Jedi and the Jews

So, my January 12th op ed for the Jewish Standard was given the title, Jew vs. Jedi: “May the Schwartz Be With You”, and here it is for the first time on Blog Time Passing:

The Last Jedi is one of the best, if not the best, of the Star Wars cinematic series that first exploded onto theater screens in 1977. The film franchise, originated by George Lucas, was sold to the Walt Disney Company in 2012, and revitalized in 2015 by the first installment in the new trilogy, The Force Awakens, directed by J.J. Abrams.

Although it was a huge commercial success and generally well received, many fans were unhappy with the shift to a more progressive outlook in The Force Awakens, and expressed dissatisfaction with the casting, which deviated from the previous films, which were all but monopolized by white males. In this new trilogy, the lead heroic role of Rey is given to a young woman, while another main character is played by a young African-American man. Even when the sentiments expressed were not overtly racist and sexist, those undercurrents were apparent, especially given that the plot of The Force Awakens was quite consistent with the original Star Wars film.

Star Wars The Force Awakens cast Harrison Ford; Daisy Ridley; Bob Iger; J.J. Abrams; John Boyega; Lupita Nyong'o; Oscar Isaac

The Last Jedi, directed by Rian Johnson, extended the new sensibility by highlighting female leadership, including the late Carrie Fisher as the leader of the resistance and Laura Dern as a self-sacrificing admiral of their decimated fleet, while introducing a significant new character played by Kelly Marie Tran, the child of Vietnamese immigrants. Consistent with this move toward greater diversity in casting, the film also emphasized the progressive theme of breaking with the past.

Given the reactionary mentality of most disgruntled Star Wars fanatics, I was disturbed to read Liel Liebovitz’s December 18 piece in Tablet magazine, called “Reform Jediism.” Liebovitz explains his reaction to the film:

I felt a torrent of anger I haven’t known since gazing at the calamity that was Jar-Jar Binks. That’s because the movie, while otherwise engaging and enjoyable, introduced a radical new take on the Jedi religion. Call it Reform Jediism.

Anger is consistent with right-wing screeds against any form of liberal politics, but in this instance the target was Reform Judaism. As he puts it,

for American Jewish audiences… The Last Jedi can feel almost like a documentary, a sordid story about a small community eager to trade in the old and onerous traditions for the glittery and airy creed of universalist kumbaya that, like so much sound and fury, signifies nothing.

As a Reform Jew, I am deeply offended by Liebovitz’s disdain for those of us who practice a form of Judaism different from his own. And I have to wonder what it is about us that makes him so afraid. In the words of the Jedi master Yoda, who presumably represents Liebovitz’s idea of Orthodox Jediism, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Don’t we know this to be true? Isn’t our world big enough for different forms of Jewish worship, different modes of Jewish identity? Does he really want to open up an irrevocable schism in the Jewish population?

Responses from readers both sympathetic to his general outlook and supportive of the Reform movement have taken Liebovitz to task for misinterpreting the meaning of The Last Jedi, ignoring important details in the film or just getting them wrong, forcing facts to fit his views instead of vice versa. For my part, I find the entire conversation absurd. Its original sin is Liebovitz’s equating Jew and Jedi.

The Star Wars universe was created by George Lucas, who was raised a Methodist. The film’s underlying Christian sensibility is apparent in its emphasis on a savior figure. In the original trilogy, the messianic character is Luke (evoking the Gospels) Skywalker (paralleling walking on water). In the prequels, Anakin Skywalker is born via immaculate conception on the part of the Force and identified as the “chosen one” of prophecy, before falling from grace and becoming the equivalent of the Christian Satan, Darth Vader.

The Jedi are referred to as an “order” rather than a religion. Judaism does not have any orders, but there are many within the Catholic tradition (e.g., Jesuits, Dominicans), as well in as other forms of Christianity including the Methodists, and also within Buddhism, a major influence as well on Lucas and his creation. The Jedi Order is monastic. Worldly attachments—notably marriage—are forbidden; that’s a rule also associated with Christianity and Buddhism.

A fully trained Jedi is referred to as a knight, and Jedi knights are all but invincible warriors, in some ways modeled after Japanese samurai, but also after holy paladins, not unlike the Arthurian knights of the roundtable in search of the Holy Grail of Christian legend. Jedi also are much like priests, Christian or Shaolin, with a direct connection to the godlike Force, one that ordinary people lack. They are nothing like the great rabbis of Jewish tradition, learned sages who study and interpret our sacred texts.

