THE VOICE AND THE JEWS: There are two wildly off-the-mark stories in this week's Village Voice which treat the issue of Jewishness with uncommon cluelessness, even by Voice standards. And while neither is as egregious as last week's cover story that made up, out of whole cloth, a Bush scheme to pull all US troops out of Iraq this summer, but still have me scratching my head.
First, media critic Cynthia Cotts takes the Times' Thomas Friedman to task for his decision to donate a $2,000 journalism prize to Kol Shalom, a synagogue he co-founded in suburban Maryland. The prize, from The Week magazine, was mandated to be donated to a library, and Friedman chose the library of the shul.
Cotts throws in some background about the temple's rabbi, who supposedly has a shady financial past; point taken. But her real beef is with Friedman donating money/being an investor in a Jewish institution, when he writes about the Middle East for a living. Never mind that Friedman is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and that everyone who reads him is aware that he is in fact Jewish, and has some sort of personal attachment to the state of Israel- and while I've heard people argue that Friedman is excessively pro-Israel, he's far from a neo-con, and I've heard others argue just as forcefully that he's not pro-Israel enough. But regardless, I agree with Sullivan that whether or not TLF donates to a synagogue is no one's business but his own. Why should an op-ed columnist have to check his Jewishness at the door?
Just as goofy is a piece by Alisa Solomon, a Tony Kushner intimate who wrote some pretty ridiculously slanted pieces from Israel for the Voice a couple years back. Her latest polemic is about the forthcoming Broadway revival of "Fiddler on the Roof," and while first arguing that she hopes the show's famous book isn't changed too much, she then abruptly reverses field and wonders how the revival will fit into "today's radically different cultural context"- in other words, is a show about struggling Old World Jews still relevant, now that the Jews run the world?
Wondering how 'Fiddler' will fit into a world in which "boys talk baseball at their Bar Mitzvahs" (they didn't in the '50s?), Solomon asks how the show will connect with today's Jews, and leads us to this unbelievable paragraph:
The grandchildren of Tevye no longer dream of becoming rich men (and women) in "a big tall house with rooms by the dozen." In vast numbers, they're there. And more and more of them are voting Republican. A few even have a hand in shaping Bush's bellicose foreign policy.