Habitus

by Michael Sterling · 12/05/11

This December marks the twentieth anniversary of Pedro Meyer‘s legendary multi-media photography exposition I Photograph to Remember. Meyer’s intimate collection of photographs documents his parents’ struggle with cancer.

The first of its kind, I Photograph to Remember originally could only be viewed on a computer screen. The exposition was housed, so to speak, on a CD-ROM; the photographs of Meyer’s family are accompanied by music and narration. “The narration, and the use of my voice,” says Meyer, “made a huge difference in how this work was perceived. It is precisely because of the inherent limitation of the photographic medium, that the presence of the voice picks up where the photograph couldn’t tread. I made sure that the narration would always be a complement to that which was self evident in the picture, thus adding to the story being told while not competing with the image.”

I Photograph to Remember is featured in the Mexico City issue of this magazine.

View the original project as it was intended to be seen in 1991 here. See an essay Meyer wrote in 2001 about I Photograph to Remember here. Visit Meyer’s website here to see his most recent work.

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by Habitus · 11/27/11

Arthur Leipzig, Chalk Games, Prospect Place, Brooklyn

Here is a round-up of what we’re excited about this week and think you will be, too:

On Our Shelf

Read an excerpt from Umberto Eco‘s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, which deals with the legendary anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Take a look at what the New York Times and the Washington Post think about it. And make sure to read (and watch) what Eco himself has to say.

Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative is a collection of essays–on everything from digital animation to writer’s block–by Lawrence Weschler, director of NYU’s Institute for the Humanities and Habitus board member. Check out an interview with Weschler, read a review of the book and tune into a talk he gave at the Open Society Institute.

André Aciman, a fellow Habitus board member, contributor, and friend, has written a new memoir, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. Read the New York Times review, as well as the feature on Tablet Magazine, which includes an excerpt.

The work of Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec has finally appeared in English, thanks to Open Letter Books, which published his My Two Worlds this summer and plans to release his The Planets next year. Take a look at the Words without Borders review of My Two Worlds and the recent interview with Chejfec in Guernica Magazine. Look for more from Chejfec in our upcoming New York issue.

 Jews with Cameras

Photographer Joshua Cogan has traveled the world in search of far-flung Jewish communities, from Gondar in Ethiopia to Kochi in southern India. Check out his evocative photos as featured in the Forward.

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 is now on view through March at the Jewish Museum and profiles the dynamic Jewish photographers who combined their art with social commentary and found a new way of looking at New York. For more, take a look at our recent conversation with Daniel Morris, author of After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers.

From Nowy Targ to Zuccotti Park

Translationista, the blog of author and translator Susan Bernofsky, features a fascinating personal essay linking a visit to her grandmother’s hometown in Poland to Bernofsky’s experiences in Zuccotti Park with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Be sure to check out the recent interview with Bernofsky in Book Forum, and our Berlin issue, which features her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck.

-Compiled by Daniel Bloch and Michael Sterling

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by Daniel Bloch · 11/21/11

Maghen Abraham synagogue before renovations (courtesy Wikipedia)

To speak of synagogues in Lebanon sounds obscure today, given the country’s history of conflict with Israel, but at one time over 20,000 Jews worshipped in dozens of synagogues throughout the country. The community’s core has always been Beirut, which is fitting given the city’s legacy of religious diversity, but the sectarian bloodshed of the ’70s and ’80s drove the majority of Lebanon’s Jews overseas, mainly to Europe and the United States. (Ironically, the deadly Green Line dividing Beirut’s Christian and Muslim neighborhoods during the civil war ran through the Jewish quarter, Wadi Abu Jamil.) The community now hovers around 200, but a comprehensive plan to rebuild the Maghen Abraham synagogue in Beirut is nearing completion.