The Christian sensibility of Star Wars is especially apparent in its valuation of redemption and forgiveness. At the end of the original trilogy, Luke is able to convince his father, Darth Vader, to turn on his master, the evil emperor. Luke insists that there still is good in Vader, and this final act allows Vader to die in a state of grace, and to appear in ghostly form alongside the good Jedi who have also left the earthly plane. But the fact remains that Vader was guilty of untold atrocities, including destroying an entire planet in the first Star Wars film.

In The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren is introduced as essentially worshipping Darth Vader as well as following the evil Supreme Leader of the First Order, and engages in acts of patricide and mass murder. In The Last Jedi, Rey tries to turn Ren away from the dark side, just as Luke did with Vader, saying that it’s not to late for him. The idea that you can be forgiven for all of your sins as long as you repent in the end has its origins in Christian theology, whereas in our tradition, as expounded by Maimonides, some sins are so heinous that no forgiveness or redemption is possible.

I don’t mean to imply that Star Wars is based only on Christian elements. Lucas weaved together a variety of influences, including Buddhism, Japanese samurai films, westerns, World War Two movies, old movie serials such as Flash Gordon, and Joseph Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey (itself more consistent with Christianity than Judaism). What I want to emphasize is that Star Wars does not reflect Jewish sensibilities, and does not make for a good analogy with contemporary Jewish life.

We still can appreciate and enjoy the movies, which above all are entertaining. But we also ought to be aware of Lucas’s failings as a storyteller. His movies have been criticized for portraying democratic institutions as weak and ineffectual, supported only by the elitist Jedi. Only a few people exhibit the force sensitivity needed to become a Jedi, and that trait is inherited rather than acquired through hard work or ethical conduct.

Lucas drew on many stylistic elements from the World War II era, some in disturbing fashion. For example, the final scene of the first Star Wars movie is based on a scene from the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Worse, in the prequel trilogy, Lucas drew on offensive ethnic stereotypes, trying to displace them onto alien beings. The character of Jar Jar Binks, whom Liebovitz and many other fans criticized for being too silly, was based on African-American Stepin Fetchit stereotypes, with a Jamaican/Rastafarian speech pattern. The leaders of the evil Trade Federation were based on East Asian “yellow peril” stereotypes. And the greedy slave owner Watto is hook-nosed and speaks with a Yiddish accent.

Liebovitz is wrong in thinking that the earlier Star Wars movies emphasized tradition. No, they were exercises in nostalgia, romanticized images of the past. And they are profoundly ahistorical, set “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The fairytale-like formula stands in stark contrast to the Jewish invention of historical narrative. The events that occur in the Star Wars universe have no connection to our world. How long ago did they happen? What is the connection between their time and ours? Are we the descendants of the human characters in these stories? Are they even human? For this reason, as well as the fact that there is no rationale given for the “futuristic” science and technology, purists argue that these stories are fantasy rather than science fiction.

As Jews, we believe in progress toward a better future as well as continuity with the past. The Star Wars universe is as disconnected from our tradition as it is from human history. We can enjoy the films as entertainment, certainly, and I would suggest that also we ought to applaud the more progressive approach associated with Abrams, Johnson, and Disney. As for a Jewish take on the franchise, I can think of none better than the 1987 Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs, which teaches us to live and let live and not take ourselves so seriously.

And so I say to Liebovitz and others like him, “May the Schwartz be with you!”

Science Fiction and Language

So, in my previous post I mentioned my online Writing for Online Media class that I'm in the midst of teaching as part of Fordham's summer session, and I also want to note that I'm doing what's called a hybrid class, mostly online with occasional in-class meetings. And the hybrid is class is a new version of a class I've been doing during the regular school year in a regular way for many, many years. It's a class on Science Fiction Film and TV, formerly called The Science Fiction Genre, and originally called Science Fiction Film.

So, anyway, given that I'm in the midst of that class as well, I thought it was about time to post about the panel discussion I organized for the New York Society for General Semantics back on March 1st on the topic of science fiction. Here's the description of the session:

Science Fiction, Language, and General Semantics

Science fiction has long been associated with spaceships, alien beings, futuristic technologies, and the like. But the genre has also provided an opportunity to speculate about the future of human consciousness, about modes of perception and communication, and about language and symbols.

