Nordau, it would seem, is completely won over to the cause. My talk with him concerns objections in the higher realms; "If the Jews are anthropologically fit for nationhood?-and the like.

Experience will tell.

Nordau thinks that the plan will need three hundred years for its realization.

I believe thirty–provided the idea makes headway.

Nordau seems to have thought that the Jewish body had to evolve in the Darwinian sense before they could be ready–something that would have taken a lot more than 300 years. Herzl’s diary entry on September 3, 1897, contained this boast: "If I were to sum up the [First Zionist] Congress in a word…I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it."

Exactly 50 years and 87 days later, on November 29, 1947, the UN partition vote created the Jewish state; Israel’s nationhood was proclaimed on May 14 the next year. It was not evolution, it was revolution, and it was in large part a revolution of the body.  

Between1904 and 1914 an estimated 40,000 Jews came to Israel. One, Aaron David Gordon, was a founder of the first kibbutz, Degania. Like many Zionists, he thought a major part of the Jewish "problem" was that Jews had an unhealthy alienation from physical labor on the soil. At his death in 1922, he was widely known in Israel as an old man with a long white beard who farmed in the fields of the kibbutz all day and led the young men and women in song and dance at night.

But all was not song, dance, and working the soil. Causes of death ranged from malaria through suicide; there were Arab attacks, and Jews in the older settlements had hired Bedouin and Arab guards – basically, a protection racket in which Jews paid Arabs not to attack them. In 1907 a group of ten Jews began to protect themselves, and their success led to an expanded multi-settlement organization called Ha-Shomer – the Guard. They dressed as Arabs and spoke Arabic well but slung bandoliers of bullets across their chests like Mexican revolutionaries. They were good horsemen, considered both fierce and fair by the Bedouin, and their motto said it all: "By blood and fire Judah fell, by blood and fire Judah will rise up."

The rest, like they say, is history. European Jewry was doomed, and the Zionists who had foreseen that doom took the helm of Jewish destiny. Six million Jewish bodies were crushed by the Nazi murder machine and millions more were permanently hurt in mind and body by the ravages of deliberately inflicted starvation, disease, beatings, loss, humiliation, and more. The Jewish body took on a new element in the form of a tattooed number on the arms of survivors, and this indelible mark on that body will not only outlive them, it will stand out forever in our collective memory as emblematic of what happens when Jews allow others to define their bodies.

Of the remnant, hundreds of thousands went to Israel and followed their Zionist predecessors into blood and fire. But Judah did rise up, and the martial courage and prowess of the new Israeli Jews stunned the world, friend and foe. For Jewish Americans, only a tiny fraction of whom joined those fights, the success of the new Jewish body in the uniform of the IDF would recreate the pride of the distant past.

In the tiny historical space of a single lifetime, Jews have experienced the greatest physical weakness and vulnerability in their long, often tragic history, both as a people and as individual bodies. After centuries of relying on mind, faith, and spirit, they discovered that no matter how good your mind is, bodily weakness is still dangerous. In the same single lifetime they have also experienced their greatest historical strength, giving the lie to millennial slanders about their physical fortitude and courage.

Strength is better.

Melvin Konner’s website is www.jewsandothers.com, See the videotrailer for his new book, The Jewish Body here: http://www.nextbook.org/bookseries/title.html?bookid=25 and listen to a podcast here: http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=3175

The post The Jewish Body, Part 5: The Warriors appeared first on Jewcy.

 What we need to-day, second only to the necessity of closer union and warmer patriotism, is the building up of our national, physical force…We read of the Jews who attempted to rebuild the Temple using the trowel with one hand, while with the other they warded off the blows of the molesting enemy. Where are the warrior-mechanics to-day equal to either feat…For nineteen hundred years we have been living on an idea; our spirit has been abundantly fed, but our body has been starved…

Let our first care to-day be the re-establishment of our physical strength, the reconstruction of our national organism, so that in future, where the respect due to us cannot be won by entreaty, it may be commanded, and where it cannot be commanded, it may be enforced.

