Leonard Bernstien, Eternal Truths Of A Megastar

Norman Lebrecht for Mosaic

The next time you suffer overspill on your bookshelves, take down the Bernstein section and send it for recycling. The Leonard Bernstein Letters, out this month from Yale University Press, contains so much that is startling and unknown that all past books, including his own, become instantly inadequate. Don't take my word for it. On the jacket, Bernstein's official biographer, Humphrey Burton, declares that, with this book in hand, "I want to start all over again."

The letters, preserved by Bernstein's early piano teacher and lifelong secretary Helen Coates, are housed at the Library of Congress, tens of thousands of them, so many that only an amazingly knowledgeable or presumptuous scholar would dare to sift wheat from chaff. The man who dared is Nigel Simeone, an English expert on Messiaen and West Side Story; his curation is confident, comprehensive, beyond criticism.

Simeone opens with a 1932 letter to Miss Coates: "I have decided to study with you, taking one lesson every two weeks." He is 14 years old and his authority verges on effrontery. That assurance never wavers through his life.

Bernstein writes letters as I remember him speaking: in a stream of consciousness that burbles with wit, malice, truth, flashes of human insight, an omnivorous curiosity and a profound understanding of failure. His voice is irresistible, his interests boundless and his position on any important issue magnificently ambivalent.

"Which of us worth his salt is not a paradoxnick," he demands, late in life. "There's something in the Bible we all believe, even if not literally; and there's something also in Darwin and Freud that grabs us equally. Wm. Blake vs. Martin Gardner, X vs Y and on down the list of all the antitheses that engender free inquiry and democracy. I like to think of myself, and you, as primarily
rational humanists, but then there I go inhaling cosmic energies . . ."

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‘Sesame Street’ Explains ‘Homeland’ Best

“She’s crying wolf again, Sauuuul”

By Stephanie Butnick for Tablet Magazine

Homeland has been a bit of a roller coaster lately, with Season 3 devolving quickly into a hard-to-believe narrative that seems to taunt even the most loyal of viewers. But there is hope yet—though from a surprising source. Sesame Street, which has long been making delightful parody videos—from Monsterpiece Theater to the more recent Sons of Poetry (aw)—has given Homeland the puppet treatment it so desperately needed.

Homelamb is a spot-on parody, as Hilary Busis noted over at EW.com, and the best part is, naturally, puppet Saul Berenson, played in real life by human Mandy Patinkin. Puppet Saul couldn’t be any more Upper West Side Jewish man (“Such a worrier that one!”) if he said the Shehecheyanu on-screen.

No spoilers, bahh:

Loving Us to Death

Jonathan S. Tobin in Mosaic

In the first half of the 20th century, the political and social perspective of the American Jewish community was defined by its collective experience of anti-Semitism—both in the countries from which Jews had emigrated and, in far more muted form, inside the United States. Four percent of Americans were estimated to be Jewish at mid-century, twice as many as at present. But the Jews of that time were insecure about their place in American society and often unwilling to make a show of their background and faith. They felt themselves a people apart, and they were. It was difficult if not completely impossible for them to live as American Jews entirely on their own terms.

Now the situation is reversed. As an explosive new survey of 3,400 American Jews reveals, 94 percent say they are proud of being Jewish. That data point dovetails neatly with the current place of Jews in American society—a society in which they make up 2 percent of the population but in which there are virtually no barriers to full Jewish participation. American Jews can live entirely on their own terms, and they do. But the stunning finding of Pew’s A Portrait of Jewish Americans—the most comprehensive portrait of the community in 20 years and, in the richness of its detail, perhaps of all time—is the degree to which American Jews are now choosing not to live as Jews in any real sense. Secularism has always been a potent tradition in American Jewry, but the study’s analysis of what being Jewish means to its respondents reveals just how much irreligion has taken center stage in American Jewish life.

