Flashback 1991: Jews in Ethiopia an ancient riddle

  

Photo courtesy of VisitEthiopia.et.

   Rabbi Capers Funnye died Monday. I can't recall how, but he got on my radar in 1991, and I attended a service at his South Side synagogue and wrote about him. What I remember most about the story are peripherals — editors at the paper were reluctant to run it, since it wasn't "news" ("It's news," I recall saying, "if people don't know about it.") And the complaints from angry Ethiopian Jews in Chicago who felt the divinity of their origins were being questioned. Anyway, I've posted the story previously, but not the little sidebar that went with it. In the years that followed, almost the entirety of the Ethiopian Jewish population were welcomed — with the attendant difficulties found in every nation — by Israel, that pariah of the western world.

   When French scholar Joseph Halevy made contact with the Jews of Ethiopia in 1867, he found they were skeptical about his claims to being Jewish.
     Halevy was a white man and, as the Ethiopians knew, all Jews were black.
     The question of how tens of thousands of black Jews came to be planted in a remote, impoverished region of Africa is one of the great riddles of anthropology.
     They often are called Falashas, a term they consider pejorative because the word means "stranger" or "outsider" or "no roots" and signifies a lowly place in society. They prefer to be called "Beta-Israel" or "House of Israel."
     The Ethiopian Jews claim to be descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Anthropologists guess they were converted, en masse, thousands of years ago.
     They do not practice Judaism as found in Skokie. But there is no question they follow Judaism of a sort. They follow certain kosher dietary laws, observe Jewish festivals, are circumcised, keep the Sabbath on Saturday and read the Torah translated into Ge'ez, an ancient Ethiopian tongue.      Their priests are called kohanim.
    They lived in obscurity as blacksmiths and potters until the ouster of Haile Selassie in September, 1974, when they became swept up in the civil war that devastated the country.
     In 1975, Israel's orthodox Jewish establishment declared that the Ethiopian Jews were true Jews, descendants of the lost tribe of Dan, and therefore had the right of return and to settle in the land of Israel. At the time, only several hundred Ethiopian Jews lived in Israel.
     Over the next decade, the Israeli government conducted a rescue, dubbed Operation Moses, that secretly airlifted as many as 20,000 out of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum and resettled them in Israel.
     Fewer than 20,000 were left in Ethiopia.
     The airlift was kept under wraps until 1985, when news of it broke, embarrassing the various African governments who collaborated in the airlift and bringing it to a halt.
     Since then Ethiopian Jews have continued to trickle out, depending on the politics of the moment. Only a handful live in Chicago.
     The relocation to the Middle East was a jarring adjustment for both sides. The Israelis sometimes reacted with racist fear and an air of religious superiority to the Ethiopians, who had to cope with racial biases of their own.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 31, 1991

Wait a sec! This isn't the Donald Trump we know

 

     Words don’t often fail me. I wouldn’t last long in this job if they did. But Tuesday night, after sitting with a big bowl of popcorn, serenely watching the Democrats run the table in the midterm elections — a strong majority in the House, more than enough in the Senate, even the governorship of Texas — I snapped off the television, sucked my front teeth, tweeted out a clip of Anthony Quinn doing his ecstatic Zorba the Greek dance, then went to bed.
     But the clip, even without elaboration, was deceptive. I didn’t feel ecstatic, or celebratory, or even particularly glad. What I felt was calm, focused and more than a little wary. So ... after all that thundering for years about rigged elections, conjuring up will-o'-the-wisps of voter fraud and mobilizing the Justice Department to chase after them, the biggest crybaby in public life since Nero is going to just shrug and go, “Oh, right, I lost. Good for you.”
And we’re supposed to believe him? Does that sound probable to you?
     Maybe I bought a bully’s bluster. Didn’t realize that, like the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” one solid bop on the nose would change him from a preening predator to a blubbering wreck, complaining that Fox News doesn’t love him anymore.
     Or maybe there’s a Plan B — they won’t certify the election. Another mob will be sicced on the Capitol. He tried it before.
     Did he really say he was “absolutely willing” to accept the election results? That he would “look forward to working with” the Democrats? That they did a “good job”? Does that sound like the Donald Trump you’ve gotten to know over the last 10 years? Can I be the only one in the country who is suspicious?
     Smarter political minds than my own seem to accept it. Wednesday I reached out to political whiz David Axelrod, the man who helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Why isn’t Trump fighting this tooth and nail? His reply might be the most succinct remark in the history of punditry since Dorothy Parker supposedly responded to the death of Calvin Coolidge with, “How can they tell?”
     “Too big to rig!” Axelrod said.
     Could that be it? Yes, the scope of the loss was enormous. Seven states flipped: Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. With Mississippi — Mississippi! — incredibly, still too close to call. Governorships in Texas, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Iowa. Why not enjoy it? Grab our skis and head for hell, because obviously it’s frozen over, every red state now a winter Democratic wonderland.

