An Iftar…at the Israeli consul general’s house?

Sunset in West L.A. A swank little outdoor get-together, rosé and single malt at the bar, men in their Bonobos and Untuckits. The chat among a tribe of writers, managers and producers turns to that week’s plans.

“So, I’m going to this iftar,” one says. “At Wilshire Boulevard Temple.” An iftar is the traditional evening break-fast meal during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“Oh,” says a young TV exec. “I went to the NewGround iftar there last year. I’m going to one in Culver City.”

Suddenly, the game was on — that competition that happens when men gather in small circles and compare. And I wanted to play.

“I’m going to two,” I said. “One at the Israeli consul general’s house.”

“Oh!” one guy said. “Wow.”

I was feeling good. Winning.

“I was invited to that one,” the producer countered. “Couldn’t make it.”

We were five Jews, standing in a circle, one-upping one another over who was invited to the better Muslim break-fast. Could it be, I wondered, that in Los Angeles in 2017, iftars are the new Oscar party?

The first one I attended this year certainly felt exclusive. It was billed as the Jewish Muslim Leaders Summit. There were a couple dozen Muslims and Jews, half and half, in a function room at the Islamic Center of Southern California on Vermont Avenue. A lot of lawyers and accountants — and I’m talking about the Muslims. 

“People ask me to describe the American Muslim community,” one lawyer told me. “I always say, ‘We’re boring.’ ” Muslims go to school, work, raise families, he shrugged. What’s to say?

Edina Lekovic, one of the Muslim conveners, said Ramadan is the perfect time to engage in what we Jews call tikkun olam. 

“The absence of food and water can mean the presence of something else,” she said. Plus, she added, when you have to fast from dawn to past sunset, “It’s good to have something to keep you busy.”

We spoke of the current state of division in America, the sense of discrimination and how we can work together to create better polity and politics.

At 8:06 p.m., the fast was over. We each ate a date stuffed with a walnut, the traditional break-fast treat (note to Jews: excellent post-Yom Kippur idea). Across the hall, the imam chanted the call to prayer. We all were invited to pray, or to wait until the prayers finished. Then we ate — a banquet of hummus, salads, kebab, falafel and pita with za’atar. 

It was Lebanese food, someone pointed out.

Two days later, I was at the home of Sam Grundwerg, Israel’s new consul general in Los Angeles. Grundwerg, his wife, Julia, and their children had just moved into their new home in Los Angeles and were hosting their first event, an iftar.

“Thank you for helping us open up our home for the first time,” Grundwerg said. “I think it’s really making a statement.” 

That was an understatement. For 69 years, Israel has worked toward more equality, more integration of its 20 percent Muslim population, with many ups and downs. But the message of this evening was one of welcome and acceptance. At a time when Muslims are feared and singled out in America, including by our president, the consul general of Israel made them the first guests in his new home.

Getting Muslims to come the first time, Grundwerg recognized, would be a challenge. He lit on the idea of inviting someone with a high enough profile to lead the way, like, say, the greatest basketball player who ever lived. 

“I thought it would be difficult to get him,” Grundwerg said of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the former Lakers and UCLA legend. “But he loved the idea right away.”

About 50 guests sat in white folding chairs in Grundwerg’s living room. Abdul-Jabbar, stately, serious, towering over the second-tallest guest (me) by a foot at 7 feet 2 inches, led a panel discussion on tolerance and Muslim-Jewish relations with music impresario Russell Simmons; Mohammed Khan, director of interfaith outreach at King Fahad Mosque in Culver City; and New York Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.  

“As a Muslim and as someone who loves my country,” Abdul-Jabbar said, “I’m really concerned about what’s happening in our country. People are at each other’s throats. This is avoidable if we can talk to each other and learn to respect each other.”

Abdul-Jabbar, author of several books on history, spoke of the Golden Age of Spain, when Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together and flourished.

“The beginning of the Renaissance came out of Spain and North Africa,” he said, “because Muslims, Jews and Christians cooperated and shared knowledge and shared solutions. That’s what I want to get back to, and that’s why I’m here this evening.”

