HAMANTASCHEN: A PRUNE-PAVED KABBALISTIC SOJOURN (1/26/04)

Judaism is replete with funky little holidays. Probably only the Catholics beat us out. We try to impute some sublime, contemporarily relevant meaning to each one, but the result is usually sheer sophistry.

The funkiest of them all is dippy little Purim, which defies deeper analysis. It celebrates the victory of good guys over bad guys, lifted from Persian mythology overlaid with a whiff of historical significance, in which, naturally, the Jews are the good guys.

The observance of Purim has its benevolent dimension: alms to the poor, an exchange of culinary gifts among the more fortunate – Hershey Kisses and a bottle of grape juice if you are a piker, an ornate fruit basket and a fifth of Glenlivet if you want to impress the boss.

For the kiddies, Purim is a time of noisemaking, costume parades, goodie bags (starting to sound like Jewish Halloween, huh?), silly skits and a one-day reprieve from Hebrew school narcolepsy.

For adults, the down-and-dirty of Purim may also include cross-dressing and drunken stupor. In my yeshiva days, Purim meant license to brutally satirize our rabbis and to give guided “tours” of the labyrinth of tunnels underneath the dorm to girls of dubious repute.

The common denominator of Purim celebration is the omnipresence of the triangular Hamantaschen pastry, named ironically for the Hitlerian antagonist of the Purim story, Haman. The word literally means “Haman’s pocket.” Israelis refer to them as “Haman’s ear,” while American Hebrew school children will tell you that they symbolize Haman’s tri-corner hat. I theorize that the association of Hamantaschen with Haman’s hat derives from medieval Jews projecting upon their archenemy the same three-cornered hat that they were obliged to wear to distinguish themselves from the gentiles. Are Hamantaschen also the inspiration – God cut out my tongue for this – for the Pepperidge Farms popover?

The minority opinion on the Hamantasch’s exterior is that it be of a yeast-based dough, not unlike the consistency of challah, resulting in an oversized, sodden Danish. Majority rules, however, that the shell of the Hamantasch be of a sugar-cookie dough, albeit slightly more resilient. These, when mass-produced, are often hastily pinched together to form a sloppy scalene. My nitpicking grandmother, however, would fuss over each Hamantasch until it was a perfectly domed pyramid that would make Cheops proud.

[An aside about my Grandma Ida: I shared a bedroom with her until I went off to college. In addition to repressing my nascent sexuality, Dr. Freud, she suffered from sleep apnea, so that multiple times each night I was certain that she was stone-cold dead in the bed right next to me. My bipolarity may be due to a neurochemical imbalance, but my basic neuroses derive from inescapable proximity to a cranky old woman whose favorite pejorative was “Feh!”]

In my youth, overwhelming popularity went to only two fillings for Hamantaschen: “mohn” and “lekvar.” Mohn is poppy seed. I abhorred it and still do. That casts no aspersion, though, on mohn devotees. Lekvar is prune butter of the two-fisted variety. It bears the color and consistency of axle grease that had lustily matured for 20,000 miles under the chassis of a ’57 Ford. I love lekvar and curse Dr. Atkins for refusing me even a sniff of the magnificent stuff.

Grandma Ida had a different take on Hamantaschen filling. She would mince raisins and walnuts with the tip of a knife and bind the mixture with a combination of strawberry and pineapple jams. I was crazy about that filling, one of only a handful of positive memories that I have of that thoroughly difficult woman.

The repertoire of fillings has by now expanded beyond mohn and lekvar, to include raspberry, apricot, peach, and just about any other house brand of jam you can find at Safeway or Waldbaums. I imagine that the Juppies of the Upper West Side have broadened the Hamantaschen landscape to include honey-pistachio and cream-cheese-raisin, like that sumptuous strudel at the Carnegie.

The Kabbalistic masters – listen up now, Madonna and Britney – do impute metaphysical significance to biting into a toothsome Hamantasch. They say that, when deeply contemplated, it symbolizes the Divine spirit piercing our corporeal exterior and penetrating our sacred soul.