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Earthquake

     Construction on the Carmo Convent began in 1389, and the structure loomed over central Lisbon until Nov. 1, 1755, when the Great Lisbon Earthquake brought the roof down.
     Rebuilding the city was such a massive task that neither replacing the Carmo roof nor clearing the ruins was a priority. Time passed, the skeleton became something of a tribute to the tragedy, which took up to 40,000 Portuguese lives. Today it holds an archeological museum and is one of the most diverting ways to spend an hour in the city. Who doesn't love a good ruin?
     There was a lot of fallout from the Great Lisbon Earthquake, wiping out much of Portugal's wealth and sealing that once prosperous nation's decline, plus providing a stark horror that tamped down Enlightenment optimism — with a helping hand from Voltaire, who was inspired by the earthquake to pen his novel "Candide," poking fun at those who decide that this vale of woe is nevertheless the "best of all possible worlds."
     Tuesday's mid-term election was an earthquake, though not a tragedy. I hope it is an event that will restore America's fortunes, rather than doom them. We'll see. Either way, it was a seismic shift, and the truth is, I'm still chewing on what it means. The outcome seems a clear occasion for optimism though, like Candide's Cunegonde, I nevertheless find "my heart is almost closed to hope." The results were too late to opine on for Wednesday morning — I went with a column about motherhood — and while I've begun trying to gather my thoughts, which, startled at the thunderous election results, bolted in every direction of the compass, it's going to take another day to coax them back into their pen and give them a good brushing before I can consider putting them on display.

     So forgive me for buying some time with these cool photos that I took last March when my wife and I were in Lisbon.
     The news is good. I think. As Candide says, ""You see that crime is sometimes punished." But the question remains: what else is it? Because good can be fleeting; here today, gone tomorrow.

Millions of American women don't want kids — one stands up to explain why

 

Bailey Swilley

     The American birthrate has fallen to historic lows, and Bailey Swilley isn’t helping any. Which is ironic.
     “I love babies,” said the Brooklyn-based comedian/storyteller. “That’s the thing. I love babies. I like kids.”
     Fair enough. I love bread, yet don’t want to be a baker.
     “I don’t see myself as a parent,” she said. “I don’t see myself in that role.”
     She has a lot of company. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced a fertility rate of 1.6 children per American woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1. I’d been brooding on this for a while when the email from a publicist hit my inbox, slugged, “NOV 21: Hit NYC Fringe Show in Chicago — Bailey Swilley’s “A Baby For Me? No Thank You, Please!”
     Approaching random women and asking why they don’t want to have children seems a recipe for a quick trip to human resources. But here was an opportunity. About a third of young women don’t want kids. What soured Swilley on the prospect?
     “I am an older sister, my brother is five years younger,” said Swilley, who grew up in Memphis. “Older enough to remember watching my parents parent him and me, and being like, ‘I don’t think that’s for me. I just don’t see myself in this. Not what I aspire to.’”
     Inherent revulsion with parenthood doesn’t usually make the traditional list of reasons people don’t want children — jittery economy, lack of suitable partners, the generally fraught future. Swilley mentioned the term “body horror” — she has a routine about a doctor hunting for part of a broken IUD — as well as the “ring of fire,” which I thought had to do with volcanic activity in the Pacific, but is also a phrase associated with the pain of childbirth.
     Swilley is married — I assumed her husband is on board with her determined childlessness.
     “We’re on the same page,” she said. “I bring it up a lot. I ask him. All of his friends have kids, more his friends than mine. We spend a lot of time with his friends’ kids. Afterwards, I’ll check in, ‘Did you feel anything? Feel that should be something we do?’ We have those check-ins a lot, and always land at, No.”
     Other folks’ kids will do that. I distinctly remember the shock of being childless and visiting friends who had just had children, to find them sitting sunken-eyed in the middle of their shattered apartments, their padded coffee tables and plastic safety gates and gadgets, spattered with spit up and splotches of green and orange baby food, smiling these serene, exhausted, souls-among-the-damned-in-hell grins and urging us to follow them over the cliff into their zombie cult.

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There's something not COMPLETELY on the up-and-up with that fellow...