This is from a series in American Hebrew, a magazine widely read by American Jews, in 1882. It was a year before she wrote the poem that made her famous, now carved in bronze at the base of the Statue of Liberty. She was Emma Lazarus.

Fifteen or twenty years later, Max Nordau, a Zionist physician, thought he had an answer to the general ill-health and even the racial status of the Jews. He called it Muskeljudentum – "muscle-Jewry" – and it became one of the most debated ideas about the Jews. He first proposed it at the Second Zionist Congress of 1898: "We must think of creating once again a Jewry of muscles." He went on to write an article in 1903, reminding readers that "history is our witness that such a Jewry had once existed.

In Nordau’s view the physical conditions of the Jews, the very elements they lived in, had conspired against their bodies for centuries:

In the narrow Jewish street our poor limbs soon forgot their gay movements; in the dimness of sunless houses our eyes began to blink shyly; the fear of constant persecution turned our powerful voices into frightened whispers, which rose in crescendo only when our martyrs on the stakes cried out their dying prayers in the face of their executioners. But now… at least we are allowed space enough for our bodies to live again. Let us take up or oldest traditions; let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men.

Dr. Nordau intended literally to remake the Jewish body, and it was a message many Jews were ready for. At the Basle conference, he proposed a network of gymnastics clubs to enhance the physical fitness of Jewish youth. These were called Bar Kochba clubs, after the hero of the second revolt against Rome, or Maccabi clubs, recalling other warrior-champions. Within a few years these clubs had spread throughout the European Jewish world, and Nordau’s writing would spread them further:

For no other people will gymnastics fulfill a more educational purpose than for us Jews. It shall straighten us in body and in character. It shall give us self-confidence, although our enemies maintain that we already have too much self-confidence as it is. But who knows better than we do that their imputations are wrong. We completely lack a sober confidence in our physical prowess.

Our new muscle-Jews have not yet regained the heroism of our forefathers who in large numbers eagerly entered the sport arenas in order to take part in competition and to pit themselves against the highly trained Hellenistic athletes and the powerful Nordic barbarians. But morally, even now the new muscle-Jews surpass their ancestors, for the ancient Jewish circus fighters were ashamed of their Judaism and tried to conceal the sign of the Covenant by means of a surgical operation…while the members of the "Bar Kochba" club loudly and proudly affirm their national loyalty.

Interestingly, this was a century after a Jewish bare-fisted prizefighter named Daniel Mendoza thoroughly dominated the London boxing ring (he later wrote a book on scientific boxing) and just as the great Jewish-American boxers were about to do the same on our side of the puddle. Kid Berg, "Corporal" Izzy Schwartz, Al Singer "The Bronx Beauty," Louis Wallach "The Fighting Dentist", Solly Krieger, and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom were just a few, culminating in two of the greatest fighters of all time: Benny Leonard (Benjamin Leiner) and Barney Ross (Beryl Rosofsky), later a World War II hero. There were forty Jewish world championships. But as we’ll see tomorrow, the greatest muscle-jews were just beginning to emerge in their own people’s ancient, sacred land.

Melvin Konner’s website is www.jewsandothers.com, See the videotrailer for his new book, The Jewish Body here:http://www.nextbook.org/bookseries/title.html?bookid=25 and a podcast here: http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=3175

The post The Jewish Body, Part 4: The Muscle-Jews appeared first on Jewcy.

From Samson’s fatal attraction to Delilah to Seinfeld and his (all Jewish) buddies nattering on about some new fox’s “shiksappeal,”Jewish men’s gaze has often strayed outside the fold. A T-shirt currently available on the web has a reclining nude silhouette that’s classic but could be any woman; yet the legend shouts, “I LOVE SHIKSAS.”

Forget for a moment the insult this levels against every Jewish woman who sees it. Even if the jerks who wear this thing burned it, it wouldn’t change what happens in their hearts, minds, and other parts. For many Jewish men, shiksa-hunger is real. And it’s nothing new. Joseph had it, Moses had it, Solomon had it, and so did lots of others in between and since. Why?