Not surprisingly, general semantics, as a discipline based on applying a scientific approach to thought and action, has influenced science fiction in a number of ways. Science fiction writers such as A.E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and Frank Herbert were familiar with general semantics and incorporated concepts learned from Alfred Korzybski and S.I. Hayakawa into their novels and short stories. Through them, the influence of general semantics spread to the fiction of Philip K. Dick, and the films of George Lucas. Moreover, novelists William S. Burroughs and L. Ron Hubbard were students of general semantics, while a fictional (and less than flattering) version of the Institute of General Semantics appears in the Jean Luc-Godard film, Alphaville.

More generally, questions concerning language, meaning, and consciousness have been incorporated into science fiction narratives, for example the presence of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation in The Matrix, references to Julian Jaynes in HBO's remake of Westworld, and in the problematic nature of translation in stories such as Samuel R. Delaney's Babel-17, Stanslaw Lem's His Master's Voice, and the recent film, Arrival.

Clearly, this is a topic for discussion that is, in many ways, out of this world.

As for the participants on this program, well, here's the listing:

Marleen S. Barr, Science Fiction Critic and Novelist

Paul Levinson, Past President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Novelist

Lance Strate, NYSGS President and Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

Ed Tywoniak, Editor of ETC: A Review of General Semantics and Professor of Communication, Saint Mary's College of California

All right now, enough of the preliminaries, let's move on to the program itself, or rather, the video recording of the panel discussion:





Science fiction may not have the greatest reputation in literary circles, but when it comes to the exploration of not only outer space, intellectual space, no other genre or type of narrative can quite do what science fiction does, whether it's about language, thought and action, or media and technology, or society and culture, or simply the nature of the universe, life, and time bound and unbounded.

An Inspirational Video

So, for a number of summers now, I've been teaching an online class at Fordham, on Writing for Online Media, mainly about blogging. The students get to create and write for their own blogs, on themes and topics of their own choosing. And one of my students this summer has been blogging about art, including galleries museums, and special exhibitions. A recent post on her blog, which is called Mona Lisa by the way, was on A Blog that Inspires: Colossal, which in turn directed me to check out another blog on art and design called Colossal, and specifically a post entitled Where Do Ideas Come From? A Short Film by Andrew Norton Tackles the Nature of Inspiration.

If you're following me so far, well then, that blog post featured a video by a filmmaker named Andrew Norton on the nature of creativity, inspiration, and the source of original ideas. The video, Where Do Ideas Come From?, can be found over on Vimeo, the YouTube alternative favored by many serious and professional videographers. And it's also embedded over on the Colossal blog, so why not include it here on Blog Time Passing, I thought to myself. And so, here it is:


Where Do Ideas Come From? from Andrew Norton on Vimeo.


And you can rightly infer from the fact that I've included it here that I think it's pretty nifty, and worth a look-see. Oh, and here is the write-up from the Vimeo page:

A short film about the mysteries of inspiration.

Featuring thoughts on the subject by:
David Lynch
Robert Krulwich
Chuck Close
Tracy Clayton & Heben Nigatu
Ray Barbee
Lulu Miller
Susan Orlean
and a couple of kids named Mason and Ursula

Presented by transom.org
With funding from The National Endowment for the Arts
For more about this video, visit:
transom.org/2017/where-do-ideas-come-from/

The Transom site is run by Atlanta Public Media, and identified as "A Showcase and Workshop for New Public Radio" in case you were wondering. It's based on an idea by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose work is well-recognized in media ecology circles. And it looks to be an excellent resource for anyone interested in public radio and media, podcasting, audio production, and creative endeavors more generally. If you have those sort of interests, I think it's worth checking out.

Strained Relations

I have one more op-ed to catch up on, this one appearing in the October 28th issue of the Jewish Standard, in conjunction with Halloween. The title of the piece was changed to "Less Horrible Horror Series" which, in my view, is not all that much less than horrible itself, but what can you do? I have taken the liberty to use the original title I came up with for this blog post:

Jews and vampires don’t mix. Or at least they don’t mix easily.

As a kid growing up in the 60s, I remember picking up a copy of a magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and reading all about Dracula and the other creature features produced by Universal Studios and their rivals. The original Dracula motion picture was released in 1931, so it wasn’t a movie I could see at the local cinema, but those of us who lived in the New York metropolitan area did have Chiller Theatre, hosted by Zacherley (“The Cool Ghoul”) on Channel 11 WPIX.