Ponder that tidbit of esoterica the next time your mouth lovingly embraces a perfectly symmetrical Hamantasch oozing lekvar. After Purim, I may even try finding that mystical truth in a California roll.

TIME FOR JEWISH AND AFRICAN AMERICANS TO REAFFIRM COMMON GROUND (1/6/04)

The yearly commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday evokes a rush of bittersweet recollections and emotions. Among those poignant memories, I as a Jew am fixated on the picture of Dr. King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel locked arm-in-arm, marching together for social justice and human decency. They shared fully in the nobility of their mission as they shared fully in the jeers, brickbats, and spittle of their detractors. As Dr. King was the “Drum Major for Justice,” Rabbi Heschel was the quintessential Biblical prophet: humble, selfless, and yet indignantly outspoken in the face of evil. He was for us the very symbol of the Jewish commitment to social justice and social conscience.

The memory of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel locked arm-in-arm brings a modicum of pride for a time when Jewish and African Americans proudly marched together with unity of purpose. My deepest emotion, however, is grief over the mutual distrust that has since placed enormous tensions on the special relationship between African Americans and Jews, but has not, I believe, injured it beyond repair.

Some Jewish organizations deny support to affirmative action and other legitimate initiatives for equity . . . Jesse Jackson’s motives toward the Jews are, at best, suspect, while Minister Louis Farrakhan’s are blatantly anti-Semitic . . . Revisionist historians in both camps rewrite the story of the civil rights struggle to depict African Americans and Jews as motivated solely by opportunism and self-interest . . . So the litany goes.

If we are looking, we will find myriad excuses for the breakdown of black-Jewish relations. Neither side is entirely right, nor is entirely wrong. The crime is that we have come to see each other as “sides,” always demanding a quid pro quo, always vigilant lest the equities go unbalanced, always cynical of the other side’s motives.

I cannot deny that the differences are there and that they are compelling. But I refuse to accept the image of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel as a fossil of a bygone era. The time has come to reaffirm that the experiences and ideals that bind Jewish and African Americans together are strong and are still stronger than the difference that threaten to pull us apart.

What common ground do African and Jewish Americans share?

We both know the bitterness of oppression and persecution.

Negative forces are not the ultimate glue that cements lasting relationships. But one cannot deny that there must be some natural affinity, some innate empathy and common vocabulary, between two peoples whose histories so closely parallel each other’s: enslavement, exile, displacement, ghettoization, massacres, subversion of family ties, severance from cultural identity, scapegoatism, political, social, educational, and economic disenfranchisement. Moreover, significant segments of both our people still suffer from these horrors. African Americans and Jews share a bitter common knowledge of the ravages of hatred and inhumanity.

Shouting matches of “who’s had it worse” are not merely counterproductive; they demean and trivialize the ravages that both our peoples have sustained. Let us simply acknowledge that there has been more than enough anguish to go around.

Persecution has taught us to be more, not less, humane and compassionate.

A persecuted people may learn one of two lessons from its persecution: callous cynicism (Why shouldn’t others feel the pain I once felt?) or heightened compassion (I must ensure that no one else will ever suffer what I have suffered!). All in all, African Americans and Jews have repeatedly chosen the latter path. The ancient Hebrews were exhorted time and again that the ultimate lesson of their Egyptian bondage was to be kind to the stranger in their midst. The exhortation became a consistent theme of the Prophets, the rabbis, and great Jewish moralists to this day.

Elie Wiesel’s years in Nazi death camps taught him to champion the rights of all who are oppressed. Rabbi Heschel spoke out indignantly for social justice because he knew that the only appropriate response to millennia of Jewish suffering is a redoubled commitment to human decency.

Dr. King, his colleagues, and disciples embraced the same ideal and could speak of the African American struggle for self-determination only in the larger context of justice for all the world’s oppressed. Their message was overwhelmingly universalistic. All told, persecution has left Jews and African Americans with the same indelible message: Pain must be replaced with compassion.

We both believe that we overcome oppression through an amalgam of faith and human initiative.

It is no idle coincidence that the great black and Jewish spokespeople for social justice have almost invariably been great masters of faith and spiritual calling. African Americans and Jews, more than any other groups, share in the understanding that faith and determination are totally interrelated, not mutually exclusive.

