Jews Wear Hats

Jews wear a lot of hats. I mean that metaphorically but also literally: from black hats to fur hats to little white tent-yarmulkes to doilies to the Jackie O cloches of the Modern Orthodox upper-middle-class, hats and headcoverings mean different things -- important things -- to Jews.

There's the idea of covering your head to show modesty before God, and the idea of covering your head to shield it from other people. Observant men cover their heads whenever they make a blessing. And sometimes people cover their head-coverings -- when entering a non-kosher restaurant, for example, or when you're trying to appear inconspicuous for one reason or another. (Lest your mind jump to unkind judgments about people who wear yarmulkes, let me tell you: I spent nine months of my life wearing a tweed hat while living in parts of Eastern Europe where you didn't want to be spotted wearing anything vaguely Jewish except an Uzi.)

What got me thinking about all this was Facebook. Two friends of mine, both amazingly talented performers, both from way different parts of the musical/social/spiritual continuum, and separated by thousands of miles, popped up next to each other on my friends list. Their pictures were next to each other -- and, to be honest, it was hard to look away. If for no other reason than, well, this:



Insert here the jokes about how all Jews look alike. (It's true.) But it's funny how, aside from their finely-trimmed beards or their studiously artistic composure (Jon Madof, left, fronts the experimental jazz band Rashanim; Patrick A is the singer for Jewish punk band Can Can), both of them have singular headgear.

When I started wearing a yarmulke and hanging out with mostly Orthodox people -- significantly guys, for the purposes of this post -- I would frequently realize how often my yarmulked new friends were, well, not yarmulked. We'd go out on a Saturday night and I'd be wearing my new black velvet kippah, possibly still with the price tag on the underbelly, and I'd be accompanied by half a dozen guys in baseball caps, one in a ski cap, one in a Holden Caulfield hunter's hat, and one, only the good Lord knows why, in a sombrero.

The one thing they'd avoid -- like the plague, like the devil, and like every stigma in the book -- is wearing a yarmulke.

Or: they'd avoid wearing just a yarmulke.

At first I thought it was akin to my reticence to wear a yarmulke in Prague. Not that they didn't want to be lynched, necessarily, but that they didn't want to be instantly identified as Jewish. It's a stigma, after all. Either they were being low-key about it or they were being ashamed of their Jewish pride. In fact, I can remember people going on self-righteous anti-hat crusades, saying that hats equated ethnic shame. "You're a Jew!" they would rant and rave. "Be proud of it! Why do you need to hide beneath a hat? Do black people hide their skin beneath a hat? Did Moses need to hide his Judaism? Did Anne Frank?"

I would stop myself before mentioning that Moses lived several decades undercover as a Coptic Egyptian, and that Anne Frank probably didn't have a choice in the matter -- yellow armbands, you know -- but it's each person's choice. Besides, wasn't wearing a yarmulke and hiding it better than not wearing a yarmulke at all?

Now I'm older. I still wear a yarmulke (covered, sometimes, by a knit cap or a hoody). I live in New York, where I'm surrounded by a lot of other people who also wear yarmulkes -- and many people who don't. Some of them, of course, just don't wear yarmulkes straight-out. But others are deeply devout, and yet you'll rarely catch a glimpse of them in just a kippah -- the hip-hop artist Y-Love, for instance (he wears a tweed jeff-cap), or rabbi/author Danya Ruttenberg (yarmulke with attached devil-horns -- well, sometimes), or even the Biala Rebbe (either a Stetson hat or a fur-tipped streimel, depending on the day of the week).

And I think I've hit upon the reason. Even though we're all Jews, and we all cover our heads to honor the same ancient decree, we all want to do it in our own way. We don't all pray with the same voice, or using the same language. We don't dress the same. We have our own traditions that we might share with our family, or our friends, or the synagogue we attend. But in the modern cult of individuality, for better or for worse, we feel the need to self-identify with everything we do, from the way we act to the way we practice our religious rituals...to the clothes we wear.

