 7:89), Rima writes:

In Numbers 7, we read about the sanctification of the tabernacle (the Mishkan). Moses anoints the tabernacle and its components, and then the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel each bring offerings: silver, gold, incense, oxen, sheep, and goats. The offerings function as a dedication, after which the tabernacle is anointed again. Moses goes into the tabernacle, and the Divine speaks to him.

What does it mean to create a holy space? The Divine is not your dinner date—Ze won’t come over to your apartment just because that’s where you live. You can invite Zir in, but that doesn’t mean Ze is going to come. Those of us who pray or meditate regularly are familiar with this reality. Some days we enter into prayer and prayer enters into us—but sometimes prayer takes a day off, no matter how hard we try (or try not to try, or try not to try not to try—well, you get the picture).

I love what Rima’s done with gender-neutral pronouns. I had heard these neologisms used in referring to people (at Jews in the Woods, where else?) but never before had I seen them in discussions about divinity. So useful!

The use and innovation of gender-neutral pronouns in English has a long history summarized in a FAQ here. Gender-neutral pronouns currently in use have roots extending back at least into the early days of USENET in the 1980s, where they found popularity in nascent gender queer usegroups. The earliest use I could find of the pronouns zie and zir on USENET are in this post by a Lynn Dobbs in the soc.bi newsgroup from December 1993. (Fair warning, the subject matter is erotic.)

Richard Creel, a philosophy professor at Ithaca College, may have been the first to specifically use  gender-neutral neologisms in discussing divinity in his philosophy of religion classes. This is what Creel wrote in “Ze, zer, mer,” in the Fall 1997 issue of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy:

“Ze,” “zer,” and “mer” may seem awkward now, but if we use them regularly and the usage becomes widespread, they will soon seem quite natural. Meanwhile we will have enriched the categories of our language and improved our ability to communicate clearly, precisely, and grammatically. “She,” “her,” “he,” “his,” and “him” should, of course, continue to be used when appropriate. “Ze,” “zer,” and “mer” will supplement them, not supplant them.

To close on a personal note, in my philosophy of religion courses I explain these terms to my students, then I use them when I speak of God, which, of course, I do a lot. My students are not required to use these terms yet many of them are intrigued, attracted, and choose to do so, at first with self-conscious good-humor. My women students seem especially appreciative of an opportunity to speak of God without being forced to use a gendered pronoun or an awkward strategy designed to evade the use of pronouns altogether. Similar benefits accrue for general discussions of the nature of a person, whether in philosophy of religion or not. Hence, even if “ze,” “zer,” and “mer” do not enter into common usage (obviously the odds are greatly against that), nonetheless they can be very useful in philosophical discussions.

* As evidinced by her bio at Jewish Mosaic, Rima is exploring the use of the neologisms ze and zir to refer to zirself. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to be at war even with language in determining for society what your gender identity is. But I do know a hint of a shade of this struggle from thinking about gender and god, and so I’m hopeful that in using the language that my friend Rima chooses for zirself, I will also be that much more mature in wrestling with a god that defies easy gender delineations.

UPDATE 6/15: Rima posts more at her blog.

Tags: gender god human mysticism
Categories: Aharonium and Yiddishkeit
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From her yeshivah digs in Jerusalem, Gella Solomon (of Nogah Chadash) writes to me of an aggadic commentary she’s recently composed on the story of Cain and Abel (or transliterated, Qayin and Hevel). Her midrash, narrated by Cain is deeply humanistic — Cain expresses himself and his experience of fratricide in human terms that easily resonate with our experiences of desire and disappointment. But at the same time, G. Solomon leaves Cain within the world of midrash and its poignant exegetical suggestions, within the world of myth where Cain remains fully aware that he is a character being used as a homiletical device. Within this setting, Solomon lets Cain explain himself, his actions, his set up.

Here is how Solomon has Cain describe his relationship to his brother with special attention to his eponymous name, Hevel, which has the literal meaning of “breath” connoting a sense of his “fleeting” and impermanence:

I would sometimes prod him to see if he would dissolve into vapor at my touch. You have to understand, it wouldn’t have seemed so odd. In those times, things were as they were and we, the first three, were discovering a newly created world. We were each so different from each other, would it be so odd to have a man who was flesh and a man who was not? Well he was solid enough– solid enough to bleed, solid enough to kill– but though, as it turned out, he could be killed, he did not truly live. Hevel was not Named. Hevel did not speak. I was given to Mother Chava to be Man after Father Adam. Hevel was added. Added to be My Brother.

To see what I would do.

