This week on Unorthodox: Bloomberg, Bernie, and Trump, oh my!
Our Jewish guest is Mark Seidenfeld, vice president and deputy general counsel at Scholastic, publisher of the wildly successful Harry Potter and The Hunger Gamesseries. He tells us about traveling to Scotland to pick up a manuscript from Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling—which he then sat on during the flight back to New York to keep safe—and never leaking any secrets to his Harry Potter-obsessed kids.
Our non-Jewish guest is bioethicist and writer Alice Dreger, whose new book,Galileo’s Middle Finger, explores clashes between scientists and activists throughout history. The book was the result of Dreger’s experience having found herself in those cultural crosshairs after her research on intersex people angered transgender activists. She also tells us about her family’s pet rat, Darling.
We love to hear from you! Send comments, kvetches, and questions toUnorthodox@tabletmag.com. We’ll share our favorites on air.
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The Parents Circle’s event on International Day of Peace, September 20th, 2014. (Photo: Judith Hertog)
When Robi Damelin’s son was killed by a Palestinian sniper in 2002 while on reserve duty in the West Bank, Damelin refused to give in to the urge for revenge. Instead, she decided to become a peace activist. “Some people die when their child is killed. They give up on life and channel all their grief into the desire for revenge,” she said. “I can’t give up hope. It’s what keeps me going and gets me out of bed every morning. The pain of losing my child is what spurs me on to do whatever I can to prevent others from experiencing this.”
Wajeeh Tomeezi, a Palestinian from Idna, a village near Hebron, came to a similar understanding. In 1990, his 13-year-old brother was shot by Israeli soldiers. Tomeezi, who was 32 at the time, wanted to avenge his brother at first, but the words of the poet Khalil Jibran—“only the weak revenge themselves; the strong of soul forgive”—reminded him that causing pain to others would not bring back his brother. In 2001, another tragedy pushed Tomeezi further toward non-violence: He was on his way home from a wedding when the car in which his cousins traveled was attacked by extremist Israeli settlers who killed three passengers, including a 4-month-old baby. “When I saw this baby, covered in blood,” said Tomeezi, who was traveling in a different car, “I realized there is nothing more holy than human life.”
Wajeeh Tomeezi at the Peace Square in Jaffa on Dec. 19, 2015. (Photo: Judith Hertog)
Damelin and Tomeezi are now part of the Parent Circle Families Forum, an Israeli-Palestinian peace organization whose members have all lost at least one family member in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The organization was established in 1995 by Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose son had been kidnapped and killed by Hamas. It now has around 650 members, half of them Palestinians from the West Bank (the organization has lost touch with its former members in Gaza) and half of them Israelis—almost all Jewish, except for a few Druze. The organization is an equal partnership, with an Israeli office in Ramat Gan and a Palestinian office in Beit Jala.
The PCFF promotes peace by encouraging mutual understanding between Palestinians and Israelis. This is done through educational and dialogue programs such as presentations in schools, a Facebook group that connects Palestinians and Israelis, public discussions, and a “Narrative Project” that brings together, over the course of several weeks, groups of Palestinians and Israelis who explore each other’s personal and national narratives and traumas. The women’s group of PCFF has produced a cookbook in which members share their favorite recipes and their personal stories, and are now working on a new project: embroidered shoes, which will be offered for sale and presented to women representatives in the European parliament as a reminder to promote peace.
“The biggest problem between Israelis and Palestinians is that we don’t know each other, and that we only learn stereotypes about each other,” said Tomeezi, explaining that the security wall and the separation of Palestinian and Israeli society have made personal interactions rare—which has made it easier for both sides to demonize each other. Overcoming these personal barriers is essential to the PCFF, whose slogan is: “It won’t end until we talk.”
