Esoterica: Frozen Chosen

Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union is set in Alaska's Sitka province, which has become the homeland of the world's Jews after Israel was destroyed in 1948. His Jews speak Yiddish, eat matzo balls and refer to themselves as the Frozen Chosen. Generally a funny read, especially for people who wonder what would have happened if things didn't work out for Israel.

I thought that last detail was Chabon just being funny, but it turns out that Alaska's Jews actually do refer to themselves as the Frozen Chosen, and they follow EskiMoses. Check out the link for an article on their Congressman.

Back to Life...Back to University?

When I signed the lease on an apartment in the Negev desert city of Beer Sheva for the coming year, I had assumed I would be renting as a Geography Master's student at Ben Gurion University. Besides a solid academic reputation, BGU is also known as the Israeli institution that most closely resembles American college life, because most of the students live near campus and have a robust social life. Classes are supposed to start November 16.

However, BGU has joined the other six public Israeli universities that have threatened to strike unless the Ministry of Finance shells out $125 to shore up a wide budget gap - apparently in the last eight years the university budgets shrank 20 percent even as enrollment increased 10 percent.

If you think it is impossible for universities to strike, look at last year, when the faculty refused to teach for two months, or the year before that, when students went on strike against higher tuition. This has turned into an annual public dance between the universities, which demand more money, and the government, which refuses to give it. The article I linked to above presents a clear, if depressing, analysis of how that process works. It seems to be the fault of the government.

The outcome of this awkward negotiation is that public higher education, a widely accessible rite at $2,400 a year in Israel, is earning a reputation for being unreliable. This leaves a vacuum filled by private colleges, where 61 percent of this year's undergraduates are enrolled. Private colleges charge higher tuition and depend less on government funding. Healthy colleges, which open on time and are not subject to the whims of the Finance Ministry, can attract professors with higher salaries and students with a promise of dependability - which will eventually strip the public schools of their best talent and their strongest students.

Hopefully, this year's strike will not be two months long. But just in case, I am going to start pitching articles the minute I move to my new apartment so that I have a way to fill my days if classes are canceled. Who knows - I may look back on my university years in Israel as the tail end of the era when public universities actually functioned.

Main Street Versus Mall Street

With the Dow Jones diving 700 points a day and Swiss banks joining the bailout party, America's next top cliche is the question, "How will what's happening on Wall Street affect Main Street?," meaning how will this crisis trickle down to the average guy.

But, as a recent adventure with my mother proves, the comparison between streets is not quite accurate.

Last week, we went on a mini road trip in search of a quaint downtown area within a 30-minute drive of East Brunswick, NJ, and where we had not been before.

The obvious choices would have been New Brunswick, home of Rutgers University, or its neighbor Highland Park. But these were out because we had been there many times. So we began to look on the map. Did Sayreville have a downtown? No. Milltown? One Main Street, mostly inhabited by Dunkin' Donuts and taxidermists. North Brunswick? No. Spotswood? Main Street populated by nail salons, Rite Aid and Dunkin' Donuts (again).

Eventually we gave up and settled on Highland Park, pop. 14,000. The downtown consists of one solitary Main Street running between blocks and blocks of single-family detached homes with lawns. To HP's credit, the leafy downtown area is attractive, with a pretty school building, a pleasantly small library, houses with generous wrap-around porches, and no taxidermists. On the other hand, Main Street is an extension of a busy road in the adjacent town and sitting outside means a constant drone of passing cars and trucks.

The street itself was disappointingly was full of banks, closed restaurants and a chain coffee house selling hotdogs encased in bagels. After walking up and down for an hour and pondering the fate of the recently vanished used book shop, we cut our losses and left.

As I looked out the window on the ride home, I realized that my mom and I had searched for the wrong thing in New Jersey. Rather than hunt for Main Streets, we should have been on the lookout for enclosed shopping malls and strip malls crowding highway frontage. This would have been much easier to find. East Brunswick alone has one sprawling enclosed shopping center, as well as strip malls along every major road - Summerhill Road, Race Track Road, Arthur Street, Rues Lane, Ryder's Lane, Route 18, Cranbury Road. Basically any paved surface gives birth to a strip mall on either side surrounded by oceans of parking spaces.

Here's Mega Movies at the East Brunswick mall, courtesy of a local realtor's Web site.

From the trip, I gather that the only people who really care about most Main Streets in America are apparently Dunkin' Donuts and taxidermists. Therefore, I would like to suggest a change in the national cliche: "We need to think about how what happens on Wall Street affects the mall street."

NYTimes takes on food

Hats (and heads) off to the New York Times for publishing an excellent Jewish food photo: Meet Andy Kastner, 28, who was dismayed that contemporary rabbinical training doesn't include lessons on how to slaughter animals for kosher consumption, as it once did before Jewish mass-meat-production made local butchers unnecessary. Mr. Kastner goes to a live animal market in Yonkers, chooses a chicken, whispers a blessing in its ear and slits its throat. Talk about a kosher beefcake.

This week's Times magazine is all about food - beginning with Michael Pollan's letter to the future president, also known as Farmer in Chief (we need to solarize our food, he says, instead of eating oil). Other choice pieces are on a San Diego restaurant where no tipping is allowed, on the Vietnamese catfish industry and on a cantankerous restaurateur who kicks customers out of his 20-person eatery if they criticize the food, take cell phone calls or waffle indecisively over his 900-item menu, including 300 varieties of pancakes. It's a feast for the senses, and one of my favorite magazine issues of all time.

However, when I finished the magazine I wandered into a bookshop where one of the newest arrivals was on the meat industry. I began to think about the serious glut of food articles, books, magazines, television shows, and any other kind of media expression of our obsession with dinner. While this is good on the one hand, because our heavily sprayed, high-oil food system is broken and needs help, I worry that saturating every media outlet may cause a public fatigue and we won't have the patience to contemplate yet another craven animal feedlot. And more importantly, my potential readership may grow sick of reading the awful stories behind their shopping carts.

Ironically, the majority of food crisis writers call into question our American propensity to overconsume - we eat too much meat, too much corn syrup, too many imports and too much period. Yet the only way we can process this information is by eating too much news.

Homecoming Weekend

New writing alert: a first piece in Nextbook.org.

In a move that surprised me, I have decided to go to Northwestern University's Homecoming Weekend. For anyone unschooled in US traditions, homecoming is a weekend when college alumni come back to campus, the football team plays a home game, and university fundraisers go into high gear to coax donations out of the people who just finished paying $40,000 a year in tuition. I'm going to see my friends, although I feel guilty about my carbon spewing flight (I wrote about it here).

Of course, now that I am going for the weekend I have already caught wind of an alumni bar night, where $25 gets you lots of beer and other drinks, but $35 gets you the coveted Northwestern Homecoming shirt. Don't these people know what a recession is?

Well, bitter commentary aside, I am very excited to go back to school for the first time in a year and a half.

Voter Abstinence

It's about to be Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance. The biggest thing I am repenting is putting my inheritance from my grandfather in the stock market. Oh, what a terrible choice.

Anyways, in the meantime I'm developing a mean addiction to Stephen Colbert, who last week came out with this Voter Abstinence ad: "Because if you're old enough to vote, you're old enough not to."