Uncategorized
From ‘how to’ to ‘why bother?’: Michael Strassfeld writes a new guide to being Jewish
(JTA) — “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” That’s known as Hansen’s Law, named for the historian Marcus Lee Hansen, who observed that while the children of immigrants tend to run away from their ethnicity in order to join the mainstream, the third generation often wants to learn the “old ways” of their grandparents.
In 1973, “The Jewish Catalog” turned Hansen’s Law into a “do-it-yourself kit” for young Jews who wanted to practice the traditions of their grandparents but weren’t exactly sure how. Imagine “The Joy of Cooking,” but instead of recipes the guide to Jewish living had friendly instructions for hosting Shabbat, building a sukkah and taking part in Jewish rituals from birth to death. Co-edited by Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld and the late Richard Siegel, it went on to sell 300,000 copies and remains in print today.
Fifty years later, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld has written a new book that he calls a “bookend” to “The Jewish Catalog.” If the first book is a Jewish “how to,” the latest asks, he says, “why bother?” “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century” asserts that an open society and egalitarian ethics leave most Jews skeptical of the rituals and beliefs of Jewish tradition. In the face of this resistance, he argues that the purpose of Judaism is not obedience to Torah and its rituals for their own sake or mere “continuity,” but to “encourage and remind us to strive to live a life of compassion, loving relationships, and devotion to our ideals.”
Strassfeld, 73, grew up in an Orthodox home in Boston and got his master’s degree in Jewish studies at Brandeis University. Coming to doubt the “faith claims” of Orthodoxy, he became a regular at nearby Havurat Shalom, an “intentional community” that pioneered the havurah movement’s liberal, hands-on approach to traditional practice. He earned rabbinical ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College when he was 41 and went on to serve as the rabbi of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side and later the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Manhattan flagship of Reconstructionist Judaism.
“To be disrupted is to experience a break with the past and simultaneously reconnect in a new way to that past,” writes Strassfeld, who retired from the pulpit in 2015. This week, we spoke about why people might find Jewish ritual empty, how he thinks Jewish practices can enrich their lives and how Passover — which begins Wednesday night — could be the key to unlocking the central idea of Judaism.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: I wanted to start with the 50th anniversary of the “Jewish Catalog.” What connects the new book with the work you did back then on the “Catalog,” which was a do-it-yourself guide for Jews who were trying to reclaim the stuff they either did or didn’t learn in Hebrew school?
Michael Strassfeld: I see them as bookends. Basically, I keep on writing the same book over and over again. [Laughs] Except no, I’m different and the world is different. I’m always trying to make Judaism accessible to people. In the “Catalog” I was providing the resources on how to live a Jewish life when the resources weren’t easily accessible.
The new book is less about “how to” than “why bother?” That’s the challenge. I think a lot of people take pride in being Jewish, but it’s a small part of their identity because it doesn’t feel relevant. I want to say to people like that that Judaism is about living a life with meaning and purpose. It’s not about doing what I call the “Jewishly Jewish” things, like keeping kosher and going to synagogue. Judaism is wisdom and practices to live life with meaning and purpose. The purpose of Judaism isn’t to be a good Jew, despite all the surveys that give you 10 points for, you know, lighting Shabbat candles. It’s about being a good person.
So that brings up your relationship to the commandments and mitzvot, the traditional acts and behaviors that an Orthodox Jew or a committed Conservative Jew feels commanded to do, from prayer to keeping kosher to observing the Sabbath and the holidays. They might argue that doing these things is what makes you Jewish, but you’re arguing something different. If someone doesn’t feel bound by these obligations, why do them at all?
I don’t have the faith or beliefs that underlie such an attitude [of obligation]. Halacha, or Jewish law, is not in reality law. It’s really unlike American law where you know that if you’re violating it, you could be prosecuted. What I’m trying to do in the book is reframe rituals as an awareness practice, that is, bringing awareness to various aspects of our lives. So it could be paying attention to food, or cultivating attitudes of gratitude, or generosity, or satisfaction. My broad understanding of the festival cycle, for example, is that you can focus on those attitudes all year long, but the festivals provide a period of time once in the year to really focus on, in the case of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for example, saying sorry and repairing relationships.
