Joel Schalit

Work in Progress

In a matter of weeks, Zeek will cease publishing at Jewcy. As many of you already know, the periodical is moving to a brand new home, hosted by The Forward, America’s oldest Jewish newspaper. In the final stages of a redesign, we’ll be debuting a brand new site too, put together by Jennifer (who created the wireframes) and Richard Winchell, a terrific visual designer. It’s going to be a wonderful publishing platform, if only because of the people who pieced it together. Hopefully we’ll provide it with content of equal quality.

I’ve been working as Zeek’s online editor for the last three months, though I’ve been supplying the same amount of content since February. Following the completion of the book, I’ve had the opportunity to step up my day-to-day work at the mag. So far, its been extremely gratifying, and a nice change of pace. I’ve often worked as an editor in order to give myself a break from writing. Even though I’m supposed to be writing a column (and will be doing more of that) its nice to worry about other folks grammar for a change.

Despite the fact that we had not planned on returning to the US this summer, it turned out, obviously, to be an ideal time. I could not imagine doing this level of editorial work and planning at such a distance. This way, when we return in the Fall, everything will be built, and we can get to work, wherever we are. I’m enjoying the idea of editing Zeek in Milano. The Italian tie-in seems so distant from what English-language Jewish publishing is about here, with its division of coverage always split between the US and Israel.

Wartime Imaginary

In the Fall of 2007, I started to document numerous instances of the Middle East in San Francisco. Signs of the city’s burgeoning Palestinian and Israeli immigrant populations, the local Jewish community’s longstanding activism around the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the War on Terror, everything seemed to come to a visual head here during the final year of the Bush administration.

Imagine my surprise when, the day after returning from Milan, Jennifer and I encounter the image above. An archetypal ‘milk carton kid’ (for those unfamiliar, in the US, milk cartons used to carry pictures of missing children) the picture was taken on Valencia Street, in a spot normally covered with smarty-pants political posters. Notice, of course, the fact that this missing child is in fact Osama Bin Laden.

The following day, twelve blocks away, I found this image inserted inside a weekly newspaper bin. The cover of another American icon – a Chick comic – this one features obvious caricatures of terrorists. Judging from the execution, jihadis, in traditional garb, disingenuously posing as ‘friends’ while still flying the flag of Islam. Notice the sinister-looking guy holding up the flag. Its hilarious, albeit lame.

Chick publications, a hipster fetish (because of their obvious extremity) are too easy to pick apart. Rightist Christian pamphlets designed to deliver political information in the form of a religious comic book, the contrast of such publications with the imposition of Bin Laden’s likeness on an all-American beverage is a good way of summarizing the mental space the Mideast continues to take up here.

Star Apartment

When people talk about San Francisco’s Richmond District, they generally don’t talk about Jews. It’s far more likely that the area’s excellent selection of Asian restaurants and Russian groceries will come first. As they should. The food is tremendous, amongst the best the city has to offer.

Nevertheless, there are four synagogues in the greater neighborhood, and it’s easier than anywhere else I’ve lived on the West Coast to pick up a package of Elite Turkish coffee or a bag of Bamba. The customers for these products are primarily Russians who relocated to the United States from Israel.

The one thing you don’t see are Magen Davids like this, which Jennifer noticed as we walked down 24th avenue last week, towards the apartment we’ll be subletting here until September. If you look closely, there’s a menorah to the right. It makes you think you’re in New York, not San Francisco.

Rough Guide to London (Slight Return)

The timing couldn’t have been better. Immediately after arriving in London, I had to edit the US edition of a guide to local graffiti installations by British political artist Banksy. Written, photographed and self-published by journalist Martin Bull, the book has been an underground hit here since it first appeared last March. Finding a copy at the Serpentine Gallery bookstore, Jennifer and I were pleasantly surprised. Having only seen the UK version before, back in San Francisco, it made our new home feel a lot more familiar.

