It was after thirty years of thinking of myself a semi-scholarly critic of Jewish American comic art, and fifty-plus years since I discovered Mad Comics to be the soul of my childish literary pleasures, that I came across the work and world of Sammy Harkham. There's a good reason for this late discovery: he is so young! Not yet pushing thirty, Harkham already has launched Kramer's Ergot, a premier comics anthology.

The Cover of Sammy's book "Crickets." Kramer's Ergot is "only" an annual, but an extravagant annual with no compromises of any kind to the history of comic art or any other art, nor to politics, nor (and this may be an important point for a former yeshiva bokher still interested in the Torah) to anyone's interpretation of Jewishness. His drawing fills a small minority of the pages because, obviously, he wants to offer as much variety as he can.

 He is thus building comic art in his own fashion. Looking back-though not so far back as the original Mad--I see only Arcade (1975-77), edited by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, and Raw (1980-91), edited by Spiegelman with Francois Mouly, as occupying such a high creative space. This is not to demean Zap, Weirdo (mostly Robert Crumb's Nineties mag), Comix Book, Blab or another zine that Harkham edits occasionally, Drawn & Quarterly Showcase. Or the Best American Comics series with two annual numbers so far, edited by Anne Elizabeth Moore. Each has an honorable and proudly weird place of its own.

Continue reading...

One Tuesday night [a few years back], I sat at a local cafe with a cappuccino and my just-purchased copy of Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath; all of my reading for pleasure seemed to be about Judaism at this point. I had already begun to understand why, on the seventh day, Jews traditionally refrain from lighting fires or using telephones or cooking food or spending money or doing many other things understood to be either technically "work" or outside the spirit of rest that governs the day.

It seemed clear that abstaining from this stuff would create long stretches of silence and a freedom from distraction that could help a person access the most silent, hidden parts of the self. Heschel, however, explained that there was even more to it than that. He wrote,

To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence from external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature-is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man's progress than the Sabbath?[i]

The irony is that human progress depends on saying no to technology and economic engagement, at least for a while. Heschel framed Shabbat as a way of returning to too-oft-neglected ways of being human-a way to help us remember what we have in common with the woman who got up at 4 a.m. to clean the office.

I sipped my drink and I chewed on Heschel. The idea of being free from commercial transactions on Shabbat was attractive. I thought through the implications: If I didn't spend money, I couldn't get the eggplant sandwich I loved from the deli up the street. I wouldn't be able to ride the bus, since I never had a monthly pass. I needed Friday-night money to tip bartenders, pay cover charges, pick up the tab on a date, get into a movie. The list seemed to be endless. No eggplant sandwich?

Continue reading...

Ehud Olmert's announcement that he would step down from office caught no one by surprise. The drama surrounding the announcement was typical of Olmert, a Prime Minister who has always been much more style than substance.

Israel treats its politicians harshly, even by the cynical standards of the twenty-first century. Almost all leave office under a cloud of disgrace. Where American presidents, even those who left office in disgrace, are generally respected figures in their later lives, even towering figures like Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and David Ben-Gurion, all held in almost idolatrous esteem in the United States, were treated much less ceremoniously in Israel.

On the flipside, disgraced leaders in Israel often have an easier time rehabilitating their image than do leaders in the United States, often even climbing the rungs of party politics to regain positions at the top of government. Such was the case with Ariel Sharon, who rebounded from the debacle of the first Lebanon War in 1982 to regain his position in the Likud Party, eventually becoming its leader and winning the premiership before forming his own party. Ehud Barak suffered the worst defeat of any incumbent Prime Minister ever, yet came back to lead the Labor Party and hold the Defense portfolio. Benjamin Netanyahu left office amid scandal and anger, after being soundly defeated by Barak, yet is currently the leading candidate for Prime Minister in most polls. Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres regained the office after earlier tenures that were widely regarded as failures.

Continue reading...

During the 1980s, Israeli filmmakers were preoccupied with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the 1990s, they explored the dynamic between Israel's urban centers and the country's periphery. The past decade has witnessed a rise in films that seek to portray the experience of communities previously considered marginal to Israeli cinema. Avi Nesher's latest drama, The Secrets (Israel/France, 2007), joins a host of recent Israeli films, both feature-length and documentary, which explore Israel's ultra-orthodox community.

Ultra-orthodox Jews were mostly absent from Israeli filmmaking until the 1990s. This is no surprise, because Israeli cinema has historically reflected the identity of the Israeli establishment, promoting secularism and criticizing religion as a sign of ethno-nationalism rather than as a cultural facet of everyday life. From the late 1990s, however, the religious experience moved to the center of stage of Israeli cinema.

