Joel Schalit

Invoking the Fetish Object

The most in-depth review of Israel vs. Utopia to date was published in The Forward yesterday. Combined with reviews of brand new books by Yitzhak Laor and  James Horrox (the title I edited for AK Press), its an honor to keep such company.

Enclosed at the end of the article is an audio interview with yours truly, about IvU, conducted by arts and culture editor Dan Friedman. We recorded it in New York at the end of November, just before I got on my return flight to Milan.

Bear and Chain

Wildlife in the giftshop. Ben Gurion Airport, 11/5/09.

Zionism as Genre

Of the seven Jewish artists displayed, only two are actually Israeli. Global musics section, HMV Oxford Circus. London, March 11.

Always About the Present

I’m so glad I fell behind posting this review. It’s the perfect piece to be publishing right now, this week in particular. Shai Ginsburg, the house critic at Zeek, has just penned his thoughtful take on Dani Rosenberg’s  Homeland. Premiered this year for the first time in the US, this Yiddish-language film about Israel’s War of Independence is packed, to put it mildly, with contemporary relevance.

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.

Ahmadinejad As Zionist

Regimes like Iran need Israel to give the people they rule–many of whom are destitute due to systematic economic and political discrimination–an external object for their anger. Not only is the U.S. far too large to serve this fetishistic function, the reach of its consumer culture, particularly in the form of movies and popular music, makes it hard to regard America as fully external. In a sense, the U.S. is too near even when it’s thousands of miles away. By contrast, Israel is a place that people throughout the Middle East can imagine reaching in a geographical sense – the testing of missiles is always reported together with their cruising range – but it’s not part of their domestic experience. This has made it a fine scapegoat for the entirety of its six-decade existence.

What has changed since 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that the political psychology of the region has been shaken by the physical proximity of American forces. Just as Israel has had to come to terms with the fact that the United States is now practically a virtual geographic neighbor, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and, above all, Iran have had to deal with the repercussions of a military imperialism as invasive as the cultural sort that preceded it. The American presence in the region has never been so thoroughly embodied. For this reason, the old stand-by of hostility towards Israel is being summoned, often hysterically, as a way to shore up the cracks in these countries’ political identities.

Blue and White Blues

If you haven’t read Roi Ben-Yehuda before, you’re sorely missing out.

One of the best writers I’ve ever worked with, Roi’s articles epitomize the sensibilities of someone who has grown up in both Israel and the US, and remains rightfully suspicious of one-dimensional appeals to all forms of nationalism and xenophobia.

His latest piece, on the ideological limitations of Israel’s flag, was published yesterday in Haaretz.

Israel As a Vocation

Today, Israel commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of it’s founding. Unlike the celebrations of the country’s 50th birthday in 1998, today’s events have a far more somber quality to them, as though they are observing the passing of something far more tentative and fragile than we imagined back then, just before the peace process ground to a halt. Predictably, this month has witnessed the publication of a number of controversial articles questioning whether Israel will survive, generating, in turn, the expected reactions. In other words, business as usual.

As an Israeli citizen, and as an American-born editor working in English-language news publishing, I’ve resisted the temptation to draft my own thoughts on the subject, if only because I’m loathe to indulge the cliches that inevitably accompany the ritual of commenting on any specific nation’s annual observation of it’s independence. Especially those penned by U.S. Jews, which I read all of the time, and inevitably drive me nuts. Whether its spreading the love, or demonstrating disappointment, more often than not, it all reads the same.

This isn’t to say that I’m not using the date as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the state my friends and family continue to create. I am, just as I do every day, as someone who, for better or worse, always has Israel on his mind. If Israel has succeeded in establishing itself as it’s own unmoved mover, to quote my divinity school training, it would make Aquinas proud. Nothing in my mind is not somehow related to or impacted by it. Israel is everywhere, and everything.

However, I don’t feel the least bit sentimental about it, and there’s something about recognizing this that I find relatively liberating. To wit, my wife and I will be going home to see my parents in a month’s time, and the country will not feel any different than it did the same time last year I returned home, or, for that matter, this week, as I worried about the fact that I was not worried whether I’d write anything about this date at all. Israel, quite simply, exists, and feels more a part of my life than ever.

Of course, like the pundits I like to read, I could offer my own interpretation of the country’s Italian-style political scene, and what I think the future holds in store for Israel under a coming Berlusconi-equivalent. Or I could offer it by way of talking about the remarkable films I saw this week at the San Francisco International Film Festival, such as Vasermil, Children of the Sun, or Under the Bombs, all of which offer rich insights into how Israelis and Arabs alike experience the country. At some point, I’m sure I will.

But, today, I guess, my point is far more mundane. For me, as it is for many Jews, Israel is something of a vocation. If that’s what citizenship ultimately means, that’s fine. I gladly accept it. As much as I’d like to find the identity somehow transformative or more involving, over the years, I’ve had to set certain instinctual limits to it because the psychic burden of being Israeli is traumatic enough. Adding anything else to the equation would be, for lack of a better of way of putting it, completely overwhelming.