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At times when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intensifies, the PCFF tends to step up its activities. During the 2014 Gaza War, for instance, the PCFF started to organize public “Peace Square” discussions in central Tel Aviv, where passersby would stop and share their thoughts about the war. It also came out with a provocative video in which members of the forum each declare, “We don’t want you here”—because the ultimate goal of the group is to put itself out of business: ending the conflict so there are no more bereaved family members to join. The video triggered a long stream of hateful comments from both sides—some saying, “We don’t want Arabs and left-wing traitors here,” and others calling for the expulsion of all Jews from Palestine.
The violence in recent months has only increased such sentiments, to which the PCFF has responded by initiating a new series of weekly “Peace Square” discussions, this time in Jaffa, a mixed Jewish-Arab town.
At a recent meeting of the “Peace Square” on Jaffa’s seaside boulevard, members of the forum told their stories and invited passersby—Jews and Arabs out for a Saturday evening stroll—to sit down in plastic chairs and join the discussion. Their goal was to engage everyone, including the fiercest critics of the PCFF.
“We’re not there to talk to people who already agree with us,” said Doubi Schwartz, the general manager of the Israeli office. “Any dialogue is valuable, as long as we engage with each other and listen—especially if we disagree!”
When one passerby shouted, “Stupid leftists!” he was invited to sit down, but the heckler ignored the invitation.
Tomeezi, who speaks fluent Hebrew because he worked most of his life in Israel, took the microphone and explained to the Israeli listeners the plight of Palestinians, like himself, who live in and near Hebron, where a heavy Israeli army presence guards the small community of settlers who live in the city center. He described how an Israeli soldier once threatened to shoot him because he took issue that Tomeezi approached a roadblock with his headlights on, and how another soldier in his village ordered his 11-year-old daughter to strip.
“I’m sorry you have to experience such things,” responded a middle-aged Israeli named Rami, “but it’s not our choice to have roadblocks. We must protect ourselves from people who want to kill us!” As Rami got up to continue on his way, he commented that it’s always good to talk, but added: “I sense a lot of naivety here.”
Bassam Aramin, the Palestinian spokesperson for PCFF, would disagree. Aramin, whose 10-year-old daughter was shot in the head in 2007 by an Israeli soldier, says that the PCFF’s task is not to resolve the conflict, but to change people’s attitudes. “Even if we can’t change the situation now, we must continue to promote a narrative of reconciliation and create a culture of peace to keep alive hope for the future,” he said. Aramin spent seven years in an Israeli prison for planning an attack on Israeli soldiers when he was 17, but he has long ago realized the futility of violence and decided to dedicate himself to promoting peace.
While many have become pessimistic about the prospects for peace, especially in light of the recent violence, the PCFF stays stubbornly hopeful. Rami Elhanan, an Israeli whose 14-year-old daughter was killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 1997, denounces pessimism as an indulgence: “Today, the bon mot here in Israel is ‘desperation.’ People wave their desperation as if it’s some kind of flag: Everything is hopeless, and everything is black. But you can’t live like that. Especially people like us, who have already experienced tragedy, we can’t afford to lose hope.”
The current wave of violence has brought practical challenges for the PCFF. Travel restrictions and curfews on Palestinians have made it impossible to continue programs.
“Since the beginning of October we haven’t been able to hold any dialogue meetings because of the situation on the ground,” said Mazen Faraj, the general manager of the Palestinian office, who lives in Dheisha Refugee Camp, near Bethlehem. He explained that travel has either been forbidden or has become too dangerous and added that recent events have diminished good will among Palestinians.
Still, the PCFF gained a large number of new Palestinian members: 28 families decided to join last year. “Palestinians are interested in dialogue because they want to change the situation and improve their conditions,” said Faraj.
Schwartz said that he has had to cancel educational programs in Israeli schools because the Palestinian presenters didn’t have permits to enter Israel and because schools were afraid of students’ reactions to the presence of Palestinian moderators in their classrooms. But the tension has also brought in new members. Beside the 28 new Palestinian families, 30 Israelis have recently joined the PCFF.
One of these new members is Oren Balaban, whose father was killed in 1965 during his army service in the IDF, when Oren was just a toddler. Balaban decided to join the PCFF in October 2015, when he encountered the Peace Square in Jaffa and joined the discussion.