   
     "The Odyssey" had a moment over the summer, as the Christopher Nolan movie made waves around the world. I didn't see it, having been reading Homer's epic tale for decades, along with its predecessor, "The Iliad." Judging from the reviews, I figured the film wouldn't compare.
     You can't immerse yourself in masterpieces like these without getting a lot back. The violence of war. The capriciousness of fate. Then there are the stylistic flourishes. Since both works are designed to be memorized and recited out loud — I read both to my boys — in a pre-literary age, there are certain tropes intended to trip off the tongue. "The wine dark sea." "The long black ships." I imagine many people know this.
     Facing Donald Trump's bottomless venality, criminality, and general unfitness and loathsomeness, I realized, quite quickly, that it wouldn't do to disgorge a big copy block of faults every time his name was mentioned.
     So I coined what I considered a Homeric trope, "liar, bully and fraud," at first, later amended to "liar, bully, fraud and traitor." The essentials. Short and to the point. I hasten to add that those terms are not insults, or empty slurs, but dry journalistic descriptions. He's a liar because he lies continuously, on matters big and small, and has done so since his first day in office and before. He is a bully because he picks on the weak and vulnerable, both in his policies, directed against immigrants, children, the poor. And in his social interactions, browbeating reporters whose jobs depend on them never responding, "Will you shut the fuck up you orange shitstain of a human being?"
     "Fraud" is well-documented, in various courts of law. And a "traitor" is someone who betrays his country, usually for money, which would ID Trump easily as a question on Jeopardy: "This president accepted gifts from foreign powers and allowed his family and himself to be enriched by embracing policies contrary to the interests of the United States." Only one name fits.
     Over the past few years, I haven't put the Trump trope in the paper because ... well, I hesitate to speculate. My hunch is they don't want to attract the attention of the administration, which has already been hacking away at public radio funds. Which I suppose is defendable, the way you can't really blame a soldier for throwing down his gun and running away when the bullets fly. But that doesn't make it a laudable practice.
     Besides, newspapers with far more solidity than the Sun-Times have long been cowering before Trump. The New York Times, while in some ways doing yeoman's work reporting on the torrent of news, has this maddening tendency to try to frame his actions in the patterns of the past. "Sanewashing" is the term I've seen. Pretending this is all normal. I subscribe to the Times, read it best I can, and generally ignore when they do this.
      But Sunday ... well, they finally snapped to the idea that Trump is out of his fuckin' mind, and ran a story, quite prominently, in the upper right hand corner, with the headline, "Trump's Speech Becomes More Vulgar and Muddled."
     Hard to argue that.
     The fourth graph is the nut graph, and let me see if the word that stopped me dead stops you:

     "He is more long-winded, more profane and more absolutist than when he ran for president a decade ago. His rambling speeches seem even more garbled at times. He makes comments that leave people wondering what he is talking about or that sound like he is saying something he is not. And even for a president who has never fully observed the norms of the office, he seems more willing to say things no other president would say."

     "Fully," right? "Never fully observed the norms of office." Ya think? Missed a few, did he? That has to be a joke, right? From day one, Jan. 20, 2017, when he got in a pissing match with the National Park Service because its crowd estimate didn't jibe with his delusions of grandeur, to Jan. 6, 2021, when he sicc'd a mob to storm the Capitol, then gazed at his thumb, ignoring pleas to do something to stem the violence, Donald Trump has been a grotesque violation against any kind of dignity, decorum, rationality, kindness, forethought, patriotism, selflessness, not to mention the gravitas and responsibility that, prior to him, were wrapped up in the word "presidential."
     Saying that Donald Trump "never fully observed the norms of office" is like saying that Stormy Daniels did not reflect the values of modesty and diligence often associated with Quaker women.
     Today is Election Day. The received wisdom is that the Democrats will do well, and I hope that wisdom is correct. And yet. I feel obligated to point out, again, that no Blue Wave is going to wash away years of corruption and norm-wrecking. Won't happen. The Democrats, quick to fall to bickering among themselves, will have to take full advantage of whatever institutional edge they get. And they've failed to do that in the past, big time. Trump should have been in a cell next to Lex Luthor on the moon by the time the Biden administration ended. That he wasn't, that he was allowed to run again and be elected is a massive failure we need to all acknowledge. And how can we do that if we can't even describe the scope of Trump's failing? He trashed the norms that made this country work, sent an engraved invitation for every grifter, hater, fanatic, con man, power-thirsty blonde enabler, plutocrat, kleptomaniac and proto fascist to come help him. That's what he did fully. This demon crew he has assembled, they will not go quietly.