There has been a startling increase over the past quarter century of Jews who say they regard themselves as having “no religion.” Intermarriage rates in that group are now at 70 percent. And the proportion of families raising their children as Jews by religion is 59 percent, while only 47 percent are giving them a Jewish education. Jews are not being driven from Judaism due to social difficulties. Fewer than 20 percent claimed to have experienced even a snub in a social setting, let alone an anti-Semitic epithet, in the last year. Such numbers are not only without precedent in American history; they are without precedent in the millennia-long history of the Jewish people. The Pew survey paints a portrait of a group that feels none of the shame or fear that once played a major role in defining Jewish attitudes toward other Americans. But this loss of shame, and the concomitant growth of pride when it comes to having a Jewish heritage—these have come at a heavy cost, it appears. It is now inarguable that American Jewry, or at least the 90 percent that does not hew to Orthodox practice, is rapidly shrinking, and the demographic trend lines are stark.

The same American Jewish community that is bursting with pride also now regards Jewish identity as a matter of ancestry and culture almost exclusively. Forty-two percent think a good sense of humor is essential to being Jewish; almost exactly the same number, 43 percent, think it means supporting the State of Israel. When asked about the fundaments of Judaism itself, Jews speak of values and qualities that apply equally to other faiths and are followed just as readily by those who have no faith at all. After all, there is nothing distinctively Jewish about believing one should lead an ethical and moral life or about working for justice. And yet these are the defining characteristics of Judaism for American Jews. Only 28 percent think being Jewish has something to do with being part of a Jewish community. Only 19 percent think it means abiding by Jewish religious law.Continue reading.

Is Antisemitism Back in Europe?

John Allen Gay, The Buzz for Mosaic

The status of Jews in Europe remains a delicate one. At least that is what a new survey by the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights suggests. The survey, to be released in full in November, found that nearly one quarter of European Jews avoid doing things or wearing symbols that could allow others to identify them as Jewish. And the numbers are worse in some places: Forty-nine percent of the Swedish utopia’s Jews avoid recognizably Jewish clothing and symbols in public. Eighty-eight percent of French Jews said antisemitism has become worse in the last five years. Thirty percent of Hungarian Jews have experienced an antisemitic incident in the past twelve months. And around Europe, two-thirds said reporting assaults and other antisemitic incidents to the police wasn’t worth it, or wouldn’t make a difference.

Surveys like this cast doubt on the belief that the history of the West has been one of steady progress. Sure, the Europeans seem to have finally been civilized, with their bloody, multicentury stream of wars and revolutions supplanted by social democracy and multinational union. But in 2012, reports Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center, France led the world in violent antisemitic incidents.

Who is to blame? The media would have you believe it’s the far right—Greece swarming with Golden Dawn blackshirts and cryptofascists flexing their muscles almost everywhere east of the Elbe. And the Kantor Center documents plenty of far-right violence. But participants in the EU survey, many drawn from Western Europe, saw it differently—just 19 percent pinned it on the extreme right. Twenty-two percent faulted the extreme left. But Europe’s Muslims are cited by 27 percent.

This brand of antisemite has imported the hatred of Jews to countries where it was historically less severe, such as Denmark. Tablet, a Jewish online magazine, relates the tale of Martin Krasnik, a journalist and a liberal Jewish Dane who decided to take a long walk through the immigrant neighborhood of Nørrebro with a yarmulke perched atop his head. He’s quickly harassed—flipped off, told to “go to hell, Jew,” told to his remove his cap, and so forth. There were plenty of threats—men tell him that “we have a right to kick your ass,” that his religion may tell him to wear the yarmulke but that it doesn’t tell him to get killed, that “my cousin killed a guy for wearing a ‘Jewish hat.’” Krasnik was extremely uncomfortable, telling Tablet’s Michael Moynihan that he thought, “If I keep doing this for an hour or two, something will happen. And if I did this everyday, I would get my ass kicked around.”

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