“I’ve always stayed away from politics,” he explained, “but recently I started feeling that I no longer have the option of not being involved. Israel has become a society of fear and intolerance. Freedom of speech is eroding, and we’re becoming less and less democratic. It feels wrong to live a comfortable life here in Tel Aviv, while 40 kilometers away Palestinians are living under occupation of the Israeli army.”
Even though many Israelis agree that the occupation is a problem, the discussion at the Jaffa Peace Square demonstrates that there is no simple solution.
Tsipi Freyer and her husband Yisrael, an elderly couple out for a stroll, were reluctantly convinced to sit down in the circle. “I remember a time before the occupation,” Tsipi said when she was handed the microphone. “Even then, the PLO was carrying out terror attacks. And look at Gaza! I’m afraid the Palestinians will continue attacking us even if we sign an agreement and withdraw from the West Bank.”
Elhanan responded: “The fear is real! It’s part of our history and is based on things that happened. But we have to free ourselves from the fear and from the victim mentality. I don’t want to use my victim status to hurt others. If we reach an agreement with the Palestinians, we can’t be sure that everything will be immediately all right. But we must try to resolve the conflict because the alternative is too terrible.”
Another bystander, Yigal Baram, who lives in Jaffa, objected to a two-state solution and, citing Jaffa as an ideal of Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel, asked why Palestinians need a state: “Why can’t they just live peacefully as Arabs in Israel?”
“I’d be fine with that,” Tomeezi responded. “Just give me citizenship and equal rights, and it’s a deal!”
Yachia Raba’a, a Muslim from the Old City of Jerusalem who said he has come to Jaffa with his fiancée and another couple to relax from the tension in East Jerusalem, took the microphone to plead for peace. “People are tired and exhausted,” he said. “For 20 years, the politicians have been talking about peace, peace, peace … But this government doesn’t want peace and is just making things worse. They’re just building more and more settlements and our situation is getting worse. I’m in despair. It pains me when people get killed—on both sides.”
“I took their business card,” Raba’a said as he left. “Maybe I can get in touch with them. I don’t know if it’ll make a difference, but at least it makes a difference to my heart.”
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Jesse Eisenberg onstage during The New Yorker Festival in 2015. (Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images)
Bream Gives Me Hiccups, the new collection of humorous short stories by actor Jesse Eisenberg, opens with a set of restaurant reviews by a 9-year-old boy. Precocious young foodies are not an uncommon sight in restaurants, but for the unnamed child, a visit to a high-end sushi joint is less an opportunity for culinary indulgence than for personal introspection:
When the woman brought the bill, Mom smiled at her and said thank you, which was a lie, because Mom hates when people bring her the bill. When Mom and Dad were married, Mom would always pretend like she was going to pay, and when Dad took the bill, which he always did, she said more lies like, “Are you sure? Okay, wow, thanks, honey.” Now that Dad doesn’t eat with us anymore, maybe I should pretend to take the bill from Mom and say a lie like, “Oh, really? Okay, thanks, Mom,” but I don’t because lies are for adults who are sad in their lives.
I told Jesse Eisenberg during a recent Skype conversation that his stories strike me as really sad. (He was in New York, on a day off work on the upcoming Woody Allen film he appears in. I was in my apartment in Tel Aviv.) “Well, as an American Jew, this is like my world perspective,” he told me. “You’re Israeli, so you’re just kind of necessarily more confident than I am. You look at these stories as sad, whereas I look at them as incredibly optimistic.”
So, everything could be a whole lot worse, I offered.
“Yes, exactly,” he said. “This is the fundamental difference between us.”
Jesse Eisenberg and I have been friends for 20 years, and the nature of our conversations, mostly about geopolitics, girls, and musical theater, has stayed more or less consistent throughout that time. That Jesse became, over the course of those years, an Academy Award-nominated movie star never took much getting used to on my part, because I considered him a thespian of some renown from day one, even though when we first met his acting career consisted of community productions of classic musicals. (I might have the distinction of being one of the first people to ask him for an autograph, although that may in fact have been his own idea. I don’t know if he has hung on to my own autograph, which he insisted I give him in exchange.)