Simmons, who identifies himself as a yogi, said he and Schneier have been doing Muslim-Jewish dialogue for 10 years, in 40 countries, but recently the need for it has become more urgent.

“Today it’s gotten so bad, it’s impossible to avoid a public discussion,” he said. “This idea of the children of Abraham being so separate is so disturbing. We need to give others what we want for ourselves.”

When the clock struck 8:06 p.m., marking the end of the fast, the consul ended the discussion. As the guests broke the fast with dates, consular officials and Julia Grundwerg hurriedly cleared the chairs and laid down a large rug. An imam issued the call to prayer, his voice echoing through the room. About a dozen of the Muslim guests then held a prayer service in the consul’s living room.

“Allahu Akbar (God is great),” called out Khan, who led the prayer. “Allahu Akbar,” they repeated.   

There was a kosher buffet meal in the backyard: hummus, salads, kebab, braised lamb, stuffed grape leaves and pita with za’atar.

“Israeli food,” someone said.

The night wound down. Abdul-Jabbar took selfies and signed autographs. The Persian actor Navid Negahban, who played the Jew-murdering arch-terrorist Abu Nazir on the TV series “Homeland,” gave a moving, funny speech about empathy.

As I walked to the parking valet, it occurred to me that the surest path to empathy is experience — sharing one another’s lives, rituals and holidays, in person. Sure, we can imagine ourselves walking in someone else’s shoes, but it always will be more powerful to spend a few hours walking beside the person. May the competition for the best iftar invitations in L.A. only grow, I thought.

And as if I needed a sign that I was right, it was there on the booth where I picked up my car. The sign said, “Abraham’s Valet Parking.” 

---

Rob Eshman is publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal. Email
him at robe@jewishjournal.com. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter @foodaism
and @RobEshman.

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Hunk hawks hideous health bill

John Thune is the most handsome man in the U.S. Senate. Square jawed, gleaming smile, cowboy tan, the 6’4” South Dakota Republican’s rugged good looks are antipodal to the mien of majority leader Mitch McConnell, whom Jon Stewart has definitively established is Yertle the Turtle’s doppelgänger. If the human brain’s positive bias toward attractive people didn’t cue me to infer that Thune is a great guy, a real straight shooter, I’d be as outraged by the assault on Americans’ health that Thune and his co-conspirators are currently waging, and by the subversion of American democracy they’re using to ram it through, as I am when its public face is McConnell’s.

Thune is a member of the all-white, all-male “gang of 13” staunchly conservative Republicans whom McConnell tasked two months ago with secretly writing a new GOP health bill in the Senate.

Because a parliamentary tactic will embed this Affordable Care Act (ACA) repeal — and alleged replacement — into a budget reconciliation bill, it’s exempt from being filibustered by Democrats. That means the bill will need only 50 of the 52 Republican senators, along with Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote, in order to pass, instead of the 60 votes it takes to shut down a filibuster, which would require at least eight Democrats to defect.

Because the House also must pass the bill with only Republican votes, it needs to be mean enough to win over the House’s far right Freedom Caucus, “mean” being President Donald Trump’s new description of the formerly “beautiful” House health bill he fêted in the Rose Garden in May. That’s why the American Health Care Act (AHCA) that McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan want Trump’s signature on before July 4 likely will deprive 23 million Americans of health insurance; end Obamacare’s minimum benefits, like mental health services and maternity care; deny coverage for pre-existing conditions; permit lifetime benefit caps; cut $800 billion from Medicare and turn it into block grants to states, effectively killing the program — oh, and give the top 0.1 percent of households an average tax cut of nearly $200,000.

I say “likely,” since the actual content of the bill has been shrouded in secrecy. Because a majority of Americans oppose those changes to a law that a majority of Americans support, McConnell knows that his only chance to pass it before the public catches on and rises up is a total blackout of information as they write the bill, which is what’s happening now, and once they reveal it, a blitzkrieg without committee hearings or time for town halls, hurtling toward a final vote within a matter of hours.