Yesterday the author signed off on the final PDF, whose cover, shot in Hoxton, appears above. Today, the book’s designer, Courtney Utt, will enter his final corrections and send it to the printer. We’re both really excited to finally see it off. The book was ingeniously re-designed from the ground up. I worked my little fanny off (or non-existent one, as my wife would lovingly put it) to retain Bull’s original language, while giving it a good makeover. Banksy: Locations and Tours will be in US bookstores starting in January.

Rear-View Mirror

Speaking of political economy, this was the last picture I took before leaving the US. San Francisco, 9/27, just as Congress and the Bush Administration were trying to close a deal to bail out America’s troubled banking sector.

Posted on Valencia Street, adjacent to a store I’d gone to at the last minute to buy discounted Brazilian espresso, its unclear whether this is a Shepard Fairey print, or one inspired by him. I should have examined it a little more closely.

Burning Down the House

When we first moved into the neighborhood, we rented an apartment from a former aide to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Always eager to talk politics with me, almost every time we spoke, our ex-landlord would inevitably disclose how disappointed he was to no longer be on the local Congresswoman’s staff.

Seeing this poster pasted to the ground floor of a new condo being built down the street, I couldn’t help but think of my former landlord, and wonder how he’d react to this attack on his one-time employer. Not particularly partial to this brand of agitprop myself, for once, it seemed a little more complex than usual.

It must be the superimposed Tow Away sign, and the 666 scrawled on Pelosi’s forehead. “Endless midrash“, as we were fond of saying in my biblical hermeneutics class in grad school. Everything is commentary.

Leaving Here

I couldn’t think of a better title for this post than Motorhead’s very first single. Released on Stiff Records in 1977, it was one of the first 7″ singles I think I ever saw – in a London record store. Three days away from moving back to the UK for the first time since 1979, I couldn’t imagine a better heading to affix over this genius of a shop sign, three blocks away from where we live, on Mission street. Boasting a fist full of skull rings, Motorhead leader Lemmy Kilmister practically invented bling.

If only we were leaving here by car. Not just any, but in our prized Prius, now being cared for by friends in the People’s Republic of Berkeley. It’s just about the only hybrid we know that felt the need to balance out the obligatory Obama propaganda with a reminder that at least some of the people who will be voting for the Democrat in the upcoming US elections first thought of themselves as leftists because they listened to bands like Black Flag.

Merlot Shoah

Walk three blocks in either direction from our home, and the discourse is the same.

Genocide is bad, freedom for Jews and Palestinians, good. The local used book store carries vintage Israeli vinyl, while bumper stickers decry Israeli foreign policy.

The interesting thing about all of this isn’t that it’s not recognized as a conversation between neighbors. It’s that records like the one pictured above are not appreciated for their irony.

Bernal Hebrew

No one speaks Hebrew in San Francisco. Ever. Cortland Avenue, September 2008.

Stairway to Zion

I don’t know of another city in America with as many comparable Israel and Mideast-related visual signifiers as San Francisco. As documented in my recent Zeek photo essay, Welcome to My Neighborhood, and this blog, (and, also, in a chapter in my forthcoming book) they’re impossible to miss.

This retail display above, of the classic 1950s children’s introduction to Zionism, sits quite unselfconsciously two storefronts down from the window arrangement below, of a keffiyeh and Phoenician-themed bowls,  on Valencia street. If you want a mirror of SF’s increasingly Semitic character, the proof is in the pudding.

Out running an errand later this same day, I took the following picture, below, of a pickup bearing the inscription TRUCK AK-47 on the upper left rear panel. Though there is nothing specifically Levantine about an American naming their truck after the infamous Russian assault rifle, it still made me feel more at home, however awkwardly.

Considering how common the AK-47 was in criminal circles here during the 1980s and 1990s, and before that, in Vietnam (where they were used by the Viet Cong and the NVA), and how frequently they’re encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan today, to Americans, the Kalashnikov has become synonymous with conflict.

Yesterday, Jennifer and I went looking for evidence of a recent poster campaign about Israeli Arabs, that has been taking place in San Francisco this month. Already displaced (at least in Noe Valley) by Monday Night Football ads, apparently there is one left downtown. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to capture it on film before we leave.