Pivoting from the Day of the Dead to the Day of the Election

     Happy Day of the Dead!
     OK, first off, you’re not supposed to say “happy,” despite all the colorful calaveras de azúcar, or sugar skulls, and boisterous street parties. Because the Day of the Dead, unlike Halloween, is not a peripatetic candy festival for kids that has been retrofitted into a costumed beer bash for adults. It’s a solemn, reflective time of honoring lost loved ones.
     And second, as mentioned above, it is “Day of the Dead,” singular, Día de los Muertos. Even though there are at least two days, Nov. 1 and 2, the first to remember lost children, Día de los Angelitos, which is an agony almost too great to consider — heck, it’s hard enough when your children survive, grow up on schedule, excel, get married and go off to live in Washington, D.C., where you hardly ever see them.
     And the second, Monday, Día de los Difuntos, or “All Souls Day,” dedicated to adults. For starters. Some mark four, or even eight days, referring to the “Week of the Dead.”
     Complicated, right? You can see why a lot of folks ignore cultures other than their own. Once you start to unpack the actual details, there’s a lot to keep track of, and it’s easier to neglect something than to be wrong about it.
     Nor is the holiday limited to solemnizing your own family. There is, for instance, a strong political element, usually completely overlooked, lost amid the sugary bread.
     We might, for instance, pause to remember all the children who are gone but not dead, those in ICE custody. They are alive, though children, separated from their parents and plunged alone into a nightmarish, unending confinement in a sprawling police state who might easily wish they were dead. They’re not your children; but they’re somebody’s children, and while this might be hard for you to wrap your head around, those children are loved and missed as much as you love and would miss yours, if some performatively cruel government separated you from them to score points with its howling base. Maybe more.
      We might also consider the departed who aren’t blood relatives. Especially with Tuesday being what we could call the Día de la Elección — the Day of the Election — most likely, although at this point, we really can’t be certain, can we?

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Fancy chocolates

 

     I'm tempted to just leave you with this array of gorgeous chocolates from Richart. Really, what else is there to say? Life is good, enjoy it when you can. 
     But that might leave you wondering where you can pick up such a box, and the bottom line is, you can't, unless you find yourself in Paris (or, checking the web site, two locations in Lyon, and one in Saint-Andre de Corcy, just north of the city). And no, the rioting didn't affect the flagship store. I checked.

     Richart showed up on our radar in 1993, when my wife and I visited Paris together. Blundering out of the Musee d'Orsay, there it was, on Rue Bonaparte. At first I thought it was a jewelry store, then realized the small gemlike objects were candies. We bought a big white box, with drawers, that indeed looked like a jewelry box, only it was filled with chocolate. We were flush, back then, before kids, and did things like that.

     We returned in 2016, when we went to visit our oldest, who was going to school there for a semester. Feeling far less monetarily-endowed, with two boys in college, I think we picked up a couple big bars.

     Cut to last month. Our youngest son, daughter-in-law and older grandson headed over to Paris. because ... well, you'd have to ask them, but my belief is, to show that a newborn was not going to cramp their considerable style. We didn't say, "While you're there, go to Richart and buy us some chocolate." We did point out the existence of the place and suggest they might enjoy swinging by, if they were in the 6th arrondissement and looking for something to do. Though we did watch their two cats. For about a month. So credit to them for showing a gratitude unusual in the young.

     If the above were the extent, I would shelve it under "shameful boasting." But the thing with these chocolates is, they come in 34 flavors, as explained in a little booklet, "Guide de Degustation," with helpful English translation, matching each glyph with the flavor within,  which chocolate is "Madagascar vanilla Bourbon ganache and which "Black Current coulis and raspberry." My favorites: "Thyme praline" and "Grapefruit light ganache."

     So for over a month, most nights a week after dinner, my wife and I would make tea and haul out the way-attractive square white box, slide out the array and make our selections, with much discussion. I don't want to say the analysis process was more fun than the actual consumption, but it was definitely part of the fun.

     Doing the checking thing that journalists were once known for, I see that my opening paragraph is dead wrong. You CAN indeed order Richart in the United States. The box above will set you back $216, which, yes, is a lot for chocolate, but less than the price of professional cat sitters, and less than a single dinner at some of the trendier restaurants around town. The good news is shipping for this particular item is free. If you limit yourselves to three chocolates a night apiece — harder than it looks — that gives you and your beloved about at least a fortnight of joyfully sharing exotic French chocolates after dinner. A bargain really.