This is not normal. It’s not how a bill affecting one-fifth of our economy is supposed to be considered. McConnell’s plan is to make it seem normal, which is why they’re deploying the credibility of John Thune’s chiseled cheekbones: to sell a coup d’état as if it were a “Schoolhouse Rock!” civics lesson.

The day after a gunman opened fire on a Republican congressional baseball practice, prompting calls to for a return to civil discourse in our politics, Thune was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” saying we all must do our part to achieve the unity that this moment requires. Speaking of unity, journalist Mike Barnicle piped up, what about the health care bill being written in secret? “Nobody knows what’s in this bill,” Barnicle said. As a starter, he asked, in the spirit of reaching across the aisle, of bipartisanship and openness, “How about … telling us what’s in this bill?”

Thune’s answer made me marvel that a man with such good hair could deceive so baldly.

There’s really no bill to share, he said. What’s going on now is just discussions, just policy options. It will be openly shared when it’s reduced to legislative language, he said, as though that’s just how the lawmaking process works.

It’s not. Drafts of bills are routinely made public long before legislative language is locked in. They’re distributed as outlines, memos, letters, emails, talking points, PowerPoints, lists, charts, conference calls, cut-and-pastes, works in progress, principles, summaries, overviews, abstracts. They’re the basis for innumerable meetings with constituents, stakeholders, interest groups, media, members of both parties, think tanks, analysts and experts. That’s American democracy in action. What’s happening now is not.

Besides, Thune added, there’s been so much discussion of health care over the past decade, “it’s like any of us are unfamiliar with what the issues are.” We’ve already discussed them.

The ACA was the subject of hundreds of committee hearings and markups, hundreds of hours of congressional debate, hundreds of town halls and public forums and two years of news coverage. But that discussion was about expanding Medicare, not eliminating it; about increasing benefits, not cutting them; about providing health insurance to millions, not giving tax cuts to millionaires. If the media were to give the AHCA’s issues the kind of scrutiny and airtime it gave Obamacare, Republicans would now be running from it like a dumpster fire.

To be sure, John Thune would make one handsome fireman. But I doubt even he could convince his colleagues in Congress to bunk in a burning building.

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MARTY KAPLAN is the Norman Lear professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Reach him at martyk@jewishjournal.com.

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A Palestinian state: Like Gaza, only bigger

“Two-state” Middle East proposals are alluring given the prizes they offer each side: a Jewish, democratic Israel; and an independent Palestine. But any real two-state “solution” (and not just a two-state result) must improve the daily lives of both Israelis and Palestinians. For Palestinians, that’s unlikely.

Ten years ago this week, the radical terrorist group Hamas took control of the already-miserable Gaza Strip – and daily life in Gaza has only worsened in the decade since. Indeed, two million Gazans face massive unemployment and daily struggles to find adequate food, housing, electricity, clean water, and medical care. The United Nations predicts the area will be “unlivable” by 2020.

Gaza’s dire straits are usually blamed on the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt, as well as other travel and economic restrictions that wouldn’t apply if Palestine were independent. But Palestinian structural, political, and cultural problems mean the Gaza script is all too likely to be replayed on the West Bank in the event of a two-state resolution. How long before the Palestinian residents of Nablus and Hebron begin pining for the good old days of Israeli presence?

With all the complaints about Israeli checkpoints and other restrictions, it’s easy to forget that Israel built the skeleton upon which Palestine has rested, for better or worse, for half a century.

I’m not sure Israel would simply hand over the infrastructure it created – let’s face it, mostly for its own citizens – in the event of a Palestinian state. Two states would not reflect a “divorce” as in Czechoslovakia in 1993, since the land for Palestine originally came from Jordan and Israel was never binational. If Palestine asks Israel to defer to its declaration of independence, it can’t reasonably expect to simply keep everything Israel built within its borders. The two states would have to negotiate the disposition of the West Bank’s water systems, telecommunications, transportation, electric grid, and more.

But even if Israel did abandon all claims to the foundation it built through massive investment in the West Bank, Palestinians have no experience administering and operating it efficiently. Over in Gaza, the technical problems are not solely due to Israeli interference; Hamas blunders also play a role.

