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When Rabin was assassinated, Israel changed before my eyes
The minibus was crammed with Jordanians making their way from the south of the country to Amman. I couldn’t help but wonder why everyone looked so grim. We had departed at dawn, and throughout the three-hour drive, the radio had been dominated by somber discussion. I hadn’t studied any Arabic yet so I couldn’t make out the conversation beyond a smattering of place names: Tel Aviv, Washington, Amman, Al Quds — the Arabic name for Jerusalem.
No one in the minibus said a word, and I didn’t want to break the silence. So I listened to the radio, keeping my ears open for more proper nouns. Peres. Clinton. Hussein. Rabin.
It wasn’t until I walked into the lobby of my hotel in Amman and saw a TV screen showing a photo of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, along with the text “1922-1995,” that I realized something terrible had happened.
My mind raced through worst-case scenarios — a political assassination by a Palestinian group, a countdown to war, retaliation and counter-retaliation, an inexorable spiral of violence. But when I asked the man behind the check-in counter what had happened, he sounded almost relieved.
“Another Jew” did it, he said, before adding, “So there probably won’t be a war this week.”
I was fresh out of college and had never traveled to the region before. My then-girlfriend (now wife) and I had decided to backpack around Egypt, Jordan and Israel, as the overall political situation had seemed positive — at least when viewed from a distance back home in the United States. The previous year, Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat had shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords. Efforts to achieve a two-state solution were moving forward, albeit at a measured pace. It seemed the ideal time to go on a bit of an adventure, and perhaps to feel the hope in the air.
All of those hopes became a blur as we stood in the hotel lobby, trying to figure out what to do next. “There probably won’t be a war this week,” I thought: Instead, an entire country would be sitting shiva, not to mention planning a state funeral for the following day. We made arrangements to go to Jerusalem the next morning.
The road from Amman to Jerusalem by way of the West Bank was nearly deserted. No one spoke a word the entire time, lost in thought, pondering the what-ifs and what-nexts. I expected Israel to be many things, but silent was not one of them.
We arrived ahead of schedule, well before the start of the funeral. As we checked into our new hotel, I asked if it would still be possible to attend the funeral procession, which would begin a few hours later.
“You’re too late,” the clerk told me. “The entire country is already lined up along the route. You might as well watch it on TV at this point.”
I couldn’t just sit there, though. So we left the hotel and began to make our way to the Western Wall.
I’d always imagined my first encounter with Jerusalem’s Old Town would be awash with activity, filled with encounters with street vendors, pilgrims and tourists. Instead the area was nearly deserted. Many shops remained shuttered, save a handful that kept their doors open because they happened to have a TV inside. We stood for a while in one such shop, its owner fidgeting with prayer beads as a small crowd of Palestinian men watched the televised funeral procession in silence.
As we reached the Western Wall, almost no one was present: a smattering of soldiers, a handful of tourists, a davening Haredi man. I ripped two pages from my guidebook and scrawled a pair of prayers on them to tuck between the stones of the wall — one for my grandfather, who had passed away a few years earlier, and one for Rabin. I wish I could remember what I wrote.
After I approached the wall, sirens marking the start of the two minutes of silence began to wail from every direction. The world stopped for two minutes. I stared at the ancient stones, mere inches from my face. Everyone was silent, except for the Haredi man, who continued to quietly pray.
By the time we made it to Tel Aviv several days later, the illusion of normality had returned. People walked along the beach and crowded the outdoor cafes, bundled up in sweaters amid an unseasonal chill in the air, until a downpour sent people scattering. As the weather cleared, I decided to visit Kikar Malchei Yisrael, the square where Rabin had just been murdered.
I had expected the crowds of mourners. But it was the thousands of yahrzeit candles that broke my heart. In some places they were laid out in neat rows, surrounded by drenched flowers; volunteers were drying out each candle and attempting to re-light them.
