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On the streets of Tel Aviv, protesters on cusp of a big victory vow to keep fighting
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Yaniv, a resident of Tel Aviv, has lost count of how many protests he’s been to during the past three months. But on Monday afternoon, he headed once again to Kaplan Street, the urban artery that has become ground zero of the anti-government demonstrations, to demonstrate once again.
Israel’s current rupture, said Yaniv, 34, is the “biggest crisis in my lifetime.”
“We’ll keep going until something changes,” he said. “They left us no choice. The damage has been done.”
Week after week, Yaniv and tens of thousands of other Israelis have filled the streets of Tel Aviv to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed overhaul of the country’s judiciary — which would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power and influence. Then, on Sunday night, massive protests again took shape to oppose Netanyahu’s firing of his defense minister, who called for a pause on the legislation.
Now, the following day, the protesters came with a different feeling: that their activism might actually succeed, at least in the short term. After people gathered in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and elsewhere, Netanyahu announced that he would pause the legislation to allow time for dialogue. Several of his ministers had already called for him to do just that.
Justin Jacobs, a recent immigrant to Israel from the United States, said he is hopeful about the outcome of the protest movement. (Deborah Danan)
But even as the campaign to stall the legislation was poised to achieve an at least temporary victory, protesters were not in a celebratory mood. They vowed to continue demonstrating against what some described as Netanyahu’s broader authoritarian impulses.
“You see how the liberal voice that has been missing for so long is returning to the street and has become the mainstream,” said Ben Luria, a resident of Jaffa protesting in Tel Aviv. “It looks like they’ve succeeded in passing the message across.”
But for Luria, that success doesn’t translate into any desire to ease the pressure. “You can’t deny that this is no longer just a question of Bibi being Bibi, this is a dictator in the making,” he added, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “We need to put the line somewhere.”
Even as Israelis were glued to their TV screens, waiting to hear Netanyahu announce a suspension of the legislation, Daria, who immigrated to Israel with her family from what is now Russia, did not pin her hopes on Netanyahu changing course.
“I don’t think that even if they stop this legislation, they will stop anything else,” said Daria, who came to the protest with Yaniv and, like him, declined to give her last name. “Even if they say they’ll postpone until Pesach or for forever, that doesn’t mean that we stop protesting what this government is doing.”
Sunday night’s protests were followed by a countrywide general strike. Blocked streets and canceled bus routes in downtown Tel Aviv meant that a 20-minute journey to a high-risk pregnancy clinic on Monday instead took an hour and a half for Natalie Solomon, who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant. She said she hoped Netanyahu would concede and spare Israelis further disruption.
“Our country is falling apart,” she said, expressing her hope that an end to the political standoff is near. “I really hope Bibi backs down today, that’s the only option. … We care about democracy but we really just care about the health of our baby.
At the end of the day it really does disrupt day-to-day lives.”
Despite being on the cusp of their first major victory, protesters said the potential respite offered by Netanyahu would be a minor gesture, not one that could overcome the hard feelings that have built up over the past three months.
Justin Jacobs, an immigrant to Israel from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said Israel has “turned a corner” after Sunday night’s protests.”So, [there’s] a glimmer of hope that we’ll go back to the status quo, which to me remains not good enough,” he said. “But not good enough is still better than horrifying.”
Others were less optimistic. “My feeling, the feeling of my parents, my grandparents, [is] that there’s no future here, I don’t know if I’ll raise kids here,” said Yotam Weingrad.
Like Weingrad, Daria, recalling her family’s experience, is also considering her future in the Jewish state.
Yariv and Daria, left, walk in Tel Aviv after participating in anti-government protests on Monday, March 27, 2023; at right, Natalie Solomon said her trip to a high-risk pregnancy clinic took more than four times longer than normal because of the protests. (Deborah Danan)
“I grew up in a family with intimate knowledge of what it feels like to live under oppression, and I feel like it’s our duty to do whatever we can to prevent it,” she said. “But if push comes to shove, if nothing’s going to change, I’ll make the same decision my parents did — my kids aren’t going to live in a dictatorship.”
For those not emotionally invested in the Israeli crisis, the streets of Tel Aviv on Monday provided a rare experience, and a sense of uncertainty. Jennifer, a tourist from Utah visiting Israel with her two daughters, Holly and Diana, wanted to know if “it is going to get scary” and wondered if they’d be able to get back to the United States, as airports had closed due to the general strike.