Continue reading...

Most of the time, as a society we walk in darkness, wounded by walking blindly into an economic barbed-wire fence here, an environmental open manhole there. Once a generation--if we are lucky, once a decade--there is a flash of lightning in the dark that lights up the truth of our country's politics.

For some of us, Katrina was such a flash of lightning. And now, for some of us, an allegedly kosher meatpacking plant oddly located, far from Jews, in Postville, Iowa.

Even in the dark, there is usually some prophetic voice warning of oncoming damage. In this case, prophetic calls to apply "eco-kosher" and "ethical kosher" standards not only to food but also to such consumables as coal, oil, plastics went back to the work of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in the mid-'70s and my own book Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex and the Rest of Life in the mid-'90s. Calls for Jewish support for unionization and workers' rights went back to 1911 and the 1930s, and the continuing work of the Jewish Labor Committee. Calls for a compassionate Jewish approach to immigration law went back to the work of HIAS, the Jewish Funds for Justice, the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (in Chicago) in two different Jewish coalitions on immigration policy (one moderately liberal, one more progressive) in the mid-'00s.

All these warnings called out the necessity of action; few of the Jewish public got the point.

And then came Postville - not just one lightning flash but a thunderstorm, flash after flash lighting up broader and broader aspects of oppression.

First, PETA filmed the torturous killing of animals who were supposed to be ritually slaughtered in a virtually painless way. Indeed, that was exactly what made their meat kosher for observant Jews (and some other folks who hoped to be getting purer food). For some, under-cover films made of the torture suddenly lit up the whole structure of kosher certification in America, putting it deeply in doubt. Were the Orthodox certification bodies paying no attention? Were the fees they were paid by producers dulling their responses to violations of Jewish law and simple humane decency?

Then--stirred by the kosher factor to look more closely at this plant--a Jewish newspaper, the Forward, and the Jewish Labor Committee began to report rank illegal oppression of the Postville workers - many of them undocumented Guatemalan migrants who were afraid to protest for fear of deportation. That lightning flash revealed not only Postville but a little of what was true about the broader world of immigrant workers.

Whereupon, ironically tipped off by the Forward story, the Federal Migra raided the plant. They charged hundreds of the workers with criminal offenses, sent them to prison, and deported hundreds more. The raid decimated Postville's community, and when an official broke the customary silence, flashed a searing light on how Federal agents behave toward powerless "illegals": no time or lawyers allowed to shape a defense, families shattered.

But--they brought no charges against the rich and powerful owners despite visible evidence of crimes they had committed far worse than those charged to the penniless immigrants. After all, the owners made massive political contributions.

Now larger parts of the Jewish community responded: calls for boycotts; a march of support and collections of money for the workers and their families; some renewed concern about the paralyzed campaign for a comprehensive and compassionate immigration law; (less, but some) renewed interest in stronger pro-labor legislation; a somewhat beefed-up effort by the Conservative denomination to establish "hekhsher tzedek,"its own version of an eco-kosher standard.

But there are three areas in which The Shalom Center seeks a broader vision beyond the lightning flashes:

1. Repairing an unjust "justice system" in which the wealthy are not required to obey the law, while the poor, the powerless, and the desperate are sent to prison for minor offenses, without the opportunity to defend themselves. All Jewish wisdom and all Jewish history teaches: Do not shrug off a system of injustice!

2. Facing the truth that immigration is not a narrowly "domestic" issue. So long as poverty, powerlessness, and environmental destruction in Mexico and Central America drive people to despair, there will be greater numbers of immigrants to the USA than our laws, our economy, and our culture can compassionately sustain. The pressure is a set-up for driving unemployed white and Black Americans into hostility against Hispanic Americans, while the rich and powerful chortle. We must use trade agreements and all other negotiating frameworks to insist on high wages, health and safety standards, and environmental protections for ALL OF US in Anglo and Latino-America, and we must support transnational pressure to those ends by unions, environmentalists, religious communities, and others.

3. Achieving ecological respect and sanity through three factors; how animals are killed; how they live their lives (so eco-kashrut must forbid factory farming, etc); and yet it cannot stop there. It is all too clear that the obsession of many people with eating a great deal of meat is a twin to our addiction to oil and coal as a way to poison the planet. Huge farms of cows and pigs pour methane - an even more dangerous global-scorching agent than CO2 - into the atmosphere. To heal our earth as well as our own bodies, we must return to our forebears' healthier diet of eating meat no more than once or twice a week.

We must go beyond the lightning flashes over Postville -- to a steady, open, sacred light of clarity about the dangers and the damages the lightning has revealed. The light of systemic change is what the Torah calls for.

Continue reading...