And that's why we cover our heads in different ways.

One last point: In the '80s, the two big foreign synth-pop groups were Men Without Hats and Men at Work. Men Without Hats, in spite of writing a song with a Jewish mother-approved title ("The Safety Dance"), faded from sight. Men at Work, on the other hand -- who have frequently been seen wearing hats, and come from Australia, where ozone conditions dictate that you should always wear a hat -- have a song that's become the most recognizable Jewish wedding song ever:




You see? It's the hats that always win. Hence my argument that, given the choice, Jews will always gravitate toward odd and unique headgear. So there.

Regina Spektor Blows (Shofar)

Oh, Jewish blogging world, you are losing your touch.

Or maybe I'm just losing touch with you. Last Rosh Hashanah, Regina Spektor -- whose song "Laughing With," by the way, was just named one of the Best Lyrics of 2009 by, um, us -- blew a shofar at one of her concerts.

This might be Regina overkill. After all, we've already reviewed her new album and blogged about her song lambasting Holocaust deniers. But as long as she keeps being cheeky and inventive and writing crazily good songs, we'll probably keep writing about it. And, with the recent tragic loss of YIDCore -- the only band I've ever seen with enough chutzpah to blow hummus out of a shofar and onto their audience -- well, somebody needs to step up and take the mantle of introducing traditional Jewish instruments into pop music.

Thank you, ReSpekt Online, for keeping me in the loop. *Ahem.*

Paris Hilton Is Responsible (and Jewish)

The awesome Jewish poetry magazine The Blue Jew Yorker has its new issue online today. It probably seems like I'm telling you to go read it because of my poem, "The Other Universe of Paris Hilton," which takes place in an alternate universe where Paris is responsible and Orthodox Jew (and she always wakes up to pray at exactly the right time before sunrise), and I'm a drunken heiress.

But that wouldn't be one-tenth of it. Legitimate (and goood) poet and professor Charles Bernstein gives this very Addams Family-like gothic poem called "Rivulets of Dead Jew." There's a furious poem called "It Takes Awhile" by Heather Bell, and Samuel Menashe, who's basically a living legend of poetry (don't believe me? read the MJL article), has a new poem, "Adam Means Earth," which is as brief and brilliant as anything he's ever written (and that's saying something):

I am the man
Whose name is mud
But what’s in a name
READ THE REST >

But my favorite might be this tiny little poem by Gary Levine. It's a love song to his siddur.

It goes wherever I go
My little blue worn siddur
Tattered and well used, cover bent and dog eared.
Wrinkled from praying in the rain
On the way to shul on Pesach day
Wine stains on page 178 & 179
Made while standing making Kiddish by a hospital bed

READ THE REST >

Kindly Ones to Keep Us Company

I got a review copy of Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones -- a massive, 982-page paperweight of a novel about a (fictional) SS officer during the Holocaust -- and didn't immediately read it. Although the novel won one of France's major literary awards and was hailed in Europe, it's still, well, Europe. The American reviews soundly thrashed the thing, calling it bloated and pretentious and severely scatological in its humor. And then there was the size of it:

Finally, a few weeks ago I sat down to conquer the thing. It actually came at an opportune time: I had to run out of work to go to the doctor's. (I'd gotten a tick in the middle of winter, and even though I live in Brooklyn, a city without any trees or bushes or nature, I decided I needed to make sure I wasn't dying of Lyme disease.) I could run down to the medical center and wait for a walk-in. This sounded to me like the prospect of hours with nothing to do. What better time to dig into a monster such as that?

So I had this period of time, roped off, with nothing else to fill it. I dove in and started to read. And I discovered: The Kindly Ones actually is sort of compelling.