When I learned that my father was born in Transylvania, which meant that I was half-Transylvanian, I was delighted. It meant that I was a bit cool myself. I asked my father if he knew Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor who played Dracula in the original movies. My father was born before World War I, when Transylvania was a part of Hungary, so it seemed altogether likely to me that he would know the famous film star. My father joked that he knew Bela Lugosi, but Lugosi didn’t know him.

Having a connection to Transylvania gave me a bit of an edge, but I was hardly the only kid who had fun imitating Dracula and the other monsters, on Halloween and all year round. After all, we had comedy programs on TV like The Munsters, which included the character of Grandpa, aka Sam Dracula, played by Al Lewis, aka Albert Meister, not to mention The Addams Family, commercials for Count Chocula cereal, and Sesame Street’s Count von Count. Humor, not horror, led us to imitate an Eastern European accent and utter the immortal words, “I vant to suck your blud.”

The one bit of dissonance that I encountered in reading about the powers and weaknesses of vampires was the idea that they could be warded off by a crucifix or cross. Vampire lore fit into a Christian cosmology that Jews were not a part of. The 1979 comedy film Love at First Bite, starring Richard Benjamin as psychiatrist Jeffrey Rosenberg, plays on this problem in a scene where he tries to combat Dracula by reaching for his necklace, resulting in a moment of suspense as Dracula recoils in anticipation. But much to the vampire’s relief, he pulls out a Star of David instead.

Indeed, in many ways I found it easier to identify with the vampire, given my aversion to Christian symbols. I grew up seeing them as the symbols of people who for close to two millennia had oppressed and persecuted us, culminating in the pogroms and the Holocaust that both of my parents lived through. It helped that I was a bit of a night owl as well. This was long before the emergence of vampire subcultures, an offshoot of the Goth movement, inspired by the vampire novels of Ann Rice, and the Twilight young adult fiction and film series, featuring “Bella” Swan as the willing paramour of a handsome young vampire.

These and other new takes on the vampire mythos tend to downplay or eliminate its Christian-specific elements, and otherwise sympathize with, sometimes glamorize, and otherwise normalize what once was considered monstrous. The recently concluded HBO series True Blood also falls into this category, and while not featuring any Jewish characters, introduced Lilith as the mother of all vampires in a scene in which contemporary vampires took part in ritual drinking of blood while chanting in Hebrew. This was more than a little disturbing, given the long history of the blood libel used as justification for anti-Semitism.

This summer, I caught up with the Shadowhunters series on the Freeform cable channel. Like the Twilight movies, Shadowhunters is a young adult novel adaptation. The main character, Clary, learns that she is one of a small number of people of mixed ancestry—they’re part angel—and they are called upon to battle demons as shadowhunters. Her best friend, Simon Lewis, is Jewish, and as played by the Alberto Rosende he comes across as a typical Jewish nebbish type, of the sort made famous by Woody Allen, neurotic, fearful, and nursing his unrequited love for Clary. Until he is turned into a vampire, at which point he becomes cool, competent, and charismatic. According to synopses of the book series online, when his devout mother eventually learns of his conversion, she throws him out of their house. At a later point in the narrative, he thankfully is restored to human status.

The narrative may be typical of young adult fiction, and the character somewhat stereotypical, but the way that Jewish characters are inserted into the vampire narrative is both original and commendable. It is no coincidence that the author of the bestselling series, The Mortal Instruments, upon which Shadowhunters is based, Judith Rumelt, who uses the pen name Cassandra Clare, is Jewish.

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When it comes to quality television, my award for best series in the horror genre goes to The Strain, now in its third season on FX. Created by respected Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro and novelist Chuck Hogan, The Strain is set in New York City, and one of the elements I appreciate about the series is that it takes place in neighborhoods all over the five boroughs and has a real New York sensibility. The plot line is reminiscent of contagion and zombie apocalypse genres, combined with elements drawn from the Alien film series, and science fiction stories about doubles taking the place of their human counterparts, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These elements meld together to form an altogether original vampire narrative, one in which the supernatural elements are absent, and the strigoi (the Romanian word for vampire used in the series) are the result of a parasitical worm that takes over and transforms its host.