“We’ve never been to this part of the world so we’re kind of like ‘Wow,’ just taking in everything,” said Diana. “We don’t know what it’s like without the protests, and we’re like, ‘This is Tel Aviv. It’s a lot.’”
Support for the protests isn’t unanimous across Tel Aviv, a bastion of left-wing politics in Israel. Josh Eidelshtein called the protests “hypocritical,” and blamed them for fanning the flames of conflict.
“What if the protesters were right-wingers, Orthodox Jews, or Palestinians?” he said. “Would their strategies still be OK? There is too much hate being bred here, and it’s as if the collective stress and anxiety this country has lived on for so long has been set aflame. The same people who went out to vote [for the left] are now trying to work against the system because they didn’t get what they wanted.”
Khalil, who originally hails from the Arab village of Ein Hawd in Israel’s north, and has lived in Tel Aviv for 50 years, also opted to stay away from the protests, which he felt did not speak for him.
“The Arabs are a minority, what do they have to do with these protests?” Khalil said as he walked his dog near a giant yellow sign reading “Nonstop Democracy,” painted by the Tel Aviv municipality on the boardwalk.
“Bibi has done good things but now he’s silent. This is a man who knows how to speak,” Khalil said. Then, referring to Netanyahu’s coalition partners, he added, “He’s not the king of Israel anymore. He made big mistakes by taking those criminals into the government with him. They want to throw out all the Arabs.”
Also sitting out the protests was Meir Dayan, who counts himself among the supporters of Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform. He is especially in favor of the legislation that was due to be brought for a final vote on Monday, which would have increased the governing coalition’s control over Supreme Court appointments. But Dayan added that he didn’t appreciate the way Netanyahu attempted to pass the measures into law.
The path along the beach in Tel Aviv has been painted with pro-democracy messages. (Deborah Danan)
“The way they went about it was reckless,” he said. “Change to heavy organizational processes — because this is what this basically is, after all — doesn’t happen with legislation, it happens with people. It must be bottom-up and from a place of education, not ignorance.”
Dayan predicted that Netanyahu will halt the legislation now, and then in the summer months “when the left are overseas,” he will return it to the Knesset floor.
Roughly four miles away from the main protest, a smaller demonstration coalesced near Jaffa’s clocktower, a landmark at the entrance to Tel Aviv’s older counterpart. At this protest, children as young as 5 chanted “Shame!” and “Save Democracy!” while their parents stood to the side.
“Here the adults are quiet so the children are taking the lead. It’s exciting,” said Gavri, 10.
There are a few things he’d like to bring about in Israeli society: the failure of the judicial overhaul, as well as an end to fighting between Jews and Arabs. Like the adults protesting across the city, he vowed not to give up.
“I will be here until the end,” he said. “I hope it won’t be a long time.”
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Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
The television entertainment personality Gene Shalit, who celebrated his centenary on March 25, semaphored a Jewish appearance for decades to viewers of NBC’s early morning gabfest The Today Show.
With his Jew-fro hairstyle that fascinated celebrity interviewees and his abundant mustache that outdid Groucho Marx’s mere greasepaint simulacrum, Shalit was one of a kind. Born in New York City in 1926, he clearly aimed to be recognizable even through half-opened bleary eyes of half-asleep viewers. And audible too. Shalit’s precise pronunciation, always at a vigorous decibel level, sought to be comprehensible even during voiceovers. The Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, transfixed by this persona, imitated him on SCTV roaring at high decibel levels.
In one skit, Levy embodied Shalit with haimish affection, hawking a remedy for a migraine presumably caused by his own bellowing. In another, Levy spoofed Hollywood celebrities who were notorious fressers at local restaurants, including the American Jewish actress Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift). In still another lampoon, Levy-as-Shalit danced and also kibitzed with the late Catherine O’Hara as the Jewish gossip columnist Rona Barrett (born Burstein).
Shalit apparently kvelled at the notion that he was prominent enough in media culture to be affectionately kidded like other Jewish noteworthies Levy imitated, including Howard Cosell, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Milton Berle, Judd Hirsch, Jack Carter, James Caan, Lorne Greene, Norman Mailer and Neil Sedaka.
Years later, Levy recalled that when the SCTV comedy troupe was invited to appear on The Today Show, before the segment was filmed, chairs were arranged so that Catherine O’Hara was seated next to Shalit. Suddenly Shalit exclaimed: “Wait a minute, shouldn’t the person who [imitates] me be sitting beside me?” Another Jewish comedian, Jon Lovitz, would likewise attempt to imitate Shalit on Saturday Night Live, but without the zest of Levy’s indelible incarnation.