Read more. (link, Beyond the Near)

With the essential role Cain must play in the narrative, can he actually have free will. This is a playful suggestion Solomon makes — but from Dwayne Hoover’s revelation in Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions to Nobusuke Tagomi’s epiphany in Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, the self-awareness of imaginary characters is a postmodern trope that resonates. As Authors we can give our characters a tselem elohim (an image of their creator) — and our characters in turn reflect whatever creative spirit we possess to our readers. When we write, when we dream we are in a state of communion with those that we are dreaming. Our imagination gives them life and if the myth of their life can be transmitted, it can endure long after we’ve ceased dreaming them.

Solomon’s reading of Cain also reminds me of the sympathetic reading of Judas Iscariot in the second century Gospel of Judas. In that second century work, Jesus asks Judas to turn him into the Romans, since “betrayal” is not really possible for a supposedly living god whose determination of all events must preclude the free will of betrayal. In the Gospel of Judas, Judas is the most beloved since only the most trusted lover of a god could be entrusted with the most painful job of assuring his capture and execution. In this reading popular with early Christian Gnostics, Judas is written in a sense similar to Abraham ready to offer up his son Isaac.The theme of child sacrifice within biblical and post-biblical christian narratives is more fully explored in Jon D. Levenson’s excellent Death and Ressurection of the Beloved Son: Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity.

Strangely enough, the gnostic sect that appreciated and possibly authored the Gospel of Judas were Sethians - a sect the predated Christianity and traced the lineage of their spiritual authority to Adam and Eve’s third son, the one born to replace the murdered Abel — Seth. In Sethian traditions, aspects which in other common traditions are seen as failures (e.g. the transgression of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) are seen rather as necessities in an unraveling emergence of divine transformation.

Solomon doesn’t make mention of Seth in her midrash, though his absence could I think easily be remedied with a perusal of the extant midrashim on the significance of Seth, as well as the more recent discoveries of ancient lost gnostic works such as the Apocalypse of Adam.

Tags: emergence,gnostic,imagination,midrash,sentience
Categories: Mythology and Yiddishkeit
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The umbilical of my omphalos winds its way back in time to the blessings of my mother and father, but also inwards and outside-of-time, stretching into a womb land that is all myth and dream and imagination. With some effort I can follow my way back into this makom, this space and hopefully return from it with something useful — or at least, interesting — and not just to myself mind you. I do love sharing these thoughts, but I am also interested in their relevance, by which I mean, their utility. Let me explain.

I was having a conversation with a mathematician, Yaakov, at the University of Maryland recently, and he was struggling with aesthetic questions on what is good or bad art, so I suggested an alternative more useful question as rather, “what is this art good for?” recalling Marcel Duchamp’s 1957 essay, The Creative Act:

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

The verdict of the spectator is separate from the activity of the artist. The spectator might very well take umbrage if the art object, the object of fascination (or boredom) had been or had not been toiled over, had or had not been the expression of a theory or movement, had or had not been the work of an artist at all. As a spectator, my verdict is not whether art is or is not art, but whether the art is useful — and useful only in the sense of whether it has opened my eyes and expanded my conscious awareness as to the existence of wonder in the world of relationships and things outside of frames and pedestals, galleries and museums — whether appreciation of the art object has brought me to appreciate everything else in the Everything Else room in the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum.

In a related sense, as much as I ponder myth in Judaism specifically, and religion in general, I return to this concern, that these ideas, while interesting to me, while stimulating and enriching an emerging creative expressive innerverse within me, that these ideas should also hopefully be useful for others. That if they are not, that they are trivial, and that this whole project is a delusion of self-indulgence. I will be honest with you, that I am not wholly convinced that this is not, but I am writing — with the intention that these labyrinth of ideas I’m exploring and sometimes getting lost in — that I will bring back along my wayfinding thread/trail of breadcrumbs/umbilical chord, something useful.

I’m hopeful that just as art becomes useful by revealing to an observer the greater wondrous reality outside the frame of (framed) Art, that my insights into myth and religion might also be useful for helping to reveal a greater wondrous imaginary world only hinted at within the source text of religious doctrine and dogma. Myth and storytelling thus convey the promise and potential of enduring creative liberty and the subversion of religious control to generations of eager children and aging heresiarchs.

Having said this, let me share with you something totally weird that I just found (on wikipedia, where else) that blew my mind. An Arabian myth of a creature called Bahamut (بهموت‎) which unlike the Behemot is not terrestrial, but like Leviatan, inhabits the endless depths of the ocean. This is mind blowing to me because the tradition in Sefer Chanoch, that the Leviatan is the mate of the Behemot seems much more plausible (in a sort-of mythic taxonomy) if we imagine both of them as sea dwellers rather than as opposites on a terrestrial/aquatic scale.