The series features a small group of people who fight what appears to be a losing battle against the strigoi as they take over New York and the rest of the country, led to some extent by Professor Abraham Setrakian. Setrakian is identified as an Armenian Jew in the series, conferring on him a double coding as the victim of genocide, and he is shown to be a concentration camp survivor who first saw the strigoi feeding on captives at Treblinka. He had been a professor of mythology and East European literature at the University of Vienna, and after immigrating to the United States, became a New York pawnbroker. (This is an homage to the 1964 Sidney Lumet film The Pawnbroker.)

The leader of the strigoi is known as the Master (an allusion to the Nazi reference to the Aryan “master race”), an ancient strigoi who can exert complete psychic control over his spawn. His second in command, one of the few strigoi granted free will, is Thomas Eichhorst, who was the Nazi commandant at Treblinka, and Setrakian’s torturer. It follows that The Strain can be understood as a metaphor for authoritarianism and fascism, and this wouldn’t be the first time del Toro used fantasy elements in conjunction with this sort of political critique, as can be seen from his 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth.

. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .

All of the heroes in The Strain are flawed characters, and Setrakian is no exception. He is cranky and humorless, obsessed and ruthless as a vampire hunter, but also intelligent, learned, and the one who recognizes and understands the threat most clearly. The victim of great trauma, he is only occasionally show as deserving of our sympathy. This parallels the way that Jews, and Israel, are seen by many today, both in the United States and abroad.

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud the way in which del Toro has allowed a Jewish character to take a leading role as a vampire hunter in a vampire narrative. Having eliminated the supernatural themes from the vampire mythos, it is not surprising that Setrakian’s Jewish identity relates only to his ethnicity. But del Toro missed an opportunity to transcend the stereotypical fully by including something of his religious tradition, by showing that the source of his strength is derived from his belief in the value of human life, the pursuit of justice, and a sense of spirituality.

Houdini Whodunit

So, seeing as I'm still playing catch-up, I figured I'd post one of my op-ed pieces from the Jewish Standard, this one published in the June 24th issue. And just so you know that I haven't been a total slacker as far as this sort of thing is concerned, I did post it online on my Jewish Standard Times of Israel blog on June 30th. That post included an update to the original column, and this version is further updated, as you'll see if you read through to the end:

My son was about 8 or 9 when we had our first family outing to Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey.

As I recall, it was his first time in the amusement park, and my first time as well. And I was pleased to discover, soon after entering, an attraction called Houdini’s Great Escape. It paled in comparison to anything that can be found at one of Disney’s or Universal’s theme parks, but I was happy to have the opportunity to introduce my son to the great Jewish showman Harry Houdini.

Houdini was a household name when I was growing up, immediately recognizable as the world-famous escape artist of a bygone era. The fact that Houdini was Jewish also was well known, especially within the Jewish community.

Houdini’s fame persisted long after his death in 1926, at the age of 52, but it began to fade in the waning years of the 20th century. I wonder how many millennials have heard of him these days. For that reason, I applaud Six Flags for keeping his memory alive. I am particularly grateful to all those who protested when Great Adventure closed the ride in 2008, and convinced Six Flags to bring it back in 2011.

We bought my son a hamster about a month or two after our trip to the amusement park, and I asked him what name he wanted to give to his pet. He answered, “Harry.” I smiled and said, “So you want to name him after Harry Houdini?” “No,” he replied. “After Harry Potter.”

I immediately realized that Houdini’s Great Escape made a much greater impression on me than it did on him, and that there was no competing with the young adult novels by J. K. Rowling, and even more so with the Warner Bros. film adaptations, with their amazing special effects, which made magic seem real. This amounts to a bit of a reversal, as stage magicians produced some of the first special effects to appear in early cinema.

Houdini himself started out as an illusionist performing in vaudeville, before achieving widespread fame by specializing as an escapologist. He also starred in a few silent films between 1906 and 1923, but he did not enjoy the same success on the screen as he did in live performance.

Significantly, Houdini was devoted to stage magic as a profession, and led the Society of American Magicians as president of that organization for almost a decade, his tenure cut short by his untimely death. The society pays for the maintenance and care of Houdini’s grave site, which is in the Machpelah Cemetery in Queens. The monument displays both his stage name, Houdini, and his actually family name, Weiss; he was born Erik Weisz in Budapest, the son of a rabbi, and was only about 4 years old when his family emigrated to the United States. That’s when Erik Weisz was changed to the German version, Erich Weiss.

