Habitus

by Habitus · 02/15/10

At Habitus, we were very pleased to learn that this November, the Jewish Federations of North America will be bringing its General Assembly and International Lion of Judah Conference to New Orleans. JFNA president Jerry Silverman sees the city as the perfect choice for this organization of Jewish philanthropies to reflect, “as a Jewish community and family…on our collective responsibility and action together.”

We agree that it’s an inspired choice of locale.

In 2008, Habitus visited New Orleans, working with local artists, writers, and scholars to reveal the multiple legacies of Diaspora that define a place that, as Habitus editor Joshua Ellison puts it, “contains multitudes and has been defined by the murky edges where people meet to create something new.”

In the pages of our New Orleans issue, you’ll find poetry, drama, fiction, interviews, and memoir from the city’s best writers—a guide to the city’s intellectual and cultural landscape. We encourage those planning on attending the General Assembly to read selections from the issue—and we invite you to take advantage of the special discounted price we’re offering on the issue. Right now, the issue is only $5, or 50% off.

In those pages, Andrei Codrescu describes a city where the Jewish people are one diaspora among many, parading their differences even as they incorporate them into the city’s cultural fabric, fearing “only amnesia”:

Jews join the Krewe de Jew
And throw glittery bagels instead of beads to the mob
…
The rebbe leads the congregation through the streets
Playing Where the Saints Go Marching In on the shofar

Rodger Kamenetz writes of how he maintains a sense of being at home in a place that is always on the verge of displacement, that that has survived—not just since Katrina, but always—as an “affront to rationality of all kinds.” For him, the city exists in a familiar dialectic of flux and rootedness, restoration and renewal, a dialectic he began to understand in light of the destruction of the Second Temple:

They needed to keep alive the hope of returning, but they also needed to create a new way of living in the meantime. That new way of living was strong enough and flexible enough to survive in almost every environment, from Poland to China, from the ancient world to the modern. And that was a good thing because “in the meantime” turned out to be almost two thousand years of human history.

You’ll also find fiction from Nancy Lemann, memoir from Joshua Clark, drama from John Biguenet, and much more—a travel guide to New Orleans’ cultural and intellectual landscape.

We’ve recently posted an intriguing video from musicologist Ned Sublette, who sees New Orleans not (as many do) as an outlier, somehow out of place in the United States, but instead as the “most American city…[using] the term ‘American’ in its full hemispheric context,” tying together the hemisphere’s Native American, African, Spanish, and French threads like nowhere else.

As Joshua Ellison puts it:

So many different people have laid hands on this place—empires, immigrants, slaves, and their descendants. Their imprints are still everywhere, on an unforgiving terrain that pushes back against human intervention…New Orleans is a constant negotiation between time and space, expansion and limitation. History moves in its ways, the landscape shifts too, and New Orleans is their fluid sum.

Keep checking back to explore all of our online New Orleans coverage. We’ll be updating the site with New Orleans-related interviews, images, and assorted findings throughout the year.

And as you prepare for your visit to New Orleans, make sure to sample more of the unique flavors of the city as you browse our our Amazon shop. There you’ll find work from our contributors, ranging from Ned Sublette’s cultural history of the city, to Ari Kelman’s meditation on how human agency and natural forces have shaped the city, to Joshua Clark’s memoir of the absurdity of the aftermath of Katrina.

And since no journey to New Orleans could be considered complete without music, you’ll also want to make sure to listen to Andrei Codrescu’s lyrical collaboration with the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, who take the city’s polyglot (and polyrhythmic) musical heritage in an entirely new direction.

We’ll see you in November.