Last month, The Scroll editor Adam Chandler uncovered a curious charm for sale on Ebay. This mysterious creature, identified by the seller as a “Unique Vintage Navajo Moose 925 Sterling Silver Pendant, Mariking 0.8 grams,” happens to look a lot like a certain Semitic symbol (the Yud becomes the tusks, facing outward, see it?), and readers were intrigued.

Yesterday, a Scroll reader reported another sighting of the mythical beast, this time in a Houston suburb. He was quick to qualify his discovery, however:

I cannot confirm that this particular pendant is the actual and now famous “E-Bay Navajo Moose.” My gut tells me one of the Israelis working at a kiosk in our local mall has stumbled upon a clever way to off-load a surplus-shipment of Chai pendants.

Have you seen the Navajo Moose?

The Navajo Moose Is Now a Fashion Trend [The Scroll] Navajo Moose: Jewish Spirit Animal

The post Navajo Moose Pendants Are the New Chai Necklaces appeared first on Jewcy.

Orthodox Jewish chef-turned-musician Alex Clare—the man behind this summer’s relentlessly popular song, “Too Close”—listed his favorite kosher restaurants for food website Immaculate Infatuation’s Friday Fives feature. Spoiler alert: the globe-trotting musician’s favorite kosher joint is in Crown Heights:

“My all time favorite restaurant is Basil in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Most Kosher restaurants you go into and you know it’s kosher. The food is horrible, service sucks. With this one you’d never know. The food is phenomenal. The branzino salad, grilled fish on cold lettuce is fantastic. Basil ice cream. The thing I would order are the polenta fries, cut soft and fluffy in the middle, crispy on the outside.”

Also on his list are LA’s Mexikosher and Shiloh’s, The White House Express in London, Einstein’s in Munich, and Birthright hot spot Burgers Bar on Emek Refaim in Jerusalem.

We do take some issue, however, with one thing the Immaculate guys write in their intro to Clare’s picks: “Being a touring artist is challenging, we can’t imagine that there are a lot of kosher restaurants to choose from when one is in Houston, TX.” We checked with our Houston correspondent, The Scroll editor Adam Chandler’s mom, who says there are in fact several kosher restaurants in Houston, and that the kosher pizza there is great.

Her Houston picks: Madras (Indian), Aroma (pizza and salads), Saba (dairy), My Pita (Israeli, with good shawarma), and Suzie’s (eclectic), and Nosher at the J (sandwiches, soups).

And finally, here’s how you know Alex Clare:

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Solo albums come in many shapes and sizes. Some, like in the case Justin Timberlake, are fame grabs, attempts at being a star not tied down by any band mates (like Joey “Fat One” Fatone); some, like in the case of Albert Hammond Jr., are the result of sidemen looking for their shot at front-man perks; some are the result of a perfect blend of inspiration and accident. Kiss Full of Teeth the new album from Takka Takka’s Gabriel Levine is most definitely the latter. Performing under the name Gabriel & the Hounds, his solo effort marks the most personal music of his career. He told me, “the project started with a fake name but the songs were too close to the bone to release them under another name.”

The album, which will be released stateside on February 28^th, is exactly to Levine’s vision. The albums quirks and off-center moments are what happen when an artist is allowed complete freedom to experiment. The most successful of which, is the surprising use of heavy classical arrangements. Songs will quickly move from soft guitar strums to chamber orchestra, all while never losing sight of his voice and lyric. His understated songwriting allows the record to remain grounded and feel personal.

I got to speak to Gabriel about writing and recording Kiss Full of Teeth with an all-star line-up made up of various members of the Brooklyn music scene and play a music version of the game fuck/marry/kill:

JESSE: Was there a specific moment or song that you realized what you were writing wasn’t Takka Takka music?
GABRIEL: “Lovely Thief” was definitely not a Takka song.

How would you describe this difference?

The batch of songs that became the Hounds record, pull from a different set of influences, a different palate, a different process, and a different group of musicians. They feel very different to me, approached in a more immediate and personal way. Is it like Pepsi and Coke? It’s more like grapefruits and calamari.

What made you decide that you wanted to continue down the path of this diversion?
Basically, I wanted to make a new Takka record about a specific thing. So, I set about writing songs around a set of rules, so of course, I ended up writing a ton that didn’t fit into the Takka mission statement. I shared those songs with some friends who wanted to play on them. One thing led to another, without a plan, or path and we ended up with the Hounds record.

With the new Takka Takka album set to come out soon as well, did you find yourself trying to write both at the same time?

