My long-suffering readers...

Apologies for the delayed absence.

I've taken a new job at Tablet Magazine where I edit The Scroll, blogging obsessively and semi-convincingly about topics that I used to limn about here at TFR.

It's a great gig and I'd be very happy if you'd make it part of your regimen.

Check it out here: The Scroll.

I will (ahem...try my best) to continue to use this as a forum to blast about things not related to my new gig, like, for example, the piece I wrote for the Atlantic about the War of 1812. So stay tuned and keep in touch.

Love Always,
Adam

Essay on Adam
by Robert Bringhurst

There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.
Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:
he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.
Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.

The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,
fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth,
nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between:
he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these

is only an issue of whether the demons
work from the inside out or from the outside
in: the one
theological question.

This is definitely the most fun I've ever had reporting on a story. New Orleans, Carnival, parades, culture, anarchy, sex, drugs, and violence.

For The Atlantic:

The parade reached its endpoint, which was a warehouse-turned-event-space on the corner of Piety and Chartres. Pizarro stood at the door charging a $2.22 sliding-scale cover for the Eris Legal Defense Fund. The lither partygoers hopped the wall to avoid the fee. Inside, the band began the Eris Anthem before carrying on into waltzes and dirges, while the dance floor crowded thick and the sidelines became alleys for the sleepy and overindulged.

Throughout the night, various projects seemed to be underway. A line of flag twirlers performed an elaborate dance. A series of lavish cakes exploded. People scribbled aphorisms on strips of paper and dropped them in a box: If a cat follows you home, keep it! Erisians drank and offered each other acid, and the intrepid scaled scaffolding and hung from the rafters watching. The scene emitted a sense of danger without peril.

After nearly two hours, the Eris band performed a final song written for the occasion: "The Trickster's Waltz," a 10-minute coda flecked with klezmer and polka. The band played the crowd out to the street, where some dispersed for the bars. Others hung around Bywater performing music and setting off fireworks at intersections. One couple employed the much-maligned vertical model for upright sidewalk sex. A few of the Eris faithful stared plaintively at the side of the venue that had been tagged with graffiti during the party: Rest in peace, Eris! Eris is dead! Long live Eris!

It's practically a TFR tradition:

Do I Wait?

My latest: the story of the South African Jewish exodus to Houston, Texas. Read all about it here.

This week, as tables across the globe become the gathering point for Passover Seders, one implicit note will be the regenerating narrative of exodus in Jewish history. But often overlooked in this narrative is the way that exoduses, either forced or self-motivated, give birth to new Jewish communities in our own day. And few American cities are more emblematic of this, I’d argue, than my hometown of Houston, Texas, where roughly 400 South African Jewish families have settled, stayed, and grown from the late 1970s to the present. Although, as often happens, their assimilation process was not without its hitches—as the story of one of their early experiences reveals.

“We went to each of the synagogues and they each said, ‘Unless you become a member of the synagogue, you can’t come to the synagogue,’ ” Dr. Les Nowitz recalled, of his first holiday in town. “We said, ‘We just arrived, we came here in June, we don’t know where we want to join and what we want to do.’ There wasn’t one synagogue that would allow us to come into the synagogue for services. So, we sat on the Katy Freeway near the swimming pool in the apartments where we were living. We came from an environment where there was no such thing as needing a ticket to get into synagogue.”

Of course that environment, though perhaps less formal or demanding, had also grown precarious. By the time a 1980 census estimated that the Jewish population of South Africa had reached its apogee at 119,000, a significant number of the country’s Jews had already left. With myriad political crises, including the battles to end apartheid, deepening, the South African Jewish community had begun scattering across the globe by the late 1970s, settling in Europe, Australia, Israel, Canada, and America. For a group that traces itself mostly—80 percent by conservative estimates—back to Lithuania or the Baltics, this dispersal began to reduce one of the most historically singular groups in modern Jewish history. Today the Jewish community in South Africa numbers around 70,000, with an average reduction of nearly 2,000 each year.

As always, my little blog here is taking some neglect as I pursue my dreams of artistic greatness alleged financial solvency.

For Salon, I interviewed Kirby Dick, a filmmaker whose documentary on the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system brought to light some serious ethical issues about the way films are rated. It was, in some ways, a follow up to the story I did about the documentary "Bully," which garnered an R rating for its infrequent use of the F-word and limited the film from reaching the audience for which it was intended.

What’s your take on the Weinstein Co.’s decision to release the film without a rating?

They did that, obviously, so that they can reach children under the age of 16, which is their primary audience. The intent of the film, as I understand it, is to change the behavior of how children related to other children in terms of bullying. It’s really their only choice, if they want to reach children under 16. It’s great if parents want to take their children to see this film, but on the hand, if children want to see this film, and they don’t want to go with their parents, they should absolutely be able to.

For Tablet Magazine, I've had these projects:

I covered the J Street Conference in Washington, D.C., which, if you are blissfully unaware, is meant to be the counterweight to AIPAC. See my dispatches here.