The currency Palestinians use – even in Gaza – is the Israeli shekel. An independent Palestine would have its own currency, which – even if pegged to the dollar or the Euro – would be untested and a risky change from Israel’s currently robust shekel.

People often forget that Israel’s military presence in the West Bank modulates the territory’s internal conflicts. Palestinians are sharply divided, particularly regarding the religious and political shape of any future state. Israel’s army has kept those tensions from boiling over into civil war. Who will play that role if Israel withdraws?

And some of Gaza’s plight results from Palestinian cultural factors that would stymie a healthy democracy. (Indeed, the technically democratic Palestinian Authority hasn’t held an election in 11 years.) Notorious corruption on the West Bank combined with tribal and regional rivalries suggest a constantly destabilized Palestine, particularly after it can no longer (well, should no longer) unify its people by blaming its disarray on Israel.

Of course, one of the reasons for Gaza’s hardship is the three short but devastating wars it fought with Israel. Israel had to invade each time because of rockets being fired at its civilians – and not only by militants controlled by Hamas. An independent Palestine will be hard-pressed to prevent individuals and groups from launching missiles on Israel – this time from closer range to Ben Gurion Airport and Tel Aviv. Palestinians bemoan the deaths of Gaza residents from Israel’s “disproportionate response” to its defensive actions. Independence in the West Bank would double down on that problem.

Why are Palestinians even pushing for an independent state given its likely failure to improve their lives? It’s not like they are unaware of the obstacles. Well, for many of them, an independent Palestine is just one step toward the ultimate goal of a unified nation including all of their “heritage” – and that includes Tel Aviv and its suburbs as much as it does Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.

Not every world problem has a solution. Korea remains divided and China still occupies Tibet. Many Israelis have welcomed he Trump Administration’s signals it is not wedded to the two-state approach. Perhaps Palestinians should also be heartened and eager to explore different strategies for easing the conflict, lest a two-state result produces a Palestinian state that is basically Gaza, only bigger.

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David Benkof is a columnist for The Daily Caller, where this essay first appeared. Follow him on Twitter (@DavidBenkof) and http://ift.tt/2mGILXa, or E-mail him atDavidBenkof@gmail.com.

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A(nother) Response to Rabbi David Wolpe

David Wolpe is a well-regarded rabbi who likes speaking out on public issues. So it is a little odd, to say the least, that he is now saying that rabbis *shouldn’t* speak out on public issues. This piece is deeply wrong, but it is wrong in interesting ways:

1) As alluded to above, Rabbi Wolpe doesn’t believe it himself. He very loudly attacked the Iran Deal two years ago, even though it was more of a technical issue far outside rabbinic competence (unfortunately revealed by his comments). He has given sermons on, for example, whether a mosque should be built near the 9/11 site. Somehow those are things to talk about, but, say, stripping 23 million people of health care to give a tax cut to billionaires is off-limits, or preserving the earth by fighting climate change must be ignored, or dealing with child refugees from Central America is unimportant. That silence speaks volumes. Put another way, Rabbi Wolpe is not staying out of politics: he is making a political decision about particular issues. That is his right, but then he should be upfront about it.

2) Rabbi Wolpe correctly says that he as well as other rabbis are besieged with requests to speak out or work on issues and they cannot engage with all of them. Absolutely. But rabbis are not unique on this: everyone has pressures on them, and everyone must pick their spots. I literally get dozens of petitions, fundraising appeals, and event invitations every week. I’m not so special, and neither are rabbis. It is one thing to say “I cannot be all things to all people.” It is quite another to say “I will be no things to anybody.” And that is particularly the case when the rabbi assumes the position of a public intellectual: he or she cannot do that and then protest that they should not be responsible for political opinions.

3) Most importantly, as Aryeh Cohen has pointed out, the piece seems to convey a narrow concept about what speaking and doing rabbinic politics means. If all Rabbi Wolpe is saying is that he does not want to harangue his congregation from the pulpit, more power to him: people come to shul to davven, not to sit through a political advertisement. As the older rabbi in the terrific Ben Stiller/Ed Norton movie “Keeping the Faith” says: “People want to be led: they do not want to be pushed.” But that is often the least relevant aspect of what rabbinic politics is.

