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| JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT. Give a tax-deductible donation Training for Martian life in Israeli desert, Brazil's bat mitzvah queen, Holocaust survivor known as 'happiest man on Earth' has died, the Jewish founder of Weight Watchers and more. OUR LEAD STORY Irish novelist Sally Rooney is regarded as one of the foremost millennial writers. (Getty Images) Are cultural boycotts of Israel antisemitic?
The young Irish writer Sally Rooney is a literary prodigy. In 2018, she was nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, her novels have received rapturous reviews and the TV series adapted from her first book, “Normal People,” became a global hit.
At the age of 30, she published her third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” last month, and it has been on The New York Times bestseller list since. On Monday came the news that she is refusing to allow the book to be translated into Hebrew due to her support for cultural boycotts of Israel.
“Rooney’s decision surprised and saddened me,” Gitit Levy-Paz wrote in our opinion section. “I am a Jewish and Israeli woman, but I am also a literary scholar who believes in the universal power of art.”
Ruth Franklin, a book critic, saw the move as hypocritical. “Sally Rooney’s novels are available in Chinese and Russian,” Franklin wrote on Twitter. “Doesn’t she care about the Uighurs? Or Putin-defying journalists? To judge Israel by a different standard than the rest of the world is antisemitism.”
Dave Rich, author of a book about antisemitism, echoed those sentiments. “Hebrew isn’t an Israeli state product or invention,” he wrote. “It’s a Jewish language, and cultural boycotts (like academic ones) are unavoidably boycotts of people, not governments.”
Rooney has brought up the Mideast conflict in her previous books – in one, characters attend a protest against Israel during the 2014 Gaza War. And she is not the first author to take such a stand. Alice Walker would not let “The Color Purple,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1983, be translated into Hebrew because, as she put it, Israel “is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people.”
In her essay, Levy-Paz argues that Rooney’s decision will actually have a counter-effect. “Rooney has chosen a path that is anathema to the artistic essence of literature, which can serve as a portal for understanding different cultures, visiting new worlds and connecting to our own humanity,” she writes. “The very essence of literature, its power to bring a sense of coherence and order to the world, is negated by Rooney’s choice to exclude a group of readers because of their national identity.”
ALSO IN THE FORWARD Israel's Minister of Regional Cooperation Esawi Frej at his office in Tel Aviv. (Photo: Jacob Kornbluh) He’s Arab, he’s in the Israeli cabinet and he’s fine with a delay in the peace process: In an interview, Esawi Frej told our Jacob Kornbluh that Palestinians are more interested in seeing immediate change in their daily lives than in hoping for an independent state. He sees his role as to help create that change with concrete steps to improve Arab-Israelis’ quality of life – which he said gives Arabs and Jews “reason to believe that there is no other way but to be together.” Read the interview >
This kid is going places … just not Israel: Carolina Kuperstein, 13, is the only Jewish girl at her school in Florianópolis, an island town in southern Brazil – which has made her something of a faith ambassador to her classmates. She’s modeled a very meaningful bat mitzvah: turning it into a fundraiser to feed the city’s poor. She even donated money she had been saving for a trip to Israel. “She didn’t want anything for her,” said her family’s rabbi. Read the story >
But wait, there’s more… Does Sarah Silverman actually have a point about ‘Jewface’? Benjamin Ivry explores the troubled history of non-Jewish actors being cast in Jewish roles like Tevye in the Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” College campuses are again embroiled in fierce debates over who has the right to take what stands on Israel. At the University of Illinois, Jewish students have filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education saying that pro-Palestinian groups have harassed them. Gregg Bordowitz’s Jewish upbringing had long been an inspiration for his art. But when he was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, he found himself on the fringe of Jewish society and largely abandoned by traditional institutions. A retrospective of his work is now on display.