Just for review, I’ve written about the Behemot in Jewish myth, how it seems to relate to Apsu, the ancient ur-deity in Babylonian mythology, the personification of heavenly fresh water. I’ve written how the Behemot is imagined as a cosmically large hippopatamus dripping with condensation, and referred to in midrash as the “Ox of the Pit.” I’ve wondered whether the Pit was a reference to the t’hom, the primordial abyss, the abstraction of the other Babylonian ur-deity and personification of saltwater, Tiamat. How Leviatan seems to be synonymous with Tiamat in biblical writings. How Behemot/Leviatan are mated to one another in Sefer Chanoch. The Talmud also prefers the notion that Leviathan and Behemot were each created like all other creatures, male and female. So the existence of a myth where Behemot takes the form of a non-terrestrial sea creature like the leviathan seems significant.

From the wikipedia article on Bahamut:

Bahamut (Arabic: بهموت‎ Bahamūt) is a vast fish that supports the earth in Arabian mythology. In some sources, Bahamut is described as having a head resembling a hippopotamus or elephant.

If that’s not enough of a teaser, here is the entire fantastic entry on Bahamut written by Jorge Luis Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings (translated by Margarita Guerrero, Norman Thomas di Giovanni). I want to point out that I find it significant that similar to the Behemot tradition, the Bahamut myth describes the creatures with hippopotamus features.

Behemoth’s fame reached the wastes of Arabia, where men altered and magnified its image.

From a hippopotamus or elephant they turned it into a fish afloat in a fathomless sea; on the fish they placed a bull, and on the bull a ruby mountain, and on the mountain an angel, and over the angel six hells, and over these hells the earth, and over the earth seven heavens. A Moslem tradition runs: God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel’s feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues, and feet. But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach.

Others have it that the earth has its foundation on the water; the water, on the crag; the crag, on the bull’s forehead; the bull, on a bed of sand; the sand, on Bahamut; Bahamut, on a stifling wind; the stifling wind on a mist. What lies under the mist is unknown. So immense and dazzling is Bahamut that the eyes of man cannot bear its sight. All the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish’s nostrils, would be like a mustard seed laid in the desert. In the 496th night of the Arabian Nights we are told that it was given to Isa ( Jesus) to behold Bahamut and that, this mercy granted, Isa fell to the ground in a faint, and three days and their nights passed before he recovered his senses.

The tale goes on that beneath the measureless fish is a sea; and beneath the sea, a chasm of air; and beneath the air, fire; and beneath the fire, a serpent named Falak in whose mouth are the six hells.

The idea of the crag resting on the bull, and the bull on Bahamut, and Bahamut on anything else, seems to be an illustration of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This proof argues that every cause requires a prior cause, and so, in order to avoid proceeding into infinity, a first cause is necessary.

The story of Bahamut is thus a variation in a wide tradition of cosmic creatures said to be supporting the world. In Hinduism, the creature is Akupara, a ginormous tortoise. Or elsewhere in the Vedas, as the turtle being Kurma, second incarnation of Vishnu. In Greek myth, it is the titan, Atlas. If you’ve read any Terry Pratchett, you might also be reminded of the turtle that supports his fictional Discworld.

In modern Western philosophical debate, an anecdote relating the myth of Bahamut or Akupara is sometimes referred to as “Turtles all the way down” (explanation below). The anecdote has been used by enlightened moderns lampooning the logical fallacies of irrational belief systems since the 17th century. Or as the wikipedia describes it, the anecdote is used “to humorously illustrate both infinite regress, in cosmological imagery, and the perils of religious/mythic myopia.” This is how Stephen Hawking relates the anecdote in his A Brief History of Time (1988):

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Russell probably wasn’t the scientist to have been the recipient of this retort. Most identify the scientist in this popular anecdote as the 19th century psychologist and philosopher William James. But Hawking can be forgiven for thinking so since Bertrand Russell, said the following in his lecture Why I Am Not a Christian (1927):

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”

William James’ godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, may very well have been acquainted with the story from his peer, Henry David Thoreau who wrote in his journal in 1852,

Men are making speeches… all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise.

So whether the Turtles anecdote originated with Russell or James, it is clear that myths representing cosmological proofs were useful arguments of ridicule for enlightenment rationalists and other freethinkers. In 1690 John Locke may have been the first western philosopher to refer to this myth in a philosophical argument on what the substance is of an object being empirically investigated. From book 2, chapter 23 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke writes,

If anyone be asked what is the subject wherein colour or weight inheres, he would have nothing to say but, the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded what is it that solidity and extension adhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before-mentioned who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on, to which his answer was, a great tortoise; but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad backed tortoise, replied, something, he knew not what.

Perhaps the Indian said, “Bahamut.” Bahamut, the imaginary foundation of the world of myth.

Above: illustration of Bahamut for The Book of Imaginary Beings by the graduate students in the Department of Illustration and Art of the Book at the Vakalo School of Art and Design in Athens, Greece.