People had formed some batches of the candles into Stars of David, doves and peace signs. Around them stood children, families, soldiers, most of them quietly grieving. A pair of students sat cross-legged on the wet pavement, engaged in a passionate debate. I couldn’t understand what they said, but the heightened tone of their exchange carried the weight of their worries about the future.
At some point I began reciting Kaddish to myself. People began photographing me, which struck me as odd, until I recalled that I had been doing exactly the same thing to others just a few minutes earlier. I then collected some candles and reassembled them in the form of chai, the Hebrew word for “life.”
I lingered for a while before departing, but returned later that afternoon. The two students were still there.
In the 30 years since that awful week, I’ve thought about them periodically. At the time, they seemed painfully aware their lives had been irrevocably altered by what had transpired, that their hopes and dreams had died alongside Rabin himself.
They must be approaching 50 years old. Have the intervening years been kind to them? Have they prospered, or wasted the decades embittered by the consequences of that seminal moment of their lives, and the life of their country? Have they served in wars, protested against them, or both?
Assuming they are even still alive, do they think about that day each year and feel their heart break all over again like mine does?
And will they, too, light a yahrzeit candle tonight in Rabin’s memory, and for the lost promise of what could have been?
The post When Rabin was assassinated, Israel changed before my eyes appeared first on The Forward.
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Marilyn Monroe would be 100 today. Are we making too much of her conversion?
Back in 2019, Marilyn Monroe’s menorah, a gift from her former in-laws, sold at auction for more than $112,000. The candle in the wind jokes wrote themselves, but how exactly the tragic actress lived her life has long been a point of Jewish fascination.
The effort to make Monroe a Jewish icon is almost certainly strained, though not baseless.
Born Norma Jean Mortenson, she converted to Judaism in 1956 ahead of her nuptials with Arthur Miller. That this detail still commands such attention can’t easily be divorced from certain stereotypes of their mismatched pairing: the beauty and the brain. He, balding and bespectacled, she, a peroxide paragon of bombshell beauty. Philip Roth didn’t need to write about it — Joyce Carol Oates did instead.
But Monroe’s attachment to Judaism, beyond leaving behind such effects as the menorah and an annotated siddur (sold for $21,000 in 2018), may be overstated, even as she continued to identify as a “Jewish atheist” after her 1961 split with Miller. That she engaged with her lessons with some seriousness, according to the rabbi who converted her, may be more a testament to her curiosity and intelligence than a true demonstration of faith.
In 2015, the Jewish Museum in New York offered a useful contrast. An exhibition hosted Andy Warhol’s portraits of Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor presented as a diptych. Taylor’s conversion came about after the death of a Jewish husband and remained important to her through the rest of her life, extending to pro-Israel causes and activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry. (Taylor was buried by a rabbi, Monroe by a Lutheran minister.)
Both women had their films banned in Egypt on account of their adopted faith — in the case of Taylor, this meant completing Cleopatra in Rome. Only one could be said to have lived a thoroughly Jewish life, though Monroe’s death is certainly a mitigating factor, the subject of so many “what ifs.”
When we look at Marilyn as a coreligionist, it may say more about us than her. I suspect the fact she didn’t “look Jewish” is what makes her affiliation matter to so many.
But the affiliations that truly matter are in the credits: Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis, Charles Lederer, Lee Strasberg. The work, or Avodah, is captured in celluloid: the way Sugar Kane takes a belt from her flask and tucks it in her garter or Lorelei Lee swats at her suitors with a fan.
It is Marilyn, not Norma Jean, not Miriam bat Sarah, who continues to have immense cultural cachet, already long exceeding her brief time on earth.
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Retracing the epic journey of the world’s oldest Jew
I, A Wandering Jew. A Five-Century History of our Modern Condition
Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press, 272 pages, $29.95.
My father, an American-born son of Belarusian immigrants, bought the record when it first came out in 1960 and we enjoyed listening to it to no end. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s album The 2,000 Year Old Man featured Brooks as a somewhat laconic old man who responded in Yiddish-inflected English to Reiner’s guileless questions about his long life.