Neither Jews nor African Americans have ever embraced a theology of waiting helplessly until God miraculously redeemed us from our woes. Yet, neither group has ever maintained that the transition from oppression to freedom could be accomplished solely by human devices. Divine guidance and providence are equally crucial elements of the equation. Despite our overt religious differences, Jewish and African Americans share a deep and abiding common belief that God and humankind must work together in full partnership if the world is to be set on a more righteous course.

True equality comes through educational, political, and economic empowerment.

Jewish and African Americans have learned that real self-determination and prosperity do not come as a benevolent gift of the societal mainstream that then also determines precisely how prosperous and assertive “outsiders” may and may not become. True equality, we now know, comes from entering the mainstream through processes that make African Americans and Jews total participants in shaping social destiny and in the production and distribution of the American pie.

Jewish Americans in the first half of the 20th century and African Americans in the second half have both rightfully concluded that their energies must be directed to attaining the educational tools, political influence, and economic vitality that bring real empowerment, not continued dependency and subservience.

Family and heritage are central to our destiny.

No two peoples place more emphasis on the family as the wellspring from which the health of all our other endeavors must emanate. Our detractors have always known that the surest way to demoralize us was to subvert our family unity. More importantly, African Americans and Jews both recognize that the integrity of our families is the single most important factor in determining whether we as a people will flourish or deteriorate. We are thus both determined to keep our family bonds strong.

We also recognize that our respective heritages are the primary source of our moral guidance, personal identity, and sense of dignity and self-respect. Jewish and African Americans have largely rejected the notion that we must renounce our heritage in order to conform to the social mainstream. To the contrary, we have come to realize that our heritage is the most humanizing and ennobling force at our disposal.



The cynic would say that we could just as easily identify five or ten points on which African and Jewish Americans are at absolute odds. I harbor no illusions: Any number of important issues are certainly pulling African Americans and Jews in opposite directions. And, I admit that the situation of African and Jewish Americans are somewhat asymmetrical in that Jews are presently counted among society’s “haves,” while African Americans are still largely numbered among the “have nots.”

Nonetheless, if we review the values, experiences, ideals, aspirations, and modus operandi that African Americans and Jews do have in common, we realize that there are profound and substantive principles that go directly to the very soul of these two peoples. They form an undergirding of shared purpose and destiny far more enduring than the superficial, transitory grievances and flash points that cause tempers to flare and tug us to opposing corners.

We could reestablish a tremendously potent force for human decency and social justice were African and Jewish Americans to focus on the important, deep-seated values and ideals that we hold mutually dear. We would recognize that the call for black-Jewish reunion is not a contrivance, but the natural, logical conclusion to which those shared values and ideals irresistibly lead.

The first attempts at rapprochement should be low-key and modest. Some cities, Atlanta most noteworthy among them, have established coalitions of African and Jewish Americans for precisely this purpose. African Americans and Jews must put aside the “waxy buildup” of years of neglecting, even sabotaging, that compelling relationship, and find our ground for dialogue and renewed purpose.

The picture of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel arm-in-arm is so compelling because I know implicitly that they deeply trusted the nobility of each other’s motives. They understood, perhaps without speaking a word, that the experiences, values, and ideals that African Americans and Jews share compel us to strive together for a world that is truly fair and free and just.

I reminisce bittersweetly over that magnificent image and all that it symbolized. And I aspire to a time when, in memory of those two righteous men and for the sake of all the struggles that yet lie ahead, we will find the renewed conviction to march forward together, arm-in-arm again, as it should be.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, WOOKY WITH THE FLU (1/4/04)

What else to do on a Sunday afternoon when you are languishing with “the real flu” than to tell you about the first time I got roaring drunk, age 15. O what a special time that was . . .

In the mid-‘60s, it was a simple dichotomy: If you were a Camp Ramah kid, and you had just finished your junior year, and your parents could afford it, you were trundled off to the much trumpeted Ramah Seminar in Israel.