I have written so much music in the past few years, it’s insane. It’s enough for 4+ albums worth. I hope to keep up the productivity. I am just now happy to share this music with others!

I think a song like “Lovely Thief” perfectly encapsulates the instrumentation of the record. It starts with just voice and guitar, and it sounds very much like the type of song someone would write and perform alone. But then as the song progresses, more and more orchestrated elements are introduced. When writing this song, and all the others, did you think they would have this added instrumentation?

No. Every song started out as just me and a guitar—I never anticipated the insane amount of arranging and instrumentation that would find its way into the songs in the end. As I said, I had no real plan other than to make a personal record that sounded like an [Roy] Orbison record. I guess that is a plan.

Who did the arrangements and how did you come about working together on the project?

Mike Atkinson. Our mutual friend (and my manager) Lisa Moran introduced us. They had worked together on other projects and when she heard my demos we thought some “real” instruments would sound nice on them.

How collaborative was the writing process between you two?

Mike fleshed out a lot of ideas I put together on synths or in Reason, using fake strings and horns. We worked closely on crafting the perfect orchestration. He’s amazing to work with. Having never studied music, I am always in awe of people who know what they’re doing!

The album starts and ends with what can best described as minimalist classic music. Where did this come from? What do you think it says about the rest of the record?

I was first introduced to Philip Glass in 1992 in a work called the The Voyage, commemorating Columbus’s arrival into the New World. The opera ends with a spaceship descending. Ever since that moment I have always wanted to make music like Mr. Glass. Of course I don’t and I can’t. This is my homage.

It is a solo record insomuch as it has your name on it and you wrote all the songs, but the album was made with a lot of collaborators. How did you go about finding people to work with? And what do you think it says about the camaraderie of the Brooklyn scene?

Many of the people on the record are friends and people whom I have played shows with, opened for, drank with, argued with, and love. There are so many amazing musicians here in Brooklyn and I am very lucky to have had them play on this album.
How important was it to maintain an intimacy to the recording, even when you have some many collaborators?

The core of the record is its intimacy. All the vocals and acoustic guitars were recorded in my home – in my living room (it sounds better than the bedroom). It started as “Gabe’s whisper in your ear” but with a little bombast.

Vulnerability is a major theme in the record both in terms of the lyrical content and just the fact that it’s your name on it. Was that something that you were conscious of or something that revealed itself afterwards?

I am never conscious of what I am doing. It is definitely something that is still revealing itself to me. Especially, as I prepare for shows!

Did you feel like there was less pressure with project because there are fewer expectations or more because it is you solo?

Yeah, I felt zero pressure to do anything above and beyond Takka. It was so freeing to just make music and not make a follow up record.

Where Takka Takka has explored African and World music influences, this project seems focused on Western tradition. Did you see that sonic theme working its way through the record?

I certainly tried to make a record that could sit next do Buddy Holly or Roy Orbison. It’s just where my ear was when I was recording. Just as African and Indonesian music was in my ear when I was into the last Takka record.

Was your willingness to experiment with this and in other ways a response to the freedom of being solo?

Yes, there was no “sound” that was established that I needed to think about when working on this record. The songs were what they were and the arrangements and additions were all decided by the songs themselves.

Were there certain former lead singers, whose solo records/careers you looked to for inspiration? Not just necessarily sonically but to get a sense of the psychology of releasing a side project.
No, I didn’t even think of it as a subset of music. That’s interesting. There are so many…. As I answer the obvious pops into my head. Peter Gabriel and Bryan Ferry.

Have you heard of the game Fuck/Marry/Kill?

No….um…

It’s a game where you are presented three options and you have to decide which you’d fuck, which you’d marry, and which you’d kill. I wanted to try something similar but musical. It’s called Single/Album/Kill. I’ll give you three musicians and you have to decide which you’d want to record a single with, which you’d want to record and album with, and who’d you kill and why. This is a special solo projects addition.

We’ll start with an easy one: Sting, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel:

Kill Sting. Love him, but he’s too fit.

Single with Phil because he’s so pop-crafty.

Album with Peter Gabriel because that would be an experimental mindfuck.

Black Francis, Stephen Malkmus, Thurston Moore:

I will have to break the rules and say that we would have to form a Travelling Willburys style band and record at least two amazing albums together.

Chris Cornell, Darius “Hootie” Rucker, and Eddie Vedder (but he’s only going to play ukulele):

I think they already were killed off musically. No?

Last one. Gwen Stefani, Fergie, Beyonce:

Pass.

Last question. I know you are finishing up the next Takka Takka album. What can we expect from it?

