It’s that time again: Eurovision!
Every year it disappoints me, yet every year I return. And once more, the Eurovision Song Contest is upon us. For the uninitiated (though I can’t imagine there are that many people unaware of exactly what this affair entails), I have selected some of my favourite Eurovision winners from ABBA to Loreen, both of whom are Swedish, by coincidence I presume. My selection indicate two things: first, that Eurovision had a kind of musical peak between 1974 and 1982; and second, I started watching Eurovision after 1997, and in spite of the overall decline in quality, I keep doing so.
ABBA, “Waterloo” (Sweden, 1974)
Marie Myriam, “L’oiseau and l’enfant” (France, 1977)
Izhar Cohen and the Alphabeta, “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” (Israel, 1978)
Johnny Logan, “What’s Another Year”(Ireland, 1980)
Nicole, “Ein Bisschen Frieden” (Germany, 1982)
ESSENTIAL MUSICAL #16: THE ACT
In the post-Rodgers & Hammerstein era, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s contribution to American musical theatre should be considered in the same breath as those of Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne.
The music of John Kander has an instantly recognisable sound, while Kander and Ebb’s shows at their most successful explore (as I have previously argued) uniquely dark political and sexual themes, focusing in on characters that reside on the margins of society: cabaret girls in Weimar Germany; murderesses in Prohibition-era Chicago; political prisoners in Latin America. This is also the case with The Act. While not as ambitious or successful as Chicago, Cabaret, or Kiss of the Spider Woman, through Michelle Craig — the protagonist of the piece — Kander and Ebb examine the life of a faded, washed-up, lonely movie star, trying to make a comeback as a Las Vegas singer.
Lyrically and structurally, The Act helps highlights the marked difference that exists between the songs of Fred Ebb and Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim (to speak generally) uses break for song in musicals in order to advance the plot, so in other words the character is in a different place at the end of the song when compared to its beginning. Ebb, on the other hand, seems to use song to focus in on one particularly funny or emotional idea, and then augment it, largely through repetition or expansion.
Examples of this include “The Grass Is Always Greener” from Woman of the Year, where a housewife and a TV star sing back and forth about how one person’s life is better than the other, and “The Apple Doesn’t Fall (Very Far From the Tree)” from The Rink, this time with mother and daughter sharing the traits that make them similar. This particular technique is prominent in The Act, too. The conceit of “The Money Tree” is noted in the title: that love will come when the sky turns black and there’s a money tree, an idea that is repeated myriad ways. And, in “City Lights”, urban-rural tension and the notion that the city is better than the country is said about twenty different ways, if not more. Sties and stables sure are smelly, let me sniff some Kosher deli, is my favourite.
(Source: Spotify)
Another slap in the face from Netanyahu
From Peace Now:
Following a rumoured freeze, and Secretary Kerry’s continuing efforts to launch negotiations, Israel announces intent to establish four new settlements by legalizing existing illegal outposts.
On Tuesday, the Government submitted a formal response to Peace Now’s Supreme Court petition against six illegal outposts. In the response the government declares its intention to legalize four outposts, in isolated areas.
The Civil Administration has been instructed to begin a process of legalizing the outposts of Ma’ale Rehavam, Haroeh, Givat Assaf, and Mitzpe Lachish. The former government had previously promised to remove the illegal construction built on private land, but had not declared its intention to legalize the outposts.
The Supreme Court will hold a hearing on the petition on Wednesday, May 22nd.
All of these proposed new settlements — retrospectively legalised ones — are located outside of the Security Barrier and beyond the boundary line drawn by the Geneva Initiative, both of which form the basis for a future border between Israel and Palestine to be finalised in negotiations. This move is, therefore, another slap in the face delivered by Benjamin Netanyahu to his coalition partners Yesh Atid and Hatnua, his few partners for peace in the Palestinian Authority, as well as Secretary of State John Kerry who has been working diligently in recent weeks to restart the peace process.
View New settlements (16/5) in a larger map
Joseph Massad’s problem with rooted cosmopolitans
Joseph Massad’s op-ed, “The Last of the Semites”, demonstrates above all that the Columbia professor knows very little about not a lot.
His essay — of that length by virtue of the fact that no-one seems to have thought to edit it down — hinges on that old idea that Zionism is racism. In this case, Massad applies this cliché not just in the usual way to indicate prejudice towards non-Jews. No, he believes Zionism is explicitly anti-Semitic. Zionism, according to Massad, emerged not as a response to European anti-Semitism but in sympathy with its racialist precepts:
When Zionism started a decade and a half after Marr’s anti-Semitic programme was published, it would espouse all these anti-Jewish ideas, including scientific anti-Semitism as valid. For Zionism, Jews were “Semites”, who were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. In his foundational pamphlet Der Judenstaat, Herzl explained that it was Jews, not their Christian enemies, who “cause” anti-Semitism and that “where it does not exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations”.
Zionism, Massad thinks, was anti-Semitic not only of this reason but because it represented a “continuation of the Haskalah quest to shed Jewish culture and assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture,” which of course is a total perversion of Jewish history and what Herzl actually thought and wrote.
In part, the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, was related to assimilation but in the main it was an attempt to synthesis traditional Judaism with the modern ideas of the Enlightenment, including liberalism, nationalism, egality, and emancipation. Zionism emerged throughout the nineteenth century (not bang on 1897, as Massad understands it) as a product of this intellectual and cultural shift in the sense that its claim was that Jews are equal to all others and as deserving of statehood as anybody else. It is not, as Massad seems to think, some declaration of Jewish supremacy.