First, it’s the lure of the other that applies to all ethnic groups, and we’ve seen it go the other way. But when a group is down and out, it tends to look up for beauty. And the dominant ethnic group for the last couple of centuries has be northern Europeans–tall, slim, healthy-looking folks with light skin, blue eyes, blond hair, and straight, narrow noses.

Michael Jackson’s cosmetic adventures tell us that Jews and women have no monopoly on this, but they have certainly felt the pull. So lots of Jews have become bottle blondes, ironed their hair, and spent half their lives in the gym in a quest for Aryan beauty. But these moves are easy compared to surgery, and it’s very useful to trace the rise and partial fall of rhinoplasty, aka the nose job.

It was invented by Jacques (born Jakob) Joseph, a German-Jewish surgeon in the late 1890s. On his own face he proudly wore the dueling scars from his college days that men of that era needed to move in the highest circles, so he knew that changing a face could make a career.

He did the first one on a young Jewish man who, as Dr.Joseph told the Berlin Medical Society, was happy to move around unnoticed, recovered from his depression, and wanted to party. His sister, sixteen-year-old Adolphine Schwartz, came under the same knife. They were poor, and as she later said, he often fixed the noses of poor Jews for free.

As time went on medical journals and textbooks linked the op with Jewish noses, even though other people also had it. When famed Jewish comedienne Fanny Brice had hers, Dorothy Parker (half Jewish herself) quipped in a column that Brice had “cut off her nose to spite her race.”

In the ‘50s and ‘60s it was a fad among Jewish girls. As Dr.Thomas Rees, who trained many Park Avenue plastic surgeons, said, “Everybody wanted to look like a shiksa.”

But Barbra Streisand didn’t, and she set a new standard of beauty that helped cause a nosedive in Jewish nose jobs. Yet in the ‘90s some textbooks were still talking Jewish noses. And an Orthodox plastic surgeon said, “I come from a family where four out of five kids wanted rhinoplasty. I don’t think they wanted to look Swedish. I think they all had beaks.”

Beaks? It’s a fine line between wanting your beak bobbed and wanting to look less Jewish, and where you draw it depends on whether you think there’s an abstract standard of beauty independent of culture. I also don’t blame anyone for wanting to do it. And it’s not going away.

It’s subtler these days, but it happens, and there’s a lively buzz on the web about whether Natalie Portman (born Herschlag), Winona Ryder (Horowitz), Gwyneth Paltrow (of the Paltrowitzes), Sarah Jessica Parker (of the Bar-Kahns), Rachel Weisz, Tori Spelling, Roseanne Barr, and Kate Hudson have or have not had one, complete with earlier and later photos. I’m not saying, and I’m certainly not judging–they should live and be well and keep being famous.

Meanwhile, back in the Middle East where the “Jewish” nose comes from, there’s pretty intense irony: a huge surge in nose jobs among our Muslim cousins in–can you guess?–Iran.

Melvin Konner’s website is www.jewsandothers.com. You can watch the video trailer for his new book, The Jewish Body, here: http://www.nextbook.org/bookseries/title.html?bookid=25 and listen to a podcast here: http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=3175

The post The Jewish Body, Part 3: The Nose Jobs appeared first on Jewcy.

Your mother told you men only want one thing, and you may have rolled your eyes, but she had a piece of the truth. Biology and common sense both tell us sex is something women have and men want. We can try as hard as we want to talk our way around this, but we can’t make it any less true–for the Jews or any other people.

In Portnoy’s Complaint, the insanely randy main character famously tells his analyst, "LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!" He’s feeling down because he couldn’t get it up while trying to rape an Israeli soldier-girl who unmanned him.