We just finished mixing the Takka record. It’s insane. I keep describing it as Metal Machine Music meets Burt Bacharach. But it’s more like a Pink Floyd record than anything else. It’s like nothing we’ve ever done.

The post Jewcy Interviews: Gabriel Levine of Takka Takka and Gabriel & The Hounds appeared first on Jewcy.

Last night was the third and worst episode of Smash thus far. Katherine McPhee got to sing some cover and look like a covergirl, there was a British-off by the show’s resident British dudes, Debra Messing got to where a few cardigans, Angelica Huston threw multiple drinks in her ex-husband’s face and so on and etc. Somehow an episode with multiple major plot developments felt like it went nowhere. At its worst, we now know, Smash feels like an hour-long trailer for the next episode. Yet in spite of, or maybe because of the episode’s lousiness, Smash’s bigness was on full display. There hasn’t been a show of this scale and production ambition in years.

Well, specifically, two years.

The first scene of the series was a glossy shot of Katherine McPhee, all sparkles and fake smoke, singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”* It was arresting, simply do to how unlike anything else it looked. It instantly reminded me of Lost’s famous first shot, in which Jack opens his eyes to see the post-plane crash carnage spinning around him. Explicitly and tonally, both these scenes couldn’t be more different, but they do share the trait of being different from everything else that has come before it as well.

In addition to this—and that both have punchy one-syllable names—there are some genuine similarities. Both share an uncommonly large cast set in a large “foreign” setting (Is the business of Broadway inherently a mystery that people care about? The show surely thinks so, dropping the word “agent” last night more often than any show I can recall, including Entourage). The first episode established nine main characters, with the a tenth added last night. Ten principal characters, six of which could be considered leads, is so obscenely many that it sends a certain message, this is a “big” show.

So far this largeness seems to be the main goal—quality will come later. In that way, it resembles later Lost, when the mythology took precedent over keeping the dialogue sharp and characters evolving. It’s here where each show’s biggest similarity rears its respectively Jewish head; both started as broad visions by their heavyweight creators, who in turn put it in the hands of others. Lost was J.J. Abrams’s response to ABC asking him for a scripted version of Survivor—Smash is the result of Steven Spielberg having the idea of creating a TV show about creating a Broadway musical that would lead to the creation, and success, of the actual Broadway musical (the man is dying to EGOT). Leaving both shows with more successful sets that scripts.

So far, for Smash it has worked to garner popularity, just like Lost had. Both Abrams and Spielberg are known for being populist visionaries and their respective shows are designed for a big tent. Smash waters down its dialogue so it always goes down easily (That last sentence, if paired with a wink, would be perfect for Smash—you’re welcome, Mr. Spielberg). It focuses, probably rightfully so, on broad character types—the young Mid-Western performer trying to make it in the big city, the uptight working mom trying to have it all, the untrustworthy British charm machine, the sassy divorcee—instead of subtle explorations of Broadway. Just like how Lost was confined to the rules of science fiction, Smash accepts the trappings of musicals.

Smash is not Mad Men. Subtly is spurned in favor of every character always telling the audience exactly what they are thinking, through song or not. To the show’s backers, that’s exactly the point, Smash is hoping to do little more than accompany your weekly serving of popcorn, oohs, and ahhs. I’ll keep watching for that purpose alone. That and I want to see what happens when they get off the island, Manhattan.

*This was meant to be an allusion to her “famous” audition for American Idol, which I believe has since been added to the Library of Congress.

The post Jews Watching TV: Smash Is The New Lost appeared first on Jewcy.

If you don’t know Deborah Feldman yet, you will soon. (Read here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)  With a publicity onslaught rarely seen on the arrival of a new writer (The View!) we are bound to hear more of her in the upcoming weeks. In short, Deborah Feldman grew up in what many would call the misogynistic, insular world of Satmar Hasidim. Married at 17, Feldman then left the community to live the life of an independent single mother in NYC. Hermemoir , entitled Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots is not necessarily unique, her stye, at certain points well written, at certain points displaying basic mistakes of craft, both merit some attention, especially in the young adult crowd, but its ferocious reception strikes me as curious and worthy of analysis. I believe the hoopla speaks to a certain cultural shallowness in our understanding of religion and our definition of freedom.