The project, as covered recently by Deutsche Welle Online, began in 2009 and has progressed under tight security and with financial support from both the Lebanese Jewish diaspora and local construction companies involved in urban renewal projects in downtown Beirut. One of the companies, Solidere, was founded by Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister whose assassination in 2005 touched off massive socio-political change in Lebanon. For an in-depth look at the rebuilding of Maghen Abraham, check out the website of the Lebanese Jewish Community Council, which includes extensive photo coverage of the reconstruction, as well as notes on the community’s history.

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by Michael Sterling · 11/21/11

Stanton Street shul (The Lo-Down)

Jenna Weissman Joselit, a Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at the George Washington University, reviewed Jonathan Boyarin‘s Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side. The book is a history of the district told through the story of a humble synagogue, Boyarin’s own shul which he’s attended since he was a youth in New York. Joselit’s review, titled Praying with Ghosts, is published in The New Republic.

The Lower East Side, situated in the very heart of the city in south Manhattan, is in many ways its own space apart from New York. “Everything about the place–its architecture, its rhythms, its residents–seemed at odds with the rest of the city. It still does,” writes Joselit.

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by Michael Sterling · 11/21/11

In 1922, Sioma Lifshitz set off for China. He was a twenty-year-old Russian who became disillusioned with the political aspirations of the 1917 Revolution. He would spend the next thirty years in Shanghai, launching a career as a high-class photographer under the pseudonym Sam Sanzetti. Today, Lifshitz is heralded by many as one of the best photographers ever to have worked in Shanghai. When he left for Israel in 1957, he carried in his suitcase some 20,000 photographs that he had taken during his career.

Lifshitz–calling himself Sanzetti–opened his own photography studio in 1927 on Nanjing Road, a commercial street near the Bund, the tourist center and financial district in Shanghai. He photographed all manner of people: celebrities, film stars, young couples, children.

Lifshitz is famous for saying, “You could have found me in Honolulu, if that happened to be the destiny of the ship.” He was speaking of his decision to leave Russia when, quite impulsively, he boarded the next available ship to somewhere. In Shanghai, he apprenticed under an American photographer who taught him the craft, and soon thereafter Lipshitz began to work as Sam Sanzetti.

Lifshitz died in Israel in 1986. For years, his photography was unavailable for public viewing and his name had all but faded from memory. Now, the Israeli consulate in Shanghai has headed the effort to reinvigorate Sanzetti’s name and well-deserved fame in Shanghai.

The consulate hopes to find the stories behind the photographs. They’ve posted many of Lipshitz’s photographs on their Weibo—a Chinese version of Twitter—in hopes that someone will recognize who is in the photograph. Within days, the Weibo post has had thousands of hits and the consulate has received many calls with possible leads.

Oren Rozenblat, the deputy consul general of Israel in Shanghai said of the project: “It will be beautiful to see at the exhibition a very old lady standing in front of her picture as a young bride.”

Visit the Israeli consulate in Shanghai’s website on the digital exhibition here. Satellite Voices, an international photography forum, features some of Lipshitz’s work as well. Read the related article in the China Daily here.

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by Habitus · 11/21/11

This conversation between memoirist, novelist, critic, and scholar André Aciman and Habitus editor Joshua Ellison was recorded last summer at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in lower Manhattan, at an event entitled, “Is New York the Diaspora?”

Diaspora is not a word you use a lot in your writing, but exile is a concept you return to again and again. So, I ask, as a beginning: are Diaspora and exile the same thing?

An exile is someone who has been forcibly evicted or dispossessed. Force is inherent to the displacement of an exile; otherwise he is just an immigrant. Therefore, as an exile, you are a wanderer until you find a home—if ever you do. Diaspora is a condition of dispersion that applies to more than one individual; you cannot have one person being diasporic. You cannot be a Diaspora unto yourself. This is an important distinction because the experience of solitude defines exile but does not necessarily have any kind of repercussions in a Diaspora. For example, you could dismantle an entire ghetto in Vilnius and transport it to Brooklyn. Those people are in the condition of Diaspora but they are together. They bring with them their own history, a set of cultural values, and artifacts that keep bound them together.