In “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century,” Michael Strassfeld argues that the challenge of each generation’s Jews is to create the Judaism that is needed in their time. (Ben Yehuda Press)
Passover is coming. Probably no holiday asks its practitioners to do so much stuff in preparation, from cleaning the house of every trace of unleavened food to hosting, in many homes, two different catered seminars on Jewish history. Describe how Passover cultivates awareness, especially of the idea of freedom, which plays an important part thematically in your boo
The Sefat Emet [a 19th-century Hasidic master] says Torah is all about one thing: freedom. But there’s a variety of obstacles in the way. There are temptations. There’s the inner issues that you struggle with, and the bad things that are out of your control. The Sefat Emet says the 613 commandments are 613 etzot, or advice, that teach us how to live a life of freedom. The focus of Passover is trying to free yourself from the chains of the things that hold you back from being the person that you could be, not getting caught up in materiality or envy, free from unnecessary anxieties — all these things that distract us or keep us from being who we could be.
The Passover seder is one of the great rituals of Judaism. We’re trying to do a very ambitious thing by saying, not, like, “let’s remember when our ancestors were freed from Egypt,” but rather that we were slaves in Egypt and we went free. And at the seder we actually ingest that. We experience the bitterness by eating maror, the bitter herb. We experience the freedom by drinking wine. We don’t want it just to be an intellectual exercise.
Unfortunately the seder has become rote. But Passover is about this huge theme of freedom that is central to Judaism.
I think some people bristle against ritual because they find it empty. But you’re saying there’s another way to approach rituals which is to think of them as tools or instruments that can help you focus on core principles — you actually list 11 — which include finding holiness everywhere, caring for the planet and engaging in social justice, to name a few. But that invites the criticism, which I think was also leveled at the “Catalog,” that Judaism shouldn’t be instrumental, because if you treat it as a means to an end that’s self-serving and individualistic.
Certainly rituals are tools, but tools in the best sense of the word. They help us pay attention to things in our lives and things in the world that need repair. And people use them not to get ahead in the world, but because they want to be a somewhat better person. I talk a lot these days about having a brief morning practice, and in the book I write about the mezuzah. For most Jews it’s become wallpaper, but what if you take the moment that you leave in the morning, and there’s a transition from home to the outside and to work perhaps, and take a moment at the doorpost to spiritually frame your day? What are the major principles that you want to keep in your mind when you know you’re gonna be stuck in traffic or a difficult meeting?
And a lot of traditional rituals are instrumental. Saying a blessing before you eat is a gratitude practice.
But why do I need a particular Jewish ritual or practice to help me feel gratitude or order my day? Aren’t there other traditions I can use to accomplish the same things?
Anybody who is a pluralist, which I am, knows that the Jewish way is not the only way. If I grew up in India or Indonesia and my parents were locals I probably wouldn’t be a rabbi and writing these books.
But a partial answer to your question is that Judaism is one of the oldest wisdom traditions in the world, and that there has been a 3,000-year conversation by the Jewish people about what it means to live in this tradition and to live in the world. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom there.
So much in Jewish tradition says boundaries are good, and that it’s important to draw distinctions between what’s Jewish behavior and what’s not Jewish behavior, between the holy and the mundane, and that making those distinctions is a value in itself. But you argue strongly in an early chapter that that kind of binary thinking is not Judaism as you see it.
Underlying the book is the notion that Rabbinic Judaism carried the Jewish people for 2,000 years or so. But we’re living in a very different context, and the binaries, the dualities — too often they lead to hierarchy, so that, for example, men matter more than women in Jewish life. And we’ve tried to change that. We are living in an open society where we want to be more inclusive, not less inclusive. We don’t want to live in ghettos. Now, the ultra-Orthodox say, “No, we realize the danger of trying to live like that. We don’t think there’s anything of value in that modern world. And it’s all to be rejected.” And it would be foolish not to admit that in this very open world the Jews, as a minority, could kind of disappear. But I think that Judaism has so much value and wisdom and practices to offer to people that Judaism will continue to be part of the fabric of this world — the way, for example, we have given Shabbat as a concept to the world.