Though Houdini died almost 90 years ago, his name recently has been resurrected on television with the airing of Houdini & Doyle, a series launched last spring on Fox. It’s based on the actual friendship between the great escapologist and Arthur Conan Doyle, the British author best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. While drawing on bits and pieces of historical fact, essentially the series is fictional and full of anachronisms, blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction in ways that have become quite common in recent decades. The central fiction is that Houdini, who is performing in London, teams up with Doyle to solve mysteries that baffle the police.

In this new series, Michael Weston (née Michael Rubinstein, grandson of Arthur Rubinstein) became the most recent of at least a dozen actors to have portrayed Harry Houdini. His predecessors include Tony Curtis, Harvey Keitel, Norman Mailer, and Adrien Brody. In this role, Weston looks Jewish, but not in a way that might be deemed stereotypical or particularly overt. His speech does not feature any obvious form of Jewish (or Hungarian) accent, although it does strike me as very similar to the kinds of voices I hear at my congregation. In short, in this series, the fact that Houdini is Jewish is downplayed significantly—but it is not entirely absent.

Houdini & Doyle is a TV version of the buddy film genre, a type of narrative especially commonplace in American popular culture, no doubt due to the diversity of American society. That’s because it depends on strange bedfellows, or if you prefer Neil Simon to Will Shakespeare, an odd couple team-up. The buddies often contrast opposing qualities—rich and poor, white and black, male and female, young and old, professional and amateur, and so on.

The great French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, argues that a culture’s myths are ways of symbolizing significant polar oppositions, and scholars analyzing popular culture, such as Arthur Asa Berger, have applied this approach to film, television, and other media. Looking at Houdini & Doyle through this lens can be quite revealing.

To begin, Houdini is American and Doyle is British, Houdini is ethnic while Doyle is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASPs are an ethnicity, of course, but traditionally they are presented as non-ethnic in American popular culture), and Houdini is an American immigrant while Doyle is native to Britain. (The show is set in London.) Houdini’s background is not emphasized in the first few episodes, but in the third episode, “In Manus Dei,” he falls ill and his mother, who has accompanied him on his travels and speaks with a noticeable accent, gives him chicken soup as a cure. Her character, Houdini’s own devotion to her, and the insecurity associated with being an immigrant all are featured more prominently in episode 5, “The Curse of Korzha,” and the fact that Houdini is Jewish is discussed briefly in episode 6, “The Monsters of Nethermoor.”

On the one hand, it is quite positive that a Jewish-American immigrant can serve as a symbol of an American in general. On the other hand, Houdini’s Jewishness mainly is reflected in his being a victim of prejudice, as he reveals in episode 6. This also makes him a champion of tolerance, as he defends another character facing discrimination and scapegoating, which is commendable. But in this respect, there is no contrast with Doyle, who is sympathetic, albeit revealed as never having been the victim of bias, while the third main character, Constable Adelaide Stratton, Scotland Yard’s first policewoman (an anachronism), also is subjected to significant prejudice and therefore is in favor of tolerance.

Having viewed seven out of the 10 episodes that comprise the first season of the program, a joint British, Canadian, and American production, I would have wanted to see Houdini’s Jewishness reflect something more than ethnicity and open-mindedness. I would have liked it to reflect as well some aspect of his religious heritage. But of course that would undercut his role as a symbol of Americans in general.

Other contrasts come into play. Houdini is a famous and self-promoting entertainer, while Doyle enjoys the quieter esteem accorded as an author, one somewhat embarrassed by the popularity of his Sherlock Holmes stories. Houdini’s success makes him relatively affluent and his brashness marks him as nouveau riche, while Doyle is the model of upper-middle-class propriety, as befits a physician. (That’s his day job.) There is a bit of a contrast between low and high culture, between the sensationalism of the popular performer and the reserve of the man of letters, which also maps onto the egalitarianism of American society and the elitism of the British (Doyle eventually receives a knighthood). It’s also the contrast between the rags-to-riches story of the ethnic immigrant and the conservative narrative of old money. Additionally, there is a contrast between Houdini’s physicality, as an escape artist and also as a fighter, and Doyle’s cerebral quality.

The major opposition on which the program turns, however, is between Houdini as a skeptic and rationalist and Doyle as a believer and spiritualist. While the belief that it is possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead is age-old—King Saul speaks to the ghost of Samuel in the Tanach—the spiritualism movement began in the 19th century. It was inspired in large part by the ethereal (but decidedly earthly) form of communication introduced by the invention of the telegraph, and later by messages sent over the air by radio.