Twenty years later, Jesse’s Internet Movie Database page lists some 37 acting roles, with highlights including Jeff Daniels’ son in The Squid and the Whale, a zombie killer and master magician in Zombieland and Now You See Me, and, of course, Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, which earned him the Oscar nod. (My personal favorite among his varied roles was the ultra-Orthodox drug dealer in Holy Rollers.) This March, Batman v Superman—a natural contender for box office success—will open, with Jesse as a relatively youthful and hirsute Lex Luthor.
I first met Jesse at a Fourth of July barbecue in central New Jersey, through family friends. Though I never shared his passion for the NBA, many of our other interests coincided. He was very funny and as close to being a mensch as an 11-year-old can be. We’d get together whenever I’d visit the United States, and pick up where we left off. We were good kids; he once passed me off as himself (using his driver’s license and baseball cap) to get me past the doorman at the Bowery Ballroom when I was just shy of 21 and he was not yet quite so famous, but I am afraid that was the extent of our mischief.
Since his teens, Jesse has also been writing: first screenplays (optioned but unproduced) and then plays (three of which premiered off-Broadway in recent years). Throughout, he’s amassed the dozens of short prose pieces that constitute his new collection, many of which have been published in places like McSweeney’s andThe New Yorker.
So, how did this book actually come about? I’d read a lot of your stories throughout the years but they’re all pretty short. Now suddenly it turns out you have more than enough for a full-length book.
I started by writing jokes. In retrospect I realize that a lot of the humor writers that I like started doing the same thing. I love stand-up comedy and I love the idea of a quick joke, a one-liner. And then probably like most people who write humor, you feel like the value of that maxes out pretty quickly, and you want to write something more substantive. I started writing plays, and more dramatic stories. The jokes there are character based, oftentimes masking a character’s deep pain. That’s more interesting, because you’re getting at something that’s beyond the surface.
‘I’m writing in a tradition of, frankly, mostly Jewish writers.’
When I discovered that there are books that are compilations of short humor—Woody Allen has done it, my friend Simon Rich has written a few—when I realized these exist, I was inspired to write a lot, because I thought I could do it well. And I thought I could do it well enough to match the quality of the books that I like, or at least be in the same league.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak this confidently about anything. You’re always apologizing, but you’re completely unapologetic when it comes to your writing.
That’s just because I haven’t achieved that much success as a writer. The most confident writer you’ll meet is an unpublished writer. I’m sure Shakespeare was a nervous wreck! There’s a line in The End of the Tour [where Jesse played journalist David Lipsky, profiling David Foster Wallace (played by Jason Segal)]. “I say, ‘Is it great, having all these people read you and think you’re really brilliant?’ and he answers, ‘That’s not so, the more people say they love you, the more scared you are of being a fraud.’ I’m new at this, so I still have the cockiness of the loner in his bedroom thinking that his thing’s great. Once people start having reactions to the book—and I’m sure they’ll be across the board, as they are for everything—I will probably start to feel the kind of vulnerabilities that anybody who has put their work out for public consumption feels.
Now you’re embarking on a book tour, meeting readers and doing press. How is this different from when you’re doing junkets for movies you’ve acted in?
Tonight I have to give a speech at a conference of independent booksellers, and it’s fun for me because I can do something a little more creative than typical public presentations. When I act in a movie I have to be an ambassador for a multi-million-dollar project that I am a small part of, so it’s more difficult for me to do something that’s unusual. But with the book, because it’s only me as the creator and it’s a smaller economic undertaking, I can do something creative. Tonight I’m going to give a comedic speech about doing the different things that I do, but in a faux-self-aggrandizing way, talking about what it’s like to be a writer.
But aren’t you still basically selling yourself?