The rest of us defaulted to the Ramah Seminar stateside at a clammy used-to-be Christian orphanage in Nyack. This was the option intended for us down-and-outers: a morning of fairly serious classes, an hour or so of semi-enforced study each evening, the rest of the day completely unstructured, laissez faire, with “advisors” (never to be called “counselors”) who attempted, with near-futility, to "advise" us in the direction of productive activities. This was the summer of 1965. The good news was that it was kind of like living on a commune. The bad news was that there were neither free drugs nor free sex, or at least so we thought.

That final evening of Seminar took and filtered the customary unstructuredness through the mind and palette of Jackson Pollock. Guys and girls who were savvy enough to pair up snuck off to get laid. When I think back, that was most of them. I had a terrible crush on a girl named Sheila, two years older, who knew how to play the puppy love and raging hormones of a naïve 15-year-old off against each other. She teased me and was friendly, even coquettish, by day, but that night she was making it with Eli, an Israeli “advisor.”

So the few pathetic remnants, I the youngest among them, decided that we would drink away our farewell. What were the libations? Someone had secreted away two six-packs of off-brand malt liquor and a fifth of Four Roses, no ice, one bottle of ginger ale. My three companions were a little savvier, so they got happy. I, having had no experience, got roaring, puking drunk. We cut that rotgut with ginger ale until it ran out, then with lukewarm water.

And the audience went wild. I remember little of the acute drunkenness, save pitching-and-rolling side-to-side in my bunk chanting the entire weekday Amidah (page-after-page of petitional prayers) impeccably by heart.

That was clearly my most glorious moment. For, shortly thereafter, the skids ensued. I need not become graphic, but to this day I am sure that my gullet had chucked up way more than I had chucked down.

The Prosecuting Angel was swift and ruthless in meting out his judgment:

As dawn broke, and I could no longer recite the morning Amidah with such acuity, we were to be bused from Nyack to Jewish Theological Seminary in Upper Manhattan, to go our separate ways. That meant that – rotten-sick-to-my-stomach, wall-to-wall Astroturf lining my mouth, the Anvil Chorus clanging in my head – I was to wait patiently for four hours at the Seminary, take a subway, bags in tow, to Grand Central Station, and board the otherwise trendy and quite romantic Twentieth Century Limited for the 19-hour shuffle-off-to-Chicago, where I was to be greeted by my doting parents. And, as a sidebar, my noodgey traveling companion, Barry, kept reminding me that I had promised him all summer that before we got to Grand Central, I would join him for a hot pastrami sandwich at the late Lou G. Siegel’s.

I remember mercifully little of the actual trip. I do recollect renting a pillow for a buck and sleeping off the drunk. This, by the way, has never stopped me from boasting to my kids, by cracky, how I had once traveled on the legendary Twentieth Century Limited.

If not the trip, what reminiscences do I retain?

Well, I do remember that while drying out on my bunk on the morning after, the Head Advisor lectured me ad (already) nauseum about what a shameful disappointment I had become for everyone who had heretofore so respected me. Amazing . . . now that the summer was over, he finally gave me advice.

I also remember only too well feebly knocking on door after door of the Seminary’s Rabbinical School dormitory rooms, begging student after student to let me use his sink long enough to brush my moss-green teeth . . . and repeatedly being told without a scintilla of compassion in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, to “get lost.” Only now, 39 years later, does the cloud of my disdain for the Conservative rabbinate, class of 1965, lift, as I make my peace knowing that they were merely pawns in the master-plan of the Prosecuting Angel.

I also remember greeting my parents, keeping a smile plastered to my face, begging off on a/nother pastrami-sandwich lunch at Golda’s on Devon Avenue, complaining to them of this awful “sinus headache,” for which only two Bufferin would do. May they rest in peace, they went to their graves none the wiser, and if they bump in to that Prosecuting Angel, I have good vibes that my secret remains safe with him.

And finally, there was that first triumphal march down the majestic length of Devon Avenue on my way to synagogue. You have to remember Chicago’s mores well to keep in mind that taverns pretty much lined every block of Devon Avenue on one side of the street or the other, and each of those taverns belched forth the most acrid stench of beer, malt liquor and, uh . . . Four Roses. The visceral stimuli conveyed by that aroma turned my triumphal march into a cross-the-street-and-back-again zigzag, second only in slapstick to Peter Falk’s command to Alan Arkin, “Serpentine!” in that unforgettably hysterical scene in the original In-Laws. My pathetic weekly serpentine of penance down Devon continued until I went away to college.

