[Jewish] Fwd: Jewish "Cool"

[Beth Deal]

> 
> washingtonpost.com
> 
> Young, Jewish and . . . Cool
> Music, Multiculturalism Help Generation Reconnect With Ethnic
> Identity
> 
> By Carol Eisenberg
> Newsday
> Saturday, April 17, 2004; Page B09
> 
> Jason Saft once believed Jewish cool was as incongruous an idea as, 
> well, a Jewish James Bond.
> 
> Growing up in Levittown, N.Y., Saft, 26, admits he felt "ashamed and 
> embarrassed about being Jewish." He wanted to be like all the other 
> kids at his high school, which is to say, Irish or Italian.
> 
> That was before he got in touch with his "kosher fabulosity," as he 
> likes to say, and helped stoke a worldwide pop-cultural movement. A 
> year and a half ago, after brainstorming with friends about 
> cutting-edge Jewish humor for a new theater, Saft printed out their 
> logo, ironed it onto a T-shirt, and went walking around Manhattan
> with it plastered across his chest.
> 
> The message was simple, racy and undeniably proud: "JEWCY," it said.
"I was mobbed," Saft says. "People were coming up to me on the
> street, Jews and non-Jews, saying, 'I have to have that shirt.'"
Suddenly, as Saft discovered, it had become hip to be Hebrew in
America.
> 
>  From the Web site JewLo.com , which proclaims that "Jew and cool are
 not incompatible, but go together like peanut butter and 
> Kosher-for-Passover chocolate," to the arrival in downtown movie
> houses  of the Hebrew Hammer, the first Jewish action hero in the
guise of a Yiddishkeit Shaft, a younger generation is creating new
narratives of what it means to be Jewish.
> 
> And virtually overnight, JEWCY has become one of its emblems,
> capturing 
> the flip, in-your-face attitude of a largely secular group weaned on 
> rap, hip-hop and the new American love affair with multiculturalism.
> 
> With no advertising, save Web logs and word of mouth, the T-shirt has
become the accoutrement of choice for a new breed of Jewish hipsters 
> from Manhattan to Los Angeles. They listen to bands such as the
> Hasidic New Wave and Hip Hop Hoodios, delight in the
Yiddish-inflected humor of the magazine "Heeb: The New Jew Review" and
read a new raft of young,transgressive Jewish writers.
> 
> "I think it's too soon and too inchoate to call it a movement yet,
> but  I really do believe there is something profound and exciting
going on right now with young Jews who are trying to connect with
Judaism in 
> thoroughly untraditional and in thoroughly new ways," said Joshua 
> Neuman, 31, publisher and editor of the two-year-old Heeb.
> 
> Not for this generation, the ghettoized sensibility of Catskills
> shtick  or the nose jobs and name changes that were the symbol of
their  parents' and grandparents' anxieties.
> 
> "These are people who are really comfortable in their identities, and
 so they can be playful about boundaries and make fun of themselves," 
> said Alicia Svigals, a pioneer of the Jewish music scene whose work 
> with the Klezmatics beginning in the mid-1980s set the stage for the 
> hipsters.
> 
> "There's a confidence and an unself-consciousness. And I think on an 
> unconscious level [the slogans] . . . are also about claiming the
> power  that Jews have now. We're not vulnerable immigrants anymore.
And so you  can say 'shalom' -- because you don't have to worry. What's
being defied is no longer anti-Semitism and the hostile, non-Jewish
world.  What's being defied is one's parents and the idea of being
meek."
> 
> To be sure, there are plenty of young Jewish people who never bought 
> into the caricature of Jews as meek, or had the self-doubt that
> JEWCY's  Saft did, but for whom the revival of all things
self-consciously  Jewish is still meaningful. Theirs is a generation,
after all, reared  largely in the American suburbs without firsthand
knowledge of  privation or persecution -- and for whom hip-hop is often
more familiar than Hebrew. They have watched with fascination, and not
a little envy,  as one ethnic group after another has rediscovered its
own  particularity now that Americans have come to embrace
multiculturalism.
> 
> Many are impatient with their grandparents' preoccupation with Jews
> as  victims or "the chosen people," even as they experience the
Holocaust  as a Steven Spielberg movie.
> 
> "My parents' generation grew up afraid to tell people they were
> Jewish, 
> largely because of the Holocaust," said Benyamin Cohen, 28, an
> Orthodox Jew and son of a rabbi, who is the founder of the
Atlanta-based Webzine, Jewsweek.
> 