The improvised sketch had apparently begun 10 years earlier, when Reiner, who worked with Brooks on a TV show, turned to him, while testing a new tape-recorder, and asked, “Is it true you were at the scene of the Crucifixion, 2000 years ago?” Jesus Christ, Brooks quipped, was a “nice boy, wore sandals.” William Shakespeare, however, had “the worst penmanship” and when asked if he knew Joan of Arc, Brooks blurted out, “Knew her? I dated her!”
As a kid of 9, I didn’t think that their shtick was anything other than funny. But in retrospect, I can see that the Yiddishkeit tone and audacity of the conceit also answered something bigger and much more sinister. The Shoah had only just ended, the weekend before, as it were. So, the immortality and know-it-all comedy of Brooks’ hero expressed resiliency and social integration in the face of nothing less than genocide. “The 2000 Year Old Man” was, in a Borscht Belt voice, an affirmation of life. My fondness for Brooks resurfaced during the haze of high school, and remained in the back of my mind as decades went by, but it wasn’t until reading Yair Mintzker’s new book, I, Wandering Jew, that I came to appreciate another dimension of its significance, namely, its evocation of the figure of the Wandering Jew.
Originally, the Wandering Jew was an antisemitic trope Christians used to explain the marginality and foreignness of Jews in European society. A cobbler stood at the doorstep of his Jerusalem shop, according to the story, as Jesus labored by, hauling his burden to his death. Refusing his request for help, Jesus cursed the cobbler, who inexplicably came to be known as Ahasverus, the name of a Persian king, to live eternally in exile until the Second Coming. The Jews were thus condemned to a de-territorialized, homeless fate as Christ deniers.
Ahasverus appears and reappears in various forms over the course of European history — often as a tall, severe man who spoke several languages, never laughed and criticized people for moral failures. His story spread in ballads, poems and novels — and eventually in Nazi propaganda — to support the claim that Jews were not only alien to European culture and society but could never live together with Aryans.
Mintzker, a Princeton history professor, has written an intriguing book that traces the legend of the Wandering Jew over the centuries in reverse chronological order, eventually to arrive at the salience of the figure’s story in the author’s own life and times.
The first of his five examples is set in Israel, just a few years after the nation achieved independence, when a mysterious man, known by some as Ben Shoushan, caught the attention of a journalist as he disembarked at the port of Haifa with a forged Moroccan passport that dated his birth in 1902. He seemed to be both middle-aged and ageless, perhaps mad or possibly a genius. The author Eli Weisel had met him at one point immediately after the war and also couldn’t quite make sense of who he was — perhaps a “Kabbalist, comedian and anarchist”? The mystery man, lacking an origin or an income, claimed to speak 30 languages and was said to love riddles.
He spent time in two religious kibbutzim near Tel Aviv. The kibbutzniks recalled him as a harsh, unbearable, eccentric man who lectured on the Talmud, rotating between the communities until he was expelled from both. Leaving Israel in 1956, he was spotted in a Jewish community in Uruguay, where he was regarded as a Wandering Jew, an identity he apparently embraced. In other words, Shoushan was at once a real person, in Mintzker’s view, who also seemed to project a post-Holocaust trope, as of the survival of the Jewish stranger but also the survival of the unconventional Jewish intellectual.
Another version appeared in The Nag, which was an allegorical, 1873 Russian novel by Sholem Yakev Abramovitch in which a broken-down, talking horse declares herself to be a “wandering mare” and demands justice rather than mercy from her tormentors. Abramovitch’s image of the Wandering Jew was somewhat veiled, although the reticent, pitiful animal does admit to being both a horse, passing from one harness to another, and something else. Unable to live or die, she says she wants only to belong — but is dismissed as not human.
