The Epic of the Gen-X Jewish Teen

In the opening of the verse novella Eugene Nadelman, Michael Weingrad introduces us to the titular protagonist, an “acne-speckled” fourteen-year-old “nerd” living in Philadelphia. Set in 1982, the first chapter describes Eugene’s adventures at his cousin Steve’s bar mitzvah in the suburbs. Herewith, an excerpt:

The temple is a mausoleum
Constructed out of stone and glass,
A kind of history museum
Of Jews who reached the middle-class.
It’s one of many edifices
With parking lots and benefices
For clergy paid to sermonize
And tell the people when to rise
And when to sit. The “Neveh Shaloms,”
In Hebrew words no one can read
(With English prayerbooks there’s no need),
Are chiseled over marble columns
Through which few people come to pray
Save for occasions like today. . . .

His Uncle Sol’s already snoring,
Eugene slides past him on the pew.
Must services be quite so boring?
They haven’t even gotten to
The Torah portion yet. The droning
Of Cantor Borowitz intoning
A Hebrew dirge, inscrutable
To those assembled in the shul,
Is interspersed with somber pleadings
From Rabbi Kaplan in his gown
To turn the page, stand up, sit down,
And join him in responsive readings.
With organ playing all the while,
It’s Protestant but with less style.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: American Jewish literature, American Jewry, Bar mitzvah, Poetry, Synagogues

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