For generations now, we’ve been living in a time in which religious transformation signifies somewhat the norm. Pulling apart the pieces, or dismantling, or wiping off the dirt of your religious personality (the different metaphors matter,) involves inner turmoil. Not to say the transition must entail sadness, or a mourning period, but a religious connection, especially one which entrenches itself deep in your inner psyche, requires precise, long surgery to remove, and surgery is always a trauma of sorts. Consequently, despite their prevalence, stories of religious transformation can be interesting, insightful, harrowing when approached with humility, sophistication, and a deep understanding of the larger mechanics at work, an understanding that requires time, thought, and patience.

I know that in the world of books, just as in every other world sensationalism sells. The masses seek out gossip, especially of the insulated religious kind (who amongst us doesn’t enjoy a small romp on the high horse of self righteousness, especially against religious extremists?) and young adult audiences  just want to know that no matter the situation you can do it, on your own, you can achieve and accomplish your dreams, which is no small lesson, and one that bears repeating. For me though, I know that Feldman can accomplish much more than a simplistic vision of unambiguous stories that appeal to something visceral in us all.

I met with Feldman before and after I read her story. Sometimes, I wonder about the choice to publish the book. Feldman wrote her memoir in the immediate wake of tearing away from Satmar, and because of that, the choice to publish this book strikes me as choice in the infancy to childhood stage of religious transition. It feels as if Feldman forgot not to send that angry letter we write, and then put in our desk drawer, and wait a week to send until our anger abates. The end of her book displays a picture of her, sitting on a bench, looking flirtatious, in pants, while smoking a cigarette….Freedom! Albeit, an empty looking one.

Besides the book itself, the publicity surrounding of the memoir is the type that makes me sad the way the insistence of a GoDaddy.com commercial makes me sad. Some of the publicity stunts, and some of what she says in interviews sound downright sensationalist and self aggrandizing. For example, the hyper-sexualized NY Post spread reeks somewhat of an antiquated idea that the antidote to the obsession with modesty displayed by Hasidic sects lies in the opposite choice of focusing even more on sexuality, which in the end of the day, still treats women as an objects. I feel no need to defend the Satmar community, and I don’t believe, necessarily, in the worry of airing dirty laundry. However, I feel that this book deserved a greater gestation period to mature. It bespeaks little understanding of the conceptual background from which she came, or of the life she chose as a replacement. Feldman writes from the early stage of religious transformations, a world in which her personal wisdom is something taken for granted, not earned.

In private conversations, though, Feldman speaks intelligently, almost in a lamenting tone about the price necessary to pay to sell books, mainly the sensationalist tone adopted in the latter part of the book title: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, or the title of the NY Post piece: “Woman Breaks Free!”, or the title of an ABC News piece: Hasidic Hell. For the most part I choose to assume that her publicist desired to create a public persona of Feldman as some kind of forward thinking, independent woman/sex symbol because otherwise, I don’t know how to spin a desire to see oneself as Kardashian-esque as sophisticated, or forward thinking. In fact some of the NY Post interview smacks of a certain kind of childish understanding of freedom as the freedom to do whatever you want as opposed to the freedom to search for your own version of the good life.

When you read the book, or talk to her, or read one of her interviews, you cannot discount her courage, her vision, her tenacity, independence, and bravery, but in many ways, these come off as largely the sounds and rumblings of a once powerless, victimized teenager, raging against her machine, instead of a sophisticated, calm look at an important transformation, or the larger social issues at work. Part of the immaturity stems from the realization that just because you break free from a repressive culture doesn’t mean that you immediately, or even slowly, become a different person. Tact, nuance, and subtlety come from a long time of struggling with ambivalence, the ambivalence of modern living.

I think the larger problem will lie in the inevitable, staid, tired cultural backlash. Some will see her story as a heroic escape that speaks of the larger ills of religion; a true American hero, right here! To them, the simple response is that this story, worn out with time, demands complication, not repetition. Others will see it as airing dirty laundry for narcissistic purposes, which I do disagree with because these types of stories do deserve their space, but both of these viewpoints stagnate our conversation about Hasidim. We treat them as angels or demons but never as humans.

Few books get written with the warmth and wit of an insider, detailing the range of experiences, both horrific and holy, the devotion, kindness of its members along with the insularity, intolerance, and mistrust. The world needs less of a tabloidesque, pandering view that caters to our need to feel superior, and more of balanced, nuanced understanding of that which we find strange, and yes, perhaps oppressive. I know, or trust, that Feldman, a talented writer, will take on this more mature task with time. In fact, I know that she hopes to open up a center for similar Hasidic women with some of the profit from her books. Perhaps the ends do justify the means. Regardless, for now, we get to sit back and watch the show. Good Luck, Deborah.

The post Making Sense Of Deborah Feldman And Post-Hasidim Memoirs appeared first on Jewcy.

