Overdoing Stanley Kubrick’s Jewishness

In Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, Nathan Abrams seeks to demonstrate that the famed director fully merits the book’s subtitle. Frederic Raphael, who wrote the screenplay for Kubrick’s 1999 Eyes Wide Shut, is unconvinced:

Abrams affects to unlock what Stanley was “really” dealing with, in all his movies, never mind their apparent diversity. It is declared to be, yes, Yiddishkeit, and in particular, the Holocaust. This ground has been tilled before by Geoffrey Cocks, when he argued that the room numbers in the empty Overlook Hotel in The Shining encrypted references to the Final Solution. Abrams would have it that even [Kubrick’s 1975 film] Barry Lyndon is really all about the outsider seeking, and failing, to make his awkward way in (Gentile) society. On this reading, [the film’s protagonist] is seen as Hannah Arendt’s Jewish “pariah” in 18th-century drag. The movie’s other characters are all engaged in the enjoyment of “goyim-nakhes” [sic], an expression—like mentshlikhkayt—he repeats ad nauseam, lest we fail to get the stretched point. . . .

Abrams seeks to enroll [Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of] Lolita in his obsessive Jewish-intellectual scheme by referring to Peter Arno, a New Yorker cartoonist whom Kubrick photographed in 1949. The caption attached to Kubrick’s photograph in Look [magazine] asserted that Arno liked to date “fresh, unspoiled girls,” and Abrams says this “hint[s] at Humbert Humbert in Lolita.” Ah, but [Vladimir Nabokov’s novel] Lolita was published, in Paris, in 1955, six years later. And how likely is it, in any case, that Kubrick wrote the caption?

The film of Lolita is unusual for its garrulity. Abrams’s insistence on the sinister Semitic aspect of both [its predatory villains], Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert, supposedly drawing Kubrick like moth to flame is a ridiculous camouflage of the commercial opportunism that led Stanley to seek to film the most notorious novel of the day while fudging its scandalous eroticism.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Arts & Culture, Film, New York Intellectuals

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society