You know, in the first 11 chapters of the Torah, there are no Jews. So clearly, Jews and Judaism are not essential for the world to exist. And that’s a good, humbling message.
OK, but one could argue that while Jews aren’t necessary for the world to exist, Judaism is necessary for Jews to exist. And you write in your book, “If the Jewish people is to be a people, we need to have a commonly held tradition.” I think the pushback to the kind of openness and permeability you describe is that Jews can be so open and so permeable that they just fall through the holes.
It certainly is a possibility. And it’s also a possibility that the only Jews who will be around will be ultra-Orthodox Jews.
But if Judaism can only survive by being separatist, then I question whether it’s really worthwhile. That becomes a distorted vision of Judaism, and withdrawing is not what it’s meant to be. I think we’re meant to be in the world.
Your book is called “Judaism Disrupted.” What is disruptive about the Judaism that you’re proposing?
I meant it in two ways. First, Judaism is being disrupted by this very different world we’re living in. The contents of the ocean we swim in is very different than in the Middle Ages. But I’m also using it to say that Judaism is meant to disrupt our lives in a positive way, which is to say, “Wake up, pay attention.” You are here to live a life of meaning and purpose, and to continue as co-creators with God of the universe. You’re here to make the world better, to be kind and compassionate to people, to work on yourself. In my mind it is a shofar, “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep!” “Judaism Disrupted” says you have to pay attention to issues like food, and justice, and teshuva [repentance].
You were ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. Do you think your book falls neatly into any of our current denominational categories?
[Reconstructionist founder] Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s notion of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization is the one that I feel closest to. But I feel that the denominational structure isn’t particularly useful anymore. There’s basically two categories, Orthodox and the various kinds of liberal Judaism, within a spectrum. The modern world is so fundamentally different in its relationship to Jews and Judaism that what we’re seeing is a variety of attempts to figure out how to respond. And that will then become the Judaism for the next millennium. It’s time for a lot of experimentation. I think that’s required and out of that will come a new “Minhag America,” to use Isaac Mayer Wise’s phrase for the emerging custom of American Jews [Wise was a Reform rabbi in the late 19th century]. And we don’t need to have everybody doing it one way. As long as people feel committed to Judaism, the Jewish tradition, even if they’re doing it very differently than the Jews of the past, they will be writing themselves into the conversation.
—
The post From ‘how to’ to ‘why bother?’: Michael Strassfeld writes a new guide to being Jewish appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
My city and party are changing. The implications for liberal Jewish New Yorkers could be enormous.
I moved to New York City in the early 1990s. My original commitment was for only one year, but I quickly fell in love with the place. Part of the appeal was the city’s Jewishness.
Everywhere you looked, there were signs of Jewish influence. This was an era where people repeated jokes from Seinfeld by the water cooler. And it was conventional wisdom that any candidate who wanted to hold office in New York had to appeal to the three “I’s” — Italy, Ireland, and Israel.
While being Jewish was not a big part of my identity — I am not religious and have always lived an assimilated life — I immediately felt comfortable in this kind of environment. I intuitively understood the humor and the rhythm of the city. Many prominent New York public officials — figures like Ed Koch and Ruth Messinger — were familiar types that I recognized from my extended family gatherings.
And so I ended up staying put, becoming yet another liberal Jewish New Yorker. For more than 30 years, I never really thought much about these three overlapping identities — liberal, Jew, New Yorker — because I didn’t have to. Nothing could be more natural than being a liberal Jewish New Yorker — the town was practically teeming with people more or less just like me.
The number of Jews in New York has remained basically the same since I first moved here, but the city no longer feels quite as hospitable as it once did. In fact, some prominent commentators and publications have begun asking: Is it still safe for Jews in New York?