But Portnoy’s droopiness aside, nobody ever took the id – Freud’s word for our sexual instincts – out of Yid. The first commandment is "Be fruitful and multiply," and so far there’s just one way to do that. Like all men, the great rabbis were scared of their own sexual drive and the power that gave women. But they didn’t lose their sense of humor.

In one Talmud story, the Rabbi Amram has some women travelers staying in one of his rooms, only reachable by a ladder that takes ten men to move it. The rabbi catches a glimpse of a woman and moves the ladder back himself with superhuman lust. But as he’s climbing up to them, his judgment takes over: "Fire at Rabbi Amram’s," he yells, and his colleagues rush over and save him–and the women–from himself.

In another story, two top sages are walking behind a woman.The senior one says they have to get out in front of her or they’ll be tempted.The other reminds him that he once said "fit men" can be around women. Answer: "I didn’t mean fit men like you and me!" Believe it or not, the Talmud also brags about the size of certain rabbis’ organs.

Even more explicit are descriptions of their beauty – the rabbis, not the organs. And beauty is biblical too. Abraham lies about Sarah being his sister when they travel, so he won’t be killed by strangers lusting after her. Jacob gets Leah first but wants Rachel, the pretty one. David watches Bathsheba bathing. Result: adultery and quasi-murder, but also the birth of Solomon and his glorious reign.

So the Jews always kept the id in Yid. Unlike the Christians who surrounded and oppressed them, Jews never considered celibacy a virtue. Sure, sex was dangerous. You had to control it. You had it with another person, of the opposite sex, who you were married to. You had to have it just so often depending on your occupation (scholars more than laborers), and the pace would be hard for some modern couples. Doing it on Shabbat was a mitzvah, doing it during menstruation a no-no. But not do it at all? You have to be kidding.

The menstrual restriction mattered a lot. For the first twelve days of the month, a woman couldn’t have sex or even touch a man, and thi — along with men’s pathetic distractibility – meant women were kept out of the public sphere, and even more so, the religious sphere. This shaped Jewish women’s destiny.

But even the very Orthodox say that when the wife comes back from the mikvah, the ritual bath, after her twelve "unclean" days, and lets hubby know she’s ready, it’s like a monthly honeymoon. Too much availability, they say, makes marriage stale, while their laws and rituals perk things right up again.

Men do have to go to the mikvah at times, when they are unclean because of, say, a wet dream. According to folklore, this means the man was seduced in his sleep by Lilith – Eve’s uppity, hyper, oversexed predecessor – and may now be the father of imps and demons.

But the legitimate sex appeal of Jewish women was perfectly kosher, and of course it affected non-Jews too. In the Purim story, the Jews of Persia are saved because a king is overcome by Jewish beauty, and when we dress up our little girls like Esther year after year, it tells them a lot about what we think.

In English literature too, despite its anti-Semitism, Jewish beauty brings Gentiles to their knees. Shylock may have his "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech, but we know he’s a monster and a caricature of Jewish male ugliness. Yet his daughter Jessica is a beauty sought and won by Lorenzo, a Christian, and she ends up trashing the faith of her fathers. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe has another famous father-daughter pair. Isaac the greedy moneylender is another cartoon, but his lovely daughter Rebecca wins the hearts of not one but two Christian knights. Unlike Jessica, though, she’s a true daughter of Israel, and no one can blame her for being beautiful.

So for Jews sex is normal and good, however potentially dangerous, and Jewish beauty is a key thread in the weave of the tradition. But of course, just as non-Jews get gaga over Jewish women, Jewish men fall under others’ spells. More on that tomorrow.

For an exchange between Konner and a distinguished Orthodox rabbi on women’s roles, with comments by smart Jewish women, click here.

Konner is the author of "The Jewish Body" and is guest-blogging on Jewcy all week.

The post Jewish Body Part 2: The Sex appeared first on Jewcy.