The story follows the narration of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a man with no pretense of brevity and a truly OCD mind. The story is by turns relentlessly brutal (explosion after explosion, battle scenes in plenitude) and severely nitpicky. When Aue is given the chance to kill Jews, you get the sense that he thinks of it, not as ethnic cleansing or mass murder, but as an innumerably complex problem to solve, and one more thing to analyze. And the man can analyze: he goes off on ten-page digressions about statistical models and mid-20th-century medical culture. Single paragraphs fill pages, and sometimes when you come to a paragraph break, a chorus plays Hallelujah in your head.

It's cheapening the story to chalk up Aue's neuroses to the author's need to portray the hyperactiveness of the German Nazi methodical mind. At the same time, however, reading this book really illuminates the intricacies of someone obsessed with detail, and how the humanity of humanity can get lost in the process. Aue, at various points in the book, destroys his family, embarks on an incestuous relationship with his sister, and argues -- regretfully, it seems -- that the more accurate tally of Jews killed in the Holocaust is closer to five million than six. There is also the aforementioned scatology: Aue is obsessed with vomiting and bowel movements, both his own and other people's. One of my favorite lines from Publisher's Weekly's review puts it best: "Nary an anus goes by that isn't lovingly described (among the best is one surrounded by a pink halo, gaped open like a sea anemone between two white globes)."

It's not a sympathetic portrait of Nazis by any means. But it's a thought-provoking one. I don't know if I'd actually want to read this book given the choice between it and, oh, just about any other book about the Holocaust (or not) out there. But for those with the curiosity -- and the time to spare -- it's an intriguing perusal.

I Hate Christmas

We are in the strange void between Hanukkah and Christmas, a time where Jews are already sick of being proud and silver-and-blue glitter and singing Maoz Tzur, while the rest of the western world is just about to kick their holiday into high gear. I know it's not fair to pit our minor (though fun) holiday against the birth of the central dude of the Christian religion. But I can't really help it. Kyle Broslovsky was right: it is hard to be a Jew on Christmas. Which doesn't at all explain the song that Josh Lamar and I put together called "I Hate Christmas." It's actually about, uh, why I like Christmas. You can listen to it free right there, or you can download the whole mini-EP for just $1. It's so worth it...both because it's good music, and because you can crank it loud enough to drown out all that Christmas music on the radio. What's interesting is the way this came about. Joshua Lamar, the non-Jewish drummer for the Jewish punk band Can!!Can, asked me if he could have some of my spoken-word tracks to play with. I sent him a volley of a bunch of them -- a while Christmas sack full of presents, you could say -- and the one he picked to work on first is the Christmas one. So take a listen! And, by the way, there's some raw language on it, just as a warning. I'm still kind of nervous about posting this -- much more nervous than posting the Hanukkah songs that we commissioned a few weeks ago -- but, then again, it's a whole different ball game. After all, "Mi Yimalel" and "Maoz Tzur" were written by great people thousands of years ago. This is just me ranting about Bob Dylan and Bette Midler. What do you think?

770s of the World

Admittedly, 770 Eastern Parkway, the biggest synagogue in Crown Heights and the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidic Judaism, is not the most instantly recognizable building in the world. At least, not according to most people. (That would probably be, depending on your POV and cultural background, either the Taj Mahal, the White House, or the Haunted Mansion.) But in the eyes of many Chabad Jews, 770 is the first and last word in architecture, whether it's constructing a new school, a new synagogue, or the perfect little something to fill in the space between two office buildings.

The photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher went around the world, taking pictures of 770s and their spinoff buildings, from a block-wide school in Los Angeles to a summer camp in Montreal to a library in Australia...and, yes, a house between two massive office buildings in Brazil. Check out some of the photos below, and then check their site for all twelve 770s built all over the world.

Yes, it's a little weird. But just like we hang pictures of people to inspire us -- whether it's a rabbi above your child's bed to ward off evil spirits, Robert Pattinson hanging in your locker, or a picture of my favorite rock star next to my writing desk -- having an iconic building around is probably a good thing for inspiration, whether it's hitting new spiritual heights or just getting to synagogue on time.