Tags: art,Behemoth,Jorge Luis Borges,Leviathan,makom,myth,mythic landscape,relevance
Categories: Aharonium, Art History, Mythology and Yiddishkeit
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On this trip, I had the pleasure of sharing a day trip between D.C. and N.Y.C. with a friend of an acquaintance. As it happens, by which I mean, by the tender coincidences blessed upon me in the happenstance of creation, this fellow, Eli K-W, also happens to love Jewish myth and has lately been quite active reinventing biblical aggadah (stories) in the medium of shadow puppetry. We successfully navigated to the city using an exegetical reading of signage along U.S. 1 until we reached the New Jersey Turnpike and the Lincoln Tunnel. In between miraculous cell phone retrievals from our car’s roof after an hour of hard driving and a lovely afternoon with my grandfather’s youngest brother and his wife in Yardley, Eli and I also shared our thoughts on yiddishkeit and talked about the Leviatan (the Leviathan).

UPDATE 6/5: It is something of a testament to my interest (obsession?) over the Leviatan myths that I realized only today that I had provided something a fuller treatment in a post I wrote already over two years ago, “Rejoining Tetragrammaton.” You can read on below for a good enough summation of my thoughts but it lacks source references and quotes. So please go to the earlier post first if you’re interested in these myths. What appears below is a rewritten article I wrote originally as the about page for this blog when it was called — guess — “The Leviathan and the Behemoth.” In the post below I write with some more detail on what I find relevant in the Enuma Elish and I do mention Hermann Gunkel as the source for the idea that Tiamat is a cognate for the biblical hebrew Tohu/T’hom, and I should have mentioned this in that earlier post. So besides being topical, these posts will help me in a later synthesis I need to write. I think what’s important to note in any case is that all of this has been written about with greater academic rigor, sophistication and nuance in scholarly literature — what I’m trying to do is articulate how this myth may still be relevant (read: useful) in a Judaism that is both mythically and environmentally conscious. The Leviatan/Behemot myths ARE interesting specifically because they are so well linked to an ancient natural cosmology that seems to have identified and personified aspects of what we now call the Water Cycle.

——

The Leviathan is one of the oldest and most obscure creation myths in the Torah. For me, the myth must be understood in the context of other midrashim concerning the Behemot (Behemoth). Together, I believe the Leviatan and Behemot represent two aspects of the ancient Israelite cosmology: the snowy pure waters above shamayim (the heavens) and the sweet waters below the aretz (the earth). The origins of the Leviathan myth are old and can be traced even into Sumerian mythology thousands of years before the birth of ancient Israel.

Being so old, the meaning of the myth has morphed over time. In perhaps its oldest known incarnation, the Leviatan (Kur and Tiamat in Sumerian mythology, Tiamat and Rakhab elsewhere in the TaNaKH) is a primordial chaotic force which must be defeated or tamed by wisdom in order to allow for creation to proceed. According to Hermann Gunkel, the primordial mother deity Tiamat (representing chaos in Sumerian myth) is abstracted in the Torah’s Genesis as T‘hom (the abyss). Following from Raphael Patai’s reading in his Hebrew Myths (with Robert Graves) the body of the Leviathan forms the earthly depths and is alternately represented as a tremendous underwater mountain, as a dragon, as a cosmic serpent (sustained by fresh waters flowing underground from terrestrial streams), as the abyss of the cosmos (the blank slate before creation), or as purely abstract chaos.

Meanwhile, midrashim represent the Behemot as an impossibly ginormous hippopotamus or water buffalo, supported on earth by the four pillars of its gigantic legs, dripping with condensation from the fresh waters above the earth, or simply as the primordial Void. The esoteric Sefer Chanoch preserves the ancient tradition that the Behemot and the Leviatan are each others mates. If we accept Patai’s reading, then Behemot, in his earlier Sumerian incarnation, was the ur-deity, lover of Tiamat, the fresh water god, Apsu.

In the Enuma Elish, Apsu, is killed by the newborn God of Wisdom, Ea (an early cognate of the YHVH) in order for creation to proceed. After this, Tiamat, and Kinghu (her new lover) and their children (representing the chaotic unstructured waterworld) battle with Ea to return the world to its chaotic state. The two lovers must be separated (violently in the myth) in order to be defeated (this time by the hero of Ea, Marduk) and a new age to begin.

Besides the explicit tradition preserved in Sefer Chanoch, the relationship between Apsu/Kingu and Tiamat, Leviatan and Behemot was all but lost. Whispers of it, however, remained in the two creatures relationship to fresh water, their below and above relation to the world as giants, and the Leviatan’s enduring association with the chaotic Ocean and saltwater despite her reliance on fresh water.