Rabbis can use their non-pulpit time for political engagement. They teach students in religious and day school. They serve as an exemplar for civic participation: they need not demand “here is what you must do,” but they can show by their actions “here is what I am doing and why it is important to me.” Most importantly, they teach their congregation in many ways. We are too bound up with the Heschelian-prophetic model, which, as I think Rabbi Wolpe correctly fears, can quickly become self-righteousness. But a rabbi can work with congregants to engage the critical Jewish texts that bear on crucial public issues. Torah has things to say about these issues, sometimes appealing, sometimes appalling. Rabbis can learn *with* their congregations, and can say what they draw from the panoply of texts, traditions, and practices that comprise the history of our people’s engagement with God. If they present these materials and history in a rigorous and intellectually honest way, and reach a strong conclusion about it, then that is not “doing politics from the pulpit.” It is doing Torah. Indeed, if a rabbi isn’t doing that, one wonders what he or she IS doing and why they got into the business in the first place.

When the history of this era is eventually written, there will be a detailed record of what Jews and their clergy did during this age of democratic and moral decay. History’s view of those who take the attitude that it was not something for them to get involved with will not be positive.

Jonathan Zasloff is professor of law at UCLA, where he teaches, among other things, property, international law and Pirkei Avot. He is also a rabbinical ordination candidate at the Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

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Politics versus humanity

It’s hard to root for an attitude. It’s a lot easier to root for an ideology or a team.

More and more, politics has become a “rooting for my team” phenomenon. The fact that we associate politics with ideologies that define us only accentuates this phenomenon. Every current event we encounter is filtered through this political lens. It colors how we judge people, how we choose friendships, how we experience culture, how we judge ourselves.

The Bush-Obama-Trump era, along with the social media revolution, has provided a perfect storm of ferocious partisan division. It’s not just about their various ideologies. It’s also the fact that they each played God, trying to transform the world in their image. Instead of making politics more humble, they made it more arrogant.

No modern president has ever had the guts to tell the American people this fundamental truth:

“My fellow Americans: The pursuit of your happiness and personal fulfillment is not determined by whether you vote Democrat or Republican. Your vote does make a difference, but so does your character and your willingness to improve the little world around you. In fact, the success of this country is very much dependent on how you act within your families and communities.

“By all means choose your parties, pick your causes and cast your votes. But don’t let those votes define how you view our country. America is bigger than that, and so are you. Our government depends on you as much as you depend on us. Will you embrace our liberty with a sense of responsibility? Will you see the humanity in those with whom you disagree? Will you honor your obligations as much as you fight for your rights? These questions are as crucial to our future as our debates about policy.”

Which politician could ever get away with such humility and honesty? Politics is the opposite of humility. To win our votes, politicians act as if they’re larger than life and their opponents are mere weasels. The more they fight for our vote, the more entertaining they become, and the more the media laps it up.

This dramatic brew of ideology, hero worship and fierce combat conspire to make politics the all-consuming cultural force it has become. Is it any wonder that friendships and families can break up over politics? We’re hypnotized by the team we’re rooting for, and nobody better get in the way.

I’m not downplaying the importance of policy. For people in dire need of assistance, and for many others, policy can be life or death. What I’m saying is that when we allow policy and politics to define us to the point that we can’t see the humanity or validity in any “other side,” we undermine the value of both politics and policy. It becomes more about power and winning. Go Lakers.

Some of my deepest friendships are with those on the opposite side of my political views. I’m not sure why. It could be because our political differences just accentuate the strength of our human, non-political connection.

But there’s also something else: I like to enjoy life. As much as I follow politics because of my profession, and as much as there are causes I feel incredibly passionate about, at the end of the day, what makes my life better and more meaningful? Is it to root for my team at the expense of everything else? Is it to block myself from alternative or inconvenient views? Is it to demand from politics what it can never give me?

Politicians can promise me the world, but I know they’ll never come to my house to set up my Shabbat table or help me raise my kids or play some great music. Not even God can do that.