You want me to say, “those were the days”? OK, those were the days. Frankly, I don’t think about them too much anymore. But, on a Sunday afternoon, feeling wooky with the flu, I really don’t have a much better place for my mind and spirit to be.

I’m glad that you stopped by.

KOSHER WINE: A DISTILLATE OF JUDAISM’S COMING OUT PARTY (1/2/04)

Folks in these parts who tire of my liberal pinko bluster tend to call me a “whiner,” but I do not claim to be an oenophile. In a much earlier life, I had a friend who boasted about being an oenophile. But, all I remember of his predilection toward wine was his poster of Bordeaux and once dining with him at the Atlanta Hilton when he loudly dismissed a bottle of Chateau Whatchamacallit with, “I wouldn’t serve that swill to pigs!” as I slid under the table. Then again, he wore black socks and oxfords with his Bermuda shorts. Sic semper Mogen Davidius.

Once upon a time, I would occasionally enjoy a bottle of fine wine. But, would you call yourself an oenophile if you still had to point to the wine list and grunt at the sommelier, “that one”? Besides, I blew out my pancreas a couple of years ago, as I nearly died. Thus, at the tender age of 54, the best I get is to savor the memory of a good Cabernet with a good meal and good friends, or at least not being called a “whiner.”

Looping elliptically in-and-out of Jewish orthodoxy has also taken its toll on my pretensions of oenophilia. Talk to an orthodox – or even right-leaning conservative – Jew and s/he will tell you that wine, too, must be kosher. And you think, even ask, “Where’s the cheeseburger? Where’s the pork?”

Fact is that if you want to be “strictly strictly,” as my former secretary put it, wine must pass through the hands only of orthodox Jews, from juicing the grapes to double-sealing the bottles (or heating the wine to 165-190°, I know, picky-picky). This all has to do with wine’s potential for idolatrous libation or promoting unnecessary conviviality between Jews and their gentile neighbors. We are all well aware of the conviviality sparked by a shared bottle of Manischewitz: crusades, inquisitions, ghettos, pogroms, ah, blood libels, yes, especially blood libels . . . but hey, I am just reporting the news.

All this to say that my theological bipolarity has rapidly cycled me through repetitive phases of Chateauneuf du Pape and Pouilly-Fuse counterpointed by bouts with Schapiro’s Extra-Heavy and Kedem Bananarama.

I know what you of a more upscale kosher palate would say: “That is all yesterday’s news.” You would be right, I guess. Every Upper West Side Metrodox (thanks to my friend Binyomin Cohen for that term) and Jewish gastro-journalist celebrates that one can now procure kosher dry wine with a cork (!) in the bottle, as though it were, pardon the mixed metaphor, the Second Coming.

It is true. It is true. Chateau de Fesles Bonnezeaux, Chateau Fonbadet Pauillac, Chateau Giscours Margaux, Chateau Leoville Poyferre Saint Julien ($134.99), Chateau Patris Filius (Isn’t that two-thirds of the Holy Trinity?). All kosher. All to be swirled and swizzled at equally trendy-dox kosher establishments: sushi at Estihana, faux-filet at Le Marais, primavera at Va Bene.

Not only do they come bearing corks and un-sugar-encrusted bottlenecks, but tales of international awards, too. Another friend, an honest-to-goodness, no-oxfords-with-Bermudas oenophile avers that most of this is hyperbolic hokum. And, I have to wonder what toll this cooking to 165-190° that so many kosher wines go through does to a their basic integrity . . . as if I could tell.

I will stop being such a crab. I, too, am damned proud that observant Jews have access to, and have developed a palate for, the subtleties of a finer wine’s bouquet and finish, as much as for the extravagance of its price. It is indeed a prism through which we may view the coming of age of American Jewry. We could not say that as recently as my own young adulthood; it has been just that recent, thus just that paradigmatic. Then one day in 1973, I stumbled on a bottle of Yago Sangria certified kosher by the Chief Rabbi of some Iberian shtetl. It was not a fine wine, but a “different” wine, and I knew that the cultural mainstream was winking at me like Lady Marmalade. And it just got better and better.