The Talmud alternately presents the notion that to preserve space in the world, God slaughtered the male counterparts of the created Leviatan and Behemot and pickled them for later feasting by the righteous when the sukah of peace is spread out across the world at the dawn of the messianic age. The idea that the primordial deities needed to be slaughtered for creation not to be filed with cosmic monsters also recalls the motivation of Ea’s fratricide in the Enuma Elish.

Much much later, Hobbes invoked the image of Leviathan to represent the gigantic nature of state bureaucracy. The Behemot and his relationship to Leviatan was forgotten. This past century, fundamentalist Christians have revived the Behemot as textual proof for the existence of dinosaurs during the age of Man.

Putting aside Hobbes and the creationist ideas, when I think of the leviathan and the behemoth, I can’t help but join the ancient mythic ideas in my mind with Andy Goldsworthy’s observation of serpentine forms in the movement of water on the surface of land, as well as the ancient Jewish mystical belief that all forces must be reconciled and unified for their to be a cosmic healing, a Tikkun Olam.

In contrast to the midrashim describing a final battle at the end of days when God slaughters the surviving Leviatan, Behemot, and Ziz (another ginormous birdlike creature), I imagine Behemot and Leviatan as once close, inseparable friends whose love for one another was so profound it excluded the possibility of any other relationships forming. While the midrashim imagine the Leviatan slaughtered and skinned with the tzakkim (righteous) feasting on her flesh of the Leviatan and sheltered under her luminous skin, I imagine a peaceful unification after a tragic separation spanning the history of all creation. In this way as well, I can reconcile the aspiration to be righteous with my practice of not eating the flesh of other creatures

This binary relationship expressed in verticality (above/below), or terrestrial vs. marine, or inner vs. outer expansiveness (depth/void), also helps me imagine two other invisible reactives, thought of at odds: the invisible hand of the market, and the complicated ecology of nature. As a planner, my power derives from my position as an expert to provide intelligence for people making market decisions, decisions that will have wide repurcussions on an environment (that in turn impacts the market). I am a mediator between two invisible forces, surrogates for the hand of God: the Market and Nature.

Tags: Environment,Leviathan,Serpentine,Water
Categories: Aharonium, Mythology and Yiddishkeit
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This week I’m in New York City for the New Voices Conference in Independent Jewish Student Journalism. “Blacks, Jews, and the Post-Racial Candidate” was the subject of last night’s (May 28) panel discussion at the Center for Jewish History (CJH).

Moderated by Marissa Brostoff (New Voices contributing writer), the panel consisted of Sam Freedman (Columbia U. Journalism Professor, NY Times columnist), Jonathan W. Gray (John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY, Assistant Professor of English), and Ari Berman (writer for The Nation). Dr. Gray filled in at the last minute for Ta-Nehisi Coates, who couldn’t make it. In this discussion, the age, ethnicity and race of the panelists matter. Sam Freedman is a middle aged white Jewish academic with experience in political campaigns, Gray is a thirty-six year old African-American academic (with impressively long dreads), and Berman is a twenty-something white Jewish journalist.

The long auditorium was largely filled by the time the discussion started and the audience consisted of mostly CJH members, the general public including many young Jewish Obama supporters, and fellow New Voices conference participants. The discussion was videotaped and the recording should be available on the New Voices website, I’m told by the conference organizer, Elizabeth Alpern.

With Brostoff’s introduction, the discussion at first centered on the question, “Why is this a story?” – why is the story of Obama’s reception with Jews, a small minority, being covered with such enthusiasm in the media (mainstream and otherwise). From this starting point, the discussion hit on some very important points.

