NYTimes Review of Extra-Credit Book - Israel Is Real

[johnkarls]

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NY Times Book Review – Sunday 26 July 2009

Book =
Israel Is Real
By Rich Cohen
383 pages – Farrar, Straus & Giroux – available from your local library or from Amazon.com ($17.82 new or $11.82 used – plus shipping)

Book Review =
A Land and A People
By Tony Horwitz (a former foreign correspondent for the Wall St Journal where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and a former staff writer for The New Yorker, Tony Horwitz is the author, most recently, of “A Voyage Long and Strange” and, not so recently, of (among other things) the immensely popular “Baghdad Without A Map”)

I read “Israel Is Real” while preparing for my son’s bar mitzvah. By “preparing,” I mean talking to tent people and mailing invites. On the spiritual side, I’ve done my usual shirk: ducking services, doodling during sessions with the rabbi and dodging queries about my own bar mitzvah of wretched memory, celebrated in a gloomy temple filled with old men waiting for me to blunder.

I mention this as preface because Rich Cohen’s book accomplished the miraculous. It made a subject that has vexed me since early childhood into a riveting story. Not by breaking new ground or advancing a bold peace plan, but by narrating the oft-told saga of the Jews in a fresh and engaging fashion.

“David Alroy was the first superhero,” Cohen writes of a 12th-century false messiah known as “King of the Jews”. “He offered a picture of strength to a people lousy with weakness.” Cohen regards Alroy as a model for the figure created in 1938 — “another dark age for the Jews” — by two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland. “Superman is a writer; Superman is brainy in his glasses; Superman is in exile from an ancient nation destroyed by fire; Superman has two names, a fake WASP-y name (Clark Kent) and a secret name in an ancient tongue, Kal-El; . . . Superman, whose cape is a tallis; Superman, whose logo, the “S” emblazoned on his chest, marks him as a freakish stranger as the yellow Star of David marks the ghetto Jew.”

Cohen often riffs like this, swooping across centuries and continents to connect far-flung dots of Jewish history. The results aren’t always convincing (is Superman’s cape really a Jewish prayer shawl?), but they seldom fail to be provocative and entertaining. This breezy irreverence helps centuries of Talmud and exile go down easy. Here, for instance, is Cohen describing the self-transformation of European refugees from pale, cowed shtetl-dwellers into tanned Hebrew warriors:

“When Shmuel Goldfein — it means something like Sam the Moneygrubber (in Europe, Jews were given surnames by their Christian neighbors) — made aliyah from Plotsk, he changed his last name to Barak (Lightning), and named his son Ehud, which means something like ‘popular.’ Sam the Moneygrubber begat Popular Lightning.”

Cohen, whose previous books include “Tough Jews,” brings tough love to Judaism and modern Israel. His hero is a first-century rabbi, Jonathan ben Zakkai, who advised, “If you have a sapling in your hand and they say to you, ‘The Messiah has come,’ finish planting the sapling, then receive him.” Cohen credits ben Zakkai with turning Judaism into a bookish, abstract and portable faith that could survive in exile. Two millenniums later, he argues, Zionism has reversed ben Zakkai’s path, putting Judaism at risk by creating a physical Jewish state that can be attacked and erased.

To illustrate this thesis, Cohen takes a roughly chronological tour of Jewish history that is mostly an album of vivid characters. Many of the best sketches are of lesser-known figures like “Sam the Banana Man,” a fruit magnate from Alabama who donated a banana boat that became the refugee ship Exodus. Cohen also excels at recasting familiar icons. He describes the first Zionists to settle 19th-century Palestine as “hippies,” so drunk on Tolstoy that they craved the peasant toil denied them in Russia, where Jews couldn’t own land. “They built their ideology around a few paragraphs from ‘Anna Karenina.’ ” Of 300 Russian Jews who signed on for the first voyage to Palestine, only 15 made it. “The rest got distracted. Met a girl — gone. Were moved by a line of poetry — gone.”

In Cohen’s hands, even the stone-faced leaders who carried Israel into statehood can seem vulnerable. On the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967, Yitzhak Rabin suffered a nervous collapse, was given a pill and was put to bed. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 so panicked Moshe Dayan that he flipped out in “the Pit,” a military bunker beneath Tel Aviv. Golda Meir also broke down during the 1973 conflict — “Her eyes were weepy and wild, and she spoke of suicide.”

And here’s Cohen’s portrait of Menachem Begin, the hawkish but schlumpy prime minister elected in 1977: “He looked like my Grandma Esther’s second husband, Izzy Greenspun, of Skokie, Ill., who stuttered and repeated and got flustered and died while wiping a dish — ‘I thought Izzy had dropped the dish,’ said Esther, ‘but it turns out what Izzy had dropped was dead.’ ”

Cohen’s eye for the absurd even extends to the crematoria; a digression on the concept of “the six million” leads to a weird news item on a “mouse holocaust” in Maine in the 1940s, which he calls “a last fleeting glimpse of the word used the old way” before it became the sole property of Jews. “It’s not yours. It’s ours. It’s what happened to us.”

Cohen sometimes gets carried away with his own shtick, diluting his humor with material that is overdone or simply inane. And he’s too fond of grand and pithy pronouncements, not all of which bear close scrutiny. “There are no new characters in Jewish history” (tell that to Paul Newman), or the Golan “is beautiful because it’s terrible and old.” Myself, I quite liked the orchards.

In addition, Cohen fails to bring his talent for characters to Israel’s foes. He’s brilliant at humanizing a man like Ariel Sharon, “the fat old kosher butcher, with blood on his apron and a sly grin on his face” who is also a beloved general, grief-stricken father and tragic old man repenting too late of his violent deeds. But there’s no comparable nuance in Cohen’s portrayal of the Arabs who are crucial to the latter half of his book. Most appear as little more than walk-ons, performing familiar roles: the Nazi-loving grand mufti of Jerusalem; the kaffiyeh-draped Arafat; the Hezbollah leader chillingly declaring, “They love life, and we love death.”

Though he fails to evoke Palestinians as individuals, Cohen is clearly sympathetic to their plight as a people. He holds Israel accountable for wartime massacres; he scalds religious settlers of the West Bank, as well as their spiritual forefather, the “perfectly named Rabbi Abraham Kook”; and he sees Zionism as fatally flawed from the start, by “the odd notion that Palestine was without a people.” Cohen animates this familiar point by putting American Jews in Arabs’ shoes. Imagine if an Iroquois tribe “suddenly started building settlements in Westchester, driving families out of Scarsdale and Armonk in an effort to reclaim their ancient nation.”

Cohen offers no road map out of this mess. Instead, he concludes his quest to understand Jewish history on a hilltop in Jerusalem, glumly wondering if modern Israel will be destroyed like the ancient temples. There are many reasons to feel pessimistic about peace in the Middle East. One of them is that Rich Cohen, a writer who can wring dark humor from the Holocaust, finds nothing at all amusing about the future of the Jewish state.

Correction: August 9, 2009
A review on July 26 about “Israel Is Real: An Obsessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History,” by Rich Cohen, misidentified the region in which David Alroy, a 12th-century false messiah, lived. It was present-day Iraq, not Persia. (Alroy was born in what is now Kurdistan and studied in Baghdad, which was then ruled by the Seljuk Turks.)johnkarls