That’s the attitude I root for.

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Dore Gold’s fight for Jerusalem

With all the talk of renewed diplomacy in the Middle East involving Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, you can bet that one of the most emotionally charged issues will be the status of Jerusalem.

That’s why I looked forward to attending a recent multimedia presentation at the Museum of Tolerance titled “Jerusalem United: Fifty Years of Freedom, Three Thousand Years of Jewish History.” The presenter was Ambassador Dore Gold, a longtime senior Israeli diplomat, author and strategist, who now is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Gold made a compelling case for the deep, uninterrupted, 3,000-year Jewish connection to Jerusalem. Using artifacts from biblical times, ancient scrolls, recent archaeological discoveries, legal documents from international bodies and other pieces of evidence that appeared on a large screen, Gold was like a trial attorney making his closing argument to a jury.

And like a good attorney, he didn’t skip the emotional part.

When I say emotional, I mean the sense of outrage Gold feels toward anyone who denies a Jewish connection to Jerusalem.

Gold didn’t go through the list of deniers, but we know the list is long. For example, in an August 2012 Jerusalem Post piece under the headline “Abbas Denies the Jewish Connection to Jerusalem,” Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas went as far as questioning the very existence of the Jewish Holy Temple, an affront to any historian, archeologist or biblical scholar. He also said recently that Jews have no right to desecrate the holy sites in Jerusalem with their “dirty feet.”

International bodies like UNESCO have had no problem passing resolutions denying a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Even United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which President Barack Obama refused to veto, characterized the Western Wall as “occupied Palestinian territory.”

The Jewish connection to Jerusalem is not just good for the Jews, it’s good for the whole world. 

Gold is acutely aware of this pervasive movement to negate Jewish history and strike at the core of Jewish identity. Maybe that’s why he’s so obsessed with evidence. Discussing international efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, he showed legal documents that he says makes Israel “the most legitimate state in the U.N.,” because it is “the only state whose legality was recognized even before it was founded by both the League of Nations and the United Nations.”

Gold also reminded us that attacks on Jewish legitimacy and identity are hardly new. “Let me tell you one last historical truth,” he said near the end of his presentation. “The Romans understood that to wage war and defeat their enemies, they needed to attack their identity, not just their physical bodies. After crushing the last Jewish rebellion against them, they renamed Jerusalem ‘Aelia Capitolina,’ and Judea was given a new name: ‘Syria-Palestine.’ They wanted to erase the memory of Jewish self-rule forever.”

Preserving and disseminating the truth of this memory is consuming Gold at the moment. Over lunch the next day, he spoke of the urgency of taking his “Jerusalem United” show on the road. “With all the talk of diplomacy right now, Jerusalem will be right in the middle of the discussions,” he told me. “It’s critical that the truth about the 3,000-year Jewish connection comes out loud and clear.”

I couldn’t agree more, but I hope he will accentuate an additional truth that is essential and often overlooked. It’s a truth that deals not with the time frame of 3,000 years but with the time frame of 19 years, between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan was in control of the holy sites of Jerusalem.

Here’s what Gold himself wrote in his 2007 book, “The Fight for Jerusalem”:

“After seizing East Jerusalem in 1948, Jordan’s Arab Legion completely evicted the Jewish population from the Old City. The Jewish Quarter was set aflame, its homes were looted, and dozens of synagogues were destroyed or vandalized. Tombstones from the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were converted into latrines.

“For the following nineteen years, Jews were prevented from praying at their holy sites, including the Western Wall. The Jordanians also barred Christian institutions from buying land and otherwise restricted the rights of Jerusalem’s Christian population, which dropped by over 50 percent during the period of Jordanian rule.”

Now compare those 19 years to what followed: “Upon capturing the Old City in 1967, Israel decided on a new approach to governing the city — it adopted a law protecting the holy sites of all religions and guaranteeing their free access to all worshippers.”

In other words, the Jewish connection to Jerusalem is not just good for the Jews, it’s good for the whole world. Maybe that’s how Gold should rest his case. 

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Wonder Woman’s other mission

When I told my wife how much I liked “Wonder Woman,” she said, “I bet you did.”