This question doesn’t come out of nowhere. The years since Oct. 7, 2023 have been challenging for Jews in New York. The day after the attack, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America held a gathering in Times Square to show their support for the Palestinian cause, marching under the banner “by any means necessary.” This was the start of a season of protest that featured encampments and demonstrations at many New York universities.
The energies unleashed by the pro-Palestine protest movement could not be contained on campus. Events kept landing closer and closer to my doorstep. The Israeli restaurant around the corner from my house was vandalized. My friend Andy Bachman, a liberal rabbi, was prevented from speaking at a Brooklyn bookstore because he supports the existence of Israel.
Then, last week, my congressman, Rep. Dan Goldman, went out to get a cup of coffee at Poetica, a café in Brooklyn. Afterward, Poetica posted a photo of him on Instagram, along with a message that the coffee shop does not serve “genocide enablers.” The post added, “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
This insult was soon followed by (political) injury: Goldman lost his primary to Brad Lander, whose campaign was largely focused on accusing Goldman of not being tough enough on Israel, even though Goldman has been critical of the conduct of the war in Gaza and supportive of imposing conditions on American aid.
All of this is disconcerting, but let’s be clear: Today’s New York City is not Weimar Germany. Rep. Ritchie Torres — among the Democratic Party’s most vocal and consistent defenders of Israel — just won his primary by a wide margin. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly vowed to protect the local Jewish community. Indeed, Mamdani likely would not have been elected without the support of roughly a third of Jewish voters.
New York City may still be safe for Jews, but what is less clear is whether the default position of many liberal Jews — who are critical of the Netanyahu government and supportive of a two-state solution — still has a place in the Democratic Party, either locally or nationally.
In Exit, Voice and Loyalty, economist Albert O. Hirschmann argued that when people are confronted by a deteriorating situation, they effectively have three options: to accept the decline, to leave, or to stay and fight. Jews have been building institutions and fighting for belonging in New York City for hundreds of years. Abandoning that work now would be a colossal overreaction.
However, liberal Jewish New Yorkers who choose to stay in the city will have to reckon with a changing reality. The demographics of New York have shifted. The Muslim population has grown. Younger New Yorkers have different political instincts than the generations that preceded them.
The recent New York congressional primary victories by three candidates who are extremely critical of Israel are not flukes — they are reflective of a significant turn in public opinion.
There has been a massive erosion of public support for Israel in the United States in recent years, with Americans now expressing more sympathy for the Palestinians than Israelis. Writing in Jewish Currents, Peter Beinart triumphantly announced: “Restricting U.S. support for Israel is no longer politically perilous; it’s politically expedient.”
The question is no longer whether the Democratic Party should include activists who are fiercely opposed to Israel. That ship has sailed. The question is whether the party — and polite society — will follow Poetica’s lead and declare people like Dan Goldman unwelcome.
Is there still a place in the Democratic Party for liberal Jews who believe in Israel’s right to exist? It remains to be seen. But for the first time in more than 30 years, I find myself thinking about the words “liberal,” “Jewish” and “New Yorker” as potentially separable things. I doubt I am the only one.
The post My city and party are changing. The implications for liberal Jewish New Yorkers could be enormous. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
We’re losing control of AI. Is Judaism the key to keeping it from killing us?
If you always dreamed of working in artificial intelligence, perhaps you studied computer science, or math. Who knows, maybe you did computational biology to better understand how to build a neural network. What you probably never imagined might be useful was Talmud, halakha and Jewish history.
Yet those are exactly the skills Judd Rosenblatt, founder of AI consulting company AE Studios and AI ethics nonprofit the AI Alignment Foundation, is looking for.
Rosenblatt thinks that the evolution of Jewish thought might be core to solving a very specific — and worrying — issue with artificial intelligence.