Denizens of D.C. and history wonks (by no means mutually exclusive groups) are fond of explaining why Washington’s alphabetical street layout does not include a J Street among its lettered grid. Across the city’s four quadrants, every letter has its own street all the way from A through W (sadly X, Y, and Z didn’t make the cut, either), excepting J. One moth-eaten myth is that Pierre L’Enfant, the city’s original designer, had a beef with John Jay, the first chief justice, and left “J” out as a slight. The truth is actually that until sometime in the mid-19th century, the letters “I” and “J” were difficult to distinguish from each other. As usual, the explanation is much closer to pragmatic than exciting.

On Saturday, J Street, the organization designed to be a liberal counterweight to the more hawkishly pro-Israel AIPAC, kicked off its third convention under the banner of “Making History,” history being something the group has assiduously tried to avoid becoming. As its 2,500 participants gathered, it seemed as though the group might have found some footing. Nearly a quarter of this year’s attendees are college students from over 100 different universities in five different countries. This young, 650-strong contingent was the point of much attention, as they were featured parading through the conference’s opening plenary on Saturday night. It was announced that J Street U, the organization’s campus outposts, had reached 33 colleges.

I also got to attend a Passover cooking demonstration at the White House led by culinary celebrity Joan Nathan and the White House executive pastry chef Bill Yosses. See here.

My most recent article for Tablet, about a group of non-Israeli IDF vets, is up. OMG check it out here!

Some of the members also interact with Israeli-born IDF veterans who have since moved stateside—but again, their experiences are not exactly the same, and native-born Israelis sometimes look askance at these vets. A common phrase used by Israelis to describe the foreign soldiers who came to join the IDF is the Yiddish slur “freier,” which is somewhere between a fool and a sucker. While each man says the respect eventually came, the broader sense of integration often didn’t. In this way, Aluf Stone deals with the consequences of dual loyalty—of not truly belonging in either place.

Folks, I've got a piece in Salon today about the MPAA's decision to give an R rating to a documentary about teenage bullying because of the language used by the bullies.

“I believe we’re at a tipping point moment when it comes to bullying,” said filmmaker Lee Hirsch in a phone interview with Salon.

Hirsch is the director of “Bully,” a documentary about teenage bullying, which is set to be released at the end of March. The film chronicles the lives of five students through a school year, including high school and middle school students, as they endure the torments of their peers. It features two families who lost their children to suicide after they were bullied and also details the fate of a distressed fourteen-year-old girl who faced multiple felony counts after she pulled out a gun on a school bus.

Last week, the Motion Picture Association of America dealt the film a serious blow by upholding the film’s R rating, making the documentary less accessible to its target audience. For the MPAA, the problem with “Bully” stemmed from a scene in which a student was harassed and the f-word was said seven or eight times by various accosters. Hirsch, however, was adamant about keeping all the scenes intact as they were originally filmed.

“For me, when it comes to bullying, people are always minimizing the experience, they’re whitewashing it,” Hirsch explained. “The tendency is to say it’s a rite of passage or it’s just kids being kids, but it matters because the honesty and the brutality and the truth of those scenes are important and relevant. They aren’t thrown in there or scripted — this is what happens.”

Last week’s appeal to the MPAA was headed up by Harvey Weinstein, the co-chair of the Weinstein Company, who first saw the documentary during its successful run at independent film festivals last year. Weinstein was joined at the meeting by Alex Libby, a subject of the film who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and frequently suffers ridicule. Afterwards, Libby commented to Hirsch that the MPAA ruling meant that he wouldn’t be able to see his own life on film.

It was published here, but here's the original version.

Shortly before leaving his native Tennessee, Davy Crockett--Texas’s most venerated adopted son--famously told fellow statesmen, “You may all go to hell, I will go to Texas.” Crockett’s departure for Texas in 1835 was precipitated by a series of events: his humiliating defeat in a congressional election, the imminence of the romantic Texan rebellion against Mexico, and the repellent notion of a Martin Van Buren presidency. The rest is legend. Less than six months later, Crockett died at the Alamo, an event that some savvy Texas politicians affectionately call “Texas’s Masada.”

Earlier this month, the Orthodox Union, a body whose members also don distinctive hats, announced an initiative reminiscent of Davy Crockett’s proclamation, albeit for slightly different reasons. With the job market in the American northeast slow to rebound, the cost of housing still swelling, and tuition for private day schools continuing to grow, the OU admitted that an alternative was needed for large Orthodox families under financial duress in New York and New Jersey. Their solution: Houston, Texas.

Houston, the fourth-largest city in America, is an easy sell for a number of financial reasons. In a state with no income tax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_income_tax#States_without_an_individual_income_tax), Houston is noted for its affordable housing and low cost of living. On the strength of its medical, tech, and energy industries, Houston flourished during the recent recession and continues to have a strong job market (http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2011/12/16/houston-unemployment-rate-continues-to.html). The city also houses (by a large margin http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/cities/) more headquarters of Fortune 500 companies than every American city but New York.