1. Politically liberal support in general and support for Obama specifically is very strong in the American Jewish electorate. Ari Berman quoted Atrios’ post “Writing the Script” on Eschaton (5/11/2008): “Approximately 12,000 articles will be written between now and November about how Jewish voters have a problem with Obama, and then they will go to the polls and overwhelmingly vote for him. Despite this, no articles will be written about how Jewish voters have a problem with McCain.”
2. The idea of building or (perhaps) restoring a Jewish-Black alliance is distracting when Jewish-American and African-American support of a liberal Democratic party candidate is in reality quite certain. Within the realm of inter ethnic political alliances, more attention needs to be developed between Jews and Hispanics, and between Jews and European-American (e.g. White) Catholics. (Samuel Freedman)
3. In media discussions, “when Blacks are in the room, Jews are allows to stand in for Whites.” — we need to think of how Jews are being used in terms of “Roveian Politics” (Jonathan Gray). I think Dr. Gray is saying that the media will not comfortably ask whether White America will vote for a Black President, and so instead, news media looks to the opinion polls of a useful ethnic minority so as not to suggest that all of White America is racist. If the observers of this set-up are in fact racist but unwilling to admit this (they won’t vote for Obama because he is a Black president), then they can more comfortably excuse their prejudice if they have a positive feeling towards the useful minority that is allowed to represent their prejudice. Jews may fulfill this role for white gentile philosemites.
4. The organized smear campaign against Obama that is being spread virally (and effectively) in certain parts of the Jewish community makes use of Israel as a wedge issue. The engineers of the smear know the wedge will not divide Jews because our Democratic support in November is predictable: we will vote for Obama. Rather, the engineers are using the wedge to manipulate Jewish reaction. Once again, the nature of our reaction is important to the observers of Jewish sentiment – namely, white Christian Zionists philosemites — the true target of opinion for the smear campaign. (Ari Berman).
5. The wedge issue of Israel is effective among American Jews because of our chronic concern for existential threats to Israel. (Samuel Freedman). Amazingly, surveys show that this concern for Israel does not translate into hawkish views among most American Jews. Most Jewish-Americans do not favor preemptively attacking Iran were Iran to acquire nuclear power or weapons.
6. The Jewish electorate constitutes a liberal “silent majority” because most (powerful) American Jewish organizations are politically conservative. (Ari Berman).
7. Concern that Obama is a secret Black Nationalist or that he is Muslim has its roots in political disagreements between Jews and Blacks in college student unions in the 1980s. Jewish college students of different backgrounds found solidarity in identification with Israel and Zionism while Black students became cosmopolitan by seeking identification with the apartheid struggles in South Africa. Tension between the two groups arose when black student leaders on campuses were convinced that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza constituted a similar parallel to the hegemony imposed in S. Africa and in the experience of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. (Jonathan Gray)
8. Tom Freedman of the NY Times and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, not exactly Progressives, are presenting a vision of a new vision of being pro-Israel that is at odds with the established pro-Israel lobby. (Berman) What Freedman and Goldberg have written about is the necessity for Israel to marginalize the settler movement and enable a two-state solution within the next three or so years, after which the demographic reality will give truth to the canard that Israel’s occupation is apartheid, and the call for a binational state with an Arab political majority will begin in earnest. Goldberg predicts that when this occurs, American Jewish organizations will withdraw their support for Israel.
9. It was left to be inferred from the discussion, but we can speculate that powerful Jewish conservative organizations are helping to manipulate the liberal Jewish public. Jews are being used as pawns in influencing the opinion of the much larger Christian Zionist electorate in order to elect Republicans into office and to continue developing a vision for a safe and secure Israel imagined by right wing Jewish organizations whose powerbase depends on all the conservative political alliances they’ve cultivated over the last thirty or so years.

Sam Freedman started with some context on Black and Jewish relations making the point that Jews entertain a “sentimental mythology” that once upon a time Jews and Blacks were allies in the civil rights marches 50 years ago, while in reality this alliance was a progressive Christian and Black alliance with small and short lived participation by certain Jewish progressives. Freedman hit on this a number of times throughout the discussion. Sam Freedman also mentioned the obvious — that since there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, it is an insult to Muslim-Americans to call Obama a Muslim suggesting he is therefore un-American or worse. Freedman wished this point was made in Jewish circles. He might not have seen Ali Eteraz’ excellent post in Jewcy, “Calling Obama ‘Muslim’ Isn’t Accurate, But It’s Not an Insult Either.”

Jonathan Gray pointed out that in contrast to Jewish cultural memory, Blacks don’t think of Jews as long lost allies in the Civil Rights movement. Rather, Blacks perceive Jews as a “model minority” having achieved material success and social acceptance in the US despite a long history of rejection and non-inclusion. While Freedman would prefer this “sentimental mythology” debunked, Gray considers the (re)establishement of a “liberal consensus” as synonymous with the building of common cause between Jews and Blacks. Obama understands the trajectories of young Jewish and young Black intellectuals and social advocates and believes that common cause in racial and social justice can and should be forged.

Gray also visibly winced at the term post-racial arguing that Obama has self-consciously constructed his identity as Black, regardless of whether he will be recognized as Black by Whites simply because of his appearance. Freedman considered the loss of focus on Obama’s bi-racial identity to be unfortunate — Obama’s “hyphenated” identity seemed to be something that young people really got. For Freedman, this pointed to a future of racial identity politics that is really substantially different than it has been, and so the refocus on Obama’s Black identity, Rev. Wright, etc., is a shame.

The discussion trailed off into questions and answers with Ari Berman making the point that Cory Booker and Obama are new Black leaders who will, for now, continue to be asked, “will X ethnic group (White, Hispanic, Jewish, Black) vote for a Black man.” Meanwhile, young Jewish leaders have yet to emerge and are still overshadowed by Joe Lieberman’s (strangely) evolving playbook. Berman fantasizes of Obama delivering his AIPAC speech at Howard University and vice versa as a more interesting window into Black-Jewish relations.