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by Konrad Bercovici · 11/21/11

This essay by Romanian-born Konrad Bercovici (1882–1961) was published in in the September 12, 1923 issue of The Nation.

© John Rosenthal

There is an old European saying that every country deserves the kind of Jews it has.

If so, New York does not know what it deserves, for it has every kind—gangsters, social workers, philanthropists, corrupt politicians, patriotic capitalists, preaching socialists, anarchists, bigots, atheists, ignorant illiterates, highly educated men. Every kind of Jew, from the lowest strata of humanity to the peak of culture, is represented here—a complete nation. The only way to purify water is to sterilize it. The only way to purify a nation is to kill it. You can kill a Jew but you can’t kill the Jews. Spain has learned that. Russia has had her lesson. Poland has tried to solve her Jewish problem in a river. Hungary has imitated Poland. Rumania has tried to imitate them. Germany is doing it now. But it all comes down to one and the same thing. You can kill a Jew, ten, a hundred, a thousand, but you can’t kill the Jews. They cannot even be absorbed. No sooner has the inevitable process of absorption begun in a country, after two generations of tolerance has put the national or racial consciousness to sleep, than an anti-Semitic outbreak in that country or in another awakens the consciousness in the Jews and the reluctance to absorb them in the non-Jews. And the would-be alloy separates like non-mixable chemical matter, a little tarnished but not welded.

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by Daniel Bloch · 11/09/11

Photo by Marcelo Brodsky

The work of Marcelo Brodsky merges the historical with the personal. In his career as a photographer, Brodsky has created an enormous archive of powerful images engaging with the nuances of his identity as an artist, a Jew, an Argentine and the brother of a desaparecido–a disappeared. Marcelo’s brother Fernando is one of an estimated 30,000 Argentines who were kidnapped, tortured and killed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 Dirty War, victims of an exceptionally cruel apparatus of state-sponsored terrorism which targeted  suspected “subversives.” Many, like Fernando, were barely out of their teens and allegedly linked, however tenuously, to anti-dictatorship political and social movements. Once detained, the majority were never heard from again, their bodies never recovered, thus literally disappearing by the thousands from their families–a horrific technique replicated during the same era by dictatorships across Latin America, especially in Chile and Uruguay.

In a conversation that appeared in the Buenos Aires issue of Habitus, Marcelo Brodsky recognized the importance of his family’s experience not only to his art but to a larger conversation about collective healing and memory in Argentina. Brodsky said:
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by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Gertrude Stein’s reputation is that of a literary maverick and an American ex-pat in Paris. Yet she is hardly known for being a staunch Franco supporter, a disdainful detractor of Roosevelt, nor is she known for suggesting in 1934 that Hitler merited the Nobel Prize.

Eric Banks, a New York based writer who is the current president of the National Book Critics Circle, wrote an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses the relationship Gertrude Stein held with Bernard Faÿ, a Vichy bureaucrat directly responsibly for the death of at least 550 freemasons in France after 1940. The article is titled “Wars They Have Seen: How an Unlikely Friendship With a Vichy Collaborator Complicates Our Understanding of Gertrude Stein”.

She believed in the collaborationist policies of Philippe Pétain, the Vichy Marshall of the French State from 1940 to 1944—Stein even translated several of his speeches into English. Stein wrote in the introductory text to the speeches that the Méréchal was similar to figures like George Washington and other great leaders who, as a knight might, arrived in time to rescue his country and people. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1970 that Stein’s less reputable past was made available for public scrutiny with Richard Bridgman’s biography, Gertrude Stein in Pieces.