With Book of Mormon winning a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album this weekend, super-producer Scott Rudin became the 11^th person to ever win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony or as it’s commonly referred, EGOT. Rudin is the sixth Jew to do so (6.5 if you count Whoopi Goldberg, which you probably shouldn’t). Controlling the media or not, that is still an incredibly high percentage for a people that make up such a small percentage of the non-Hollywood population. Moreover, there are many Jews fighting Ms. Kate Winslet for the chance to be the next EGOT. Here are the five most likely to pull it off:

Person: Matt Stone
Awards Won: Emmy for South Park, Grammy for Book of Mormon, Tony for Book of Mormon
Missing Award: Oscar
Likely Path to the EGOT: An adaption of Book of Mormon into film. At minimum it would be a lock for a Best Original Song nomination. If it is executed incredibly well, there is also the potential for Best Adapted Screenplay and even Best Picture. Of all the people on this list, this seems most weirdly plausible.
Odds: 3:1

Person: Barbara Streisand
Awards Worn: Emmy for multiple projects, Grammy for multiple projects, Oscar for Funny Girl
Missing Award: Tony
Likely Path to the EGOT: Some say Streisand has already EGOTted, due to her Special Achievement Tony Award, but they are not EGOT purists like you or I. Personally, it feels sacrilegious to presume that The Babs wouldn’t be able to win a Tony on her own.  Hey Mr. Broadway Producer Man, do I have a show for, it’s called: “An Evening with Barbara Streisand.” She’ll win all the Tonys.
Odds: 4:1

Person: Stephen Spielberg
Awards Worn: Emmy for multiple projects, Oscar for multiple projects
Missing Awards: Grammy, Tony
Likely Path to the EGOT: S-squared is the only member of this list missing two awards; however, considering his all-consuming Hollywood power, an EGOT is firmly within his reach—especially, if he is reaching to Smash something (ba dump cha). Smash was designed to be such a runaway success that it would effectively work as promotion for a Broadway version of the show within the show. Marilyn The Musical very possibly can win a Tony for Best New Musical and a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. If not those, there are probably a zillion other projects he has in the works. The man is going to EGOT, even if he has to turn Jurassic Park into a Broadway show.
Odds: 8:1

Person: Randy Newman
Awards Won: Emmy for multiple projects (including Cop Rock!), Grammy for multiple projects, Oscar for multiple projects
Missing Award: Tony
Likely Path to the EGOT: Four words: “Short People The Musical”. Seriously though, Randy Newman is an incredibly gifted songwriter, especially in the realm of hired composition. It stands to reason that even if Newman doesn’t write a musical himself, Disney might ask him to spearhead the music for a big Broadway adaption of Toy Story or The Princess and the Frog.
Odds: 10:1

Person: Stephen Sondheim
Awards Won: Grammy for multiple projects, Oscar for Dick Tracy, Tony for multiple projects
Missing Award: Emmy
Likely Way to EGOT: It’s not an easy road for him, but in this recycled culture, some Producer (maybe Scott Rudin) might turn a Sondheim classic into a TV show, any day now. West Side Story, on Wednesdays at 10pm on NBC; you know you’d watch that and you know The Sondhammer would get nominated for it. He might be the dark horse in this race but maybe the Emmy voters will pity his age.
Odds: 20:1

The post Who Will Be the Next Jewish EGOT? appeared first on Jewcy.

As far as minority representation on television is concerned, some seem to think that Jews have gotten off pretty lucky.  TVTropes.org a collection of recurring tropes and archetypes in TV, Film and books posits that Jews are plentiful in TV and film because the influence Jews wield in Hollywood.  A section on the site titled, “You Have To Have Jews” lists the examples of TV shows with predominant Jewish characters, it is however surprisingly short, and filled with almost entirely contemporary examples.   On Wikipedia’s List Of Fictional Jewish Characters, the same characteristic is present, examples of Jewish TV characters from before the 1990’s are few, and from before the 1970’s non-existent.   TVTropes has also compiled of tropes specific to Judaism including some predictable, and some less so.  Predictably Jews are stereotyped as: cheap, argumentative, bad-ass (only if they’re Israeli), nerdy, complaining, sexy (to non-Jews) and sexually obsessed (with non-Jewish women.)  More interestingly, the site points out the tendency for Jews on TV to be always be portrayed as Ashkenazi, never Sephardic as well as the tendency for Jewish characters to be paired with Irish characters.  Then there’s “The Ambiguous Jews” characters often played by Jewish actors with Jewish characteristics or tendencies but who are either never identified as Jewish or only cryptically so, such as David Duchovny as Fox Mulder on The X Files. In attempt to quell any sensitivity, the site goes onto reason that there was once few career options for the ambitious, educated non-Christians, and that Jews happened to be among the few willing to take the risk on both film and TV when they were new mediums.  As a result, the Jews practically built Hollywood, yet they are still so under and misrepresented.  Spike Lee popularized the term, “The Magical Negro” while lecturing to a group of students at Washington State University, but it had been ostensibly identified as a trope some time before that.  Most authors cite Sidney Portier’s role in The Defiant Ones as the first of this kind, but similar examples of African American characters span up to the present. Though the stereotypical and often demeaning trope is most pervasive with black fictional characters, in more recent years it’s seemingly spread to other minorities.  The Magical Minority has 3 basic characteristics.