UPDATE 5/30: This discussion was a good start to what has so far been an excellent journalism conference. Just a shout out to Una Osato who patiently listened to me digest these points over breakfast while she was attempting to prepare a performance piece later that evening. (Her piece at the Bowery rocked!)

CORRECTION 5/30: The first version of this post misnamed the panelist Dr. Jonathan W. Gray. This has since been corrected. Thank you very much for the correction.

UPDATE 6/9: While Ta-Nahisi Coates couldn’t be at this discussion, I found his recent 6/8/08 blog post to back up some of the points Dr. Gray made — notably how the political discourse of Black students in elite college campuses in the 80s and 90s has distorted the actual voice and opinion of most Black Americans. Worth reading.

Categories: Yiddishkeit
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This past Sunday, May 18th, marked the end of the Frida Kahlo exhibit this year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. My friend Robyn and I caught it just before its expiry along with hordes of locals who had waited till the last moment. Outside, pregnant rain clouds were birthing a fury of elements, a meteorological interruption of the Philly Jewish community’s Israel [at] 60 parade festivities taking place in Logan Circle and Ben Franklin Parkway, just outside the museum. More about the parade in another post.

Robyn and I purchased our tickets and waited patiently in the long exhibit queue where we had an opportunity to look at Diego Rivera’s Liberation of the Peon (1931). Once through the entrance, we accepted the audio guides and commenced our study of the work of Frida Kahlo. Narration on the tour was provided by a device contained a small LCD screen, a keypad, and pause, stop, and play audio buttons, as well as attached earphones.  To play the commentary for a particular image, one would simply press in the keypad the number listed next to the painting on the wall of the gallery. In addition to the audio commentary, informative text was also silk screened onto the walls of the gallery adjoining the paintings and photographs displayed.

This exhibit originally began its tour with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The fancy Antenna Audio gadget that had been used in these earlier Kahlo exhibits was for some reason not used for this show at the PMA. I’m not certain why. Also, the audio provided was not that of the exhibit curator Hayden Herrera, or her assistant Elizabeth Carpenter, but from some other British man. I’m still trying to find out who this is. I’d like to ask them a question:

Namely, why did the curator introduce Kahlo as having been born of mixed German and Mexican Indian heritage and not mention her Jewish heritage? This is what the narrator said:

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, a southern suburb of Mexico City, the third daughter of a German father and a mother of Spanish and Native American descent.

So I want to know: was Kahlo’s father Guillermo (née Wilhelm) Kahlo’s Hungarian-Jewish ancestry so irrelevant and besides the point to exclude it? Kahlo’s Indian heritage and Mexican socialist nationalism is well known because they are so much a part of her art work. But Kahlo herself claimed to be the granddaughter of Hungarian Jews that emigrated to Germany in the 19th century. Isn’t that significant? In an article on a 2007 Kahlo exhibit, Gannit Ankori, an art historian specializing in Frida Kahlo provides the details,

Kahlo testified “many times” about her Jewish identity, “stressing that her paternal grandparents, Henriette Kaufmann and Jakob Kahlo, were Jews from the city of Arad.” Further, many people who knew Frida and Wilhelm, such as Frida’s biographer, Hayden Herrera, and Frida’s husband Diego Rivera’s biographer, Bertram Wolfe, personally repeated this fact.

It seems a mistake to omit the fact that expatriate Eurpoean Jews made up an important core of the radical progressive political and art scene that Kahlo and her husband Diego inhabited, the most famous of whom was Leon Trotsky. This is an important point because socialism, communism, and anarchism, and the arts were secular programs that accepted the contribution of Jews at a time when anti-Jewish sentiment was profound and ubiquitous. Although antisemitism persisted (and still persists) in the Left, Guillermo Kahlo and his daughter, could find sanctuary among more enlightened contemporaries. And they did.

Perhaps the lack of attention or unwillingness of the art historian narrating the exhibit to be fully forthcoming about Kahlo’s Jewish heritage stems from ambivalence and ignorance of what Judaism is in general, let alone specifically how Kahlo and her father understood it as relevant to their self-identity. Judaism is correctly understood as not only a religion, but also as a civilization with an enduring culture the re religious aspect of which is not easily (or honestly) excised, as well as the inspiration of a modern nationalist and socialist movement of liberation and self-determination (Zionism). If Kahlo’s Jewish ancestry was only understood to be a religious identity then commenting on her Jewish parentage would correctly be considered irrelevant and misleading. So, what did Kahlo think of her Jewish heritage? How did she self-identify?