Shalit once told showbiz reporter Eileen Prose that at first, his looks limited him to radio jobs in more conventional times for TV talent. By the more liberated late 1960s, when long hair and a hirsute upper lip were more common, he was hired as quasi-permanent house Jew on The Today Show. Although his mustache fit the counterculture in the mode of Jewish activist Jerry Rubin’s, Shalit as an aspiring journalist may have grown his facial hair more in tribute to earlier literati like the playwright William Saroyan or the eminent humorist Mark Twain.
At times, Shalit’s appearance could be clown-like or cartoonish, so it was natural that characters inspired by him would appear on animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy as well as The Muppet Show.
Famous interviewees like Peter Sellers were plainly at ease with Shalit’s persona. A conversation filmed shortly before Sellers’ untimely death was cordial, with the sometimes tetchy actor on his best behavior, acknowledging Shalit as a fellow entertainer. And with Mel Brooks in 1987, Shalit looked to be in paradise.
A warm-hearted empathizer and enthusiast, Shalit was more suited to promoting films than criticizing them. In 1989, a tzimmes occurred when a memo drafted by Bryant Gumbel, a Today Show colleague, deemed Shalit a “specialist in gushing over actors and directors” and added that Shalit’s interviews “aren’t very good.” To his credit, Shalit minimized the controversy, telling The Los Angeles Times that Gumbel’s disses were “not big whacks.”
“Listen, I’ve been interviewing people on the show for 17 years,” Shalit said. “I must be doing something right.”
Part of his inspiration was a sincere appreciation for humor, Jewish and otherwise. His 1987 anthology, Laughing Matters featured contributions by Jewish wits such as Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Samuel Hoffenstein, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Allan Sherman, Max Shulman, Calvin Trillin, Rube Goldberg, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, B. Kliban, Robert Mankoff, J. B. Handelsman, Jules Feiffer and George Burns. The volume was dedicated to, among others, the Jewish screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who was Shalit’s instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His visceral reaction to Jewish parody was such that during one commuter train ride, Shalit admitted in a preface, Perelman’s story “No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait” caused a conductor to lean down with concern, stating: “A passenger says you’re crying.” To which Shalit retorted, choking and rubbing away tears: “I’m laughing.”
The subliminal message of Shalit’s book was that without Jews, America would have distinctly fewer tears of laughter. And he regretted not being able to include funny Jews like Jack Benny and Ed Wynn whose performances could not be transferred to the printed page.
Shalit also reviewed books for years. Sticking firmly to the content of cultural products with a few brief hints of value judgment, Shalit seemed to have neither the time nor presumably the inclination to subject new items to analysis of Freudian intensity. He clearly preferred boosting things to panning them, and when a film displeased Shalit, he could be uncomfortable saying so.
One occasion when Shalit raised hackles was his response on The Today Show to the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Shalit described one of the gay characters as a “sexual predator.” The LGBTQ media group GLAAD objected to Shalit’s characterization as a homophobic stereotype. Shalit’s son Peter wrote an open letter to GLAAD, identifying himself as a gay physician with a Seattle practice helping the gay community. Peter Shalit admitted that his father “did not get” the film in question, but was “not a homophobe.” He might have added that his father had even included an excerpt from Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy in the aforementioned humor collection.
Shalit followed up with his own apology, stating in a mensch-like way that he did not intend to cast “aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” When Shalit finally retired from broadcasting at age 84, with the Yiddish-inflected declaration: “It’s enough, already,” he left behind admiring viewers and decades of bonhomie as one of morning television’s most genial protagonists.
Mazel tov, Gene Shalit. Biz hundert un tsvantsik (May you live until 120)!
The post Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100 appeared first on The Forward.
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How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
I’m almost positive I heard about the old lady who swallowed a fly before the father who bought a goat for two zuzim.
This occurred to me a few years ago while riding in my sister’s minivan. My niece was in her car seat fidgeting with a toy that plays a catalogue of public domain children’s songs. But unlike the version I’d grown up hearing, where the old lady’s ravenous habit of devouring ever-larger animals is met with the prognostic shrug of “perhaps she’ll die,” the refrain was changed to the more kid-friendly “oh me oh my.”
The Seder tune “Chad Gadya,” which involves a quite similar conceit, has no such timidity when it comes to the ravages of death.
Jack Black once described it as the “original heavy metal song” for the way it progresses along the chain of life from a little goat bought for two zuzim, to the cat who ate the goat, to the dog who bit the cat, all the way up to the angel of death. (“Very Black Sabbath.”)