If I’m talking about a movie and I say something sarcastic, it can be parsed and repeated and used for slander. Whereas if I say something about my own book, there’s just so much less interest in it that I can just speak a little more freely. I feel only beholden to myself, and my publisher. When you’re surrounded by the big apparatus of a movie, you have a responsibility to so many different people to be the public face of a big investment that’s trying to appeal to a large amount of people, so you have to be not only more careful but you end up having to censor yourself, if only in an attempt not to say something that’s going to be parsed inaccurately. You can make a joke or something offhand—there’s a kind of simultaneous and conflicting demand that a public person be both authentic and not say anything that hurts anybody’s feelings. And that’s kind of an impossible and paradoxical set of requests.
How about fame on the more mundane level? I know you can’t really blend into the background any more and just observe situations which could provide fodder for your writing.
Being recognizable makes things both difficult and advantageous. I can’t really do what I used to do, which is sit in public places with headphones, pretending to listen to music, and eavesdrop on conversations. It’s hard for me to do that now because people will come up to me. On the other hand, I can now talk to people in personal ways that I would never be able to do if they hadn’t approached me in order to ask me a question about being in a movie. By virtue of them breaking this tacit pact we have of living in New York City, which is that you don’t talk to anybody, I now have free rein to ask them something very personal. So, I have this great advantage as well.
The acknowledgements note in the book ends with a thank-you to your family, “who never seem to exercise their veto power even when the joke’s on them.” I guess I’m a slightly privileged reader because I know you and your family, but I think anyone reading the book will get the strong sense that some of the stories are very personal, even if they’re clearly fictional and sometimes outlandish.
I can’t understand what drives somebody to write about their lives. I’m absolutely bewildered when somebody writes a memoir. I’m reading a book now, let me find it so I can give you the exact title, Measure of a Man, by Martin Greenfield. He’s a tailor. He did all the suits for the Woody Allen movie that I’m doing, and for Obama and Patrick Ewing. He survived Auschwitz and became the most successful tailor in New York. So, someone like that, I completely understand why he would write a memoir, because he has a story that’s really powerful and unusual and interesting to a lot of people.
I would never write about something that I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling the entire world, but I can talk about feelings and have the catharsis of self-expression through fiction. You and I know each other, and you could probably see where things come from, but someone could read the book a thousand times and not have any idea of what the feeling is based on. It makes total sense to me to write a book like this that has elements of feelings that I have, because it’s so veiled in fiction. I suppose that maybe the difference between me and the memoirist is not so vast, but to me that difference is everything.
I think the young people in the book—the 9-year-old critic, or the freshman Harper Jablonski—are its most fully realized characters. What sort of childhood experiences did you draw on for them?
There’s a line in the book where the 9-year-old critic says that adults have less original thoughts than children, because the more they live in the world the more their thoughts become similar to other people’s, just by virtue of being around other people longer. That’s how I feel. You’ll talk to a child and they’ll have this completely inaccurate yet totally vivid imagination of reality.
Sometime in your teens, you discovered Woody Allen. How have Allen and his contemporaries influenced your writing?
I’m writing in a tradition of, frankly, mostly Jewish writers. You could say that Woody Allen is the most important father of this. And while I don’t think of what I’m writing as particularly Jewish, when you print out the pages, after it’s done, you realize that it’s in the tradition of Jewish writers. I think there’s something in writing humor, writing this kind of fiction, that actually dovetails with the Jewish-American experience, or with the Jewish experience in general, which is that Jews have a way of both assimilating and separating, and they do it very deftly. They’ve done it in Europe, they’ve done it in America. It’s not Machiavellian, it’s just habitual. And this kind of writing manifests from that because you’re both commenting as an observer and also immersed as a player, and it’s that strange world perspective of the kind of outsider-assimilator that creates a funny and often compelling juxtaposition.
How about the 9-year-old restaurant critic? Is he Jewish?
I think of his dad as Jewish, and his mom as not Jewish. Which I guess technically makes him not. In my mind the mother’s not from New York, and the dad is.
