Zackary Sholem Berger's Blog, page 42
June 27, 2011
On a mission from God
Missionaries came to my door on Sunday for the first time ever, smiling folks from a church elsewhere in the city. We had a pleasant chat. (Them: One hundred and forty-four thousand people will go to heaven! Me: Is there a limit? Them: The Book of Matthew is not in your Bible? Are you Hindu?) The problem was, it was too pleasant. They never made the ask. At some point, when I could no longer bear to hear them nattering on about the Israelites of the Bible I am supposedly the incarnation of, I said I had to play with my kids (true!) and went inside. They let me go inside without switching teams. If I go to Hell, it's on them.
June 21, 2011
Ominous double meanings in each of God's commands
The first thigh of the bird was set aside for the false messiah, hungering in his error for centuries. The second thigh was set aside for the first-born-son on the eve of the birth of his first child. The rest was distributed among the needy, the hysterical women who heard ominous double meanings in each of God's commands, and the one-eyed or one-armed exiles from the community, sitting in disgrace in the park in ratty overcoats, cursing the laws by which they themselves had forfeited their places at the banquet. The exiles lurched back and forth and talked over a plan to kidnap the rabbi's sister and hold her for ransom in a warehouse in the middle of the desert, laughing until they coughed up blood and became silent watching dusk fall softly on the city, where each is an exile unto himself.
An excerpt from Alexander Nemser's midrashic miniatures in The White Review.
June 20, 2011
Triskaidekaphilia made fleshy future: Ron Tanner's Kiss Me Stranger
Many a reader of a novel set in the future realizes with dread, around page 50 or so, that the future as the novelist understands it no longer includes a sense of humor. Part of this is due to narrative demands. If the human race has been elevated to a higher plane of existence and now draws its sustenance exclusively from (say) cosmic rays, someone has to explain to us how this works. No time for jokes when there's physics to be learned and the Zombies of Planet Zeta are slavering at the heels of our hero.
Read all of my review of Ron Tanner's novel Kiss Me Stranger, over at the lovely & talented Baltimore Books.
June 15, 2011
More or less
Every bracha
is a little cliche
for those who can't face the louche
blessings of la vida. The Loch
Ness monster's girlfriend
says it best:
less is less.
More's what I need to handle.
It's 90 degrees out.
I'll self-spindle on this right angle.
June 14, 2011
A request from the Cool Jew Review
You know the Cool Jew Review – it's an online magazine who wants to be the Jewish answer to New York, the New York Times, or the New Yorker. But aren't those three Jewish? Only inasmuch as their readers, writers, and editors are disproportionately Jewish. What makes the Cool Jew Review cool is its Jewish content. But not, God forbid, too Jewish.
Now the editors of the CJR (which is completely fictional and I just made up) came to me with a request: come up with the perfect article for their inaugural issue, one which yanks eyeballs onto the page while making the reader's nose perk up with the homey aroma of bubbe's chicken soup. It's got to be frothy yet relevant, global but heimish, secular but heavy with myth and lore. Oh, and it can't be too long – boorring! Sex, of course, would be nice.
Here's my attempt. The winning headline submitted by my readers will get a year-long subscription to the CJR and a big wet kiss from my parents' dogs. (And a beer, I guess, if I like you.)
Israelis Jail "Gay-lestinian Flotilla" Captain After He Admits to Sexting Ex-IMF Head
June 10, 2011
Autonomy in moral development: oh well!
"While Marxists have been most vocal in raising the issues of "false consciousness," and "true versus false needs," it is important to see that the question is one which a wide range of social theorists must address. For it is a reasonable feature of any good society that it is self-sustaining in the sense that people who grow up in such a society will acquire a respect for and commitment to the principles which justify and regulate its existence. It is very unlikely that the development of such dispositions is something over which individuals have much control or choice. Socialization into the norms and values of the society will have taken place at a very young age. It looks, then, as if we can only distinguish between institutions on the basis of what they convey, their content, and not on the basis that they influence people at a stage when they cannot be critical about such matters. It looks, therefore, as if autonomy in the acquisitions of principles and values is impossible. "
–Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy.
June 7, 2011
Events coming up!
See the relevant page for details. Whether it's a reading or a launch party you're after, we have just the thing to satisfy your bilingual poetry needs.
June 2, 2011
Welcome readers of the Forward!
June 1, 2011
שאַפֿראַן וועגן סקווער
האָט איר געוווּסט אַז הרבֿ אַבֿי שאַפֿראַן, ראָש־המדברים פֿון תּורה־אידנטום, האָט אַ טוויטער־קאָנטע? זה דבֿר חדש…
May 30, 2011
Plastics!
I never promised you topicality, but even I am embarrassed that my reaction to this article is three weeks late. In the New Republic, the versatile Sabbath-supporter Judith Shulevits summarized the danger to health that some public health experts and toxicologists see from plastics and other ever-more-widespread environmental pollutants. On the cellular, molecular, and – in general – toxicological level, her summaries are convincing. But the transition I was waiting for – from "this might be dangerous" to "these plastics can cause increased rates of this particular disease, and here's why" – never came. Instead, I got this frustrating paragraph:
By now, you may be asking, if our health is so sensitive and if we live in a total plastic environment, why aren't we sicker than we are? And sicker than we used to be? The answer is, we're healthier in some ways and sicker in others. Medical adances mean we're likelier than ever to survive our diseases, but all kinds of diseases are on the rise. Childhood cancers are up 20 percent sine 1975. Rates of kidney, thyroid, liver, and testicular cancers in adults have been steadily increasing. A woman's risk of getting breast cancer has gone from one in ten in 1973 to one in eight today. Asthma rates doubled between 1980 and 1995, and have stayed level since. Autism-spectrum disorders have arguably increased tenfold over the past 15 years. … Obesity, of course, has been elevated to the status of an epidemic.
Of course. So what has this to do with plastics?
There are many ways to explain upticks in rates of any particular ailment: for starters, a better-informed populace and better tools for detecting disease mean more diagnoses. Other environmental stressors include Americans' weirdly terrible eating habis, our sedentary lifestyle, and stress itself. Still, in [NIEHS director Linda] Birnbaum's talk at the National Academy of Sciences, she declared unequivcally that data from animal studies "support a role" for environmental toxins as contributing players in a long list of 'important human diseases.'"
That's the only evidence we get (buried somewhere towards the end of the 4th page of a 5 page article) that environmental toxins might actually have concrete effects on the rates of real diseases that affect people, not laboratory animals or molecules. "Data from animal studies support a role." With so many public health priorities involving billions of lives that are ended or cut short by concrete diseases, how much attention should we pay to toxicological worries for which evidence of real health effects is still lacking? Not much, I think.