Stein’s politics did not wend their way into her writing. Instead, her political predispositions were visible only in her personal relationships she held with figures like Bernard Faÿ, who whisked her through the bureaucratic red tape necessary for translating Pétain’s speeches. John Whittier-Ferguson, an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, discusses this distinct lack of politics in Stein’s oeuvre:

“Most people don’t have enough reference points around her late writing from the war to engage with why it might matter to figure this out.” he says. “With Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis, the story about their politics has been told and worked over more consistently and for longer,” says Whittier-Ferguson. “The narrative we have to tell ourselves about Stein’s politics is not really yet formed, which makes it harder to say what you’re going to do with this material on politics when she doesn’t seem to do much with it in her own texts. Glance at it, look off to the side, what do you do with that? But that’s what makes it very interesting, and challenging.”

Bernard Faÿ, Stein’s excellent friend who was deeply involved with the Vichy government, was an unlikely collaborator: an academic, an American history buff and Roosevelt fan, a homosexual. Faÿ pulled strings to keep Stein and Alice B. Toklas–Jews–safe together in the Northern French countryside once the Nazis began the Occupation; he arranged a lecture tour of the United States for Stein and worked extensively with her on her novel The Making of Americans. Faÿ earned his masters at Harvard and penned a dissertation at the Sorbonne titled L’Esprit Revolutionnaire en France et aux États-Unis à la Fin du XVIIIème Siècle—a study of both the American and French revolutionary spirits between 1770 and 1800. He would have the won 1926 Pulitzer Prize were it written in English and not French, originally. Faÿ was a revered academic whose specialty was American Civilization. He taught at institutions like Columbia, Kenyon and the University of Iowa, and he wrote popular biographies of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. He championed forward thinking and modernism in literature in music.

As more is discovered about Stein and Faÿ, new books and studies arise that help us understand who these two tremendous figures were, and how their politics and careers intermingled. Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives, Ulla E. Dydo’s and Edward M. Burns’ The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma, and Antoine Compagnon’s Le Cas Bernard Faÿ: Du Collège de France à l’indignité nationale are all relatively recent publications that seek answers to questions about Stein and Faÿ’s questionable political leanings.

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by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Pamela Potter, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, reviews Erik Levi’s Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon. Her essay was titled Crimes Against Culture or Business as Usual?  The Yale University Press published Levi’s book earlier this year. He discusses the Nazis’ use of Mozart as fodder for both antisemitism and Aryan pride.

Levi’s research, which unearthed newspaper articles, speeches and other archived materials, effectively transports readers back to the early 20^th century when, at the advent World War I, Mozart became a political tool to prove Aryan superiority.

Though Potter does find some faults with some of Levi’s contentions—that the steely appropriation of Mozart’s artistic identity was as ruthless and exacting as the Nazis’ elimination of Jews, for example–Potter considers Levi’s work to be an exemplary examination of the Nazi’s use of German cultural heritage. One significant aspect of the Nazis’ treatment of Mozart that Potter takes into consideration is the relation the German Jews to the composer:

Mozart’s significance particularly for Jewish performers and scholars provides perhaps the most compelling material for readers of this list, as the discussions yield some very poignant insights into this group’s stubborn adherence to German cultural identity. As is well known, the systematic exclusion of Jews from participation in German cultural life led first to a stop-gap measure concocted by the government and the Jewish community, known as the Jewish Culture League (Kulturbund deutscher Juden), to provide cultural and educational programs exclusively for Jews by Jews. When it came to excluding German content from the league’s programs, the deep connection German Jews held to German culture became all too evident. The ban on Mozart imposed upon the league in 1937 was a bitter pill to swallow, and Herbert Peyser, reporting for the New York Times, perceptively noted the German Jews’ undying claim to “that same artistic, scientific, and philosophic fare to which, through the centuries, they have felt a proprietary right to equal that of other Germans.

Erik Levi is a music and music history professor at the Royal Holloway University of London. He has extensively researched 20^th century German music, especially during the Nazi era. His other book Music in the Third Reich is available for purchase.

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