You’ve pretty much avoided the Jewish-mother trope in your stories, except for that one monologue by the mother accompanying her son to the ballet.
Probably because my mom is not that kind of overbearing cliché. What makes the overbearing mother funny is that it’s not the mother thinking that her son is the best in the world, but the juxtaposition between the mother expecting the son to be the best in the world and permanently disappointed that he’s not: arrogance on behalf of your son and total disappointment in him. So, I’m certainly aware of that cliché, but my mom is not like that. She grew up in the hippie movement, she was a socialist Zionist, part of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, and saw Israel as a bastion of socialism led by the kibbutzim. She was interested in Israeli folk-dancing—that was actually her main artistic expression as a child and a teenager. And then she parlayed that interest into becoming a choreographer at a Christian boy’s school in Philadelphia, which is the first job she got. She was a choreographer and on the weekends became a professional birthday clown. And that was really the beginning of my interest in the arts.
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(Collage by Tablet magazine)
The cast has been announced for Woody Allen’s long-in-the-works six-episode television project for Amazon Studios (Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle, and The Man in the High Castle), and boy, does it have people you’d never expect to see in the same room together. Most notable is the pairing of frequent Allen collaborator (and my Shukert spirit animal) Elaine May, and…wait for it… Miley Cyrus.
Just because you never quite pictured the erstwhile Hannah Montana—with her outstretched tongue, vinyl underpants and all, existing in the tweedy, overeducated, and more genteelly psychosexual realms of Upper East Side—in Allenland doesn’t mean that she hasn’t. Apparently Miley has a painting of Allen hanging next to her bed, and was actually staring meditatively into his oil-rendered (or might it be watercolor?) eyes when she got the call telling her she’d booked the job. In typical Allen fashion, few concrete facts about the content of the project has been released, except that it is set in the 1960s.
And thank God for that. For all of Allen’s gifts, a keen sense of the current moment is not one of them: it’s no coincidence that his best— and most acclaimed—comedy of the past decade, Midnight in Paris, is about a young-ish man who lives half his life in the 1920s.) It’s been painful at times to see him dust off hoary old scripts from the drawer—the terrifyingly bad Whatever Works, starring a game but clearly humiliated Larry David comes to mind—and try to pass them off as contemporary, giving one the feeling he hasn’t actually had a conversation with another human being since about 1975.
The Woodman, despite appearing, as always, at the height of hipster fashion in his artfully frayed plaid shirts and thick-framed glasses, turned 80 last year and still famously works on an old-fashioned typewriter. He’s not exactly the ideal person to chronicle, say, the mating habits of the Instagram age. But I’m pleased—and heartened—to see him a return to a time whose taboos, conflicts, and culture he knows in his bones, and which—as the success of Mad Men showed—still, to a frightening degree, still affects us today.
Which brings us to Miley. Their collaboration may seem like an odd match on first glance, but if you scratch the surface a bit you’ll find that it has a certain perverse kismet to it. Under all the anxious self-deprecation and Jung by way of the Borscht Belt psychobabble, Allen has always had a deeply freaky side, like the constant jokes about polymorphous perversity (long after Americans at large were educated enough about their bodies to know such a thing didn’t biologically exist), and the blitheness with which his well-heeled characters sleep with the sisters of their wives and the husbands of their brothers and God knows what else (I’ll refrain, at this moment, from any comment on the filmmaker’s notoriously tempestuous personal life). In such a melee, there seems to be more than enough room for the pansexual Miley, who has cheerfully expressed her willingness to try anything sexual, as long as its consensual, and spoken out about queerness and gender fluidity with a frankness that would have been truly shocking even a few years—let alone a few decades—ago.
I can’t predict the concept behind the series—Elaine as a decorous retiree with Miley as her hippie granddaughter? A classic battle of the generations? A lesbian Harold and Maude?—but I do, however oddly, understand exactly why Woody wants to work with her. She’s not just the flavor-of-the-month; she might, in fact, be his most ideal muse. Let’s just hope he doesn’t try to date her.
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