1. A Sacrificial Lamb: A magical minority is put into a fictional world to further the agenda of the white male protagonist.  Most often to help them see some kind of evident truth and overcome some kind of obstacle.  Not always, but often the Magical Minority will give their lives for the protagonist’s cause.
2. Sagacious: Particularly when applied to an African American Character, a sort of folksy, “seen it all” kind of wisdom is needed in order for the Magical Minority to further the agenda of the protagonist.
3. Magic: The extent of a magical minority’s magic differs from character to character, story to story and minority to minority, and some characters’ powers are more overt than others.

The examples of such characters are many but here’s a start.  Notable Magical African American Characters include, Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance, Scatman Crothers in The Shining, Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty and Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile. These characters all share folksy wisdom, martyrdom and numerous magical abilities.  But the Magical Character Trope has made its way across the rainbow, pervading minorities throughout movies and TV.  Magical Native American characters such as Jose Chavez in Young Guns are given wisdom and magic with categorically spiritual implications while Magical Gay characters’ wisdom and power is a mixture of one part wisdom and one part camp.  Magical Female characters have been represented in a number of markedly different ways but “A Magical Girlfreind” is a character brings a protagonist out of some kind of funk and helps them discover their real purpose in life.  Recently, a more specific version of the Magical Girlfriend has emerged in the form of, “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” a term cooked up by The Onion AV Club’s Nathan Rabin.  Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s include Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethatown and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  According to Rabin, these characters exist, “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Often Manic Pixie Dream Girls are characterized as Jews, either ambiguously or not, as is the case with Dharma Finkelstein in Dharma and Greg or Jenny Shecter in The L Word or even Barbara Streisand in What’s Up Doc.

Interestingly, Jews have yet to be formally included in the Magic Minority archetype, and that may be a mistake. Mandy Pantinkin compellingly plays the role of the role of Saul Berenson on Showtime’s Homeland. As the methodic and wise CIA boss over protagonist Carrie Mathison, it seems Patinkin has perhaps shed light on the current TV writers’ rendition of “A Magical Jew.”  Carrie Mathison, the haphazardly brilliant, bi-polar CIA agent played the oh-so-waspy Claire Daines (who once played a Jewish Manic Pixie Dream Girl in Igby Goes Down) depends on Saul to bring her down to earth during her incremental manic binges.  Carrie also looks to Saul to push her frowned upon hunches through CIA red tape, often to his detriment.   She even goes as far as to offer herself to him sexually skirt the rules.  However, in true Magic Minority fashion, Saul refuses her advances (seemingly he’s the only character capable of doing so, such is the magic of the Jew) and always sacrifices himself to her whims.  When Mathison goes off her medication and has to be watched after 24/7, Patinkin steps in despite his marriage crumbling on the periphery.   As Saul, Patinkin plays a magic Jew.  He may be educated which seems to go against the usual Magic Minority archetype, but in a sense, this is his magic.   Practical scholarly wisdom intended to bring down the more folksy, charming WASP protagonist is the magic or the Jew.

If the theory is that magical Jews are written just as other magical minority characters only with wisdom pertaining specifically to practicality and book smarts, then another notable Magical Jew in recent TV history would be The West Wing’s Toby Ziegler.  Though Ziegler notably went a city school rather than an Ivy like the rest of the Bartlet White House staff, Ziegler remains the quiet, even-keel wise man of Sorkin’s West Wing, always ready with a raspy-voiced aphorism to put Martin Sheen’s world into perspective.  Ziegler, the son of an ex-Jewish gangster who is supposedly based on Clinton advisor Patrick Cohen, is always willing to let his personal life fall apart (he divorces early in the show) in order to aid President Bartlett. Zeilger’s magical abilities include his acerbic wit, keen eye and the ability to “fix” social security after a sleepless night.  The identifying characteristic of the Magical Jew is that he’s an advisor of sorts to the protagonist, always able to pull practical wisdom out of his yarmulkah in order to save the day.