It is pretty metal — in a kosher Kidz Bop, tot Shabbat kinda way. But why we sing it should, in Jewish circles, be as popular a seasonal question as what a bunny with a clutch of eggs has to do with Jesus’ resurrection. (Some Haggadot explain the greater significance of “Chad Gadya;” my Maxwell House does not.)
Dating the song or rooting out its precise origins is not easy.
As historian Henry Abramson wrote, scholars have noted the song’s similarities to a late Medieval German folk rhyme. While the fact that it is mostly in Aramaic, not the vernacular in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggests an earlier provenance, it is missing from extant Sephardic and Yemenite Haggadot, where one would expect to find texts originating in the language, and the Aramaic itself has many errors.
Abramson reasons that, given the surviving written versions, it was likely adapted sometime in the 14th century from a German children’s rhyme called “The Foreman that Sent Jockel Out,” about an idler named Jockel who a foreman tries to rouse to fieldwork with an escalating series of messengers, ending with a hangman. (Abramson notes the original is characterized by “some Teutonic weirdness,” like a witch sent to subdue a vulture.)
“Chad Gadya” belongs, like its Seder companion “Echad Mi Yodea,” to a genre called “cumulative song,” where verses build with new information a la “12 Days of Christmas.” But “Chad Gadya” stands out for its strangeness and its more oblique message.
Abramson and others see the goat, small and vulnerable, standing in for the Jewish people, and the ensuing parade of antagonists corresponding to historical enemies (Assyrians, Babylonians) and periods of time (Exodus, various conquests), ending with redemption in the Messianic age when the Holy One smites death.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in a commentary for his Haggadah, the song “teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion.”
That this truth is conveyed in song, with much banging on the table or animal noises, speaks to the centrality of children in the Passover Seder. And, some think, its inclusion serves a practical purpose: keeping the kids awake through the last leg of a long ritual meal.
My own interpretation is admittedly less lofty. I don’t think of Israel’s tribulations. I do think of the abundance of stray cats in Jerusalem, said to have originated during the British mandate when the city had a rat problem.
And, in the years since my own days as designated Four Questions asker, I’ve been reading “Chad Gadya” into non-Jewish contexts. “The White Cat,” off of Mitski’s new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, contains a lyric that recalls the song, only altered to be a metaphor for the predations of capitalism.
In it, the speaker says she must work to pay for the cat’s house and “for the bugs who drink my blood/and the birds who eat those bugs/so that white cat can kill the birds.”
These cycles speak across cultures and time because they represent a fundamental rule of nature: There’s always a bigger fish (or cat or dog or stick).
To erase death from the equation, like my niece’s toy does with that hapless, insect-ingesting pensioner, is a concession to today’s sensitivities. That’s not to say “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” represents anything more homiletic than a choking hazard warning, but in the case of “Chad Gadya,” death is the story, and an end to death is the hope.
“The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life,” Rabbi Sacks concluded his drash on the song, which ends when God strikes down the Angel of Death. “A fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, ‘Choose life.’”
I know it’s a principle of faith all over the Haggadah, but I’m more agnostic as to that Messianic promise and maybe more in the camp of our old lady. My understanding of Jewishness, which accords with Moshe’s command, says life is best lived knowing that — perhaps — we’ll die.
The post How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay appeared first on The Forward.
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Katz: ‘Israel’s Goal in Lebanon is to Disarm Hezbollah’
Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz held a situation assessment Friday with senior military and defense officials, reiterating that the country’s policy in Lebanon remains focused on disarming Hezbollah by military and political means. Katz emphasized that the goal applies “regardless of the Iran issue” and pledged continued protection for Israeli northern communities.
Katz said the Israel Defense Forces are completing ground maneuvers up to the anti-tank line to prevent direct threats to border towns. He outlined plans to demolish houses in villages near the border that serve as Hezbollah outposts, citing previous operations in Rafah and Khan Yunis in Gaza as models.
The Defense Minister added that the IDF will maintain security control over the Litani area and that the return of 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who had evacuated north will not be permitted until northern communities’ safety is ensured. Katz also reaffirmed that the IDF will continue targeting Hezbollah leaders and operatives across Lebanon, noting that 1,000 terrorists have already been eliminated since the start of the current campaign.
“We promised security to the northern towns, and that is exactly what we will do,” Katz said. He further warned that the IDF will act decisively against rocket fire from Lebanon, stating that Hezbollah “will pay heavy prices.”