Well, yes, if I have to watch someone run around in spandex for two hours, I’d rather it be Gal Gadot than, say, Michael Keaton. So sue me.

But even a woman that striking wouldn’t stand out if the rest of the movie hadn’t been so entertaining: the script, the direction, the superb score. 

That’s why I wish I could sit down Lebanon’s Ministry of Economy & Trade and tell them, Look, don’t be a shmuck.

When “Wonder Woman” came out, the Hezbollah-run Lebanese ministry banned it, on account of Gadot being Israeli.

Israelis and Jews were bound to make a big deal of Gadot’s star turn. That’s what tribes do: boast of every Jewish wrestler, Armenian astronaut, Azerbaijani chess master. But what would have been just a source of parochial pride now, thanks to Lebanon, has become an international symbol.

Here’s yet another example of how the irrational hatred of Israel in the Arab world inevitably backfires.

Gadot’s Israeliness would have been a footnote on IMDb. Now — shukran Lebanon — she is carrying the Israeli brand on a platform that eventually will reach into every movie theater, laptop, cellphone, toy store, kids meal, Halloween costume and childhood fantasy.

The fictional Wonder Woman has to rescue humanity from the Kaiser’s army. The real Gal Gadot now has an even harder task: rescuing Israel’s image whenever and wherever it is maligned unfairly.   

It’s a lot to put on the shoulders of a 32-year-old mother of two. But if she can film the re-shoots of “Wonder Woman” while five months pregnant, she can handle the BDS crowd. 

Recently, I impulse-bought a T-shirt online that was pure white but for the black outline of a round head and an eye patch. In the 1960s and ’70s, any adult in the world instantly would have recognized it as Moshe Dayan. In the days before and after the Six-Day War, he didn’t just come to represent Israel, but to reflect its best qualities of bravery, fearlessness and intelligence.

Although it’s not a role she signed up for, Gal Gadot is destined to be this generation’s Moshe Dayan. Real Israeli heroes of the military type have become far too controversial. A make-believe action hero is much safer: Gadot as the Amazon princess Diana still embodies fearlessness and brains, and reflects it back on her native country. She just doesn’t have to worry about landing in Europe and being carted off to The Hague.

What’s striking, considering how fraught the subject of Israel can be, is how fearless Gadot has been in taking it on. It was striking not just that she has been called out for being Israeli, but how Israeli she is. Most movie heroes are deracinated totems of Middle American virtues. Just try to think of a single tent-pole superhero who speaks with a Southern drawl or Spanish accent. For generations, the same has been true of all leading men and women in most movies and TV shows — they had to grind down their noses and names and polish their accents if they ever wanted to be accepted. 

But Gal is Gal. She kept her Israeli name (OK, Gadot used to be Greenstein, but the change was an Israeli, not a Hollywood, thing). And strikingly, she kept her Israeli accent. In fact, director Patty Jenkins went a step further. To make Gadot not stand out as foreign, all the other Amazons adopted variations of her accent. The ones who did it well, like Robin Wright, sound like they could be selling Dead Sea cosmetics at the local mall. 

And Gadot’s character acts Israeli. When her love interest, Steve, kowtows to his English commanders, she marches into their conference room, shouts them down, then turns to macho Steve and dresses him down for buckling to authority. Any polite American Jew who has dated an Israeli has lived that moment, minus the generals.

Until Gadot, the Israeli image was essentially macho.  The most famous Israeli woman abroad was Golda Meir, whose reputation had long faded, especially in her own country. Now Gadot comes along and fuses feminism to Israeliness — “badass and kickass and morally courageous” as Times of Israeli journalist Sarah Tuttle-Singer put it.

In the end, I wonder what will have more power to soften the hearts of Israel’s most irrational enemies: the fake heroics of the character she plays, or the more subtly heroic choices Gadot has made to embrace who she is, and to stand up for where she comes from.  

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Rob Eshman is publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal. Email
him at robe@jewishjournal.com. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter @foodaism
and @RobEshman.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Wonder Woman’s other mission : http://ift.tt/2rimfUa