In Jewish Memorabilia, Jacob Schudt, who was a Protestant scholar from Frankfurt, adopted the sort of doctrinal view of the legend that the eternal exile of the Jews from Israel was a punishment for having rejected Christ. The final installment of the four-volume work apparently brimmed with antisemitic views that criticized how Jews looked, their lack of hygiene, and purported greed, as well as their supposed penchant for self-flattery. Schudt dismissed the Wandering Jew as nothing more than a fable by which the lower classes could perceive and understand Jews. Yet he also recognized certain flaws in the story — that it contradicted Christ’s compassion, for one. Lacking historical support, Schudt went on to conclude that the story was probably of Catholic origin, or perhaps the result of nothing more than a publisher’s money-making scheme. The figure of Ahasverus, in other words, was a contradiction that featured a real personage who simultaneously never existed.
Mintzker then turns to the centerpiece of the story, an anonymous German broadsheet, the Kurtze Beschreibung, which was a wildly popular text that was first published in 1602 and then republished a dozen times throughout the rest of the century.
It cast Ahasverus as a strange man who met a Lutheran theologian and explained to him that he was a Jewish shoemaker who had been born 1,500 years earlier in Jerusalem, when and where he had refused to help Christ on his way to the Crucifixion and had been cursed to wander the earth until the return of the Messiah. The account included details of the Crucifixion, the deaths of the Apostles, and about Ahasverus himself — for example that he spoke German with a Saxon accent.
Mintzker strives to pin down the author of the pamphlet and how its contents changed over the course of the 17th century. He marshals quite a bit of detailed evidence that leads him to conclude that Paul von Eitzen, a leading a 16th century Lutheran official and contentious pastor in Hamburg who claimed to have met Ahasverus in the 1540s, must have written it. Readers of the pamphlet, Mintzker also notes, would certainly have been able to identify both von Eitzen and the man he called Ahasverus in this version of the story, who was likely a notoriously uncompromising anti-Calvinist named Tilemann Heshusius.
In the final chapter of his well-paced book, Mintzker turns his gaze upon himself — to the meaning of the Wandering Jew in his own life as a yored, an Israeli expatriate.
Mintzker was born and raised in an upper middle-class, progressive Ashkenazi family in Jerusalem, but eventually left the country to go study and then work in the United States. He had learned about Ahasverus from a close high school friend but only came to identify with him in New Jersey, where the image of exile, and of Jews as “eternal strangers,” haunted him and became more and more salient, particularly amid the violence of the past few years in Israel. With the rise of anti-Zionism, Mintzker admits, he came to “embrace the figure of Ahasverus … as a model for political life” but also for his own sense of self.
The 2,000 Year Old Man clearly echoed the legend of the Wandering Jew, in a chutzpadik voice that entertained diaspora American Jews during the immediate post-Holocaust years. But wasn’t this precisely Mintzker’s point? The trope’s meaning, as his book shows us, shifted across time and place. Thus, in this last expression, he comes to own it as an acknowledgement of his own disquiet and alienation, which he connects to his yored autobiography and recent events in Israel that have called Zionism into question. In doing so, the story of the Wandering Jew has shed its antisemitic, racialized roots, or justification for exile once again, to be read anew as a trope of Mintzker’s (and perhaps our) estrangement from contemporary Israeli society. A timely read.
The post Retracing the epic journey of the world’s oldest Jew appeared first on The Forward.
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The mayor missed the Israel Day Parade. Many who went didn’t miss him.
(JTA) — The energy was palpable Sunday as thousands packed a dozen blocks of Fifth Avenue waving Israeli flags for New York’s annual Israel Day Parade. Organizers said the turnout was the largest in the event’s six-decade history.
The procession featured its usual mix of Jewish nonprofits, schools and synagogues marching to blaring Israeli music alongside parade floats sponsored by groups including Nefesh B’Nefesh, the UJA Federation of New York and the Maccabiah Games.