> "I grew up in the South wearing my yarmulke, and I didn't experience 
> anti-Semitism at all," Cohen said. "We're not the nebbish Jews 
> epitomized by Woody Allen anymore. We don't identify with 'Fiddler on
 the Roof.' . . . You're seeing a generation trying to reconnect with 
> Judaism in new and inventive ways."
> 
> Many seek "new" connections to Jewish culture in the burgeoning music
 scene -- exploring jazz by John Zorn's Masada and Hasidic New Wave, 
> klezmer by bands like Mikveh, Golem and Pharaoh's Daughter and even 
> novelty hip-hop by 50 Shekel.
> 
> Others pass around books by a new generation of self-consciously
> Jewish 
> writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg and Gary 
> Shteyngart, who explore sex, religion and even the Holocaust in fresh
 and often outrageous ways.
> 
> Some assert newfound ethnic pride by wearing edgy and sometimes 
> explicit slogans such as "Yo Semite" and chortling over Heeb's homage
to the big-hipped, big-nosed appeal of "the Jewess."
> 
> And a few have dedicated themselves to reclaiming the old slurs with
> a 
> chutzpah that would surely make their grandparents cringe -- turning 
> "hebe," for instance, from ugly epithet into an everyman greeting, 
> spoofing Jewish cabals on InternationalJewishConspiracy.com , and 
> drinking He'brew, "the chosen beer" from the northern
> California-based  Schmaltz Brewing Co.
> 
> "I think this time is going to be seen, in hindsight, as the
> beginning  of a golden age," said Heeb's Neuman. "You could call it 
> post-denominational Judaism. Our staff includes Jews from every 
> denomination . . . all of whom think of ourselves as trapped, for 
> better and for worse, in the same historical narrative. And we want
> to  have a dynamic, interrogating, nuanced, at times critical and at
> times irreverent relationship with all things Jewish."
> 
> Some acknowledge, though, that that posture might change if resurgent
anti-Semitism abroad takes hold in the United States.
> 
> "This is happening at a time when Jews in other parts of the world
> are  facing risks," said Paul Zakrzewski, editor of "Lost Tribe:
Jewish  Fiction from the Edge."
> 
> "Here in New York, you're surrounded by other Jews, and so you have a
 sense of safety," Zakrzewski said. "And you can afford to poke fun at
 yourself. I probably would feel very differently if I lived in
> England  or Turkey."
> 
> Beyond that, some are frankly skeptical that the hipster scene will 
> warrant more than a footnote in Jewish history.
> 
> "If there's something that distinguishes this generation from the
> past,  it's that it is much more removed from a substantive Jewish
> upbringing  and substantive Jewish education," said Rabbi Andy
Bachman, 40,  executive director of New York University's Bronfman
Center for
> Jewish 
> Life. "They celebrate pop-culture expressions of Jewishness, like 
> 'Seinfeld,' bagels-and-lox and Larry David, but that's about it. And 
> that is a totally ephemeral Jewish identity."
> 
> Many suggest, moreover, that lurking beneath the flip veneer of the 
> hipster scene is a deep craving for identity that is unlikely to be 
> satisfied with pop culture expressions of Jewishness alone.
> 
> "This is not about hipness or cool, I don't think," said Roger
> Bennett, 
> 33, vice president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies.
> 
> "What's driving it is a real hunger among members of my generation to
 explore Jewish meaning, identity and community. . . .
> 
> "So it's a time of great experimentation. And we're telling ourselves
new stories as we move towards a sense of Jewishness, which is based 
> around ritual, around joy and self-confidence, and around how Jews 
> really live."
> 
> Above all else, that joyousness and self-confidence is what many Jews
describe as bringing them back into the cultural fold.
> 
> Annette Ezekiel, of the klezmer rock band Golem, comes from a 
> nonreligious background. But she says she is now studying ancient 
> Jewish texts, along with Yiddish, to deepen her appreciation of 
> klezmer, a genre based on Eastern European folk music.  "My Yiddish 
> teacher says that you don't have to believe it, but you have to know 
> about it."
> 
> And Saft, of JEWCY fame, has returned to synagogue for the first time
 in 13 years, although he is making no long-term commitments.
> 
> "I honestly don't know where this will lead," he said. "I just
> started to wonder what the bigger picture is."
> 
> © 2004 The Wa
> 
>   



	
		
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