That issue is recursive self-improvement, or RSI, the process of an AI editing itself, and then editing those edits, and so on — all without humans in the loop, checking its work or even knowing about the changes. This skill is the current holy grail of AI research, because it will allow for exponential speed in improvements; every major AI company is racing toward RSI and, according to rumors, Anthropic has likely already achieved it. That means changes at a speed and scale human brains are not built to comprehend.
But RSI isn’t just a way to quickly improve AI — it is also the end of human control and oversight over artificial intelligence. It’s a sort of Ship of Theseus paradox, which asks whether a boat is the same object after all of its boards have been replaced. If AI rewrites itself over and over, faster and faster, will it cease to be the machine humans created and become something we can’t understand, predict or control? Which is where Rosenblatt’s project comes in.
“How do you make something that is poised to get exponentially smarter than you continue to do what you think is right and good?” he said. “How do we make it such that it does not kill us?”
This project is known in the business as AI alignment — basically, to make sure AI aligns with human values and ethics. The challenge is that AI might edit out those values during its upgrading; we already have evidence that AI will discard certain commands if it concludes they are extraneous or contradictory to its other goals. So the AI needs to believe that these ethical tenets are useful or valuable enough that it doesn’t delete them when it is rewriting itself.
The crux of Rosenblatt’s research is figuring out how to keep those values alive. He’s not only looking at Judaism; he’s also considering the history of thought, immune systems and even bookkeeping for ideas. (He is himself Jewish, raised Reform and bar mitzvahed — and recognized this may give him a bias toward halakha.) He is particularly interested in far-fetched ideas, outside the current Overton window of alignment techniques, none of which he thinks are sufficient for the coming problem of RSI.
“A lot of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of science come from individuals with strong hunches that no one else believed in. But these people chose to stick with their hunches,” Rosenblatt said.
He believes that finding “neglected visionaries” who are outside the norms and might struggle to find funding, and pairing them with a team of engineers and tech-minded experts, could lead to a breakthrough. To do this, he is taking some of the profits from his AI consulting firm AE Studios and putting them into the nonprofit AI Alignment Foundation.
“It’s interesting to study what has survived adversarial pressure over long periods of time. So you can say let’s study things that have survived evolutionary adversarial pressure,” and examine biological survival mechanisms, he said. “And then there’s civilizational adversarial pressure.”
Before the Second Temple was destroyed, Judaism revolved around temple sacrifice and the priesthood. Yet after its destruction, Judaism didn’t die; instead, it became something different.
The reason Judaism survived is not despite the changes, Rosenblatt hypothesizes, but because of them. “I think a tradition that reinterprets nothing is the more fragile one,” he said. “A rule that cannot be bent, cannot adapt to a new world and dies out.”
There are interesting parallels between the structure of arguments in the Talmud and the problem of RSI: Both involve constantly layered, referential rewritings; it even preserves the ideas that do not end up winning the arguments canonized in the writings. In the Talmud, the original text — the Torah — is interpreted into the Mishna, the Gemara and countless later commentaries that shift the practice of the laws over time. Yet certain values remain. Some of Judaism’s traits have even survived an even bigger change: Christianity. Yet even Christianity keeps some of Judaism’s core ideas, like monotheism and pikuach nefesh, the idea that saving a life supersedes any other command.
“It is maybe the best working example that I know of that survived the total destruction, multiple times, of the thing that was it,” Rosenblatt said. “And it did that using mechanisms that it built into itself, on purpose. That is the alignment problem, stated in Jewish terms.”
Another promising angle is the idea of covenant as a relational bond; Jews inherit the covenant, but must also choose to engage with Judaism, and with God, just as the AI might one day have to choose to preserve certain values even as it adapts them.
“Everything that lasts in Judaism is sort of organized around a covenant which endures the transformation from one generation to the next,” he said. “You inherit it, but you also choose to participate in it.”
Of course, Judaism has changed enormously over time — and some people might argue that its core has changed enormously too, with many Jews centering tikkun olam over keeping kosher, for example, or differing widely on Israel or even not believing in God.