But this year’s parade, which was themed “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists,” unfolded amid growing political polarization over Israel and without New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who became the first mayor in decades to skip the event.
For all the criticism Mamdani has received over his campaign pledge not to attend the event, many of those who did turn out told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency they were glad he wasn’t there.
“He doesn’t like us,” said Andrea Roman, who attended the parade wearing an Israeli flag cape and thought it was “good” that Mamdani hadn’t come. “Why should you be some place where you don’t like? He does not promote peace. This promotes peace, but of course he’s not going to be here.”
Jeremy Bell, 39, also said wasn’t bothered by the mayor’s absence – and that there were many more who felt as he did.
“I don’t think that he was really wanted here,” Bell said, adding, “I don’t want to be here with someone who doesn’t believe in our right to exist and obviously associates with people that don’t have our best interests in mind.”
Despite Mamdani’s absence, the event, known as the largest pro-Israel parade in the world, featured a lengthy roster of political officials and lawmakers. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler were among those in attendance, as were former New York City Mayors Eric Adams and Mike Bloomberg.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who on Thursday said that security preparations for the parade would be “the most extensive” that the NYPD had ever put together, also joined the festivities as an honorary grand marshal.
While many paradegoers said that they never considered staying home because of security concerns, several said they appreciated the presence of thousands of police officers and extensive barricades that blocked the streets surrounding the event.
“We are grateful that tens of thousands of participants and spectators were able to gather safely and proudly in the heart of New York City,” Mitchell Silber, the CEO of the Community Security Initiative, said in a statement. “Today’s success reflects the extraordinary planning, coordination, and professionalism of the NYPD and our law enforcement partners.”
That number was boosted in some cases by participants who said the mayor’s decision to skip the event factored into their own decision to come.
Karene Hermon, 22, said that while previously she would have been more “neutral” about attending, hearing that Mamdani had chosen not to come drove her to “be with my people.”
“I think it sends the wrong message,” Hermon said of the mayor’s refusal to participate. “I think we’re trying to come together, not separate people, regardless of … how you feel about a cause.”
First-time paradegoer Luis Margules travelled to the march from Pennsylvania. He said that he had come because it felt like “a moment to be with Israel.”
“This is my first parade, but I think this year it’s one of the most important ones,” Margules said. “I think the world doesn’t understand the situation with Iran and the Palestinians, and everything is blamed on Israel.”
Ofir Akunis, the consul general of Israel in New York, said in a statement that the parade “delivered a resounding answer to all those who hate Israel.”
“This year’s parade was an unprecedented demonstration of strength by New York’s Jewish community and the people of Israel,” Akunis said. “It sends a clear and unequivocal message: We are here to stay, and we are not going anywhere.”
But not all of the spectators Sunday were there in support.
While there was no large-scale protest visible during the parade, roughly 25 people demonstrated along the route to oppose the inclusion of a record delegation of roughly 10 Israeli Knesset members, including far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and two members of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit party.
As the delegation passed the demonstration, which was organized by the progressive groups Israelis for Peace and Friends of Standing Together New York, protesters shouted “shame” and “war criminals,” according to Tamar Glezerman, an organizer for Israelis for Peace.
“We were there to protest against the Israeli Knesset delegation, the largest of its size of all of the parades, that sent members of the coalition and the so-called opposition to do hasbara and march victoriously up a New York avenue,” Glezerman told JTA in a phone interview Sunday, using the Hebrew word for public relations.
While the focus of the demonstration centered on opposing the Knesset delegation, Glezerman added that “a parade that very much champions unexamined, unchecked and non-critical support of Israel is perhaps important for people here. It is not good for Israelis. It sure as hell isn’t good for Palestinians.”
Margules, in contrast, said that seeing the Israeli Knesset members pass by had made him feel “proud.”
“It’s good to know that even in these dark times we can still be together without violence, and we can disagree on many things, but we have to agree on something,” Margules said. “We are here because Israel exists.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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