Doyle actually was an ardent believer in spiritualism. He believed in it so strongly that this difference of opinion eventually brought his friendship with Houdini to an end. And Houdini actually was firmly committed to debunking anyone claiming to have psychic powers or the ability to communicate with the dead, invariably revealing them as scam artists using the same methods as stage magicians.

Houdini & Doyle draws on these historic facts to set up the program’s main opposition. It’s similar to The X-Files, except that Gillian Anderson’s Dr. Dana Scully was the skeptic and David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder was the believer. Doyle’s scientific background as a physician does come into play when he solves mysteries, but it does not prevent him from believing in psychic phenomena. Interestingly, Houdini’s and Doyle’s roles are reversed in “The Monsters of Nethermoor,” but only because the unearthly phenomenon being investigated is, in fact, alien beings, and Houdini is willing to believe in the scientific notion that life on other planets is possible.

Houdini, then, comes across as something of a 20th century Spinoza, a modern secular humanist, in contrast to Doyle’s apparent superstition. And the episodes clearly favor science over spiritualism, while portraying both buddies as sympathetic characters. Here too, however, I would wish for something more than rejection of belief on Houdini’s part. I’d have liked some positive expression of Jewish faith, its emphasis on ethics, even a touch of true spirituality.

Still, I applaud the show’s creators for bringing the spirit of Houdini back to life and with renewed vigor. This doesn’t seem like the kind of program that will gain much of an audience, or even make it to a second season. But escaping cancellation may just be Houdini’s greatest trick of all.

First Addendum

Two additional episodes have aired since I wrote this op-ed, one after it was published on June 24th. At the end of episode 8, “Strigoi,” which features their contemporary, Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, Houdini discovers that his mother has passed away. This and other matters prompts a trip across the Atlantic in episode 9, “Necromanteion” (the title referring to an invention of Thomas Edison's, who appears in the episode, that is supposed to allow communication with the dead via radio waves).

The episode includes a scene of a Jewish funeral. Incredibly, Houdini is shown at the grave site minus any form of head covering, and walks out on the ritual, criticizing the solemnity of the proceedings. While the intent is to show that Houdini is suppressing his feelings of grief, it also resonates with his rejection of superstition in an unfortunate manner. The episode ends with his return to his mother’s grave to recite a Hebrew prayer, alone and therefore not as part of the Jewish community. This no doubt reinforces his connection to Doyle and Stratton, but at the cost of a positive portrayal of Jewish community, and one of the most essential functions of any religious tradition.  

Second Addendum  

In the final episode of the season, "The Pall of LaPier," Houdini receives spiritual advice from a native American that he finds comforting. This is a common trope in American popular culture, the "noble savage" as a source of wisdom and superior spiritual connection in contrast to us sophisticated moderns, but once again, this appears in the absence of any link to Houdini's own faith, any interaction with a rabbi, and almost not acknowledgement of Jewish mourning rituals.  And just to be clear, the problem is not in this one series, but the fact that this is typical of the way that Jewish characters, whether historical or fictional, are portrayed in our popular culture.

The Angel of Death and the Choice of Life

Here's my latest op-ed to appear in the Jewish Standard, published in the April 22nd edition of the weekly paper. Published just in time for Passover, it's a reflection on the significance of the holiday, entitled, The Angel of Death and the Choice of Life:

Passover is a celebration of freedom, a holiday marking the defining moment in Jewish history, our liberation from bondage.

Passover represents the birth of a nation. The clan of Jacob, just an extended family, becomes a multitude, the children of Israel.

And the story takes us through a revolution against an unjust monarch and an escape from tyranny, to the framing of a constitution at Sinai. No wonder that the holiday resonates so powerfully here in the United States. The Jewish story of slavery’s abolition even includes a civil war of sorts, with the confederacy that turns to worship the golden calf.

The powerful injunction to remember that we were slaves in Egypt stands in sharp contrast to the mythologies of other peoples of the ancient world, which cast them as the descendants of gods or otherwise of supernatural origin. Passover establishes the foundation of Jewish ethics—not simply to value freedom, but in the words of Micah, “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” You can’t get much more humble than being a slave.