“In terms of large metropolitan cities, we’re at the top of the list in terms of unemployment rate,” said Rabbi M. Davis of Houston, who helped coordinate the initiative. “Compared to New York, Chicago, LA, the unemployment rate is far lower and the cost of living index is incredibly lower. The average cost of a home in the city of Houston is $124K, in Queens, New York, it’s $450K. All those numbers are mind-boggling when you think about what it’s like to live in Houston comfortably.”

Perhaps most surprisingly though is how Houston has developed into a city with intricate Jewish infrastructure. In the late 1970s, spurred by the Arab Oil Embargo, the city’s petroleum industry exploded, matching its already internationally renowned medical center. Houston prospered--earning the name “The Golden Buckle of the Sunbelt”--and its population boomed, drawing in new Jewish families from the northeast as well as Europe, South America, Israel, and South Africa. Today, the city has a Jewish population of nearly 45,000, including an estimated 500-600 Orthodox families and countless proud mothers of innumerable Jewish doctors. Unthinkable just decades ago, major grocers have kosher butchers, there are plenty of mikvaot watering holes, and one of the city’s largest public schools even offers Hebrew, notoriously taught by a ruthless Israeli martinet. Just miles from the city’s business and medical centers, eruv enclosures cordon off the two large Orthodox neighborhoods.

“We’ve got a great system here,” said Davis. “It’s much cheaper, we’ve got a nice quality of life, we have all the amenities we need: six Orthodox shuls, five Orthodox schools, a strong federation, and a strong JCC. We don’t have a Main Street or a Central Avenue with 30 Kosher restaurants, but we have enough. ”

But this lack of Jewish geographical centrality, while spiritually apropos for a city that infamously has no zoning, also raises issues of how an influx of Jewish families might tip the demographic scales between the two Modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities. A few years ago, a small number of female students at the Robert M. Beren Academy--Houston’s only Orthodox Jewish co-ed day school--left the school to help found the Torah Girls Academy of Texas, a new girls-only high school. While the negative effect for the Beren Academy was small, there is a fear that this shift could be a harbinger of future tension should the demographics of the Orthodox community radically change.

“Some people are concerned,” said Dr. R. Collins, President of the Beren Academy. “I am very optimistic about what growth will bring. If anything that departure, if that’s what you want to call it, solidified our mission statement. To some degree, it was a blessing the way I see it because now the Modern Orthodox movement in Houston really understands where we stand.”

While many other leaders have registered excitement about the potential expansion of the Orthodox population in Houston, some in the community admitted their apprehension about the social implications of a large Jewish movement from the northeast on the existent Jewish ecosystem.

“I am concerned that New Yorkers could negatively impact the cooperative spirit of the community,” said a local leader, who asked to remain anonymous. “New Yorkers are not especially well known for their tolerance in these matters. The Houston community tends to diminish denominational differences and that makes this a very special place. The new-comers will have to realize this unique quality and make sure they help to sustain it.”

All told, the concerns and objections of the community as well its excitement may be premature. While the OU and the Houston community have put resources into the initiative, at this stage, the OU program is mainly a public relations push. Subsidies for tuition, housing, or relocation are not being offered and a larger question lingers: will they come at all? Regardless of its economic vitality, when envisioning the newest frontier for Orthodox Jewry in America, The Bayou City seems an unlikely destination for Jews of the northeast.

“I believe that one of the greatest obstacles Houston has in attracting people from the northeast is the perception that we are backwards and that J.R. Ewing and Rick Perry represent the state,” says M. Wadler, the president of United Orthodox Synagogues, Houston’s largest Modern Orthodox shul.

In addition to its distinctively Texas swagger, Houston’s physical make-up could not be more different than the metropolitan areas of the northeast. Like many regional cities, it’s flat, hot, humid, and lacks a serviceable public transportation system. The vertiginous diffusion of schools, smog drifts, strip malls, mega-churches, city parks, high rises, and acre-plotted residential neighborhoods within the city limits makes chaos the city’s principle of order. “Keep Houston Ugly,” remains both a popular bumper sticker and defiant city credo.

Despite these physical differences, Houston shares other qualities with the urban centers of the northeast. A demographer will attest to the city’s ethnic diversity: Houston is home to over a million foreign-born residents, over 90 languages are spoken, and because of heavy immigration (legal or other), it has one of the youngest populations in the country. A political pollster will tell you that despite its conservative milieu, Houston consistently votes blue in presidential elections and its last Republican mayor left office in 1982. In December 2009, with the election of its current mayor, Annise Parker, Houston became the largest American city to elect an openly gay mayor. A patron of the arts will brag of the treasures held within the Houston Museum District and the world class opera, ballet, and symphony of its Theater District, the second-highest concentration of theater seats in an American city.

Only time will tell whether Houston has enough selling points to inspire a Crockett-like fervor in Jewish communities in the northeast. The OU may be more optimistic than its members. Abraham Karesh, who currently lives in northern New Jersey with five children, was nonplussed by the idea.

“Sure, things can be tough right now...but Houston? In Texas? I could move in with my brother too.”