Jewish Bod 1: The Circs

Have you seen the picture bouncing around the net? One oft hose signs with movable letters on a lawn outside a synagogue: "MADOFF BRIS TODAY. NOT JUST THE FORESKIN. THE WHOLE SCHMCK. NO ANESTHESIA. FUN FOR ALL." They may have wanted to castrate Bernie, but they delicately circumcised the word "schmuck" for some reason, which after all just means jewel – as in, family jewel.

In most of the old circ jokes, castration was an accident, not payback for the cad who palmed billions. But to Freud and friends, successful circumcision was a ritual mini-castration, some sort of racial memory of what fathers wanted to do to sons, a stand-in for the real thing. Odd for a practice the Jews always saw as perfecting the family jewel, not destroying it.

It goes back to B’reishit, the book of Genesis, and you could say it’s an emblem of genesis itself. Bris doesn’t mean foreskin snipping, it means "covenant," a deep and subtle bargain. God promises Abraham as many descendants as the stars, but… There’s this little thing he has to do to seal the deal, and do the same to his sons, his servants, and every male child from here to the stars.

And any male who doesn’t have this done "that soul will be cut off from his people, for he has broken My covenant." So it’s either the one cut or the other.

There’s a midrash, a rabbinical back-story, attached to this passage. Abraham doesn’t just pick up his blade and start slicing…he wants to know what he did to deserve the honor. Answer: You were the first to be worthy of it. After a couple of more "but-but"s from Abe (he is 99 after all), God says, look, just do it, or I’ll un-create the world.

Wow. Not just destroy it, like God did back in Noah’s time. Un-create it. Run the tape backwards, as if it never existed. All the way back to "without form and void."

It’s almost as if the whole point of Creation was to get to that moment, that bargain. And of course, at that moment, the Jews as a people are born. If you were male, you had to have it; if female, it was the only family jewel you could play with, and all your sons had to have it too, often while you watched. (I can hear Tevye saying, "Can’t You choose somebody else for a change?") This may have been God’s idea of perfection, but there was definitely pain involved.

The, um, point was the opposite of what Freud thought. It wasn’t, symbolically, to cut the whole thing off, it was to make it perfect, to complete the work of Creation–the first tikkun olam. And the result was opposite too. Castration cuts your reproduction short; circumcision makes you massively fertile, numerous as the stars.

The fertility link is common toother cultures that circumcise sons–often at puberty, like the Australian aborigines and a number of African groups. You make a boy a man and you make him fertile in one swipe of the knife.

Is there anything to that? Well, we now know circumcised men and their partners have fewer STDs, which can block fertility, and the women have less cervical cancer. It’s been proven in Africa to reduce the spread of AIDS. But for the Jews throughout the centuries, it wasn’t mainly the hygiene, it was the covenant.

And the identity. Cut off from his people was no joke, and neither was the fact that doing it cut you off from everyone else. Ancient Greek Olympians, gorgeous as gods, competed nude to show their splendor, and they ridiculed the Jews who tried to measure up. However good they were, they were maimed. Pathetically, some tried to reverse their circumcisions to better their circumstances, but this left a lot to be desired.

And of course, many of us who grew up in the wake of the Shoah had nightmares about the "drop-your-pants" moment when the SS man would expose us for who we were. So, now that almost every man in America has one, what does the circ really say about who we are?

It still says what it always said: Jewish boy. Jewish man. Not cut off from his people, past, present, or future. And not cut off from the God his people believe in, whether or not he believes in God himself. So don’t do it in passing in the hospital, just to reduce infections, or to make him look like Dad. Do it on day eight, ceremoniously, and honor the countless generations who risked their lives and those of their sons to keep this precious tradition, to keep this people whole, and to keep the bargain with whatever force or spirit brought them from ancienttimes till now, through untold challenge and unspeakable adversity, to a time of tremendous achievement and triumph.

Melvin Konner’s new book is The Jewish Body, in the "Jewish Encounters"series. 

You can see the trailer for it here: http://www.nextbook.org/bookseries/title.html?bookid=25 and learn more at his website,www.jewsandothers.com.

The post Jewish Body Part 1: The Circs appeared first on Jewcy.