Birth is a common theme for holidays that incorporate the rites of spring, as does Passover, with the rebirth of nature symbolized by the green vegetable and the egg on the Seder plate. The other side of birth is death, a topic we don’t like to think much about. But death, unlike taxes, is unavoidable for each and every one of us, whether we acknowledge its existence or not. The very name of the holiday Passover, or Pesach, refers to the Angel of Death passing over the dwellings of the Israelites.

The escape from servitude only occurs after the escape from death. First there must be life. Only then can there be hope, and the potential for freedom. But what is left unsaid is that the escape from death is only a temporary reprieve. Does this imply that the same might be true of the escape from bondage? Certainly, there is no permanent liberation from the inevitability of death.

The Jewish-American anthropologist Ernest Becker, author of the 1974 book The Denial of Death, argued that we human beings are the only forms of life on earth that are aware of our own mortality, and that awareness represents a crushing blow to our self-esteem. The function of human culture is to provide some form of compensation, through beliefs in various kinds of immortality, and by providing us with heroic roles to play in the lives that we lead. Of course, when it comes to the denial of death, religious beliefs have played a major role, especially in the very specific conception of an afterlife that many provide.

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Passover stands out from all of the other traditional holidays on the Jewish calendar in its direct confrontation with death. By way of contrast, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we pray that we may be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life, with barely a mention of life’s opposite. On Passover, however, death is personified in the guise of an angel. Since an angel literally means a messenger, this implies that death is a message from God, the same God who exiled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to keep them from eating from the Tree of Life and becoming immortal.

The message is one of choice. In Deuteronomy (30:19) God tells us, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you may live.” While we do not choose to be born or to die, there are choices still to be made. The Pharaoh chooses death time and time again, beginning with his order to kill every newborn Hebrew male, continuing with his refusal to let the Israelites go, resulting in the death of the Egyptian firstborn. The Pharaoh’s choice of death culminates in the decision to pursue the escaping Israelites, resulting in the drowning of the Egyptians army.

Pharaoh’s choices come as no surprise, insofar as he represents an ancient cult of death. We may marvel at the pyramids and Sphinx as wonders of the ancient world, but we also should recall that they were built with the blood of forced laborers, and that they are enormous tombs carrying the embalmed remains of the Pharaoh along with those who served him in life and were sacrificed so that they might follow him in death.

While the Pharaoh chooses death, the Israelites must make an active decision to choose life. When it comes to the tenth plague, the Angel of Death will not discriminate automatically in favor of the Israelites, will not spare anyone by virtue of their descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or because they are circumcised, or because they worship Adonai. It is not Jewish blood that saves the Israelites, but the blood of the sacrificial lamb. This requires, first of all, being a part of the community. If you were not, how would you learn about what had to be done? It also requires choosing to follow the instructions.

We may have replaced the sign made with lamb’s blood with mezuzahs long ago, but the lesson remains: choose life, that you may live.

The Angel of Death who executes the tenth plague is no Adversary. It is not the equivalent of the Christian Satan or Lucifer, nor is it a lord of the underworld along the lines of the Greek god Hades. The personification of death quite naturally is a frightening figure. Its depiction as a creeping darkness in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille film The Ten Commandments, usually broadcast on television at this time of year, has been the stuff of childhood nightmares for six decades now.

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I recall being disturbed, in my youth, by the image of this angel in a Haggadah that illustrated a Passover song, Chad Gadya. That the “Holy One, Blessed be He,” finally “smote the Angel of Death, who slew the slaughterer, who killed the ox…” clearly communicated the hierarchy, but this didn’t change the fact that both the slaughterer and the ox ended up dead.

Which brings me back to the point that Passover is a holiday that confronts death rather than denying it, and offers the alternative—to choose life. The Angel of Death is neither an object of worship nor the embodiment of evil. The personification of death is frightening, without a doubt, but as God’s messenger, it is at the same time an Angel of Justice, under certain circumstances an Angel of Mercy, and without a doubt an Angel of Humility.

Ernest Becker eventually came to the conclusion that in our contemporary culture, we have come to place too much emphasis on enhancing self-esteem. Humility serves as a counterweight to that tendency, the humility that comes from remembering that we were slaves, and the humility that comes from remembering that our lives are finite.

Passover is a celebration of redemption and renewal, but above all it is a celebration of life, whose meaning and value can only be understood through its contrast with death. So as we drink our four cups of wine at the Seder, let us also remember to say L’chaim! To life!