In the end, there have been Magical Jews all along; only a more uniform version has begun to take shape on TV in recent years.  The Magical Jew embodies all the stereotypical characteristics TV writers have been attributing to Jews for decades: they’re nerdy and argumentative, they’re sometimes irresistible, sometimes full of lust, and like all other minority characters, they’re self-sacrificing for the good of the protagonist, and until Jewish characters are given room to exist as full fledged three-dimensional characters, or even (gasp) as the protagonists themselves, we’ll just have to settle for borderline magical intellect as a sort of door prize instead.

The post The Search For TV’s Magical Jews appeared first on Jewcy.

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I imagine Ben Marcus, despite his prodigious talent, sadly, doesn’t make the biggest splash outside of the literary world. His previous works: experimental, challenging and brilliant, have drawn wide acclaim and a cult-like following, but he lacks the controversial nature of other authors (unless you count an argument with Jonathan Franzen in Harper’s Magazine) and often writes with a density that precludes a mass audience. However, in his new book, perhaps his most stylistically conventional to date, The Flame Alphabet, Marcus attempts to meld his ambitious intelligence with a more classic narrative style. Not shockingly, our conversation touched upon a range of subjects including the power and limitations of language, Kabbalah, the nature of family dynamics, and the state of the American novel.

Jewcy: Your book describes a world in which the language of children literally kills adults, both a scary and ambitious idea for a novel. Where did this idea come from?

I have always thought of language as something very potent, something that could change us on a biological level, the way a drug can. It affects our feelings, changes our behavior, and when I thought of it that way, and magnified it, I wondered what would happen if we consumed too much of it, if it could or would be poisonous, and that was the first idea of language as a virus, which seemed to generate a lot of stories for me. But it was equally important to be happening to a family. It was important for me to portray the struggle of a parent. I was really interested in having a parent go through the challenge of having to choose between staying with a child and perishing because of it, or leaving and dealing with that shame.

You chose to unleash this nightmare virus on a family that already displayed some pretty dysfunctional relationships…

Yea, that’s right. It’s not as though they had a perfect relationship beforehand, and I thought of that, but it seemed that if this toxic language visited a happy family, it seemed too easy to just pick on this joyful and peaceful family and send this meteor down on their house. This choice seemed to me more morally complicated, that they already had trouble and issues. I think one of the things that I try to do throughout the book is to slowly escalate the moral problems.

You speak of morally complicated situations, and your characters are morally complex as well, almost to the extent that some of them can engender a lack of sympathy. I’m thinking of Esther who gives the angst ridden teenager a new dimension. What do you think of her as a character?

Well she might have been a teenage bitch to her parents, but quite possibly she was not to her friends.  We only have the story from one person, her parent, Samuel’s eye, and I am fascinated how people are different around their parents than around their friends and everyone outside in the world. In a way, parents are a punching bag, of course that’s not all they are, but it’s safe to misbehave around your parents because they wont break up with you. I think what attracts me is that in our lives and in our imagination family is completely essential and yet it is a cauldron of a lot of bad behavior, tension, and vulnerability.  You don’t love anyone the way you love your family, but it’s also the safest place to test out your fears and bad behavior. I like Esther, but I was aware that I was just showing one side of her. Plus to me, her teenage rebelliousness made a kind of sense; the logic of a teenager. I think what it comes down to is that it is not her story, we see ultimately as her father sees her.

There seems to be an inherent tension in a book full of words attempting to describe the danger and limits of language.

Well, that’s a kind way to put it. I basically gave a gift to a reviewer who didn’t like the book. It’s a huge unanswerable paradox to use language to write about the end of language. I can’t imagine my life without language. I have the craziest and the most delusional belief that there is far more to language than we’ve even discovered. Consequently, to try to write with language about this paradox can be one of the most fascinating things I can try to do, and I keep thinking that more is possible and if you put the right words in the right order we will unlock deeper riches of human experiences. It’s a lot of faith in language, and that’s partly why I wanted to reverse the idea for myself. I try this a lot, to reverse my belief so as to feel vulnerable when I’m actually writing about it, because if it’s antithetical to what I really feel it almost forces me to live the bad dream I am writing and to try think differently.

This idea of the untapped potential of language leads us into the mysticism of the book.