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY 🚀 An international team of astronauts entered a Mars habitat in southern Israel’s desert to begin a three-week simulation of what life would be like on the Red Planet. They will conduct a host of experiments for the project, which involves more than 200 scientists from 25 countries. (Haaretz)
💉 In Borough Park, an Orthodox enclave of Brooklyn, 43% of the population has been vaccinated, according to new data from the New York City health department. Between Sept. 29 and Oct. 5, the neighborhood also had the city’s highest seven-day COVID positivity rate and the most new infections. (AM New York)
✉️ Both the Reform and Conservative movements sent letters to parents last week urging them to report any sexual misconduct by camp staff and youth group leaders. The letters are part of external investigations the movements started in response to several cases that have become public in recent years, including a rabbi who was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year old.
📺 Sarah Podemski, the Jewish and Indigenous star of “Reservation Dogs” on FX, says her background as Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi is a miracle of fate. “I think my Jewish identity means legacy,” she explained. “I feel it so deeply in everything I do. Knowing that my grandfather is a Holocaust survivor, I feel the responsibility to do better for humanity.” (Alma)
❓ Mayim Bialik opened up in a new interview about wanting to host “Jeopardy!” permanently. “But her willingness to share her opinions publicly on everything from parenting to the conflict in the Middle East represents a striking departure from the studied neutrality of Trebek,” writes Julia Jacobs. (NYT)
🤭 The obituary of Rabbi Moshe Tendler that appears in today’s print edition of The New York Times opens with a sex joke. (NYT)
☎️ Josh Angrist, an Israeli-American professor, missed the phone call Monday telling him he won the Nobel Prize for Economics because … well, because he was sleeping and his phone was on silent mode. (We can all relate, Josh!) He woke up hours later, his phone flooded with congratulatory text messages. Thankfully, he was able to find the number to call the Nobel committee back because he has several friends who have won Nobel prizes in the past. (Times of Israel)
Shiva call > Eddie Jaku, a Holocaust survivor who called himself “the happiest man on Earth,” died at 101 in Australia. “You know happiness doesn’t fall from the sky,” he once said. “It’s in your hands. You want to be happy? You can be happy.” Jaku was still volunteering at the Sydney Jewish Museum and published an autobiography last year to mark his 100th birthday, in which he summed up his life’s mission this way: “As long as I live, I’ll teach not to hate.” (AP)
ON THE CALENDAR On this day in history: Jean Nidetch, who co-founded Weight Watchers after losing 72 pounds, was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 12, 1923. Struggles with weight had always been an issue for Nidtech, who reached her breaking point when a friend at the supermarket mistook her for being pregnant. She incorporated Weight Watchers in 1963 along with her husband and two friends.
“This was not about the fizzy highs of starving oneself, but rather pragmatism, substitution, portion control,” Marissa Meltzer wrote in The New York Times. “Dieting was work, a slog. To make up for that, the Weight Watchers tone was, crucially, upbeat and likable. Mrs. Nidetch wasn’t there to be a mean mother figure, disciplining her dieters like misbehaving children, but instead a fellow traveler who made it.”
Nidetch died in 2015 at her goal weight.
A SERIOUS LOOK AT A FUNNY TOPIC More than 700 people joined us for our recent roundtable about the rise of American Jewish comedy. The Borscht Belt is known for its Yiddish-inflected dialogue and speedy delivery, and while the heyday of the Catskills resorts may be a bygone era, its influence continues on stage and on the screen. (See: “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”)
Among the topics discussed were the comedians who came out of or were influenced by the Borscht Belt; why so many Jews spent summers in the Catskills; what life was like for the guests and the waiters, and ultimately, why it eventually disappeared. Watch it now >
PHOTO OF THE DAY (Assaf Peretz/Israel Antiquities Authority) A massive, 1,500-year-old wine factory was unearthed by archaeologists in Israel. The directors of the excavation estimated that two million liters of wine were produced every year – and noted that “the whole process was conducted manually.” The site is open to the public in the coming days before it is covered over to protect from the impending rains.
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