The answer to these questions was dealt with in 2003 at a Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Jewish Museum, “‘Frida Kahlo’s Intimate Family Picture.” In that exhibit, Israeli curator Gannit Ankori recognized an extremely important point revealed in Kahlo’s painting, “My Grandparents, My Parents and I.” Grace Glueck for the NY Times Art Review explains,

”My Grandparents” shows Frida as a small child, standing naked in the courtyard of the Casa Azul, the comfortable home built by her father in Coyoacán, then a village south of Mexico City, where Frida spent most of her life. (She died there, and it is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.) In her right hand she holds a ribbon that flows upward on either side of the picture to support floating portraits of each set of grandparents; the Mexican couple on the left, the Hungarian-Jewish pair on the right. (From her Kahlo grandmother, Frida apparently inherited those awesome black eyebrows that almost met in the middle of her forehead.) [emphasis mine]

The subject of Kahlo’s Jewish identity was returned to again in a 2005 book on Guillermo Kahlo’s photographic work, Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo, by Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle. The historians reveal that contrary to Frida Kahlo’s own claim, her father was the scion of a long line of German Lutheran Protestants. If this was indeed the case, then the curiosity remains why Kahlo claimed herself to be of Jewish ancestry. Was it a family legend encouraged by her father? Was it in vogue to have Jewish ancestry in artsy socialist circles in Mexico City? Or was Kahlo, in identifying her genealogy with Jews during the 1930s, declaring solidarity with another ethnic minority oppressed by fascists at the onset of Hitler’s campaign of extermination?

The complex construction of Kahlo’s identity and its relationship to anti-Nazi Jewish sympathies is the subject of 2007 article in the Jewish Press by Menachem Wecker on Kahlo exhibit in Washington, DC’s National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). Wecker writes,

[Ankori] cited the position that Kahlo sought to distance herself from the Nazis based upon the fact that testimony about Wilhelm Kahlo’s Jewish background surfaced most frequently between 1936 and the 1940s. But she said over email, “I think in light of the new findings , these issues require further investigation. What is of great interest to me is not Wilhelm Kahlo’s ‘real’ religion, but Frida Kahlo’s construction of her self-image” insofar as it “impacted Kahlo’s self-image as manifested in her art.”

But later in Wecker’s article, Ankori does consider Wilhelm Kahlo’s “real religion” to be of interest, since besides Kahlo’s penchant for and mastery of her self-constructed image, she may very well have building a family tree to satisfy any doubts of her father’s identity in terms of both halakha (Jewish ritual law) and the Nazi’s ancestry laws. In short, what is relevant for Kahlo herself is whether her genealogy is Jewish enough to be murdered with her adopted semitic compatriots.

To Ankori, the question is whether Henriette Kaufmann was Jewish, since her Jewishness would make Wilhelm Jewish “according to both Jewish Halakha and Nazi laws.” If instead Wilhelm was a German Lutheran (Ankori says Lutheran, while Ronnen wrote Protestant), “why would Frida Kahlo ‘create’ a Hungarian Jewish genealogy for him and for herself?” Ankori wondered.

Even after Franger and Huhle’s book, for Jason Steiber, archivist at the NMWA, Kahlo remains a Jewish artist.

“I believe, without a doubt, that Frida Kahlo was a Jewish artist,” said Jason Stieber, archivist at the NMWA, through e-mail. But Stieber said other aspects of Kahlo’s identity played much greater roles in her life and work. “Frida was many things … and she embraced wholeheartedly everything that she was,” he said, noting that Frida “was proud of this lineage” and greatly delighted in “wheedling anti-Semites in America,” such as her famous inquiry put forth to Henry Ford of whether he was Jewish. Although she was an atheist, “she abhorred the Catholic religiosity of her mother,” and she “did embrace her Jewish ethnicity, if not the tenets of Judaic faith.”

“So yes, Frida was a Jewish artist,” Strieber continued, “however, I think she would have been more likely to refer to herself as a Mexican artist. Mexico held a very special place in heart and in her art.”

So I’ve been thinking about all of this and I’m left with an important quote that Wecker brings from an email in conversation with, Robin Cembalest, executive editor of ARTNews magazine, reveals the other side to the fascination with the question of Kahlo’s heritage.

“In my world the process of defining Jewish art, or what is Jewish in art, is both parlor game and intellectual exercise,” Cembalest wrote. “Either way, clearly it reveals as much about who is doing the assessing as it does about the figures we are claiming for our team.”

I think this is a remarkable statement as it rings both true and hollow — true in the sense that, yeah, ethnic pride is commonly expressed in appropriating the achievements of individuals as evidence of community capabilities. Hollow in the sense, that if art historians can not see beyond chauvinist ethnic boosterism to understand the importance of identity politics in the lives and art of artists then they are willingly blinding themselves to significant contextual meaning.

Kahlo’s creative philo-semitism is just one example of her passion for the liberation of all peoples. I, for one, am proud of Frida Kahlo’s defiant solidarity with Jews in the face of fascism, her storytelling in the face of a geneology and ritual law that would deny her a more rigorous and truthful connection with my people.

Categories: Aharonium, Art History and Yiddishkeit
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