Being part of that schizoid bridge-generation, I do, however, owe a love song – part serenade, part lament – to those goopy, syrupy wines that were so long synonymous with kosher, so long the butt of Borscht Belt tummlers’ jokes. I tell you, they have taken a bum rap, because when the final chapter is written, they were us, and we were just fine with them.

Those were the wines that had an indelible influence on my earliest infancy. Dr. Freud helped me regress to the age of eight days, when the mohel administered my pre-circumcision anesthesia, gauze soaked not in Bonny Doon, but in Schapiro’s Extra-Heavy Malaga. Primal nursing instinct and Chateau Schapiro soothed my castration trauma then, and I have owed it a debt of gratitude ever since.

Maybe we Jews were simply prescient about soon-to-become-toney full-bodied dessert wines. We, however, were so delighted by our sweet Malaga, Concord, Tokay and Muscat that they were never secreted away for dinner’s end. No, they were pre-prandial and post-prandial. They sanctified the Holy Days and consecrated the marriage vows. They were sipped at the Seder to coax down the bolus of matzo stuck at the back of your throat and chugalugged on an empty stomach at Yom Kippur’s end.

Fond memories of childhood include eating brisket and kishke (stuffed derma) at Siegel’s, under the Lake Street El tracks in Chicago, and Mr. Siegel furtively bringing over shot glasses of Mogen David to the men of the party, a lagniappe to his “preferred” customers. I likewise remember my own rite of passage, the evening that I joined my folks at Siegel’s, and Mr. Siegel included me among the “preferred.” What then, if not Mogen David, would be the proper wine to accompany kishke glistening with schmaltz? Garrison Keillor could write a better coming-of-age story, but no one could have felt it more sweetly consummated than I did over that nectar we now deride as “cough syrup.”

“Are you sure it was Mogen David?” you ask me. Nah. I will get complaints about this from the true get-yourself-a-life aficionados, but basically they were all interchangeable: Manischewitz, Kedem, Lipschutz, Mogen David, Schapiro’s, and a myriad other local and regional offerings. Each had a little edge of its own identity, to be sure. Manischewitz was first with the fruity, soda-poppy varieties – peach, strawberry, mango – quite a buzz, and cheap, too. The old Mogen David label had that loopy little picture of the Seder table, prompting the winos of bygone days to ask for “Morgan Davis, you know, the one with the guys playing poker on the label.”

The warmest spot in my heart, though, is left for Schapiro’s. There was an honest, proud wine, no apologies, no secrets. You want sweet or extra-sweet? They boldly led with their “so thick you can almost cut it with a knife” tag-line. Norman to this day boasts that Schapiro’s is “aged for over six months” as though it were a century-old Balsamico di Modena.

The taproot of its integrity, though, is in the musty, musky subterranean labyrinth, the cellars of Schapiro’s, a full square block right underneath the schmootz of the Lower East Side. Yes, the operation has moved Upstate, but on a Sunday, you can still meet one of the Schapiro’s at the ancestral entrance on Essex Street, enjoy a free tasting tour, and walk, and inhale, the catacombs for yourself. Amazing, is it not, that as everything gentrifies, even as the Lower East Side gentrifies, the taproot keeps bearing its luscious fruit?

Now, our Jewish palates are more finely attuned. Our noses are better sensitized to inhale the bouquet. We know, and own, the right crystal for each Bordeaux and Merlot. We debate how “chilled” chilled should be, with Talmudic acuity. We Jews have arrived, and remarkably, our yarmulkes are still clipped to our heads. We are deservedly proud, as we have lived to witness “synthesis” become reality.

Sorry, though. I also pine for the other days. We were not so smug, nor so self-satisfied, nor so damned sure of ourselves. But, one thing was for sure: When someone raised a thimbleful of Mogen David at Siegel’s and bellowed “L’chayim!” we all knew what to answer . . . and we meant it.