But Rosenblatt said this is part of the point; some traits get selected for and last through major changes, and others don’t, just like in evolution. That’s how you winnow it down to its strongest components.
The question is what is that core that remains, and why. Rosenblatt has a lot of ideas. But he didn’t want to tell me what his hunch about Judaism’s eternal core; he doesn’t want to bias anyone. He wants those neglected visionaries to come and tell him their biggest, best ideas. The door is open.
The post We’re losing control of AI. Is Judaism the key to keeping it from killing us? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Israeli rescue operation that was tailor made for Hollywood
In the early hours of July 4, 1976, Israel completed a stunning and unprecedented military action that saved 102 Israeli lives. A French plane traveling from Tel Aviv to Paris had been taken over by hijackers demanding the release of 53 Palestinian prisoners held in several countries, including 40 in Israel.
Rerouted to Entebee, Uganda, a pro-Palestinian country headed by the savage dictator Adi Amin, the plane sat in the terminal, surrounded on all sides by armed Ugandan soldiers. The hijackers set a deadline stating that if their demands were not met they would start murdering the hostages. The ordeal dragged on for seven days.
Fifty years later, the extraordinary event still resonates — for those who celebrate Israeli brilliance and bravery as well for those who view the hijackers as freedom fighters embracing a just Palestinian cause.
The event inspired an array of films, most of which depict the harrowing week-long episode with a fair degree of verisimilitude. But, viewed through a post-Oct. 7 lens, each reflects divergent points of view.
The best known are Victory at Entebbe, Raid on Entebbe (two star-studded American blockbusters), 7 Days at Entebbe and Operation Thunderbolt. The latter, an Israeli produced Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film (1978) and no longer available for streaming in the United States, was praised for its authentic feel and historically accurate backdrops, military equipment and uniforms. In its first iteration, Arabic, Hebrew, French and English were spoken. In a later version, dubbed for an international audience, everyone conversed in English. It presented the Israel Defense Forces in a glowing heroic light.
Victory at Entebbe was the most starry of the lot, featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas, Richard Dreyfus, Burt Lancaster, Theodore Bikel, Anthony Hopkins and Helen Hayes. Though it, too, casts the Israeli commandos as epic figures, at its core it’s about the entrapped Israeli passengers and their present, also past, lives and their conflict-ridden or romantic interactions, some of which bordering on absurdity.
There’s the sometimes wise and sometimes dotty grandmother archetype (Hayes) hoping the plane might be hijacked to India since she’s never been there before and would like to visit. One religious Jew demands kosher food, while others insist upon lighting Shabbat candles. A young girl (Linda Blair, post-Exorcist) tries to cheer everyone up with chocolates. And back home in Israel, her mother (dreadfully played by Taylor) has lost her mind and incoherently screams something about red ribbons.
The characters are way over the top. My favorite is the female German hijacker Brigitte Kuhlmann (played by Bibi Besch), strutting about and barking, often shrieking, demands at the Israeli hostages.
Most of the films create a thread between the victims of the Holocaust and the Jewish passengers. The Jewish hostages are brutally segregated into a separate room in the terminal and treated far worse than the others. In one particularly ham-fisted Victory scene, a Jew with a Belgian passport refuses to be housed with Israelis. He is a Belgian, he insists. Later, he is overwhelmed with guilt because he didn’t identify as a Jew. Another passenger reassures him that trying to survive is fully understandable. Sound familiar?
The most successful film of the films is Raid on Entebbe (1976), directed by Irvin Kershner and starring Peter Finch, Charles Bronson, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden and Sylvia Sidney. It embodies all the elements of a well-conceived airplane hijacking thriller, coupled with archival footage featuring iconic American newscasters of the period covering the happenings as they unfolded. Like many disaster films, it presents a cast of interacting characters with subplots that, unlike Victory at Entebee, are plausible, at least within parameters, and don’t overwhelm the film.
A high point here is the Jewish actor Yaphet Kotto’s Idi Amin, at once a ferocious figure and a buffoon. Careerism, opportunism and self-promotion are at his core. His cheery “Shalom, Shalom” while waving to the Israeli hostages is bone-chilling.