To me I couldn’t imagine this book without mysticism.  It’s fundamentally, at least how I understand it, opposed to using language to try label our deep spiritual experience.  It suggests that deep spiritual mystical experiences are beyond language, which is an amazing taunt to me.  On the one hand people chase after it and try to describe describe and describe, but I think there is something romantic and alluring and compelling to the idea that language can’t reach a certain level of experience, not only can’t, but that language is almost a suspicious decoy away from those experiences.

Besides mysticism, there seem to be a little bit of Nietzschean idea of the limits of language.

He’s an interesting reference, but even on the sweeter side, it’s funny, but for some reason I am noticing more and more people going on retreats were they take vows of silence. Places where the whole idea is to not speak for a while, to pursue this fantasy of what you might think and feel if you weren’t constantly trying to say what you think or feel. The more I read into Kabbalah, I found that what I had invented at least with the way these characters worshipped in the woods and their relationship to language, made my idea of language feel less invented, and more of an ancient idea, maybe I just needed to delude myself, but I am pretty sure there are many antecedents.

In terms of style, this seems to be the least experimental of your books. This is a book with almost a classical narrative arc. How did you make this choice?

Well, I found it essential that one person tell it.  As opposed to my earlier books which used different narrators, or unseen or removed omniscient narrators, here, I felt very compelled that this wasn’t supposed to be told that way, that it needed to be a story of one person, and that is why it has the look and feel of a more traditional narrative. Additionally, I felt that I wanted to have a lot of momentum to move along as quickly as possible so that in a certain sense the hurdles to the believability of the idea wouldn’t settle in, because the conceit would put too much pressure and leave the reader scratching their head. So the ruse was to keep changing and moving things so that people wouldn’t stop and think about.

In a book of evil, grotesque, and disgusting situations, there are moments of beautiful poetic transcendence in the writing. How does that fit in with the larger tone of the book? Specifically, you wax poetically on the potential of the Hebrew language.

Well I think that it is intentional there. The narrator is trying to invent a new language and out of some dim notion of respect he has refused to use Hebrew to test on the subjects because he doesn’t want to injure anyone with the Hebrew language, but he starts to think he might find a sort of personal antidote in it.  I wanted to suffuse that feeling with some reverence and hope.  Sam feels reverence towards this, and believes that the Hebrew language is not finished, that the whole mystical idea of the Hebrew alphabet has sort of these potential missing pieces if plotted together, or built out, would release everybody from this difficulty.

This is a novel full of mysteries, riddles, and philosophical ideas underlying the compelling narrative, did you ever think that there is a saturation point of philosophy or ideas in a novel?

Yes. The saturation depends on trendiness. It also depends on how commercial you want to think about a reader, and what kind of reader you write for.  I think I did put thoughtful material in the book, but I did not want it to feel inert or just a repository of ideas, although there is all that, I think I used to do that more often, but here I was more interested in illustrating or embodying ideas, setting it in motion, so that a reader could find it there if he or she wanted to, but it wasn’t feeling like you were getting schooled in this book.

These questions sound similar to those you tackled in your Harper’s article on experimental fiction and Jonathan Franzen

Look, it’s an interesting question about American fiction in general and the kind of books we consider major. I try to think of the ten major books of the last decade, and it’s an interesting question. I think the basic question is how to write substantive books that you want to write without alienating people. I don’t feel that readers need to be forced to read anything, and if something feels didactic to them, they shouldn’t read it. In the end I think the challenge and problem and responsibility comes back to the writer, and the writer needs to accept how much they care about something.  The artistic challenge is whether they can find a delivery system for their material that is engaging vital and entertaining without forfeiting the issues that started their novel off.

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For Adam Kirsch’s latest Tablet post, Nathan Englander’s (above) latest collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, as well as his forthcoming translation of the Passover Haggadah, gives Kirsch a perfect opportunity to assess the last century of the Jewish novel, and also look forward to the next generation.

I especially like the opening where Kirsch perfectly encapsulates the places of some of the most iconic scribes who are normally the first ones people think of when they hear the term “Jewish writer”:

Isaac Babel, who wrote about the impotence of the Jewish intellectual, is now a hero to Jewish intellectuals; Franz Kafka, who dramatized the blockage of Jewish tradition and the impasse of theology, is now read as a profound Jewish theologian. Even Philip Roth, the creator of Alexander Portnoy and Mickey Sabbath and Nathan Zuckerman, has turned in his late-late period into a moist elegist of his boyhood Newark; his recent books all read like palinodes. Born into this Jewish and American cultural climate

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