But it is also a by-product of the Haskalah: it is a reflection of the actual, lived Jewish experience in nineteenth-century Europe, and the waves of anti-Semitism that came with Jewish emancipation and entry into the professions from which Jews had previously been barred. Massad doesn’t seem to wish to acknowledge that anti-Semitism affected Jews in this way, at all.
If I were a politician and therefore had to deliver public speeches, I would almost certainly do all of them in front of a giant portrait of Yitzhak Rabin.
(Credit: Haaretz/Oren Nachshon)
(Source: haaretz.com)
OVER THE WEEKEND: Senior Tories back EU exit; Sharif wins Pakistan election; J14 returns in Tel Aviv
- In the continued fallout from UKIP’s decent showing in local election, Michael Gove and Philip Hammond said that if a referendum were held tomorrow, they would vote for the UK to leave the European Union. [BBC]
- Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif claimed victory in Pakistan’s legislative elections, although his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party did not secure an absolute majority. [The Guardian]
- Authorities linked twin car bombings in southern Turkey to the continued unrest in Syria and the government of Bashar al-Assad. [The New York Times]
- More than 12,000 marched through Tel Aviv on Saturday night, to protest against Yair Lapid’s budget proposal and for social justice. [+972]
- Following a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, Shelly Yachimovich called on Israelis and Palestinians to renew the process for a two-state solution now. [Ha’aretz]
- A celebration of Stiliyan Petrov’s life and career was almost ruined by Aston Villa’s 2-1 defeat at home to Chelsea. Frank Lampard became Chelsea’s leading goalscorer with two second-half goals. [BBC]
THE WEEK THAT WAS (07-10/05/2013)
This week, I covered the Church of Scotland’s slanderous new document, “The inheritance of Abraham”, which used a twisted definition of Zionism to deny Jewish claims to the Land of Israel. Also, I looked at the anti-Semitic tropes Philip Weiss utilises in his articles, and asked who exactly has the right to determine who is a good or bad Jew.
Amos Oz asks this very question in his new book, Jews and Words, and he spoke about it recently in a lecture at the University of California San Diego. Peace Now, which whom Oz is connected, found the money Yair Lapid has been looking for (hint: look beyond the Green Line), while in Ha’aretz, Anshel Pfeffer argued that those who support BDS are merely useful idiots for Israel’s right wing.
Elsewhere, this week’s essential musical was Miss Saigon, and I wrote about the role of the production number, while my song choice was “I Am Here”, as part of the ongoing look at Israeli music.
This is adorable. The song is called “Hineni Kan”, “I Am Here”, and is — insofar as I can tell from the translation — not only about love and longing in general but specifically the Jewish yearning for Jerusalem. The chorus goes:
I am here, like circling birds,
I am here, looking from the roofs;
I am here, like a stone in the fence,
like a rock, like a well -
I am the one who always returns, returns.
I am responsible for all the views of the video.
Is he or she a good or a bad Jew? This is up to the next Jew to say…
The Rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinowitz, had called for calm, but in the end the scene at Women of the Wall’s monthly visit on Friday morning was far from it. As Judy Maltz and Yair Ettinger report in Ha’aretz, thousands of ultra-Orthodox demonstrators turned up to picket and try and block Women of the Wall from worshipping as they deem fit:
The demonstrators jeered at the women as they prayed, some throwing water bottles and chairs in their direction. Dozens of riot police were on hand to separate them from the women’s prayer group and they grew increasingly violent. After the women exited Dung Gate, ultra-Orthodox demonstrators ambushed them with rocks.
…Several young seminary girls questioned by Ha’aretz said that they had come to the Western Wall because they were told to do so. One young woman, named Rachel, who refused to provide her last name or the name of her seminary, said she had come to protest women praying in the men’s section. Women of the Wall, however, do not pray in the men’s section, but in the women’s section.
Rabbi Aaron Frank, the principal of Beth Tefiloh, a modern Orthodox day school in Baltimore, said he had just “come to daven” at the Western Wall with a few of his students. But when a group of ultra-Orthodox noticed him being interviewed by a foreign TV crew, they began shouting in his direction: “You are a Reform Christian. You are a Muslim. You are the pope.”
This is shameful. The Western Wall belongs not to one Jew, nor one strand of Judaism — it is the collective property of all Jews: secular, Liberal, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and ultra-Orthodox. It must be possible for haredi Jews to pray as they wish, and for Women of the Wall to do the same, without the two coming into conflict.
The onus, in this instance, is on the haredim: it is about time they acknowledge, at least in the public sphere, that there more than one way to be Jew. This begins with refraining from calling Jews who aren’t ultra-Orthodox goyim, and ending these brash displays of verbal and physical intimidation at the Wall and on the street. At the moment, their words and actions not only undermine religious pluralism in Israel, but the few gathered at the Wall today threaten the haredi community more widely, particularly given that their privileged position is evermore being called into question. The haredi community — known for its charity and dedication to study — is better than this.
Perhaps to clarify: It is not that one Jew does not have the right to tell the other how to be a Jew from time to time. To assert to the contrary would be a threat to discourse and argumentation, and evolution of thought and religious practice. Better to say, then, that while it is fine for one to Jew tell the another how to be a good Jew, they do not have to heed that advice, and should not be forced to do so, either.