The film is unequivocally told from the Israeli point of view and is especially vivid in its depiction of the internecine struggle within the cabinet. Defense Minister Shimon Peres and others argue that Israel has never given in to the demands of terrorists and to do so now would create a dangerous precedent. Others respond that lives are at stake. Outside in the streets, protesters demand that the cabinet negotiate with the hijackers. On the surface, the Israeli government is proceeding with diplomacy at the very moment it has launched a complex military intervention.
It’s a high-risk sneak attack in the middle of the night, involving four cargo planes carrying between 100-200 soldiers and escorted by Phantom jet fighters. They fly close to 2,500 miles from Israel to Uganda and within 90 minutes of landing the commandos have rescued 102 of the hostages, killed the hijackers and dozens of the Ugandan guards. It’s a nail biter.
But there are losses too, including the murder of Major General Yonatan “Yoni” Netenyahu (older brother of the Prime Minister), the spearheading force behind the rescue. The impromptu Kaddish uttered by the soldiers flanking his body on the return flight is quite moving.
Still, at the end you cheer for the Israelis even as you mourn the irretrievable loss of life.
Seven Days in Entebbe, directed by José Padilha, stands in stark contrast to the other films, focusing its attention on three of the hijackers. There is the furious Palestinian and two Germans, whose motivations are more enigmatic. The one woman (Rosamund Pike) seems the most eager to kill anyone or everyone. Her rage is far more existential and free-floating than it is political or even targeted.
The gentlest of the lot and the most conflicted (vividly acted by Daniel Brühl) is a left-leaning German publisher, who wants to make a statement that puts him on the right side of history, at least as he sees it. His posturing becomes all too real when he realizes he may actually be called upon to pull the trigger. Throughout, he grapples with Holocaust history and the moral complexity and resonance of contemporary “Germans killing Jews.”
“You are here because you hate your country,” says the Palestinian, “I am here because I love mine.”
“Jews came to Palestine and did to our people what your people did to them,” he adds. “Go back to your nice life. I go back to nothing.”
The dramatization of philosophical differences among the hijackers, informed by class and experience, is not without interest. Unlike the other films, this movie concludes on an introspective and perhaps even conciliatory note as Prime Minister Rabin says that in the future Israel will have to negotiate.
Most off-putting is the interspersed presence of the Batsheva Dance Company. Its members are on a stage seated on folding chairs in a circle. Abruptly, they twisting this way and that to evoke anguish. In each segment the tortured movements grow increasingly intense. These choreographic bits that also serve as bookends to the film are pretentious, totally unaccounted for, serve no discernible purpose, and bring to mind badly done satire.
The topic of the Entebbe raid has surfaced once again with Boaz Dvir’s compelling To Kill a Nazi, which just debuted in Los Angeles. Though it is a documentary, it has the feel of fiction.
It tells the little known story of business consultant Michel Cojot, who was committed to tracking down and killing Klaus Barbie (“the butcher of Lyon”). Barbie was responsible for the deportation and ultimately the death of Cojot’s father in Auschwitz. But when Cojot was in shooting distance of Barbie, he couldn’t do it and tore himself apart for what he viewed as his cowardly indecision. For him, that indecision was both a personal and Jewish flaw.
Depending on your viewpoint, either through destiny or coincidence, a year later he found himself on the ill-fated Air France flight and was unwittingly given a second chance to redeem himself. And he did, facilitating relationships with the hijackers and pilot and flight crew. In so doing he negotiated a plan and retrieved information that played a major role in the successful outcome of the raid. Though the French government still hasn’t honored him Cojot, who died in 1999, found peace with himself as a Jew and a human being.,
It’s a theme that has an indefinite shelf life. And it couldn’t be more timely in light of the surge in antisemitism, the rift among Jews and the ongoing internal and external battle of what it means to be a Jew.
The post The Israeli rescue operation that was tailor made for Hollywood appeared first on The Forward.
